WTS

Malcolm Anderson

(Research Fellow, Australian Institute of Archaeology)

Malcolm studied prehistory and anthropology at the ANU (BA Hons) and has dug in sites in Hong Kong (Tung Lung Island Ching Dynasty fort with the Museum of Hong Kong) and in Israel (Tel Ahwat excavation with Adam Zertal of Haifa University).

He has a PhD in archaeology from the University of Melbourne and is a research fellow with the Australian Institute of Archaeology (attached to La Trobe University).

He and his family are part of our 11am Congregation.

Martin Luther lived through extraordinary times in the early decades of the Sixteenth Century; he would be amazed to know there are 830 million Protestants in the world today. But how did it all start? And why was his reform successful? Why did large numbers of Roman Catholics adopt Luther’s views? How can the life and times of ‘Dr Martin’ get us to the heart of reformation theology? This overview of the world of Luther, the life and work of the reformer, and an introduction to his theology will be explored and explained.

In this session we continue to explore the life and work of Martin Luther after the tumultuous Diet of Worms in 1521, and its after-effects in Europe. Presbyterianism was one of a number of Protestant denominations that expressed ‘reformed theology’. While in most respects it is identical to Lutheranism (especially in its conception of the gospel), there were some differences that are of interest to us. But how did Presbyterian and reformed churches come to the rest of the world - including Australia? It is a story that takes us to the hazardous world of four Tudor rulers in Great Britain. And it was never a foregone conclusion that the Reformation, Puritanism and later, evangelicalism, would flourish in its early days; but bloom it did, and the result was a Protestant missionary movement that has impacted the rest of the world profoundly.