The Reformation: A Brief History is a succinct and engaging introduction to the origins and history of the Protestant Reformation. * A rich overview of the Reformation, skillfully blending social, political, religious and theological dimensions * A clearly and engagingly written narrative which draws on the latest and best scholarship * Includes the history of the Reformation in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, areas that are rarely covered in any detail * The Reformation is placed in the context of the entire history of Christianity to draw out its origins, impetus, and legacy

As historians have gradually come to recognize, the involvement of women was central to the anti-slavery cause in both Britain and the United States. Like their male counterparts, women abolitionists did not all speak with one voice. Among the major differences between women were their religious affiliations, an aspect of their commitment that has not been studied in detail. Yet it is clear that the desire to live out and practice their religious beliefs inspired many of the women who participated in anti-slavery activities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This book examines the part that the traditions, practices, and beliefs of English Protestant dissent and the American Puritan and evangelical traditions played in women's anti-slavery activism. Focusing particularly on Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian and Unitarian women, the essays in this volume move from accounts of individual women's participation in the movement as printers and writers, to assessments of the negotiations and the occasional conflicts between different denominational groups and their anti-slavery impulses. Together the essays in this volume explore how the tradition of English Protestant Dissent shaped the American abolitionist movement, and the various ways in which women belonging to the different denominations on both sides of the Atlantic drew on their religious beliefs to influence the direction of their anti-slavery movements. The collection provides a nuanced understanding of why these women felt compelled to fight for the end of slavery in their respective countries.

The Reformation has traditionally been explained in terms of theology, the corruption of the church and the role of princes. R.W. Scribner, while not denying the importance of these, shifts the context of study of the German Reformation to an examination of popular beliefs and behaviour, and of the reactions of local authorities to the problems and opportunities for social as well as religious reform. This book brings together a coherent body of work that has appeared since 1975, including two entirely new essays and two previously published only in German.

Strategic to the study of popular evangelical movements, this volume provides a thorough description of the holdings of one of the major evangelical resource centers in the United States. The Billy Graham Center, with its focus on efforts by Evangelicals around the world to spread the Christian Gospel, with a special emphasis on North America, has developed a superb array of sources to document this vigorous yet largely uncharted aspect of modern Christianity. The special strengths of the Graham Center's Library, Museum, and Archives are documented here. Books, magazines, photographs, paintings, artifacts, diaries, letters, and files of Christian organizations are among the types of sources described. Two appendices, comprising 20 percent of this volume, give detailed summaries of holdings in 161 other archives and libraries throughout the United States. Also included are 61 photographs of artifacts and documents from the Graham Center. This guide includes three main chapters on the Library, Museum, and Archives of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. Chapters on the collections of the Library and Museum discuss their thematic strengths, featured holdings, and services. A lengthy chapter on the Archives provides an overview, an annotated catalog of its more than 525 collections, and a list of subjects treated in each collection. Two appendices provide extensive descriptions of other archival and library collections around the country. A comprehensive index of subjects and names quickly helps researchers determine what the Graham Center and other North American research centers offer. The user can enjoy a general overview or receive direct information on a specific topic. This volume is designed for the varied interests of pastor, missionary, scholar, journalist, or interested layperson.

An accessible and academic reading of the doctrine of justification by faith. It is often assumed that the Reformation taught justification by faith as if there was a monolithic view of the doctrine. Since We Are Justified By Faith is a collection of important essays that dispel this myth, demonstrating the diverse theologies of that period. Experts in the field, including Cameron MacKenzie, Aaron OKelly, Jeff Fisher, Kirk MacGregor, Mary Patton Baker, Karin Spiecker Stetina, David Hall, Bonnie Pattison, Timothy Shaun Price, Andre Gazal, and Chris Ross, write on the theologies of Luther, Melanchthon, Oecolampadius, Marpeck, Calvin, and the English reformers to give a nuanced reading of the doctrine in sixteenth-century Protestant theology.

This volume is a comprehensive collection of articles on Bunyan as well as including several broader views of the Nonconformist tradition.

One of the most significant developments within contemporary American Christianity, especially among younger evangelicals, is a groundswell of interest in the Reformed tradition. In Reformed Resurgence, Brad Vermurlen provides a comprehensive sociological account of this phenomenon - known as New Calvinism - and what it entails for the broader evangelical landscape in the United States. Vermurlen develops a new theory for understanding how conservative religion can be strong and thrive in the hypermodern Western world. His paradigm uses and expands on strategic action field theory, a recent framework proposed for the study of movements and organizations that has rarely been applied to religion. This approach to religion moves beyond market dynamics and cultural happenstance and instead shows how religious strength can be fought for and won as the direct result of religious leaders' strategic actions and conflicts. But the battle comes at a cost. For the same reasons conservative Calvinistic belief is experiencing a resurgence, present-day American evangelicalism has turned in on itself. Vermurlen argues that in the end, evangelicalism in the United States consists of pockets of subcultural and local strength within the "cultural entropy" of secularization, as religious meanings and coherence fall apart.

