American public intellectual Yuval Levin once stated that ‘politics is really rooted in political philosophy’, and that political discourse will ‘make much more sense if you see that people are arguing about [different] ways of understanding what the human person is, what human society is, and especially what liberal society is’. In other words, disagreements about political ideology stem from disagreements about political anthropology and about the nature of nature. The history of these conceptions has been the focus of this investigation into various Reformed Protestant thinkers. We have seen that two of them, namely Hobbes and Locke, decoupled the transcendent from their theories of political life. The question that naturally follows is this: what is the consequence of this decoupling? We will address this question more directly soon. First, we should recapitulate the main lines of my argument in order to feel its full force.

This book has pursued one particular argument concerning how the transcendent came to be disconnected from ideas about human political life. I have argued that the way this happened in the Reformed tradition was through changes in both natural law theories and in conceptions of the origins of political life. In the opening chapters, I argued that early Reformed thought held to a sacralised conception of both natural law and the origins of political life. The chapter on Calvin demonstrated Calvin's continuity with his medieval forebears in his basic understanding of natural law and in his theistic political naturalism. The natural law was, first and foremost, a law given by God himself to undergird the mundi fabrica, the fabric of the universe. According to Calvin, this natural law also governed human social relations both before and after the Fall. Calvin thought there was potential for a ‘natural’, prelapsarian political condition, and the same holds true after the Fall. Richard Hooker's position was much the same, although he adhered much more closely to a classic Thomist account of natural law and the origins of politics. For Hooker, also, God is the founder of human political life under the auspices of the natural law.

The opening chapters also established that both early continental and early anglophone Reformed Protestants adhered to the same sacralised understanding of political life.