Locke Essay

John Locke’s name is synonymous with influential thoughts on government and philosophy. Like all dead influential thinkers, Locke’s beliefs are debated to no end. One of the most common debate topics is whether Locke was a Deist or a Christian. In this humble discourse we will first define both a Deist and a Christian and then classify Locke as one or the other.
A deist has four beliefs that separate him from Christians. First, that God created the universe and then left it to run on its own. The implications are that God is not personal or sovereign over human affairs. Secondly, the universe is a closed system, based on cause and effect. This is the classically Deist ‘Clockwork Universe’ clause. This has a two fold impact: God doesn’t/can’t have any more effect on our reality and history is linear, having already been determined at the beginning of time. Thirdly, humans, though personal, are part of the universal machine. The personality part includes our intelligence, morality, need for other humans, and creativity. The machine part means we’re autonomous from God and have a fated destiny which there is no way around. There is no way to transcend or affect the system of the universe. The final and 4th belief is that both man and the universe are in their normal and original state. This implies two principles. The first is that nature and our intellect can tell us everything there is to know of God. There is no need for any revelation or incarnation of God. The second implication is that man has no need for a redeemer and there is no archenemy, no devil. Man needs to only study the universe to find morality. He posses within himself the willpower to act justly. Most Deists believe Jesus was a good moral teacher who could express the natural law found in the universe in words easy to understand. They do not believe that Jesus was divine, performed miracles nor was resurrected. They do not believe in a devil.
A Christian believes in a personal and eternal God who is still active in our day-to-day lives. This belief disqualifies the Clockwork Universe principle. Christians do believe in consequences and natural laws, but they also believe that God can and does change factors and outcomes and intervenes in His universe. Christians also believe that humans can affect their world and future. Humans are not fated to a non-negotiable part in the play of history: they are free to improvise and rewrite. Christians believe that mankind and the universe are fallen because of Adam’s sin. Therefore, we are in need of a Saviour. This is Jesus Christ, God incarnate, who defeated sin, Satan, and death by dying and then rising from the dead.
Now it only remains to examine Locke himself and see what he believed.
On the nature of God, Locke says, "God, out of the infiniteness of his mercy, has dealt with man as a compassionate and tender Father.” I could not find any other texts where Locke deals with the nature of God. Locke looked at the acts of God in creation, salvation, and miracles and found it so obvious that God was active and personal that he did not feel it was needed to point that fact out.
Locke obviously believed in an open system because of his belief and many discourses on miracles as reliable, historic fact. A miracle is a Divine violation of a natural or physical law. This makes the universe an open system subject to an active God.
Locke did not view man as an autonomous, perfect machine. He speaks at length in Reasonableness of Christianity on man’s nature. He rejects the notion that man is perfect and the idea that we are compelled to sin. If we are compelled to sin we have no choice and are reduced to a machine.
“What Adam fell from…was the sate of perfect obedience…and by this fall, he lost paradise, wherein was tranquility and the tree of life, i.e. he lost bliss and immortality. Genesis 2:17…As Adam was turned out of paradise, so all his posterity were born out of it, out of the reach of the tree of life; all, like their father Adam, in a state of mortality, void of the tranquility and bliss of paradise…the consequence of it was, that all men should die, and remain under death for ever, and so be utterly lost.” Reasonableness of Christianity
So we have the fall. What now?
“Here then we have the standing and fixed measures of life and death; immortality and bliss belong to the righteous; those who have lived in an exact conformity to the law of God, are out of the reach of death: but an exclusion from paradise, and loss of immortality, is the portion of sinners, of all those, who have in any way broken that law, and failed of a complete obedience to it, by the guilt of any one transgression…But yet, ‘all having sinned’, Romans 3:24 ‘and come short of the glory of God’, so that, by the deeds of law, no one could be justified, verse 20, it follows, that no one could then have eternal life and bliss…God found out a way to justify some, i.e. so many as obeyed another law, which God gave, which in the New Testament is called the law of faith, Romans 3: 17, and is opposed to the law of works…The law of faith, in short, is for every one to believe what God requires him to believe…What we are now required to believe to obtain eternal life, is plainly set down in the gospel. St. John tells us, John 3:36, ‘He that believeth on the Son, hath eternal life; and he that believeth not the Son, shall not see life.’” Reasonableness of Christianity
This is a very brief explanation of John Locke’s extremely influential beliefs. He is most famous for his writings on law and government, but those were based on his beliefs on the nature of God, the universe, and man and the relationships between the three. Next time you hear arguments being traded on Locke remember his worldview and don’t believe secondhand information of him being a Deist.