Church History

This book deals with Bible translation and its development from Antiquity to the Reformation. Taking the Hebrew Masoretic Text of Genesis as Old Testament Vorlage, it examines corresponding verses from five translations: Septuagint, Vulgate, Luther's Bible, Tyndale and the Authorized Version, and the Dutch State Translation. The context is the challenge mounted by feminist scholarship, particularly those scholars of the ‘second wave’, who have tried and convicted Scripture of androcentricity and misogyny. Translated passages in Genesis 1–4 that deal with the male‐female dynamic are subjected to detailed analysis, tracing linguistic and ideological processes and seeking to determine the extent of interaction between contemporary culture and translation. The degree and development of androcentricity in these passages in both Hebrew and translated texts are likewise taken into account. Each chapter dealing with a specific translation consists of two parts: the historical/cultural background of period and translator(s), particularly with regard to women, and a close exegesis of the verses in question. Results point to the Hebrew text revealing significant androcentricity, with the Septuagint, possibly influenced by Greek philosophy, emphasizing the patriarchal elements. This trend persists through the Vulgate and even Luther's Bible — though less so in the English and Dutch versions — and suggests that the translators must be at least partly responsible for an androcentric text becoming the justification for the oppression of women. Each section dealing with textual analysis is sub‐divided into the same groups of verses: male and female (1:26–28), man (2:7,9,15–17), woman (2:18–25), seeing (3:1–13), consequences (3:14–24), generation (4:1–2,17,25).

This book is the first history in English of the Lutheran Church in Germany and Scandinavia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning and ending in war, this period was of particular unease and upheaval for the Church. Attempts to emulate the spiritual community of the early Church, reform of the Church establishment and steps taken to enlighten parishioners were almost always held back by the anomalous structural legacy of the Reformation, tradition and parish habit, sacred and profane. The birth of the modern nation state and its market economy posed a fundamental challenge to the structure and ethos of the Reformation churches, as it did to the Catholic Church. The First World War deepened the crisis further.

This book discusses issues of need, poverty, social welfare, and social justice in the history of the Christian tradition, and their modern relevance for ethical responses today. The book weaves together stories from late antiquity with three conceptual paradigms that may bridge the gap between historical story and modern action: sensing need, sharing the world, and embodying sacred kingdom. The first four chapters explore how personal need influences the way that we look at the world and at the needs of others. Beginning with a personal memoir of encounters with need and a discovery of the world of early Christian texts on poverty and religious response, this book retells these many historical narratives in new ways and traces their influence on charity in post-Reformation history. The second half of the book uses a complex dance of images and stories to consider several recurrent themes in any religious responses to poverty and need, including poverty and gender, the dilemma of justice in material distribution, ascetic models of social activism and contemplation, the language of human rights and “common good,” challenges of hospitality, and the role of liturgy in constructing a vision for restorative righteousness. Through their sensitive exploration of nuances and tensions, these chapters invite reflection, conversation, and response.

This book is the first comprehensive description of some of the many kinds of Protestantism that competed for the souls of Cromwellian Ireland. Its principal purpose is to document the period's most important theological debates, arguing that they were both a cause and consequence of protestant experiences in that turbulent period and that they illustrate surprising contests between and within several English, Scottish, and Irish varieties of protestant identity. Cromwellian protestants were sometimes less puritan, and often much less united by religious convictions, than has often been supposed. Even their resolute opposition to Roman Catholicism has, at times, been exaggerated. The military campaign and its aftermath have been associated with eschatological stringency and anti‐Catholic rhetoric, but this rhetoric is largely absent from the treatises that survived the 1650s. In fact, where Antichrist does appear, it is almost always within the community of the godly. His presence marks the constantly shifting boundaries of projected systems of truth. These shifting boundaries reflect a sustained introspection that allows historians to trace the evolution of religious identities throughout this period. That introspection provides a key to our understanding of the period's events, for the Cromwellian regime had an evidently religious base, and its exponents worked self‐consciously for a second reformation. Nevertheless, the state failed to endorse an ecclesiastical ideal, and that failure made sectarian disagreements inevitable. This book documents the tenor and impact of these debates.

The story of the apocryphal pope and saint Gregorius was extremely popular throughout the Middle Ages and later in Europe and beyond. In a memorable narrative Gregorius is born from an incestuous relationship between a noble brother and sister, and is set out to sea with (unspecific) details of his origin. He is found and brought up by an abbot, but when revealed as a foundling, leaves as a knight to seek his origins; he rescues his mother’s land from attack, and marries her. On discovering his sin he undertakes years of penance on a rocky islet, which he survives miraculously. An angel sends emissaries from Rome to find him after the death of the pope, the key to his shackles is equally miraculously discovered, and he becomes pope. This hagiographical romance is not a variation upon Oedipus; it uses the invisible sin of incest as a parallel both for original sin (the sin of Adam and Eve) and for actual sin. It combines the universal theme of the quest for identity with the problem not of guilt as such, which is inevitable, but of how sinful humanity can cope if it avoids despair. The story probably originated in medieval England or France, but is found in versions from Iceland and Ireland to Iraq and Egypt, in verse and prose, in full-scale literary forms or in much-reduced folktales, in theological as well as secular contexts, and more or less continuously down to and even beyond. It is a truly European theme.

