When saints utter prophetic words, they must in some way come true, at least in the hagiographic tradition. But what if one holy person curses another (and vice versa)? Such was the case between Epiphanius and John Chrysostom during the so-called Origenist Controversy, which ensued at the end of the fourth century and into the fifth. Epiphanius, working at the behest of Theophilus of Alexandria, was suspicious of John's orthodoxy and accused him of harboring Origenist fugitives. Epiphanius played the provocateur, traveling to Constantinople and conspiring to discredit John and cast doubts on his leadership, while John did his best to accommodate his elderly colleague from Cyprus. Their differences, however, were irreconcilable. In the end, each bishop wished a dubious fate for the other, both of which came true: Epiphanius died on his journey home, and John was deposed twice and died in exile. Yet both are revered as preeminent fathers of the church, and so in order to reach a point in which they could be counted together as saints, a process of hagiographical rehabilitation and selective forgetfulness began soon after their respective deaths.

In the growing canon consciousness of the fourth century, Christians debated what should constitute the official reading list for the church. Epiphanius of Salamis was part of this conversation. His massive Panarion described eighty heresies, and, for Epiphanius, wrong books were a marker of wrong belief. However, although Epiphanius was a stringent supporter of Nicene orthodoxy, he, too, referred to books outside the canon. In the Panarion, he frequently referenced Jubilees, an expanded, rewritten Genesis found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and which also circulated among early Christian readers. The Decree of Gelasius later declared the text anathema. This paper explores the significance of a vocal heresiographer reading Jubilees, particularly when he defined heretics based on similar reading practices. It suggests that Epiphanius saw close kinship between Jubilees and his own Panarion. The citations of Jubilees in the Panarion also indicate that Epiphanius defined the text as a part of a larger Christian tradition. In doing so, Epiphanius transformed Jubilees from Jewish apocrypha to Christian tradition. Thus, the citations of Jubilees in Epiphanius's Panarion show the complicated dynamics of canon consciousness in the shaping of Christian Orthodoxy.

Between the 1960s and 2010s, yoga became a familiar feature of American culture, including its Christian subcultures. This article examines Christian yoga and public-school yoga as windows onto the fraught relationship between Christianity and culture. Yoga is a flashpoint for divisions among Christians and between them and others. Some evangelicals and pentecostals view yoga as idolatry or an opening to demonic spirits; others fill gaps in Christian practice by using linguistic substitution to Christianize yoga. In 2013, evangelical parents in California sued the Encinitas Union School District (EUSD) for promoting Hinduism through Ashtanga yoga. Sedlock v. Baird's failure to dislodge yoga exposes tensions in Christian anti-yoga and pro-yoga positions that stem from a belief-centered understanding of religion, the dissatisfaction of many Americans with Protestant dominance in cultural institutions, and a broad-based pursuit of moral cultivation through yoga spirituality. I argue that, although many evangelicals feel like an embattled minority, they are complicit in cultural movements that marginalize them. Naïveté about how practices can change beliefs may undercut Christian doctrines, facilitate mandatory yoga and mindfulness meditation in which public-school children and teachers are required to participate, and impede evangelistic goals by implicating Christians in cultural appropriation and cultural imperialism.

This article examines a little-studied work by Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167): his tractate on the miracles of the saints of Hexham—referred to here as Miracula—composed for the feast of the saints’ translation in 1154/1155. While Miracula has been incidental to the prolific scholarship on Aelred, this article brings it back to the center of Aelred's life and thought. It describes Miracula in some detail, putting to rest any speculation that Aelred was not the text's author through a careful treatment of the surviving manuscripts. It then explores Aelred's sophisticated notions of who the saints were, how they inhabited Hexham, and what he and his audience expected the saints to do on their behalf. Finally, it demonstrates that Aelred intentionally combined local traditions about the saints with his own modern Cistercian concerns about spiritual life to produce an innovative meditation on saints, miracles, and veneration. Miracula allows scholars to see Aelred not only as a preeminent reformed Cistercian thinker but also as someone formed by and committed to the ongoing cult of the local saints.

