The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890

The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890
Author: Charles D. Cashdollar
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2014-07-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1400860105

Charles Cashdollar reinterprets nineteenth-century British and American Protestant thought by identifying positivism as the central intellectual issue of the era. Positivism meant, at first, the ideas of the French thinker Auguste Comte; later in the century, the term indicated a more general opposition to supernatural religion. Cashdollar shows that contemporary thinkers recognized positivism, at each of these stages, as the most fundamental of the proliferating challenges to religious belief. He further reveals how the encounter with positivism altered Protestant orthodoxy--in both subtle and radical ways. Positivists denied that humans could know anything other than physical phenomena. Declaring many orthodox beliefs archaic, they proposed a new, ethically based vision of service to humanity. After portraying the dissemination of these positions among British and American Protestants, the author explains how each of several groups reacted. A few theologians rejected positivism outright, but many more responded by recasting their own beliefs. The implications of this story of change extend to such topics as Darwinism, Biblical criticism, the rise of the social sciences, theological liberalism and the Social Gospel, the beginnings of fundamentalism, and the twentieth-century debate about "creationism" and science. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century

The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century
Author: Melvin Easterday Dieter
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1996
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0810831554

This new edition expands and updates the only general interpretation of the rise and influence of perfectionist revivalism in America and Europe. Fifteen years of expanding research on the holiness movement reinforce this volume's continuing seminal value to cultural and social research. The new concluding essay describes the history of the revival through the turn of the century. This book expands our understanding of the fragmentation and coalescence of American religion by analyzing the factors which created numerous new holiness denominations. Dieter also outlines the historical and theological factors that separate this largely Wesleyan and Methodist wing of evangelicalism from the fundamentalism of Reformed evangelicals. The identification of such nuances will prove especially helpful to those struggling with the extreme diversity in American religion, especially in evangelicalism. For students and scholars of American religious movements as well as students of the feminist, temperance, abolitionist, and populist movements in American society.

Reform Movements in Methodism and How They Were Treated (1784–1830)

Reform Movements in Methodism and How They Were Treated (1784–1830)
Author: Paul F. McCleary
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1493196898

Rev. Paul F. McCleary is a graduate of Olivet Nazarene University, Bourbonnais, Illinois, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, and Northwestern University, both in Evanston, Illinois. He has an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from MacMurray College, Jacksonville, Illinois. Paul served student appointments in Illinois Great Rivers Conference of the United Methodist Church before going to Bolivia as a missionary, where he served as district superintendent and executive secretary of the Annual Conference. He has served denominational posts as executive secretary of the Structure Study Commission of the General Conference, assistant general secretary for Latin America of the Board of Global Ministries, and as associate general secretary of the General Council on Ministries. He also served as executive director of Church World Service of the National Council of Churches of Christ. For several years, he served with nongovernmental organizations, such as Save the Children, Christian Children’s Fund, and Feed the Children. He served two terms as president of the NGO Committee to UNICEF and chair of the Board of InterAction. He served as a consultant to the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. McCleary served for eight years as an advisor to the Bishops’ Task Force on Children and Poverty of the United Methodist Church. McCleary is married to Rachel P. and has four children, seven grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. They currently reside in Tempe, Arizona.

Catherine Booth

Catherine Booth
Author: John Read
Publisher: Lutterworth Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2014-01-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0718841638

Catherine Booth's achievements - as a revivalist, social reformer, champion of women's rights, and, with her husband William Booth, co-founder of the Salvation Army - were widely recognized in her lifetime. However, Catherine Booth's life and work has since been largely neglected. This neglect has extended to her theological ideas, even though they were critical to the formation of Salvationism, the spirituality of the movement she cofounded. This book examines the implicit theology that undergirds Catherine Booth's Salvationist spirituality and reveals the ethical concerns at the heart of her soteriology and the integral relationship between the social and evangelical aspects of Christian mission in her thought. Catherine Booth emerges asa significant figure from the Victorian era, a British theologian and church leader with a rare if not unique intellectual and theological perspective: that of a woman.

Dictionary of Early American Philosophers

Dictionary of Early American Philosophers
Author: John R. Shook
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1249
Release: 2012-04-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1843711826

The Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, which contains over 400 entries by nearly 300 authors, provides an account of philosophical thought in the United States and Canada between 1600 and 1860. The label of "philosopher" has been broadly applied in this Dictionary to intellectuals who have made philosophical contributions regardless of academic career or professional title. Most figures were not academic philosophers, as few such positions existed then, but they did work on philosophical issues and explored philosophical questions involved in such fields as pedagogy, rhetoric, the arts, history, politics, economics, sociology, psychology, medicine, anthropology, religion, metaphysics, and the natural sciences. Each entry begins with biographical and career information, and continues with a discussion of the subject's writings, teaching, and thought. A cross-referencing system refers the reader to other entries. The concluding bibliography lists significant publications by the subject, posthumous editions and collected works, and further reading about the subject.

