David W. Kling

• Ph.D., University of Chicago
• University of Miami

This book examines the symbiotic relationship between Scripture and the social and cultural contexts shaping its interpretation throughout Western history. Biblical texts have not only shaped the times, but the times have also exerted an enormous impact on shaping the interpretation of texts. The book traces how specific biblical texts—verses, chap...

David W. Kling offers a response to the essays by Ines Jindra, Dana Robert, and Joseph Lee in a book forum on his A History of Christian Conversion (2020). Following a discussion of the background to the research and writing of his book, Kling engages the disciplinary approaches of each author (Jindra’s sociological, Robert’s missiological, Lee’s h...

The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards offers a state-of-the-art summary of scholarship on Edwards by a diverse, international, and interdisciplinary group of Edwards scholars, many of whom serve as global leaders in the burgeoning world of research and writing on 'America's theologian'. As an early modern clerical polymath, Edwards is of interest...

This chapter begins by examining the relationship between Christianity and colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa and assessing Christianity’s explosive growth in the twentieth century. Indeed, accounting for conversion to Christianity in Africa has been a much-discussed topic among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, missiologists, and theologia...

This chapter focuses primarily on the New Testament, the charter document for Christian views of conversion. It examines the vocabulary of conversion and the multitudinous ways that Scripture depicts conversion. At a basic level, conversion in the New Testament is a personal response of faith to God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ: theologically,...

This chapter opens with an analysis of the revised meaning of conversion as Christianity transitioned from a “cult” (out-group) to a “church” (in-group) now favored by Christian emperors. Following Constantine’s ascent to power, Christian leaders complained of hasty, superficial, and opportunistic conversions. Indeed, in many areas, very little sep...

This chapter examines independent Protestant movements in China from the 1930 to the present. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Protestant foreign missionaries encountered occasional and sometimes violent resistance in China. At the same time, independent Chinese movements and leaders increasingly displaced foreign-controlled Protestan...

This chapter opens with a broad survey of Christianity’s initial appearance in West Asia and the several papal-sponsored sending missions of a handful of friars that followed. It then moves to a more extended treatment of the first organized and subsidized effort by the Church to penetrate China with the gospel—the first Jesuit mission of the sixte...

This chapter examines the necessity and nature of conversion from the earliest Puritan communities in New England through the colonies-wide Great Awakening. It begins with the conversionary views of Thomas Shepard, examines briefly the phenomenon of the Great Awakening, and ends with an extended discussion of the centrality of conversion in the lif...

This chapter examines Christian growth and conversion in the early church period. Due to the lack of textual, inscriptional, and archaeological evidence, the second and third centuries are perhaps the most difficult period to account for the spread of Christianity and the nature of conversion. Nevertheless, historians have proposed and debated the...

This chapter examines conversion from the English Reformers to John Bunyan. Beginning with William Tyndale’s translation and annotations of the New Testament, the early evangelical movement promoted a religious culture that uplifted conversion as an ideal of Christian life. By the end of the sixteenth century, Puritan practical divinity represented...

As Christian European society expanded geographically and as the Latin Church insisted on its universal rule, the perceived contamination of Christians by “religious aliens” accelerated intolerance by church and state authorities, mobs, and vigilante groups. This chapter examines the forced conversions of Jews and pagans. In four incidents of Jewis...

Conversion has played a central role in the history of Christianity. In this first in-depth and wide-ranging narrative history, David W. Kling examines the dynamic of individuals, families, and people groups who turn to the Christian faith. Global in reach, this book progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity’s ex...

This chapter examines the varieties and methods of Christian conversion in early medieval Europe. Christians made repeated attempts to adjust Christian convictions to the realities of people who practiced a variety of nature religions. Two cultural worlds interacted in a reciprocal process of adding and subtracting, creating and destroying. One way...

This chapter introduces the subject of conversion by considering issues, themes, theories, and methods in the study of Christian conversion. Conversion is movement from something to something. Its process is dynamic and multifaceted and raises a number of questions: Is the change intellectual, social, psychological, moral, or some combination? Is i...

Beginning in the 1840s, Anglo-French gunboat diplomacy and “unequal treaties” forcibly opened China to European economic interests and, in so doing, introduced unprecedented opportunities for Christian expansion. Catholic missionaries and priests returned to nurture “Old Catholics” and plant new missions, and for the first time Protestants appeared...

