1. Since an early draft of this paper received penetrating criticisms from Joseph M. Kitagawa, Amanda Porterfield Langston, Wilhelm Pauck and Lee H. Yearley, I would be remiss to let my debt to them go unacknowledged. But this statement of obligation does not imply that any of them would be less critical of the address as presented than each was of the draft—which was plenty.

2. Ahlstrom, Sydney E., Brauer, Jerald C., Clcbsch, William A., Gaustad, Edwin Scott, Handy, Robert T., Hudson, Winthrop S., Marty, Martin E., Mead, Sidney E., Olmstead, Clifton E., Osborn, Ronald E., Smith, Hilrie Shelton. See my A New Historiography of American Religion (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Reprint Series, 1967).Google Scholar

3. Bainton, Roland H., The Church of Our Fathers (New York: Scribner's, 1941)Google Scholar; Hudson, Winthrop S., The Story of the Christian Church (New York: Harper, 1958)Google Scholar; Marty, Martin E., A Short History of Christianity (New York: Meridian, 1959)Google Scholar. Marty used as his interpretative scheme the four claims of the church, to be one, holy, catholic, apostolic, and their relative accomplishment in each of four epochs.

4. Walker, Williston, A History of the Christian Church (New York: Scribner's, 1918)Google Scholar; second ed., rev. by Cyril C. Richardson, Wilhelm Pauck and Robert T. Handy (1959); third ed. rev. by Robert T. Handy (1970).

5. We must await the completion by Jaroslav Pelikan of the large work he has begun before we can tell whether “the variety of Christian teachings within history and their possible unity within tradition” are as combinable themes for the projected fifth volume on “Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture (since 1700)” as they appear to have been for the first volume on “The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600).” In the earlier centuries, he writes, doctrine “moved from being believed to being taught to being confessed and back again.” In the process many of the extant heterodox and most of the extant heretical writings came to be preserved in documents given over to the refutation of their teachings and the condemnation of their authors. Theologians since 1700 have not enjoyed so privileged a status. Of course, whenever the historian of Christian doctrine in any epoch defines dogma as what has been held everywhere, always and by everybody, the scales are already tipped so that unity weighs more heavily than variety. See Pelikan, Jaroslav Jan, The Christian Tradition, A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971): 9.Google Scholar

6. Gerardus van der Leeuw boldly typifies Christianity as the religion par excellence of reciprocal love between God and the world—so boldly, in fact, that he is compelled to abandon his comparative stance. In beholding this theological truth “the contemplative and comprehending servant of research”, he writes, “reverently withdraws; his own utterance yields place to that of proclamation, his service to that in the sanctuary.” See his Religion in Essence and Manifestation, tr. Turner, J. E. with appendices to the paperback edition incorporating the additions of the second German ed. by Hans H. Penner (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 667.Google Scholar

For his part, on theologians William James became unusually impassioned: “In the middle of the century just past, Mayne Reid was the great writer of books of out-of-door adventure. He was forever extolling the hunters and field-observers of living animals' habits, and keeping up a fire of invective against the ‘closet-naturalists,’ as he called them, the collectors and classifiers, and handlers of skeletons and skins. When I was a boy, I used to think that a closet-naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun. But surely the systematic theologians are the closet-naturalists of the deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid's sense. What is their deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word ‘God’ by one of those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the trail of the serpent over them.” The Varieties of Religious Experience, A Study in Human Nature (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), p. 446.Google Scholar

Specific reservations for the autonomy of Christian theology were made also, but less extremely, by Max Weber, Joachim Wach, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Mircea Eliade, Raffaele Pettazzoni and in a different way by Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Not so, as far as I can tell, by Joseph M. Kitagawa.

