In 1710 Archbishop John Sharp of York of the Church of England and Daniel Ernst Jablonski of Prussia began a dialogue hoping for the possible union of their respective churches. They wanted to bring about a junction of the Reformed and Lutheran churches in Prussia through the adoption of the Anglican liturgy and episcopal polity and an organic union between this Prussian church and the Church of England, perhaps including other Protestant churches as well. The progress of this effort surprised even the men most dedicated to it, and it appeared likely that they could forge an association within a short time. Yet, in the end these churchmen were disappointed and their negotiations came to naught. The reasons, however, were not religious in nature; indeed, there seemed to be no religious impediment to the effort at all. Although the ministers of both Queen Anne and King Frederick expressed interest in the discussions, political considerations relating to the English exertions to end the war of Spanish Succession led to the failure.

In the 1539 edition of the Institutes and in each succeeding edition Calvin calls justification by faith “the main hinge on which religion turns” and the “sum of all piety.”2 Yet, invariably, in 1539 as well as in subsequent editions, justification is not treated until well into the Institutes,3 as if to belie the centrality which is expressly attached to it: justification appears to be at most one doctrine among others.4 Interpreters who have wanted to explain both Calvin's very high regard for justification by faith and the relatively minor place it is accorded in the various revisions of his magnum opus have generally maintained that it is the fact, the Erlebnis, of justification which is central for Calvin rather than the doctrine.5 The force of such argumentation is not to be denied, but there is reason to suspect that it may not encompass the whole truth. For in his 1540 Romans commentary Calvin has a comprehensive doctrine of justification which has largely been overlooked. This doctrine is a product of the same period during which Calvin published his first and, in a sense, his most significant revision of his Institutes.6 The relation between the 1539 nstitutes and the 1540 Romans commentary is very close. This is indicated, in part, by the fact that Calvin apparently prepared both works for publication at the same time.7 Whether the doctrine of justification delineated in the commentary is of formative significance for the 1539 Institutes, however, and therefore in some sense formative for all subsequent editions, is a question which cannot concern us here. We must be content to describe the doctrine in the commentary. This procedure should at least keep open the question of the doctrinal-systematic centrality of justification in the formation and final shape of Calvin's thought (the religious centrality of justification is not in doubt).8

The Catholic relief act passed by the Irish parliament in 1778 was the first significant breach of that comprehensive system of legal discrimination against Irish Catholics known in the eighteenth century as the Popery laws. The act of 1778 removed virtually all of the legal restrictions respecting the acquisition and free testamentary disposition of landed property imposed on Irish Catholics by the legislators of William III and Anne and formed a powerful precedent for the subsequent acts of 1782 and 1791–93 that repealed discriminatory statutes affecting the Irish Catholic hierarchy, secular clergy, and the Catholic business and professional classes. While most scholars have fully recognized the revolutionary character of this act and have discussed its provisions many times, a mistaken impression that no detailed record of this measure's passage through the Irish house of commons existed has discouraged original research into the complicated set of circumstances surrounding its enactment. Consequently, the relation of the Anglo-American crisis to the cause of Catholic relief, the connection between this particular act and the movement for Irish legislative independence during the later phases of the war for American independence, and the extraordinary arguments and tactics employed by supporters and opponents of the bill in an exclusively Protestant parliament have remained unnoticed.

The progressive movement in the United States was a complex set of reforms during the first decades of the twentieth century. Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson focused on the control of the new economic forces in American society by regulating railroad rates or by breaking up large monopolies. Slums, political corruption, and red-light districts troubled the consciences of other progressives such as Jane Addams and Walter Rauschenbusch. These urban progressives believed that an older, rural America produced a sense of community among rural people which mitigated such social problems, and thought that community-oriented settlement houses and churches in the cities could recreate the rural feeling that individuals were a part of their neighborhoods, and urban neighbors then could attack urban problems as a community. Other progressives, such as the anti-vice committees of New York City, wanted laws to recreate the moral standards which social pressures in the old rural communities had maintained informally. The Progressive Era also included a “country life movement” which shared many of its analyses and plans for reform with the urban progressives, but applied them to rural America.

