Origen's vocabulary is quite definitely that of an intellectual; it owes little to daily life or to the vernacular of his time.… He seems …to manufacture his own language, often hermetic, abstract, or difficult to understand, the language of a man concerned above all with ideas, somewhat cut off from the real world, and constitutionally separated from concrete realities. Are we wrong in attaching a particular significance to the fact, so characteristic of his passionate idealism as well as of his introversion, that he made himself a eunuch ?

The issue of Origen's relations with contemporary Judaism has attracted considerable attention, particularly in the past decade. There seems to be little question that Origen produced the bulk of his extensive exegetical work during the years he lived, taught, and preached in the Palestinian coastal city of Caesarea, from about 232 to his death between 251 and 255, and that Caesarea was a major intellectual center of rabbinic Judaism at that time. It is also generally agreed that Origen had frequent exchanges with Jews, friendly consultations as well as public debates; that Origen's writings suggest reasonable acquaintance with contemporary Jewish belief and practice; and that biblical exegeses known to us from rabbinic sources appear in the commentaries and homilies of Origen.

Jacques de Vitry's Historia Occidentalis is one of the more remarkable and informative studies of contemporary western Christendom to come out of the thirteenth century. As numerous commentators have pointed out, it is unmistakably the product of the spiritual-intellectual school of Master Peter the Chanter of Paris, who inspired a generation of scholars and churchmen to marry popular preaching with the theology of the schools. Written early in the third decade of the thirteenth century, the Historia Occidentalis analyzes the moral state of the western church and juxtaposes in full relief the modes of both degeneracy and religious renewal within that society. Its thesis is that despite all the evils of the day, God is still working in and through the various elements of Christian society to sanctify his people; and these Christian people, for all of their failings, continue to share in the spiritual regeneration of Providence. The Historia Occidentalis has been characterized by one modern historian as “pulpit history.”

In the Christian world during the late fourth through the sixth centuries various strains of monastic life developed, from extreme eremitic isolation to the communal discipline of the cenobia. These different types of monastic life continued to evolve through the Middle Ages. Though most specialists are aware of the multiplicity of patterns of monastic life which are found within both the Latin and the Byzantine spheres, they have been less concerned with what informs these traditional patterns.1This paper attempts to isolate some differences in modes of monastic life in the eastern empire during the Komnenian period and then to explain those differences in terms of the founders' distinct conceptions of salvation.2 The analysis compares two founders—John II Komnenos and Neophytos—and the monastic life led in their respective institutions—the Pantocrator monastery in Constantinople and the Enkleistra in the provincial milieu of Byzantine Cyprus. These two monasteries have been selected not only because they represent extreme examples of their types, but also because rich artistic and literary documentation survives from both.

Just as God condemns and curses the Roman Antichrist,

so without any doubt at all he also curses the new Caesaropapacy … in which governmental officials station themselves in God's temple and puff themselves up against God and the church … as they compose and promulgate new decrees contrary to what Christ has ordained for his ministry, and then decide to subject [Christ's ministers] to the punishment of exile and condemnation.

One of the most significant events in recent Anabaptist studies has been the entry of secular historians into a field traditionally populated by confessional apologists.The result has been a striking change in historical perspective, particularly concerning the origin and nature of the early Swiss Anabaptist movement. Whereas Harold Bender saw Anabaptism as an emphatically religious movement which emerged directly from Zwingli's reformation and continued on the original path even after Zwingli had abandoned his original vision, the new view suggests that Swiss Anabaptism grew out of the social, economic, and religious ferment of Zürich and the outlying rural districts.But the revision does not stop there.

The thirteenth century represents a high point in the establishment of female orders, whose ministry was directed largely at an urban population prone to heresy and undergoing the disruptive transition from pastoral feudalism to nascent capitalism. During this period, more than a quarter of the contemporary saints were women; they identified with all of the new movements which animated the church. Some, continuing the already established tradition of princely veneration, were active in evangelization in the recently Christianized regions of Europe's periphery, like Spain and Poland, through the patronage of charitable institutions and religious houses. The canonization trials of Hedwig of Poland, Elizabeth of Thuringia and Margaret of Hungary all reflect a broadly based constituency including rural and urban, lay and clerical, male and female support Others appealed to a narrower social and geographical audience and ministered to the problems of the urban poor: Sperandea of Cingoli's miraculous cures were performed exclusively on married women of the city and of the adjacent countryside. But the largest number of female saints continued to be cloistered women whose chief accomplishment was the establishment or endowment of a new convent or the foundation of a new female order, usually in association with a male order; for while many such orders began independently, the church feared the consequences of independent female piety and sought to ensure orthodoxy by associating the female houses with a corresponding male order. Nevertheless, while contemporary hagiography continued to be patterned after the stereotypical saints of early Christianity, the character of female piety changed to reflect such dynamic changes within the church as the rise of mendicancy, the transition from rural to urban life, the cult of the Virgin, the rise of national states, the war against heresy, the new emphasis on the humanity of Christ and the political struggles of the papacy.

