In recent years new methods of approaching the study of gnosticism have arisen. The older synthesis of Bousset, with its somewhat over-schematized picture of gnostic thought, and the severely critical analysis of de Faye, with its emphasis on our ignorance of gnostic beginnings, have failed to retain general approval. The newer methods have stressed an existentialist or psychological understanding of the gnostics, and questions of source-analysis and chronology have faded into the background. Often the problem of development within gnostic thought is not seriously considered.

In the year of the Incarnation 839, there occurred an event which alarmed the inhabitants of Frankland: a royal chaplain named Bodo, nobly born and a deacon in Holy Orders, under singularly dramatic circumstances abandoned the Christian faith for Judaism, changed his name to Eleazar, took a Jewish wife, and went to live in Saracenic Spain. The incident is remarkable for three reasons. First, it shows the vitality of Jewish proselytism in the ninth-century Western world. Secondly, it had some effect on the relations between the Frankish state and the Spanish Muslim government.

Until the appearance of Rudolf Sohm's Kirchenrecht in 1892 and of Karl Rieker's study, Die rechtliche Stellung der evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung bis zur Gegenwart in 1893, the opinion prevailed among scholars by and large that the historic development in the relationship of the church in Germany to the state was contrary to the ideal of the Reformer. This ideal was held to be an autonomous congregational church based upon evangelical principles, an interpretation which had received the support of Aemil Richter's authority in Die Geschichte der cvangelischen Kirciwnverfassung in Deutschland, 1851. Since then, Reformation students have divided on this question. Luther wrote of the Notbischöfe: “I wish to leave the jurists … to settle this disputation … I will write as a theologian and a heretic,” and thereby he left a legacy of controversy both to jurists and historians. With equal truth Luther could write, “The other articles … I commend to the lawyers, for it is not my business as an evangelist to decide and judge in these matters. I shall instruct and teach consciences what pertains to divine and Christian matters,” and still maintain, “that since the time of the apostles the secular sword and authority has never been so clearly described and grandly lauded as by me, which even my enemies must acknowledge.” He was involved by circumstances in social and political questions which were not per se his concern as a theologian. Several factors complicate an analysis of Luther's theory of church and state, the immediacy of the medieval inheritance, conceptual differences of terminology from current usage, the complexity of the transitional historical situation, and Luther's characteristic way of addressing himself to a problem without relating his plan of action to his total theory. In fact, Dieckhoff says that as the pertinent quotations lie side by side, it is impossible to harmonize them. Such pessimism, however, is unwarranted, for Luther was never pathologically dialectical and his position can be satisfactorily understood if viewed in relation to his central orientation. Luther's political theory involved, of course, many facets, the question of Imperial power, papal theory, war, toleration, the Turkish question, feudal loyalties, and others. A study of the Notbischöfe problem is central, however, for an understanding of his ecclesiology and the much debated church-state question.

Perhaps the most famous religious dispute of the latter half of the sixteenth century was that between Walter Haddon (1516–1572), the distinguished English Latinist, and Jerome Osorio de Fonseca (1506–1580), Portuguese bishop and eminent Ciceronian. The controversy was a part of the tumult over the church establishment of Queen Elizabeth which eventually led to her excommunication by Pope Pius V in 1570, and to the final separation of the Church of England from Rome. Though neither participant was primarily a theologian, the affair attracted a great deal of attention in its time because of the commanding reputations of both men as Latin stylists. By his fellow-Englishmen, Haddon was regarded as the best Latin orator, poet, and epistolist of his generation; and on the Continent Osorio was widely admired not only for his skill in Scriptural studies but also for his excellent Ciceronianism.

John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) is best known to the world as the pioneer of modern educational theories and methods. More particularly is he remembered as the author of a series of elementary Latin textbooks for which many generations of schoolboys in the bygone days have called him blessed. But although he has richly deserved the praise he has received for his pedagogical reforms, that contribution by no means exhausts his astonishingly many-sided accomplishments. For he was the author of almost two hundred treatises (some of them rather forbiddingly bulky tomes, not all so far published), dealing with scientific, linguistic, pedagogical, philosophical, political, literary, and above all religious and theological subjects. He was likewise a fervent enthusiast for religious and political peace during one of the most disturbed periods of European history—the era of the Thirty Years' War. And above all, he was a convinced believer in pansophy—the principle of unification of all scientific, philosophical, political, and religious knowledge into one all-embracing, harmonious world-view. Previously, the term pansophy was used by Peter Laurenberg (1585- 1639) for an encyclopaedic compend of universal knowledge. Comenius gave it a deeper connotation, that of correlating all knowledge by means of an unifying principle. Thus he endeavored to produce an encyclopaedic, unified system of education which would fuse into one whole all knowledge, ethics, and religion, and by having all people educated in this system, would ultimately secure universal peace. His pansophy is, therefore, the dominant principle of almost everything he wrote, pervading it either explicitly or implicitly. Surprisingly enough, by reason of the recent discovery of Comenius' long lost pansophic corpus, we hope soon to learn more about this important aspect of his work than we have known hitherto.