were amalgamated into a single denominational Union, the resulting body was called the Evangelical Church. In many places around the world to this day, Lutheran churches retain this older sense of the term (for example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, or [in India] the Tamil Evangelical Lutheran Church).5 The specific sense of the term ‘evangelical’ as used in this book and this series comes not out of continental Europe but from eighteenth-century