The abolition of monastic vows and mandatory clerical celibacy and the exaltation of marriage and the family were among the most revolutionary changes in religion and ethics produced by the Reformation. Although scholars have given it too little attention, the controversy over the relative merits of marriage and celibacy, and particularly the campaign for clerical marriage, played a major role in the development of the Reformation. The law of celibacy and vows of chastity became principal topics of discussion when the reformers strove to break down the old order of medieval Christianity. The most concrete manifestation of the impact of the controversy over marriage and celibacy lay in the fact that many priests joined the Reformation movement precisely to escape the restrictions imposed upon their domestic life by the old order.

If one were to ask a Scandinavian to name the outstanding Pietist from the eighteenth century, that Pietist would undoubtedly be Erik Pontoppidan. August Herman Francke would most assuredly come in second place. Pontoppidan's lasting fame rests with his “Explanation” (Forklaring) to Luther's Small Catechism which he published in 1737 under the title Truth Unto Godliness (Sandhed til Gudfryktighed). A little over one hundred years later (1842), a pioneer Norwegian-American pastor by the name of Elling Eielsen translated it into English and walked—yes walked—from the Fox River settlements in northern Illinois to New York City in order to get Pontoppidan's “Explanation” published.

Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin (1831–1863), has been characterized as a representative of the Broad Church movement of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Convinced that the Church of England's sacraments and liturgies, indeed its very structure, should correspond to the times and not to some ancient formulary, Whately argued continuously for a general reformation of its rules and regulations and for a separate church body to arbitrate disputes over spiritual matters. Recognizing the force of his arguments on these and myriad other subjects, a reviewer for the Christian Observer commented that “the Archbishop is a great intellectual gladiator, and all parties will confess that it is far pleasanter to have him with them than against them.” The nature of his role as a Christian advocate also was noted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “He showed a rare union of literary talent, knowledge of human nature, and administrative ability, and the work that he accomplished places him in the highest rank of Christian statesmen. … [His essays] have had a wide influence upon the course of religious thought in England for more than a quarter of a century.”

On the fIfth day of August in 1603, the mayor of Norwich and “a great multitude of people” crowded into Saint Andrew's parish church to hear John Robinson preach an afternoon sermon celebrating the third anniversary of James I's deliverance from the Gowrie Plot. In the congregation were two of Bishop John Jegon's lay informers, Michaell Peade and Frances Dawes. As Robinson began, the two informants turned a critical ear, intent on sifting the sermon for hints of the kind of ecclesiastical radicalism that establishment prelates recently had found so exasperatingly disruptive to the ministerial machinery. They had good cause for concern since the young Robinson, fresh from Cambridge University where a generation earlier the new wave of religious dissent had first flourished, was now in Norwich seeking a license from Jegon to preach in his diocese.

In 1856 Ralph Waldo Emerson stated boldly that the English “cannot interpret the German mind.” 1Although German higher criticism did not “merely attack the Scriptures” but rather “studied them in a new spirit,” it was to be censured, feared, ignored, or misunderstood in the early decades of the nineteenth century in England.2 Such was not the case in the country which gave birth to the school of which David Friedrich Strauss is perhaps the most notorious and most distinguished representative. Eduard Zeller asserted that, in his own country, Strauss's work “had … a decided effect upon the philosophy and the general culture of our own day.”3

On 29 May 1831, the Reverend James Jenkins Trott, a Methodist missionary to the Cherokee, was arrested in the Cherokee Nation by the Georgia Guard and forced to march 110 miles to prison at Camp Gilmer. Released after four days, he was required to post a five-hundred-dollar bond and ordered to keep out of that part of the Indian nation within the territorial limits of the state of Georgia. He refused to obey the order. Married to a Cherokee who lived near his mission station at New Echota, he went to visit his wife and two children in July. On 6 July he again was arrested and forced to march 110 miles back to prison. With him this time were two Presbyterian missionaries, the Reverend Samuel A. Worcester and Dr. Elizur Butler. Two of Trott's friends, the Reverend Dickson C. McLeod and the Reverend Martin Wells, who were also Methodist circuit riders within the Cherokee Nation, heard of his arrest. They saddled up and rode after him. When they caught up with the prisoners along the road, the officer in charge, Col. C. H. Nelson, ordered them curtly to “flank off!.” When McLeod made some disparaging remarks about the treatment of the missionaries, Nelson ordered him off his horse, arrested him and made him march with the prisoners. Wells, who was left holding McLeod's horse, also was ordered with oaths to flank off. When he refused, “Col. Nelson cut a stick and making up to Mr. Wells gave him a severe blow on the head.”1

