Twenty years ago Jerald Brauer wrote an essay on the writing of American church history entitled, “Changing Perspectives on Religion in America.” In this essay he noted that “change in perspective marks the writing of the history of religion in America.” After discussing the work of Robert Baird and William Warren Sweet, the two historians whose perspectives most influenced the writing of American church history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, Brauer then directed his attention to a third and new perspective. This new perspective had developed in the post-World War II era and was the result of the work of Sidney E. Mead, Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Winthrop S. Hudson, and others. Brauer described the new perspective by pointing out how it differed from the work of Sweet. It was clear to Brauer, however, that no one historian or school of historians had yet emerged whose perspective was able to dominate the landscape in the manner that Baird and Sweet had. There really was no new single perspective, but a variety of approaches and interpretations. In other words, in the late 1960s the discipline of American church history was in a state of flux, and “a number of young historians” were, in Brauer's words, “anxious to develop a new perspective through which to view the development and nature of Christianity in America.”

Horace Bushnell's children knew him as a tender, playful father whose after-dinner romps and continual courtesy warmed the memories of their early family life. But his daughter, Mary, once told of a curious and glaring exception to his habit of fun and kindness at home. “The sight of a doll or [toy] monkey was abhorrent to him,” she remembered, “and he could not restrain his expression of the disgust thus awakened…Woe to the doll which lay in his path!”

Many years ago, almost on my first acquaintance with Calvin, I was impressed by a phrase in that last brief letter of his to his old companion in labor and battle, William Farel:

Live mindful of our union which, as it has been useful to the Church of God, so its fruits await us in heaven.

We may begin here, though it is where Calvin's work ended. His friendships, labors, struggles, and studies had as their aim to be “useful to the Church of God.” It was in Geneva that they had been fellow-laborers, but it is not merely to the Church of Geneva that he thinks their labor to have been useful. It was a contribution to a far wider community, the Church of God, that has no boundaries narrower than the communion of believers, the divine society extending over all the world and throughout all the ages of mankind's history. The Holy Catholic Church was for him a universal reality, however hidden from men's eyes through the prevailing abuses and the proud assumptions of those who claimed to rule and speak for the Church.

Philip Schaff's America, newly translated from the German, appeared on these shores 133 years ago. Although that fact belies the title (and pushes the beginning of the American Society of Church History a third of a century into the future), I suspect that in 1888 Schaff would have concurred with much that he had thought as a younger scholar. He claimed, though, that he would not live in California “for any price,” and I have speculated about whether by 1888 he had changed his mind. The question is more than personal, for perhaps the most pungent metaphor in Schaff's America is his “Phenixgrave” figure for the land. “America,” he wrote, “is the grave of all European nationalities; but a Phenix grave, from which they shall rise to new life and new activity.” Beyond that he thought that America seemed “destined to be the Phenix grave not only of all European nationalities … but also of all European churches and sects, of Protestantism and Romanism.”

In the 1920s a loosely united band of militant conservatives launched a crusade to capture conrol of the major Protestant denominations. These fundamentalists staunchly affirmed the supernatural character and literal accuracy of the Bible, the supernatural character of Christ, and the necessity for Christians to separate themselves from the world. Most often Baptists and Presbyterians, they struggled to reestablish their denominations as true and pure churches: true to the historic doctrines of the faith as they perceived them, and pure from what they saw as the polluting influences of an increasingly corrupt modern culture. But by the late 1920s the fundamentalists had lost the fight. Not only were they powerless minorities in the Northern Baptist and the Northern Presbyterian denominations, where the struggle for control had been the fiercest, but many perceived them as uneducated, intolerant rustics. The Scopes trial cemented this notion in the popular consciousness.

The publication of a major reference work in any field of interest is always a welcome event. The three-volume Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience: Studies of Traditions and Movements, edited by Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), is no exception. It is welcome for the authoritative up-to-date information it supplies, and it is doubly welcome for its new conception in design, format, and scope. Unlike many encyclopedias, it is not an alphabetical compendium of many brief entries dealing with narrowly defined topics or very specific items. Instead, this new encyclopedia is composed of 106 essays (mostly fourteen to sixteen large double-column pages in length, with some as long as twenty-eight pages) ranging over a broad spectrum of themes, traditions, movements, and preoccupations of“the American religious experience.” Little is neglected. While the volumes are not arranged for ready reference use, provision is made for this aspect of more convetional encyclopedias by an unusually good index which helps one locate information on a wide variety of subject matter, both past and present. The focus on the broad aspects of religion in America more than compensates for the absence of any readily available alphabetized items of information.

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 Calvinism (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.

So far as religious affairs are concerned, the colonial period of our history begins with the planting of the first permanent English colony in 1607, guided by the intention to perpetuate in the new land the religious patterns to which the mother country had grown accustomed. Chief of these for our purposes was uniformity enforced by the civil power. The period culminates just 180 years later with the complete rejection of this central intention in the provisions for national religious freedom in the Constitution (1787) and First Amendment (1791).

Religious division has determined Germany's destiny. In the Middle Ages, it was the struggle between Emperor and Pope which doomed the Holy Roman Empire. During the Reformation, and the Thirty Years' War, it was Protestantism as well as the anti-Imperial diplomacy of the Pope and the French cardinals, which prevented the emergence of a national state and a centralized government. “From the split of the church dates all our misfortune,” complained in 1846 the Lutheran historian Johann Friedrich Böhmer, editor of a major medieval source collection. “It is a pity that the nation in the heart of Europe was drawn away from its political profession by quarrels with the church, that the development of strong political institutions was interrupted, that they eroded under the acids of religious passion and negation, so that the German people finally got into a stage of the disease where they are either seized by violent fever, or rot in apathy and despair. All our inner ferment which soon will erupt in a revolutionary outburst, all our political impotence and lethargy were, in the final analysis, caused by the split of the church, which tore us apart, and which no one can bridge. Only a new St. Boniface who would restore ecclesiastical unity could help us.”