"The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty"

No matter how little I enjoy marking final exams, and no matter how many "breaks" I manage to find for myself, I'm not up for doing a full-on review of "The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty: Richard Hooker, the Puritans, and Protestant Political Philosophy" by W. Bradford Littlejohn (Eerdmans 2017). But I can give my readers some reasons why they might want to read it.

Littlejohn does an excellent job of summarizing how a combination of the material ground of the Protestant Reformation (justification by faith alone) and its formal ground (solā scripturā) entailed (and entail) a certain liberty of conscience. No news here. Standard Protestant fare.

Littlejohn's contribution lies in closely examining the late sixteenth-century debates between Richard Hooker and his Puritan adversaries over what to do about the rest of life. In other words, if God alone speaking through his written Word is Lord of the conscience, who decides (1) what his Word says (its application), (2) how far his Word extends (its scope), and (3) what who (and how) does anyone have legitimate authority over whatever is outside the scope of God's written Word? With the Reformation, liberty of conscience became a very important matter (potentially one of eternal life and death) and it became all the more important in civil affairs with the rise of the Liberal political order. (For whether and how liberty (now freedom) of conscience will subsist in a post-Liberal world remains to be seen.)

After carefully weighing the details of Hooker's Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity and concluding that there is ample room for prudential reason and ample scope for its deployment--in other words, much of life is adiaphora--Littlejohn goes on to ask how the insights of Richard Hooker play out in a world that has made each person, rather than God, Lord of his or her individual conscience.

I won't go into the details of Littlejohn's work with Hooker or contemporary critics of liberalism but will say that his book, while a bit dense, rewards its close reading.