John Knox considered himself a preacher, not a writer of books. His History of the Reformation of Religion in the Realm of Scotland is an extended sermon on the duty of Scottish Christians to rely solely, obediently, and unflinchingly on God. The printed work contains five books, but Knox did not write Book 5. In Book 4, Knox made the point that the Lord authorizes and requires all Christians (even common subjects, when they are able to do so) to correct their rulers' religion and to compel them to obey God's commandments. For Knox, no more history was needed. His sermon was “compleat.”

Few historians of early Christianity would dissent from the view that Hilary of Poitiers was the west's most able and articulate anti-Arian apologist of the 360s. In the course of this bishop's exile in Asia Minor (356–360) and return to the west, there is evidence of a substantial literary activity, most of which was circulated soon after his death and survives to the present day. Works such as his letters to the emperor Constantius II, expecially the so-called In Constantium, his collected dossier against Valens and Ursacius, and his theological treatises De synodis and De trinitate, attained for this once obscure bishop from Gaul a position of preeminence in the minds of the next generation of anti-Arians.

By the thirteenth century, Latin Christians had been dispensing and collecting indulgences for two centuries. Though indulgentia was a relatively late term, and first the favorite of thirteenth-century Dominican theologians, remissions of temporal penalty for sin had been granted since the eleventh century, whether they were known as remissiones or relaxationes, the two most popular terms of eleventh- and twelfth-century ecclesiastics. Bishops granted partial indulgences for visitations of holy places. Partial indulgences remitted a fraction of all penalty incurred through sin. Contributions to pious works, such as church, hospital, or bridge constructions, were also rewarded with indulgences. Other prelates granted indulgences until Lateran IV. The popes granted both partial and plenary indulgences (those which remitted all penalty for having sinned). They granted partial indulgences for much the same reasons as other bishops. Plenary indulgences were almost exclusively granted to crusaders or contributors to crusades.

The bicentennial of the American Bill of Rights offers an appropriate occasion to reassess its intellectual heritage. British radicals, I will argue, had a major impact on the principles enunciated in the Bill of Rights, including the rarely cited ninth amendment, so crucial for the resolution of such sociolegal issues as the rights to life and privacy and the place of religion in society. By radicals I mean those who sought fundamental changes in politics, religion, society, or the economy by striking at the root of contemporary assumptions and institutions.

With the publication of his Den Byencorf der H. Roomische Kercke (The Beehive of the Holy Roman Church) in 1569, the Netherlandic Calvinist Marnix of Saint Aldegonde launched a satirical attack onthe clergy, polity, and sacramental practice of Catholicism. Though the fame of the book and its author have been eclipsed, they were both well known during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesas shown by the frequency of publication. Marnix's task, in common with other sixteenth-century religious propagandists, was to communicate a theological message to a popular audience. The success of this effort depended on reaching across the separation between systematic theology and folk religiosity. The object was not original theology, nor even doctrinal subtleties, but the creativeuse of common terms to explain divergent schemes of basic dogma. Because the subject was more religious than theological, the separation between Latin and the vernacular cultures could be bridged by the use of metaphors common to both high and popular culture. In this, Marnix's work is distinguished by his use of the metaphors of beehive, honey, and manna to explain the differences between the Catholic Eucharist and the Calvinist Lord's Supper. The use of manna is not surprising as one would expect it to be a common image; however, the metaphors of hive and honey are less expected. While the former is clearly biblical in origin, the apiary metaphors are not. Thus, Marnix relies on the common sociocultural context of the beehive to instruct a popular Dutch audience in a fundamental difference between Calvinism and Catholicism. By identifying the Catholic host with polluted honey, Marnix defends the necessary presence of the Word for the Calvinist Lord's Supper, which he portrays as pure manna. Rather than feeding on the body of Christ, Marnix argues, the true Church feeds on the Word of God, which is present in the Calvinist wafer.