This chapter considers expressions and views of conversion in two major evangelical movements in two locales—Pietism in Germany and Methodism in England. Pietism, whose spirituality informed nearly all aspects of British and American evangelicalism, emerged in the seventeenth century as one of the most important Protestant renewal movements after t...

The growth of evangelicalism in Latin America, largely of the Pentecostal type, is a recent phenomenon. After half a century of relative dormancy, Pentecostalism exploded during the last three decades of the twentieth century, reshaping the Latin American religious landscape that for nearly four centuries had been monopolized by the Catholic Church...

Beginning in the 1860s and 1870s, in separate regions of India, Protestants witnessed explosive growth through group conversions among the “depressed classes.” Forced to revise their understanding of conversion as an individual commitment made by one person at a time, Christians discovered that their future success lay in the conversion of the outc...

The concluding chapter provides summary observations of the book’s themes that highlight the complex, multifaceted dimension of conversion throughout twenty centuries of Christian history. These include the convert’s cognizance of divine presence; the crucial importance of historical context (political, religious, institutional, and socioeconomic f...

By the early sixteenth century, the call to conversion had moved in other and more radical directions, resulting initially in renewed personal spiritual commitment at odds with the Catholic Church and then moving to outright schism and a change of institutional commitment. Reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin experienced new and profound...

The focus of this chapter is on the East African Revival, one of the most powerful and enduring African conversionary movements of the twentieth century. From the mid-1940s through the late 1970s, the revival expanded well beyond East Africa as teams of missionaries and African leaders carried the message to an international audience, from Brazil t...

In the early Middle Ages, the monastic model of conversion represented Christianity’s highest form of spirituality. Conversion meant becoming a religious or entering a religious order; it represented withdrawal into a cloistered community where the soul’s quest for perfection in imitation of Christ could be fully realized. Conversion signified a li...

This chapter begins with an examination of the evangelical movement among African Americans, including the testimonies of ex-slaves and the spiritual autobiographies of George White and Jarena Lee. It then considers the role of conversion in the Second Great Awakening. Although there was no overarching unity to this awakening, the revival profoundl...

This chapter examines the contributions of monks, bishops, popes, and kings in spreading Christianity to the emerging kingdoms of Europe. With the exception of Ireland, the conversion of Europe was largely brought about by the mutually reinforcing interactions between missionaries and kings. In this symbiotic relationship, missionaries had somethin...

Conversionary efforts in the New World mirrored attitudes and practices in the Old. Christendom remained as much a project in the New as in the Old, and thus religious differences remained as problematic in the Americas as they did in Europe. Images of military conflict—combat, battle, and victory—language familiar on the Continent—infused the outl...

The long Catholic Reformation, which lasted from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, is one of the most active, intense, and expansive in the history of Christian conversion. This chapter begins with an examination of the conversions of two profoundly influential Catholics from the Iberian Peninsula (Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Ávila) and...

The first part of this chapter examines Catholic missions among the Maasai, with particular attention given to the perennial issues raised by Vincent Donovan in his book Christianity Rediscovered . After a cursory examination of the role of missionary education as a vehicle of conversion, the discussion returns to the Maasai and, in particular, to...

After tracing the early Christian presence in India and discussing the nature of the caste system, this chapter profiles individuals—well-known upper-caste nineteenth-century converts from Hinduism. As in China, the missionary presence in India was a necessary but not sufficient factor in Christianity’s spread. Missionaries initiated the first conv...

In this contribution to the Lives of Great Religious Books series, Joel Baden, a professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School, guides his readers on a thematic tour of the Book of Exodus, beginning chronologically with its prehistory and concluding with its modern appropriation by liberation theologians. Over the centuries, Baden avers, the at...

The contemporary field of cognitive science proposes that religion (1) is a natural evolutionary development and (2) involves a two-system model of reasoning that, in a Christian context, moves from basic beliefs in God to a theological elaboration of those beliefs. The transition from natural religion to theology can lead to tensions, if not contr...

Boundless Dominion: Providence, Politics, and the Early Canadian Presbyterian Worldview. By Denis McKim. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion, series 2, vol. 80. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017. xx + 363 pp. $110 cloth (CAD & USA); $34.95 paper (CAD & USA). - Volume 88 Issue 1 - David W. Kling

David W. Kling explores the exegetical foundations of Jonthan Edwards' understanding of conversion. Given the importance of revivalism in Edwards' career, one cannot deny the preeminent place of conversion in his thought and preaching. Yet fundamental to that doctrine was Scripture's teaching on the nature of conversion. Kling probes this topic by...