It is equally true that the Reformation was inspired and defined by the Bible and that the Bible was reshaped by the intellectual, political, and cultural forces of the Reformation. In this book, a distinguished scholar-whose contributions to the field of religious studies have won him wide renown-explores this relationship, examining both the role of the Bible in the Reformation and the effect of the Reformation on the text of the Bible, Biblical studies, preaching and exegesis, and European culture in general. Jaroslav Pelikan begins by discussing the philological foundations of the "reformation" of the Biblical text, focusing on the revival of Greek and Hebrew language study and the important contributions to textual criticism by humanist scholars. He then examines the changing patterns of interpretation and communication of the Biblical text, the proliferation of vernacular versions of scripture and their impact on various national cultures, and the impact of the Reformation Bible on art, music, and literature of the period. The book is richly illustrated with examples of early printed editions of Bibles, commentaries, sermons, vernacular translations, and other works with Biblical themes, all of which are identified and discussed. The book serves as the catalog for a major exhibition of early Bibles and Reformation texts that has been organized at Bridwell Library, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, and will also be shown at the Yale Center for British Art, the Houghton Library and the Widener Library at Harvard University, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. Copublished with the Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University

In the course of the nineteenth century, the boundaries that divided Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany were redrawn, challenged, rendered porous and built anew. This book addresses this redrawing. It considers the relations of three religious groups-Protestants, Catholics, and Jews-and asks how, by dint of their interaction, they affected one another.Previously, historians have written about these communities as if they lived in isolation. Yet these groups coexisted in common space, and interacted in complex ways. This is the first book that brings these separate stories together and lays the foundation for a new kind of religious history that foregrounds both cooperation and conflict across the religious divides. The authors analyze the influences that shaped religious coexistence and they place the valences of co-operation and conflict in deep social and cultural contexts. The result is a significantly altered understanding of the emergence of modern religious communities as well as new insights into the origins of the German tragedy, which involved the breakdown of religious coexistence.

This innovative urban history of Dublin explores the symbols and spaces of the Irish capital between the Restoration in 1660 and the advent of neoclassical public architecture in the 1770s. The meanings ascribed to statues, churches, houses, and public buildings are traced in detail, using a wide range of visual and written sources.

While Protestant Christians made up only a small percentage of China's overall population during the Republican period, they were heavily represented among the urban elite. Protestant influence was exercised through churches, hospitals, and schools, and reached beyond these institutions into organizations such as the YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) and YWCA (Young Women's Christian Association). The YMCA's city associations drew their membership from the urban elite and were especially influential within the modern sectors of urban society. Chinese Protestant leaders adapted the social message and practice of Christianity to the conditions of the republican era. Key to this effort was their belief that Christianity could save China - that is, that Christianity could be more than a religion focused on saving individuals, but could also save a people, a society, and a nation. Saving the Nation recounts the history of the Protestant elite beginning with their participation in social reform campaigns in the early twentieth century, continuing through their contribution to the resistance against Japanese imperialism, and ending with Protestant support for a social revolution. The story Thomas Reilly tells is one about the Chinese Protestant elite and the faith they adopted and adapted, Social Christianity. But it is also a broader story about the Chinese people and their struggle to strengthen and renew their nation - to build a New China.

This is the first full-length biography of the Reverend Thomas K. Beecher, a member of the most famous family of reformers in 19th-century America. Unlike his famous siblings, Thomas Beecher defended slavery on the eve of the Civil War and condemned the abolitionist, temperance, and women's rights movements. This account of his anti-reform views examines important, but relatively unexplored, questions in the historiography of antebellum reform: Why did some Northern evangelical Protestants oppose these movements? To what extent did their opposition represent a backlash against the legacy of American Revolutionary ideals? Glenn emphasizes how Thomas Beecher's life and work illustrate important changes in the Protestant ministry during the latter half of the 19th century. This is an insightful and thorough biography that will appeal to readers interested in American cultural and religious history.

