By almost any measure, the study of ancient Christian history is alive and well, even if one limits one's view to the North American scene. Over the last three decades the number of publications in the field, both books and articles, has grown considerably, fueling (among other things) the astonishing success of the Journal of Early Christian Studies, founded by the North American Patristic Society (NAPS) a decade'ago. Each year the program of the annual meeting of NAPS features more papers and attracts more participants (even though they must stay in less than ideal, even appropriately monastic, dormitory rooms). The number of papers on early Christian topics at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature (as well as the American Philological Association) is very impressive.

For centuries, from its Roman endorsement as imperial cult around the year 400 to its revolutionary disestablishment in the 1790s, the Christian religion laid claim to the allegiance of Europe's peoples, even a right to set policies about Jews. This fateful historical conjunction between the making of Europe and the spread of Christian allegiance rested upon an ever-changing mix of custom, law, and conviction, religious in coloration but political, social, and cultural in expression. Diverse practices and patterns, worked out over centuries, became so tightly interwoven that to pull on one was to stretch or unravel another. To call for religious purity or poverty was to upset social and legal custom; to round up heretics was to secure political order, and the reverse; to see into the end-state of things presaged, for some, the overthrow of Roman prelacy as the reign of Babylon, whence its reverse: to manage time and chronology was to stabilize the standing order.

There can be no question but that the great principles of freedom of conscience, separation of church and state and voluntarism in religion, so basic in American Protestantism and so essential to democracy, ultimately are derived from the Anabaptists of the Reformation period.

With these confident words, Harold S. Bender introduced the main theme of his presidential address at the fifty-fifth meeting of the American Society of Church History, held at Columbia University on 28 Dec. 1943. In the decades that followed, Bender's speech—which he titled.

Since 1970, when Church History last published a review of Pietist scholarship, there have been significant contributions to almost all areas of the field. Research on Pietism—once the distinct province of German church historians—has become increasingly international as well as interdisciplinary in scope as Germanists, musicologists, social historians, and historians of Christianity explore the influence of this movement in Europe and the New World. The yearbook Pietismus und Neuzeit, the magisterial four volume handbook Geschichte des Pietismus, and the first International Pietism Congress in 2001 all testify to the vitality of current scholarship in this field. As much recent scholarship makes clear, Pietist research can contribute significantly to how historians understand the development of Christianity in the last three hundred years.

In the Introduction to his lectures on the modern British missionary movement published in 1965, Max Warren suggested that “any serious student of modern history must find some explanation of the missionary expansion of the Christian Church.” Many, perhaps most, scholars have ignored his advice, and until very recently, it would have been difficult to persuade researchers in the modern academic mainstream to take such an injunction seriously, so flatly would it have seemed to contradict or question the dominant assumptions of liberal, secular scholarship. The progress of an all-pervasive secularization meant that missions, if not the churches both that supported them and that they hoped to build, were to be listed amongst history's losers and were therefore unattractive subjects for study.

One hundred years ago, the discipline of church history was well established within institutions of higher learning in Western societies. The heirs of Leopold von Ranke and Philip Schaff were well versed in the range of topics that church history comprised. Church history was an integral part of the study of theology. Church historians published handbooks and had their own journals. All church historians—those with a Catholic and those with a Protestant affiliation, the members of state churches, and those belonging to church bodies, built on the principle of voluntarism—seemed to have a common agenda. This was the story of Christian churches throughout the centuries.

As befits an article encouraging reflection, I would like to start with a personal anecdote. I recently heard a paper by a prominent literary scholar, which I thought would be an analysis of his encounter with a text. (I am familiar enough with current literary analysis to know that it would certainly not be an analysis of a text.) It turned out instead to be purely autobiographical. In talking about this later with a friend of mine from the Italian department, he told me that this was a new trend. As he put it: “We used to do Dante's life and works, then with New Criticism we did ‘the work,’ then with New Historicism we did Dante's works in their historical location, then with post-structuralism we did Dante and me, and now we just do me.’

The relationship between history and tradition has long been convoluted, just as any consensus on the definition of either term is difficult to achieve. The tongue-in-cheek comment by Jean Cocteau that “history is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end” is only one of many quotable quips that glance lightly off the interstices of these two universes of discourse. Such humor, nevertheless, is not that far removed from the canons of serious discussion. The realities that these two terms represent, as well as their nature, their goals, and their points of contact, provide the framework for our reflections herein.