Though periodization is admittedly a matter of opinion, there is much to warrant the thesis that the later Middle Ages were born in Avignon and were shaped by the uncertainty and hierarchical confusion due to the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy (1309-1377) and the succeeding period of the Schism (1378-1415). The impact, especially of this latter event, can scarcely be overestimated, so much so that we are included to advocate the terms “pre-schismatic and schismatic Middle Ages” to replace the traditional terms “early and later Middle Ages.”

In his recent scholarly study Professor Gerhart Ladner has delineated the Christian idea of reform is it was expressed and acted upon in the Patristic Age. As a study of the mediaeval period readily indicates, the idea of reform, written of in diverse ways and manifested in a multitude of movements, was also of major significance for the earlier and high middle ages. The efforts of these pages will be directed toward an analysis and exposition of reform ideology in the thought of one very interesting and versatile man of the twelfth century—Anselm of Havelberg.

In recent years, it has become fashionable in scholarly and journalistic circles to employ the image concept as a means of describing and interpreting historical, political, or social realities. A number of attempts have been made recently to sketch the picture or to present the image of America. It is both interesting and puzzling that the image concept should be so widely employed; yet it is, in some sense, understandable. We live in an era of communications through images. We are confronted by them on all sides through the media of mass communication such as television, press, billboards, and radio. Professor Daniel Boorstin recently pointed out that our age is dominated not by ideas but by images. This has had already and will have increasingly momentous consequences both for our national self-understanding and for our stance before the world.

A Somber Theme:—Ever since Eusebius sought with dedicated zeal to prove the survival of the Church by blazing a trail back to the Apostles, the program of church history has been the same: “To give a clear and comprehensive, scientifically established view of the development of the visible institution of salvation founded by Christ.” To describe it—not to question it. By its very definition church history requires unquestioning acceptance of the basic proposition that the Church did survive. One may write endlessly about The Infant Church, l'Eglise naissante, die Pflanzung der Kirche, etc., but one may not ask why the early Christians themselves described their Church not as a lusty infant but as an old and failing woman; one may trace the triumphant spread of The Unquenchable Light through storm and shadow, but one may not ask why Jesus himself insisted that the Light was to be taken away. Church history seems to be resolved never to raise the fundamental question of survival as the only way of avoiding a disastrous answer, and the normal reaction to the question—did the Church remain on earth?—has not been serious inquiry in a richly documented field, but shocked recoil from the edge of an abyss into which few can look without a shudder.

The writings of the Bohemian Brethren dating from the sixteenth century and the end of the fifteenth accuse the founding generation of their Unitas of a spirit-breaking perfectionism and an unwarranted idealism (“high thinking”) about the moral achievements, or inner “corrrection” (opraveni) available to those born anew in Christ. According to the later documents, the expectations which were placed upon the early Brethren by their spiritual leaders were “above measure and sobriety,” made them live in constant fear and anxiety, and took away from them the hope of salvation. The revolution which took place within the Unitas toward the end of the fifteenth century liberated the Brethren from the demand to carry out to the letter the injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount as spelled out in Matthew 5: 21–48, permitting them to have an active part in the political and social order of the day. It also released them from the apparently unbearable pressure to show their new birth by lives free from sin. The revolutionary official Agreement of 1495 setting aside the authority of the Brethren's older writings refers to the abiding frailty of even the greatest saints and states that the hope of salvation cannot be based on the achievement of perfection by the Christian.

James Arminius (1560-1609) is not nearly as well-known as the various movements which bear his name. “Arminianism” is a familiar word in Protestant history and theology and a pervasive movement particularly in English-speaking Protestantism. The Arminian movements, however, because of their diversity do not point clearly to Arminius himself. The label of Arminianism has been applied to and often accepted by such diverse entities as the politics of William Laud, seventeenth century Anglican theology from high churchmanship to moderate Puritanism, the communal experiment at Little Gidding, the empiricism of John Locke, Latitudinarianism, the rational supernaturalism of Hugo Grotius and the early Remonstrants, early Unitarianism in England, Wales, and New England, the evangelicalism of the Wesleys, and the revivalism of the American frontier. In our time the term means for some the crowning of Reformation theology; for others it points merely to an anachronistic sub-species of fundamentalism; and for still others it means an easy-going American culture-Protestantism.

