The second general council of Ephesus was convened on August 8, 449, and adjourned some fourteen days later by the legates of Theodosius II, who promptly confirmed the council's canons and decrees. It had been as regular, or irregular, as Nicea I or Ephesus I had been, and far more general than the Constantinopolitan synod of 381. Its chief importance lay in registering another splendid victory for the Alexandrines. The “school” of Antioch was shattered beyond repair; Pope Leo and the Westerners were walled off and weakened; the bare notion of “two natures” was branded as Nestorian; every principal see in the East was manned by a henchman of Dioscoros. Moreover, the emperor and his grand chamberlain (the eunuch Chrysaphius, godson to Eutyches) were prepared to support Alexandrine policy with police power.

The writings of the so-called Apostolic Fathers (a term used by the Monophysite Severus of Antioch in the sixth century) present us not only with a fascinating theological literature but also with some difficult problems in regard to its nature. Thomas Elborowe translated Ignatius, Polycarp, and Barnabas and entitled his published work (London, 1668) “a prospect of the primitive Christianity, as it was left by Christ to his apostles, by the apostles to their disciples Saint Polycarp and Holy Ignatius, both contemporaries with and disciples to the Holy Evangelist and Apostle Saint John.” The neatness of this part of the prospect was somewhat marred by the inclusion of Barnabas. “His following epistle indeed,” Elborowe wrote, “may not prove so very acceptable to some, in regard of his strange explications of scripture, which are not after the modern and more refined mode. But it is to be noted that, when he wrote, Christianity was but in the cradle, and scarce advanced into her morning dress.” Nearly three hundred years later Mgr. G. Jouassard, writing in the Mélanges de science religieuse (1957), was facing problems not unlike those stated or implied by Elborowe. What is the value of the Apostolic Fathers? What kind of authority do they have? Are they any more valuable than such a document as the Epistle of the Apostles? They are hard to classify as literature and they come from a long period of time. Both “apostolic” and “fathers” are words which ascribe more importance to them than they really deserve.

The jurisdiction of the Roman see is, and always has been, a point of controversy, not merely between the adherents of that see and all other Christians, but even among those who look with reverence akin to devotion to the successor of St. Peter. It is not merely a legal question, it is essentially a theological question, and as a doctrine it must be dejure divino. Accordingly, it has been discussed with that acrimony which as from a psychological necessity is characteristic of so many theological disputes. But discussion of the development of the doctrine and practice does not necessarily involve polemics. For a doctrine may be true or false, and to show this is a matter of exegesis and systematic theology, but to show that as finally stated it was the result of a long development is not to touch upon the question of its truth at all. Thus one may ask as to a doctrine closely connected with that we are to discuss, does the teaching of the Church as stated in the Bull, Unam Sanctam, appear in the second or third century as an article of belief required to be held by all Christians as a condition for receiving the sacraments? To show that it does not so appear, is merely to show what nearly every one acknowledges as to almost any doctrine not involved in modern polemics, that in the earliest ages they were not formulated with any great precision, in fact were expressed in forms sometimes afterward regarded as even heretical. Such a doctrine as the appellate jurisdiction may be studied in the same historical and non-polemical spirit as the doctrines of the atonement, incarnation, grace, or the sacraments.

Many years ago, almost on my first acquaintance with Calvin, I was impressed by a phrase in that last brief letter of his to his old companion in labor and battle, William Farel:

Live mindful of our union which, as it has been useful to the Church of God, so its fruits await us in heaven.

We may begin here, though it is where Calvin's work ended. His friendships, labors, struggles, and studies had as their aim to be “useful to the Church of God.” It was in Geneva that they had been fellow-laborers, but it is not merely to the Church of Geneva that he thinks their labor to have been useful. It was a contribution to a far wider community, the Church of God, that has no boundaries narrower than the communion of believers, the divine society extending over all the world and throughout all the ages of mankind's history. The Holy Catholic Church was for him a universal reality, however hidden from men's eyes through the prevailing abuses and the proud assumptions of those who claimed to rule and speak for the Church.

