Light-front Hamiltonian methods are being developed to attack bound-state problems in QCD. In this paper we advance the state of the art for these methods by computing the well-known Lamb shift in hydrogen starting from first principles of QED. There are obvious but significant qualitative differences between QED and QCD. In this paper, we discuss the similarities that may survive in a non-perturbative QCD calculation in the context of a precision non-perturbative QED calculation. Central to

more »

... discussion are how a constituent picture arises in a gauge field theory, how bound-state energy scales emerge to guide the renormalization procedure, and how rotational invariance emerges in a light-front calculation.