John Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity was published anonymously in August 1695. About six weeks later John Edwards published an attack on Reasonableness and other theological writings of the day which he titled Some thoughts concerning the Several causes and Occasions of Atheism. In November of that same year Locke, still concealing his authorship, published an aggressive response to Edwards under the title A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity. Edwards then published two extremely sharp responses to Locke's Vindication: Socianism Unmask’d in April 1696, and The Socinian Creed in November 1696. To these two attacks by Edwards, Locke responded, now revealing his authorship, in March 1697 with A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity. The Second Vindication is far more prolix than the first, considerably longer even than The Reasonableness itself.

The main body of the volume here under consideration consists of what I judge to be definitively edited texts of the two Vindications. To this is added a fragment of a defence of The Reasonableness that Locke never published; and a French translation by Pierre Coste of an abridged version of the two Vindications. Coste was supervised, to some extent, by Locke himself in making his translation. This body of texts is preceded by a superb introduction by the editor, Victor Nuevo, in which he describes the cultural and theological context within which the debate took place.

For us, theological debates of the seventeenth century are, for the most part, musty and stupefyingly boring; often interest is carried along by little more than the inventive nastiness of the rhetoric. Locke was no exception. So a natural question to pose, concerning this fine edition of these Lockean texts, is whether these texts retain any cultural significance or whether they are now of no more than antiquarian interest.

Let me explain what I see as the abiding cultural significance of Locke's Reasonableness and his two Vindications. It is a paradox of Locke's influence that he was one of the great founders of both modern liberal Christianity and modern evangelical Christianity. Locke's announced strategy in both The Reasonableness and his later commentary on Paul's epistles, repeated in his two Vindications, was to put the theology of the ecumenical councils out of mind and read the Gospels and Paul's letters as one would read any other religious text. This strategy of biblical interpretation is fundamental to evangelicalism; ‘no creed but Christ’ is the evangelical slogan. But whereas evangelicals usually embrace a high christology, Locke's reading of the gospels led him to a low christology; liberal Christianity has followed him in this.

Locke's thesis in the Reasonableness is that the fundamental Christian confession is that Jesus was the Messiah; Edwards and others pummelled him mercilessly for saying nothing about the doctrine of the Trinity, nothing about the doctrine of the incarnation, nothing about vicarious atonement, and so forth. One of the more recent publications of the former bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright, is his massive study of the Gospels, Jesus and the Victory of God; it's a vastly more rich, subtle and detailed study than Locke’s. Wright is by no means a liberal. That makes it especially fascinating to note that, on his interpretation, the basic category the Gospel writers used for coming to grips with this baffling man, Jesus of Nazareth, was that he was the long-expected Messiah.