John Wesley (1703-1791), leader of British Methodism, was one of the most prolific literary figures of the eighteenth century, responsible for creating and disseminating a massive corpus of religious literature and for instigating a sophisticated programme of reading, writing and publishing within his Methodist Societies. John Wesley, Practical Divinity and the Defence of Literature takes the influential genre of practical divinity as a framework for understanding Wesley's role as an author, editor and critic of popular religious writing. It asks why he advocated the literary arts as a valid aspect of his evangelical theology, and how his Christian poetics impacted upon the religious experience of his followers.

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.

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.

A major new account of the most intensely creative years of Luther's career The Making of Martin Luther takes a provocative look at the intellectual emergence of one of the most original and influential minds of the sixteenth century. Richard Rex traces how, in a concentrated burst of creative energy in the few years surrounding his excommunication by Pope Leo X in 1521, this lecturer at an obscure German university developed a startling new interpretation of the Christian faith that brought to an end the dominance of the Catholic Church in Europe. Luther's personal psychology and cultural context played their parts in the whirlwind of change he unleashed. But for the man himself, it was always about the ideas, the truth, and the Gospel. Focusing on the most intensely important years of Luther's career, Rex teases out the threads of his often paradoxical and counterintuitive ideas from the tangled thickets of his writings, explaining their significance, their interconnections, and the astonishing appeal they so rapidly developed. Yet Rex also sets these ideas firmly in the context of Luther's personal life, the cultural landscape that shaped him, and the traditions of medieval Catholic thought from which his ideas burst forth. Lucidly argued and elegantly written, The Making of Martin Luther is a splendid work of intellectual history that renders Luther's earthshaking yet sometimes challenging ideas accessible to a new generation of readers.

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 focusing on the unintended by-products of New England Puritanism as a cultural transplant in the Levant, this book explores the socio-historical forces which account for the failure of early envoys' attempts to convert the 'native,' population. Early failure in conversion led to later success in reinventing themselves as agents of secular and liberal education, welfare, and popular culture. Through making special efforts not to debase local culture, the missionaries' work resulted in large sections of society becoming protestantized without being evangelized. An invaluable resource for postgraduates and those undertaking postdoctoral research, this book explores a seminal but overlooked interlude in the encounters between American Protestantism and the Levant. Using data from previously unexplored personal narrative accounts, Khalaf dates the emergence of the puritanical imagination, sparked by sentiments of American exceptionalism, voluntarism and "soft power" to at least a century before commonly assumed.

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.

Luther provides a clear exposition of the state of German politics on the eve of the Reformation. Dr Mullett concentrates particularly on the evolution of Luther's thought and its central preoccupation with re-aligning the church's theology with that of the New Testament.

Volume 50 of the American Edition of Luther's Works is the third and final volume of letters in this series; it presents 89 letters written by Luther in the period from January 1532, to February 14, 1546, a date four days prior to Luther's death.

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 Alpha Enterprise explores the development, growth and impact of the most widely used evangelising programme of recent decades. The Alpha course is run in over seven thousand churches in the UK and over five thousand in the USA. Across the world some four million people have graduated through the course in over 80 countries. Alpha is truly the fastest growing evangelising initiative, creating widespread support as well as stirring strong criticism. Stephen Hunt critically examines the content and working philosophy of the Alpha course through the experiences of the churches that have run it, as well as the individuals who have experienced it first hand. Hunt charts the history of the programme, its use of group dynamics and media, how it links with the charismatic movement, how it deals with issues such as homosexuality, how it is run not only in churches but in prisons and universities too, and concludes by measuring Alpha's impact and success. Engaging with debates regarding postmodernity, globalisation, McDonaldisation, consumerism, and secularisation, and based on real-life surveys, The Alpha Enterprise sheds new light not only on evangelism but on contemporary Christianity in general and how it engages with a post-Christian culture.

From William Langland's Piers Plowman, through the highly polemicized literary culture of fifteenth-century Lollardy, to major Reformation writers such as Simon Fish, William Tyndale and John Bale, and into the 1590s, this book argues for a vital reassessment of our understanding of the literary and cultural modes of the Reformation. It argues that the ostensibly revolutionary character of early Protestant literary culture was deeply indebted to medieval satirical writing and, indeed, can be viewed as a remarkable crystallization of the textual movements and polemical personae of a rich, combative tradition of medieval writing which is still at play on the London stage in the age of Marlowe and Shakespeare. Beginning with a detailed analysis of Piers Plowman, this book traces the continued vivacity of combative satirical personae and self-fashionings that took place in an appropriative movement centred on the figure of the medieval labourer. The remarkable era of Protestant 'plowman polemics' has too often been dismissed as conventional or ephemeral writing too stylistically separate to be linked to Piers Plowman, or held under the purview of historians who have viewed such texts as sources of theological or documentary information, rather than as vital literary-cultural works in their own right. Radical Pastoral, 1381-1594 makes a vigorous case for the existence of a highly politicised tradition of 'polemical pastoral' which stretched across the whole of the sixteenth century, a tradition that has been largely marginalised by both medievalists and early modernists.

