Europe in the early seventeenth century was a continent divided along confessional lines. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Not only had the gulf between Protestants and Catholics widened there, in addition the animosity between Lutherans and Calvinists had grown to the point where members of the two Protestant churches often resented each other more than their common Catholic foe.

It is remarkable that study of William Perkins (1558–1602) has had so little impact on conventional interpretations of English history. Of the work of this great pastoral theologian, William Haller observed that “no books… were more often to be found upon the shelves of succeeding generations of preachers, and the name of no preacher recurs more often in later Puritan literature.” In an article which commented upon Perkins's undeserved obscurity, Louis Wright suggested that in Perkins's thought Max Weber would have found “pertinent illustrations” for the famous argument about Protestantism and capitalism. Historical scholarship generally appears to have followed Wright's suggestion, mining Perkins's works for “pertinent illustrations” of established outlooks. Perkins has been pressed into service in economic and political versions of Haller's neo-Foxian epic which describes religious forces gathering relentlessly toward a mid-seventeenth-century climax. Other historians, encountering Perkins's insistent defense of the established church, have portrayed him as an Elizabethan moderate of varying degrees of sincerity and importance. Ultimately, these unproductive readings rest on an assumed typology of Anglicanism and Puritanism which casts Puritan theology as sectarian and disruptive while reserving the culturally integrative role of a churchly religion for Anglicanism. However faithfully this typology represents the outcome of seventeenth-century English history, it may have impeded fruitful analysis of Perkins's thought.

Christian monasticism in the East has three sources: the original rule of the founder or that of a reformer, laws issued by the Roman emperors, and the canons of church councils. The purpose of this article is to study the latter two, which have received little attention in the scholarly work on monastic life. The close association between church and state, unique to the East, made it incumbent upon the leaders of both the secular and religious hierarchies of Byzantium to oversee the development of monasticism from the fourth to the eighth century. Those 400 years mark the first and normative period of legislation dealing with the monastic life.

As Peter Brown has so eloquently described in The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, bones became an avenue to power in late antiquity. Wealthy Christians who could lay claim to the bodies of the holy dead gained status through their willingness to share the gratia thus acquired with those lacking relics of their own; Paulinus of Nola, proprietor of Saint Felix's remains, affords an illuminating example. Patronage was restyled, Brown argues, as the royal, priestly, or monastic controllers of bones became the intermediaries through whom the saints' generosities were bestowed on sinful humans. Yet cooperation was not always the dominant spirit in the dispensing of gratia: relics could provide new opportunities for competition, as is dramatically illustrated by a rivalry confused and perhaps forever obfuscated by contradictory texts. The rivals are the heiress-turned- ascetic Melania the Younger and the empress Eudocia, wife of Theodosius II. The bones are Stephen's.

Some years ago James Hasting Nichols wrote, “A significant impetus to the awakening in Geneva and France came from Scotland… In Scotland the Evangelical revival may be dated from the 1700's.” But the influence of the Scottish Free Church went beyond the bounds identified by Nichols. At least one other country, namely, Sweden, was stimulated by this religious force from the British Isles.

Strict observance of the Lord's Day became a distinctive feature of English and Scottish society in the seventeenth century. The Sabbatarian principle touched not only British religion but many social and economic practices as well. At some times, English Puritan settlers in the Netherlands attempted to introduce their brand of Sabbatarianism into Dutch society but with disappointing results. The success or failure of Sabbatarianism often has been identified with a certain stage of capitalistic economic development. This article examines the centrality of teachings about the Sabbath in Puritan social theology and, secondarily, the Sabbatarian-capitalism connection by comparing events in England and Holland from approximately 1600 to 1660. A comparison of Puritan Sabbatarians at home in England and abroad in Holland reveals anew the extreme difficulty of transporting values from one society, where they fit, into another location.

Few English Nonconformists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries have proven more elusive than Stephen Offwood.He was a Separatist who renounced Separatism and later joined the English Reformed Church of Amsterdam, whose pastor, John Paget, was a powerful enemy of separation. Offwood was also a prominent printer, publisher, and distributor of Puritan tracts. In 1632 he wrote a book of his own entitled An Advertisement to Jhon [sic] Delecluse, and Henry May the Elder.

