Essays and letters by Sasse written between 1927 and 1939 create a $$$ of a pastoral theologian.

This book offers an historical and comparative profile of classical pentecostal movements in Brazil and the United States in view of their migratory beginnings and transnational expansion. Pentecostalism's inception in the early twentieth century, particularly in its global South permutations, was defined by its grassroots character. In contrast to the top-down, hierarchical structure typical of Western forms of Christianity, the emergence of Latin American Pentecostalism embodied stability from the bottom up-among the common people. While the rise to prominence of the Assemblies of God in Brazil, the Western hemisphere's largest (non-Catholic) denomination, demanded structure akin to mainline contexts, classical pentecostals such as the Christian Congregation movement cling to their grassroots identity. Comparing the migratory and missional flow of movements with similar European and US roots, this book considers the prospects for classical Brazilian pentecostals with an eye on the problems of church growth and polity, gender, politics, and ethnic identity.

Awarded the Hermann-Sasse-Preis by the Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany Martin Luther read and preached the biblical text as the record of God addressing real, flesh-and-blood people and their daily lives. He used stories to drive home his vision of the Christian life, a life that includes struggling against temptation, enduring suffering, praising God in worship and prayer, and serving one's neighbor in response to God's callings and commands. Leading Lutheran scholar Robert Kolb highlights Luther's use of storytelling in his preaching and teaching to show how Scripture undergirded Luther's approach to spiritual formation. With both depth and clarity, Kolb explores how Luther retold and expanded on biblical narratives in order to cultivate the daily life of faith in Christ.

This book explores how polarised interpretations of America's past influence the present and vice versa. A focus on competing Protestant reactions to President Trump's 'Make America Great Again' slogan evidences a fundamental divide over how America should remember historical racism, sexism and exploitation. Additionally, these Protestants disagree over how the past influences present injustice and equality. The 2020 killing of George Floyd forced these rival histories into the open. Rowley proposes that recovering a complex view of the past, confessing the bad and embracing the good, might help Americans have a shared memory that can bridge polarisation and work to secure justice and equality. An accessible and timely book, this is essential reading for those concerned with the vexed relationship of religion and politics in the United States, including students and scholars in the fields of Protestantism, history, political science, religious studies and sociology.

The essays in this volume testify to the far-reaching effects of Emanuel Swedenborg's works in Western culture. From his early days as an ambitious young scientist in the ferment of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment Europe, through his mid-life entrance into an ongoing experience of the spiritual world, to his last decades as a researcher of things spiritual, Swedenborg built a career that left a unique legacy. His vivid descriptions of the nonphysical realm made a powerful impression on minds as diverse as Goethe, Blake, Emerson, Yeats, and Borges.

This book serves as a self-contained resource on Swedenborg's life and thought and as a gateway into further exploration of the labyrinthine garden of Swedenborg's works. It includes a biography, rich in fascinating detail; lively overviews of the content and history of Swedenborg's writings on spiritual topics; and essays tracing Swedenborg's impact in various regions of the world.

Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster is the most influential and historically significant sector of Christianity in Northern Ireland. It is often associated only with the controversial figure of Ian Paisley, but this book includes fresh analysis of a spectrum of Evangelical opinion. Covering the period from Partition in 1921 to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Patrick Mitchel explores why and how Evangelical Christians are deeply divided over politics, national identity, and the current Peace Process. The result is an original and significant study that provides an invaluable guide to understanding both the past and contemporary mindset of Ulster Protestantism.

This is a detailed and scholarly account of religious belief and conflict in the strategically important province of Inner Austria between 1580 and 1630. Dr Pörtner analyses the aims, achievements, and shortcomings of the Habsburgs' confessional crusade in Styria, showing how although the progress of Protestantization was reversed, the Counter-Reformation left an ambivalent legacy to the modern Austrian state.