Fundamentalism and American Culture

Fundamentalism and American Culture
Author: George M. Marsden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2006-02-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199741123

Many American's today are taking note of the surprisingly strong political force that is the religious right. Controversial decisions by the government are met with hundreds of lobbyists, millions of dollars of advertising spending, and a powerful grassroots response. How has the fundamentalist movement managed to resist the pressures of the scientific community and the draw of modern popular culture to hold on to their ultra-conservative Christian views? Understanding the movement's history is key to answering this question. Fundamentalism and American Culture has long been considered a classic in religious history, and to this day remains unsurpassed. Now available in a new edition, this highly regarded analysis takes us through the full history of the origin and direction of one of America's most influential religious movements. For Marsden, fundamentalists are not just religious conservatives; they are conservatives who are willing to take a stand and to fight. In Marsden's words (borrowed by Jerry Falwell), "a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something." In the late nineteenth century American Protestantism was gradually dividing between liberals who were accepting new scientific and higher critical views that contradicted the Bible and defenders of the more traditional evangelicalism. By the 1920s a full-fledged "fundamentalist" movement had developed in protest against theological changes in the churches and changing mores in the culture. Building on networks of evangelists, Bible conferences, Bible institutes, and missions agencies, fundamentalists coalesced into a major protest movement that proved to have remarkable staying power. For this new edition, a major new chapter compares fundamentalism since the 1970s to the fundamentalism of the 1920s, looking particularly at the extraordinary growth in political emphasis and power of the more recent movement. Never has it been more important to understand the history of fundamentalism in our rapidly polarizing nation. Marsen's carefully researched and engrossing work remains the best way to do just that.

Salvaging Wesley's Agenda

Salvaging Wesley's Agenda
Author: Kevin Twain Lowery
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2008-03-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1556353774

Kevin Twain Lowery believes that two of John Wesley's most distinctive doctrines--his doctrines of assurance and Christian perfection--have not been sufficiently developed. Rather, these doctrines have either been distorted or neglected. Lowery suggests that since Wesleyan ethics is centered on these two doctrines, they need to be recast in a schema that emphasizes the cognitive aspects of religious knowledge and moral development. Salvaging Wesley's Agenda constructs such a new framework in three stages. First, Lowery explores Wesley's reliance upon Lockean empiricism. He contends that Wesleyan epistemology should remain more closely tied to empirical knowledge and should distance itself from mystical and intuitionist models like Wesley's own spiritual sense analogy. Second, examining the way that Wesley appropriates Jonathan Edwards's view of the religious affections, Lowery shows that Wesleyan ethics should not regard emotions as something to be passively experienced. Rather, emotions have cognitive content that allows them to be shaped. Third, Lowery completes the new framework by suggesting ways to revise and expand Wesley's own conceptual scheme. These suggestions allow more of Wesley's concerns to be incorporated into the new schema without sacrificing his core commitments. The final chapter sketches the doctrines of assurance and perfection in the new framework. Assurance is based on religious faith and on self-knowledge (both empirical and psychological), and perfection is understood in a more teleological context. The result is a version of Wesleyan ethics more faithful to Wesley's own thought and able to withstand the scrutiny of higher intellectual standards.

Embodying Wesley’s Catholic Spirit

Embodying Wesley’s Catholic Spirit
Author: Daniel Castelo
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498241069

To what degree is Wesleyan theology part of the church's catholic witness? This book explores this question from a number of angles and goes on to embody some of these possibilities in conversation with other major traditions and figures within the Christian church. Overall, the volume shows that Wesleyan theology does draw from and can contribute to conversations related to the catholic Christian witness.

Experiencing Christ

Experiencing Christ
Author: Darrell Poeppelmeyer
Publisher: Nazarene Theology Foundation
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2023-04-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

This is Book One of a six book series on Nazarene soteriology (salvation). This book applies the insights gained from studying 2,000 years of Christian salvation to our modern situation. It examines modern salvation experiences as interpreted by Scripture, Christian tradition, rational responses, and emotional encounters with God. The perspective comes from the Nazarene view of two works of grace as Christian Conversion and Holy Purpose. Holy Purpose always follows Christian Conversion. The other five books look at previous historical periods.

Voices of the Marketplace

Voices of the Marketplace
Author: Anne C. Rose
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780742532632

In this comprehensive and insightful reinterpretation of antebellum culture, Anne C. Rose analyzes the major shifts in intellectual life that occurred between 1830 and 1860 while exploring three sets of concepts that provided common languages-Christianity, democracy, capitalism. Whereas many interpretations of American culture in this period have emphasized a single theme or have been preoccupied with the ensuing Civil War, Rose considers sharply divergent tendencies in religion and politics and a wide range of reformers, authors, and other public figures.