A thorough examination of the central sacrament of Christianity explained through the light of the Reformed tradition, which sees the act not only as a sign or symbol, but also as a proof of the presence of Christ.

The last years of Henry VIII's life, 1539-47, have conventionally been seen as a time when the king persecuted Protestants. This book argues that Henry's policies were much more ambiguous; that he continued to give support to Protestantism and that many accordingly also remained loyal to him. It also examines why the Protestants eventually adopted a more radical, oppositional stance, and argues that English Protestantism's eventual identity was determined during these years.

Faith Active in Love is a perspective on Michael Welker's theology - a Biblisch-realistische Theologie from a perspective of the Spirit. Van der Westhuizen argues that it is a multisystemic theology that in multiple tensions and triplexes - held together by the resurrection and resonance, the pouring out and structured pluralism, the reign and emergence - in complex ways cultivates a hermeneutic for faith active in love, a hermeneutic for public theology.

This comprehensive investigation into the involvement of ordinary Christians in Church activities and in anti-clerical dissent, explores a phenomenon stretching from Britain and Germany to the Americas and beyond. It considers how evangelicalism, as an anti-establishmentarian and profoundly individualistic movement, has allowed the traditionally powerless to become enterprising, vocal and influential in the religious arena and in other areas of politics and culture.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203166507

This Bible published in the classic King James Version includes center-column references and large print type allowing for an easy Bible reading experience. This edition is published in large KJV Comfort Print type, which was designed exclusively for Thomas Nelson to be the most readable at any size. With this KJV Large Print Center-Column Reference Bible, you won't have to sacrifice study features for readability. Center-column references, book introductions, a concordance, and full-color maps make this Bible the go-to edition you'll look forward to reading. As part of the Verse Art Cover Collection, this edition is branded with an inspiring verse to encourage you as you read the truths and promises within its pages. Features include: Presentation page is a special place to record a memory or note Bible book introductions provide a concise overview of the background and historical context of the book about to be read Center-column references allow you to find related passages quickly and easily Reading plan guiding you through the entire Bible in a year Miracles and parables of Jesus call out important events during Jesus' earthly ministry Concordance for looking up a word's occurrences throughout the Bible Full-color maps show the layout of Israel and other biblical locations for better context 2 satin ribbon markers help keep track of where you were reading Easy-to-read large 11-point KJV Comfort Print (R)

Of particular significance for an understanding of early Church history are the Waldensians, members of a dissident religious movement which originated in France in the twelfth century and resided primarily in the Duchy of Savoy and Northern and Southern Italy, before moving to other parts of Europe. Bringing together contributions by leading scholars in the field, this volume of essays discusses the construction and transmission of Waldensian identity through discourse and cultural production. It highlights in particular the religious and political significance of the Waldensians at an international level, not least with regard to the Reformation and its aftermath. Fundamental to the research presented are the rich holdings of Waldensian manuscripts in the Old Library of Trinity College Dublin and also in Cambridge, Geneva and Grenoble. The volume is divided into two parts and its first section, "Editing Waldensian Texts and Manuscripts", considers Waldensian texts and manuscripts, their circulation, physical characteristics, language and textual sources. The second section, "Constructing Waldensian Identity", examines the shifting representation of Waldensian identity through stereotypes, modern literature, the visual arts and historical accounts; the role played by specific libraries, individuals, gifts, and countries in promoting and fashioning Waldensian identity is also brought to light. A key aim of the volume is to offer a review of research to date and to point to future directions for study.

Latino Protestantism is growing rapidly in the United States. Researchers estimate that by 2030 half of all Latinos in America will be Protestant. This remarkable growth is not just about numbers. The rise of Latino Protestants will impact the changing nature of American politics, economics, and religion. Latino Protestants in America takes readers inside the numbers to highlight the many reasons Latino Protestants are growing as well as the diversity of this group. The book brings together the best existing scholarship on this group with original research to offer a nuanced picture of Latino Protestants in America, from worship practices to political engagement. The narrative helps readers move beyond misconceptions about Latino religion and offers a window into the diverse ways that religion plays out in real life. Latino Protestants in America is an essential resource for anyone interested in the beliefs and practices of this group, as well as the implications for its growth and areas for further study.

