Mark Goldie
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The Reformed theology of Thomas Hobbes
The Answer to Archbishop Bramhall
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Thomas Hobbes was a theologian. The scholarship of the past generation has established that fact, wresting him from the presumption that his Leviathan was atheistic and marked a radical secular break with the Christian religion. But what kind of theologian was he? This chapter takes a late work for its case study, An Answer to Dr Bramhall (1668), in which Hobbes positions himself within the tradition of Reformed and magisterial Protestantism and attacks an eminent Arminian and Laudian bishop. Hobbes wrote his treatise in the midst of a crisis in Restoration England in which the newly re-established Church of England, and its regime of uncompromising conformity in worship and doctrine, were coming under scrutiny and attack. Theology therefore abutted upon ecclesiastical politics. The chapter explores Bramhall’s charges against Hobbes and the latter’s rebuttals; Restoration critiques of the episcopate; Hobbes’s substantive theology and his efforts to provide historical credentials for his heterodox positions; and his ‘sociology’ of the priestly perversion of religion. Finally, the chapter assesses the extent to which Hobbes’s claims to Protestant orthodoxy were plausible.

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