This chapter argues that not only the author but also the implied audiences and situations of the Johannine texts are fictionalized. It also critiques the longstanding scholarly reconstruction of a “Johannine Community,” proposing alternative ways of contextualizing these works.

The first of the three topics that occupied censors across the regimes was ‘religion’, which predominantly meant Catholicism. This chapter traces examples of self- and bureaucratic censorship under the Ancien Régime, when the king was in power through divine right, through the Revolution, where plays criticizing the Church exploded, and onto the Empire and the Restoration, both of which had an uneasy relationship with biblical and Catholic material for the theatre, especially on secondary stages like the Vaudeville. Generally, the larger the role the Catholic Church played at the time, the more difficult the representation of religious material became. However, when such material did make it to the boards, lateral censorship meant that religion could quickly act as an ersatz vehicle to discuss the ruling regime. Religion was an even tricker subject as reactions were far from homogenous: context was key, and whilst a play might be acceptable to one audience, another could boil over into violence in its quest to promote or silence specific worldviews.

In January 1950, the missionaries reported a vicious attack and an attempted stoning while preaching in the town of Castel Gandolfo, home to the Papal Palace and the Pope’s summer residence. The missionaries’ efforts to preach and proselytize in the town sparked outrage among the local population, with violent reactions allegedly incited by the local clergy. Accounts of the incident varied. In Italy, the police and pro-Vatican press sought to downplay the event, framing it as a reaction to the missionaries’ perceived insensitive and aggressive behavior, and accusing them of aiding the spread of Communism. The missionaries seized the opportunity to raise awareness of their challenges and promote their mission. The crisis garnered headlines in the United States, leading to a significant mobilization in Congress, where senators and representatives urged the Truman administration to pressure the Italian government to allow the missionaries to preach and proselytize. The Italian Foreign Ministry and the State Department entered into protracted negotiations, which lasted several years, as they sought a practical solution that could accommodate the many actors involved. The Castel Gandolfo incident thus became a flashpoint in the broader struggle over religious freedom, sovereignty, and Cold War geopolitics.

This chapter considers whether church education itself makes a difference to citizens’ democratic attitudes. Drawing on evidence from the handover of Catholic primary schools to the Zambian government in the early 1970s, it finds limited effects of the handover on students’ political attitudes except that Catholic schools foster more conservative gender norms. In Tanzania in the period before 1970, Protestant school attendance improves women’s citizenship on many dimensions compared to secular school attendance, but Catholic school attendance does not.

This chapter explains how liberal democratic institutions provide a solution to the problem that rulers cannot otherwise credibly commit to forgoing the introduction of regulations that increase state control over church activities. In particular, churches have greater autocratic risk when they have historically invested in activities, such as church schools, that the state has high capacity to regulate. As a result, churches with significant education systems have greater incentive to speak out in support of liberal democratic institutions, although this incentive is mitigated when their schools are fiscally dependent on the government to operate.

This chapter considers the political effects of church activism in support of liberal democracy, contrasting the effects of church activism in Zambia and Tanzania between 2016 and 2021. Drawing on interviews, survey data, and combined endorsement/conjoint candidate experiments in both countries, I show how churches in Zambia have galvanized international actors, domestic elites, and public opinion in support of democratic institutions, while churches in Tanzania have had more limited success.

This chapter provides a historical overview of church–state relations and church education provision in sub-Saharan Africa. It also demonstrates that churches have not had partisan coalition partners with closely aligned interests in this context, necessitating alternative approaches to ensuring political representation of their interests.

This chapter discusses the implications of the book for understanding democracy and democratic activism beyond churches in sub-Saharan Africa. It emphasizes that some churches employ coalitional strategies to advance their interests, and, in such cases, their attitudes toward liberal democracy are contingent on whether doing so will advance or hinder the power of their preferred parties. It also shows that some churches rely on liberal democracy as an institutional guarantee of their interests, suggesting that my argument applies to churches beyond Africa. It concludes by explaining how the theory can be applied to other types of actors in other regions of the world.

This chapter demonstrates that churches have often engaged in activism for liberal democratic institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, and yet existing scholarship provides little guidance in explaining why churches sometimes engage in this type of activism while others do not. It sketches out an argument for why some churches have an interest in liberal democratic institutions because they protect them from rulers unilaterally introducing regulations that reduce their control of key church activities. It argues that church schools have particular risk of regulation by rulers, giving churches that run greater number of schools particular incentives to support liberal democratic institutions. It also argues that this risk is mitigated when churches are highly dependent on the state for financing activities.

