bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Continental Influence on American Christian Thought Since World War I
Authors: Ahlstrom Sydney E.
Published: April 2006

Just after the turn of the nineteenth century, the Rev. Samuel Miller, then a Presbyterian minister in New York but soon to become a professor of ecclesiastical history at the newly-founded Princeton Theological Seminary, published his ambitious Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century. He remarks in due course that “it would be improper to pass in silence the celebrated IMMANUEL KANT, Professor at Koeningsberg, in Prussia.” He then goes on to comment on the “extravagant panegyrics” of Kant's disciples, but having heard “that the acutest understanding cannot tolerably comprehend [this profound and extensive system] by less than a twelve-month's study,” he satisfied himself with a brief second-hand report. The incident might be considered an accurate commentary on the state of “Continental influence on American Christian thought” in 1803.
The Earliest Christan Gnosticism
Authors: Grant Robert M.
Published: April 2006

In recent years new methods of approaching the study of gnosticism have arisen. The older synthesis of Bousset, with its somewhat over-schematized picture of gnostic thought, and the severely critical analysis of de Faye, with its emphasis on our ignorance of gnostic beginnings, have failed to retain general approval. The newer methods have stressed an existentialist or psychological understanding of the gnostics, and questions of source-analysis and chronology have faded into the background. Often the problem of development within gnostic thought is not seriously considered.
The Social Philosophy of Josiah Strong: Social Christianity and American Progressivism
Authors: Muller Dorothea R.
Published: April 2006

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries progressivism and social Christianity were two answers to the need of that day for social action and reform. A study of the social philosophy of Josiah Strong, a leader in the movement for applied Christianity, provides an interesting illustration of the harmony of the social ideas of these two movements.
Some Aspects of Serbian Religious Development in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Jelavich Charles
Published: April 2006

The eighteenth century was an era of conflict and radical change within the Serbian church. After the establishment of Ottoman control in the Balkan peninsula, the Serbian nation remained united solely by the bonds of the church. It was the center of life and the unchallenged leader of the community. However, in the eighteenth century new ideals and new loyalties emerged which threatened the position of predominance previously enjoyed by the church. Religious nationalism gradually gave way before secular nationalism as the ideas of the enlightenment took root among the Serbs living within the Habsburg empire, until by the end of the century the church as an instrument of national unification had been relegated to a position of secondary importance. Moreover, the change was the result not only of the absorption of western thought by the Serbian intellectuals, but also of the rivalries of the Christian churches in the Balkans, a conflict whose roots are to be found in this century.
Lessing and Hamann: Two Views on Religion and Enlightenment
Authors: Horowitz Irving Louis
Published: April 2006

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.
Methodist Historical Studies 1930–1959 (Part II)
Authors: Norwood Frederick A.
Published: April 2006

The traditional unconcern for historical roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church still prevails sufficiently to help account for a less extensive program of historical investigation than that reviewed above for Great Britain. The fact that England has a long-established Historical Society with a vigorous publishing program is indicative of the contrast. Organization for historical study in America is either dominated by the limited vision of Annual Conference groups or is so informal and peripheral as to lack central support.
Anti-Intellectualism in the puritan Revolution
Authors: Solt Leo F.
Published: April 2006

The preachers of the New Model Army during the 1640's and 1650's engaged in a three-pronged attack upon the educated people of Puritan England, i.e., upon the clergy, the university teachers, and the lawyers. Both the Levellers and the Diggers gave strong support to this anti-professional or anti-intellectual point of view. Most of the Army preachers, especially William Dell, John Saltmarsh, Thomas Collier, Walter Cradock, and William Erbery, were purveyors of that branch of Independent Puritanism (sometimes called Antinomianism) which stressed the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit rather than formal learning. Furthermore, despite the conclusions of R. H. Tawney about Puritanism in general, the Army preachers were generally concerned with the poor and uneducated members of society rather than the prosperous and educated. In the phraseology of H. Richard Niebuhr, they sought “the salvation of the socially disinherited.” An examination of this interest in social amelioration will help to clarify the anti-intellectual attack.
The Reception of the Council of Florence in Moscow
Authors: Cherniavsky Michael
Published: April 2006

As the Council of Florence concluded its deliberations, the Greek Orthodox participants had a number of choices open to them. The Byzantine metropolitan and newly created cardinal of the Roman Church, Bessarion, elected to remain in the Roman West where his intellect and knowledge were so well appreciated, after a short visit to a Constantinople unreconciled to the idea of Union. The Metropolitan of all Russia, Isidore, likewise adorned with the red hat and invested by the Pope with legatine power over Russia, chose another solution. Proud Greek that he was, Isidore trusted his superiority over the Russians and decided to return to his see, bringing with himself the new faith. According to the Tale of Isidore's Council by the monk Simeon of Suzdal', the metropolitan explained to Pope Eugene IV the reasons for his confidence that Moscow would accept the Union: “They are all in my hands, all the princes and bishops,” Isidore told the Pope; “Not one of them dares argue with me; the Grand Prince is young and is under my will… their bishops are ignorant and they, too, fear me.”
Philipp of Hesse's View of the Relationship of Prince and Church
Authors: Hancock Alton O.
Published: April 2006

