Michael J. McClymond

This book offers a broad-based study of Jonathan Edwards as a religious thinker. Much attention has been given to Edwards in relation to his Puritan and Calvinist forebears. McClymond, however, examines Edwards in relation to his eighteenth-century intellectual context. Among the topics considered are spiritual perception, metaphysics, contemplation, ethics and morality, and apologetics.

This book offers a wide-angle and yet integrative approach to Christian spirituality, engaging diverse historical traditions, incorporating recent developments in Asian, Africa, Latin America, and in global Pentecostalism, while displaying an essential unity in this topic in relation to a number of salient themes (e.g., love, humility, prayer, servanthood, etc.). Though the book is geared toward students in college courses, it should also be of particular interest to practicing Christians across a very broad spectrum of traditions and denominations, and engages secular, Jewish, and Muslim readers, as well as those practicing one of the traditional Asian religions. Endorsements "McClymond's book could be the very best single-volume work on spirituality that I have read in sixty-two years of Jesuit life. He has written a brilliant tour de force with impressive and unimpeachable scholarship. His vast and sound knowledge of primary and secondary sources is combined with a solid historical, theological, and ecumenical sense. His compelling contemporary anecdotes and illustrations are a lively help to the reader." —Harvey D. Egan, SJ, professor emeritus of systematic and mystical theology, Boston College "Martyrs, Monks, and Mystics offers much more than an overview of Christian spirituality. Michael McClymond holds up its multiple expressions with such sensitivity and generosity that, for many readers, his book will serve the role of mystagogical guide. While accessible to non-experts, this book is at the same time remarkably thoughtful and comprehensive. McClymond's Martyrs, Monks, and Mystics is bound to become a classic in Christian spirituality." —Hans Boersma, PhD, Nashotah House Theological Seminary "For anyone interested in the history of spirituality, Michael McClymond's magisterial study of Christian spirituality is must reading. Solidly researched, this study of the vast scope of Christian spirituality—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, ancient, medieval, and modern—is clearly written and informed by a profoundly biblically based point of view. Dr. McClymond has given us a book that promises to be the 'go to' book on the history and theology of Christian spirituality. Highly recommended." —Ralph Martin, STD, director of graduate theology programs in the new evangelization, Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Archdiocese of Detroit Michael J. McClymond is professor of modern Christianity at Saint Louis University. He was educated at Northwestern, Yale, and the University of Chicago, and has held teaching or research appointments at the University of California–San Diego, Emory, Yale, and the Universities of Birmingham (UK) and Berlin (Germany). He has written or edited works on Christian theology, comparative religions, and biblical studies, and his book The Theology of Jonathan Edwards won a theology/ethics "Book of the Year" award from Christianity Today. †

2018 Book Award Winner, The Gospel Coalition (Academic Theology)A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2019Will all evil finally turn to good, or does some evil remain stubbornly opposed to God and God's goodness? Will even the devil be redeemed? Addressing a theological issue of perennial interest, this comprehensive book (in two volumes) surveys the history of Christian universalism from the second to the twenty-first century and offers an interpretation of how and why universalist belief arose. The author explores what the church has taught about universal salvation and hell and critiques universalism from a biblical, philosophical, and theological standpoint. He shows that the effort to extend grace to everyone undermines the principle of grace for anyone.

The Theology of Jonathan Edwards is the first survey of the religious thought of America's theologian--Jonathan Edwards--that draws on all of his writings, now available in a 73-volume online Yale critical edition. In 48 chapters, McClymond and McDermott, two of the world's leading Edwards scholars, treat topics in Edwards's thought that have rarely been analyzed in depth, and never in coordination with a close analysis of the rest of his theology. Such topics include the implications of his doctrine of the Trinity for the divide between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, his enduring appeal among both conservative and liberal Protestants, his ecclesial and sacramental theologies, his conflicted relationship with the history of Calvinism, the cultural-historical and comparative-religious turn he made toward the end of his career (as the leading colonial thinker on the topic of world religions), the appeals to his ideas in nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates over Methodist, Holiness, Pentecostal, and Charismatic revivals, and the reception of his writings in the England, Scotland, continental Europe, and, more recently, in the evangelical communities of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Many of these topics have only been treated in passing in the existing literature, and never in connection with one another and with the whole bulk of Edwards's writings.

McClymond summarizes current scholarship on Jesus and offers a clear, comprehensive, and compelling report on what is known about him here at the start of the 21st century.