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.

Outside of hagiography, the evidence for female anchorites in early Christian Egypt remains scarce. House ascetics in cities survive for us in documentary and other sources, but women monks in non-coenobitic, nonurban environments are more difficult to locate, to the point at which some scholars have begun to question their very existence. This essay seeks to change the parameters of the scholarly debate over the nature of non-coenobitic female monastic experience. It examines hagiography, monastic rules and letters, and documentary papyri to reassess the state of the field and to produce a fuller portrait of anchoritic and semi-anchoritic female asceticism. Non-coenobitic women's monasticism existed, and it crossed boundaries of geography and social status, as well as the traditional categories of lavra, eremitic, coenobitic, and house asceticism. This interdisciplinary approach provides insights not only into women ascetics’ physical locations but also into their class, education, and levels of autonomy. An intervention into the historiography of women's asceticism in late antique Egypt, this study ultimately questions the advisability of using traditional categorizations of “anchoritic,” “lavra,” and “coenobitic” to classify female monasticism, because they obscure the particularities and diversity of female ascetic history.

At the 1860 conference on Protestant missions held in Liverpool, a session was dedicated to the use of the reported 200,000 monthly missionary periodicals produced by various societies for encouraging the home support of missionary work. The 125 delegates from more than twenty-five Protestant missionary societies both in Britain and abroad had divergent opinions on the prospective contents and audiences for missionary periodicals. One thing that they did agree upon, however, was their necessity. The Reverend Thomas Green from the Church Missionary Society noted that missionary periodicals provided a means of “influencing” the minds of readers in order to excite the missionary spirit among the home community. The high circulation of missionary periodicals was, according to the Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, Reverend Frederick Trestrail, an indication that they provided a source of information that was received willingly and consumed by the masses.

The question of the church's stand during the first three and a half centuries on Christians enlisting in the Roman army has received much attention since 1900. With slight overlapping, modern historians of the encounter of Christians with the Roman military fall into three basic groups: Roman Catholic, Protestant pacifist and “establishment” Protestant, primarily Lutheran.

In the last few decades, and especially since the excellent translations by Parsons and Gerth appeared, considerable discussion of Max Weber has taken place. Since only a few of his publications have been made accessible, the result has been an incomplete and oftentimes incorrect concept of the man. He is sometimes regarded as emphasizing almost exclusively the importance of the spiritual factor with regard to changes in the socio-economic sphere. More frequently he is regarded as one who deals with religous phenomena only in a rationalistic way. Both concepts of the man are equally wrong. Thus, it is my purpose to outline his basic religious, philosophical, and ethical convictions as well as the possible interrelationship between such ideas and his investigations.

It is customary to describe and interpret the history of Christianity as church history. To be sure, most church historians do not emphasize the special importance of the “church” in the Christian life they study and analyse; indeed, they deal with the idea of the church, with ecclesiological doctrines and with ecclesiastical practices as if they represented special phases of the Christian life. But, nevertheless, the fact that all aspects of Christian history are subsumed under the name and title of the “church” indicates that the character of Christianity is held to be inseparable from that of the “church”; the very custom of regarding Christian history as church history indicates that the Christian mind is marked by a special kind of self-consciousness induced by the awareness that the Christian faith is not fully actualized unless it is expressed in the special social context suggested by the term “church.”

When students of early American religion remember David Brainerd, if they remember him at all, it is usually in the context of the First Great Awakening. Born in Haddam, Connecticut in 1718, Brainerd enrolled at Yale in 1739, shortly after he had experienced conversion. By his sophomore year, when New Haven was aflame with the religious fervor that spread like a brush fire through New England, Brainerd was recognized as one of the “New Light” student leaders at Yale. For this reason, he was among the first undergraduates to be disciplined by the college administration as part of an effort to contain religious enthusiasm. Rector Thomas Clap expelled Brainerd in 1742 for remarking that tutor Chauncy Whittelsey had no more grace than a chair and for attending a meeting of Separate Congregationalists in defiance of college rules.

This paper deals with the nature of the idea of “covenant” in English Puritan writings of the first half of the seventeenth century, and particularly as this bears upon the question of the assurance of salvation.

That this assurance could be obtained was a commonly accepted axiom and, indeed, the actual striving for such awareness was a commonly recognized obligation. When William Ames wrote, “The assurance of our calling and election is a thing greatly to be desired”, he also added the statement that this certainty “is not only possible for us to attaine unto, but also … it belongs to our duty to make this our calling and election sure”. There may well be many difficulties along the way, with serious agonies and doubtings. But excessive fearfulness is as great a sin as presumption, denying as it does the power of God's mercy. And so William Perkins could say, “we doe not teach that all and every man living within the precincts of the Church, professing the name of Christ is certen of his salvation, … but that he ought so to be, and must indeavor to attaine thereto”.