By 1516 Luther charged that the Schoolmen had grotesquely inflated the significance of natural virtues. Thereafter, he increasingly was provoked by the suggestion that human effort—touched only lightly, if at all, by grace—could accomplish more healing than harm. But it is commonly supposed that opinions Luther then condemned were opinions he had condoned in his earliest works, in which he is said to have assumed God's willingness to accept the best efforts of sinful persons as virtuous preparation for grace. Certainly Luther's ambitious remarks about partial merit (mentum de congruo), which found their way into his marginal notes on Lombard's Sentences (1509–1510) and into his Dictata super Psalterium (1513–1515), contrast with his later repudiation of the “sufficiencies” of natural powers for moral achievement and of moral achievement for divine acceptance and reward. Luther himself conceded his schoolboy admiration for Ockham, who probably inspired the semipelagianism of much of the late medieval soteriology that Luther came to detest. Understandably, Luther's early apparent endorsements of semipelagian features of scholastic soteriology have attracted considerable scholarly attention. His passage from nominalism to Protestantism, choreographed variously with leaps and stumbles or as an orderly march, has been a topic for debate ever since new fragments of Luther's early theology surfaced and were pieced together in the nineteenth century. Yet two early sermons have generated comparatively little discussion. Copied together from a manuscript in Erfurt and published twice before 1900, they are clearly witnesses from Luther's early career and their contribution to the determination and evaluation of his early semipelagianism ought not to be undervalued.

Debates over the interpretation of the English Reformation often have followed from the wider controversies of the day. This was especially true in the years before Catholic Emancipation, when political tensions led Catholic, Anglican, and Whig historians to revive the many quarrels about the past. Of these disputes, the persecutions under Mary I and the alleged treason of Elizabethan Catholics seemed most relevant to the issue of Catholic freedom. From John Foxe had come the Anglican image of Catholic cruelty; from the statutes and official tracts of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the obsessive fears of Catholic treason. John Foxe taught his generation that persecution and treason had been practiced by the papal antichrist since the fourteenth century. The apparent timelessness of Roman evil was given new support by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the Irish Massacres of 1641. Moreover, by culling quotations from church councils, papal decrees, and Catholic divines, seventeenth-century Anglican writers alleged that treason and cruelty flowed from the very principles of the Roman church. Since those same principles had been established as early as 1215 and never had been rescinded, the lesson was clear enough: the penal laws could not be ended until Rome changed. For the historians of the English Reformation, Mary's fires and Elizabeth's traitors would show not only what Rome had been but what it must always be.

Congregational polity first appeared in New England in 1620 with the arrival of a small company of Separatists from Scrooby, England. In 1607 or 1608, after many difficulties arising from the policies of King James I, the Scrooby congregation migrated to Amsterdam in Holland. In 1609 they transferred to Leyden, where John Robinson ministered as their pastor. After a decade in Leyden, the congregation negotiated a charter or patent with the Virginia Company to go to Virginia; it was approved in September 1619. Volunteers for the voyage to the New World were sought from the Leyden congregation. Robinson planned to accompany them if a majority agreed to go. However, since only a minority chose to make the journey, he disappointedly conformed to his prior agreement and remained in Holland, where he died six years later in 1625. Traveling on the Mayflower, which sailed off course, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony arrived on 6 December 1620 in Cape Cod harbor. At this time they were under the pastoral leadership and ecclesiological influence of Robinson, and they remained so until his death.

Any discussion of the relationship between Pietism and nationalism must start from a consideration of the two major works in this field: Koppel S. Pinson's Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism, published in 1934, and Gerhard Kaiser's Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland, published in 1961. Both studies are valuable and lasting contributions to the topic. After presenting the main thesis of both works I will comment on the premises and conclusions of both works and then focus on aspects not mentioned by Pinson and Kaiser, especially the impact of Protestant revivalism on German nationalism in the middle of the nineteenth century.

In 1978 the first American publication of Heinrich Heppe's classic textbook of 1861 on Reformed dogmatics appeared. That occasion provides an opportunity to give an account of Heppe's place in nineteenth-century German Protestantism. An examination of Heppe's life and writings shows that, like August Vilmar, his Lutheran antagonist on the Marburg University faculty, Heppe was a confessionalist, defending the old Protestant church against modern rationalistic enemies. Unlike Vilmar, however, Heppe's confessionalism was inclusive rather than exclusive.

The composite volume entitled Essays and Reviews, published in 1860, became the center of one of the major religious controversies of Victorian England—a crisis of faith contemporary with that provoked by Darwin's Origin of Species but more central to the religious mind. Essays and Reviews was at once the culmination and the final act of the Broad Church movement. The volume itself was modest in its pretensions and varied in the character and quality of its seven essays. The first, by Frederick Temple, was a warmed-over sermon urging the free study of the Bible. Rowland Williams wrote a provocative essay on Bunsen, denying the predictive character of Old Testament prophecies. Baden Powell flatly denied the possibility of miracles. H. B. Wilson gave the widest possible latitude to subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles and questioned the eternity of damnation. C. W. Goodwin (the only layman among the Essayists) wrote a critique of the attempted “harmonies” between Genesis and geology. Mark Pattison wrote a learned and cold historical study of the evidential theologians of the eighteenth century (perhaps the only essay of lasting value). The volume was capped by Benjamin Jowett's tremendous though wayward essay “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” in which he urged that the Bible be read “like any other book” and made an impassioned plea for freedom of scholarship. Little of all this was original, though it was new to most Englishmen. It was not the cutting edge of biblical scholarship; rather, it was the last gasp of an outmoded Coleridgianism, contributing little except a demand that somebody—somebody else—engage in serious biblical criticism. But this work touched off a controversy which lasted four years and mobilized the resources of both church and state.

