Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority

Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority

Author: Harro Höpfl

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1991-09-27

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 9780521342087

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Martin Luther and John Calvin were the principal 'magistral' Reformers of the sixteenth-century: they sought to enlist the cooperation of rulers in the work of reforming the Church. However, neither regarded the relationship between Reformed Christians and the secular authorities as comfortable or unproblematic. The two pieces translated here, Luther's On Secular Authority and Calvin's On Civil Government, constitute their most sustained attempts to find the proper balance between these two commitments. Despite their mutual respect, there were wide divergences between them. Luther's On Secular Authority would later be cited en bloc in favour of religious toleration, whereas Calvin envisaged secular authority as an agency for the compulsory establishment of the external conditions of Christian virtue and the suppression of dissent. The introduction, glossary, chronology and bibliography contained in this volume locate the texts in the broader context of the theology and political thinking of their authors.


Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority

Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority

Author: John Calvin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1991-09-27

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 1107393035

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Martin Luther and John Calvin were the principal 'magistral' Reformers of the sixteenth-century: they sought to enlist the cooperation of rulers in the work of reforming the Church. However, neither regarded the relationship between Reformed Christians and the secular authorities as comfortable or unproblematic. The two pieces translated here, Luther's On Secular Authority and Calvin's On Civil Government, constitute their most sustained attempts to find the proper balance between these two commitments. Despite their mutual respect, there were wide divergences between them. Luther's On Secular Authority would later be cited en bloc in favour of religious toleration, whereas Calvin envisaged secular authority as an agency for the compulsory establishment of the external conditions of Christian virtue and the suppression of dissent. The introduction, glossary, chronology and bibliography contained in this volume locate the texts in the broader context of the theology and political thinking of their authors.


Theology of John Calvin

Theology of John Calvin

Author: Karl Barth

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 1995-11

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780802806963

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This historically significant volume collects Karl Barth's lectures on John Calvin, delivered at the University of Göttingen in 1922. The book opens with an illuminating sketch of medieval theology, an appreciation of Luther's breakthrough, and a comparative study of the roles of Zwingli and Calvin. The main body of the work consists of an increasingly sympathetic, and at times amusing, account of Calvin's life up to his recall to Geneva. In the process, Barth examines and evaluates the early theological writings of Calvin, especially the first edition of the Institutes.


Luther, Calvin and the Mission of the Church

Luther, Calvin and the Mission of the Church

Author: Thorsten Prill

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2017-01-20

Total Pages: 102

ISBN-13: 3668383502

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Document from the year 2017 in the subject Theology - Miscellaneous, Namibia Evangelical Theological Seminary, language: English, abstract: On the 31st October 1517 Martin Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses in which he criticised the sale of indulgences by the Roman Catholic Church. This date is considered the beginning of the Reformation. While the Protestant Reformers are widely praised for the rediscovery of the biblical gospel, they have come under fire regarding their views on mission. There are church historians and missiologists who argue that the Protestant Reformers were not interested in mission and, in fact, ignored the mission mandate which Christ had given to his Church. However, a closer study of Luther, Calvin, Bucer, and Melanchthon, shows that the critics miss both the Reformers’ commitment to practical mission work and their missiological contributions. The critics seem to overlook the fact that cities, such as Geneva and Wittenberg, in which the Reformers lived, studied and taught, served as hubs of a huge missionary enterprise. Thousands of preachers went out from these centres of the Reformation to spread the gospel all over Europe. Leading Scandinavian theologians, such as Mikael Agricola, Olaus Petri, or Hans Tausen, had all studied under Luther and Melanchthon in Wittenberg before they began their reform work in their home countries. Furthermore, with their re-discovery of the gospel of justification by faith alone, their emphasis on the personal character of faith in Christ, their radical re-interpretation of the priesthood, their recognition of God’s authorship of mission, their reminder that the witness to the gospel takes place in the midst of a spiritual battle, and their insistence that the Bible has to be available in common languages, the Protestant Reformers laid down important principles for the mission work of the church which are still valid today.


Martin Luther in Context

Martin Luther in Context

Author: David M. Whitford

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-08-30

Total Pages: 813

ISBN-13: 1108584098

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Martin Luther remains a popular, oft-quoted, referenced, lauded historical figure. He is often seen as the fulcrum upon which the medieval turned into the modern, the last great medieval or the first great modern; or, he is the Protestant hero, the virulent anti-Semite; the destroyer of Catholic decadence, or the betrayer of the peasant cause. An important but contested figure, he was all of these things. Understanding Luther's context helps us to comprehend how a single man could be so many seemingly contradictory things simultaneously. Martin Luther in Context explores the world around Luther in order to make the man and the Reformation movement more understandable. Written by an international team of leading scholars, it includes over forty short, accessible essays, all specially commissioned for this volume, which reconstruct the life and world of Martin Luther. The volume also contextualizes the scholarship and reception of Luther in the popular mind.


