It was Marc Bloch, I believe, who once posed the question whether there may not have been schools of asceticism, whether different groups of men at different times might have viewed the holy life in different ways and even have formed rival schools. The popular idea of what makes a saint has varied from time to time. The earliest Christians, suffering under the persecutions of the Roman Empire, reserved their admiration and their cult for those who suffered martyrdom. Albert Marignan has traced the transformation of this ideal after the end of the persecutions. When Christians no longer suffered death for their beliefs, they hoped to gain a similar crown by a living death, by the sacrifice of all earthly joys and the mortification of the flesh. The monastic ascetic ideal was born. But the monk, at least in the West, did not retain a lasting and exclusive hold on the affections of the Christian populace. He was ousted from his place by the hero bishop, the protector of the city, who combined ascetic practices with social leadership. Yet was the change a simple evolution in time, or were there really rival schools of sainthood through which the transformation took place?

In the medieval theocratic societies of both the Byzantine East and the Latin West, where the influence of Christian precepts so strongly pervaded all aspects of life, it was inevitable that the institutions of church and state, of sacerdotium and regnum to use the traditional Latin terms, be closely tied to one another. But whereas in the West, at least after the investiture conflict of the eleventh century, the pope managed to exert a strong political influence over secular rulers, notably the Holy Roman Emperor, in the East, from the very foundation of Constantinople in the fourth century, the Byzantine emperor seemed clearly to dominate over his chief ecclesiastical official, the patriarch.

At the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 Philip Melanchthon advised against discussion of the priesthood of all believers, relegating it to the “odious and unessential articles which are commonly debated in the schools.” In the Augsburg Confession, which had already been finished and read when he gave this judgment, the doctrine is passed over in silence. But Protestant tradition has not followed Melanchthon in this respect. The priesthood of all believers has come to be regarded, along with Biblical authority and salvation by faith, as one of the three main points of evangelical theology. Like the other two, however, it has not always been interpreted in the same way, nor taken as seriously in practice as in theory. All too often it has become a dead letter in a clergy-dominated institution. And where it has come alive again, it has been used to support a bewildering variety of practices, such as Congregational polity, the Quaker meeting, Pietistic ecclesiolae, and the Methodist commissioning of lay preachers. Sometimes, again, it has become associated with such slogans as “the right of private judgment” or “immediate access to God,” and interpreted so individualistically that any institutional or corporate expression of it becomes unthinkable. Finally, it is perhaps not superfluous to point out that the “royal priesthood” is not a Protestant invention, but a Biblical category, which had an interesting history before Luther and has never been wholly neglected in the “Catholic” tradition. This fact, too, complicates the problems of interpretation.

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.”

When the historians of frontier revivalism turn to James McGready, they find him difficult to comprehend. Since the Kentucky Great Revival of 1797 to 1802 first arose in his frontier congregations, the historians point to McGready as the original frontier revivalist, imitated by all other revivalists. Because the origins of the frontier camp meeting were inextricably tied to his career, McGready has been described as the leading innovator of the western awakenings, who gave frontier religion its peculiar flavor. And the revivals have been described as a bizarre form of undisciplined religious barbarism, dominated by emotional intensity, primitive excesses, and pious anti-intellectualism. The difficulty with these widely accepted generalizations is that McGready was neither the model nor the advocate for the revivalism the historians said he created.