In the prologue to his commentary on Leviticus composed in the mid- twelfth century, the reformist abbot Ralph of Flaix noted with anxiety the effect on his monks of Jewish argumentation against Christian exegesis of the Old Testament:

Nihilism has been present in Western culture for many centuries, but no century has been so permeated by nihilism as has our own. With perceptive insight Alexander Salzhenitsyn recently observed that Western democracy is in its “last decline,” has no ethical foundation, and consists only of “parties, and social classes engaged in a conflict of interests, just interests, nothing higher.” Solzhenitsyn's observation can hardly be brushed aside. His words describe a nihilism that is prominent in more than Western democracy, Nihilism reaches as far back as Ecclesiastes in our Old Testament and Nargarjuna in Buddhism. Perhaps no century has been without it, but in our century it has become pervasive, finding expression not only in a flood of literature but in virtually every phase of our existence. The Nazi holocaust, Vietnam, the “death of God,” and Watergate fall within its scope. It is so pervasive that it merits attention, especially from church historians.

The aim of this paper is to throw some light on Tertullian's attitude to military service. His statements on this subject are highly useful for a more accurate understanding of his own changing views on the empire and the duties of citizenship. They are also important evidence for marking a crucial stage in the pre-Constantinian evolution of the relations of church and state. It will be seen that the whole question of Christians serving in the Roman army became relevant only in the late second century; Tertullian is one of the earliest literary witnesses for this momentous development. Therefore, on both counts, the texts deserve close scrutiny.

An 1894 biography of St. Francis of Assisi was a milestone in the lives of two young urban missionaries. They were “Sisters of the People” at the dynamic and progressive Wesleyan Methodist West London Mission in Soho, a poor and overcrowded central London district. Sister Mary Neal and Sister Emmeline Pethick would eventually distinguish themselves nationally, Emmeline as a militant suffragist in tandem with her husband Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, and later as a feminist and peace activist; Mary as a music educator and folklorist. French protestant clergyman Paul Sabatier's scholarly but lyrical biography of Francis enthralled the mission's leaders, including the superintendent, Hugh Price Hughes. Francis's rejection of his family's wealth, his insistence on absolute poverty for himself and his followers, and his devotion to the poor presented a compelling model of Christian service, one that the two young Sisters found especially exciting. They resigned the Sisterhood in 1895 to live cheaply in workers' housing just north of their old turf. This decision launched them into a national community of Franciscan-inspired settlers, philanthropists, “simple livers,” and collective farmers—offering us a new perspective on fin de siècle social activism.

The sixth century in the Eastern Roman Empire saw the appointment to high ecclesiastical offices of several laymen chosen from the upper ranks of the army and the civil service. Apollinaris, patriarch of Alexandria from 551 to 570, had been before his appointment a high military officer, and his successor John had likewise passed the whole of his previous career in the army. It was evidently their marked executive ability which was responsible for the sudden translation of such men from the government service to the church, and in their new careers their energy and their mastery of administrative detail no doubt outweighed any previous lack of training in theological affairs.

In his Faithful Narrative of a Surprising Work of God, an account of the awakening of 1734–35 in his church at Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards excitedly reported a considerable number of old persons among the several hundred converts. “I suppose,” he wrote, “there were … more than twenty of them above fifty, and about ten of them above sixty, and two of them above seventy years of age.” Edwards's evident self-satisfaction stemmed from the widespread belief that conversion among the elderly was unusual. “It has been a thing heretofore rarely to be heard of,” he noted, “that any were converted past middle age; but now we have the same ground to think that many such have in this time been savingly changed, as that others have been so in more early years.”

Historians of the development of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century have normally treated this aspect of intellectual history as a preserve of the university don and the ambitious cleric. However, further study points to a movement of considerable magnitude and momentum beginning in the last decades of that century which aimed at popularizing the methods and results of the higher criticism of the Old Testament. Widespread popular recognition of a critical approach to the Old Testament and its implications began in the 1860s in response to the work of J. W. Colenso and the contributors to Essays and Reviews.

Much has been made of the persecutions and repressions of the Protestant nonconformists in the age of Charles II, but the equally important, if less dramatic, attempts at toleration and comprehension have been neglected. As reflections of the transitory nature of the period—as a bridge between the first half of the century and the glorious revolution—this interest, on the part of a large group of lay and ecclesiastical peers, as well as the king, in a broader, more tolerant church is of critical significance.

Recent scholarship has argued that Cold War anticommunism was key among the tools with which conservative evangelicals in the United States negotiated their return to the mainstream of American public conversation. While useful, such renderings of the anticommunist leaven in the repoliticization of religious conservatives remain misleading as long as they remain pivoted on the small cadre of reputedly moderate new evangelical intellectuals. Entirely obscured in such portrayals is the agency of the militant separatist fundamentalists whose engagement with anticommunism was at once broader in scope, more systematic, organized and pervasive, and of significantly earlier lineage than that of their new evangelical rivals. The roots of the Christian Right do indeed lie in Cold War Christian anticommunism but the lines of influence stretch as much, if not more, from the fundamentalists gathered around the controversial pastor Carl McIntire and his American (and International) Council of Christian Churches as they do from the new evangelicals. A pivotal transitional figure who nurtured, renovated, and passed on to a new generation the anticollectivist public doctrines of the original fundamentalist movement. In his anticommunist work McIntire pioneered, as well, the faith-based mass demonstration and petition, the political use of Christian radio, and the lobbying of government officials that the later Christian Right perfected.

