Gospel-Centered Theology for Today Evangelical Theology, Second Edition helps today's readers understand and practice the doctrines of the Christian faith by presenting a gospel-centered theology that is accessible, rigorous, and balanced. According author Michael Bird the gospel is the fulcrum of Christian doctrine; the gospel is where God meets us and where we introduce the world to God. And as such, an authentically evangelical theology is the working out of the gospel in the various doctrines of Christian theology. The text helps readers learn the essentials of Christian theology through several key features, including: A "What to Take Home" section at end of every part that gives readers a run-down on all the important things they need to know. Tables, sidebars, and questions for discussion to help reinforce key ideas and concepts A "Comic Belief" section, since reading theology can often be dry and cerebral, so that readers enjoy their learning experience through some theological humor added for good measure. Now in its second edition, Evangelical Theology has proven itself in classrooms around the world as a resource that helps readers not only understand the vital doctrines of Christian theology but one that shows them how the gospel should shape how they think, pray, preach, teach, and minister in the world.

With sound historical scholarship and penetrating insight, Roland Bainton examines Luther's widespread influence. He re-creates the spiritual setting of the sixteenth century, showing Luther's place within it and influence upon it. Richly illustrated with more than 100 woodcuts and engravings from Luther's own time, Here I Stand dramatically brings to life Martin Luther, the great Reformer. A specialist in Reformation history, Roland H. Bainton was for forty-two years Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale, and he continued his writing well into his twenty years of retirement. Bainton wore his scholarship lightly and had a lively, readable style. His most popular book was Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (1950), which sold more than a million copies.

The Reformation thinker John Calvin had significant and unusual things to say about life in public encounter, things which both anticipate modern thinking and, says William Stevenson, can serve as important antidotes to some of modern thinking's broader pretensions. This study attempts to give a coherent picture of Calvin's political theory by following the stream that flows from Calvin's fascinating short essay "On Christian Freedom," which constitutes one coherent chapter in Book Three of the Institutes of the Christian Religion. Stevenson argues that a full examination of this essay yields not only a more thorough explication of Calvin's political ideas proper but also a more complete and coherent picture of their theological underpinnings.

George Smith (1833 1919) spent many years in India as an educator and editor of the Calcutta Review. He was a great supporter of missionary work and became secretary of the foreign mission committee of the Free Church of Scotland in 1870. He also wrote popular books of missionary biography including this two-volume Life of Alexander Duff (1879). Duff (1806 1878) was the first foreign missionary of the Church of Scotland and a leading figure in promoting Christian education in India. Duff pioneered what he called 'downward filter theory' which centred on educating India's upper caste through English in the hope that this elite group would then take responsibility for the evangelisation and modernisation of South Asia. Volume 1 describes Duff's life until 1843, covering his education in Scotland, his arrival in Calcutta and the founding of his school, the General Assembly Institution.

George Smith (1833 1919) spent many years in India as an educator and editor of the Calcutta Review. He was a great supporter of missionary work and became secretary of the foreign mission committee of the Free Church of Scotland in 1870. He also wrote popular books of missionary biography including this two-volume Life of Alexander Duff (1879). Duff (1806 1878) was the first foreign missionary of the Church of Scotland and a leading figure in promoting Christian education in India. Duff pioneered what he called 'downward filter theory' which centred on educating India's upper caste through English in the hope that this elite group would then take responsibility for the evangelisation and modernisation of South Asia. Volume 2 describes Duff's life from 1843 until his death in 1878, covering his contribution to the 1854 educational reforms in India and the founding of the University of Calcutta.

The first book-length treatment of its topic, this study is aimed at abolishing the old cliche that Congregationalism failed to adapt to the democratizing culture of the westward migration. Drawing on hundreds of previously unused letters, journals, and sermons, the author argues that Congregational missionaries were aggressive evangelists who successfully adjusted to the egalitarian demands of the early republican frontier. Keepers of the Covenant critically examines the various explanations for the decline of Congregationalism after the American Revolution, and in the process, overturns generalizations that have prevailed for years. The conclusion offers a reinterpretation of Congregationalist decline that challenges much conventional wisdom about church growth. It will interest not only church historians and students of early republican America, but also sociologists and all those concerned with the decline of the Protestant "mainline" today.