This book provides the first full single-volume scholarly account in English of the "Waldenses" and examination of the concept of "Waldensianism" from the late 12th century to the Reformation. "Waldenses" is the name given to diverse and widely-scattered groups of religious dissenters since the time of the movement's reputed founder, a rich citizen of Lyon called Valdesius, in the late twelfth century. Though living within the culture of the Catholic Church, these people doubted the holiness of its priesthood and questioned its teachings about the destiny of souls after death.

The various strands of this movement emerged and endured over a long period of time. In consequence some earlier historians assumed, rather than demonstrated, that 'Waldensian' heresy remained one coherent phenomenon throughout its life-span. They also tended to neglect some of the transient or 'untypical' aspects of the movement.

This new book draws on primary sources to consider each of the manifestations of the movement in turn. It examines connections in space and time through correspondence and tradition between the different groups of Waldenses. It also asks what were the common threads in certain characteristics of religious practice, linking in differing degrees all the forms that the movement took.

Drawing primarily from Suffolk sources, this book explores the development and place of Protestantism in early modern society, defined as much in terms of its practice in local communities as in its more public pronouncements from those in authority. Using detailed analysis of four communities, Mildenhall, Bury St Edmunds, Thetford and Hadleigh, John Craig explores the responses and initiatives of these towns to the question of the Reformation in the 16th century. A fascinating picture emerges of the preoccupations and priorities of particular groups. The political goals and consciousness of townsmen and tradesmen are examined, and the problems of analyzing the evidence for ascribing religious motivations to urban factions are highlighted. The case of Hadleigh addresses some aspects of the connection often made between the growth of Protestantism and the incidence of social division and conflict. These local studies provide the basis for a broader perspective on urban reformation in East Anglia.

Addresses the nature of the influence of the European Enlightenment on the beliefs and practice of the Protestant missionaries who went to Asia and Africa from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, particularly British missions and the formative role of the Scottish Enlightenment on their thinking.

For the first time in 70 years, a new translation of Max Weber's classic "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" --one of the seminal works in sociology-- published in September 2001. Translator Stephen Kalberg is an internationally acclaimed Weberian scholar, and in this new translation he offers a precise and nuanced rendering that captures both Weber's style and the unusual subtlety of his descriptions and causal arguments. Weber's original italicization, highlighting major themes, has been restored, and Kalberg has standardized Weber's terminology to better facilitate understanding of the various twists and turns in his complex lines of reasoning.
Weber's compelling work remains influential for these reasons: it explores the continuing debate regarding the origins and legacy of modem capitalism in the West; it helps the reader understand today's global economic development; and it plumbs the deep cultural forces that affect contemporary work life and the workplace in the United States and Europe.
This new edition/translation also includes a glossary; Weber's 1906 essay, "The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism"; and Weber's masterful prefatory remarks to his "Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion," in which he defines the uniqueness of Western societies and asks what "ideas and interests" combined to create modem Western rationalism

Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558—1689 explores an issue that is key to early modern political, religious and cultural history.

Traditionally regarded as a period of expanding and extended liberalism, as superstition and received truth were overthrown, this book argues conversely that one set of intolerant orthodoxies was replaced by another. It examines what toleration means now and meant then, within a European context.

Introduced with a survey of the theory, including the writings of Locke and Hobbes, the book then studies the Stuarts, the Puritan Revolution and the Restoration. This is a crucial addition to the study of early modern Britain, religious and political history.

This book provides key essays on the most recent interpretations of the German Reformation movement. Rather than viewing the religious developments of the sixteenth century in isolation, modern historiography tends to picture the Reformation as an event which reached into all corners of society and slowly worked to transform the course of European history. This collection comprises essays written by the scholars who have helped bring about this shift in understanding and includes articles translated into English for the first time.

The book illustrates how the movement was bound and shaped by the society in which it was broadcast, how the reformers interacted with the trends and tensions of the period, as well as how the forces of religious change came to influence European culture and society over the long term.

The Reformation of the 16th century has always been seen as one of the pivotal events in European history. Lord Acton, the famous 19th-century British historian, compared the importance of Martin Luther's speech at the diet at Worms in 1521 with Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1813. Lord Acton's may or may not be an extravagant claim, but it is certainly true that the events of the 16th and 17th centuries, now called the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, changed forever the religious and political history of the West. The Historical Dictionary of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation provides a one-volume, balanced, alternative to the overwhelming amounts of literature on the events of the time and the theological and political debates that spawned those events.

