The Meaning of Winthrop’s City on a Hill

Whatever else winthrop’s sermon might have said—however strange its manuscript history, however intricate its structure, however dependent on the Geneva Bible—one enduring phrase has stood above the rest: “For we must consider,” Winthrop declares, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill.” In the twentieth century, those words would become a kind of tagline for the entire United States, another way to link the “first” American sermon forward to the continuing vision of the nation. But it could become a modern slogan only because of the way it operated in a seventeenth-century theological debate between Protestants