The idea of pilgrimage occupies an important place in the life and thought of Ignatius Loyola. In the autobiography which he dictated to a colleague late in his life he refers to himself throughout as “the pilgrim.” He actually went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and describes in detail his long and difficult journey. His biographers too often use the term and imagery of pilgrimage when they write about his early years, yet the notion of pilgrimage in his life has never been explored to any extent; nor has its significance, I believe, been sufficiently taken into account. In this article I should like to focus on this theme and indicate what I consider to be its role and importance in his religious experience.

One of the most important and controversial issues in Gnostic studies is the age of Gnosticism. Was it a post-Christian heresy? Was it roughly contemporaneous with the rise of Christianity? Was it Christianity's twin, as someone has called it? Or was it a fully developed movement preceding Christianity and influencing it? Ingeneral, German New Testament scholars, under the influence of Rudolf Bultmann, have assumed a pre-Christian Gnosticism as the basis for their interpretation of the New Testament. Other scholars such as Charles H. Dodd and Robert M. Grant have questioned their heavy reliance upon late Mandaean texts to support such a conviction. With the recovery of the Coptic Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi a number of scholars, most notably James Robinson, have hailed these new materials as evidence for Bultmann's hypothesis:

From the days when Christians were identified by the exclamation, “See how they love one another!”, to the present when other sorts of exclamations may be heard, the phenomenon of Christian community has received considerable attention. “From the first century in Rome,” Robert Nisbet has observed, “down to the contemporary works of Maritain, Niebuhr, and Ellul, the search for Christian community has been a crucial element of Western history.” Durkheim, Nisbet adds, found the very origins of religion in “the sense of the sacred community.” Whether as historians of Western history or of church history, we cannot escape the question of community. And whether as citizen or believer, neither can we escape more existential questions suggested in our own land and our own time that relate to the broad theme, “Christianity and Community.”

The intellectual dominance of the clergy is an important feature of Catholic Christianity in the second and third centuries. If one goes through the roll of Christian writers from the period, one finds very few laymen: Hermas, Justin, Tertullian, Minucius Felix. The great majority were ordained men, including a disproportionate number of bishops: Ignatius, Polycarp, Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus, Melito, Theophilus, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Dionysius of Alexandria, Cyprian, to give but a partial list.

During the sixth session of the Council of Trent, Girolamo Seripando and others proposed a theory of justification which the council fathers felt leaned toward the Lutheran view of justification. The theory, known as duplex justitia or double justice, was reviewed by the various theologians, reflected upon, and finally rejected.

Paul of Samosata, who succeeded Demetrianus as bishop of Antioch in 260 C. E., faced heresy charges early in his career and formal interrogations in 264 and 268 at synods in Antioch. The second of these condemned him. This study seeks to reinterpret the Christological position of the faction opposing Paul and to analyze its implications for the later development of eastern Christian thought. Of course, the bishops and presbyters who met at Antioch in the 260s to discuss the morals and doctrines of Paul did not represent a unified doctrinal position. Gathered from various regions, they revealed a diversity of motives and concerns. Even the label “Origenists,” often used to characterize the group, is misleading. Although many of the attending prelates followed Origen and his school, there is no record of conscious appeal to the writings of the Alexandrian master.

There has been little substantial textual work on Erasmus' paraphrases of the New Testament. This study of the paraphrase of the Gospel of John, by examining the changes in the various editions, the use of patristic commentaries, and the characteristic emphases of the text itself, attempts to further our understanding of his work on the New Testament. I shall discuss first the composition of the paraphrases insofar as this relates to Erasmus' self-consciousness about the project of writing paraphrases of the New Testament.