The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. By Michael J.McClymond and Gerald R.McDermott. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xvi + 766 pp. $64.00 cloth. - Volume 83 Issue 1 - David W. Kling

The Edwardsians were not only thinkers but doers; speculative theologians, but like their eponymous leader, revivalists. This was particularly evident among the third generation of Edwardsians, a postrevolutionary cohort whose ministry extended from 1790 to the 1820s. Among the Edwardsian revivalists of the Second Great Awakening in New England, Ed...

William Wilberforce: A Biography. By TomkinsStephen. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007. 238 pp. $18.00 paper. - Volume 77 Issue 4 - David W. Kling

The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. By JonathanSheehan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. xvi + 273 pp. $35.00 cloth. - Volume 75 Issue 2 - David W. Kling

This book examines the dynamic interplay between scripture and society. Kling traces the story of how specific biblical texts have at different times emerged to be the inspiration of movements that have changed the course of history. He selects eight specific texts (sometimes a single verse, other times a selection of verses or chapters, even books...

Connecticut church architecture underwent significant stylistic innovations from 1790 to 1840, a transition that historians refer to as “meetinghouse to church.” The traditional boxy meetinghouse gave way to the steepled church; forward facing pews replaced box pews; a lowered, simplified pulpit replaced the lofty pulpit; and the main entrance was...

This book examines the dynamic interplay between scripture and society. Kling traces the story of how specific biblical texts have at different times emerged to be the inspiration of movements that have changed the course of history. He selects eight specific texts (sometimes a single verse, other times a selection of verses or chapters, even books...

This book examines the dynamic interplay between scripture and society. Kling traces the story of how specific biblical texts have at different times emerged to be the inspiration of movements that have changed the course of history. He selects eight specific texts (sometimes a single verse, other times a selection of verses or chapters, even books...

This book examines the dynamic interplay between scripture and society. Kling traces the story of how specific biblical texts have at different times emerged to be the inspiration of movements that have changed the course of history. He selects eight specific texts (sometimes a single verse, other times a selection of verses or chapters, even books...

This book examines the dynamic interplay between scripture and society. Kling traces the story of how specific biblical texts have at different times emerged to be the inspiration of movements that have changed the course of history. He selects eight specific texts (sometimes a single verse, other times a selection of verses or chapters, even books...

This book examines the dynamic interplay between scripture and society. Kling traces the story of how specific biblical texts have at different times emerged to be the inspiration of movements that have changed the course of history. He selects eight specific texts (sometimes a single verse, other times a selection of verses or chapters, even books...

The theological influence of the New Divinity in the formation and character of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) is uncontested among scholars of American religious history and missions. Since the mid nineteenth century, both partisans of missions and nearly all scholarly observers have attributed the origins of the...

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This study examined the relationship between religiosity and the affective and immune status of 33 HIV-seropositive mildly symptomatic African-American women (CDC stage B) in a replication of a prior study that reported an association between religiosity and affective and immune status in HIV-seropositive gay men. All women completed an intake inte...

This study examines the relationship between religiosity and the affective and immune status of 106 HIV-seropositive mildly symptomatic gay men (CDC stage B). All men completed an intake interview, a set of psychosocial questionnaires, and provided a venous blood sample. Factor analysis of 12 religiously oriented response items revealed two distinc...

The Life of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt: An Autobiography. By JarrattDevereux. The William Bradford Collection. Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 1995. xxvii + 138 pp. $12.95. - Volume 66 Issue 4 - David W. Kling

Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World. By HallTimothy D.. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. x + 196 pp. $39.95 cloth; $16.95 paper. - Volume 65 Issue 3 - David W. Kling

The story is a familiar one, found in nearly every narrative text of American religious history In the summer of 1806, five Williams College students met in a grove of trees to pray for divine guidance and to discuss their religious faith and calling. While seeking refuge from a summer rainstorm under a haystack, Samuel J. Mills, Jr., and the other...

“Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770. By LambertFrank. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. xii + 238 pp. $24.95. - Volume 65 Issue 1 - David W. Kling

The Life of Jedidiah Morse: A Station of Peculiar Exposure. by MossRichard J.. Knoxville, Tenn.: The University of Tennessee Press, 1995. xiv + 175 pp. - Volume 65 Issue 1 - David W. Kling

MM 100 This course is a study of the role of religion (primarily Christianity) in popular culture and the way in which religion becomes the vehicle for aesthetic, social, political, and other cultural purposes. In particular, this course explores contemporary American religious life with special attention given to groups and issues depicted through...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1985. Microfilm. s