This book explores the religious concerns of Enlightenment thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to
Thomas Jefferson. Using an innovative method the study illuminates the intellectual history of
the age through interpretations of Jesus between c.1650 and c.1826. The book demonstrates the
persistence of theology in modern philosophy and the projects of social reform and amelioration
associated with the Enlightenment. At the core of many of these projects was a robust
moral-theological realism sometimes manifest in a natural law ethic but always associated
with Jesus and a commitment to the sovereign goodness of God. This ethical orientation in
Enlightenment discourse is found in a range of different metaphysical and political identities
(dualist and monist progressive and radical) which intersect with earlier ¿heretical¿
tendencies in Christian thought (Arianism Pelagianism and Marcionism). This intellectual
matrix helped to produce the discourses of irenic toleration which are a legacy of the
Enlightenment at its best.
