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Part history, part narrative, The Lord of the Ring takes readers on a fascinating journey back to the 18th century Moravian renewal movement and 100-year prayer watch. Experience the passion of young Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and his friends as they took a vow to serve Christ their King faithfully in whatever situation of life they found themselves. Signed by the five school friends and illustrated in a medallion made by Zinzendorf’s grandmother, the vow of the “Confessors of Christ” is as relevant today as when it first was conceived in 1716. Join Phil Anderson on an aerial road trip via his three-seater plane as he undertakes a 21st century pilgrimage from England to Germany. Anderson retraces the steps of Zinzendorf, reconnects with his legacy and seeks to apply it to life and faith in a new millennium. Learning from the past, readers will discover crucial signposts for grappling with the Church of today’s identity and calling as an authentic, relational, missional community.
Despite shifting trends in the study of Oceanic Atlantic history, the colonial Atlantic world as it is described by historians today continues to be a largely English-only space; even when other language communities are examined, they, too, are considered to be monolingual and discrete. Babel of the Atlantic pushes back against this monolingual fallacy by documenting multilingualism, translation, and fluid movement across linguistic borders. Focusing on Philadelphia and surrounding areas that include Germantown, Bethlehem, and the so-called Indian country to the west, this volume demonstrates the importance of viewing inhabitants not as members of isolated language communities, whether Engli...
This collection explores different approaches to contextualizing and conceptualizing the history of Pietism, particularly Pietistic groups who migrated from central Europe to the British colonies in North America during the long eighteenth century. Emerging in German speaking lands during the seventeenth century, Pietism was closely related to Puritanism, sharing similar evangelical and heterogeneous characteristics. Dissatisfied with the established Lutheran and Reformed Churches, Pietists sought to revivify Christianity through godly living, biblical devotion, millennialism and the establishment of new forms of religious association. As Pietism represents a diverse set of impulses rather t...
In Munich 1942-43, handbills appeared-some in mailboxes-some left secretly on parked cars-others still, surfaced in city phone booths. The words condemned Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime and called Germans to passive resistance. The message, penned and distributed by a handful of student-soldiers and other youthful associates who had come of age during the twelve-year catastrophe of the Third Reich, hoped to stir the conscience of a nation. The regime had tempted them with promises of power and prosperity. In time, the youths made their way through a labyrinth of propaganda, confusion, and personal conflict, arriving at the threshold of their own inner convictions-a passage bringing them to...
Essays re members of the Moravian Church; although many of these Protestant immigrants spoke German, they originated in various countries.
The Moravians, a Protestant sect founded in 1727 by Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and based in Germany, were key players in the rise of international evangelicalism. In 1741, after planting communities on the frontiers of empires throughout the Atlantic world, they settled the communitarian enclave of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in order to spread the Gospel to thousands of nearby colonists and Native Americans. In time, the Moravians became some of early America's most successful missionaries. Such vast projects demanded vast sums. Bethlehem's Moravians supported their work through financial savvy and an efficient brand of communalism. Moravian commercial networks, stretching from the P...
The Moravians who settled Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1742 were committed to a society centered around missionary work. To free their missionaries from the need to earn a living, they formed a communal economic organization in which all workers gave their labor to the community in exchange for food, shelter, and clothing. To encourage each individual's religious development, family ties were deemphasized and members of the same sex, marital status, and age slept, worked, and worshipped together. After 20 years, the worldwide Moravian Church, facing a financial crisis, ordered Bethlehem to reorganize into a traditional community of nuclear families. It was hoped that, under this more conventi...
A definitive history of Christian evangelism—including noteworthy persons, movements, and methods from the past Christians have been sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with nonbelievers for two thousand years. Within this deep history is wisdom for today—including numerous models for understanding what evangelism is and how it should be done. In Gospel Witness through the Ages, David Gustafson introduces readers to evangelism’s noteworthy persons, movements, and methods from the entire scope of church history—including both examples to emulate and examples to avoid. With this thorough historical approach, Gustafson expands the reader’s conception of the evangelistic task and suggests new ways to shape our identity as gospel witnesses today through the influence of these earlier generations of Christians. With discussion questions for further reflection and primary sources from major evangelistic figures of the past, Gospel Witness through the Ages is the most definitive history of evangelism available—essential for understanding how Christians today can continue proclaiming the gospel to the whole world, as Christians have in every century past.
In this book three main things have been accomplished. First, it locates the emergence of religious pluralism as a problem for Christian theology. Secondly, it shows the critical weaknesses in the approaches to pluralism that we find in the works of Gavin D'Costa, George Lindbeck and John Hick, all major players in the field of religious pluralism. Retrieving theological material from seventeenth-century Comenius and eighteenth-century Zinzendorf, the book shows that the Protestant tradition has suitable theological material that can better serve the development of a theology of religious pluralism. Thirdly, the book enters into dialogue with Islam and highlights exciting new approaches to addressing the issues of salvation, the Qur'an and Christology. One critical outcome of the book is that it breaks new ground in showing the limitations of liberation theology and proposes a fascinating, new, pluralism-sensitive hermeneutical approach to contextual theology.
Tanzanian Adventism exemplifies one of the most fascinating shifts in the history of religions: the growth of Christianity in Africa. Most striking in this account is the analysis of a minority denomination's transformation to a veritable "folk church."