Examines the readership of the contemporary best-selling series Left Behind, drawing on a qualitative study of readers. Rapture Culture asks what role an anti-worldly theory like dispensationalism ...plays in contemporary evangelicalism when evangelicals have gained increasing social and political power. The book argues that apocalyptic stories are a form of social relationship. They shape identity not only through agreement and a sense of belonging, but also through disagreement and dissent. The most urgent message of the rapture for readers of Left Behind is that the end of time could come soon, and therefore a decision about personal salvation is necessary. While it is true that the Left Behind series plays on readers’ fears, the primary fear is not so much a social or political fear as a personal one—a fear that the reader himself or herself might be left behind. The primary purpose of the Left Behind series is to promote evangelism. Readers feel convicted by the books of the need to tell their loved ones about Christ and to seek the conversion of others. In addition, the story of rapture and tribulation provides a lens through which readers can interpret the chaotic and sometimes disconcerting events of the world. The popularity of the Left Behind series and its diffusion into mainstream culture leads the book to conclude with the suggestion that evangelicalism is wrongly understood as a “subculture” and instead needs to be conceived as a broad and fluid part of dominant popular culture in the United States. Rapture Culture urges its readers to take seriously both the fears and the desires about social life present in the testimonies of Left Behind’s readership and to consider popular fiction reading as a complex and dynamic act of faith in American Protestantism.
This book examines the place of literature in the Reformation, considering both how arguments about biblical meaning and literary interpretation influenced the new theology, and how developments in ...theology in turn influenced literary practices. Part One focuses on Northern Europe, reconsidering the relationship between Renaissance humanism (especially Erasmus) and religious ideas (especially Luther). Parts Two and Three examine Tudor and early Stuart England. Part Two describes the rise of vernacular theology and Protestant culture in relation to fundamental changes in the understanding of the English language. Part Three studies English religious poetry (including Donne, Herbert, and, in an Epilogue, Milton) in the wake of these changes. Bringing together genres and styles of writing that are normally kept apart (poems, sermons, treatises, commentaries), the author offers a re-evaluation of the literary production of this intensely verbal and controversial period.
This paper offers a critique of certain aspects of the spiritual formation movement as it has been manifested in evangelical churches in the past few decades. My experience with this facet of the ...spiritual formation movement has grown out of my former ministry as a pastor in a large, evangelical, suburban congregation and out of my current role as a professor serving at a Christian university and seminary. It is a friendly critique, offered by a person who has been directly involved in facilitating spiritual formation in various settings within the evangelical community. Taken together, the points of unease I will identify are not a “cease and desist” order, but rather a cautionary word for all of us who seek to press the spiritual formation movement forward. These points of unease include: 1) unease about a dualistic tendency to value spirituality at the expense of the material world, 2) unease with devotional practices grown in the soil of monastic Catholicism rather than Protestantism, 3) unease with a rhetorical strategy that sharply distinguishes between being and doing, 4) unease with devotional practices that fail the “soccer mom” test, and 5) an unease with certain ways of using Scripture which are devotionally fruitful but hermeneutically faulty.
Huston Diehl sees Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as both a product of the Protestant Reformation--a reformed drama--and a producer of Protestant habits of thought--a reforming drama. According to ...Diehl, the popular London theater, which flourished in the years after Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism in England, rehearsed the religious crises that disrupted, divided, energized, and in many respects revolutionized English society. Drawing on the insights of symbolic anthropologists, Diehl explores the relationship between the suppression of late medieval religious cultures, with their rituals, symbols, plays, processions, and devotional practices, and the emergence of a popular theater under the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth and James. Questioning long-held assumptions that the reformed religion was inherently antitheatrical, she shows how the reformers invented new forms of theater, even as they condemned a Roman Catholic theatricality they associated with magic, sensuality, and duplicity. Using as her central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.
Abstract In order to define the new religious movements on Romanian territory beginning in the 19th century, the following terms need to be explained: sect Church, Evangelical Church, and ...Neo-Protestant Church. First, the term ‘sect’ has negative connotations, and it is being used more and more seldom after the Communist era. Second, the term ‘Evangelical’ is currently more accepted even by historians (such as Dorin Dobrincu) but it still can be confusing because it refers to German Lutherans. Finally, the term ‘Neo-Protestant’ is problematic because it can lead to confusion about modern Lutheran Protestantism, which is called in German Neoprotestantismus. This work uses the term ‘Neo-Protestant’ as it will be shown that these cults have a historical sustainability of classical Protestantism bringing new aspects but still respecting the same frame, the same matrix.
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