Samuel Wesley and the Religious Societies, 1698–1702

2021 ◽  
pp. 64-89
Author(s):  
William Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
The Reformation

Chapter 3 investigates Wesley’s appointment to, and early years as a parson in, Epworth, in Lincolnshire. It explores in particular his campaign to bring moral reform to the parish. It examines Wesley’s interests in the religious societies and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK). His short-lived consideration of the society for the reformation of manners is also considered. His membership of the SPCK brought Wesley into contact with like-minded clergy and churchmen who aimed for religious renewal. The chapter also outlines how Wesley confronted his parishioners and set an acrimonious tone to his relations with them. It also considers his creation of a religious society in Epworth, which met regularly in the rectory and sought to instil greater piety and religious energy into his parishioners’ lives. It explores the rules of the society and the ways in which Wesley developed the society. Wesley’s behaviour in Epworth were not without opponents and those who derided his efforts.

Erasmus the Theologian

2016 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 498-515
Author(s):  
Greta Grace Kroeker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Reformation

Erasmus of Rotterdam developed from a classical humanist to a Christian humanist theologian in the first two decades of the sixteenth century. In the early years of the Reformation, his theological work responded to the theological debates of the age. Although many contemporaries dismissed him as a theologian, he developed a mature theology of grace before his death in 1536 that evidenced his efforts to create space for theological compromise between Protestants and Catholics and prevent the permanent fissure of western Christianity.

Southwark Cathedral: a MacMillan première (and a CD round-up)

Tempo ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 57 (223) ◽  
pp. 80-83
Author(s):  
Martin Anderson
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Early Years ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Catholic Culture ◽  
The Reformation

I am no believer in historical determinism, nor am I a Scottish (or any other kind of) nationalist, but the fact that The Sixteen should commission James MacMillan to set anew the text used by Robert Carver in his 19-part motet O bone Jesu brings a profound satisfaction. No one else could have tidied up five-centuries-old loose ends as he. Carver (c. 1487–1566) was part of the dizzyingly rich flourishing of Scottish culture in the early years of the 16th century – a Catholic culture, doused by the dour sincerity of the Reformation (the MacTaliban, if you wish). MacMillan, a dry-eyed member of Scotland's Catholic minority, is the first composer since those days whose combination of faith and accomplishment allows him to pick up the glove torn from Carver's hand. His O bone Jesu – given its first public airing by The Sixteen under their founder-conductor Harry Chistophers at Southwark Cathedral on 10 October, at the outset of a year-long tour that takes them round the British Isles and to North America – may not quite reach Carver's Olympian heights (no other Scottish composer has achieved commensurate greatness) but it exploits a striking range of emotional reference nonetheless.

ON PETERSON ON SWIFT

PMLA ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 86 (5) ◽  
pp. 1017-1025 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan R. Van Meter ◽  
Leland D. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reform ◽  
Gulliver's Travels ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
New Interpretation

THE recent exchange between Phillip Harth and Leland D. Peterson (PMLA, 84, March 1969, 336–43) over Peterson's reading of Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709) has left the issue precisely where it began. In his original article (PMLA, 82, March 1967, 54–63), Peterson presented a new interpretation of Swift's essay which would read as satire what has been long accepted as a direct proposal for political and moral reform. Basically, Peterson's thesis is that the traditional reading of the Project poses a problem for students of Swift since the article … seems to advocate hypocrisy, a vice consistently satirized and anathematized in such works as A Tale of a Tub, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and Gulliver's Travels.

Hurrell Froude and the Reformers

1970 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Church Of Christ ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
William Cobbett ◽  
The Church

‘No portion of our annals’, Macaulay wrote in 1828, ‘has been more perplexed and misrepresented by writers of different parties than the history of the Reformation’. In the early years of the nineteenth century, when polemicists turned to history more often than to philosophy or theology, the Reformation was the subject most littered with the pamphlets of partisan debate. Macaulay could have cited numerous examples. Joseph Milner's popular History of the Church of Christ (1794–1809) set the Reformation in sharp contrast to the ‘Dark Ages’ when only occasional gleams of evangelical light could be detected, thus providing the Evangelical party with a historic lineage; Robert Sou they, in his Book of the Church (1824), presented a lightly-veiled argument for the retention of the existing order of Church and State as established in the sixteenth century; and in 1824 William Cobbett began the first of his sixteen weekly instalments on a history of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, in order to call attention to the plight of labourers in the British Isles. In the history of the Reformation, duly manipulated (‘rightly interpreted’), men found precedents for their own positions and refutation of their opponents' arguments.

