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.1750 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 legacyof the Enlightenment at its best.

Jonathan C P Birch teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is an intellectual historian who specialises in biblical interpretation and Western philosophy.

Chapter One: Introduction.- Chapter Two: Imagining Enlightenment The Historical and Historiographical Context.- Chapter Three: Overture to a Moral Messiah - God, Goodness, and the Heretical Tendency.- Chapter Four:  Material Messiah - Hobbes, Heresy, and a Kingdom Not of This World.- Chapter Five: 'No Spirit No God' - From the Light of Christ to the Age of Enlightenment.- Chapter Six: What Would Jesus Tolerate? - Reason and Revelation in Spinoza, Locke, and Bayle.- Chapter Seven: The Unity of God and the Wisdom of Christ - The Religious Enlightenments of Joseph Priestley and Thomas Jefferson .- Chapter Eight: Postscript and Conclusion.