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No other American Puritan has fueled both the popular and academic imagination as has Cotton Mather (1663-1728). Colonial America's foremost theologian and historian, Mather was also one of its most powerful voices advocating millennialism. His lifelong preoccupation with this subject culminated in his definitive treatise, "Triparadisus" (1726/1727), left unpublished at his death. In it, Mather justified his ideological revisionism; his response to the philological, historical, and scientific challenges of the Bible as text by English and continental deists; and his hermeneutical break from the orthodox exegeses of his father, Increase Mather, and Joseph Mede. In his critical introduction to this edition of "Triparadisus," Reiner Smolinski demonstrates that Mather's hermeneutical defense of revealed religion seeks to negotiate between the orthodox literalist position of his New England forebears and the new philological challenges to the scriptures by Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac de La Peyrere, Benedict de Spinoza, Richard Simon, Henry Hammond, Thomas Burnet, William Whiston, Anthony Collins, and Isaac Newton. In "Triparadisus" Mather's hermeneutics undergoes a radical shift from a futurist interpretation of the prophecies to a preterite position as he joins the quasi-allegorical camp of Grotius, Hammond, John Lightfoot, and Richard Baxter. The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather also challenges a number of longstanding paradigms in the scholarship on American Puritanism, history, literature, and culture. Smolinski specifically calls into question the consensus among intellectual historians who have traced the Puritan origin of the American self to the Errand into the Wilderness and the idea of God's elect. He also challenges the commonplace argument that New England represented the culmination of prophetic history in an American New Jerusalem for the Mathers and their counterparts. As an important link between Mather's premillennialism in the late seventeenth century and Jonathan Edwards's postmillennialism in the Great Awakening, "Triparadisus" provides important biographical insight into Mather's last years, when, liberated from his father's interpretations, he put forward his own.
The Croatian-born Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520-1575) was a Lutheran theologian and reformer who spent most of his adult life in the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire, playing an important role within the Evangelical churches and in the confessionalization of his day. Luka Ili? establishes that Flacius' theology became increasingly radicalized with time and examines aspects of this process through following two parallel tracks. One trajectory focuses on the development of Flacius' theological thought, while the other one discusses the pivotal influences and major turning points in his life, such as being exiled from different cities. Although Flacius did enjoy some measure of success and even attracted a considerable number of followers for shorter periods of time, his radicalized theology ultimately led to his public downfall and marred his legacy. Flacius' relationships with the most important Wittenberg figures, Luther and Melanchthon, are also explored, along with the vast personal and professional networks Flacius built up in imperial cities, all of which shaped his theological development. One of the dominant claims is that Flacius' understanding of original sin and of grace were the lynchpin for much of his opus. At the same time, the findings demonstrate that Flacius was a multifaceted individual with interest and competences in a number of different academic fields.
As profound as Martin Luther's ideas are, this giant of church history was concerned above all with practical instruction for daily Christian living. Harvesting Martin Luther's Reflections highlights this concern of Luther, mining his thought in key areas of doctrine, ethics, and church practice. Gathering noteworthy contributions by well-known Luther scholars from Europe and the Americas, this book ranges broadly over theological questions about baptism and righteousness, ethical issues like poverty and greed, and pastoral concerns like worship and spirituality.
Until relatively recently most of southern Europe was governed by authoritarian dictatorships, but within the space of two decades more or less stable democracies have become established throughout the entire region. At the same time, backward peasant economies have been transformed by the injection of huge amounts of capital and new technology, into modern economies which are now approaching the size of the more established economies of Northern Europe. Southern Europe is a major contribution to our understanding of European politics. The product of original research and synthesis on exceptionally wide literature, it provides authoritative and systematic coverage of the politics, economics and society of this important region of Europe from 1945, up to the 1994 election of Silvio Berlusconi's far right alliance in Italy.
The chapters in this volume were originally presented as papers at the 2009 colloquium of the Calvin Studies Society, held to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of John Calvin's birth. They offer a fresh evaluation of Calvin's ideas and achievements, and describe how others--from his contemporaries to the present--have responded to or built upon the Calvinist heritage. This book dispels popular misperceptions about Calvin and Calvinism, allowing readers to make a more accurate assessment of Calvin's importance as a theologian and historical figure. Contributions address areas in which Calvin's legacy has been most controversial or misunderstood, such as his attitude toward women, his advocacy of church discipline, and his understanding of predestination. These essays also give a nuanced picture of the impact of Calvinism by taking account of both the positive and negative reactions to it from the early modern period to the present. Part 1: Calvin: The Man and His Work Part 2: Appeal of and Responses to Calvinism Part 3: The Impact of Calvin's Ideas