Explores the manner in which people of various caste and various religions responded to the Lutherian mission and congregation. The text investigates the manner in which Tamils themselves understood the Evangelical religion as they spread it beyond Tranquebar. It then turns to the early career of Vedanayagam Sastri (1774-1864). It considers how he responded to efforts by "new missionaries" to change the language, liturgy and social custom that had guided Tamil Protestants for over a hundred years. Reflections on the intellectual impact of colonial Europe on those early Protestant Christians of India conclude the study.

Through a series of case studies of major fundamentalist missionary institutions and campaigns in China from 1930 to 1937, this work traces and clarifies the historical process of the movement and its controversy with modernism, the nature of character of the movement, its theological cores, its impact upon missionary thinking and strategies, and its influences on emerging evangelicals within Chinese churches.

The first full-length biography of Rev. Long, one of the most remarkable Protestant missionaries working in India in the 19th century, examining his work and activities in the context of his own background, philosophy and motivation as well as the political and cultural climate of the day.

H. Richard Niebuhr's powerful interpretation of Ernst Troeltsch has shaped our view of the man for over seventy years. Troeltsch is one of the most respected and renowned figures in liberal Protestant thought. Yet as Harvard philosopher of religion Cornel West observes in his foreword, Constance Benson "shat-ters certain crucial aspects of Troeltsch's image as a liberal religious thinker" with God and Caesar. Benson reconstructs the historical context in which Troeltsch wrote his landmark The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, and reinterprets it in relation to that context. She shows that Troeltsch's Christian-ity legitimized class, religious, and gender inequality in response to the challenges of social democracy. Her controversial exploration of why most Troeltsch scholars have remained silent on this deserves seri-ous consideration. Her discovery of Troeltsch's role in the politics and ideological debates of Imperial Germany require a painful reexamina-tion of an entire chapter of Protestant history. Benson exposes Troeltsch's relationship to Paul de Lagarde, a notorious anti-Semite and architect of what later became Nazi ideology. God and Caesaris a needed corrective. Troeltsch is an important figure for the Chris-tian right in Germany and for many mainstream Protestants in the United States. Benson's courageous book is the most challenging critique of Troeltsch's politics we have-an unsettling perspective that forces us to revise the beloved Troeltsch so many of us had come to admire and cherish. It will be of interest to intellectual historians, theologians and students of religious history, and specialists in German social and political history.

Although the connection between the invention of printing and the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century has long been a scholarly commonplace, there is still a great deal of evidence about the relationship to be presented and analysed. This collection of authoritative reviews by distinguished historians deals with the role of the book in the spread of the Reformation all over the continent, identifying common European experiences and local peculiarities. It summarises important recent work on the topic from every major European country, introducing English-speakers to much important and previously inaccessible research.

The four years from the Wittenberg disputation of 1517 to the Diet of Worms in 1521 provide one of the most dramatic stories in human history. In those years a young theological tutor emerged from obscurity to disrupt Western Christendom and to refashion a large part of it. They were years of prodigious activity for Luther himself, and there can be no true understanding of the Reformation apart from the writings, some long, some quite short, which came from his pen during those years. Lee-Woolf has done great service to the study of Luther by translating the most significant of these writings. Introductions and explanatory notes make clear their historical context. The student will find them invaluable. Lee-Woolf's lively and virile translation makes the authentic Luther step out of the pages, and brings the reader close to great events which are still formative in the life of the Church and the world.

The Basil Society's China mission, one of the ore successful Protestant missions in the nineteenth century, was distinguished by the fact that most of the initial proselytizing was conducted by Chinese converts in the interior rather than by Western missionaries in the treaty ports. Thus the first viable protestant communities were not only established by Chinese evangelists, they were established among an ethnic minority in south China, the Hakka people.

The autobiographies of eight pioneer Chinese missionaries featured in this book offer an unusual opportunity to view village life and customs in Guangdong during the mid-nineteenth century by providing details on Hakka death and burial rituals, ancestor veneration, lineages and lineage feuds, geomancy, the status of Hakka women, widespread economic hardship, and civil disorder.

