This new edition expands and updates the only general interpretation of the rise and influence of perfectionist revivalism in America and Europe. Fifteen years of expanding research on the holiness movement reinforce this volume's continuing seminal value to cultural and social research. The new concluding essay describes the history of the revival through the turn of the century. This book expands our understanding of the fragmentation and coalescence of American religion by analyzing the factors which created numerous new holiness denominations. Dieter also outlines the historical and theological factors that separate this largely Wesleyan and Methodist wing of evangelicalism from the fundamentalism of Reformed evangelicals. The identification of such nuances will prove especially helpful to those struggling with the extreme diversity in American religion, especially in evangelicalism. For students and scholars of American religious movements as well as students of the feminist, temperance, abolitionist, and populist movements in American society.

The volume constitutes Klaus Fiedler's crowning contribution to scholarship. Essays in the first half of the book focus on Malawian Christianity and how contrasting Powers, Gospel and Secular, engage each other, creating social, political and cultural conflict in the process. In the second half, Fiedler examines general missiological themes. These essays provide a broader missiological background, offering a theoretical framework necessary for appreciating the essays in the first half. He concludes with a chapter that reviews selected seminal books on themes under study. Throughout the volume Fiedler applies the "restorationist revival theory" he constructed in The Story of Faith Missions, an earlier 1994 work putting emphasis on non classical missions and churches, not systematically covered in earlier scholarship. This volume, the first of its kind on Malawian Christianity, will long remain an indispensable text for those interested in Missiology and Malawian Christianity.