The Freedom of a Christian Nation by Brad Littlejohn

The Freedom of a Christian Nation by Brad Littlejohn

For all their insight, Reformers like Vermigli and Hooker will not provide us sufficient resources to counter such claims. Instead, we must look to Luther himself, with his crucial but neglected theology of the “three estates”—family, church, and state—and even more to the great early Protestant political theorist Johannes Althusius, who took up his pen at the same time as Hooker to propose a bottom-up theory of the state as a “community of communities” that would reject papal pretensions, head off the ambitions of absolute rulers and despotic national states, and lay a groundwork for durable individual liberty. No effort toward a “Protestant Christendom” will get airborne without the guiding lights of Hookerian nationalism and Althusian federalism.

Fascinating and complex article on the fallout from the Reformation in terms of liberty.