Bucer, Ephesians and Biblical Humanism

N. S. Amos is Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he has taught since 2002. Dr. Amos received the PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2003, and holds graduate degrees in History (MA, the College of William and Mary), as well as Divinity (M.Div., Th.M., Westminster Theological Seminary). His particular fields of interest are: Martin Bucer, specifically his practice as a theologian and exegete, and his relationship with the English Reformation; Bucer’s broader career; the English Reformation more generally; and the history of biblical interpretation. He has published essays on these subjects in Renaissance and Reformation Review, Westminster Theological Journal, Renaissance Studies, as well as in several edited volumes published by Brill, Mohr-Siebeck, and Librairie Droz. Dr Amos also shared (with Andrew Pettegree and Henk van Nierop) in the editing of The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands (Ashgate, 1999), and contributed the article on Bucer to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

• Chapter 1 : Introduction.- PART I : HISTORICAL CONTEXT.- Chapter 2: The Old Theology and the New Learning at Cambridge to 1549.- Chapter 3: “Remember the Readings and Preachings of God’s Prophet and True Preacher, Martin Bucer”: Bucer’s Sojourn in Cambridge, 1549-1551.- PART II: THE PRAELECTIONES AS AN EXERCISE IN BIBLICAL-HUMANIST METHOD.- Chapter 4: “Ratio seu Methodus Martini Buceri”: Bucer’s Prefatory Lectures on Ephesians and His Use of Biblical Humanist Theological Method.- Chapter 5: “An Exposition of the Whole Doctrine of Salvation”: Bucer’s Deployment of Biblical Humanist Method in Exegesis and Theology and the Shape of the 1550 Ephesians Lectures as a Whole.- Chapter 6: Theology in an Exegetical Context: Bucer on Ephesians 1:3-6 and the Doctrine of Election.- Chapter 7: Theology in an Exegetical Context: Bucer on Ephesians 1:13-18 and the Doctrine of Faith.- Chapter 8: Conclusion.

“For biblical scholars and systematic theologians this work is significant for trying to understand the integral relationship between the disciplines. … For the historian of the early modern period Amos gives us a clear understanding of the ecclesial politics in sixteenth-century Cambridge. … As Protestants celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation this year they would do well to remember the contribution of Martin Bucer and biblical humanism within this global movement. Amos’s work helps us do just that.” (Brian Lugioyo, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 70 (1), 2017)