Abstract
Critics of Christianity have sometimes accused it of having been, “for most of its existence… the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors,” using force if necessary. This is a paradox, since much Christian teaching condemns the use of force for any purpose, and the earliest Christians, fighting to be tolerated in the Roman Empire, often argued vigorously for religious liberty. This paper will contend that there are Christian teachings which can be used to justify religious intolerance, and consider what the best response to those teachings is. I claim that moderate responses, like Locke’s, are inadequate, and that what is needed is a more radical critique, of the kind to be found in Spinoza.
I’ve presented versions of this paper at the Pacific Division Meetings of the APA in April 2010, Boston University in November 2010, and Emory University in March 2011. I’m indebted to the members of the audiences on all those occasions, for helping me see how I might improve my argument. But I owe particular thanks to my commentator at the Pacific APA, Jay Bruce.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
MacCulloch 2010, 4. The “candid friend” quote comes on p. 11. Voltaire made the same judgment: “De toutes les religions, la chrétienne est sans doute celle qui doit inspirer le plus de tolérance, quoique jusqu’ici les chrétiens aient été les plus intolérants de tous les hommes” (Voltaire 2008, 277).
- 2.
Matthew 5:38–41, in the New Revised Standard Version, as given in The HarperCollins Study Bible, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2006. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent quotations from the Bible will be from this edition.
- 3.
See, for example, Letter 138, to Marcellinus, included in Augustine 1994b, 205–12.
- 4.
Letter 138, §14, benigna quadam asperitate (Patrologia latina, Vol. 33).
- 5.
Augustine , 1994c, 209 (translation modified).
- 6.
From Augustine’ s dialogue On Free Choice, in 1994c, 214 (PL, Vol. 33, 5, 12).
- 7.
From Augustine , Against Faustus the Manichaean, in 1994a, 221–222 (PL Vol. 42, 22, 74). Translation modified.
- 8.
Augustine 1991, Letter 93, ¶17.
- 9.
Letter 93, §2, The Works of Saint Augustine , Augustinian Heritage Institute edition. Augustine uses a similar example in Letter 185, §33: “Suppose two people were living in a house that we most certainly knew was going to collapse and that they refused to believe us when we told them of this and insisted on remaining in it. If we were able to snatch them from there, even against their will, and afterwards showed them that the collapse was imminent in order that they would not venture to return again to that danger, I think that, if we did not do so, we would be rightly judged heartless.” In this quote Augustine assumes that we have certain knowledge that the people will be harmed if they don’t leave the house. This may invite the skeptical response that in the religious case we don’t know the truths we would need to know to justify action, and so are not obliged to take action. But I think that in a case like the one Augustine poses, if we lacked certainty, but nevertheless thought it highly likely that the people would be harmed, we would still feel obliged to act. If we required certainty before we tried to avert every impending disaster, we would act too infrequently.
- 10.
E.g., in Matt. 13:37–43, 25:46; Mark 9:42–48; John 3:16–18. What may be surprising, given that support, is that while belief in heaven remains strong among contemporary American Christians, belief in hell does not. In the Pew Forum’s Survey of the U.S. Religious Landscape (http://religions.pewforum.org/), while the percentage of both Catholics and Protestants believing in heaven was greater than 80%, the percentage believing in hell was only 73% among Protestants, and dropped to 60% among Catholics. Among Evangelical Protestants the percentage believing in both heaven and hell exceeded 80%; among those affiliated with mainline Protestant churches the figures were 77% for heaven and 56% for hell.
- 11.
John 3:16–18. For similar passages see John 3:36, 5:24, 11:25–26, 14:6, 20:31.
- 12.
In what follows I summarize the conclusions of an unpublished paper, “Locke on Religious Toleration,” in which I defend this interpretation at greater length. That paper is much indebted to the work of John Marshall, particularly Marshall 1994.
- 13.
Locke 1999, Ch. I, p. 9.
- 14.
See Article IX of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England: “Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the Spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation.” http://www.victorianweb.org/religion/39articles.html
- 15.
John Marshall has traced Locke ’s development on this issue very persuasively (see particularly Marsall 1994, xv, 23, 64–5, 138, 140–141, 336, 342, 347, 350, 413, 416, 419–27).
- 16.
Locke 1999, Ch. IV, pp. 22–23.
- 17.
