Recently, attention has been given to understanding the status of woman in early Christianity. As expected, the light has been focused on Saint Paul, Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine, but so far, no one has examined one of the most fascinating movements of the second century—Montanism. Perhaps this is because Tertullian is remembered as both a Montanist and a notorious misogynist. Given the boldness and originality of Tertullian's thought, however, it would be perilous to assume that Tertullian's view of women was identical to that originally held by the Montanists of Asia Minor. Indeed, as this study of Montanism in Asia Minor will show, it is highly probable that from the beginnings of Montanism, women were permitted to rise to ministerial status through their role as confessor-martyrs in the early Christian church.

The purpose of this article is to review the relations of Béla III of Hungary with the papal curia and the role Lukács, archbishop of Esztergom, played in the development of those relations. To do this, one must first direct one's attention to politics at the Byzantine court, where Manuel Comnenus succeeded to the imperial throne in 1143. Because Emperor Menuel regarded himself as heir to the territorial and intellectual integrity of old Rome and of the crown of Constantine the Great, he let it be known that he had in mind a role for the Hungarian court to play in his policies. He was the grandson of Ladislas I, the Saint of Hungary (1077–1095)—his mother, Pyrisk (Iréne) was the daughter of Ladislas—and looked. upon Hungary as an integral part of the former province(s) of (Upper and Lower) Pannonia. Emperor Manuel decided to have Béla III, educated at the imperial court.

In the early ninth century Bishops Gerbald of Liège and Haito of Basel described the qualities of the ideal country priest.1 Many of his virtues were negative. For example, he was to shun all questionable contacts with women; drunkenness was condemned, and he was to avoid taverns with their salacious amusements; he was not to ape the laity by bearing arms; commerce and usury were forbidden to him as were, of course, all simoniacal practices. More positively, he was admonished to be diligent in his sacramental functions, especially baptism and anointing, as well as celebration of the Mass, and to observe the canonical hours. Finally, he was to instruct his flock in the rudiments of the faith, the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer, and to exhort them to lead the Christian life. The desire to attain these modestly ambitious goals during the Carolingian period resulted in an increased concern for clerical qualifications. Manuscripts from St. Emmeram at Regensburg and Freising in Bavaria, for example, contain detailed lists of subjects for ecclesiastical examination,2 and the sorts of episcopal statutes or capitularies which Gerbald's and Haito's works represent seem to have been distributed widely throughout the Empire3.

There are both striking similarities and significant differences between the Lollards of the fifteenth century and the radical Puritans of the sixteenth. Both rejected the authority of the established church in England, and both suffered for such boldness. With the passage of De heretico comburendo in 1401 the so-called Wycliffites were liable to inquisitorial proceedings and punishments. Lollards were now felons as well as heretics. In 1406, by means of a supplement to the 1401 legislation, the laymen in Parliament at last took heed of the warning from the churchmen that confiscation of church possessions threatened all lordship, secular as well as spiritual. Under a constitution drafted at the Oxford Assembly from November to December, 1407 and republished at St. Paul's in 1409, any preacher other than a priest in his own parish was required to obtain a license from the ordinary or the archbishop in order to preach. Arundel further decreed that such preachers were to speak only on the subjects set forth in Peckham's constitution, Ignorantia sacerdotum. As the chief legal instrument of this English Inquisition, De heretico comburendo remained in effect until set aside by Henry VIII. It was later revived by Mary, and finally repealed by Elizabeth.

The stress of Elizabethan and early Stuart Puritans on the significance of the family as the fundamental spiritual unit of society has led historians to the apparent but perhaps simplistic conclusion that the origins of this doctrine are to be found in Protestant theology. The concomitants of the doctrine—an exaltation of the marriage relationship, a demand for household religious education and discipline and a slight but noteworthy elevation of the position of women within the household—are therefore attributed to Protestantism and particularly to Protestantism of “the hotter sort.” We are told, for example, that “the Reformation, by reducing the authority of the priest in society, simultaneously elevated the authority of lay heads of households” and that the stress on household religious instruction and discipline “was part of the protestant inheritance.”

The call for the reform of the life and teachings of the church which emanated from Wittenberg early in the sixteenth century elicited an almost immediate response in southeast central Europe. In the lands which came under the rule of Ferdinand I after the disastrous battle at Mohács, reformation doctrines and practices spread quickly. By the middle of the sixteenth century the majority of the population in the lands ruled by the Austrian Habsburgs adhered to one of the several evangelical reform movements. Hussite, Lutheran, Helvetic, Anabaptist and Anti-Trinitarian theologies all found supporters in the region.