In his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter portrayed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalism in America as part of a “revolt against modernity.” Others, however, have suggested the opposite. For instance, Timothy Smith in his Revivalism and Social Reform saw revivalism as fundamental to much nineteenth-century American benevolence, a progenitor of the very social gospel that Hofstadter associated with modernity. And Donald G. Mathews saw in the Second Great Awakening of 1780 to 1830 an “organizing process” that fostered institutional structuring, mobilization of people for action, and their nationalization—ingredients central to theories of modernization, although Mathews himself did not use the term.1

It is a commonplace of antebellum historiography that the numerous reforms of the age often bore an intimate connection with Protestant evangelicalism, and Charles Grandison Finney is often portrayed as a symbol of this link. In addition to endorsing such causes as antislavery and temperance, the great evangelist inspired numerous converts to work out their salvation through useful service, including reform; and the areas swept by his revivals provided fertile soil for every manner of ultraism. Both as theological innovator and religious activist, he seemed to epitomize a tide of perfectionist optimism surging with great force against institutional restraints.Yet there was a very cautious side to Finney. He seldom committed himself unreservedly to any cause other than revivalism and generally eschewed the most controversial approaches to reform. Viewing this aspect of his career, one scholar has recently argued that “the basic thrust of Finney's thought and activity was conservative, status conscious, and pessimistic about human nature.” Because of these two faces, the historian is tempted to fix on one or the other as the “real” Finney, but it is more profitable to probe his ambiguities than to mitigate them. An examination of Finney offers fruitful insight into nineteenth-century evangelicalism's explosive potential for reform and its equally powerful tendency to limit and contain that impulse.

William Penn intended no new synthesis of thought. His practical social reforms, combining the Quakers' radical hope for the total transforming of men, ethics and society by God's Spirit with a humanist's trust in reason and conscience already at work in all men universally, were a new stance for Quakers. But Friends noted mainly his exuberance and pragmatism and his uncritical openness about ideas. In Europe and America as a whole, he was best known in his own time for his practical career: he was the man of peace with the Indians, the founder of Pennsylvania, the champion of toleration. For these he was later celebrated in the paintings of “the Peaceable Kingdom” and the writings of Voltaire.

Though one of the most Protestant nations (approximately 96 percent belong to the state Lutheran church), Norway seemingly had neither cause nor opportunity to write the history of her Reformation. For her the modern writing of history began only in the early nineteenth century, triggered by the nationalism of the Napoleonic era and the July Revolution of 1830. Lacking the Reformation era's religious polemicism, Norway produced no church historians, such as those in other countries who helped found modern historiography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was not even a printing press in Norway until 1643. But in 1811 Norway's first university, the present University of Oslo, was founded and soon became a center for historical research and writing. Far more important, on May 17, 1814, Norwegian representatives signed their constitution, making their land a constitutional monarchy. Precipitated by the 1814 Treaty of Kiel, which tore Norway from over four centuries of royal union with Denmark, a Napoleonic “loser,” and forced her into another ninety–year royal union with victorious Sweden, this constitution, as the only one from the revolutionary era to survive the Metternichian system, became the symbol of one of the most fervent and long-lasting displays of nationalism in modern times. This nationalism is the most important key toward understanding the writing Norwegian historians have done, or not done, about their Reformation.

When the twenty–two year old Andronicos II (1282–1328) acceded to the throne of Byzantium, the empire was in a state of political, social, and ecclesiastical decline. This paper will consider the attempts of Patriarch Athanasios I to reverse this process of decay and to eliminate foreign religious elements from the capital of the Orthodox Byzantine empire. In 1261, the Byzantine empire had been restored to its capital, Constantinople, after fifty-seven years of Latin occupation. The city, however, had declined sadly from its former glory. The area of its effective hegemony was reduced to sections of western Anatolia and Greece, some islands in the Aegean, and Byzantine Thrace. Even this pitiful remnant was subject to the continuing assaults of the Turks, the pillaging of Catalan mercenaries turned hostile, the exploitation of Latin merchants, and threats of a Western military adventure to restore a Latin kingdom and Church of Constantinople.

