In September 1522, Martin Luther published his German translation of the New Testament. Each of the four Gospels opened with a woodcut initial depicting its apostle seated with a codex. Each apostle was identified by his symbol; otherwise, Matthew, Mark (lion), and Luke (ox) might have been taken for humanists in their studies, small cramped spaces with narrow windows. Lucas Cranach depicted Matthew (Figure 28), Mark, and Luke each holding a stylus, seated at a desk writing in the codex; Matthew and Mark are writing at the bottom of the right-hand page of a codex. John (Figure 29) was significantly different: seated not at a desk, not in a study, but outdoors in a landscape framed by a medieval town and mountains. He, too, held a stylus, but on a page already lined past his hand, a specific place in what was so visibly a complete text. Alone among the four, John was depicted in apostolic robes.

When early modern writers invoked the right of resistance their intentions were generally directed at addressing two fundamental ideas in the conceptual catalogue of political philosophy: sovereignty and liberty. Both of these concepts have played a major role in the history of political thought, each undergoing a crescendo in the late medieval period to become the dominant actors on the stage of early modernity. But their historical development cannot be separated from the dawn of certain ideas about resistance, which evolved in parallel and served as a fulcrum for debates about the origin and nature of political authority, as well as the boundaries and implications of subjection to political power. It was precisely through the construction and appeal to a right of resistance that many contemporary thinkers canvassed the fundamental questions of what is the state and what is its ultimate raison d’être.

This chapter examines two so-called transitional theologians who straddled the worlds of orthodox belief and learning and forward-looking scholarship and literary engagement. Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1693–1755) and Johann Georg Walch (1693–1775) pointed the way to a new view of the Reformation, even if the results of their interventions went much farther then they intended. Mosheim’s History of Michael Servetus sought a type of transhistorical reconciliation between the eponymous Spanish heretic and John Calvin, who had him burned at the stake in Geneva. Mosheim tried to acknowledge the occasional brutality of Reformation-era Protestants while contextualizing the historical attitudes of an earlier era. Walch’s twenty-four-volume Luther edition was notable not only for rendering Luther’s language into a readable vernacular, but also for a long historical essay on Luther’s “accomplishments.” Walch sought to both acknowledge the genuine contributions of the first Reformer while also stripping away some of the mythical status that had accrued to Luther through generations of pious veneration.

The introduction looks at the different ways that the unique, but troublesome, injunction at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount for the followers of Jesus to ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matt. 5.48) has been interpreted within Christian history. It looks specifically at the interpretations of John and Charles Wesley, John Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, Gregory of Nyssa and Tertullian and argues that Aquinas’ is the most sophisticated. It suggests how each reflects the influence of their particular social contexts and their radically different theological takes on humanity, while holding in common a clear distinction between human and divine perfection.

Focusing on Donne’s view of natural theology, especially from 1614 onward, this chapter makes two central claims. First, considering Donne biographically, I argue that while there is important continuity in Donne’s career (insofar as he engages with the book of nature throughout), his vocational turn in the years 1611–1614 refocuses, reshapes, and intensifies that engagement: the skeptical and noncommittal attitude toward apprehension of the divine in the sensible world that can be traced in the Songs and Sonnets is replaced by a clearer and altogether more hopeful tone in the Essayes, with Donne further developing his insights about the book of nature in his sermons and the Devotions. Second, I argue that Donne’s insights deserve to be included in historical studies of natural theology in the early seventeenth century and his exclusion has been partly facilitated by scholarly emphasis on his earlier work, although this is changing.

Greggs examines how creaturely gratitude has been disrupted by the Fall, but is restored by grace. Rather than accepting the Thomist or Calvinist account of gratitude as an obligation, stemming from the Fall, Greggs sees true creaturely gratitude as movement within grace, in anticipation of redemption; an outpouring of thankfulness into all areas of life.

Natural law and natural rights are contested categories among many modern Protestants, but were common legal and theological topics for their sixteenth-century forebearers. Early Protestant reformers echoed classical and scholastic teachings, and their natural law principles and natural rights overlapped with Catholic, humanist, and republican formulations in their day. But the reformers grounded their teachings in distinct accounts of the created order, human nature, the Ten Commandments, law and Gospel, divine sovereignty and natural order in the two kingdoms - giving their views a unique accent. This chapter samples the natural law and rights teachings of Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, the Magdeburg Confession, John Calvin, Christopher Goodman, and Johannes Althusius. They illustrate the hundreds of Protestant sources, by Lutherans and Calvinists, Anabaptists and Anglicans of various denominations. These teachings were a driving force of early modern Western democratic revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic; and influential in modern international declarations of rights, in the civil rights movement in the United States, and in various liberation movements in the Global South.

