In working out his own understanding of historical causation, Eusebius had to deal with the great issues of the pagan Graeco-Roman historiographical tradition. He had to reject, alter or adapt the classical understanding of Fate, Fortune, Nature and human free will in order to work out a coherent Christian understanding of history and the forces that shaped it.

Although the past two decades have shown signs of scholarly interest in the social history of fourth- and fifth-century Christianity, especially among British scholars, much remains to be done before a synthetic reconstruction will be justified. Among the tasks to be completed is the determination of the social class backgrounds of the later empire's Christian clergy. For if these backgrounds can be established, it will be possible to investigate how extensively they influenced the clerics' thought and action. Unfortunately, the determination of social origins in antiquity is not always a straightforward enterprise. This is particularly true in the case of the Cappadocian Fathers, whose social class membership is the topic of the present essay.

There are two old Arminian jokes: one can be recounted here, the other later. In the late seventeenth century, when English Arminianism was riding high, so the story goes, Bishop George Morley was asked: “What do the Arminians hold?” He replied: “All the best bishoprics and deaneries.”

Sometime between a.d. 176 and a.d. 180 Athenagoras, a Christian, an amateur philosopher and possibly an Athenian, wrote a Plea addressed to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. This document is marked by a carefully controlled apologetic aim unmarred by crude efforts to convert and is remarkable for the positive attitude it shows toward the Roman emperors and the administration of justice throughout their realm. Athenagoras' apology was lost sight of in antiquity, in all likelihood, because it contributed so little to theology; precisely for the same reason it is valuable to us in our assessment of the political and social awareness of a segment of Christians shortly before the empire plunged into the troubles of the third century. Athenagoras was obviously well trained in rhetoric; he had dabbled in philosophy; and he clearly felt himself culturally superior to the “common men, artisans, and old women” whom he praises for their simple, if unreasoned, display of Christian virtue (11.4). He is representative of a growing elite in Christian circles which was seeking to explain the new religion to the Graeco-Roman world.

All through the second half of the year 1529, John the Constant, the Elector of Saxony, played a double game with the Evangelical towns of southwestern Germany. In April of that year at the Diet of Speier, John had led a united Evangelical party in a protest against the recess of the Diet and in an agreement to form a military alliance of all the Evangelical governments in the empire. A few weeks later, John began to regret that he had allied with cities suspected of Zwinglian heresies, a step which could only aggravate his relations with the emperor. John and his advisers searched for the proper instrument by which to win favor from Charles V by abandoning their Zwinglian associates. That instrument was the Schwabach Articles, an uncompromisingly Lutheran statement of doctrine which flatly excluded the disputed Zwinglian interpretation of the sacrament of the Eucharist. John kept the southwestern towns dangling in expectation until the meeting at Smalkalden in December, 1529. There he informed Jacob Sturm of Strasbourg and Bernhard Besserer of Ulm that his conscience forbade him to ally with the southerners so long as they supported the errors of Zwingli. Sturm and Besserer, who now began to understand John's duplicity, announced that their governments would not sign the Schwabach Articles. At the year's end, nothing remained of the solidarity the Evangelical estates had displayed at Speier.

During the twelfth century the papacy in the interest of peace within the Christian community gradually took a more active part in the mediation and settlement of secular disputes. Innocent III regarded such mediation as an obligation of his office, and throughout his pontificate he sought to promote more harmonious relations among Christian princes. In his correspondence he referred on several occasions to the words of the Psalmist, “…seek peace, and pursue it.” He often cited Christ's counsels of peace as in the Gospel of John, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” At the beginning of the thirteenth century peace was not only a worthy end in itself; it could have the additional advantage of freeing the European princes to fight as crusaders in a cause which Innocent zealously fostered.

The earliest extant sources of Syrian Christianity reveal a powerful spirit of self-consciousness for independence. This desire is imprinted on every page of the historical records. That which stands at the very forefront of Tatian's thought is profoundly instructive for our purposes: it is his dislike, nay more his hatred, fore everything bearing a Greek or Roman label. This spirit shows itself in whatever direction we look. Syrian gnosis is the least hellenized of all. The pattern of Christian life carries its own attributes of sovereignty in every respect. Autonomy is the hallmark of the early Syrian conception of the church. Theological thought travels along quite independent lines in accord with that genius—even in the works of Aphrahat written decades after the Council of Nicea.

