Melchior Hoffman, the Swabian furrier turned Reformation lay preacher, played a minor role in the early stages of the Danish Reformation, as preacher, polemicist, and printer. This paper will address some of the remaining problems in the narrative of Hoffman's Danish tenure and reassess some of the longstanding interpretations.

Although England's official participation in the Council of Basel came to an end with the departure of the second English delegation from Basel in the summer of 1435, the history of England and the Council does not end with this event.1 There was no lack of English concern over the developments that followed: the Council's final break with Eugenius IV in 1436–37, its suspension and deposition of him, and election, in 1439, of the anti-pope, Felix V. Henry VI was anxious to intervene to restore peace and unity in the Church, while the fathers of Basel made unsuccessful bids for renewed English support. This article is devoted chiefly to an examination of English relations with the Council from 1435 until its dissolution in 1449; but the subject is also closely linked with the history of Anglo- papal relations during these years, for England remained staunchly loyal to Eugenius. Although no English delegation went to the general council which the pope summoned in 1437 to Ferrara, this council's fruitful work towards union with the Greek Church and other Christians was followed with approval in England.

At the outset of Italy's struggle for political regeneration religious differences divided American opinion as to the justice of the Italian demands and continued to color that opinion throughout the years that followed. Before the election of Pius IX to the Papacy, Americans had read and heard a great deal about the tyranny of the various despotic governments of Italy after the Congress of Vienna. Books of travel, memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, accounts of newspaper correspondents in various cities of the peninsula, stories told by returning travellers and by Italian exiles in America had painted a most gloomy picture of the spiritual and physical conditions under which many liberals were suffering in the dungeons of the despots who had been restored to power after the downfall of Napoleon. Nowhere were conditions worse, it was believed, than in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and in the Papal States.

One of the most important results of the New Testament study that has gone on during the past generation is its realization that the theology of the New Testament is unintelligible outside the context of its eschatological message. The precise meaning of that message is still the subject of much investigation and controversy, but its importance has become a matter of general agreement among New Testament students. Much less general is the realization of the implications of this insight for other areas of theological concern. Rudolf Bultmann's recent essay on mythology and the New Testament has served to raise again the question of the relevance of New Testament eschatology for systematic theology. That question has far-reaching implications for the study of the history of theology as well, implications with which historical theology has not yet come to terms. The relation between primitive Christian eschatology and the development of ancient Christian theology is a problem deserving of more study than the standard interpretations of the history of dogma have given it, for it can help iiluminate the origins of such dogmas as the Trinity and ancient Christology. Among the historians of dogma, only Martin Werner has taken up the problem in great detail, and his discussion of it has not yet issued in any new historico-theological synthesis.

Shortly after the formation of the United Church of Canada, Charles Clayton Morrison told readers of the Christian Century to “put down a new monumental date in ecclesiastical history—Wednesday, June 10, 1925.” “On that day,” he continued, “took place the first large scale achievement of organic union of separate denominational families since the Protestant Reformation.” Aware that the full significance of this venture would not be evident for some time, he predicted it would be “the object of continued study and exposition for months and perhaps years to come.”1 Since Morrison's enthusiastic pronouncement, a considerable body of literature has accumulated on the church union movement and the United Church of Canada. No critical evaluation, however, has been made of it and little is known about its authors or their understanding of the formation and development of this Canadian institution.

Gilbert Tennent (1703–1764), an “Ulster Scot” born the same year as John Wesley, is usually remembered as a leader of revivals during the “Great Awakening” in the middle-colonies. John Witherspoon (1723–1794), a “champion of orthodoxy” from Edinburgh called to be the President of the College of New Jersey, is usually treated as a “founding father” of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. However, many events leading up to the first General Assembly in 1788 reflect the influence of Gilbert Tennet, the moderator of the newly re-united Synods of Philadelphia and New York in 1758.

The ground and provocation of the German Reformed Church are first considerations in the appreciation of its character. It is understood that the Palatinate Church Order of 1563, containing the Heidelberg Catechism and the Palatinate liturgy, introduced a permanent Reformed tradition to Germany. It should also be understood that that kirchenordnung represented the effort of a Melanchthonian church to maintain its evangelical consciousness against the pressures of Gnesio-Lutheranism. Later Palatinate religion arose thus from the ground of Melanchthonianism and in the context of the Crypto-Calvinist controversy—the creation of Zacharius Ursinus, a pupil of Melanchthon and Martyr, and more deeply of John a Lasco, the Polish reformer whose influence in this connection remains untold.