On 24 February 861 Pope Nicholas I excommunicated and deposed one of Italy's most powerful prelates, John VIII, archbishop of Ravenna. This papal action, prompted by a number of transgressions on the archbishop's part, was taken with the consent of a council of bishops at Rome. John immediately turned for aid to Louis II, king of Italy and emperor in the West. A delegation from Louis, however, failed to deter Nicholas who insisted that John come to Rome for adjudication. Moreover, the pope journeyed to Ravenna at the invitation of its citizens, and there personally rectified the situation which John's abuses had created. As Nicholas advanced, John retreated to seek Louis's intercession at Pavia again, but this time his reception was less cordial. The Pavians, led by their bishop, shunned the excommunicate and his retinue and Louis, who would not even grant John an audience, advised him through an intermediary to “humble himself to such a pontiff to whom we and the entire Church bow.” When a second delegation, gained only by John's repeated pleas, was again unsuccessful in bargaining with the pope, the archbishop had no choice but to submit. At the Roman synod which met from 16 to 18 November 861, John acknowledged the charges against him and was restored to his see on conditions laid down by the synod. According to the Vita Nicolai, the proceedings concluded with a standing ovation for the pope from the bishops who proclaimed three times:

The correct judgement of the supreme pontiff, the just ordering of the pastor of the whole Church, the generous settlement of the disciple of Christ is pleasing to all. We are all of one voice, one mind, one judgement.

The month of December 1816 found Schleiermacher thinking about too many things at once and not at all in the best of health. To his friend Gass, who seemed to have no trouble combining scholarship with administration, he sent a plea for help:

I have long been bent upon making just some superficial patristic and scholastic studies, in order to gather a few handy quotations for my dogmatics; and I never got around to it. I would be very much obliged if you would write me somewhat more exactly how you have gone about it and on what [passages] you have chiefly relied.

Unlike the religious dominance of Puritans in New England and Anglicans in the South, the mid-Atlantic colonies of eighteenth-century America were covered with an assortment of northern European churches and sects. By the 1740s, an overflow of New England Puritans shared New York with an earlier immigrant population of Reformed Dutch and French Huguenots. In the Raritan valley of New Jersey, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians lived alongside enclaves of more Dutch, and coexisted with English Quakers, Swedish and German Lutherans, and a variety of sectarians along the lower Delaware River and in the city of Philadelphia. On the upper Delaware were further German settlements while along the western frontiers of Penn's colony additional Scotch-Irish Calvinists were to be found.

In the fall of 1811, President Timothy Dwight of Yale College, traveling once again into the countryside in pursuit of New England's natural history, stopped briefly at Middlesex, Connecticut. Only five years before Dwight's visit, this village, known today as Darien, had suffered the loss of its longtime Congregational minister, Moses Mather. After commenting on the village, Dwight went on to say something about its late pastor:

Dr. Mather was a man distinguished for learning and piety, a strong understanding, and a most exemplary life. His natural temper was grave and unbending. His candor was that of the Gospel.… Dr. Mather died September 21, 1806, venerated by all who knew him, in the eighty-eighth year of his age.

Over the past several decades American historians have emphasized the importance of New England ministers as town leaders during the colonial and Revolutionary eras. Recently, several scholars have examined changing roles of Congregational and Presbyterian pastors from the 1630s to the early nineteenth century. Ministerial dismissals are an important aspect of this subject, yet historians have not given this topic the critical analysis it deserves. This essay will discuss the nature of these dismissals and explain their significance in relation to several broad questions of social change in New England prior to 1790. Although New Hampshire's experience with clerical removals was not necessarily representative of New England, that state merits special attention because it has been neglected in studies of this period.

As a doddering old man in 1850, Lyman Beecher told his children about the religious conditions at Yale College fifty-five years earlier. His words have become familiar to students of American religious history. The school had been “in a most ungodly state” when he entered as a student in 1795, he recalled. Its president, Ezra Stiles, had been ineffective as a pastor. Immorality and religious skepticism had been rife. Then Timothy Dwight replaced Stiles as president, and religion revived. Dwight's students embraced evangelical Christianity and followed him into battle against rationalists who challenged orthodoxy and politicians who wanted to separate church and state. Dwight transformed religious life at the college and, together with his students, rejuvenated the congregational churches of New England.

When he was confirmed in 1906 into the membership of Saint John's Church of Lincoln, Illinois, Reinhold Niebuhr, in the custom of the Evangelical Synod, recited a memory verse assigned him by his pastor: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (Jeremiah 31:3). No doubt this verse, especially selected for the young Niebuhr, also expressed a father's love and faithfulness, since it was given to Reinhold by Pastor Gustav Niebuhr.

