Students of the cultural history of the late Roman and Byzantine periods sometimes speculate as to what may have been the ordinary daily intellectual interests—the private store of detached thought and emotion—of the average educated men of those times. To us, the literary activity of those centuries seems a barren skeleton, picked bare by the sophists, an abhorrent thing in which we can find no real interest. The formal philosophy of the schools was a wild business whose fantastic flights seem to many of us today to be quite incredible and absurd. We can perhaps understand a little better the intellectual and political interest which attached to the theological controversies, though these often went to lengths which seem to us to be excessive. Private religious experience there was, of course, and there was an emotional outlet in Christian art which we can understand quite well. But even the total of these things will not perhaps satisfy our curiosity; whether rightly or wrongly, we find it difficult to understand that a man's life can have been made up of these things alone, and we wonder what a mind of at least some independence and vigor can have found as a basis for its individual existence.

This article takes as its central site of interrogation the stone sculpture of Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960) in the Washington National Cathedral, asking how a statue of a Japanese Christian leader came to be constructed inside one of America's most important religious institutions. At first glance, the statue appears to be a simple instance of commemoration for an individual who dedicated his life to helping the poor and spreading the gospel within his native country of Japan. What emerges from a close examination of the National Cathedral's archives, however, is the story of a religious leader whose international standing and reputation underwent a significant shift over the course of his career. By tracing the construction of Kagawa's image as a globally renowned Christian pacifist during the interwar period, and the challenges to this image brought on by his subsequent wartime activities, this study seeks to place the Cathedral's building of the statue into historical context. In doing so, it illuminates the politics of national representation inherent in this project of cross-cultural commemoration, while also highlighting the lessons it offers about the rise and fall of Christian internationalism in the mid-twentieth century.

This essay reexamines the network centered on the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather, the great Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, several of the latter's associates in Halle and London, and Halle-sponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. It pursues the question what this network (which existed from circa 1710 into the 1730s) reveals about how the idea of a “Protestant religion” evolved as a theological construct and how “Protestantism” as a category of religious identity came to have meaning and resonance across denominational and linguistic divides. Through the Boston-Halle-Tranquebar exchange, the essay argues, “awakened souls” from Anglo-American Reformed and German Lutheran churches converged toward a conservative but dogmatically minimalistic understanding of the Christian religion that combined an intensely Christocentric, biblicist, and experiential piety with an activist-missionary and eschatological orientation—a package which was now equated with being truly “Protestant” or “protestantisch,” respectively. This reflects how the historical development of “Protestantism” intersected with larger philosophical and theological debates about “religion” and the different “religions” of humanity that involved Enlightenment thinkers as much as awakened Christians. The distinct version of “the Protestant religion” that first developed among the correspondents of this network would continue to evolve through the transatlantic awakenings of the eighteenth century and remain influential into the nineteenth century.

The mid-nineteenth century, which spawned numerous doctrinaire systems, witnessed the rise, among Baptists in Trans-Appalachia and the Southwest, of a doctrinaire ecciesiology which is consistent and rigid, and which calls for denominational exclusivism.

Charles I, King of England and Scotland, appointed John Spottiswoode Chancellor of Scotland on December 23, 1634. This position was the last and highest bestowed upon a man who had served the crown faithfully for over three decades. Spottiswoode was ordained a minister in the Scottish Reformed (Presbyterian?) Church in 1583. In 1604 James named him Archbishop of Glasgow; in 1605, appointed him to the Privy Council; and in 1615, translated him to the Archbishopric of St. Andrews. In this position it fell to Spottiswoode to implement the Scottish ecclesiastical policy of James I, which consisted of an attempt to make the Scottish Kirk more episcopal in form. In the early stages of the transfromation which dealt with structure Spottiswoode was successful. However, in the final analysis, he failed because, even though the Five Articles of Perth which contained the liturgical changes were ratified by the Perth General Asembly of 1616 and by Parliament in 1621, they did not receive general acceptance. Nothing that Spottiswoode did quieted the vocal opposition among the clergy and laity.1 These groups became the nucleus of the opposition to Charles in the 1630s.

To begin missionary activity in India was not a simple matter. The missionaries there had to face a great deal of opposition not encountered by the missionaries to the South Seas and Africa. In the latter areas the really serious difficulties did not arise until the mission fields had actually been entered. In the case of the Indian missions the missionaries found the first line of osbtruction in England itself, in the London offices of the East India Company. The Company was resolutely opposed to the introduction of missionaries into its own territories, or into any part of India.

The German Evangelical Synod of North America, now merged with the Reformed Church in the United States under the name of Evangelical-Reformed Church, was founded in the year 1840 as Der Deutsche Evangelische Kirchenverein des Westens. It might appear to the casual observer that the establishment of the Kirchenverein, like the founding of all immigrant churches, represented purely the transplantation of a foreign culture to the new world where, protected from old-world influences and indifferent to the forces of a strange environment, it would develop its independent forms. The development of this German religious community on the Missouri frontier, however, can not be understood apart from the conditions prevailing in both Europe and America at the time. From the time of its inception it was put to the task of emancipating itself from the ties which bound it to the fatherland and establishing such contacts with the new environment as would constitute it an American body.

