In 430, Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, wrote in his treatise Adversus Nestorium that we must put away idle questioning and “receive with faith the simple and undefiled tradition.” Which tradition did he have in mind? About the same time, Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, defended a priest who denied the appellation theotokos to the Virgin Mary. Nestorius claimed the term was not in accord with the tradition. Which tradition did he have in mind?

It was Marc Bloch, I believe, who once posed the question whether there may not have been schools of asceticism, whether different groups of men at different times might have viewed the holy life in different ways and even have formed rival schools. The popular idea of what makes a saint has varied from time to time. The earliest Christians, suffering under the persecutions of the Roman Empire, reserved their admiration and their cult for those who suffered martyrdom. Albert Marignan has traced the transformation of this ideal after the end of the persecutions. When Christians no longer suffered death for their beliefs, they hoped to gain a similar crown by a living death, by the sacrifice of all earthly joys and the mortification of the flesh. The monastic ascetic ideal was born. But the monk, at least in the West, did not retain a lasting and exclusive hold on the affections of the Christian populace. He was ousted from his place by the hero bishop, the protector of the city, who combined ascetic practices with social leadership. Yet was the change a simple evolution in time, or were there really rival schools of sainthood through which the transformation took place?

The editors of Vox Theologica have asked me for a “survey of Zwingli research in the last five to ten years.” However, to understand this subject thematically and methodologically one must go farther back. For the prevailing image of Zwingli today has been formed by three well-known books: 1) Die Kirchenratsauswahl, 1918; 2) Paul Wernle, Zwingli, 1919; 3) Walther Köhler, Huldrych Zwingli, 1943/1954. Walther Köhler (1870–1946), a native of strongly Reformed Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Professor of Church History in Zürich from 1909 to 1929, himself theologically of liberal orientation, was one of the foremost authorities not only on the Reformation as a whole but also on the other movements of the sixteenth century, especially Humanism and Anabaptism. Through countless books, articles and reviews, and through his introductions in the great critical edition of Zwingli's works, he became actually the dean of Zwingli research. Even those who, like this writer, did not know him personally and who differ from him on essential points owe him reverence.

The second general council of Ephesus was convened on August 8, 449, and adjourned some fourteen days later by the legates of Theodosius II, who promptly confirmed the council's canons and decrees.1 It had been as regular, or irregular, as Nicea I or Ephesus I had been, and far more general than the Constantinopolitan synod of 381. Its chief importance lay in registering another splendid victory for the Alexandrines. The “school” of Antioch was shattered beyond repair; Pope Leo and the Westerners were walled off and weakened; the bare notion of “two natures” was branded as Nestorian; every principal see in the East was manned by a henchman of Dioscoros. Moreover, the emperor and his grand chamberlain (the eunuch Chrysaphius, godson to Eutyches) were prepared to support Alexandrine policy with police power.

In the medieval theocratic societies of both the Byzantine East and the Latin West, where the influence of Christian precepts so strongly pervaded all aspects of life, it was inevitable that the institutions of church and state, of sacerdotium and regnum to use the traditional Latin terms, be closely tied to one another. But whereas in the West, at least after the investiture conflict of the eleventh century, the pope managed to exert a strong political influence over secular rulers, notably the Holy Roman Emperor, in the East, from the very foundation of Constantinople in the fourth century, the Byzantine emperor seemed clearly to dominate over his chief ecclesiastical official, the patriarch.

Historians for some time now have tried to solve the extremely complex and very interesting problem of whether or not the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth-century represented a reaction against or an extension of Renaissance attitudes and ideas. Debate over whether or not the Reformation was essentially medieval or modern has taken several forms. One of the methods used to approach the problem has been that of studying in detail the life and thought of certain leaders of the Protestant movement in order to ascertain whether they were basically men of the Middle Ages or individuals who contributed substantially to the making of the modern world. Pierre Viret was one of those early champions of the Protestant drive for reform, in particular of that branch of the Protestant Reformation later known as Calvinism. This study represents an attempt to demonstrate to what extent he was influenced by Renaissance attitudes and ideas.