The fifth-century Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgius is an unusual example of a surviving minority source. Although scholars have mined his work for raw data on events between 320 and 425 c.e., in contrast to other contemporary ecclesiastical historians, Philostorgius has received little attention. His work has suffered derision, being seen as nothing more than “Arian” polemic and thus as more partisan than its pro-Nicene counterparts. This essay analyzes Philostorgius's role as one of many competitive voices participating in the composition of historical works for the elite readership of Constantinople in the fifth century. Philostorgius's Ecclesiastical History constituted an integral part of the historiography of late antiquity and early Christianity. His representation of the relationship between bishops and emperors reveals a distinctive theory of history which informs his entire work.

This essay explores eighth- and early ninth-century Frankish understandings and experiences of churches as holy spaces, arguing that myriad textual genres demonstrate the widespread Carolingian belief in churches as highly sacred spaces as well as the significant variations in the specifics and execution of that belief. The first part of the article details how Carolingian legislation worked to define, recognize, and maintain the sacred space of churches by insisting upon specific, respectful behaviors within them. The central portion of the article considers epistolary and hagiographical texts that describe and, at times, accept transgressions of these laws, including by an elite member of the Carolingian court. The article contends that not all misbehavior and misuse of churches defiled them; rather, inappropriate behaviors often highlighted or activated the sanctity of a space in a way that legislation could not. This essay, in triangulating Carolingian legislative, hagiographical, and epistolary texts, opens a window onto the views of the laity regarding churches as sacred spaces. Ultimately, it raises questions about the extent (and limits) of Frankish beliefs regarding spatial sacrality, the reach of the Carolingian reform efforts, and the nature of lay religiosity.

This article examines the role of lay seigneurs in religious change in the French countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the Catholic Reformation and a period of socioeconomic change in land ownership and exploitation. The focus here is on middling and lesser lords—the rough equivalent of the English gentry, who held land in a single province or even pays and had a frequent presence in their parishes—rather than the great nobles who operated at a national level. Brittany is used as a case study, for it was a province rich in rural lords and because relatively good source material survives. It is argued that seigneurs were important patrons of religious innovation in the countryside, particularly in the parish church. They were rarely innovators themselves, but they lent support and resources to the introduction and maintenance of new devotional practices. Lords worked closely with clergy, sharing their aspirations and ideas. Four areas were particularly prominent in eliciting their support: appointment of clergy, support of missionaries, new devotional practices, and funding of building projects and liturgies in parish churches. These combined family strategies of enhancing social status and individual means to salvation which were indivisible in the world of the lay rural nobility. It was from a traditional understanding of lordship that patronage of religious reform stemmed.

This piece explores the origins of the anomalous 1655 New Haven statute against sodomy that broke with legal traditions and codes both in England and New England. A lengthy and extraordinarily specific piece of legislation, the New Haven law stands in stark contrast to the minimalist language favored by the English in the early seventeenth century. When viewed within the larger context of clerical animosities, particularly between Thomas Hooker and John Cotton, there is a strong circumstantial case to make for its implementation as an extension of John Cotton's rejected Massachusetts Bay legal code, Moses His Judicials, applied by his friend and admirer John Davenport in New Haven. A devout disciple of John Cotton, John Davenport's New Haven colony relied on Cotton's influence and stood as a rebuke to Thomas Hooker's Connecticut settlements, often criticized as too spiritually lax by those in Massachusetts Bay and New Haven. While seeking to demonstrate greater piety and rigidity, John Cotton and Thomas Hooker sought to exert dominance over the other, with Cotton employing Davenport's colony as an effective castigation of Hooker's perceived liberality. This piece is reflective of trends in studies of sexuality which suggest that ideas and identities related to sexuality do not operate in isolation, but often mirror anxieties not necessarily connected to the regulation of sexual activities. This article situates the 1655 Sodomy Statue within a broader context in order to understand its origins and animosities that potentially motivated its inclusion into the New Haven legal statutes.

