Letters To A Friend Who Has Felt It His Duty To Secede From The Church Of England And Who Imagines That The Miraculous Gifts Of The Holy Ghhost Are Revived Among The Seceders

Author : Martin Spence
Publisher : James Clarke & Company
ISBN 13 : 0227905229
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (279 download)

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Download or read book Heaven on Earth written by Martin Spence and published by James Clarke & Company. This book was released on 2015-10-29 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In nineteenth-century Britain, a large number of prominent Anglican and Presbyterian Evangelicals rejected the idea that salvation meant 'going to heaven when you die'. Instead, they proposed that God would establish his kingdom on earth, renewing the creation and reanimating embodied humans to live in a world of science and progress. This book introduces the writings and activities of these women and men, among whom were counted the ardent social reformer Lord Shaftesbury, the highly respectedclergyman Edward Bickersteth, the popular author Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and the General Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, Thomas Rawson Birks. The book shows that the catalyst for such theological revisionism was the end-times doctrine known as 'premillennialism'. While commonly characterised as a gloomy and sectarian belief, the book argues that remillennialism in Victorian Britain was actually an optimistic and often liberalising creed. It dissolved older Evangelical assumptions about the dissimilarities between time and eternity, body and soul, heaven and earth. The book demonstrates that, far from being eccentric pessimists, premillennialists were actually pioneers of trends in nineteenth-century Christian theology that stressed the importance of the incarnation, prioritized social justice, and even entertained the idea of universal salvation.