During the first phase of the Iconoclastic Controversy (717–787), John of Damascus emerged as the chief spokesman of the iconodules. His apologetic for icons, developed in his Treatises Against Those Who Attack the Holy Images (around 730) provided the rationale for the dogmatic decree legitimizing icons, which was adopted at the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicea II, 787). Exegetical, hermeneutical, and christological arguments played the dominant roles in his defense of the legitimacy of icons. An additional element in the Damascene's apologetic was an innovative theory of human cognition which placed a high value on created materiality, and thus extended the traditional Eastern Christian appreciation of the material world.

“Again am I commencing another manuscript,” wrote Rachel Stearns in October of 1836, a “brief record of the most interesting events of my life, of the Lord's dealings with me, and of my own feelings and conduct. Faithful monitors in future years to warn me against departing from my God, by a detail of past sufferings in consequence of wandering; to encourage me to trust in God, by a recollection of the many deliverances I have experienced. Very joyful has been my path sometimes, at others very sad, but in sadness or in joy the Lord has never forsaken me.”

Medieval Christians were fascinated by the character of the Samaritan woman, whose story is presented in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John. Numerous legends celebrating her life history recounted in imaginative detail the heroic deeds of this convert to Christ. The Bible itself, of course, gives no information about her following her encounter with Jesus, nor does it even mention her name. But medieval hagiographers named her Photina and recounted her brave witness to the gospel, leading to her ultimate martyrdom. One legend reports that she converted the daughter of Nero and was martyred in Rome. Another places her in Carthage, where she preached the gospel and died in prison. Although ancient and medieval commentaries on the fourth Gospel do not commemorate these extracanonical accomplishments, they portray the Samaritan woman's personality and discipleship in equally flattering ways. Not only does she beautifully model the sinner's conversion to Christ, but she also demonstrates admirable zeal in bearing witness to Christ among her fellow Samaritans. On the basis of her testimony, a host of the citizens of Sychar come to faith in Christ, a feat matched by none of Jesus' disciples in the pages of the Gospels.

Philip Melanchthon's 1539 treatise On the Authority of the Church and the Writings of the Ancient Fathers (hereafter De ecclesiae autoritate) occupies a prominent place in the canon of his theological writings. Few texts of the Reformation period state so clearly the principles according to which the Fathers and the councils of the church may be considered authentic sources for Christian doctrine. To set the work within the canon of Melanchthon's theological work is not necessarily to say that other genres are not present in it, however. The compartmentalization of a thinker's work, while perhaps heuristically necessary, always risks distortion. The danger is all the more present with regard to an author like Melanchthon, whose intellectual interests were broad and whose historical importance is many-sided. The scope of Melanchthon's activities is broad, and so are the contexts and ramifications of his important writings. In 1960 Peter Fraenkel called De ecclesiae autoritate Melanchthon's “patrology”—not an inaccurate label, but an overly restrictive one.

In his historical defense of the doctrines of the Church of England, published in 1826, Robert Southey assumed that “the question concerning the celibacy of the clergy had been set at rest throughout Protestant Europe.” The conclusion that Anglicanism necessarily entailed the rejection of celibacy was, in early-nineteenth-century England, decidedly premature, and the ambiguity over celibacy in the Church of England is starkly and exceptionally exposed in the life and work of John Henry Newman. Recent assessments of Newman's peculiar standing in Victorian society have often emphasized the sexual—or rather, the seemingly sexless—dimension of his image, as if to concur with Sydney Smith's celebrated witticism: “Don't you know, as the French say, there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen?” The nature of specifically clerical celibacy, however, and its influence on the young Newman, have tended to be overlooked in favor of a general psychosexual understanding of his own unwillingness to marry. As an antidote to such readings, this essay will explore the distinctively Anglican and firmly intellectual tradition behind Newman's decision, and will thereby argue that his celibacy was not as “perverse”—a word which, in Victorian England, connoted conversion to Catholicism as well as sexual peculiarity—as it has sometimes been made to seem.

