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 post-apostolic generation was not interested in the person who, according to all four gospels, betrayed Jesus the day before his death. This whole episode remained a rather dark spot for the young church, which was in constant self-defence against the manifold powers of the pagan world. It is not astonishing, therefore, that the apologetic literature of the second century carefully avoided this subject. The Judas legend, developing more and more the evil character and the horrible end of the betrayer, does not even appear in the second century writings of Justin, Hermas, and Clement, and we would not know anything about it if Irenaeus and the Catenas of the church had not preserved the Papias fragments for us. The apologetic literature had no use for it.

This year marks the fourth centenary of Richard Hooker, who is perhaps the greatest apologist of the Anglican Church. It is easy to forget this because the epithet “judicious” when used of him conveys to most of us the idea of one who was careful, conscientious and not likely to accept or adopt rash views. But the meaning of the word “judicious” as applied to Hooker is “judicial.” It was used of one who had spoken the last word on a subject, one whose conclusions and opinion were so firmly based that neither premise nor conclusions could be shaken.

The intimate connection between religious rites and civic activities in ancient Rome made it imperative that the Christian Church establish early certain tolerant policies. In a society where even granaries and police barracks had altars to guardian deities, where a citizen could not pay taxes, enter a museum, or collect his dole without coming into contact with an official religion, it was impossible to designate certain areas or buildings as “secular” and others as “religious,” to permit entry to some places and forbid it to others. Thus we find Tertullian about 200 A. D. writing in his De Spectaculis: “There is no law forbidding the mere places to us. For not only the places for show-gatherings, but even the temples, may be entered without any peril of his religion by the servant of God, if he has only some honest reason for it. … The places themselves do not contaminate, but what is done in them.” With the adoption of the new religion as that of the State itself, however, the situation changed. Buildings like the Senate chamber, inaugurated as templum and dedicated to the goddess Victoria, had to continue in their civic functioning. But what of the temples proper—those buildings which could not now justify their existence in terms of civil, social, or political activity?

American Christianity is so diversified and confusing and its material is of such vast extent that the scholars who have worked at the broader aspects of its history have had to bring to their study certain interpretative theses in order to find their way through the material at all. These interpretative theses, some implicitly held and others explicitly stated, some relatively adequate and others fairly weak, have paved the way for a great deal of intensive research, so that the young discipline of American Church History has a solid and illuminating body of material. Out of the research thus far undertaken have sprung new themes of interpretation, so that what may be called an “historiographical cycle” operates. This interaction of research and interpretation has functioned sufficiently well so that the overall picture of American Christian history grows steadily clearer. The process of clarification has, however, proceeded satisfactorily only to a point—to the Civil War. For the years since the Civil War, the picture has not yet come into sharp focus. The interpretative theses thus far proposed have had serious limitations, and as a result the historiographical cycle has not operated to best advantage. The excellent monographic studies that have been done remain therefore somewhat unrelated and leave us with a rather fragmentary understanding of religious history since 1865. Yet in these years occurred decisive developments which must be further probed and clarified if we are to understand more fully the contemporary American religious scene, now so important a part of the total life of the world church. To be sure most of the significant movements of the period have received some attention, but they can be fully understood and their significance grasped only as they are delineated as part of the total history of American Christianity with the interconnections traced and the polarities analyzed. More fruitful and better-directed monographic studies will follow from the setting forth of fresh and rounded themes of interpretation; the historiographical cycle will then operate to better advantage for this important period.

The history of the Estonian nation begins about 2000 B.C. when they settled down in the land which is now known as Estonia. Roman historians called all the peoples of the Baltic area collectively by the name of “Aesti”; later that name came to apply to the Estonians alone. Tacitus thought that the “Aesti” spoke a language “similar to that of the Britons”, whereas in fact the Estonians, Finns and Livs spoke a so-called Finno-Ugri language, utterly distinct from the languages of Slavs, Germanic groups, Latvians and Lithuanians.

The morning of April 8, 1348, began on an ominous note. Milling and shouting thousands covered the area of St. Peter's and surrounded the palace where the cardinals had entered into conclave the day before to elect the successor of Gregory XI, who had chanced to die before returning to Avignon. The Romans were desperate. For nearly seventy years they had lost to Avignon the revenues that had handsomely supported Rome. The city was poverty-stricken; churches and monasteries were in ruins, papal properties dissipated, and rebellion was smoldering. During the customary nine days elapsing between the death of the former pope and election of a new one, citizens and municipal officials of Rome had visited individual cardinals to inform them that they must elect a pope who would reestablish the Holy See in Rome, making it clear that they could not answer for the safety of the cardinals if the latter acted contrary to their wishes.

