Christian freedom was a major concern for Calvin from the very beginning of his theological career. The very long sixth and final chapter of the first edition of the Institutes is devoted to this question. He opens the chapter by calling this freedom “a matter of prime necessity; … without a knowledge of it consciences dare undertake almost nothing without faltering, often hesitate and draw back, constantly waver and are afraid … unless this freedom be grasped, neither Christ nor gospel truth is rightly known.” From this first edition till the last Calvin continues to talk at length about three aspects of Christian freedom: freedom of the conscience and freedom from the law because of justification by grace alone; freedom of the liberated Christian to obey God's will voluntarily and not out of necessity; and freedom in outward things which are “indifferent,” that is, in themselves neither necessary nor forbidden. For much of this understanding Calvin is deeply indebted to Luther and Melanchthon.

Over the past few years a spate of books and articles have forced scholars to reject the idea that the Anglican church was created as a compromise between Queen Elizabeth, who would have preferred to return to Henrician Catholicism, and radical Protestants, who wished to create in England a godly society modeled on the Swiss Reformation. This historiographic revolution has been led by historians who have challenged J. E. Neale's tale of a Puritan opposition party which was born in 1559 and bedeviled the queen for her entire reign. Demonstrating that the queen achieved the religious settlement she desired in 1559, they have forced us to question anew Elizabeth's attitude toward her church and to challenge some of the assumptions upon which ecclesiastical historians, following Neale, have built their histories of the Elizabethan church.

When Godfridus Dellius, Dutch Reformed minister at Albany, surveyed the religious situation of the Middle Colonies in 1694, he found little to cheer him. In addition to the recent deaths of two colleagues and the political upheaval in New York, Dominie Dellius lamented the intrusion of William Bertholf into the Dutch churches in New Jersey. Bertholf, a cooper by trade, openly flaunted his independence from both the Netherlands ecclesiastical authorities and the orthodox New York clergy. With pietist leanings, Bertholf had ingratiated himself with Dutch communicants on the New Jersey frontier. “He will now not neglect anything to carry out his designs,” Dellius warned, and “soon some marvelous kind of theology will develop here.”

It is often asserted that the aggrandizement of the papacy during the nineteenth century reached its height with the definition of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870. A case can be made, however, for the view that that definition, with its careful delimitations, was in fact a kind of anticlimax, that the ultramontane high tide really had been reached, and checked, five years before with the issuance of the Syllabus of Errors and the fateful intervention of Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans.

Lord Halifax is primarily remembered for his dedication to ecumenism. Negotiations with the Vatican concerning the validity of Anglican orders and the pioneering conversations with Cardinal Mercier are examples of his efforts to bring unity and peace to Christendom. Believing that certain practices, devotions, and customs were the inheritance of all Christians, he sought to introduce into the Church of England some of those common elements. One, absent since the sixteenth century, was Benedictine monasticism. Not only did the Anglican church have the right to claim monastic life as part of its tradition, he insisted, but Benedictine life in the Church of England might invigorate a structure many believed was static.