Overview

Catherine Booth's achievements - as a revivalist, social reformer, champion of women's rights, and, with her husband William Booth, co-founder of the Salvation Army - were widely recognized in her lifetime. However, Catherine Booth's life and work has since been largely neglected. This neglect has extended to her theological ideas, even though they were critical to the formation of Salvationism, the spirituality of the movement she cofounded. This book examines the implicit theology that undergirds Catherine Booth's Salvationist spirituality and reveals the ethical concerns at the heart of her soteriology and the integral relationship between the social and evangelical aspects of Christian mission in her thought. Catherine Booth emerges as a significant figure from the Victorian era, a British theologian and church leader with a rare if not unique intellectual and theological perspective: that of a woman.

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9780718893200

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Reviews

'Throughout the book the various influences on Catherine's theological position are considered and [ - ] the thoroughness with which these interplays of thought are studied is one of the greatest strengths of the book.' Hugh Osgood, Churches Together in England Previous writing on Catherine Booth - a cofounder of The Salvation Army - has been broadly biographical, but this book concentrates on the theology...The book reveals some of the major debates that were hot topics in some 19th Century Christian circles: how to understand the atonement, whether you needed a very personal experience of salvation, the relationship between prevenient grace and personal choice in relation to faith, the place of sacraments in the life of the church, the risks of antinomianism etc...Comparisons with today's renewal movements are invited by this book too. The Booths were inspired to live a Christianity that was faithful to the first generation of Christians. Is that hope as lively today? Are we as hungry to be faithful to the apostolic church? --Rev Susan Durber, Reform Magazine, (May, 2014)

'Throughout the book the various influences on Catherine's theological position are considered and [ - ] the thoroughness with which these interplays of thought are studied is one of the greatest strengths of the book.' Hugh Osgood, Churches Together in England

'Throughout the book the various influences on Catherine's theological position are considered and [...] the thoroughness with which these interplays of thought are studied is one of the greatest strengths of the book.' Hugh Osgood, Churches Together in England Previous writing on Catherine Booth - a cofounder of The Salvation Army - has been broadly biographical, but this book concentrates on the theology ... The book reveals some of the major debates that were hot topics in some 19th Century Christian circles: how to understand the atonement, whether you needed a very personal experience of salvation, the relationship between prevenient grace and personal choice in relation to faith, the place of sacraments in the life of the church, the risks of antinomianism etc ... Comparisons with today's renewal movements are invited by this book too. The Booths were inspired to live a Christianity that was faithful to the first generation of Christians. Is that hope as lively today? Are we as hungry to be faithful to the apostolic church? Rev Susan Durber, Reform Magazine, (May, 2014) Christ-like response to injustice and inequality remains as relevant as ever. Ted Harrison, Church Times, (20th June, 2014) This volume engages with the work and teaching rather than with the person of Catherine Booth ... the author uses the first three chapters to examine her doctrine of salvation, which embraced the doctrines of justification and sanctification, and the way this doctrine relates to the birth of the Salvation Army. Another set of three chapters is concerned with Catherine Booth's doctrines of church, ministry, and sacraments which derive from her doctrine of salvation. Journal of Contemporary Religion, Issue 29.2 (2014) Overall Read's work is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the ideas motivating Salvationists and a reminder of how important theology was for many Victorians, but it also implicitly points to the challenges inherent in writing religious history, including how to synthesize ideas and actions, intentions and perceptions, and meaning and experience. As a highly interdisciplinary project, religious history can benefit from the explication of theology in a historically contextualized manner.2 -Jaqueline R. de Vries, Victorian Studies, Vol. 58 No. 3, Spring 2016

Author Information

John Read is a Salvation Army officer currently serving as the Army's ecumenical officer for the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.

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