This thesis explores the late-eighteenth-century movement to end Britain’s transatlantic slave trade through recovering one of the major discourses in favour of abolition, namely that of the evangelical Anglicans. This important intellectual milieu has often been ignored in academia and is discovered through examining the sermons, hymns, and prayers of three influential leaders in this movement: Member of Parliament William Wilberforce, pastor and hymn writer John Newton, and pastor and professor Charles Simeon. Their oral texts reveal that at the heart of their discourse lies the doctrine of Atonement. On this foundation these abolitionists primarily built a vocabulary not of human rights, but of public duty. This duty was both to care for the destitute as individuals and to protect their nation as a whole because they believed that God was the defender of the enslaved and that he would bring providential judgement on those nations that ignored their plight. For the British evangelicals, abolishing the slave trade was not merely a means to avoid impending judgement, but also part of a broader project to prepare the way for Jesus’s imminent return through advancing the work of reconciliation between humankind and God as they believed themselves to be confronting evil in all of its forms. By reconfiguring the evangelical abolitionist arguments within their religious framework and social contexts, this thesis helps overcome the dissonance that separates our world from theirs and makes accessible the eighteenth-century abolitionist discourse of a campaign that continues to resonate with human rights activists and scholars of social change in the twenty-first-century.

This thesis explores the late-eighteenth-century movement to end Britain’s transatlantic slave trade through recovering one of the major discourses in favour of abolition, namely that of the evangelical Anglicans. This important intellectual milieu has often been ignored in academia and is discovered through examining the sermons, hymns, and prayers of three influential leaders in this movement: Member of Parliament William Wilberforce, pastor and hymn writer John Newton, and pastor and professor Charles Simeon. Their oral texts reveal that at the heart of their discourse lies the doctrine of Atonement. On this foundation these abolitionists primarily built a vocabulary not of human rights, but of public duty. This duty was both to care for the destitute as individuals and to protect their nation as a whole because they believed that God was the defender of the enslaved and that he would bring providential judgement on those nations that ignored their plight. For the British evangelicals, abolishing the slave trade was not merely a means to avoid impending judgement, but also part of a broader project to prepare the way for Jesus’s imminent return through advancing the work of reconciliation between humankind and God as they believed themselves to be confronting evil in all of its forms. By reconfiguring the evangelical abolitionist arguments within their religious framework and social contexts, this thesis helps overcome the dissonance that separates our world from theirs and makes accessible the eighteenth-century abolitionist discourse of a campaign that continues to resonate with human rights activists and scholars of social change in the twenty-first-century.

Text in German / This thesis gives a short overview abont the anthropological term worldview and discusses various views of it. A historic resume of the situation of the metropolis Antiochia in Syria in the 4th century AD is followed by an analysis of some important aspects of the worldview of its inhabitants. A short account of the life and work of John Chrysostom is given and followed by an analysis of four of his homilies of the Gospel of Matthew. These are compared with own exegetical points of view of the same texts. The focus is directed to some topics where the influence of worfdview makes itself felt. In the last chapter some observations in connection with the influence of worldview on biblical interpretation ensue. The thesis closes with a short discussion of some missiological and hermeneutical consequences / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / M.Th. (Missiology)

The diploma thesis describes the development of St. Anne and St. Lawrence Dominican convents in The Old Town of Prague during early modern period (mainly in the 17th and the 18th centuries). Both the indoor life and contacts with outside world are included in the description. Only three topics of the above-mentioned specialization could be seamlessly elaborated due to fragmentary sources. The introduction and first three chapters constitute a summary of sources and literature. Furthermore, they chronologically depict the history of the Dominican order and the particular convents. The fourth chapter deals with the relationship between the nuns and their dependants in the municipality of Radlice. The system of servile taxes withdrawals and visitations of the monastic farms are emphasized. The chapter finally records a concrete discord between the convent and Barbora Wlaška in the 16th century. The fifth chapter focuses on baroque sermon that were held during ceremonies of admission aspirants among the other nuns. The preachments were analyzed in light of their contents and spiritual thoughts. The last chapter studies the performance of the archiepiscopal authority to the convents in the 18th century and the relationships between the Dominican nuns and aristocratic families or bourgeoisie in the...

