Giving Locke Some Latitude: Locke’s Theological Influences from Great Tew to the Cambridge Platonists

Abstract

Locke’s political philosophy brings forth theologically-rich aims, while seeking to counter or disarm threats such as atheism, hyper-Calvinism, and religious enthusiasm. Locke’s theological views are born out of a context, and his theological perspective is heavily shaped by strands of influence from these perspectives. There is a generous orthodoxy that lay beneath Locke’s political project which parallels closely the explicit teachings of a moderating influence in seventeenth-century England with whom Locke is intimately associated—the Oxford Tew Circle, the London Latitudinarians, and the Cambridge Platonists. Locating Locke within his seventeenth-century religious context provides a fitting framework for placing Locke’s political project within the sphere of a moderating political theology. Locke scholars and biographers have already established these links broadly; but how did this background provide not only a general influence, but an impetus to provide something akin to a political theology after the teaching of Whichcote, Cudworth, and the like? The answer is that many of Locke’s political aims (and theological argumentation to support those aims) are already present in his theological context. This backdrop shows how Locke was able to establish the crucial link between his political ends (freedom, equality, property, toleration, and a just civil government) and his Christian theological commitment.