Since the publication of Voigt's classic volumes on Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini a century ago, scholarly interest in the celebrated pontiff of the mid-fifteenth century has grown, not withered, with the years. While the wealth of material contained in Aeneas's writings may in part explain this continuing interest, to a greater degree it is Aeneas himself who has fascinated historians. Yet for all the attention lavished upon him, there has been little agreement in the interpretation of Aeneas's personality and historical significance. This is not surprising. Since the days of Burckhardt, the fifteenth century in Italy has elicited different interpretations, and it is only natural that this diversity be reflected in the treatment of one who was, as all admit, the mirror of the age. Besides, it must be acknowledged that his life is so enigmatic in so many ways that agreement over its final meaning is probably impossible.

The Syriac term qeiama, “covenant,”1 with its derivations benai qeiama, “the sons of the covenant,” and benat qeiama, “the daughters of the covenant,”2 not only marks the idiosyncracy of primitive Syrian Christianity but it also mirrors a development which parallels the whole process of transformation in ancient Syrian Christianity. Originally the term qeiama designated the whole church comprised of ascetically oriented Christians.3.Standing face to face with this singular concept of church and the peculiar profile of primitive Syrian Christianity, we must be reminded that the first Christian impulses in the lands of the Euphrates and Tigris did not come from Hellenistic Christianity via Antioch but from Palestinian Jewish Christianity.4 Therefore the earliest traditions implanted here reveal the Palestinian Aramaean influence not only in the contacts which these Christian Jews had with the Palestinian Jewish Christians5 but also in the use of the ancient Palestinian Targum as the first biblical texts translated into Syriac6 and in the fundamentally ascetic orientation of the Christian Kerygma7 which echoes the Palestinian ascetic trends.8 These archaic conditions, which understood the qeiama as the whole

The policy of Frederick II toward the Church in the kingdom of Sicily during the period 1220 to 1224 follows logically from that of his Norman predecessors. Its aim was the restoration of the ecclesiastical privileges which had been held by the Norman kings to the death of William II (1189) and the recovery of dues, rents, services and prerogatives usurped from the crown by the ecclesiastical magnates of the kingdom during the “Time of Troubles” (1189–1209). Practical considerations were of fundamental importance in the formation of this policy. Within the kingdom, the Church was a potential rival to the establishment of a strong monarchy. The Norman kings of Sicily, like the Norman kings of England, had exercised considerable control over the appointment of bishops and, in Sicily and Calabria, over the holding of church councils and the attendance of the bishops at them. Though generous in their grants to the Church, the Norman kings of Sicily both expected and obtained the cooperation of churchmen in imposing strong rule over the kingdom. In desiring to restore the Norman pattern of relations between the church and kingdom, Frederick was faced with the fact that important changes had taken place since the death of William II. Not only had the personnel of the Church changed, but the authority of the papacy within the kingdom had been greatly increased while Innocent III acted as regent during Frederick's minority (1198–1209).

An excess of partisan feeling has surrounded the study of the Covenanting movement in 17th century Scotland. The issues which led to the Second Reformation, bound so closely as they are with religious feeling, have often prevented historians from exhibiting a reasonable amount of objectivity toward God's New Israel, as the Covenanters were inclined to call Scotland. Consequently the Covenanters have usually been portrayed as either the embodiment of the true faith or as a group of bigoted and conceited fanatics.

Of the Puritan sects which proliferated in Cromwellian England, the Fifth Monarchy Men were distinctive because of the extreme political implications which they drew from their deep commitment to millennialism. Sometimes called “millenaries” by their fellow countrymen, or “anabaptists” by continental observers, this sects wanted to set up the kingdom of Jesus Christ for His thousand-year rule by the Saints. Its members hoped to realize their quest for a religious utopia by making the old kingdoms of the Stuarts into new saintly kingdoms of the Lord. In order to carry out this idea, several of the leading Fifth Monarchy spokesmen urged Oliver Cromwell to convoke a “Jewish Sanhedrin” or Parliament of Saints which first assembled in June, 1653.