This chapter analyzes the shift towards a closer involvement of the Amsterdam authorities in the lives of citizens from all layers of society that occurred through various institutional innovations after the city turned Protestant in 1578. Credit was a unifying economic phenomenon in Amsterdam, and examining the function of credit allows us to shed light on the connections between people from various classes. Focusing on the phenomenon of insolvency, essentially a breakdown of credit, makes it possible to open up broader perspectives on the early modern economy. Guilds and their civic middle-class values shaped social and economic policies of this period in important ways, clearly displaying the integration among different social groups that also came to be reflected in contemporary legal theory and practice. Religious communities also occupied an important role in financial conflict resolution between creditors and debtors. The moral dimensions of insolvency that become manifest through the acts of various Amsterdam consistories reflect important changes in the attitudes towards insolvency that are typical of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

The final chapter explores the problems of agency and conformity among the enslaved at both individual and communal levels. I situate the Shepherd among ancient Mediterranean writers who understood enslaved persons to function as extensions of their own personae, as well as in conversation with Africana, feminist, postcolonial, and slavery studies on the agency of enslaved and possessed individuals. I suggest that God’s enslaved persons, as possessed instrumental agents of God, are imagined to be empowered by the enslaver to take particular actions and acquire particular virtues that contribute both to their enslaved obedience and their salvation. I then turn to the construction of a tower, the most lengthy visionary account in the Shepherd. Placed alongside Vitruvius’s On Architecture and Sara Ahmed’s scholarship, I argue that the Shepherd portrays the bodies of the enslaved as (ideally) uniformly shaped pieces of a monolithic ecclesiastical whole. Being “useful for the construction of the tower” is made manifest by how the various stones are shaped, reshaped, or rejected from being used to build a tower that is said to represent both God’s house and the Christian assembly itself.

The book concludes by pointing out two major shifts that my reading of the Shepherd produces: one focused on how the centrality of slavery in the Shepherd that complicates earlier treatments of the text as most invested in baptism and/or repentance, and the other focused on the ethical and historical anxieties that emerge from the enslaved–enslaver relationship being so deeply embedded in early Christian literature, ethics, and subject formation. Additionally, I point to how my findings reveal why the Shepherd would be appealing to late ancient Christians: its visionary, dialogical, parabolic, and ethical content are aimed toward crafting obedient enslaved believers who were unified in their ecclesiastical vision. The work of feminist, womanist, Africana, and slavery studies scholars offer an intellectual and ethical scaffolding upon which I contend with the centrality in early Christian thought of God as an enslaver and believers as enslaved persons, as well as the continuations and challenges of the embeddedness of slavery in Christian vocabulary into the twenty-first century.

The argument of this chapter is that the instrument doctrine, if held, sharpens our understanding of other mysteries of the Christian faith, including the hypostatic union, the Church, and the sacrament of the Eucharist. One reason that Aquinas held to the doctrine was the clarity it brought to these other mysteries. With Christology, the benefits are grammatical and speculative. Calling Christ’s humanity an instrument leads us to think of the one who possesses it, namely, the Logos, and so it can render single-subject Christology clearer to the intellect. If Christ’s humanity is held to be an instrument, it also implicates in our understanding the divine power through which the Logos works. With the theology of the Church, the instrument doctrine supports the biblical idea that Christ sends the Holy Spirit on the Church as a human being, and not only as God. And with the theology of the Eucharist, the instrument doctrine assists Catholic faith in perceiving how Jesus gives us a share of the divine life through sacramental communion.

The introduction states the biblical premise of the book’s argument. In Scripture, God saves human beings through the actions and sufferings of Christ in the flesh. St. Thomas Aquinas developed a theological account of the Incarnation that attempts to account for the way Scripture speaks, namely, that Christ’s humanity is the instrumental cause of salvation, or as the book calls it, "the instrument doctrine." The introduction then gives an overview of the book’s argument: this doctrine best accounts for how Jesus Christ saves Christians in virtue of his humanity. It outlines the argument of the seven following chapters.

This chapter introduces the main themes and scope of the volume, including discussing the origin of the concept of ‘heresy’, as well as outlining what aspects of it will and will not form the focus of the following chapters. It then provides a summary of the division of the volume into two parts and the particular topics and case studies contained in each.