The last forty years has witnessed a 'golden age' of Quaker Studies scholarship, with the bulk of this work into the history and sociology of Quakerism being undertaken by scholars who are also Quakers. For the scholars involved, their Quakerism has both prompted their research interests and affected their lives as Quakers. This book presents a unique study into Quakerism: it draws together the key theories of Quaker origins, subsequent history, and contemporary sociology, into a single volume; and it allows each of the contributors the opportunity to reflect on what led to the initial choice of research topic, and how their findings have in turn affected their Quaker lives. The result is a unique contribution to Quaker theory as well to the discussion on insider/outsider research. This book is invaluable to anyone interested in Quakerism, research into religion, notions of outsider objectivity within academia, and areas of theology, religious history and sociology in general.

Perceptible inspiration, a term used by John Wesley to describe the complicated relationship between Holy Spirit, religious knowledge, and the nature of spiritual being, is not unlike the term 'Methodist' which was also coined by critics of Methodism during the eighteenth century in Britain. John Wesley's adversaries, especially the pseudonymous John Smith with whom Wesley exchanged letters for a period of three years, frequently challenged the plausibility of direct spiritual sensation, which Wesley defended. What does Wesley mean by perceptible inspiration? What does the teaching reveal about the nature and existence of God in Wesley's thinking? What does it suggest about the spiritual nature of humankind? In John Wesley's Pneumatology, it is argued that 'perceptible inspiration' more than a sidebar of Methodist thought, offers a useful model for considering the various features of Wesley's views on the work of the Spirit in relation to human existence, participatory religious knowledge, and moral theology.

Congregational Music, Conflict and Community is the first study of the music of the contemporary 'worship wars' - conflicts over church music that continue to animate and divide Protestants today - to be based on long-term in-person observation and interviews. It tells the story of the musical lives of three Canadian Mennonite congregations, who sang together despite their musical differences at the height of these debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Mennonites are among the most music-centered Christian groups in North America, and each congregation felt deeply about the music they chose as their own. The congregations studied span the spectrum from traditional to blended to contemporary worship styles, and from evangelical to liberal Protestant theologies. At their core, the book argues, worship wars are not fought in order to please congregants' musical tastes nor to satisfy the theological principles held by a denomination. Instead, the relationships and meanings shaped through individuals' experiences singing in the particular ways afforded by each style of worship are most profoundly at stake in the worship wars. As such, this book will be of keen interest to scholars working across the fields of religious studies and ethnomusicology.

Max Weber, recognized as one of the world's most important sociologists, saw his life's work as nothing less than the comparative analysis of world civilizations. Above all, he was fascinated by the differing historical paths traced by Western civilization and the civilizations of the East. In his famous essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he addressed the forces behind that dramatic and enormous transformation of human life and society known as the Industrial Revolution. Weber's thesis proposes a causal link between the forces of the 'protestant ethic' and the 'spirit of capitalism' that lay behind the Industrial Revolution.This important book offers a sophisticated analysis of Weber's key concepts and an in-depth study as to their formulation in the early modern period. Michael Lessnoff proposes an original and essential distinction between the protestant 'work' and 'profit' ethics and examines the logical relation between them. He looks at Adam Smith's work on the relation between morals and capitalism, comparing Smith's 'spirit of capitalism' to Weber's. Lessnoff also considers the significance of the 'protestant ethic' in the modern world. As one of the first books of its kind to offer a complex analysis of the Weber thesis and using a large body of previously neglected evidence, The Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic will be welcomed by historians of religion and economics and by all sociologists.

The Rev. James Long was one of the most remarkable Protestant missionaries working in India in the nineteenth century. Sent to Calcutta at the age of 22 in 1840, he devoted his life to representing what he passionately believed were the best interests of the forgotten poor and oppressed among the Bengali population. Long was a central figure in the indigo planting controversy of 1861 and suffered imprisonment as a result. His memory is revered even today in modern India, where his contribution to the development of Bengali vernacular education, literature, history, and sociology is highly regarded. Dr Oddie has produced the first full-length biography of Rev Long, 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. This book will add significantly to our knowledge of social movements in nineteenth century India and the colonial responses to them.

Focusing on the period from 1830 to 1857, this book discusses the confrontation of Evangelical Christianity and Islam in northern India during the last century. It shows how the confrontation developed from a friendly exchange of ideas to the animosity which marked the 1857 meeting.

