‘Faith’ is one of Christianity's most significant, distinctive and complex concepts and practices, but Christian understandings of faith in the patristic period have received surprisingly little attention. This article explores two aspects of what Augustine terms fides qua, ‘the faith by which believers believe’. From the early second century, belief in the truth of doctrine becomes increasingly significant to Christians; by the fourth, affirming that certain doctrines are true has become central to becoming Christian and to remaining within the church. During the same period, we find a steady growth in poetic and imagistic descriptions of interior faith. This article explores how and why these developments occurred, arguing that they are mutually implicated and that this period sees the beginning of their long co-existence.

The second half of the second century saw the development of a more hierarchical institutionalized church and of a theology of the Holy Spirit (Pneuma) reflecting this development. A driver of this development was a higher educational level among church leaders and Christians participating in theological discourse. In fact, ‘higher education’ (paideia) became a guiding value of Christian living, including for the study and interpretation of Scripture and for theology and church leadership. Yet the same period also saw a new wave of ‘inspired’, ‘pneumatic prophecy’, later known as ‘Montanism’, which was perceived as a threat in an increasingly institutionalized church and attacked and suppressed. This article sees a paradox here, and asks how Pneuma could be promoted as a source of Christian leadership under the banner of paideia, when the Spirit (Pneuma) at work in the ‘New Prophecy’ was perceived as such a threat. One area of investigation which may provide answers to this question is the controversial role women played both as educated participants in theological discourse and leading figures in the Montanist movement.

Medieval religious institutions, such as the papacy or the religious orders, tend to designate a saint as their founding inspiration. For the papacy, this has been St Peter; for the religious orders, saints such as St Benedict, St Dominic or St Francis. While it might appear logical to think of these inspiring founders as preceding the establishment of such institutions, in reality the latter are almost entirely responsible for the making, maintaining and circulating of the image of a founding saint. Hence it is necessary to approach historiographical narratives with great caution in which an institution is thought to be diverging from the founder's path, falling short of the founder's ideals or deliberately distorting the image of a founder to justify their evolution. If such a discrepancy between the initial ideal and later practice is observed, the central point of investigation should focus on why the hagiographical and liturgical records regarding the founding saint included elements in conflict with the institutional practice. This article will investigate the medieval evidence and the historiographical narratives pertaining to the Order of Friars Minor.

The Order of the Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives (or Trinitarian Order) is one of the least studied continental religious groups to have expanded into thirteenth-century England. This article examines shifting notions of Trinitarian redemption in late medieval England through the prism of the order's writing about Yorkshire hermit St Robert of Knaresborough (d. 1218). Against the Weberian theory of the routinization of charisma, it demonstrates that Robert's inspirational sanctity was never bound too rigidly by his Trinitarian hagiographers, who rather co-opted his unstable charisma in distinct yet complementary ways to facilitate institutional reinvention and spiritual flourishing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

This article examines the reception and application of arguments developed during the Donatist controversy in later debates over clerical celibacy, marriage and continence in the medieval and early modern church. It explores the collision of inspiration and institution in this context, arguing that the debates over sacerdotal celibacy in the medieval Latin church and Reformation controversy over clerical marriage and continence both appropriated and polemicized the history of Donatism. The way in which the spectre and lexicon of Donatism permeated the law and practice of the medieval and early modern church, particularly when it came to the discipline of clerical celibacy, is a prime example of the process of imbrication by which the history of heresy and the history of the church were constructed. As such, it exemplifies the ways in which forms of religious inspiration that manifested as dissent, such as Donatism, became embedded in the histories and self-fashioning of the institutional church.

Previous scholarship has often employed the categories of ‘voluntary’ and ‘established’ religion when studying lay involvement in parish religion; yet these categories do not provide adequate space for the vitality of lay religious initiatives during the English Reformation. Through a study of the singing of metrical psalms, this article argues that the categories of ‘inspiration’ and ‘institution’ provide a more nuanced understanding of lay religious initiatives during the English Reformation. It outlines the ways in which the singing of metrical psalms, taken from the Sternhold and Hopkins Whole Booke of Psalmes, moved from its origins in domestic devotions, through inspirational initiative, to become an institutionalized part of the worship of English congregations. This process developed over many years, coming to the fore during the reign of Elizabeth I, yet even once institutionalization had occurred, inspiration could still arise, providing fresh direction and development.

