Review: W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty: Richard Hooker, the Puritans, and Protestant Political Theology

This fine study by Bradford Littlejohn asks how the Christian is to understand her spiritual freedom before God in relation to both political and ecclesiastical authority. According to standard narratives, Protestantism, with its doctrine of Christian liberty, undermined the late-medieval synthesis between ecclesiastical and civil authority, thus providing the impulse for the development of civil liberty, the separation of church and state, and the individual freedoms modern liberal society is said to secure.