The University of Chicago Theology Workshop

The Theology Workshop, the History of Christianity Club, and the Nicholson Center for Brittish Studies are co-sponsoring a public lecture by Bruce Hindmarsh,  Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College (Vancouver):

“Wesley Agonistes and the Calvinist Sublime: The Early Evangelical Movement as a Devotional School”

Tuesday, October 13
4:30 p.m / Swift Hall Common Room

(Followed by a dinner: RSVP to dje@uchicago.edu.)

This lecture reinterprets the Calvinist-Arminian controversies of the eighteenth century in terms of the changing social space for debate in the eighteenth century. Rather than interpreting the evangelical movement through geometric models, this lecture views early evangelicalism as a devotional school, in the way that art historians speak of artistic schools. An experiment in interdisciplinary criticism, the lecture includes slides of a number of paintings and examines evangelical religion from the point of view of an art historian, drawing analogies and establishing parallels between developments in British academic art and religion in the period, and then employing two terms of art—the agonistic and the sublime—to illuminate the character of evangelical spiritual ideals.