Recent scholarship has often focused on the failure of sixteenth-century reform aspirations; scholars have also questioned the coherence and historical significance of the Reformation. The present study brings into relief a yet-unresolved question underlying these debates: what did reformers want to achieve? Scholars have highlighted numerous goals (relief from the social and psychological burdens of late-medieval religion, Christianization, consolation, certitude); this book views the reformers’ central concern as truth and the alignment of Christian life around truth. Luther, Karlstadt, and Müntzer agreed that human self-assertion in thinking and willing was the root of religious deception; thus, they agreed in seeing suffering both as key to the reception and perception of truth and as an inevitable consequence of life according to truth in a fallen world. Eckhartian mysticism inspired and aided their work to teach discernment and self-discipline. Such pedagogical efforts continued through the preaching, printed sermons and postils, and devotional literature of the early modern era, and it is inappropriate to pass judgment on the success or failure of the Reformation without attending to that literature.

This essay serves as a more extended introduction to many of the themes, concerns, and aims of this issue. Along these lines, key terms and discourses like extractivism, energy humanities, and petroculture studies are introduced. The essay elaborates two key claims: energy has been theological (and not just techno‐scientific) and analysis of current energy concerns (including climate change) need to be theorized and addressed in relation to land. These claims call for approaches to an energy‐driven climate crisis that attend to theo‐philosophical assumptions of energy and extraction and point to the significance of energy humanities approaches. Engagement with energy and extractivism humanities leads to a call for further attention to three different areas within Christian energy ethics and Religion & Environmentalism scholarship: (1) an approach to Christian energy ethics that better accounts for the theo‐philosophical gendered, racialized, and colonial implications of energy concepts, (2) closer attention to mineralogies and geologies among ecotheologians and 3) critical assessment of convergences of creation and redemption theologies for extractive aims.

The Covid‐19 pandemic forces North American churches to reckon with long‐standing crises and questions surrounding online community, access to worship, decline in membership, the struggle of small congregations, and the reality of our global communion. This article describes a response grounded in faith defined as confidence in our liberation from pride and despair through Jesus Christ. There is need for clarity of doctrine and spiritual courage to fulfill the church's twofold mission to sustain and grow the body of Christ; both these tasks require courage to approach and speak from the Gospel in ever‐new contexts and ages.

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Chapter 4 examines how Karlstadt unfolded a unique theology and reform program following his public break with Luther. Continuing to engage the Eckhartian tradition, Karlstadt found his center in the goal of “sinking into God’s will,” and he saw earthly life as growth toward the postmortem attainment of this goal, revising the doctrine of purgatory. According to Karlstadt, God exercised divine pedagogy through inward illumination, scripture, and eternally ordained suffering; in turn, Christians were to engage in individual and communal study, self-examination, self-accusation, and improvement. Karlstadt depicted Luther and his Wittenberg allies as enemies of the cross, who refused to sink into God’s will by accusing and denying their own will, and who consequently preferred a practical reform program that did not arouse opposition. This verdict mirrored the verdict against scholastic theology and so-called papists that Luther and Karlstadt shared.