John Toland: The Politics of Pantheism

Abstract

This paper will try to address the question of the sincerity of John Toland's public Christianity and relate it to his private and unorthodox beliefs: the public and the private in Toland's thought have been bifurcated for too long. One result of this reconstruction of Toland's religious ideas will be to suggest that his religious opinions (whether public or private) were intimately related to a political agenda. Much historical attention has focused upon the critical aspects of his assault upon the priestcraft of "protestant popery" but very little interest has been paid to the idea of Toland as a "Christian reformer". By exploring Toland's precise definition of pantheism and relating it to his neo-stoic doctrines of civic politics the paper hopes to revise current thinking about the significance of public Christianity in the freethinking polemic. © 1995 Springer.