Ulrich Zwingli During his ministry at Einsiedeln, Zwingli began to entertain doubts about certain church practices. In 1516 he read a Latin translation of the Greek New Testament published by the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, which he later transcribed into notebooks and memorized verbatim. On the basis of these and other scriptural readings, Zwingli charged in sermons that church teachings and practice had diverged widely from the simple Christianity of the Holy Writ. Among the practices cited by Zwingli as unscriptural were the adoration of saints and relics, promises of miraculous cures, and church abuses of the indulgence system. His forthright affirmations of scriptural authority won him wide popular repute, and on January 1, 1519, he was appointed priest at the Gross Münster (German, “Great Cathedral”) in Zürich
John Calvin According to Calvin, the Bible specified the nature of theology and of any human institutions. Thus, his statements on doctrine began and ended in Scripture, although he frequently cited the church fathers and important medieval Catholic thinkers. He sought to minimize speculation on divine matters and instead to draw on the Word of God. He also urged the church to recover its original vitality and purity.
In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin sought to articulate biblical theology in a sensible way, following the articles of the Apostles’ Creed. The four books in the definitive edition focus on the articles “Father,” “Son,” “Holy Spirit,” and “Church.”
The Wesleys Wesley’s thought was based on an Arminian interpretation of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England but emphasized personal experience of conversion, assurance, and sanctification. He held to the doctrines of original sin, the atoning work of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity. These were the objective ground of the subjective appropriation of salvation. Justification was by faith alone, with good works as the testimony and test of faith and therefore a condition of final salvation. New birth through the Holy Spirit was the beginning of sanctification, which was to be brought to a “Christian perfection” of entire love towards God and neighbor. He believed in the universal sufficiency and scope of Christ’s work, which restores to every man a measure of free will that allows him to accept the gospel and do its works.
Wesley discarded many tenets of the Church of England, including the doctrine of the apostolic succession (the maintenance of an unbroken line of succession of bishops of the Christian church beginning with St. Peter),
Jonathan Edwards The result of Edwards’s 1734-35 sermons was a religious revival in which a great number of conversions were made; he received 300 new members into his church. Some of the converted were so obsessed by his fiery descriptions of eternal damnation that they contemplated suicide. In 1740 the British evangelist George Whitefield visited Edwards. Together, the two men started a revival movement that became known as the Great Awakening and developed into a religious frenzy engulfing all New England. The conversions were characterized by convulsions and hysteria on the part of the converts, and the harshness and appeal to religious fear in one of Edwards’s sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” caused his congregation to rise weeping and moaning from their seats. By 1742 the revival movement had grown out of control, and for the next 60 to 70 years it had the effect on American religion of preventing any attempt at a liberal interpretation of doctrine.
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher Schleiermacher has been accused of making religion invulnerable at the expense of turning it into a purely subjective experience, but this criticism is contested on the grounds that it misinterprets the term feeling. The influential neoorthodox movement of early-20th-century theology, particularly as represented by Karl Barth, developed partly in reaction to Schleiermacher’s influence, stating that Schleiermacher led the great defection whereby liberal theology focused on human potentiality and religiosity at the expense of God’s own reality, majesty, and grace. Barth himself, however, retained a wistful admiration for Schleiermacher, eventually speculating that “all might not be lost” with him, especially if we await a theology “predominantly and decisively of the Holy Spirit.”
John Henry Newman: His Developing Faith, His Life as a CatholicA leader of the Oxford Movement and later a cardinal of the Roman Catholic church, John Henry Newman, outstanding religious thinker and essayist, was probably the most influential theologian of Victorian England.
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