PURITAN NATION:

Its task is ambitious: no less than a rehabilitation of a distinctively--and ecumenically--Protestant social doctrine, one spanning (with variations) the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican strands of the Reformation. To that end, the work focuses on three major domains: (1) law, justice, and punishment; (2) marriage, life, and death; and (3) property, wealth, and poverty. Chapters within those broad categories cover topics such as the role of the civil magistrate, just war theory, procreation, abortion, private property, and environmental care, among others. In so doing, the book manages to sketch out an internally coherent set of principles that, despite their distinguished provenance, rarely find institutional expression among theologically conservative Protestants today.

Much of the content of this Protestant Social Teaching ("PST") resembles Catholic Social Teaching--such as its concern for the protection of unborn life and its contextualization of property rights within the horizon of a sovereign God, among other things. But its form is distinct. Specifically, PST tends to ground its claims in arguments from natural law and the early Christian tradition rather than in encyclicals or other ecclesiastical documents, a structural corollary of the fact that the Protestant tradition has historically rejected a single magisterium as the norming source of doctrine. Despite that difference, the Protestant and Catholic social traditions clearly ended up converging on common themes. Such similarity implies a significant degree of unanimity on the metaphysical underpinnings of Christian thought, a theme stressed by many chapter authors.

Among the volume's individual subsections, Steven Wedgeworth's chapter on the history of Christian views on abortion--ranging widely across sources from Jewish tradition to the writings of Luther and Calvin--is a particularly outstanding contribution. Similarly strong is Allen Calhoun's lengthy exploration of how the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican traditions shaped the rise of social-welfare regimes in European countries. Calhoun's work is a devastating rejoinder to claims that the Protestant tradition culminates in a kind of Randian libertarianism, or necessarily guts public forms of poor relief. [...]

If one overarching theme comes through in Protestant Social Teaching, though, it is that the Reformers celebrated by so many churches today shared a far "thicker" vision of society than the American frontier ideal. As Brad Littlejohn stresses in an early chapter, "the Reformers' profound respect for the mystery of God-given civil authority is a jarring but needed wake-up call, one that can help us question our own deep-seated individualism." Theirs was an era of magistracy and hierarchy, not of lone cowboys gazing out upon an untapped wilderness.

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