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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Protestantism & Protestant Churches
This book explores the Society of Friend's Atlantic presence
through its creation and use of networks, including intellectual
and theological exchange, and through the movement of people. It
focuses on the establishment of trans-Atlantic Quaker networks and
the crucial role London played in the creation of a Quaker
community in the North Atlantic.
The reformation was not a western European event, but historians have neglected the study of Protestantism in central and eastern Europe. This book aims to rectify this situation. It examines one of Europe's largest Protestant communities in Hungary and Transylvania. It highlights the place of the Hungarian Reformed church in the international Calvinist world, and reveals the impact of Calvinism on Hungarian politics and society.
Stories of contemporary exorcisms are largely met with ridicule, or
even hostility. Sean McCloud argues, however, that there are
important themes to consider within these narratives of seemingly
well-adjusted people-who attend school, go shopping, and watch
movies-who also happen to fight demons. American Possessions
examines Third Wave evangelical spiritual warfare, a late
twentieth-, early twenty-first century movement of evangelicals
focused on banishing demons from human bodies, material objects,
land, regions, political parties, and nation states. While Third
Wave beliefs may seem far removed from what many scholars view as
mainstream religious practice in America, McCloud argues that the
movement provides an ideal case study for identifying some of the
most prescient tropes within the contemporary American religious
landscape; namely "the consumerist," "the haunted," and "the
therapeutic." Drawing on interviews, television shows,
documentaries, websites, and dozens of spiritual warfare handbooks,
McCloud examines Third Wave practices such deliverance rituals (a
uniquely Protestant form of exorcism), spiritual housekeeping (the
removal of demons from everyday objects), and spiritual mapping
(searching for the demonic in the physical landscape). Demons, he
shows, are the central fact of life in the Third Wave imagination.
McCloud provides the first book-length study of this influential
movement, highlighting the important ways that it reflects and
diverts from the larger, neo-liberal culture from which it
originates.
Why, when traditionally organized religious groups are seeing
declining membership and participation, are networks of independent
churches growing so explosively? Drawing on in-depth interviews
with leaders and participants, The Rise of Network Christianity
explains the social forces behind the fastest growing form of
Christianity in the U.S., which Brad Christerson and Richard Flory
have labeled "Independent Network Christianity" (INC). This form of
Christianity emphasizes aggressive engagement with the
supernatural, including healing, direct prophecies from God,
engaging in "spiritual warfare" against demonic spirits, and social
transformation. Christerson and Flory argue that large-scale social
changes since the 1970s, including globalization and the digital
revolution have given competitive advantages to religious groups
organized by networks rather than traditionally organized
congregations and denominations. Network forms of church governance
allow for experimentation with controversial supernatural
practices, innovative finances and marketing, and a highly
participatory, unorthodox, and experiential faith, which is
attractive in today's unstable religious marketplace. Christerson
and Flory argue that as more religious groups imitate this type of
governance, religious belief and practice will become more
experimental, more oriented around practice than belief, more
shaped by the individual religious "consumer" and that authority
will become more highly concentrated in the hands of individuals
rather than institutions.
Samuel Rees Howells, A Life of Intercession: The Legacy of Prayer
and Spiritual Warfare of an Intercessor by Richard A. Maton, Paul
Backholer and Mathew Backholer. Hardback and paperback edtions have
39 black and white photos interspersed throughout the book.
Rees Howells, a powerful intercessor, taught his son Samuel the
principles of intercession and commissioned him some weeks before
his death, stating, "Whatever you do, stand and maintain these
intercessions." For the next fifty-four years, Samuel Rees Howells
exercised a powerful intercessory ministry as he focused prayer on
gospel liberty, in order for the good news of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ to be given to every creature.
With the mantle of intercession weighing heavily upon him, Samuel
spent decades participating with others in their own countries, in
profound spiritual struggles that shook world events and shaped
history for God's glory Discover how Samuel was led by the Holy
Spirit to exercise authority over the principalities and powers,
and to 'pray through' until God's purposes were fulfilled in many
lethal world conflicts. Learn how God still intervenes in world
history, from the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and from
the Six-Day War to the fall of the Soviet Union
Beginning in the days of Rees Howells, this book continues this
powerful story of intercession and traces its effectual legacy into
the twenty-first century. Filled with principles of intercession,
faith and spiritual warfare, this book provides a fascinating
insight into what is possible when the Holy Spirit finds an
individual, who will stand in the gap and become a channel for His
intercession. Ezekiel 22:30, Romans 8:26-27, Ephesians 6:12.
Richard A. Maton worked under Samuel's ministry for forty-seven
years and provides us with an eyewitness account of Samuel's life
of intercession. Richard is married to Kristine who joined Rees
Howells' Bible College in 1936 and prayed alongside him. Together
Richard and Kristine spent more than 120 years at the College
This is a facsimile of 1760 Luke Hinde edition.
