"Ryken's Worldly Saints offers a fine introduction to seventeenth-century Puritanism in its English and American contexts. The work is rich in quotations from Puritan worthies and is ideally suited to general readers who have not delved widely into Puritan literature. It will also be a source of information and inspiration to those who seek a clearer understanding of the Puritan roots of American Christianity." -Harry Stout, Yale University " the typical Puritans were not wild men, fierce and freaky, religious fanatics and social extremists, but sober, conscientious, and cultured citizens, persons of principle, determined and disciplined excelling in the domestic virtues, and with no obvious shortcomings save a tendency to run to words when saying anything important, whether to God or to a man. At last the record has been put straight." -J.I. Packer, Regent College "Worldly Saints provides a revealing treasury of primary and secondary evidence for understanding the Puritans, who they were, what they believed, and how they acted. This is a book of value and interest for scholars and students, clergy and laity alike." -Roland Mushat Frye, University of Pennsylvania "A very persuasive...most interesting book...stuffed with quotations from Puritan sources, almost to the point of making it a mini-anthology." -Publishers Weekly "With Worldly Saints, Christians of all persuasions have a tool that provides ready access to the vast treasures of Puritan thought." -Christianity Today "Ryken writes with a vigor and enthusiasm that makes delightful reading-never a dull moment." -Fides et Historia "Worldly Saints provides a valuable picture of Puritan life and values. It should be useful for general readers as well as for students of history and literature." -Christianity and Literature"

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.

Alan Sell explores the lives and ideas of four unjustly neglected Anglican philosophers: W. G. De Burgh (1866-1943); W. R. Matthews (1881-1973); O. C. Quick (1885-1944); H. A. Hodges (1905-1976). This study fills an important gap in the history of twentieth-century philosophical and theological thought. Sell argues that these writers covered a wide range of philosophical topics in an illuminating way, and that a comparison of their respective standpoints and methods is instructive from the point of view of the viability or otherwise of Christian philosophizing. Exploring the challenges these four philosophical Anglicans issued to certain important trends in the philosophy and theology of their day, Sell argues that they have important continuing significance today.

This is the story of how the Protestants in the GDR struggled to survive while striving to put their theology into practice and remaining true to their vision of what the role of the church should be - a 'church for others' as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it. Having taken the reader from the foundation of the GDR, through the peaceful revolution, to the unification of Germany, the story ends with some reflections on the church's past as well as on the challenges it faces in present-day Europe. Protestants in Communist East Germany makes a unique contribution to existing literature by drawing not only on written sources but on a series of first-hand interviews with theologians, pastors and lay people of different ages whose experiences, views and analyses bring the story to life. The East German church's relationship to the state will probably always remain controversial and the vision for a different socialism in the GDR espoused by those involved in the peaceful revolution may now be considered illusory. Nevertheless, many of the issues raised by the Protestants in the GDR remain as vital challenges to the churches in Europe today. Foreword by Paul Oestreicher.

Heinrich Heshusius (1556-97) became a leading church superintendent and polemicist during the early age of Lutheran orthodoxy, and played a major role in the reform and administration of several German cities during the late Reformation. As well as offering an introduction to Heshusius's writings and ideas, this volume explores the wider world of late-sixteenth-century German Lutheranism in which he lived and worked. In particular, it looks at the important but inadequately understood network of Lutheran clergymen in North Germany centred around universities such as Rostock, Jena, KAnigsberg, and Helmstedt, and territories such as Braunschweig-WolfenbA1/4ttel, in the years after the promulgation of the Formula of Concord (1577). In 1579, Heshusius followed his father Tilemann to the newly founded University of Helmstedt, where Heinrich served as a professor on the philosophy faculty and established lasting connections within the Gnesio-Lutheran party. In the 1590s, Heshusius completed his doctoral degree in theology and worked as a pastor and superintendent in Tonna and Hildesheim, publishing over seventy sermons as well as a popular catechism based on the Psalms and Luther's Small Catechism. As confessional tensions mounted in Hildesheim, Heshusius worked as a polemicist for the Lutheran cause, pressing for the conversion or expulsion of local Jews. At the same time, Heshusius began to argue aggressively for the expulsion of Jesuits, who had been increasing in number due to the activities of the local bishop and administrator, Ernst II of Bavaria. By discussing the connection between these two expulsion efforts, and the practical activities Heshusius undertook as a preacher, catechist, and administrator, this study portrays Heshusius as a zealous protector of Lutheran traditions in the face of confessional rivals. Understanding this zeal, and the policies, piety, and propaganda that came as a result, is an important factor in relating how Lutheran orthodoxy gained momentum within Germany in the last decades of the sixteenth century. In all this book will reveal the complex characteristics of an important (but virtually unknown) Lutheran superintendent and theologian active during the era of confessionalization, providing a useful resource for the ongoing efforts of scholars hoping to understand the nature of orthodoxy and its importance for early modern Europeans.f

