It has long been recognized that the homilies preserved in Old English from the early Middle Ages are almost entirely derived from Latin writings. It has also been known that, in selecting sources for adaptation, the Anglo-Saxon writers did not subject Latin materials to rigorous tests of orthodoxy and canonicity. Several important studies have been devoted to analysis of the relation of homilies which derive from apocryphal literature to their sources. They show that a relatively restricted number of apocryphal documents exercised an important influence on the popular religious literature of the late Old English period.

Of all the dissidents with which Saint Boniface, the “Apostle of the Germans” in the eighth century, had to deal, those whom the sources reveal the most clearly are Aldebert and Clement, the former representing an eccentricity much in the manner of the later and more famous Tanchelm, the latter representing the reactionary resistance of the lax clergy to moral reform. Though these heretics have often received mention,1 no one has seen fit to study them closely, doubtless owing to the mistaken prejudice that any instance of heresy in this early period must have been isolated and of little general significance. We may now see that they are in many ways representative of eighth century heresy as a whole.

When the church in England was reorganized in the reign of Henry VIII the canon law immediately became one of the major concerns of both the monarch and the bishops since it lay at the very foundation of the nature and structure of the church. From the earliest centuries England had participated in the full life of the church and there was no intention now to separate itself from that heritage. English bishops had participated in the conciliar procedures of the church as early as 314 at the Synod of Arles; other early synods were convened in England and the canon law of the church was known and observed there.

In the research on Theodore's theology, a complication has arisen. Certain Conclusions which place Theodore's ideas in quite different perspective than the traditional have been drawn. The monograph produced by R. Devreesse established the thesis that the views which have been repeated about Theodore's convictions concerning man are erroneous and need to be corrected. The alleged deviations from the established positions as affirmed by tradition must upon closer examination be regarded as no more than myth which has gained the status of established truth. Theodore's thinking is in fact entirely within the line of orthodox tradition. He taught both the immortal status given to Adam by creation and original sin and its effects on human nature.

Although England's official participation in the Council of Basel came to an end with the departure of the second English delegation from Basel in the summer of 1435, the history of England and the Council does not end with this event.1 There was no lack of English concern over the developments that followed: the Council's final break with Eugenius IV in 1436–37, its suspension and deposition of him, and election, in 1439, of the anti-pope, Felix V. Henry VI was anxious to intervene to restore peace and unity in the Church, while the fathers of Basel made unsuccessful bids for renewed English support. This article is devoted chiefly to an examination of English relations with the Council from 1435 until its dissolution in 1449; but the subject is also closely linked with the history of Anglo- papal relations during these years, for England remained staunchly loyal to Eugenius. Although no English delegation went to the general council which the pope summoned in 1437 to Ferrara, this council's fruitful work towards union with the Greek Church and other Christians was followed with approval in England.

In the article by Sydney E. Ahlstrom on “Thomas Hooker—Puritanism and Democratic Citizenship” in the December, 1963, issue of Church History (XXXII, 4, p. 418) an alteration on the proofs did not make the printer's deadline due to a postal delay. In the interests of precision, the characterization of Edmund S. Morgan's The Puritan Dilemma had been revised to read as follows:

…he counteracts the interpretation of T. J. Wertenbaker and J. T. Adams by accenting the extension of political rights and the limitation of clerical authority in the Bay Colony. Compared to Winthrop's moderation, he finds the ‘belligerent precisionism’ of Thomas Dudley and Roger Williams impractical and ineffective.

Mr. Morgan does say that Winthrop “extended political rights to a larger proportion of the people than enjoyed such rights in England” (p. 92) and that “of all the governments in the Western world at that time, that of early Massachusetts gave the clergy least authority” (p. 96), but not explicitly—as I may have implied—that the Bay Colony was “the most liberal government then existing in the world.”

The literature popular among students at Paris in the 1260's included a series of poems lamenting the ascendant role in society of the new mendicant orders. The Dominicans are so shrewd, said one of these poems, that they control both Paris and Rome, they are both king and apostle. The blame for this state of affairs was being placed squarely on Louis IX. The king favors the mendicants, read a second poem, yet ill-treatrs his knights, as if the friars could do anything useful for the defense of his kingdom.

