This companion brings together new contributions from internationally renowned scholars in order to examine the past, present, and future of Protestantism. The volume opens with an investigation into the formation of Protestant identity, looking at its historical development across Europe, North America, Asia, Australasia, and Africa. This section includes coverage of leading Protestant thinkers, such as Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth. The companion then goes on to consider the interaction of Protestantism with different areas of modern life, including the arts, politics, the law, and science. The editors and contributors take seriously the shift in Protestantism from a predominantly North Atlantic perspective to a more global reality. A final section looks to the future of Protestantism, debating what will happen to both Western and non-Western Protestant movements.

George Eldon Ladd was a pivotal figure in the resurgence of evangelical scholarship in America during the years after the Second World War. Ladd's career as a biblical scholar can be seen as a quest to rehabilitate evangelical thought both in content and image, a task he pursued at great personal cost. Best known for his work on the doctrine of the Kingdom of God, Ladd moved from critiquing his own movement to engaging many of the important theological and exegetical issues of his day.
Ladd was a strong critic of dispensationalism, the dominant theological system in conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism, challenging what he perceived to be its anti-intellectualism and uncritical approach to the Bible. In his impressive career at Fuller Theological Seminary, Ladd participated in scholarly debates on the relationship between faith and historical understanding, arguing that modern critical methodologies need not preclude orthodox Christian belief. Ladd also engaged the thought of Rudolf Bultmann, the dominant theological figure of his day. Ladd's main focus, however, was to create a work of scholarship from an evangelical perspective that the broader academic world would accept. When he was unsuccessful in this effort, he descended into depression, bitterness, and alcoholism. But Ladd played an important part in opening doors for later generations of evangelical scholars, both by validating and using critical methods in his own scholarly work, and also by entering into dialogue with theologians and theologies outside the evangelical world.
It is a central theme of this book that Ladd's achievement, at least in part, can be measured in the number of evangelical scholarswho are today active participants in academic life across a broad range of disciplines.

Journeying to Justice provides the very first comprehensive appraisal of the tumultuous journey towards equity and reconciliation amongst British and Jamaican Baptists across two centuries of Christian missionary work, in which slavery, colonialism and racism has loomed large. This ground-breaking text brings together scholars and practitioners, lay and ordained, peoples from a variety of culturally and ethnically diverse backgrounds, all speaking to the enduring truth of the gospel of Christ as a means of effecting social, political and spiritual transformation. Journeying to Justice reminds us that the way of Christ is that of the cross and that grace is always costly and being a disciple demands commitment to God and to others with whom we walk this journey of faith. At a time when the resurgence of nationalism is threatening to polarise many nations this text reminds us that in Christ there is solidarity amongst all peoples.

This valuable contribution to the debate about the relation of religion to the modern city fills an important gap in the historiography of early nineteenth-century religious life. It is a pioneering study of local churches in the urban environment. Based on extensive archival research of churches in Manchester and London in the years 1810-60, it considers the work and thought of ministers who held to a high Calvinistic form of theology. Exploration of this little studied and often derided grouping reveals that their role in the religious and social life of these cities was highly active and responsive, and merits serious reappraisal.

In his The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther set forth a reconsideration of the sacramental Christian life that centered on the word. His thesis is that the papacy had distorted the sacraments with its own traditions and regulations, transforming them into a system of control and coercion. The evangelical liberty of the sacramental promises had been replaced by a papal absolutism which, like a feudal lordship, claimed its own jurisdictional liberties and privileges over the totality of Christian life through a sacramental system that spanned birth to death. Yet Luther, does not replace one tyranny for another; his argument for a return to the biblical understanding of the sacraments is moderated by a consideration of traditions and external practices in relation to their effects on the individual conscience and faith. This volume is excerpted from The Annotated Luther series, Volume 3. Each volume in the series contains new introductions, annotations, illustrations, and notes to help shed light on Luther's context and interpret his writings for today.

The Rotterdam City Library contains the world's largest collection of works by and about Desiderius Erasmus (1469?-1536), perhaps Rotterdam's most famous son. The origin of this unique collection dates back to the seventeenth century when the city fathers established a library in the Great or St. Laurence Church. This bibliography of the Erasmus collection lists, for the first time, all of the Rotterdam scholar's works and most of the studies written about him from his time to the present day. The collection is of vital importance to Erasmus studies and has, in many cases, provided the basic material for editions of Erasmus's complete works. In addition to the unique sixteenth-century printings listed in this book, the collection includes many translations into Estonian, Polish, Russian, Czech, Hebrew, and other languages. The Rotterdam Library has acquired publications about Erasmus that cover such topics as his life, work and times; his contemporaries; his humanism, pedagogy, pacifism, and theology; his relationship to Luther and the Reformation; and his influence on later periods. The collection numbers (as of 1989) roughly 5,000 works divided as follows: 2,500 works by Erasmus himself, 500 works edited by him, and 2,000 books and articles about him. This bibliographic resource will be of great value to Erasmus scholars, philosophy researchers, and historians studying the path of philosophical and religious thought.

All truly religious movements are informed by a search for spiritual renewal, often signalled by an attempt to return to what are seen as the original, undiluted values of earlier times. Elements of this process are to be seen in the history of almost all modern religious revivals, both inside and outside the mainstream denominations.