1. Given the nature of this essay, I document only sparingly. I must thank several colleagues who kindly have offered comments, both positive and negative: Clark, Elizabeth, Kaufman, Peter, Lotz, David, O'Malley, John, and Wacker, Grant. My reasoning may not have become more persuasive; it assuredlyhas become more cogent as a result of their comments.Google Scholar

2. I am using the terms “church history” and “history of Christianity” in this essay quite interchangeably and as virtually synonymous. I mean to indicate, thereby, that I do not share the (current) reluctance of the use of the term “church history” and find rationales for the use of both. I am well aware (as should go without saying) that the term “church,” as in “church history” is historically as well as theologically problematic, especially for a Protestant. However, I do prefer, as a matter of fact, the term “church history” for what seems to me, at least, a persuasive historical reason: I read the history of Christianity to have been eminently a pursuit of the “church.” That is what the theologians argued about and, even more importantly, what the men and women in the pews were convinced they were part of. To use the term, therefore, seems to me to acknowledge historical reality. My major misgiving with the term “church history” is that it intimates a simple equation between “church” and “Christianity” that in our pluralistic culture would seem problematic.

3. As quoted in Wright, Conrad, “History as a Moral Science,” American Historical Review 81 (1976): 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Gibbon, Edward, Memoirs of my Life and Writings (Hartnolls, Bodmin: Ryburn 1994).Google Scholar

5. My Duke colleague Grant Wacker reminded me of Royko's quip.

6. Of course, the topic has triggered an almost endless array of studies. See, for example, the old but still valuable work by Walter Nigg, very much in the anti-establishment tradition that goes back to Arnold, Gottfried: Die Kirchengeschkhtsschreibung: Grundzüge ihrer historischen Entwicklung (München: C. H. Beck, 1934).Google ScholarMore recent and important works are Conzemius, V., “Kirchengeschichte als ‘nichttheologische’ Disziplin: Thesen zu einer wissenschaftstheoretischen Standortsbestimmung,” Theologische Quartalsschrift 155 (1975): 187ff.Google Scholarand Seelinger, Hans Reinhard, Kirchengeschichte—Geschichtstheologie—Geschichtswissenschaft (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1981).Google Scholar

7. Seelinger, , op. cit., 24.Google Scholar

8. Ephraim Emerton, first Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard, seems to have missed this point in his 1882 inaugural address, for he sought to make the case that “the method of historical science is the method of history.” Perhaps this should be seen as yet another proof for the futility of presidential or inaugural addresses!

9. An excellent treatment, from that perspective, is Uhlig, Christian, Funktion und Situation der Kirchengeschichte als theologischer Disziplin (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1985).Google Scholar

10. For example, as regards the Reformation of the sixteenth century, we have impressive studies on festivals or ritual, but we have no interpretative conceptualization of the phenomenon we used to call “the Age of the Reformation” other than the notion implicit in much recent work that several centuries were characterized by change and reform.

11. The important influence of social history, and concomitantly, social anthropology, has led to what I would call an intriguing secularization of the study of the history of Christianity. As Lotz, David has observed, “the great bulk of the writing in church history and most of the best such writings has been done by scholars in university departments of religion, history, and literature” (“A Changing Historiography: From Church History to Religious History,” in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935–1985, ed. Lotz, David [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989], 312). This echoes an earlier comment by James Nichols that the historians of culture and thought have contributed more to the literature of church history than had the occupants of chairs assigned to the discipline. One can easily think of names of distinguished colleagues and suggest that the field has become dominated by the agenda of scholars from outside the discipline.Google Scholar

12. Scribner, R. W., “Religion, Society and Culture: Reorienting the Reformation,” History Workshop Journal 14 (1982): 2–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. See, for example, Bynum, Carolyn Walker, “The Last Generation of Europeanists,” Perspectives (02 1996)Google Scholarand Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

14. Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).Google Scholar

15. On Anabaptist research, there are a number of thoughtful assessments. See, for example, Stayer, James M., “Review Essay: Anabaptist History and Theology,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 71 (1997): 473–82,Google Scholaras well as Stayer's earlier contribution “The Radical Reformation,” in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, eds., Brady, Thomas A. Jr, Oberman, Heiko A., Tracy, James D. (Leiden, 1995), 2: 249–82.Google ScholarFor the Genevan records see Kingdon, Robert M., ed., Registres du Consistoire de Genéve au temps de Calvin, Vol. 1 (1542–44) (Geneva: Droz, 1996).Google Scholar

16. Dilthey, Wilhelm, Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul York von Wartenburg, 1877–1897 (Leipzig, 1923), 130.Google Scholar

17. Cherry, Conrad, Hurrying Toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

18. This North American development was (and remains) unique, since elsewhere the teaching of the history of Christianity continued to be done in seminaries and theological faculties.

19. I am thinking here of such departments as that at Arizona State University at Tempe and the department at the University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri.

20. Two perceptive studies are Lotz, David, as cited above, and Clifford, N. Keith, “Church History, Religious History or the History of Religion?” in Religious Studies: Issues and Prospects, eds. Klostermaier, K., Hurtado, L. W. et al. (Atlanta: Scholars, 1991), 171ff.Google Scholar

21. I see this tendency, to cite just one example, in Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon, 1984), xx.Google Scholar

22. Insightful in its analysis is Pelikan, Jaroslav J., The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

23. Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980).Google Scholar

24. My reference is, of course, to Weber's, Max famous Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (numerous editions, the most recent of which is Los Angeles: Roxbury, 1998)Google Scholar and to Walzer's, MichaelRevolution of the Saints (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

25. Gregory, Brad S., Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). This is one of the major monographs in recent Reformation scholarship.Google Scholar

26. Butterfield, Herbert, History and Human Relations (London: Collins, 1951), 114,Google Scholaras quoted in Wright, , op. cit., 11.Google Scholar