Journal articles on the topic 'Plymouth Brethren Christian Church'

This article examines the recent engagement with media by the closed Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (pbcc). Historically the pbcc have been reluctant to engage with mainstream media, preferring instead to keep their own council. However, the rejection by the Charity Commission for England and Wales of an application by a pbcc trust for charitable status proved to be a catalyst for significant and sustained media engagement. The concept of mediatization is utilised as a meta-process to frame the way the pbcc engaged with media in order to demonstrate how they provide ‘public benefit’ to the wider community, which was crucial to the successful gaining of charitable status.

Separation from the (evil) world based on 2 Tim 2.19-21 is a defining characteristic of exclusive brethrenism, both in its most extreme form, the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, and in other exclusive brethren groups. I examine this text in its context and then critically assess John Nelson Darby’s reading of it, working from his translation and his comments elsewhere in his writings. Darby misread the text as separation from “evil people” rather than avoidance of wrongdoing, with disastrous consequences. I conclude with some reflections on how his reading of v. 19 arose and on the dangers associated with translation work undertaken by influential individuals working in isolation from other scholars.

This article will examine aspects of Watchman Nee's interactions with British churches and missions during the 1920s and 1930s. It will argue that, rather than simply appropriating and adapting Christianity for a Chinese context, as has been claimed, a more complex exchange was taking place. In particular, Nee was seeking to develop churches in China on a primitivist basis – that is, using the New Testament as a model for church forms and practices. In this, he was drawing inspiration from the Christian (or Plymouth) Brethren, a radical evangelical group that had emerged in Britain during the nineteenth century. For a number of reasons, the significance of Nee's primitivism has been played down, both by his admirers in the West and by historians. However, it was a vital factor in the success of his movement and gave an important impetus to the spread of Christianity in China during the twentieth century.

Framed by formative worship theory, this paper examines the worship practices of the Methodists, the Baptists and the Plymouth (Free or Christian) Brethren in Argentina (1867–1930) and the beliefs and values these practices imprinted on a minority group striving to find its own identity at its inception in a predominantly Roman Catholic country. This essay not only aims to contribute to a better understanding of early evangelical Protestantism in Argentina, but also intends to foster a broader reflection on the formative power of Christian worship and the importance of its study, especially in missionary contexts. 1

The Church's attitude to housing issues is, of necessity, complicated. At the most basic level, human beings need shelter in order to survive: they need protection from the weather, and from predators, and all human beings need to sleep securely for several hours every day. The Christian gospel enjoins Christ's followers to assist in meeting such human need: “in as much as ye did it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it unto me”.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, there was a growing concern within the Church of Sweden that the church was, to a too large extent, managed by the clergy alone. In an attempt to give the laity a more active and influential role in the Church of Sweden, the Brethren of the Church was established in 1918. Since it was only possible for men to become members, the organization simultaneously addressed a different issue: the view that women had become a much too salient group in church life. This process was described by the Brethren and similar groups as a “feminization” of the church, a phrasing which later came to be used by historians and theologians to explain changes in Western Christianity in the nineteenth century. In other words, the Brethren considered questions of gender vital to their endeavor to create a church in which the laity held a more prominent position. This article analyzes how the perceived feminization and its assumed connection to secularization caused enhanced attempts to uphold and strengthen gender differentiation in the Church of Sweden in the early twentieth century. By analyzing an all-male lay organization, the importance of homosociality in the construction of Christian masculinities will also be discussed.

James Luther Adams died last summer at the age of 92. He was one of four or five giants in his generation of American Christian ethicists. Many members of this society who were doctoral students under him have themselves become important teachers and writers of religious ethics.George Huntston Williams has described Adams as one of the three most significant figures in the history of the Unitarian Universalist denomination, yet Adams grew up as the son of a Baptist and Plymouth Brethren preacher. Adams lived in tension but not in rejection with this Fundamentalist youth. On the one hand, he found lacking there what became his constant passion. Christian life must be carried out in the midst of the institutions of society.

The political turmoil which characterised the decade from 1825 to 1835 is interestingly reflected in a religious crisis, as a result of which Established Church and traditional nonconformity alike were found by seceders to be spiritually wanting. Millenarian and charismatic movements are often, in part, an expression of social uncertainty. Any analysis of such movements as the Plymouth Brethren or the self-styled ‘Catholic Apostolic Church’ must take into account their social milieu which, at that time, included a great deal of political agitation - for causes like Roman Catholic Emancipation, parliamentary reform, currency reform and nascent socialism - as well as anxiety arising from the outbreak of cholera and social unrest, with several European revolutions in the background. It may not be entirely fortuitous that, when Edward Irving was expelled from his church in Regent Square in 1832, his congregation (not without some misgivings) met for a while in Robert Owen's socialist Rotunda in the Gray's Inn Road.

