The third week of the summer course began with a Student Fellow presentation by Rawdah Gawaher (University of Birmingham). She compared the religious policies of the 4th-century Roman emperor Constantine with the attempt of the caliph Abdullah ibn al-Mamun (786-833) to make the doctrine of the createdness of Qur’an the standard teaching. The group discussed whether and how the first Christian emperor and the seventh Abbasid caliph can be compared.
The day’s lecture and source study focused on the institutionalization of the Reformation. What happens when Reformation theology and the evangelical movement are transformed into more permanent forms? Martin Luther’s “German Mass” of 1526 is an example of the crucial step in the accelerated process of change that transformed the Western Church in the 1520s and 1530s.