As the Council of Florence concluded its deliberations, the Greek Orthodox participants had a number of choices open to them. The Byzantine metropolitan and newly created cardinal of the Roman Church, Bessarion, elected to remain in the Roman West where his intellect and knowledge were so well appreciated, after a short visit to a Constantinople unreconciled to the idea of Union. The Metropolitan of all Russia, Isidore, likewise adorned with the red hat and invested by the Pope with legatine power over Russia, chose another solution. Proud Greek that he was, Isidore trusted his superiority over the Russians and decided to return to his see, bringing with himself the new faith. According to the Tale of Isidore's Council by the monk Simeon of Suzdal', the metropolitan explained to Pope Eugene IV the reasons for his confidence that Moscow would accept the Union: “They are all in my hands, all the princes and bishops,” Isidore told the Pope; “Not one of them dares argue with me; the Grand Prince is young and is under my will… their bishops are ignorant and they, too, fear me.”

Fasting has an ancient and revered place in the many religious traditions that human communities have fostered throughout history and across the globe. In India, to take a modern example, Hindu women commonly carry out ritual fasts or vrats. Fasting, particularly in its collective forms, is also frequent and widespread among western groups that scholars have sometimes described as Abrahamic religions. Muslims annually observe Ramadan, a month of fasting, prayer, and celebration. Jews customarily fast, taking no food or drink from sunup to sundown, several days each year and, most notably, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. For medieval Christians, preparation for the holy feasts of Christmas and Easter meant substantial periods of religious preparation, the well-known Advent and Lenten periods complete with fasting and abstinence from certain foods. In contemporary Christian circles, fasting may be less widely practiced, yet it retains an important place among Roman Catholics and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, to cite but two better-known cases. In short, the utilization of food for purposes of religious devotion and piety, whether through fasting or feasting, has been a long-standing custom within and without western religious culture.

That Czech nationalism was the mainspring of the Hussite movement has long been an article of faith among those concerning themselves with the history of that protean wave of reform which swept over Central Europe a full century before the Protestant Reformation. It is not the intent of this paper to quarrel with this fundamental assumption. The assumption has, however, a corollary, namely that because the Hussites were prima facie Czech nationalists and that because this nationalism was patently anti-German, Hussitism could not by definition and consequently did not take root in the Germanic lands bordering upon Bohemia. An attempt will be made here to examine this a priori position in the light of some empirical researches into the history of the Lands of the Austrian Crown in the first half of the fifteenth century.

From the second half of the eleventh century, medieval Latin theologians and canonists wrestled with a number of questions related to sexual relations and marriage. Marriage is, characteristically, one of the avenues by which a society—especially a religious or holy community— attempts to define its boundaries. In this effort church authorities had, for centuries, proscribed both marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Christians. They had sought control over marital relations among Christian spouses by proscribing sexual contact before receiving communion, during Lent, or during a woman's pregnancy or menstrual cycle. They had also attempted to eliminate marriage among clergy, with occasional success, as part of an effort to define and control marital unions more effectively.

Strict observance of the Lord's Day became a distinctive feature of English and Scottish society in the seventeenth century. The Sabbatarian principle touched not only British religion but many social and economic practices as well. At some times, English Puritan settlers in the Netherlands attempted to introduce their brand of Sabbatarianism into Dutch society but with disappointing results. The success or failure of Sabbatarianism often has been identified with a certain stage of capitalistic economic development. This article examines the centrality of teachings about the Sabbath in Puritan social theology and, secondarily, the Sabbatarian-capitalism connection by comparing events in England and Holland from approximately 1600 to 1660. A comparison of Puritan Sabbatarians at home in England and abroad in Holland reveals anew the extreme difficulty of transporting values from one society, where they fit, into another location.

