Unlike the magisterial reformers, their radical counterparts were more suspicious of the role of secular government, and their approaches to worldly authority appear on a spectrum from theocracy to entire separation. Many Anabaptists ultimately rejected politics and argued that church and state must be entirely distinct. One who disallowed any place for Christians in secular…

The reformer of Geneva, John Calvin (1509-1564) affirmed a greater distinction between the roles of the church and the state in his formulation of the two kingdoms than many of his contemporaries, which perhaps reflects the contentious relationship he often had with the Genevan civil authorities. Nevertheless, he still sees these civil and spiritual governments…

In formulating their doctrine of two kingdoms for the governance of the world, the magisterial reformers envisioned a close, reciprocal relationship between these two institutions. In this excerpt from Urbanus Rhegius (1489-1541) in response to Anabaptism, the Lutheran theologian argues that in their role of administering the temporal world, leaders are nevertheless to seek the…

Reading Journal Home << Previous Entry Next entry >> In this installment of the Inferno Reading Journal, I muse on how Dante subverts our politics, critiques our stewardship of our resources, calls out heresy as a sin of reason, and employs the Medusa as an image of our sin. To start at the beginning of Sapientia‘s Dante…