{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02367531003382187, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0011273957158962795, 'mean_word_length': 4.9820224719101125, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Biblical Politics of John Locke

[1] Nietzsche remarked in Beyond Good and Evil that ‘philosophy is an atavism of the highest kind,’ by which he meant that philosophers less discover “Truth” than project their deepest impulses onto the cosmos as a whole. Thus Nietzsche’s question of Kant: what kind of soul, really, would need to distinguish the modalities of autonomy and of heteronomy; and of Darwin: does not the idea of the ‘survival of the fittest’ amount, really, to the projection of the Ethic of Resentment onto nature herself? [2] A kindred sort of atavism seems to be at work in the field of the History of Political Thought. While the debate about which authors fall within its purview is more or less settled, the question of the how they are to be interpreted remains a highly divisive one. In light of John Locke’s contribution to the development of Liberal thought, for example, no one doubts that he belongs in the Canon; what to make of Locke’s writings, however, is another matter. Perhaps the most contentious issue is religion. How much weight should be given to Locke’s writings on religion; what are we to make of his invocation of religion within his political writings; did he really mean what he wrote, or was it a subterfuge that embedded unorthodox teachings within Christian categories he himself repudiated? The answers given to these question diverge wildly, and one is prone to wonder whether the matter can be resolved by more scholarship, or whether what is at issue, really, is a scholar’s sympathy toward religion in general, toward Christianity in particular, and toward the idea that modern secular politics stands on its own as a coherent whole, without the need of religious foundations. Might Nietzsche be right: does scholarship on Locke confirm that the History of Political Thought is an ‘atavism of the highest order’? [3] Readers exhausted by the tourtured labor of scholars to prove that Locke does not really mean what he says will find Professor Parker’s The Biblical Politics of John Locke to be a thoroughly refreshing book. Absent here is any hint of convoluted hermeneutical moves that render Locke’s writings opaque, in no small part because Parker nowhere invokes the ancient/moderns heuristic that hobbles a not-insignificant portion of the scholarship on the Reformation period. A metanarrative that supposes an enchanted ancient world that is normatively superior to the disenchanted modern world, the ancients/moderns heuristic makes no room for the possibility that early Modern political thought is not only imbued with religious thinking of the Reformation period, but cannot be coherent without