It is not surprising that the sixteenth century Anabaptist movement should gain increasing attention among American church historians. Anyone who becomes even slightly acquainted with that movement cannot help but observe that many of its features, such as its individualism, its rejection of infant baptism, its subjectivism, and its fragmentation into many diverse groups, seem to anticipate the kind of ecclesiastical developments that characterize much of North American church history. The parallel even extends to a number of individual phenomena: Many modern premillennialist movements hold views remarkably like those of Melchior Hoffman. The efforts of Jan de Bakker and Jan Beukelzoon to set up a Kingdom of God at Miinster were very like those of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and the Latter Day Saints who followed them, to achieve a similar objective in the United States. In this case the parallel even extends to the polygamy that was introduced in both movements. Among the early Anabaptists Adam Pastor held beliefs which did not differ markedly from the anti-trinitarian doctrines of the present Jehovah's Witnesses. The existence of many such similarities makes the study of early Anabaptism a profitable one to the student of American church history.

In the post-Reformation period one of the most significant developments concerns the understanding of the nature of theology and its relation to church and university. This development, which was related to a dual definition of theology and to a new distinction between the realms of reason and faith, began with Luther and Melanchthon and attained a preliminary crystallization with John Gerhard of the University of Jena, who was one of the chief representatives of seventeenth-century Protestant scholasticism. In this paper I wish to trace that development, which has failed to receive its due attention in accounts of Protestant theological history.

In this age of growing ecumenicism, many scholars are turning to the history of the sixteenth century for a fresh examination of the origins of those ideas and institutions which continue to divide the Christian community. During these years of the widely publicized meetings of an ecumenical council sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church, many are turning specifically to the canons and decrees drafted by the Council of Trent for a fresh study of the extent to which they do or must divide Christians. But fully to understand these Tridentine decisions from an ecumenical perspective requires not only a knowledge of their texts and of the debates from which they emerged. It requires also a knowledge of the hostile reactions which they aroused among the many Christians who would not accept these decisions or the authority of those who promulgated them. An interesting spectrum of such reactions can be found among French criticisms of Trent published during the sixteenth century. Of these publications, three semto me to demonstrate this proposition neatly: one by a distinguished French theologian, John Calvin; a second by a dustinguished French Jurisconsult, Charles Dumoulin; a third by a prominent French lawyer and historian, Innocent Gentillet. These works have not been ignored by such experts on the historiography of Trent as professor Jedin. But I feel they merit a more detailed and more considered examination than they have as yet received. This paper sketches some of the lines upon which such an examination might proceed.

In 1643 the Long Parliament, confronted by war with the king and by religious anarchy, called an assembly of divines to advise it on the steps which must be taken to reform the church. The situation clearly called for decisive action. The bishops, shorn of their political power, had retired to live in their sees or to join the king. Many clergymen, suspected of royalist sympathies or unpopular because of their ritualistic tendencies, had been ejected from their parishes; others, like Thomas Fuller, non-ritualistic but royalist, had left to join the king; while other loyal Anglicans remained in their parishes with the support of their patrons or their church wardens and thus presented a threat to parliament. Furthermore, with the old discipline gone, sectaries had sprung up. To fill the vacant pulpits, to provide a form of ordination for those who objected to prelatical ordination, to substitute for the Prayer Book a simpler form of worship, and, most of all, to clip the wings of the bishops or to replace episcopal government with a system nearer to that of the reformed churches,— these were the tasks which confronted parliament. To accomplish them it went back to an action of 1642, when it had appointed a number of ministers of anti-Laudian, Presbyterian, or Independent views to act as advisors in the settlement which it hoped to reach with the king.

More than eighty years ago the celebrated church historian Philip Schaff correctly observed that the Czech Brethren “surpass all churches in the number of their confessions of faith.”1 Undoubtedly he too, like any other student of the Unitas Fratrum, was astonished at the number of confessional statements which the Brethren wrote and published within the span of less than two hundred years. While discounting separate printings and translations into Latin, German, and Polish, one still has to take into consideration seventeen documents which must be classified as official apologies or confessions of faith. However, if anyone wished to include all such documents, the number would reach almost forty. This, admittedly, is a difficult task, as in several instances it is not easy to determine which ones of these were directly authorized by the spiritual leadership of the Unitas Fratrum, or at least met with its silent approval.2

