The history of exegesis as a discipline is one of the stepchildren of Church History. As such it has not only been neglected by Church historians, but even if studied, it has received inferior treatment. Surely there is something ironical about an age of theological scholarship which has so self-consciously bought the historical method to study the Bible, but which nevertheless allows scholars to be so un-historical in their approach to the history of its interpretation. Consider that much of the material in the history of exegesis has been mined by scholars whose proper business is the study of the Old and New Testaments; or that the history of interpretation is usually considered a part of biblical studies. Inevitably the question asked by biblical scholars sounds something like this: how does a man, a school, or epoch interpret such and such a passage? Frequently this question issues in monographs tracing the history of interpretations of the chosen passage. The result is usually a catena of citations classifying and cataloguing the answers given to problems in the text. Most often the perspective brought to the material is that of the contemporary exegete, who, either explicitly or implicitly thinks he knows what the passage meant—or at least what it could not mean.

Philipp of Hesse's style as a Christian prince had some unusual aspects. He came under the influence of the Reformation during a formative period for himself and his territory and developed his princely self-understanding and the ecclesiastical constitution of Hesse in dialogue with the evangelical movement. Both the man and the land bore the indelible stamp of the encounter.

It is generally acknowledged that Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ranks as one of the supreme masterpieces of historical writing. Yet surprisingly enough, more than a third of his entire narrative, that portion dealing with the later Roman or Byzantine Empire, has been badly neglected by historiographers. Now Gibbon as a Byzantinist must needs be an ecclesiastical historian as well, given the nature of Byzantine civilization with its close identification of the religious and the political. But here again, though sharp controversy has for long raged over Gibbon's judgment of early Christianity, especially its responsibility for the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, his treatment of medieval Greek Christianity has been almost ignored by critics, except for sporadic, general remarks by Bury, Dawson, Giarrizzo—remarks which have added little to the traditionally accepted view that Gibbon was contemptuous of Byzantine civilization.

In recent years growing numbers of German and American church historians have turned their attention to the spectacular Kirch enkanipf (Church Struggle) under the Nazis but have so far largely neglected the preceding Weimar period. And yet it stands to reason that the ambiguous response of Evangelical churches in the 1930's to a seemingly demonic use of political power can be explained, at least in part, by their political and social attitudes in the 1920's.

Recent studies of the history of ethnic groups in America have produced a growing awareness that the relationships between religious institutions and ethnic identity are more complex than was earlier believed. Three factors, it seems to me, are now hindering our efforts to understand these relationships. One is the absence of an alyses of the wide functional differences between congregations and denominations, the two kinds of institutions which serve the religious needs of modern democratic societies. Another is the con centration of most historical research in immigrant religion upon one ethnic group. And the third is the emphasis upon the history of either rural frontiers or large cities. In this paper, I wish to present the results of a study of the religious life of the Lake Superior cop per and iron mining country, a region in which immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe are predominant, yet one in which the newcomers of each nationality were spread widely through small towns and villages.

Few books purporting to be serious historical and theological analyses miss the mark as widely as Thomas G. Sanders' Protestant Concepts of Church and State, a “study” sponsored by the National Council of Churches and the Fund for the Republic. Far from clarifying Protestant thinking in this area, the author compounds the confusion and does little to enhance the reputation of either the sponsoring agencies or the publisher. Both sponsoring agencies have sufficient resources to have provided the author with competent counsel, and it is usual publishing practice to submit manuscripts to outside readers for criticism in order to avoid obvious gaffes. Apparently this responsibility was not taken seriously.