In recent years, it has become fashionable in scholarly and journalistic circles to employ the image concept as a means of describing and interpreting historical, political, or social realities. A number of attempts have been made recently to sketch the picture or to present the image of America. It is both interesting and puzzling that the image concept should be so widely employed; yet it is, in some sense, understandable. We live in an era of communications through images. We are confronted by them on all sides through the media of mass communication such as television, press, billboards, and radio. Professor Daniel Boorstin recently pointed out that our age is dominated not by ideas but by images. This has had already and will have increasingly momentous consequences both for our national self-understanding and for our stance before the world.

The Syriac term qeiama, “covenant,”1 with its derivations benai qeiama, “the sons of the covenant,” and benat qeiama, “the daughters of the covenant,”2 not only marks the idiosyncracy of primitive Syrian Christianity but it also mirrors a development which parallels the whole process of transformation in ancient Syrian Christianity. Originally the term qeiama designated the whole church comprised of ascetically oriented Christians.3.Standing face to face with this singular concept of church and the peculiar profile of primitive Syrian Christianity, we must be reminded that the first Christian impulses in the lands of the Euphrates and Tigris did not come from Hellenistic Christianity via Antioch but from Palestinian Jewish Christianity.4 Therefore the earliest traditions implanted here reveal the Palestinian Aramaean influence not only in the contacts which these Christian Jews had with the Palestinian Jewish Christians5 but also in the use of the ancient Palestinian Targum as the first biblical texts translated into Syriac6 and in the fundamentally ascetic orientation of the Christian Kerygma7 which echoes the Palestinian ascetic trends.8 These archaic conditions, which understood the qeiama as the whole

The policy of Frederick II toward the Church in the kingdom of Sicily during the period 1220 to 1224 follows logically from that of his Norman predecessors. Its aim was the restoration of the ecclesiastical privileges which had been held by the Norman kings to the death of William II (1189) and the recovery of dues, rents, services and prerogatives usurped from the crown by the ecclesiastical magnates of the kingdom during the “Time of Troubles” (1189–1209). Practical considerations were of fundamental importance in the formation of this policy. Within the kingdom, the Church was a potential rival to the establishment of a strong monarchy. The Norman kings of Sicily, like the Norman kings of England, had exercised considerable control over the appointment of bishops and, in Sicily and Calabria, over the holding of church councils and the attendance of the bishops at them. Though generous in their grants to the Church, the Norman kings of Sicily both expected and obtained the cooperation of churchmen in imposing strong rule over the kingdom. In desiring to restore the Norman pattern of relations between the church and kingdom, Frederick was faced with the fact that important changes had taken place since the death of William II. Not only had the personnel of the Church changed, but the authority of the papacy within the kingdom had been greatly increased while Innocent III acted as regent during Frederick's minority (1198–1209).

At Ferrara and Florence the healing of the old schism between the Eastern and Western Chruches proved to be more than a hope, and in corresponding measure the breach between the Pope and the Council of Basel became less than a real new Occidental Schism. The Florence-Ferrara conception of Christian unity has led to the doctrine of the Vatical Council and will be of great importance at the council which has been announced by the present Pope. Together with our Roman Catholic brethren we are convinced that a clear understanding of the character of Christian unity must exist prior to all attempts at union or reunion of churches, prior as a condition and as an incentive those efforts.

John Wyclif is remembered today as an innovator. Scholars have not misled us at that point. W. W. Shirley in 1858 stated his role as a pioneer without predecessors: “On most of us the dim image looks down, like the portrait of the first of a long line of kings, without personality or expression—he is the first of the reformers.” The English Bible translated under his inspiration is a monument that stands apart. It established no direct connection with any English version that either preceded or followed it. No prior medieval schoolman quite paralleled Wyclif in setting forth Holy Scripture alone as the final religious authority. Nor had any university leader so encouraged unlicensed preachers to expound the Bible to commoners.

In the last years, a number of surveys on Luther have appeared. Some of these will be continued. With the re-appearance of the Luther-Jahrbuch and the regular “Zeitschriftenschau” by Gunther Franz in various issues of the Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, an ongoing medium for references to articles and reviews of books is at hand. All major German books are reviewed in the Luther-Jahrbuch and in the Theologische Literaturzeitung. The 1957 issue of the Luther-Jahrbuch, the first volume in the resumed series after a fifteen year interval, contains a summary Luther-Bibliography for 1940- 1953, and a more extensive survey for the year 1954. The 1958 volume contains a bibliography for 1955; the 1959 one, for 1956; the 1960 one, for 1957. The disadvantage of the time lag in publication does provide the possibility of a comprehensive listing. Apart from the book reviews, the materials are listed without evaluation.

For more than fifty years the Weber thesis, which attributed to Calvinism a decisive influence in the development of modern capitalism, has been vigorously debated. In his celebrated essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), Max Weber had suggested that Calvinism contributed to the rise of capitalism in various ways—by relaxing the restraints which hitherto had largely served to impede its growth; by fostering the economic virtues of diligence, frugality, honesty, prudence, and sobriety; and, most of all, by providing a psychological, fillip to the development of the “spirit” of capitalism, “the temper of single-minded concentration upon pecuniary gain.” The controversy precipitated by the publication of Weber's essay engendered considerable heat that often served to obscure the points at issue, but over the years the continuing discussion has served to remove many of the issues from the area of debate and to narrow the focus of the central issue that remains.

This meeting, I gather, is concerned with the need for reinterpretation. I am not at all certain that reinterpretation is a universal necessity, i.e., that there cannot be final or definitive interpretations especially in those areas of historical research which are the most important. But I cannot go now into this difficult theoretical subject. I must limit myself to saying that the call for reinterpretation is dangerous practically. That call tells the historian: be original! Originality is very rare and the original historians do not have to be told to be original. As for the large majority of historians, they merely get bewildered by that call. Every one of us is probably flattered by the implication that we could be original if we only tried. This implication draws our attention away from our simple and urgent duties, the duties to be careful and thorough and to think straight. It would be also a great delusion to believe that the demand for novelty has made us more receptive to novel approaches: the resistance to genuine innovations as distinguished from fads is today as great as it was in the most benighted ages.

Many of the giants of American Catholicism were born in Europe and this is seen rather strikingly in the case of the American period of Roman Catholicism in California, which period dates from 1850. When, on December 6 of that year, a young Dominican friar, newly consecrated in Rome as Bishop of Monterey, arrived through the Golden Gate in San Francisco, he brought with him strong European traditions and background.