In the year of the Incarnation 839, there occurred an event which alarmed the inhabitants of Frankland: a royal chaplain named Bodo, nobly born and a deacon in Holy Orders, under singularly dramatic circumstances abandoned the Christian faith for Judaism, changed his name to Eleazar, took a Jewish wife, and went to live in Saracenic Spain. The incident is remarkable for three reasons. First, it shows the vitality of Jewish proselytism in the ninth-century Western world. Secondly, it had some effect on the relations between the Frankish state and the Spanish Muslim government.

It is commonly said that the two live movements in European and American Christianity during the eighteenth century were rationalism and pietism. Both were rooted in the seventeenth century. And commonly their differences, which were real, are stressed to the point of making them appear to have been completely separate and even mutually exclusive developments. This obscures the fact that in origin they were but obverse sides of a single movement which gathered enough power and momentum during the eighteenth century to sweep in religious freedom and separation of church and state over the opposition of the great bulk of traditional orthodoxy in the churches.

This unsigned tract published in 1645 is one of the most interesting and historically significant documents in the polemic literature of the Puritan Revolution; it has also been described as “one of the halfdozen most important contributions ever made to the theory of religious toleration in England.” The authorship has never been established, though some speculation has attributed the work to Francis Rous, Puritan mystic and leading member of Parliament. But certain references in contemporary documents, together with considerations of thought and style provide conclusive evidence that the pamphlet is from the pen of Joshua Sprigge, army chaplain, Fellow of All Souls College, constant advocate of toleration, and author of several sermons and political tracts, among them the important history of the army under Fairfax, Anglia Rediviva.

Until the appearance of Rudolf Sohm's Kirchenrecht in 1892 and of Karl Rieker's study, Die rechtliche Stellung der evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung bis zur Gegenwart in 1893, the opinion prevailed among scholars by and large that the historic development in the relationship of the church in Germany to the state was contrary to the ideal of the Reformer. This ideal was held to be an autonomous congregational church based upon evangelical principles, an interpretation which had received the support of Aemil Richter's authority in Die Geschichte der cvangelischen Kirciwnverfassung in Deutschland, 1851. Since then, Reformation students have divided on this question. Luther wrote of the Notbischöfe: “I wish to leave the jurists … to settle this disputation … I will write as a theologian and a heretic,” and thereby he left a legacy of controversy both to jurists and historians. With equal truth Luther could write, “The other articles … I commend to the lawyers, for it is not my business as an evangelist to decide and judge in these matters. I shall instruct and teach consciences what pertains to divine and Christian matters,” and still maintain, “that since the time of the apostles the secular sword and authority has never been so clearly described and grandly lauded as by me, which even my enemies must acknowledge.” He was involved by circumstances in social and political questions which were not per se his concern as a theologian. Several factors complicate an analysis of Luther's theory of church and state, the immediacy of the medieval inheritance, conceptual differences of terminology from current usage, the complexity of the transitional historical situation, and Luther's characteristic way of addressing himself to a problem without relating his plan of action to his total theory. In fact, Dieckhoff says that as the pertinent quotations lie side by side, it is impossible to harmonize them. Such pessimism, however, is unwarranted, for Luther was never pathologically dialectical and his position can be satisfactorily understood if viewed in relation to his central orientation. Luther's political theory involved, of course, many facets, the question of Imperial power, papal theory, war, toleration, the Turkish question, feudal loyalties, and others. A study of the Notbischöfe problem is central, however, for an understanding of his ecclesiology and the much debated church-state question.

It is an easy and not an essentially inaccurate generalization to say that Latin America is a Catholic world. If we begin to apply the generalization more narrowly, caution and reservations become increasingly necessary. In parts of Haiti, for example, the Catholic veneer is thin. A useful book about Mexico published some years ago carried the intriguing title Idols Behind Altars. Its author did not mean the connotation exactly as it sounds but she might have so meant it. In large parts of Indo-America, especially in those areas such as the Andean highlands and parts of Central America and southern Mexico where the pre-Columbian Indian cultures were best developed and most tenacious, Catholicism has had to make a degree of accommodation which adopted and adapted various pagan practices. The same process occurred about a millennium earlier when Christianity moved into pagan Germany.

Perhaps the most famous religious dispute of the latter half of the sixteenth century was that between Walter Haddon (1516–1572), the distinguished English Latinist, and Jerome Osorio de Fonseca (1506–1580), Portuguese bishop and eminent Ciceronian. The controversy was a part of the tumult over the church establishment of Queen Elizabeth which eventually led to her excommunication by Pope Pius V in 1570, and to the final separation of the Church of England from Rome. Though neither participant was primarily a theologian, the affair attracted a great deal of attention in its time because of the commanding reputations of both men as Latin stylists. By his fellow-Englishmen, Haddon was regarded as the best Latin orator, poet, and epistolist of his generation; and on the Continent Osorio was widely admired not only for his skill in Scriptural studies but also for his excellent Ciceronianism.