Philipp of Hesse's style as a Christian prince had some unusual aspects. He came under the influence of the Reformation during a formative period for himself and his territory and developed his princely self-understanding and the ecclesiastical constitution of Hesse in dialogue with the evangelical movement. Both the man and the land bore the indelible stamp of the encounter.
The Problem of Christian Unity in Early Nineteenth-Century America
Authors: Loetscher Lefferts A.
Published: April 2006

American Protestants in the early nineteenth century faced intellectual and social challenge which made conspicuous the weakness of their own divided condition. The American Revolution—which was part of a larger upheaval in the Atlantic Community—had spread Enlightenment ideas, with their aggressive attack on orthodoxy. Quite typical was the lament of a convention of Massachusetts Congregational ministers in 1799 over “the present decay of Christian morals and piety, and the awful prevalence of speculative and practical infidelity.” Well before the middle eighteen-thirties the tide of deism had ebbed, but some, like the editors of the newChristian Review, were still building sea walls against it.
The Idea of Progress in Most Recent American Protestant Thought, 1930–1960
Authors: Carter Paul A.
Published: April 2006

“In hope that sends a shining ray/far down the future's broadening way…” Quoting these lines from a well-known hymn by the Social Gospel pioneer Washington Gladden, Clarence Reidenbach, a Congregationalist minister in Holyoke, Massachusetts, addressed himself late in 1930 to the question of the meaning of the New Year: “Was Dr. Gladden right? Is life really a broadening way” Or, to put the matter in the language of a classic of intellectual history, is “the idea of progress”—in Professor Bury's words the idea “that civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction”—a valid description of social reality? Reidenbach had no doubt that it was. that it was. “I have at least two great reasons for optimism” that the future is in fact a broadening way, he continued. “One is my confidence in God … the other is that history shows progress.”
The Coherent Calvinism of Samuel Willard
Authors: Whittemore Robert C.
Published: April 2006

Puritan authors as a class are not noted for their economy with words, and in this respect Samuel Willard is no exception. His “works” consist of somewhat more than 6,000 pages of exegetic sermons, catechetic lectures, hermeneutic discourses, and polemic tracts on scriptural topics. He published nothing of a speculative nature, and his expression of church doctrine is—throughout—such as Calvin and his English and American posterity would approve.
Comment on ‘Two Roads to the Puritan Millennium’
Authors: Wilson John F.
Published: April 2006

Recently Millenarianism has received increasing attention in Puritan Studies. The heretical character of Millenarianism (as well as the apparent failure of all past prophecies concerning that age) has contributed to the essential neglect of the phenomenon by historians who have stood in denominational traditions which were shaped by that revolutionary age. The new interest in Puritan Millenarianism is linked to an awareness of the role of the Spirit in Puritan thought. It is also part of a broader appreciation of the apocalytic ideological ingredient which is present in revolutionary periods. Thus Mr. Cohen's discussion is timely as a contribution to a developing analysis both of Puritan Millenarianism and also revolutionary apocalypticism more generally. In my comments on the paper I would like to distinguish between the thesis itself and several assumptions which are implicit in Mr. Cohen's application of it. I will suggest that if other assumptions were to be substituted it would be necessary to find a different significance in the thesis, but that in that process the thesis would be sustantiated.
The Earliest Text of the Old Roman Symbol: A Debate with Hans Lietzmann and J. N. D. Kelly
Authors: Holland D. Larrimore
Published: April 2006

One of the curiosities of the scholarly enterprise is the fact that often what tends to advance the handling and interpretation of data with respect to one problem has the side effect of preventing adequate and imaginative treatment of related problems. This appears to be the case in recent creedal research. The question of the earliest text ofvetus symbolum romanumhas been obscured, rather than clarified, by the important recognition at the hands of many scholars of the richness and variety of creedal data surviving from the second century.
The Puritan Notion of the Covenant in Jonathan Edwards' Doctrine of Faith
Authors: Cherry C. Conrad
Published: April 2006

