This dissertation interrogates the quality of sincerity as it appears throughout John Locke’s work on religious toleration and Christian theology. Sincerity, and the framework it provides, offers a means to draw together his political and theological works, as well as to appreciate both his radical potentialities and conservative impulses. The language of sincerity – purity, integrity, honesty – and its opposite, insincerity – corruption, adulteration, dissimulation – are identified in Locke’s approach to scriptural exegesis, his polemical exchanges, exclusions to toleration, and strategy for religious conversion. Attention is drawn to the ways in which Locke was speculatively and doctrinally radical and, at the same time, reproduced prevailing prejudices, concerned to discredit certain interpretations of Christianity which threatened fundamental ordering hierarchies of political and social life. Catholicism, or papsim, is consistently judged intolerable because of its pernicious mingling and adulterations, “Enthusiasm” by virtue of its unbounded, and so unmanageable, subjectivism. Such language of blending and boundaries fits neatly within the discourse of sincerity centred on unadulterated purity and integrity. Ultimately, Locke was concerned to avoid a reputation as radical or heterodox (for him or his anonymously published texts) and to theorize ways to manage the Reformation’s legacy of freed scriptural interpretation.

Creator

• Brown , Julia Margaret

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-1cw3-5d07

Subject

• Political science

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_855043
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15813

Keyword

• Scripture
• John Locke
• Religious toleration

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright