What did Paul mean when he wrote that the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom? Through close analysis of the sixteenth-century reception of Paul's discourses of folly, this book examines the role of the New Testament in the development of what Erasmus and John Calvin refer to as the "Christian philosophy." Erasmus and Calvin on the Foolishness of God reveals the importance of Pauline rhetoric in the development of humanist critiques of scholasticism while charting the formation of a specifically affective approach to religious epistemology and theological method. As the first book-length examination of Calvin's indebtedness to Erasmus, which also considers the participation of Bullinger, Pellikan, and Melanchthon in an Erasmian exegetical milieu, it is a case study in the complicated cross-confessional exchange of ideas in the sixteenth century. Kirk Essary examines assumptions about the very nature of theology in the sixteenth century, how it was understood by leading humanist reformers, and how ideas about philosophy and rhetoric were received, appropriated, and shared in a complex intellectual and religious context.

By considering transformative ideas and experiences which are explicitly articulated or implicitly structured in languages of religion and spirituality, Alternative Salvations probes concepts including 'religious', 'secular', 'spiritual', 'post-Christian', and 'post-secular', providing a series of studies which question the functionality of these broad categories. Part one draws on contemporary salvation narratives showing how current cultural forms, social practices and secular discourses are influenced by, or are interpreted through, the lens of religious and theological accounts of salvation. Examples include twelve step recovery programs, drug culture, and public policy surrounding HIV-AIDs in Kenya. Although outside traditional religious contexts, the contributors show ways in which they are not free from religious symbolism. Part two explores alternative accounts of salvation rooted in religious traditions. Established orthodoxies are confronted by contemporary critical questions, for example about gender, the status of animals, and the political dimensions of salvation. By contributing new perspectives and unique case studies, Alternative Salvations provides a deliberate challenge to easy binaries which often underpin contemporary and traditional discourses of salvation.

The recent emergence of "two kingdoms" and "two cities" approaches to Christian social thinking are shown to have a key-and often unacknowledged-connection to Luther's reshaping of the Augustinian paradigm. The project works for a better understanding of Luther's own thought to help understand the convergences and divergences of Christian political theology in the twentieth century and today.In particular, Luther's two-kingdom thinking issued forth in a strong distinction of law and gospel that was also worked out in twofold pairs of Israel and church, general and special revelation, creation and redemption, and especially the outward and inward life. The work traces this legacy through acceptance and modification by Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer, Lutheran and Catholic neoconservatives, Reformed two-kingdom proponents, Augustinian liberals, and finally Oliver O'Donovan. The conclusion reflects on both the historical narrative and its connection to an account of modern liberalism, as well as a theological reflection on hermeneutical decisions of the "twoness" of Christian theology.