The immense importance of the idea of the covenant for the Puritans of England and New England has been thrown into sharp relief by recent Puritan studies. Many problems regarding the origin and function of the Puritan covenant-idea still await the careful attention of the student of Puritanism, but this much is clear: the notion of the covenant was decidedly a pervasive idea in Puritan theology, and the idea was developed in a rather elaborate scheme by a host of Puritan theologians. As Leonard J. Trinterud has discerned, the idea of the covenant so permeated the thinking of the Puritans that in “the first decades of the seventeenth century … scarcely a single important figure was not a covenant theologian” among “the Presbyterian and Independent Puritans.”1
The Change in the Understanding of Zwingli in Recent Research
Authors: Locher Gottfried W.
Published: April 2006

The editors ofVox Theologicahave asked me for a “survey of Zwingli research in the last five to ten years.” However, to understand this subject thematically and methodologically one must go farther back. For the prevailing image of Zwingli today has been formed by three well-known books: 1)Die Kirchenratsauswahl, 1918; 2) Paul Wernle,Zwingli, 1919; 3) Walther Köhler,Huldrych Zwingli, 1943/1954. Walther Köhler (1870–1946), a native of strongly Reformed Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Professor of Church History in Zürich from 1909 to 1929, himself theologically of liberal orientation, was one of the foremost authorities not only on the Reformation as a whole but also on the other movements of the sixteenth century, especially Humanism and Anabaptism. Through countless books, articles and reviews, and through his introductions in the great critical edition of Zwingli's works, he became actually the dean of Zwingli research. Even those who, like this writer, did not know him personally and who differ from him on essential points owe him reverence.
Covenant and Assurance in Early English Puritanism
Authors: von Rohr John
Published: April 2006

This paper deals with the nature of the idea of “covenant” in English Puritan writings of the first half of the seventeenth century, and particularly as this bears upon the question of the assurance of salvation.

That this assurance could be obtained was a commonly accepted axiom and, indeed, the actual striving for such awareness was a commonly recognized obligation. When William Ames wrote, “The assurance of our calling and election is a thing greatly to be desired”, he also added the statement that this certainty “is not only possible for us to attaine unto, but also … it belongs to our duty to make this our calling and election sure”. There may well be many difficulties along the way, with serious agonies and doubtings. But excessive fearfulness is as great a sin as presumption, denying as it does the power of God's mercy. And so William Perkins could say, “we doe not teach that all and every man living within the precincts of the Church, professing the name of Christ is certen of his salvation, … but that he ought so to be, and must indeavor to attaine thereto”.
Luther and Erasmus, Another Perspective
Authors: Kleinhans Robert G.
Published: April 2006

The relationship between the Renaissance and the Reformation is a major theme of sixteenth-century historical studies. Generally, the discussion of the influence of these two movements upon one another has centered on two facets of their relationship: first, the influence of the Renaissance in creating an intellectual atmosphere which fostered certain Reformation movements such as a revival of biblical studies, the rejection of scholasticism, and the undermining of the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman church; and secondly, the Reformation's rejection of Renaissance humanism because of its optimistic view of human nature. This latter relationship was exemplified in the debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam, the undisputed leaders of the respective movements during the early decades of the sixteenth century. While the question of the Reformation's dependence upon Renaissance intellectual movements is usually conceded (after all Luther did use Erasmus' edition of the Greek New Testament as the basis for his German translation), there has been little evaluation of the corresponding influence of the Reformation on Renaissance humanism.
A Summary of “Images of Catharism and the Historian's Task”
Authors: Shriver George H.
Published: April 2006

Only four decades ago one of the present leading medievalists in this country was not allowed to write a dissertation in the area of Catharism. In turning down the request, the director referred to the paucity of sources for undertaking such a study. In view of the materials currently available one nearly finds it unbelievable that such a delimited area of research has been given so much attention in the interim, in the manuscript finds, translation work, and multifold secondary source interpretations which have touched on everything from sex to song to diet! And whenever a topic in the field of history edges out biblical studies, contemporary theology, and the latest witless fad in religion in Time (the whole religion section, no less), perhaps it can be said that that topic has indeed arrived. Sparkling brilliance has been added to Catharism in the studies of the likes of Runciman, Söderberg, Borst, Dondaine, Manselli, Roché Nelli, Russell, and Wakefield. And yet, as is obvious, there are still unanswered questions and the necessity for continuing scholarship which will engage even more facets of Catharism.
Church History and the Contrasystem: A Case Study
Authors: Redekop Calvin
Published: April 2006

When Moses entreated Pharoah to let his people go the children of Israel were aware of differences between themselves and others in the land. The ensuing drama which included some stern “supernatural” interventions finally convinced Pharaoh that here indeed was a group of people that was different and not about to become a constituent of the core culture. The theme of “stranger and pilgrim” became a motif for the Jewish people; later a prophet named Jesus and his followers recognized themselves as strangers and pilgrims and experienced considerable hostility at the hands of the dominant society.
Work and Hope: The Spirituality of the Radical Pietist Communitarians
Authors: Durnbaugh Donald F.
Published: April 2006