In his inaugural address at the Union Theological Seminary, Robert T. Handy called attention to the present possibility of reexamining the whole course of church history from unitive perspectives. Handy pointed out that “the church historian in an ecumenical era can with particular profit devote special attention to the unitive hopes, dreams, and actions of the past.”

At Ferrara and Florence the healing of the old schism between the Eastern and Western Chruches proved to be more than a hope, and in corresponding measure the breach between the Pope and the Council of Basel became less than a real new Occidental Schism. The Florence-Ferrara conception of Christian unity has led to the doctrine of the Vatical Council and will be of great importance at the council which has been announced by the present Pope. Together with our Roman Catholic brethren we are convinced that a clear understanding of the character of Christian unity must exist prior to all attempts at union or reunion of churches, prior as a condition and as an incentive those efforts.

In France, religious persecution outlived Pierre Bayle and nearly outlived Voltaire. Only in the mid-1760's, when the Enlightenment had long been affecting other aspects of their thinking, did Catholics at last accept a measure of religious toleration. Six Calvinist pastors were put to death after 1745, and Jean Calas was condemned as late as 1762. The purpose of this article is to study why the persecution of religions persisted in a non-theological age. Our understanding in this instance requires that we set aside strictly religious categories, and examine what role the secular state played in the thinking of Catholics and anti-Catholics alike; for it was this state to which the last Huguenot victims were sacrificed.

R. G. Collingwood has suggested that the basic contrast between the Greek view of nature and what he calls the Renaissance view, springs from the difference between their respective analogical approaches to nature. Whereas, he argues, the Greek view of nature as an intelligent organism was based on an analogy between the world of nature and the individual human being, the Renaissance view conceived the world analogically as a machine. Instead of being regarded as capable of ordering its own movements in a rational manner, and, it might be added, according to its immanent laws, the world, to such a view, is devoid both of intelligence and life, the movements which it exhibits are imposed from without, and “their regularity due to 'laws of nature' likewise imposed from without.” Coiling- wood concludes, therefore, that this view presupposed both the human experience of designing and constructing machines, and the Christian idea of a creative and omnipotent God.

The eighteenth century Welsh revivalist, Howell Harris, was record conscious. He left behind almost 300 Diaries and almost 3,000 letters, together with miscellaneous papers, known as “The Trevecka Manuscripts”. (Trevecka, a village in Breconshire, South Wales, was Harris's home.) Today, they form the nucleus of the Calvinistic Methodist Connexional Archives and are deposited in the National Library of Wales, at Aberystwyth.

It is being said on every hand that the church is remiss in its moral responsibilities in our time. The church is conspicuous because of its failure to give ethical perspectives either to the world revolution of Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans rising to prominence or to America's revolution of minority groups. There are many to bemoan, however, and few to offer constructive solutions.

The Lessing “legend” is grounded in paradox. It rests on his total dedication to the Enlightenment ideal of Sapere aude — dare to use one's own understanding—while at the same time he viewed himself as heir apparent to German Protestantism. Lessing was a religionist who depended on rationalism for the solution to every major problem. The unity of these apparently diverse perspectives was summed up in Lessing's program of seeking truth, not claiming its possession. “If God held in his right hand all the truth, and in his left hand the ever active longing for the truth, and said to me: ‘choose’, I should humbly grasp his left hand and cry: give me this, oh Father! the truth is for you alone”. If truth were relinquished to God, then at least Lessing could lay claims to salvaging history for man. In this form, what appeared to the philosophes as alien traditions, human revolution and divine revelation, were to be united.

An issue that inevitably appears in discussion concerning historical method is the degree to which a historian's philosophical presuppositions influence his historical work. It is not surprising that the matter is most heatedly discussed in the realm of New Testament interpretation, although the principles involved concern all historical work.

John Wyclif is remembered today as an innovator. Scholars have not misled us at that point. W. W. Shirley in 1858 stated his role as a pioneer without predecessors: “On most of us the dim image looks down, like the portrait of the first of a long line of kings, without personality or expression—he is the first of the reformers.” The English Bible translated under his inspiration is a monument that stands apart. It established no direct connection with any English version that either preceded or followed it. No prior medieval schoolman quite paralleled Wyclif in setting forth Holy Scripture alone as the final religious authority. Nor had any university leader so encouraged unlicensed preachers to expound the Bible to commoners.