Nathan Rein

Scholar of religion trained as a historian of the Protestant Reformation, particularly interested in the ramifications of Reformation historiography for current debates in the theory of religion. Currently working in an all-undergraduate institution. Other areas of experience include the pedagogy of religious studies, religion and violence, the history of Christianity and the history of popular culture. Primary professional goals: teach transformatively; publish widely and broadly.

• The Chancery of God Protestant Print, Polemic and Propaganda against the Empire, Magdeburg 1546–1551

  • Ashgate
  • 2008
  Authors: Nathan Rein

  The disastrous protestant defeat in the Schmalkaldic War (1546-47) and the promulgation of the Ausburg Interim (1548) left the fate of German Protestantism in doubt. In the wake of these events, a single protestant town, Magdeburg, offered organized, sustained resistance to Emperor Charles V's drive to consolidate Habsburg hegemony and reinstitute uniform Roman Catholic worship throughout Germany. In a flood of printed pamphlets, Magdeburg's leaders justified their refusal to surrender with forceful appeals to religious belief and German tradition. Magdeburg's resistance, interdiction and eventual siege attracted admiring attention from across Europe. The teachings developed and disseminated by Protestant thinkers in defence of the city's stance would ultimately influence political theorists in Switzerland, France, Scotland and even North America. Magdeburg's ordeal formed a signal crisis in the emergence of German Lutheran confessional identity.
  
  The Chancery of God is the first English language monograph on Magdeburg's anti-Imperial resistance and pamphlet campaign. The book offers an analysis of Magdeburg's printed output (over 200 publications) during the crucial years of 1546-51, texts which present a broad spectrum of arguments for resistance and suggest a coherent identity and worldview that is characteristically and self-consciously Protestant.

• From the history of religions to the history of 'religion': the late Reformation and the challenge to sui generis religion

  • Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Early Modern German Culture: Order and Creativity 1550-1750 (Leiden: Brill)
  • 2007
  Authors: Nathan Rein

• Enemy Brothers: Gary Lease and the Scholarship of Religion

  • Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 21.2
  • 2009
  Authors: Nathan Rein

  Gary Lease, a controversial figure in the study of religion, was best known throughout his long career for his uncompromising antipathy towards theologically and phenomenologically-oriented approaches to the field. Lease developed his analytic perspective on religion around a set of broad, global assumptions about human nature, the mind, and society. These assumptions lie at the root of those provocative positions which have come to characterize Lease's work. This paper argues that those assumptions, which center primarily on his understanding of human thought as sharply and inescapably limited by biological, cognitive, and historical constraints, form the basis for a distinctive and robust framework for the study of religion. This framework posits, among other things, a fundamentally agonistic relationship between the religion and the study of religion.

• History and Vulnerability: A Response to Levene and Furey

  • Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 20.4
  • 2008
  Authors: Nathan Rein

  The articles by N. Levene (writing on St. Anselm's Proslogion) and C. Furey (on Thomas More's Utopia) in this volume offer a nuanced critical perspective on historicist tendencies in the study of religion. While insisting on the importance of seeing primary texts as embedded in their historical context, both propose that scholars simultaneously seek to maintain an element of openness and vulnerability to the voices of the past. This can serve as a counterweight to the typical historicist strategy of debunking and unmasking the past's pretensions to authoritative discourse.

• Faith and Empire: Conflicting Visions of Religion in a Late Reformation Controversy—The Augsburg Interim and Its Opponents, 1548–50

  • Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71.1
  • March 2003
  Authors: Nathan Rein

  The battle of Mühlberg (23 April 1547) began a brief period of dominance of German affairs by Emperor Charles V. In the wake of his victory, Charles, a zealous Catholic, attempted to undo the effects of the Reformation and bring the church under his control by engineering the Augsburg Interim. This was nominally a Catholic–Protestant compromise, but it was seen by most Protestants as an attempt to lead the “free” German church back into Catholic and Latin “servitude.” This article examines the differing visions of religion held by the Interim's supporters and opponents. For the Interim, religion centers on sacerdotal authority and social order, whereas for the Lutherans who opposed it religion concerned faith, salvation, and conscience. The struggle over religion was also a struggle over the shape of German society, as emperor, princes, and urban leaders attempted to realize their visions of religious practice and meaning.

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Honors and Awards:

DAAD Fellowship, 1998-1999
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Fellowship, 1999-2000
Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion research grant, 2006