Several essayists in a recent issue ofDaedalusnoted with regret the absence of utopian thought among twentieth-century intellectuals, a lack they held to be detrimental to progress. The tragic events of the century, compounded by disenchantment with the poor taste and judgment of the supposedly liberated masses, have turned writers to gloomy prophecies of totalitarian and science-ridden worlds of the f uture. Dystopia rather than utopia is ascendant, they claim.1
The Eschatology of the Eos-Circle
Authors: Gottfried Paul
Published: April 2006

Madame de Staël, in her monumental study of German culture, L'Allemagne, wrote of the Catholic church at the dawn of the nineteenth century: “Today, standing disarmed, it has the majesty of an aged lion which formerly made the universe tremble.”1 The French empire, continuing the policy of the revolution, confiscated ecclesiastical property wherever it expanded. By 1804 Napoleon distributed the church's land in Germany—which had been the most extensive in her possession of any country in Christendom—among his client rulers on the right bank of the Rhine.2 All over Europe princes were dissolving monastic communities in order to make their revenues available to the state. Perhaps the church suffered her crowning indignity in 1809, when Napoleon responded to a dispute with the pope by making him his prisoner.
Francesco Modon: Colporteur and Evangelist at Rome, 1870
Authors: Koenig Duane
Published: April 2006

Nineteenth century liberals constantly expressed dissatisfaction that non-Catholic worship was banned in Rome by the pontiffs. Traditionally, diplomats such as Prussians, Americans, and Russians, were allowed chapels of choice for themselves and their nationals, usually in legations or in licensed buildings outside the city gates. The fact that Pope Pius IX had removed to extra-mural quarters two Scottish Presbyterian churches and the false rumor that he threatened the American place of worship, played a role in causing the United States to cut off as of June 30, 1867, funds for its minister to the Vatican. A discreet Protestant cemetery containing the tombs of Shelley, Keats, and Alexander von Humboldt, cheek by jowl against the walls of Rome near the Porta San Paolo, is reminder that dissenters were not permitted to give scandal to the faithful by ostentatious religious ceremonies. The situation changed abruptly once the Patrimony of Saint Peter became part of Italy.
The Sociology of Swabian Anabaptism
Authors: Clasen Claus-Peter
Published: April 2006

We are better informed about the outlawed Anabaptist sect than any other religious movement of the sixteenth century. While there is a wealth of material on Luther, we badly lack records of the common people who accepted his doctrines. Paradoxically enough, the richness of Anabaptist sources is due to the very fact that Lutheran, Zwinglian, and Catholic authorities did their utmost to suppress the movement.
From Church to Denomination: American Congregationalism in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Pearson Samuel C.
Published: April 2006

Springing from English Puritanism, Congregationalism became the established religion of New England outside Rhode Island and at the time of the American Revolution stood pre-eminent in membership and prestige in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Congregationalism's position in New England was not, however, indicative of its national appeal. When the Revolutionary War commenced various of the other American religious groups began to organize themselves into national churches. By the early part of the nineteenth century it was apparent that these national churches forged in the midst of a pluralistic society were denominations, i.e., they were voluntary associations of like-minded individuals united to accomplish certain defined objectives. Thus, religious groups in America came to be defined in terms of a common purpose rather than in terms of a special relationship to civil government or even in terms of a precise theological standard.
Patterns of Ecclesiastical Authority: The Problem of Chicago Succession, 1865–1881
Authors: Gaffey James P.
Published: April 2006

The inevitable tension between freedom and order within the Roman Catholic Church has ever been an attractive and rich subject of comment. Perhaps nowhere can this issue be studied with more seriousness and clarity than in the fragile equilibrium between American bishops and priests. The balance within clerical ranks in the United States has long represented a singular combination of authority and obedience which has sought to reconcile itself in a society historically egalitarian and devoid of feudal relationships.
A Note on Anne Dutton, Eighteenth-Century Evangelical
Authors: Stein Stephen J.
Published: April 2006

Anonymity, forced or voluntary, has frequently cloaked the contributions of women to the life and thought of religious movements. Such was the case with Anne Dutton (1692–1765), an English evangelical, a “gentlewoman” who appears fleetingly in the records of the eighteenth century and only momentarily in later annals of pious women. In spite of some efforts to seek her out early in this century, Dutton has remained a relatively unknown figure in the history of English evangelicalism. In fact she was a prolific though elusive writer, credited by one source with nearly fifty distinct publications—religious pieces of diverse size and character. Anne Dutton became the friend, confidant and correspondent of many evangelical leaders and on more than one occasion directly assisted them in their pastoral activities. She was also the spirited opponent of others. This obscure, talented author defied powerful social conventions in her effort to rise above the backstage role commonly assigned to and accepted by women in the religious world of the eighteenth century.
The Papal Aggression of 1850: A Study in Victorian Anti-Catholicism
Authors: Ralls Walter
Published: April 2006