This article focuses on the martyrdoms of the French Jesuit Antoine Daniel in New France and the Spanish friars Alonso Navarrete and Hernando Ayala in Japan. Drawing upon the accounts written by the missionaries Paul Ragueneau and Jacinto Orfanel, it shows how they adapted apostolic teaching and the Tridentine vision of the priesthood to interpret the acts of their brethren as sources of inspiration and models of renewed institutional identity. It argues that martyrdom was viewed as a pastoral responsibility in the missions to New France and Japan. Martyrs were portrayed as divinely inspired to lay down their lives for their communities, while the act of martyrdom was viewed as a literal, semi-liturgical sacrifice imbued with the sacramentality of the priesthood. Martyrdom was perceived both to fulfil an urgent pastoral need within communities and to model the apostolic vision of the Roman Catholic Church.

The institutional Catholic Church in seventeenth-century Amsterdam relied on the work of inspired women who lived under an informal religious rule and called themselves ‘spiritual daughters’. Once the States of Holland banned all public exercise of Catholicism, spiritual daughters leveraged the ambiguity of their religious status to pursue unique roles in their communities as catechists, booksellers and enthusiastic consumers of print. However, their lack of a formal order caused consternation among their Catholic confessors. It also disturbed Reformed authorities in their communities, who branded them ‘Jesuitesses’. Whilst many scholars have documented this tension between inspired daughter and institutional critique, it has yet to be contextualized fully within the literary culture of the Dutch Republic. This article suggests that due to the de-institutionalized status of the spiritual daughters and the discursive print culture that surrounded them, public criticism replaced direct censure by Catholic and Reformed authorities as the primary impediment to their inspired work.

The Seekers, a supposed sect which flourished in late 1640s England, have generally been neglected by historians, with the exception of Quaker historiography, in which the Seekers play a pivotal but supporting role. This article argues that the Seeker phenomenon is worth attending to in its own right. Perhaps deriving from spiritualist, radical and Dutch Collegiant roots, it also represents the logical outcome of English Baptists and other radicals trying and failing to find ecclesiological certainty, and being driven to the conclusion that no true church exists or (for some Seekers) can exist. The article concludes by examining how the Seeker life was lived, whether as austere, apophatic withdrawal; a veering into libertinism; or by forming provisional communities, communities which did, in some cases, serve as a gateway to Quakerism.

The Connexion established by John Wesley (1703–91) experienced many outbreaks of local revival in the late eighteenth century. These were examples of the tension between reason and emotion, spontaneity and regularity, which characterized the movement. This article discusses how, amidst concerns from within Methodism and beyond, the leadership sought to manage but not suppress what was perceived to be this work of the Holy Spirit. Its challenge to the connexional polity was especially acute in the 1790s, during the Great Yorkshire Revival. In 1800, a Methodist-inspired publication sought to present good practice on validating and encouraging local revivals while maximizing their effectiveness and minimizing any disruption to the connexional order or wider civil society. However, despite fears that institutional concerns were dampening the Spirit's work, around 1800 Wesley's successors acted to reassert the control of the Preachers’ Conference over Methodist practice and premises, and a cautious rationalism came to the fore.

Nineteenth-century North American religious history is filled with divinely inspired people who received and recorded new revelations. This article presents Joseph Smith Jr and Ralph Waldo Emerson as charismatic prophets who promoted the idea of continuing revelation. Drawing on Max Weber's concept of charismatic authority, it will contrast their forms of new sacred writing with one another to show how both had experienced encounters with the divine. The second part will then explore how different conceptualizations of revelation led to opposing concepts of religious authority, with consequences for the possibility of institution-building processes. While Smith would reify revelation in hierarchy, Emerson eventually promoted extreme spiritual individualization by rejecting the idea of an exclusive institution as the centre of revelatory authority.

This article explores the tension between missionary hopes for mass conversion through Christian education and the reality of operating mission schools in one colonial context: Hong Kong. Riding on the wave of British imperial expansion, George Smith, the first bishop of the diocese of Victoria, had a vision for mission schooling in colonial Hong Kong. In 1851, Smith established St Paul's College as an Anglo-Chinese missionary institution to educate, equip and send out Chinese young people who would subsequently participate in mission work before evangelizing the whole of China. However, Smith's vision failed to take institutional form as the college encountered operational difficulties and graduates opted for more lucrative employment instead of church work. Moreover, the colonial government moved from a laissez-faire to a more hands-on approach in supervising schools. The bishops of Victoria were compelled to reshape their schools towards more sustainable institutional forms while making compromises regarding their vision for Christian education.

