The question of the church's stand during the first three and a half centuries on Christians enlisting in the Roman army has received much attention since 1900. With slight overlapping, modern historians of the encounter of Christians with the Roman military fall into three basic groups: Roman Catholic, Protestant pacifist and “establishment” Protestant, primarily Lutheran.

“Lies always limp arid are easily caught. It is difficult for them to escape the verdict of a keen, quick intellect.”Thus wrote Petrarch to Emperor Charles IV regarding the authenticity of a document which purported to exempt ”Austria” from imperial jurisdiction. But even Petrarch with his “keen, quick intellect” might have had difficulty in detecting another besetting sin of his day—but by no means only of his day—plagiarism. For by its very nature plagiarism tends to remain silent whereas one lie, as Marc Bloch once observed, “drags in its train many others, summoned to lend it a semblance of mutual support.” A keen, quick intellect, then, though very helpful, may not always be enough to detect a plagiarism; a thorough familiarity with the sources and the secondary literature on the subject in question as well as a great deal of painstaking correlation may also be necessary once suspicion has been aroused. The investigator may also need a “little bit o' luck” as the song of My Fair Lady would have it. What follows has something to do with both lies and plagiarism. Considerably more important, it revolves around two pivotal interpretations of the sixteenth-century religious radical and social revolutionary, Thomas Müntzer, the erstwhile scapegoat of the Reformation era but since rehabilitated by Wilhelm Zimmermann and now the hero of the Marxist interpretation of the Reformation.

One of the unsolved problems of the history of sixteenth-century thought is that of the relation between humanism and religion. A key figure here was Desiderius Erasmus. Unfortunately, although exhaustive studies have been devoted to Erasmus as a Renaissance figure, not enough is known of his place in the Reformation. Compared to research into other aspects of his work, his place as a theologian has been neglected. And while several scholars have attempted to trace his influence upon some of the Protestant reformers, scant attention has been paid to his impact upon the Wittenberg leaders, especially in regard to justification. It is generally known that Luther and Melanchthon made diligent use of the Greek New Testment published by Erasmus in 1516. But the accompanying Annotations, as well as the subsequent Paraphrases, have largely been overlooked in the Erasmus research, and their impression upon the theology of the Wittenberg reformation has scarcely been investigated. With the quadricentennial observance of the Formula of Concord close at hand, this kind of study seems especially appropriate.

It has typically been said of the English Reformation that the doctrine of unconditional predestination (that is, predestination without foreknowledge of merit or repentance but soley as an act of God's will to redeem some of mankind as a manifestation of grace) was neither emphasized nor of central importance until the “Genevan” influence of the returning Marian exiles and the wide dissemination of Calvin's writings in England after the accession of Elizabeth. It is the purpose of this article to show that, (1) a soteriologically rooted doctrine of unconditional predestination of the type characteristic of the so-called “Rhineland Reformers” was central to key figures of the early English Reformation, was accepted and expressed by many other leaders and theological writers of the English Reformation prior to the accession of Mary and was upheld by important and influential continental divines resident in England; (2) the doctrine of predestination in the English Reformation had been developed to the point of reprobation and double predestination and frequently expressed as such before 1553; (3) while this predestinarian emphasis in English Protestant theology was to a large extent the result of the influence of the continental Reformation, it had been received prior to the return of the Genevan exiles and the pervasive influence of Calvin in Elizabethan England. Thus the Genevan influence reinforced and further refined English predestinarian theology. It might be added that Calvin's influence ought not to be considered an unusually harsh one with respect to predestination; not only does Calvin follow the general pattern of earlier Reformed theology, but also does Reformed theology in the later part of the sixteenth century tend toward a more rigid and scholastic version of the doctrine quite apart from Calvin, whose real influence could well operate in the opposite direction, as the recent study by Brian Armstrong shows.

The occasion of this article is the appearance of V. Norskov Olsen's John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley, San Francisco and London: University of California Press, 1973, xi + 264 pages, $11.50). Gleanings from numerous other volumes dealing with Foxe, and from editions of his works, will also be reflected in this treatment. Professor Olsen has closely studied Foxe both as an author and as a churchman moving in the ecclesiastical environment of the Tudor era. His book, however, offers neither a biography of Foxe nor an account of the Elizabethan church. Instead it sheds light on numerous incidents in which Foxe played some part in the history of the church, and clarifies his relation to Puritanism and the establishment. The most distinct impression left in the reader's mind is that of the personality of Foxe as Olsen sees him, namely, a man of widely varied interests and talents but of unified purpose, an irenic spirit amid contending forces, playing a minor role in public while laboriously engaged in the research and writing that brought him lasting fame and influence. One paragraph seems to cry out for repetition here:

Athough Quakers had always cautioned their brethren about the perils of wealth, in late eighteenth-century America a generation of Quakers arose that criticized wealth far more severely than any of its forebears had. These critics included John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, two of the most renowned Quakers since George Fox, as well as a score of Friends who were the liveliest members of the church in the eighteenth century. That these men should focus their critical attention on the spiritually corrosive effect of wealth, when their predecessors had not, may be explained in part by the passing of a century in which Friends used the time to accumulate fortunes, in part by some deeply quietistic Friends' discovery of an inherent conflict between materialism and spiritual religion and in part by the political situation of late eighteenth-century American Friends, which illuminated the tension between Friends' devotion to their property and their devotion to their religious ethics.

For those wishing to generalize about the Victorians the Great Exhibition of 1851 usually proves irresistable. But it does seem an obvious omission that so little is said about the disorders which kept the country upended during the preceding six months, that is, during the episode of the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the “Papal Aggression”. Christopher Dawson has urged that the one needs the other to symbolize properly the Victorian frame of mind. Here I wish to outline the underlying causes of this last great outburst of No-Popery feeling in an effort to trace the paradox of the aroused, angry, bigoted Guy Fawkes Day-men of November appearing the next summer as the staid, curious and progressive-minded citizens sunning themselves in the glory of all that glittering machinery so carefully displayed beneath the vaulted glass dome of their Crystal Palace.

In A Handbook of Christian Theology Jerald C. Brauer notes that “the kingdom of God is one of the most fruitful yet controversial concepts in Christian theology. It has been employed to uphold the status quo, and it has been a revolutionary ideal used to break social forms and customs.”1 This bibliographical survey will list articles and books that deal with the kingdom of God and closely related subjects in the history of Christianity, concentrating on the West.2