In his now classic “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” read before the American Historical Association in 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner quoted from A New Guide for Emigrants to the West (second edition; Boston, 1837), written by the pioneer Baptist missionary and founder of seminaries, John Mason Peck, who died just a century ago. Peck had distinguished three types of Westerners: the pioneers, the settlers, and “the men of capital and enterprise.” Turner found this typology useful and adapted it in his succession of studies that have helped to shape our understanding of American history.

It is the peculiar distinction of Steven Runciman to have directed our attention to the importance of the twelfth century in the “hardening” of the schism between the Greek and Latin Churches. In the main, Runciman attributes this unhappy development to those tensions which arose between East and West as a result of the crusades and the establishment of the Latin States in Syria-Palestine. While it is not our intention to question Runciman's arguments, it may be suggested that there are other fruitful approaches to the problem of relations between Rome and Constantinople in the twelfth century which Runciman has touched on only in passing. In general terms, it is the purpose of this article to suggest that the development of the schism must also be understood within the context of a complex political drama, centred on southern Italy, in which the Papacy, the Normans, the Germans and the Greeks were the chief protagonists. Our investigation will be confined to the period extending from the signing of the Concordat of Worms in 1122 to the death of Pope Eugene III in 1153. The purpose of the opening section which follows is: 1) to describe the genesis of this web of conflicting aims and objectives; 2) to indicate in what ways the problem of church union had become woven into the fabric of these political developments; 3) to delineate the various responses, both ecclesiastical and political, which the Papacy made to these new developments in her relations with the Greeks prior to the Second Crusade.

The relationship—or lack of it—between religious belief and socalled secular culture is a topic which has been of perennial interest both to ancient students of religion and history and to modern historians. Students today use the phrase Unity of Faith and Culture because it has become current and because it bears some relationship to our own situation and problems, but we must also consider the subject, at least as we see it in antiquity, in terms of the interdependence or the interaction of faith and culture.

In the Reformation the phrase “The Word of God” was mighty and prevailed. It was pronounced with assurance and heard with acceptance. To use it was to invoke in one's behalf a divine utterance of incontestible authority, that was documented of old in the canonical scriptures but now freshly reverenced and understood after long centuries of disregard. The Reformation was, or at any rate aimed to be, a reform of the visible church by applying to it the superior authority of the Word of God, so that the Word may be said to be the panoply of the Reformation, its all-sufficient armor and resource. This appears from Luther's early writings through Calvin's whole work, and that of Protestant writers to a much later era, and is a familiar note in our day.

The current revival of interest in both Jonathan Edwards and eschatology points up the fact that there has been no deliberate effort to bring these two subjects together. The only previous attempt to treat Edwards' doctrine of the last things is that by Frank Hugh Foster, in a series of articles on “The Eschatology of the New England Divines.”1 Unfortunately, the title promises more than the discussions afford; because Foster's interest is confined almost entirely to the problem of Universalism, his section on Edwards treats only of the doctrine of eternal punishment and serves to perpetuate the common notion that the great Puritan was little more than a preacher of damnation.

On the seventh of October, 1528, late at night, agents of Dukes Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X of Bavaria came to the home in Abensberg of Johann Aventinus, the distinguished historian and pedagogue, and arrested him, “ob evangelium,” as he notes the occasion in his diary.1 The Dukes' action was not unexpected. Aventinus recorded arrests of acquaintances and associates in May and July, also “ob evangelium.” He had been away from home much of the time, possibly to avoid the same fate. He spent the summer in Regensburg2 where the Bavarian government had no jurisdiction, but where prolonged residence, at a time when both Lutheranism and Anabaptism seemed to be making rapid gains there,3 could not but arouse suspicion in Munich. In early October Aventinus returned to Abensberg, his captors at his heels.

The year 1602 put the Unity of the Brethren to a severe test. Three years before, the long and systematic efforts of the papal nuncio in Bohemia had resulted in the fall of Chancellor Charles Želinský, and the highest offices of the realm had passed into the hands of Catholics— representatives, for the most part, of the new aggressive generation, who made no secret of their intention to wipe out the evangelical faith in Bohemia, and who had indeed begun energetically to work in that direction. Zdeněk Lobkovic, more of a Spaniard than a Czech, had been put at the head of the government, and at his side were Jaroslav Martinic and the convert William Slavata.

In the period of the Prussian reform movement, Friedrich Schleiermacher, pastor and intellectual, found a key political role in the Prussian state. Some aspects of Schleiermacher's singular public life during these years were considered by Wilhelm Dilthey in his short article on Schleiermacher's political thought and activity, written almost a hundred years ago. But Dilthey never expanded this preliminary analysis which was, in any case, partial in coverage and limited in critical approach. The recovery of a vast body of material and information unavailable to Dilthey as well as greater historical perspective necessitate a thorough reconsideration of Schleiermacher's activities during these critical years.

