Liturgy, as the formal rite of Catholic devotion, underwrote every stage of the ideology, practice and history of crusading, the first large-scale lay religious movement and the greatest collective devotional endeavour of the Middle Ages. It was the chief means of sacralising warfare and thus making war holy. And it was also understood to be an essential aspect of fighting and a means of victory, and thus was one of the weapons of crusading strategy and warfare. As churchmen repeatedly explained, just as the Israelites won against the Amalekites only so long as Moses raised his hands in prayer (Exodus 17:9–13), so Christians must pray to God for forgiveness and aid if the crusaders were to gain victory in battle. In 1217, in organising liturgical services in support of the Fifth Crusade, Pope Honorius III explained that Christians must fight ‘visible enemies with invisible weapons, that is, prayers’ if they were to win. Liturgical prayer and supplication undergirded much of crusading, and between 1095 and c. 1500 liturgy became a central and ingrained feature of crusade culture in the Latin West.

The previous chapter showed how John began to transfer the negative implications of divine absence from believers to unbelievers by depicting Jesus’s absence as divine abandonment of those who rejected Jesus as the enfleshed divine presence. This chapter demonstrates how John completes that transfer by describing how believers retain access to the divine presence through the Spirit-Paraclete in a manner that can be construed to their benefit. I begin by considering three passages (John 9; 11; 12:27–50) that depict Jesus’s absence as a problem for the narrative’s believing characters and clarify the expectations that the authorial audience should have for the provision of a new experience of divine presence. The chapter then examines John 14–20 to show how John presents the Spirit-Paraclete as the provision of divine presence in line with those expectations. I argue that John depicts the Spirit-Paraclete not as Jesus’s Doppelgänger but as one who mediates the divine presence with a Christological-orientation in Jesus’s absence. I then clarify how this understanding of the Spirit-Paraclete affects scholarly debates about John’s alleged sectarian perspective and his eschatology.

The theology of the incarnation set out in Chapter 12 depends upon the Spirit for its life. In this chapter, I set out something of the pneumatology that is involved. I begin with a speculative depiction of the Spirit’s role in the eternal Godhead, and then transpose that depiction into a series of new settings, moving in turn to the doctrines of creation, incarnation, salvation, and the eschaton. Under each heading I expound the Spirit’s role as the one who unfolds for us the gift of God’s inexhaustible life of love, and draws creatures into that life. I emphasise the ways in which, in doing all this, the Spirit characteristically works with bodies, in all their materiality, temporality, and diversity. Finally, I speak about the limitations upon our reception of the gift that the Spirit is laying out for us – the inherently fragmentary and provisional nature of any one form of reception, and the fallibility and corruption that characterise all forms of reception this side of the eschaton.

Chapter 7 closes the study by focusing on a single source: Gregory of Nyssa’s homilies On the Song of Songs. Through them, he weaves his most comprehensive and sustained account of the history, ontology, and activity of the devil and his army of demons. Only Christ is victorious over this army of hostile powers in the proper sense. Christians participate in Christ’s victory by journeying with Gregory through On the Song of Songs. The way of victory begins with baptism and continues with prayer, pure thoughts, and self-knowing. Like those sources examined in the previous chapters, the homilies undertake a journey toward victory, bringing to the fore the eschatological nature of spiritual warfare. This chapter, along with the previous ones, demonstrates that in addition to his other accolades, Gregory of Nyssa was an erudite homilist and skilled teacher on spiritual warfare.

Death has been a major focus of Ulster-Scots Presbyterian writing, from theeighteenth century to the present day. Eschatological, apocalyptic, anddispensational modes of thinking circulate, migrate, and manifest themselves invarious expressions of Ulster Protestant culture, both religious and secular. A futuristeschatology can be connected to the restlessness and motion characteristic of Ulstermigrants to the New World. The Ulster Kailyard tradition demonstrates narrativeexamples of death-in-life that form the atmosphere of Presbyterian piety. ArchibaldMcIlroy, Lydia Foster, and Florence Davidson offer an escape from the modern worldthrough an embracement of death and future judgement. The discourse around theNorth West 200 road race also participates in a fascination with time and eternity,and identifies speed and death as central to Ulster identity. The novels of JanCarson, following the tradition of Irish Protestant Gothic, articulate evangelicalconcepts of time and the embracement of death.

Chapter 6 examines the Sectarians’ portrait of the end-time destruction of its enemies. The depictions of eschatological violence offer insights into how the Sectarians responded to their present overmatched position while simultaneously affirming their special status. Sectarian texts imagine an imminent end of days that would usher in a period in which all of its enemies – both foreigners and other Jews – would be vanquished in the end-time battle.

Chapter 4 analyzes several common features in New Religious Movements that turn violent – a millennial and apocalyptic worldview, totalistic organizational rules, isolation, and real or perceived persecution – and how these features can help make sense of the infusion of violent expectations in the sectarian movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls as represented especially in the Rule of the Community.

Origen makes sense of the Gospel traditions by receiving them as if the Evangelists were themselves figurative readers of the life of Jesus. Advancing this thesis one stage further, this final chapter discovers Origen locating the inspiration for the Gospels’ literary form in the figure of Jesus himself. That is, Origen believes that the canonical records of Jesus’s life indicate that he also was a “spiritual reader” of this particular epoch in the history of Israel and, ultimately, the role of his own life therein. For an archetypal expression of Jesus’s figurative mode of discourse, no series of passages more clearly establishes Origen’s view – that Jesus himself “intended to teach what he perceived in his own understanding by way of figures” – than his interpretation of Jesus’s prophetic Son of Man sayings. Here, I show that one can take up the whole matrix of first principles developed in the preceding chapters on the nature of the Gospel narratives and may, with startling immediacy, transpose them into a distillate of the nature of Jesus’s own discourses.

Chapter 7 focuses on the War Scroll, the most sustained portrait of the imagined end-time war against the Sectarian enemies. Alongside its elements of fantasy, the War Scroll simultaneously contains many prescriptive details for the eschatological war that the Sectarians believed was imminent. This chapter characterizes the War Scroll using the language of social anthropologists as a violent imaginary and argues that it functions as a propagandistic tool to prepare the Sectarians for this war.

Focusing on the often too easily neglected concept of piety, Job Getcha sheds light on the natural bond between liturgy and spirituality. It would be erroneous to see them simply as the objective or communal and subjective or individual sides of the same reality, since an argument can be set up that spirituality itself is as liturgical as the liturgy is spiritual.