Hildegard, the twelfth-century Benedictine abbess of Bingen, is best understood not as a mystic, but as a visionary prophetess. The spectacular visions that introduce the sections of her three great works, the Scivias, the Liber Vitae Meritorum, and the Liber Divinorum Operum have dazzled modern readers, but they are not the only or even the most important expressions of her prophetic inspiration. Her prophetic insight also allowed her to understand the figures of the Scriptures and relate them to contemporary theological and political questions. Nor can her visions, however central they are to her symbolic theology, be separated from her interpretations of them, her understanding of scriptural typology, or her role as a reforming prophetess.

On 26 May 1434, the sisters of the Abbaye Saint-Georges de Rennes filed into their chapter house. Their abbess had died two days previously, and following her burial in the abbey church the abbey's prioress had called a meeting to plan the election of a new leader for the community.

Picture, if you will, the rich landscape of American religious history that has taken shape over the last half century. At least three features of this terrain stand out, the first being a richly-textured panorama before us, a recognizable field of study that has come into existence in a relatively short span of time. This field has been shaped by a varietyof forces, among them the vast expansion of religion departments since 1960, the recovery of the role of religion in the broader disciplines of history, literature, sociology and political science, and the stubborn persistence of religion in modern American life which scholars struggle to explain.

Augustine said that Rome fell frequently, all too often into “utter moral depravity,” occasionally into the hands of the city's enemies. Maybe Aeneas was to blame. He had shown poor judgment, hauling to Italy the gods that failed to save Troy. Subsequently, when the Gauls came to Rome's gates, those divine and purportedly vigilant protectors did remarkably little protecting. They later offered no resistance when Nero reduced Rome to rubble. Augustine held Aeneas's humiliations all the more demoralizing; Virgil misled citizens, suggesting that Rome would stand forever. Christians should have known better. They had it on higher authority that heaven and earth would pass away.

Three major Protestant missionary organizations—the Company for the ropagation of the Gospel in New England (the NEC, founded 1649), the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG, founded 1701), and the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK, founded 1709)—all played significant roles in Christianizing and civilizing the inhabitants of British North America. The New England Company had the longest history and is the oldest Protestant missionary organization. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts sent no fewer than three hundred missionaries to America between 1701 and 1783. While the NEC and the SPG have received scholarly attention, the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge has been virtually ignored.

The antitrinitarian Polish Brethren, from the inception of their denomination as a breakaway from the Calvinist Reformed Church in 1565, had earnestly debated the issue of whether a “true Christian” might collaborate in the workof the sword-bearing magistracy, take part in war, or kill a fellow human being in self-defense. Whereas the brotherhood in the militarily exposed Grand Duchy of Lithuania, with a few exceptions, gave a positive answer, the congregational leaders in the more secure kingdom of Poland for the most part said no. To do any of these things, the latterargued, entailed disobedience to Jesus’ commandments as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in the New Testament. For Christ replaced the laws of the Old Testament, which had allowed the ancient Israelites to wage just wars and wield the sword for good cause, with a gospel of love and defenselessness. This doctrine of nonresistance the pacifist Brethren, of course, had taken over from the Anabaptists of central Europe, whose insistence on adult baptism they also adopted.

The recent interest in reconstructing the history of spirituality and religious belief is nowhere more welcome than in the history of Roman Catholicism in the United States. From the very point of its emergence as a recognizable subdiscipline at the turn of the century and lasting into very recent scholarship, American Catholic history has been a relentlessly “topdown”affair. It focused on the leaders of the church—almost all of them white males—and on official church institutions. Episcopal biography was the preferred form and, as often as not, “progress” was the theme: the hierarchy established itself steadily along the advancing frontier; populations of clergy, religious, and laity all increased heroically; immigrants once despised were transformed into the American mainstream. There was even an inspirational final chapter to the tale, as one American Catholic finally grasped the brass ring of acceptance and moved into the White House. The story was a deliberately edifying one, but it was a story primarily for insiders. Perhaps for that reason alone, American Catholic history seemed to remain, as Leslie Tender has recently observed, “on the margins” of serious scholarly discourse.