For those wishing to generalize about the Victorians the Great Exhibition of 1851 usually proves irresistable. But it does seem an obvious omission that so little is said about the disorders which kept the country upended during the preceding six months, that is, during the episode of the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the “Papal Aggression”. Christopher Dawson has urged that the one needs the other to symbolize properly the Victorian frame of mind. Here I wish to outline the underlying causes of this last great outburst of No-Popery feeling in an effort to trace the paradox of the aroused, angry, bigoted Guy Fawkes Day-men of November appearing the next summer as the staid, curious and progressive-minded citizens sunning themselves in the glory of all that glittering machinery so carefully displayed beneath the vaulted glass dome of their Crystal Palace.
The New American Catholic History
Authors: Rischin Moses
Published: April 2006

Even historians and historically minded Sociologists with little sense or awareness of the current Roman Catholic scene have been stirred by the precipitous flow of events of the last dozen years to ask questions about the Catholic role in American society. Virtually without warning, the history of American Catholicism has been catapulted from specialized ecclesiastical history of interest to Catholics primarily into an ecumenical history of unprecedented general interest. After hovering backstage for centuries, the Catholic presence has erupted almost simultaneously from the secular and theological wings and burst onto centerstage. A convergence of public events dramatized and personalized for world Catholicism by the papacy of John XXIII and for American Catholicism by the presidency of John F. Kennedy ironically magnified a sense of supreme Catholic crisis and confusion that in its scope and implications dwarfed earlier American Catholic crises, making them appear parochial and intramural by comparison. The elevation to the papacy of the most saintly and humble of priests and the brief presidency of the first Catholic president of the United States turned an aged pope and a young president into symbols of a new public Catholicism, cosmopolitan and courageous in its vision and democratic in its thrust. Vatican II, the ecumenical movement, the race revolution, the general revolt against authority, the new ethnic succession, explosive social and geographic mobility, and the heightened self-consciousness of newer ethnics of European origin and largely Catholic religion, combined with the instant exposure of the mass media, synchronized with an era of American world hegemony and the emergence of an American Catholicism of appropriate dimensions.
European Positivism and the American Unitarians
Authors: Cashdollar Charles D.
Published: April 2006

Few movements have been so remarkably transformed within such a short period of time as nineteenth century American Unitarianism. In the 1830s, despite its recently acquired denominational independence, it remained theologically quite close its Congregational ancestry. Its most typical leaders of that period —Orville Dewey, John G. Palfrey, Ezra Stiles Gannett, and Nathaniel L. Frothingham—were all men of gentility and moderation, with little taste for theological revolution. Thus their Unitarianism differed from orthodox New England theology in degree rather than kind and still formed, as one contemporary put it, “the liberal side of the old Congregational body.” Men like Frothingham, who filled the prestigious pulpit of Boston's First Church, continued to believe in a supernatural deity revealed by miracles and divinely inspired Scripture. They placed only limited faith in man. Although not totally depraved, humanity was filled largely with evil and needed divine mediation for salvation. Jesus, who provided this mediation, was described as “the divinely inspired Son of the Father.” The social views of these men, based as they were on the assumption that God had ordained and established the social institutions of the day, were predominantly conservative.3 Within a generation, however, this Old Unitarianism had dissolved. Not everyone changed, of course. Some Conservatives maintained the traditional views until their deaths, but they quickly became a minority as a New Unitarianism emerged.
The Able and Fair Reasoning of Butler's Analogy
Authors: Grave S. A.
Published: April 2006

In the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (entry for Tuesday, August 17) Boswell relates that at a meeting with Dr Johnson the poet Blacklock spoke “with apparent uneasiness” about uncertainty in morals and religion.
Religious Typologies and Popular Religion in Restoration England
Authors: Sommerville C. John
Published: April 2006

There have been numerous studies of the religious leaders of early modern Europe, but accounts of the religious attitudes and interests of the general public have been highly impressionistic. It might seem a hopeless task to try to reconstruct a profile of the religious mind of such a remote period, and yet historians are not deterred from making broad characterizations, and other disciplines sometimes build on them. The question is not so much whether we must give up such descriptions entirely, but how rigorous we can be in making them.
Nihilism in the Twentieth Century: A View from Here
Authors: Manschreck Clyde L.
Published: April 2006