In this article, I compare two forms of Christian temproality in the Faroe Islands. In so doing, I problematize some of the ways in which the idea of history has been applied theoretically to studies of churches and congregations in the country. As a remedy to what I see as the shortcomings of social theory when applied to Pentecostal temporality, I propose seeing the latter as a form of extended present. This is set in contrast to dispensationalism, which sees historical and theological time as occuring in a sequential manner. Dispensationalism in this context refers more than anything to the Plymouth Brethren, who make up the biggest group of non-Lutheran Christians in the Faroe Islands. Finally, I reflect on how temporality is shaped by operational goals that differ between similar, yet subtly different Christian practitioners. Keywords: Faroe Islands, Pentecostalism, temporality, history, theology, presence, dispensationalism, orthodoxy

This brief article is a legacy of the authors twenty-five year teaching experience of Nigerian Church History in three Nigerian Universities between May 25, 1987 and May 31, 2012 and his ministerial duties and lecture on Church history in the Lutheran Seminary in Nigeria and the various interaction with other Christian brethren, especially in relationship with Christian students of The Apostolic Church, Nigeria. In this article, the researchers have tried to describe the early history of the Apostolic Church in Cross River State of Nigeria, West Africa, through a brief biographical stetch of Pastor Eyo Nkune Okpo Ene of Ambo Family, Mbaraokom, Creek Town (Obio Oko), who lived between 22nd November, 1895 and 1st February, 1973 (78years). This work is a paragon or model of other similar ones: like those of Garrick Idakatima Sokari Braide, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, Essien Ukpabio, Jonathan Udo Ekong and others.

AbstractThis article analyzes the phenomena of dancing and wedding apparel in weddings of rural members of an unusual Protestant denomination of Anabaptist origins in Matabeleland, colonial Zimbabwe. The focus is on gendered aspects of African Christian adaptation of mission teaching amongst Ndebele members of the Brethren in Christ Church. The church in North America was firm at home on the matter of dancing (it was forbidden), and internally conflicted regarding men's garb. In the decades preceding World War II, African members of the church embraced fashionable dress for grooms and dancing at wedding feasts as common practice at BICC weddings. However, in a gendered pattern reflecting Ndebele, colonial and mission ideas of women's subjection, African women's bridal wear adhered to church teaching on Plainness, while African men's did not.

“‘God Is My Partner’: An Evangelical Business Man Confronts Depression and War” chronicles the early career of R. G. LeTourneau, an industrialist and lay preacher whose life challenges the historiography of mid-twentieth-century fundamentalism as apolitical and otherworldly. In the 1930s and 1940s, every businessman had to grapple with the expanding federal state under the New Deal and in World War II. LeTourneau exemplified theologically conservative evangelical resourcefulness under changing political and economic conditions. Born in 1888 to a Plymouth Brethren family, his cultural memory reached back to the evangelical business activism of the nineteenth century, while his future lay in the fundamentalist subculture that the Brethren did much to create. However, as a businessman, LeTourneau had little patience with doctrines dividing “the world” from the church. He integrated evangelicalism into his manufacturing and managerial roles, and pushed fundamentalist clergy to tap laymen's proselytizing energy. Between 1930 and 1943, the years on which this article focuses, LeTourneau attacked dilemmas that preoccupied other evangelical business men: higher taxes, greater regulation, a forceful labor movement, and the challenge, as he saw it, to uphold the gospel and private enterprise against communist subversion. Business men such as LeTourneau represented the front line of what scholars have too often dismissed as trivial: evangelical politics during the New Deal.

‘From some modern perspectives’, wrote James Belich, a leading historian of New Zealand, in 1996, ‘the evangelicals are hard to like. They dressed like crows; seemed joyless, humourless and sometimes hypocritical; [and] they embalmed the evidence poor historians need to read in tedious preaching’. Similar views have often been expressed in the historiography of Evangelical Protestantism, the subject of this essay. It will cover such disapproving appraisals of the Evangelical past, but because a high proportion of the writing about the movement was by insiders it will have more to say about studies by Evangelicals of their own history. Evangelicals are taken to be those who have placed particular stress on the value of the Bible, the doctrine of the cross, an experience of conversion and a responsibility for activism. They were to be found in the Church of England and its sister provinces of the Anglican communion, forming an Evangelical party that rivalled the high church and broad church tendencies, and also in the denominations that stemmed from Nonconformity in England and Wales, as well as in the Protestant churches of Scotland. Evangelicals were strong, often overwhelmingly so, within Methodism and Congregationalism and among the Baptists and the Presbyterians. Some bodies that arose later on, including the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren, the Churches of Christ and the Pentecostals (the last two primarily American in origin), joined the Evangelical coalition.

