John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689 (though written largely in the early 1680s), is the foundational text of liberal political philosophy and the most politically influential work of the Enlightenment. What is frequently overlooked in secular appropriations of Locke is the extent to which his political philosophy is saturated with biblical argument. The First Treatise, which demolishes Robert Filmer's divine-right theory through detailed exegesis of Genesis 1-3, occupies most of the work's bulk. The Second Treatise, which establishes the positive theory of natural rights and government by consent, is itself grounded in a theology of human dignity derived from the imago Dei doctrine of Genesis 1:26-28. Locke was not using the Bible rhetorically; he was constructing a genuinely biblical political philosophy.
The Thinker and His Work
Locke (1632-1704) was a physician, a philosopher, and a political exile. He had been implicated in the Rye House Plot against Charles II and had fled to the Netherlands in 1683, where he worked on the Two Treatises and the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He returned to England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought William of Orange to the throne, and published the Two Treatises in 1689 - ostensibly, he claimed in the preface, to justify the Revolution already accomplished. His close friendship with the third Earl of Shaftesbury had drawn him into the Whig cause and into opposition to royal absolutism.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Genesis 1:27 - 'God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them' - is the foundation of Locke's natural equality. All human beings are made equally in God's image. This means that no human being has a natural right to rule over another that is not derived from consent. Filmer's argument that God gave Adam dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:28) and that this dominion was transmitted through patriarchal succession to current monarchs is, Locke argues, a systematic misreading of the text: the dominion given to Adam was over animals, not over other human beings, and it was given equally to Adam and Eve ('male and female he created them').
Genesis 2:15 - 'The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it' - grounds Locke's labor theory of property. God commanded humanity to labor, and labor is the means by which persons mix their personhood (as God's image-bearers) with the natural world and thereby establish a claim of ownership. This is the philosophical basis for the right to property that Locke regards as natural and pre-political: it derives from the divine command to work the earth, not from any human convention or legal system.
Acts 17:26 - 'And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth' - grounds Locke's argument for the fundamental equality of all nations and peoples. All human beings share a common origin in God's creation; no natural hierarchy of races, nations, or classes exists that would justify the permanent subjection of one people to another.
Core Argument
The Second Treatise argues that the purpose of government is to protect the natural rights of persons - life, liberty, and property - which are given by God and exist independent of any political arrangement. The right to life derives from the fact that human beings are God's creatures and 'his property, whose workmanship they are' (Second Treatise, sect. 6); no person has the right to destroy another's life or even their own. The right to liberty derives from the fact that rational beings, made in God's image, have the capacity for self-governance; subjection to another person's arbitrary will is incompatible with their dignity as God's rational creatures.
Government is constituted by consent - the social contract - for the purpose of better protecting these pre-political rights than can be achieved in the state of nature. When government systematically violates the rights it was constituted to protect, the people have the right to revolution.
Intellectual Context
Locke was working within the tradition of natural law theory that ran from Aquinas through the Spanish Scholastics (Suarez, Vitoria) to Grotius and Pufendorf. He departed from this tradition by grounding natural rights in individual persons rather than in social wholes, and by making consent rather than natural hierarchy the basis of political authority. His biblical arguments were not peripheral to his project but integral: he was arguing against Filmer's biblical absolutism with a more careful reading of the same biblical texts.
Reception and Critique
The American Declaration of Independence (1776) echoes Locke's Second Treatise at almost every point: the unalienable rights of 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' (the third term is a Jeffersonian modification of Locke's 'property'), the government's derivation of its just powers from the consent of the governed, and the right of revolution when government becomes destructive of these rights are all Lockean. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) are further instantiations of the Lockean framework, though increasingly detached from the biblical grounding Locke himself provided.
Carl Becker's The Declaration of Independence (1922) traced the Lockean origins of Jefferson's language. Leo Strauss and C.B. Macpherson argued (from very different perspectives) that Locke's theory was more radically individualist and less traditionally Christian than it appeared. Jeremy Waldron's God, Locke, and Equality (2002) offered the most sustained defense of the view that Locke's egalitarianism is genuinely theological and that removing the theological foundation undermines the egalitarian conclusion.
Legacy
Locke established the philosophical vocabulary for modern liberal democracy: natural rights, government by consent, separation of powers, and the right to revolution. The fact that this vocabulary was developed through careful exegesis of Genesis and Acts is a significant datum for the history of political thought and for the relationship between biblical theology and liberal political philosophy. The contemporary debate about whether liberal democracy requires a religious foundation or can be sustained on purely secular grounds is in significant part a debate about whether Locke's conclusions can survive without his premises.
Key Passages
'The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker.' (Second Treatise, sect. 6)
Contemporary Relevance
The question Locke raises - whether human rights require a theological grounding, and specifically whether the imago Dei doctrine provides the most secure basis for human equality - has become urgent in an era when alternative groundings (utilitarian, contractualist, communitarian) have each proved vulnerable to critique. Michael Perry's The Idea of Human Rights (1998) argues that human rights claims are genuinely intelligible only on a religious account of human dignity, making Locke's theological grounding not an embarrassing historical contingency but a philosophically necessary foundation.