Author: Bryan F. Le Beau
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813193826
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Get Book Here
Book Description
During the eighteenth century Presbyterians of the Middle Colonies were separated by divergent allegiances, mostly associated with groups migrating from New England with an English Puritan background and from northern Ireland with a Scotch-lrish tradition. Those differences led first to a fiery ordeal of ecclesiastical controversy and then to a spiritual awakening and a blending of diversity into a new order, American Presbyterianism. Several men stand out not only for having been tested by this ordeal but also for having made real contributions to the new order that arose from the controversy. The most important of these was Jonathan Dickinson. Bryan Le Beau has written the first book on Dickinson, whom historians have called "the most powerful mind in his generation of American divines." One of the founders of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and its first president, Dickinson was a central figure during the First Great Awakening and one of the leading lights of colonial religious life. Le Beau examines Dickinson's writings and actions, showing him to have been a driving force in forming the American Presbyterian Church, accommodating diverse traditions in the early church, and resolving the classic dilemma of American religious history—the simultaneous longing for freedom of conscience and the need for order. This account of Dickinson's life and writings provides a rare window into a time of intense turmoil and creativity in American religious history.
Author: Thomas S. Kidd
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300148259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the mid-eighteenth century, Americans experienced an outbreak of religious revivals that shook colonial society. This book provides a definitive view of these revivals, now known as the First Great Awakening, and their dramatic effects on American culture. Historian Thomas S. Kidd tells the absorbing story of early American evangelical Christianity through the lives of seminal figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield as well as many previously unknown preachers, prophets, and penitents.The Great Awakening helped create the evangelical movement, which heavily emphasized the individual’s experience of salvation and the Holy Spirit’s work in revivals. By giving many evangelicals radical notions of the spiritual equality of all people, the revivals helped breed the democratic style that would come to characterize the American republic. Kidd carefully separates the positions of moderate supporters of the revivals from those of radical supporters, and he delineates the objections of those who completely deplored the revivals and their wildly egalitarian consequences. The battles among these three camps, the author shows, transformed colonial America and ultimately defined the nature of the evangelical movement.
Author: Michael J. Lee
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137299665
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211
Get Book Here
Book Description
According to conventional wisdom, by the late 1800s, the image of Bible as a supernatural and infallible text crumbled in the eyes of intellectuals under the assaults of secularizing forces. This book corrects the narrative by arguing that in America, the road to skepticism had already been paved by the Scriptures' most able and ardent defenders.
Author: Bradley J. Longfield
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 066423156X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book provides a history of Presbyterians in American culture from the early eighteenth to the late twentieth century. Longfield assesses both the theological and cultural development of American Presbyterianism, with particular focus on the mainline tradition that is expressed most prominently in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). He explores how Presbyterian churches--and individuals rooted in those churches--influenced and were influenced by the values, attitudes, perspectives, beliefs, and ideals assumed by Americans in the course of American history. The book will serve as an important introduction to Presbyterian history that will interest historians, students, and church leaders alike.
Author: Mark A. Noll
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199882231
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 637
Get Book Here
Book Description
Religious life in early America is often equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism best embodied by the theology of Cotton Mather. Yet, by the nineteenth century, American theology had shifted dramatically away from the severe European traditions directly descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most influential. In its place arose a singularly American set of beliefs. In America's God, Mark Noll has written a biography of this new American ethos. In the 125 years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, theology played an extraordinarily important role in American public and private life. Its evolution had a profound impact on America's self-definition. The changes taking place in American theology during this period were marked by heightened spiritual inwardness, a new confidence in individual reason, and an attentiveness to the economic and market realities of Western life. Vividly set in the social and political events of the age, America's God is replete with the figures who made up the early American intellectual landscape, from theologians such as Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel W. Taylor, William Ellery Channing, and Charles Hodge and religiously inspired writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Stowe to dominant political leaders of the day like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The contributions of these thinkers combined with the religious revival of the 1740s, colonial warfare with France, the consuming struggle for independence, and the rise of evangelical Protestantism to form a common intellectual coinage based on a rising republicanism and commonsense principles. As this Christian republicanism affirmed itself, it imbued in dedicated Christians a conviction that the Bible supported their beliefs over those of all others. Tragically, this sense of religious purpose set the stage for the Civil War, as the conviction of Christians both North and South that God was on their side served to deepen a schism that would soon rend the young nation asunder. Mark Noll has given us the definitive history of Christian theology in America from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. It is a story of a flexible and creative theological energy that over time forged a guiding national ideology the legacies of which remain with us to this day.
