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This book shows how a simple message embedded in the New Testament and also handed on in a Christian oral tradition has been expressed consistently through ancient Christian communities (Catholic and Orthodox churches), churches of the Protestant family, and Evangelical Christian communities. The book begins by examining the New Testament and the primitive expressions of the early Christian message that are embedded in New Testament documents. Using formal doctrinal statements of churches and more informal ways in which church teachings have been “received” in churches, the book highlights the single unifying core of faith that almost all Christian churches and communities have shared. The book examines not only Christian scriptures, traditional creeds, and doctrinal statements, but also forms of worship (liturgy), hymns, Gospel music, and contemporary Christian music to understand how they have conveyed this same message. It shows, moreover, how this message has been expressed in the ecumenical movement, the movement that has sought the unity of Christian churches since the early twentieth century.

This book reconstructs Friedrich Schleiermacher's understanding of religion and sets this reconstruction into the intellectual and political context of Schleiermacher's work. It is common in the English literature to see Schleiermacher described as a theorist of “religious experience” or as a hermeneutician of religion, but these views fundamentally misrepresent both the central concerns and the contents of his writings. The reconstruction focuses on Schleiermacher's account of religion as a historically and culturally embedded phenomenon that extends from a core or “essence” within human subjectivity into the realm of interpersonal relations, practices, and material productions. The book calls particular attention to Schleiermacher's lectures in ethics at Halle and Berlin, wherein he developed an understanding of religion as a process of the social formation of feeling. Schleiermacher should be regarded as a thinker who attempted to ground not only academic theology but also the collective self‐understanding of religious persons on an understanding of religion as a natural phenomenon unfolding within history and subject to investigation by the entire range of the natural and human sciences.

Coleridge tended to view objects in the natural world as if they were capable of articulating truths about his own poetic psyche. He also regarded such objects as if they were capable of illustrating and embodying truths about a transcendent spiritual realm. After 1805, he posited a series of analogical ‘likenesses’ connecting the rational principles that inform human cognition with the rational principles that he believed informed the teleological structure of the natural world. Although he intuitively felt that nature had been constructed as a ‘mirror’ of the human mind, and that both mind and nature were ‘mirrors’ of a transcendent spiritual realm, he never found an explanation of such experiences that was fully immune to his own sceptical doubts. This book examines the nature of these doubts, and offers a new explanatory account of why Coleridge was unable to affirm his religious intuitions. The book situates his work within two important intellectual traditions. The first — a tradition of epistemological ‘piety’ or ‘modesty’ — informs the work of key precursors such as Kant, Hume, Locke, Boyle, and Calvin, and relates to Protestant critiques of natural reason. The second — a tradition of theological voluntarism — emphasizes the omnipotence and transcendence of God, as well as the arbitrary relationship subsisting between God and the created world. It is argued that Coleridge's familiarity with both of these interrelated intellectual traditions undermined his confidence in his ability to read the symbolic language of God in nature.

This book focuses on the relationship between conservative Protestants and social power in the U.S. The book, which is particularly concerned with which sorts of power relationships seem natural and which do not, is based on fieldwork (conducted in the early 1990s), in three Philadelphia churches: Oak Grove Church, Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship, and the Philadelphia Church of Christ. The data drawn from that fieldwork suggests that in the early 1990s, Bible‐carrying Christian churches tended to naturalize (to various degrees) the authority of heterosexuals and men. The data also suggested that under certain (relatively rare) circumstances Bible‐carrying Christian churches denaturalized the authority of ministers, corporations, and nation‐states.

This book offers a critical account of Elizabeth Bowen, a significant 20th-century Irish writer still too little known and appreciated. It considers her novels, short stories, essays, and family history, showing how her work both inherits from the Modernist movement and transforms its experimental traditions. The book explores Bowen's adaptation of Irish Protestant Gothic in relation to the Troubles of the 1920s and the Second World War, especially the London Blitz. It reads her explorations of childhood as a response both to Henry James and to the European novel of adultery. Focusing on the ideas of return and reflex, it reads the presence of the supernatural, and of other kinds of haunting, in her work in relation to concepts drawn from both Freud and T. S. Eliot. The book also makes use of non-fictional materials in its interpretations, notably, Bowen's wartime reports from neutral Ireland and the diaries of her wartime lover Charles Ritchie. The intention is to demonstrate the ways in which Bowen's writing merges personal story with public history. The book's radical readings, which depend on a wealth of original research, propose that Bowen is as important to 20th-century literary studies as her much better-known Irish Protestant fellow writer, Samuel Beckett.

Scholarship on Middle English romance has done little to access the textual and bibliographical continuity of this remarkable literary tradition into the 16th century and its impact on Elizabethan works. To an even greater extent, Spenserian scholarship has failed to investigate the significant and complex debts The Faerie Queene owes to medieval native verse romance and Malory's Le Morte D'arthur. This book accordingly offers a comprehensive study of the impact of Middle English romance on The Faerie Queene. It employs the concept of memory, in which both Middle English romance writers and Spenser show specific interest, in building a sense of the thematic, generic, and cultural complexity of the native romance tradition. The memorial character of Middle English romance resides in its intertextuality and its frequent presentation of narrative events as historical and consequently the basis for a favourable sense of local or even national identity. Spenser's memories of native romance involve a more troubled engagement with that tradition of providential national history as well as an endeavour to see in pre-Reformation romance a prophetic and objective authority for Protestant belief.