Modern studies of church and state in America have begun to modify some older conclusions. Much attention has been given to the Constitutional “solution” of separation and its contradictions and problems in practice. Similarly, church historians, qualifying an older assumption that conservative churches ultimately shed the forms of “classic Protestantism” and permitted American religion to be shaped by the sectarian heritage of the radical Reformation, have begun to re-examine the background of ideas. This re-examination is urgently needed in treating America's last disestablishment contest, the struggle over the state churches in New England which raged until the 1820's. For this struggle had unusual significance.

There are four men whom popular tradition, and the builders of Luther's monument in Worms, have grouped around the figure of the Wittenberg reformer as his greatest forerunners: Peter Waldo, Savonarola, Wyclyf and Hus. Luther himself considered only the last named as a man to whom he was indebted, and with whose teachings he could increasingly identify himself, at least after he wrote that famous letter to Spalatin in February 1520 in which he claimed, half-correctly, that he had always held the whole doctrine of Hus without having even been aware of it. But what, in the consciousness of present historiography, is the relation between the heritage of Hus, the whole vast movement called Hussitism, and the Lutheran reformation?

Historians who have been concerned with Christian missions to the Indians of Oregon have generally limited their writings to denominational histories or to biographies glorifying the missionaries. Little has been done to correlate the efforts of the various individuals and denominations involved, in the light of the economic and political situation, so necessary for the presentation of a complete picture of the total missionary enterprise in the proper perspective. In this brief paper an attempt will be made to do just this.

In The History and Character of Calvinism, John T. McNeill dismisses the story of English Presbyterianism in the eighteenth century with the following statement: Here we may return for a brief reference to Calvinism in England, where the Presbyterian … nonconformity carried its banners but weakly in the eighteenth century… After the death of Matthew Henry (1714) … Presbyterian leadership was undistinguished. A tincture of rationalism and Socinianism entered the nonconformist academies, and many of the Presbyterian ministers rejected the Westminster standards and doctrines … Those who remained orthodox were in general dull and ineffective ministers. The result was a decline in numbers and significance. This decayed Presbyterianism was restored, or more accurately replaced by the activity of Scots in England, including both those of the Kirk and those of the secessions1.

The power that impelled Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini from his first insignificant clerkship at the Council of Basel to the height of papal dignity resided less in himself than in the cross-currents of fifteenth-century European politics through which he moved. The particular currents that Aeneas Sylvius exploited were those emanating from German resistance to Rome, from the Hauspolitik of the Hapsburgs, from the entrenched Hussitism of Bohemia, and in general from the cultural differential between backward-Gothic Central Europe and the new life of Renaissance Italy. Amply endowed with energy and the kind of rich but not first-rate talent that never has to sacrifice effectiveness to an original vision of truth, Aeneas carefully made himself useful to the dignitaries of Basel, to the Council's pope, then to the Emperor Frederick III, and finally to the Roman papacy. His good style, facetious imagination, and worldliness helped him throughout his career, and when it became possible for him to look forward to high office in the church he experienced a mild spiritual conversion and took the necessary holy orders; as Bishop first of Trieste (1447), then of his own Siena (1449), he served both the Emperor and the Roman Pope; in 1456 his service to both parties was rewarded with the dignity of Cardinal Priest of Santa Sabina, and in 1458, on the death of Calixtus III, he was elected to the papacy.

Following a period of neglect Methodist historiography in the three decades since 1930 has taken a new start. The keynote of this revived interest is not antiquarian but existential, and manifests a concern for the recovery of the Methodist heritage as roots for the faith of the present. Curiously, this interest in the denominational background arises in part from increasing participation in the Ecumenical Movement. Methodists have felt that they had something of their own to offer, but were not quite sure what it was.

There are growing evidences of a sense of concern with respect to the interpretation accorded Adolf Harnack and his liberal colleagues in the three decades since his death. As a result, appeals have been made for a re-evaluation of liberal theology, and of Harnack in particular. Certainly one of the tasks which is pre-requisite to such a reassessment is a consideration of the historical situation which shaped Harnack's thought and in some measure, at least, determined the options for his own position. Perhaps this article may contribute to this preliminary discussion, and nothing more ambitious than a consideration of Harnack's background and cultural environment, with a concluding characterization of his position, will be attempted here.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries progressivism and social Christianity were two answers to the need of that day for social action and reform. A study of the social philosophy of Josiah Strong, a leader in the movement for applied Christianity, provides an interesting illustration of the harmony of the social ideas of these two movements.

If in our previous section, we attempted to show how the Papacy discovered the possibilities which the East-West alliance possessed with regard to the healing of the schism, this final section will indicate how the East-West alliance became pregnant with menace for the Roman Church and thus destructive of all hopes for a reconciliation between Rome and Constantinople. Indeed, as we shall show, all plans for church union, on either side, now disappear into a welter of conflicting ambitions whose focus was southern Italy and the Norman Kingdom of Roger II.