Locke on Reason, Revelation, and Spiritual Illumination

Abstract

Like his epistemology of original revelation, Locke’s epistemology of traditional revelation can be seen as analogous to his natural epistemology. First, judgments of faith are not simply reducible to judgments about the natural world, because their content is beyond anything we can know with our natural faculties. Nevertheless, both cases must meet first and second order justificatory conditions. Just as we have a method to follow in justifiable assent to probable judgments about the natural world, we have the same method to follow in arriving at justifiable assent to judgments of Christian articles of faith. In addition, we can see the same justificatory conditions operating in Locke’s hermeneutics of biblical interpretation.