Catholics and Protestants have, since the earliest days of the Reformation, held markedly different views about the Virgin Mary. Beth Kreitzer examines the development of Lutheran views on this subject as expressed in 16th century Lutheran published sermons, starting with the earliest of Luther's own Reformation sermons. She shows that from the beginning Lutherans rejected much of the theology and piety that surrounded Mary in Catholicism, especially her status as heavenly queen and intercessor with Christ.

Based on unprecedented access to the Order's internal documents, this book provides the first systematic social history of the Orange Order - the Protestant association dedicated to maintaining the British connection in Northern Ireland.
Kaufmann charts the Order's path from the peak of its influence, in the early 1960s, to its present-day crisis. Along the way, he sketches a portrait of many of Orangeism's leading figures, from ex-Prime Minister John Andrews to Ulster Unionist Party politicians like Martin Smyth, James Molyneaux, and David McNarry. Kaufmann also includes the highly revealing correspondence with adversaries such as Ian Paisley and David Trimble.
Packed with analyses of mass-membership trends and attitudes, the book also takes care to tell the story of the Order from 'below' as well as from above. In the process, it argues that the traditional Unionism of West Ulster is giving way to the more militant Unionism of Antrim and Belfast which is winning the hearts of the younger generation in cities and towns throughout the province.

This book analyses the most sung contemporary congregational songs (CCS) as a global music genre. Utilising a three-part music semiology, this research engages with producers, musical texts, and audiences/congregations to better understand contemporary worship for the modern church and individual Christians. Christian Copyright Licensing International data plays a key role in identifying the most sung CCS, while YouTube mediations of these songs and their associated data provide the primary texts for analysis. Producers and the production milieu are explored through interviews with some of the highest profile worship leaders/songwriters including Ben Fielding, Darlene Zschech, Matt Redman, and Tim Hughes, as well as other music industry veterans. Finally, National Church Life Survey data and a specialized survey provide insight into individual Christians' engagement with CCS. Daniel Thornton shows how these perspectives taken together provide unique insight into the current global CCS genre, and into its possible futures.

'a vital resource' TLS 'Compelling collection' Literary Review The Reformation was a seismic event in history whose consequences are still unfolding in Europe and across the world. Martin Luther's protests against the marketing of indulgences in 1517 were part of a long-standing pattern of calls for reform in the Christian Church. But they rapidly took a radical and unexpected turn, engulfing first Germany, and then Europe, in furious arguments about how God's will was to be 'saved'. However, these debates did not remain confined to a narrow sphere of theology. They came to reshape politics and international relations; social, cultural, and artistic developments; relations between the sexes; and the patterns and performances of everyday life. They were also the stimulus for Christianity's transformation into a truly global religion, as agents of the Roman Catholic Church sought to compensate for losses in Europe with new conversions in Asia and the Americas. Covering both Protestant and Catholic reform movements, in Europe and across the wider world, this compact volume tells the story of the Reformation from its immediate, explosive beginnings, through to its profound longer-term consequences and legacy for the modern world. The story is not one of an inevitable triumph of liberty over oppression, enlightenment over ignorance. Rather, it tells how a multitude of rival groups and individuals, with or without the support of political power, strove after visions of 'reform'. And how, in spite of themselves, they laid the foundations for the plural and conflicted world we now inhabit.

'The Fifteen Confederates' was published anonymously in the fall of 1521, shortly after Martin Luther's hearing at the Diet of Worms and subsequent disappearance. The fifteen pamphlets that make up the book address religious, social, economic, and political challenges facing the German people. Their author, Johann Eberlin von Gunzburg, subsequently became one of the most prolific and popular pamphleteers of the German Reformation. As an important contribution to the pamphlet war that accompanied the beginnings of the Reformation in Germany, 'The Fifteen Confederates' provides us a valuable window on the aspirations and dreams that accompanied Luther's initial calls for reform of the church and society.

