Michael Allen Gillespie

Many debts have been incurred while I was writing this book. It is hard to name all of them. Some of them have read the drafts of this study and provided me with insightful advices. Among them, I would like to thank firstly to Michael Allen Gillespie whose advices helped me navigate in the dark paths of intellectual history of the early modern era and who wrote the foreword of this study....

The idea to investigate the theological origins of liberalism came to my mind when I was having a discussion about justice with a colleague of mine, a socialist sociopolitical theorist. For a reason I do not remember, at some point we began discussing divine justice. So the discussion evolved into a debate between liberal and socialist approaches to divine justice because I define myself as a...

The relationship between philosophy and theology is one of the most contentious topics in both philosophy and theology. Throughout history, much ink has been dedicated to the question whether philosophy has or should have any relationship with theology. There have been two main approaches to this relationship. The first one argued that philosophy and theology should be regarded as...

The roots of liberalism have generally been traced back to the Protestant Reformation.Some important...

In this chapter, the theological origins of contractarianism (i.e., of social contract doctrine), of federalism and constitutionalism are examined. Although covenant is principally a theological concept having many types and used many times in the Bible, this chapter mainly focuses on its political ramifications. Although some information was given about the theology of the idea of covenant,...

The first chapter of this work put forward that human mind advances on a prepolitical ground, which is theological or metaphysical, while constructing a political theory. John Locke was the first philosopher to borrow theological ideas from the Bible and to use them as premises of a liberal political theory in the second half of the seventeenth century. Therefore, the prepolitical ground of the...

Liberal political theory was for the first time systematically grounded by John Locke on the theory of natural law and natural rights that he premised on a number of Christian ideas such as the idea of imago dei that are examined in the previous chapter. Therefore, the theories of natural law and natural rights have played major roles in the birth of liberalism. This chapter analyzes the...

Contradictions in natural rights liberalism are the inevitable consequences of contradictions in the theories of natural law, and these contradictions in turn are the result of a wrong understanding of reason. Lockean philosophy could be examined as an embodiment of these contradictions. Therefore, this chapter examines the alleged contradictions in John Locke’s philosophy, argues that these...

In this study, I investigated the theological origins of liberalism. Although I had the intuition that liberalism had some common points with Christianity, I was not totally aware of the roots of these points when starting this undertaking. I think this study has achieved, if anything, a number of things. First, it is a modest contribution to the argument that ideas play important roles in the...

Aaron, Richard I.,4.28 , 4.76 ,

İsmail Kurun is a faculty member in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Necmettin Erbakan, Konya, Turkey. His articles have been published in a number of journals. Among his research topics are classical liberal philosophy, liberal political theology, comparative political theory, medieval and early modern political thought, Islamic...