Perhaps the most famous religious dispute of the latter half of the sixteenth century was that between Walter Haddon (1516–1572), the distinguished English Latinist, and Jerome Osorio de Fonseca (1506–1580), Portuguese bishop and eminent Ciceronian. The controversy was a part of the tumult over the church establishment of Queen Elizabeth which eventually led to her excommunication by Pope Pius V in 1570, and to the final separation of the Church of England from Rome. Though neither participant was primarily a theologian, the affair attracted a great deal of attention in its time because of the commanding reputations of both men as Latin stylists. By his fellow-Englishmen, Haddon was regarded as the best Latin orator, poet, and epistolist of his generation; and on the Continent Osorio was widely admired not only for his skill in Scriptural studies but also for his excellent Ciceronianism.

In the 1670s John Bunyan and his Nonconformist colleagues put into effect an organizational plan developed during the imprisonment years prior to 1672. The purpose of the plan was to provide a network of preachers and teachers in the local villages throughout northern Bedfordshire and contiguous areas that would be strong enough to withstand further persecution. As the plan was put into effect, it brought Bunyan into closer contact with other Nonconformists to the south and east, as far away as London. Ironically the plan was formulated when Bunyan and others were imprisoned together at Bedford for their Nonconformity. Their success vividly illustrates the failure of the Stuart government to suppress these men of faith.

In the 1860s the controversy over the widespread revival of such African customs as “lobolo” (bridewealth) and the development of concubinage among the Christian converts almost destroyed the American Board Mission (AZM), which had been founded in 1835. Suddenly—or so it seemed to the American missionaries—the obedient converts of the previous decades began to defend customs that, from the beginning of the mission, had been denounced as “heathen” by the missionaries.

By the thirteenth century, Latin Christians had been dispensing and collecting indulgences for two centuries. Though indulgentia was a relatively late term, and first the favorite of thirteenth-century Dominican theologians, remissions of temporal penalty for sin had been granted since the eleventh century, whether they were known as remissiones or relaxationes, the two most popular terms of eleventh- and twelfth-century ecclesiastics. Bishops granted partial indulgences for visitations of holy places. Partial indulgences remitted a fraction of all penalty incurred through sin. Contributions to pious works, such as church, hospital, or bridge constructions, were also rewarded with indulgences. Other prelates granted indulgences until Lateran IV. The popes granted both partial and plenary indulgences (those which remitted all penalty for having sinned). They granted partial indulgences for much the same reasons as other bishops. Plenary indulgences were almost exclusively granted to crusaders or contributors to crusades.

During the first phase of the Iconoclastic Controversy (717–787), John of Damascus emerged as the chief spokesman of the iconodules. His apologetic for icons, developed in his Treatises Against Those Who Attack the Holy Images (around 730) provided the rationale for the dogmatic decree legitimizing icons, which was adopted at the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicea II, 787). Exegetical, hermeneutical, and christological arguments played the dominant roles in his defense of the legitimacy of icons. An additional element in the Damascene's apologetic was an innovative theory of human cognition which placed a high value on created materiality, and thus extended the traditional Eastern Christian appreciation of the material world.

Jacob Vernet (1698–1789) numbers among those eighteenth-century theologians whose relationships to the philosophes have saved them from being forgotten but at the cost of being misrepresented. Vernet is usually remembered for editing the first edition of Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois, helping to restore Rousseau to Calvinism, and corresponding and then crossing swords with D'Alembert and Voltaire: it is especially the controversy with D'Alembert surrounding the article on “Geneva” in the seventh volume of the Encyclopédie (1757), as well as a sustained conflict with Voltaire over many issues, that have secured him scholarly attention. The scholars who have noticed Vernet have accordingly concentrated on aspects of his person: ascertaining whether he was mendacious, conniving, and hypocritical, as some of the philosophes, especially Voltaire contended, or the figure of impeccable behavior and conscience suggested by his office and his hagiographers. This one-sided emphasis on his person obscures the fact that Vernet wrote a shelf of books and was such an influential figure that he was the representative Genevan theologian of his day. The neglect of his thought is hardly astounding, however, since it is characteristic of the treatment accorded eighteenth-century theology in general. Theologians and students of religion have for long dismissed eighteenth-century theology as derivative; students of the Enlightenment have considered it outside the canon of Enlightenment literature and thus beyond their purview. Both these assumptions should be challenged.

