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Cambridge Companions are a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.
Cambridge Companions are a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.
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This chapter explores the shifting landscape of American Protestantism and its relationship to American culture from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century, focusing on such major themes as membership decline in mainline denominations, the growth and influence of evangelicalism, the use and impact of television and other forms of mass media, responses to political and social turmoil, debates over marriage and sexuality, and the rise of non-denominational evangelicalism and megachurches.
The Stone-Campbell Movement combined the evangelical revivals of the American frontier, the Enlightenment philosophy of John Locke, Thomas Reid, and Francis Bacon, and the democratic ideals of the United States. The “restoration plea” of early Stone-Campbell leaders emphasized four interrelated themes: restoration, unity, missions, and eschatology. Early leaders believed that the restoration of the teachings, practices, and terminology of the New Testament church would lead to visible unity in an increasingly divided Christianity, which in turn would aid global missions and usher in the millennium. They thought restoring the New Testament church would promote greater faithfulness to God and individual freedom of conscience, as Christians would be united around the teachings, practices, and terminology of Scripture alone, not those promoted by later teachers or found in creeds of human origin. Today the movement represents the ongoing desire in American Protestantism for a Bible-based, mission-oriented, non-denominational Christianity.
In the ninety-year period between the start of the American Revolution and the end of the Civil War, American Protestantism underwent a profound transformation. Protestant churches and ministers engaged on both sides of the revolutionary struggle and argued over the relationship between church and state in constitutional deliberations. Religious liberty emerged as an article of faith; religious populism grew; and new Protestant denominations proliferated, reinforced by the dynamics of western expansion along the unfolding American frontier. Industrialization, immigration, home missions, and the growth of the Black church added to the diversity and richness of Protestant Christianity, as did the explosion of reform movements and the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening. Yet abolitionism and the sectional crisis of the 1840s and 1850s further segmented religious organizations into Northern and Southern divisions, until in the Civil War Protestant theology and piety coursed through both Union and Confederate societies.
Ever since their seventeenth-century origins, Baptists have represented an array of theological, racial, ethnic, ideological, and political backgrounds and have traversed a number of social, theological, and ecclesiastical roads. The first Baptists came out of the dissenting tradition in England; the persecution they experienced during their early history in America helps explain their enduring support for the separation of church and state. Baptists make the Bible central to their practice, an emphasis central to their disputes over slavery, gender, and sexuality. They value the theological notion of the “priesthood of the believer.” Baptists hold that only people who can publicly profess their Christian conversion can be candidates for baptism. They have varied on who can take the Lord’s Supper; many Baptist churches practice open communion, but some do not. A central tenet of Baptist governance is the autonomy of the local church.
American Protestants have expressed diverse views of how “faith” and “medicine” relate to health. Certain Protestants consider God the source of both illness and healing, while others attribute sickness to demons and wholeness to God. Some rely exclusively on either faith or medicine for healing, while others combine them. Over time, perceived tensions between faith and medicine have diminished, but not disappeared. There are numerous examples of Protestants praying in faith for healing and trusting God to heal through medical means. American Protestants have sometimes conflated rejection of medicine with “faith” and acceptance of medicine with “unbelief” – rather than following a line of logic that one may reject medicine and still lack faith, or accept medicine without wavering in faith.
A broad evangelical consensus dominated American Protestantism in the first half of the 1800s, but the social and intellectual changes of the decades after the American Civil War began to fracture this consensus, creating debate over how to achieve the still agreed-upon goal of Protestantizing the nation. Social shifts included industrialization, urbanization, and immigration from non-Protestant areas of the globe; meanwhile, women’s educational and professional opportunities expanded while the civil rights of African Americans contracted. Intellectual shifts included the popularization of Darwinian evolution and a new “higher critical” approach to interpreting the Bible. The Civil War had also raised hermeneutical questions: Northern and Southern white Protestants had reached polar-opposite conclusions on the morality of slavery. Yet even though subsequent economic, social, and political crises like the world wars and the Great Depression further strained Protestant unity, American Protestants largely retained their cultural dominance throughout this era.
