A leading expert on John Calvin brings together the reformer's most profound reflections on what it means to live a fully Christian life. The Christian Life includes excerpts from Calvin's impressive theological writings and illuminating sermons, as well as a selection of his stately prayers. Editor John H. Leith focuses on Calvin's spirituality, which arose out of the reformer's conviction that theology's primary importance is to encourage piety, to edify, and to transform human life and society. Calvin's writings have much to tell about the manner and style of Christian living. The writings gathered in The Christian Life draw upon Calvin's own heartfelt commitment to the ideals of life in Christ and to the responsibility to the community he served as pastor, preacher, teacher, and counselor. Here, then, is Calvin's own pattern for the conduct of the fully Christian life, which stresses that it is in Christian people living in Christian community and in society that we see most clearly the reality of faith. The Christian Life shares Calvin's thinking on such essential questions as the nature of sin; the importance of self-denial and cross-bearing to the Christian life; maintaining the proper balance between the present life and the life to come; the role of grace; the concept of Christian freedom; the place of prayer; the centrality of community; ideas of the elect and predestination; and the deepest purposes of God for his people. He relates all issues to the fundamental question of piety and how Christians can best attune themselves to God's unfolding plans in everyday life. This compact volume makes available to readers as never before some of the most accessible and rewarding writings of this foremost figure in the history of Christian thought. The selections in The Christian Life will introduce the reader to an influential form of Christian piety; but above all, they provide a clue to how Christians today may live and cope with the problems of personal and public life in a highly pluralistic and secular culture, in which the traditional guides and support for Christian living seem to have lost vitality and vigor.

The courtly love tradition had a great influence on the themes of religious poetry—just as an absent beloved could be longed for passionately, so too could a distant God be the subject of desire. But when authors began to perceive God as immanently available, did the nature and interpretation of devotional verse change? Ryan Netzley argues that early modern religious lyrics presented both desire and reading as free, loving activities, rather than as endless struggles or dramatic quests. Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist analyzes the work of prominent early modern writers—including John Milton, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, and George Herbert—whose religious poetry presented parallels between sacramental desire and the act of understanding written texts. Netzley finds that by directing devotees to crave spiritual rather than worldly goods, these poets questioned ideas not only of what people should desire, but also how they should engage in the act of yearning. Challenging fundamental assumptions of literary criticism, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist shows how poetry can encourage love for its own sake, rather than in the hopes of salvation.

What does “Christ died for us” mean? Why does the Bible say that we were reconciled to God through the death of Jesus and that we shall be saved by his life? What is the meaning of God's incarnation in the first place? Why “God with us”? In this book we will try to answer these and other questions about salvation, first by reconstructing the origin of the various theories that have been proposed throughout history. We will discover that, to this day, there is no agreement among theologians on many fundamental points of the doctrine of redemption, and we will come up with our own hypothesis, which is exhaustive and does justice to God's mercy. To do so, we will rediscover some lost biblical concepts that will help us to recover the original idea of salvation. We will show that it is intrinsically linked to the nature of God, which was fully manifested in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ and the gift of his life. We will also understand why we are called to identify ourselves in him and in his love, since it is the source, foundation, and ultimate goal of salvation.

Renaissance and Reformation—partners or enemies? The popular image of these two historical phenomena is one of opposition and contradiction: the Renaissance was a cultural revival influenced by classical philosophy; the Reformation was a radical religious movement which rejected traditional authority. But in the life and work of Peter Martyr Vermigli, a "Calvinist Thomist" and the leading sixteenth-century Italian Reformer, scholasticism and Protestantism converge. An international conference, sponsored by the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, reflects the recent renewed interest in Italian reform. Entitled "The Cultural Impact of Italian Reformers," its aim was to gather Vermigli scholars along with Renaissance and Reformation scholars. Half the essays (by Paul Grendler, Cesare Vasoli, Rita Belladonna, Anthony Santosuosso, and Antonio D'Andrea) deal with the general question of Renaissance and Reformation interaction: How are humanism and scholasticism related? Marvin Anderson, Philip McNair, J. Patrick Donnelly, Robert Kingdon, and Joseph C. McLelland focus on the thought and activity of Vermigli himself. Students of theology, history, and philosophy, and specifically of the Renaissance and the Reformation, will welcome this book.

In this second volume, Webster progresses the discussion to include topics in moral theology, and the theology of created intellect. An opening chapter sets the scene by considering the relation of christology and moral theology. This is followed by a set of reflections on a range of ethical themes: the nature of human dignity; mercy; the place of sorrow in Christian existence; the nature of human courage; dying and rising with Christ as a governing motif in the Christian moral life; the presence of sin in human speech. Webster closes with studies of the nature of intellectual life and of the intellectual task of Christian theology.