JOHN LOCKE. THEOLOGY,ETHICS & POLITICS BY JOHN PERRY

[Music] so I think the the briefest way I can introduce John Locke is this he was an English philosopher who lived in the 1600s and he provided answers to three questions that were massively important to modern philosophy and modern theology those questions were what should I believe what should I do and how should we live together so in essence those questions are respectively the answers to questions about epistemology about ethics and about politics now one of the reasons Locke is so important for theology nowadays is that we've come to take a lot of his answers for granted to those questions in the West often without thinking about the fact that we're accepting his answers they've become essentially the reigning common sense of our life and this is especially the case in the United States but it's true in the Western world generally so many of the things we take for granted about politics about the way that politics relates to rights the way that we rights relates to freedom religious freedom and human rights more generally all of our answers to those derived to greater or lesser degrees from things Locke answered about those those questions now certain seeit theologians and theological ethicists have recently challenged the way that we take those answers for granted without thinking reflectively or critically about them and so these would be people well known to theologians and theology students nowadays people like John Milbank Stanley how are wasps William Cavanaugh and so on and they're critical of the way we take for granted modern answers and few writers are more characteristically modern than Locke another reason that Locke is particularly important is for people that ask questions about the relation of the church to the state and about questions of religious freedom on those questions especially Locke's answers are for many simply the common sense Savard I'm so John Locke lived from 1632 to 1704 he was born in a small village near what's now Bristol in fact if you've ever been to the Bristol Airport the runway ends just about exactly where John Locke was born he was born to a Puritan family his father was a lawyer who had some money but not a terrible lot of money and so in fact Locke himself was only able to attend school because of the generosity of a friend of Locke's father there were two events of particular importance in the world that can help us understand blocks context so the first is that about a century before he was born was the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation and this led in a variety of complex ways to the increasing fragmentation of Europe this is we're talking about religious fragmentation social fragmentation and political fragmentation so this is partly characterizing the world into which Locke was born more immediately in his context was the English Civil War and so when he was 10 years old the english civil war broke out and his father joined the parliamentary side and fought a number of battles he's a captain for the parliamentary forces Locke himself went at around about this time to Westminster School again this had to be paid for by a friend of Locke's father and subsequently to Christ Church Oxford although he was at notable institutions for much of the early period of Locke's career he didn't accomplish very much in fact he was at Christchurch for some time without writing anything of note the only two things he wrote during his period in residence at Christchurch even as a scholar here were not published until the 1960s so they're obviously only of historical interest and we're of no importance in his time in 1666 though he met someone called Lord Ashley who is later created the first Earl of Shaftesbury now Shaftesbury was involved in the court of King Charles the second and was initially a supporter of king charles but subsequently as we'll see over the years grew hostile to charles and eventually they became enemies so although he in name retained his position at christchurch locke joined the household of Shaftesbury and worked for him in a variety of ways Shaftesbury was effectively his patron for example locke helped him with business affairs traveled to france on his behalf for a number of years and again during this period i suppose it lapsed about 15 years didn't do any serious scholarly work this begins to change when Shaftesbury becomes increasingly involved in a series of political maneuvers against charles ii as I mentioned Shaftesbury was initially his supporter they grew hostile Shaftesbury endeavors to support parliamentary rights against the monarchy and the Monarchs power eventually this reaches a crisis the exclusion crisis and with that basically it becomes dangerous for Shaftesbury and for Locke to remain in England and they flee to the Netherlands and this happens in 1683 there Shaftesbury dies quite soon after and Locke begins making new acquaintances and this leads to the work that we now know him for so much of it in fact was ironically written in the Netherlands despite him being known as an English philosopher so he makes new acquaintances there one is Philippa Sivan Limburg who was a Dutch systematic theologian they met a sort of a strange fashion in these days it was quite unusual for them to have the opportunity to understand the anatomy of wild animals this was a particularly harsh winter in Amsterdam and the local zoo's lion died and so all of the local men of note and men of science rushed down to the zoo to see the lion dissected and the autopsy performed and van Limburg and Locke were in attendance and became very close friends having met at the Lions dissection and referred to each other