For both Schaff and Nevin, while they were colleagues at Mercersburg, the issue of issues in mid-nineteenth century America as well as in Continental Europe and in England, was “the church question.” This subject has already been provided a seminal treatment by James H. Nichols to which all later students of Mercersburg Theology are deeply indebted. The purpose of this article is to attempt to shed new light on this question by focusing upon what was for both of them a critical ecclesiological issue, one upon which they in part agreed and in part disagreed—namely, the question of historical development. It is this issue which I believe especially provoked Nevin's theological crisis. This essay will also seek to describe Schaff's role in this crisis.

For the contemporary historian, whether male, gray-haired and ensconced in the ivory tower of an old-fashioned political or intellectual history, or female, young, and happily dismantling the tower by the seige-machine of social history, Carolingian society is a source of continuing wonderment. For those with a love of order and of the enjoyment of the fruits of their labor, Carolingian society especially in the years just preceding and following Louis the Pious's death in 840, mirrors all the anxieties of a committed band of representatives of high culture surrounded by the rising seas of low culture. For those riding the crests of the sea, Carolingian society speaks of the possibilities open in a society of little structure and much mobility to those of imagination, not tied to the past.

Jean-Alphonse Turrettini (1671–1737) was the last of the line of theology professors from his family at the Academy of Geneva, following his grandfather Benedict (1588–1631) and his father François (1623–1687), the famed Reformed scholastic theologian. Jean-Alphonse started his theological career as the pastor of the Italian congregation in Geneva in 1693; he was then named professor of church history at the Academy in 1697 and then rector in 1701 and finally professor of theology in 1705. Although his father was one of the principal architects of the Helvetic Formula Consensus (1675), Jean-Alphonse led the movement toward eliminating such credal religion through the abrogation of the Formula in 1706.

In the 1840s, Laura Bridgman, a teenage girl from a New Hampshire village, was among the most famous women in the Western world. Thomas Carlyle called her life story “one of the most beautiful phenomena at present visible under our Sun.” British intellectuals, including the novelist Charles Dickens, the geologist Charles Lyell, and the phrenologist George Combe considered a visit with Laura Bridgman an important stop on their much publicized American tours. Dickens devoted fifteen pages of his American Notes to describing his visit with her, and Combe reported that “Laura Bridgman is very much admired by the British public, and her case is universally attractive. It is spoken of with deep interest and admiration in every society into which I enter.” Journals on both sides of the Atlantic published annual updates on her life, periodic chapters in a biography hailed as a tale “of thrilling interest, not surpassed by those of the novelist.”

In the spring of 1376, Catherine, the uneducated daughter of a Sienese dyer, a simple lay Tertiary, traveled to Avignon in southern France. She wanted to speak directly with Pope Gregory XI about organizing a crusade, reforming the Catholic church, ending his war with Florence, and moving his court back to Rome. Her reputation for holiness and her orthodoxy gave her a hearing with the pope, and so her words had a measure of influence on him. Gregory did move to Rome in the fall of 1376, and he paid for her trip back to Italy. In 1377 he allowed her to lead a mission in the Sienese countryside: he wanted her presence there to help save souls and perhaps stimulate interest in a crusade. In 1378 he sent her to Florence as a peacemaker for the war between the Tuscan cities and the papacy. In late 1378 Gregory's successor Urban VI asked her to come to Rome to support his claim to the papacy against the schismatic Pope Clement VII. Finally in 1380, Catherine died in Rome, exhausted by all these endeavors.

It is now well recognized that the papal condemnation of Modernism in 1907 had a devastating effect on American Catholic intellectual life. This was particularly true in the archdiocese of New York where St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, had been one of the leading centers of scholarly activity. Suspicion of Modernism cast a cloud over several of the professors and led to the termination of their highly-regarded journal, the New York Review. The fate of the Dunwoodie faculty during the Modernist crisis is a story that has often been told. Less well known, however, is the effect that the condemna knowledge of the colonial situation to a larger canvas in his widely-read synoptic work American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Clyde A. Milner II and Floyd A. O'Neil, eds., Churchmen and the Western Indians, 1820–1920 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985) was a much-noticed collection of essays on interactions. At the middle of this period President Grant inaugurated new policies on church and state; these are well reviewed in Robert H. Keller, Jr., American Protestantism and the United States Indian Policy, 1869–1882 (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).