The antitrinitarian Polish Brethren, from the inception of their denomination as a breakaway from the Calvinist Reformed Church in 1565, had earnestly debated the issue of whether a “true Christian” might collaborate in the workof the sword-bearing magistracy, take part in war, or kill a fellow human being in self-defense. Whereas the brotherhood in the militarily exposed Grand Duchy of Lithuania, with a few exceptions, gave a positive answer, the congregational leaders in the more secure kingdom of Poland for the most part said no. To do any of these things, the latterargued, entailed disobedience to Jesus’ commandments as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in the New Testament. For Christ replaced the laws of the Old Testament, which had allowed the ancient Israelites to wage just wars and wield the sword for good cause, with a gospel of love and defenselessness. This doctrine of nonresistance the pacifist Brethren, of course, had taken over from the Anabaptists of central Europe, whose insistence on adult baptism they also adopted.

AbstractAs persistent territorial expansion transformed the predominantly Slavic, Orthodox Christian Muscovite state into a multiethnic empire by the mid-16th century, the Church articulated an ideology that set adoption of the Orthodox faith as the fundamental criterion for admission and assimilation into Muscovite society. An examination of Tatars in Muscovite service during the 1550s-1580s, however, reveals that in practice religious affiliation was not the sole factor determining acceptance into Muscovite society. Orthodox Christian Tatars, both members of the Chingissid elite and common servicemen, entered Muscovite society, but their ethnic Tatar identity continued to distinguish them from their Muscovite peers and inhibit their complete assimilation. Muslim Tatars, also represented at both elite and common levels, were not excluded from Muscovite society, but also found positions in it and were treated in a manner similar to that of their Orthodox brethren.

Abstract This paper critiques the framing of the pneumatological underpinning of ecclesiology as an Orthodox-Catholic conversation. The context for the Joint Commission for Orthodox-Catholic dialogue warrants the use of the metaphor “two lungs of the church” by official church leaders, ecclesiologists and theologians to speak of the Spirit’s work in and between both communions. However, I want to call attention to the pneumatological and ecclesiological problems in the use of the image “two lungs of the church.” If the Holy Spirit breathes upon and through the Body of Christ, reading the Spirit’s operation in the church (pneumatological-ecclesiology) cannot ignore, and much less dismiss or absorb (either explicitly or implicitly), the charismas outside of the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodoxy. Protestant denominations, such as Baptists, Brethren, Evangelicals, Presbyterians, Pentecostals and Charismatics are also contexts for studying the Spirit’s work in the churches. The paper concludes by proffering a mapping of recent pneumatological contributions of other Christian denominations and churches to invite theologians to assist in reframing or reconceptualizing a more appropriate anatomic metaphor for the Spirit’s work in and among the churches together.

Abstract Despite the centrality of the concept of God in Christian theology and Western philosophy for over two millennia, little attention has been given the concept of God in twentieth-century occultism in general, and in the writings of Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) in particular. In this article it is argued that Crowley’s multifaceted and sometimes conflicting approaches to God, are dependent on five main factors: (1) his childhood experiences of Christianity in the form of the Plymouth Brethren, (2) the impact of Empirical Scepticism and Comparative Religion, (3) the emanationist concept of God that he encountered through his membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, (4) the revelation of The Book of the Law and the claim of being a Prophet, The Great Beast 666, of a New Age, and finally (5) solar-phallicism as expressed through the Ordo Templi Orientis. These apparently contradictory strands in Crowley’s biography and intellectual armoury are in fact interlinked, and it is by studying them together that it is possible to identify the concept of God in Crowley’s magical writings.

The earliest Latin commentaries on the Apocalypse of John interpret this strange and powerful text as a revelation of the Christian community's drama as it fulfills the conditions leading to its glorious triumph in the final chapter of God's temporal plan. According to early Latin exegetes, one event—the opening of the seven seals, described in Apocalypse 6:1 through 8:1—represents a microcosm of the whole, revealing the entire purpose for the church's historical development. Throughout the first millennium of Christian history, biblical authorities analyzing the account of the seven seals for its underlying message concluded that God causes history to unfold and mature in order to allow the assembly of the elect to separate itself from its false brethren within the church. Processed and purified by history, the elect will exist in a state of readiness for their ascension into eternity.

