Description
Religion & Republic: Christian American from the Founding to the Civil War
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.
The Two Kingdoms: A Guide for the Perplexed
What does it mean to live as citizens of this world and of the world-to-come? How can we render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s? In recent years, fresh controversy has erupted over these age-old questions, and especially over the meaning and relevance of the Reformation’s “two-kingdoms” doctrine. At stake in such debates is not simply the shape of Christian politics, but the meaning of the church, the nature of human and divine authority, and the scope of Christian discipleship. In this concise guide, Reformation scholar and Christian ethicist Bradford Littlejohn first sketches the history of the doctrine and clears away common misunderstandings. He then shows that the two-kingdoms doctrine can offer a valuable framework for thinking about pastoring, politics, and even financial stewardship.
Our world is obsessed with stories about Protestantism and modernity. Are Protestant societies dynamic, progressive, and free? Or are they godless, Erastian, and libertine? Thinkers and theologians once argued we should rejoice in Protestantism’s creation of societies grounded on reason, freedom, and the individual; now, many are quick to pin the blame for modernity’s ills squarely on the Reformation. But these are two sides of the same coin, united by a shared assumption: that Protestantism necessitates revolution, and with it the dissolution of religious and metaphysical bonds which once united generations, nations, a continent, the Church, and even heaven and earth.
But what if these accounts are wrong? What if Protestantism is more than this, or something different altogether? The burden of this book is to illuminate Protestantism’s historic vision of society, culture, and governance, with the aim of applying its rich legacy in our own day. Collecting and expanding essays originally published in the journal Ad Fontes, this book deals with the issues of church and state, politics and culture, and economics and justice, and proposes that Protestantism’s own vision for these things is worth seeing afresh, on its own terms. If you are wiling to ask “A Protestant Christendom?”, you may be surprised by the answer.
The doctrine of creation concerns our beginningbut also our destiny, since the world to come is the new creation. But Christians have long debated: how much does the first creation have in common with the last? And what does this mean for Christians, who live even now with a foot in both? Our answer to these questions conditions our answer to many others: the relationship of philosophy to theology, of the church to the saeculum, of the kingdom of Christ to the visible church. This volume brings together the careful investigations of established and emerging historians and theologians, exploring how these questions have been addressed at different points in Christian history, and what they mean for us today.
In November 1605, English Roman Catholics came within hours of killing the King. The famed Gunpowder Plot was a watershed moment in the conflict between England’s Protestant monarchs and their Roman Catholic subjects, stretching back to Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1533.
The event triggered several years of fevered writing by Protestants and Catholics alike regarding the jurisdictions of the crown, the Church, and the Pope. Eloquent works were published on both sides by the likes of the Catholic Cardinal Bellarmine, and even the King himself. In 1610, George Carleton (1559 – 1628) made a decisive Protestant contribution by publishing Jurisdiction Regal, Episcopal, Papal. A delegate at the Synod of Dort, and later Bishop of Llandaff, he first outlines the biblical and theological basis for a Protestant view of church and state. Then, he exhaustively surveys church history to expose how Rome gradually robbed kings and churches of their rightful power, theologically justifying itself after-the-fact.
This new edition presents the original text with a new scholarly introduction and extensive footnotes, and the time is ripe for its publication. With debates about the relationship of church and state resurfacing in a post-liberal and post-pandemic era, it is vital that Protestants and Catholics alike return again to the sources of our understanding of the body politic.
