Lecture by Stanislau Paulau, IEG-Researcher, as part of the Frankfurt Lectures »Revisiting Confessionalism Konfessionen auf dem Prüfstand«. The confessional differentiation triggered by the Reformation brought about a lasting transformation of Western Christianity. However, the processes of defining the relationships between the emerging denominations not only shaped the religious landscape of Europe. Rather, it also had a decisive impact on the perception of non-European Christianity and thus influenced the dynamics of global interactions in the early modern period. The lecture aims to shed light on these processes using a concrete case study. The focus will be on Protestant knowledge production in relation to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, a variant of Christianity that has been rooted in sub-Saharan Africa since late antiquity. In particular, it will be shown how Protestant actors contributed to the invention of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity as a distinctive “denomination” in an early modern confessional sense through contextual adaptation, reshaping and modification of Ethiopian knowledge. This phenomenon will then be analysed in more detail, taking into account both Ethiopian and European theological discourses. © All images were sourced from Wikimedia Commons. These images depicting historical works are without copyright restrictions, or have been made freely available by the copyright holder.