Till now history has neglected the utterly radical nature of Luther's thought. In bringing together the political, theological, conceptual and cultural dimensions of Luther's work, Montover brings his readers to an awareness of their truly radical nature. Luther's understanding of the universal priesthood of believers was not simply another evangelical concept that dealt only with the office of ministry. In serving as a means for reordering the concepts of temporal authority and the temporal order it challenged the cosmological foundations of the political structure of his day. A compelling work that can only serve to revive the study of this monumental figure of theology.

Ernst Troeltsch is widely recognized as having played an important role in the development of modern Protestant theology, but his contribution is usually understood as largely critical of traditional modes of theological inquiry. He is best known for his historicist critique of dogmatic theology, and seen either as the closing chapter of nineteenth-century liberalism, or as a proto-postmodernist. Central to this pivotal period in modern theology stands the problem: how can we articulate a doctrine of ultimate reality such that a meaningful and coherent account of the world is available without our understanding of God thereby becoming conditioned by the world itself? Evan Kuehn demonstrates that historiographical assumptions about twentieth-century religious thought have obscured the coherence and relevance of Troeltsch's understanding of God, history, and eschatology. An eschatological understanding of the Absolute, Kuehn contends, stands at the heart of Troeltsch's theology and the problem of historicism with which it is faced. Troeltsch's eschatological Absolute must be understood in the context of questions that were being raised at the turn of the twentieth century both by research on New Testament apocalypticism, and by modern critical methodologies in the historical sciences. His theory of the Absolute is central to his views on religion and religious ethics and provides practitioners of constructive studies in religion with important resources for engaging with sociological and historical studies, where Troeltsch's status as a classical figure is widely recognized.

English text with Spanish, German, and French translations. This volume presents the policy statement on ecumenical commitment of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America adopted in 1991 by the ELCA's second churchwide assembly.

This work challenges the common consensus that Luther, with his commitment to St. Paul's articulation of justification by faith, leaves no room for the Letter of St. James. Against this one-sided reading of Luther, focused only his criticism of the letter, this book argues that Luther had fruitful interpretations of the epistle that shaped the subsequent exegetical tradition. Scholarship's singular concentration on Luther's criticism of James as "an epistle of straw" has caused many to overlook Luther's sermons on James, the many places where James comes to full expression in Luther's writings, and the influence that Luther's biblical interpretation had on later interpretations of James. Based primarily on neglected Lutheran sermons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this work examines the pastoral hermeneutic of Luther and his theological heirs as they heard the voice of James and communicated that voice to and for the sake of the church. Scholars, pastors, and educated laity alike are invited to discover how Luther's theology was shaped by the Epistle of James and how Luther's students and theological heirs aimed to preach this disputed letter fruitfully to their hearers.

In The Reformation of Historical Thought, Mark Lotito re-examines the development of Western historiography by concentrating on Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560) and his universal history, Carion's Chronicle (1532). With the Chronicle, Melanchthon overturned the medieval papal view of history, and he offered a distinctly Wittenberg perspective on the foundations of the "modern" European world. Through its immense popularity, the Chronicle assumed extraordinary significance across the divides of language, geography and confession. Indeed, Melanchthon's intervention would become the point of departure for theologians, historians and jurists to debate the past, present and future of the Holy Roman Empire. Through the Chronicle, the Wittenberg reformation of historical thought became an integral aspect of European intellectual culture for the centuries that followed.

This book is the first history in English of the Lutheran Church in Germany and Scandinavia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A period of fundamental and lasting change in the political landscape-with the separation of the old twin monarchies of Sweden-Finland and Denmark-Norway in Scandinavia (1809, 1814), and the unification of Germany (1866-71), this was also a time of particular unease and upheaval for the Church. Attempts to emulate the spiritual community of the early church, reform of the church establishment, and steps taken to enlighten parishioners were almost held back by the anomalous structural legacy of the Reformation, tradition, and parish habit, sacred and profane. However, the birth of the modern nation-state and its market economy posed a fundamental challenge to the structure and ethos of the Reformation churches, as it did to the Catholic Church. The First World War deepened the crisis further: German Protestants (and the Scandinavians were not immune either, although they remained neutral), who bracketed modernity with crisis and religious with national renewal, and who saw national loyalty as a higher value than the faith, fellowship, and moral order of the Church, were swept up into the maw of a modern national war machine which threatened to wipe out Protestantism altogether.