By the time that Henry, archdeacon of Huntingdon, completed the first edition of his Historia Anglorum, about 1129, four reform councils had made it quite clear, even to the stubbornly resistant English clergy, that subdeacons, deacons and priests should not have wives, concubines or sons with clerical ambitions. Henry, who had uncanonically succeeded his father, Nicholas, in his archdeaconry, was by 1129 about forty-five years old and had at least one son, probably in minor orders. His major literary works, Historia Anglorum and the epistle De Contemptu Mundi, contain explicit information about his father and the succession of the archdeaconry of Huntingdon, but Henry's careful silence has kept several further generations of this clerical family virtually hidden from readers. Needless to say, he was not pleased with the notions of clerical celibacy that some, in increasing numbers during his lifetime, chose to call reform. Modified by a wary reluctance to state his objections openly, Henry's angry inability to accept that central issue of Gregorian reform shaped his account of the introduction of Gregorian reform to England with insinuation, slander and prevaricating silence. The particular interest of Henry of Huntingdon's treatment of reform councils and reformers lies in its tense delineation of the discomfort felt by many of the higher clergy and their families caught when the reform ideal of celibacy was no longer a startling novelty, but was still not universally accepted, not yet venerable as custom, certainly not easy.

A good deal of literature has dealt with the relationship between the works of John Wyclif and John Hus. It seems clear now that John Hus did not simply parrot Wyclif as Johann Loserth argued in the nineteenth century, but rather he was the product of a native Bohemian reform movement. He regarded Wyclif as a fellow reformer and was reliant on him for much of his realist philosophy and ecclesiology but was largely independent of Wyclif in matters of dogmatic theology. Concerning the eucharist, for example, Hus clearly accepted the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation rather than Wyclif's remanence.

Faced with suspicion, hostility and repression, yet small in number and dedicated increasingly to peaceful principles, the early Quakers had recourse to the press. They published detailed accounts of their persecutions and a large number of purely theological treatises which are relatively well known. They also published a literature of defense which, although widely cited, has not until now been the subject of systematic study. In these tracts they refuted charges that they were emissaries of Rome and enemies of the established order; justified their refusal to do “hat honor”, to take oaths, to pay tithes and to participate in the rituals of an established church; pleaded for liberty of conscience; threatened their opponents with God's wrath; and encouraged each other to stand fast in adversity. The literature of defense grew rapidly in the decade before the Restoration and declined steadily in the decade or so thereafter.

That towns and townspeople played an important part in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century is obvious even to those with a superficial knowledge of the movement. In the case of Scotland, however, this has not always been recognized as true since many writers on the subject have believed that the movement was primarily baronial in character. Yet as one looks closely into the Scottish Reformation the names of Aberdeen, Perth, Dundee and Edinburgh fill important places in the story of the rise of Scottish Protestantism. Edinburgh in particular held a strategic position as Knox, recently appointed minister of St. Giles, recognized in 1561. When Thomas Randolph reported to Sir William Cecil on the appointment of superintendents he stated: “Mr. Knox thinks his state honorable enough if God give him strength to persist in that vocation that he hath placed him in, and will receive no other.” To understand the Scottish Reformation, therefore, it is necessary to see what happened in the principal burgh of the country.

In his book Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkely, 1968), William J. Bouwsma claims that the confrontation between Rome and Venice in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was based on two different views of the world. He sees Rome as the embodiment of the authoritarianism and intolerance of the Counter Reformation and Venice as the last representative of Renaissance republicanism. Bouwsma maintains that the struggle which reached a point of crisis during the interdict of 1606-1607 was a logical development of an inborn ideological conflict between Venice and Rome. His thesis, however, does not fit the facts for the 1540s, which were a crucial decade in Venetian history since these years witnessed the acceptance of the Roman Inquisition and the first attempt to adopt an Index of Forbidden Books. During this period, Rome and Venice disagreed not on what should be implemented or rejected, but on who should have the responsibility and weaponry to enforce it. When there was a confrontation between them, it was caused by reasons of state—the political needs of two governments sharing a common border and having different political interests in Italy and/or in Europe.

Of all the evils of the late medieval church, none was complained about quite so frequently by contemporary theologians as that which Pierre D'Ailly termed the “evil of superfluity.” Jan Hus compared the prelates of his own day to the scribes and pharisees of old, who imposed many fasts, many prayers and other hard things upon the people while they themselves did none of them. A man of Adam's ststure had but one command fulfill and failed, Jean Gerson wrote at the start of the fifteenth century; how then is the Christian to escape, placed as he is among innumerable commands? If Augustine could complain about the Judaic condition of the church of his time, what, Gerson containud, would he have to say now! According to wessel Gansfort, the “forest if decrees and decretals” had become so dense that the Christian could scarcely find his way any longer to a study and knowledge of sacred Scripture.Even Gabriel Biel was forced to admit that the burden of Christian obedience had become heavier than the old Judaic yoke, if one took into accont the plethora of ecclesiastical laws and ceremonics.