In today's world the most powerful appeal of any spokesman for the West is to champion liberty against the oppressiveness of a monolithic society and the tyranny of the totalitarian state. The call for freedom appeals to the deepest aspirations of peoples and touches upon the longing of masses of individual human beings. No rellying cry is so effective in creating a durable ethos among the democratic nations and in bringing to their consciousness a sense of those values by which they live or ought to live. No idea is more useful in destroying the image of the West as the self-satisfied defender of the status quo and in dramatizing the authentic revolutionary tradition, for men live by their dreams and visions.

One of the curiosities of the scholarly enterprise is the fact that often what tends to advance the handling and interpretation of data with respect to one problem has the side effect of preventing adequate and imaginative treatment of related problems. This appears to be the case in recent creedal research. The question of the earliest text of vetus symbolum romanum has been obscured, rather than clarified, by the important recognition at the hands of many scholars of the richness and variety of creedal data surviving from the second century.

Clement of Rome has often been judged and found wanting by his Protestant interpreters. His letter is frequently presented as “a good illustration of the break between the New Testament faith and the Apostolic Fathers' lapse into moralism.” (And “moralism,” to put it mildly, is not always a pleasant word in Protestant theological circles.) Rudolf Knopf calls attention to the “rationalen Moralismus des Schreibens.” And Johannes Weiss says that “a strong moralism runs through all its expressions from the first page to the last.” When James Mackinnon gives us examples of Christian moralism in the sub-apostolic period, Clement is of course present in a prominent way, as indeed he is also significantly present when H. E. W. Turner mentions the “tradition of ‘sober moralism’ which was so notable a feature of late first-century and early second-century Christianity.” Moreover, A. C. McGiffert stands in the same tradition of interpretation when he says that for Clement “salvation is to be had only by obeying God and doing his will.” One could of course go on and on citing examples of this kind, but it seems unnecessary to do so, especially in view of the fact that a great many more illustrations are readily available in Thomas F. Torrance's The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers. Not only does Professor Torrance mention numerous scholars who stress the moralism of Clement, but also he himself comes to the conclusion that grace in I Clement appears to be an “enabling power granted to those who are worthy.” Clement “may use the language of election and justification, but the essentially Greek idea of the unqualified freedom of choice is a natural axiom in his thought, and entails a doctrine of ‘works,’ as Paul would have said.”

If we are correct in saying that for the Arians the relationship of the Logos-Son to the Father was primarily a cosmological problem and for the Catholics primarily a soteriological problem, we should be able to go on and point to corresponding differences in the liturgical ethos of the rival parties and more specifically to divergent conceptions and practices connected with the Eucharist, resulting from differing conceptions of the role of Logos-Son. We do find, despite the meagre materials on the Arian side, divergent emphases that will be seen to bear on the behavior of the two parties in the ecclesio-political struggle of the fourth century.

Over the past few years I have been dealing with a narrow version of this question, as it has applied to the history of Protestantism in the twentieth century. In our book, Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to the Present, Douglas Jacobsen and I argued that the two-party model of Protestantism in the United States—conservative vs. liberal, fundamentalist vs. modernist, and so on—does not take into account the remarkable complexity and diversity of the Protestant religious experience in America, and in some sense presents distorted picture of that reality. There were scholars—including Martin Marty, who generously contributed a dissenting essay to our volume—who felt that we had overstated our brief against the two-party paradigm. More relevant for our purposes this evening, there were a number of reviewers who agreed with our critique of the two-party paradigm, but who also expressed disappointment that we provided only the barest outlines of a new or better metaphor or model to explain twentieth-century American Protestantism. While I had not gone into this project thinking that we would end the day with a new interpretive paradigm, I certainly was not surprised by this critique. The very first time I gave a paper on some of our preliminary findings, there was a scholar of U.S. religious history in the audience who squirmed throughout the entirety of my remarks; when I finished, before I had the chance to ask for questions, she blurted out: “I find your argument pretty convincing, but if you can't give me a new model to replace the old one, how am I supposed to teach my course on the history of American Protestantism?” Well, we broaden the topic from Protestantism in the United States to religion in the United States, it would seem that, in many ways, this is the issue we are addressing this evening.

Whatever else may be said about the Reverend William Dwight Porter Bliss, his reform energy was indefatigable. From the Haymarket Affair until the Red Scare, he was instrumental in organizing, researching, editing, publishing and lecturing on behalf of the coming of God's Kingdom. Along with Walter Rauschenbusch and George Herron, Bliss was certainly one of the most prominent spokesmen for the left wing of the Social Gospel.