To hear some people talk, you would think that the birth of freedom, democracy, and the modern world started with the Protestant Reformation. In fact, the coincidence of faith and modernity has less to do with Martin Luther than with John Calvin, the reformer who had the audacity to question the rule of bishops and […]
Monday, 29 August, 2022 by D. G. Hart
Reformed Resurgence: The New Calvinist Movement and the Battle over American EvangelicalismBy Brad VermurlenOxford University Press, 2020304 pages (hardcover), $99.00 What is the health of Reformed Protestantism, and how do you administer the physical exam? Brad Vermurlen’s new book on the New Calvinist Movement (hereafter NCM) answers this question by looking at the influence of […]
Thursday, 01 July, 2021 by D. G. Hart
Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals: Why We Need Our Past to Have a FutureBy Gavin OrtlundCrossway Books, 2019218 pages (cloth), $21.99 Think back to the 1980s television show Family Ties. Readers born since then may be surprised to learn this was Michael J. Fox’s start as a Hollywood celebrity. In this sitcom, the actor (who went […]
Sunday, 01 November, 2020 by D. G. Hart
Protestants and American Conservatism: A Short History by Gillis J. Harp Oxford University Press, 2019 323 pages (hardback), $34.95 Since about the time when Jerry Falwell Sr. founded the Moral Majority in 1979 (with lots of help from Republican Party operatives), confessional and evangelical Protestants have generally identified as conservative. In Christian terms, being conservative […]
Friday, 01 May, 2020 by D. G. Hart
“The West” is not a phrase that Protestants frequently use. Of course, part of the problem is the way President Trump sullied the idea in his 2017 speech in Poland in which he used “the West” to stand for a common civilization shared by both Poles and Americans that included politics, history, and artistic expression. […]
Wednesday, 24 July, 2019 by D. G. Hart
David A. Hollinger begins Protestants Abroad with a startling assertion: “The Protestant foreign missionary project expected to make the world look more like the United States. Instead, it made the United States look more like the world” (1). A reader could well imagine that missionaries went to other parts of the world in hopes of making […]
Wednesday, 01 May, 2019 by D. G. Hart
In 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president of the United States, Christians had an easy time identifying as political conservatives. After all, Reagan checked all the boxes of movement conservatives while showing friendliness to families and churches. He was firmly anti-Communist, a proponent of limited government and reduced spending (except for the Pentagon), and surprisingly […]
Monday, 10 September, 2018 by D. G. Hart
When you hear the phrase “Christian society,” your mind likely turns to Christendom. In his book The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2007), historian Hugh McLeod described Christendom as a place where Christian leaders have close ties to civil authorities, where laws originate from Christian convictions, everyone is assumed to be a […]
Friday, 30 June, 2017 by D. G. Hart
Has God ordained certain techniques or forms for the church's growth? The one reliable God-given method is the natural and organic one of baptizing infants born to believing parents. In the past, confessional Protestants, such as Presbyterians and Lutherans, planted new churches in a remarkably calm way. Several families would move away from a community […]
Tuesday, 30 June, 2015 by D. G. Hart
In the summer of 2009, when scholars, pastors, and the historically minded laity were celebrating the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth, The Washington Post ran an op-ed piece by a constitutional attorney who attempt-ed to give reasons for not only Protestants but all Americans to commemorate the Frenchman's birth. Ac-cording to Doug Phillips, "On […]
Tuesday, 01 November, 2011 by D. G. Hart
What is the theological equivalent for the conundrum about the tree that falls in the woods without a hearer? What happens when a theological bomb is detonated but no one seems to notice? Is it still a bomb? Is it still destructive? Re-Thinking Missions, a book published in 1932 just when it seemed the fundamentalist […]
Friday, 29 April, 2011 by D. G. Hart
In 1982, the Yale University historian of colonial America, Jon Butler, wrote a provocative article on the First Great Awakening and called the colonial revivals "an interpretive fiction." His subject was less the eighteenth century than the particular efforts of nineteenth-century American pastors to construct a narrative of awakenings led by Jonathan Edwards and George […]
Friday, 17 December, 2010 by D. G. Hart