Between 1640 and 1660 the English nation experienced a political, social, and religious upheaval which in retrospect can only be called a revolution. So profound was this crisis, epitomized by the public execution of a duly anointed king, that not even the restoration of the Stuart monarchy could reverse the long-term effects of those turbulent decades. Historians long have noted the religious purpose and zeal which moved so many of the king's subjects, egged on by their ministers, to resort to insurrection against their lawful sovereign. For example, Stephen Marshall, parliamentary preacher, spoke to the House of Commons in February 1642 on the impending civil war: “If this work be to avenge God's church against Babylon, he is a blessed man that takes and dashes the little ones against the stone.” In August of the same year William Carter told the Commons that God sometimes commanded brother to fight against brother: “God hath put into your hands, a work of his, the greatest that hath been on foot for God in these islands for many hundred years … God hath called you to the purging of the land of those locusts and caterpillers.” Two years later, the war against the king still unconcluded, Edmund Staunton declared: “There is a fire of civill war kindled in England, still burning in the bowels of it … but two bloods will quench it, the blood of Christ and that of his desperate enemies.” Such statements, while prompted by the revolutionary stirrings of the 1640s, must be set in the larger context of Puritan theories of war and peace. From the 1570s when Puritanism emerged as a distinct party of reform within the Church of England until 1641 when the Long Parliament convened, English Puritans developed a considerable body of literature dealing with the nature, purpose, and limits of warfare. The purpose of this article is to examine in this literature what might be called a Puritan theology, or perhaps better, spirituality of warfare in prerevolutionary England.

“Altogether, the Iconoclast controversy is in the grip of a crisis of over-explanation.” Since in his recent article Peter Brown is himself offering an explanation, we need to ask whether he has relaxed one grip only to fasten on another. Brown's analysis is characteristically brilliant. With a few deft strokes he outlines where scholarship is and what culs-de-sac it has got itself into, and he focuses attention on aspects of the evidence that have been insufficiently appreciated. Brown is peculiarly sersitive to the nature of religion, and as a result his article is an excellent account of the complex dynamics of religion in early Byzantium.

The parable of the tares is the proof pàssage for religious liberty. Sinite utraque crescere (Matthew 13, 30) is the counterpart of compelle intrare (Luke 14, 23). The apostles of liberty repeat the text with monotonous iteration, although there is an occasional variety in the emphasis. Some stress the rationalistic argument: we do not know enough to separate the tares from the wheat. Others emphasize the eschatological approach: we can afford to be patient because God will burn the tares at the harvest. Others again make a legalistic appeal: Christ has commanded us to leave the tares alone. More interesting are the expedients employed by the persecutors to evade the liberal implications of the parable. The simplest device is to identify the tares not with the heretics, but with the moral offenders within the church. Another subterfuge is to identify the overly zealous servants with the ministers, not with the magistrates, who are not to be hampered by the parable.

The first letter in Pope Innocent III's register of his second year was Vergentis in senium, a letter which he sent to the city of Viterbo in March, 1199. The decretal reflected Innocent's growing concern with heresy in the papal states and established new and more stringent penalties for those who rejected or subverted the Christian faith. In Vergentis, perhaps following the Roman lawyer Placentinus, Innocent imposed the traditional spiritual punishment of excommunication on heretics, equated heresy with lese majesty, and applied to convicted heretics the sanctions for treason in Roman law: complete confiscation of goods, even disinheriting innocent children. The punishment was fitting, Innocent observed, because a heretic injured celestial majesty, a crime far more heinous than any offense committed against temporal authority. Since the heretics in Viterbo continued to demand his attention later in his pontificate, we do not know how effective Innocent's decree was, but Vergentis did establish a precedent for papal action throughout Christendom. In order to root out all vestiges of heresy, Innocent extended the provisions of the decretal from the heretics themselves to their “supporters, defenders, and harborers.” The decretal marked the first firm step of his increasingly grim policy to use all of the resources of the church to extirpate heresy from Christian lands. The step from Viterbo to the Albigensian crusade was a short one. And, since heresy was an ecclesiastical crime, both laymen and clerics who were accused of heresy had their cases heard in ecclesiastical courts, giving lawyers another item to add to the list of cases in which the pope could exercise jurisdiction in the secular world.