Facing the Revocation tells the story of one French Protestant (Huguenot) family, the Robillard de Champagnes, as they faced the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, issued under Louis XIV, which criminalized their religion in 1685. Carolyn Chappell Lougee challenges the way Huguenot history has been told for 300 years, ever since the Huguenots themselves set its principal interpretive lines, thereby offering new insights into the reign of Louis XIV. Denying the standard ascription of deeper faith to the Huguenots who emigrated and venal motives to those who remained in France, this study shows how complex the considerations were-at once social, familial, economic, and political, as well as religious-that impelled individuals and families either to leave the country or stay and convert to the king's religion. Lougee uses evidence elucidating Huguenot escapes from France to question how intent Louis XIV was on stopping Huguenots from leaving, and how closely he and his agents hewed to the letter of the law prescribing imprisonment for captured fugitives. Exploring the personal stories of several families among the Champagnes' social set who stayed after the Revocation, Facing the Revocation sheds new light on the possibilities for Protestant resistance in Louis XIV's late reign and on the satisfactions available to families who complied with the king's will, while demonstrating how strongly the values emigrants like Marie de La Rochefoucauld de Champagne and her children brought with them from France shaped their experiences in changed circumstances.

In The Pastor, Eugene H. Peterson, the translator of the multimillion-selling The Message and the author of more than thirty books, offers his life story as one answer to the surprisingly neglected question: What does it mean to be a pastor?

When Peterson was asked by his denomination to begin a new church in Bel Air, Maryland, he surprised himself by saying yes. And so was born Christ Our King Presbyterian Church. But Peterson quickly learned that he was not exactly sure what a pastor should do. He had met many ministers in his life, from his Pentecostal upbringing in Montana to his seminary days in New York, and he admired only a few. He knew that the job's demands would drown him unless he figured out what the essence of the job really was. Thus began a thirty-year journey into the heart of this uncommon vocation--the pastorate.

The Pastor steers away from abstractions, offering instead a beautiful rendering of a life tied to the physical world--the land, the holy space, the people--shaping Peterson's pastoral vocation as well as his faith. He takes on church marketing, mega pastors, and the church's too-cozy relationship to American glitz and consumerism to present a simple, faith-filled job description of what being a pastor means today. In the end, Peterson discovered that being a pastor boiled down to "paying attention and calling attention to 'what is going on right now' between men and women, with each other and with God." The Pastor is destined to become a classic statement on the contemporary trials, joys, and meaning of this ancient vocation.

Enchanted Calvinism's surprising central proposition is that Ghanaian Presbyterian communities have become more enchanted -- i.e., attuned to spiritual explanations of and remedies for suffering -- as they have become moreintegrated into capitalist modes of production. Enchanted Calvinism's central proposition is that Ghanaian Presbyterian communities, both past and present, have become more enchanted -- more attuned to spiritual explanations of and remedies for suffering -- as they havebecome integrated into capitalist modes of production. The author draws on a Weberian concept of religious enchantment to analyze the phenomena of spiritual affliction and spiritual healing within the Presbyterian Church of Ghana,particularly under the conditions of labor migration: first, in the early twentieth century during the cocoa boom in Ghana and, second, at the turn of the twenty-first century in their migration from Ghana to North America. Relying on extensive archival research, oral interviews, and participant-observation conducted in North America, Europe, and West Africa, this study demonstrates that the more these Ghanaian Calvinists became dependent on capitalist modes of production, the more enchanted their lives and, subsequently, their church became, although in different ways within these two migrations. One striking pattern that has emerged among Ghanaian Presbyterian labor migrants in North America, for example, is a radical shift in gendered healing practices, where women have become prominent healers while a significant number of men have become spirit-possessed. Adam Mohr is Senior Writing Fellow in Anthropology in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Calvinist Reformation in Scottish towns was a radically transformative movement. It incorporated into urban ecclesiastical governance a group of laymen - the elders of the kirk session - drawn heavily from the crafts guilds as well as wealthy merchants. These men met at least weekly with the minister and comprised a parochial church court that exercised an unprecedented discipline of the lives of the ordinary citizenry. They pried into sexual behaviour, administered the hospital and other poor relief, ordered fostering of orphans, oversaw the grammar school, enforced sabbath observance, investigated charges of witchcraft, arbitrated quarrels and punished people who railed at their neighbours. In times of crisis like the great plague of 1584-85, they rationed food sent from other towns and raised an already high bar on moral discipline to avert further divine wrath. The minute books of Perth's session, established in the 1560s and surviving most fully from 1577, open a window on this religious discipline, the men who administered it, and the lay people who both resisted and facilitated it, negotiating its terms to meet their own agendas. They are presented here with full introduction and explanatory notes. Margo Todd is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania.