This work synthesizes work previously published in leading journals in the field into a coherent narrative that has a distinctive focus on Germany while also being aware of a broader European dimension. It argues that the German Lutheran Christoph August Heumann (1681-1764) marginalized the biographical approach to past philosophy and paved the way for the German Lutheran Johann Jacob Brucker's (1696-1770) influential method for the writing of past philosophy, centred on depersonalised and abstract systems of philosophy. The work offers an authoritative and engaging account of how late ancient Platonism, Plotinus in particular, was interpreted in eighteenth-century Germany according to these new precepts. Moreover, it reveals the Lutheran religious assumptions of this new approach to past philosophy, which underpinned the works of Heumann and Brucker, but also influential reviews that rejected the English Plato translator Thomas Taylor (1758-1835) and his understanding and evaluation of late ancient Platonism.

Part of a 14-volume work covering writings in American religious history with specific attention to trends in American Protestantism; church and state; theological issues; social Christianity; women in religion; native American religion; regional and black religion; fundamentalism and creationism.

One of the major challenges faced by the emergent Protestant faith was how to establish itself in a hitherto Catholic world. A key way it found to achieve this was to create a common identity through the fashioning of history, emphasising Protestantism's legitimacy and authority. In this study, the life and works of one of the earliest and most influential Protestant historians, Johann Sleidan (1506-1556) are explored to reveal how history could be used to consolidate the new confession and the states which adopted it. Sleidan was commissioned by leading intellectuals from the Schmalkadic League to write the official history of the German Protestant movement, resulting in the publication in 1555 of De statu religionis et reipublicae, Carolo Quinto, Caesare, Commentarii. Overnight his work became the standard account of the early Reformation, referenced by Catholics and Protestants alike in subsequent histories and polemical debates for the next three centuries. Providing the first comprehensive account of Sleidan's life, based almost entirely on primary sources, this book offers a convincing background and context for his writings. It also shows how Sleidan's political role as a diplomat impacted on his work as a historian, and how in turn his monumental work influenced political debate in France and Germany. As a moderate who sought to promote accommodation between the rival confessions, Sleidan provides a fascinating subject of study for modern historians seeking to better understand the complex and multi-faceted nature of the early Reformation.

"Harnack's book is a theological-historical document of the greatest importance." --Rudolf Bultmann

For most of our history, American religious life has been dominated by a view of church history in which we appear as mere deposits of European religious culture. In fact, however, the freedom of Americans to choose without penalty to join any religious body or none at all is new in human history. This book is an effort to understand and interpret how we arrived at our present situation and, in doing so, to clarify many cultural, social and political issues.

How will American Protestants respond to the historical shift from Protestant dominance to more fluid conditions, in which Catholicism and Judaism also have great force and influence? By the anxiety expressed in anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism? By reaffirming "the American tradition"?

In answer, the author explores the very categories that have shaped our study of American church history. Without false ideals of the past, he can perceive the uniqueness of the situation today. The true Golden Age, he argues, lies, if anywhere, in the years just ahead; and through his realistic analysis he encourages that honest "consciousness of calling" that will determine whether religion in America is to be vital or effete.

Fat Religion: Protestant Christianity and the Construction of the Fat Body explores how Protestant Christianity contributes to the moralization of fat bodies and the proliferation of practices to conform fat bodies to thin ideals. Focusing primarily on Protestant Christianity and evangelicalism, this book brings together essays that emphasize the role of religion in the ways that we imagine, talk about, and moralize fat bodies. Contributors explore how ideas about indulgence and restraint, sin and obedience are used to create and maintain fear of, and animosity towards, fat bodies. They also examine how religious ideology and language shape attitudes towards bodily control that not only permeate Christian weight-loss programs, but are fundamental to secular diet culture as well. Furthermore, the contributors investigate how religious institutions themselves attempt to define and control the proper religious body. This volume contributes to the burgeoning field of critical fat studies by underscoring the significance of religion in the formation of historical and contemporary meanings and perceptions of fat bodies, including its moralizing role in justifying weight bias, prejudice, and privilege. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society.

