One of the major goals of the early Christian apologists was to demonstrate the cultural acceptability of Christianity. In order to achieve this goal, a number of them (notably Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, and Theophilus of Antioch) drew comparisons between doctrines of the Greek philosophical tradition and those of Christianity, usually demonstrating the uniqueness and superiority of the latter. They thus unwittingly preserved for us doxographical data concerning Greek philosophers, some of which is to be found nowhere else. When we meet with such a doxographical hapax legomenon, we are faced with the problem of its reliability, since we lack comparative data. Does the author in question give a reliable version of the tradition, or does he misrepresent it because of his own inadequate understanding of the material?

The year 1988 marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of H. C. Lea's A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages. I would like to get the next century off to a good start by renaming his enterprise “A History of the Criminal Prosecution of Heretics in the Middle Ages.” The term inquisition has been widely misunderstood and misused by historians. There are two distinct abuses, one upper-case and the other lower-case.

Forty years ago George Every called the attention of the scholarly world to the likelihood that in the oriental patriarchates after the time of John of Damascus the Arabic language increasingly became the language of the Melkite, or Roman (rūmī), community of Christians in the caliphate. They came to use Arabic, Every suggested, not only for scholarly purposes, but even for the divine liturgy, at least for the Scripture lessons.1 In the years since Every made these observations it has become increasingly clear that not only was there such an increase in the use of Arabic in the church during the first Abbasid century, but that the crescendo in the use of Arabic went hand in hand with the diminishment of Greek as a language of church scholarship in the monasteries of the Holy Land from early Abbasid times, perhaps even until the Ottoman period, when the so-called “Rūm Millet” reintroduced the control of Greek speakers in the Jerusalem patriarchate.2 Accordingly, one might speak of the first flowering of Christian life in Arabic in the Holy Land as having occurred during the three centuries stretching from 750, the beginning of the Abbasid caliphate, to around the year 1050, the eve of the crusader period in Near Eastern history.3 And the documentary evidence for the literary activity of the Holy Land monks who wrote in Arabic during this period is largely the archive of “old south Palestinian texts” which Joshua Blau studied for his Grammar of Chrtstian Arabic.4

In textbooks on the history of early Christianity Marcellus of Ancyra usually merits one footnote, as the fourth-century oddity refuted by the Creed of Constantinople in the clause “and his kingdom will have no end,” since Marcellus taught that Christ's kingdom would end. But his significance is greater than that. Marcellus enjoyed notoriety in the 330s. Four decades later, in the 370s, opposition to Marcellus had all but ceased. But Basil of Caesarea, the first of the three Cappadocian fathers, campaigned relentlessly against Marcellus and his followers. Basil's virulent opposition to Marcellus still needs interpretation.

The Catholic church during the era of the Catholic Reformation experienced great vitality and vigor. Missionary activity was one of the clearest indications of this renewed spiritual energy. Simultaneously with Catholic revitalization there occurred the expansion of European commerce and colonization. In the wake of the Age of Discovery portions of Africa, Asia, and the New World became more accessible to Europeans. The Catholic church, by means of its religious orders, carried Christianity to the inhabitants of these regions. The drive and dedication which led to reform of the church within Europe also fueled an intense missionary commitment towards the people of other continents. The dedication and zeal of the regular clergy reflected the apostolic tradition within the church, but this older ideal was enhanced by a new spirit of expansionism. The Catholic religious orders shared the urge of many of their secular contemporaries to take advantage of new opportunities for growth overseas.

The year 1988 marks not only the centennial of the American Society of Church History, it is also the anniversary of two important works dealing with the theme of religious toleration and freedom of ideas. One is the fiftieth anniversary of G. G. Coulton's Inquisition and Liberty. The other is Henry Charles Lea's History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, published in three volumes early in 1888. Coulton's work became a model for many that followed: a highly readable, consciously engaging narrative outlining the main features of one of the darker chapters of medieval church history. It covered the development of religious nonconformity, the church's response, especially through the creation and operation of the Inquistion, and the principal victims of the Inquisition: the Albigensians, Waldensians, Spiritual Franciscans, and those accused of witchcraft. Lea's earlier treatment covered those themes in a far more extensive way, and he also included, unlike Coulton, a final chapter on the problem of religious orthodoxy in the schools as viewed from the standpoint of the Inquisition. Lea, in fact, is one of the few authors writing on heresy and inquisition who attempted to place the cases of questioned orthodoxy and freedom of thought in medieval schools and universities in this larger context. Although he did not pursue the topic in any depth, Lea was aware that the character of theological study and the proper training of an educated priesthood were linked to the issue of religious orthodoxy in the schools and the threat of heresy among those charged with the preservation and dissemination of truth.

