Writing in the half-century after the “conversion” of Constantine, Bishop Hilary of Poitiers wrote two works regarding Emperor Constantius II. The first, Ad Constantium, is a polite and formal letter, seeking an audience with the emperor. The second, In Constantium, is a harangue against the emperor. Some scholars have proposed that the difference in tone between these two documents indicates that Hilary had come to advocate for the emperor to be completely uninvolved in the affairs of the Church. Closer analysis reveals that Hilary always endorsed a position in which the emperor should be involved in ecclesiastical affairs, so long as he submitted to the higher authorities of scripture and the ancient apostolic faith. Hilary would have had no concerns with a pro-Nicene emperor enforcing proto-orthodox church councils and creeds. Prior to Hilary, most of Christianity had accepted imperial involvement in the Church. But the involvement of the Roman emperors in ecclesial matters caused many to have to consider the problems of someone outside of the Church making decisions for the Church. Hilary's efforts stand as one of the first western attempts to nuance and limit the emperor's ecclesiastical role.

Despite the demarcations of the political and religious spheres, Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575) considered the city's system of poor relief to be a pastoral concern. The chief minister of Zurich expected the wealth from confiscated church property to be used for communal needs and believed that the magistrates needed the ministers to guide them in poor relief reforms. This article demonstrates that Bullinger's biblical interpretation was not peripheral to his political activity, but rather central to his contributions to poor relief and to the justification of his political involvement in poor relief reform. More specifically, Bullinger's involvement in poor relief reform was a consistent development from his articulation of his theological views in the 1530s, applied to the Zurich context in the 1550s, and politically supported in the 1570s. An examination of Bullinger's biblical interpretation and scriptural references in his commentaries, sermons, and speeches reveals a consistent concern for the care of the poor from the early years of his career to the end of his ministry in Zurich.

Tertullian is widely regarded as having originated the expression Credo quia absurdum (est) (I believe because it is absurd) and the phrase often appears in contemporary polemics about the rationality of religious belief. Patristic scholars have long pointed out that Tertullian never said this or meant anything like it. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to the circumstances in which this specific phrase came into existence and why, in spite of its dubious provenance, it continues to be regarded by many as a legitimate characterization of religious faith. This paper shows how Tertullian's original expression—“It is certain, because impossible”—was first misrepresented and modified in the early modern period. In seventeenth century England a “credo” version—I believe because it is impossible—became the common form of Tertullian's maxim. A further modification, building on the first, was effected by the Enlightenment philosophe Voltaire, who added the “absurdity condition” and gave us the modern version of the paradox: I believe because it is absurd. These modifications played a significant role in Enlightenment representations of religion as irrational, and signal the beginning of a new understanding of faith as an epistemic vice. This doubtful maxim continues to play a role in debates about the cognitive status of religious faith, and its failure to succumb to the historical evidence against it is owing to its ongoing rhetorical usefulness in such debates.

Huguenot suffering inspired fast days, prayer meetings, and collections among Congregationalists in Massachusetts and Plymouth in the 1680s. Ministers used a variety of frameworks to motivate compassion for the French refugees. Some preachers considered the French plight to be the result of an Antichristian attack, one that might soon spread to New England. Others assumed Huguenot suffering generally was a result of their sinful neglect of the Sabbath, and that compassion and honor should extend to those who suffered cheerfully while upholding disciplined purity. As suspicions mounted that there were French Catholic spies within the refugee communities and local harassment increased, the prominent Huguenot minister Ezekiel Carré advocated an alternate framework for Christian charity. In his remarkable sermon, The Charitable Samaritan, Carré shifted the meaning of charity from an apocalyptic framework to one centered on active mercy for the wounded regardless of sect or nationality. A friend of Carré’s and Huguenot supporter, Cotton Mather incorporated Carré’s interpretation of the Samaritan story into his magisterial Bible commentary. Though always contested, Huguenot practices and rhetoric broadened the conversation over the meaning of charity in early New England.

According to historiographical convention, the experience of exile by Protestants from the Habsburg Netherlands between the 1550s and the early 1570s played a critical role in promoting confessional Calvinism in the early Dutch Republic. But there are too many problems in the evidentiary basis to sustain this conclusion. This essay traces the historiography on the Dutch Reformation in order to isolate where and why this idea emerged. It demonstrates that no specific role for religious refugees in the development of Dutch Calvinism can be found in historical writing from the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Only in the late nineteenth century, during a debate about the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands, did the experiences of religious refugees come to take on a specific role in explaining the development of Dutch Calvinism. The idea first emerged among Neo-Calvinists who critiqued state supervision of their church. By the twentieth century, it came to be used by orthodox and moderate Reformed Protestants, as well as liberal and secular academic historians. This paper thus demonstrates that this key interpretive framework for understanding the Dutch Reformation was the product not of developments in the sixteenth-century Habsburg Netherlands, but of religious politics in the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the late nineteenth century.

This article inquires into the piecemeal, provisional de-marginalization of American irreligion and analyzes the social stakes and strategies of dis/belief's invocation during the long nineteenth century. It does so by considering the era's corpus of American deathbed narratives. It argues that late-century irreligionists mimed and subverted the deathbed strategies of their Christian detractors to convince a skeptical American audience to concede the contested sincerity of their disbelief. For much of the nineteenth century, Christian-produced infidel deathbed narratives mapped the mixture and multiplicity of inner irreligion and interrogated the sincerity of disbelief. In response, irreligionists—initially ambivalent about the interpretability of the deathbed—eventually came to invest it with as much power to prove sincerity as had American Christians. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, irreligionists developed a nationwide network of irreligious dying and selectively, strategically deployed the deathbed's accrued power to prove the uniform sincerity of their disbelief. By the turn of the century, they had largely neutralized the derisive force of the infidel deathbed genre, leaving disbelief a partially, provisionally less marginal and less multiplex marker in American society, and re-tethering themselves to their Christian detractors in the process.