afterwards as the best of friends in fact one of Locke's most important works the letter concerning toleration we often forget that that's in fact quite literally a letter and it was letter written from to Funland work another event that helped develop slocks thinking so two years after arriving in the netherlands so 1685 the Edict of Nantes revoked so the Edict of not had previously protected French Protestants in France from persecution granted them a measure of religious freedom so this is revoked in 1685 and this unleashes a huge wave of terrible prosecution by Catholics against French Protestants horrible scenes father's dragged away to be enslaved on galleys children ripped away from their mother's arms so that they couldn't be raised Protestant and so on so Locke sees and the Netherlands these refugees fleeing so he recognizes both the horrors they're undergoing in the nether in France but also sees the way that the religious freedom and general tolerant atmosphere in the Netherlands actually works well it doesn't lead to strife or civil dispute because there are different dominant denominations represented there there was a measure of freedom granted to different Christian denominations and Locke could see that on some level that sort of worked so in the subsequent years to that Locke writes now the works for what she is famous so Edict of not is revoked in 1685 and by 1689 Locke has written and then in that year published three of the most important works of modern philosophy so not one but three events three three works all published in the same year the essay concerning human understanding the letter concerning toleration and the two treatises on government and these answer the questions with which we began what should I believe what should I do and how should we live together so the first of those questions is what should I believe Locke's answer to this question is an empiricist answer that means Locke believes that we should believe things because we come to know them through our senses that is true knowledge that true belief is something knowing through our senses something empirically rather than rationally say now in saying this lock is beginning a tradition that comes to be called British and Pierre so figures like Berkeley Hume and so on continue that tradition after Locke for our purposes especially for people interested in theology the more interesting part of Locke's answer to the question of what I should believe isn't lies not so much in his empiricism but lies rather in the way that he relates what we can know through revelation that is through the Bible and what we can know through human reason unaided by revelation now when this Locke doesn't actually have as good an answer as he might and in fact he may not have as good an answer as he thought he did Locke was always confident that we could arrive at the important moral truths and theological truths including the fact that God exists that we could arrive at those conclusions by unaided human reason but he never actually provided a way where we could see that that was the case and he seems to have recognized and appoints maybe even acknowledged subtly in his writings that he didn't in fact have a way to show that but he thought that in theory there was such a way and this leads to a bit of a puzzle for Locke and it's one that he returns to a number of times in his later works so much of the earlier works including the three that he published in 1689 don't deal as explicitly with theology he turns to that later he writes a number of Pauline commentaries and then most famously a work called the reasonableness of Christianity so his answer and the reasonableness of Christianity to the puzzle I just described is that although we could in theory know the truth this we need to know in order to be saved for example that God exists that Jesus is the Messiah and the moral duties that are required of the Christian life we could know those in theory by the means of unaided human reason most of the time most of us aren't smart enough or don't have enough available free time to the proper conclusions on that and so in that case we depend on revelation and especially we depend on the Gospels so he focuses interestingly not so much on the figure of Christ and not so much in the Bible as a whole though as I mentioned he does write some Pauline commentaries he focuses rather on the Gospels and uses that phrase quite specifically it's not entirely clear what he means by that whether he has in mind Jesus's teachings chiefly most regard his work at this point as basically deist and he more or less explicitly says that denies the Trinity this was a dangerous thing for him to deny at the time but I think reading between the lines of reasonableness of Christianity were not even reading between the lines just reading the lines we actually see that at least he didn't recognize Jesus as divine in the way that the Nicene Creed seems to then I said the Nicene Creed affirms that he's divine now the puzzle the puzzle that this leaves Locke with about whether or not we can actually come to the moral truths we need to in order to leave a good life leads locked to the second question what should I do so Locke's led by a series of puzzles related to what I should know to another question what should I do and in order to understand Locke's answer to this question we need to bear in mind what was going on in the world of ethics up to this point so what is it that people took for granted before Locke so in the centuries before Locke and in fact perhaps for as much as a millennium there was a more or less stable to answer stable answer to that question that was provided by the church and it was