This book provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the challenges faced by pastoral ministry in South African Pentecostalism as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as some interventions being made to manage these challenges. Contributors present descriptive approaches to churches' reactions to lockdown measures, and especially the adaptations generated within Pentecostalism in South Africa. Through a variety of approaches-including pastoral care, virtual ecclesiology, social media, and missiology-contributors offer intervention techniques which can help readers to understand the unique role of Christian ministry during the pandemic, in South Africa and beyond.

This volume investigates Paul Tillich's relationship to Asian religions and locates Tillich in a global religious context. It appreciates Tillich's heritage within the western and eastern religious contexts and explores the possibility of global religious-cultural understanding through the dialogue of Tillich's thought and East-West religious-cultural matrix.

The Early Reformation on the Continent offers a fresh look at the formative years of the European Reformation and the origins of Protestant faith and practice. Taking into account recent work on Erasmus and Luther, Owen Chadwick provides a balanced view of the raison d'être for the changes which the reforming communities sought to introduce and the difficulties and disagreements concerning these. The reader is taken back to the origins and development of each topic examined and given an authoritative, accessible, and informative account.

This interdisciplinary volume represents the first comprehensive English-language analysis of the development of Protestant Christianity in Xiamen from the nineteenth century to the present. This important regional study is particularly revealing due to the unbroken history of Sino-Christian interactions in Xiamen and the extensive ties that its churches have maintained with global missions and overseas Chinese Christians. Its authors draw upon a wide range of foreign missionary and Chinese official archives, local Xiamen church publications, and fieldwork data to historicize the Protestant experience in the region. Further, the local Christians' stories demonstrate a form of sociocultural, religious and political imagination that puts into question the Euro-American model of Christendom and the Chinese Communist-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement. It addresses the localization of Christianity, the reinvention of local Chinese Protestant identity and heritage, and the Protestants' engagement with the society at large. The empirical findings and analytical insights of this collection will appeal to scholars of religion, sociology and Chinese history.

Luther stands out as the defender of his understanding of the Christian faith in this volume. What he had said and written was attacked by leaders of the Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Though friends and enemies sought to deflect him from his purpose, he remained steadfast so that what took place at the Diet of Worms has a become a watershed in the history of Christendom.

Protestant reformers found the prophet and biblical prophecy to be exceptionally effective for framing their reforming work under the authority of Scripturefor the true prophet speaks the Word of God alone and calls the people, their worship, and their beliefs and practices back to the Word of God. The Reformation of Prophecy uses the prophet and biblical prophecy as a powerful lens through which to view many aspects of the reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. G. Sujin Pak argues that these prophetic concepts served the substantial purposes of articulating a theology of the priesthood of all believers, a biblical model of the pastoral office, a biblical vision of the reform of worship, and biblical processes for discerning right interpretation of Scripture. Pak demonstrates the ways in which understandings of the prophet and biblical prophecy contributed to the formation of distinct confessional identities. She goes on to demonstrate the waning of explicit prophetic terminology, particularly among the next generation of Protestant leadership. Eventually, she shows, the Protestant reformers concluded that the figure of the prophet carried with it as many problems as it did benefits, though they continued to give much time and attention to the exegesis of biblical prophetic writings.

This volume honors the work of a scholar who has been active in the field of early modern history for over four decades. In that time, Susan Karant-Nunn's work challenged established orthodoxies, pushed the envelope of historical genres, and opened up new avenues of research and understanding, which came to define the contours of the field itself. Like this rich career, the chapters in this volume cover a broad range of historical genres from social, cultural and art history, to the history of gender, masculinity, and emotion, and range geographically from the Holy Roman Empire, France, and the Netherlands, to Geneva and Austria. Based on a vast array of archival and secondary sources, the contributions open up new horizons of research and commentary on all aspects of early modern life. Contributors: James Blakeley, Robert J. Christman, Victoria Christman, Amy Nelson Burnett, Pia Cuneo, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Amy Newhouse, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, Helmut Puff, Lyndal Roper, Karen E. Spierling, James D. Tracy, Mara R. Wade, David Whitford, and Charles Zika.

The young Luther emerges in this volume in his role of reformer. We follow him through his early years of clarifying his evangelical doctrines and relive with him the stirring events that were to influence the fate of Germany, all of Europe, and eventually the whole world.

Andrew Fuller (1754-1815) was the leading Baptist theologian of his era, though his works are just now being made available in a critical edition. Strictures on Sandemanianism is the fourth volume in The Works of Andrew Fuller. In this treatise, Fuller critiqued Sandemanianism, a form of Restorationism that first emerged in Scotland in the eighteenth century and was influencing the Scotch Baptists of Fuller's day. Fuller's biggest concern was the Sandemanian belief that saving faith is merely intellectual assent to the gospel. Fuller believed this "intellectualist" view of faith undermined evangelical spirituality. Strictures on Sandemanianism became a leading evangelical critique of Sandemanian views. This critical edition will introduce scholars to this important work and shed light on evangelical debates about the faith, justification, and sanctification during the latter half of the "long" eighteenth century (ca. 1750 to 1815).