Shortly before the opening of the nineteenth century there began what American historians have chosen to call the Home Missionary Movement. This phenomenon in American social and religious history must not be confused with “church extension,” for its purpose was not to extend religious denominations as such. but rather to “save souls.” This missionary enterprise was carried out chiefly by various missionary “societies”—both denominational and interdenominational. Some of these groups were all-inclusive in their missionary interests, but others were limited to specific phases of the work, such as the distributional enterprises. While these organizations flourished along the Atlantic seaboard, their chief concern was the spiritual welfare of the inhabitants of the frontier where the easterners believed that shameful lawlessness and immorality prevailed.

At the present time ideas of church reunion are current in many forms. Journals are appearing which are devoted exclusively to the exposition of dogmatic positions in an increasingly irenical light. Not the least important among these publications devoted to the expository method of clearing up possible areas of thought for reunion are Irenikon, produced by the Benedictines at Chevtogne, and Catholica, published at Münster under the auspices of Dr. Robert Grosche. Catholica has once again appeared after eleven years of virtual suspension and Dr. Grosche lauds the theologisches Gespräch “as the recognized way which can bring us nearer to the unity of the Church.” With respect to actual ecumenical meetings the Faith and Order Conference of the World Council of Churches met in Lund, Sweden, in 1952, and there Greek Orthodox, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, Anglican and free church representatives, and even Roman Catholic observers, rubbed shoulders and discussed problems of ecclesiology with church unity as the ultimate goal.

Konstantin Pobedonostsev, over-procurator of the holy synod in the Russian Church from 1880 until 1905, occupies an important place in Russia's history. As adviser and confidant of the last tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II, he left his firm imprint upon imperial policies during years of crisis. As ruler of the church he also played a significant part in religious affairs—a part which has not yet been accurately evaluated. Too often it has been assumed that ardent religious faith guided his conduct of church affairs, and he has been likened to Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, or called the Russian Torquemada. In truth, however, Pobedonostsev was a man of politics; more particularly, a man of Russian politics. His main objective was always the preservation of a strong and powerful Russian state; and in almost every act which at first glance appears to have been determined by religious motives, a more critical study reveals the primacy of his political aims.

John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) is best known to the world as the pioneer of modern educational theories and methods. More particularly is he remembered as the author of a series of elementary Latin textbooks for which many generations of schoolboys in the bygone days have called him blessed. But although he has richly deserved the praise he has received for his pedagogical reforms, that contribution by no means exhausts his astonishingly many-sided accomplishments. For he was the author of almost two hundred treatises (some of them rather forbiddingly bulky tomes, not all so far published), dealing with scientific, linguistic, pedagogical, philosophical, political, literary, and above all religious and theological subjects. He was likewise a fervent enthusiast for religious and political peace during one of the most disturbed periods of European history—the era of the Thirty Years' War. And above all, he was a convinced believer in pansophy—the principle of unification of all scientific, philosophical, political, and religious knowledge into one all-embracing, harmonious world-view. Previously, the term pansophy was used by Peter Laurenberg (1585- 1639) for an encyclopaedic compend of universal knowledge. Comenius gave it a deeper connotation, that of correlating all knowledge by means of an unifying principle. Thus he endeavored to produce an encyclopaedic, unified system of education which would fuse into one whole all knowledge, ethics, and religion, and by having all people educated in this system, would ultimately secure universal peace. His pansophy is, therefore, the dominant principle of almost everything he wrote, pervading it either explicitly or implicitly. Surprisingly enough, by reason of the recent discovery of Comenius' long lost pansophic corpus, we hope soon to learn more about this important aspect of his work than we have known hitherto.

Most historians of the Pacific Northwest attribute the beginning of Christian missions in the old Oregon country to the appearance at St. Louis, Missouri, in the fall of 1831 of four Nez Perce Indians. According to Protestant sources these Indians were seeking the “Book of Life;” according to Roman Catholics they sought the “Blackrobes,” as the Jesuit missionaries were known. Some modern historians, unable to account for the Indians' interest in Christianity, have even asserted that they had no religious interest at all. The publicity given this event caused the Methodist Church to send out the Reverend Jason Lee in 1834, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to send out the Reverend Samuel Parker in 1835. As a result of these exploratory trips the Methodists established themselves in the Willamette Valley and the American Board sent Marcus Whitman, Henry Spalding and W. H. Gray in 1836 and Cushing Eells, Elkanah Walker and A. B. Smith in 1838 into the area of eastern Washington and Idaho now called the Inland Empire. The Roman Catholic priests, Fathers DeMers and Blanchet, arrived at Fort Vancouver in the fall of 1838.

An inventory of research projects in progress in the field of Missions reveals a marked reversal of the long prevailing trend towards studies concerned with strategy and tactics, with methods and techniques, and with area surveys. History holds the center of interest at this moment. Fully half of the projects reported by the foreign mission boards and by the professors of missions are of a historical nature and numbers of others are closely related and require an historical approach.