THE 1000C CLASS # 7 |
encountering christianity assignment sheet 7
I. ask
Age 6: Modern Age (AD 1650 - 1960): The New Piety | Discontents of the Modern West
What is behind the transition to the Modern Age? How does Christianity adapt to the transition?
II. read
III. answer
Noll, Turning Points, Chapter 10, The New Piety - Conversion of the Wesleys (AD 1738)
1) What inspired John and Charles Wesley to work outside the religious conventions of the eighteenth century?
2) John Wesley experienced conversion after reading Luther’s preface to his Epistle to the Romans. Compare John Wesley’s theology with that of Luther and the other Reformers. How are the differences a reflection of Wesley’s personality or of his era?
3) What aspects of eighteenth-century Protestantism did John Wesley help organize and institutionalize as key elements of modern evangelical Protestantism?
4) Pietism is often considered the European Continent’s equivalent to the revivalism experienced in England and North America. What are the roots of pietism especially as a reaction to the trends occurring within European Protestantism? What was it a reaction against?
5) What were Philipp Jakob Spener’s proposals for reform? What were the two problems that resulted from Spener’s proposals? How are these problems representative of other reform movements in the church history?
6) Pietism on the European continent had several manifestations in the eighteenth century, but what were the common threads seen in the various movements?
7) What aspects of European society and thought changed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries? How were the pietist, Wesleyan, and revivalist movements better equipped to meet the environment of the eighteenth century than the Protestantism of the sixteenth century?
8) The evangelicals and pietists of the eighteenth century spark the first significant push toward cross-cultural missions among Protestants. What characteristics of their faith and their time made this era the beginning of Protestant missions?
Noll, Turning Points, Chapter 11, Discontents of the Modern West - French Revolution (AD 1789)
9) For the first time in this book, a purely secular event is named one of the turning points in the history of Christianity. Why?
10) What was the progression that Christendom had taken since the reign of Charlemagne, through the Reformation and rise of national states, to the climax of the French Revolution?
11) What, in the words of Conor Cruise O’Brien, had come to take the place of traditional religion in the late eighteenth century? What secular bases of authority were replacing Scripture, revelation, and tradition in Western thought?
12) What factors worked together to bring about the demise of European Christendom?
13) How did new trends in science and the elevation of reason impact biblical studies in the nineteenth century?
14) What changed in the economic, cultural, social, intellectual, and national life of Europe as a result of Christianity being “marginalized”?
15) What are some of the ways that the church responded to the increasing secularization of the West?