Inquiry into puritan “federal” doctrine established decades ago the now standard distinction between the covenant of grace and the national covenant. Perry Miller provided the first extensive analysis of the gracious covenant, and apparently it was he, too, who first found—or emphasized—in puritan sources the idea that “a nation as well as an individual can be in covenant with God.” His basic proposal, that ”the ‘covenant of grace’ … refer[red] to individuals and personal salvation in the life to come, [whereas the national covenant] applied to nations and governed their temporal success in this world,” has become a virtual article of faith in puritanist scholarship, although few recent historians have shared his profound interest in the latter covenant. Indeed, relegation of communal and this-worldly themes to a separate and inevitably secondary category has narrowed dramatically the focus of inquiry. It suffices to note that the three most recent monographs on the subject in English virtually equate “federal theology” with a gracious individualized contract exclusive to the elect (and its antithesis, the “covenant of works”).

In standard Jewish reference works the figure of Pope Pius X has either been sorely neglected or has received a decidedly negative press. For the concise New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia, Pius X simply does not exist. The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia mentions rather cryptically that the pope was “better disposed” towards the Jews than had been his immediate predecessors. On the other hand, the monumental Encyclopaedia Judaica characterizes Pius as “disdainful of Judaism and the Jewish people.” Catholic biographies of this pontiff, essentially hagiographic, provide little or no insight into his relations with the Jews or his position on the Jewish question. However, as we shall attempt to argue, Giuseppe Sarto (1835–1914), who was elected pope in 1903 and canonized in 1954, maintained warm personal relationships with individual Jews throughout his ecclesiastical career, held a positive view of the Jewish character, defended the Jewish people against defamation and violence, and was instrumental in halting a twenty-year-old antisemitic campaign that had previously been waged in Italy by the clerical party.

The attempt to create a purified Dutch language and establish a Dutch cultural and linguistic identity distinct from Germanic variants became a major preoccupation of late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Netherlanders. Overcoming variations in regional dialects between the central province of Holland and the northern, eastern, and southern provinces and constructing a standard unitary language for inhabitants of the Low Countries was to occupy Dutch writers for several generations. Clearly the development of a national vernacular was essential in the process of achieving cultural and political independence from the Spanish overlords during the Eighty Years War.

Between May 1875 and December 1879, Vincent van Gogh's life was marked by a devout evangelical piety, distinctly different from what had gone before. Although raised in a religious family, his father a Dutch Reformed minister in the Groningen tradition, van Gogh barely mentions religion in his early letters. His religious fervor deepened considerably, however, sometime during 1875, while he was living in Paris. Van Gogh's letters dating from May 1875 are increasingly filled with biblical quotations and religious reflections. His sister-in-law, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, in describing van Gogh's character during this period wrote, “that was Vincent's aim—to humble himself, to forget himself, ‘mourir à soi-meme,’ (to sacrifice every personal desire), that was the ideal he tried to reach as long as he sought his refuge in religion, and he never did a thing by halves.”

Sarah Osborn does not appear in the definitive biographical dictionary, Notable American Women. She is not in the pages of Sydney Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American People, nor of any more recent standard American religious history text. She failed to catch the attention of the editors and authors of the recent Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience or Dictionary of Christianity in America. The great New Divinity pastor-theologian Samuel Hopkins in some measure owed his career to Sarah Osborn, but studies of him mention her only in passing or not at all. Scholars have learned of her through the work of Mary Beth Norton and in the documentary history, Women and Religion in America, but the Sarah Osborn most often mentioned in connection with early New England is the one accused as a witch at Salem who died in Boston prison 10 May 1692.