Gregory of Nazianzus has long been regarded as the premier teacher on the Holy Trinity in Eastern Christianity. Yet, ironically, for over a century historians and theologians have neglected his work in favor of his fellow Cappadocians Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, while Gregory has long been overshadowed in the West by Augustine. Christopher Beeley's groundbreaking study—the first comprehensive treatment in modern scholarship—examines Gregory's Trinitarian doctrine within the full range of his theological and practical vision. Following an introductory orientation to Gregory's life and theological works, the book traces Gregory's Trinitarian doctrine through a wide range of concerns, from biblical interpretation and language theory to the practicalities of Christian worship, asceticism, and pastoral ministry. It highlights the soteriological nature of Gregory's doctrine, which seamlessly integrates what have more recently been distinguished as dogmatic and ascetical, or doxological and systematic, theology. Unique among modern studies, this book examines Gregory's doctrine across his entire corpus of orations, poems, and letters, giving special attention to its highly rhetorical and contextualized form. It offers new insights in many areas and a major reinterpretation of the famous Theological Orations and Christological epistles (Ep. 101‐102, 202). By comparing Gregory's work with that of his great master, Origen, his Eastern contemporaries, and his Western counterpart, Augustine, the book shows Gregory to be the most outstanding example of the Origenist Trinitarian tradition of fourth‐century Asia Minor. Gregory offered the most powerful and comprehensive Trinitarian doctrine of his age from a distinctively Eastern point of view, largely independent of the work of Athanasius, while also representing the interests of Damasus of Rome and the Italian bishops as the leading pro‐Nicene theologian at the heart of the Eastern empire—a fact which sharply qualifies the long‐accepted dominance of the Athanasian‐Western paradigm as the normative standard for Trinitarian orthodoxy. Long eclipsed in twentieth‐century scholarship, Gregory's doctrine is now brought into full view as the major Greek authority on the Trinity and one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Church.

Distinctive forms of Christianity have emerged in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands since the late eighteenth century. With European and North American roots, they have successfully intermixed with local cultures, despite the influence of the colonizing powers and their missionaries. Pacific Island Christians, both the Melanesians and the Polynesians, have successfully retained a unitive religion and social order, though that was much less possible for Aborigines, Kanaks and Maori, because they were so outnumbered by their colonizers. Protestantism and Roman Catholicism have been the dominant forms of Christianity, though Orthodoxy has been significant in Australia since the 1950s. In two centuries, significant changes have occurred in worship, theology, and patterns of discipleship, as well as in relationships with government and in the public face of religion. Since the 1960s, there has been a major decline of numbers attending worship and professing denomination allegiance, especially in the under 40s. Widening roles for women, including ordination, ecumenical cooperation, reunion, a growing emphasis on social justice, and liberalized views on sexuality, marriage, and parenting have been divisive and underlined Christian pluralism. Migration has brought all the major world religions to Australia. The churches have continued to be major partners with governments in education, the social services, as well as the economy, with members contributing substantially to philanthropy, voluntary community service, and civil society.

This history of the ninteenth‐century popes covers the papacies of Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII and Pius X in their religious and political aspects. The period was dominated by the question of whether the pope could hold political power and the relations of the papacy with the Catholic states of Europe. The major themes of the book are therefore the causes and consequences of the end of the Papal State as an independent power in Italy and the conflicts between the popes and the forces of the Risorgimento, fighting for the unification of Italy under the Piedmontese monarchy. At the same time it discusses the connected challenge of liberal movements in France, Spain and Portugal, and the separate question of the oppression of Catholic Poland by the Russian Empire. It shows how the popes opposed liberalism, democracy, socialism and ’the modern world’ in general, but how this intransigence served to strengthen papal authority among Catholic believers, with mostly unfortunate political consequences. The nuances in the attitude of each individual pope are traced through such major events as the revolutions of 1848, the First Vatican Council, the taking of Rome by Italian nationalists, the Kulturkampf in Germany, and the separation of Church and State in France. Catholic authority became more centralized, demonstrated by the Syllabus of Errors and the doctrine of papal infallibility and the moral demands made by the papacy over such issues as labour relations, marriage and divorce, and religious toleration. Separate chapters discuss the question of religion and national identity in Poland, Spain and Portugal; the fortunes of the religious orders; Catholic universities; the idea of reunion of the Churches; and the making of saints.