Robin Hood and Remote Rule

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

British North America developed from a landscape of religions into a nation of races over the course of the eighteenth century.This process culminated in a hot, locked Philadelphia hall in 1787, but the lessons upon which the drafters drew reached back to the Reformation of the sixteenth century and earlier to Rome.

Americans had, after all, just rejected their inclusion in the British variant. If they failed to grasp the significance of their success, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of Rome, David Hume’s History of England, and the tales of Robin Hood1 served to remind them of the dangers of remote rule.

Early Modern Europe possessed two empires with established Protestant populations inhabiting borders under perpetual threat.The Holy Roman Empire’s borderland Protestants included the Southwestern Germans of Wuerttemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate, for whom “cuius regio, eius religio” offered precious little protection from neighboring Catholic armies. The British Empire sent forth Scots to settle among and pacify the Catholics a few leagues away in Northeastern Ireland. These two groups moved away from their fraught locations on Europe’s bloodiest frontiers topopulate the so-called backcountry of eighteenth-century British North America from the Kennebec to the Altamaha.2

The Eve of Reformation?

Steven Cromack

What was life like for those living during the time of Martin Luther? Is Western Civilization on the eve of another Reformation? Modern society certainly indicates, at the very least, that people are speaking up and speaking out.

In the United Kingdom a rapidly increasing number of people are flocking to the “emerging churches.” Led by people like Peter Rollins (How [Not] to Speak of God) and other renegade pastors, these “churches” meet in bars, at skate parks, and other profane places. The theology of the emerging church takes a postmodern approach to Christianity and conceives that institutional churches have lost the true meaning of the Christian faith because people are too focused on following prescribed, meaningless rituals. Instead, emerging Christians sit together and read the Gospels and talk about Jesus the Christ.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, scholars, theologians, journalists, and ordinary people are launching their own assault on mainstream Christian practices. In his 2011 controversial book Love Wins Rob Bell indicts “traditional” Christianity on the charge of using the concept of Hell as a means of social control. Accept Jesus, or you go to Hell. Complete this Christian checklist, or you go to Hell. Go to church, or burn in Hell. This notion, Bell argues, runs counter to the crux of Christianity, which is that love wins because God’s love is infinitely more expansive than the box in which we place it, along with Heaven, Hell, and our own narrow conception of God. Bell goes even further to say that Hell will be empty because God’s grace extends into Hell itself.

Books & Culture Podcast on Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

Last week over at the Books & Culture site John Wilson and Stan Guthrie did a podcast on Historically Speaking.  They discuss the new issue and highlight some of the contents.  Wilson praises our forum on Brad Gregory's new book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). (Alexandra Walsham, Bruce Gordon, Carlos Eire, and Euan Cameron offered comments.) Wilson sees the book as "one of the most interesting, provocative, learned works of history that I've read in the last several years and it's good to see that Historically Speaking is devoting attention to it." 

Gregory introduces his lead piece to the forum as follows:

The Unintended Reformation is a work of historical analysis that takes the present as its point of departure. . . . While disclaiming comprehensiveness, the book aims to be as explanatorily powerful as possible while making as few theoretical and methodological assumptions as necessary. Secondarily, the book addresses some major contemporary concerns based on its historical analysis. These remarks will speak mostly to the first ambition and briefly to the second.

I endeavor in The Unintended Reformation to answer a basic but very big question: How did contemporary ideological and institutional realities in North America and Europe come to be as they are? The book intends to characterize these realities matter-of-factly. Ideologically, they include an open-ended range of secular and religious truth claims made by individuals about matters pertaining to human meaning, morality, purpose, and priorities, including some religious truth claims articulated with great intellectual sophistication by theologians and philosophers of religion. Insofar as the present is the product of the past, any adequate history must be able to account for all these claims. The modern liberal institutions variously characteristic of all contemporary Western states permit this ideological heterogeneity through the legal and political protection of individual citizens to believe and live as they please so long as they obey established laws.   

Read more of the forum and the rest of the issue at Project Muse, or subscribe to the print version today.