In the years since the civil rights and black power movements cooperative black religious organizations have become a familiar feature of the religious landscape in America. Among these interdenominational bodies, in addition to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, may be noted the now defunct National Conference of Black Churchmen, the Black Theology Project, Partners in Ecumenism, and the Congress of National Black Churches. Little noted, however, is a precursor of these organizations which functioned for two decades prior to the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

With the death of Duke George of Saxony on 17 April 1539, the Reformation lost one of its fiercest enemies, a leader of great prestige who not only resisted the Reformation, but actively campaigned against it.1 With the accession of his brother Heinrich, the Reformers gained an important ally, for the new duke had converted to Lutheranism in 1537. The union of Saxony, which had been divided a half-century before, under the banner of Protestantism would have been one of the great political triumphs of the new religious movement.2 The Reformers themselves certainly considered it a good sign.3

In 1685 the government of Louis XIV revoked the vestiges of the Edict of Nantes, after having made various encroachments on it since the 1630's when Richelieu nullified the military provisions. And thus France, which under Henry IV in the late sixteenth century had gone farther toward legal toleration than the other states of Europe, lapsed into the ranks of those intolerant. The Edict had never been popular with a large element of the French people, notably the group which had fought under the Guises in the Wars of Religion. The clergy in particular urged its repeal. Louis XIII and Louis XIV under the influence of his Jesuit advisors, Pères Le Tellier and La Chaise, and of his second wife, Madame de Maintenon, a zealous ex-Protestant, revoked the Edict completely.

The attempt to arrive at a balanced and objective understanding of the relationship between the German Protestant church, which is predominantly Lutheran, and the rise of National Socialism is an almost impossible task today. For what we now hear about the Protestant church of the thirties tends to be written by those who were vindicated by the turn of events, while those who supported Hitler and National Socialism have tended to remain silent, understandably enough. The flood of books and articles by the Confessing Church gives the misleading impression that the stand of the church toward the Nazi state was one of resistance and opposition. Instead, the main Protestant response to Hitler and to the nationalistic forces he represented ranged from inactive indifference to over-whelming support. The Confessing Church, which did display a courageous though not always consistent opposition, at best never spoke for more than about one tenth of all Protestant Christians.

Conciliarism at the Fifth Lateran Council? Despite the current interest in things conciliar this is a strange and, no doubt to some, a rather forced juxta position. For what, after all, is there to be said about it? The council may indeed have been a great non-event in the religious history of the sixteenth century but it was surely a highly papalist non-event. Was it not, in form and procedure, a faithful copy of the papal general councils of the pre-Conciliar era—of Lateran IV (1215), of Lyons (1274), of Vienne (1311)? To what did it owe its convocation if not the desire of Julius II to cut the ground from under the feet of the dissident conciliabulum of Pisa (1511–12)—itself, of course, summoned by the cardinals of the opposition with the support of the French king and very much a conciliarist's council? Were not the first half-dozen sessions occupied almost exclusively with the condemnation of the activities of that council, the proscription of those who persisted in adhering to it and the reconciliation of those who had abandoned it? Did not the eleventh session witness the definitive rejection of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, the base from which for so long conciliarist thinkers had been able to operate with impunity? Did it not witness also the unambiguous assertion of the superiority of pope to council, and was not this principle underlined in practice by the craven responsiveness of the council fathers to papal demands? And so on. It is easy enough to envisage the questions, the queries, the dissents.1

Although dependence upon a literally inspired Bible has been one of the most common beliefs among American Protestants, theological justifications for this doctrine of the Scripture have not been common. Eighteenth century infidelity from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine attacked the possibility of special revelation more than any particular form of revelation. In order to refute these adversaries, the great champions of orthodoxy, such as Timothy Dwight, never found it necessary to become specific about the nature of biblical inspiration. The growing influence of biblical criticism after the Civil War ended this period of Edenic innocence and compelled the churches to theologize about the nature of biblical authority. The results were not unanimous, and the ensuing controversy focused attention as never before upon the doctrine of inspiration. Only one of the conservative defenses of inspiration, the Princeton Theology, will be discussed in this paper, but there are good reasons for considering it the most influential theological support for biblical literalism in the twentieth century. J. Gresham Machen carried the Princeton Theology with him into his new denomination and seminary after 1929, and others in Bible institutes and seminaries not connected with the Presbyterian church have looked up to the Princeton professors as their great teachers and champions. In the Fundamentals series published just before World War I, six articles were devoted to the problem of inspiration, and three of these took much of their argument from the Princeton Theology. The history of the Princeton Theology is not well known nor its importance widely appreciated, but some good monograph and periodical literature has been written.

