Eastern and Western Perspectives on the Reformation and Its Impacts

The religious, cultural, and political transformations precipitated by the Reformation fundamentally challenged the Roman Catholic Church, reshaped the entire Christian landscape, and, in the course of subsequent missionary activities and the global expansion of Christianity, impacted cultures far beyond Renaissance Europe. Philip Jenkins's paper examines the inter-dynamics within Catholic and Protestant traditions in the global context of the missionary horizon. Among these, the discussion of human rights informed by Reformed theology, uncovering startling connections between Protestant and Chinese intellectual history, as well as tracing the more immediate repercussions of the Reformation for the development of world Christianity, all draw attention to the complex nature of value formation and ideas exchanges across cultures in the context of global modernity from the Protestant Reformation onward.