Traditionally, divisions among Protestant groups during the English Reformation have been examined as deep theological crises, simply written off as manifestations of economic or political struggles, or, more recently, treated as having roots in basic ideological commitments. One of the most important Protestant divisions, that between Anglicans and Puritans, has undoubtedly had a great impact on western history; however, it lacks full treatment from the point of view of its intellectual and social bases. One's attention is easily drawn to the Anglican-Puritan conflict of Queen Elizabeth's rule or to the seventeenth-century revolution in England; but earlier origins often receive only cursory treatment. Actually, the ideas, party divisions and social characteristics of the Anglican-Puritan division in the Elizabethan and Stuart eras have their roots and first appearance during the flight of Protestants from England after the reign of King Edward VI. It is to the ideological and social factors which appeared in the congregation of English exiles at Frankfurt-am-Main in 1554–55 that I should like to draw attention, for it was in the “Troubles at Frankfurt” that the historical pattern of the Anglican-Puritan division assumed a form which was to have such a great impact on western society.

For the past century and a half most scholars engaged in the study of French Quietism have hesitated to focus primarily on its founder, Madame Jeanne-Marie Bouvières de la Mothe Guyon. Instead, their investigations have gravitated toward her champion, François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, who emerged as a far more significant figure in the Quietist controversy once it began to take definitive form in 1693.

The transition from Pietism and Evangelicalism to a social gospel in the thought and activities of a number of Christians, occurring as it did in the nineteenth century, was a transition largely provoked by the impact of the Industrial Revolution on landscape and people. Yet those who were among the earliest to respond to the new industrial and geographical situation often retained an older vision of life and society and left to others the task of developing a more effective response.Joseph Rayner Strphens (1805–79), sometime Methodist, notorioue revolutionary of the late 1830s, advocate of the Ten Hours Bill and vigrous opponent of the factory system in nineteenth-century England, was just such a person; he provides and illumination case study in the stryggle to carve out a social gospel which was virtually without precedent at the time.

The struggles and sacrifices of those pastors and laymen who reconstructed the Reformed churches in southern France during the eighteenth century compose one of the intriguing chapters of the history of the “Church of the Desert.” Members of an outlawed Protestant church in a country which was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic by religion, these pastors and their flocks ran great risks in holding open-air religious services in the secluded and rugged countryside of the Midi—or the “Desert”—in southern France. Attendance at their services was punishable by perpetual service in the king's galleys for the men and life imprisonment for the women; the Reformed pastors who led these meetings did so on pain of death. Not a few of these Calvinists suffered extreme physical and mental anguish because of their obstinate refusal to abandon the faith of their fathers.

Among the problems posed to one interested in Unitarianism is to explain why it was that Unitarianism evolved out of Presbyterianism in England while it emerged out of Congregationalism in the United States. The problem of the origins of Unitarianism is in this way fashioned into denominational questions. Why did English Presbyterianism become Unitarian? What explains the appearance of Unitarianism in New England Congregationalism? The purpose of this essay is to examine the denominational understanding of the genesis of English Unitarianism.

Modern scholars generally agree that the Indemnity Acts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were enacted to afford legal relief to religious nonconformists from the restrictions placed upon them by the Test Act of 1673 and the Corporation Act of 1661. The oaths required by this legislation were a means of debarring religiously and politically seditious individuals from offices, in national government in the case of the Test Act and from corporation government in that of the Corporation Act. Both acts required the taking of “the several oaths of supremacy and allegiance” in addition to the “sacrament of the Lord's Supper according to the usage of the Church of England.” To qualify under the Test Act the sacrament had to be taken in a public church on a Sunday “immediately after divine service and sermon…” within three months of admission to office. The Corporation Act differed significantly in its requirement that the sacrament had to have been received in the year preceding election to corporate office.

George Whitefield's racial views pose an enigma for the historian, for he has been closely identified with both the rise of humanitarian ideals and the defense of slavery. In the middle of the eighteenth century as he traveled up and down the American seaboard electrifying the English colonists with his preaching, Whitefield showed a special concern for the plight of the slaves in America. Despite this concern, a nagging fear of insurgency by the blacks gripped him and shaped his reflections about the institution of slavery.