This essay reflects on how Presbyterians changed their views on the civil magistrate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My contention is that Reformed political thought has not been static, and, in fact, that American Presbyterianism saw itself as correcting elements of the earlier tradition.
In 1788, American Presbyterians meeting in Philadelphia approved a revised version of the Westminster Confession of Faith. The most significant change to the original 1646 version concerned the doctrine of the civil magistrate in Chapter 23. In the century and a half following the Westminster…
For all the fine retrieval work Stephen Wolfe does in parts of The Case for Christian Nationalism, the overall project must be rejected. I offer a substantive critique of this book under four headings: nations and ethnicity, the nature of the church, Protestant political thought,…
Beth Allison Barr’s influential book The Making of Biblical Womanhood sets out to demonstrate the historical roots of “biblical womanhood,” a system of Christian patriarchy that is not really Christian. This review article poses two key questions, both of which point to significant weaknesses in…