For much of his career as a Reformer John Calvin was involved in trinitarian controversy. Not only did these controversies span his career, but his opponents ranged across the spectrum of theological approaches-from staunch traditionalists to radical antitrinitarians. Remarkably, the heart of Calvin's argument, and the heart of others' criticism, remained the same throughout: Calvin claimed that the only-begotten Son of the Father is also, as the one true God, 'of himself'.
Brannon Ellis investigates the various Reformation and post-Reformation responses to Calvin's affirmation of the Son's aseity (or essential self-existence), a significant episode in the history of theology that is often ignored or misunderstood. Calvin neither rejected eternal generation, nor merely toed the line of classical exposition. As such, these debates turned on the crucial pivot between simple unity and ordered plurality-the relationship between the processions and consubstantiality-at the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity. Ellis's aim is to explain the historical significance and explore the theological implications of Calvin's complex solidarity with the classical tradition in his approach to thinking and speaking of the Triune God. He contends that Calvin's approach, rather than an alternative to classical trinitarianism, is actually more consistent with this tradition's fundamental commitments regarding the ineffable generation of God from God than its own received exposition.

Protestant institutions of higher learning have historically enrolled fewer students of color than nonsectarian colleges and universities. In this book, George Yancey explores the racial climate on Protestant campuses, examining the reasons why these institutions succeed or fail to attract a diverse student body and why students of color who do attend such institutions either succeed or fail to graduate. Of course, no major Protestant denomination endorses overt racism, and Protestant educators have indicated a wish to increase racial diversity on their campuses. Despite this expressed desire, however, Yancey finds numerous barriers to achieving such diversity. On the one hand, evangelical institutions, like the denominations that sponsor them, tend to espouse an individualistic, "colorblind" ideology that ignores racial injustices and discourages the attendance of students of color. Mainline Protestants have much more progressive racial attitudes than conservatives. Ironically, however, Protestants of color tend to be theologically conservative, and have deep disagreements with the mainline on such theological issues as biblical inerrancy and social issues like homosexuality. Yancey finds that many traditional approaches to enhancing diversity appear ineffective. Such diversity programs, he discovers, are not as effective as curriculum reforms or student led multicultural groups. Educational courses and student led groups that deal with racial issues prove to be more highly correlated with a diverse student body than multicultural, anti-racism, community, or non-European cultural programs.

Abraham Kuyper is known as the energetic Dutch Protestant social activist and public theologian of the 1898 Princeton Stone Lectures, the Lectures on Calvinism. In fact, the church was the point from which Kuyper's concerns for society and public theology radiated. In his own words, ''The problem of the church is none other than the problem of Christianity itself.'' The loss of state support for the church, religious pluralism, rising nationalism, and the populist religious revivals sweeping Europe in the nineteenth century all eroded the church's traditional supports. Dutch Protestantism faced the unprecedented prospect of ''going Dutch''; from now on it would have to pay its own way. John Wood examines how Abraham Kuyper adapted the Dutch church to its modern social context through a new account of the nature of the church and its social position. The central concern of Kuyper's ecclesiology was to re-conceive the relationship between the inner aspects of the church-the faith and commitment of the members-and the external forms of the church, such as doctrinal confessions, sacraments, and the relationship of the church to the Dutch people and state. Kuyper's solution was to make the church less dependent on public entities such as nation and state and more dependent on private support, especially the good will of its members. This ecclesiology de-legitimated the national church and helped Kuyper justify his break with the church, but it had wider effects as well. It precipitated a change in his theology of baptism from a view of the instrumental efficacy of the sacrament to his later doctrine of presumptive regeneration wherein the external sacrament followed, rather than preceded and prepared for, the intenral work grace. This new ecclesiology also gave rise to his well-known public theology; once he achieved the private church he wanted, as the Netherlands' foremost public figure, he had to figure out how to make Christianity public again.

The nature of evangelical identity in Britain is both a perennial issue and an urgent one. This is especially the case because evangelical Christianity has, throughout its history, been characterised by a remarkable degree of dynamism and diversity. These essays, by a distinguished list of contributors, explore the issue of evangelical identity and the nature of evangelical diversity by investigating the interactions of evangelicalism with national and denominational identities, race and gender, and its expression in spirituality and culture from the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century to evangelical churches and movements of the present.

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The Reformation in Germany" provides readers with a strong narrative overview of the most recent work on this topic. It addresses the central concerns of Reformation historiography as well as providing a distinct interpretation of the movement.

The book examines the spread and reception of the evangelical movement, the historical dynamic created by the fusion of religious ideas and the social context, the religious imagination of the common man and utopian visions of reform, and the relationship between political culture and religious change. The narrative goes on to consider the long-term legacy of the Reformation movement in Germany. The book provides readers with a fresh perspective on the movement, one which seeks to understand its rise and evolution as a historical process in constant dialogue with the cultural and political context of the age.