Philip Melanchthon was the author of the first book of Protestant theology, which he called Loci communes rerum theologicarum seu hypotyposes theologicae (Wittenberg, 1521). As a first it is worth some study, for firsts are likely to be models for later things of their kind. Moreover, while Melanchthon is by some considered to depart from early Protestant thought (cf. Philippism), Luther gave unqualified and almost extravagant praise to his young collaborator's first work. This justifies putting at least the 1521 edition in the fundamental canon of Protestantism. Finally, if suth is its importance Melanchthon's method deserves examination.

In the early ninth century Bishops Gerbald of Liège and Haito of Basel described the qualities of the ideal country priest.1 Many of his virtues were negative. For example, he was to shun all questionable contacts with women; drunkenness was condemned, and he was to avoid taverns with their salacious amusements; he was not to ape the laity by bearing arms; commerce and usury were forbidden to him as were, of course, all simoniacal practices. More positively, he was admonished to be diligent in his sacramental functions, especially baptism and anointing, as well as celebration of the Mass, and to observe the canonical hours. Finally, he was to instruct his flock in the rudiments of the faith, the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer, and to exhort them to lead the Christian life. The desire to attain these modestly ambitious goals during the Carolingian period resulted in an increased concern for clerical qualifications. Manuscripts from St. Emmeram at Regensburg and Freising in Bavaria, for example, contain detailed lists of subjects for ecclesiastical examination,2 and the sorts of episcopal statutes or capitularies which Gerbald's and Haito's works represent seem to have been distributed widely throughout the Empire3.

King James VI and I had a taste for aphorisms, a circumstance which has occasionally misled the historians of his reign. James's deeply held and lifelong attachment to the doctrine of the divine right of kings is well known and unquestionable; so when, at the Hampton Court Conference, he said, “No bishop, no king”, it has perhaps been too readily assumed that his devotion to episcopacy as a system of church government was as unswerving and permanent as his belief in divine right. The king's admiration for the Church of England and its prelates, his threat at Hampton Court to harry the Puritans out of the land, his savage attack in Basilikon Doron on those “fiery spirited men in the ministry” who “fed themselves with the hope to become Tribuni plebis” but who were really “very pests in Church and Commonweal… breathing nothing but sedition and calumnies”—all this is so familiar as scarcely to require repeating. It is also well known that when he began to govern for himself in Scotland in the 1580s the position of the Scottish bishops was feeble. It continued to worsen for about a decade, as the king and his advisers found it desirable for political reasons to make concessions to the dominant presbyterian wing of the kirk, until the presbyterian historian David Calderwood could write of the year 1596, “The Kirk of Scotland was now come to her perfection.” Then, beginning in 1596, the tide began to run in the opposite direction.

One of the more interesting features of American religious life in the years following the Civil War was the renascence of perfectionist or “holiness” teachings among evangelical Protestants. Declaring that the scriptural Baptism of the Holy Spirit brought entire sanctification, perfectionists held that all Christians should seek and expect a “second blessing”, beyond the conversion experience, which would bring complete and instantaneous purification from sin and perfect holiness toward God. Beyond the “new birth” of justification, there lay the “higher life” of sanctification. These doctrines were first promulgated in the United States by the evangelist Charles Finney in the 1830s. Finney drew upon the theology of John Wesley and the early Methodists whose doctrine of “perfect love” paralleled his own religious experience. In the antebellum decades a proliferation of perfectionist devotional literature and a wave of perfectionist-oriented revivals bore witness to the appeal of the doctrine. Although Methodists were in the vanguard, the movement was thoroughly interdenominational. In this period perfectionism also had strong social connotations, and many social reforms of the era drew freely upon perfectionist impulses.

