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.

This book describes Martin Bucer (1491-1551) as a teacher of theology, focusing on his time as Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge between 1549 and 1551. The book is centered on his 1550 Cambridge lectures on Ephesians, and investigates them in their historical context, exploring what sort of a theologian Bucer was. The lectures are examined to find out how they represent Bucer's method of teaching and "doing" theology, and shed light on the relationship between biblical exegesis and theological formulation as he understood it. Divided into two interconnected parts, the book first sets the historical context for the lectures, including a broad sketch of scholastic method in theology and the biblical humanist critique of that method. It then closely examines Bucer's practice in the Cambridge lectures, to show the extent to which he was a theologian of the biblical humanist school, influenced by the method Erasmus set forth in the Ratio Verae Theologiaein which true theology begins, ends, and is best "done" as an exercise in the exegesis of the Word of God.