Much of John Goodwin's theological output can be viewed as a backlash against the “orthodox” doctrine of God. That God, as Goodwin conceived him, was too eager to command the “impossible” and too inclined to “delight” in the punishment of the noncompliant. During the early 1650s, Goodwin turned to the pagans in order to articulate the gracious countenance of a wise and equitable deity. In the process, he went close to canceling the operational distinction between grace and nature. For nature, according to Goodwin, preached unlettered sermons about “atonement.” And because, as Paul declared in Romans, the blessings of creation render the sins of creatures inexcusable, it is only because they willfully repudiate the deity's gracious overtures that pagans deprive themselves of excuse. The doctrine, as Goodwin presented it, horrified his many opponents. It seemed to them that Goodwin had lodged in the “free will” of rational creatures the power to attain salvation. He put himself on a collision course with the magisterial masters—Bucer, Vermigli, Calvin, Pareus, and others—whose lead he professed, in many respects, to follow. There is reason to suspect that Goodwin had been particularly indebted to Arminius, Episcopius, and Corvinus.

In research concerning the spread of eleventh-century ecclesiastical reform ideas, papal protection bulls have been somewhat overlooked as scholarship has privileged more obvious instruments of papal politics, such as legates, councils, canon law, papal letters, and friendship networks. This is not surprising considering the fact that the only documents preserved are very often the bulls themselves, making it virtually impossible to reconstruct the impact that they had on the local churches. Therefore, the availability of several narrative sources discussing the reception of the bulls Gregory VII issued in favor of the Benedictine abbey of Saint Hubert in the diocese of Liège in 1074 and of the priory of regular canons in Watten in the diocese of Thérouanne in 1077 is truly unique. While these accounts are heavily biased, they permit us to catch a rare glimpse of how bulls were received at the grassroots level. As becomes clear from their stormy reception, the charters prompted discussion in the episcopal entourage about questions of ecclesiastical hierarchy, procedure, papal obedience, and episcopal authority. They cleverly rooted the papal reform program in the midst of far-off but politically important dioceses and forced bishop and clergy to take a stance in the reform debate.

This article contextualizes the origins and development of Joseph Smith's secretive Council of Fifty, a clandestine assembly whose minutes were sequestered from public access since their creation in 1844 and were only made available in September 2016. Organized by Smith, the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, only months before his death at the hands of a mob in June 1844, the council was destined to introduce a new form of world governance. Colloquially named the “Council of Fifty,” it blended democratic principles with theocratic rule. More than a significant moment in the development of America's largest home-grown religion, however, Joseph Smith's controversial organization and the ideals it represented hint at broader anxieties over the nation's cultural disunity and democratic excesses in the wake of disestablishment. While many embraced the democratization of religious authority, the Mormons and some of their contemporaries countered that it only introduced cultural and political chaos. Examining how groups such as the Mormons grappled with these implications—through orchestrated electoral participation, appeals to higher laws, and revisions to democratized authoritative structures—sheds light on this dynamic challenge of political self-rule during America's antebellum period.

This article presents an unpublished and largely unexplored source written in Basel during the international church council, the Vita fratrum predicatorum conventus Basiliensis (1442–1444). It deals with the reform of the Dominican friary, which was effectuated just before the start of the council to prevent scandals. Johannes of Mainz, its author, was the first lector of the reformed friary and wrote the text to corroborate the reformed religious identity of his community. He presented the reform of the Basel friary—which aroused fervent opposition of the original inhabitants—as a new episode in the history of salvation. A second part of the Vita fratrum eulogized the characteristics that Observant friars have in common. By “othering” Conventual friars and by depicting their horrible deaths, Johannes tried both to convince the Observant Basel friars of their superiority over Conventuals and to exhort them to stick to an Observant lifestyle. Unfaithful friars, the narrative warned, were eradicated from the celestial vineyard. For the last part of the Vita fratrum, which presents “the most fruitful plants” of the vineyard, Johannes of Mainz drew up personal and original biographies of contemporary Dominicans, such as Johannes Nider (d. 1438), who is presented as a “mirror of observance” and a “doctor of souls.”