Using place, politics, and rhetoric as analytical tools, historical geographer David N. Livingstone investigates how religious communities sharing a Scots Presbyterian heritage engaged with Darwin and Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century. His findings, presented as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, transform our understandings of the relationship between science and religion. The particulars of place-whether in Edinburgh, Belfast, Toronto, Princeton, or Columbia, South Carolina-shaped the response to Darwin's theories. Were they tolerated, repudiated, or welcomed? Livingstone shows how Darwin was read in different ways, with meaning distilled from Darwin's texts depending on readers' own histories-their literary genealogies and cultural preoccupations. That the theory of evolution fared differently in different places, Livingstone writes, is "exactly what Darwin might have predicted. As the theory diffused, it diverged." Dealing with Darwin shows the profound extent to which theological debates about evolution were rooted in such matters as anxieties over control of education, the politics of race relations, the nature of local scientific traditions, and challenges to traditional cultural identity. In some settings, conciliation with the new theory, even endorsement, was possible - demonstrating that attending to the specific nature of individual communities subverts an inclination to assume a single relationship between science and religion in general, evolution and Christianity in particular. Livingstone concludes with contemporary examples to remind us that what scientists can say and what others can hear in different venues differ today just as much as they did in the past.

In 1690, the Church of Scotland rejected episcopal authority and settled as Presbyterian. The adjacent Presbyteries of Stirling and Dunblane covered an area that included both lowland and highland communities, speaking both English and Gaelic and supporting both the new government and the old thus forming a representative picture of the nation as a whole. This book examines the ways in which the two Presbyteries operated administratively, theologically and geographically under the new regime. By surveying and analysing surviving church records from 1687 to 1710 at Presbytery and parish level, Muirhead shows how the two Presbyteries related to civil authorities, how they dealt with problematic discipline cases referred by the Kirk Sessions, their involvement in the Union negotiations and their overall functioning as human, as well as religious, institution in seventeenth-century Scotland. The resulting study advances our understanding of the profound impact that Presbyteries had on those involved with them in any capacity.

In 1539, Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, Bishop of Carpentras, addressed a letter to the magistrates and citizens of Geneva, asking them to return to the Roman Catholic faith. John Calvin replied to Sadoleto, defending the adoption of the Protestant reforms. Sadoleto's letter and Calvin's reply constitute one of the most interesting exchanges of Roman Catholic/Protestant views during the Reformationand an excellent introduction to the great religious controversy of the sixteenth century. These statements are not in vacuo of a Roman Catholic and Protestant position. They were drafted in the midst of the religious conflict that was then dividing Europe. And they reflect too the temperaments and personal histories of the men who wrote them. Sadoleto's letter has an irenic approach, an emphasis on the unity and peace of the Church, highly characteristic of the Christian Humanism he represented. Calvin's reply is in part a personal defense, an apologia pro vita sua, that records his own religious experience. And its taut, comprehensive argument is characteristic of the disciplined and logical mind of the author of The Institutes of the Christian Religion.

A revealing new portrait of John Calvin that captures his human complexity and the sixteenth-century world in which he fought his personal and theological battles During the glory days of the French Renaissance, young John Calvin (1509-1564) experienced a profound conversion to the faith of the Reformation. For the rest of his days he lived out the implications of that transformation-as exile, inspired reformer, and ultimately the dominant figure of the Protestant Reformation. Calvin's vision of the Christian religion has inspired many volumes of analysis, but this engaging biography examines a remarkable life. Bruce Gordon presents Calvin as a human being, a man at once brilliant, arrogant, charismatic, unforgiving, generous, and shrewd. The book explores with particular insight Calvin's self-conscious view of himself as prophet and apostle for his age and his struggle to tame a sense of his own superiority, perceived by others as arrogance. Gordon looks at Calvin's character, his maturing vision of God and humanity, his personal tragedies and failures, his extensive relationships with others, and the context within which he wrote and taught. What emerges is a man who devoted himself to the Church, inspiring and transforming the lives of others, especially those who suffered persecution for their religious beliefs.

The Protestant Reformation and revolt against Spain led to major struggles among civic and religious leaders over how to care for the poor in the cities of Holland. For centuries parish charity had been devoted to all poor residents. Calvinists, however, intended their church deacons (who were responsible for charity) to care primarily, if not exclusively, for poor church members. Focusing on six cities, this study shows that the struggle over charity is best understood as a conflict between two distinct visions of Christian community during the Reformation.

