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.

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.

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.

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.