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.

Christian freedom was a major concern for Calvin from the very beginning of his theological career. The very long sixth and final chapter of the first edition of the Institutes is devoted to this question. He opens the chapter by calling this freedom “a matter of prime necessity; … without a knowledge of it consciences dare undertake almost nothing without faltering, often hesitate and draw back, constantly waver and are afraid … unless this freedom be grasped, neither Christ nor gospel truth is rightly known.” From this first edition till the last Calvin continues to talk at length about three aspects of Christian freedom: freedom of the conscience and freedom from the law because of justification by grace alone; freedom of the liberated Christian to obey God's will voluntarily and not out of necessity; and freedom in outward things which are “indifferent,” that is, in themselves neither necessary nor forbidden. For much of this understanding Calvin is deeply indebted to Luther and Melanchthon.

On 11 November 1417 the Great Western Schism ended with the election of one pope accepted by almost all of western Christendom. The thirty-nine terrible years of disunity were over, and the members of the Council of Constance had good reason to rejoice. Among those at Constance who did not live to see this happy day was Cardinal Franciscus Zabarella, who had died in late September and who up to his death had been considered a leading candidate for the papacy. During the council he had indicated in several sermons and addresses how much the unity which they had sought for so long meant to him and his contemporaries. He expressed these ideas and sentiments on the occasions when, little by little, various groups were united with and took their places at the Council at Constance in the years 1415–1416, reintegrating the fragmented western church. These sermons reflected the hopes and dreams of the members of the council.

No literary product of the humanistic period north of the Alps enjoyed a wider circulation or had a more lasting impact than satire. By far the best known of Erasmus's works today is In Praise of Folly, a satire that lays open and criticizes the foolishness of pre-Reformation society. Yet the prince of humanism had produced only a derivative of another satire, Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff which also claimed a spot on the Western world's best-seller list for a few centuries. Sebastian Brant and Erasmus still are recognized as two of the severest critics of the society in which they lived, and their conception of pre-Reformation life set the trend for generations of historians to come. Erasmus's “Fool Stultitia continues, year after year, to climb her pulpit and deliver her oration to new audiences in every langauge…”

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.

Over the past few years a spate of books and articles have forced scholars to reject the idea that the Anglican church was created as a compromise between Queen Elizabeth, who would have preferred to return to Henrician Catholicism, and radical Protestants, who wished to create in England a godly society modeled on the Swiss Reformation. This historiographic revolution has been led by historians who have challenged J. E. Neale's tale of a Puritan opposition party which was born in 1559 and bedeviled the queen for her entire reign. Demonstrating that the queen achieved the religious settlement she desired in 1559, they have forced us to question anew Elizabeth's attitude toward her church and to challenge some of the assumptions upon which ecclesiastical historians, following Neale, have built their histories of the Elizabethan church.

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.

The Schools of Christian Doctrine taught the fundamentals of Catholicism, and reading and writing, to a very large number of boys and girls in sixteenth-century Italy. Numerous laymen and laywomen gave up their holiday leisure in order to teach in these schools. The Schools of Christian Doctrine were a significant feature of the Catholic Reformation, a broad movement of Catholic renewal that began before 1517 and whose major initiatives were not necessarily responses to the Protestant Reformation. New religious orders, missionary activity, the founding of institutions to care for the sick, poor, and homeless, and a general effort to teach and preach to the laity more effectively characterized the Catholic Reformation. Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, and others provided leadership and were canonized in later centuries. Scholars have given all of the above a good deal of attention, but probably only specialists are aware of the Schools of Christian Doctrine.

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.

From the publication of Peter Heylyn's History of the Sabbath in 1636 to the most recent studies of this doctrine, sabbatarianism has been treated as an important and controversial issue in the post-Reformation period. These studies portray sabbatarianism as a puritan innovation, which that party introduced in an effort to reform the church from below, having failed to covert the English church to presbyterianism. This doctrinal innovation has been described by Professor Collinson as “something more than a certain ethical and social attitude to the use of Sunday: it implies the doctrinal assertion that the fourth commandment is not an obsolete ceremonial law of the Jews but a perpetual, moral law, binding on Christians; in other words, that the Christian observance of Sunday has its basis not in ecclesiastical tradition but in the decalogue.”

