In his Preface to the study entitled, Puritan Pronaos, Samuel Eliot Morison writes: “I have trod warily for fear of the Indians that are always lying in wait to scalp that unpopular wayfarer, the New England historian.” The Indians have no quarrel with Professor Morison, and presumably are not interested in securing his scalp, but were the ancient Puritan divines of New England alive today, they would at least desire to question some of his conclusions.

Christianization was an important and traumatic event that became embedded in the cultural memory of Icelanders. Through the reconstruction of this event in historical narratives, there was an ongoing debate on the identity of Icelanders as a group as the cultural heritage of this group was institutionalized and cultivated by particular organizations and individuals. This is reflected in very different emphasis on individual agents in this process, which can be found in various historical works composed between 1070 and 1330. The general trend is that the narrative became more inclusive for a larger group with each major version, as the leading role passed from the Archbishop to a select group of few leading families to a larger group including leaders from all parts of Iceland and, finally, to the general population, the humble as well as the mighty.

“‘God Is My Partner’: An Evangelical Business Man Confronts Depression and War” chronicles the early career of R. G. LeTourneau, an industrialist and lay preacher whose life challenges the historiography of mid-twentieth-century fundamentalism as apolitical and otherworldly. In the 1930s and 1940s, every businessman had to grapple with the expanding federal state under the New Deal and in World War II. LeTourneau exemplified theologically conservative evangelical resourcefulness under changing political and economic conditions. Born in 1888 to a Plymouth Brethren family, his cultural memory reached back to the evangelical business activism of the nineteenth century, while his future lay in the fundamentalist subculture that the Brethren did much to create. However, as a businessman, LeTourneau had little patience with doctrines dividing “the world” from the church. He integrated evangelicalism into his manufacturing and managerial roles, and pushed fundamentalist clergy to tap laymen's proselytizing energy. Between 1930 and 1943, the years on which this article focuses, LeTourneau attacked dilemmas that preoccupied other evangelical business men: higher taxes, greater regulation, a forceful labor movement, and the challenge, as he saw it, to uphold the gospel and private enterprise against communist subversion. Business men such as LeTourneau represented the front line of what scholars have too often dismissed as trivial: evangelical politics during the New Deal.

The first issue of the journal Church History appeared in 1932—seventy-nine years ago—the year William Warren Sweet was president of the American Society of Church History. It was a time of considerable pain and social stress in many parts of the world. Perhaps in response to this turmoil, the inaugural issue conveyed a deep-seated optimism about the future. A bracing faith in the providential course of history characterized the three essays in that first issue and the authors conveyed that faith with erudition, narrative flair, and sweeping knowledge of Christian history. Few authors today exert such broad command of events in the larger history of Christianity, or display such facility with a wide range of primary documents, and few write with such ebullience. Such may be the price of leaving behind a world where providence is clearly in sight.

The rise of German academic institutions in the nineteenth century considerably altered the landscape of American higher education. American students of theology looked to Germany to develop their discipline, where they found model textbooks that gave directives in learning and piety, transforming academic and theological practice. With sensitivity to the history of the book and the history of the rich cultural traffic across the Atlantic, this article focuses on the reception in English translation of the important and widely read Swiss-German church historian Karl Rudolf Hagenbach, whose textbooks enjoyed a considerable audience in the United States by crossing ideological boundaries and unseating obdurate assumptions. By examining this reception in the United States and Britain and investigating those “transatlantic personalities” who played pivotal roles in bringing his ideas from the “Old World” to the “New,” this article demonstrates Hagenbach's lasting influence on the changing fields of history, church history, and academic theology in America. An “Atlantic” perspective on these themes offers new insights for our understanding of religion in the modern academy, the movement and translation of theological ideas in an age of steamship travel, and the surfacing of commonalities among ostensibly mismatched, if not outright conflicting, Protestant religious cultures.

The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) occupied an unusual position in the British Atlantic as an internationally minded voluntary organization rooted in Anglicanism but also able to unite members of different Protestant groups. Its history during the American Revolution provides opportunity to examine the ideal of international Protestantism in the latter part of the eighteenth century. This investigation indicates that, despite many international ties and a strong sense of politically based international Protestant unity during the early decades of the century, members of the SPCK did not experience the Revolutionary crisis that ruptured the British Atlantic as a spiritual separation from their fellows in North America. International Protestant engagement within the SPCK was largely personal in nature, based on the experiences of a few individuals. Though the SPCK's regular publications create the impression of an organization leading an international Protestant community, an analysis of its membership reveals a profoundly English group. Thus, during the Revolution, the SPCK rallied to the British cause without a sense that an idealized Protestant union had been divided by fratricidal violence. This article builds on and supports the transnational perspective put forth by scholars in recent years and suggests that international Protestantism was varied and, in the case of the SPCK, politically limited.

We, Lucifer, lord of darkness, ruler of deep sadness, emperor of the hellish cesspool, duke of the sulphuric waters, king of the cliff, and administrator of the hellish fire, to each and everyone in our realm, friends, bishops, prelates, cathedral canons, clergy, and all others of whatever dignity and the state you may be in: our greetings.

