Forty years ago George Every called the attention of the scholarly world to the likelihood that in the oriental patriarchates after the time of John of Damascus the Arabic language increasingly became the language of the Melkite, or Roman (rūmī), community of Christians in the caliphate. They came to use Arabic, Every suggested, not only for scholarly purposes, but even for the divine liturgy, at least for the Scripture lessons.1 In the years since Every made these observations it has become increasingly clear that not only was there such an increase in the use of Arabic in the church during the first Abbasid century, but that the crescendo in the use of Arabic went hand in hand with the diminishment of Greek as a language of church scholarship in the monasteries of the Holy Land from early Abbasid times, perhaps even until the Ottoman period, when the so-called “Rūm Millet” reintroduced the control of Greek speakers in the Jerusalem patriarchate.2 Accordingly, one might speak of the first flowering of Christian life in Arabic in the Holy Land as having occurred during the three centuries stretching from 750, the beginning of the Abbasid caliphate, to around the year 1050, the eve of the crusader period in Near Eastern history.3 And the documentary evidence for the literary activity of the Holy Land monks who wrote in Arabic during this period is largely the archive of “old south Palestinian texts” which Joshua Blau studied for his Grammar of Chrtstian Arabic.4

The Catholic church during the era of the Catholic Reformation experienced great vitality and vigor. Missionary activity was one of the clearest indications of this renewed spiritual energy. Simultaneously with Catholic revitalization there occurred the expansion of European commerce and colonization. In the wake of the Age of Discovery portions of Africa, Asia, and the New World became more accessible to Europeans. The Catholic church, by means of its religious orders, carried Christianity to the inhabitants of these regions. The drive and dedication which led to reform of the church within Europe also fueled an intense missionary commitment towards the people of other continents. The dedication and zeal of the regular clergy reflected the apostolic tradition within the church, but this older ideal was enhanced by a new spirit of expansionism. The Catholic religious orders shared the urge of many of their secular contemporaries to take advantage of new opportunities for growth overseas.

When the early nineteenth-century pastor William Henry Foote reflected upon the eighteenth-century Christians who were his forebears in North Carolina and Virginia, he paused at one point to make an observation about the clothes they wore. “A church-going people are a dress-loving people”, he said; “The sanctity and decorum of the house of God are inseparably associated with a decent exterior; and the spiritual, heavenly exercises of the inner man are incompatible with a defiled and tattered, or slovenly mein. All regular Christian assemblies cultivate a taste for dress, and none more so than the hardy pioneer settlers of Upper Carolina, and the valley and mountains of Virginia” As they readied themselves for worship, Foote elaborated, the faithful “put on their best and carefully preserved dress” in preparation for “their approach to the King of Kings”.

Among nineteenth-century North American Lutherans the only corporate body to take an early, serious, and vigorous stand on behalf of the abolition of human slavery was a small group in upper New York State called the Franckean Evangelic Synod.1 On 25 May 1837, at a meeting held in a small country chapel in Minden township, Montgomery County, four Lutheran clergymen and twenty-seven lay delegates broke with the Hartwick Synod and formed the new association. It was named after the German Lutheran Pietist cleric and humanitarian August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). The abolitionist convictions of the Franckean Synod were embedded in the main body of its constitution. No minister who was a slaveholder or engaged in the traffic of human beings or advocated the system of slavery then existing in the United States could be accepted into the synod nor could a layperson practicing any of the above serve as a delegate to synodical meetings.2 By 1848 these restrictions were increased to include laity who “justified the sin of slavery” and clergy “who did not oppose” it.3 Such precise constitutional requirements in opposition to human slavery remain without precedent in the history of the Lutheran church.

At the end of August 1914, with German troops having violated Belgian neutrality and rapidly advancing toward Paris, German Protestants made a desperate bid for a show of solidarity from the Protestant majority of Britain and the Protestant minority of France. In an “Appeal to Protestant Christians Abroad” leaders of the German Protestant missions movement expressed their hope that the war would not spread to Africa nor result in an “incurable rent” in the Protestant fellowship. Recalling the spirit of cooperation at the international Missionary Conference of Edinburgh in 1910 they urged that the mission fields not become battlefields, lest the gospel message of love be discredited in the eyes of the heathen.1