During the 1650s, James Nayler was one of the most important leaders of the emerging Quaker movement in England and, arguably, its most effective preacher and writer. However, his legacy has been dominated by events that took place in the summer and autumn of 1656, leading to a conviction for blasphemy, brutal public punishment, and imprisonment. Official histories of Quaker beginnings portrayed him as a gifted, but flawed, character, who brought the Quaker movement into disrepute, and prompted a concern for corporate order. Scholarship during the past century has begun to question this received position. However, a continued preoccupation with his 'fall' has tended to overshadow interpretations of his writings. In this volume, Stuart Masters seeks to identify a number of important theological themes visible within Nayler's works, and to locate them within their radical religious context. He argues that a powerful Christological vision at the heart of Nayler's religious thought engendered a practical theology with radical political, economic, and ecological implications.

Is there any way to avoid sin in my life? Does God cause everything that happens to me? Could I lose my salvation? Will I find proof of God's existence in the Bible? Why was Satan allowed to tempt Adam and Eve? Do you have a mature, bible-based understanding of these and other fundamental issues at the heart of the Christian faith? Through a straightforward question and answer approach, Richard S. Taylor explains basic Christian beliefs in What Every Christian Ought to Know . This book will help you grow in your spiritual life as you follow the command to 'be transformed by the renewing of your mind' (Rom. 12: 2).

The Cross of Reality investigates Bonhoeffer's interpretation and use of Luther's theology in shaping his Christology. In this essay, H. Gaylon Barker uses the "theology of the cross" as a key to understanding the characteristic elements that make up Bonhoeffer's theology; he also shows how Bonhoeffer's conversation with his teachers and contemporaries, Karl Holland Karl Barth in particular, develops. Bonhoeffer's thought was indeed radical and revolutionary, but it was so precisely because of its adherence to the classical traditions of the church, especially Luther's theologia crucis. When his theology is understood in light of this tradition, his "nonreligious interpretation," which he set out to describe in his theological letters from Tegel prison, is not a radical departure from his earlier theology, but is the mature expression of his "theology of the cross." Bonhoeffer's Lutheran roots would not allow him to turn his back on the problems and tragedies of the world. In fact, because God had turned toward the world, had entered into the world and identified with suffering individuals, the only proper sphere for theological reflection was this world. Theology properly conceived, therefore, is very this-worldly. It is this worldly character that gives it its power to speak.

In The Emergence of Pastoral Authority in the French Reformed Church, c.1555-c.1572, Gianmarco Braghi offers a broad overview of the issues and ambiguities connected to the implementation of the authority of the first generation of Geneva-trained French Reformed pastors and of their implications for the character and identity of the early French Reformed movement at large, using them as a prism for historical analysis of the transition from loose evangelicalism to a nascent synodal-consistorial network of Reformed congregations scattered across the kingdom of France.