George Herbert was a devotional poet in the early part of the seventeenth century; he was also an Anglican minister. Like his friends, John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes, he loved the Church of England, and his faith was a source of creativity. In the later part of his life Herbert had a hobby; he liked to collect simple proverbs. Herbert's sayings, which he published as Outlandish Proverbs, had little to do with religion. Compared with the themes of his poetry, in fact, they were surprisingly secular.

The current revival of interest in both Jonathan Edwards and eschatology points up the fact that there has been no deliberate effort to bring these two subjects together. The only previous attempt to treat Edwards' doctrine of the last things is that by Frank Hugh Foster, in a series of articles on “The Eschatology of the New England Divines.”1 Unfortunately, the title promises more than the discussions afford; because Foster's interest is confined almost entirely to the problem of Universalism, his section on Edwards treats only of the doctrine of eternal punishment and serves to perpetuate the common notion that the great Puritan was little more than a preacher of damnation.

The Practice of Piety by Lewis Bayly was one of the most famous treatises ever penned by a Puritan. This devotional manual went through numerous editions and was translated into six languages, including into German by Philip Jacob Spener. Piety is the term that best expresses Puritan religiousness. Spirituality was a term seldom employed by Puritans, and when used it never referred to their essential religiousness. Today spirituality is used as a description of all forms of piety, though originally it referred to a particular kind of piety, namely that which developed out of monasticism. Roman Catholic spirituality, whether lay or clerical, has been shaped by the massive presence of monasticism. But Protestant piety has been shaped by the massive absence of that monastic ideal. Hence, the term piety will be used in an effort to delineate Puritan religiousness.

In view of the rancor and vehemence which characterize much of the patristic condemnation of Epicureanism, it seems remarkably incongruous that there should be in the Fathers any expressions of approval at all for the philosophy of the Garden. Nevertheless, such expressions do occur and with reference to all three divisions of Epicurus's system, canonic, physics, and ethics. No doubt the best explanation for this apparent inconsistency of attitude is suggested by Clement's definition of philosophy and the tolerance that it implies: “By philosophy I do not mean the Stoic nor the Platonic, or the Epicurean and Aristotelian, but everything that has been well said by each of the schools and that teaches righteousness along with science marked by reverence; this eclectic whole I call philosophy” (Strom., i. 7. 732CD).

Recent discussions of the major literary works of the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have advanced significantly our understanding of this important episode in European history. Clearly, our efforts no longer are controlled by the anticlerical and even antireligious sentiments that corrupted so much late nineteenth-century scholarship on this subject. Yet a more subtle nineteenth-century prejudice still remains with us. We still wish to believe that those who opposed the craze did so because in some fundamental way they were more enlightened, or more rational, or more scientific than those who accepted and even supported witch hunting. Recent anthropological research, however, stressing both the ubiquity and the intellectual integrity of a belief in witches, suggests strongly that this modern viewpoint is probably not correct. Certainly, this prejudice has seriously distorted our understanding of one important contribution to the witch debate, Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Modern commentators have invested this book with an aura of scientific rationality that it ill deserves. A closer inspection, I believe, reveals an entirely different source for Scot's ideas and, more importantly, sheds some new light on what it really was that brought witch hunting in Europe to an end.

The interest of the Laurentian schism, which broke out on the death of Pope Anastasius II in November 498, lies not in any doctrinal content but rather in the tensions with Rome that it reveals and the contribution it made to papal ideology and historiography by the propaganda it stimulated. The papal break with Constantinople in 483, the Acaian schism, has been advanced as an external factor in the schism because it caused many of the senatorial nobility of German-ruled Italy to look back with nostalgia toward the Empire and to oppose papal stands on doctrine. Furthermore, senatorial discontent did not die down during the pontificates of the masterful and contentious Gelasius (492–496) or the weaker Anastasius 11(496–498) who, the caput senatus Festus assured the Emperor, would be brought to sign the Henotikon. Attention has been directed towards the internal roots of the schism, among them the late-developing interest of senators in church affairs, specifically through their claims to influence in papal elections and over church revenues, drawn for the most part from endowments from their own class and families, just as a century earlier their predecessors had sought to retain control over the revenues of the pagan cults. These claims had been put forward on the death of Pope Simplicius in 483 at a meeting of the senate with a group of bishops under the presidency of the praetorian prefect Basilius but they had been rejected once by Gelasius, an opponent of several senatorial traditions and a reorganizer of the church's property administration, and again by Symmachus in March 502.1

