You Tube Theology

This session is part of the Mission and the Bible in the Wake of the Reformation Conference held Oct 20, 2017 held at Wycliffe College.

Alec Ryrie: Lovers and Brawlers: Protestants and their Bibles from the Reformation to the Present. (https://youtu.be/1Ej2E2-Hxxg)

Eckhard Schnabel: The Great Commission: The Vision and Practice of Missionary Work from Jesus, John, and Paul to Bonifatius and Martin Luther. (https://youtu.be/uEx-ZgukN5g)

Cheryl Peterson: God's mission has a church, but does it have a scripture? Reflections on the Scriptural basis for the church's mission. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU-Xhyou24A)

Carl Trueman: A Narrative in Crisis? The Reformation and Some Modern Critics. (https://youtu.be/lNGdjMd5abM)

Topic: Lovers and Brawlers: Protestants and their Bibles from the Reformation to the Present.

Alec Ryrie
University of Durham
Reformation Historian
Durham, United Kingdom

I am a historian of Protestant Christianity. My specialism is the history of England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but I have interests in the emergence and development of Protestant and radical beliefs, identities and spiritualities more widely in that era and beyond. My recently published book Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World gives an overview of the history of Protestantism as a whole from Luther to the present. I am also one of the co-editors of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. My blog occasionally discusses how I hold all this together.

Historical theology is one of Durham's traditional strengths. Within the Department, my own work complements that of my colleagues Krastu Banev, Susan Royal, Mike Snape and Clare Stancliffe, and I also find things to argue about with Lewis Ayres, Douglas Davies and Mathew Guest. Through the University's Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, there are also links with specialists in related fields in the departments of History, English and elsewhere. I co-convene the History of Christianity seminar.

My research interests have focused on the culture and politics of religious reform in England and Scotland. My doctoral work, eventually published as The Gospel and Henry VIII, examined how early evangelical reformers in England dealt with the peculiar political pressures of Henry VIII's reign, and argued that this period was decisive in forming the politically radical strand of English Protestantism's character. My work on the early English Reformation drew my interest to the very different path of events in the neighbouring kingdom of Scotland. My second book, The Origins of the Scottish Reformation, examined how the culture and politics of Scottish Protestantism slowly took shape, arguing that the process was contingent and shaped decisively by the use and threat of violence.

In 2013 I published Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (OUP), a study of the spirituality of English and Scottish Protestantism c. 1530-1640, winner of the Society for Renaissance Studies' book prize and of the triennial Richard L. Greaves Prize. This grew in part out of the AHRC Research Network on worship in the early modern world which I administered during 2008-09. Several of the papers from the Network's conferences are published by Ashgate as Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (ed. Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie, 2012) and Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (ed. Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie, 2013).

The work on my recent history of Protestantism has taken me into the realm of public history, with several broadcast and print media contributions in both Britain and the United States. In particular, much of that book was prefigured in my lectures as Visiting Professor in History of Religion at Gresham College for 2015-17, which are available in full through their website.