Interpretations of the last book of the New Testament usually dwell upon its visions of things to come. Except for its prayers and hymns, however, little attention has been paid to its liturgical character. This fact is the more surprising since it is just in that respect that the Apocalypse of John differs mostly strikingly from other Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writings. Its visions are presented within a framework of liturgical activities, and toward the end of the book it is hardly possible to dissociate the acts of worship from the visions of the future. This close relationship shows that its liturgical portions are not a purely literary device. Rather in the Seer's mind they form part of the revelatory process itself representing the reaction of initiated creatures to the gradual disclosure of the saving purpose of God and its execution. From the historical viewpoint, this liturgical framework of the Apocalypse of John is interesting, because it contains a number of features which, in a similar manner, occur also in the liturgies of the Ancient Church. Thus it is from the liturgical character of the Apocalypse that the historical development of the Christian liturgy becomes intelligible. Out of the perplexing diversity of its types, the formative principle of its early stages emerges, and a number of motives become visible, some of which have determined its history to the present day. Others, which have no longer a vital role assigned to them, were, nevertheless, preserved on account of the significance originally attached to them. Among these features I mention the ideas of the Eucharistic Parousia, the Church's participation in the angelic worship, the emphasis placed upon the worthiness of the interpreter of Scripture, the connection between the Confession of Sins and the Eucharist, the separation of the believers and unbelievers prior to the heavenly meal, the celebration of the Eucharist as an act of the Church in its cosmic totality, the association of the Eucharist with the Judgment of the World, and the interpretation of the liturgy as a spiritual battle. It will suffice to single out two of these features, which for their lack of centrality in the liturgies are particularly apt to illustrate our point, viz. the participation of the Church in the angelic worship, and the worthiness of the interpreter of Scripture.

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.

History and church history are disciplines well entrenched in the schools. This means that church historians commonly have an unquestioned place in theological school faculties. Hence there is little incentive for them to become self-conscious or troubled about the reason-for-being either of the discipline or of themselves. Probably church history is always included in the curriculum more from habit than because there is an articulated rationale for it. I dare say that many church historians if asked the question “Why have church history in the curriculums” would reply in effect that its place is obvious, and if one cannot see the obvious it is hopeless to try to explain it to him.

“Women go to church for the same reason that farmers and convicts go to church,” H.L. Mencken once observed—strictly for the company. His book “in defense of women,” written at the close of World War I, systematically deflated the Victorian era's sentimental notions about the “fairer sex.” “They are growing less and less religious as year chases year,” he noted cheerfully. “The evangelical Protestant denominations will have a hard time holding them.” Others shared Mencken's conclusion, though less joyfully. “Women no longer accept Christianity as a matter of course because they happen to be women,” the Christian Century lamented in 1924. “They pause and question here as in all things else.”

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries progressivism and social Christianity were two answers to the need of that day for social action and reform. A study of the social philosophy of Josiah Strong, a leader in the movement for applied Christianity, provides an interesting illustration of the harmony of the social ideas of these two movements.

During the eighteenth century the major problem confronting the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was that of survival. Throughout most of the century the Irish Catholic clergy had to live and work under a code of laws designed to destroy the ecclesiastical organization of their church and, thereby, to end Catholic religious observances in Ireland. In their effects, however, the Popery laws failed their purpose. Ireland was not transformed into a state, “Protestant and past all danger of relapsing again into Popery.” In all of their respective parts, the laws against priests were impossible to enforce, perhaps never even meant to be enforced. Although the laws were sufficiently enforced to affect profoundly Catholic religious institutions and religious practices, Ireland's Catholic environment was never destroyed and never replaced by a Protestant one. The Irish language, divisions among Protestants, self-interest, jobbery, politics, missed opportunities, and stupidity combined to prevent rigorous enforcement of the laws and to frustrate the missionary and educational schemes planned by the leaders of the Established Church.

Europe in the early seventeenth century was a continent divided along confessional lines. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Not only had the gulf between Protestants and Catholics widened there, in addition the animosity between Lutherans and Calvinists had grown to the point where members of the two Protestant churches often resented each other more than their common Catholic foe.

What could it mean to a medieval monastic community to own a valuable object? Certainly, property in general was crucial to the survival of a stable community, ideals of poverty and the thirteenth-century Franciscan experiment in radical poverty notwithstanding. More specifically, what did it mean to own not simply a field or mill that generated revenue, but an object that was believed to have power beyond its material qualities? Such objects—saints’ relics and wonder-working images—did of course also generate revenue, but their meaning and role for the monastic community and the wider society could be much richer than that. And what if the monastic community was a convent of nuns, of professed religious women whose lives were shaped not just by the rule they shared with their male counterparts, but also by the codes, both implicit and increasingly explicit, that constrained the range of women's religious activities?