The nature of the relationship between the Renaissance and the Reformation has intrigued historians of both the past and the present. Recently a number of noted scholars have attempted to demonstrate the connection between the two movements with varying degrees of success. Historians seem to have marshalled an impressive and growing body of evidence to show the direct relationship between the advent of humanism and the coming of the Lutheran Reformation, even though the exact nature of this relationship has not yet been clarified in a definitive manner. But in the case of humanism and Calvinism no consensus has been reached concerning this problem; consequently, the situation is still in doubt. The purpose of this study is to enhance the historical understanding of the connection between humanism and Calvinism by a fresh analysis of the life and thought of three important first generation leaders of the Reformed church, namely, John Calvin, Theodore Beza and Pierre Viret. Moreover, new evidence on the subject from the career of Viret, the least known but nevertheless a very important member of this Calvinist trinity, will be presented to demonstrate more clearly the positive and direct link between humanism and Calvinism in the formative years of the Reformation.

After the war was over leading Catholic laity and the lower clergy pointed their finger at their bishops, faulting them for not having the backbone and willpower to stand up to Hitler. Was this fair? Bishops said they tempered their criticism of Nazism because Hitler punished their priests rather than them. Were the bishops being candid and forthright with this statement? If so, was this the right strategy? Jesuits urged the bishops to become active in the Kreisau Circle of resistance. They did not. Should they have? Pope Pius XII gave the German bishops freedom to do as they saw fit regarding speaking out about the Holocaust. They spoke only guardedly. Should they have said more? The Concordat, the agreement between the Vatican and the German government, surprised German Catholics who had been warned again and again about Nazism. Was the Concordat a mistake? Once signed, should the church have stuck to it once Nazi racial policy had become manifest? There was an active Catholic resistance circle in Berlin. Were there others? If not, why not? Questions about Catholic resistance run on and on. Are they worth probing, trying to answer? In the end no matter what is said about Catholic resistance, the six million will have perished. And, in the end, no German managed to put an end to Hitler, although the Swabian Catholic, Klaus von Stauffenberg, came close. Is a discussion about Catholic resistance an exercise in futility?

Medieval exegetes contributed distinguished commentaries on the Book of Job that had far-reaching influence. When, in 1554, Calvin ascended the pulpit in Geneva to deliver a series of sermons on Job, his listeners heard not only the Genevan Reformer but echoes of that medieval tradition. In Job's story Calvin saw a God whose providence held sovereign sway over nature, history, and Satan. Having undertaken these sermons, however, Calvin soon confronted Job's question: Why do the righteous suffer? Calvin did not answer Job alone. He turned to both medieval Joban commentaries and Scotist-nominalist categories to resolve this book's central issue of divine justice. But we will see that despite all these resources the exegetical difficulties posed by the text itself forced Calvin to realize that his central hermeneutical device brought with it implications with which he was ultimately uncomfortable. That device was double justice.

In his economic history of the Schwarzwald, published in 1891, Eberhard Gothein called attention to the connection between Calvinism and modern capitalism.

Thirteen years later, in a series of brilliant essays, Max Weber insisted that Calvinism and capitalism were intimately related and alluded to such Calvinistic virtues as secular asceticism, thrift, and predestination as significant elements in the situation.2

Very few ancient Christian writers have been as maligned by posterity as Tertullian has been. This is understandable, for Tertullian made little effort to endear himself to either his contemporaries or his future readers. His conversion to—many still say “lapse into”—Montanism was not calculated to make him popular with Catholic historians. His so-called legalism has become a favorite straw man for Protestant writers. The disappearance of both Montanism and the ancient African church destroyed the two logical communities where his name might have been venerated. In the sixteenth century a number of scholars became sufficiently interested in him to produce editions of his works; but although his rhetorical ability attracted some attention from the humanists, they found his manner and spirit too uncouth. Protestant rigorists who ought to have welcomed his stringency rejected him because of his emphasis on tradition. Catholic polemicists who could be expected to welcome such an emphasis ignored him because of his apparent denial of the authority of tradition in becomeing a Montanist. Rationalist scholars who ought to have enjoyed his wit and his unflinching logic were unable to sympathize with the seemingly illogical consequences of that logic. The result of these various biases has been a surprising agreement on a generally negative evaluation of Tertullian as a thinker and as a person.

In several articles and books published in recent years attempts have been made to examine the anti-Christian tradition in China and to seek for the causes of the failure of Christianity to substitute itself for the religious and philosophical traditions of the Chinese people. Reflective analyses of missionary policy and strategy, as well as of the Chinese milieu within which missionaries carried on their activities, have been made by theologians, historians and sociologists in order to determine what “went wrong.”