The authors' commentary addresses the issue of conversion, which was fueled by individual desire for solace and salvation, the building of a support community amid social chaos and the possibility of social mobility through education. Despite an expanding role by Western missionaries, the Chinese origins, the rural interior locale, and the status of the Hakka as a disadvantaged minority contributed to successive generations of Christian families and to early progress toward an autonomous Hakka church.

The Basil Society's China mission, one of the ore successful Protestant missions in the nineteenth century, was distinguished by the fact that most of the initial proselytizing was conducted by Chinese converts in the interior rather than by Western missionaries in the treaty ports. Thus the first viable protestant communities were not only established by Chinese evangelists, they were established among an ethnic minority in south China, the Hakka people.

The autobiographies of eight pioneer Chinese missionaries featured in this book offer an unusual opportunity to view village life and customs in Guangdong during the mid-nineteenth century by providing details on Hakka death and burial rituals, ancestor veneration, lineages and lineage feuds, geomancy, the status of Hakka women, widespread economic hardship, and civil disorder.

The authors' commentary addresses the issue of conversion, which was fueled by individual desire for solace and salvation, the building of a support community amid social chaos and the possibility of social mobility through education. Despite an expanding role by Western missionaries, the Chinese origins, the rural interior locale, and the status of the Hakka as a disadvantaged minority contributed to successive generations of Christian families and to early progress toward an autonomous Hakka church.

Many scholars assume that Luther advocates for a Christian life in which human beings are always passive recipients of God's grace as it is delivered in preaching, and mere instruments through which God works to serve their neighbors. This book offers a different reading of Luther's views on human agency by drawing on a fresh source: Luther's preaching. Drawing on Luther's sermons in the Church Postil as a primary source, Justin Nickel argues that Martin Luther preached as though Christians have real, if secondary, agency in the lives they lead before God and neighbor. As a result, Nickel presents a Luther substantively concerned with how Christians lead their lives.

Though the Reformation was sparked by the actions of Martin Luther, it was not a decisive break from the Church in Rome but rather a gradual process of religious and social change. As the men responsible for religious instruction and moral oversight at the village level, parish pastors played a key role in the implementation of the Reformation and the gradual development of a Protestant religious culture, but their ministry has seldom been examined in the light of how they were prepared for the pastorate. Teaching the Reformation examines the four generations of Reformed pastors who served the church of Basel in the century after the Reformation, focusing on the evolution of pastoral training and Reformed theology, the theory and practice of preaching, and the performance of pastoral care in both urban and rural parishes. It looks at how these pastors were educated and what they learned, examining not only the study of theology but also the general education in languages, rhetoric and dialectic that future pastors received at the citys Latin school and in the arts faculty of the university. It points to significant changes over time in the content of that education, which in turn separated Basels pastors into distinct generations. The study also looks more specifically at preaching in Basel, demonstrating how the evolution of dialectic and rhetoric instruction, and particularly the spread of Ramism, led to changes in both exegetical method and homiletics. These developments, combined with the gradual elaboration of Reformed theology, resulted in a distinctive style of Reformed Orthodox preaching in Basel. The development of pastoral education also had a direct impact on how Basels clergy carried out their other dutiescatechization, administering the sacraments, counseling the dying and consoling the bereaved, and overseeing the moral conduct of their parishioners. The growing professionalization of the clergy, the result of more intensive education and more stringent supervision, contributed to the gradual implantation of a Reformed religious culture in Basel.

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in religion and religious issues. Some have linked this to a neo-liberal form of individualism, while others noted that secularism has left people bereft of a humanly necessary link with the transcendent. The importance of identity issues has also been remarked upon. This book examines how liberal forms of religion are allowing people to engage with religion on their own terms, while also feeling part of something more universal. Looking at liberal approaches to the Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Protestant and Roman Catholic Christianity and Islam - this book teases out how postmodern culture has shaped the way in which people engage with these religions. It also compares and contrasts how liberal thinking and theology have been expressed in each of the faiths examined, as well as the reactionary responses to its emergence. By considering how liberalism has influenced the narrative around the Abrahamic faiths, this book demonstrates how malleable faith and spirituality can be. As such, it will be of interest to scholars working in Religious Studies, Theology, Sociology and Cultural Anthropology.