the Washington, DC area. He earned the MDiv from Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri, with emphasis on Theological Studies and Pastoral Counseling, in 1989. He earned the MA in History from Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri, in 1990; and the MA in American Studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia in 2005. Don became interested in Christianity through an encounter with the Invisible Church, a charismatic Jesus Movement community that existed fleetingly in London, the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 80s. He was then a young atheist soldier stationed in West Berlin, West Germany, who encountered God while on leave in London.
Samuel W. Muindi, PhD, is a Lecturer in Biblical and Theological Studies at International Leadership University in Nairobi, Kenya. His areas of teaching and research interest include Old Testament Biblical Studies, Biblical Hermeneutics, Pentecostal Studies, and African Christian Spirituality. His recent publications include: Pentecostal-Charismatic Prophecy: Empirical-Theological Analysis (Oxford: Lang, 2107); “Ritual and Spirituality in Kenyan Pentecostalism,” in Scripting Pentecostalism: A Study of Pentecostals, Worship and Liturgy (ed. M. Cartledge and A. J. Swoboda; London: Routledge, 2017); and Ancient Israelite and African Wisdom Traditions: A Comparative-Hermeneutical Analysis (Nairobi: Christian Academic Publishing, 2015). He earned the PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK. He and his wife, Jane, live in Nairobi, Kenya. They are blessed with four children and four grandchildren and are actively involved in church ministry, particularly among the African Initiated Pentecostal-Charismatic churches.
Michael M. C. Reardon is a PhD student in New Testament and Historical Theology at Wycliffe College of the University of Toronto, Canada. His research explores the role of deification in New Testament soteriology and its reception by Medieval and Early Modern thinkers. He is currently the Professor of Biblical Languages and Christian Thought at Canada Christian College in Toronto. His other research interests include German idealism, Pietism, hermeneutic methodology, and Sino-Christian theology. Outside of academia, Michael enjoys spending time with his wife and two children, playing basketball, and serving in his local church.
Andrew Snyder is a PhD candidate in Theological Studies at the Regent University School of Divinity in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and is writing his dissertation on the qualitative distinction between Kierkegaard’s concepts of anxiety and despair. He earned the MA in Christian Thought from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, with his wife, Christabel.
Fitzroy John Willis, PhD, teaches Physical Science and Bible at Landmark Christian School in Fairburn, Georgia, and is the co-founder of The Willis Group, LLC, a consulting firm that supports individuals and organizations to fulfill their talent, learning, and developmental needs. He was previously an Adjunct Professor of Worldviews, Theology, Bible, and Biblical Interpretation at Ohio Christian University. He earned the PhD in Christian Theology from the Regent University School of Divinity in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he also earned an MA in Biblical Interpretation. He also earned the MS from SUNY Health Science Center in Brooklyn, and the BS in Biochemistry from SUNY Stony Brook, New York. He lives in Metro-Atlanta with his wife and five children.
Christopher J. Wilson holds the PhD in Renewal Studies with a concentration in ChristianTheology from the Regent University School of Divinity in Virginia Beach, Virginia. His dissertation will be published as Renewal Apologetics: The Argument from Modern Miracles. His interests include the intersection of medical miracles and Christian prayer as a primary means of apologetics, evangelism, and renewal, developed from a comprehensive theology of the miraculous. He is married with four children, ages eight and down. He enjoys watching sports, playing chess, reading (apologetics, theology, and philosophy), and spending time with his family.
Introduction
Mark A. Jumper and Mark J. Cartledge
The Protestant Reformation represented a revolution in the religious affairs of the West that reverberates to the present. The East–West Schism in Christendom (1054) between Roman Catholic and Orthodox had reflected formal actions of the bodies, Rome and Constantinople, that had long been recognized as definitive leaders of the Church. The Protestant Reformation (1517), in contrast, sprang from the soil, as it were: if not ex nihilo (progenitors included such as Huss and Wycliff, among other persons and movements), certainly not ex cathedra. The formation of two leading movements, Lutheran and Reformed, as well as Anglicans, Anabaptists, and others proceeded unplanned and piecemeal with many diversions and dispersions in the process. In the meantime, the Roman Catholic Church experienced many reformations of its own, including the forming of the innovatively modern Society of Jesus.1 Years of struggle and battle followed -theological, ecclesial, political, and military- that remade not just the face of Europe, but its religious configuration, by the time of Westfalia’s peace of 1648.
We note that the European discovery, exploration, and expropriation of the New World predated the Reformation by only twenty-five years, reaching its floodtide even as Reformation conflicts tore the explorers’ homelands. The New World’s melee of new boundaries and rulers reflected much of Europe’s conflicts, eventuating in North America generally aligning Protestant and South America, Roman Catholic. The dynamics occurring in both Europe and the New World were thus not isolated, but mutually interactive in myriads of unpredictable and sometimes unrecognized ways.
Technical, economic, and social change also claimed roles in the times’ convulsions. New technology, most notably the movable type printing press, had a primary role. The Gutenberg Bible was completed by 1455, when the future Pope Pius II spoke of it sixty-two years before Luther’s handwritten 95 Theses were posted. However, it was Luther and the Protestants who made mass pamphlet printing and distribution their trademark method of propagation and teaching. That teaching implicitly depended upon the Holy Spirit’s illumination of those lesser-trained individuals who read it in private and public. New social developments included travel, trade, infusions of New World gold, spice, and crops, and new uses of capital. These brought significant changes to a continent not so far removed from feudalism. To generalize, Protestant places tended to be more open to these changes, embracing them with enthusiasm in some contexts. Max Weber later named The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as the mutually reinforcing winners of that war.2
We also remember that Europe, after centuries of loss to Muslim conquerors from the south, had only recently put a definite close to Christendom’s near-death threat at Islam’s hands. Spain’s 700-year self-deliverance from Islamic rule, the Reconquista, was only completed in 1492, with the victorious Ferdinand and Isabella promptly sending Columbus on his momentous voyage (as well as exiling Jews who took their prosperous practices elsewhere).3 The gates of Vienna only survived the climactic Ottoman assault in 1529, finally leaving central and western Europe to stew in their internecine conflicts rather than have their weakened pieces consumed by Islam’s cumulative victories. Islam’s retreat from high tide, Spain in 1492 and Vienna in 1529, thus overlapped the Reformation’s early years, along with the New World dynamics.
Finally, we note the Renaissance as another of the Reformation’s overlays, starting as it did in the 1300s and continuing through the 1700s. This movement of academic and cultural recovery of ancient literature and philosophy combined with an energetic flowering of art and new philosophies, and the rise of humanism and science, to undermine many of the assumptions and underpinnings of Christendom’s ancien regime.
It may thus be seen that the Reformation does not stand alone in its revolutionary role. If the Renaissance weakened the ancien regime, perhaps the Reformation administered a coup de grace of sorts. However, the conjunctions of the New World’s opening horizon, Islam’s ebbtide, and paradigmatic changes in technological, social, scientific, and economic developments were certainly of momentous import. These factors, each in itself of defining consequence, joined to birth a new world that is yet with us as our formative heritage: “No Westerner can ever hope to know him- or herself, or the world he or she lives in, without first understanding this crucial turning point in history. And the same goes for any non-Westerner who wants to understand Western civilization.”4
The question then arises: as Christians who affirm the providence and sovereignty of God, do we dare to discern the role of the Holy Spirit amid such momentous