The Church: Ideology or Institution

1981 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Kingdon
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Training ◽  
Gifted Students ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Church History ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Religious Educators ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Theology ◽  
American Society

I am greatly honored but a bit puzzled to find myself president of the American Society of Church History. Most of my predecessors in this position have been professors within theological faculties or departments of religion. Even those who have been, like me, members of secular departments of history, have generally received some formal instruction in religious studies. But this year you have chosen a president who is entirely secular in both education and career, whose graduate training was in diplomatic history of the Reformation period and whose teaching has been largely limited to secular state universities. I descend, to be sure, from a line of Protestant missionaries, ministers and religious educators, and over the years I have learned a good deal of historical theology from some very gifted students. But neither asset, I fear, places me very securely within the line of succession in which I now find myself.

scholarly journals Historiese teologie in ʼn veranderende konteks

2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wim A. Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Church History ◽  
Church Polity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Missions History ◽  
History Of Theology ◽  
Historical Theology ◽  
History Of Biblical Interpretation ◽  
The Church ◽  
Precarious Situation

In this contribution, the author reflects on historical theology as theological discipline. After a short introduction to the precarious situation of church history as a theological discipline in South Africa and the question of faith and history, the contribution presents an analysis of Gerhard Ebeling’s 1947 publication on church history in which he proposed that church history should be understood as a history of Biblical interpretation. Based on some of the principles Ebeling delineated, the author proposes that historical theology could be applied to five areas of research: prolegomena, history of the church, history of missions, history of theology and church polity. The point is made that historical theology, when properly structured and presented, could play a major role in enriching the theological and ecclesial conversation and in assisting the church in the process of reformation and transformation.Keywords: Gerhard Ebeling; Hermeneutics; Church History

Heresy hunt: Gilbert Burnet and the convocation controversy of 1701

1994 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Greig
Keyword(s):  
Church History ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Lower House ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Trinity

ABSTRACTThe aim of the high church agitation in the 1690s for a convocation was to establish doctrinal discipline within the anglican church. When convocation met in 1701 the lower house produced censures on Toland's Christianity not mysterious and Burnet's Exposition of the thirty-nine articles.It was Francis Atterbury who insisted that Burnet's Exposition was heretical. He had long been critical of Burnet's views on the trinity and his erastian interpretation of English church history in his History of the reformation. And if Burnet's History was an attempt re-write English church history from the perspective of a latitudinarian, then his Exposition was its theological counterpart.It was assumed that the charges against Burnet were lost. But a copy of them has surfaced and it confirms that it was the connection between latitudinarians and dissent which led to the attack on Burnet. In his zeal to heal divisions within anglicanism and between anglicans and other protestants Burnet had introduced a ‘latitude and diversity of opinions’ which misrepresented true anglican doctrine. This was dangerous, because Burnet intended his Exposition as ‘a platform laid for Comprehension’ with the dissenters and other ‘Adversaries of our Church’. These included obvious heretics like socinians and the deist Toland.

An Accidental Historian: Erasmus and the English History of the Reformation

2013 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory D. Dodds
Keyword(s):  
Mental Image ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Church History ◽  
Desiderius Erasmus ◽  
English History ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Historical Authority

When post-Reformation English authors sought to describe pre-Reformation Catholicism, they turned to the writings of Desiderius Erasmus for historical evidence to back up their arguments justifying the break from Rome. For many later English schoolboys, Erasmus was one of the only Catholic authors they read and the depictions of Catholicism found in the Praise of Folly and, especially, in the Colloquies, became their picture of Catholic clergy, as well as foundational imprints for their mental image of relics, pilgrimages, and other Catholic practices. References to Erasmus as a historical authority for his times appear in dozens, if not hundreds, of texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ignoring the literary and fictitious nature of Erasmus's satirical texts, they used Erasmus to justify their depictions of Catholic corruption, superstition, and irrationality. Over time, these descriptions became an almost uncritically accepted portrayal of the Catholic world prior to the rise of Protestantism. This constructed reality thus became the worldview of English speaking Protestants from the mid-sixteenth century up to nearly the present. Examining how later English authors used Erasmus helps us understand the subsequent nature of English historical consciousness and the development of English and Protestant narratives of Church history.

Recent Currents in the Historiography of the Radical Reformation

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-535
Author(s):  
John D. Roth
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Church History ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Freedom Of Conscience ◽  
Radical Reformation ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
American Society

There can be no question but that the great principles of freedom of conscience, separation of church and state and voluntarism in religion, so basic in American Protestantism and so essential to democracy, ultimately are derived from the Anabaptists of the Reformation period.With these confident words, Harold S. Bender introduced the main theme of his presidential address at the fifty-fifth meeting of the American Society of Church History, held at Columbia University on 28 Dec. 1943. In the decades that followed, Bender's speech—which he titled.

Practices of Satisfaction, 1215–1700

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 106-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bossy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
General Public ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Oxford English Dictionary ◽  
Short History ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Professional Fields

The title, and subject, of this piece is ‘satisfaction’, though its main locus in time is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I chose the subject because it fitted in with our president’s preoccupations, and because it interested me; it turns out, to my surprise, to jog our elbow about some contemporary matters, as I guess he wished.We had better start with the word, where there are two distinctions to be considered. The obvious one is between making up for, paying for, making amends, making reparation; and contentment, gratified desire, giving satisfaction, what you can’t get none of. I shall say that the first is the strong meaning, the second the weak one. The first is always other-directed, and entails an offence previously committed; the second is principally self-directed. ‘To content’ is a classical meaning of satisfacere, but it means to content someone else: to do something (facere), as against receiving something. A short history of the word in Latin and English records that the strong meaning emerged into late Latin as a description of church penance, and so passed into English in the fourteenth century. Its heyday was from then until the eighteenth. It referred to ecclesiastical penance (interrupted by the Reformation), the theology of the Redemption (encouraged by the Reformation), and in general public usage to the meeting of any kind of obligation, payment, atonement or compensation. From the eighteenth century it passed from public use, superseded by the weak meaning except in technical or professional fields. One professional usage, to which The Oxford English Dictionary gives a good deal of attention, is ‘to satisfy the examiners’: they think it is a case of ‘content’; may it be a case of ‘avert wrath’?

