The modern missions movement has seen profound shifts in theology, philosophy, and strategy, most notably described in seminal works such as Bosch’s Transforming Mission and Wright’s The Mission of God. An additional shift in missions literature has occurred in a departure from patriarchal paradigms in missions toward an accentuation of cultural humility and mutuality in … Read more
Chief Albert Luthuli was the first African Nobel Laureate, a confessing and practicing Christian within the Congregational Church, and an anti-apartheid activist who was President-General of the African National Congress from 1952 until his untimely death in 1967. Guided by the notion that particular and contextual theological reflections possess broader, catholic significance, the paper discusses … Read more
The nature of Christ’s millennial kingdom was one that greatly preoccupied English theologians across the long seventeenth century. The national trauma of the English civil war throughout the 1640s and the execution of Charles I in 1649 produced many millennial postulations, yet upon Charles II’s rise to the throne in 1660 and the 1688 “Glorious” … Read more
The nineteenth century’s “social purity” campaign against prostitution highlights the role of Christian theology in empowering women in social activism. This paper will tell the story of the nineteenth-century social purity movement by drawing on what has been called “Globalizing Historiography”: telling the story of five social purity movements in four countries during the years … Read more
Throughout his life and ministry, which spanned nearly four decades in the late eighteenth century, the Particular Baptist pastor-theologian Abraham Booth (1734–1806) stressed the necessity of sanctification in the Christian life. In short, he believed that the Holy Spirit’s work of sanctification was an indispensable aspect of the believer’s salvation in Jesus Christ. What were … Read more
February 15, 2007, Nigeria’s Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola met in Dar es Salam with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to discuss their differences over the denomination’s accommodation of the gay agenda. They were there for a worldwide Anglican primates meeting, a group riven by that issue since the 1990s. Lines were drawn, with Williams favoring … Read more
Full title: Monoculture or Counterculture: Authentic Christianity vs. Christendom in Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen as a Model for Global Evangelicalism In the early 19th century, theologian/philosopher Søren Kierkegaard lived in Copenhagen, Denmark. Kierkegaard dubbed his situation “Christendom,” an amalgamation of cultural and national identity with Christianity. In the “objective” sense everyone was a Christian—by law all infants … Read more
For many contemporaries, the twentieth century was an age of the Holy Spirit. Besides the great revivals in Wales, India, and Korea, the enthusiasm of the Keswick Convention was also carried by the missionaries to China. For Chinese Protestants, pneumatology is an understudied doctrine, even though many desperately desired the Holy Spirit’s power. While praying … Read more
Despite public hostility toward Roman Catholicism by mid-nineteenth-century American Protestants, there are notable cases of influential Northern Protestants converting to Catholicism. Particular conversions during the 1840s may be primarily attributed to shared experiences among the converts before changing faiths, facilitated by the evangelistic outreach of the Roman Catholic Church. Such transitions may be seen as … Read more
In 2022, the Center for House Church Theology released an important anthology of essays on Church and State (“Faithful Disobedience”), with prominent contributions from Pastor Wang Yi. His work deserves, as this publication intended, a wider broadcast. Moreover, his thought agrees in key sectors with previous ground-breaking political theorists and provides a global witness to … Read more