This chapter examines the liberal approaches to Christian prescriptivism, which have typically fallen under the label of the “essence of Christianity.” The quest for the essence has its origins in the Reformation but becomes a widespread theological concern in the Enlightenment. This first chapter examines liberal, historicist, dialectical, and liberationist versions of this quest. Using Schleiermacher’s rubric, I organize different versions of the essence along the lines of reason (doctrine), experience (culture), and morality (politics).

This chapter shows the persistence of the imperial imagination in Baeck’s thought during the First World War, and his later critique of theological colonization during the Weimar Republic. When the Great War broke out, Baeck volunteered to serve as an army chaplain (Feldrabbiner), a position he held for almost the entire war period. Baeck’s sermons and writing from the front exemplify his view of the East as a space for colonization as well as his reading of the German military predicament as paralleling Jewish history. Baeck’s stature as a public intellectual rose during the Weimar Republic, but he also recognized a growing danger in the resurgence of the figure of second-century heretic Marcion, among others in the work of Adolf von Harnack, who called for a de-canonization of the Hebrew Bible. Baeck identified this tendency as central in the German theological and political imagination of the time. Against neo-Marcionite attempts to detach Christianity and Germany from Judaism and the Jews, Baeck offered a presentation of Judaism that stressed its place as the ethical foundation of Christianity. Only Judaism, Baeck insisted, could save Christianity from itself.

“Cacophony” was the term appropriately chosen by David Bell more than twenty years ago to sum up recent research on early modern nationalism (in France).1 His diagnosis still stands. The sources of this dissonance can clearly be traced to the “political language” (as Pocock and Skinner call it) of nationhood itself. Its longue durée encourages the assumption that the nation was “always already” there; moreover, it is many sided, and its key concepts – nation, Volk, (father)land, kingdom, the French, the Germans, etc. – are each distinct rather than interchangeable.2 Because this political language displays a high degree of congruency across the individual language areas of early modern Latin Christendom, this congruence of signifiers in the vernacular is frequently taken at face value to equal a congruence of the things signified.

Chapter 1 investigates the English Reformation conversation on contentment, beginning with early sixteenth-century translations of St. Paul’s epistles and Martin Luther’s works and ending with texts from the English Revolution. Renaissance authors did not invent contentedness, but they drew upon available traditions to reinvent a contentment consistent with Protestant ideals and adapted to the needs of English audiences. Chapter 1 charts the role of contentment in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Charles I’s Eikon Basilike, and Hobbes’s Leviathan, as well as an archive of sermons and theological treatises. First, it traces the notion of Christian contentment to two passages in 1 Timothy 6 and Philippians 4, which featured heavily in the cultural discourse. Next, it examines how reformers reconcile contentment, suffering, and even martyrdom. Then, it analyzes the relationship between contentment and contemporary theories of embodiment and the passions. Finally, it shows how authors extended individual contentedness to the body politic. During the Renaissance, contentment became a prominent Protestant principle of fortifying self and society.

Volf and McAnnally-Linz ask to what extent the Christian obligation to be grateful to God should be construed as a burden. By placing Martin Luther and Anthony Kronman in dialogue with each other, Volf and McAnnally-Linz take issue with the debt-creating view of gratitude as repayment, proposing in its place an account of gratitude as a joyful recognition of the divine gift-giver.

Natural law and natural rights are contested categories among many modern Protestants, but were common legal and theological topics for their sixteenth-century forebearers. Early Protestant reformers echoed classical and scholastic teachings, and their natural law principles and natural rights overlapped with Catholic, humanist, and republican formulations in their day. But the reformers grounded their teachings in distinct accounts of the created order, human nature, the Ten Commandments, law and Gospel, divine sovereignty and natural order in the two kingdoms - giving their views a unique accent. This chapter samples the natural law and rights teachings of Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, the Magdeburg Confession, John Calvin, Christopher Goodman, and Johannes Althusius. They illustrate the hundreds of Protestant sources, by Lutherans and Calvinists, Anabaptists and Anglicans of various denominations. These teachings were a driving force of early modern Western democratic revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic; and influential in modern international declarations of rights, in the civil rights movement in the United States, and in various liberation movements in the Global South.

In late medieval Europe, most people accepted the Catholic Church’s teachings, but a significant minority called for reforms. In the 1520s, reformers came to include Martin Luther, a professor of theology in Germany. Luther’s ideas turned into a movement, in part through the new technology of the printing press. He and other reformers worked with political authorities, and much of central Europe and Scandinavia broke with the Catholic Church and established independent Protestant Churches. In England, King Henry VIII’s desire for a male heir led him to establish a separate English Church. In the late 1530s, the Catholic Church began to respond more vigorously to Protestant challenges and began carrying out internal reforms, led by the papacy and new religious orders such as the Jesuits. At the same time, the ideas of John Calvin inspired a second wave of Protestant reform, in which order, piety, and discipline were viewed as marks of divine favor. Protestant and Catholic political authorities thought that their territories should have one official state Church, and sought to purge ideas, objects, and people considered religiously alien. The Reformation led to religious persecution, individual and group migration, and more than a century of religious war.

