The very life of Martin Luther (1483-1546) manifested turbulence, over and over. From his troubled youth in Saxony (Erikson, 1958/1962), through his contretemps against the Roman Catholic Church, and on into a bitter, even scurrilous old age,  Luther trailed controversy, such that his name is readily associated with one…

Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology. Glenn A. Moots. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2010.   I suspect that Glenn Moots is a great fan of Agatha Christie.  It is not that his book is a work of fiction, but it certainly does read like a…

Reaching Limits: The Covenant in America A series of covenants joined together church, town, and commonwealth in New England. Many of the immigrants who followed afterward, particularly Presbyterians and Baptists who settled in the Middle Colonies, were already familiar with covenanting before they arrived in the New World.51No person…

The Covenants from Abraham to David We will consider here the merits and limitations of covenantal social thinking and ask whether such ideas have relevance today. While the usual cast of characters is revisited, this study is not just about John Calvin or the English Puritans. They play a…

The Reformation movements of fifteenth-century Europe have been variously described as a cultural advance, a civilizational disruption with continuities, a religious revival, a heresy of “invincible error and perfect good faith,” and a schism and “calamity.” In Karl Holl’s estimation, for example, it “enriched all areas of …

The genius of Eric Voegelin is perhaps most apparent in his insight that the crisis of Modernity springs less from the naturalistic relativism that followed modem science than from unrestrained religious absolutism. The horrors of the twentieth century thus arise out of religious claims to truth. According to Voegelin,…