Members and friends of the American Society of Church History: We gather here in Atlanta for our annual meeting only a few months after President Ford inaugurated a Bicentennial Era of unspecified duration. My address tonight, however, will not treat of the Republic's founding but with the Romantic Revolution and some of its implications for the scholarly tasks of this society.1

The type of man who became bishop during the central Middle Ages depended both on who influenced the selection of the bishop and on what qualities a bishop was expected to have by those who chose him. The process by which a medieval bishop was elected has been studied in great detail, and recently attention has been turned to the backgrounds of some of the men who were elected, especially their social origins.

It is the purpose of this paper to determine whether Anabaptists were schismatics as was charged, to do this in the context of Protestant and especially Reformed attitudes towards Catholics, other Protestants and Anabaptists, and to describe the reasons for the separation of Anabaptism from Protestantism. The discussion will be limited primarily to the Anabaptists who had conversations with the Reformed tradition during the years 1523–1540. Much in the position of this segment of Anabaptism will apply to other parts of the movement as well.

Presidential addresses to professional societies are a special kind of presentation. Undoubtedly each of us has his or her own set of categories for them: the lofty pronouncement upon the current professional scene, the prescription of a new direction for the discipline, an analysis of presuppositions prevailing in the field, and, of course, a review of and reflections upon developments in the course of the incumbent's professional years. Whether this particular typology of addresses, that is, this general classification system, accords with yours is not the point at issue. Rather, I wish to stress the moment of uncertainty which is experienced, inevitably, as one sets about the task of composing his or her contribution under the constraints of office. Quite frankly, at first I had thought to turn this problem to advantage by offering as the substance of my presentation a critical review of those presidential addresses which have graced the Society through its venerable history. This seemed to be a way that an office-holder might serve the Society in a properly historical fashion. Of course I foresaw difficulties. Should I stop analysis at a discreet distance, shall we say in 1950? Or ought I pass over the addresses of those predecessors who are still active members of the Society, especially if they might be in attendance? Such practical considerations were finally less important in dissuading me from taking this course, however, than the advice of good friends and colleagues: “Build upon your current research interests; it will be a more appropriate presentation.”

In the autumn of 1495 Desiderius Erasmus began his theological studies in Paris and during the next four years sampled the wares of Scotists lecturing at the University. From the Augustinian monastery at Steyn, where Erasmus pursued his own studies in secular literature under the disapproving eye of his abbot, the University of Paris must have seemed like a bank of resplendent lights drawing the Christian scholar into the company of learned and erudite colleagues. Exposure to scholasticism and to those who came to sharpen their skills in scholarly disputation soon convinced Erasmus that the light had been an ignis fatuus and that the university was no place for a free and eclectic spirit. Erasmus was as unhappy as a graduate student who realizes too late that he has enrolled in the wrong department at the wrong school. He bitterly complained that the schoolmen were sectarian, contentious, and confused; and he deplored the sparing and deleterious accommodations at the College de Montaigu, his place of residence. A small cadre of Parisian humanists who shared Erasmus' predilection for secular literature furnished the young scholar with some diversion, but Erasmus required little prompting to hasten from Paris. When William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, asked Erasmus to accompany him across the Channel to England in 1499, the Dutch scholar could not have been more pleased. By late summer he had made the crossing and had visited London, and by October he was dining in Oxford with Richard Charnock, Prior of St. Mary's College.

When physical affections are destroyed and tyrannical desire extinguished, then no hindrance will any longer stand in the way of men and women being together, because all evil suspicion will be cleared away and all who have entered the kingdom of heaven can maintain the way of life of the angels and spiritual powers, through the grace and love of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit be glory, honor, and dominion from age to age. Amen.1

During its long history Roman society absorbed innumerable changes without losing its sense of continuity. The present study examines this process of change and continuity in one social and religious epithet of womanly virtue. It concentrates on the history of univira, an epithet that appears in Latin literature and funerary inscriptions from early pagan to Christian Rome.

This paper is concerned with examining the British pan-evangelical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from the perspective of a little known but very important organization called the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews. The London Society, as it was better known, was a product of the same general missionary impulse that brought into being its better known sister organizations such as the London Missionary Society, the Religious Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society. Like the Missionary Society out of which it evolved in 1809, the London Society was a missionary organization dedicated to evangelizing the world. It differed from the Missionary Society only in emphasis, suggesting that the Jews rather than the heathen would first be converted to Christian principles.

In order to write about the relationship of four Hungarian kings with the Holy See during the eleventh century, one must first make acquaintance with the ecclesiastical policy of King Stephen I (ob. 1038), who established the political and religious unity of the country. One must also consider the relations with Rome and with the German court of Kings Andrew I (ob. 1060) and Solomon (1063–1074) in the 1050s through the early 1070s. Finally, it is important to point out that only Ladislas I, who reigned during the last quarter of the century and died in 1096, had shown a firm attitude toward Rome, though his policy went too far and, in the view expressed by Urban II to Coloman the Learned of Hungary (ob. 1116), led to a rapture of relations with the Holy See.

In the contemporary intellectual and institutional world, a distinction between theology and the study of religion is taken for granted. Those labels designate two quite separate disciplines or perspectives, even though their data overlap. Obviously, this distinction did not always exist within Christendom. Until about the middle of the seventeenth century, discussion of religion was almost always in the context of theology. But then, a new field of inquiry began to appear, and one may trace the first outlines of the study of religion or, to use a slightly too-specialized label, the scientfic study of religion.