Text in German / This thesis gives a short overview abont the anthropological term worldview and discusses various views of it. A historic resume of the situation of the metropolis Antiochia in Syria in the 4th century AD is followed by an analysis of some important aspects of the worldview of its inhabitants. A short account of the life and work of John Chrysostom is given and followed by an analysis of four of his homilies of the Gospel of Matthew. These are compared with own exegetical points of view of the same texts. The focus is directed to some topics where the influence of worfdview makes itself felt. In the last chapter some observations in connection with the influence of worldview on biblical interpretation ensue. The thesis closes with a short discussion of some missiological and hermeneutical consequences / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / M.Th. (Missiology)

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This thesis examines the life and works of the English Calvinist clergyman Daniel Featley (1582-1645) through the lens of various printed and manuscript sources, especially his manuscript notebooks in Oxford. It links his story and thought to the broader themes of early Stuart religious, political, and intellectual history. Chapter one analyses the first thirty- five years of Featley’s life, exploring how many of the features that underpin the major themes of Featley’s career—and which reemerged throughout his life—were formed and nurtured during Featley’s early years in Oxford, Paris, and Cornwall. There he emerges as an ambitious young divine in pursuit of preferment; a shrewd minister, who attempted to position himself within the ecclesiastical spectrum; and a budding polemicist, whose polemical exchanges were motivated by a pastoral desire to protect the English Church. Chapter two examines Featley’s role as an ecclesiastical licenser and chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot in the 1610s and 1620s. It offers a reinterpretation of the view that Featley was a benign censor, explores how pastoral sensitivities influenced his censorship, and analyses the parallels between Featley’s licensing and his broader ecclesiastical aims. Moreover, by exploring how our historiographical understandings of licensing and censorship have been clouded by Featley’s attempts to conceal that an increasingly influential anti- Calvinist movement was seizing control of the licensing system and marginalizing Calvinist licensers in the 1620s, this chapter (along with chapter 7) addresses the broader methodological issues of how to weigh and evaluate various vantage points. Chapters three and four analyse the publications resulting from Featley’s debates with prominent Catholic and anti-Calvinist leaders. These chapters examine Featley’s use of patristic tradition in these disputes, the pastoral motivations that underpinned his polemical exchanges, and how Featley strategically issued these polemical publications to counter Catholicism and anti-Calvinism and to promulgate his own alternative version of orthodoxy at several crucial political moments during the 1620s and 1630s. Chapter five focuses on how, in the 1620s and 1630s, the themes of prayer and preaching in his devotional work, Ancilla Pietatis, and collection of seventy sermons, Clavis Mystica, were complementary rather than contradictory. It also builds on several of the major themes of the thesis by examining how pastoral and polemical motivations were at the heart of these works, how Featley continued to be an active opponent—rather than a passive bystander and victim—of Laudianism, and how he positioned himself politically to avoid being reprimanded by an increasingly hostile Laudian regime. Chapter six explores the theme of ‘moderation’ in the events of the 1640s surrounding Featley’s participation at the Westminster Assembly and his debates with separatists. It focuses on how Featley’s pursuit of the middle way was both: a self-protective ‘chameleon- like’ survival instinct—a rudder he used to navigate his way through the shifting political and ecclesiastical terrain of this period—and the very means by which he moderated and manipulated two polarized groups (decidedly convictional Parliamentarians and royalists) in order to reoccupy the middle ground, even while it was eroding away. Finally, chapter seven examines Featley’s ‘afterlife’ by analysing the reception of Featley through the lens of his post-1660 biographers and how these authors, particularly Featley’s nephew, John Featley, depicted him retrospectively in their biographical accounts in the service of their own post-restoration agendas. By analysing how Featley’s own ‘chameleon-like’ tendencies contributed to his later biographers’ distorted perception of him, this final chapter returns to the major methodological issues this thesis seeks to address. In short, by exploring the various roles he played in the early Stuart English Church and seeking to build on and contribute to recent historiographical research, this study sheds light on the links between a minister’s pastoral sensitivities and polemical engagements, and how ministers pursued preferment and ecclesiastically positioned themselves, their opponents, and their biographical subjects through print.