“It is too early to assess the impact of the Great Depression upon American Protestantism,” wrote Robert Moats Miller in his recent study of American Protestantism and social issues in the period between the world wars. No doubt it is too early for any overall assessment, yet it is becoming steadily clearer that American religion passed through an important transition in the depression period. If we are to gain a fuller understanding of developments in American Christianity since the 1930's, then serious attention needs to be given to that bleak period. Inasmuch as our understanding of times long past are significantly influenced by our definitions of the present situation, attempts to deal with that particular period of crisis in our recent past may help us more adequately to see the whole story of American religion in fairer perspective. Furthermore, a number of recent dissertations, articles and books have dealt in whole or in part with the period between the wars; they provide guidance for handling the vast array of sources relevant for an understanding of religion in the depression, supply material for at least prcliminary interpretations, and point to the need for further analysis. This paper is one effort to suggest some interpretative guide lines for further exploration into an important topic.

“Christology was an important element of the earliest Arianism.” So states Raven in the introductory chapters to his study of apollinarianism. This paper will consider the christology of the “earliest′ Arians,” in particular that of Arius himself. Christology has been defined as “the study of the Person of Christ, and in particular of the union in Him of the Divine and human natures.” In the latter “particular” sense, we shall conclude that Arius really had no developed christology. This is not to say, however, that Arius was not christologically concerned in the larger sense of the word; i.e., “the study of the Person of Christ.” It is true to say after Dorner that:

We should be very greatly mistaken … if we were to suppose that the Christological labours had meanwhile been totally suspended: on the contrary, in the case of the thinkers of the Church, Christology was the perennial motive of their trinitarian efforts.

Raymundus Lullus (Ramon Lull) tells of an educated Mohammedan ruler, who, when urged by a missionary to embrace the Christian faith, answered him: “Prove to me that your faith is true; then I, with all my subjects, shall adhere to it.” The missionary replied that Christian faith is too sublime a thing to be proved, and he contented himself with explaining the actual belief of the Christians. Answered the king: “If you ask me to leave what has been my faith thus far, then you should give me something reasonable instead of it.” Lull uses this story in order to warn missionaries among the Mohammedans not to follow such a method. According to him, it is useless and even ridiculous to refuse to discuss Christianity in philosophical terms in giving demonstrations of its truth to people who are acquainted with such a method.

In most areas where Christianity was confronted during the four centuries after the Hegira by Islam the Christian religion suffered setbacks or was eclipsed in some measure, but it did not disappear. In North Africa, however, Christianity was not merely eclipsed, it was supplanted. Tertullian, the “Father of Latin Christianity,” had labored in North Africa during the latter years of the second century and the early years of the third. Victor I (189–99), the first bishop of Rome to write in Latin, and, according to Prof. G. LaPiana the first “Pope,” had been North African in origin.

King John of England has one of the most unsavory reputations of any medieval English king, but it is some vindication of the principle “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones” to find that he made charitable contributions amounting to substantial sums. Moreover, in spite of the harsh criticism that has sometimes been directed toward the medieval practice of charity, there is something stimulating about a system which caused even such a man as John to pay regular alms from his revenues throughout England.

It is generally recognized that the centralized organization and strict discipline of the Jesuits played an important role in the Order's successful agitation against Protestantism during the Counterreformation. It is little known that during this period of great accomplishment the Society went through one of the most serious crises of its 400 years of existence—a rebellion, centered in Spain, against the allegedly dictatorial rule of the general and for a quasi-democratic form of governnient. This movement reveals the intrusion of constitutional ideas into an organization which usually has been held up as the prototype of autocracy and monolithic cohesion.

The confused and tumultuous circumstances surrounding the election to the papacy of Urban VI, its corollaries, the subsequent defection of thirteen of the cardinals, their election of a rival pontiff, and the ensuing years of dismal division within the Church—these form the general background to this tract, which is a product, therefore, of the immense outburst of polemical writing occasioned by the onset, in 1378, of the Great Schism. The more immediate circumstances surrounding it are the failure by 1403 of the French withdrawal of obedience from the Avignonese pope to produce a settlement of the Schism, the breakdown of all subsequent negotiations between the rival pontiffs, and finally the convocation, by dissident cardinals from both camps, of a general council which was to meet at Pisa in March, 1409.