Like many great theologians, Jonathan Edwards was a polemicist. Although he kept extensive personal notebooks in which he developed his views concerning scripture interpretation and doctrinal theology, in most instances he did not publish these views without the catalyst afforded by theological controversy. Throughout the course of Edwards's ministry Arminianism was his constant foe. In the 1730s he published a number of anti-Arminian sermons and actively opposed the ordination of Robert Breck, an Arminian sympathizer. He also viewed the revivals as falling within the scope of this anti-Arminian polemic. In Faithful Narrative (1737) he expressed concern over the spread of Arminianism in the Connecticut Valley and portrayed the revival as working directly against this tendency. Likewise in Some Thoughts (1743) he predicted that the activity of the Holy Spirit in the revivals would “entirely overthrow their scheme of religion” and suggested, “Now is a good time for Arminians to change their principles.” In the late 1740s on several occasions he recorded his intention to write “something particularly and largely on the Arminian controversy, in distinct discourses on the various points in dispute.” Although he was temporarily distracted from this proposed project by the communion controversy in Northampton, he began to carry it out soon after the move to Stockbridge, publishing Freedom of the Will in 1754.

The French Revolutionary festivals were planned as ritualized celebrations (speeches, tableaux, parades/processions, and music) of a revolutionary myth (new nation, elect community, pantheon of political heroes) with strong resemblance tothe traditional myth and ritual celebrating creation and redemption. This myth and ritual in the case of theweekly festivalswas then placed on a day set aside in the same fashion as previously Sunday had been set aside, mythologized, and ritualized. Under the Directory government, however, the festival celebrations went into steep decline, and only the Commemorationof 14 July survived the revolutionary decade. Even so, almost twenty years ago, in a brilliant and all-encompassing essay that has become the reigning paradigm, Mona Ozouf argued that the experience of the sacred central to the Old-Regime Catholic feasts was transferred to the revolutionary festivals, and from the revolutionary festivals to the revolutionary (and post-revolutionary) government. In a chapter entitled “Popular Life and the Revolutionary Festival” she presented evidence that popular religious sentiment (love of bells, crucifixes, Maypoles, and so on) remained alive and well; and in a chapter entitled “The Revolutionary Festival: A Transfer of Sacrality,” evidence that fundamental humanconcerns (biological, social, and civic) once alive in a religious context lived on in a political context.

Gilbert Tennent (1703–1764), an “Ulster Scot” born the same year as John Wesley, is usually remembered as a leader of revivals during the “Great Awakening” in the middle-colonies. John Witherspoon (1723–1794), a “champion of orthodoxy” from Edinburgh called to be the President of the College of New Jersey, is usually treated as a “founding father” of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. However, many events leading up to the first General Assembly in 1788 reflect the influence of Gilbert Tennet, the moderator of the newly re-united Synods of Philadelphia and New York in 1758.

Traditional nineteenth-century views of the relationship between science and Christianity have seen the two in a mortal conflict from which science emerged victorious over an obscurantist theology which sought to dominate the thinking of the new scientific class. Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) represented a high point in such battlefield historiography. Recent writers have found the relationship to be more complex and less militaristic as a result of examining more closely the context in which the alleged battles took place. This paper will examine the case of English evangelist John Wesley (1703–1791), long a scapegoat of the warfare model. Wesley was often tarred with antiintellectualism during his lifetime and, in the ensuing two centuries, this argument has focused on his attitudes toward natural science. The effect has been to cast a leading religious figure of eighteenth-century England in the antiscience mold.

