Bible and Government: Public Policy from a Christian Perspective by John Cobin, (Greenville, SC: Alertness Books, 2003), Softcover: 244 pages. $10.95.

Review by Ryan Setliff

Bible and Government: Towards A Scriptural Understanding of Civil Government

Bible and Government: Public Policy from a Christian Perspective is written by a Christian public policy researcher. The author John Cobin essentially espouses a Jeffersonian libertarian political philosophy while adhering to biblical norms for proper social perspective. Recognizing the tyranny of good intentions and how public policy has gone awry, Cobin looks to alternatives to more state solutions for solving social problems. John Cobin who is presently an Investment Adviser has a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Mason University and a Masters in Economics from UC Santa Barbara. Well-versed in the Austrian and Public Choice schools of economic thought, Cobin offers an exceptional Christian perspective on law, government, authority, and public policy considerations. He esteems the vitality of the free-market, private property and constitutionally limited government to civil society. In modern times, the state has tediously concentrated a vast array of power, welding and abusing the power flamboyantly. The state has increasingly displaced and marginalized the traditional non-state institutions of family, church, neighborhood, and voluntary civil associations. Too often, both neoconservatives and statist liberals make the mistake of confusing the state with society (just like the Greeks of antiquity did.) So, Cobin offers a new paradigm to the worn-out status quo which seems posed to evolve into some sort of totalitarian democracy. One of the most prudent public policy considerations often entails not having a "public policy" on particular issue to begin with. By devolving responsibility back to the traditional institutions that have been encroached upon by the State, better solutions to social problems may be mete out. In an age of belligerent statism when more government is always posed as the solution to the various societal ills, Cobin is one of the few prudent policy gurus keen enough to pose civil society and market solutions.

D.G. Hart offers this provocative claim, "confessionalism is the lost soul of American Protestantism in the sense that scholars of American religion have largely ignored." His book The Lost Soul of American Protestantism offers a unique and fresh perspective on Protestant religion in the American culture and public life. The common contemporary dichotomy of American Protestantism between evangelicals (or fundamentalists) and modernists (or liberals) is an eggregious bit of reductionism, argues D.G. Hart. According to Hart, we need to take account of an oft-neglected category—namely confessional Protestants. As R. Laurence Moore writes in the introduction:

Hart is committed to what he calls confessional Protestantism—a neglected and almost defeated tradition in American religious history that he skillfully traces from "Old Line" Presbyterians of the eighteenth century to Missouri Synod Lutherans in the late twentieth century. It is grounded in Luther and Calvin and deeply tied to creeds, clergy, and liturgical ritual.