When a Yankee named George Washington rode into the town of Lebanon in central Kentucky during the summer of 1834, most townspeople grew suspicious of what they called “his eastern ways.” Washington assumed control of the eight-year-old Presbyterian school for girls and soon made it his goal to monopolize education in the area. Finding that since 1828 the Catholic Sisters of Loretto ran Saint Augustine's Female Academy in the same town, Washington, according to one report, “did all in his power to bring odium upon” the rival institution. He even encouraged some sort of ill reports about the school's principal, Sister Ann Constantia Spalding, the daughter of prominent Catholic pioneers Henrietta and Richard Spalding. Within that first year, Washington challenged Sister Spalding to select a handful of her students to face a like number of his pupils in a debate so that the public might judge, as he wrote, which “is the best of the two [schools].” “‘Which is the best of the two,’” Spalding responded, [would have been more grammatically written ‘which is the better of the two.’” Having thus asserted herself, Spalding politely declined the invitation. Embarrassed by this exchange, Washington slipped out of town at the end of the academic year.

Early in his career, when he still trusted in the power of councils to effect reform, Martin Luther wrote: [The Romanists] are not empowered to prohibit a council or, according to their pleasure, to determine its decisions in advance, to bind it and to rob it of freedom. But if they do so, I hope to have shown that of a truth they belong to the community of Antichrist and the devil.” Some seventy years before Luther's appeal to the German nobility, however, the Spanish theologian and noted conciliarist, Juan de Segovia, who championed the authority of councils throughout his career, had already drawn a more startling connection between the chief “Romanist” opponent of councils and the spiritual adversaries of Christendom. For, in several works written in the 1450s, Segovia identified Pope Eugenius IV with Lucifer.

Imperial law strictly prohibited religious novelty in eighteenth-century Germany. The Westphalian Peace accords of 1648, which served as the constitutional framework for the German empire until Napoleon, banned all public expression objectionable to the three sanctioned churches: the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist or Reformed. Various ordinances applied the Westphalian definitions broadly, but the jurisdictional quilt of the empire frustrated implementation. In particular, noble patrons could enable a writer accused of spreading heterodox, antichurch, or even anti-Christian views to remain active and influential.

“A New Testament which Needs neither a Glossary nor a Commentary.” So proclaimed the New York Evening Post on 21 May 1881, in a front-page story announcing the publication of the Revised Version of the Scriptures. The first major English translation since the King James Bible, the Revised New Testament was billed as the most accurate version ever, and the Post writer did not hesitate to hyperbolize. The printing of the Revision, the reporter declared, would probably “rank among the great events of the nineteenth century.” Meanwhile, as buyers snatched up the first Testaments in New York, a bigger sensation was building in Chicago. Dubbing the new translation nothing other than “the Bible as it is,” the Chicago Tribune printedthe entire Revised New Testament—from Matthew to Revelation—in its regular Sunday edition. Although the Tribune pilfered its scriptural text from the Bible's authorized publishers, the paper lambasted the rival Chicago Times (“the fraudulent newspaper concern on Wells Street”) for printing a “forged” Testament of its own. The unsavory competition in Chicago's fourth estate did not deter an eager public, who bought 107,000 copies of the Tribune's Testament alone. Demand for bound editions of the updated Bible was no less intense, with nationwide sales figures quickly surpassing one million.

On a Sunday morning in January of 1827, “all the taste and fashion” of Washington, D.C., streamed toward the Capitol to witness one of the most remarkable events to take place in the gentlemanly preserve of the Hall of Representatives: Harriet Livermore, a devout evangelical and the daughter of a former Congressman, had convinced the Speaker of the House to allow her to preach to Congress. With crowds of eager spectators spilling out of the Hall and into the street, Livermore ascended into the Speaker's Chair, which served as a makeshift pulpit, and silenced a crowd of a thousand with a sermon on the text, “He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.” Included among her audience were congressmen, senators, and President John Quincy Adams himself, who sat on the steps leading up to her feet because he could not find a free chair. According to published reports, many in the audience wept quietly as she spoke. “It savored more of inspiration than anything I ever witnessed,” one woman marvelled. “And to enjoy the frame of mind which I think she does, I would relinquish the world. Call this rhapsody if you will; but would to God you had heard her!” Livermore's sermon was such a success that she was permitted to preach to Congress again in 1832, 1838, and 1843, each time to large crowds.