Nestorius continues to be a problem for modern historians of doctrine. The Problem arose in the fifth century when the church acting at the Council of Ephesus (431 A.D.) anathematized Nestorius, the Bishop of Constantinople, and pronounced Nestorianism a christological heresy. The decisions of the Council of Ephesus were accepted and re-affirmed at the Fourth (451 A.D.) and Fifth (553 A.D.) Ecumenical Councils. It must be said that “Nestorianism” as a special kind of doctrine could have been condemned as heretical could be called “dyoprosopatism.” But such was not the case. Nestorius was condemned and exiled as a heretic, and he was judged on the basis of certain doctrines which he was accused of holding. From the moment of his excommunication until the present time there have been many expressions of uncertainty as to whether he really taught and believed what was defined and condemned as Nestorianism. Somewhat epigrammatically historians have been asking whether Nestorius himself was a Nestorian.

While the study of early medieval kingship and king-making rites has generated an extensive literature, scholarship on contemporary queenship has concentrated on themes of authority and power in religious and political contexts, and queen-making rites have received only passing mention. Beginning in the late ninth and early tenth centuries it became customary in England and Francia for a queen to be ritually inaugurated to her position. The rite of consecration endowed her with a new persona, entailing the attributes and virtues of queenship. Of course, sources reveal that kings' wives had been considered queens and significant members of royal households from at least the sixth century. The nature of queenship changed gradually over the period. Initially marriage to a king made a queen, and this position appears to have been quite satisfactory until the late eighth century, when Bertrada was consecrated queen in 751 or 754. Regular consecrations of queens, which included unction, began in the mid- to late eighth century.

Ernst Troeltsch is known to church historians largely for his classic threefold distinction of church, sect, and mysticism. In The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, Troeltsch describes the church as an institution enmeshed with society and making accommodations to the world's imperfections; the sects, driven by a quest for purity, refuse to make accommodations or compromises, while the mystics stand aside from this conflict and concern themselves with “a purely personal and inward experience” in which “the isolated individual, and psychological abstraction and analysis become everything.” Troeltsch sees mysticism not as a phenomenon naturally at home within the church but rather as one that leads away from the establishment, and it is perhaps this perception in particular that gives his work lasting relevance. The assumption that mysticism veers naturally in an antiecclesial direction, and that its more orthodox manifestations are anomalies requiring explanation, remains very much alive in the literature. Indeed, from the perspective of cultural materialism, it is the political, antiecclesial, subversive bite of mysticism that is its most interesting feature. On this point liberal Protestantism and postmodernism have come together, theology and cultural studies have embraced. Troeltsch's schema thus retains relevance well beyond the sphere of historiography.

In the history of Protestant Christianity, sectarian movements have often served to bridge the gulfs which have opened between conventional forms of religious life and new secular aspirations among the lower classes. The emergence of the Labor Church movement in England during the closing decade of the last century may be seen in part as an attempt at such a reconciliation. For it was dedicated to the idea that the emancipation of the working classes from capitalism was a religious movement, that the improvement of social conditions was as important as the development of personal character. And yet its leader, John Trevor, repudiated the dogmatic implications of the sectidea and viewed the Labor Church as a search for a truly free religion. In fact it quickly severed all ties with the traditional faith and embarked on a quest for radically new religious meaning.