The lady is Flavia Domitilla of the imperial Roman family and the emperor is Domitian, the traditional “second persecutor” of the Christians. We know little about their relationship, save that they were relatives, but the story goes that Domitian killed the lady's husband, Flavius Clemens the consul, and sent the lady into exile. This was by no means an unusual thing for Domitian to do, but with this event is inseparably connected the question of whether or not Domitian persecuted the Christians. To the “persecution” are again tied various matters of importance for church history and the study of New Testament. The problem of the lady and the emperor therefore assumes significance for critical study. Furthermqre, it offers us a good vehicle for a survey of the development of church-historical writing and research, partly because of its fascinating character which has attracted many prominent scholars, and partly because it has been rather free from theological prejudices. Its treatment does not exhaust the critical problems of the “Domitian persecution,” which would be impossible in a paper of this nature, but it does offer us a representative discussion of the issues involved. We shall therefore proceed to a description of the weaving of this ancient tapestry and shall then follow the unraveling of its threads which has taken place through four centuries of historical effort.

The history of the Plan of Union has been written largely under the influence of denominational zeal, jealousy, and antipathy. Underlying much of the writing have been the assumptions that a main object of religious endeavor is to build up denominational organizations and enlarge the statistics, that denominations ought to be kept “pure,” that movements of individuals or churches from one to another are not altogether creditable and justify suspicion of inferior motives on the part of somebody. For example, the Rev. James H. Dill, in an article on “Congregationalism in Western New York” in the Congregational Quarterly in 1859, which has recently been cited as an authority, refers to churches “which have been spirited away from Congregationalism”; and Dr. Joseph P. Thompson, in an article on “Congregationalism in Eastern New York” in the same periodical in 1860, says “The Black River Association … had increased to seventeen churches when in 1817, it was induced to unite with the Watertown Presbytery. … After some years, some of the Congregational churches withdrew from this entanglement, and re-organized in an Association.” On the other side, Dr. Samuel J. Baird in 1868 said in A History of the New School, “The multiplication of Congregational ministers, in the Presbyterian Church, was no increase of strength; but the introduction of an element of weakness, division and heresy.”

Only months after Luther's death in 1546, a colleague, Caspar Cruciger, Sr., published his magnum opus, an 879-page commentary on the Gospel of John, In Evangelium Iohannis Apostoli Enarratio. Cruciger's Enarratio provides an excellent angle from which scholars may examine an important shift in Wittenberg's exegesis and theology during the crucial decade of the 1540s. To be sure, this work has few of the characteristics of other treatments of the fourth Gospel produced near the same time. The exposition of the four Gospels by Cologne's Franciscan theologian, von Konigstein, underwent far more printings. The works on John by Calvin and Bullinger have attracted more attention in our own day. However, when set into the context of continued sharp debate over ecclesiology, Cruciger's commentary on John provides a critical reshaping of Philip Melanchthon's exegetical method to meet the continuing challenge of defining the church in line with an emerging Lutheran orthodoxy and against Roman Catholicism. Unlike later Protestant commentaries, which often roll ponderously from one unrelated locus in theology to the next, Cruciger's work, though massive, focuses almost singlemindedly on the doctrine of the church. The commentary represents part of Wittenberg's response to failed discussions over the nature of the church and its authority which began in 1520, nearly halted in 1541 at the Colloquy of Regensburg which Cruciger attended, and collapsed with the outbreak of hostilities during the Smalcald War of 1547. It also demonstrates the farreaching effect of Philip Melanchthon's exegetical method in shaping that response among his own students.

In the middle 1870s British society experienced the greatest debate over foreign policy since the early days of the French Revolution: the dispute known as the Eastern question. For two years the British political world was divided by this issue as the country took sides between the Ottoman Empire, the oppressor of the Christian Slavic peoples of the Balkans, and Czarist Russia, the Slavs' protectors. What began as a diplomatic dispute became through its religious dimension a moral, even ideological, issue. Responsibility for this transformation belonged to a strange coalition made up of English radicals, a major portion of the Nonconformist community, and a considerable number of High Church Anglicans. They were joined later by the greatest Victorian exponent of moral force in politics, William Ewart Gladstone. Inexorably the Catholic community in Britain was drawn into this dispute.

From the days when Christians were identified by the exclamation, “See how they love one another!”, to the present when other sorts of exclamations may be heard, the phenomenon of Christian community has received considerable attention. “From the first century in Rome,” Robert Nisbet has observed, “down to the contemporary works of Maritain, Niebuhr, and Ellul, the search for Christian community has been a crucial element of Western history.” Durkheim, Nisbet adds, found the very origins of religion in “the sense of the sacred community.” Whether as historians of Western history or of church history, we cannot escape the question of community. And whether as citizen or believer, neither can we escape more existential questions suggested in our own land and our own time that relate to the broad theme, “Christianity and Community.”