Revivals have been a regular feature of the missionary enterprise. The modern Catholic and Protestant missionary movements themselves emerged from major religious revivals in the Western world. On the nineteenth-century China mission fields, Protestant missionaries from the mainline denominations frequently lamented the fact that their often nominal convert communities were lacking in Christian spirit and called for reinvigoration campaigns. It was, however, in the twentieth century that several large-scale revival movements occurred, starting with the ‘Manchurian revival’ of 1907–8 and culminating in the great ‘Shandong revival’ of the 1930s. The years after 1908 saw the rise of Chinese ― as well as some foreign ― full-time revivalists engaging in evangelistic efforts to reach the native Christian as well as non-Christian populations. The Canadian Presbyterian Jonathan Goforth (1859–1936) and the Shandong evangelist Ding Limei (1871–1936) are the most prominent representatives of the early campaigns of Christian renewal. In the 1920s, in spite of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy and anti-Christian agitation by nationalist and revolutionary forces in China, revivalism actually intensified. The principal focus of this paper will be on the new currents of spiritual regeneration that came with the proliferation of mostly small and sectarian missions of Holiness or Pentecostal provenance. Pentecostal ideas, in particular, contributed to the growth of Chinese independent churches and the wave of revivalism that swept across parts of China in the early 1930s. Such ‘gifts of the spirit’ as prophecy, divine healing and speaking in tongues, as well as a strong pre-millenarian belief, energised many of the more radical indigenous revivalists at this time. Other well-known Chinese evangelists had been influenced by the Holiness movement or Plymouth Brethren ideas. The Chinese dimension, especially in the context of Shandong province, is receiving particular attention in this paper.

I have always most earnestly desired that Christians should meet in Associations, such as will meet on Thursday, with this conviction, that their common Christianity ought to form a bond far more powerful to unite them to their one Lord, and Master, and Head, and in brotherhood one to another, than that their conscientious differences of opinion should form cause or excuse for hostile separation. I am glad to know that some of my brethren in the ministry of the Church of England will be with you. YMCA is a household acronym. Throughout the world people are sure that they know what it means. In 1926 two well-connected Labour politicians, the Wedgwood Benns, were in Moscow. There the head of the Bureau for Cultural Relations with Foreigners, Olga Kamenev, who was also well-connected, since she was Trotsky’s sister, told them about one of the Russian capital’s most serious problems: the street children. These youngsters, homeless since the civil war, slept under bridges and robbed railway trains:

This study studies the topics of the publications of the magazines «Yasna Put» (1935―1939s) and «Prominchyk Sontsia Liubovy» (1936―1937s). Those were issued by the monks of the Univ Holy Dormition Lavra of the Studite Rite. The religious press is one of the factors of social progress, specifically the development of spiritual and moral values. For the Ukrainian nation, it is also a significant means of social consolidation. A special place in the religious periodicals of the interwar period was occupied by the print media of monk orders and congregations. This study aims to determine the role of the Univ monks’ periodicals as a type of mission in preaching the Gospel and the spiritual renewal of the Ukrainian society. Analysis of the publications shows that «Yasna Put» helped the monks to understand their calling, to delve into it, to take the difficult path to the perfection of cognition of the God and approach to Him, as well as to spread the faith and preach the Gospel. The theological discourse of the Studite Rite and the problems of the history of the Ukrainian monasticism, the revival of the monasticism traditions based on the principles of the Early Church Fathers are present in the publications’ topics. At the same time, through «Prominchyk Sontsia Liubovy», the monks brought the word of God to the laity Christians, promoted among the youth «moral-religious education» and family values. Based on these findings, we conclude that the monks of the Univ Holy Dormition Lavra of the Studite Rite were open to dialogue, and their periodicals were the means of communication, dissemination of Christian values and the principles of the Early Church, as well as promoting the idea of ecumenism. The Studite Brethren are always the benchmark of living faith and an example of passing on the latter to neighbours in the Christian ethos. Keywords: religious press, Studite Brethren, Univ Holy Dormition Lavra of the Studite Rite, mission, Andrei Sheptytsky, Klymenty (Klymentii) Sheptytsky.

Mathew's varied ecclesiastical progress presents a fascinating case study of an episcopate detached from a main-stream Christian community and alerts us to the danger of solely considering ‘episcopal lineage‘ as the litmus test for apostolicity. Mathew was born in France in 1852 and baptised a Roman Catholic; due to his mother's scruples he was soon re-baptised in the Anglican Church. He studied for the ministry in the Episcopal Church of Scotland, but sought baptism again in the Church of Rome, into which he was ordained as a priest in Glasgow in 1877. He became a Dominican in 1878, but only persevered a year, moving around a number of Catholic dioceses: Newcastle, Plymouth, Nottingham and Clifton. Here he came across immorality, and became a Unitarian. He next turned to the Church of England and the Diocese of London, but was soon in trouble for officiating without a licence. In 1890 he put forward his claim to Garter King of Arms for the title of 4th Earl of Llandaff of Thomastown, Co. Tipperary. He renounced the Church of England in 1899 because of vice. After founding a zoo in Brighton, which went bankrupt, he appeared in court in connection with a charge of embezzlement. He then became a Roman Catholic again, now as a layman.