It is a well-known fact that the German Evangelical churches did not hold the Weimar Republic in the highest esteem. This lack of church affection for the republic cannot be wholly explained with reference only to the monarchist, authoritarian intellectual and theological heritage of the German churches. Research in the Evangelical newspaper press and in official church proceedings and proclamations reveals that the republic's treatment of issues of vital concern to the churches played a crucial role in shaping church political opinion.1 Among the most important of these issues was the question of religious instruction in the schools. German children had always received such instruction as a regular part of their elementary school curriculum. Also, the overwhelming majority of school children before 1918 had attended confessional schools; that is, Protestant children attended Protestant schools, Catholics went to Catholic schools, and Jews to Jewish schools. Only three states, Baden, Hesse, and Nassau, had systematically established interconfessional or “simultaneous” schools (Simultanschulen).2

Until the time that the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints left western New York (where the church had been founded in 1830) and moved en masse to Kirtland, Ohio and then Far West, Missouri (where a second gathering place was established), the Mormons constituted a close-knit and fairly harmonious group. At Kirtland, however, serious internal discontent developed. In the wake of the collapse of the Anti-Banking Society in 1837 came widespread apostasy of many Mormons, several apostles included, who challenged Joseph Smith's role as prophetic leader whose word was the will of the Lord in secular as well as spiritual affairs. According to the prevailing interpretation, the causes were essentially economic. Fawn Brodie maintains in her chapter on the “Kirtland Disaster” that the “toppling of the Kirtland bank loosed a hornet's nest.” Quoting Apostle Heber C. Kimball, she says that afterward “there were not twenty persons on earth that would declare that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God.” Despite Smith's efforts to salvage his Ohio community, “with mercantile firms bankrupt, the steam mill silent, and the land values sinking to an appalling low, Kirtland was fast disintegrating.” In a recent work, Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton repeat the generalization: “in Kirtland … Smith's failed bank led to internal dissension.”

In the 1850s, when both Oregon and Washington were pioneer lands just emerging from wilderness conditions, sporadic Indian warfare made life dangerous and miserable for white settlers and threatened the very existence of the Indian subtribes which inhabited the mountains and valleys south and north of the great Columbia River basin. In the previous decade a provisional territorial government had been organized, even before the treaty of 1846 set the international boundary at the forty-ninth degree of latitude. Federal territorial government dates from 1849. In 1853 Washington territory was set off from Oregon.

The enthusiastic reception with which the Catholic hierarchy greeted the burgeoning Christian Democratic movements immediately after World War II could leave the impression of a solidarity born of a long and stable relationship. In fact, such was not the case. Christian Democracy had failed for a century in its attempts to reconcile Catholicism with the democratic values emanating from the French Revolution. Antirepublican forces within the church had been too strong and the hierarchy too unsympathetic to permit such a reconciliation. In addition, the democratic forces outside the church had come to incorporate anticlericalism as part of their creed. Both camps seemed to share at least one view in common: one could not be both a Christian and a democrat. Only small groups of Christian republicans sought to challenge this assumption by word and deed.

On 23 July 1933, the pro-Nazi German Christian movement won a stunning victory in the elections for representatives to local parish councils of the German Evangelical Church. In many areas, especially north and eastern Germany where the National Socialist party itself was strongest, the German Christians attracted as much as 75 percent of the vote. The Old Prussian Union church, which embraced most of the political unit of Prussia, felt the effects most profoundly. Upon filling the higher synods after the parish elections, the German Christians were the majority in seven of eight provincial representative bodies. Only the provincial synod in Westphalia retained a non-German Christian majority. Yet this resulted less from a lack of a strong German Christian following in the parishes than from an intentionally undemocratic filtering system that protected higher synods from the Nazi sympathizers.

The study of history in National Socialist Germany served a demolition function. Students were taught to recognize threats to their way of life, all of which were subsumed under Jewish internationalism and included Christianity, Marxism, democracy, liberalism and modernity. The history written by the Nazis undergirded an ersatz religion whose central theme was the German people's faltering attempts to obey the divine will of a racial deity. A major priority of Nazi educators was the liberation of the fierce Germanic instincts which more than a thousand years of foreign influence had repressed; and in their estimation, Christianity bore a major responsibility for blunting the expression of that Germanic spirit. The new German schools would help create a militarized society which would both purge the national spirit and promote the high-tension ethos which accepted war as a normal condition in a life of struggle.

In April of 1952 an article in Christian Life magazine proclaimed Chicago “the evangelical capital of the U.S.A.” To back this claim, editor Russell T. Hitt cited a host of evangelical agencies in greater Chicago: mission boards, denominational offices, colleges, Bible institutes, seminaries, publishing concerns (including Christian Life itself) and youth organizations. In total, the author mentioned over one hundred different agencies such as Youth For Christ International, the Slavic Gospel Association, Scripture Press and the Swedish Covenant Hospital. At first glance, the article appears to present a confusing list of unrelated organizations, but closer inspection reveals a coherent pattern.