Although in recent years fourth- and fifth-century Egyptian monasticism has received much scholarly attention of increasing methodological and theoretical sophistication, conflict with demons, a primary metaphor for the ascetic life in the literature of the period, has been left relatively unexplored. One reason for this lack of attention is a shift in the intellectual paradigms through which scholars approach ascetic literature: as they have moved from psychological and theological models to social and performative ones in interpreting ascetic theory and practice, seemingly subjective or theological themes such as demonological theory have given way to more cultural topics, such as constructions of the body and formations of ascetic institutions and practices, with their accompanying politics. But the neglect of demons is a function also of the weighty influence exercised by two fourth-century demonologists, Athanasius of Alexandria and Evagrius of Pontus, and of the powerful modern explications of monastic demonology based on these important sources. Together the Life of Antony and the works of Evagrius construct, it seems, the monastic demonology, upon which later sources only elaborate.

Science and religion both constitute vital dimensions of experience, but people differ in their views on proper relations between the two. In modern times, when science increasingly dominates the outlook of society, many regard science and religion as incompatible and strive to maintain them in watertight compartments. In 1972, for example, the National Academy of Sciences, responding to a demand that creationism be given equal time with the theory of evolution in biology classrooms and textbooks, adopted a resolution stating that “religion and science are … separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstanding of both scientific theory and religious belief.” The battle over creationism continues, with the National Academy of Sciences and orthodox religious groups both insisting on the incompatibility of the two spheres.

Our knowledge of the life of Justin “the Martyr” depends almost entirely on what he himself tells us, especially in the introduction to the Dialogue with Trypho, where he recounts his journey to the true philosophy, Christianity. It appears that he was born in the late first or early second century at Flavia Neapolis in Samaria into a Greek-speaking family. Although he refers to himself in one passage as a Samaritan by race (Dial. 120.6), this background seems unlikely, since there is no evidence that he was familiar with any Samaritan religious traditions. Rather, it appears that his ancestors were originally Greek or Roman colonists who settled in Flavia Neapolis after its establishment by Vespasian in A.D. 72. In any case, he certainly was not Jewish, for he did not encounter the Jewish scriptures until later in life.

In 1922, George Freeman Bragg, rector of an Episcopal Church in Baltimore, published a volume detailing the work of his fellow church members from the colonial era to the present. He painstakingly recorded baptisms, catechists, church growth, church debates, social outreach, and listed prominent leaders in the movement. His work was, in many respects, unremarkable, one of many garden-variety “church histories” that still line the shelves of seminaries and colleges around the country. Their production reminds us of an era of abundant confidence in the efficacy of religious institutions to shape society, and of histories to mold the future of Christian communities.

In his book Two Tudor Conspiracies, D. M. Loades challenged the traditional view among historians that the Wyatt rebellion was influenced by Protestant concerns over the Catholic policies of Mary Tudor. In Loades' account of the event, religion played no prominent part; the conspirators were secular and anti-clerical, but otherwise their religious convictions remain “shadowy.” Loades contends that apart from William Thomas, the well-known Protestant enthusiast, “all had conformed without protest under Edward, and those still alive were to do so again under Elizabeth, but throughout the period of the rebellion and trials which followed it, all protested their loyalty to the Catholic Church.” The real reasons for the revolt, he asserts, were secular and political—namely, fear of foreign domination through the Queen's intended marriage to Philip of Spain.

