Jon Butler

Training God's army : the American Bible school, 1880-1940

PREFACE INTRODUCTION I. ENTHUSIASMS Conversion The Bible Holiness Divine Healing Premillennialism Pentecostalism II. SYSTEMS Despensationalism Methods and Manuels The Language of Fundamentalism III. FUNDAMENTALISTS IN SOCIETY The Society and the Economy Fundamentalists in the Culture The Fundamentalists and Education Fundamentalism and Other Protestants IV. BEGINNINGS Some Founders The Founders A.B. Simpson Adonira Judson Gordon and F.L. Chapell Dwight L. Moody V. BEGINNINGS The Religious Training Schools The Missionary Training School in America Training Schools and Theological Seminaries Continuing the Training School Tradition VI. A TYPOLOGY OF BIBLE SCHOOL DEVELOPMENT Stage One, Foundings. 1882-1915 Stage Two, Expansion, 1915-1930 Stage Three, Toward Academic Respectability, 1940-present VII. INSIDE THE BIBLE SCHOOL Classroom Teaching The Teaching of the Bible Personal Work Classes Specialization Classes Outside the Religious Curriculum VIII. INSIDE THE BIBLE SCHOOL Beyond the Classroom Practical Work Cultivating Consecration Rules IX. WORLDS WITHIN THE BIBLE SCHOOL A Foreign Missionary Culture A World of Women A Culture Of Scarcity X. THE BIBLE SCHOOL AND THE FUNDAMENTALIST MOVEMENT The Bible Schools as Moderating and Unifying Influences The Bible Schools as Headquarters for Fundamentalists The Bible Schools as Vehicles for Conservative Groups Marketing as the Gospel XI. THE BIBLE SCHOOLS AND AMERICAN EDUCATION The Bible Schools as Popular Educators APPENDIX: DEFINING FUNDAMENTALISM NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY INDEX

FORUM: American Religion and the Great Depression

Few topics seem more natural and, sadly, timelier than American religion in bad economic times, our own or the economic depression of the 1930s. The essays by Heather Curtis, Jonathan Ebel, and Alison Greene point up how little we know about religion in the 1930s and, by implication, how little religion has informed policy during our own economic downturn. Perhaps our own crisis is still too new or we are distracted by the “Christian nation” debate or the latest clerical sex scandal. Whatever the cause, Curtis, Ebel, and Greene demonstrate that in the 1930s religion and economic dislocation produced remarkable religious challenges and transformations whose similarities as well as differences underlined their sometimes fateful intersection.

Three Minds, Three Books, Three Years: Reinhold Niebuhr, Perry Miller, and Mordecai Kaplan on Religion

hree truly exceptional books appeared in the early 1930s— exceptional not only for their absolute brilliance but for emphasizing religion in history as well as modern times. In 1932, Reinhold Niebuhr published Moral Man and Immoral Society, which shook liberal Christianity to its core with its powerful denunciation of naïve faith in optimism and progress and its blunt assertion of the reality of evil still darkening human achievement. A year later, Perry Miller published Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, the first in a series of stunning histories by Miller that described the intellectual power residing inside sixteenthand seventeenth-century Calvinist theology. Miller resuscitated the reputation of New England’s Puritans, and his work shaped the writing of American history for half a century. Then, in 1934, Mordecai M. Kaplan published Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life, which demanded wholesale rebuilding of Judaism as traditionally conceived and practiced, and which challenged traditional theistic and prophetic conceptions of religion broadly construed.1 T

Africans' Religions in British America, 1650–1840

Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. By Philip Morgan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1998. xxvi + 703 pp.

Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America (review)

49.95 cloth;

Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People.

21.95 paper. Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790. By Robert Olwell. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. xvi + 294 pp.

Book Review: The Huguenots and Ireland: Anatomy of an ImmigrationThe Huguenots and Ireland: Anatomy of an Immigration. Edited by CaldicottC.E.J., CoughHugh and PittionJean-Paul. Dublin: Glendale Press, 1987. Pp. 444.

49.95 cloth;

36.00.

17.95 paper. A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840. By Jon E Sensbach. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1998. xxvi + 342 pp.

Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People

45.00 cloth;

Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction

17.95 paper.