Thesis forty-three of the Ninety-five Theses reads, “Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than he who buys indulgences.” Following the historical convention of dating the Reformation from the Ninety-five Theses of 1517, we may argue that from its inception theology and social ethics were inseparable. One particular aspect of the Reformation impact on social change which has attracted attention and controversy from the sixteenth century to the present is welfare reform. While it would be overbold to claim that reform of poor relief was motivated by theology alone, radical theological change was certainly a major factor. Since righteousness coram Deo was thought to be by grace alone, it became difficult to rationalize the plight of the poor as a peculiar form of blessedness. Thus Luther excoriated the indulgence sellers who robbed the people of needed resources. What was implicit in the Ninety-five Theses became increasingly explicit in the months and years leading up to the publication on January 24, 1522 of the Wittenberg Order.

Scholars who have assessed the racial attitudes of southern Protestants in the late nineteenth century have strangely neglected the pronouncements of two outspoken bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Affirming in the 1880s that white southerners would “never tamely and without protest submit to the intrusion of colored men into places of trust and profit and responsibility,” Bishop George Foster Pierce insisted that blacks had no “right on juries, [in] legislatures, or in [other] public office.” And he frowned equally on their pursuit of higher learning; advanced schooling instilled expectations of advancement “far above the station he [the Negro] was created to fill,” the churchman felt, including hopes for interracial mating. Nor was the succeeding senior Southern Methodist bishop more liberal in outlook.

Thus far we have considered all the learned ladies of whom we have any knowledge. But as the light of the sun shines above all the stars and with its bright splendor dulls the sparkling starlight, so the learned light of these other ladies stands, as it were, in the shadow because of the great luster of the incomparable young lady Anna Maria van Schurman.

Joh. van Beverwijck, Van de

Uitnementheyt des Vrouwelichen Geslachts (1643)

The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell was a practical experiment in government, but it was an experiment guided by more than practicality alone. For its first three years, it rested heavily on a single ecclesiastical party, the Congregational Independents. This was the party of the preachers John Owen, Philip Nye, Thomas Goodwin, and their fellows and followers. They did not rule alone, but for three years they managed to dominate the governing coalition. They supplied the implicit ideological basis and the explicit personal support for the establishment of the Protectorate, the reign of the major generals, and the refusal of the Protector to accept a crown. Briefly but with lasting effects, England experienced the political consequences of a Congregational Independent regime.

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.

The last decade of the nineteenth century witnessed a number of trends in the American Catholic religious scene with special reference to new immigrants:

(a) The immigrants developed a cohesion and identity based on language that tended to obscure provincial loyalties and to transcend village patriotism.

(b) This new sense of identity, a product of nationalist ideology and the influence of the American experience, received its primary expression in the ethnic church. This institution, founded primarily on linguistic lines, encompassed those who spoke the same tongue and resided within the same ghetto or patch.

The progressive movement in the United States was a complex set of reforms during the first decades of the twentieth century. Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson focused on the control of the new economic forces in American society by regulating railroad rates or by breaking up large monopolies. Slums, political corruption, and red-light districts troubled the consciences of other progressives such as Jane Addams and Walter Rauschenbusch. These urban progressives believed that an older, rural America produced a sense of community among rural people which mitigated such social problems, and thought that community-oriented settlement houses and churches in the cities could recreate the rural feeling that individuals were a part of their neighborhoods, and urban neighbors then could attack urban problems as a community. Other progressives, such as the anti-vice committees of New York City, wanted laws to recreate the moral standards which social pressures in the old rural communities had maintained informally. The Progressive Era also included a “country life movement” which shared many of its analyses and plans for reform with the urban progressives, but applied them to rural America.

“Fundamentalism” is used in so many ways that a definition is the only place to begin. As I here use the term, “fundamentalism” refers to a twentieth-century movement closely tied to the revivalist tradition of mainstream evangelical Protestantism that militantly opposed modernist theology and the cultural change associated with it. Fundamentalism shares traits with many other movements to which it has been related (such as pietism, evangelicalism, revivalism, conservatism, confessionalism, millenarianism, and the holiness and pentecostal movements), but it has been distinguished most clearly from these by its militancy in opposition to modernism. This militancy has typically been expressed in terms of certain characteristic theological or intellectual emphases: whereas modernism or liberal theology tended to explain life and much of religion in terms of natural developments, fundamentalists stressed the supernatural.

This article describes and interprets the ebb and flow of religious liberty in Argentina from 1943 to 1955, concentrating on the restriction of Protestant liberties. Most authors have not included the situation of Protestants in their discussions of the first Perón regime, but since new source material on the subject has become available, it may be treated somewhat objectively. The following essay will evaluate the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the intricate developments which led to the coercion of Protestants and will examine the role played by General Perón during the last year of his first regime as it affected Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity.

In his pamphlet entitled From the First to the Last of the Just, Jean-Paul Lichtenberg concludes a brief history of Jewish-Christian relations with a list of five periods to each of which he assigns a particular quality of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism. Of the third period, 1096–1520, marked by the Crusades, the Ghetto and the Inquisition, Lichtenberg remarks,

“the pogroms, the massacres and the persecutions perpetrated on the Jews by Christian hands are the manifestation of a Christian anti-Semitism of the people, fed by harsh and comtemptuous preaching. Doctrinal anti-Judaism had filtered down to the masses and given birth to anti-Semitism. The end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance brought about no changes in this situation. Relations between Christians and Jews are already poisoned and only the coming of the (French) Revolution will bring a change in the situation [emphasis added]. One may qualify the Christian anti-Semitism which prevails during this period as an anti-Semitism of passion based upon religion or, again, as an anti-Semitism of intolerance.”