From the period after the Revolutionary War, when Philadelphia and New York merchants first replaced Maryland planters as the lay elite, American Catholicism has been predominantly urban. This became especially noticeable in the late nineteenth century when large numbers of European immigrants swelled the Catholic ranks in many cities of the Northeast and Midwest. The astonishing ethnic variety of the newcomers made the American Catholic Church more “catholic” than ever before, which was a boon to Catholic apologists, but a nightmare for the American bishops. To their credit, they responded to this pastoral challenge imaginatively and effectively by creating an extensive network of “national parishes” for virtually every sizable ethnic group.

The historical development of explicit forms of Christian mysticism can be sketched according to a model of gradually accumulating and interactive layers of tradition. The monastic ideal of flight from the world in order to lead a specialized life of penance and prayer, either as a hermit or within a community, formed the institutional context for most forms of Christian mysticism down to the end of the twelfth century. This monastic layer of mysticism was primarily biblical and liturgical in the sense that it sought God in and through personal appropriation of the mystical understanding of the Bible as cultivated within the liturgical life of the monastic community. Most monastic mystics were also “objective” in the sense that they rarely talked about their own experiences of God, but rather sought to express their understanding of mystical transformation through biblical exegesis and theoretical expositions of a mystagogical character (that is, expositions designed to lead readers into the mystery of the consciousness of God's presence)

Scholars have frequently noted that the American temperance movement had close ties with Protestantism throughout its long history. The Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher, generally viewed as the founding father of temperance, helped spark the establishment of the American Temperance Society in 1826 with his Six Sermons on drunkenness. Later in the century devout Protestant laypersons, such as Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) leader Frances Willard and Nebraska congressman and perennial presidential hopeful William Jennings Bryan, took up leadership of the cause. In the early years of this century, as Protestants began to divide into warring liberal and evangelical camps, Prohibition was one—and perhaps the only—issue which could unite most Protestants, from the firebreathing revivalist Billy Sunday on the one hand to the scholarly, liberal Walter Rauschenbusch on the other.1

Within their considerable rhetorical arsenal, perhaps the favorite accusations that sixteenth-century Calvinist Reformers lodged against the medieval church and the pious conduct of its followers were those of “superstition and idolatry.” Prominent leaders such as John Calvin and Theodore Beza, erudite theologians and celebrated preachers, local pastors and village elders alike stood ever ready to apply the designations to a variety of religious convictions and habits that they considered the incorrect belief and inappropriate behavior of the uninformed and vulgar. This Calvinist campaign against the superstitious and idolatrous went well beyond an attack on such unscriptural matters as belief in purgatory, veneration of images and relics, or invocation of the saints. It also manifested a deeply felt animosity toward papal Christianity—a hostility often expressed in dramatic and powerful language. One particularly intense example comes from the southern French town of Marsillargues during the early seventeenth century. When two men, who had converted to Calvinism, reverted to their earlier Catholicism several months later, the local Reformed church condemned them for having returned to their “vomit” and “slime.”

