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Pursuing Wisdom in a Time of Crisis
As we approach the seventh anniversary of our founding, we are now poised to open an exciting new chapter in the ministry of the Davenant Institute.
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Retrieving John Donne: Poetic Companion for Conflicted Protestants
Many Protestants today are conflicted Protestants. Here we stand, we can do no other—yet we feel adrift of the church’s historical doctrine and worship.
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The Art of Protestant Learning
One of the misguided but persistent assumptions about English reformers in the sixteenth century is that they rejected the study of ancient languages, rhetoric, grammar, philosophy, and poetry in their efforts to defend the supremacy of Scripture.
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American Disestablishment: The Conclusion
While the Commonwealth was not the cartoonish inquisition its detractors make it out to be, the Cromwellian regime by no means approached what eventually became the understanding of toleration in the American republic.
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The Shape Fallacy: The Book of Common Prayer as Text
The Reformers were concerned not only with theology but also with its expression in worship. Many liturgies were produced in the churches of the magisterial Reformation in Germany, England, Switzerland, and elsewhere.
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“Presbyterians” and the Making of an Informal Establishment (Pt. 2)
So far, I have worked to argue that the English Reformed tradition had already become considerably less magisterial by the mid-seventeenth century. Next, I want to suggest that Cromwell’s move towards supporting a kind of multiple establishment had echoes in the early republic, first in the abortive attempts to create shared establishments that would support…
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The Decline of the Magisterial Tradition and the Rise of the Cromwellian Consensus (Pt. 1)
After the conclusion of the English Civil War, the tensions between two Puritan emphases began to become apparent: the ideal of the “godly magistracy,” which assumed general uniformity in religious practice, and the tendency towards a “gathered church,” which had encouraged the gathering of the “godly” in separate assemblies.
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A Theology of Proportion
A Review of God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, by Steven J. Duby (InterVarsity Press Academic, 2019) by James Clark When considering how to engage in theology, two inclinations tend to be opposed. The first prioritizes “a speculative doctrine of God driven by natural theology or ‘metaphysics’” which inordinately colors…
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The Promise and Peril of Disestablishment: Baptist and Reformed Political Theology in the New Republic
This essay briefly attempts to explore the major formational differences between Baptists and Reformed Christians in the American republic on the question of church and state.
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The Neglected Craft: Prudence in Reformed Political Thought
Aristotle described politics as involving art or craft (techne). It, too, required skill. It, too, could produce excellent, even wondrous edifices: regimes. Once upon a time, the Reformed tradition saw politics in the same manner. Althusius, for example, spoke of “the art of governing.”[1] Joseph Caryl, a Westminster Divine, described rulers as engaging in an…
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