The British Jesus focuses on the Jesus of the religious culture dominant in Britain from the 1850s through the 1950s, the popular Christian culture shared by not only church, kirk, and chapel goers, but also the growing numbers of Britons who rarely or only episodically entered a house of worship. An essay in intellectual as well as cultural history, this book illumines the interplay between and among British New Testament scholarship, institutional Christianity, and the wider Protestant culture. The scholars who mapped and led the uniquely British quest for the historical Jesus in the first half of the twentieth century were active participants in efforts to replace the popular image of "Jesus in a white nightie" with a stronger figure, and so, they hoped, to preserve Britain's Christian identity. They failed. By exploring that failure, and more broadly, by examining the relations and exchanges between popular, artistic, and scholarly portrayals of Jesus, this book highlights the continuity and the conservatism of Britain's popular Christianity through a century of religious and cultural transformation. Exploring depictions of Jesus from over more than one hundred years, this book is a crucial resource for scholars of British Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the English-speaking world Ernst Kasemann's name is associated primarily with the renewed quest for the historical Jesus which he helped to initiate in the mid-1950s. In addition he is well known for his passionate theological commitment, and for the highly polemical character and sheer difficulty of his writing. There is less appreciation of the breadth of Kasemann's interests, the system of his thought, and the key role of his understanding of Pauline theology within the whole. This study, the first of any length to be written in English, seeks to redress this imbalance. Dr Way traces Kasemann's views from his doctoral dissertation to his magnum opus, the Commentary on Romans. From its context in German Protestant theology, Kasemann's Pauline interpretation is systematically analysed and emphasis is given to the major theological themes which identify the continuing significance of his interpretation to biblical scholars and the Church. Certain unpublished lectures and letters are referred to in tracing Kasemann's views, and the influence of this most provocative of Rudolf Bultmann's students on contemporary New Testament scholarship is assessed.

The experience of the King's church in early America was shaped by the unfolding imperial policies of the English government after 1675. London-based civil and ecclesiastical officials supervised the extension and development of the church overseas. The recruitment, appointment and financial support of the ministers were guided by London officials. Transplanted to the New World without the traditional hierarchical structure of the church - no bishop served in the colonies during the colonial period at the time of the American Revolution - it was neither an English-American nor American-English church, yet it modified in a distinctive manner. instrument of imperial policy and an examination of: unfolding imperial policies of the Committee of Trade and Plantations that aided and supported the extension of the King's church overseas; the civil and ecclesiastical agencies and leaders that developed and implemented the policies for the development and supervision of the church in the American colonies; the financial support of the King's church in America; and the impact of the American Revolution on the King's church.

This work presents a comprehensive systematic account of Luther's eschatological theology on the basis of the 17 sermons which he preached on "1 Corinthians 15" in 1532 and 1533. The interpretation of the sermons provides exemplary evidence for the thesis that Luther's theology is totally based on the promise of full completion. This applies both to his basic decisions in the doctrine of faith and the word and of the language of faith. It applies equally to the doctrine of the Resurrection, which covers the whole span from creation and the fall through salvation to the consummation of Christ's victory in "the death of death", and to Luther's discourse on life in this world.

Approximately 2,500 Anabaptists were martyred in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe. Their surviving brethren compiled stories of those who suffered and died for the faith into martyr books. The most historically and culturally significant of these, The Bloody Theater-more commonly known as Martyrs Mirror-was assembled by the Dutch Mennonite minister Thieleman van Braght and published in 1660. Today, next to the Bible, it is the single most important text to Anabaptists-Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites. In some Anabaptist communities, it is passed to new generations as a wedding or graduation gift. David L. Weaver-Zercher combines the fascinating history of Martyrs Mirror with a detailed analysis of Anabaptist life, religion, and martyrdom. He traces the publication, use, and dissemination of this key martyrology across nearly four centuries and explains why it holds sacred status in contemporary Amish and Mennonite households. Even today, the words and deeds of these martyred Christians are referenced in sermons, Sunday school lessons, and history books. Weaver-Zercher argues that Martyrs Mirror was designed to teach believers how to live a proper Christian life. In van Braght's view, accounts of the martyrs helped to remind readers of the things that mattered, thus inspiring them to greater faithfulness. Martyrs Mirror remains a tool of revival, offering new life to the communities and people who read it by revitalizing Anabaptist ideals and values. Meticulously researched and illustrated with sketches from early publications of Martyrs Mirror, Weaver-Zercher's ambitious history weaves together the existing scholarship on this iconic text in an accessible and engaging way.

The cultural conflict that increasingly divides American society is particularly evident within Protestant Christianity. Liberals and evangelicals clash in bitter competition for the future of their respective subcultures. In this book, James Wellman examines this conflict as it is played out in the American Northwest.
Drawing on an in-depth study of twenty-four of the area's fastest-growing evangelical churches and ten vital liberal Protestant congregations, Wellman captures the leading trends of each group and their interaction with the wider American culture. He finds a remarkable depth of disagreement between the two groups on almost every front.
Where evangelicals are willing to draw sharp lines on gay marriage and abortion, liberals complain about evangelical self-righteousness and disregard for personal freedoms. Liberals prefer the moral power of inclusiveness, while evangelicals frame their moral stances as part of a metaphysical struggle between good and evil. The entrepreneurial nature of evangelicalism translates into support of laissez-faire capitalism and democratic political advocacy. Liberals view both policies with varying degrees of apprehension. Such differences are significant on a national scale, with implications for the future of American Protestantism in particular and American culture in general.
Both groups act in good faith and with good intentions, and each maintains a moral core that furthers its own identity, ideology, ritual, mission, and politics. In some situations, they share similar attitudes despite having different beliefs. Attending church services and interviewing senior pastors, lay leaders and new members, Wellman is able toprovide new insights into the convenient categories of "liberal" and "evangelical," the nature of the conflict, and the myriad ways both groups affect and are affected by American culture.