As news of the great Welsh Revival of 1904 reached Southern California, Frank Bartleman, an itinerant evangelist and pastor living in Los Angeles, became convinced that God was preparing to revitalize his beloved holiness movement with a powerful, even apocalyptic, spiritual awakening. Certain that events in Wales would be duplicated in California, Bartleman reported in 1905 that “the Spirit is brooding over our land.… Los Angeles, Southern California, and the whole continent shall surely find itself ere long in the throes of a mighty revival.” In 1906 he speculated that theSan Francisco earthquake “was surely the voice of God to the people on the Pacific Coast.” Bartleman indeed witnessed such a revival, for in early April 1906, this “Latter Rain” outpouring had begun to fall on a small gathering of saints led by William J. Seymour, a black holiness preacher. At a vacant AME mission at 312 Azusa Street, countless pentecostals received the baptism of the Holy Spirit evidenced by speaking in other tongues—a “second Pentecost” replicating the first recorded in Acts 2. Bartleman, who also experienced this, would soon become integral to the revival's growth by reporting the events at Los Angeles within a vast network of holiness and higher life periodicals. As during other religious awakenings, such reports not only generated the perception of widespread divine activity but also provided an interpretive scheme for understanding the meaning of such activity. For Bartleman, Azusa was the starting point of a worldwide awakening that would initiate Christ's return. He reported: “Los Angeles seems to be the place, and this the time, in the mind of God, for the restoration of the church to her former place.”

In 1912, Andrew Murray, an influential spokesperson for the Keswick theology prevalent in American fundamentalism, decried the sorry state of spirituality among modern Christians. How many there are, he exclaimed, who “say that they have no time and that the heart desire for prayer is lacking; they do not know how to spend half an hour with God! … Day after day, month after month passes, and there is no time to spend one hour with God.” Closing his jeremiad, Murray exclaimed, “How many there are who take only five minutes for prayer!” A few years later, Herbert Willett and Charles Clayton Morrison, editors of The Christian Century, the voice of the emerging liberal movement in American Protestantism, published a daily devotional guide entitled The Daily Altar. Its purpose was to provide Christians with “a few moments of quiet and reflection” in the midst of “short and crowded days” in order to maintain a daily prayer life. To be precise, devotions in The Daily Altar took one and a half minutes to complete.

One of the most interesting Protestant sects that settled in Palestine from 1881 onwards, and that operated successfully for more than fifty years, was the American-Swedish “Colony” in Jerusalem.1 Known in its early years as the “Spaffordites,” the group was also called the “Overcomers,” since the members' journey to Jerusalem was spurred by their desire to overcome a series of personal tragedies. The history of the “American Colony,” as it was known in Jerusalem, reveals the power of religious beliefs to motivate and shape the lives of adherents. In this case, believers emigrated, built a new community with its own order and sense of purpose, demonstrated dedication, and made sacrifices in following what they considered to be divine commands. The American Colony also exemplifies the limited possibility of sustaining a religious community based upon intense beliefs, as one generation struggles to convey its religious tenets and social principles to the next. To reconstruct the religious influences, principles, and practices of this unique group in Palestine, the American Colony should be placed in the context of nineteenth-century American evangelical Protestantism, which included elements of revivalism, dispensational premillennialism, evangelism, and holiness teachings.

German Seventh-day Adventists entered the Nazi era with apprehension. As a foreign sect which resembled Judaism in many respects, Adventists were particularly threatened by a society based on the principle of völkisch racism. Yet the new state also had much to offer them, for it held the prospect of new opportunities for the church. The Nazi state banished the scourge of liberalism and godless Bolshevism, it restored conservative standards in the domestic sphere, and it took effective steps to return German society to a life in harmony with nature—a life Adventists had long championed.

The name “John Calvin” and the movement associated with him, Calvinism, serve as rhetorical negatives in the popular language of American culture. In a society often regarded as the most ahistorical in the Western world—an important American proclaimed that “history is bunk”—the name of Calvin, the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer who worked mostly in Geneva, is common enough coinage to show up in a variety of contexts. One can read newspaper stories on baseball, and Calvin is there. Or one can look at a popular book on the drug Prozac and there read about “pharmacological Calvinism.” A moving analysis of the AIDS crisis in the New York Times mentions Calvin. All of the references carry negative connotations of fatalism, guilt, and so on. The word “Calvin” seems to be shorthand for a range of negative thoughts and feelings in the American cultural consciousness.