something like this that what I should do is what leads to my own flourishing or well-being or happiness God's law then is a guide for me to achieve my own happiness flourishing and well-being and ultimately what that happiness will entail is me being United with God or me seeing God face to face as a friend as Thomas Aquinas described it now this held sway more or less for a millennium all the way from Augustine to Aquinas and well up to Locke as we'll see so at the heart of this vision is an idea that there's something that humans ought to become this vision of ethics is based on the premise that humans are a certain way that there's a way humans ought to be and that ethics is just the art or science of getting from here to here becoming the kind of person who can be happy for the right things in the right way and for the right reasons now this becomes problematic at just the time we're talking about in the 1600s and partly this is related to what was going on in the world politically partly related to the fragmentation we talked about in Europe as a result of the Protestant Reformation and so on and there's a particular passage where Locke captures he encapsulates exactly why that approached ethics that's been more or less stable for about a thousand years why that can no longer work why in his view it needs to be discarded and this is probably the wittiest and funniest passage in Locke and he wasn't a particularly funny guy so this is as good as he would cook as good as he could provide but it's pretty well written Locke says every mind has a different relish as well as the palate and you will as fruitlessly endeavor to delight all men with riches or glory as you would satisfy all man's hunger with cheese or Lobster it's very agreeable and delicious to some but to others it's extremely nauseous and offensive hence it was I think that the Philosopher's of old did in vain inquire whether the Summa bonham was to be found in riches or bodily delights or virtue or contemplation they might as well have debated whether the best relish were to be found in apples plums or nots and have divided themselves into sects upon it so here Locke is poking fun at that whole tradition we just described the idea that you could understand the good life by knowing what it is that humans Haught to be over here simply won't work why won't it work because different people like different things some people like cheese some people like lobsters some people like virtue some people like money you might think that it's worthwhile to read the works of Shakespeare or attend the Opera and I might think that it's more worthwhile to set out in the college quad and count the blades of grass and shove berries up my nose everyone likes something different Locke says that simply can't be a reliable base for FX so notice first of all that LOC here is drawing on his empiricist ideal his empiricist epistemology so what we know is related important ways to our senses and as he draws on that image and a sort of creative or humorous way where our taste is leading it not necessarily leading us astray but our taste varies from one person to the next in such a way that there isn't a reliable rational basis for what it is that humans ought to do but more importantly that's overthrowing the whole tradition of ethics that had preceded it we simply can't go on and do ethics in the way that the church in particular had for the past millennium now you might think that this makes Locke relativist so if he's saying that vice Rich's virtue delight contemplation those are all just random taste preferences this might be a form of relativism in which he might be saying some people like to murder their neighbor some people don't well who's to say so that's not Locke's answer in fact Locke think this that Locke believes that there is a rational basis for ethics and that there some things are objectively wrong and others are objectively right but the answer he provides to that is significantly more thinned out than the answer we would have received and sort of full-blooded you diamond aesthetics that Locke is here rejecting and so we might refer to Locke's ethics as a kind of lowest common denominator ethics and so in fact what we see in subsequent modern moral theory is this the old you demonism build Christian natural law is dispensed with and we find various replacement theories emerging and in fact there are three of note so there's Locke's there's cons and there's John Stuart Mill's so Locke's answer becomes effectively classical political liberalism that is what's right is guided by rights and specifically rights modelled on the notion of property so that my own person my physical property and the space around me in which I live my life and make my choices and pursue my life's goals that's a form of property and so I can do what I want in that space and have be morally right you have your own space around you and we go around trying to not interfere with each other spaces so it's a kind of conception of negative rights now at various points elsewhere in Locke's work he tries to relate this to God's commands to the natural law and the more traditional sense and so on and on this there's a disagreement among Locke scholars about how those two insights should relate so I'm inclined to think that Locke is basically committed to the idea of morality being defined by rights these bubbles around me or these sort of zones of non-interference others that would prefer to read Locke's Christianity as more central to his thought would suggest that Locke is has found a way though it's unclear how this would work but that Locke has somehow found a way to go on doing traditional natural law without the notion of