bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Apostolic Fathers' First Thousand Years
Authors: Grant Robert M.
Published: April 2006

The writings of the so-called Apostolic Fathers (a term used by the Monophysite Severus of Antioch in the sixth century) present us not only with a fascinating theological literature but also with some difficult problems in regard to its nature. Thomas Elborowe translated Ignatius, Polycarp, and Barnabas and entitled his published work (London, 1668) “a prospect of the primitive Christianity, as it was left by Christ to his apostles, by the apostles to their disciples Saint Polycarp and Holy Ignatius, both contemporaries with and disciples to the Holy Evangelist and Apostle Saint John.” The neatness of this part of the prospect was somewhat marred by the inclusion of Barnabas. “His following epistle indeed,” Elborowe wrote, “may not prove so very acceptable to some, in regard of his strange explications of scripture, which are not after the modern and more refined mode. But it is to be noted that, when he wrote, Christianity was but in the cradle, and scarce advanced into her morning dress.” Nearly three hundred years later Mgr. G. Jouassard, writing in the Mélanges de science religieuse (1957), was facing problems not unlike those stated or implied by Elborowe. What is the value of the Apostolic Fathers? What kind of authority do they have? Are they any more valuable than such a document as the Epistle of the Apostles? They are hard to classify as literature and they come from a long period of time. Both “apostolic” and “fathers” are words which ascribe more importance to them than they really deserve.
The History of Theological Education in America
Authors: McCloy Frank Dixon
Published: April 2006

The following bibliographical sketch is designed to acquaint the student of American theological education with the present state of available sources on its history. It is the by-product of the researches pursued in connection with the writing of an article on American theological seminaries (Theologische Bibelanstätten) for the new edition of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. The article is a joint enterprise by professor George Huntston Williams of Harvard University and F. D. McCloy, and covers the period from the close of the eighteenth century to the present. There is no comprehensive study of the development of ministerial tranining with regard either to educational theory or institutional structure during the one hundred and seventy-eight years since the founding of the first seminaries by the Dutch Reformed and the Roman Catholic denominations in 1784. A very brief survey was given by William Adams Brown in “A Century of Theological Education and After,” Journal of Religion, VI, 4 (July, 1926), pp. 363–383, and, also, in his article, “Theological Education,” in A Cyclopedia of Education, edited by Paul Munrone (New York, 1931) V, pp. 582–606. Henry K. Rowe, professor at Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, Contributed a short supplement, dealing with the American scence, to the major article on the history of theological education by Ferdinand Cohrs in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (reprint, Grand Rapids, 1950) XI, p. 335a. Three articles on Jewish, Protestant, and Roman Catholic theological training apperared in Highers Education, IX, 18 (May 15, 1963), pp. 202–216, by Seymour Siegel, Oren H. Baker, and James E. O'Connell respectively.
The Ecumenical Thought of Bishop Charles Henry Brent
Authors: Bianchi Eugene C.
Published: April 2006

Episcopalian Bishop Charles Henry Brent was one of the outstanding pioneers in the modern ecumenical movement. His career as an international figure began in 1901 with an appointment at the age of 39 to be first missionary bishop of the Philippine Islands. From this mission vantage point his influence extended around the world. In 1909 President Taft chose him to be President of the First International Opium Commission in Shanghai. During the last year of the First World War he served as Senior Headquarters Chaplain to the American Expeditionary Forces. But Brent' greatest achievement was to be in the realm of church unity. He founded and inspired the Faith and Order movement, and presided over its First World Conference at Lausanne, Switzerland in 1927.
A Spanish Calvinist Church in Elizabethan London, 1559–65
Authors: Hauben Paul J.
Published: April 2006

As a result of Father Albert J. Loomie's recent volume, The Spanish Elizabethans, this descriptive phrase would appear to be a dramatic designation for English Catholic exiles in Philip II's dominions. However, it seems equally appropriate to use the appelation with reference to a much less known and smaller group, the Spanish Calvinist refugees of Elizabethan London. The latter were organized into a congregation in the early 1560's by Cassiodoro de Reina; to a very considerable extent the success and collapse of this church parallels its pastor's career, as we shall see.
A Survey of Recent Research on the Albigensian Cathari
Authors: Walther Daniel
Published: April 2006

