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2. Harbison, E. Harris, “The ‘Meaning of History’ and the Writing of History,” Church History, XXI (06 1952), p. 97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Handy, Robert T., “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935,” Church History, XXIX (03 1960), 3–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. May, Henry F., “The Recovery of American Religious History,” American Historical Review, LXX (10 1964), 79–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. “From the beginning, in theory and increasingly in practice, America has been intellectually pluralistic and officially and practically secular,” even though “unofficially America was Protestant in its cultural forms.” O'Brien, David J., “American Catholicism and the Diaspora,” Cross Currents, XVI (Summer 1966), 319, 316.Google Scholar

6. An example is Kelley, Robert, “Presbyterianism, Jacksonianism, and Grover Cleveland,” American Quarterly, XVIII (Winter 1966), 614ffGoogle Scholar., which not only takes Cleveland's religious upbringing at face value as a motivating factor in his public career but also combines this judgment with a markedly more favorable appraisal of Cleveland's presidency than had been fashionable among (lay) American historians.

7. Agnew, Theodore L., reviewing Cole, Charles C., The Social Ideas of the Northern Evangelists 1826–1860 (New York, 1954)Google Scholar, in Church History, XXIV (12, 1955), 379.Google Scholar

8. William Hamilton, “The New Optimism—from Prufrock to Ringo,” in Altizer, Thomas J. J. and Hamilton, William, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis, 1966), 158.Google Scholar

9. Marty, Martin E., “Redeeming the Poor,” a review of Handy, Robert T., ed., The Social Gospel in America: Gladden, Ely, and Rauschenbusch (New York, 1966)Google Scholar, in Book Week, July 3, 1966, 4.

10. Baker, Carlos, “The Place of the Bible in Fiction,” in Smith, James Ward and Jamison, A. Leland, eds., Religious Perspective in American Culture [“Religion in American Life,” II] (Princeton, 1961), 257, n. 23.Google Scholar

11. May, Henry F., Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York, 1949).Google Scholar

12. For a relatively late specimen of this point of view see Sweet, William Warren, Religion in the Development of American Culture 1765–1840 (New York, 1952)Google Scholar. For an outstanding critique, see Mead, Sidney E., “Professor Sweet's Religion and Culture in America,” Church History, XXII (03 1953), 33–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. DePilis, Mario S., “The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism,” Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, I (Spring 1966), 71.Google Scholar

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15. Smith, Timothy L., Called Unto Holiness, the Story of the Nazarenes: the Formative Years (Kansas City, 1962), 200.Google Scholar

16. Mead, Sidney E., The Lively Experiment: the Shaping of Christianity in America (New York, 1963), 111 and esp. 200, n. 12.Google Scholar

17. Geanakoplos, Deno J., “Edward Gibbon and Byzantine Ecclesiastical History,” Church History, XXXV (06 1966), 170–185.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. May, Henry F., “The Recovery of American Religious History,” 84f.Google Scholar

19. Revisionism has struck particularly hard at Miller's interpretation of Jonathan Edwards. See Whittemore, Robert C., “Jonathan Edwards and the Theology of the Sixth Way,” Church History, XXXV (03 1966), 60ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar., esp. 68, and C. Conrad Cherry, “The Puritan Notion of the Covenant in Jonathan Edwards' Doctrine of Faith,” Ibid., XXXIV (September 1965), 328ff.

20. Morgan, Edmund S., Author's Preface to The Puritan Dilemma: the Story of John Winthrop (Boston, 1958), xi.Google Scholar

21. Bacon, Leonard Woolsey, A History of American Christianity [“American Church History Series,” XIII] (New York, 1897)Google Scholar, Chap. I. A relatively late exception to this generalization was the work of Concordia Seminary's F. E. Mayer, who not only retained a providential interpretation of the settlement of North America but further argued that “by God's providence the United States were colonized not by the Roman Catholics, as [was] Canada,” but by Protestants. Mayer, , The Religious Bodies of America (St. Louis, 1954), 199, n. 12.Google Scholar

22. Outler, Albert C., “Theodosius' Horse: Reflections on the Predicament of the Church Historian,” Church History, XXXIV (09 1965), 259.Google Scholar

23. Mead, Sidney E., reviewing Lambert, Richard E., ed., Religion in American Society (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 332 [11, 1960Google Scholar, in Church History, XXX (12 1961), 498.Google Scholar

