Ecclesiastical discipline is the one area of church order in which Johannes Brenz, one of the most important architects of the sixteenth-century Lutheran territorial state church, signally failed to achieve his purposes.1 During his career in Schwäbisch Hall (1522–1548) and later in Württemberg (1550–1570) Brenz tried repeatedly, but ultimately without success, to establish an order of ecclesiastical discipline which would include effective use of the penalty of excommunication. An examination of the reasons for this failure may throw some light on the limits of what could be achieved within the context of the state church.

Several essayists in a recent issue of Daedalus noted with regret the absence of utopian thought among twentieth-century intellectuals, a lack they held to be detrimental to progress. The tragic events of the century, compounded by disenchantment with the poor taste and judgment of the supposedly liberated masses, have turned writers to gloomy prophecies of totalitarian and science-ridden worlds of the f uture. Dystopia rather than utopia is ascendant, they claim.1

A striking feature of religious life in the United States has been the strength and vitality of the black churches. How is the distinctive character of these churches, as well as their strength and vitality, to be explained and understood?

It is almost a commonplace that the ideology and circumstances of the Carolingian empire made possible assertion by the Frankish episcopacy of an increasingly active role in the government of ninth-century Frankish Europe. Restoration of the ecclesiastical hierarchy begun in the mid-eighth century by Pepin the Short and completed under his son, the emperor Charles, resulted in the establishment of a class of able men whose common interests were closely bound up with preservation and extension of the imperial structure; in the reign of Charles' successors this group came to be involved more and more prominently in the workings of the empire, as events in the forty years following Charles' death necessitated rapid reinterpretation of that entity. In that process no member of the hierarchy played a more ubiquitous part than did Ebbo, archbishop of Reims from 816 until his deposition nineteen years later. Loyal to the principles of imperial rule while at the same time betrayer of the friendship and fealty owed his monarch, Ebbo was scholar, builder, missionary, high public official, rebel and outcast during a career inextricably bound up with the course and transmutations of the empire. In the range of his activities and influence almost a paradigm of those opportunities and tasks open to the Carolingian episcopate, his history is in no small measure that of the empire itself and of the church with which in the ninth century that empire was conceived to be coextensive, even identical. It is those two histories and their interrelations that form the subject of the present paper.

In September 1908 the British Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, offended Roman Catholics by cancelling the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, which was to have been the climax of the 1908 international Eucharistic Congress. This incident illustrates the persistence of religious extremism as a disruptive force in British politics and the muddled manner in which Asquith's government dealt with crises. As early as 1900 social and economic issues had become the dominant focus of British politics, and Great Britain had established a reputation for religious toleration. In spite of the growing trend toward secularism, militant Protestants continued to agitate against Catholicism by resurrecting archaic laws restricting Catholic rituals.

The study of history in National Socialist Germany served a demolition function. Students were taught to recognize threats to their way of life, all of which were subsumed under Jewish internationalism and included Christianity, Marxism, democracy, liberalism and modernity. The history written by the Nazis undergirded an ersatz religion whose central theme was the German people's faltering attempts to obey the divine will of a racial deity. A major priority of Nazi educators was the liberation of the fierce Germanic instincts which more than a thousand years of foreign influence had repressed; and in their estimation, Christianity bore a major responsibility for blunting the expression of that Germanic spirit. The new German schools would help create a militarized society which would both purge the national spirit and promote the high-tension ethos which accepted war as a normal condition in a life of struggle.

In the fourth and early fifth centuries Christians laid claim to the land of Palestine. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the investment of the land of Palestine and its places with Christian historical and cultural meanings, and to trace its remapping as the “holy land.” This map was not a figurative representation of geographical and cultural features; as with all maps, it was an idea. The Christian “holy land” is also an idea, one which did not exist at the beginning of the fourth century, but which, by the mid-fifth century, was a place constructed of a rich texture of places, beliefs, actions, and texts, based in the notion that the landscape provided evidence of biblical truths. When Constantine became a Christian, there was no “holy land”; however, over the succeeding one hundred and thirty years Christians marked and identified many of their holy places in Palestine. The map-makers in this transformation were emperors, bishops, monastics, holy women, and pilgrims who claimed the holy places for Christianity, constructing the land as topographically Christian and mediating this view of their world through their pilgrim paths, buildings, liturgies, and texts. The idea of mapping is used here as an aid to understanding the formation of cultural viewpoints and the validation of ideas and actions that informed the construction of the “holy land.”

The theological influence of the New Divinity in the formation and character of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) is uncontested among scholars of American religious history and missions. Since the mid nineteenth century, both partisans of missions and nearly all scholarly observers have attributed the origins of the modern American Protestant missionary spirit to the writings of Jonathan Edwards and his self-appointed heirs, those Congregational ministers who came to be called New Divinity men. Edwards proposed a theology of cosmic redemption and supplied the exemplary missionary model in Life of Brainerd (1749), his most popular and most frequently reprinted work. Samuel Hopkins then furnished a theological rationale for missions by revising Edwards' aesthetic concept of “disinterested benevolence” into a practical one of self-denial for the greater glory of God's kingdom and the betterment of humankind.