The significant manuscript discoveries on medieval neo-Manichaeism in the last twenty-five years have raised the hope that the Albigensian riddle may now be more accurately and critically appraised. However, the problems are far from being solved. Despite penetrating essays and newly found sources, more clarification is needed on (a) the origins of Catharism. Henri-Charles Puech, of the Collége de France, has clearly summed up this question in “Catharisme mèdiéval et Bogomilisme,”Accademia nazionale dei lincei: XII Convegno “Volta” promossa dalla classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche(Roma, 1957), pp. 56–84; (b) religion, where the question is not merely whether the Cathari were dualists, but to what degree. There is an excellent essay, partly solving this problem, by Hans Söderberg,La religion des Cathares: Etude sur le Gnosticisme de la basse Antiquité et du Moyen Age(Uppsala, 1949); (c) the political situation. “Occitanie,” later called Languedoc, was at the time independent of the Capetian Kings of France who undertook to integrate it, by the sword of Simon of Montfort, as discussed by Jacques Madaule,Le drame albigeois et le destin français(Paris: B. Grasset, 1961); (d) Albigensianism coincided with courtly love, a subject which has not been sufficiently elucidated as to the relationship of the troubadours and Catharism, although numerous essays have been written about it.
Some French Reactions to the Council of Trent
Authors: Kingdon Robert M.
Published: April 2006

In this age of growing ecumenicism, many scholars are turning to the history of the sixteenth century for a fresh examination of the origins of those ideas and institutions which continue to divide the Christian community. During these years of the widely publicized meetings of an ecumenical council sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church, many are turning specifically to the canons and decrees drafted by the Council of Trent for a fresh study of the extent to which they do or must divide Christians. But fully to understand these Tridentine decisions from an ecumenical perspective requires not only a knowledge of their texts and of the debates from which they emerged. It requires also a knowledge of the hostile reactions which they aroused among the many Christians who would not accept these decisions or the authority of those who promulgated them. An interesting spectrum of such reactions can be found among French criticisms of Trent published during the sixteenth century. Of these publications, three semto me to demonstrate this proposition neatly: one by a distinguished French theologian, John Calvin; a second by a dustinguished French Jurisconsult, Charles Dumoulin; a third by a prominent French lawyer and historian, Innocent Gentillet. These works have not been ignored by such experts on the historiography of Trent as professor Jedin. But I feel they merit a more detailed and more considered examination than they have as yet received. This paper sketches some of the lines upon which such an examination might proceed.
The First Calvinistic Baptist Association in New England, 1754?–1767
Authors: McLoughlin William G.
Published: April 2006

Baptist historians have frequently asserted that the first Calvinistic Baptist Association in New England was the Warren Baptist Association founded under the aegis of James Manning in 1767. Most historians are aware that an earlier association, founded in the 1690's, existed among the Six Principle General or Arminian Baptists in New England, but with the great Calvinistic reorientation in the Baptist movement following the Great Awakening this association ceased to be of any significance outside Rhode Island. Little notice has been taken, however, of the Six Pinciple Calvinistic Baptist Association which developed on the borders of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island in the 1750's to unite and serve a group of Separate-Baptist churches formed in the aftermath of the Awakening. And yet this association, short-lived though it was, merits attention. It represented the first spontaneous effort of the Separate- Baptists to seek unity and order in the confusion which followed the break-up of the Separate movement after 1754. Although it proved to be a false start, it nevertheless prepared the way for the Warren Association whose importance is acknowledged by all Baptist historians. And it is particularly interesting that the basis of the organization was agreement on the belief that the ritual of laying on of hands was essential to church membership.
The Apocalyptic Element in Olivi's Critique of Aristotle
Authors: Burr David
Published: April 2006

Modern scholars are well aware of the role played by Petrus Iohannis Olivi in the so-called spiritual Franciscan movement. They are equally aware that his adherence to that movement was partly inspired by a theology of history which attributed eschatological significance to the Franciscan order, a theology of history based at least in part upon the views of Joachim of Fiore. On the other hand, in the last few decades Olivi's role in the development of Scholastic thought has been appreciated by an increasing number of scholars. While few scholars portray him as the equal of Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, or Ockham, many are willing to place him among the handful of medieval thinkers who stand just outside that charmed circle.
Priesthood and Ministry in the Theology of Luther
Authors: Gerrish B. A.
Published: April 2006

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.
Liturgical Developments in Sweden and Finland in the Era of Lutheran Orthodoxy (1593–1700)
Authors: Harjunpaa Toivo
Published: April 2006

Liturgical questions have never aroused wider public interest and more intense emotions in the history of Sweden and Finland than they did during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The Reformation movement was fully seventy years old in Sweden before that nation became definitely and officially committed to the Confessional Standard of Lutheranism. The Augsburg Confession was accepted by the Church and State in Sweden and Finland in 1593 as a binding religious symbol. The developments which led to this final settlement in Sweden need a brief presentation since they are in many ways related to liturgical matters.
The Theological Revival in The French Reformed Church, 1830–1852
Authors: Osen J. Lynn
Published: April 2006