Plotinus stands at a crossroads in ancient philosophy, between the more than 600 years of philosophy that came before him and the new Platonic tradition. He was the first and perhaps the greatest systematizer of Plato's thought, and all later students of Plato in the following centuries approached Plato through him. This Companion from a new generation of ancient philosophy scholars reflects the current state of research on Plotinus, with chapters on topics including mathematics, fate and determinism, happiness, the theory of forms, categories of reality, matter and evil, and Plotinus' legacy. The volume offers an accessible overview of the thought of one of the pivotal figures in the history of philosophy, and reveals his importance as a thinker whose impact goes far beyond his importance as an interpreter of Plato.
The book of Genesis stands apart from the rest of the Hebrew Bible in the diverse genres and topics that it covers, from creation accounts to shorter etiologies (e.g., the advent of clothing [Gen 3:7, 21], animal husbandry, agriculture, arts and crafts [Gen 4], dietary laws [Gen 9:3–4], the diversification of language [Gen 11:1–9]), and the early histories of specific linguistic and cultural groups descended from Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet. Genesis 12–50, which focuses on Shem’s descendants, introduces key figures referred to here as the ancestors: Abraham/Sarah, Isaac/Rebecca, Jacob (renamed Israel)/Leah and Rachel (his two principal wives), and the twelve fathers of the tribes of Israel, Jacob’s male offspring.
Kinship studies are central for interpreting the ancestral narratives of Genesis. These studies are integral to understanding institutions such as marriage, as well as customary and traditional backgrounds to adoption, bartering, children, and many others, and provide a context for a close reading of this book in the texts of Genesis 12–50. In what follows, I rely on the Hebrew contextual application of the terms for family, clan, and tribe – the kinship units of ancient Israel – and define kinship as a culturally determined emphasis on blood and marriage as the preferred method for constructing the Israelite family, rather than solely on blood line.1
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the book of Genesis has increasingly come to be studied in terms of form and genre as well as of the history of tradition. One of the reasons was Hermann Gunkel’s epochal commentary on Genesis, published in 1901, which was soon to become authoritative.1 Gunkel’s often-quoted statement that “Genesis is a collection of legends”2 (“Die Genesis ist eine Sammlung von Sagen”) determined the path future research would take, though he had not meant to say that Genesis was only that.
Christians have been reading the book of Genesis for a very long time now, because from the beginning of the Christian movement they have believed that “all Scripture is God-breathed and … useful” in one way or another (2 Tim 3:16, NIV) – and they have held this to be true, first and foremost, of what they have regarded as the Old Testament (OT). They have read Genesis, then, in pursuit of what they should believe and how they should live.
“The Torah speaks a human language” – the saying, accredited to Rabbi Ishmael (90–135 CE) and found in the Midrashic treatise Sifre to Numbers 112, is at the root of a critical reading of the Scriptures. It underscores that Scriptures, considered divine revelation, are formulated in a language that follows the rules of any language and the conventions of human communication. R. Ishmael had his opponents, obviously, who belonged to the school of Rabbi Aqiba (40–137 CE) and affirmed that every detail in the Scripture is divinely inspired and therefore meaningful, a tendency for which recent scholarship coined the term “omnisignificance.”1 On the one hand, the school of R. Ishmael thinks of the Bible as having divine origin, but also as being a book like many other books and, on the other hand, R. Aqiba affirms the uniqueness of the Bible and detects a deeper, theological, meaning in every peculiarity of the biblical text.2 For R. Ishmael’s disciples, we may perceive errors, inconsistencies, differences, and imperfections in Holy Scriptures as in other human work.
The book of Genesis is replete with philosophical issues. Some include the nature of the human condition (e.g., the propensity for evil and goodness), freedom, contingency and necessity, ecological responsibility, and the contours of human interaction and flourishing.1 However, a perennial philosophical issue focuses on the relationship between divine commands and ethical evaluation. An important and related question is whether what God says and does is fitting if judged by a more developed concept of the divine nature. What, for example, is befitting of the divine? What is involved in determining whether the actions of the divine are befitting?