Nihilism has been present in Western culture for many centuries, but no century has been so permeated by nihilism as has our own. With perceptive insight Alexander Salzhenitsyn recently observed that Western democracy is in its “last decline,” has no ethical foundation, and consists only of “parties, and social classes engaged in a conflict of interests, just interests, nothing higher.” Solzhenitsyn's observation can hardly be brushed aside. His words describe a nihilism that is prominent in more than Western democracy, Nihilism reaches as far back as Ecclesiastes in our Old Testament and Nargarjuna in Buddhism. Perhaps no century has been without it, but in our century it has become pervasive, finding expression not only in a flood of literature but in virtually every phase of our existence. The Nazi holocaust, Vietnam, the “death of God,” and Watergate fall within its scope. It is so pervasive that it merits attention, especially from church historians.
The Ecclesiastical Trials in Massachusetts of Oliver Sherman Prescott
Authors: Malone Michael T.
Published: April 2006

Every one who have ever been comforted by hearing the words “By this authority I absolve thee” spoken by one of our priests after a penitent confession, is indebted to Oliver Sherman Prescott; and might give thanks to God that he lived and fought in courts ecclesiastical in these United States of America.
The Swiss Brethren: An Exercise in Historical Definition
Authors: Stayer James M.
Published: April 2006

The Swiss Brethren originated “in, with and under” the Reformation. They lacked the traditional mystical thought patterns which were so influential for Thomas Müntzer, Hans Hut and Hans Denck and their followers in South and Central Germany. Although they possessed a vivid apocalyptic sense, which they shared with many of the Reformers, they did not permit their eschatological expectancy to crystallize into the concrete and violent prophecies of a Hans Hut or a Melchior Hoffman. Thus they avoided the chiliasm which at first stimulated, but eventually blighted, German and Dutch Anabaptism. They did not move from sectarian congregations to communalism like the Hutterites, with the result that in the later sixteenth century they were preyed upon and denounced by Hutterite missionaries anxious to lead their members to the promised land. They were willing to regard the Christological speculations of the Melchiorites as adiaphora, but Menno Simons remained too much a Melchiorite to accept the hand of brotherhood which they extended from Strassburg. Despite their impulses toward “Anabaptist ecumenicism,” followers of that other would-be Anabaptist ecumenicist, Pilgram Marpeck, denounced them in the Kunstbuch as a “harmful and corrupting sect” which sought Christ “outside the human heart … in the Scriptures or other dead creatures.” The relations of the Swiss Brethren to the German and Swiss Reformations, their relations to other Anabaptist groups and the phases of their development remain historical problems, in some cases controverted, in others insufficiently studied.
‘All the Best Bishoprics and Deaneries’: The Enigma of Arminian Politics
Authors: Bangs Carl
Published: April 2006

There are two old Arminian jokes: one can be recounted here, the other later. In the late seventeenth century, when English Arminianism was riding high, so the story goes, Bishop George Morley was asked: “What do the Arminians hold?” He replied: “All the best bishoprics and deaneries.”
The Coming of the Reformation to Edinburgh
Authors: Reid W. Stanford
Published: April 2006

That towns and townspeople played an important part in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century is obvious even to those with a superficial knowledge of the movement. In the case of Scotland, however, this has not always been recognized as true since many writers on the subject have believed that the movement was primarily baronial in character. Yet as one looks closely into the Scottish Reformation the names of Aberdeen, Perth, Dundee and Edinburgh fill important places in the story of the rise of Scottish Protestantism. Edinburgh in particular held a strategic position as Knox, recently appointed minister of St. Giles, recognized in 1561. When Thomas Randolph reported to Sir William Cecil on the appointment of superintendents he stated: “Mr. Knox thinks his state honorable enough if God give him strength to persist in that vocation that he hath placed him in, and will receive no other.” To understand the Scottish Reformation, therefore, it is necessary to see what happened in the principal burgh of the country.
Anna Maria Van Schurman: From Feminism to Pietism
Authors: Irwin Joyce
Published: April 2006

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 Response to Grace: Seventeenth-Century Sermons and the Idea of Thanksgiving
Authors: McFarland Ronald E.
Published: April 2006

The thanksgiving sermons offered from Anglican and Puritan pulpits during the seventeenth century, particularly upon such special occasions as proclaimed by Parliament, often led the preacher to consider an important issue for all Reformation Protestants: the response to grace. Whether the specific event were the anniversary of the Spanish Armada, the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, the defeat of royalist forces at Selby, or the victorious return of the West Indies fleet, the occurrence was interpretable as a special evidence of God's merciful grace. The preacher generally conceived his responsibility to be, first, to remind his congregation of additional mercies, some general in nature (creation, preservation, redemption), and others specific or individual as indicated above. Second, the preacher was to direct his congregation in the manner of its response to these testimonies of grace. Beyond this, the preacher might proceed as he wished. He might fulminate against ingratitude; he might expatiate on the historical or political implications of the event or of past mercies; or he might focus upon the hope for future mercies.
John Wesley and Conyers Middleton on Divine Intervention in History
Authors: Campbell Ted A.
Published: April 2006