The founders of successful religious and social movements have received much attention from popular and scholarly writers. Would-be prophets who failed, on the other hand, generally have been ignored, except for a few sensational cases such as those of Sabbatai Sevi, the Jewish messianic pretender of the seventeenth century, or Jim Jones, whose charismatic leadership of a group suicide in Guyana shocked the nation and the world. Yet although religious leaders who fail usually attract little attention, they are often as interesting as those who succeed. Their lives vividly highlight aspects of new religious and social movements which we might otherwise overlook. One of the most remarkable religious failures in nineteenth- century America was James J. Strang, the schismatic Mormon prophet who set up a community of 2,500 on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan and ruled it for nearly ten years until he was assassinated in 1856. Strang was articulate and capable, a compelling intellect and speaker who seemed totally sincere to some yet an utter fraud to others. His life raises fundamental questions about the promise and the dangers inherent in prophetic leadership, not simply in early Mormonism but in many similar movements as well.

In his book, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, Robert T. Handy stresses “the important role that the idea of civilization has played in the evangelical Protestant denominations that together made up the dominant religious subculture of nineteeth-century America.” Handy contends that the English-speaking evangelical Protestant denominations—he includes the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Disciples of Christ, United Brethren, and the evangelical wing in the Protestant Episcopal Church—thought of themselves as making up the “religious mainstream of the nation” and were motivated by the vision of a Christian America. They saw it as their task to work for the creation of a nation based on Christian principles, and they sought to utilize a number of institutions, voluntary organizations, and techniques to achieve that goal.

What happened to the social gospel impulse after World War I? Recent historians have demonstrated that many reformers did not bid farewell to reform in the 1920s.1 In the case of Protestant social liberalism, however, the precise relationship between postwar social action and the prewar social gospel movement requires further clarification. Was the former merely a continuation of the latter? Such a question is currently difficult to answer since few major studies of the social gospel bridge both historical periods. Indeed, the death or retirement by 1918 of so many early leaders of the social gospel movement, particularly Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, and Walter Rauschenbusch, leaves the impression that an era had come to a close.

Historians of the development of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century have normally treated this aspect of intellectual history as a preserve of the university don and the ambitious cleric. However, further study points to a movement of considerable magnitude and momentum beginning in the last decades of that century which aimed at popularizing the methods and results of the higher criticism of the Old Testament. Widespread popular recognition of a critical approach to the Old Testament and its implications began in the 1860s in response to the work of J. W. Colenso and the contributors to Essays and Reviews.

In the late-flowering study of religion in the South, relatively little attention has been given to its intellectual traditions. The field's rich body of literature, largely produced in the last two decades, has yielded only one serious study of theology in the region, E. Brooks Holifield's The Gentlemen Theologians. So great has been the historians' stress upon the heartfelt, emotional character of popular religion in the South, says Holifield, that even to inquire into a “Southern religious ‘mind’ … is to question a commonplace.” One might say that, lacking a Jonathan Edwards, the South has no call for a Perry Miller. Even Holifield felt compelled to analyze the social status of his regional divines in order to create interest in their tomes of derivative common sense theology.

An enormous change in the academic study of religion has occurred in the United States during the last half-century as the center of the enterprise has moved from the church-supported college and the seminary to the secular university and the graduate school. Some of this change has been caused by the rise of state-supported higher education, some by the secularizing trend that has shaped all modern American universities, both public and private. The change clearly has resulted in a discipline (if the term may be loosely used) in which not only has the number of practicing religion scholars greatly multiplied, but the scholarship itself also has grown in academic stature, becoming less eulogistic, more critical, and more methodologically congruent with other humanities disciplines.1

This essay focuses attention on certain aspects of the religious forces which powerfully shaped the small colleges which dominated American higher education prior to the Civil War. Religion, and more specifically evangelical Protestantism, has long been recognized as an important factor influencing the early history of these colleges. But the precise connections between evangelicalism and higher education during those years have not been studied very systematically recently, especially in the light of a new historiography concerning the ante-bellum college which has been developing during the past decade. This article begins with a brief sketch of the new historiography and tries to suggest some of the interpretive strengths and weaknesses of the recent writings. Then follows a description of the “agency” systems developed by certain Midwestern schools to aid in fund raising—a specific point of linkage between the general religious community and the colleges this community helped to found. This latter section seeks to redress in a limited way the interpretive imperfections of the recent historiography and to suggest something of the nature of the special relationships which existed between the small colleges of the Midwest and the evangelical Protestant churches during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.