John Thompson describes how Martin Luther and John Calvin treated conscience. For Luther, natural conscience is beset by knowing that a person can never meet the rigorous requirements of the law. Faith can relieve a person’s downtrodden conscience, which would otherwise condemn him. Once a person accepts the favor of God that flows solely from trusting him, his conscience is liberated. He knows he can do nothing himself to merit that favor. His conscience is freed “to trust God’s promise of mercy and forgiveness.” The highest functioning conscience for Luther, then, is the one that does not depend on its own goodness or perfection. Calvin teaches that, though a person’s conscience is a natural faculty, it is marred and affected by the fall. Once a person is saved, however, his conscience is transformed so that he desires to obey the will of God found in the law. This is true even though adherence to the law will not add in the least to his salvation. For this reason, Calvin created a catechism to train and chasten Genevan Christians’ consciences. Calvin also helped to establish the Geneva consistory, which was less a disciplinary body, and rather “a school for consciences.”

This chapter sifts through the various contemporary interpretations of the Pauline phrase “in Christ.” Based on the likely origin of the phrase and the way it functions in Paul’s argument, it is suggested that for Paul, union with Christ expresses genealogy and lineage. By being “in Christ” one is folded into Abraham’s family. An analysis of multiple Pauline letters suggests that the means of being united with Christ is baptism. This interpretation calls for a revision of traditional Protestant accounts of the ordo salutis, in particular of the tendency to separate baptism and union in Christ.

This chapter analyzes Paul’s understanding of the atoning nature of Christ’s death and resurrection. Since Paul regularly uses imagery from Israel’s sacrificial cult to interpret the meaning of Jesus’ death, this chapter delves into recent work on the logic of Israel’s cult so as to understand what a first-century Jew would mean to say if they compared the events of Golgotha with the rite of Yom Kippur. The chapter contrasts Luther’s and Calvin’s understanding of the cross, which paint Paul’s account on a canvas of a generic, universal struggle with the powers of sin, guilt, and evil, with an argument in which Paul interprets the difference the cross makes as addressing a specific historical situation in the life of Israel and its relationship to Israel’s God.

Famous for concepts such as “identity crisis” and the eight life-stage psychosocial development model, Erik Erikson was born to a Jewish mother and a father whose identity was never revealed. He became a drifter and wandered the countryside for seven years before training and analysis by Anna Freud. Moving to the USA to escape Nazi persecution, he became the first child psychoanalyst in the Americas, and one of the key players of the “neo-Freudian” movement. Drawing on his own struggles with identity confusion while growing up and adjusting to American life, he wrote a series of books detailing the importance of identity in personality development and successful adjustment in life. He also coined the term “moratorium” to emphasize the need for time for adolescents and young adults to search for their own directions. His tomes on Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi have been bestsellers and are still regarded as classics. These books eloquently illustrate the role “identity crisis” played in shaping the lives and acts of prominent historical figures who profoundly changed the course of human history.

This chapter examines the place in English history memory of what is generally considered the original ‘event’ of the Reformation: Martin Luther’s posting of the Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. Despite its uncertain historical veracity, the episode was prioritised by the ideological demands of the first Reformation centenary celebrated in Germany in 1617, and thereafter (particularly in the nineteenth century) it became a magnet of Protestant artistic expression and cultural identity. In England, however, interest in Luther’s ‘Thesenanschlag’ remained remarkably muted through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even in 1817, when a commemorative impulse fired by imaginative remembering of the episode swept through Lutheran Germany, Scandinavia and the United States, English interest remained muted. Across the nineteenth century as a whole, non-conformists were much more likely than Anglicans to celebrate the valour and significance of Luther’s ‘deed’. The reticence points to a long-standing reluctance among Anglicans to acknowledge Luther, even at a remove, as a founder of the Church of England. Yet a long-standing failure to advance consensually any alternative date or event as the foundational moment of the English Reformation is striking, underlining the unresolved tension over continuity versus rupture which lies at the heart of Anglican historical identity.

This chapter offers a reexamination of three key figures that developed trajectories of Christian interpretations of Mosaic and later Jewish law, focusing on the distinctions that Justin Martyr, Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther each create to interpret scripture’s accounts of law. Early Christian theologians consistently reconsidered the soteriological and moral importance of law, denying it pride of place in the economy of salvation. In contrast, public law was largely addressed through the lens of nature, culture, or creation. Israel’s laws were Christologically rethought, but the civil laws of the nations were by and large left to the realm of natural law. The process of making soteriological distinctions about the law resulted in an anemic account of public law that is highly critical of Israel and Judaism and overly positive on natural law. Even in Thomas’s highly developed theology of the law or in Luther’s instance on the primacy of the gospel, nature remains the governing category for building a Christian understanding of public law. Natural law and by extension public law was thus quarantined from critical interrogation.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the most significant painting of the Antichrist in Western art – Luca Signorelli’s ‘The Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist’. This painting is located within the story of the Antichrist in the Italian Renaissance, particularly around Girolamo Savonarola. With the Reformation, a new chapter in the life of the Antichrist began. Within Protestantism, the papal Antichrist (both individual and as an institution) became dominant. The views of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox are discussed, along with representatives of the so-called Radical Reformation, both on the Continent and in England. Key to the Protestant reading of the pope or the papacy as the Antichrist was a new interpretation of the book of Revelation that reinforced the judgement that the Antichrist was to be found in the Roman papacy and had been present there since its inception. The chapter analyses the new Protestant interpretation through the commentaries on Revelation by John Bale and John Napier. The chapter also examines the Catholic response to Protestantism by a return to the Antichrist of Adso of Montier-en-Der.