John Orvis, Eliab W. Capron, Mary L. Cox, and Abraham Brooke were four Quakers who had much in common. Geographically they were widely separated: Orvis lived at Ferrisburg, Vermont; Capron at Walworth, New York; Cox near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; and Brooke in Clinton County, Ohio. All, however, were Hicksite Friends committed to abolition, the principles of nonresistance, and the repudiation of all coercive force. All selfconsciously patterned themselves on the early Friends by bearing witness to what they saw as truth, whether in Friends' meetinghouses or in the churches of the “world's people.” And all shared the same fate: disownment for “disunity.”

The intellectual crisis of Victorian faith was a tale of two books. Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published on 28 November, 1859; a composite volume of biblical criticism, Essays and Reviews, six of whose seven authors were clergymen, appeared on 21 March 1860. Both volumes provoked controversies. The Darwinian controversy is remembered and the biblicalcontroversy is largely forgotten, and perhaps in the longue durŕe of history this ought to be so. But there was no doubt at the time that the biblical controversy was more important, dealing with matters that Victorians regarded as both fundamental and familiar. Richard Church, later dean of St. Paul's, wrote to his American scientist friend Asa Gray in 1861 that Darwin's “book I have no doubt would be the subject still of a great row, if there were not a much greater row going on about Essays and Reviews.” Leslie Stephen, who experienced both controversies as a young man, later regretted that “the controversy raised by Essays and Reviews even distracted men for a time from the far more important issues raised by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.” A modern student of press reactions to Darwin found that Essays and Reviews received quantitatively more attention and concluded: “Darwin's book received decidedly less immediate attention in the press than the theological Essays and Reviews … [T]here is little doubt that science was no match for religion in the competition for public interest in Mid-Victorian Britain.” Had Essays and Reviews been published when first advertised in February 1859, or even when rescheduled in October, it, rather than the Origin of Species, would have been the major book of that critical year.

Methodist studies of the last four decades have insisted that Methodism be seen as a distinctive intellectual tradition with its own integrity. These studies have corrected the excesses of an earlier experiential interpretation. Although some may still characterize Wesley's Christianity as “almost totally devoid of intellectual content,” the subjects of Wesley, of Methodism, and of the American Holiness Movement can now no longer be reduced to merely an unreflective warm-hearted piety. Current studies have especially highlighted several distinct Wesleyan theological developments. These include the displacement of election and predestination by a religious assurance from the witness of the spirit, the tension between salvation by holy living and salvation by faith alone, an emphasis on vital Christian experience in theological reflection, and especially the development of a Protestant understanding of Christian perfection or holiness. As Henry Rack states, Wesley “softened the hard edges of Calvinism” with an Arminian accent and moved the center of Protestantism so that justification became “the door into the pilgrimage of holiness” rather than the Lutheran cradle or the Calvinist promise. Wesley's prominence in Jaroslav Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine indicates the growing acceptance of this Methodist intellectual history.

Throughout the nation's history, Americans have used foreign events as a screen upon which to project their own domestic hopes and fears. European revolutions in particular have become the occasion for airing homespun anxieties about social (and religious) upheaval. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Red Scare of 1920 are simply the most prominent examples of how revolutions abroad can stir the fears of American conservatives. According to some historians, the American reaction to the Paris Commune of 1871 was just as swift and negative as the reaction to the French and Russian Revolutions. An examination of clerical response to the Commune, however, suggests a very different picture: that of a community of public spokesmen trying to make sense of a foreign upheaval for their American audience while offering hope that similar events were avoidable on this side of the Atlantic.