The French Reformed Church merged from the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon stengthened by government recognition and support but weakened by the ideological offensive of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Although it enjoyed a secure official and financial position, it had yet to reconcile itself intellectually with the contrasting currents of eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century romanticism. This process of assimilation and reconciliation took place after 1815 and culminated, during the July Monarchy and the Second Republic, in a theological awakening and renewal.
The Humanistic Interests of the Early Tudor Episcopate
Authors: Masek Rosemary
Published: April 2006

Since H. L. Gray questioned the view that “Italian learning languished” between the death of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in 1447 and 1488 when John Colet, William Grocyn, and Thomas Linacre visited Italy, several scholars have attempted to show the nature of the new learning fostered in England by such intermediaries as Robert Flemmyng, William Selling, and John Free, among others. Roberto Weiss has investigated more thoroughly than anyone else the interest of these Englishmen in the new learning during that interval. His book brings the narrative to 1485, a time which for him marks the beginning of genuine English humanism.While there is no doubt that Colet, Grocyn, and Linacre were leaders of the avant garde of humanism or that Selling, Flemmying, and Free helped bridge the gap between 1447 and 1488, some less well-known men played an important part in the advance of the new learning.
Andreas Bodenstein of Carlstadt Prodigal Reformer
Authors: Hillerbrand Hans J.
Published: April 2006

In the fall of 1524 the Strassburg reformer Wolfgang Capito published a typically irenic work entitledWas man halten und antworten soil von der Spaitung zwischen Martin Luther und Andres Caroistadt, in which he showed, at least to his own satisfaction, that the disagreement between Martin Luther and Andreas Carlstadt, the two former colleagues on the Wittenberg faculty, was peripheral and of no significance. Luther himself begged to differ, called Carlstadt “incarnatus diabolus” and remarked with characteristic flair, “ibi non homo sed spiritus Satanae ornat se sua sapientia.” Historically Luther's assessment, rather than Capito's, has set the precedent. In the first decade of this century Hermann Barge sought to raise and answer Capito's question once more Barge published an impressive two-volume biography of Carlstadt with the express intent of modifying the traditionally negative view of his hero. At the same time he offered a broad reinterpretation of the early Reformation. Barge chided scholarship for its preoccupation with the leading Reformation figures and demanded that greater attention be paid to the sentiment of the common people. According to Barge, a ground swell of popular enthusiasm for ecclesiastical change came to the fore at Wittenberg during Luther's stay in the Wartburg, exerting its influence upon the theologians, notably Carlstadt, who became the main spokesman for this new perspective and helped in the attempt at actual transformation at Wittenberg, making some incisive theological and ecclesiastical contributions. Elector Frederick, perturbed by the mandate of theReichsregimentof January 20, 1522, intervened and crushed this budding “lay puritanism.” Luther had originally sided with those who demanded definite ecclesiastical change, but switched his orientation under the Elector's influence and returned to Wittenberg as a determined proponent of conservative reform. The scholarly opposition to Barge was virtually unanimous and his volumes, while adding substantial information, particularly for the time after 1523, made no positive contribution to Reformation scholarship.
Miles Gloriosus: The Christian and Military Service according to Tertullian
Authors: Gero Stephen
Published: April 2006

The aim of this paper is to throw some light on Tertullian's attitude to military service. His statements on this subject are highly useful for a more accurate understanding of his own changing views on the empire and the duties of citizenship. They are also important evidence for marking a crucial stage in the pre-Constantinian evolution of the relations of church and state. It will be seen that the whole question of Christians serving in the Roman army became relevant only in the late second century; Tertullian is one of the earliest literary witnesses for this momentous development. Therefore, on both counts, the texts deserve close scrutiny.
Theological Concepts of Magistracy: A Study of Constantinus, Henry VIII, and John F. Kennedy
Authors: Speel Charles J.
Published: April 2006

As we move in this study from Constantius to Henry VIII to John Fitzgerald Kennedy we move in Christian doctrine from heresy to orthodoxy to “American” Catholicism, and in Church-State relations from domination to manipulation to separation or from a form of Caesaro-Papism to Lay State regalism to Lay State separatism of the American type. An important key to understanding these shifts or changes is to be found in a study of the Magistrate's theological conception of the magistrate's office.
The Distinctiveness of American Denominationalism: A Case Study of the 1846 Evangelical Alliance
Authors: Sandeen Ernest R.
Published: April 2006

The Chicago school in American religious historiography, especially its two most distinguished representatives, W. W. Sweet and Sidney E. Mead, has emphasized the growth of religious liberty as a crucial factor in accounting for the characteristic shape of American Protestantism in the early nineteenth century. The effect of this interpretative hypothesis has been to emphasize the distinctiveness of American religious history while focusing attention so intensely upon American phenomena that evidence from European history which might have served to qualify that hypothesis has not yet received adequate attention.
The Study of Early Church History
Authors: Balas David L. , Muehlenberg Ekkehard , Norris Richard A. , Wilken Robert L.
Published: April 2006