When the early nineteenth-century pastor William Henry Foote reflected upon the eighteenth-century Christians who were his forebears in North Carolina and Virginia, he paused at one point to make an observation about the clothes they wore. “A church-going people are a dress-loving people”, he said; “The sanctity and decorum of the house of God are inseparably associated with a decent exterior; and the spiritual, heavenly exercises of the inner man are incompatible with a defiled and tattered, or slovenly mein. All regular Christian assemblies cultivate a taste for dress, and none more so than the hardy pioneer settlers of Upper Carolina, and the valley and mountains of Virginia” As they readied themselves for worship, Foote elaborated, the faithful “put on their best and carefully preserved dress” in preparation for “their approach to the King of Kings”.

“Use Auriol's Compendium as a mould, pour in Lyre, flavor with Augustine, and sprinkle with Grosseteste.” This was John Wyclif's (1330–1384) recipe for biblical commentary. It may be the nature of biblical commentary that commentators do not follow recipes closely, but the history of how the admirers of Nicholas of Lyra's Apocalypse Commentary (1329) received and reworked it indicates that Nicholas's work served frequently as the “mould” into which other interpretations were “poured,” while his own Augustinian seasonings were largely ignored. Although later commentators often adopted Nicholas's method, they more frequently poured in the ingredients of his younger Franciscan colleague, Peter Auriol (whose Apocalypse Commentary of 1319 Nicholas sharply critiqued), serving up a dish that Nicholas would not have enjoyed eating.

Few men in modern Dutch history have played such a significant role as Abraham Kuyper. A theologian of European renown, a church reformer whose activities lastingly changed the existing church order in his country, a statesman who during five decades of an active political career combined his religion with a unique theory of government, and last but not least, a journalist and outstanding man of letters, Kuyper, during the course of his long life, placed a stamp upon the civilization of the Netherlands which it never was to lose. The immense breadth of his intellect, sustained by a tremendous energy, allowed him to speak with authority on subjects ranging from Calvin's concept of grace, through Islamic architecture, to the future of colonial reform, and earned him the epithet of Abraham de Geweldige (Abraham the Magnificent). His greatest achievement, however, was the foundation of a system of religious dogma upon which he erected a political and social philosophy which in the Protestant Netherlands since 1850 was the only one of lasting influence.1

Thesis forty-three of the Ninety-five Theses reads, “Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than he who buys indulgences.” Following the historical convention of dating the Reformation from the Ninety-five Theses of 1517, we may argue that from its inception theology and social ethics were inseparable. One particular aspect of the Reformation impact on social change which has attracted attention and controversy from the sixteenth century to the present is welfare reform. While it would be overbold to claim that reform of poor relief was motivated by theology alone, radical theological change was certainly a major factor. Since righteousness coram Deo was thought to be by grace alone, it became difficult to rationalize the plight of the poor as a peculiar form of blessedness. Thus Luther excoriated the indulgence sellers who robbed the people of needed resources. What was implicit in the Ninety-five Theses became increasingly explicit in the months and years leading up to the publication on January 24, 1522 of the Wittenberg Order.

In the successive waves of “No Popery” which ebbed and flowed until the middle of the nineteenth century in British public life, the role played by the oldfashioned identification of the pope of the Roman Catholic Church with Antichrist is not easily discernible. Yet its presence is undeniable, though rarely on the surface or on the lips of those who, in the ordinary sense, “made history.” A study of the background and setting of John Henry Newman's thought on the papacy and the Antichrist has led me to uncover a neglected field of popular and cultured Antichrist thinking which helps to account for the persistence of “No Popery” sentiment in Christian history after its demise had been prematurely announced by more than one reasonable and enlightened politician.

Few historians of early Christianity would dissent from the view that Hilary of Poitiers was the west's most able and articulate anti-Arian apologist of the 360s. In the course of this bishop's exile in Asia Minor (356–360) and return to the west, there is evidence of a substantial literary activity, most of which was circulated soon after his death and survives to the present day. Works such as his letters to the emperor Constantius II, expecially the so-called In Constantium, his collected dossier against Valens and Ursacius, and his theological treatises De synodis and De trinitate, attained for this once obscure bishop from Gaul a position of preeminence in the minds of the next generation of anti-Arians.