The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty: Richard Hooker, the Puritans, and Protestant Political Theology by Bradford Littlejohn (review)

The Protestant Reformers reconsidered the question of how to navigate the Christian’s dual loyalties to God and human authorities, ecclesial and civil. Few deny that their formulations of Christian freedom and the two kingdoms influenced modern political thought and practice. Yet scholars debate how exactly Protestant political theology shaped modern liberalism and whether the kernel of individual freedom can now leave behind the husk of Protestant theology. With this erudite study of competing Protestant political theologies that emerged from the Reformation, Bradford Littlejohn establishes himself as a major contributor to these debates and a provocateur who both disrupts and affirms aspects of the standard narrative linking Luther to liberalism. Littlejohn argues, counterintuitively, that the survival of modern liberalism as a modest proposal for desacralizing politics rests upon publicly acknowledging the Christ who renders the political realm relative and penultimate. To defend this constructive proposal he enlists the aid of sixteenth-century theologian Richard Hooker’s synthesis of Luther and Aquinas and his reconciliation of “loyalties to God and prince within the terms of orthodox Protestant theology” (42).

With the discriminating acuity one expects from a student of Oliver O’Donovan, Littlejohn explores a controversy over church vestments in Elizabethan England as a “reliable proxy” for larger Protestant attempts to reconcile the Christian’s freedom to obey God with the freedom of a Christian commonwealth to seek the common good (42). This method allows him to look both back to the Reformers and forward to contemporary debates around church-state relations, pluralism, and liberty. On the one side in the vestment controversy are the dissenting Puritan “precisianists” who claim to base their positions on Scripture. On the other side are the conformists, Hooker chief among them, investing civil authorities with the representative power to come to prudential, contingent judgments on adiaphora—that is, matters indifferent to salvation—to preserve civil peace and the common good. Through understanding Hooker’s position on the extent to which civil authorities can curtail religious freedom for the sake of civil peace, Littlejohn retrieves Hooker as a major Christian thinker who, unlike the Puritans, faithfully develops the Reformers’ doctrine of Christian freedom and shapes later political thought on toleration.

The “startling irony” at the center of Littlejohn’s study is that the Puritan nonconformists—the proponents of individual liberty of conscience—often ended up minimizing adiaphora and defending an illiberal, biblicist legalism based on one interpretation of Scripture, while the conformists who stressed religious uniformity and circumscribed individual conscience within the boundaries of human law were much more amenable to liberal toleration (35). The latter, principally Hooker, rejected the “perilous” Puritan two societies view of the two kingdoms founded on a Nestorian christology and a bifurcated creation-redemption formulation that tended to associate the civil community with freedom and the church with legalism. Hooker reasserted the Reformers’ more “promising” two kingdoms doctrine along an inner-outer distinction that submits both spiritual and civil kingdoms to Christ’s rule and affirms that freedom before God is qualitatively different from civil freedom. At root, these differing political theologies result from the difference between a “formal doctrine of Christian liberty” founded on the epistemological principle of sola Scriptura and a “material doctrine of Christian liberty” founded on the soteriological principle of sola fide (252). Littlejohn sees the former still at work in David VanDrunen and other theological defenders of a political liberalism founded on church-state separation, while the latter actually provides a better political theology for pluralistic society because it opens a wide space for deliberating over adiaphora and developing the virtues of prudential reason and love necessary for making contingent political judgments free of soteriological import.

The book is a welcome contribution to contemporary political theology and would be an excellent text for undergraduate, graduate, and seminary courses engaging the depth and relevance of the Protestant tradition. Because he...