Since the end of the nineteenth century scholars have been divided on the identity of Hilary of Poitiers's opponents in his Commentarium in Matthaeum. As he wrote the treatise in the early 350s, it is assumed that his opponents, if real and not contrived, must be ‘Arian’. What has not been sufficiently considered is whether Hilary may be addressing other fourth-century theological positions. In this article it will be argued that two key passages from the commentary, generally used to indicate an awareness of ‘Arian’ ideas, actually suggest an engagement with the theological views commonly associated with Photinus of Sirmium.

This essay explores the evolving significance of a famous fourteenth-century Paul's Cross sermon by Thomas Wimbledon in late medieval and early modern England and its transmission from manuscript to print. It highlights the ideological ambiguity of the text against the backdrop of the academic Wycliffite challenge and shows how it illuminates the permeability of the boundary between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in the fifteenth century. It then examines how the sermon was revived and published in the mid-Tudor period as a Lollard tract as part of an effort to supply the new Protestant religion with an historical pedigree and how it subsequently entered into the popular stock of commercial publishers. The afterlife of Wimbledon's celebrated sermon sheds fresh light on the ongoing process of inventing and re-inventing the pre-Reformation past.

This article explores aspects of the life and works of the religious exile John Ernest Grabe, who fled Lutheran Prussia to settle in England in 1697. Welcomed in Oxford, he established a network of contacts in the academic and publishing worlds that enabled him to pursue an ambitious programme of religious scholarship. His Spicilegium patrum and edition of the Septuagint established his reputation as a patristic and biblical scholar of international standing. A passionate believer in regaining and retaining the purity of the primitive Church, he willingly defended Anglican orthodoxy against the controversial Arian scholar William Whiston.

This article considers the radical contribution of Edward Irving to mid-Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism, in an analysis of nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelical theology and spirituality, political and social thought and missionary activity. While historians of doctrine have acknowledged the influence of aspects of Irving's thought upon liberal Anglicans like F. D. Maurice, they have paid scant attention to Irving's influence upon the theology of Evangelical churchmen. Irving's legacy was, in fact, an important and positive force for theological change. This article also challenges the conventional historical view that Evangelical churchmen produced only negative polemical works in response to the innovatory approaches of Oxford Movement and ‘Broad Church’ theologians. It considers, in particular, the work of the leading Anglican Evangelical theologian Thomas Rawson Birks, which was shaped by the legacy of Irving and has many significant parallels with that of Maurice.

One of the weaknesses of post-colonial theory has been a tendency to view colonialism in unitary and essentialist terms. This weakness is particularly evident in post-colonialism's treatment of missionary endeavour. This is the result of insufficient engagements with missionary texts. This article engages with one of the most remarkable missionary texts. Dan Crawford's Thinking black reveals an openness to Africa far in advance of prevailing ideas. While this enlightened attitude had its roots partially in the author's character, it was also an expression of the primitivism typical of the Brethren movement. We may therefore see Crawford as a paradigm of Brethren missions.