This article examines the interplay between religious agency and institutional control. The Church Law of 1869 gave members of the Lutheran Church of Finland the right to apply to chapters for permission to preach. Men who passed the examinations became licensed lay preachers, who could take part in teaching Christianity and give sermons in church buildings. Applicants had varying backgrounds, skills and motivations. In order to avoid any disruption in church life, they had to be screened carefully and kept under clerical supervision. However, licensed lay preachers could also be of great help to the church. In a rapidly changing modern society with a growing population and a recurring lack of pastors, the church could not afford to disregard lay aid. The article shows how the Lutheran Church both encouraged and constrained the agency of the licensed lay preachers.

From its American roots in the early 1880s, within twenty years the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavour (YPSCE) had become a worldwide phenomenon. This article focuses on how the YPSCE developed at a local level, specifically within the English county of Hampshire. Here, as elsewhere, it touched a ‘spiritual nerve’. With its motto, ‘For Christ and the Church’, it quickly became established in the various denominations that constituted evangelical Nonconformity. Consideration is given to the spiritual, social and service attributes of the YPSCE, which inspired young people to become involved, together with the attendant institutional imperatives in the form of committees, combinations and conventions. Attention is also drawn to the challenges the YPSCE faced in seeking to consolidate its position as a central feature of church life. In so doing, the article contributes to the historiography of Christian youth movements in general, and of the YPSCE, which has attracted relatively little attention from historians, in particular.

This article explores how Nick Stacey and John Robinson, two central figures in Anglican radicalism, navigated the tensions between their institutional embeddedness and their radical theological inspiration during the ‘religious crisis’ of the 1960s. These tensions operated on the level of strategy, as radicals calculated the opportunities and costs of leaving Anglican institutions, but also on the level of emotion, as radicals weighed institutional loyalties that went deep inside themselves. In the mid-1960s, Anglican radicals attempted to resolve these tensions by campaigning to transform the Church of England. By the early 1970s, however, the failure of these attempts had led to the movement's disintegration, leaving individuals to address the emotional tensions between inspiration and institution in their own particular ways. Thus Anglican radicals failed to evade the central paradox of their movement, namely that their brief moment of prominence in the early 1960s owed much to the prestige of the institution they were critiquing so influentially.

In 1943 a twenty-six-year-old Pentecostal pastor arrived in Slough, a fast-growing industrial town that many church leaders found spiritually tough. Over the next thirty years Billy Richards built a thriving church with six hundred adult members and a thousand children attending groups across the town. His ministry extended beyond Slough through books, radio broadcasts, correspondence courses and international speaking tours. His methods embraced modern media, new forms of worship, conservative theology and a focus on the active work of the Holy Spirit. One local newspaper characterized it as ‘Old-Time Religion in a New-Fashioned Way’. This article explores the inspirational aspects of Richards's ministry, how these took institutional expression in his lifetime, and why that institution continues to be influential today. His ministry provides one example of how local churches could adapt successfully to the changing social and cultural landscape of late twentieth-century Britain. This has implications for the understanding of urban mission and the contribution made by the agency of organized religious institutions to twentieth-century secularization.

America, said G. K. Chesterton, is a nation with the soul of a church. It is a sacred community commanding sacrificial loyalty. It is also a violent and weapon-loving civilization, in which force is tethered to patriotism and national identity. American culture is at once militarist and theological, Christian and violent. How can this paradox be explained? This article discusses the role of New England puritanism in establishing a providentialist nationalism that would define war as a theological prerogative and non-violence as heresy. It shows how theologians such as Cotton Mather identified the emerging nation of America with the sacred vessel of the Christian church to the point that ‘chosenness’ or divine election represented a blank cheque for military adventure. It also shows how theologies of peace and restraint were anathematized as not merely heretical but a form of spiritual violence against the American project. In this sense, American nationhood functions as a controlling consideration akin to an institution, and Christian pacifism serves as a charismatic critique – or inspiration. To what extent were attitudes to violence framed by models of salvation? How did identity or chosenness trump ethics or the duty of love in the puritan imagination? The article concludes with more recent observations about the relationship of the ‘institution’ of nationhood to the troublesome, fissiparous energies of peace.