Although the first two of these questions—about monastic property and the religious value of sacred objects—have been extensively discussed in scholarship on the Middle Ages, a specific focus on gender in relation to monastic ownership of sacred objects has not been widely examined. My focus on gender here is generated by two salient aspects of religious life in the twelfth century, the period of this study. First, there was an increasing articulation of the priesthood as the sole means of mediating divine presence, and of that priesthood as exclusively male.

It is a commonplace of antebellum historiography that the numerous reforms of the age often bore an intimate connection with Protestant evangelicalism, and Charles Grandison Finney is often portrayed as a symbol of this link. In addition to endorsing such causes as antislavery and temperance, the great evangelist inspired numerous converts to work out their salvation through useful service, including reform; and the areas swept by his revivals provided fertile soil for every manner of ultraism. Both as theological innovator and religious activist, he seemed to epitomize a tide of perfectionist optimism surging with great force against institutional restraints.Yet there was a very cautious side to Finney. He seldom committed himself unreservedly to any cause other than revivalism and generally eschewed the most controversial approaches to reform. Viewing this aspect of his career, one scholar has recently argued that “the basic thrust of Finney's thought and activity was conservative, status conscious, and pessimistic about human nature.” Because of these two faces, the historian is tempted to fix on one or the other as the “real” Finney, but it is more profitable to probe his ambiguities than to mitigate them. An examination of Finney offers fruitful insight into nineteenth-century evangelicalism's explosive potential for reform and its equally powerful tendency to limit and contain that impulse.

Traditionally, divisions among Protestant groups during the English Reformation have been examined as deep theological crises, simply written off as manifestations of economic or political struggles, or, more recently, treated as having roots in basic ideological commitments. One of the most important Protestant divisions, that between Anglicans and Puritans, has undoubtedly had a great impact on western history; however, it lacks full treatment from the point of view of its intellectual and social bases. One's attention is easily drawn to the Anglican-Puritan conflict of Queen Elizabeth's rule or to the seventeenth-century revolution in England; but earlier origins often receive only cursory treatment. Actually, the ideas, party divisions and social characteristics of the Anglican-Puritan division in the Elizabethan and Stuart eras have their roots and first appearance during the flight of Protestants from England after the reign of King Edward VI. It is to the ideological and social factors which appeared in the congregation of English exiles at Frankfurt-am-Main in 1554–55 that I should like to draw attention, for it was in the “Troubles at Frankfurt” that the historical pattern of the Anglican-Puritan division assumed a form which was to have such a great impact on western society.

Writing in the first issue of The Magnetic and Cold Water Guide in 1846, an unnamed editor hailed the virtues of the cold-water cure: “Instead of the dosing and drugging of the old system of practice, it proposes to rely on the indwelling healing power of nature alone, to provoke and regulate which, it employs the widespread element of fresh unadulterated water.” In case readers had not caught the full dimensions of the message, the writer inserted “the testimony of an experienced physician of Massilon, Ohio.” The doctor, an A. Underhill, waxed eloquent on his investigations of “the Water Treatment of disease” and worked his way to a concluding rhetorical flourish. “Physiology, Phrenology, and Magnetism,” he summarized, “are the keys that are unlocking the great mysteries of nature and mind, and letting us in, as it were, to the inner temple, where the sunbeams of light and truth are filling the minds and understandings of all the truly devout worshippers of the Eternal principles which govern all things.”

Nicholas of Gusa’s Concordantia catholica, that “most mature and harmonious” of conciliar treatises whose 550th anniversary we celebrated in 1983-1984, bears a dual dedication: to the Emperor Sigismund and to Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, papal legate and president of the Council of Basel from 1431 to 1438. These two figures represented church and empire and—no less significantly—were potential allies to Cusa’s client, Ulrich of Manderscheid, in the disputed election to the archbishopric of Trier.

Modern studies of church and state in America have begun to modify some older conclusions. Much attention has been given to the Constitutional “solution” of separation and its contradictions and problems in practice. Similarly, church historians, qualifying an older assumption that conservative churches ultimately shed the forms of “classic Protestantism” and permitted American religion to be shaped by the sectarian heritage of the radical Reformation, have begun to re-examine the background of ideas. This re-examination is urgently needed in treating America's last disestablishment contest, the struggle over the state churches in New England which raged until the 1820's. For this struggle had unusual significance.

