Research into the origins of bishops is not new, but it has taken on increasing importance within the last twenty years. In 1965 an important introductory study of the social origins of French bishops between the years 1150 and 1350 appeared under the auspices of the Institut de Droit Canonique de Strassbourg. Since then, other studies on the origins of the French episcopate have followed. Despite the fact that these studies possess intrinsic value as manifestations of interest in the family and social origins, the method employed in them raises questions. It is the scope of the studies—not so much in terms of chronology as in numbers of bishops considered—that is problematic. The large numbers of candidates considered render scrutiny of individual candidates and electoral processes impossible.

Of the many lost causes in history, one of the most dramatic was the struggle for power and religious rights waged by the French Huguenots in the sixteenth century; and, as lost causes are wont to do, this one inspired poets, writers, musicians and artists for at least two centuries to depict in graphic detail the courageous men who led a zealous minority through miraculous victories, but finally into inevitable defeat. Less dramatic than the heroic period of Huguenot history, and therefore neglected by poets, and also by historians, but no less important—and more significant in the story of the development of religious toleration—is the struggle of the French Protestants in the eighteenth century to secure civil and religious rights.

During the fifth century of our common era the Latin church fathers struggled to explain how we humans are saved and why it seems that not all humans are saved. Most of these attempts pivoted on the writings of Augustine of Hippo. The fathers either borrowed from Augustine's thought, adapted it, or reacted to it. Beginning with the generation of theologians who thrived at the end of Augustine's life and just following his death, there arose a tendency in the western church to moderate his more extreme positions concerning grace and predestination by realigning them with accepted church tradition. This tradition includes those Christian doctrines which were held and promoted most widely by theologians—up to, but not including, Augustine himself—whom the early church accepted as orthodox.

It has become almost a commonplace of both historical and systematic theology to interpret the doctrine of the Trinity as an elaboration of the christological faith and formulations of the early church. That is true of such radically divergent interpreters of that doctrine's origin as Adolf Harnack and G. L. Prestige. Both these scholars agree in seeing the trinitarian dogma as a response to the question whether, in Harnack's words, “the divine that has appeared on earth and reunited men with God is identical with that divine which created heaven and earth, or whether it is a demigod.” Or, as Prestige elaborates the thesis: “If the godhead was not unitary, it was as simple to conceive of three Persons as of two; hence the deity of Christ carried the weight of trinitarian controversies without any necessity for extending the range of dispute, and as a matter of history, the settlement of the problems connected with the Father and the Son was found to lead to an immediate solution of the whole trinitarian difficulty.”

Prior to the outbreak of the German Revolution of 1848, the liberal publicists Wilhelm Jordan and Robert Prutz complained bitterly about “the foolish absorption of the Germans in theological problems.… when political and economic issues should occupy their full attention.”

Once in a while, an occasion turns out to be historic, historical, and historiographical. Such an occasion was the conference on the Canadian Evangelical Experience held at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, early in May 1995. This four-day conference devoted to the history of evangelicalism in Canada (thus “historical”) was the first of its kind in this country, and marked the emergence of a critical mass of scholarship in this field (thus “historic”). It has become a considerable enough mass, in fact, that this review will confine itself to published books and particularly those published in the last ten years. It is a “critical” mass, furthermore, in that the conference raised explicitly and implicitly serious questions about the writing of Canadian evangelical history, some of which this essay will discuss (thus “historiographical”).

Episcopalian Bishop Charles Henry Brent was one of the outstanding pioneers in the modern ecumenical movement. His career as an international figure began in 1901 with an appointment at the age of 39 to be first missionary bishop of the Philippine Islands. From this mission vantage point his influence extended around the world. In 1909 President Taft chose him to be President of the First International Opium Commission in Shanghai. During the last year of the First World War he served as Senior Headquarters Chaplain to the American Expeditionary Forces. But Brent' greatest achievement was to be in the realm of church unity. He founded and inspired the Faith and Order movement, and presided over its First World Conference at Lausanne, Switzerland in 1927.

Students of medieval theology are acquainted with the fact that neither the formative years of the medieval synthesis—say, from the 8th through the 12th century—nor the climax of the Middle Ages— 13th century—conceived of Holy Scripture as being only a set of inspired books, the ‘Canon,’ containing the Revelation committed by Christ to His Church. Rather, the Sacred Scripture—or, as it was also called, the Sacred Page or the Sacred Doctrine—was to the medieval mind wide enough to encompass somehow the works of the Fathers and those of subsequent Doctors. Distinct though these were from the canonical scriptures, they nonetheless were viewed in the same perspective: Holy Writ and the commentaries thereupon formed one uncleft whole which was kept together by the continuity of the Church's life. The apostolic writings were in a way continued by the Fathers' homilies and treatises, and these in turn were prolonged in the early medieval tractates.