Members of Full Truth Calvary Church (a pseudonym) say that they trust God for their material needs by relying on Him to send jobs, homes, and even occasional windfalls of cash. In doing so, they reject steps that might help them get ahead, such as higher education, credit cards, mortgages, or negotiations for higher pay. Members frame their circumstances—which would typically mark them as working class or poor—as indicators of faith. Using over three years of ethnographic and interview data, I explore how this fundamentalist religious community manages socioeconomic risk and inequality with a discourse of reliance on God. I present three key findings. First, I show how Full Truth teachings connect financial practices to faith, framing how members handle money as an important part of their Christian identity. Next, I show how those teachings mitigate inequality by discouraging educational or economic advancement that would place members outside of church community norms. Finally, I show how members with greater means give to their poorer brethren anonymously in an effort to keep the focus on God as the ultimate provider. Though members remain aware of inequity between families, these gifts ideally ease disparities without creating relationships of debt or resentment. My findings contribute to sociological understandings of how religious communities make meaning out of socioeconomic inequality.

Reflecting on the early endeavours of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) following its establishment in 1699, John Chamberlayne, the Society’s secretary, confidently noted the ‘greater spirit of zeal and better face of Religion already visible throughout the Nation’. Although Chamberlayne clearly uses the language of revival, through the nineteenth century, many historians of the Evangelical Revival in Britain saw it as a ‘new’ movement arising in the 1730s with the advent of the evangelical preaching of the early Methodists, Welsh and English. Nineteenth-century historians often confidently propagated the belief that they lived in an age inherently superior to the unreformed eighteenth century. The view that the Church of England from the Restoration to the Evangelical Revival was dominated by Latitudinarian moralism leading to dead and formal religion has recently been challenged but was a regular feature of Victorian scholarship that has persisted in some recent work. The traditional tendency to highlight the perceived dichotomy between mainstream Anglicanism and the Revival has served to obscure areas of continuity such as the fact that Whitefield and the Wesleys intentionally addressed much of their early evangelistic preaching to like-minded brethren in pre-existing networks of Anglican religious societies and that Methodism thrived as a voluntary religious society. Scores of historians have refuted the Victorian propensity to assert the Revival’s independence from the Church of England.

This paper has argued that over some four decades the Catholic charismatics have been pulled in different directions regarding their political views and allegiances and that this is a result of contrasting dynamics and competing loyalties which renders conclusions as to their political orientations difficult to reach. To some degree such dynamics and competing loyalties result from the relationship of the charismatics in the Roman Church and the juxtaposition of the Church within USA politico-religious culture. In the early days of the Charismatic Renewal movement in the Roman Catholic Church the ‘spirit-filled’ Catholics appeared to show an indifference to secular political issues. Concern with spiritually renewing the Church, ecumenism and deep involvement with a variety of ecstatic Christianity drove this apolitical stance. If anything, as the academic works showed, the Catholic charismatics seemed in some respects more liberal than their non-charismatic counterparts in the Church. To some extent this reflected their middle-class and more educated demographic features. More broadly they adopted mainstream cultural changes while remaining largely politically inactive. As they grew closer to their Protestant brethren in the Renewal movement Catholic neo-Pentecostals tended to express more conservative views that were then part of the embryonic New Christian Right - the broad Charismatic movement becoming more overtly politicised in the 1980s. Somewhat later the Catholics were being pulled towards the traditional core Catholicism at a time the Renewal movement found itself well beyond its peak and influence in the mainstream denominations including the Roman Church. The Catholic charismatics were ‘returning to the fold’. During this period too the New Christian Right increased its attempt to marshal a broad coalition of conservative minded Protestants and Catholics. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s this proved to be largely ineffectual. The 2004 American Presidential election saw the initiation of the second office of George Bush. It seems clear that without the support of the New Christian Right - fundamentalist, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, charismatics - the victory would not have been secured. Based on research in South Carolina, however, suggests that the CR continues to be inwardly split and quarrels with other wings of the Republican Stephen J. Hunt: BETWIXT AND BETWEEN: THE POLITICAL ORIENTATIONS OF ROMAN CATHOLIC NEO-PENTECOSTALS • (pp. 27-51) THE CONTEMPORARY ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH AND POLITICS 49 Party, particularly business interests are evident.59 It is also apparent that into the twenty-first century there has proved to be an uneasy alliance in the New Christian Right, threatening to split along lines already observable in the 1970s and 1980s. For one thing the some of the political and social, if not moral teachings of the Catholic Church are at variant with such organizations as the Christian Coalition. The re-invention of the New Christian Right has not fully incorporated conservative Catholics nor Catholic charismatics. A further dynamic is that lay Catholics, charismatics or otherwise, have increasingly adopted a ‘pick and choose’ Catholicism in which there is a tendency to exercise personal views over a range of political issues irrespective of the formal teachings of the Church. To conclude, we might take a broader sweep in our understanding of the role of Catholicism in USA politics, in which the Catholic charismatics are merely one constituency. Recent scholarly work has pointed to the often under-estimated political influence of Roman Catholics in the USA. Genovese et al.60 show how today, as well as historically, Catholics and the Catholic Church has played a remarkably complex and diverse role in US politics. Dismissing notions of a cohesive ‘Catholic vote,’ Genovese et al. show how Catholics, Catholic institutions, and Catholic ideas permeate nearly every facet of contemporary American politics. Swelling with the influx of Latino, Asian, and African immigrants, and with former waves of European ethnics now fully assimilated in education and wealth, Catholics have never enjoyed such an influence in American political life. However, this Catholic political identity and engagement defy categorization, being evident in both left-wing and right-wing causes. It is fragmented and complex identity, a complexity to which the charismatics within the ranks of the Catholic Church continue to contribute.