As missionaries from New England made initial forays into Zululand and Natal in the 1830s, the Zulu people were in a state of considerable stress. Dingan had come to power in 1828 after participating in the assassination of his brother Shaka, the notorious warrior king whose conquests after 1816 brought people from dozens of clans and chieftanships into a Zulu state. Ecological crises caused by drought and competition for scarce resources contributed to Shaka's ability to exert unprecedented authority, as did the predatory incursions of European traders seeking ivory, skins, and slaves in various parts of southeast Africa. Expanding on a tradition of religious initiation and military ranking known as ambutho, Shaka crated a system of loyalty to the state that built on but also compromised the loyalties to particular clans commanded by lesser chiefs.

There have been numerous studies of the religious leaders of early modern Europe, but accounts of the religious attitudes and interests of the general public have been highly impressionistic. It might seem a hopeless task to try to reconstruct a profile of the religious mind of such a remote period, and yet historians are not deterred from making broad characterizations, and other disciplines sometimes build on them. The question is not so much whether we must give up such descriptions entirely, but how rigorous we can be in making them.

In 1790, the year John Carroll was consecrated as the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Baltimore, the Catholic population numbered less than 40,000—a very distinct minority in a country of nearly 4,000,000 people. As a small group living in a society overwhelmingly composed of Protestants, Catholics could not avoid mixing with those of different faiths in their everyday life.1 Carroll viewed such contacts with mixed feelings. As a native American he understood that so many of his countrymen considered his church, however wrongly, an “alien” institution. He resented most the accusation that the allegiance that Catholics owed to Rome detracted from their attachment to the United States.

Scholars who have assessed the racial attitudes of southern Protestants in the late nineteenth century have strangely neglected the pronouncements of two outspoken bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Affirming in the 1880s that white southerners would “never tamely and without protest submit to the intrusion of colored men into places of trust and profit and responsibility,” Bishop George Foster Pierce insisted that blacks had no “right on juries, [in] legislatures, or in [other] public office.” And he frowned equally on their pursuit of higher learning; advanced schooling instilled expectations of advancement “far above the station he [the Negro] was created to fill,” the churchman felt, including hopes for interracial mating. Nor was the succeeding senior Southern Methodist bishop more liberal in outlook.

At Ferrara and Florence, Western intellectuals met with the greatest Greek scholarly and theological delegation that ever came to Latin soil. The Greeks did not come empty-handed. They brought with them de luxe editions of Greek sacred and, above all, secular authors—coveted treasures for Renaissance Italians. To judge by the letters in which Ambrogio Traversari announced the arrival of the Greeks, Christian Humanists were as much interested in the codices of Plato, Plutarch, Euclid and Ptolemy, brought by the Emperor and Bessarion, as in the cause which brought the Greeks to Italy.

In March 1835 Charles Finney told a gathering in New York City: “If the church will do all her duty, the millennium may come in this country in three years.” This statement has often served as an epigram for the era, the motto of that movement for revivalism and social reform that, having already swept the churches, was to so infuse the culture with its moral imperatives as to make a Civil War against slavery inevitable and the hegemony of evangelical Protestantism secure. On this reading Finney's declaration marks the midpoint in a story of triumph—triumph for revival religion, and triumph for a nation that aspired to righteousness.

The Reformation in Scotland, as Professor John T. McNeill has shown, was never a purely nationalistic movement. John Knox, as well as Sir David Lyndsay, viewed the Scottish church as a part of the universal “kirk,” and directed their efforts toward securing a closer uniformity with the English church and with the Reformed churches on the Continent. But it must be admitted that, until 1638, the principal drive for unity between the English and Scottish churches came from the southern kingdom. In 1638, however, with the restoration of Presbyterianism in Scotland, the process was reversed and the Scots became vigorous in their effort to presbyterianize the Church of England.

In 1894 Heinrich Denifle showed conclusively that the official textbook of masters in theology in the medieval university was the Bible. At one time historians commonly assumed that masters in theology lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a most subtle and thought-provoking book. There are so many medieval commentaries on the Sentences, both published and unpublished, and so many great masters did in fact comment on the Sentences that it was easy enough to assume that this was the set text for masters in the universities. Today there can be no doubt. Normally only bachelors lectured on the Sentences before being promoted to the rank of master. Once the young man became a master in sacred theology, he was not allowed to lecture on the Lombard. His task was to lecture on the sacred scriptures, and his official title was magister in sacra pagina, Master of the Sacred Page.