• The Christian Right (and Wrong)

    Harp’s narrative provides useful history, but a more charitable and accurate assessment is needed to develop a contemporary Protestant political theology

  • Christ and Caesar: A Response to John MacArthur

    Last week, John MacArthur used his immense stature in the evangelical church to call Christians to civil disobedience. WE

  • 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.

  • “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 […]

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 […]

  • “Nursing Fathers”: The Magistrate and the Moral Law

    Not many passages in the New Testament speak directly to political order. The first part of the thirteenth chapter of Romans is perhaps the most famous. I would like to focus in this essay on vv. 3-4, which may appear prima facie to be something of an interpretive crux. Are these verses descriptive or prescriptive? […]