Recent studies of English Methodism have called attention to the importance of the doctrine of the ministry and its evolution for the understanding of the Methodist tradition. Chief among these are John C. Bowmer's Pastor and People and the first two volumes of the new History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain. Each of these studies cites the evolution of the pastoral office, from its roots in John Wesley to its culmination under Jabez Bunting, as one of the distinguishing marks of the Wesleyan tradition. But while they mention the beginnings of formal education for ministry during this period, they do not attempt to gain insight into the understanding of ministry within Wesleyan Methodism that these foundations can provide. It is my intention in this paper to explore these connections and to encourage further investigation into related matters that could prove fruitful for our understanding of this tradition.

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.

Historians of American Catholicism long have recognized that John Ireland, the aggressive archbishop of Saint Paul, Minnesota, was a leading exponent of the Americanist movement. At the turn of the twentieth century Ireland advocated a number of important ideas—religious liberty, separation of church and state, interfaith cooperation, and greater lay initiative—gleaned from the American experience. Reflecting his democratic convictions, Ireland declared, “Let there be individual action. Layman need not wait for priest, nor priest for bishop, nor bishop for pope.” Although there were differences on specific issues, Americanists in general took an optimistic view of American life and culture. In fact, they were eager to move their church into a more positive relationship with the political, cultural, and social climate of America.

There is a certain irony in the title of Eldon G. Ernst's Moment of Truth for Protestant America, the standard interpretation of the Interchurch World Movement (IWM) of 1919–1920, because this broad and generally perceptive study of the IWM is based primarily upon an elaborate falsification of the historical record. That falsification was perpetrated in a document entitled “History of the Interchurch World Movement” prepared under the direction of Raymond B. Fosdick. Fosdick, who was the lawyer and long-term adviser of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had the document compiled precisely to conceal the real role Rockefeller played in the organization. Research in Rockefeller's papers reveals the truth about his role and thereby illumines a significant aspect of the ecumenical movement and its relationship to wider historical trends. This overlooked aspect from the background of the liberal side of the fundamentalist controversy is particularly pertinent today as tensions mount between those who identify themselves as “liberals” and those who claim to lead a “moral majority” of resurgent conservatism. Perhaps Washington Gladden, the old social gospel advocate, was not entirely wrong when he referred to a Rockefeller contribution as “tainted money,” however idealistic Rockefeller's motives may have been.

Americans pondering cultural relationships to Europe have always rather enjoyed quoting that splendidly splenetic outburst of rhetorical questions that the Reverend Sydney Smith posed in 1820 in the Edinburgh Review: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons?” As Smith's catalogue continues, it becomes Job-like; or rather, by no accident, like God's questions to poor Job. Where were the Americans, Smith thunders, when we British laid the foundations of modern culture? “Where are their Foxes, their Burkes, their Sheridans?… What new substances have their chemists discovered? What new constellations have been discovered by [their] telescopes?”

The Right Reverend Monsignor William T. Russell, pastor of Saint Patrick's Church in Washington, D.C., since 1908 and reputedly one of the finest preachers in the country, agreed to an unusual interview during the spring of 1912. Five other clergy, including a rabbi, likewise participated in separate sessions with the same Protestant minister. The resulting six semiautobiographical accounts appeared as a weekly series in Collier's magazine at midyear. Unlike the companion pieces, however, the article devoted to Msgr. Russell appeared at a particularly timely moment. On the one hand, the Pan-American Thanksgiving Day celebration, although just three years old, seemed well on the way toward becoming an annual observance that neither the president of the United States nor the Latin American diplomatic contingent could slight idly. Yet, on the other hand, the article heralded a major Protestant protest that would call the entire basis of the celebration into public and even political question. Upon assuming the presidency in 1913, an unsuspecting Woodrow Wilson would find himself inadvertently drawn into an interdenominational dispute over the special Catholic service. Embarrassed to the point of privately admitting a clumsy mistake, Wilson eventually yielded to the critics and finally withdrew his support from an implied experiment in the cultural extension of a famous holiday.