A new feature at the December 1971 meeting of the American Society of Church History in New York was a series of historiographical seminars. These seminars (in early church history, Reformation history and American church history) were designed to give members of the society an opportunity to meet in a somewhat less formal setting than the customary paper-response session and to discuss areas of mutual interest and concern in their respective fields. Each seminar took a different form. In the section on early church, three panelists were asked to present brief statements on recent works in the field.
Slavery and Theology: The Emergence of Black Christian Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America
Authors: Smith Timothy L.
Published: April 2006

Extensive discussion of the origin and nature of Black Christianity in America has in recent years linked together two issues which are logically distinct: the degree of uniqueness attributable to the beliefs of Afro-Americans, and whether or to what extent their faith sustained resistance to the system of slavery. Abundant evidence that slaveowners hoped Christian instruction would persuade Black people to asquiesce in their bondage has been readily taken for proof that acquiescence was in fact the usual result of their conversion. This questionable conclusion has sometimes led to another: that such religious notions as occasionally inspired resistance were brought from Africa and were uniquely the heritage of Black men. According to this view, the biblical rationales for revolt such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner appear to have employed were merely a gloss upon ideas of freedom and justice which they and their people had long held.
James VI and the Revival of Episcopacy in Scotland: 1596–1600
Authors: Lee Maurice
Published: April 2006

King James VI and I had a taste for aphorisms, a circumstance which has occasionally misled the historians of his reign. James's deeply held and lifelong attachment to the doctrine of the divine right of kings is well known and unquestionable; so when, at the Hampton Court Conference, he said, “No bishop, no king”, it has perhaps been too readily assumed that his devotion to episcopacy as a system of church government was as unswerving and permanent as his belief in divine right. The king's admiration for the Church of England and its prelates, his threat at Hampton Court to harry the Puritans out of the land, his savage attack in Basilikon Doron on those “fiery spirited men in the ministry” who “fed themselves with the hope to become Tribuni plebis” but who were really “very pests in Church and Commonweal… breathing nothing but sedition and calumnies”—all this is so familiar as scarcely to require repeating. It is also well known that when he began to govern for himself in Scotland in the 1580s the position of the Scottish bishops was feeble. It continued to worsen for about a decade, as the king and his advisers found it desirable for political reasons to make concessions to the dominant presbyterian wing of the kirk, until the presbyterian historian David Calderwood could write of the year 1596, “The Kirk of Scotland was now come to her perfection.” Then, beginning in 1596, the tide began to run in the opposite direction.
American Foreign Policy, The Politics of Missions and Josiah Strong, 1890–1900
Authors: Reed James Eldin
Published: April 2006

The revival of interest in American Protestant missionary activity is a remarkable feature of current historical writing in the United States. Two generations ago mission history was a flourishing enterprise, but was closely tied to the missionary movement itself. And when the fire went out of the crusade to evangelize the world in a single generation, the study of mission history was thereby virtually extinguished. With the exception of the distinguished writings of the late Kenneth Scott Latourette, the history of Christian missions in the modern period has been generally disregarded by American historians for most of this century. The renascence of mission history in a new, more modern and ostensibly more objective form began around a decade ago. Whether the present generation of historians will produce greater understanding of the missionary movement than did the generation of their grandfathers is an open question; in any event, the history of missions is once again the latest thing.
French ‘Left-Catholics’ and Communism in the Nineteen-thirties
Authors: Hellman John
Published: April 2006

Not long before he died, Lenin told a French Catholic visitor that “only Communism and Catholicism offered two diverse, complete andinconfusibleconceptions of human life.” Lenin's belief that Communism and Catholicism were incon fusible was probably shared by most Communists, and most Catholics, in France in the nineteen-thirties. When the French Communists offered an “outstretched hand” to Catholic workers in 1936 in an effort to achieve a tactical alliance to head off fascism in France and Europe and to promote social progress—ignoring the incompatibilities of world view as much as possible—a number of French Catholics sought to grasp it. But these Catholics were not, for the most part, the “Catholic workers, clerks, artisans, peasants” to whom Maurice Thorez had addressed his appeal, but rather Catholic philosophers, “social priests,” journalists, and cardinals. They grasped, or considered grasping, the outstretched hand with a variety of motivations, hopes, and intentions which were quite often different from the intentions of the Communists who proffered it.
The English Indemnity Acts 1726–1867
Authors: Short K. R. M.
Published: April 2006

