A History of Preaching brings together narrative history and primary sources to provide the most comprehensive guide available to the story of the church's ministry of proclamation. Bringing together an impressive array of familiar and lesser-known figures, Edwards paints a detailed, compelling picture of what it has meant to preach the gospel. Pastors, scholars, and students of homiletics will find here many opportunities to enrich their understanding and practice of preaching. Volume 1 contains Edwards's magisterial retelling of the story of Christian preaching's development from its Hellenistic and Jewish roots in the New Testament, through the late-twentieth century's discontent with outdated forms and emphasis on new modes of preaching such as narrative. Along the way the author introduces us to the complexities and contributions of preachers, both with whom we are already acquainted, and to whom we will be introduced here for the first time. Origen, Chrysostom, Augustine, Bernard, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Edwards, Rauschenbusch, Barth; all of their distinctive contributions receive careful attention. Yet lesser-known figures and developments also appear, from the ninth-century reform of preaching championed by Hrabanus Maurus, to the reference books developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the mendicant orders to assist their members' preaching, to Howell Harris and Daniel Rowlands, preachers of the eighteenth-century Welsh revival, to Helen Kenyon, speaking as a layperson at the 1950 Yale Beecher lectures about the view of preaching from the pew. Volume 2, available separately as 9781501833786, contains primary source material on preaching drawn from the entire scope of the church's twenty centuries. The author has written an introduction to each selection, placing it in its historical context and pointing to its particular contribution. Each chapter in Volume 2 is geared to its companion chapter in Volume 1's narrative history. Ecumenical in scope, fair-minded in presentation, appreciative of the contributions that all the branches of the church have made to the story of what it means to develop, deliver, and listen to a sermon, A History of Preaching will be the definitive resource for anyone who wishes to preach or to understand preaching's role in living out the gospel. "...'This work is expected to be the standard text on preaching for the next 30 years,' says Ann K. Riggs, who staffs the NCC's Faith and Order Commission. Author Edwards, former professor of preaching at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, is co-moderator of the commission, which studies church-uniting and church-dividing issues. 'A History of Preaching is ecumenical in scope and will be relevant in all our churches; we all participate in this field,' says Riggs...." from EcuLink, Number 65, Winter 2004-2005 published by the National Council of Churches

In one series, the original writings of the universally acknowledged teachers of the Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, and Islamic traditions have been critically selected, translated, and introduced by internationally recognized scholars and spiritual leaders. Until now, the mainstream historiography of Wycliffism has largely ignored the positive spirituality that Wycliffite dissenters associated with their faith. Even anthologies of Wycliffite writings have focused on their key polemical tenets rather than their spirituality. Wycliffite Spirituality offers a new, refreshing approach with a collection of texts showing that Wycliffites were as keenly interested in the spiritual life as many of their contemporaries and that Wycliffites reflected at length on such questions as how best to live a virtuous active life in the world, how most appropriately to approach God in prayer, how to understand traditional prayers such as the Our Father and Ave Maria, and how to live up to Christ's expectations for ministers and others in the church. WyclifÆs writings on spirituality, the English texts composed by his followers, and records from heresy trials that disclose information about suspects' spiritual practices and devotional lives reveal that late medieval dissenters practiced a vibrant Christianity deserving of further study. Book jacket.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains the full text of volume one and two. Volume two contains primary source material on preaching drawn from the entire scope of the church's twenty centuries. Each chapter in volume two is geared to its companion chapter in volume one's narrative history.

The followers of the martyred Bohemian priest Jan Hus (1371-1415) formed one of the greatest challenges to the medieval Latin Church. Branded as heretics, outlawed, then forced to fight for their faith as well as their lives, the Hussites occupy one of the most colorful and challenging chapters of European religious history. The essays reprinted in this book (along with one here first published in English and additional notes) explore the essence of the early Hussite movement by focusing on the nature and development of heresy both as accusation and identity. Heresy and Hussites in Late Medieval Europe first examines the definition of heresy, and its comparative nature across Europe. It investigates the unique practices of popular religion in local communities, while examining theology and its unavoidable conflicts. The repressive policy of crusade and the growth of martyrdom with its inevitable contribution to the formation of Hussite history is explored. The social application of religious ideas, its revolutionary outcomes, along with the intentional use of art in pedagogy and propaganda, situates the Czech heretics in the fifteenth century. An examination of leading personalities, together with the eventual and more formal church administration, rounds out the study of this remarkable era.

Wyclif's ideas caused a major upheaval both in the country of his birth and in the Bohemian area of central Europe; that upheaval affected theological, ecclesiastical and political developments from the late 14th to the early 16th centuries. Some of those ideas were transmitted orally through Wyclif's university teaching in Oxford, and in his preaching in London and Lutterworth, but the main medium through which his message was disseminated was the written word, using the universal western language of Latin. The papers in this collection look at aspects of that dissemination, from the organization and revision of Wyclif's works to form a summa of his ideas, the techniques devised to identify and make accessible his multifarious writings, the attempts of the orthodox clerical establishment to destroy them, through to the fortunes of his texts in the Reformation period; manuscripts written in England and those copied abroad, mostly in Bohemia, are considered. Although most of the papers have been published previously, a new edition of the important Hussite catalogue of Wyclif's writings is provided, and three lengthy sections contribute new material and additions and corrections to previous listings of Wyclif manuscripts.