In his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul wrote three main problems based on Timothy’s reports (1Thess 3:6). For the second problem, Paul discusses it with the technique of captatio benevolentiae. Paul first commended the Thessalonian way of life. For Paul, the Thessalonians had retained a distinctive Christian virtue, namely φιλαδελφία. Paul wrote the proof, “And indeed ye do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia” (1Thess 4:10). Out of praise, Paul later turned his letter into exhortation. Paul asked the Thessalonians “to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands” (1Thess 4:11). By using social and lexical approaches in interpreting 1 Thess 4:9-12, the writer finds the main focus of the second problem. Paul actually wanted to direct his advice to few Thessalonians who were able to work but chose not to work and instead depended on others. Paul refers to them as ἀτάκτοι. For Paul, they had damaged the reputation of the church in the eyes of τοὺς ἔξω by being a parasite and a burden to the rest of the Thessalonians.

To compare and contrast medieval Japan and medieval Western Europe allows one to discover three things. First, analogous to Catholic holy war, in Japan becomes visible a potential for war (albeit seldom actualised) for the sake, quite surprisingly, of Buddhism. Second, the different role played by emotions during war: in Europe, when vicious (and motivated by emotions such as greed, ambition or lust), they endanger the victors; thus the concern for right emotions foster, to a point, proper behavior during war; in Japan, however, the focus is on the emotions of the defeated, which may hamper a good reincarnation and produce vengeful spirits harmful to the victors and to the community at large. Finally, while Japanese warriors could and often did switch sides, the archipelago did not know for centuries anything approaching the European concept of treason, ideally punished with the highest cruelty, hated and feared to the point of generating collective paranoia and conspiracy theories. Western treason was (and is still) a secularised offspring of the Christian belief in the internal enemy of the Church, the false brethren. Arguably, the texture of the religions present in the two ensembles gave their specific form to these three aspects of warfare.

The two hundred or so evangelical clergymen who seceded from the Church of England into Protestant Dissent during the first half of the nineteenth century often paid a considerable price for their action. By crossing the subtle social boundary between Anglican priesthood and Nonconformist ministry they forfeited status and often, no doubt, income. A number vanished into comparative obscurity as pastors of small chapels, whether as ministers of a major denomination, Strict and Particular Baptists, Christian Brethren, or preachers in some unlabelled and impoverished chapel. If not so severely penalised for their secession as many of their colleagues who went to Rome, particularly those with wives for whom entry into the Roman priesthood was closed, they usually came off the worse in temporal terms for following the dictates of conscience. This, no doubt, they fully anticipated. What was not anticipated, however, was the imposition of a legal penalty for their act of secession. Though Anglican secessions to Rome or Dissent were not infrequent, their legality was apparently seldom if ever questioned. Liberal Churchmen like Theophilus Lindsey, who had abandoned the establishment for Unitarianism during the eighteenth century, had set up their chapels with impunity. In 1831 the evangelical William Tiptaft received a threat from Thomas Burgess, the bishop of Salisbury, upon seceding from the parish of Sutton Courtney, Berkshire, but nothing came of it. Those who left the via media for Rome were assumed to be acting within the framework of the law when they took up a new ministry as priests of another apostolic confession.

