Interpreting the Religion of Thomas Hobbes: An Exchange: Hobbes’s Erastianism and Interpretation

A. P. Martinich's The Two Gods of Leviathan appeared in 1992, and J. R. Collins's The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes in 2005. Martinich offered a revisionist interpretation of Thomas Hobbes's religious commitments. He rebuked the conventional view that Hobbes was an atheist and placed him within particular traditions of reformed Christian theology. Collins's book strongly differed from these conclusions, and reasserted Hobbes's hostility to traditional Christianity as part of a general contextualization of his writings within the period of the English Revolution. The following exchange between Martinich and Collins was first aired in 2007 as a debate at the Southwestern Political Science Association's Annual Conference.