For centuries historians have offered often bitterly contradictory answers to the question of who exactly was Thomas Cranmer. Although Cranmer was a key participant in the changes to English life brought about by the Reformation, his reticent nature and lack of extensive personal writings have left a vacuum that in the past has too often been filled by scholarly prejudice or presumption. For the first time, however, this book examines in depth little used manuscript sources to reconstruct Cranmer's theological development on the crucial Protestant doctrine of justification. The author explores Cranmer's cultural heritage, why he would have been attracted to Luther's thought, and then provides convincing evidence for the Reformed Protestant Augustinianism that Cranmer enshrined in the formularies of the Church of England. For Cranmer the glory of God was his love for the unworthy; the heart of theology was proclaiming this truth through word and sacrament. Hence, the focus of both was on the life of on-going repentance, remembering God's gracious love inspired grateful human love.

In present-day America, the topic of certitude is much debated. On one side, commentators like Charles Krauthammer urge us to achieve “moral clarity”. On the other, those like George Will contend that the greatest present threat to civilization is an excess of certitude. This book points out that Europe in the 16th century was preoccupied with similar concerns. Both the desire for certainty, especially religious certainty, and warnings against certainty permeated this earlier era. The book analyzes the pervading questions about certitude and doubt in the terms and contexts of a wide variety of thinkers during this time of competing truths. The Protestant Reformation was the wellspring of this debate, which expressed itself in terms of questions about salvation, authority, the rise of skepticism, the outbreak of religious violence, the discernment of spirits, and the ambiguous relationship between appearance and reality. Repeatedly, the book says, we find the recurring fear of deception. It examines the history of theological polemics and debates as well as other genres to shed light on the progress of this controversy. Among the texts the book draws on are Montaigne's Essays, the mystical writings of Teresa of Avila, the diary, letters, and treatises of St. Ignatius, and the dramas of Shakespeare. The result is not a book about theology, but rather a book about the way in which the concern with certitude determined the theology, polemics, and literature of the age.

In 1801, the United Kingdom was a semi-confessional State, and the national established Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland were vital to the constitution. They expressed the religious conscience of the State and served as guardians of the faith. Through their parish structures, they provided religious and moral instruction, and rituals for common living. This book explores the struggle to strengthen the influence of the national Churches in the first half of the nineteenth century. For many, the national Churches would help form the United Kingdom into a single Protestant nation-state, with shared beliefs, values and a sense of national mission. Between 1801 and 1825, the State invested heavily in the national Churches. But during the 1830s the growth of Catholic nationalism in Ireland and the emergence of liberalism in Britain thwarted the efforts to unify the nation around the established Churches. Within the national Churches themselves, moreover, voices began calling for independence from the State connection — leading to the Oxford Movement in England and the Disruption of the Church of Scotland.

Most Americans say they believe in God, and more than a third say they attend religious services every week. Yet studies show that people do not really go to church as often as they claim, and it is not always clear what they mean when they tell pollsters they believe in God or pray. This book presents up-to-date information about religious trends in the United States, in a succinct and accessible manner. The book provides essential information about key developments in American religion since 1972, and is the first major resource of its kind to appear in more than two decades. The book looks at trends in diversity, belief, involvement, congregational life, leadership, liberal Protestant decline, and polarization. It draws on two important surveys: the General Social Survey, an ongoing survey of Americans' changing attitudes and behaviors, begun in 1972; and the National Congregations Study, a survey of American religious congregations across the religious spectrum. The book finds that American religious life has seen much continuity in recent decades, but also much change. It challenges the popular notion that religion is witnessing a resurgence in the United States—in fact, traditional belief and practice is either stable or declining. The book examines why the decline in liberal Protestant denominations has been accompanied by the spread of liberal Protestant attitudes about religious and social tolerance, how confidence in religious institutions has declined more than confidence in secular institutions, and a host of other crucial trends.

Tracing the intersection of religion, race, and power in Texas from Reconstruction through the rise of the Religious Right and the failed presidential bid of Governor Rick Perry, this book illuminates American history since the Civil War in new ways, demonstrating that Texas's story is also America's. In particular, the book shows how distinctions between “us” and “them” are perpetuated and why they are so often shaped by religion and politics. Early settlers called Texas a rough country. Surviving there necessitated defining evil, fighting it, and building institutions in the hope of advancing civilization. Religion played a decisive role. Today, more evangelical Protestants live in Texas than in any other state. They have influenced every presidential election for fifty years, mobilized powerful efforts against abortion and same-sex marriage, and been a driving force in the Tea Party movement. And religion has always been complicated by race and ethnicity. The book tells the stories of ordinary men and women who struggled with the conditions they faced, conformed to the customs they knew, and on occasion emerged as powerful national leaders. We see the lasting imprint of slavery, public executions, Jim Crow segregation, and resentment against the federal government. We also observe courageous efforts to care for the sick, combat lynching, provide for the poor, welcome new immigrants, and uphold liberty of conscience.

This book investigates the direction of religious epistemology under a chief architect of Calvinism (1519–1605). The book contends that Theodore Beza consolidated his tradition by balancing the subjective and objective aspects of faith and knowledge. Making use of new editions of Beza's class notes and correspondence, and examining the theological ideas found in Beza's long-neglected New Testament annotations, this study clarifies the thought of Calvin's successor. The nature of Protestant scholasticism and the relationship between faith and philosophy are observed in context, rather than from the anachronistic perspectives of modern schools that seek to establish their own continuity with Calvinism.