The Lessing “legend” is grounded in paradox. It rests on his total dedication to the Enlightenment ideal of Sapere aude — dare to use one's own understanding—while at the same time he viewed himself as heir apparent to German Protestantism. Lessing was a religionist who depended on rationalism for the solution to every major problem. The unity of these apparently diverse perspectives was summed up in Lessing's program of seeking truth, not claiming its possession. “If God held in his right hand all the truth, and in his left hand the ever active longing for the truth, and said to me: ‘choose’, I should humbly grasp his left hand and cry: give me this, oh Father! the truth is for you alone”. If truth were relinquished to God, then at least Lessing could lay claims to salvaging history for man. In this form, what appeared to the philosophes as alien traditions, human revolution and divine revelation, were to be united.

This article considers the social and cultural contexts of the two lives of Margherita Colonna (c.1254–1280) to reveal her traditional, monastic Franciscan piety that originated with her baronial Roman background. To her family, Margherita Colonna represented a moderate type of Franciscan piety that did not conflict with elite patriarchal expectations of women, and one that differed from the radical penitence of Clare of Montefalco, Angela of Foligno, and Margherita of Cortona. Her hagiographers structured their respective renditions of her life to promote their own agendas, choosing and omitting saintly virtues as they saw fit. Margherita's first life, written by her brother Giovanni Colonna, extolled her humility, nobility, and almsgiving. Her second life, written by Stefania, her relative and the successor of her spiritual community, focused on Margherita's mysticism and concern for her cloistered community. Both of these works diverge from the lives of radical female Franciscans who practiced contempt for the world and rigorous poverty. For this reason, this article argues that Margherita's pious type broke from that of Clare of Assisi, and more closely resembled the traditional monastic religiosity practiced by her family before the arrival of St. Francis. Such an approach to hagiography reveals the social context from which it arose, as well as gendered notions of holiness, thereby contributing to the fields of medieval sanctity, gender, and society.

In my review of previous presidential addresses, I found it interesting to discover that only one had built upon one of the most significant cultural and scholarly developments of the past generation and perhaps the past century, that is, women's and, later, gender studies and their relevance for our respective fields. That was Jane Dempsey Douglass's address twenty years ago as the first woman president of this Society on “what Calvin learned at the school of women,” an event that will surely be recognized in the program session tomorrow on “Women in the American Society of Church History.”

In Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Walter Rauschenbusch compared the sin of speculating in land to the sin of slavery. The great theologian of the Social Gospel tried to open his audience's eyes to the sinfulness of land speculation by reminding them that not long ago, Christians had been unaware of the sinfulness of slavery. Before the abolition of slavery, he wrote, “there were millions of genuine Christians, honestly willing to see and do the right thing in other matters, to whom it seemed a preposterous proposition that slavery is incompatible with Christianity.” To these honest believers, slavery was a necessary social institution like the family or the school. Today, he continued, most Christians, despite their genuine faith, do not realize “that it is a crying wrong to hold land idle for speculation in cities where men's lungs are rotting away … few who realize that it is a flat denial of Christianity to take advantage of the needs of your fellow man to buy his labor cheaply or sell him your goods dearly.” Christians were blind to the evils of industrial society just as they had been blind to the evils of slavery. Both slavery and land speculation were social sins, morally deficient practices that were so deeply embedded in the economic and social structure that they seemed to be “a necessary and inevitable part of the structure of society.” Social sins were different than individual sins. “Genuine Christians” did not tolerate individual sins like drunkenness, adultery, or murder, but they had tolerated slavery.

On a Sunday morning, early in the eighteenth century, Anglican minister James Blair accused male members of his Virginia congregation of attending church “on the purpose that they may feed their lustful Eyes.” Criticizing his hearers for unleashing their “Wanton Desires” through “Undecent, Lascivious Glances, and ogling Gestures,” Blair called on them to keep their “Hearts … eagerly intent upon Devotion” so as to “keep out the Wandring both of Eyes and Heart.” James Blair was not the only Virginia minister worried about the “irregular Wandring” of his parishioners' eyes and minds during weekly services.

