Categories: uncategorized
Date: 05 August 2011 10:40:50
As regular readers will know I've been doing a local preacher course over the last couple of years and most of it has been very useful. Recently though I got excited by something I was doing for it and I mean really excited...not that buzz for a minute thing but proper I am enjoying myself and losing myself in my imagination type excited. The assignment called me to get creative and think about how I could explain theology in a different way. I have to say I loved putting it together.
The bit I loved most was getting stuck into 16th and 17th century reformers. Oh, yawn if you will but going through the assignment and crawling back into things like Christopher Hill's Puritanism and Revolution, (which I hadn't properly explored since A Level History), was exciting. I got to play with the kind of stuff which really sparks me. I also saw that if you are a Protestant of any flavour the influence of these guys and the arguments they were having cannot be escaped, because we are still arguing about the same things in different ways. Also I got back to the fact whilst we focus on the continental guys if we look at just the England based contingent we can see how interesting the development of English Protestantism is, (being careful here because I know Scotland was a whole different ballgame).
People I enjoyed reading about and producing a short drama on, within a wider service designed to teach the history of theological differences, were: Gerrard Winstanley, William Perkins; John Preston , George Fox and Jacob Arminius. Ok so the last one is Dutch, but....hey it is a Methodist thing and I needed Arminius to complete where I was going.
So if I were asked which bit of Faith and Worship I have loved most it has to be unit 16....I got to play :D