In the 1539 edition of the Institutes and in each succeeding edition Calvin calls justification by faith “the main hinge on which religion turns” and the “sum of all piety.”2 Yet, invariably, in 1539 as well as in subsequent editions, justification is not treated until well into the Institutes,3 as if to belie the centrality which is expressly attached to it: justification appears to be at most one doctrine among others.4 Interpreters who have wanted to explain both Calvin's very high regard for justification by faith and the relatively minor place it is accorded in the various revisions of his magnum opus have generally maintained that it is the fact, the Erlebnis, of justification which is central for Calvin rather than the doctrine.5 The force of such argumentation is not to be denied, but there is reason to suspect that it may not encompass the whole truth. For in his 1540 Romans commentary Calvin has a comprehensive doctrine of justification which has largely been overlooked. This doctrine is a product of the same period during which Calvin published his first and, in a sense, his most significant revision of his Institutes.6 The relation between the 1539 nstitutes and the 1540 Romans commentary is very close. This is indicated, in part, by the fact that Calvin apparently prepared both works for publication at the same time.7 Whether the doctrine of justification delineated in the commentary is of formative significance for the 1539 Institutes, however, and therefore in some sense formative for all subsequent editions, is a question which cannot concern us here. We must be content to describe the doctrine in the commentary. This procedure should at least keep open the question of the doctrinal-systematic centrality of justification in the formation and final shape of Calvin's thought (the religious centrality of justification is not in doubt).8

The purpose of this paper is to establish a more consistent estimate of John Canne within the context of English Puritanism, 1630–1660. A further conclusion, however, is that study of a figure like Canne makes evident the need to interpret his Puritan context in new ways. This reconsideration involves at once a critical attitude toward the exaggerated emphasis on parties in the analysis of Stuart Puritanism and also an appreciation of the apocalyptic exegesis of scripture which was common in that era and which frequently issued in Millenarianism. It is beyond the scope of this paper to implement these observations but it will be argued that such an effort is required insofar as John Canne has representative significance.

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.

If after many years of scholarship and controversy, the French Revolution is to be seen, with Georges Lefebvre, as preeminently the revolution of equality, and its most important achievement the substitution of a bourgeois and individualistic social order for the former aristocratic and corporatist one, the nature of eighteenth-century corporate or “constituted bodies” becomes a major area for research. There are many questions which the historian would like to ask about these aristocratic institutions, but generally these questions fall into two groups: the relationship of these bodies to society as a whole, and their inner cohesiveness. By examining the taxation of the clergy in eighteenth-century France, we investigate the chief temporal characteristic of the ecclesiastical estate and are in a position to evaluate both its relationship to French society as a whole and its internal strengths and weaknesses.

In 1848 Horace Bushnell delivered a lecture at Yale College entitled “The Divinity of Christ,” in which he set forth, for the first time, his views on the doctrine of the Trinity. A year later, this lecture and two others (“The Atonement” and “Dogma and Spirit”) appeared in a book entitled God in Christ. The book was prefaced with a preliminary dissertation on language. Almost immediately the critics assailed Bushnell for his Sabellian views on the Trinity. The Christian Observatory charged him with rejecting the “… commonly received doctrine of a proper Trinity in the Godhead, substituting for it a Pantheistic form of Sabellianism.” The Bible Repertory and Princeton Review, concurring in this judgment, indicated that “This, true enough, is the Sabellianism of Schleiermacher—a threefold revelation of God in the world, in Christ, and in the church.”

In 1772 John Wesley wrote a letter to Lloyd's Evening Post which was reprinted in a slightly revised form the following year under the title, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions.1 Although intended by Wesley to be an essay exposing the evils of what Thorstein Veblen would later refer to as “conspicuous consumption,” it has been reprinted and cited during the present century primarily as a temperance tract.2 As intended or as adapted it makes for interesting reading but is far more fascinating as a testament of Wesley's economic theories. In terms of length and concern the pamphlet represents, as Wesley's biographer Francis J. McConnell observed “as nearly as anything a statement of his economic views.”3 Undoubtedly it does represent Wesley's most mature (he was in his sixty-ninth year when it was published) and deliberate attempt to express himself in the area of political economics. What does it reveal? Was he a profound theorist? Or did he follow slavishly the current philosophy? In short, was John Wesley a political economist?

At the Sixtieth General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, held in Detroit, Michigan, in September of 1961, the Bishop of West Florida moved, the Bishop of California seconded, and the Convention voted a radical revision of Canon 36 of the Church's Constitution and Canons. The revision of Canon 36 marked the end of a slow death for the “Concordat” painfully hammered out between 1919 and 1922 by representatives of the Episcopal Church and the National Council of Congregational Churches.

Episcopalian Bishop Charles Henry Brent was one of the outstanding pioneers in the modern ecumenical movement. His career as an international figure began in 1901 with an appointment at the age of 39 to be first missionary bishop of the Philippine Islands. From this mission vantage point his influence extended around the world. In 1909 President Taft chose him to be President of the First International Opium Commission in Shanghai. During the last year of the First World War he served as Senior Headquarters Chaplain to the American Expeditionary Forces. But Brent' greatest achievement was to be in the realm of church unity. He founded and inspired the Faith and Order movement, and presided over its First World Conference at Lausanne, Switzerland in 1927.