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In 1898, Abraham Kuyper delivered his Lectures on Calvinism at Princeton Theological Seminary. A few years later, Princeton’s B. B. Warfield pared back Kuyper’s Calvinism as a positive force in the broad realms of human culture by stressing Calvin’s usefulness for defending Protestant orthodoxy. Both Kuyper’s "neo-Calvinism" and Warfield’s "Westminster Confession" Calvinism found homes in American Protestantism. Later, H. Richard Niebuhr and Joseph Haroutunian claimed Calvin as a predecessor of a Protestant realism associated with neo-orthodoxy. In contrast, liberal theologian Wilhelm Pauck engaged orthodox Calvinists to portray Calvin as a key figure for an ecumenical Protestant theology that could resurrect a moribund liberal tradition. Later still, James M. Gustafson embraced Calvin as a precursor to his own post-Christian theocentric theology. This chapter charts these debates, exploring the extent to which Calvin’s writings shaped developments in American theology and to what extent his contributions have been defined by those developments.

This introductory chapter descibes how the editor of this book came to be interested in the subject of Jonathan Edwards. It explains the interest Edwards has held for so many theologians and talks about how admiration of Edwards is not universal in the theological world. There is much debate. The chapter goes on to mention the book's unique approach to discussing Edwards, with contributions from both Edwards scholars and non-Edwards scholars, and finally outlines the chapters that follow.

This chapter surveys the history of American theology. The activity of religious believers has been constantly transformative within American culture and, since the late nineteenth century, for the world. Yet the impact of what Americans have thought about God has been less obvious and less extensive. Nonetheless, the history of American theology shows how both inherited traditions and popular innovations have interacted with pressing circumstances to produce theological reflection of surprising breadth and unexpected depth. This chapter discusses the characteristics of American religious experience during the colonial period; theology in the new United States during the period 1776–1865; shifts in the theological landscape between 1865 and 1945; and changes in American theology in the recent past. It also provides examples of the folk origins of high theology and the theological base of popular religious movements in America.

This chapter argues that holiness was an essential mark of American Methodist theology from the beginnings of American Methodism through the first half of the nineteenth century. The chapter summarizes the initial commitment to holiness in John Wesley and early British Methodism. The commitment to holiness and entire sanctification of early American Methodism is then discussed. The chapter points to the importance of holiness as marking a theological tradition that was consistent across varieties of American Methodism as well as in popular Methodist experience. The chapter concludes by pointing to signs of coming tension, especially the rise of Phoebe Palmer and the Holiness Movement, the division that created the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, and the croakers, who initially complained about changes and compromise they saw in Methodism. The core argument of the chapter is that from 1784 through the 1840s there was a coherent theological tradition in American Methodism.

This chapter discusses the nature and construction of Asian American theology—what is Asian American about that theology, and what makes this construction theological. In addition to dealing with the “who” and/or “what,” the chapter suggests how one can narrate Asian American biblical hermeneutics into legitimacy not through a narrative of identity or authenticity but through repeated references to existing biblical scholarship by Asian American scholars. However, no single strategy will be sufficient for all situations, since they do not remain static. Asian American identities and Asian American biblical hermeneutics are both processes of “becoming-being,” “being-becoming,” or in a word, performance. As performance, these processes get remade simultaneously, responding creatively to contingent and/or changing situations.

The concluding chapter summarizes the main findings and reasserts the primary thesis regarding the essential need to consider the influences of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ernst Hengstenberg, and the mediating theologians on nineteenth-century Reformed theology in the United States. It briefly reviews the evidence indicating that American scholars were simultaneously receptive, inspired, and reactionary in their responses to German theology. The chapter also reaffirms the primary assertion that a transatlantic approach is required to bring into sharper focus the theological ideas and contexts of the Reformed theologies of Emanuel Gerhart and Charles Hodge, and that it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of European intellectual ideas to fully comprehend Reformed theology in America.

Incarcerated Christians frequently thanked God for giving them the strength to endure the incarceration and developed a variety of faith communities to provide additional support. The focus of Chapter Four turns away from church leaders to examine how lay (non-ordained) Christians experienced camp life. Buddhists joined Protestants and Catholics to organize interfaith memorial services for Nikkei soldiers killed in action, while pacifists and others resisted the military draft. This chapter expands the book’s focus to highlight Christian youth culture at a camp in Arizona and the hardships at Tule Lake, where incarcerees attacked Japanese Christians for cooperating with camp officials. The roots of Asian American theologies began growing in the camps in response to this rejection and suffering.

This chapter discusses the distinctive legacy of Catholic social action and the entrance of Latin American liberative models of praxis into community organizing in the late 1970s. By the 1970s, organizers of congregational-based communities were constructing new paradigms, drawing from both the civil rights movement's legacy and Catholic social justice traditions, especially the emergence of Latin American liberation theology. Congregational-based organizing is now grounded in the use of popular education models, which are particularly appropriate to the cultural predispositions of borderlands people. Indeed, for people living in marginalized communities who become leaders in congregational organizing, the use of popular education leads them to an awareness of the root cause of the ills affecting their communities, of God's commitment to justice, and of their own capacity to transform their collective well-being.

As Japanese Christians left the camps, white church leaders instructed them to join established churches and prevented them from re-forming their prewar ethnic congregations. This final chapter analyzes attempts to mend the nation’s racial divisions by ending the segregation of white and Japanese Protestant worship. Efforts to drastically restructure the racial divisions within American Protestantism incited extensive debate about the role of racial minorities within the church. Like the decision to form ecumenical churches, leaders thought the long term benefits of fewer divisions in the church outweighed the temporary challenges to the subjects of their experiment. Most Japanese Americans formed ethnic fellowship groups or left the church rather than join predominantly white churches. The results of this experiment revealed the limited extent to which American Christians were interested in, capable of, and willing to reform definitions of race in order to unite the Christian church.