English Puritans have only a small reputation for aesthetic contributions to architecture. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they worshiped God without making a show of buildings or beautiful ceremonies; consequently, there are few grand Puritan architectural monuments. Nonseparating Puritans, blending into the larger church, put their emphasis on the pure preaching and practice of biblical religion, not on outward appearances. And the Separatists, the strictest of the Puritans, gathered in disguised house-churches. Because of this artistic silence it is easy to downplay the importance of architectural concerns in the early history of Puritanism. Whenever historians mention “Puritan” architecture or “nonconformist” architecture, they are likely to describe it as simple, plain, functional, humble, austere, and practical. While true as far as it goes, this description is not the whole story. An examination of Puritan discussions about architecture in early seventeenth-century Netherlands reveals the interplay of theological and practical factors in creating the “proper” church architecture.

James Arminius (1560-1609) is not nearly as well-known as the various movements which bear his name. “Arminianism” is a familiar word in Protestant history and theology and a pervasive movement particularly in English-speaking Protestantism. The Arminian movements, however, because of their diversity do not point clearly to Arminius himself. The label of Arminianism has been applied to and often accepted by such diverse entities as the politics of William Laud, seventeenth century Anglican theology from high churchmanship to moderate Puritanism, the communal experiment at Little Gidding, the empiricism of John Locke, Latitudinarianism, the rational supernaturalism of Hugo Grotius and the early Remonstrants, early Unitarianism in England, Wales, and New England, the evangelicalism of the Wesleys, and the revivalism of the American frontier. In our time the term means for some the crowning of Reformation theology; for others it points merely to an anachronistic sub-species of fundamentalism; and for still others it means an easy-going American culture-Protestantism.

The greatest possibility for establishing concord between Protestantism and Rome during the Reformation occurred during the colloquy of Ratisbon of 1541. Along with Charles V one of the chief actors in the attempt to bring about such a concerd at the diet and its accompanying theological colloquy was Cardinal Contarini. He had been appointed papal legate by Paul III. Although Contarini's theological position on the question of justification was of crucial importance, the conflicting political forces represented at Ratisbon also helped to delineate the role he played there and its tragic denouement. In fact religious and political interests were so interwoven at Ratisbon that it is often hard to tell which came first. Whichever interests came first at any particular point, Contarini was, however, well equipped to deal with them, for he was both an experienced diplomat and a learned theologian.

Historians of science have often looked to the authentication of miracles at canonization trials as a way to investigate the ways in which religious and scientific understandings of the natural and the miraculous came together and, sometimes, into conflict. Most historians of science who have forayed into the world of miracles have, understandably, stopped at the moment of a saint's canonization. Examining the treatment of a saint's miracles both before and after the canonization process, however, yields a different picture. Drawing upon materials from the 1455 canonization and subsequent cult of the Dominican Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419), this essay reveals, first, that papal approval marked only one of several ways in which miracles received publicly-accepted “authentication,” and second, that, after the moment of canonization, the idea of carefully authenticated miracles became irrelevant not simply for the great masses of the faithful, but also for the ecclesiastical hierarchy, who adopted an ever shifting rhetoric of authenticity as authors used tales of the saint's “authentic” miracles to drive home their own various polemical points.

Billy and I hit New York City at the same time, the summer of 1957. He was 38 and about to clinch his reputation as the premier evangelist in twentieth-century America. I was twelve and about to taste freedom. But not quite yet. Without my permission, my parents packed themselves and me into a steamy subway to go down to Madison Square Garden to hear the Great Man preach. I remember that he was witty and charismatic and at the end of the sermon thousands surged forward to give or recommit their lives to Christ. Beyond that, nothing stuck. Soon our first family vacation to the Big Apple was finished, and we headed back to the quiet of a small town in southwest Missouri. As a kid, I never could figure out what the big whoop over Graham was all about. I soon realized, however, that Graham's core constituents—the millions of preponderantly white, middle-class, moderately conservative Protestants we might call “Heartland Americans”—did not share my puzzlement. They knew exactly what the big whoop was all about.

Scholarly opinion is generally agreed that the order of Cluny reached its apogee during the abbacy of St. Hugh, who ruled from 1049 to 1109, and began its decline as a result of the misrule of his successor, Pontius of Melgueil, abbot from 1109 to 1122. The rule of Pontius' successor, Peter the Venerable (1122–1157), is generally regarded as an attempt to realize two aims: justification of Cluniac monasticism before the criticism of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and reparation of the damage done to the spiritual life at Cluny by Pontius. It is the purpose of this article to subject the accepted view of Pontius' career to scrutiny and to present an alternative interpretation of the known facts. This alternative view will be based upon the demonstration that the available evidence concerning Pontius' disgrace and condemnation can be properly understood only if it is set into the context of events which transpired in the Roman Curia from 1112 to 1130.3