The significant manuscript discoveries on medieval neo-Manichaeism in the last twenty-five years have raised the hope that the Albigensian riddle may now be more accurately and critically appraised. However, the problems are far from being solved. Despite penetrating essays and newly found sources, more clarification is needed on (a) the origins of Catharism. Henri-Charles Puech, of the Collége de France, has clearly summed up this question in “Catharisme mèdiéval et Bogomilisme,” Accademia nazionale dei lincei: XII Convegno “Volta” promossa dalla classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche (Roma, 1957), pp. 56–84; (b) religion, where the question is not merely whether the Cathari were dualists, but to what degree. There is an excellent essay, partly solving this problem, by Hans Söderberg, La religion des Cathares: Etude sur le Gnosticisme de la basse Antiquité et du Moyen Age (Uppsala, 1949); (c) the political situation. “Occitanie,” later called Languedoc, was at the time independent of the Capetian Kings of France who undertook to integrate it, by the sword of Simon of Montfort, as discussed by Jacques Madaule, Le drame albigeois et le destin français (Paris: B. Grasset, 1961); (d) Albigensianism coincided with courtly love, a subject which has not been sufficiently elucidated as to the relationship of the troubadours and Catharism, although numerous essays have been written about it.

One of the curiosities of the scholarly enterprise is the fact that often what tends to advance the handling and interpretation of data with respect to one problem has the side effect of preventing adequate and imaginative treatment of related problems. This appears to be the case in recent creedal research. The question of the earliest text of vetus symbolum romanum has been obscured, rather than clarified, by the important recognition at the hands of many scholars of the richness and variety of creedal data surviving from the second century.

Four hundred years ago, on December 4, 1563, the Council of Trent held its twenty-fifth and last solemn session. During eighteen difficult years it dominated the ecclesiastical affairs of Europe and its influence was felt far and wide even in the temporal order. No one in Christendom was indifferent to its proceedings, for the issues involved in this Council touched in one way or another the lives of all. In the course of the years it was supported and resisted in turn by their Catholic majesties, Charles V and Francis I, as well as by the Protestant Estates of Germany. Vituperated by Luther and Calvin and avoided by the evangelical theologians it became a wall of separation between the old and the new orders. United Christendom, which witnessed its convocation in 1545, had vanished as a reality before its closure in 1563. Assembled under trying conditions it was almost doomed to failure before it commenced; the task, which confronted this reform council, was gigantic. For it was asked to revitalize and renew the Church weighed down with the burden of the centuries. In effect, the reform, which the Fathers of this Council achieved, initiated the transformation of the medieval into the modern Church.

The middle of the twelfth century marked an upsurge in historical awareness and a revitalization of the practice of historiography.1 Exemplifying this trend were three men who flourished and died within twenty years of each other. Hugh of St. Victor projected a manysided view of history. Otto of Freising and Ordericus Vitalis were universalizing historians.2 None was an academic professional after the fashion of our modern guild. Each followed a monastic vocation. All protested any evisceration of time and history, every attempt to evacuate humanity therefrom. They extended the Augustinian emphasis on the key role of the Divine in the Hebrew-Christian tradition.

The Concordat of Vienna (1448) was one of the most suggestive historical phenomena of the fifteenth century. Drafted in the midst of a century characterized by diplomatic intrigue and institutional flux, and ratified amid the pageantry of traditional ceremony, it implicitly suggested the restoration of order and stability. The agreement appeared to signify the re-establishment of papal supremacy, the destruction of conciliarism, and even the partial restoration of the medieval Christian Commonwealth by virtue of the submission of the Empire to Rome. Contemporary notions relating to the Concordat of Vienna are invariably drawn from the works of the papal historians Ludwig Pastor and Mandell Creighton. Both viewed it as a papal victory and a defeat of the Council of Basel. F. X. Seppelt took a more cautious position and suggested that the eventual implementation of the agreement brought many concessions to the territorial princes. Joseph Gill in his recent biography of Pope Eugenius almost entirely bypassed this phase of the pontiff's activity. Only Bertram's monograph on the concordats of the later middle ages devoted some space to the 1448 pact. While presenting some interesting conclusions, he failed to adequately interpret any one concordat in the light of its own peculiar political background.