Author: Gary Scott Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190608390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 636
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Presbyterianism provides a state of the art reference tool written by leading scholars in the fields of religious studies and history.
Author: Nathan Feldmeth
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467460915
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 500
Get Book Here
Book Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title (2022) A definitive history of evangelical Presbyterianism in America Reformed and Evangelical across Four Centuries tells the story of the Presbyterian church in the United States, beginning with its British foundations and extending to its present-day expression in multiple American Presbyterian denominations. This account emphasizes the role of the evangelical movement in shaping various Presbyterian bodies in America, especially in the twentieth century amid increasing departures from traditional Calvinism, historic orthodoxy, and a focus on biblical authority. Particular attention is also given to crucial elements of diversity in the Presbyterian story, with increasing numbers of African American, Latino/a, and Korean American Presbyterians—among others—in the twenty-first century. Overall, this book will be a bountiful resource to anyone curious about what it means to be Presbyterian in the multidimensional American context, as well as to anyone looking to understand this piece of the larger history of Christianity in the United States.
Author: Robert Davis Smart
Publisher: Reformation Heritage Books
ISBN: 1601784341
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 361
Get Book Here
Book Description
When Jesus ascended to heaven and sat down at the right hand of God the Father, He poured out His Holy Spirit at Pentecost. This significant historical and redemptive event was not the last time Christ poured out His Spirit in redemptive history. Mindful of these subsequent acts, Pentecostal Outpourings , presents historical research on revivals in the Reformed tradition during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Investigating the British Isles, it observes the outpourings experienced among Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, Irish Dissenters, Calvinistic English Baptists, and Scottish Presbyterians. It then moves on to evaluate the revival instincts among Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and the Dutch Reformed in America. May the knowledge of these outpourings of the Holy Spirit help us seek God earnestly to revive His Church once again. Table of Contents: Preface - Steve Lawson I. Revival in the British Isles 1. The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival - Eifon Evans 2. Melting the Ice of a Long Winter: Revival and Irish Dissent - Ian Hugh Clary 3. The Lord Is Doing Great Things and Answering Prayer Everywhere: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century - Michael A. G. Haykin 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective - Iain Campbell II. Revival in America 5. Edwards's Revival Instinctive and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded -Robert Davis Smart 6. The Glorious Work of God: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries - Peter Beck 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth Century - Tom Nettles 8. Dutch Reformed Church in America (the 18th century) - Joel Beeke
Author: Richard Endress
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1039149073
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book covers the history of multiple families whose only overarching connection is that they were all the ancestors of Robert Hilton Squires II, my brother-in-law. But these various genealogical strands intersected with many pivotal eras in English colonial and later American history. Thus in some strange way the history of this one contemporary person is a microcosm of the story of America.
Author: Peter J. Thuesen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019988398X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Get Book Here
Book Description
Winner of the Christianity Today 2010 Book Award for History/Biography, and praised in Christian Century as "witty...erudite...masterful," this groundbreaking history, the first of its kind, shows that far from being only about the age-old riddle of divine sovereignty versus human free will, the debate over predestination is inseparable from other central Christian beliefs and practices--the efficacy of the sacraments, the existence of purgatory and hell, the extent of God's providential involvement in human affairs--and has fueled theological conflicts across denominations for centuries. Peter Thuesen reexamines not only familiar predestinarians such as the New England Puritans and many later Baptists and Presbyterians, but also non-Calvinists such as Catholics and Lutherans, and shows how even contemporary megachurches preach a "purpose-driven" outlook that owes much to the doctrine of predestination. For anyone wanting a fuller understanding of religion in America, Predestination offers both historical context on a doctrine that reaches back 1,600 years and a fresh perspective on today's denominational landscape.
