Since the dawn of the Christian era the relationship between church and state has been one of the pivotal issues of western civilization. Men have offered a variety of answers to this problem. The much- persecuted Anabaptists of the 16th century presented one set of answers, radical for their age, which called for a decisive separation of the church from the state and complete freedom for the church to pursue its vocation in the world. The Anabaptists were a distressing annoyance to the civil authorities. This movement posed for the 16th century the acute problem: how should religious dissent be handled?

A preliminary word should be said about the propriety of the use of the late, twentieth-century term “pacifism” to apply to the peace doctrines of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists. As it has been used since World War I pacifism designates broadly an idealistic anti-militarist position whose goal is the elimination of war in history.

When in the process of historical research the step is taken from a mere collecting of facts to a meaningful interpretation of these facts, we may speak of the maturity of this historical research. If that is true in general history, it is even more significant in the field of church history where ideas and spiritual principles dominate the scene. But the difficulties in this area are even more conspicuous than elsewhere. A perfectly objective church historiography is almost impossible due to the inevitable bias of the writer, his sympathies and his restricted ability to appreciate phenomena in widely different fields. In fact, no historiography can do without a set of categories and concepts of a specific nature, and the choice of these is definitely the work of the particular research person and his preferences.

A lesser known but perhaps significant phase of American religious reformism manifested itself beginning with the eighteen twenties when missionaries attempted to graft Protestantism on Greek soil. These spiritual reformers prepared to plant their faith in Greece while Samuel Gridley Howe, Jonathan P. Miller, and George Jarvis sought to help the Greeks win their independence from the Turks. This phase of missionary activity represented something extraordinary, because the Americans were attempting to impose their kind of Christianity on a people who had been Christians centuries before America was discovered.