On 19 January 1774, Joseph Müller was expelled from the town of Salem, North Carolina for becoming engaged to Sarah Hauser without the permission of the Elders Conference. On 23 August 1775 Mattheus Weiβ was likewise expelled forwriting a “bad letter” to friends in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and on 4 November 1789, Jacob Bonn Jr., who hadbeen struggling with chronic debt, was expelled for refusing to sell his house and accept a steward for his finances. Theexpulsion of inhabitants for such offenses seems odd in a century labelled the “age of enlightenment.” It might well be viewed by good American constitutionalists as an unacceptable intrusion into the private lives of the individuals concerned. For the Moravian Brethren who built Salem on an ideal molded in Germany, the behavior of such offending Brethren represented a conflict between two different concepts of freedom: that of individual freedom, whichcame to be identified by both the European and American leadership of the Brethren as “American,” and that ofa spiritual freedom, which found expression in the submission to the good of the whole and obedience to Christ as literallord of the community. Historian A. G. Roeber has pointed out that many Germans were puzzled by “the American freedom” especially in the post-revolutionary years and did not always even agree among themselves over its precise meaning. Clearly, however, for many of them it represented a sharp departure from the more communal orientation of German society and government. Even the greater spiritual freedom offered by the lack of a state church was often viewed ambiguously. We can gain insight into the particular meaning of the conflict for the Brethren by first looking at the origins of the Moravian behavioral ideal, then at the way in which the dynamics of church/town discipline illustrate the tension between communal ideal and individual freedom, and finally by considering the specific impact of the translation of this ideal to an American setting.

The Third Reich's Kirchenkampf (church struggle) is sometimes mistakenly understood as referring to the Protestant churches' resistance to National Socialism. In fact, the term refers to an internal dispute between members of the Bekennende Kirche [Confessing Church (hereafter BK)] and members of the Deutsche Christen [German Christians (hereafter DC)] over control of the Protestant church. While not all members of the BK opposed Hitler's policies, the movement called for an autonomy of the church from National Socialist legal measures, particularly the racial laws, motivated both by theological and political considerations. The DC, by contrast, sought to introduce National Socialist policies and ideology into the church, especially Nazi racial laws, and modify church doctrine in accord with National Socialist ideology. Yet the antisemitism at the heart of the DC has been either ignored or marginalized by most historians. Indeed, some historians have incorrectly suggested that the DC underwent a dissolution at the end of 1933, from which it never recovered, or have presented the DC as a political creation of National Socialism, ignoring its theological roots.

“I have felt like working three times as hard as ever since I came to understand that my Lord was coming back again,” reported revivalist Dwight L. Moody, the most prominent of nineteenth-century premillennialists. Moody's testimony to the motivating power of premillennialism points to the crucial role of that eschatology in conservative Protestantism since the late nineteenth century—a role delineated by several studies within the past twenty-five years. As a comprehensive interpretation of history which gives meaning and pattern to past, present, and future, and a role for the believer in the outworking of the divine program, premillennialism has been a driving force in the fundamentalistand evangelical movements.

In September 1908 the British Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, offended Roman Catholics by cancelling the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, which was to have been the climax of the 1908 international Eucharistic Congress. This incident illustrates the persistence of religious extremism as a disruptive force in British politics and the muddled manner in which Asquith's government dealt with crises. As early as 1900 social and economic issues had become the dominant focus of British politics, and Great Britain had established a reputation for religious toleration. In spite of the growing trend toward secularism, militant Protestants continued to agitate against Catholicism by resurrecting archaic laws restricting Catholic rituals.

In 1890 the Boston Herald carried the following review of an article entitled “Thoughts for the Times or The New Theology”: “A curiosity is a paper by a native African, Orishatukeh Faduma, on ‘Thoughts for the Times,’ by which he means the new theology. This is the first time that a criticof the new theology has turned up from the dark continent, and is a curious and significant paper. When a native can write like this on subjects in which he has been obliged to educate himself, it means that we are to say nothing more against the intelligence of the African race.” While correct in noting the historical significance of Faduma's efforts, the reviewer's condescension disclosed his failure to appreciate and understand the sophistication and depth of Faduma' theological analysis and agenda. Faduma's critique of elements of the New Theology did not entail his rejection of this controversial theological synthesis which emerged during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Rather, his comments on religion and science, the historicalcritical method, comparative religion, missiology, the historical development of Christianity, and Christian ethics reveal that he essentially shared the theological orientation of its formulators.