Based on hundreds of archival documents, Christina Petterson offers an in-depth analysis of the community building process and individual and collective subjectification practices of the Moravian Brethren in eighteenth-century Herrnhut, Eastern Germany, between 1740 and 1760. The Moravian Brethren are a Protestant group, but Petterson demonstrates the relevance of their social experiments and practices for early modernity by drawing out the socio-economic layers of the archival material. In doing so, she provides a non-religious reading of categories that became central to liberal ideology, corresponding to the Moravian negotiation of the transition from feudal society to early capitalism.

This book highlights the life and writings of an itinerant preacher in John Wesley's Methodist Connexion, Thomas Wride (1733-1807). Detailed studies of such rank and file preachers are rare, as Methodist history has largely been written by and about its leadership. However, Wride's ministry shows us that the development of this worldwide movement was more complicated and uncertain than many accounts suggest. Wride's attitude was distinctive. He was no respecter of persons, freely criticising almost everyone he came across, and in doing so exposing debates and tensions within both Methodism and wider society. However, being so combative also led him into conflict with the very movement he sought to promote. Wride is an authentic, self-educated, and non-elite voice that illuminates important features of Eighteenth-Century life well beyond his religious activities. He sheds light on his contemporaries' attitudes to issues such as the role of women, attitudes towards and the practice of medicine, and the experience and interpretation of dreams and supernatural occurrences. This is a detailed insight into the everyday reality of being an Eighteenth-Century Methodist minister. As such, this text will be of interest to academics working in Methodist Studies and Religious History, as well as Eighteenth-Century History more generally.

This book explores the impact of the sixteenth-century Reformation on the plays of William Shakespeare. Taking three fundamental Protestant concerns of the era - (double) predestination, conversion, and free will - it demonstrates how Protestant theologians, in England and elsewhere, re-imagined these longstanding Christian concepts from a specifically Protestant perspective. Shakespeare utilizes these insights to generate his distinctive view of human nature and the relationship between humans and God. Through in-depth readings of the Shakespeare comedies 'The Merry Wives of Windsor', 'Much Ado About Nothing', 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', and 'Twelfth Night', the romance 'A Winter's Tale', and the tragedies of 'Macbeth' and 'Hamlet', this book examines the results of almost a century of Protestant thought upon literary art.

Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism continues to be one of the most influential texts in the sociology of modern Western societies. Although Weber never produced the further essays with which he intended to extend the study, he did complete four lengthy Replies to reviews of the text by two German historians. Written between 1907 and 1910, the Replies offer a fascinating insight into Weber's intentions in the original study, and the present volume is the first complete translation of all four Replies in English.

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.

The Calvinist view that man is predestined to be among the elect or the damned has profoundly influenced not only our views of criminals and deviants, but also the theoretical basis of correctional methods and psychotherapeutic techniques. In this provocative and original volume, Mordechai Rotenberg examines the impact of Protestant doctrine on Western theories of deviance. He explores the inherent contradiction between Protestant ethics, with its view of human nature as predestinated, and the "people-changing" sciences. Rotenberg presents empirical studies that show how people's tendency to label themselves and others as deviant can be predicted on the basis of their exposure to Western socialization. He contrasts alienating individuals, the result of competitiveness and exaggerated independence fostered by socialization in Protestant societies, to the reciprocal individualism of Hassidic, Japanese, and other non-Western cultures. Examining the Protestant "bias" of Western behavioral sciences, Rotenberg examines modern theories of deviance and proposes alternative models. He compares traditional past-oriented insight therapy, grounded in Calvinist methods of introspection, self-torment, and conversion, with Hassidic notions of redemption and salvation. "Rotenberg provides important historical and sociological insights into the intellectual origins of modern theories of deviance. His argument that Western behavioral science retains a Calvinist view of humanity will force most scholars to examine anew the assumptions and foundations of their own theories."--Gerald N. Grob, Rutgers University "A highly original work, which should be of great interest to anyone concerned with relevant behavior. It shows how macro-definitions in a society tend to lead people to think about themselves and their ills in certain ways--and thus to deviate in certain ways."--Richard A. Cloward, co-author, "Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare"

This book offers a bold reading of Protestant tradition from a rhetorical and literary perspective. Arguing that Protestant thought is based in a rhetorical performance of authority. Hobson draws on a wide range of modern and postmodern thought to defend this account of rhetorical authority from various charges of authoritarianism. With close readings of Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard and Barth, this book develops a new 'rhetorical theology of the Word' and also a new critique of secular modernity, with particular reference to modern literature and the thought of Nietzsche. Confronting the related issues of rhetoric and authority, Hobson provides a provocative account of modern theology which offers new perspectives on theology's relationship to literature and postmodern thought.

In this time-honored manifesto, Arnold and Merton add their voices to the vital discussion of what real community is all about: love, joy, unity, and the great adventure of faith shared with others along the way. Neither writer describes (or prescribes) community here, but they do provide a vision to guide our search."