Few figures in the story of the rise and establishment of Christianity have drawn so much attention as Julian the Apostate. The emperor who attempted to overthrow the church and reestablish the ancient pagan faith has from his own day to this been bitterly attacked by some, and as stoutly defended by others, until he has become almost a legendary character. Whether monster or tragic hero, his brief career has inevitably called forth an enormous literature in which every shade of the Christian and the pagan points of view is represented. Professional scholars and men of letters, attracted by a number of different aspects of the emperor's life, find rich material in the problem of his curiously mixed personality and in the spectacle of this last concerted; attempt to revive dying paganism. The manner in which the pagans responded to the attempt, and the way in which the church combatted this attack upon it, are alike subjects which will seem to every student to offer valuable lessons. Scholars realize both the difficulty and the importance of a just appreciation of these problems, and the effort to assay them properly has produced studies of the highest value.

More than eighty years ago the celebrated church historian Philip Schaff correctly observed that the Czech Brethren “surpass all churches in the number of their confessions of faith.”1 Undoubtedly he too, like any other student of the Unitas Fratrum, was astonished at the number of confessional statements which the Brethren wrote and published within the span of less than two hundred years. While discounting separate printings and translations into Latin, German, and Polish, one still has to take into consideration seventeen documents which must be classified as official apologies or confessions of faith. However, if anyone wished to include all such documents, the number would reach almost forty. This, admittedly, is a difficult task, as in several instances it is not easy to determine which ones of these were directly authorized by the spiritual leadership of the Unitas Fratrum, or at least met with its silent approval.2

A fresh study of early catechetical procedures, and an explanation of the instructions and techniques used in adult baptism in the early Church, are always welcome. Comparatively speaking, little has been done on the subject. This article makes no pretension of being a detailed study of the subject, but is only a partial treatment of it, with special emphasis upon the contributions of St. Augustine. Occasionally, references are drawn from Church canons and other early Church writings on the catechetical practice of the time.

The confused and tumultuous circumstances surrounding the election to the papacy of Urban VI, its corollaries, the subsequent defection of thirteen of the cardinals, their election of a rival pontiff, and the ensuing years of dismal division within the Church—these form the general background to this tract, which is a product, therefore, of the immense outburst of polemical writing occasioned by the onset, in 1378, of the Great Schism. The more immediate circumstances surrounding it are the failure by 1403 of the French withdrawal of obedience from the Avignonese pope to produce a settlement of the Schism, the breakdown of all subsequent negotiations between the rival pontiffs, and finally the convocation, by dissident cardinals from both camps, of a general council which was to meet at Pisa in March, 1409.

The Diggers who broke the turf on St. George's Hill Sunday morning, April 1, 1649, have an importance far larger than the number of people involved would suggest, for their action was the first effort to bring into being a socialist Utopia. Their bold combination of theoretical and practical communism baffled their contemporaries, and historians ever since have failed to see them in the totality of their meaning.*** Were they simply hungry men, agrarian revolutionaries filing one more protest against economic and social injustice? Or were they religiously inspired men who used the most dramatic means at their disposal to portray the sinfulness of man and the possibility of redemption? The ambiguity of the Digger experiment has lent color to both explanations.

For American Protestants who were sensitive to the profound social disruptions associated with rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth century, the twin discoveries of the “alienation” of the working class from Protestant churches and of a rising and vibrant socialist movement caused much consternation and anxious soul-searching. Socialism offered not only a radical critique of American political and economic institutions; it also offered the zeal, symbols, and sense of participation in a world-transforming cause often associated with Christianity itself. The religious alienation of the working class and the appeal of socialism were often causally linked in the minds of socially-conscious Protestant leaders.

In 1636 the Puritan Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay was confronted with a sectarian outburst which rent the religious and civil peace of Boston and temporarily threatened that of the whole colony. Certain of the Boston congregation, led by Anne Hutchinson and abetted by John Cotton, the teacher of the church, charged that the clergy of the Bay, almost entirely, were not true ministers of the gospel but in fact a company of unregenerate “legalists”, preaching a “covenant of works” instead of a “covenant of grace”, and there by hindering the work of redemption. For nearly two years the “Antinomian Controversy” darkened the radiance of the City on the Hill, and echoes of the affair returned in the next decade to plague apologists for the New England Way. Part of the apologists' difficulty was the fact that their star, the illustrious Cotton, had been on the wrong side.

Patriots at the beginning of the American Revolution were conscious of participating in a tradition of liberty derived from their Puritan forefathers. Not only did they refer back to the crossing of the sea by their ancestors who “bravely threw themselves upon the bosom of the ocean, determined to find a place in which they might enjoy their freedom, or perish in the glorious attempt,” but they also spoke of themselves as “the descendants of Oliver Cromwell's army,” “the descendants of Cromwell's elect.” Benjamin Rush thought of himself as being a son of liberty genetically when he wrote, “I am the great grandson of an officer John Rush who fell fighting against King Charles 1st under Oliver Cromwell.”2

The relationship—or lack of it—between religious belief and socalled secular culture is a topic which has been of perennial interest both to ancient students of religion and history and to modern historians. Students today use the phrase Unity of Faith and Culture because it has become current and because it bears some relationship to our own situation and problems, but we must also consider the subject, at least as we see it in antiquity, in terms of the interdependence or the interaction of faith and culture.

John Wesley, leader of the Methodist movement in England, was a significant figure to the unenfranchised lower class of English society. His movement roused popular spiritual and religious fervor among groups not reached by the bulk of the Anglican clergy, and he was in a position to observe and communicate with the English people in a way few others were. Many Anglicans had initially feared the Methodists as secret Jesuits or supporters of a Stuart restoration, but much of the violent opposition had declined by the 1760s. Still, little would be needed to revive action opposition to Methodist activities. It is in this connection that Wesley's activities in the era of the American Revolution should be viewed1