Common Places

Audio from The Davenant Institute's event "Beyond Rules and Roles: Scripture and the Sexes", held April 2024 at 3Crosses Church, CA. Lectures delivered by Dr. Alastair Roberts.

Audio from The Davenant Institute's event "Beyond Rules and Roles: Scripture and the Sexes", held April 2024 at 3Crosses Church, CA. Lectures delivered by Dr. Alastair Roberts.

A lecture with Q&A given by Davenant Hall Teaching Fellow, Ryan Hurd. Today, Anselm is much maligned for doing theology which results in a heartless god, and central to this caricature is his doctrine of God’s impassibility. However, critics often fail to understand the exact nature of this doctrine. Before one can even consider truth or falsity, one must determine: what does impassibility actually mean? In this lecture. Ryan Hurd determines what Anselm means by saying God is impassible, especially as found in Chapters 7 and 8 of his Proslogion, concluding that his judgment is akin to saying that someone is “invulnerable.” Although many adversities have power over us humans by virtue of our many vulnerabilities, none have any power over God, for he lacks all our vulnerabilities. This alone is what Anselm means when he says God is impassible. As he summarizes, “nothing has power against God.” Ryan Hurd is a systematic theologian whose area of expertise is the doctrine of God, specifically the Trinity. His primary training is in the high medieval and early modern scholastics as well as the 20th century ressourcement movement. He has written a number of articles and regularly does translations of early modern theology sources; but his primary project is writing a systematics of the Trinity. He is a Teaching Fellow at Davenant Hall. For more about Davenant Hall, visit our website here: https://davenanthall.com

A Davenant Hall Teaching Fellows lecture with Q&A by Dr. Miles Smith entitled "Finding a Christian America?" Since roughly 1980, the history of religion and particularly Protestantism in the United States has been litigated along a series of binaries: evangelical v. mainline, theocratic v. secular, liberal v. conservative. While these binaries are not artificial in themselves, they are particularly problematic if they are applied retroactively to the Early Republic or any point in history that precedes the so-called evangelical historiography created in the latter part of the twentieth century. Consequently, Americans have little understanding of religion in the nineteenth century and more importantly they have no idea how the fundamental laws of the United States reconciled Protestantism to a disestablished republican order. In this lecture, exploring ideas introduced in his forthcoming book Religion & Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War, Dr. Miles Smith explains there was not in fact any reconciliation needed between Protestantism and disestablishment. Rather, Christianity was always baked into the American republic’s diplomatic, educational, judicial, and legislative regimes, and institutional Christianity in state apparatuses coexisted comfortably with disestablishment from the American Revolution until the beginning of the twenty-first century. To learn more about Davenant Hall and register for classes, visit here: https://davenanthall.com/ To pre-order Dr. Smith's book, Religion & Republic from the Founding to the Civil War, visit here: https://davenantinstitute.org/religion-republic

A lecture with Q&A given by Dr. Michael Lynch entitled "The Jesuits Cannot Be Good Subjects: A Look at John Davenant’s Political Theology" with respondent Dr. Glenn Moots. John Davenant is a long neglected Reformation figure, whose work on hypothetical universalism has had a renaissance. But what about his political theology? In this lecture, Davenant Hall Teaching Fellow Michael Lynch explores John Davenant’s political theology in his early modern English context. Using lectures Davenant gave at Cambridge during his professorship and Davenant’s untranslated Latin treatise on the Judge of Controversies, Lynch explains how Davenant conceived of magisterial jurisdiction relative to ecclesiastical jurisdiction and in opposition to Roman Catholic political theology.

A talk on relief for the poor and debtors in ancient Israel and beyond. Given by Scott Pryor, Campbell University Law School

The Fall Convivium's keynote lecture, given by Adam MacLeod, St. Mary’s University

A talk given by Nick Higgins, Regent University

A Panel Discussion with Brad Littlejohn and Joe Minich, The Davenant Institute

In this address from our 2024 Davenant UK Convivium on "Renewing British Political Theology", Imogen Sinclair, Director of the New Conservatives and the New Social Covenant Unit, puts Philip Rieff and Sigmund Freud into conversation in an analysis of our current political decline.