The antitrinitarian Polish Brethren, from the inception of their denomination as a breakaway from the Calvinist Reformed Church in 1565, had earnestly debated the issue of whether a “true Christian” might collaborate in the workof the sword-bearing magistracy, take part in war, or kill a fellow human being in self-defense. Whereas the brotherhood in the militarily exposed Grand Duchy of Lithuania, with a few exceptions, gave a positive answer, the congregational leaders in the more secure kingdom of Poland for the most part said no. To do any of these things, the latterargued, entailed disobedience to Jesus’ commandments as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in the New Testament. For Christ replaced the laws of the Old Testament, which had allowed the ancient Israelites to wage just wars and wield the sword for good cause, with a gospel of love and defenselessness. This doctrine of nonresistance the pacifist Brethren, of course, had taken over from the Anabaptists of central Europe, whose insistence on adult baptism they also adopted.

Ecclesiastical exclusiveness has been among the persistent historical characteristics of the Christian church as, in its various forms and by varying degreees, it has insisted on monopoly in the mediation of salvation. The Cyprianic theme of extra ecclesiam nulla salus has not lacked occasion for re-utterance throughout the centuries, whether by the pen of Augustine, Boniface VIII, Luther or Calvin, though meanings, of course, have changed in differing theological and ecclesiastical circumstances. The church as custodian of the sacraments and chief locus of the work of the Holy Spirit, the church as supreme, universal institutional authority under the rulership of the vicar of Christ, the church as proclaimer of the Word and its promises and thus the home of saving faith—these are among the designations historically utilized to support the exclusivistic affirmations.

This, with Edwards, is established, that mind cannot conceive a state of perfect nothing. Something, somewhere, there must be; for if we say that there is absolutely nothing, we talk nonsense, inasmuch as we imply a disjunction where there is none. “Either being or absolute nothing is no disjunction, no more than whether a triangle is a triangle or not a triangle. There is no other way but only for there to be existence. There is no such thing as absolute nothing.” Some being, therefore, some place necessarily and eternally is. And if at some place then in all places, since it is no less meaningless to affirm that nothing is in some one place than it is to say that nothing is at all. “So that we see this necessary, eternal being must be infinite and omnipresent.” But if omnipresent then not solid, for solidity is nothing but resistance to other solidities, all of which we can with ease conceive as not existing, whereas this omnipresent being “is the very thing that we can never remove and conceive of its not being.” What is this being, then, that no amount of mental effort can deny? It is, says Edwards, space.

“I have felt like working three times as hard as ever since I came to understand that my Lord was coming back again,” reported revivalist Dwight L. Moody, the most prominent of nineteenth-century premillennialists. Moody's testimony to the motivating power of premillennialism points to the crucial role of that eschatology in conservative Protestantism since the late nineteenth century—a role delineated by several studies within the past twenty-five years. As a comprehensive interpretation of history which gives meaning and pattern to past, present, and future, and a role for the believer in the outworking of the divine program, premillennialism has been a driving force in the fundamentalistand evangelical movements.

In France, religious persecution outlived Pierre Bayle and nearly outlived Voltaire. Only in the mid-1760's, when the Enlightenment had long been affecting other aspects of their thinking, did Catholics at last accept a measure of religious toleration. Six Calvinist pastors were put to death after 1745, and Jean Calas was condemned as late as 1762. The purpose of this article is to study why the persecution of religions persisted in a non-theological age. Our understanding in this instance requires that we set aside strictly religious categories, and examine what role the secular state played in the thinking of Catholics and anti-Catholics alike; for it was this state to which the last Huguenot victims were sacrificed.

Though historians of religion in the United States have long recognized the importance of Mormonism, scholarly studies such as those by Mario De Pillis, Marvin Hill, and Louis Reinwand have only begun to explain the church's meaning and attraction. As a recent scholar of American religious history has argued,

the exact significance of this great story persistently escapes definition.…One cannot even be sure if the object of our consideration is a sect, a mystery cult, a new religion, a church, a people, a nation, or an American subculture; indeed, at different times and places it is all of these.…[The Mormons] remain people apart.…Their inner intellectual and spiritual problems cannot easily be shared with others.

The concept of region has been perhaps the most important in the historical study of religious geography in the United States. Its centrality is due at least in part to its having been proposed as an organizing principle at the inception of that field in its modern form by historian Edwin Scott Gaustad and geographer Wilbur Zelinsky about four decades ago. But the concept has been, and remains, highly problematic. This brief essay first explores the development and problematization of regionalism in U.S. religious history, and then offers potential new bases for its continuing vitality.

Many years ago, almost on my first acquaintance with Calvin, I was impressed by a phrase in that last brief letter of his to his old companion in labor and battle, William Farel:

Live mindful of our union which, as it has been useful to the Church of God, so its fruits await us in heaven.

The history of medieval crusading may be conveniently divided into two chapters. The first of these chapters would end with 1291 when Acre was lost by the Christians and would cover the period extending backward to 1095 when the first crusading expedition was launched. During this period the western Christians conquered and lost the Holy Lands. They also established themselves in Greece and the Greek archipelago. The second chapter would come down to 1395, the year of the battle of Nicopolis, or possibly 1444, the year of Varna. During this period, though there is considerable talk and some action for the recovery of the Holy Land, the struggle has really become one for the defense of Europe against the invading Turks.

No man was less suited to a life of affairs in church and state than was John Knox. Yet, by a curious trick of fate, he was forced by the exigencies of his times to assume the role of official prophet and leader of a whole kingdom. For there was no one else.

Perhaps the most succinct introduction to the life of Anthony Gilby is found in the famous decree of the University of Oxford in 1683 which denounced “pernicious books and damnable doctrines, destructive to the sacred persons of princes, their state and government, and of all human society.” Among the collection are Gilby's writings.