Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity

Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity PDF Author: Jan Stievermann
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161542701
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Jan Stievermann's pioneering study of Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana examines this Puritan scholar's engagement with the Hebrew Bible as Old Testament. The author focuses specifically on Mather's struggle to uphold or modify traditional typological and allegorical readings in the face of a growing awareness of the historicity of Scriptures. Other key issues include Mather's interventions in the contemporary debates over the legitimacy of Christian interpretations of the prophets, as well as over the authorship, provenance, genre, and spiritual import of texts such as Ecclesiastes and Canticles. Stievermann's book yields fascinating insights into an underappreciated phase of exegesis that was at once traditionalist and innovative, apologetically oriented, pious, and open to new modes of historical-textual criticism. Moreover, it shows how Mather's biblical exegesis fits into the broader development of Puritan theology and identity. --

Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity

Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity PDF Author: Jan Stievermann
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161542701
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Get Book

Book Description
Jan Stievermann's pioneering study of Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana examines this Puritan scholar's engagement with the Hebrew Bible as Old Testament. The author focuses specifically on Mather's struggle to uphold or modify traditional typological and allegorical readings in the face of a growing awareness of the historicity of Scriptures. Other key issues include Mather's interventions in the contemporary debates over the legitimacy of Christian interpretations of the prophets, as well as over the authorship, provenance, genre, and spiritual import of texts such as Ecclesiastes and Canticles. Stievermann's book yields fascinating insights into an underappreciated phase of exegesis that was at once traditionalist and innovative, apologetically oriented, pious, and open to new modes of historical-textual criticism. Moreover, it shows how Mather's biblical exegesis fits into the broader development of Puritan theology and identity. --

Prophecy and Eschatology in the Transatlantic World, 1550−1800

Prophecy and Eschatology in the Transatlantic World, 1550−1800 PDF Author: Andrew Crome
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137520558
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Prophecy and millennial speculation are often seen as having played a key role in early European engagements with the new world, from Columbus’s use of the predictions of Joachim of Fiore, to the puritan ‘Errand into the Wilderness’. Yet examinations of such ideas have sometimes presumed an overly simplistic application of these beliefs in the lives of those who held to them. This book explores the way in which prophecy and eschatological ideas influenced poets, politicians, theologians, and ordinary people in the Atlantic world from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Chapters cover topics ranging from messianic claimants to the Portuguese crown to popular prophetic almanacs in eighteenth-century New England; from eschatological ideas in the poetry of George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet, to the prophetic speculation surrounding the Evangelical revivals. It highlights the ways in which prophecy and eschatology played a key role in the early modern Atlantic world.

Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment

Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment PDF Author: Ryan P. Hoselton
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031449355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
This book explores the early evangelical quest for enlightenment by the Spirit and the Word. While the pursuit originated in the Protestant Reformation, it assumed new forms in the long eighteenth-century context of the early Enlightenment and transatlantic awakened Protestant reform. This work illuminates these transformations by focusing on the dynamic intersection of experimental philosophy and experimental religion in the biblical practices of early America’s most influential Protestant theologians, Cotton Mather (1663-1728) and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). As the first book-length project to treat Mather and Edwards together, this study makes an important contribution to the extensive scholarship on these figures, opening new perspectives on the continuities and complexities of colonial New England religion. It also provides new insights and interpretive interventions concerning the history of the Bible, early modern intellectual history, and evangelicalism’s complex relationship to the Enlightenment.

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture PDF Author: David P. Barshinger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019024951X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
For too long, scholars have published new research on Edwards without paying due attention to the work he took most seriously: biblical exegesis. Edwards is recognized as an innovative theologian who wielded tremendous influence on revivalism, evangelicalism, and New England theology. What is often missed is how much time he devoted to studying and understanding the Bible. He kept voluminous notebooks on Scripture and died with unrealized plans for major treatises on the Bible. More and more experts now recognize the importance of this aspect of his life; this book brings together the insights of leading Edwards scholars on this topic. The essays in Jonathan Edwards and Scripture set Edwards' engagement with Scripture in the context of seventeenth-century Protestant exegesis and eighteenth-century colonial interpretation. They provide case studies of Edwards' exegesis in varying genres of the Bible and probe his use of Scripture to develop theology. The authors also set his biblical interpretation in perspective by comparing it with that of other exegetes. This book advances our understanding of the nature and significance of Edwards' work with Scripture and opens new lines of inquiry for students of early modern Western history.

The Salvation of Israel

The Salvation of Israel PDF Author: Jeremy Cohen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501764764
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The Salvation of Israel investigates Christianity's eschatological Jew: the role and characteristics of the Jews at the end of days in the Christian imagination. It explores the depth of Christian ambivalence regarding these Jews, from Paul's Epistle to the Romans, through late antiquity and the Middle Ages, to the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Jeremy Cohen contends that few aspects of a religion shed as much light on the character and the self-understanding of its adherents as its expectations for the end of time. Moreover, eschatological beliefs express and mold an outlook toward nonbelievers, situating them in an overall scheme of human history and conditioning interaction with them as that history unfolds. Cohen's close readings of biblical commentary, theological texts, and Christian iconography reveal the dual role of the Jews of the last days. For rejecting belief and salvation in Jesus Christ, they have been linked to the false messiah—the Antichrist, the agent of Satan and the exemplary embodiment of evil. Yet from its inception, Christianity has also hinged its hopes for the second coming on the enlightenment and repentance of the Jews; for then, as Paul prophesized, "all Israel will be saved." In its vast historical scope, from the ancient Mediterranean world of early Christianity to seventeenth-century England and New England, The Salvation of Israel offers a nuanced and insightful assessment of Christian attitudes toward Jews, rife with inconsistency and complexity, thus contributing significantly to our understanding of Jewish-Christian relations.