The Family of Love met with considerable controversy in Elizabethan England. This article examines a series of confessions given by members and ex-members of the group before Protestant authorities. Such testimonies are less straightforward than they seem. Specifically, Familists and their opponents used confessions as an opportunity to refine their religious identities. Both sides fought to establish themselves as simple, transparent Christians even as they indulged in the twists and turns of sixteenth-century polemics. Rather than dismissing such sources as distortions, this article explores the ideological diversity that results from the attempt to derive meaning from hostile attention.

This article explores the secularization of the American historical profession through the lens of an early twentieth-century historical controversy: the debunking of the legend that nineteenth-century missionary Marcus Whitman saved the Pacific Northwest from becoming a British possession. The Whitman controversy was a key skirmish in an ongoing, and still unresolved, debate about what constitutes right practices and ideations of history in the American academy, what counts as undue historical bias, and what place (if any) appeals to religion should have in academic historical discourse. Through the Whitman debate and other early twentieth-century historical battles, Protestant providential narratives of history were purged from academic textbooks and providential historians marginalized from the academy. Taking a cue from the evolutionary schemas of religious studies scholars, professional historians cast tales like the Whitman legend—and the providential narratives that undergirded them—as primitive myths unfit for a modernizing society. The Whitman controversy thus serves as a case study into the American historical profession's transformation at the turn of the twentieth century, a transformation that remains contested and incomplete.

In 1709, William Freke, a pious, well-educated, and well-read English gentleman living in Dorset, declared to the world that he was the second coming of Elijah, sent to announce the arrival of the New Jerusalem and to proclaim the beginning of Christ's reign upon earth. There is no evidence to indicate that anyone at the time took him seriously, and given this absence of contemporary interest, it might be tempting to dismiss Freke as an isolated and insignificant crackpot. But this would be a misreading of his career. Research over the past couple of decades has decisively determined that the twenty years following 1690 were a period of intense religious speculation in England and the larger Atlantic world when expectations of the millennium were high. Far from being an isolated enthusiast crying in the wilderness, Freke was in fact a prophet who was connected in a variety of ways to a much larger network of religious enthusiasts in England and on the Continent that reveals much about the religious milieu of, and the millenarian interconnections that existed during, the last decade of the seventeenth and first decade of the eighteenth century.

Merging religious history with childhood studies, this article analyzes the rise of the Sunday school movement to show how concepts of childhood, and young people themselves, helped shape early American religious culture. Religious disestablishment, republican concerns about virtue, and romanticized reconstructions of childhood led to a heightened focus on young people within late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Protestant reform movements. The resulting dissemination of Sunday schools across the country established physical and imagined communities of faith dedicated exclusively to young people. They also fostered unprecedented levels of youth religious leadership by allowing adolescents to serve as teachers, challenging inherited patterns of social and cultural authority. Sunday schools thereby became transformative and transactional spaces where young people could both shape and be shaped by the growing Protestant community. This article describes this synergistic relationship between childhood, youth, and Protestant benevolence by examining the two related educational models that emerged within the Sunday school movement in the early national period. The first, exemplified by republican-humanitarian Sunday schools founded in the late eighteenth century, emphasized literacy instruction for the purpose of creating a virtuous citizenry. The second model also aspired to create virtuous citizens, but it envisioned using Sunday schools primarily to evangelize and sanctify the nation. The increasing emphasis on evangelism produced an even more significant structural shift: the transformation of Sunday schools into child-centric institutions that facilitated youth religious leadership. This in turn helped inaugurate a period within American Christianity when institutions and ministries were designed specifically for children on mass scale, permanently altering the religious landscape and redistributing spiritual authority to more marginalized groups, including young people themselves. By revealing how age became an increasingly crucial factor in determining the shape and substance of religious experiences, this article demonstrates that ideals and anxieties about childhood helped create volunteerism, which in turn reshaped the structure of American Protestantism while simultaneously contributing to the formation of a broader child-centric culture that persists in the modern day.

