Religion

This book explores the life of Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, chronicling his childhood and family life, spiritual journey, missionary work, and his role in establishing the Church of God. Its main objective is to reconcile the holiness-pentecostal tradition to its origins, and the trajectory of its subsequent history. The term “plainfolk modernist” is coined, to suggest that both Tomlinson and the world he inhabited expressed a vibrant strain of modernism, though voiced in the idioms of American plainfolk culture.

In Abelard and Heloise, a dual intellectual biography of Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and Heloise (d. 1164), I argue that there is a fundamental continuity to the evolution of Abelard’s thought from his early concern with dialectic, to his growing interest in theology in the 1120s and in ethical questions in the 1130s. Heloise was much more than the disciple and lover of Abelard. She emerges as a distinct thinker in her own right, deeply versed in classical ideals of friendship and ethics, which she wished to apply to her relationship to Abelard. While they have both functioned as mythic figures in the western imagination, I argue that both participated in a broader 12th-century renewal of interest in both classical literature and in religious reform. I examine Abelard’s dialectic as a theory not just about universals, but about language as a whole. Tracing the maturing of his dialectic from his earliest glosses to the Logica ‘Ingredientibus’, written after his early affair with Heloise (1115–17), I argue that Abelard was initially unable to come to terms with the ethical questions presented by Heloise in her side of messages (Epistolae duorum amantium) they exchanged during those years. After Abelard became a monk at St Denis, he started to write about theology. I trace the evolution of his theological interests, from his early concern with linguistic concerns to increasing preoccupation with the Holy Spirit and divine goodness, as manifest in Jesus. After Heloise, abbess of the Paraclete from 1129, responded to his Historia calamitatum and demanded he pay greater attention to the community he had founded, Abelard started to devote much more attention to commenting on Scripture and to reflecting on the ethical questions with which she had always been concerned. Accusations spread by St Bernard that Abelard promoted heresy distort the true character of his contribution to theology, on which Heloise exercised a profound influence.

Examines the emergence – and then the broad effects – of a singularly American synthesis of convictions. That synthesis of evangelical Protestant religion, republican political ideology, and commonsense moral reasoning came into existence during the second half of the eighteenth century and then exerted a telling influence on American life through the time of the Civil War. Elsewhere in the North Atlantic world, the main Christian traditions opposed both “Real Whig” republicanism and the “commonsense” principles of the era's new moral philosophy. Not so in America. Through a series of contingent circumstances – revival in the 1740s, colonial warfare with France, the struggle for independence, a great surge of evangelical denominations in the new republic, and the leadership of Protestant thought and agencies in creating a national culture – distinctly American forms of Christian republicanism and theistic common sense became the common intellectual coinage of the new United States. In turn, these patterns of thought pushed theology, for both educated elites and sectarian populists, toward greater stress on the individual, on free will, and on personal appropriation of the Bible. The very centrality of commonsense Christian republicanism also, however, set the stage for the intellectual tragedy of the Civil War – when dedicated Christians, both North and South, were convinced that the Bible supported only their own side. The story is at once a great triumph of creative theological energy and a significant tragedy of theology captured by culture.

This book offers a comprehensive examination and analysis of American Methodist worship, tracing its evolution from John Wesley to the end of the twentieth century. Attention is paid to the officially approved liturgical texts of ten American Methodist denominations. Yet, these texts do not reveal the full complexity of Methodist worship – leaders of worship have always had the freedom to depart from the established forms, and some characteristically Methodist worship services were organized without official texts. Therefore, other sources are scrutinized to provide a broader assessment. This book draws upon personal diaries and journals, church and secular newspapers, and materials from local church archives, thus exposing the processes and influences – ecclesiastical, social, and cultural – that motivated Methodists to rethink their theology of worship and to reorganize their worship praxis. Such an approach permits consideration of the nontextual matters of liturgical space, choreography, and ritual performance. Methodist worship's interactions with the wider society and cultures are addressed, and an evaluation is made of how particular factors and developments evident in national life affected liturgy and the performance of worship in what may be identified as the “Americanization” of Methodist worship.