Modern scholars generally agree that the Indemnity Acts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were enacted to afford legal relief to religious nonconformists from the restrictions placed upon them by the Test Act of 1673 and the Corporation Act of 1661. The oaths required by this legislation were a means of debarring religiously and politically seditious individuals from offices, in national government in the case of the Test Act and from corporation government in that of the Corporation Act. Both acts required the taking of “the several oaths of supremacy and allegiance” in addition to the “sacrament of the Lord's Supper according to the usage of the Church of England.” To qualify under the Test Act the sacrament had to be taken in a public church on a Sunday “immediately after divine service and sermon…” within three months of admission to office. The Corporation Act differed significantly in its requirement that the sacrament had to have been received in the year preceding election to corporate office.
Discovery of a Treatise about the Ecclesiastical Administration Ascribed to Michael the Syrian: A Unique Document in the Literary Genre of Canon Law
Authors: Vööbus Arthur
Published: April 2006

Manuscript research is an endeavor filled with suspense; often made more difficult by physical labor and severe weather, the scholar's research may prove fruitless, or it may yield an unknown text which reveals again the gaps in scholars' knowledge of ancient Christian tests.
Two Constrasting Views of the Indians: Methodist Involvement in the Indian Troubles in Oregon and Washington
Authors: Norwood Frederick A.
Published: April 2006

In the 1850s, when both Oregon and Washington were pioneer lands just emerging from wilderness conditions, sporadic Indian warfare made life dangerous and miserable for white settlers and threatened the very existence of the Indian subtribes which inhabited the mountains and valleys south and north of the great Columbia River basin. In the previous decade a provisional territorial government had been organized, even before the treaty of 1846 set the international boundary at the forty-ninth degree of latitude. Federal territorial government dates from 1849. In 1853 Washington territory was set off from Oregon.
An ‘Unnatural Alliance’ for Religious Toleration: The Philosophes and the Outlawed Pastors of the ‘Church of the Desert’
Authors: Woodbridge John Dunning
Published: April 2006

The struggles and sacrifices of those pastors and laymen who reconstructed the Reformed churches in southern France during the eighteenth century compose one of the intriguing chapters of the history of the “Church of the Desert.” Members of an outlawed Protestant church in a country which was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic by religion, these pastors and their flocks ran great risks in holding open-air religious services in the secluded and rugged countryside of the Midi—or the “Desert”—in southern France. Attendance at their services was punishable by perpetual service in the king's galleys for the men and life imprisonment for the women; the Reformed pastors who led these meetings did so on pain of death. Not a few of these Calvinists suffered extreme physical and mental anguish because of their obstinate refusal to abandon the faith of their fathers.
Univira: An Example of Continuity and Change in Roman Society
Authors: Lightman Majorie , Zeisel William
Published: April 2006

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.
Calvinism and Humanism: The First Generation
Authors: Linder Robert D.
Published: April 2006

The nature of the relationship between the Renaissance and the Reformation has intrigued historians of both the past and the present. Recently a number of noted scholars have attempted to demonstrate the connection between the two movements with varying degrees of success. Historians seem to have marshalled an impressive and growing body of evidence to show the direct relationship between the advent of humanism and the coming of the Lutheran Reformation, even though the exact nature of this relationship has not yet been clarified in a definitive manner. But in the case of humanism and Calvinism no consensus has been reached concerning this problem; consequently, the situation is still in doubt. The purpose of this study is to enhance the historical understanding of the connection between humanism and Calvinism by a fresh analysis of the life and thought of three important first generation leaders of the Reformed church, namely, John Calvin, Theodore Beza and Pierre Viret. Moreover, new evidence on the subject from the career of Viret, the least known but nevertheless a very important member of this Calvinist trinity, will be presented to demonstrate more clearly the positive and direct link between humanism and Calvinism in the formative years of the Reformation.
The Social Roots of Dutch Pietism in the Middle Colonies
Authors: Balmer Randall H.
Published: April 2006

When Godfridus Dellius, Dutch Reformed minister at Albany, surveyed the religious situation of the Middle Colonies in 1694, he found little to cheer him. In addition to the recent deaths of two colleagues and the political upheaval in New York, Dominie Dellius lamented the intrusion of William Bertholf into the Dutch churches in New Jersey. Bertholf, a cooper by trade, openly flaunted his independence from both the Netherlands ecclesiastical authorities and the orthodox New York clergy. With pietist leanings, Bertholf had ingratiated himself with Dutch communicants on the New Jersey frontier. “He will now not neglect anything to carry out his designs,” Dellius warned, and “soon some marvelous kind of theology will develop here.”
Reginald Scot and hisDiscoverie of Witchcraft:Religion and Science in the Opposition to the European Witch Craze
Authors: Estes Leland L.
Published: April 2006