When God Spoke Greek

When God Spoke Greek

Author: Timothy Michael Law

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2013-08-15

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0199781729

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Most readers do not know about the Bible used almost universally by early Christians, or about how that Bible was birthed, how it grew to prominence, and how it differs from the one used as the basis for most modern translations. Although it was one of the most important events in the history of our civilization, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in the third century BCE is an event almost unknown outside of academia. Timothy Michael Law offers the first book to make this topic accessible to a wider audience. Retrospectively, we can hardly imagine the history of Christian thought, and the history of Christianity itself, without the Old Testament. When the Emperor Constantine adopted the Christian faith, his fusion of the Church and the State ensured that the Christian worldview (which by this time had absorbed Jewish ideals that had come to them through the Greek translation) would leave an imprint on subsequent history. This book narrates in a fresh and exciting way the story of the Septuagint, the Greek Scriptures of the ancient Jewish Diaspora that became the first Christian Old Testament.


Discourse on Free Will

Discourse on Free Will

Author: Desiderius Erasmus

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-06-27

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 1780938233

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Desiderius Eramsus (1466/9-1536) was the most renowned scholar of his age, a celebrated humanist and Classicist, and the first teacher of Greek at Cambridge. An influential figure in the Protestant Reformation, though without ever breaking from the Church himself, he satirised both human folly and the corruption of the Church. Martin Luther (1483-1546) was the founder of the German Reformation. His 95 Theses became a manifesto for reform of the Catholic Church and led to his being tried for heresy. He remained in Germany, Professor of Biblical Exegesis at the University of Wittenburg, until his death, publishing a large number of works, including three major treatises and a translation of the New Testament into German. Comprising Erasmus's "The Free Will" and Luther's "The Bondage of the Will", Discourse on Free Will is a landmark text in the history of Protestantism. Encapsulating the perspective on free will of two of the most important figures in the history of Christianity, it remains to this day a powerful, thought-provoking and timely work.


Martin Luther

Martin Luther

Author: Richard Marius

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2000-11-01

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 0674040619

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Few figures in history have defined their time as dramatically as Martin Luther. And few books have captured the spirit of such a figure as truly as this robust and eloquent life of Luther. A highly regarded historian and biographer and a gifted novelist and playwright, Richard Marius gives us a dazzling portrait of the German reformer--his inner compulsions, his struggle with himself and his God, the gestation of his theology, his relations with contemporaries, and his responses to opponents. Focusing in particular on the productive years 1516-1525, Marius' detailed account of Luther's writings yields a rich picture of the development of Luther's thought on the great questions that came to define the Reformation. Marius follows Luther from his birth in Saxony in 1483, during the reign of Frederick III, through his schooling in Erfurt, his flight to an Augustinian monastery and ordination to the outbreak of his revolt against Rome in 1517, the Wittenberg years, his progress to Worms, his exile in the Wartburg, and his triumphant return to Wittenberg. Throughout, Marius pauses to acquaint us with pertinent issues: the question of authority in the church, the theology of penance, the timing of Luther's Reformation breakthrough, the German peasantry in 1525, Muntzer's revolutionaries, the whys and hows of Luther's attack on Erasmus. In this personal, occasionally irreverent, always humane reconstruction, Luther emerges as a skeptic who hated skepticism and whose titanic wrestling with the dilemma of the desire for faith and the omnipresence of doubt and fear became an augury for the development of the modern religious consciousness of the West. In all of this, he also represents tragedy, with the goodness of his works overmatched by their calamitous effects on religion and society.


Liberty in the Things of God

Liberty in the Things of God

Author: Robert Louis Wilken

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0300226632

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From one of the leading historians of Christianity comes this sweeping reassessment of religious freedom, from the church fathers to John Locke In the ancient world Christian apologists wrote in defense of their right to practice their faith in the cities of the Roman Empire. They argued that religious faith is an inward disposition of the mind and heart and cannot be coerced by external force, laying a foundation on which later generations would build. Chronicling the history of the struggle for religious freedom from the early Christian movement through the seventeenth century, Robert Louis Wilken shows that the origins of religious freedom and liberty of conscience are religious, not political, in origin. They took form before the Enlightenment through the labors of men and women of faith who believed there could be no justice in society without liberty in the things of God. This provocative book, drawing on writings from the early Church as well as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reminds us of how "the meditations of the past were fitted to affairs of a later day."