Spring 2011 Events

4 April 2011, 7:30 pm, Library West, 212

Euan Cameron (Union Theological Seminary/Columbia University)

Cosmic Time and the Dialogue between Faith and History

To Christian people of the Middle Ages and the Reformation era, history had a meaning. It was the story of God’s dealings with humanity and the world over time. Every major phase in world history, from the rise and fall of empires to the course of world religions, reflected in a visible way the purposes of God at work.

Theologians and preachers of the Reformation devised an approach to teaching the history of the world which responded to that age of crisis. The time-scale of the universe was brief: it could be recovered through holy writ, and even its individual time-intervals might be fraught with meaning. The hand of God was evidently discernible in the rise and fall of empires, and in the persecutions of the Church. The relationship between God and humanity was sealed in a perpetual covenant, based on justification by grace through faith, which expressed itself variously in the different manifestations of the historic religious communities. Time was structured around theological principles which the reformers had rediscovered.

This lecture will explore how that controversial vision of history rose and then declined, as thinking people confronted a cosmos older, more complex, and less obviously human-centred than they had first believed.

Click here to an event poster.

Prof. Euan Cameron is Henry Luce III Professor of Reformation Church History at Union Theological Seminary with a concurrent appointment in the religion department of Columbia University.  He was educated at Eton and Oxford.  He has had positions at All Souls College, Oxford, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and now Union Seminary where he served as Academic Vice-President from 2004 to 2010.  Prof. Cameron’s scholarly work analyzes the role and transformations of religion in European society in the later Middle Ages and the Reformation periods. His books include: The Reformation of the Heretics: the Waldenses of the Alps 1480-1580 (1984); The European Reformation (1991); Interpreting Christian History (2005).  His most recent work is Enchanted Europe: Religion, Superstition, Reason and Religion, 1250-1750 (2010).  He is currently academic editor to the third volume of the New Cambridge History of the Bible.

• The event is free and open to the public
• The event is co-sponsored by the Dunlevie Term Professorship of the Honors Program, the University of Florida Honors Program, the Department of History, the Department of Religion, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, and the Christian Study Center of Gainesville.
• For more information, contact: louthan@ufl.edu

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