the telus the goal the purpose for which humans are made as I say it's not clear to me that that would work or how that would work but that is at least among certain interpreters of Locke a plausible way to relate what he says here in the essay concerning human understanding about human human goods being like taste preferences like relish to relate that to what he says other elsewhere and sort of more traditional theological works at any rate so that's the first possible replacement theory Locke says that what we should do is defined by our rights conceived as property the other ones I mentioned are cots and Mills I won't go into those in detail but conses essentially that we can know rationally and by universalizing the precepts on which we act what the right thing to do is and mill says that we can know what to do by thinking about what would provide the greatest good to the greatest number that might sound and I should explain this carefully that might sound like a return to the old teleology it looks like a way to base ethics on happiness it kind of is and it kind of isn't of course a utilitarian ethicists like mill are basing their theories on preferences including the preference to be happy and especially from Elva it's a it is indeed a form of happiness based Alex but for mill this is about the subjective happiness so there still isn't the objective notion of the good that there was in traditional Christian natural law thinking so for all three of those what we have is a thin doubt or as I said lowest common denominator ethics so those won't tell you the meaning of life those theories aren't intended to tell you what the good human life would look like but they will tell you something they'll tell you you shouldn't kill your neighbor merely because she's a Lutheran so they'll tell you something basic like that but they won't tell you what separates the good flourishing life from the life that merely fulfills duties such as don't kill your Luther neighbor or don't interfere with your neighbor's property so on so these come to characterize modern ethics then and we can see why recently theologians would have regarded some of these moves is problematic not just at that time but especially because the dominance of those ideas nowadays is something that's been rendered impenetrable to most christians we simply Christians take for granted that ethics has something fundamental to do with rights that policies of the state might be defended legitimately on a utilitarian basis these sorts of questions and recent theologians like Milbank power wasps William Cavanaugh and others are trying to challenge that to push back against that and say whatever truth there might be in the insights of modern philosophy at least we need to test those against traditional Christian sources to reflect them carefully to analyze them and so on I became interested in studying John Locke because as a PhD student I found myself sympathetic to the work of a number of thinkers whose work can best be described as a form of modernity critique people like Stanley however wasps and John Milbank and this is just when William cabin ARS career was getting going at some points Oliver Donovan can also be considered a modernity critic I was deeply sympathetic to aspects of their work especially because I thought as they do that something went badly wrong for the church around about the time of early modernity often Locke becomes the central whipping boy or target in all of this and I had read Locke previously as an undergraduate my undergraduate degree was in political science and so when I returned to theology as a postgraduate student I had these conflicted feeling about figures like Locke in early modernity I agree with the modernity critics that this period in history is heard of this hinge point for subsequent Christian ethics so how we think about ethics does change decisively at this moment many things change how we think about epistemology and politics and so on but I was concerned in particular with ethical questions and so I completely agree that there is some important turning or hinge point at this date round about the 17th century but it's not clear exactly what that is especially given that I have a kind of sympathy for Locke as well the argument that the modernity critics I mentioned makes is that they're attempting to recover what might better be described and what samwell's calls ecclesial ethics that is they're trying to recover the centrality of the church to Christian moral formation to practices like baptism and Eucharist to prayer to the reading of texts communally rather than individualistically all of those things I think are important and worthwhile they believe that they're one of the reasons that the church got away from those practices lies in the way that Christians became too concerned with fitting into modern politics and specifically to appeasing of the modern nation-state so they traded away the way that they could have been formed by their church in exchange for being tolerated this is the easiest to see with modern Catholicism so one of the people not tolerated one of the groups of people not tolerated by John Locke was Roman Catholics why because they actually listen to what the Pope says about earthly affairs they're not only concerned with the way the Pope is an earthly leader they're not only concerned with individualistic conceptions of salvation reading the Bible on my own and trying to get into heaven after I die you

Channel: Timeline Theological Videos

Views: 17,253

Rating: 4.7882352 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: W0uEPBgiRYY

Length: 24min 59sec (1499 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2013