A Timely Contribution of the English Reformation to an Evangelical Public Theology of Law and Freedom

Abstract

ABSTRACT The public theology of the English Reformation provides evangelical resources for critically and constructively overcoming the legalistic and juridical ethos/ethic of contemporary society informed by the liberal tradition of natural rights. It focuses created human freedom through the lens of its renewal by God’s saving judgment given in Jesus Christ, communicated through the church’s faithful practices of proclamation, centered in common worship. Co-ordinately, it locates within the sinful human condition the practices of human law (political judgment) in their dependence on God’s law, presenting them as afflicted by moral distortions and ambiguities but ultimately ordered to God’s saving judgment. Thus, it dialectically overcomes the two tendencies of liberal natural rights: to assimilate created human freedom and order to the juridical forms of sinful human community, and to suppress the ordering of the practices of political judgment to those of communicating God’s renewal of human freedom in Jesus Christ.