Recent discussions of the major literary works of the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have advanced significantly our understanding of this important episode in European history. Clearly, our efforts no longer are controlled by the anticlerical and even antireligious sentiments that corrupted so much late nineteenth-century scholarship on this subject. Yet a more subtle nineteenth-century prejudice still remains with us. We still wish to believe that those who opposed the craze did so because in some fundamental way they were more enlightened, or more rational, or more scientific than those who accepted and even supported witch hunting. Recent anthropological research, however, stressing both the ubiquity and the intellectual integrity of a belief in witches, suggests strongly that this modern viewpoint is probably not correct. Certainly, this prejudice has seriously distorted our understanding of one important contribution to the witch debate, Reginald Scot'sThe Discoverie of Witchcraft. Modern commentators have invested this book with an aura of scientific rationality that it ill deserves. A closer inspection, I believe, reveals an entirely different source for Scot's ideas and, more importantly, sheds some new light on what it really was that brought witch hunting in Europe to an end.
Black Ecumenicism: Efforts to Establish a United Methodist Episcopal Church, 1918–1932
Authors: Dickerson Dennis C.
Published: April 2006

Between 1918 and 1932 representatives from three black denominations— African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Colored Methodist Episcopal—devised plans to merge into one religious body which they hoped to name the United Methodist Episcopal church. During this period the clergy and laity of these three black denominations debated the advantages and shortcomings of the Birmingham Plan of 1918 and the Pittsburgh proposals of 1927 which sought to create a single black Methodist organization. Opponents of the Birmingham and Pittsburgh agreements feared that organic union would work against their particular denominational interests and destroy their historical identity. Advocates of merger stressed the common religious and racial background of the three churches and argued that black Methodist unity would benefit the nation's black population. By 1932, however, the deep denominational divisions among black Methodists slowed the movement toward merger and undermined efforts to end the religious rivalry among these three important black institutions.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Interchurch World Movement of 1919–1920: A Different Angle on the Ecumenical Movement
Authors: Harvey Charles E.
Published: April 2006

There is a certain irony in the title of Eldon G. Ernst's Moment of Truth for Protestant America, the standard interpretation of the Interchurch World Movement (IWM) of 1919–1920, because this broad and generally perceptive study of the IWM is based primarily upon an elaborate falsification of the historical record. That falsification was perpetrated in a document entitled “History of the Interchurch World Movement” prepared under the direction of Raymond B. Fosdick. Fosdick, who was the lawyer and long-term adviser of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had the document compiled precisely to conceal the real role Rockefeller played in the organization. Research in Rockefeller's papers reveals the truth about his role and thereby illumines a significant aspect of the ecumenical movement and its relationship to wider historical trends. This overlooked aspect from the background of the liberal side of the fundamentalist controversy is particularly pertinent today as tensions mount between those who identify themselves as “liberals” and those who claim to lead a “moral majority” of resurgent conservatism. Perhaps Washington Gladden, the old social gospel advocate, was not entirely wrong when he referred to a Rockefeller contribution as “tainted money,” however idealistic Rockefeller's motives may have been.
The “Fractio Panis:” A Reformed Communion Practice in Late Reformation Germany
Authors: Nischan Bodo
Published: April 2006

One of the principal areas of disagreement between the followers of Martin Luther and the Swiss reformers during the Reformation concerned the Lord's Supper. As one church historian has observed, “every dissension concerning the Gospel necessarily expresses itself in dissension over the Lord's Supper.” Not surprisingly, therefore, liturgical variations in the celebration of the communion service became major points of controversy as well. Unfortunately, modern scholarship has often overlooked or underestimated the significance of these differences.
The Ritual of Happy Dying among Early American Methodists
Authors: Schneider A. Gregory
Published: April 2006

Jane M'Neil died a “glorious death” in 1814 when she was just twelve years old. Perfectly composed during her last illness, she spoke warmly of her attachment to her Methodist class leader and calmly informed visiting neighbors that soon she would be laid in the graveyard. Her biographer recalled that when the local preacher came to pray with her, “the joys of the upper world [seemed] to have been manifested… She was thrown into ecstasies of joy; she shouted the praises of the Redeemer aloud.” Her mother's unregenerate prejudices against religious shouting were removed. Her physician, a non-Christian, “was melted into tears, and gave vent to the loudest exclamations of grief” when Jane exhorted him to flee to “the good physician of souls.” Squire M'Neil, her proud and haughty father, struggled with deep conviction of sin after her death and became converted, influencing many in the neighborhood to seek religion.1
How Firm a Foundation: Martin Bucer's Historical Exegesis of the Psalms
Authors: Hobbs R. Gerald
Published: April 2006