On 29 April 1538 a letter was sent from Archbishop Cranmer to Thomas Cromwell complaining about the indictment of five men of Smarden and Pluckley in Kent. They had been holding “unlawful assemblies” and, so Cranmer argued, were indicted “of none occasion or ground else, but for by cause they are accounted fauters [supporters] of the new doctrine, as they call it.” He pleaded that their indictments might be overturned, for “if the king's subjects within this realm which favour God's word, shall be unjustly vexed at sessions, it will be no marvel though much sedition be daily engendered within this realm.” In view of the imminent conservative turn that religious policy was about to take in England, a development that would bring down Cromwell in its wake, Cranmer's concern at the ability of Catholic-minded local officials to harass Protestants is not to be wondered at.

In the prologue to his commentary on Leviticus composed in the mid- twelfth century, the reformist abbot Ralph of Flaix noted with anxiety the effect on his monks of Jewish argumentation against Christian exegesis of the Old Testament:

Medieval exegetes contributed distinguished commentaries on the Book of Job that had far-reaching influence. When, in 1554, Calvin ascended the pulpit in Geneva to deliver a series of sermons on Job, his listeners heard not only the Genevan Reformer but echoes of that medieval tradition. In Job's story Calvin saw a God whose providence held sovereign sway over nature, history, and Satan. Having undertaken these sermons, however, Calvin soon confronted Job's question: Why do the righteous suffer? Calvin did not answer Job alone. He turned to both medieval Joban commentaries and Scotist-nominalist categories to resolve this book's central issue of divine justice. But we will see that despite all these resources the exegetical difficulties posed by the text itself forced Calvin to realize that his central hermeneutical device brought with it implications with which he was ultimately uncomfortable. That device was double justice.

When the early nineteenth-century pastor William Henry Foote reflected upon the eighteenth-century Christians who were his forebears in North Carolina and Virginia, he paused at one point to make an observation about the clothes they wore. “A church-going people are a dress-loving people”, he said; “The sanctity and decorum of the house of God are inseparably associated with a decent exterior; and the spiritual, heavenly exercises of the inner man are incompatible with a defiled and tattered, or slovenly mein. All regular Christian assemblies cultivate a taste for dress, and none more so than the hardy pioneer settlers of Upper Carolina, and the valley and mountains of Virginia” As they readied themselves for worship, Foote elaborated, the faithful “put on their best and carefully preserved dress” in preparation for “their approach to the King of Kings”.

Horace Bushnell has never lacked for commentators, and with notable exceptions the general picture of him (whether for praise or vilification) has been that of the “father” of American theological liberalism. This standard interpretation of Bushnell, however, fails to do justice to one of the more interesting aspects of his thought: his discussion in his treatise Nature and the Supernatural of the possibility of modern-day miracles. Although considered scandalous by his contemporaries and a pitiable misunderstanding by later commentators, his arguments, I believe, bear reexamination. In his treatment of the question of modern miracles Bushnell both offered his contribution to a 300-year-long theological debate and set forth his vision of the direction in which American Protestantism must head in order to meet squarely the growing spiritual crisis of nineteenth-century culture.

Puritan religious experience centered around conversion, the soul's new birth in faith. Entry into the realm of the Spirit, the path to salvation, involved a protracted emotional confrontation with grace borne in God's Word. The injunction to begin life anew in grace is as old as John 3:3, which declares that one “cannot see the kingdom of God” without being “born again” but does not associate the event with any particular psychological experience; what one undergoes in becoming a child of the Spirit the gospel does not relate. Into this gap of possibility Puritan preachers insinuated their vision of holy passions; well known as physicians of the soul, they pieced together a compelling model of how the Spirit moves a human being as it translates individuals from the estate of damnation to that of grace.

On 27 April 1560 the Protestant Lords of the Great Council of the Realm of Scotland covenanted to procure by all means possible that “the true preaching of God's Word may have free passage within this realm, with due administration of the sacraments and all things depending upon the said Word.”1 Two days later they charged a group of ministers “to commit to writing and in a book deliver … judgments touching the reformation of Religion.”2 Three weeks later, on 20 May, the ministers, whose names “have not been recorded in any part of the surviving documents,” delivered to the Lords their recommendations for the organization of a reformed Christian church for Scotland.3

Of the forces that have shaped contemporary American Catholic higher education, few have been more generative or influential than the proceedings of two court cases which tested the constitutionality of direct government aid to sectarian and church-related colleges and universities. These two court cases were Horace Mann League v. Board of Public Works (1966) and Tilton v. Richardson (1971). The impact of these judicial rulings over the radical transformation and substantive reform of American Catholic higher education during the past quarter of a century is the subject of this article.