Among the many fruits of the evangelical piety within British Protestantism was the movement of renewal which crystallized around the end of the 1820s into the sect usually known as the Plymouth Brethren (or Christian Brethren as they now prefer). Brethren have “remained fairly small numerically… but [with] a theological influence much larger than [their] membership would indicate.” It is hard to say exactly when the group first appeared; its period of gestation lasted several years. At the outset “the founders … had no programme, manifesto or creed.” The sect originated among a group of earnest seekers centered first in Dublin and later in Plymouth, where at the beginning of the 1830s they began to take on the form of an organized movement. It soon had followers throughout the British Isles, and a few adherents were gathered in France, Germany, and Switzerland. Though eventually the Brethren became a predominantly lower middle-class body, the leaders of the first stage of the movement were drawn almost exclusively from the upper ranks of society: Anglican clergymen, Oxford dons, lawyers, doctors, sons of country families or wealthy merchants, and even a future peer of the realm. They were then all young men in their twenties or early thirties, nearly all of them well educated and several of them excellent classical or biblical scholars.

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.”

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.

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.

Most of the standard books on the social gospel mention Charles Oliver Brown's Talks on the Labor Troubles, published in 1886, the year of the Haymarket riot, as one of the early clerical statements on the problem of labor in America. Several of them also allude to Brown's controversy in San Francisco with George D. Herron in 1895. But these writers on the social gospel were unaware of Brown's importance, even though Henry F. May noted that a whole issue of The Kingdom, a paper issued by Herron's supporters, was devoted to the refutation of Brown's charges against Herron.

It is often asserted that the aggrandizement of the papacy during the nineteenth century reached its height with the definition of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870. A case can be made, however, for the view that that definition, with its careful delimitations, was in fact a kind of anticlimax, that the ultramontane high tide really had been reached, and checked, five years before with the issuance of the Syllabus of Errors and the fateful intervention of Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans.

In April 1895, the Pittsburgh Catholic, the official diocesan newspaper, proudly reported: the “progress” of Catholicism “is conspicuously marked in this diocese by the steady increase of churches to accom[m]odate the faithful”.This glowing assessment was prompted by news that the city's first Slovak Catholic church, Saint Elizabeth's, had been organized. Saint Elizabeth's came into existence because Slovak lay Catholics had taken it upon themselves to found a national church. If the diocese defined “progress” as an increase in the number of churches, Pittsburgh's Slovak immigrants certainly contributed to that progress during the next decade. By 1909, lay-initiated movements had led to the formation of three more Slovak Catholic churches in Pittsburgh.

Lord Halifax is primarily remembered for his dedication to ecumenism. Negotiations with the Vatican concerning the validity of Anglican orders and the pioneering conversations with Cardinal Mercier are examples of his efforts to bring unity and peace to Christendom. Believing that certain practices, devotions, and customs were the inheritance of all Christians, he sought to introduce into the Church of England some of those common elements. One, absent since the sixteenth century, was Benedictine monasticism. Not only did the Anglican church have the right to claim monastic life as part of its tradition, he insisted, but Benedictine life in the Church of England might invigorate a structure many believed was static.

In 1859 an influential theological quarterly asserted without fear of contradiction that postmillennialism was the “commonly received doctrine” among American Protestants; but by the early twentieth century, it had largely vanished, and Lewis Sperry Chafer, with only slight partisan exaggeration, could claim in 1936 that it was without “living voice”. In part, this change resulted from the defection of conservatives like Chafer to the expanding premillennial ranks, and several historians have told their story in detail. The disappearance of postmillennialism outside of premillennial quarters, however, has received scant attention. There—especially among the moderate to liberal Protestants with whom this article is chiefly concerned—the once dominant eschatology appears not to have suffered outright rejection but to have ebbed away. Although its remants endured as faith in progress, it gradually ceased to be a distinct biblically grounded eschatology.

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.