The article deals with the impact of the so called “culture of death” on medical practice in United States (US). In fact, in America, while the pretence is being kept up on the importance of the Hippocratic oath and the evangelic benevolence of the Good Samaritan, the strategy of the secular humanists is to try to make these irrelevant in the twin interests of social convenience and fiscal security. This campaign has been quietly waged in the media, in the courts, in public schools and universities. According this strategy, the threats to human life are, namely, two: abortion and euthanasia. On the first issue, in US the situation is discouraging because the US Supreme Court rulings Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton in 1973, that have made abortion a woman’s choice for any reason in the first and second trimester and available with medical consultation for almost any reason in the third trimester of pregnancy. Regarding the euthanasia, the campaign strategy is following the same pattern as that used to legalize abortion: the Euthanasia Lobby is claiming that millions of people in America are suffering unbearable pain because of terminal illness and so ought to have the right to end their pain with physician- assisted suicide. On the contrary, the author assert that there is no right to destroy any human life or participate in its destruction and there is no good moral reason for abortion or euthanasia, including the physician-assisted suicide. Finally, the author think that it is vital that Catholic activists, allied with Christian church-going brethren, should resist with all the power they can muster to the “culture of death”.

The article explores the development of peasants’ reading habits over the 18th century in the Latvian-inhabited Lutheran regions of Russia’s Baltic provinces Courland/Kurzeme and Latvian Livonia/Vidzeme. By analysing the transition from intensive to extensive reading patterns, as well as from loud and ceremonial to silent and private reading, insight into the available statistical sources and information from subscription lists is provided and the observations of contemporaries are scrutinized. The views on Latvian peasants’ reading habits expressed by Baltic-German Lutheran parsons Friedrich Bernhard Blaufuß, Joachim Baumann, Christian David Lenz, Johann Friedrich Casimir Rosenberger, Alexander Johann Stender, as well as those published by Johann Friedrich Steffenhagen, are discussed within the context of urban and middle-class reading patterns. While the number of literate peasants in the 18th century was high, reaching one third in Courland and two thirds in Livonia by the turn of the 19th century, the motivation for reading and everyday habits differed, and while extensive reading increased, before the 1840s, the Baltic rural so­ciety did not see a phenomenon similar to the European middle-class rea­ding revolution. The article focuses on differentiating among various types of readers, divided according to their confessional lines (Herrnhutian Brethren or Lutheran Orthodox Church), social stan­ding (reading patterns were different depending on rural professions) or genera­tion (the older generation tended to prefer loud and ceremonial religious reading while the younger generation more often adopted silent, private and secular reading). The collective reading of books has been explored by demonstrating how it allowed combining the reading of books with other activities and also performed a socializing function. The avai­lable sources demonstrate that quiet reading did not replace reading aloud, in the same way that extensive reading did not replace intensive, but all reading practices continued to co-exist alongside each other, creating an increasingly diverse and saturated reading experience.

Faith-Based Finno-Ugric Outreach: Estonian Christian Missionaries among Kindred Peoples in Russia This article provides an initial overview of the role of Christianity in the Finno-Ugric movement and the instrumentalisation of Finno-Ugric identity. It analyses the mission activity conducted by Estonians (and Finns to some extent) among speakers of Finno-Ugric (Uralic) languages in Russia. Above all, the writings of missionaries are used as the source – primarily mission publications published in Estonia. The background is the author’s fieldwork conducted among Nenets reindeer herders, who have been influenced by Russian and Ukrainian Protestant missionaries, and the Udmurt people living on the far side of the Kama, the latter being untouched by mission work. In both communities, religion and language inherited from forebears have a noteworthy role, even though the younger generation is becoming equally bilingual (the Russian language often dominates) and fewer and fewer young people take part in the non-Christian rituals passed down by their ancestors. The first half of the article gives an overview of how the church’s outreach directed at peoples who speak Finno-Ugric languages (hõimumisjon and hõimutöö are Estonian terms used) developed and the ideology behind it. The second half focuses on the activities of Estonian and Finnish missionaries in Russia. The author looks at the reception that the Erzya and Moksha Mordvins, Mari, Udmurts and Zyrian Komis have given the missionaries and also examines Protestant relations with the Russian Orthodox Church and representatives of local native religions. Whereas the collapse of the Soviet Union saw extensive missionary activity in Russia, Protestants from Estonia and Finland (mainly Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists and Pentecostals) set out to actively spread the gospel among Finno-Ugric peoples living in Russia. As Estonians and Finns are often accepted as ‘kin’, missionaries see this as a ‘niche provided by God’, which should be utilised. The goal for the missionaries is to create a Christian community where the kindred brothers and sisters become religious brethren. In spite of accusations to the contrary, they consider their endeavour something that will save Finno-Ugric cultures and languages, proceeding from the attempt to bring eastern ‘kindred peoples’ closer to the Protestant world and the world of the Estonians and Finns and the possibility of redemption. Protestant Estonian and Finnish missionaries portray themselves as preservers of the local languages. In practice, however, their activities are quite conflicting. On one hand, the need to make religious texts available in native languages is stressed, and they participate in organising translation of Christian texts and promote the local mission in the indigenous languages. On the other hand, the primary language used for outreach is not the local language but Russian, as Russian proficiency is predominant among Finno-Ugrians (although not always on a par with that of Russians). As the primary objective is to convert as many people as possible to Christianity, it is not of primary importance for missionaries to learn the local language. Due to conflicting values and practical choices, few native-language congregations are created. Estonian and Finnish Protestants style themselves as preservers of local cultures. The role model is that of Estonian and Finnish Christian popular cultures where the role of ‘paganism’ is under control and the elements of national culture tend to be integrated into a cultural whole. Missionaries cultivate an image of culture as something that can be dressed, sung, eaten, but not as something that relates to the house guardian spirits or the souls of ancestors, communicating with whom is a factor underlying the creation of a major part of the visible culture. To sum up, the author asserts that Christianisation as a culture-changing force has all the more powerful an effect if cultural changes are resisted.