It has by and large been characteristic of the current resurgence of Anabaptist studies to understand the Anabaptist movement as an integral part of the Reformation. Thus the two terms presently used to designate the framework of the radical dissent of the 16th century— Roland H. Bainton's now classic “Left Wing” and, more recently, George H. Williams' “Radical Reformation”—suggest a positive relationship with the mainstream Reformation. There is widespread consensus among scholars, particularly in America, that Anabaptism concurred with the Reformation on the major points of Protestant doctrine and dissented merely on secondary issues, such as baptism, the church, or political authority, around which centered indeed most of the theological polemics between the Anabaptists and the Reformers.

Atheists were even rarer and more obscure in seventeenth-century England than communists are in the modern United States. The scarcity of atheists, however, rather enhanced than restricted the term as an expression of loathsomeness and evil beyond accurate description. Those who seemed obviously wrong-headed on matters of the most serious import, and who were yet exasperatingly hard to prove wrong, must be in the power of some unnatural evil. Thus Thomas Hobbes was denounced as an atheist; and the accusation was as honest and almost as irrational as the accusation heard recently in many parts of the Southeast that the NAACP is communistic.

The crime of being “righteous overmuch”—of singing psalms, of expounding the scriptures, of praying extempore— was considered sufficiently grave two hundred years ago to expel six students from the University of Oxford. There were, it is true, alleged extenuating circumstances—illiteracy and low birth—but the basis of the prosecution was that six undergraduates of St. Edmund Hall were “reputed methodists.”

The golden age of French Protestantism, insofar as de jure recognition is concerned, extends from Henry IV's religious settlement in 1598 to the important modification of that settlement by Louis XIII in 1629. These years witnessed important developments both within the Protestant movement and in the relations between that movement and the French crown.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England were a time of rapid change, of bitter tensions, and of great hopes. This was what the economic historians describe as the “classical period” of the Industrial Revolution. These were also years in which new vitality of faith and a spate of educational and reform movements issued from the Evangelical movement within British Protestantism. Indeed, the energetic hopefulness of Evangelicalism was the child of industrial and commercial expansion as well as of renewed Christian vision. Though England suffered no such violent overthrow of authority as France, yet both industrial progress and Evangelical sense of responsibility produced a critical attitude toward the status quo in state and Church.

From time to time during the later colonial period individuals or groups in America sought and received advice and political assistance from certain influential friends in England. Who these “friends at Court” were and what their actual relationship was to the colonists and to the British Government has remained obscure. Part of the answer is to be found in the Minutes of the Protestant Dissenting Deputies now deposited in the Library of the City of London at Guildhall. These manuscript volumes contain not only a record of all the colonial matters discussed by the Deputies, they also reveal a hitherto unrecognized influence in the growth of religious liberty in America.

The relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment presents a subtle and difficult problem. No historian has as yet fully answered the important question of how the world view of the eighteenth century is related to that of traditional Christianity. It is certain, however, that the deism of that century rejected traditional Christianity as superstitious and denied Christianity a monopoly upon religious truth. The many formal parallels which can be drawn between Enlightenment and Christianity cannot obscure this fact. From the point of view of historical Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, the faith of the Enlightenment was blasphemy. It did away with a personal God, it admitted no supernatural above the natural, it denied the relevance of Christ's redemptive task in this world. This essay attempts to discover whether traditional Christian thought itself did not make a contribution to the Enlightenment.

The late 1820's, particularly the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, marked the end of an era in the history of the English Established Church. Earlier, for more than a century, the Anglican hierarchy had served as an appendage of the political system dominated by the landed interests; and since the younger Pitt's time, the Church had functioned politically as an ally of the Tory Party. By the year 1827. however, churchmen faced a rapidly changing political environment.

Turner has no mention of “Lutherans” on the frontier, and Paxson disregards them. Marcus Lee Hansen, better than any other historian, secular or ecclesiastical, has seen the importance of Lutheran immigration, Scandinavian and German, for its relation to the westward movement and the frontier.However, his suggestion that a survey be inaugurated of the source materials in the libraries of theological institutions and in the archives of church headquarters, has not been carried out. A synthesis, too, of the various immigrant movements must be made. Perhaps then the writer of a general work in the history of American Christianity or even the writers of a textbook in American history will see the significance of the Lutheran immigrants on the frontier.

Historians have shown a reluctance to discuss a basic issue of the Al Smith campaign of 1928: the relationship between the Church and the State.