For more than fifty years the Weber thesis, which attributed to Calvinism a decisive influence in the development of modern capitalism, has been vigorously debated. In his celebrated essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Calvinism (1904), Max Weber had suggested that Calvinism contributed to the rise of capitalism in various ways—by relaxing the restraints which hitherto had largely served to impede its growth; by fostering the economic virtues of diligence, frugality, honesty, prudence, and sobriety; and, most of all, by providing a psychological fillip to the development of the “spirit” of capitalism, “the temper of single-minded concentration upon pecuniary gain.” The controversy precipitated by the publication of Weber's essay engendered considerable heat that often served to obscure the points at issue, but over the years the continuing discussion has served to remove many of the issues from the area of debate and to narrow the focus of the central issue that remains.

So far as religious affairs are concerned, the colonial period of our history begins with the planting of the first permanent English colony in 1607, guided by the intention to perpetuate in the new land the religious patterns to which the mother country had grown accustomed. Chief of these for our purposes was uniformity enforced by the civil power. The period culminates just 180 years later with the complete rejection of this central intention in the provisions for national religious freedom in the Constitution (1787) and First Amendment (1791).

Religious division has determined Germany's destiny. In the Middle Ages, it was the struggle between Emperor and Pope which doomed the Holy Roman Empire. During the Reformation, and the Thirty Years' War, it was Protestantism as well as the anti-Imperial diplomacy of the Pope and the French cardinals, which prevented the emergence of a national state and a centralized government. “From the split of the church dates all our misfortune,” complained in 1846 the Lutheran historian Johann Friedrich Böhmer, editor of a major medieval source collection. “It is a pity that the nation in the heart of Europe was drawn away from its political profession by quarrels with the church, that the development of strong political institutions was interrupted, that they eroded under the acids of religious passion and negation, so that the German people finally got into a stage of the disease where they are either seized by violent fever, or rot in apathy and despair. All our inner ferment which soon will erupt in a revolutionary outburst, all our political impotence and lethargy were, in the final analysis, caused by the split of the church, which tore us apart, and which no one can bridge. Only a new St. Boniface who would restore ecclesiastical unity could help us.”

In the present discussion within the Roman Catholic Church over the requirement of clerical celibacy, the arguments generally center on the ascetical value of the practice. Pope Paul VI speaks of celibacy as a “precious jewel” leading to a life of selflessness for the man who seeks to follow Jesus Christ in the priesthood. When priests themselves talk about the subject, it is often in terms of its symbolic value as a total commitment to the service of the Lord. It is further seen as a practical measure, following Saint Paul's view that the unmarried state frees the ordained minister from the cares of personal family life so that he may devote himself entirely to the concerns of the whole Christian community.

Half a year before this paper was read before a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion (26 October 1969), the program committee had requested an essay dealing in some comprehensive way with the field of American religious history. Because I would in any case have to be thinking about the introduction to my own “religious history of the American people,” I agreed. The title was sufficiently broad; and goodness knows the problems of this subject area are sufficiently large. Aside from innumerable large and small questions of fact there are the countless questions of emphasis and interpretation, not to mention the problem of discerning an overarching theme. I also confess great sympathy with Max Lerner's comment on the ten years he spent on America as a Civilization (1957). “I found when I came to the end of the decade,” he said, “that a number of things I had written about America were no longer valid. The American civilization had been changing drastically right under my fingertips as I was writing about it.” The present-day historian's predicament is, if anything, more difficult than Lerner's in that the sixties, by contrast with the fifties, have experienced a veritable earthquake of revisionism which has profoundly altered our interpretation of the entire course of American history. By reason of its screaming moral dilemmas, moreover, the decade had an especially rude impact on long accepted views of religious history. But enough of this: let us consider the substantive questions.