It seems hard to believe that he had no knowledge of Augustine’ s argument, but so far my grounds for saying this are conjectural. Locke was living in Holland when he wrote his Letter on Toleration. Between the date he composed that work (1685) and its date of publication (1689), Pierre Bayle was publishing his own defense of religious liberty, his Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, ‘Compel Them to Come In, That My House May Be Full.’ Although the first edition of Bayle’s work (1686) did not discuss the Augustinian argument I’m focusing on, the second (1687) added an extended discussion of it, apparently in response to the recent publication of excerpts from Augustine’s writings, under the title The Conformity of the Conduct of the Church of France for reuniting the Protestants, with that of the Church of Africk for reuniting the Donatists to the Catholic Church. (See the helpful edition of Bayle’s work by John Kilcullen and Chandras Kukathas, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 2005, p. xix.) It seems likely that Locke would have known at least the first edition of Bayle’s work; if he read Bayle’ s enlarged second edition, that would have given him a fairly detailed account of Augustine’s argument. But so far I have not been able to find out how much of Bayle’s work Locke knew.
- 18.
I think this is not evident in his first Letter on Toleration. But his exclusivism becomes quite clear in the subsequent controversy with Jonas Proast.
- 19.
In quoting Locke’ s Letter on Toleration, I take responsibility for the translation of Locke’ s Latin (as given in John Locke , Epistola de Tolerantia/A Letter on Toleration, ed. by Raymond Klibansky, with an English translation and notes by J.W. Gough, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), though I often borrow phraseology either from Gough’s translation or from William Popple’s seventeenth century translation. In this instance the phrase in brackets comes from Popple’s translation. There is nothing in the Latin to explicitly warrant adding it, but it seems to me a useful clarification. The passage may be found either on p. 69 of the Klibansky/Gough edition, or on p. 395 of David Wootton’s edition of the Political Writings of John Locke (Mentor, 1993).
- 20.
On this see Lawrence Wright’s profile of Paul Haggis, “The Apostate,” in The New Yorker, Feb. 14 & 21, 2011, pp. 84–111. Proast also makes this point when he replies to Locke’s argument from ineffectiveness, insisting that he did not assume force alone would yield genuine conviction. What he assumed was that force might be useful in getting non-believers to listen to those rational arguments which would produce genuine persuasion if people gave them proper attention. He thought most non-believers simply hadn’t given the arguments a fair hearing. See his The argument of the Letter concerning toleration , briefly consider’d and answer’d, published anonymously in London in 1690.
- 21.
Augustine is writing to Vincent, the Rogatist bishop of Cartenna. The Rogatists were a splinter group from the Donatists, which had broken with the rest of the Donatists over the issue of armed resistance.
- 22.
- 23.
MacCulloch 2010, 220.
- 24.
For details see Nadler 1999, ch. 6.
- 25.
Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, III/239 in the Gebhardt edition. My translation, from Curley 2016, which gives the Gebhardt pagination in the margins. My emphasis.
- 26.
Although canon law prohibited compelling the Jews to accept Christianity, legislation adopted at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) encouraged anti-Jewish feelings which sometimes led to unauthorized attempts at forced conversion. In Spain in June 1391, “during a hot summer made worse by economic distress, urban mobs rioted, directing their anger against the privileged classes and against the Jews. In Seville hundreds of Jews were murdered and [the Jewish quarter] was destroyed. Within days, in July and August, the fury spread across the peninsula. Those… not murdered were compelled to accept baptism… From this time the conversos [Jews ‘converted’ to Christianity] came into existence on a grand scale.” (Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, a historical revision, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 10). Before these mass conversions Spain had a substantial Jewish minority. Afterward many towns had only a fraction of their original Jewish population.
Locke would say that merely going through the ceremony of baptism, without being persuaded that Christianity is true, does not make you a Christian. The conversos may have conformed externally, but in their hearts remained Jews. Many older historians would agree. (See, for example, Lea 1922, vol. I, p. 145, or Baer 1966, Ch. 12). More recent scholarship has taken a different view. Netanyahu’s investigation of the origins of the Inquisition in Spain argues that, though most of the conversos were secret adherents of Judaism in the years just after the mass conversions, by the middle of the fifteenth century “most… conversos were conscious assimilationists, who wished to merge with the Christian society, educate their children as fully fledged Christians, and remove themselves from anything regarded as Jewish, especially in the field of religion… this situation resulted from a long-lasting, ongoing process, so that the number of the Christianized Marranos was rising from generation to generation, while the number of clandestine Jews among them was rapidly dwindling… In 1481, when the Inquisition was established, the Judaizers [conversos practising Judaism in secret] formed a small minority.” (Netanyahu 1995, xvii. Kamen accepts Netanyahu’s view in the most recent edition of his history of the Inquisition.)