At the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 Philip Melanchthon advised against discussion of the priesthood of all believers, relegating it to the “odious and unessential articles which are commonly debated in the schools.” In the Augsburg Confession, which had already been finished and read when he gave this judgment, the doctrine is passed over in silence. But Protestant tradition has not followed Melanchthon in this respect. The priesthood of all believers has come to be regarded, along with Biblical authority and salvation by faith, as one of the three main points of evangelical theology. Like the other two, however, it has not always been interpreted in the same way, nor taken as seriously in practice as in theory. All too often it has become a dead letter in a clergy-dominated institution. And where it has come alive again, it has been used to support a bewildering variety of practices, such as Congregational polity, the Quaker meeting, Pietistic ecclesiolae, and the Methodist commissioning of lay preachers. Sometimes, again, it has become associated with such slogans as “the right of private judgment” or “immediate access to God,” and interpreted so individualistically that any institutional or corporate expression of it becomes unthinkable. Finally, it is perhaps not superfluous to point out that the “royal priesthood” is not a Protestant invention, but a Biblical category, which had an interesting history before Luther and has never been wholly neglected in the “Catholic” tradition. This fact, too, complicates the problems of interpretation.

This paper deals with the nature of the idea of “covenant” in English Puritan writings of the first half of the seventeenth century, and particularly as this bears upon the question of the assurance of salvation.

That this assurance could be obtained was a commonly accepted axiom and, indeed, the actual striving for such awareness was a commonly recognized obligation. When William Ames wrote, “The assurance of our calling and election is a thing greatly to be desired”, he also added the statement that this certainty “is not only possible for us to attaine unto, but also … it belongs to our duty to make this our calling and election sure”. There may well be many difficulties along the way, with serious agonies and doubtings. But excessive fearfulness is as great a sin as presumption, denying as it does the power of God's mercy. And so William Perkins could say, “we doe not teach that all and every man living within the precincts of the Church, professing the name of Christ is certen of his salvation, … but that he ought so to be, and must indeavor to attaine thereto”.

As a result of Father Albert J. Loomie's recent volume, The Spanish Elizabethans, this descriptive phrase would appear to be a dramatic designation for English Catholic exiles in Philip II's dominions. However, it seems equally appropriate to use the appelation with reference to a much less known and smaller group, the Spanish Calvinist refugees of Elizabethan London. The latter were organized into a congregation in the early 1560's by Cassiodoro de Reina; to a very considerable extent the success and collapse of this church parallels its pastor's career, as we shall see.

The two Rouen provincial councils that were held in May 1281 and October 1282 are known only from three petitions addressed to Pope Martin IV that survive in a single manuscript. One was printed by Champollion-Figeac in 1839, another by Professor Gaines Post in 1936, but the third remains unpublished because its historical interest has not been apparent. The first two can be readily related to famous events of their day: one urged the canonization of Louis IX, while the other protested the renewal of papal privileges to the mendicant orders. The third, however, has been neglected because its contents do not seem to rise above the commonplace and trivial.

Prior to the outbreak of the German Revolution of 1848, the liberal publicists Wilhelm Jordan and Robert Prutz complained bitterly about “the foolish absorption of the Germans in theological problems.… when political and economic issues should occupy their full attention.”

When the historians of frontier revivalism turn to James McGready, they find him difficult to comprehend. Since the Kentucky Great Revival of 1797 to 1802 first arose in his frontier congregations, the historians point to McGready as the original frontier revivalist, imitated by all other revivalists. Because the origins of the frontier camp meeting were inextricably tied to his career, McGready has been described as the leading innovator of the western awakenings, who gave frontier religion its peculiar flavor. And the revivals have been described as a bizarre form of undisciplined religious barbarism, dominated by emotional intensity, primitive excesses, and pious anti-intellectualism. The difficulty with these widely accepted generalizations is that McGready was neither the model nor the advocate for the revivalism the historians said he created.

The classical period for the establishment of the legal guarantees of religious freedom in America is the final quarter of the eighteenth century, otherwise known as the Revolutionary Era. Yet, enshrined in our national memory as the great hero of liberty of conscience is not a man of this classical period, but a doughty seventeenth century colonial—Roger Williams. The object of the present study is to view this hero in time and space—in that particular time remembered as the Revolutionary Era and that particular space occupied by thirteen colonies out to become a nation.

Thomas Müntzer, in the well known words of the Apostle Paul, has come to be ‘all things to all men,’ albeit only after his death. But already during his lifetime opinion was strongly divided over this man. Certainly he had his staunch supporters1 as well as his bitter enemies, but there were also those who saw both good and evil in him. Müntzer's most adamant opponent was undoubtedly Martin Luther himself, who had no intention of standing idly by while his ‘Reformation’ went up in the smoke of revolution.2 Those, however, who saw both good and evil in Müntzer were not involved in the immediate struggle but witnessed events from a distance—the Anabaptists of Zurich under the leadership of Conrad Grebel.3