This article offers an interpretation of the actions of the Franciscan Juan de Albuquerque as bishop of the first Catholic diocese in Asia. The analysis considers the local impacts of the episcopal government and the connectivities of its action, particularly through comparison with similar processes adopted in Spanish America. Based on a wide range of historical sources and cross-referencing them, it investigates how Albuquerque governed in three stages: first, describing the enormous challenges he faced; second, outlining his profile; and third, proposing a reconstruction of his government and the implications it had on the dissemination of Catholicism. The hypothesis raised at the outset is that, in Asia, the Bishop of Goa built a structure that was inspired by the matrix and dynamics of the Portuguese dioceses, which were then adapted to the specificities of the local situation. Accordingly, it is necessary to review the thesis of Charles Boxer, for whom the dynamics of evangelization in the spaces overseen by the Iberian empires from the 16th century onwards were generated essentially by the missionaries from the regular clergy and by the monarchies. By shifting the focus to the actions of a single bishop, the article demonstrates that Albuquerque, the diocesan church he created from scratch, and the secular clergy should not be underestimated.

At Ferrara and Florence the healing of the old schism between the Eastern and Western Chruches proved to be more than a hope, and in corresponding measure the breach between the Pope and the Council of Basel became less than a real new Occidental Schism. The Florence-Ferrara conception of Christian unity has led to the doctrine of the Vatical Council and will be of great importance at the council which has been announced by the present Pope. Together with our Roman Catholic brethren we are convinced that a clear understanding of the character of Christian unity must exist prior to all attempts at union or reunion of churches, prior as a condition and as an incentive those efforts.

Warren Felt Evans was the first American mental healer to publish his ideas extensively. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), the father of mental healing in America, bequeathed only scattered manuscripts to his followers. Evans, however, wrote six books that decisively influenced the growth of New Thought, a loosely organized religious movement concerned with health and spiritual integration. This essay contends that Evans' thought and therapy united idealistic philosophy and practical mysticism, thus extending one species of American romanticism, rooted in the Transcendentalist movement, into the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In January 1879 William Graham Sumner, Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale, assigned as a textbook the popular work by Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology. In a letter to the trustees in June 1880, the president of the college, Noah Porter, objected to the use of the volume. He suggested that Spencer's atheistic materialism would intellectually, morally and religiously harm immature students and bring notoriety to be the institution. Instead, of course, Noah Porter acquired the notoriety in this early and widely publicized case of academic freedom. William Graham Sumner was judged to be a bold and heroic spokesman for professional prerogatives, an uncompromising teacher of the new discipline of sociology. And Noah Porter served the sentence of historical disrepute that the supporters of Sumner passed on him.

By the 1930s few Catholics in the United States could have been unaware of their church's absolute prohibition on contraception. A widely-publicized papal encyclical had spoken to the issue in 1930, even as various Protestant churches were for the first time giving a public blessing to the practice of birth control in marriage. Growing numbers of American Catholics had been exposed since at least 1920 to frank and vigorous preaching on the subject in the context of parish missions. (Missions are probably best understood as the Catholic analogue of a revival.) And by the early 1930s Catholic periodicals and pamphlets addressed the question of birth control more frequently and directly than ever before. As a Chicago Jesuit acknowledged in 1933, “Practically every priest who is close to the people admits that contraception is the hardest problem of the confessional today.” A major depression accounted in part for the hardness of the problem. But it was more fundamentally caused by the laity's heightened awareness of their church's stance on birth control and their growing consciousness of this position as a defining attribute of Catholic identity.

During recent years there has been an interesting shift in the attitude of many historians with regard to the relationship of Calvinism to the development of democracy. A generation ago, the contention that modern democracy was a daughter of Calvinism was eminently respectable in academic circles. The fact that modern democracy arose and put down its strongest roots in lands most deeply influenced by the Reformed faith—in England, Scotland, Holland, America and Switzerland—was regarded as self-evident confirmation of this contention.

Ernest R. Sandeen's article on fundamentalism in the March 1967, issue of Church History is a work of primary importance in the reinterpretation of a significant aspect of American religious history. Professor Sandeen corrects many of the misunderstandings contained in the hitherto “standard” treatments of Cole and Furniss. And he otherwise goes quite beyond earlier studies to provide fresh insights into the nature of fundamentalism as an especially religious phenomenon.

The idea of pilgrimage occupies an important place in the life and thought of Ignatius Loyola. In the autobiography which he dictated to a colleague late in his life he refers to himself throughout as “the pilgrim.” He actually went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and describes in detail his long and difficult journey. His biographers too often use the term and imagery of pilgrimage when they write about his early years, yet the notion of pilgrimage in his life has never been explored to any extent; nor has its significance, I believe, been sufficiently taken into account. In this article I should like to focus on this theme and indicate what I consider to be its role and importance in his religious experience.

The question posed in the title of this article is answered, without further research, by the obvious facts of history. The English refugees from the wrath of Queen Mary did not plan to live long enough in their temporary homes on the Continent to be regarded as inhabitants. A fruitful field for investigation, however, lies in the study of the results of this transitory sojourn in the Swiss Cantons and the valley of the Rhine.

An unpublished journal of Rev. George Whitefield, detailing his life from October 17th, 1744, to some time in the spring of 1745, has been in the Princeton Theological Seminary Library since June, 1816. It bears an inscription showing that it was given to the seminary by Dr. John R. B. Rodgers, the famous pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New York. Probably it was a part of the papers which Dr. Rodgers is said to have guarded and carried about in a trunk during the Revolutionary War.

As eruditi et erudienti who had profited richly from pagan and Christian learning, Augustine and Chrysostom appreciated the power and influence of teachers and of pedagogical techniques. Both viewed God as the teacher, and both were captivated by the divine method of instruction. They saw this method as one of divine accommodation; that is, the Lord adapted his lessons and plan to human capacities. Augustine's and Chrysostom's works are replete with references to, and discussions of, divine accommodation; it is a common aspect of their thought which fits neatly and prominently into a lengthy and vibrant exegetical tradition.