This book shows how creative writing gives voice to the drama and nuance of religious experience in a way that is rarely captured by sermons, reports, and the minutes of church meetings. The author explores the history of religious Dissent and Evangelicalism in Australia through a variety of literary responses to landscape, from both men and women, lay and ordained. The book explores transnational themes, along with themes of migration and travel across the Australian continent. The author gives insight into the literature of Protestant Dissent, concerned as it is with travel, belonging, and the intersection of national and religious identity. Much of the writing is situated on the road: a soldier returning from the Great War, a child on a lone adventure, a night-time journey through urban slums; all of these are in some way dependent on the theme of "walking with Jesus" as the Holy Land travelogues make explicit. God in the Landscape draws the links between landscape, literature, and spirituality with imagination and insight and is an important contribution to the historical study of religion and the environment.

Hindu Christian Faqir compares two colonial Indian saints from Punjab, the neo-Vedantin Hindu Rama Tirtha (1873-1906) and the Christian convert Sundar Singh (1889-1929). Timothy S. Dobe shows that varied asceticisms, personal exemplary models, and material religion exuded their ambivalent and powerful public presence in Protestant metropolitan centers as much as in colonial peripheries. Challenging ideas of the invention of modern Hinduism, the transparent translation of Christianity, and the construction of saints by devotees, this book focuses on the long-standing, shared religious idioms on which these two men creatively drew to appeal to transnational audiences and to pursue religious perfection. Following both men's usage of Urdu, the book adopts the word "faqir" to examine the vernacular and performative dimensions of Indian holy man traditions, thereby calling special attention to missionary and Orientalist anti-ascetic accounts of the "fukeer" indigenous Islamic traditions and this-worldly religion. Exploring Rama Tirtha and Sundar Singh's global tours in Europe and America, self-conscious sartorial styles, and intimate autobiographical writings, Dobe demonstrates that the vernacular holy man traditions of Punjab provided resources that both men drew on to construct their forms of modern monkhood. The rise of heroic, anti-colonial sannyasis or sadhus of modern Hinduism like Swami Vivekananda is thus repositioned in relation to global Christianity, Sufi, bhakti, and Sikh regional practices, religious boundary-crossing, contestation and conversion. A comparative and contextualized story of two Punjabi holy men's particular performance of sainthood, Hindu Christian Faqir reveals much about the broad, interactional history of religious modernities.

While much has been written on the connections between Lollardy and the Reformation, this collection of essays is the first detailed and satisfactory interpretation of many aspects of the problem. Margaret Aston shows how Protestant Reformers derived encouragement from their predecessors, while interpreting Lollards in the light of their own faith.
This highly readable book makes an important contribution to the history of the Reformation, bringing to life the men and women of a movement interesting for its own sake and for the light it sheds on the religious and intellectual history of the period.

This collection of thirteen essays by an international group of scholars focuses on the impact of the Protestant Reformation on Donne's life, theology, poetry, and prose. The early transition from Catholicism to Protestantism was a complicated journey for England, as individuals sorted out their spiritual beliefs, chose their political allegiances, and confronted an array of religious differences that had sprung forth in their society since the reign of Henry VIII. Inner anxieties often translated into outward violence. Amidst this turmoil the poet and Protestant preacher John Donne (1572-1631) emerged as a central figure, one who encouraged peace among Christians. Raised a Catholic but ordained in 1615 as an Anglican clergyman, Donne publicly identified himself with Protestantism, and yet scholars have long questioned his theological orientation. Drawing upon recent scholarship in church history, the authors of this collection reconsider Donne's relationship to Protestantism and clearly demonstrate the political and theological impact of the Reformation on his life and writings. The collection includes thirteen essays that together place Donne broadly in the context of English and European traditions and explore his divine poetry, his prose work, the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and his sermons. It becomes clear that in adopting the values of the Reformation, Donne does not completely reject everything from his Catholic background. Rather, the clash of religion erupts in his work in both moving and disconcerting ways. This collection offers a fresh understanding of Donne's hardwon irenicism, which he achieved at great personal and professional risk.