In early January of 1749 John Wesley canceled a previously scheduled trip to Rotterdam in order to write a seventy-nine-page open letter to the Reverend Dr. Conyers Middleton on the subject of miracles in the early, post-apostolic church. The letter is one of Wesley's longest original writings, but it has never been studied critically. In it, Wesley's relationship to intellectual currents of his age become particularly clear, both because of the subject with which it is concerned (God's intervention in history) and because of the interlocutor to whom it is addressed (Conyers Middleton of Cambridge University).
‘Austin's Labour’: Patterns of Governance in Medieval Augustinian Monasticism
Authors: Reinke Darrel R.
Published: April 2006

In Chaucer's portrait of the monk, we are given the image of a lord prior who took the “modern way,” especially in regard to monastic rules.

The rule of good Saint Benet or Saint Maur,

As old and strict, he tended to ignore;…

he let go by the things of yesterday,

and took the modern world's more spacious way…

Must he toil, as Austin bade and till the very soil?

Was he to leave the world upon the shelf?

Let Austin have his labour to himself.
Women and the Social Gospel Novel
Authors: Lindley Susan H.
Published: April 2006

The American Social Gospel and the role of women in American religion
recently have emerged as significant concerns for American religious
historians, after a period of relative neglect. In 1976 Ronald C. White, Jr.
and C. Howard Hopkins called for a fresh, more inclusive look at the Social
Gospel, pointing to women as among the “neglected reforms and reformers” in
Social Gospel study. Scholarship on women and religion has exploded in the
last decade, focusing not only on important individuals and traditional
religious images of women, but also on women's own ideas and activities.
This article is presented with the hope that it not only may add to the
study of the history of women in American religion, but also may contribute
to a new understanding of the Social Gospel movement.
Religion and the American Experience: A Century After
Authors: Albanese Catherine L.
Published: April 2006

Philip Schaff'sAmerica, newly translated from the German, appeared on these shores 133 years ago. Although that fact belies the title (and pushes the beginning of the American Society of Church History a third of a century into the future), I suspect that in 1888 Schaff would have concurred with much that he had thought as a younger scholar. He claimed, though, that he would not live in California “for any price,” and I have speculated about whether by 1888 he had changed his mind. The question is more than personal, for perhaps the most pungent metaphor in Schaff'sAmericais his “Phenixgrave” figure for the land. “America,” he wrote, “isthe grave of all European nationalities; but aPhenix grave, from which they shall rise to new life and new activity.” Beyond that he thought that America seemed “destined to be the Phenix grave not only of all European nationalities … but also of all European churches and sects, of Protestantism and Romanism.”
“It pleased me much to contend”: John Bunyan as Controversialist
Authors: Underwood T. L.
Published: April 2006

In English history, 1688 is best remembered as the year of the Glorious Revolution. But that same year also witnessed the death of John Bunyan (1628–1688), the Nonconformist Bedford minister widely known as the author ofThe Pilgrim's Progress(1678; part two, 1684) and a preacher capable of drawing 3,000 persons to Sunday sermons in London. In subsequent centuries his fame increased, and, partly through translations into numerous languages, his story of Christian's pilgrimage became known in nearly every region of the world. In our own time his life and work have drawn the attention of many scholars from several fields, and the publication in modern editions of all of his sixty printed works has been undertaken. In 1988 the tercentenary of his death has been observed by a variety of activities including scholarly conferences and publications.
John Robinson and the Lure of Separatism in Pre-Revolutionary England
Authors: Brachlow Stephen
Published: April 2006

On the fIfth day of August in 1603, the mayor of Norwich and “a great multitude of people” crowded into Saint Andrew's parish church to hear John Robinson preach an afternoon sermon celebrating the third anniversary of James I's deliverance from the Gowrie Plot. In the congregation were two of Bishop John Jegon's lay informers, Michaell Peade and Frances Dawes. As Robinson began, the two informants turned a critical ear, intent on sifting the sermon for hints of the kind of ecclesiastical radicalism that establishment prelates recently had found so exasperatingly disruptive to the ministerial machinery. They had good cause for concern since the young Robinson, fresh from Cambridge University where a generation earlier the new wave of religious dissent had first flourished, was now in Norwich seeking a license from Jegon to preach in his diocese.
The Emergence of a Fellowship: Canadian Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Stackhouse John G.
Published: April 2006