In September 1529 the Strasbourg printer, Georg Ulricher of Andlau, exhibited to visitors at his stall in the Frankfurt autumn book fair the first copies of a new commentary on the Psalms. The in-quarto volume, amounting in all to over four hundred folios, purported to be the work of a Lyon humanist, one Aretius Felinus. Its author was in fact Martin Bucer, ex-Dominican, now evangelical pastor and rising star of the Strasbourg church. Bucer's refuge in pseudonymity was an attempt—as he explained in a letter to Zwingli—to facilitate circulation of the work in regions like France and the Low Countries where the name of Bucer was likely to bring it to the attention of censors vigilant to stem the flow of heretical literature. It would do no harm either, as he admitted, to dissociate the volume from the name of one who had played so prominent a role in the still lively evangelical quarrel over the Lord's Supper.
Female Ministry in the Thought and Work of Catherine Booth
Authors: Murdoch Norman H.
Published: April 2006

As with other professions, the ministry has a long record of excluding women from its ranks. Virtually all women, unlike all men, have been categorized as laity, although they have failed even to achieve that designation on occasion. George Bernard Shaw, in The Doctor's Dilemma, observed that “every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” Certainly this has been the case among lay women aspiring to become members of the clergy. But Shaw recognized in his play, Major Barbara (1905), a new kind of Christian minister, one who contested her business-tycoon father on a significant contemporary issue of how best to relieve poverty in Britain. Indirectly Shaw was paying tribute to the influence of Catherine Booth (1829–1890), co-founder of the Salvation Army, who recognized women's powers of intellect and innate equality and elevated them to clerical parity with men.
Erik Pontoppidan and His Asiatic Prince Menoza
Authors: Skarsten Trygve R.
Published: April 2006

If one were to ask a Scandinavian to name the outstanding Pietist from the eighteenth century, that Pietist would undoubtedly be Erik Pontoppidan. August Herman Francke would most assuredly come in second place. Pontoppidan's lasting fame rests with his “Explanation” (Forklaring) to Luther's Small Catechism which he published in 1737 under the title Truth Unto Godliness (Sandhed til Gudfryktighed). A little over one hundred years later (1842), a pioneer Norwegian-American pastor by the name of Elling Eielsen translated it into English and walked—yes walked—from the Fox River settlements in northern Illinois to New York City in order to get Pontoppidan's “Explanation” published.
Cherokees and Methodists, 1824–1834
Authors: McLoughlin William G.
Published: April 2006

On 29 May 1831, the Reverend James Jenkins Trott, a Methodist missionary to the Cherokee, was arrested in the Cherokee Nation by the Georgia Guard and forced to march 110 miles to prison at Camp Gilmer. Released after four days, he was required to post a five-hundred-dollar bond and ordered to keep out of that part of the Indian nation within the territorial limits of the state of Georgia. He refused to obey the order. Married to a Cherokee who lived near his mission station at New Echota, he went to visit his wife and two children in July. On 6 July he again was arrested and forced to march 110 miles back to prison. With him this time were two Presbyterian missionaries, the Reverend Samuel A. Worcester and Dr. Elizur Butler. Two of Trott's friends, the Reverend Dickson C. McLeod and the Reverend Martin Wells, who were also Methodist circuit riders within the Cherokee Nation, heard of his arrest. They saddled up and rode after him. When they caught up with the prisoners along the road, the officer in charge, Col. C. H. Nelson, ordered them curtly to “flank off!.” When McLeod made some disparaging remarks about the treatment of the missionaries, Nelson ordered him off his horse, arrested him and made him march with the prisoners. Wells, who was left holding McLeod's horse, also was ordered with oaths to flank off. When he refused, “Col. Nelson cut a stick and making up to Mr. Wells gave him a severe blow on the head.”1
Marching to Zion: Religion in a Modern Utopian Community
Authors: Wacker Grant
Published: April 2006

The twenty-fourth of September 1905 started as a typical Sunday in Zion City, Illinois. Promptly at 2:00 P.M. John Alexander Dowie ascended the platform of Shiloh Tabernacle, robed in the brightly embroidered garments of an Old Testament High Priest. He was acknowledged by the seven thousand souls who sat before him as the Messenger of the Covenant, the third and final incarnation of the prophet Elijah, and the General Overseer and First Apostle of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. The 6,600 acres of farms, homes, factories, and businesses surrounding the tabernacle were exclusively his. And for all practical purposes, so were the people. One contemporary journalist judged that Dowie had come to possess the “most autocratic power it is possible to wield in this republic,” while another concluded that “no man… of our time has ever secured anything like the personal following he has.” Near the end of the five hour service the prophet changed into his white expiation robes and, as he had done on countless Sundays in the past, prepared to bless and distribute the Holy Sacraments. But this time, in the semi-darkness of the early evening, he seemed to stagger and slump to the floor. The people soon learned that Dowie had suffered a crippling stroke. They also soon knew that their effort to build a biblical Zion on the “sky-skirted prairie” north of Chicago was in shambles.
The Local Parish as a Female Institution: The Experience of All Saints Episcopal Church in Frontier Minnesota
Authors: Gundersen Joan R.
Published: April 2006