24. “To what extent is our American church historiography in danger of losing its theological relevance while achieving a certain secular acceptance¶” Theodore Baehmann, reviewing Forster, Walter O., Zion on the Mississippi: the Settlement of the Saxon Lutherans in Missouri 1839–1841 (St. Louis, 1953)Google Scholar, in Church History, XXVI (12 1957), 394.Google Scholar

25. American Historical Review, XXXVII (1931–1932), 221–236.Google Scholar

26. Link, Arthur S., “The Historian's Vocation,” Theology Today, XIX (04 1962), 76f., 75, 74, 78.Google Scholar

27. The historian “enters into new life in which he can know and live with the truth of history and be the kind of historian that God means him to be, when he is justified… Standing under the shadow of the Cross, the historian finally sees the truth, the reality of history.” Ibid., 80, 88.

28. Link's confessio fidei raises some absorbing historiographic questions of its own. For example, “the compilers of the historical books” of the Bible—rather than, say, Thucydides! —“laid the foundations of historiography” and “set standards to which all historians might well aspire.” (Ibid., 85). It would be interesting to try out this proposition on a roomful of graduate students who had done no work at all in church history.

29. Löwith, Karl, Meaning in History (Chicago, 1949), Preface, vi.Google Scholar

30. Arthur S. Link, op. cit., 85, 89. Like Karl Löwith, Link's “justified” historian also rejects a philosophy-of-history approach, “because he accepts his own finiteness,” 83.

31. Mead, Sidney E., “Church History Explained,” Church History, XXXII (03 1963), 18, 29.Google Scholar

32. Glock, Charles Y. and Stark, Rodney, Religion and Society in Tension (Chicago, 1965), 168Google Scholar. The analysis is at times heavy-footed, and likewise the phrasing of the questionnaires on which it is based (e.g., “Jesus walked on water,” answer yes or no)—but it is just acute enough to give the authors' obiter dicta considerable sting.

33. Cf. Ibid., 294, 298ff.

34. May, “The Recovery of American Religious History,” 85.

35. “It would be impossible for a Catholic historian of Catholicism to take exactly this point of view.” Ibid., 91.

36. Niebuhr, H. Richard, “The Protestant Movement and Democracy in the United States,” in Smith, James Ward and Jamison, A. Leland, ed., The Shaping of American Religion [“Religion in American Life,” I] (Princeton, 1961), 36, 42.Google Scholar

37. Substituting the term “denomination” for “church” would not bridge May's distinction between “prophetic movements” and “institutional forms”; the “denominational” historian also ends up doing “church history.”“The denomination… succeeded the established church and was neither a sect nor simply an ad hoc action group,” Elwyn A. Smith typically writes. “It possessed fundamental forms that proved capable of adapting themselves to modern social and political conditions.” Smith, , “The Forming of a Modern American Denomination,” Church History, XXXI (03 1965), 95.Google Scholar

38. Wamble, Hugh, “Landmarkism: Doctrinaire Ecclesiology Among Baptists” Church History, XXXIII (12 1964), 429–447CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Some historians of course continued to employ the essentially sociological “sect”-“Church” typology which Richard Niebuhr had also formerly used, deriving it in turn from Ernst Troeltsch. For a Baptist example, in counterpoise to the essay just cited, cf. Bordin, Ruth B., “The Sect to Denomination Process in America: the Freewill Baptist Experience” Church History, XXXIV (03 1965), 77–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. This brilliant conception of grouping together what otherwise might seem totally disparate religious movements is the work of Smith, H. Shelton, Handy, Robert T., and Loetseher, Lefferts A., American Christianity: an Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents, II, 1820–1960 (New York, 1963), 66–118.Google Scholar

40. A. Leland Jamison, “Religions on the Christian Perimeter”, in Smith, James Ward and Jamison, A. Leland, eds., The Shaping of American Religion [“Religion in American Life” I] (Princeton, 1961), 162–231.Google Scholar