Francis Asbury (1745–1816) is one of the most important religious leaders in American history. He guided the creation of the American Methodist church, the largest church in nineteenth-century America and the foundation of much of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements. The United States remains a deeply religious nation and Asbury is an important reason why. Yet Asbury did not lead in ways that we expect. He did not look like the ministers of colonial America, nor does he look like many high profile religious leaders today. The son of an English gardener, he had only a few years of formal education before being apprenticed to a metalworker at age fourteen. He never wrote a book and was often a disappointing preacher. He never married or owned a home, rarely spoke at church conferences, and often felt insecure in public. Yet in this definitive biography Asbury emerges as an effective and influential leader. His life of prayer and voluntary poverty were legendary, as was his generosity to the poor. Offsetting his poor public speaking was his remarkable ability to connect with people one-on-one or in small groups as he crisscrossed the nation. Asbury rode more than 130,000 miles from 1771 to 1816, tirelessly organizing the church’s expansion into every state and territory. He traveled more extensively across the American landscape than anyone of his generation. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, John Wigger reveals how Asbury shaped Methodism to engage ordinary Americans, establishing patterns that are still evident today.

This study examines, within a chronological framework, the major themes and personalities that influenced the outbreak of a number of Evangelical clerical and lay secessions from the Church of England and Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century. Though the number of secessions was relatively small, between a hundred and two hundred of the ‘Gospel clergy’ abandoned the Church during this period, their influence was considerable, especially in highlighting in embarrassing fashion the tensions between the evangelical conversionist imperative and the principles of a national religious establishment. Moreover, through much of this period there remained, just beneath the surface, the potential threat of a large Evangelical disruption similar to that which occurred in Scotland in 1843. Consequently, these secessions provoked great consternation within the Church and within Evangelicalism itself, contributed to the outbreak of millennial speculation following the ‘constitutional revolution’ of 1828–32, led to the formation of several new denominations, and sparked off a major Church–State crisis over the legal right of a clergyman to secede and begin a new ministry within Protestant Dissent.

This book explores the dynamics of the Spirit and Son in the economy of salvation. It offers an interpretation of Barth and Origen around this theme, bringing them into a formative dialogue for a constructive theology of universal salvation. Examining Barth's doctrine of election and Origen's understanding of apokatastasis, the book proposes that a proper understanding of the eternal salvific plan of God in the person of Jesus Christ points towards universal salvation. However, salvation is not achieved through a general principle or rule; it is achieved through the very particularity of the Son in whom all humanity is saved. Further place for human particularity is established through the economy of the Spirit. Origen and Barth's economic pneumatologies indicate the reverse dynamic to that of their interpretation of the Son's economy: while the particularity of the Son has universal effects for all particulars, the universality of the Spirit particularizes that universal in individuals and communities in the present. However, this is in a manner which avoids a binary separation of Christians (as the saved) from all other humans (as the damned); instead, Christians are led into the ever greater depths of God, in a manner which allows God's Spirit to be present in diverse ways with humans and human communities in their temporal particularities. This dynamic of Spirit and Son in salvation allows for the place of faith, ongoing history, and community within a soteriological schema which offers a universal hope of salvation in Christ.

This volume represents the first part of a study of the concept and the symbol of the cross in Christian theology and imagination. It examines the theology of the cross in both its conceptual and aesthetic mediations within specific historical contexts, from the early church to the eve of the renaissance. Each chapter is introduced by a discussion of an artwork — a representation of Christ’s crucifixion — that exemplifies the focus of the chapter. There follows an exposition of a theological paradigm for the interpretation of the Christ’s passion as a salvific event, i.e., a particular Christian soteriology, as seen in the works of classic theologians. These theological ideas are compared and contrasted with aesthetic works that were contemporaneous with the theological classics or that illustrate a parallel theological attitude. The general method is one of correlation between two kinds of interpretation of the Christian tradition and of human experience: between theology as explicit systematic thought and as affective and communicative images. Within the aesthetic realm, this volume emphasizes visual art (various styles of cross and crucifix) and Christian poetry, both liturgical and non-liturgical.