The interplay of religion, politics, and state in National Socialist Germany continues to defy facile characterizations. In 1934, mere weeks following the Röhm Putsch in which the Nazi regime committed dozens of political assassinations, Berlin hosted thousands of Baptists from across the globe who would unanimously decry nationalism and racialism and advocate for the separation of church and state. Held from August 4–10, 1934, the fifth Baptist World Congress marks the zenith of German Baptist publicity and international Baptist cooperation during the interwar period. The Congress thus provides a focal point for analyzing interwar British and German Baptist relations. This relationship reflected both international cooperation and the gradual divergence of doctrine along nationalistic lines. German Baptists experienced greater freedom of exercise under the Third Reich than under previous regimes, and they leveraged their international connections in order to further their mission. They refused to become involved in the well-documented “Church Struggle” of the Confessing Church and the “German Christian Movement,” and this refusal strained international partnerships. The German Baptist experience challenges many assumptions concerning the churches under the Third Reich as it illustrates the Nazi regime's permissive toleration of a biblicist Free Church group with propagandistically valuable international connections.

This paper examines Joseph Smith's construction of a racialized theology, which drew upon conceptions of Abrahamic lineage and the possibility of “racial redemption” for peoples of African descent through conversion to Mormonism. This ran against the grain of his Protestant and Catholic contemporaries’ religious understandings of race. He expanded upon earlier iterations of his ideas with the introduction of new rituals and liturgy related to LDS temples. Smith's wife may have invited a person of African descent to participate in this new liturgy before his murder in June 1844. The views he expressed about peoples of African descent before his death are inchoate, although high-ranking Mormons related to Smith seemed to have agreed with the possibility of racial redemption. After Smith's death, Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders framed the LDS temple and priesthood restriction in terms of Smith's liturgy rather than any of Smith's varied teachings on race. This paper also argues that Mormonism's racial restriction arose from its roots in the sealing ritual rather than ecclesiological power structures. Mormonism's racial doctrine has often been described as a “priesthood ban,” referring to ecclesiastical authority. However, this discounts the religious contexts in which it arose and excludes the experiences of women and children, who were not allowed to participate in the endowment or sealing ordinances. This paper places Mormonism's temple liturgy at the front and center of the LDS Church's priesthood and temple restriction.

In the German church elections of July 1933, prominent liberal Protestants in the state of Thuringia gave their support to the Deutsche Christen (German Christians), a pro-Nazi faction that sought to establish a uniquely “German” form of Christianity based on “blood” and “race.” At first glance, this development might suggest an affinity between liberal Protestant theology and völkisch (racist-populist) conceptions of Christianity. However, a closer examination of events leading up to this decision reveals that pragmatic and strategic considerations were at least as important as ideology. Although liberal Protestant leaders ultimately determined that cooperation with the Deutsche Christen was necessary, they did so reluctantly, and only after they were convinced that other options had been exhausted. This article examines church-political alignments in Thuringia during the Weimar and early Nazi eras, with an emphasis on the aims and priorities of the Volkskirchenbund (People's Church League), a liberal Protestant faction in the Thuringian regional synod. It traces the decision-making processes behind the events of 1933, the motives and perceptions of key players, and diverse responses of leaders as well as rank and file members. Their story illustrates one of the more complicated paths toward Christian complicity in the Third Reich.

From the 1840s to the 1870s, the first wave of Spiritualism swept across the Atlantic world. Many social reformers looked to messages from the spiritual realm to bolster their endeavors for this-worldly improvement. The Catholic Church, sensing diabolic powers at work, condemned the movement and its attendant reforms. It therefore surprised many when, in the mid-1850s, the spirits of dead Jesuits prompted Mary Gove Nichols and Thomas Low Nichols—both prominent Spiritualists and reformers—to convert to Catholicism. While the Nicholses are best known for their reform efforts, as their conversions suggest, they also led vibrant religious lives. By charting their religious biographies and using previously neglected writings, this article demonstrates that the Nicholses abandoned neither Spiritualism nor reform upon their conversion. Rather, they argued that both séance supernaturalism and social reformation should be pursued within the Catholic Church. In this way, the Nicholses challenged the church's attempts to demarcate acceptable spirituality, intentionally crossing and blurring received religious boundaries. In doing so, they redefined what it meant to be Catholic in order to accommodate their experiences and commitments. Their story recasts the history of Spiritualism and Catholicism as a boundary contest and provides a detailed case study of the process of religious hybridization.