This class is designed to make sense of certain changes that took place in Reformed political thought in the period after the passions generated by the Protestant Reformation cooled. Last week the focus was on the Reformed response to the great political revolutions that occurred in the late 1700’s, and the development that was emphasized above all was the abandonment of theocratic…

 The foundations of Reformed political thought were laid in the 16th and 17 centuries, when the passions unleashed by the Reformation were still strong and the outcome of the competition for power among the contending religious forces was still very much in doubt in several places. But by the late 1700’s and, even more, the 1800’s, all this was less and less…