Nietzsche's Idea of Luther in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches

PMLA ◽  
1950 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
pp. 1053-1068
Author(s):  
Heinz Bluhm
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
Intimate Knowledge ◽  
Moral Superiority ◽  
The Church ◽  
Very High

Until 1876 Nietzsche paid Luther very high compliments. The works and letters of his first creative period abound with praise for the German reformer. The youthful Nietzsche, professor of Greek and philosopher of culture, more than once expressed his intellectual indebtedness to the spirit of Wittenberg. In those early years he felt himself the heir of the Lutheran Reformation and the inveterate foe of Roman Catholicism. Though anything but an orthodox Protestant, he was nevertheless firmly convinced of the intellectual and moral superiority of Protestantism to the Church of Rome. As late as 1876 he looked upon Protestantism as a source of light and freedom and upon Roman Catholicism as the embodiment of darkness and intellectual bondage. However, all his complimentary utterances on Luther and the Reformation are scarcely based on an intimate knowledge of the man and the movement he inspired. They rather express little more than the idea of Luther held by most educated Protestants of that day. What he said reflects the general, favorable attitude characteristic of Protestant Germany: Luther the great hero of the Reformation, the first representative of modern culture, without whom the world in which we live would be quite unthinkable. In other words, Nietzsche identified himself as late as Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876) with the then prevalent Protestant opinion of the Reformation: “Halten wir an dem … Geiste fest, der sich in der deutschen Reformation … offenbart hat …” (IV, 54).

Tēwodros as Reformer and Modernizer

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Crummey
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Religious Values ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Foreign Influence ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Major Turning Point ◽  
Modern Era

This paper discusses the place of the Emperor Tewodros (1855–1868) in Ethiopian history and suggests that due to his policy of modernization, and to his ambition to transform Ethiopian society along modern lines, he is to be seen as the opener of the modern era. It is suggested, as well, that this concept of modernization and transformation may be applicable to other pre-colonial African rulers. Special reference is made to missionary sources. Catholic material from the Lazarist Mission is used to clarify and elaborate the reforming intentions of the early years of the reign; while, for the later years, they reveal modern dimensions to Tēwodros's foreign policy. Protestant material from the Chrischona Mission throws new light on the Emperor's personality, and elaborates his attempts at introducing foreign influence with a modernizing intention. It is also shown how the Protestant missionaries established a close relationship with the Emperor, which partially rested upon certain shared religious values. This led the missionaries to interpret his reforming ambitions primarily in terms of the Reformation princes of Europe. Finally, it is suggested that the Protestant missionary material has an important contribution to make in determining a major turning point in Tēwodros's career; a point from which his career began to decline, and the reforming intentions were increasingly neglected.

Implementing the Reformation of the Senses in Practice

2018 ◽  
pp. 133-168
Author(s):  
Jacob M. Baum
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Lutheran Church ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Political Economic

Through analysis of church ordinances, ecclesiastical visitation reports, and church inventories, this chapter turns to assess the degree to which the early Lutheran church actually implemented the changes its proponents had envisioned in the early 1520s. It demonstrates that, in contrast to the hypercoherent rhetoric of the Reformation’s early years, the process of transforming the sensuous appeal of worship was highly inconsistent. To be sure, the impetus to “de-sensualize” religion was still very much present in the minds and in the rhetoric of leading reformers, but many of traditions of local governance over worship, established in the later Middle Ages alongside locally intervening political economic concerns, meant that implementing the reformation of the senses in practice was a highly variegated affair. Significant continuities with the late Middle Ages endured, although some important changes were apparent as well.

scholarly journals Augustinus: ’n Studie oor die etiek van die kerkvader uit Afrika deur J.H. van Wyk

2019 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ignatius W.C. Van Wyk
Keyword(s):  
Animal Ethics ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Political Ethics ◽  
Ethics Support ◽  
Church Father ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

In this review article, the book by J.H. (Amie) van Wyk, Augustine: A study on the ethics of the church father from Africa is presented and discussed. Short overviews of the content of the six chapters are given. They are: (1) Introduction – the necessity for a book on Augustine’s ethics in Afrikaans, (2) Orientation – an overview of his life and works, (3) Grounding – the relationship between dogmatics and ethics, (4) Typology – the character of his ethics, (5) Themes – marriage and sexual ethics, political ethics and animal ethics, (6) Findings – evaluation of Augustine’s ethics. Support is given to the argument that Augustine is an important forerunner to the Reformation. Information is provided on Augustine and the early years of the Reformation in Wittenberg. Critical remarks are made about the author’s understanding of the relationship between faith and works, dogmatics and ethics. The Lutheran understanding of this topic is presented as an important alternative to the Reformed version that is defended in this book. Finally, attention is given to Augustine’s ‘theory of the two cities’. Also in this regard advice is given from one of Luther’s publication. His exposition of Mary’s Song (‘Magnificat’) in Luke 1:46–55 is used as an example of how a witness to the government could look like.

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