A historically informed and philosophically sensitive reading of Leviathan presents a very different picture of Hobbes's philosophy from the standard one. I have been arguing that Hobbes's political philosophy cannot be separated from his philosophy of religion. His religious views were much more sophisticated than scholars have previously believed. In addition to arguing that he was not an atheist, I have shown that to say no more than that he was a theist or even a Christian is a misleading oversimplification. In order to understand how it is that Hobbes did not intend to subvert religion, it is necessary to appreciate the specific religious and political tradition that Hobbes was trying to uphold. The ordinary religious classifications used by philosophers to categorize seventeenth-century thinkers are not finegrained enough to represent Hobbes's views fairly. It is important to distinguish between at least three different aspects of religion: (1) doctrine, (2) church government, and (3) theology.

1. In doctrine, he was orthodox. He explicitly subscribes to the dogmatic pronouncements formulated in the Christian creeds of the first four ecumenical councils, as required by the terms of Queen Elizabeth's Act of Supremacy. It is always possible for someone to accuse him of heterodoxy, just as people accused Aquinas of it in the late thirteenth century. Hobbes and Aquinas are alike in that they both tried to reconcile orthodoxy with new philosophical or scientific theories.