A reformer tried to build religious community by preaching the word of God and subjecting the town and territory to the pastoral oversight of evangelical clergy. To preach and reorganize, the reformer needed a bible that recounted events and narratives written down for an explicit purpose: the regeneration of individual and society. The reformer was sensitive to threats to the bible’s purpose. Any time textual fact and regenerative purpose seemed to drift apart, its purpose could seem to be compromised. Fact and purpose could drift apart in two ways. Historicizing the text, taking the book as the artifact of a distinctive, remote culture or as ancient fiction, could seem to nullify the text’s power as divine speech in the present. Equally problematic was the suggestion that spiritual readings of the text were divorced from historical facts. These two challenges to the bible, one historicizing and another spiritualizing, first appeared as an intellectual dilemma in the Reformation. This chapter illustrates that first appearance by examining two controversies in the life of the Reformation’s most celebrated literalist, John Calvin. The first example is Calvin’s conflict with his friend Sebastian Castellio. The second is Calvin’s conflict with the so-called “libertines.”

Democracy in America begins from the central insight that religion precedes politics. This is best seen in the prominent role that Tocqueville accords to America’s Puritan Founders. The Puritans, in his view, contribute much to the spirit of American political culture. On the one hand, they contribute a covenantal theology that focuses on the importance of intermediation among otherwise separate democratic individuals. Yet the Puritans are also responsible for notions of sinfulness and religious “stain” that have the potential to assume illiberal forms. As Joshua Mitchell argues in this chapter, one potentially illiberal danger of Puritanism is the scapegoating of particular groups through the dynamics of identity politics. In Mitchell’s view, we need to reckon with America’s Puritan legacy not only through the lens of John Calvin and the covenantal theory of mediation but also through the prism of Blaise Pascal whose insights into the problems of loneliness, separation, and redemption illuminate contemporary political dilemmas.

David VanDrunen ties the natural law concepts found in both the Old and New Testaments to a sense of conscience. The notion of natural law appears early in the Old Testament, in God’s covenant with Noah. God instructs Noah that, for example, the killing of an innocent must be recompensed (thereby indicating that innocent people must not be wantonly killed). While there is not one Hebrew word for conscience in the OT, it does identify the “heart” (leb) and “kidneys” (kelayot) as the mechanisms by which the wise and discerning person applies what he knows to be true about the way the world works. In the New Testament, conscience is the “subjective human faculty that recognizes right and wrong and thus bears witness to a person’s standing before the law.” The Apostle Paul’s discussion of natural law in Romans chapters 2 and 3 reveals that although not all receive God’s express law (as did God’s people on Mt. Sinai), all people everywhere have an innate sense of moral rectitude to which their consciences testify. All persons everywhere therefore are subject to God’s righteous judgment.

John Thompson describes how Martin Luther and John Calvin treated conscience. For Luther, natural conscience is beset by knowing that a person can never meet the rigorous requirements of the law. Faith can relieve a person’s downtrodden conscience, which would otherwise condemn him. Once a person accepts the favor of God that flows solely from trusting him, his conscience is liberated. He knows he can do nothing himself to merit that favor. His conscience is freed “to trust God’s promise of mercy and forgiveness.” The highest functioning conscience for Luther, then, is the one that does not depend on its own goodness or perfection. Calvin teaches that, though a person’s conscience is a natural faculty, it is marred and affected by the fall. Once a person is saved, however, his conscience is transformed so that he desires to obey the will of God found in the law. This is true even though adherence to the law will not add in the least to his salvation. For this reason, Calvin created a catechism to train and chasten Genevan Christians’ consciences. Calvin also helped to establish the Geneva consistory, which was less a disciplinary body, and rather “a school for consciences.”

This chapter focuses on Pauline ecclesiology, which on some contemporary accounts takes much more prominence than in traditional Protestant theology. In particular, the chapter contrasts the strong ties between soteriology and ecclesiology in the reading of N. T. Wright with the consistent loosening of these ties in the history of Reformed theology. The intrinsic relationship in Paul between church and salvation is investigated by a study of Wright’s reading of Galatians 2 and Ephesians 2. The loosening of this relationship in Reformed theology is traced in the writings of John Calvin, Francis Turretin, and Charles Hodge.

This chapter sifts through the various contemporary interpretations of the Pauline phrase “in Christ.” Based on the likely origin of the phrase and the way it functions in Paul’s argument, it is suggested that for Paul, union with Christ expresses genealogy and lineage. By being “in Christ” one is folded into Abraham’s family. An analysis of multiple Pauline letters suggests that the means of being united with Christ is baptism. This interpretation calls for a revision of traditional Protestant accounts of the ordo salutis, in particular of the tendency to separate baptism and union in Christ.