Disestablishment did not, however, disconnect them in their mutual goal to preserving human liberty and ordering human life. Governments were not separated from the societies they governed. There was, McKnight argued, a “close and intimate connection subsisting between” civil society and the church. That connection between them rendered a right understanding of their association necessary for the protection for the liberty of both. 

Disestablishment in the newly-independent United States severed the institutional interdependence between the state and the visible church. Virginia’s disestablishment in the 1780s triggered a set of similar laws passed throughout the Early National Period. Massachusetts, the last state to maintain a state church disestablished Congregationalism in 1833. Social and cultural practices in the American republic nonetheless allowed a de-facto Protestant socio-civil establishment to continue well in to the Twentieth Century. Current conversations regarding so-called Christian nationalism variously litigate concepts as broad as the maintenance of a “soft” cultural establishment that maintains liberal democracy to outright theonomic, and theocratic, establishmentarian constructions. Conversations on the history of religion and the state in the United States often descend in to little more than politically partisan cacophony.
Although the politicization of conversations regarding church and state is probably inevitable, a better understanding regarding the meaning of disestablishment may help clarify scholarly and ecclesiastical conversations. In the Early Republic, disestablishment was seen as strengthening the liberties of the church in order to help it perform its spiritual mission to save souls and to observe the sacraments. Disestablishment did not, however, remove the church from the social or civil order, nor did Early Republic Protestants assume that the church was a merely spiritual institution that was not affected by social and political changes.
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We can consider Noah a type of Christ. Follow G. K. Beale’s reasoning: “Nowhere in the NT, however, does it say that Noah is a type of Christ. Nevertheless, if Noah is a partial antitype of the first Adam but does not fulfill all to which the typological first Adam points, then Noah also can plausibly be considered a part of the Adamic type of Christ in the OT.” To put it another way: since Noah has literary resonances with Adam and since Adam is an identified type of Christ, we can put forward the argument that Noah also points forward as a type of Christ.

In order to get the most from this article, consider first reading earlier ones on the nature of Scripture, a text’s spiritual sense, a brief introduction to typology, and whether we should imitate the hermeneutic of the apostles.
Now to the point of this article: we can identify unidentified christological types in the Old Testament. By “unidentified” I’m referring to the fact that New Testament authors didn’t identify them. These types, however, may have been identified by many uninspired interpreters after the apostolic era.
Identified types include Adam, marriage, Melchizedek, Moses, the exodus, the Passover lamb, the tabernacle, David, Solomon, the temple, the priesthood, the bronze serpent, Jerusalem, Jonah’s fish experience, and the manna in the wilderness.
Unidentified types include Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Phinehas, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, the cord of Rahab, the ark of the covenant, Boaz, Elijah, Cyrus, Job, the three friends in the fiery furnace, Daniel’s deliverance from lions, and the rebuilt temple.
In chapters 17 through 24 of 40 Questions About Typology and Allegory, I explore 100 biblical types.
The easiest way to recognize a type is if the New Testament authors identify it. Such identification is an authoritative and inerrant claim about an Old Testament person, office, place, thing, institution, or event.
What about identifying unidentified types? Ask whether what you’re considering shares parallels with an Old Testament type that is identified. When types are identified by a New Testament writer, interpreters will notice that there are correspondences and escalation between the type and the antitype. You will probably also notice some kind of covenantal significance that the potential type bears.
Here’s an example of what I mean. We can consider Noah a type of Christ. Follow G. K. Beale’s reasoning: “Nowhere in the NT, however, does it say that Noah is a type of Christ. Nevertheless, if Noah is a partial antitype of the first Adam but does not fulfill all to which the typological first Adam points, then Noah also can plausibly be considered a part of the Adamic type of Christ in the OT.”
To put it another way: since Noah has literary resonances with Adam and since Adam is an identified type of Christ, we can put forward the argument that Noah also points forward as a type of Christ.
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Why was Jesus born the son of a carpenter to work as a carpenter? The question remains answered only in the mind of God. Yet it can be said that the Father’s plan to atone for sin through Christ was perfect, and carpentry provided the perfect home life and work for the Son of God who would take away the sins of his people.

Why was Jesus born the son of a carpenter, to work as a carpenter (Mt 13:55; Mk 6:3)? Some would respond that before the Son of God entered his public ministry he needed to work, and carpentry provided a living as good as any other. However, there are other occupations which look as if they would have been better suited to prepare him for ministry. Fishing would have been fitting work; Jesus called the disciples to become fishers of men, fed multitudes with fish and bread, and compared the kingdom of heaven to a fishing net. He could have been a vintner, growing and processing grapes for wine. Young Jesus turned water into wine, then later said he himself was the vine feeding his disciples, and he cautioned his listeners against putting new vintage into old skins. Shepherding could be called a family tradition, since the Messiah came from the line of Judah, and King David worked among the sheep. Jesus told a parable about seeking the lost lamb, he said he knows his sheep, and—most importantly—he is the sacrificial Lamb of God. Shepherding would seem a better occupation than carpentry.
Christ did not say much about wood or carpentry. He spoke of judging others with the analogy of the eyes having a splinter or a log, and he alluded to carpentry when he told of the man tearing down barns to build bigger ones. Why the Christ was born of the virgin Mary into a carpenter’s household is information the Lord has not condescended to reveal to his image bearers. However, this brief article proposes that the attributes of carpentry uniquely contributed to prepare Christ for his earthly ministry.
When I was a child visiting my grandparents, a man I did not recognize came to the house. My grandmother introduced him to me as her brother. He was a quiet and reserved man, but he none the less extended his hand in gentlemanly fashion and I grasped it. I could feel his calloused leather-like palm and fingers. I was surprised by the texture and lack of suppleness of the skin. Grandmother informed me that her brother had been a carpenter for a number of years. The manual procedures required in his trade had resulted in gloves of skin created by reoccurring contact with the rough surface of wood.
Like my great uncle, the Lord of Glory’s hands had been thickened to some degree over time by tooling wood. Some of the personal encounters Jesus experienced during his ministry might raise a question regarding God’s wisdom in selecting carpentry for a trade. Consider some of the things Jesus did in ministry. His thick-skinned fingers took mud he made from spittle and dirt and gently applied it to the eyes of a blind man to give him sight (Jn 9:6). It was his toughened hands that gently touched the children that came to see him (Mt 19:13-15). Then, following rash Peter’s slash of Malchus’s ear with a sword, the Christ, the anointed one, carefully used his calloused hand to miraculously restore the ear (Jn 18:10; Mt 26:51). The softer hands of a physician, lawyer, or scholar may be thought more appropriate for Jesus’s work, but the toughened hands of the Carpenter exemplified his full humanity as he accomplished the divine work of redemption.
Jesus often argued from the lesser to the greater in his teaching, but his carpenter’s hands show a physical argument from the intuitive, what man expects, to the counterintuitive, what God does. The ways of the Triune God are not man’s ways. Christ’s hands exhibited his mannishness—and their skill came in handy to make a whip for running the moneychangers out of the temple—
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