Gender ideologies have been shown to be an important element in creating national identity. The settler population of early colonial Queensland was largely drawn from Protestant England and Scotland, and Catholic Ireland. In the process of social formation, Anglican men contributed to building a Protestant hegemony that strove to marginalise the Irish Catholic part of the population. In doing so they bracketed Tractarianism with Catholicism in an attempt to assert the essentially Protestant nature of Anglicanism. This paper explores three debates that took place in the public domain in the period 1855–65, and their impact on the local Anglican community and on social formation in the fledgling colonial society.

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.

This article examines the role, in patristic and medieval commentaries on Isaiah in the west up until 1150, of the theme of the ‘remnant’ (Isaiah i.9; x.22), which is related to Jewish Christians by St Paul. Assumed to signify the small number of Jewish converts in Apostolic times, it could also be used on the one hand to minimise the Jewish contribution to the early Church (St Jerome and Rupert of Deutz) and on the other hand to emphasise it (Haimo of Auxerre, Bruno of Segni and Herveus of Bourg-Dieu). Some authors, however, simply ignore the question (Arnold of Bonneval and Rainald of St Eloi).

In the late twelfth century, Bartholomew, bishop of Exeter (1161–84), identified astrology as the most serious heresy facing the English Church. The evidence of Bartholomew's writing suggests that astrology became more widely accepted among the English clergy during his episcopal tenure. It also supports the view that popular heretical movements enjoyed little success in England during this period, in contrast to some regions in mainland Europe. Instead, it was scholars deemed guilty of intellectual error, and above all the astrologers, who became the focus of Bartholomew's anxieties about heresy and the intellectual culture of his day.

It has frequently been assumed that church building ceased after the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933. This article shows that it continued, and considers the reasons why this was the case. Focussing on churches built in the Church of Braunschweig between 1933 and 1936, it explores the interactions between emergent priorities for church architecture and the rhetoric of National Socialist ideology, and traces their influence on the building of new Protestant churches in Braunschweig. It examines the way in which Braunschweig Cathedral was reordered in accordance with National Socialist interests, and the ambiguity which such a reordering implied for the on-going Christian life of the congregation. It concludes that church building was widely understood to be a part of the National Socialist programme for creating employment, but was also used to emphasise the continuing role of the Church in building community. However, there is still much work to be done to investigate the ways in which churches and congregations interacted with National Socialism in their day-to-day existence.

This article examines accounts of continental church life to be found in the travel journals, letters and books of leading High Church Anglicans in the nineteenth century. It argues that these constitute a neglected source of evidence for understanding the interaction between continental church developments and the High Church revival in Anglicanism. It focuses particularly on accounts of travel in Catholic countries, and concludes that there are good reasons for assuming that experience of Catholic worship on the continent influenced High Church attitudes towards liturgical and ritual reform in Anglicanism.

Histories of the English Christmas tend to downplay the role of religion in the development of the modern festival. This article examines the place of religion in the popular celebration of Christmas, as well as the provision of worship offered by the Protestant Churches during the festive season. It argues that although some churchmen viewed Christmas pessimistically as part of a broader battle between sacred and secular, the Churches played an important role in the expansion of the urban public culture of Christmas in the late nineteenth century, whilst the doctrine of the incarnation provided a religious framework for the celebration of childhood and domesticity that the festival had come to embody.

This article examines early Protestant discussion of the historic puzzle in New Testament study known as the Synoptic Problem, which deals with the potential literary relationship between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The subject was addressed by John Calvin, pioneer Reformer, and by the early Lutheran Martin Chemnitz. Calvin made a puissant contribution by constructing the first three-column Gospel harmony. Chemnitz contributed nascent redaction-critical assessments of Matthew's use of Mark. Thus, far from simply being a concern to post-Enlightenment critics (as is often assumed), interest in the Gospel sources was present from the earliest days of the Reformation.

Although the reign of Mary i (1553–8) was a tumultuous and eventful one, for over four hundred years there was little debate about it or about the queen's efforts to restore Catholicism to England. The reign was almost universally perceived as poor, nasty, brutish and short-lived and the restoration of Catholicism was believed to have been doomed to failure, both because the burning of heretics offended English sensibilities and because Protestantism was already so deeply embedded in England that it could not be uprooted. Yet towards the end of the twentieth century, the tectonic plates of historical research began to shift and the resulting tremors altered the historiographical landscape of Mary's reign, and indeed of the English Reformation.

A round 960 king Harald Bluetooth ‘made the Danes Christians’. But for another hundred years outsiders would have found the Danish Church provincial and backward. Until the end of the eleventh century Denmark had no cathedral schools and few of its native clergy were learned men. There were no influential monasteries until 1089 and, therefore, no party in the Church to counteract the influence of the married clergy and champion the ideas of reform favoured by the Roman Curia. It was not until 1054 that king Sven Estridsøn divided his kingdom into nine bishoprics and the ecclesiastical map of the kingdom began to assume its medieval shape. It took even longer for these bishoprics to acquire adequate endowments. The churches of Denmark were so poor that simony was often a necessity. Finally, Denmark had no metropolitan authority of its own until the beginning of the twelfth century. Throughout the eleventh century its bishops owed obedience to the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen and the efforts of Sven Estridsøn to establish a native archbishopric were unsuccessful.