Description

Communicating God’s Trinitarian Fullness

God created the world for his glory alone. Most Christians would confess this claim, but struggle to explain it. How could God be all-sufficient in himself and yet gain anything from creating this cosmos? Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) provided a classic answer to this timeless question in his End for Which God Created the World, but most modern readers need a guide through this difficult text.

In this book, Joe Rigney points the way to an enriched understanding of Edwards’s classic and the sublime mysteries which it plumbs: that God has an end in creation; that God is eternally happy and self-sufficient in Himself; that God creates everything from nothing; and that God values things according to their value. Rigney’s work invites academics, pastors, and laypeople alike into conversation with one of the brightest lights of the Reformed tradition.

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.