In the twentieth century some significant secondary literature concerning Gregory Nazianzen has emphasized either his attacks on philosophy or the absence in his works of a rationale for the relationship between philosophy and theology. At times these apparent weaknesses are explained as integral to his rhetorical education and interests, almost as if all rhetoricians are the opposite of philosophers. Rosemary Ruether's Gregory of Nazianzus: Rhetor and Philosopher, the most influential monograph to deal specifically with these questions in the last few years, does depict Nazianzen's rationale for relating philosophy and theology. Yet she concludes that “we would be wrong if we were to suppose that Gregory either acknowledges or is aware of any dependence of Christianity on those [philosophical] traditions,” even though he loved and studied them. For her the Cappadocian stands in the line of Christian apologists who saw both Greek philosophy and religion as blasphemous.

The association of the early Tudors with the elimination of ecclesiastical prerogatives and immunities has achieved a conspicuous respectability. Most attention is lavished justifiably upon Henry VIII, but the plural is stubborn. Henry VII has been paired with his more combative son, and his reign (1485–1509) is commonly credited as an important phase in the evolution of anticlerical prohibitions. Scholars seem convinced that he and his council “attacked” sanctuary and that the privilege's abridgment was something of a rehearsal for the English Reformation. But it is still possible, and not wholly unprecedented, to challenge the familiar view and to ask whether policies appraised as “notable encroachments” were either notable or, in fact, encroachments. After a sketch of the practice of sanctuary and a synoptical review of the thinking that led to sanctuary's destruction, we can return to Henry VII's council and courts and reevaluate earliest Tudor policy as an illustration of certain late medieval transformations of the abiding coalition between crown and church.

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.

Between 1640 and 1660 the English nation experienced a political, social, and religious upheaval which in retrospect can only be called a revolution. So profound was this crisis, epitomized by the public execution of a duly anointed king, that not even the restoration of the Stuart monarchy could reverse the long-term effects of those turbulent decades. Historians long have noted the religious purpose and zeal which moved so many of the king's subjects, egged on by their ministers, to resort to insurrection against their lawful sovereign. For example, Stephen Marshall, parliamentary preacher, spoke to the House of Commons in February 1642 on the impending civil war: “If this work be to avenge God's church against Babylon, he is a blessed man that takes and dashes the little ones against the stone.” In August of the same year William Carter told the Commons that God sometimes commanded brother to fight against brother: “God hath put into your hands, a work of his, the greatest that hath been on foot for God in these islands for many hundred years … God hath called you to the purging of the land of those locusts and caterpillers.” Two years later, the war against the king still unconcluded, Edmund Staunton declared: “There is a fire of civill war kindled in England, still burning in the bowels of it … but two bloods will quench it, the blood of Christ and that of his desperate enemies.” Such statements, while prompted by the revolutionary stirrings of the 1640s, must be set in the larger context of Puritan theories of war and peace. From the 1570s when Puritanism emerged as a distinct party of reform within the Church of England until 1641 when the Long Parliament convened, English Puritans developed a considerable body of literature dealing with the nature, purpose, and limits of warfare. The purpose of this article is to examine in this literature what might be called a Puritan theology, or perhaps better, spirituality of warfare in prerevolutionary England.

At the 1937 Edinburgh World Conference on Faith and Order, Louis Goebel of the Evangelical and Reformed Church stood on a curb between sessions with a group of delegates. On the other side of the street a lone figure passed. “Look,’ one of the delegates said, “there goes the man who taught the Niebuhr brothers.” Goebel looked up and saw Samuel Press.