7. See Kitagawa, Joseph M., “The History of Religions in America,” The History of Religions, Essays in Methodology, ed. Mircea, Eliade and Kitagawa, Joseph M. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 19.Google Scholar

8. See Kitagawa, Joseph M., “Primitive, Classical, and Modern Religions: A Perspective on Understanding the History of Religions,” The History of Religions, Essays on the Problem of Understanding, ed. Kitagawa, Joseph M. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 39–65.Google Scholar

9. This is, of course, what Mircea Eliade attempts for religion in general by positing a gulf between primitive or religious man's pervasive sense of the sacred, and modern or irreligious man's profane existence. His infrequent references to Christianity are unpersuasive: they convert (to use Kitagawa's scheme again) classical religious expressions into primitive ones, and write off modern ones as irreligious. See for example the discussion of baptism as initiation rite in Mircea Eliade. The sacred and the Profane, The Nature of Religion. tr. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harconrt Brace & World, 1959), pp. 132–136,Google Scholar and in Mircea, EliadePattern in Comparative Religion tr. Rosemarysheed (New York: Sheed & Ward. 1958). pp. 196–197.Google Scholar At other points his relative inattention to Christianity finesses interesting connection, (as well as further distinctions) between primitive and classical expressions. For example. the mass for celebrating the Nativity of Christ in the West and Easter Day in the East did indeed invoke sacred time and transport believers into an archē in which was the Logos that became flesh. How then can it be said, as Eliade asserts, that “on the level of primitive cultures the religions and ideological context is entirely different from that of Judaeo-Christianity”, that Christianity wholly differs from primitive religions in regard to sacred time (Eliade, , Sacred and Profane. p. 92)Google Scholar? Why was not this archē the same as “the sacred time periodically reactualized in pre-Christian religions … a primordial time, … an original time … not preceded by another time. because no time could exist before the appearance of the reality narrated in the myth” (ibid., p. 72)? Eliade seems to mistake the Arians' sense of sacred time for the normative Christian expression.

Part of Eliade's announced method as a historian of religions is to rely upon the work of the historians of the particular religions. To judge the state of the historiography of Christianity by his use of it could only discourage church historians. But I do not contest the implication that our historiography must be improved if we are to be able to expect general historians and phenonmenologists of religion to make better use of actual Christian religious expressions in their comparisons and analyses. General historians of religions, of course, are not mere blenders of histories of particular religions rather they develop their own special competences in the history of one or more religions and rely on the work of colleagues who specialize in other religions to generalize their purviews. So far as historians of Christianity have been preoccupied with history of doctrine, they have established a base from which it is difficult if not impossible, to move toward the general science of religions. The approach proposed in this paper is Intended to facilitate such a move, aimed ultimately at both enriching and changing the history of religions.

10. Bradshaw, John, Lord President of the High Court of Justice under Cromwell, quoted in Letters of Charles I, ed. Charles, Petrie, p. 176,Google Scholar as cited by Hill, Christopher and Edmund, Dell, The Good Old Cause, 1640–1660 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1949), p. 371.Google Scholar

11. The terms are those that Gerardus van der Leeuw applied, respectively, to Confucianism and Deism, to various kinds of mysticism and to Hinduism; they apply as well to Christian anchorites, mystics and meditative monastics. See Religion in Essence and Manifestation, chaps. 89, 91, 96.

12. This scheme is developed at length in lectures comprising a one-term course called “Christianity”; I hope to turn- the lectures into a short book.

13. Eusebius, , H. E., 5:2, 2–3.Google Scholar

14. Athanasius, , Vita Ant., § 47Google Scholar; emphasis added.

15. Ibid., § 91.

16. The absoluteness, the universality and the cultural relativity of Christianity have posed grave problems when theologians pondered the first two and assigned the third to historians, thereby giving too little historical attention to universality and uniqueness, and perhaps too little theological attention to cultural relativity. Here historians of western Christianity can find the history of eastern Christianity—particularly after the Council of Chalcedon and not only in its Greek or Greek-derived strands—instructive. For one thing, Easterners were able to transpose the sovereignty and ideal of Romanitas to Constantinople and even to Moscow; for them the decay of the traditional locus of power did not entail the demise of sovereignty. Moreover, the autocephalous Eastern churches gave the unique, universal religion many regional and therefore relative embodiments. Again, Nestorian, Monophysite and Monothelite Christians lived and were tolerated under Muslim sovereignty, demonstrating that Christianity could prosper apart from Christendom. Finally, the histories of Coptic, Jacobite, Armenian, Malabar and Maronite Christianity provide further varieties of relations of Christians to spiritual and temporal sovereignty and therefore exemplify several culturally relative embodiments of uniqueness and universality. On the last point see Atiya, Aziz S., History of Eastern Christianity, (South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969).Google Scholar