Towards Liturgies that Reconcile reflects upon Christian worship as it is shaped, and mis-shaped, by human prejudice, specifically by racism. African Americans and European Americans have lived together for 400 years on the continent of North America, but they have done so as slave and master, outsider and insider, oppressed and oppressor. Scott Haldeman traces the development of Protestant worship among whites and blacks, showing that the following exist in tension: African American and European American Protestant liturgical traditions are both interdependent and distinct; and that multicultural communities must both understand and celebrate the uniqueness of various member groups while also accepting the risk and possibility of praying themselves into an integrated body, one new culture.

Originally published between 1930 and 1988 many of the volumes in this set are based upon years of painstaking archival research in private and published papers. They provide many insights into the Puritan world of the early 17th Century and: Analyse the economic depression in the mid-1600s and the resultant unemployment and poverty which caused social upheaval. Discuss the importance of the divisions among the Puritans for political processes within both the church and wider society. Examine the motivation of the Puritans who emigrated. Discuss the impact the Puritan family had on the spiritual development of the Anglo-American world.

The book sheds light on various chapters in the long history of Protestant-Jewish relations, from the Reformation to the present. Going beyond questions of antisemitism and religious animosity, it aims to disentangle some of the intricate perceptions, interpretations, and emotions that have characterized contacts between Protestantism and Judaism, and between Jews and Protestants. While some papers in the book address Luther's antisemitism and the NS-Zeit, most papers broaden the scope of the investigation: Protestant-Jewish theological encounters shaped not only antisemitism but also the Jewish Reform movement and Protestant philosemitic post-Holocaust theology; interactions between Jews and Protestants took place not only in the German lands but also in the wider Protestant universe; theology was crucial for the articulation of attitudes toward Jews, but music and philosophy were additional spheres of creativity that enabled the process of thinking through the relations between Judaism and Protestantism. By bringing together various contributions on these and other aspects, the book opens up directions for future research on this intricate topic, which bears both historical significance and evident relevance to our own time.

Following Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, French protestants faced the stark choice of abandoning their religion, or defying the law. Many fled abroad, whilst others continued to meet clandestinely for worship and to organise resistance to government policy, culminating in the bloody Camisard rebellion of 1702-10. During this period of conflict and repression, a distinct culture of prophecy and divine inspiration grew up, which was to become a defining characteristic of the dispersed protestant communities in southern France. Drawing on a wide range of printed and manuscript material, this study, examines the nature of Huguenot prophesying in the Cevennes during the early years of the eighteenth century. As well as looking at events in France, the book also explores the reactions of the Huguenot community of London, which became caught up in the prophesying controversy with the publication in 1707 of Le Theatre sacre des Cevennes. This book, which recounted the stories of exiles who had witnessed prophesying and miraculous events in the Cevennes, not only provided a first hand account of an outlawed religion, but became the centre of a heated debate in London concerning 'false-prophets'. By exploring French protestantism through voluntary testimonies given by Huguenot exiles in London, this study not only offers a rare glimpse of a forbidden religion, but also shows how a long-established immigrant church in London confronted the problems posed by recent arrivals infused with a radical sense of mystic purpose and divine revelation.

The Dexter Avenue King Memorial Church played an important role in the Civil Rights movement-it was the backbone of the Montgomery bus boycott, which served as a model for other grassroots demonstrations and which also propelled Martin Luther King, Jr. into the national spotlight.
Roberson chronicles five generations in the life of this congregation. He uses it as a lens through which to explore how the church functioned as a formative social, cultural, and political institution within a racially fractured and continually shifting cultural and civil landscape. Roberson highlights some of the prominent figures associated with the church, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as some of the less prominent figures--for example the many women whose organizational efforts sustained the church.

The Dexter Avenue King Memorial Church played an important role in the Civil Rights movement-it was the backbone of the Montgomery bus boycott, which served as a model for other grassroots demonstrations and which also propelled Martin Luther King, Jr. into the national spotlight.
Roberson chronicles five generations in the life of this congregation. He uses it as a lens through which to explore how the church functioned as a formative social, cultural, and political institution within a racially fractured and continually shifting cultural and civil landscape. Roberson highlights some of the prominent figures associated with the church, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as some of the less prominent figures--for example the many women whose organizational efforts sustained the church.

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.