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"The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church" is a multivolume study by Hughes Oliphant Old that explores the history of preaching from the words of Moses at Mount Sinai through modern times. This sixth volume, "The Modern Age," tells the story from the French Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall -- an age that began with a rejection of Christian civilization yet ended with the failure of an anti-Christian state to take its place. As the church undertook to resist secularization, come to grips with biblical criticism, and initiate overseas missions, preaching continued to support its historic faith.
Opening with the revived Catholic Order of Preachers, continental Protestants such as Abraham Kuyper, and the self-consciously modern preaching of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Old moves on to consider such Victorian figures as John Henry Newman and Charles Haddon Spurgeon. He carefully lays out tensions in America between the evangelical Calvinism of New England and the Old School, as well as the beginnings of black preaching and the great American school of Charles Finney, Dwight L. Moody, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and many more. In the twentieth century Old's focus falls on the crises of the two world wars, especially the courageous ministries of German, Dutch, and Hungarian preachers during the Third Reich.
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