Although their statues grace downtown Hartford, Connecticut, few tourists are aware that the founding ministers of Hartford's First Church, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone (after whose English birthplace the city is named), carried a distinctive version of Puritanism to the Connecticut wilderness. Shaped by Protestant interpretations of the writings of Saint Augustine, and largely developed during the ministers' years at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and as "godly" lecturers in English parish churches, Hartford's church order diverged in significant ways from its counterpart in the churches of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Focusing especially on Hooker, Baird Tipson explores the contributions of William Perkins, Alexander Richardson, and John Rogers to his thought and practice, the art and content of his preaching, and his determination to define and impose a distinctive notion of conversion on his hearers. Hooker's colleague Samuel Stone composed The Whole Body of Divinity, a comprehensive treatment of his thought (and the first systematic theology written in the American colonies). Stone's Whole Body, virtually unknown to scholars, not only provides the indispensable intellectual context for the religious development of early Connecticut but also offers a more comprehensive description of the Puritanism of early New England than anything previously available. Hartford Puritanism argues for a new paradigm of New England Puritanism, one where Hartford's founding ministers, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, both fully embraced and even harshened Calvin's double predestination.

The extra Calvinisticum, the doctrine that the eternal Son maintains his existence beyond the flesh both during his earthly ministry and perpetually, divided the Lutheran and Reformed traditions during the Reformation. This book explores the emergence and development of the extra Calvinisticum in the Reformed tradition by tracing its first exposition from Ulrich Zwingli to early Reformed orthodoxy. Rather than being an ancillary issue, the questions surrounding the extra Calvinisticum were a determinative factor in the differentiation of Magisterial Protestantism into rival confessions. Reformed theologians maintained this doctrine in order to preserve the integrity of both Christ's divine and human natures as the mediator between God and humanity. This rationale remained consistent across this period with increasing elaboration and sophistication to meet the challenges leveled against the doctrine in Lutheran polemics. The study begins with Zwingli's early use of the extra Calvinisticum in the Eucharistic controversy with Martin Luther and especially as the alternative to Luther's doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ's human body. Over time, Reformed theologians, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Antione de Chandieu, articulated the extra Calvinisticum with increasing rigor by incorporating conciliar christology, the church fathers, and scholastic methodology to address the polemical needs of engagement with Lutheranism. The Flesh of the Word illustrates the development of christological doctrine by Reformed theologians offering a coherent historical narrative of Reformed christology from its emergence into the period of confessionalization. The extra Calvinisticum was interconnected to broader concerns affecting concepts of the union of Christ's natures, the communication of attributes, and the understanding of heaven.

The impact of Philip Melanchthon upon Lutheranism cannot be underestimated. Yet Melanchthon is often overlooked and he remains one of the most enigmatic figures of the Reformation. It is within Dr. Robert Stupperich's incisive portrayal of a man, acclaimed as 'the preceptor of Germany' in his lifetime, that the reader can uncover the secrets of a layman who directly influenced Luther. Melanchthon struggled with contemporary powers, yet his persistence and drive resulted in him becoming the chief architect of Germany's school system and also a chief negotiator between statesmen and theologians. Despite this success, almost no-one wholly accepted Melanchthon's religious views. Yet, few could have managed without the advances which Melanchthon precipitated in theology, education, natural science and even public affairs. This study of impressively broad scope begins by addressing the historical background which shaped Melanchthon's early life. The development of Melanchthon's inner humanist is investigated through an assessment of his childhood and adolescence. The second chapter examines the path which Melanchthon carved for himself in theology, where it is revealed how Melanchthon became a defender of Luther. Further chapters trace his life to its end, to allow the reader to see the full impact of a life which encourages the Reformation to be viewed in a new focus and depth.

The life and political career of William Conolly, a key figure in the establishment of the eighteenth century protestant ascendancy in Ireland. William Conolly (1662-1729) was one of the most powerful Irish political figures of his day. As a politician, in the years 1715-29 simultaneously Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, Chief Commissioner of the Revenue, Lord Justice, and Privy Councillor, he made significant contributions to the role of the Irish parliament in Irish life, to the establishment of a more efficient government bureaucracy, and to the emergence of a constructive strain of patriotism. In addition, he was a patron of architects, contributing significantly to the fashioning of Georgian Dublin, and building his own Palladian mansion at Castletown, nowadays one of the most frequently visited Irish historic properties. His rise to wealth and eminence from very humble beginnings and a Catholic background also illustrates the permeability of Irish society. Conolly's career reflects the development of the early Georgian Irish political,cultural and ideological nation, in all its complexities and contradictions. PATRICK WALSH is an IRCHSS Government of Ireland CARA mobility fellow jointly affiliated with University College London and University College Dublin. .