RÉSUMÉLe principal objectif de cet article est d’encourager une approche plus large, supraconfessionnelle, du mariage et de la famille à l’époque moderne. La conjugalité a été “désacralisée” par les réformateurs protestants du 16e siècle. Martin Luther, parmi d’autres, a refusé le statut de sacrement au mariage, tout en valorisant celui-ci comme une arme contre le péché. En réaction, le concile de Trente a réaffirmé avec force que le mariage est bien un des sept sacrements chrétiens. Mais, promouvant la supériorité du célibat, l’Église catholique n’a jamais beaucoup insisté sur les vertus de la vie et de la piété familiales avant le 19e siècle. En parallèle, les historiens décèlent des signes de “sacralisation” de la famille protestante à partir du 16e siècle. Leurs conclusions doivent être relativisées à la lumière de recherches plus récentes et plus critiques, centrées sur les rapports et les représentations de genre. Elles peuvent néanmoins inspirer une étude élargie et comparative, inexistante dans l’historiographie traditionnelle, des réalités et des perceptions de la famille chrétienne au-delà des frontières confessionnelles.MOTS-CLÉ: Époque Moderne, mariage, famille, protestantisme, Concile de TrenteABSTRACTThe main purpose of this paper is to encourage a broader supra-confessional approach to the history of marriage and the family in the Early Modern era. Wedlock was “desacralized” by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century. Martin Luther, among others, denied the sacramental status of marriage but valued it as a weapon against sin. In reaction, the Council of Trent reinforced marriage as one of the seven sacraments. But the Catholic Church, which promoted the superiority of celibacy, did little to defend the virtues of family life and piety before the 19th century. In parallel, historians have identified signs of a “sacralization” of the Protestant family since the 16th century. 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AbstractIn the second half of the sixteenth century, the Hutterian Brethren of Moravia were a thriving religious movement, described by numerous visitors as an ideal of a sacred Christian congregation. The Hutterites themselves promoted a similar self-portrait, seeing their community as the embodiment of the apostolic Church described in the Acts of the Apostles, and of the Old Testament’s Chosen People. This image was challenged by another Reform Church, the Polish Brethren, or the Arians. Focusing on the example of those two communities, this essay discusses the process of Radical Reform identity formation. It examines the creation of the Moravian myth of a sacred community and the rebuttal of this myth produced in the milieu of the Polish Brethren. Different social makeup and political context of the Arians shaped their hermeneutics of the same sacred texts that served the Moravians and resulted in construing an alternative myth of a sacred community. The essay concludes that the latter narrative was instrumental for the Polish Brethren to establish their own, separate Christian identity.

The Moravian Brethren formed a very particular community within the Protestant Church. Above all, they had a distinct understanding of the Christian ministry and, consequently, their group had a disctinct missionary character. They were the first to undertake Protestant missions among peoples living far from the centers of civilization and administrative power. This paper describes the author’s encounter with the Himala- yan cultures and traces of Moravian missionaries’ work in the area, discerned over many years of research focusing on the past European activity, its contexts and the durability of cultural solutions it promoted.