A History of American Puritan Literature

A History of American Puritan Literature PDF Author: Kristina Bross
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108879713
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
For generations, scholars have imagined American puritans as religious enthusiasts, fleeing persecution, finding refuge in Massachusetts, and founding 'America'. The puritans have been read as a product of New England and the origin of American exceptionalism. This History challenges the usual understanding of American puritans, offering new ways of reading their history and their literary culture. Together, an international team of authors make clear that puritan America cannot be thought of apart from Native America, and that its literature is also grounded in Britain, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and networks that spanned the globe. Each chapter focuses on a single place, method, idea, or context to read familiar texts anew and to introduce forgotten or neglected voices and writings. A History of American Puritan Literature is a collaborative effort to create not a singular literary history, but a series of interlocked new histories of American puritan literature.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Evangelicalism

The Oxford Handbook of Early Evangelicalism PDF Author: Jonathan Yeager
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190863315
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 681

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Book Description
Evangelicalism, a worldwide interdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity, is one of the most popular and diverse religious movements in the world today. Evangelicals maintain the belief that the essence of the Gospel consists of the doctrine of salvation by grace, through faith in Jesus' atonement. Evangelicals can be found on every continent and among nearly all Christian denominations. The origin of this group of people has been traced to the turn of the eighteenth century, with roots in the Puritan and Pietist movements in England and Germany. The earliest evangelicals could be found among Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Moravians, and Presbyterians throughout North America, Britain, and Western Europe, and included some of the foremost names of the age, such as Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and George Whitefield. Early evangelicals were abolitionists, historians, hymn writers, missionaries, philanthropists, poets, preachers, and theologians. They participated in the major cultural and intellectual currents of the day, and founded institutions of higher education not limited to Dartmouth College, Brown University, and Princeton University. The Oxford Handbook of Early Evangelicalism provides the most authoritative and comprehensive overview of the significant figures and religious communities associated with early evangelicalism within the contextual and cultural environment of the long eighteenth century, with essays written by the world's leading experts in the field of eighteenth-century studies.

The Cambridge History of the American Essay

The Cambridge History of the American Essay PDF Author: Christy Wampole
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009080415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 836

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Book Description
From the country's beginning, essayists in the United States have used their prose to articulate the many ways their individuality has been shaped by the politics, social life, and culture of this place. The Cambridge History of the American Essay offers the fullest account to date of this diverse and complex history. From Puritan writings to essays by Indigenous authors, from Transcendentalist and Pragmatist texts to Harlem Renaissance essays, from New Criticism to New Journalism: The story of the American essay is told here, beginning in the early eighteenth century and ending with the vibrant, heterogeneous scene of contemporary essayistic writing. The essay in the US has taken many forms: nature writing, travel writing, the genteel tradition, literary criticism, hybrid genres such as the essay film and the photo essay. Across genres and identities, this volume offers a stirring account of American essayism into the twenty-first century.

Early Modern Prophecies in Transnational, National and Regional Contexts (3 vols.)

Early Modern Prophecies in Transnational, National and Regional Contexts (3 vols.) PDF Author: Lionel Laborie
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004443630
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 893

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Book Description
Laborie and Hessayon bring rare prophetic and millenarian texts to an international audience by presenting sources from all over Europe (broadly defined), and across the early modern period in English for the first time.

To Walk the Earth Again

To Walk the Earth Again PDF Author: Christopher Trigg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197652751
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
"The Quick and the Dead explores the political dimension of Anglo-American Protestant writing about the future resurrection of the dead between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Reading histories, epic poetry, funeral sermons, and scientific tracts alongside works of eschatological exegesis, the book challenges the conventional scholarly assumption that Protestantism's rejection of purgatory prepared the way for the individualization and secularization of Western attitudes towards mortality. A deeper engagement with the complex history of resurrection theology reveals the importance of collective solidarity with the dead for Protestant social and political thought. Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, and radicals looked to resurrection to understand their communities' prospects in the uncertain terrain of colonial America. They also expressed their conviction that political identities and religious duties did not expire with the mortal body but were carried over into the next life. This belief shaped their positions on a wide variety of issues, including the limits of ecclesiastical and civil power, the relationship of humanity to the natural world, and the emerging rhetoric of racial difference. In the early national and antebellum periods, secular and Christian reformers drew on the idea of resurrection to imagine how American republicanism might transform society and politics and ameliorate the human form itself. Early-modern Protestants really believed that they would live again in the flesh. By taking this belief seriously, this book opens up new perspectives on their mutually constitutive visions of earthly and resurrected existence"--