The African Orthodox church, an expression of religious autonomy among black Americans, had its genesis in the work and thought of George Alexander McGuire, a native of Antigua, whose religious journey and changing ecclesiastical affiliation paralleled his deepening interest in and commitment to the cause of Afro-American nationalism and racial consciousness. Born in 1866 to an Anglican father and a Moravian mother, George Alexander McGuire was educated at Mico College for Teachers in Antigua and the Nisky Theological Seminary, a Moravian institution in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands (then the Danish West Indies). In 1893 McGuire, having served a pastorate at a Moravian church in the Virgin Islands, migrated to the United States, where he became an Episcopalian. In 1897 he was ordained a priest in that church and, in the succeeding decade, served several parishes, including St. Thomas Church in Philadelphia, which was founded by Absalom Jones. His abilities and skills were recognized, and in 1905 he became the archdeacon for Colored Work in the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas. Here he became involved with various plans—none of which bore fruit—which would have provided for the introduction of black bishops in the Episcopal church to assist in that church's work of evangelization among black Americans. It is believed, however, that McGuire was influenced by the different schemes which were advanced, and that he “almost certainly carried away from Arkansas the notion of a separate, autonomous black church, and one that was episcopal in character and structure, as one option for black religious self-determination and one avenue for achieving black independence.”

Among nineteenth-century North American Lutherans the only corporate body to take an early, serious, and vigorous stand on behalf of the abolition of human slavery was a small group in upper New York State called the Franckean Evangelic Synod.1 On 25 May 1837, at a meeting held in a small country chapel in Minden township, Montgomery County, four Lutheran clergymen and twenty-seven lay delegates broke with the Hartwick Synod and formed the new association. It was named after the German Lutheran Pietist cleric and humanitarian August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). The abolitionist convictions of the Franckean Synod were embedded in the main body of its constitution. No minister who was a slaveholder or engaged in the traffic of human beings or advocated the system of slavery then existing in the United States could be accepted into the synod nor could a layperson practicing any of the above serve as a delegate to synodical meetings.2 By 1848 these restrictions were increased to include laity who “justified the sin of slavery” and clergy “who did not oppose” it.3 Such precise constitutional requirements in opposition to human slavery remain without precedent in the history of the Lutheran church.

Perry Miller, with characteristic lése majesté, told readers of his New England Mind that, if they wanted to see his footnotes, they would have to make a pilgrimage to the Harvard College Library (The Seventeenth Century [New York, 1939], p. ix). Times have changed, and at least some scholars have become more accommodating. Bruce Kuklick, for example, not only provided notes for his “New England Mind”—the superb recent study Churchmen and Philosophers from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, 1985)—but now, through the good offices of Garland Publishing, has made available many of the sources to which those notes refer in American Religious Thought of the 18th and 19th Centuries: A Thirty-two Volume Set Reprinting the Works of Leading American Theologians from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey and including Recent Dissertations (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), $2,290. Kuklick and Garland deserve highest commendation for rescuing from unwarranted obscurity the authors and works reprinted here. The set's title may be inaccurate, and one may quibble about the exact lineup of books and articles included, but these volumes remain a magnificent achievement.

At the end of August 1914, with German troops having violated Belgian neutrality and rapidly advancing toward Paris, German Protestants made a desperate bid for a show of solidarity from the Protestant majority of Britain and the Protestant minority of France. In an “Appeal to Protestant Christians Abroad” leaders of the German Protestant missions movement expressed their hope that the war would not spread to Africa nor result in an “incurable rent” in the Protestant fellowship. Recalling the spirit of cooperation at the international Missionary Conference of Edinburgh in 1910 they urged that the mission fields not become battlefields, lest the gospel message of love be discredited in the eyes of the heathen.1

Japan offers a profound instance of the encounter between culture and Christian mission. From 1859 to 1940 American Protestant missionaries encountered powerful cultural shifts as Japan modernized. Public enthusiasm for Western ways in the late nineteenth century tempted missionaries and some Japanese to believe that Christianity was Japan's greatest resource for national development. However, the rise of nationalism made the role of churches and missionaries in Japanese life problematic. Scholars have not examined closely the Protestant missionary adaptation to Japanese nationalism. The missionaries of the Episcopal church provide an important instance of such response.

Susanna Wesley (1669–1742) was raised a Dissenter, converted to Anglicanism as an adolescent, and arguably spent the last three years of her life as a Methodist. Moreover, these three modes of English Protestantism were neatly embodied respectively in three generations of clergymen to whom she was closely related: her father, the Presbyterian divine Samuel Annesley; her husband, Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth; and her sons John and Charles, leaders of the Methodist revival. Yet she was not dominated either by the men closest to her or the patriarchically inclined religious traditions they served.