This is the first full-length biography of the Reverend Thomas
K. Beecher, a member of the most famous family of reformers in
19th-century America. Unlike his famous siblings, Thomas Beecher
defended slavery on the eve of the Civil War and condemned the
abolitionist, temperance, and women's rights movements. This
account of his anti-reform views examines important, but relatively
unexplored, questions in the historiography of antebellum reform:
Why did some Northern evangelical Protestants oppose these
movements? To what extent did their opposition represent a backlash
against the legacy of American Revolutionary ideals? Glenn
emphasizes how Thomas Beecher's life and work illustrate important
changes in the Protestant ministry during the latter half of the
19th century. This is an insightful and thorough biography that
will appeal to readers interested in American cultural and
religious history.
For much of his career as a Reformer John Calvin was involved in
trinitarian controversy. Not only did these controversies span his
career, but his opponents ranged across the spectrum of theological
approaches-from staunch traditionalists to radical
antitrinitarians. Remarkably, the heart of Calvin's argument, and
the heart of others' criticism, remained the same throughout:
Calvin claimed that the only-begotten Son of the Father is also, as
the one true God, 'of himself'.
Brannon Ellis investigates the various Reformation and
post-Reformation responses to Calvin's affirmation of the Son's
aseity (or essential self-existence), a significant episode in the
history of theology that is often ignored or misunderstood. Calvin
neither rejected eternal generation, nor merely toed the line of
classical exposition. As such, these debates turned on the crucial
pivot between simple unity and ordered plurality-the relationship
between the processions and consubstantiality-at the heart of the
doctrine of the Trinity. Ellis's aim is to explain the historical
significance and explore the theological implications of Calvin's
complex solidarity with the classical tradition in his approach to
thinking and speaking of the Triune God. He contends that Calvin's
approach, rather than an alternative to classical trinitarianism,
is actually more consistent with this tradition's fundamental
commitments regarding the ineffable generation of God from God than
its own received exposition.
John Foxe's ground-breaking chronicle of Christian saints and
martyrs put to death over centuries remains a landmark text of
religious history. The persecution of Christians was for centuries
a fact of living in Europe. Adherence to the faith was a great
personal risk, with the Roman Empire leading the first of such
persecutions against early Christian believers. Many were
crucified, put to the sword, or burned alive - gruesome forms of
death designed to terrify and discourage others from following the
same beliefs. Appearing in 1563, Foxe's chronicle of Christian
suffering proved a great success among Protestants. It gave
literate Christians the ability to discover and read about brave
believers who died for expressing their religion, much as did Jesus
Christ. Perhaps in foretelling, the final chapter of the book
focuses upon the earliest Christian missions abroad: these, to the
Americas, Asia and other locales, would indeed see many more
martyrs put to death by the local populations.
When you agree with the marvelous promises given in the Word of God, you will begin to reap God's gifts of love, joy, peace, health, and favor. When you speak those promises out loud and into the lives of others, your words can work wonders. Now, E. W. Kenyon and Don Gossett join forces to build our faith, offering timeless wisdom and challenging us to live a bolder life for God. Through His power, believers should be able to overcome adversity and sin in such areas as finances, health, marriage and other relationships, and emotions. There is power in the blood of Jesus to defeat anything and everything the enemy brings against you! You, too, can speak words of life into those who are lost, suffering, and needy. Let your compassion flow. The bolder your faith words are, the greater your results will be.
Abraham Kuyper is known as the energetic Dutch Protestant social
activist and public theologian of the 1898 Princeton Stone
Lectures, the Lectures on Calvinism. In fact, the church was the
point from which Kuyper's concerns for society and public theology
radiated. In his own words, ''The problem of the church is none
other than the problem of Christianity itself.'' The loss of state
support for the church, religious pluralism, rising nationalism,
and the populist religious revivals sweeping Europe in the
nineteenth century all eroded the church's traditional supports.
Dutch Protestantism faced the unprecedented prospect of ''going
Dutch''; from now on it would have to pay its own way. John Wood
examines how Abraham Kuyper adapted the Dutch church to its modern
social context through a new account of the nature of the church
and its social position. The central concern of Kuyper's
ecclesiology was to re-conceive the relationship between the inner
aspects of the church-the faith and commitment of the members-and
the external forms of the church, such as doctrinal confessions,
sacraments, and the relationship of the church to the Dutch people
and state. Kuyper's solution was to make the church less dependent
on public entities such as nation and state and more dependent on
private support, especially the good will of its members. This
ecclesiology de-legitimated the national church and helped Kuyper
justify his break with the church, but it had wider effects as
well. It precipitated a change in his theology of baptism from a
view of the instrumental efficacy of the sacrament to his later
doctrine of presumptive regeneration wherein the external sacrament
followed, rather than preceded and prepared for, the intenral work
grace. This new ecclesiology also gave rise to his well-known
public theology; once he achieved the private church he wanted, as
the Netherlands' foremost public figure, he had to figure out how
to make Christianity public again.
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