“Pink is her favorite,” I whisper.
Eve and Maverick slowly turn to look at me.
“What? She wears it all the time, so I noticed.”
“You really do have it bad.”
“Good girl,” I say under my breath as I tie my shoes. “Give me all the time I need to make you mine.” And she will be mine. I’ve made up my mind on that matter. It has taken me too long to find a woman I’m unwilling to share, and now that I have, I refuse to let her go.
Reklam
At the same time a movement called the German Christians arose among Protestants aimed at closer ties with the Nazis. The German Christians wanted to unite the twenty-eight regional Protestant bodies under a single bishop. They elected to this post Ludwig Müller, a fervent Nazi. They also introduced the Führer principle into church government and adopted the Aryan paragraph, which called for the dismissal of all people of Jewish origin from church positions. In 1933 the German Christians claimed three thousand out of a total of seventeen thousand Protestant pastors.
Wesley stressed what we now call Arminian beliefs; he was the only prominent leader of the Great Awakening who did. The name came from Jacob Arminius (1560–1609), a Dutch professor who tried to modify the Calvinism of his time. Wesley felt no special debt to Arminius, but he did staunchly oppose Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. He thought the belief made God seem arbitrary and partial to certain people and neglectful of others. He insisted that God willed the salvation of all and that people had enough freedom of will to choose or refuse divine grace.
Pietism arose as a reaction to this ossification of the Reformation. Just as Jansenism opposed the cheap grace of the French Jesuits, so the Pietists challenged the nominal faith of German Lutheranism.
The aims of the Pietists were twofold: First, they stressed the importance of personal faith. They left behind all dreams of Catholic Christendom and Puritan commonwealths. They believed that Christianity starts with the individual. So for the first time in Christian history, the idea of conversions of baptized Christians (as well as pagans) came to prominence.
Second, the Pietists wanted to shift the center of the Christian life from the state churches, in which a person was born and brought up, to intimate fellowships of those who had a living faith in God. Revitalized laypeople from these centers were expected to spread the Word of God through all classes of men and women.
Reklam
Reklam