We surely can’t know with any precision how many conversos were genuinely Christianized and how many were Judaizers. Perhaps the policy was not as successful as Netanyahu claims. But to rebut Locke , it seems enough to say, what seems clear, that within a few generations the percentage of Christianized conversos was high enough to make the converters feel that they had accomplished something quite significant. In any case, this is not the only example. For others see Fletcher 1999, Clendinnen 2003).
- 27.
Roth (1932) suggests that one reason there was more assimilation in Spain than in Portugal, was that when Ferdinand gave the Jews their choice between baptism and exile, it was the more devout Jews who chose exile, and the less committed who were willing to accept baptism to remain in Spain. Since Portugal was a preferred destination for many of those who chose exile, the Portuguese Jewish population had a high percentage of Jews who had already chosen exile rather than convert.
- 28.
Here I adopt the King James Version.
- 29.
This appears quite early in the TTP, when Spinoza argues that belief in historical narratives is not necessary for salvation (TTP v, 45–50). Characteristically, he focuses his attack on Jewish exclusivism, as represented by Maimonides, leaving it to his readers to apply his critique to Christian exclusivism.
- 30.
I’ve discussed Spinoza’s critique of scripture in “Spinoza’s contribution to Biblical scholarship,” forthcoming in the second edition of Don Garrett’s Cambridge Companion to Spinoza.
- 31.
“We must show the way to find out whether a phrase is literal or figurative. And the way is certainly as follows: Whatever there is in the word of God that cannot, when taken literally, be referred either to purity of life or soundness of doctrine, you may set down as figurative.” (De doctrina Christiana, III, 10, 14)
- 32.
E.g., Moses represents God as visiting the sins of the fathers upon their children, and their children’s children, to the third and fourth generation (Exodus 34:7). Ezekiel denies that God does this (Ezek. 18:14–20). Samuel claims that when God has decreed something, he never repents of his decree. (1 Sam. 15:29) Jeremiah holds that when God has decreed some harm to a nation, he may repent of his decree, if the men of that nation change for the better (Jer. 18:8–10). Most of Spinoza’s examples of prima facie contradictions come from the Hebrew Bible. But sometimes they involve the New Testament, as when he argues that Genesis (4:7) presents man as having the power to overcome the temptations of sin and act well, whereas Paul teaches that men have no control over the temptations of the flesh except by the grace of God (Rom. 9:10 ff.)
- 33.
So Manasseh’s Conciliator is dedicated to the proposition that because Scripture is the word of God, it must be consistent, and seeks to show that all prima facie contradictions in it can be interpreted in a way which makes them consistent.
- 34.
See the conclusion of Ch. X, Bruder ¶48. I discuss these matters in some detail in “Spinoza’s Contribution to Biblical Scholarship” (cited in n. 31).
- 35.
See TTP XII, ¶¶30–31, III/164.
- 36.
Mark 16:15–16. “The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned.” There are, of course, numerous exclusivist passages in the letters of Paul. Spinoza’s claim is limited to the gospels, i.e., those New Testament texts which purport to relate the life and teachings of Jesus.
- 37.
Mark 10:17–22; Matt. 19: 16–30; Luke 18:18–30. Slight variations: in Mark he is simply a rich man; in Matthew he is a rich young man; in Luke he is a rich ruler. Spinoza cites the passage from Mark in a note he added to TTP iii, 21. The parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25–37 places a similar emphasis on obedience to the law that we should love God and our neighbor, without mentioning faith in Jesus as essential. Similar is Luke 14:12–14. The parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9–14) may show the insufficiency of obedience to the law, and in that sense, come close to Pauline thought (cf. Brown, Introduction, p. 251), but nothing in it suggests that faith is the remedy. Luke 12:8–9 comes closer to John 3:16–18 than anything else I can find.
- 38.