John Locke and many others noted the vibrant political commentary emanating from the pulpit during the Glorious Revolution. Preachers from the full confessional spectrum in England, and especially in Scotland, Ireland, and the colonies, used occasional or state sermons to explain contemporary upheavals from the perspective of God's law, Natural law, and Civil law. Most surprising is the latter, clerical reference to civil history and ancient origins, which preachers used to answer contemporary questions of conquest and allegiance. Clergy revisited the origins and constitutional roots of the Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Scots, and Irish, and deployed histories of legendary kings and imaginary conquests to explain and justify the revolutionary events of 1688–1692. Sermons of this revolutionary era focused as much on civil as on sacred history, and sought their true origins in antiquity and the mists of myth. Episcopalian preachers, whether Church of Ireland, Scottish Episcopalian, or Church of England, seem to have been especially inspired by thanksgiving or fast days memorialized in the liturgical calendar to ponder the meaning of a deep historical narrative. Scots, Irish, and Massachusetts clergy claimed their respective immemorialism, as much as the English did theirs. But, as they re-stated competing Britannic constitutions and origin myths explicitly, they exposed imperial rifts and contradictions within the seemingly united claim of antiquity. By the beginning of the next reign and century, state sermons depended more upon reason and less upon a historicized mythic antiquity.

In the nineteenth century, the Mormons were a minority religious group living on the fringes of the United States in both a geographic and social sense. Yet, in the twenty-first century, historians are increasingly realizing that the history of this marginal religious “other” sheds a great deal of light on the American past broadly conceived. This essay briefly describes an important moment in early Mormon history that illuminates our developing understanding of religious liberty in the early American republic, and the political obstacles Americans outside mainstream protestant Christianity faced in their efforts to obtain equal treatment under the law as American citizens.

The most extensive early test of the American dogma of the separation of church and state seems to me to have taken place in pioneer Ohio, where a complete range of the plurality of America's religious associations first confronted public consciousness. Unlike Kentucky, whose many Protestant denominations had a largely southern cast, and unlike upstate New York, whose culture was heavily under New England influence (or, at least, appeared to literate Yankees to be so), Ohio's early citizens came from a wide mix of puritan, mid-Atlantic, and southern backgrounds. For example, every sect of Pennsylvania Germans established major outposts in Ohio's developing counties. The Buckeye State early brought together several concentrations of Roman Catholics. Early and late, diverse communities of Jews also settled there, both in smaller towns as well as in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. Also at the end of the nineteenth century, Eastern Orthodox Christians began a migration to Cleveland that later expanded into the larger industrial towns that grew southward, in such places as Toledo, Canton, and Youngstown.

Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago an ugly old man sat in the market place of ancient Athens trying to teach his fellow citizens how to think. If we may believe Plato, his pupil, the wise old Socrates once observed that human beings were far too prone to assume that the mastery of one field of learning qualified them to speak with equal authority in all others. It was some similar modern rash generalizations in two recent publications which led to the present inquiry. With a natural aversion for polemics we shall, however, refrain from dealing with this controversial material but shall rather investigate our theme on the basis of the best available evidence from the sources and recent European scholarship.

To commemorate Nietzsche on the occasion of his hundredth anniversary is both easy and difficult. It is easy because one cannot but remember him as the prophet of our century. He is more alive in 1944 than he was in 1888 when he suddenly burned out like a volcano after the last eruption, called Ecce Homo. He knew every recess of the modern soul, its widest periphery and its hidden center. His problems are our problems and his predicament is our own. For this very reason it is also difficult to commemorate him. He is still becoming what he is, and one cannot but hesitate to sum up his final significance in the history of Western man and the Christian Occident.

Hiram Mattison was fighting mad. Some of the holiness people in the Methodist Episcopal church had pulled a fast one. Early in 1867 the New York Preachers' Meeting had hosted a series of speeches on the question, “What are the best methods for promoting the experience of perfect love?” The discussion had been, in the words of one participant, “lengthy and pungent.” Mattison, a seminary professor and long-time opponent of the holiness movement, had weighed in with his professional theological polemics against the movement's doctrine and methods of promotion. He had expected that all the speeches would be published in a single volume. But the proponents of perfect love surreptitiously had withdrawn their manuscripts from the Methodist book room and had them published and copyrighted on their own. The original plan to publish a two-sided debate had been thus defeated, and the advocates of perfect love had scooped their opposition. What a move for people who professed to have attained Christian perfection, said Mattison. It must have paid well, he added, for three editions had been issued in just a few weeks.