ABSTRACT
In 1630, John Winthrop, crossing the Atlantic Ocean on the ship Arbella, gave one of the most famous sermons in history. His A Model of Christian Charity laid out the ideals for setting up a new community, a new godly state without interference from his ungodly Arminian monarch, Charles I. The ideas promoted by Winthrop, though, were not new. He wanted to establish a community much in line with that described by Saint Augustine in his City of God, in which the earthly kingdom and the spiritual kingdom would be “inextricably intermingled, the one with the other.”2 This kingdom would consist of two separate parts fused together to create a godly kingdom on earth: a City on a Hill. Although his eloquent phrasing was new, Winthrop’s ideas also followed those of the previous century’s Calvinist Reformers in Geneva, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland.