When Canadians showed themselves off to the world at the international exposition at Montreal in 1967, Canadian Christianity presented itself in strikingly symbolic fashion.1In the ecumenical spirit flourishing at the time, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches—which together represented the vast majority of Canadians—jointly sponsored a pavilion. In the experimental and critical spirit also flourishing at the time, the pavilion offered some disturbing reflections upon the fair's theme, ”Man and His World.“ A kaleidoscope of dramatic pictures and texts celebrated the possibilities of the “secular city,” but also reminded visitors how badly so many men (and women and children) were faring in their world.
Gilbert Tennent, Established “Dissenter”
Authors: Fishburn Janet F.
Published: April 2006

Gilbert Tennent (1703–1764), an “Ulster Scot” born the same year as John Wesley, is usually remembered as a leader of revivals during the “Great Awakening” in the middle-colonies. John Witherspoon (1723–1794), a “champion of orthodoxy” from Edinburgh called to be the President of the College of New Jersey, is usually treated as a “founding father” of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. However, many events leading up to the first General Assembly in 1788 reflect the influence of Gilbert Tennet, the moderator of the newly re-united Synods of Philadelphia and New York in 1758.
Two Biblical Models of Conversion: An Example of Puritan Hermeneutics
Authors: Cohen Charles L.
Published: April 2006

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.
The Clergy and the Myth of the American West
Authors: Szasz Ferenc M.
Published: April 2006

The myth of the American West has become the nation's greatest cultural creation. From nineteenth-century German writer Karl May to the present day Solidarity movement in Poland, images drawn from the frontier West have inspired people throughout the globe. Although scholars have spent years trying to separate fact from fiction in this tale, most have concluded that it is impossible. “The myth,” historian Robert Athearn has noted, “is an essential part of the western past.”1
The Practice of Native American Christianity
Authors: McNally Michael D.
Published: April 2006

The fields of Native American religious traditions and American religious history have reached something of a shared critical juncture. Although there has been a long standing scholarly interest on writing about missions to Native Americans from a variety of viewpoints, recent years have seen the publication of a number of fresh considerations of the diversity and texture of Native American Christianity—or better, native Christianities. Native communities have long woven the stories, signs, and practices of the Christian tradition into the fabric of their lifeways, in rich and resourceful ways, even under the direst of colonizing circumstances. But only recently has scholarship begun to take this fuller texture into account: most recently,Native and Christian(1996), edited by James Treat;Native American Religious Identity(1998), edited by Jace Weaver; SergeiKan's Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries; Clara Sue Kidwell's Choctaws and Missionaries; and Christopher Vecsey's multivolume study of the varieties of native Catholicism, of which volume two,The Paths of Kateri's Kin(1998), is of most interest here. This recent scholarship reflects new perspectives of native scholars entering the field and more publications that anthologize a range of native Christian viewpoints into single volumes. It has also to do with more sustained accountability among normative scholars to native communities and the way that consultants in those communities imagine their religious lives.
Thomas Jefferson, Religious Freedom, and the Supreme Court
Authors: Gaustad Edwin S.
Published: April 2006

Most American scholars are reasonably well aware of the contributions of Thomas Jefferson (and his younger colleague, James Madison) to the establishment of the legal framework for religious freedom in the United States. Perhaps many are less aware of Jefferson's “second life” in the Supreme Court's several encounters with Jefferson and with the religion clauses of the First Amendment. This article will, first, review briefly Jefferson's lifelong commitment to religious liberty, which he regarded as the foundation ofallliberties. Second, attention will be given to Supreme Court decisions in this troubled arena, with some comment on Jefferson's continued relevance—to use a tame and tired word—within the contemporary American scene.
The Relationship of Religious Practice to Linguistic Culture: Language, Religion, and Education in Alsace and the Roussillon, 1860–1890
Authors: Byrnes Joseph F.
Published: April 2006

The revolutionary and legislator Bertrand Barrère in his Sur lesidiomes étrangers et l'enseignement de la langue françaisehad said, “Federalism and superstition speak Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; the counter-revolution speaks Italian, and fanaticism speaks Basque.” For Barrère, regional languages were intertwined with religion (“superstition,” “fanaticism”) and the other antigovernment forces. And he was right, at least in part. Surveys made in the last century indicate that of those regions where a language other than French was spoken (German in Alsace-Lorraine, Flemish in the department of the Nord, Gaelic in Brittany, Basque in the Southwest, and Catalan in the Roussillon), all save the Roussillon had statistically high levels of religious practice. To explore how religious practice has been supported by linguistic culture in modern France, I have chosen the high-practice region of Alsace and the low-practice region of the Roussillon in the last half of the nineteenth century. I want to interpret the dynamics through which Alsace supported religious practice and the Roussillon did not.