England's first Protestant foreign policy initiative, an alliance with German Protestants, is shown to have been a significant influence on the Henrician Reformation. England's first Protestant foreign policy venture took place under Henry VIII, who in the wake of the break with Rome pursued diplomatic contacts with the League of Schmalkalden, the German Protestant alliance. This venture was supported by evangelically-inclined counsellors such as Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer, while religiously conservative figures such as Cuthbert Tunstall, John Stokesley and Stephen Gardiner sought to limit such contacts. The king's own involvement reflected these opposed reactions: he was interested in the Germans as alliance partners and as a consultative source in establishing the theology of his own Church, but at the same time he was reluctant to accept all the religious innovations proposed by the Germans and their English advocates. This study breaks new ground in presenting religious ideology, rather than secular diplomacy, as the motivation behind Anglo-Schmalkaldicnegotiations. Relations between England and the League exerted a considerable influence on the development of the king's theology in the second half of the reign, and hence affected the redirection of religious policy in 1538, thepassing of the Act of Six Articles, the marriage of Henry to Anne of Cleves and the fall of Thomas Cromwell. The examination of the development of Henry's religious thinking is set in the wider context of the foreign policy imperatives of the German Protestants, the ministerial priorities of Thomas Cromwell and factional politics at the court of Henry VIII. RORY McENTEGART is Academic Director of American College Dublin.

In this book S. J. D. Green offers an important account of the causes, courses and consequences of the secularisation of English society. He argues that the critical cultural transformation of modern English society was forged in the agonised abandonment of a long-domesticated Protestant, Christian tradition between 1920 and 1960. Its effects were felt across the nation and among all classes. Yet their significance in the evolution of contemporary indigenous identities remains curiously neglected in most mainstream accounts of post-Victorian Britain. Dr Green traces the decline of English ecclesiastical institutions after 1918. He also investigates the eclipse of once-common moral sensibilities during the years up to 1945. Finally, he examines why subsequent efforts to reverse these trends so comprehensively failed. His work will be of enduring interest to modern historians, sociologists of religion, and all those concerned with the future of faith in Britain and beyond.

With its exalted emotionality, Pentecostalism is a widespread religious movement in Latin America and Africa. It is a blend of Methodism and African religious culture which arouses the passions of the poorest Brazilian masses. Pentecostal conversion is experienced as a sudden break which radically transforms the life of these sectors of the population. Pentecostalism is an Utopia of equality, love, and emotion, which is staged during the worship service. However, it is also characterized by authoritarian features. This book explores Pentecostalism and how it is slowly eroding the foundation of Western political categories.

When Donald Trump was married to his first wife Ivana Ivana Zelnickova in 1977, the family minister who officiated the wedding was the preacher and author of The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale. Perhaps more than any other figure in American public life in the last decade, Donald Trump has been able to reimagine Peale's message of positive thinking to his political advantage. "I never think of the negative," he said after the opening of Trump Tower in 1983. Both Trump and Peale have appealed to people who, like themselves, have felt marginalized by an intellectual and cultural elite. Peale's 1952 book, which helped to drive the religious revival of the 1950s, remains a perennial bestseller, and has affected the lives of a vast public in the United States and around the world. In God's Salesman, Carol V. R. George used interviews with Peale himself as well as exclusive access to his manuscript collection to provide the first full-length scholarly account of Peale and his highly visible career. George explores the evolution of Peale's message of Practical Christianity, the belief that when positive thinking was combined with affirmative prayer, the technique of "imaging," and purposeful action, the result was a changed life. It was a message with special appeal for many in the post-War middle class struggling to rebuild their lives and have a voice in society. George examines the formative influences on Peale's thinking, especially his devout Methodist parents, his early exposure to and then enthusiastic acceptance of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, and his almost instinctive attraction to evangelicalism, particularly as it was manifested politically. Twenty-five years after its initial publication, and with a new foreword by Kate Bowler, God's Salesman remains a timely portrait of the man and his movement, and the vital role that both played in the rethinking and restructuring of American religious life over the last seventy years.

This book, first published in 1971, is a close analysis of some of the typical peasant uprisings of the seventeenth century. The goal of the movements in France and China was a return to an older and more traditional society, rather than a profound transformation of the social structure. In Russia, however, the peasants attempted to overturn the rigid order of a two-class structure and replace it with a more democratic society.