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The Church: Ideology or Institution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Robert M. Kingdon
Robert M. Kingdon
Affiliation:
This presidential address was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church Hzstory, 28 December 1980. Mr. Kingdon is director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities and professor of history in the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Extract

I am greatly honored but a bit puzzled to find myself president of the American Society of Church History. Most of my predecessors in this position have been professors within theological faculties or departments of religion. Even those who have been, like me, members of secular departments of history, have generally received some formal instruction in religious studies. But this year you have chosen a president who is entirely secular in both education and career, whose graduate training was in diplomatic history of the Reformation period and whose teaching has been largely limited to secular state universities. I descend, to be sure, from a line of Protestant missionaries, ministers and religious educators, and over the years I have learned a good deal of historical theology from some very gifted students. But neither asset, I fear, places me very securely within the line of succession in which I now find myself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 81 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1981

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References

1. My dissertation was later published as Kingdon, Robert M., Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555–1563 (Geneva, 1956).Google Scholar

2. For example, Spitz, Lewis W., “History: Sacred and Secular,” Church History 47 (1978):5–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I am particularly indebted to Spitz for his survey of other presidential addresses to this society, pp. 5–9.

3. This point is made more amply by Trinterud, L. J., “The Task of the American Church Historian,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 25 (1956): 3–15, especially p. 15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Bowden, Henry Warner, Church History in the Age of Science: Historiographical Patterns in the United States, 1876–1918 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1971), especially p. 60.Google Scholar

5. “Est autem ecclesia congregatio sanctorum, in qua evangelium pure docetur et recte administrantur sacramenta.” See Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, 5th ed. (Göttingen, 1963), p. 61Google Scholar for both Latin and German texts, and pp. 233–246 for a more extended explanation of this article.

6. “Car par tout où nous voyons la parolle de Dieu estre purement preschée et escoutée les Sacremens estre administrez selon l'institution de Christ, là il ne faut douter nullement qu'il n'y ait Eglise.” 4.1.9. In the critical edition of Benoĉt, Jean-Daniel (Paris, 1957–1963), 4.20.Google Scholar

7. From Vermigli's loci De ecclesia and De schismate, as excerpted and translated in the posthumous Common Places collected from his writings, in the 1583 English ed. (STC 24669), 4.1.1 and 4.6.16, with spelling, capitalization and punctuation modernized. Also quoted and discussed at more length in Kingdon, Robert M., “Peter Martyr Vermigli and the Marks of the True Church,” in Forrester, F.Church, and George, Timothy, eds., Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History: Essays Presented to George Huntston Williams (Leiden, 1979), especially p. 205.Google Scholar

8. Pointed out and documented by Tadataka Maruyama The Ecclesiology of Theodore Beza (Geneva, 1978), p. 211.Google Scholar

9. Beza, Theodore, A Discourse of the True and Visible Markes of the Catholique Churche, 1582 (STC 2014),Google Scholar sigs. Dv-[D]2 (hereafter cited as Beza, Marks; spelling, capitalization and punctuation again modernized). See Maruyama, , The Ecclesiology of Theodore Beza, pp. 164–173,Google Scholar for an extended analysis of this treatise.

10. Beza, Marks, sigs. [C6], [C7]v.

11. “propterea Ecclesiam veram invisibilem faciunt… Ecclesia enim est coetus hominum ita visibilis, et palpabilis, ut est coetus populi Romani, vel Regnum Galliae, aut Respublica Venetorum.” Robert Bellarmine, Controversiarum de conciliis, lib. 3, cap. 2; in the J. Fèvre ed. of his Opera), 2: 318. This passage was called to my attention by Robert W. Richgels of Viterbo College, the author of an unpublished University of Wisconsin-Madison Ph.D. dissertation of 1973 on “Bellarmine's Use of Calvin in the Controversies.” The passage is also cited by Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, England, 1978), 2: 147, as a part of an analysis of the sixteenth-century Thomist theory of the church, pp. 144–148,Google Scholarto which I am indebted.

12. Bellarmine, Robert, Controversiarum de conciliis, lib. 4, cap. 1–18; in the Fèvre ed., 2: 361–407.Google Scholar

13. Mead, Sidney E., “Church History Explained,” Church History 32 (1963): 19–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Ibid., pp. 25–27.

15. Pauck, Wilhelm, “The Idea of the Church in Christian History,” Church History 21 (1952): 191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Ibid. p. 210.

17. Clebsch, William A., “Toward a History of Christianity,” Church History 43(1974): 5–16, especially p. 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Schaer, André, Le clergé paroissial catholique en haute Alsace sous l'ancien régime, 1648–1789 (Paris, 1966)Google Scholar.

19. Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Religion in the Neighborhood: The Stones of Sainte-Croix Parish,” read to an American Historical Association meeting in New York, 28 December 1979.Google Scholar 1am grateful to Professor Davis for giving me a copy of this unpublished version.

20. Kingdon, Robert M., “Protestant Parishes in the Old World and the New: The Cases of Geneva and Boston,” Church History 48 (1979): 290–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York, 1962).Google Scholar

22. Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1977);Google ScholarFlandrin, Jean-Louis, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality in Early Modern France (Cambridge, England, 1979).Google Scholar

23. Monter, E. William, “The Consistory of Geneva, 1559–1569,” Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 38 (1976): 467–484, especially p. 484.Google Scholar

24. Kingdon, Robert M., “The Control of Morals in Calvin's Geneva,” in The Social History of the Reformation, ed. Buck, Lawrence P. and Zophy, Jonathan W. (Columbus, 1972), p. 12.Google Scholar

25. Monter, , “The Consistory of Geneva,” pp. 477–478.Google Scholar

26. For elaboration and documentation, see Kingdon, Robert M., “Social Welfare in Calvin's Geneva,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 50–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

27. Olson, Jeannine Evelyn, “The Bourse Francaise: Deacons and Social Welfare in Calvin's Geneva,” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1980).Google Scholar

28. Biaudet, Henri, Les nonciatures apostoliques permanentes jusqu'en 1648, in Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, ser. B 2, vol. 1 (Helsinki, 1910);Google Scholar Liisi Karttunen, Grégoire XIII comme politicien et souverain, in ibid., ser. B 2, vol. 2 (Helsinki, 1911); von Törne, P. O., Ptolémée Gallio, cardinal de Come: étude sur la cour de Rome, sur la secrétairerie pontificale, et sur la politique des papes au XVI' siècle (Helsinki and Paris, 1907).Google Scholar

29. Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland nebst erganzenden Actenstücken, ed. by the preussische, K.historische Institut in Rom, especially section 3 (1572–1585),Google Scholar and by the Görres-Gesellschaft, especially section 1 (1585–1590, 1892–).

30. Acta Nuntiaturae Gallicae (Rome, 1961-),Google Scholar especially vols. 12, 13, Correspondance du nonce en France Antonio Maria Salviati (1572–1578), ed. Pierre Hurtubise and Robert Toupin, 1975.

31. Two particularly suggestive studies of educational institutions sponsored by religious bodies which have come to my recent attention are Strauss, Gerald, Luther's House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, 1978)Google Scholar and Courtenay, William J., “The Effect of the Black Death on English Higher Education,” Speculum 55 (1980): 696–714.CrossRefGoogle Scholar