Henry Gerhard Appenzeller (1858–1902)—along with Horace N. Allen, Horace G. Underwood, William B. Scranton, and Marion F. Scranton— pioneered Protestantism in Korea at the turn of the nineteenth century from about 1885 to 1902. Appenzeller intended to convert Koreans to Methodism, to establish Methodist societies, to reform Korean society in agreement with American Protestant evangelical teachings, and, finally, to help Korea become independent, democratic, and modernized, using the United States as a model. Appenzeller's commitment to “convert the heathen” and to reform Korean society along American Protestant Evangelical lines is easy to understand. But why the commitment to Korean independence, democratic reform, and modernization? Why did a pietistic, evangelical Protestant missionary place political concerns on a par with evangelical concerns in Korea? Appenzeller, and the rest of the small American community in Korea during the late nineteenth century, brought along the partially articulated, partially unconscious agenda to build the late nineteenth-century American evangelical Protestant vision of the City on a Hill. Appenzeller attempted to create a Christian Korea in a manner similar to late nineteenthcentury Protestant efforts to create a Christian America. Appenzeller's concept of a City on a Hill provides the key to understanding his commitment to independence, democracy, and modernization in Korea. Citizens had to hold the evangelical Protestant faith. They had to have Anglo-Saxon manners and customs. They had to live morally. The nation had to maintain independence from foreign powers, maintain a democratic form of government, and enjoy the benefits of modernization. We will consider the development of that vision in American history below.

“Women go to church for the same reason that farmers and convicts go to church,” H.L. Mencken once observed—strictly for the company. His book “in defense of women,” written at the close of World War I, systematically deflated the Victorian era's sentimental notions about the “fairer sex.” “They are growing less and less religious as year chases year,” he noted cheerfully. “The evangelical Protestant denominations will have a hard time holding them.” Others shared Mencken's conclusion, though less joyfully. “Women no longer accept Christianity as a matter of course because they happen to be women,” the Christian Century lamented in 1924. “They pause and question here as in all things else.”

Only months after Luther's death in 1546, a colleague, Caspar Cruciger, Sr., published his magnum opus, an 879-page commentary on the Gospel of John, In Evangelium Iohannis Apostoli Enarratio. Cruciger's Enarratio provides an excellent angle from which scholars may examine an important shift in Wittenberg's exegesis and theology during the crucial decade of the 1540s. To be sure, this work has few of the characteristics of other treatments of the fourth Gospel produced near the same time. The exposition of the four Gospels by Cologne's Franciscan theologian, von Konigstein, underwent far more printings. The works on John by Calvin and Bullinger have attracted more attention in our own day. However, when set into the context of continued sharp debate over ecclesiology, Cruciger's commentary on John provides a critical reshaping of Philip Melanchthon's exegetical method to meet the continuing challenge of defining the church in line with an emerging Lutheran orthodoxy and against Roman Catholicism. Unlike later Protestant commentaries, which often roll ponderously from one unrelated locus in theology to the next, Cruciger's work, though massive, focuses almost singlemindedly on the doctrine of the church. The commentary represents part of Wittenberg's response to failed discussions over the nature of the church and its authority which began in 1520, nearly halted in 1541 at the Colloquy of Regensburg which Cruciger attended, and collapsed with the outbreak of hostilities during the Smalcald War of 1547. It also demonstrates the farreaching effect of Philip Melanchthon's exegetical method in shaping that response among his own students.

From the 1920s onward, many individuals and denominations have referred to themselves as Baptist-fundamentalists or fundamentalist-Baptists. Increasingly, however, scholars are emphasizing the stark contrast between fundamentalism and Baptist life.1 More than any other, the life of J. Frank Norris stands as an example of the tension, if not irreconcilability, between the two camps. The enigmatic, or perhaps oxymoronic, nature of Norris's theological life was paralleled by his political endeavors in which he claimed to be a Democrat, but almost always supported Republican candidates. Being from Texas, it was natural that Norris would begin his career as a Baptist Democrat. In time, however, he evolved into a fundamentalist Republican. He actually attempted to be a fundamentalist-Baptist religiously and a Republican-Democrat politically. The fusion of these two religious traditions was no less problematic than fusion of the political parties.