The latter half of the seventeenth century saw the Puritan families of England struggle to preserve the old values in an era of tremendous political and religious upheaval. Even non-conformist ministers were inclined to be pessimistic about the endurance of godliness' - Puritan attitudes and practices - among the upper classes. Based on a study of family papers and other primary resources, Trevor Cliffe's study reveals that in many cases, Puritan county families were playing a double game: outwardly in communion with the Church, they often employed non-conformist chaplains, and attended nonconformist meetings.

Natural law theory has been enjoying a significant revival in recent times. Led by Germain Grisez in the USA and John Finnis in the UK, one school of thinkers has been articulating a highly developed system of natural law built upon a sophisticated account of practical reasoning and a rich and flexible understanding of the human good. However, long-standing prejudices against old-style natural law among moral philosophers and Protestant ethicists, together with the new theory's appropriation by conservatives in the impassioned debate between the Vatican and dissenting theologians in the United States, have prevented the Finnis-Grisez version from being adequately appreciated. Providing a clear and substantive introduction to the theory for those who are new to it, this book then broadens, assesses, and advances the debate about it, examining crucial philosophical, theological and ethical issues and opening up discussion beyond the confines of the Roman Catholic Church. Part 1, on philosophical issues, starts with two broad chapters that locate the Grisez school in relation to modern moral philosophy and the Roman Catholic philosophical tradition of Thomism, and then follows these with further chapters on two crucial issues: the possibility of consensus on the human good, and the nature of moral absolutes. Part 2, on theological dimensions, begins with a Lutheran critique of Grisez, locates him in relation to the ethics of two very prominent 20th century Protestants, Karl Barth and Stanley Hauerwas, and then explores the major area of theological controversy within the Roman Catholic community - how to conceive of the "Church's" authority with regard to moral matters. Part 3 subjects the school's thought to critical examination in a broad range of ethical fields: bioethics, gender, sex and the environment. A concluding chapter then develops eight topics that recur in the course of the book: the status of ethical realism in the contemporary intellectual climate; whether realism is best conceived in rationalist or naturalist terms; whether marriage should be counted as a basic good; whether physical pleasure should not be counted a basic good; whether it is always wrong to act deliberately against a basic good; the problems of moral certainty and authority; the rapproachement between Protestant and Roman Catholic ethics; and, finally, whether ethical understanding is really independent of one's anthropological point of view. Drawing together North American, European and Australian contributors from across moral philosophy and Protestant ethics as well as from Roman Catholic moral theology, this book opens up the debate about the Finnis-Grisez theory, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses in order to advance current discussion about natural law in moral theology and in moral and legal philosophy.

Kierkegaard has always enjoyed a rich reception in the fields of theology and religious studies. This reception might seem obvious given that he is one of the most important Christian writers of the nineteenth century, but Kierkegaard was by no means a straightforward theologian in any traditional sense. He had no enduring interest in some of the main fields of theology such as church history or biblical studies, and he was strikingly silent on many key Christian dogmas. Moreover, he harbored a degree of animosity towards the university theologians and churchmen of his own day. Despite this, he has been a source of inspiration for numerous religious writers from different denominations and traditions. Tome II is dedicated to tracing Kierkegaard's influence in Anglophone and Scandinavian Protestant religious thought. Kierkegaard has been a provocative force in the English-speaking world since the early twentieth century, inspiring almost contradictory receptions. In Britain, before World War I, the few literati who were familiar with his work tended to assimilate Kierkegaard to the heroic individualism of Ibsen and Nietzsche. In the United States knowledge of Kierkegaard was introduced by Scandinavian immigrants who brought with them a picture of the Dane as much more sympathetic to traditional Christianity. The interpretation of Kierkegaard in Britain and America during the early and mid-twentieth century generally reflected the sensibilities of the particular theological interpreter. Anglican theologians generally found Kierkegaard to be too one-sided in his critique of reason and culture, while theologians hailing from the Reformed tradition often saw him as an insightful harbinger of neo-orthodoxy. The second part of Tome II is dedicated to the Kierkegaard reception in Scandinavian theology, featuring articles on Norwegian and Swedish theologians influenced by Kierkegaard.

This book provides a serious study of Irish evangelicalism. The authors examine the social history of popular Protestantism in Ulster from the Evangelical Revival in the mid-18th century to the conflicts generated by proposals for Irish Home Rule at the end of the 19th century. Many of the central themes of the book are at the forefront of recent work on popular religion including the relationship between religion and national identity, the role of women in popular religion, the causes and consequences of religious revivalism, and the impact of social change on religious experience. The authors draw on a wide range of primary sources from the early 18th to the late 19th century. In addition, they display an impressive mastery of the wider literature on popular religion in the period. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of social history, political history, history of ideas and religious history.