Inventing Authority is well-researched and thought-provoking, and will be of interest to the scholar, the student and the informed layperson. This work reflects a disciplined approach that bears some useful fruit for the historian. Filling a significant lacuna in the early history of the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, Inventing Authority is an important and eye-opening contribution to Reformation studies.
Discovering that the reformers most frequently appealed to patristic sources in polemical contexts, Esther Chung-Kim adeptly traces the variety and creativity of their appeals to their forebears in order to support their arguments-citing them to be authoritative for being "exemplary scriptural exegetes" to "instruments of choice."Įxamining three generations of sixteenth-century reformers-from such heavy-weights as Calvin and Luther to lesser-known figures like Oecolampadius and Hesshusen-Chung-Kim offers an analysis of striking breadth, one that finds its center by focusing in on the perennially contentious topic of the Eucharist. Adding great historical insight to the events of the sixteenth century, Inventing Authority uncovers how and why the Protestant reformers came, in their dissent from the Catholic church, to turn to the Church Fathers and align their movements with the early church.
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