In recent years historians have begun exploring the feminization of religion in nineteenth-century America. While much of the published debate has centered on the particular definition presented by Ann Douglas in her study, The Feminization of American Culture, other scholars have adopted the term but applied it in different ways. Douglas based her argument on a small sample of liberal Protestant female writers and clergymen in New England whom she saw as giving cultural expression to a new popular theology. She did not explore its impact upon any particular congregation, and much of the controversy surrounding her thesis has focused on the narrow base upon which she made expansive claims. The concept of a feminized church, however, has attracted a number of scholars. Some, like Gerald Moran, have found evidence of the process much earlier in New England, while Mary Ryan and others have explored church membership during the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century. The research continues the Northeastern focus, however, in terms of both geography and denomination. Thus historians still have no sense as to the universality of these trends. In addition, the focus has remained on church membership and cultural perceptions of women's religious role. We have precious little information on how women translated ideas about their role into the life of an ongoing religious institution.
Late Roman and Byzantine Legislation on the Monastic Life from the Fourth to the Eighth Centuries
Authors: Frazee Charles A.
Published: April 2006

Christian monasticism in the East has three sources: the original rule of the founder or that of a reformer, laws issued by the Roman emperors, and the canons of church councils. The purpose of this article is to study the latter two, which have received little attention in the scholarly work on monastic life. The close association between church and state, unique to the East, made it incumbent upon the leaders of both the secular and religious hierarchies of Byzantium to oversee the development of monasticism from the fourth to the eighth century. Those 400 years mark the first and normative period of legislation dealing with the monastic life.
Church, State, and Dissent: The Crisis of the Swiss Reformation, 1531–1536
Authors: Baker J. Wayne
Published: April 2006

During the 1520s the city council of Zurich, with the full cooperation of Zwingli, created a Reformed community in which all powers of discipline were placed in the hands of the city magistrates. Both Zwingli's theory of the Christian community and the council's actions to create such a community had their roots in the late medieval communal idea which viewed the city as a “sacral community.” This corporate ideal led to the blurring of the distinctions between the civil and ecclesiastical communities.Zwingli's theory also had roots in the thought of Marsilius of Padua, Occam, and Zwingli's contemporary, Erasmus.
The Bible in the Fourteenth Century: Some Observations
Authors: Courtenay William J.
Published: April 2006

One of the most pressing needs in the field of medieval biblical studies is for an adequate historical overview of developments in the late Middle Ages. One of the pioneers, the late Beryl Smalley, never fully achieved the intended sequel to her magisterial Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, although her English Friars and Antiquity was an excellent beginning, particularly for the early fourteenth-century English group. Other surveys end with Nicholas of Lyra, skip from the thirteenth century to the Reformation, or give only the most cursory attention to the late medieval period.2 And yet the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were rich in biblical commentaries, and scholars, have long considered a more precise understanding of developments in that period to be essential for an adequate appreciation of the character and significance of biblical commentaries in the early sixteenth century.
Reason, Revelation, and Cartesianism: Louis Tronchin and Enlightened Orthodoxy in Late Seventeenth-Century Geneva
Authors: Klauber Martin I.
Published: April 2006

Michael Heyd's description of the period between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as one of transition between orthodoxy and enlightenment has particular application to the theological climate of Geneva, the birthplace of Reformed theology. François LaPlanche refers to this era in Geneva as one of “enlightened or liberal orthodoxy.” He defines such enlightened orthodoxy as a return to the biblical text unencumbered by the controversial language of Reformed scholasticism, with the primary goal of creating a practical form of theology that the average parishioner could understand. One of the most representative theologians of this period and one who was to a great extent responsible for educating an entire generation of “enlightened orthodox” theologians was Louis Tronchin (1629–1705).
“What Must I Do to Be Saved?” Two Paths to Evangelical Conversion in Late Victorian Canada
Authors: Airhart Phyllis D.
Published: April 2006

G. K. Chesterton once remarked that all conservatism is based on the idea that if things are left alone, they will stay unchanged. Challenging this notion, he observed that a white post left alone soon becomes a black post; to maintain a white post one must always be painting it again—and, hence, always be having a revolution. Within evangelical Protestantism in late Victorian Canada a “revolution” of sorts took place in evangelical Protestantism's approach to conversion, the nature and consequences of which have been overlooked because the language of the parties involved has on the surface appeared to differ little from the revivalism which preceded it.