The definitive biography of a renowned German pastor. Though relatively unknown in America, Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805-1880) is widely recognized in his native Germany, in part because of Friedrich Zundel's landmark biography. The terrifying battle between the spiritual forces of good and evil described here, and the awakening that followed, catapulted Blumhardt's parish into the public eye and still draws seekers to it. Zundel's account is fascinating on a historical level, but it is also infused with enduring pastoral insights and spiritual wisdom. Here is an almost unbelievable account of one person's faith in the inbreaking of God's kingdom and its victory over powers that bind and divide humanity.

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

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.

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

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.

The book investigates facets of global Protestantism through Anglican, Quaker, Episcopalian, Moravian, Lutheran Pietist, and Pentecostal missions to enslaved and indigenous peoples and political reform endeavours in a global purview that spans the 1730s to the 1930s. The book uses key examples to trace both the local and the global impacts of this multi-denominational Christian movement. The essays in this volume explore three of the critical ways in which Protestant communities were established and became part of a worldwide network: the founding of far-flung missions in which Western missionaries worked alongside enslaved and indigenous converts; the interface between Protestant outreach and political reform endeavours such as abolitionism; and the establishment of a global epistolary through print communication networks. Demonstrating how Protestantism came to be both global and ecumenical, this book will be a key resource for scholars of religious history, religion and politics, and missiology as well as those interested in issues of postcolonialism and imperialism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Before Jonathan Edwards, Adriaan Neele seeks to balance the recent academic attention to the developments of intellectual history after Jonathan Edwards. Neele presents the first comprehensive study of Edwards's use of Reformed orthodox and Protestant scholastic primary sources in the context of the challenges of orthodoxy in his day. Despite the breadth of Edwards scholarship, his use of primary sources has been little analyzed. Yet, as Neele proves, Edwards's thinking on the importance of these primary sources has significant implications not only for the status of the New England theology of pre-Revolutionary America but also for our understanding of Edwards today. This volume locates Edwards's ideas in the context of the theological and philosophical currents of his day, as well as in the pre-modern exchange of books and information during the colonial period. The pre-Revolutionary status of theology and philosophy in the wake of the Enlightenment had many of the same problems we see in our theological education today with respect to the use and appropriation of classical theology in a 21st-century context. Ideas about the necessity of classical primary sources of Christianity in sustaining our theological education are once again becoming important, and Edwards offers many relevant insights. Edwards was not unique in his deployment of these primary sources; many New England pastors, including Cotton Mather (166301728), preached and wrote about the necessity of orthodox theology. Edwards's distinction came in his thinking about the issues set forth in these sources at a transitional moment in the history of Christian thought.

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.

On 31 October 1517, Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the castle church door in Wittenberg - the starting gun for the Reformation. Five hundred years later, the issues debated at the Reformation are still urgent. In this clear, incisive and accessible survey, Michael Reeves and Tim Chester show how the Reformation helps us answer questions like: How do we know what's true? Can we truly know God? How does God speak? What's wrong with us? How can we be saved? Who am I? At its heart, the Reformation was a dispute about how we know God and how we can be right with him. At stake was our eternal future - and it still is.

The best one-volume reader of Luther's writingsnow revised Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings, a single-volume introduction to Luther's most influential, noted, and important writings in the modern translationsincluding excerpts of his sermons and letterspresents Luther the theologian "steeped in the word of God, speaking to the whole church," even as it takes the reader straight to Luther the man, to his controversial Reformation insights, to his strongest convictions about God and Scripture and the life of the church, and most importantly to his theologya still-exciting encounter with the meaning of Jesus Christ for each age.The third edition includes revised introductions, updated bibliography, index, and the addition of "A Meditation on Christ's Passion" (1519), "Treatise on the Blessed Sacrament" (1519), "Sermon on the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of ChristAgainst the Fanatics" (1526), "Sermon in Castle Pleissenburg" (1539), and "Consolation to Women Whose Pregnancies Have Not Gone Well" (1542), as well as new translations of "A Practical Way to Pray" (1535) and "On the Freedom of a Christian" (1520).

In Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation, Oliver D. Crisp considers two central themes in Edwards's thought--namely, his doctrine of God and his understanding of the created order, and how God and creation interrelate. Crisp argues that Edwards offers some truly original insights on these twin loci that have important implications for current theological discussion. What emerges is a picture of Edwards's understanding of God's relationship to the created order that differs in important respects from those offered by several influential recent interpreters.
Crisp does not flinch from showing where Edwards made mistakes as well as where he offers fresh insights. Edwards is shown to be at once relevant to current discussion of issues like perfect being theology, panentheism, divine freedom or union with Christ, while remaining something of an idiosyncratic figure whose idealism and commitment to an uncompromising theological determinism can seem out of step with certain modern sensibilities. But, argues Crisp, even if we disagree with the conclusions Edwards reaches, which sometimes jar with our own intuitions about the divine nature or the created order, the clarity, rigor and sheer originality of his thinking offer an important set of themes and ideas with which contemporary theologians can fruitfully engage as they set about the task of constructive theology.