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Throughout the Hebrew Bible, God guides and saves his people through the words of his prophets. When the prophets are silenced, the people easily lose their way. What happened after the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ? Did God fall silent? The dominant position in Christian theology is that prophecy did indeed cease at some point in the past — if not with the Old Testament prophets, then with John the Baptist, with Jesus, with the last apostle, or with the closure of the canon of the New Testament. Nevertheless, throughout the history of Christianity there have always been acclaimed saints and mystics, most of them women, who displayed prophetic traits. In recent years, the charismatic revival in both Protestant and Catholic circles has once again raised the question of the place and function of prophecy in Christianity. Mainstream systematic theology, both Protestant and Catholic, has mostly marginalized or ignored the gift of prophecy. This book argues that prophecy has persisted in Christianity as an inherent and continuous feature in the life of the church. Prophecy never died but rather proved its dynamism by mutating to meet new historical conditions. This book presents a history of prophecy and closely examines the development of the theological discourse that surrounds it. Throughout, though, there is always an awareness of the critical discernment required when evaluating the charism of prophecy. It is shown that the debate about prophecy leads to some profound insights about the very nature of Christianity and the church.

This book explores religious transformation in the lives of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Migration. It argues that Delta blacks, who were overwhelmingly rural sharecroppers and tenant farmers, developed a rich and complex sacred culture during this era. They forged a new religious culture by integrating their spiritual life with many of the defining features of the post‐Reconstruction South, including the rise of segregation and racial violence, the emergence of new forms of technology like train travel, the growth of black fraternal orders, and the rapid expansion of the consumer market. Experimenting with new symbols of freedom and racial respectability, forms of organizational culture, regional networks of communication, and popular notions of commodification and consumption enabled them to survive, make progress, and at times resist white supremacy. The book then evaluates the social consequences of these changes and shows in particular how the Holiness‐Pentecostal developed in large part as a rejection of them. It ends by probing how this new religious world influenced the Great Migration and black spiritual life in the 1920s and 1930s.

This book explores the ways in which the symbolic associations of the body and what we do with it have helped shape religious experience and continue to do so. A Church narrowly focused on Christ's body wracked in pain needs to be reminded that the body, as beautiful and sexual, has also played a crucial role not only in other religions but also in the history of Christianity itself. Dance was one way in which the connection was expressed. The irony is not that such a connection has gone, but that it now exists almost wholly outside the Church. Much the same could be said about music more generally, and this book talks about the spiritual potential of not just classical music but also pop, jazz, musicals, and opera.

This book examines how German Protestant and Catholic missionaries reconsidered their attitudes toward Confucianism and, more broadly, Chinese culture. In the 1860s, German missionaries attacked traditional Chinese values as antithetical to their goals of converting China to Christianity, and congregational leadership lay solely in German hands. By the 1930s, missionaries commented that Christianity’s global survival—both in China and the West—depended on a synthesis of Christ and Confucius. Even before they were forced by the Communists to leave in the early 1950s, the German missionaries had relinquished leadership to Chinese clergy. Why did these institutional and ideological shifts occur? How did German missionaries come to repudiate their former beliefs and tactics? This book argues that German missionaries, since their first entry into China, considered their missionary work in China as a failure. Propelled by failure, the German missionaries sought to reform their practices. These missionaries began to challenge Germany’s imperial project and even abandon central theological ideas such as the exclusivity of Christian salvation. Chinese Christians were crucial partners in the process, pushing the German missionaries to relinquish their previous claims of Christian superiority. In time, this thinking catalyzed a revolution among European Christians about the nature of Christianity itself. This book sheds light on the roots of Christianity’s global shift from being a predominantly European religion in the nineteenth century to a non-European one by the twenty-first century.

This book is a study of the intellectual culture of the women’s monasteries of the Main Valley during the eighth century, with a particular focus on Karlburg and Kitzingen. It is based on an analysis of the manuscripts produced and used by the women religious, beginning in the middle decades of the century, when the arrival of the “Anglo-Saxon missionaries to Germany” (including Boniface of Mainz and his “beloved,” Leoba of Tauberbischofsheim) inaugurated book production in the region. The content of the women’s books was overwhelmingly gender-egalitarian and frequently feminist, that is, resistant to patriarchal ideas. Female intellectuals preferentially selected for reproduction and transmission texts that supported their own aspirations to dignity and authority in the ecclesiastical landscape of the Carolingian realm. Furthermore, the scribe-authors of Karlburg and Kitzingen actively intervened in the texts they transmitted to modify them (when necessary) in a more feminist direction, combined pre-existent texts in innovative ways, and composed a number of entirely new texts in order to produce powerfully feminist visions of Christian history and Christian theology. At Kitzingen, a talented theologian-artist also produced illuminations that enhanced the meaning of the texts, in one case (a crucifixion miniature illustrating the Pauline Epistles) also in a markedly feminist way. Religious Women also provides many glimpses into non-gendered aspects of monastic culture during the eighth century, such as the importance of the practice of devotional penance.

Baur has been described as “the greatest and at the same time the most controversial theologian in German Protestant theology since Schleiermacher.” The contributors to this volume regard Baur as an epoch-making New Testament scholar whose methods and conclusions, though superseded, have been mostly affirmed during the century and a half since his death. The book focuses on the history of early Christianity, although as a historian of the church and theology Baur covered the entire field up to his own time. He combined the most exacting historical research with a theological interpretation of history influenced by Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. The first three chapters discuss Baur’s relation to Strauss, Möhler, and Hegel. Then a central core of chapters considers his historical and exegetical perspectives (Judaism and Hellenism, Gnosticism, New Testament introduction and theology, the Pauline epistles, the Synoptic Gospels, John, the critique of miracle, and the combination of absoluteness and relativity). The final chapters view his influence (the reception of Baur in Britain, Baur and Harnack, and Baur and practical theology).