DAVENANT INSTITUTE

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.

In this fifth volume of a multi-year translation project by the Davenant Institute, we present key sections from Book V of Hooker’s Laws, in which Hooker thoroughly yet succinctly lays out the Reformed yet catholic perspective on both Christology and the sacraments. Long regarded as both the theological and rhetorical high point of the Laws, these chapters provide a survey of the church’s historic teaching on the person of Christ and our union with him, as well as an irenic defense of Reformed distinctives over against the Catholic, Lutheran, and anti-sacramental alternatives.

Yet this is no dry theological tract: Hooker’s descriptions of Christ, baptism, and especially the eucharist are among the most stirring passages penned during the English Reformation. Book V of the Laws is as valuable today as it was when first written for the edification of the church, the sharpening of the mind, and the enrichment of the soul.

For whom did Christ die?

John Davenant’s Death of Christ remains the most significant and comprehensive example of English hypothetical universalism. Coming on the heels of the Synod of Dordt, Davenant’s Death of Christ is a scholastic treatise dealing with the question of the extent of Christ’s atonement-for whom did Christ die? Avoiding both the Scylla of Arminianism and Charybdis of certain strands of Reformed theology, Davenant employs Scripture, reason, and testimonies from ecclesiastical history in defense of the so-called Lombardian formula: Christ died for all people sufficiently; efficaciously for the elect alone.

John Davenant’s On the Death of Christ, a classic of English Reformed thought on the atonement, is now available in a new translation by Dr. Michael Lynch–the first in modern English. This book also features two shorter letters which Davenant wrote on this topic to both the French Reformed churches and to Herman Hildebrand.