For all of their differences, Locke, Spinoza, and Kant ... share a common core in their conception of freedom, which we may justly characterize in ge… - D. C. Schindler

This is the heart of the diabolical: an image that is not an image, but presents itself as the real thing—indeed, in a certain sense, as better than the real thing precisely because of the immediacy or the lack of transcendence that the dissemblance implies.

Instead of enjoyment, there is labor, instead of goods, there are uses, instead of substance, we have property, instead of property, we have money, instead of bonds, we have boundaries, instead of connection, we have contract, instead of order, we have regulation, and so forth. Locke's political theory represents a conquest of the ordering principle of human life, which then allows that principle to retain its rule only if it changes its meaning.

Locke does not deny the existence of God or the truth of religion; indeed, he affirms these as indispensable, to the extent that atheists have to be excluded from toleration. What Locke does deny, ... is the actuality ... of any concrete, historical form that religion might take. But of course a religion cannot exist except concretely in history. If a religion, which means the effective manifestation of ultimate meaning, exists concretely in history, it necessarily makes a claim on me prior to my act of will, because it makes a claim on everything without exception. To recognize this claim is to see that actuality precedes potency, and if this is true ultimately, it will be true, so to speak, all the way down. And this will mean that freedom will necessarily have to be interpreted as sharing in actuality, a response to the good that precedes me and makes my choice of it possible; the actualizing of the will in this case comes to mean being brought into an actual world, a tradition, and a hierarchy of goods. Actual religion is therefore incompatible with an interpretation of freedom primarily as active power. Locke can affirm freedom as power only by transforming at the same time the status of religion. It can no longer be a single truth that precedes political agents, but it has to become an array of possibilities, any one of which individuals are free to accept, at least within the constraints of political order. Within these constraints, I am permitted to affirm any religion as true, and practice it thus in public, as long as I recognize that this has a new meaning that would strike an ancient thinker as confusing, if not simply confused: it is true "for me." Notice that the potentializing of religion in this way allows one to neutralize the implications of the existence of God without having to shoulder the burden of responsibility that would come with rejecting God outright. In short, the precondition for the emergence of the modern concept of freedom is not the denial of God, but the denial of his actual self-revelation in history. Modern liberty, at its core, is a rejection specifically of the incarnation, God's coming in the flesh.