The End of “The Protestant Era”?

2011 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 600-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Collis Greene
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Church History ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society

More than fifty years after delivering the talk “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935” to the American Society of Church History, Robert Handy is still the default authority on religion and the Great Depression. This is a tribute to his remarkable insights, but it is also an indication that the Depression merits more attention from historians of religion. A number of scholars have taken the religious history of the 1930s seriously. Yet we tend to think of the work of Joel Carpenter, Leo Ribuffo, Alan Brinkley, Beth Wenger, Kenneth Heineman, and others as primarily about fundamentalist institution-building, New Deal demagogues, or Jews and Catholics in New York and Pittsburgh, and only incidentally about the Great Depression.

Forum on Antebellum American Protestantism

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-609
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Church History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Traditional Church ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
Theoretical Developments

At the 2015 Winter Meeting of the American Society of Church History, the panel “Futures of the American Religious Past” examined two of the most provocative and influential recent analyses of antebellum American protestantism—Mark A. Noll's America's God and John Lardas Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America. In one sense, the pairing is odd. The two books appear drastically different, stylistically and methodologically. Modern's highly original monograph constructs a genealogy of antebellum American secularism, illuminating ways in which this cultural force haunted the historicity of American protestantism. His analysis interweaves the theoretical and discursive approaches of cultural studies and religious studies. Noll's book, on the other hand, constructs a more traditional, though deeply creative, history of protestant religious ideas, attentive to the agency of individual thinkers and institutions. Both books are brilliant, yet they exist at two opposite disciplinary poles in the study of American religions. Their juxtaposition embodies what Laurie Maffly-Kipp in her 2013 American Society of Church History Presidential Address called our “transitional moment” in American religious history, as theoretical developments of religious studies confront traditional church history paradigms.

Medieval Heretics as Protestant Martyrs

1993 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 185-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Euan Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Church History ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Church Polity ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
The Church

Two themes which figure repeatedly in the history of the Western Church are the contrasting ones of tradition and renewal. To emphasize tradition, or continuity, is to stress the divine element in the continuous collective teaching and witness of the Church. To call periodically for renewal and reform is to acknowledge that any institution composed of people will, with time, lose its pristine vigour or deviate from its original purpose. At certain periods in church history the tension between these two themes has broken out into open conflict, as happened with such dramatic results in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformers seem to present one of the most extreme cases where the desire for renewal triumphed over the instinct to preserve continuity of witness. A fundamentally novel analysis of the process by which human souls were saved was formulated by Martin Luther in the course of debate, and soon adopted or reinvented by others. This analysis was then used as a touchstone against which to test and to attack the most prominent features of contemporary teaching, worship, and church polity. In so far as any appeal was made to Christian antiquity, it was to the scriptural texts and to the early Fathers; though even the latter could be selected and criticized if they deviated from the primary articles of faith. There was, then, no reason why any of the Reformers should have sought to justify their actions by reference to any forbears or ‘forerunners’ in the Middle Ages, whether real or spurious. On the contrary, Martin Luther’s instinctive response towards those condemned by the medieval Church as heretics was to echo the conventional and prejudiced hostility felt by the religious intelligentsia towards those outside their pale.

The Classical Sources of Evangelical Devotion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Bruce Hindmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Church History ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Imitation Of Christ ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic Tradition ◽  
Devotional Reading

For all its seeming newness, evangelicalism revived ancient ideals. Evangelical use of Scripture was especially similar to ancient patterns of devotional reading. Moreover, evangelicals routinely appealed to confessional formularies (Anglican and Reformed) and creedal standards, and to precedents in church history from the Puritans, the Reformation, and beyond, stretching back to the early church. Evangelicals’ concern for true religion meant that they were also able to assimilate spiritually edifying sources from the Catholic tradition and from the Middle Ages. The reception history of Henry Scougal’s Life of God in the Soul of Man and Thomas à‎ Kempis’s Imitation of Christ illustrate a process of simplification, naturalization, and democratization of mystical and ascetical ideals. The libraries, book lists, and church histories of evangelicals further illustrate a wide range of sources, critical to evangelical spiritual life and identity.

Sola Scriptura in Africa: Missions and the Reformation Literacy Tradition

2019 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-87
Author(s):  
Steven van Dyck
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Church History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Print Communication ◽  
Mission Movement ◽  
The Church

This theoretical reflection addresses issues arising in the history of world Christianity, in particular regarding mission churches in Africa since the nineteenth century. The article first evaluates the development of oral, manuscript and print communication cultures in western culture, and their influence since the first century in the Church. Modernity could only develop in a print culture, creating the cultural environment for the Reformation. Sola Scriptura theology, as in Calvin and Luther, considered the written Word of God essential for the Church’s life. The role of literacy throughout Church history is reviewed, in particular in the modern mission movement in Africa and the growing African church, to show the importance of literacy in developing a strong church. In conclusion, spiritual growth of churches in the Reformation tradition requires recognition of the primacy of print culture over orality, and the importance of a culture of reading and study.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document