References
Attridge HW (ed) (2006) The HarperCollins study Bible. HarperCollins, San Francisco
Augustine (1991) Letter 93. In: Rotelle JE (ed) Letters, vol 1: The Works of Saint Augustine: a translation for the 21st century O.S.A and Boniface Ramsey, O.P., Augustinian Heritage Institute 1991-, Published in print by New City Press. Available online in the Past Masters database, published by InteLex Corporation, 2001.
Augustine (1994a) Against Faustus the Manichaean. In: Fortin EL, Kries D (eds) Political writings (trans: Tkacz M, Kries D). Hackett, Indianapolis, pp 221–222
Augustine (1994b) Letter 138. In: Fortin EL, Kries D (eds) Political writings (trans: Tkacz M, Kries D). Hackett, Indianapolis, pp 205–212
Augustine (1994c) On free choice. In: Fortin EL, Kries D (eds) Political writings (trans: Tkacz M, Kries D). Hackett, Indianapolis, p 214
Augustine (1995) De Doctrina Christiana. Green RPH (ed, trans). Clarendon Press, Oxford
Augustine (2001) Letter 93. In: Rotelle JE (ed) Letters, vol 1: The works of Saint Augustine: a translation for the 21st century (trans: Teske SJ). New City Press, New York, pp 376–408
Baer Y (1966) A history of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols. Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia
Barnes T (1981) Constantine and Eusebius. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Bayle P (2005) Philosophical commentary on these words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, ‘Compel them to come in, that my house may be full.’ Kilcullen J, Kukathas C (eds). Liberty Fund, Indianapolis
Clendinnen I (2003) Ambivalent conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Curley E (2015) Resurrecting Leo Strauss. In: Schroeder W (ed) Reading between the lines – Leo Strauss and the history of early modern philosophy. De Gruyter, Berlin
Curley E (2016) The collected works of Spinoza, vol II. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Curley E. Locke on religious toleration (unpublished)
Drake HA (2000) Constantine and the bishops. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
Fletcher R (1999) The barbarian conversion from paganism to Christianity. University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles
Kamen H (2014) The Spanish Inquisition, a historical revision, 4th edn. Yale University Press, New Haven
Lea HC (1922) A history of the Inquisition of Spain, vol 1. Macmillan, New York
Locke J (1689) A letter concerning toleration (trans: Popple W). Awnsham Churchill, London
Locke J (1968) Epistola de Tolerantia/A letter on toleration (trans: Gough JW). Klibansky R (ed). Clarendon Press, Oxford
Locke J (1993) Political writings of John Locke. Wootton D (ed). Mentor, New York
Locke J (1999) The reasonableness of Christianity. Higgins-Biddle JC (ed). Clarendon Press, Oxford
MacCulloch D (2010) Christianity, the first three thousand years. Viking, New York
Maimonides M (1963) The guide of the perplexed, two vols. Shlomo Pines (tr. & notes). University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Marshall J (1994) John Locke, resistance, religion and responsibility. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Nadler S (1999) Spinoza: a life. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Netanyahu B (1995) The origins of the Inquisition in fifteenth century Spain. Random House, New York
Pew Research Center (2014) U.S. Religious Landscape Study. Available via Pew Research Center. http://religions.pewforum.org/. Accessed 17 June 2016
Proast J (1690) The argument of the letter concerning toleration, briefly consider’d and answer’d. George West and Henry Clements, Oxford
Roth C (1932) A history of the Marranos. The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia
Spinoza B (1925) Tractatus theologico-politicus. In: Gebhardt C (ed) Benedict de Spinoza: Opera, vol 3. C. Winter, Heidelberg
Spinoza B Theological-political treatise, Ch. XX, III/239 in the Gebhardt edition, Bruder ¶¶ 1–2
The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (2001). Available via The Victorian Web http://www.victorianweb.org/religion/39articles.html. Accessed 17 June 2016
Voltaire (2008) Dictionnaire philosophique. Naves R, Ferret O (eds). Classiques Garnier, Paris
Wright L (2011) The apostate. The New Yorker, February 14, 21, pp 84–111
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Curley, E. (2017). From Augustine to Locke and Spinoza: Answering the Christian Case Against Religious Liberty. In: Speight, C., Zank, M. (eds) Politics, Religion and Political Theology. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1082-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1082-2_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-024-1080-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-024-1082-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)