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Evangelical Protestants enthusiastically affirm the “sufficiency of Scripture” for the Christian faith. But how does this doctrine square with the church’s long tradition of “natural theology” which teaches that a supririsng amount can be known about God from nature and reason alone?

In this short but incisive book, David Hainess demonstrates how the great English Reformer, Richard Hooker (1554-1600), answered this pivotal question. Usually, Hooker is associated with the questions of natural law and ethics rather than natural theology and the doctrine of God. However, Haines shows that a firm grasp of natural theology underpins Hooker’s teaching on natural law, and that the latter cannot be had without the former. In doing so, he provides not merely a survey of Hooker’s thought, but, via Hooker, a concise and lucid introduction to the whole topic of natural theology and a compelling defense against its biblicist critics.

By Miles Smith

A Protestant Republic

In recent years, America’s status as a “Christian nation” has become an incredibly vexed question. This is not simply a debate about America’s present, or even its future–it has become a debate about its past. Some want to rewrite America’s history as having always been highly secular in order to ensure a similar future; others seek to reframe the American founding as a continuation of medieval Christendom in the hopes of reviving America’s religious identity today.

In this book, Miles Smith offers a fresh historical reading of America’s status as a Christian nation in the Early Republic era. Defined neither by secularism nor Christendom, America was instead marked by “Christian institutionalism.” Christianity–and Protestantism specifically–was always baked into the American republic’s diplomatic, educational, judicial, and legislative regimes and institutional Christianity in state apparatuses coexisted comfortably with disestablishment from the American Revolution until the beginning of the twenty-first century. 

Any productive discussion about America’s religious present or future must first reckon accurately with its past. With close attention to a wide range of sermons, letters, laws, court cases and more, Religion & Republic offers just such a reckoning.