The congregants thanked God that they weren't like all those hopeless people outside the church, bound for hell. So the Westboro Baptist Church's Sunday service began, and Rebecca Barrett-Fox, a curious observer, wondered why anyone would seek spiritual sustenance through other people's damnation. It is a question that piques many a witness to Westboro's more visible activity—the "GOD HATES FAGS" picketing of funerals. In God Hates, sociologist Barrett-Fox takes us behind the scenes of Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church. The first full ethnography of this infamous presence on America's Religious Right, her book situates the church's story in the context of American religious history—and reveals as much about the uneasy state of Christian practice in our day as it does about the workings of the Westboro Church and Fred Phelps, its founder. God Hates traces WBC's theological beliefs to a brand of hyper-Calvinist thought reaching back to the Puritans—an extreme Calvinism, emphasizing predestination, that has proven as off-putting as Westboro's actions, even for other Baptists. And yet, in examining Westboro's role in conservative politics and its contentious relationship with other fundamentalist activist groups, Barrett-Fox reveals how the church's message of national doom in fact reflects beliefs at the core of much of the Religious Right's rhetoric. Westboro's aggressively offensive public activities actually serve to soften the anti-gay theology of more mainstream conservative religious activism. With an eye to the church's protest at military funerals, she also considers why the public has responded so differently to these than to Westboro's anti-LGBT picketing. With its history of Westboro Baptist Church and its founder, and its profiles of defectors, this book offers a complex, close-up view of a phenomenon on the fringes of American Christianity—and a broader, disturbing view of the mainstream theology it at once masks and reflects.

Traditionally, Protestant theology between Luther's early reforming career and the dawn of the Enlightenment has been seen in terms of decline and fall into the wastelands of rationalism and scholastic speculation. In this volume a number of scholars question such an interpretation. The editors argue that the development of Post-Reformation Protestantism can only be understood when a proper historical model of doctrinal change is adopted. This historical concern underlies the subsequent studies of theologians such as Calvin, Beza, Olevian, Baxter and the two Turrentini. The result is a significantly different reading of the development of Protestant Orthodoxy, one which both challenges the older scholarly interpretations and clichŽs about the relationship of Protestantism to, among other things, scholasticism and rationalism, and which demonstrates the fruitfulness of the new, historical approach. Contributors: D. V. N. Bagchi, David C. Steinmetz, Richard A. Muller, Frank A. James III, John L. Farthing, Lyle D. Bierma, R. Scott Clark, Donald Sinnema, Paul R. Schaefer, W. Robert Godfrey, Carl R. Trueman, Philip G. Ryken, John E. Platt, Joel R. Beeke, James T. Dennison Jr., Martin I. Klauber, Lowell C. Green, and David P. Scaer.

The collections of the Advocates Library, with the exception of its legal books and manuscripts, were given by the Advocates to the National Library of Scotland in 1925.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1839.