This year marks the fourth centenary of Richard Hooker, who is perhaps the greatest apologist of the Anglican Church. It is easy to forget this because the epithet “judicious” when used of him conveys to most of us the idea of one who was careful, conscientious and not likely to accept or adopt rash views. But the meaning of the word “judicious” as applied to Hooker is “judicial.” It was used of one who had spoken the last word on a subject, one whose conclusions and opinion were so firmly based that neither premise nor conclusions could be shaken.

American Christianity is so diversified and confusing and its material is of such vast extent that the scholars who have worked at the broader aspects of its history have had to bring to their study certain interpretative theses in order to find their way through the material at all. These interpretative theses, some implicitly held and others explicitly stated, some relatively adequate and others fairly weak, have paved the way for a great deal of intensive research, so that the young discipline of American Church History has a solid and illuminating body of material. Out of the research thus far undertaken have sprung new themes of interpretation, so that what may be called an “historiographical cycle” operates. This interaction of research and interpretation has functioned sufficiently well so that the overall picture of American Christian history grows steadily clearer. The process of clarification has, however, proceeded satisfactorily only to a point—to the Civil War. For the years since the Civil War, the picture has not yet come into sharp focus. The interpretative theses thus far proposed have had serious limitations, and as a result the historiographical cycle has not operated to best advantage. The excellent monographic studies that have been done remain therefore somewhat unrelated and leave us with a rather fragmentary understanding of religious history since 1865. Yet in these years occurred decisive developments which must be further probed and clarified if we are to understand more fully the contemporary American religious scene, now so important a part of the total life of the world church. To be sure most of the significant movements of the period have received some attention, but they can be fully understood and their significance grasped only as they are delineated as part of the total history of American Christianity with the interconnections traced and the polarities analyzed. More fruitful and better-directed monographic studies will follow from the setting forth of fresh and rounded themes of interpretation; the historiographical cycle will then operate to better advantage for this important period.

It is an easy and not an essentially inaccurate generalization to say that Latin America is a Catholic world. If we begin to apply the generalization more narrowly, caution and reservations become increasingly necessary. In parts of Haiti, for example, the Catholic veneer is thin. A useful book about Mexico published some years ago carried the intriguing title Idols Behind Altars. Its author did not mean the connotation exactly as it sounds but she might have so meant it. In large parts of Indo-America, especially in those areas such as the Andean highlands and parts of Central America and southern Mexico where the pre-Columbian Indian cultures were best developed and most tenacious, Catholicism has had to make a degree of accommodation which adopted and adapted various pagan practices. The same process occurred about a millennium earlier when Christianity moved into pagan Germany.

An inventory of research projects in progress in the field of Missions reveals a marked reversal of the long prevailing trend towards studies concerned with strategy and tactics, with methods and techniques, and with area surveys. History holds the center of interest at this moment. Fully half of the projects reported by the foreign mission boards and by the professors of missions are of a historical nature and numbers of others are closely related and require an historical approach.