Oscar Handlin noted some years ago that most immigrants to the United States found the voluntary practices of American religious institutions “unfamilar and disturbing.” This was not the case with the Irish Catholic immigrants in this country. They had little difficulty adjusting to these practices in America since they had developed them in Ireland before coming to the United States. Thus, many American Irish Catholics viewed voluntaryism not as a uniquely Protestant or American experience; they saw it as part of their Irish Catholic tradition.

Over the course of a century, the self-understanding of the Roman Catholic Church has undergone a dramatic change, as seen, for example, in the contrasting ecclesiologies of the last two ecumenical councils. The following juxtaposition of representative texts from Vatican I and Vatican II reveals this radical shift.

According to William Hanna “it had for many years been the highest object of [Thomas Chalmers'] literary and professional ambition to leave behind him a complete body of Divinity containing the fruits of his maturest reflections, both on the credentials and contents of the Christian Revelation.” Thus in 1845, after the epochal events of the Scottish Disruption had been put behind him, Chalmers undertook the project of writing his Institutes of Theology which were published in 1849, two years after his death. In approaching the systematic problem Chalmers felt that he was contravening “the order of every system and every text-book in theology that we are yet acquainted with” and proposing a radically altered arrangement of topics ”from that in which Calvin and Turretin, Pictetus and Vitringa have delivered them.” Chalmers' assumption that a continuity exists between Calvin and the theological systems of the seventeenth century need not detain us except to point out that Chalmers merely reflects a tradition, uniformly established until recent times, in which theology as “system” was projected retrospectively from its formulation in seventeenth-century thought back onto the theological work of the Reformation.

There can be little doubt that for centuries the most important single unit of the Christian church has been the parish. It is surely the most fundamental of the structures upon which the institutional church has been built. Only by studying closely the parish and what goes on within it can we gain a real appreciation of what religion has meant and continues to mean to the average Christian at the grass roots level. It is somewhat surprising, given the general spread of interest in social history among contemporary historians, that there has not been more study of the parish. One can understand the superior appeal of historical theology to the historian who concentrates on ideas, given the range and sophistication of the systems of thought created over the centuries by theologians, but we should not forget that these systems could not even be comprehended by the great majority of Christians. One can similarly understand the superior appeal of ecclesiastical politics to the historian who concentrates on events, given the high drama in which ecclesiastical leaders have often been engaged, but we should not assume that these events necessarily even came to the attention of average Christians. But for the historian of society who is interested in the religious experience of the average man, the parish must be a starting point.

Warren Felt Evans was the first American mental healer to publish his ideas extensively. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), the father of mental healing in America, bequeathed only scattered manuscripts to his followers. Evans, however, wrote six books that decisively influenced the growth of New Thought, a loosely organized religious movement concerned with health and spiritual integration. This essay contends that Evans' thought and therapy united idealistic philosophy and practical mysticism, thus extending one species of American romanticism, rooted in the Transcendentalist movement, into the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Witnessing the widespread internal discord plaguing the new Russian regime after the abdication of Nicholas II in March of 1917, one contemporary activist expressed fear that centrifugal forces.from within constituted the greatest challenge to the democratic revolution. Signs of disharmony quickly appeared among the revolutionary leaders themselves. The liberals in the Provisional Committee of the State Duma and the moderate socialists in the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet found themselves at swords' points even before the first Provisional Government was officially established, and as months passed the animosity grew. Not long after the establishment of the new government the bickering spread beyond the ruling circles, disrupting orderly working relations between the new regime and the institutions surviving from the old. It appeared as though the collapse of the monarchy encouraged divisiveness precisely when survival depended on cooperative action.

The Society of Jesus was a consistently controversial institution in France after papal confirmation of the order in 1540 and its installation in Paris shortly afterward. As early as 1562 a jealous University of Paris challenged, unsuccessfully, the right of its members to teach. They became embroiled in political matters from the first. King Henry IV and the Parlement of Paris, the most important law court of the realm, cooperated in exiling them from France between 1594 and 1603 because of their political intrigues.