Faith and Slavery in the Presbyterian Diaspora considers how, in areas as diverse as the New Hebrides, Scotland, the United States, and East Central Africa, men's and women's shared Presbyterian faith conditioned their interpretations of and interactions with the institution of chattel slavery. The chapters highlight how Presbyterians' reactions to slavery -which ranged from abolitionism, to indifference, to support-reflected their considered application of the principles of the Reformed Tradition to the institution. Consequently, this collection reveals how the particular ways in which Presbyterians framed the Reformed Tradition made slavery an especially problematic and fraught issue for adherents to the faith. Faith and Slavery, by situating slavery at the nexus of Presbyterian theology and practice, offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between religion and slavery. It reverses the all too common assumption that religion primarily served to buttress existing views on slavery, by illustrating how groups' and individuals reactions to slavery emerged from their understanding of the Presbyterian faith. The collection's geographic reach-encompassing the experiences of people from Europe, Africa, America, and the Pacific-filtered through the lens of Presbyterianism also highlights the global dimensions of slavery and the debates surrounding it. The institution and the challenges it presented, Faith and Slavery stresses, reflected less the peculiar conditions of a particular place and time, than the broader human condition as people attempt to understand and shape their world.

This book offers a unique approach to Calvin by introducing the individuals and groups who, through their opposition to Calvin's theology and politics, helped shape the Reformer, his theology, and his historical and religious legacy. Respected church historian Gary Jenkins shows how Calvin had to defend or rethink his theology in light of his tormentors' challenges, giving readers a more nuanced view of Calvin's life and thought. The book highlights the central theological ideas of the Swiss Reformation and introduces figures and movements often excluded from standard texts.

Puritan Family and Community in the English Atlantic World examines the dynamics of marriage, family and community life during the "Great Migration" through the microhistorical study of one puritan family in 1638 Rhode Island. Through studying the Verin family, a group of English non-conformists who took part in the "Great Migration", this book examines differing approaches within puritanism towards critical issues of the age, including liberty of conscience, marriage, family, female agency, domestic violence, and the role of civil government in responding to these developments. Like other nonconformists who challenged the established Church of England, the Verins faced important personal dilemmas brought on by the dictates of their conscience even after emigrating. A violent marital dispute between Jane and her husband Joshua divided the Providence community and resulted, for the first time in the English-speaking colonies, in a woman's right to a liberty of conscience independent of her husband being upheld. Through biographical sketches of the founders of Providence and engaging with puritan ministerial and prescriptive literature and female-authored petitions and pamphlets, this book illustrates how women saw their place in the world and considers the exercise of female agency in the early modern era. Connecting migration studies, family and community studies, religious studies, and political philosophy, Puritan Family and Community in the English Atlantic World will be of great interest to scholars of the English Atlantic World, American religious history, gender and violence, the history of New England, and the history of family.

Was Jonathan Edwards the stalwart and unquestioning Reformed theologian that he is often portrayed as being? In what ways did his own conversion fail to meet the standards of his Puritan ancestors? And how did this affect his understanding of the Divine Being and of the nature of justification? Becoming Divine investigates the early theological career of Edwards, finding him deep in a crisis of faith that drove him into an obsessive lifelong search for answers. Instead of a fear of God, which he had been taught to understand as proof of his conversion, he experienced a 'surprising, amazing joy'. Suddenly he saw the Divine Being in everything and felt himself transported into a heavenly world, becoming one with the Divine family. What he developed, as he sought to make sense of this unexpected joy, is a theology that is both ancient and early modern: a theology of divine participation rooted in the incarnation of Christ.

A great deal has recently been written about Jonathan Edwards. Most of it, however, does not make central Edwards's own intention to speak truth about God and the human situation; his systematic theological intention is regarded merely as an historical phenomenon. In this book, Robert Jenson provides a different sort of interpretation, asking not only, "Why was Edwards great?" but also, "Was Edwards right?" As a student of the ideas of Newton and Locke, Jenson argues, Edwards was very much a figure of the Enlightenment; but unlike most other Americans, he was also a discerning critic of it, and was able to use Enlightenment thought in his theology without yielding to its mechanistic and individualistic tendencies. Alone among Christian thinkers of the Enlightenment, Edwards conceived an authentically Christian piety and a creative theology not in spite of Newton and Locke but by virtue of them. Jenson sees Edwards's understanding as a radical corrective to what commitment to the Enlightenment brought about in American life, religious and otherwise. Perhaps, Jenson proposes, recovery of Edwards's vision might make the mutual determination of American culture and American Christianity more fruitful than it has yet been.

This four-volume work combines rigorous historical and theological scholarship with application and practicality―characterized by an accessible, Reformed, and experiential approach.

In this volume, Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley unpack the doctrine of humanity (anthropology) and the doctrine of Christ (Christology), revealing to us what the Bible says about who we are, who Jesus is, and how we should live in light of that knowledge.