41. Lewis Vander Velde, op. cit., p. vii.

42. Boorstin, Daniel J., The Americans: the National Experience (New York, 1965), 470ff.Google Scholar

43. Negro historians and sociologists have been prone to a belief that Negro ecclesiastical bodies were institutionally so implicated in the white man's patterns of social control that in a sense there never really was a “Negro church” For a less reductionist view cf. Vincent Harding, “Religion and Resistance among Ante-Bellum Negroes” a paper read before the Organization of American Historians, Chicago, April 27, 1967. One student of the present writer's uncovered some African Methodist statements dating from the Reconstruction and “new South” periods that were downright black-nationalist in tone, which ought to lay to rest the notion that an all-Negro religious body is necessarily a Jim Crow or “Uncle Tom” agency. Vivian Narehood, “Pride Against Prejudice,” unpublished seminar paper, the University of California (Berkeley), 1964. On this same point cf. Redkey, Edwin S., “Bishop Turner's African Dream” Journal of American History, LIV (09 1967, 271–290.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. Meyer, Donald, The Positive Thinkers: a Study of the American Quest for Health, Wealth, and Personal Power from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale (New York, 1965Google Scholar; reprinted, paper, 1966), 24.

45. Ahlstrom, Sydney E., “Continental Influence on American Christian Thought Since World War I,” Church History, XXVII (09 1958), 257.Google Scholar

46. An example of this new seriousness—taking Fundamentalism at something like face value as a religious movement rather than reducing it to non-religious categories—is Sandeen, Ernest R., “Towards a Historical Interpretation of the Origins of Fundamentalism” Church History., XXXVI (03 1967), 66–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The present writer has addressed himself to the same question, more in the spirit of demythologizing some of the reductionist explanations than of positive argument for a specific Fundamentalist theology as Sandeen has done, in an essay to be included in Braeman, John et al. , eds., The 1920's Revisited (Ohio State University Press, publication pending).Google Scholar

47. Such a commitment has far-reaching historiographic implications, which can not be evaded by pragmatically continuing to study “churches” in the plural while theologically considering “the Church” in the singular, only as the Church Invisible; for the most rarefied of historical study must still base itself somewhere on historically “visible” phenomena. Professor Mead goes into this same question in his essay “Church History Explained” n. 31, supra.

48. Breen, , reviewing a new edition of McNeill, John T., Unitive Protestantism (Richmond, 1930 and 1964)Google Scholar, in Church History, XXXIV (06 1965), 227Google Scholar. The implication was clear. McNeill's study of the Ecumenical Spirit in its Persistent Expression (his subtitle) had encouraged the intervening generation of Protestant seminarians in their ecumenical hope, for “it proves that to be Protestant does not necessarily imply sectarianism” This is “written history as an act of faith,” in a sense of that phrase even more literal than Charles Beard had intended.

49. Handy, Robert T., “The Ecumenical Vision and Church History,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, XV (01 1960), 124Google Scholar; quoted by Spalding, James C. and Brass, Maynard F., “Reduction of Episcopacy as a Means to Unity in England, 1640–1662” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, XXX (12 1961), 414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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51. By a splendid irony, secular scholarship seems to have re-discovered the vitality of Protestant separateness just at the moment when church scholarship has launched into a unitive re-thinking of the Protestant past. See Glock and Stark, op. cit., Chap.V.

52. Elwyn A. Smith, op. cit., p. 97.

53. Hudson, Winthrop S., “Denominationalism as a Basis for Ecumenicity: a Seventeenth- Century Conception” Church History, XXIV (03 1955), 45Google Scholar. Or as one heir to an eighteenth-century separation put it: “The trend toward ecumenicity has brought the genesis of many Protestant denominations under suspicion. It is not uncommon to conclude that the multiplication of sects since the Reformation has been the result of rashness or, worse yet, of envy and vindictiveness. Nevertheless, a sober view of the historical process since the 16th century does not give much support to this thesis. Few centrally Christian denominations seem to have sprung from motives either shallow or base. In most instances the process of separation was slow, painful, and marked by high moral seriousness. And once the major presuppositions had been formulated, the division was more or less inevitable”—a judgment the outsider-historian may accept even when he has the unpleasant duty to record the rash and vindictive acts which so often have accompanied such separations, in America as elsewhere. Karl A. Olsson, “The Evangelical Mission Covenant Church and the Free Churches of Swedish Background,” Chap. XIII in Ferm, Vergilius, ed., The American Church of the Protestant Heritage (New York, 1953), 249.Google Scholar

54. Sidney E. Mead, as in n. 23, supra.

55. Quoted in Burns, James McGregor, John Kennedy: a Politicai Profile (New York, 1959), p. 233Google Scholar, particularly as cited by Sped, CharlesJ. II, “Theological Concepts of Magistracy: a Study of Constantius, Henry VIII, and John F. Kennedy,” Church History, XXXII (06 1963), 143.Google Scholar