More "Extremes" from the Harvard Narrative?

In his last post Jon Rowe cited Paul Sigmund, of Princeton, reviewing John Marshall, of Johns Hopkins on John Locke. That piece contained this statement:

"Locke believed that Christ died not to atone for Adam's sin, but to show us the way to eternal life."

In the comments section I proposed changing that to the following:

"Locke believed that Christ died not to atone for Adam's sin, but for the sin of each individual."

I went back and read his notes on Romans 5:12-19 from The Works of John Locke, Volume 8 and it seems clear that he did not believe in original sin. You can read it for yourself, but in my reading I found no dispute with the first half of this statement quoted above from Jon's post.


Nonetheless, I do dispute the second half of the quote. I base this on reading Locke's notes on Romans 3:24 in which he stated this:

"For it is to God we are redeemed, by the death of Christ"

Thus my contention that Locke believed that Christ died for our personal sins.


Here is more from Locke on the topic of redemption from The Reasonableness of Christianity that brings some context to my quote above:

"IT is obvious to any one, who reads the New Testament, that the doctrine of redemption, and consequently of the gospel, is founded upon the supposition of Adam's fall. To understand, therefore, what we are restored to by Jesus Christ, we must consider what the scriptures show we lost by Adam. This I thought worthy of a diligent and unbiassed search : since I found the two extremes that men run into on this point, either on the one hand shook the foundations of all religion, or, on the other, made Christianity almost nothing : for while some men would have all Adam's posterity doomed to eternal, infinite punishment, for the transgression of Adam, whom millions had never heard of, and no one had authorised to transact for him, or be his representative ; this seemed to others so little consistent with the justice or goodness of the great and infinite God, that they thought there was no redemption necessary, and consequently, that there was none ; rather than admit of it upon a supposition so derogatory to the honour and attributes of that infinite Being ; and so made Jesus Christ nothing but the restorer and preacher of pure natural religion ; thereby doing violence to the whole tenour of the New Testament."

I think this says it all and gives us a true picture of what Locke taught about original sin and redemption. It also makes me wonder if the modern Locke scholars just ignore the things that do not align with their preconceived notions of Locke that do not fit with the "extremes" Locke warned against found in the Harvard Narrative? Locke seems to have had a problem with Augustine and Calvin, not the Bible.

Gary Amos, the Declaration, and "Christian" Ideas?

In my last few posts have spent some time trying to shift the discussion away from asking what key figures of the founding were or were not Christian to asking if the ideas that shaped the founding were or were not Christian.  I chose to do this in the context of a series of essays at "Cato Unbound" that addressed the question of which factors led to the emergence of the modern world produced by the what Alvin Toffler would call the "Second Wave".    

In that spirit, I attempted to narrow down the topic a bit by asking two questions that I hoped would be a baseline for the beginning of a Socratic dialogue about what ideas shaped the founding era, the origins of those ideas, their impact on bringing about the modern world, and how we can apply this information in our efforts to catch the "Third Wave".  In the spirit of putting first things first, I would like to focus on the first question:

"Which Christian ideas, if any, helped bring us into the modern world?

In his essay "How an Engineering Culture Launched Modernity" at Cato Jack Goldstone provided a quote from Joseph Priestley that he felt captured the spirit of the the founding age:

"Nature, including both its materials and its laws, will be more at our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more easy and comfortable, they will prolong their existence in it and grow daily more happy. . . the end will be glorious and paradisiacal beyond that our imaginations can now conceive."

Goldstone then added the following analysis: 

"This was a radical departure from the belief of almost all civilizations (including that of the classical and medieval West) that humanity’s golden age lay in the past. Instead the new engineering culture proclaimed that an earthly paradise lay in man’s future, and that it would be brought about by mankind’s own progress in developing and applying new scientific knowledge rather than by divine redemption."

He then went on to say what was perhaps the chief catalyst in the acceptance and spread of this new engineering culture:

       

"What I believe is most critical to insist upon is the degree to which Europe itself had to repudiate central elements of its own history and culture — the absolute authority of hereditary rulers, the prohibition of diverse religious beliefs in any one society, the elevation of the rights and needs of political and social status elites above those of ordinary inhabitants — in order to develop and implement the idea of society as a community of free individuals sovereign over a limited state. Yet this was necessary if the marriage of engineering culture and entrepreneurship was to survive and flourish, and produce the economic and technological miracles of the last two centuries.