You readers of Church History and of other series devoted to the historiography of Christianity will have smelled audacity in my title. I am not blind to the plenitude of reports concerning persons who, in their many places and times, took themselves, and thus may be taken, as Christians. Discrete information about past Christianity abounds. But few and far between are overall histories of this religion, even in its western manifestation. And the separate episodes can hardly be made to fit into a whole story until we fashion the pieces according to some consistent historical interpretation.

Very few ancient Christian writers have been as maligned by posterity as Tertullian has been. This is understandable, for Tertullian made little effort to endear himself to either his contemporaries or his future readers. His conversion to—many still say “lapse into”—Montanism was not calculated to make him popular with Catholic historians. His so-called legalism has become a favorite straw man for Protestant writers. The disappearance of both Montanism and the ancient African church destroyed the two logical communities where his name might have been venerated. In the sixteenth century a number of scholars became sufficiently interested in him to produce editions of his works; but although his rhetorical ability attracted some attention from the humanists, they found his manner and spirit too uncouth. Protestant rigorists who ought to have welcomed his stringency rejected him because of his emphasis on tradition. Catholic polemicists who could be expected to welcome such an emphasis ignored him because of his apparent denial of the authority of tradition in becomeing a Montanist. Rationalist scholars who ought to have enjoyed his wit and his unflinching logic were unable to sympathize with the seemingly illogical consequences of that logic. The result of these various biases has been a surprising agreement on a generally negative evaluation of Tertullian as a thinker and as a person.

Origen's fullest statement on the selection of church officers occurs in his Homily in Numbers 13.4. The following is a fairly literal translation of the passage:

At the end of his life he prayed to God that He would provide a leader for the people. What are you doing, O Moses? Are not Gersom and Eleazar your sons? Or if you distrust any one of these, are not the sons of your brother great and distinguished men? Why do you not pray to God for them so that He might appoint them leaders of the people? But the leaders in office of the churches should learn not to designate by testimony nor to deliver the leadership of the churches as an inheritance to those who are related to them by blood or are associated with them by fleshly closeness, but to submit to the choice of God and not to choose that one whom human affection commends but to grant entirely to the judgment of God the choice of a successor. Was not Moses able to choose a ruler for the people by a true judgment and to make choice by a correct and just sentence, to whom God had said, “Choose elders for the people, whom you know to be the elders,” and he chose such in whom immediately God's “spirit rested, and they all prophesied.” who therefore is able to choose a leader of the people unless Moses was able? But he did not do it, did not choose, did not dare it. Why did he not dare? That he would not leave to posterity an example of presumption. But listen to what he says, “Let the Lord, the God of spirits and all flesh, provide a man over this congregation, who shall go out and come in before them and who shall lead them forth and lead them back.” If therefore such a one as Moses gives not his judgment in choosing a leader of the people, in appointing a successor, what man would be he who dares to do so, whether of the people who are always accustomed to be moved by shouts for favor or perhaps excited for money, or of the priests themselves who will there be who would judge himself equal to this task, except only him to whom through prayers and petitions it is revealed by God? And just as God says to Moses, “Take to yourself Joshua the son of Nun, a man who has the spirit in him, and lay your hands upon him; and stand him before Eleazar the priest, and command him in the presence of the whole congregation and commission him from yourself before them; and give your honor to him that the children of Israel may hear him.” You hear obviously the ordination of a leader of the people clearly described, so that there is almost no need of exposition. Here there was held no acclamation of the people, no regard of kinship, no consideration of friendship.… The government of the people is delivered to him whom God chose.

There is little doubt that biblical literalism was a characteristic of the main stream of sixteenth-century Anabaptism. By biblical literalism is not meant a wooden, proof-texting, legalistic understanding of every word of the Bible, but a conviction that the plain meaning of scripture could be understood by any sincere Christian, and ought to be obeyed. The Protestant reformers Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Bucer also made the Bible central to their reforming efforts. In a sense this might even be said about the intentions of the Council of Trent. Yet differing hermeneutics and socio-political presuppositions led to vastly different ecclesiastical results. Recent Reformation historiography, particularly in eastern Europe, rightly reminds us of the importance of the social and economic factors involved, but hermeneutics remains a vital part of the dynamic of that period, as of all church history, and must be central to contemporary efforts to overcome the legacy of ecclesiastical fragmentation which that area left us.

King James VI and I had a taste for aphorisms, a circumstance which has occasionally misled the historians of his reign. James's deeply held and lifelong attachment to the doctrine of the divine right of kings is well known and unquestionable; so when, at the Hampton Court Conference, he said, “No bishop, no king”, it has perhaps been too readily assumed that his devotion to episcopacy as a system of church government was as unswerving and permanent as his belief in divine right. The king's admiration for the Church of England and its prelates, his threat at Hampton Court to harry the Puritans out of the land, his savage attack in Basilikon Doron on those “fiery spirited men in the ministry” who “fed themselves with the hope to become Tribuni plebis” but who were really “very pests in Church and Commonweal… breathing nothing but sedition and calumnies”—all this is so familiar as scarcely to require repeating. It is also well known that when he began to govern for himself in Scotland in the 1580s the position of the Scottish bishops was feeble. It continued to worsen for about a decade, as the king and his advisers found it desirable for political reasons to make concessions to the dominant presbyterian wing of the kirk, until the presbyterian historian David Calderwood could write of the year 1596, “The Kirk of Scotland was now come to her perfection.” Then, beginning in 1596, the tide began to run in the opposite direction.

A major problem in assessing the ecclesiastical policies of the government of Louis XIII is the equivocal reputation of its chief ministers as a churchman. Cardinal Richelieu enjoys an uncertain reputation as churchman in large measure because of the inherent ambiguities of his position as both prince of the church and chief minister of the king of France. Further compounding this ambiguous position was Gallicanism, the peculiar stance of the French church on matters of church-state and Franco-papal relations. A classic example of how Gallicanism could introduce complex and independently derived factors into Richelieu's policies was the decennial meeting of the Assembly of the Clergy of 1625. At that meeting, early in Richelieu's tenure as chief minister, the French clergy demonstrated with great vigor that Gallicanism was not a doctrine of the past and that it had wellsprings quite independent of the crown and Richelieu. Even in 1625 most people, including the papal curia, found it difficult to believe that the behavior of the Assembly of the Clergy was not dictated by Richelieu. We shall see, however, that the Assembly adopted measures well calculated to irritate the Holy See at a time when Cardinal Richelieu had every desire to placate Urban VIII. In 1625 Richelieu was negotiating feverishly to extricate Louis XIII from war in the Valtellina without losing the fruits of his aggressive action there. Richelieu's plan called for a papal garrison to be placed in the valley to keep it neutral and closed to Spain. Necessarily, the pope's cooperation was vital, which meant that it was not the moment to offend Urban VIII by attacking papal authority at home.

When Herbert O. Brayer reviewed No Man Knows My History, Fawn Brodie's biography of the Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review in 1946, his words were prophetic. “This book”, he said, “which purports to be a ‘definitive biography’ will probably be one of the most highly praised and highly condemned historical works of 1945.” The book has indeed been highly praised and highly condemned, with plaudits coming generously from professionals in the field of American history. It quickly became the standard life of Joseph Smith and the most influential book on early Mormonism, a status it has retained. Evidence of the respect it still commands is provided by Sidney Ahlstrom of Yale University who recently termed it a “sympathetic and insightful account” which is “unequaled” as a life of the Mormon prophet.