A new feature at the December 1971 meeting of the American Society of Church History in New York was a series of historiographical seminars. These seminars (in early church history, Reformation history and American church history) were designed to give members of the society an opportunity to meet in a somewhat less formal setting than the customary paper-response session and to discuss areas of mutual interest and concern in their respective fields. Each seminar took a different form. In the section on early church, three panelists were asked to present brief statements on recent works in the field.

Conciliarism at the Fifth Lateran Council? Despite the current interest in things conciliar this is a strange and, no doubt to some, a rather forced juxta position. For what, after all, is there to be said about it? The council may indeed have been a great non-event in the religious history of the sixteenth century but it was surely a highly papalist non-event. Was it not, in form and procedure, a faithful copy of the papal general councils of the pre-Conciliar era—of Lateran IV (1215), of Lyons (1274), of Vienne (1311)? To what did it owe its convocation if not the desire of Julius II to cut the ground from under the feet of the dissident conciliabulum of Pisa (1511–12)—itself, of course, summoned by the cardinals of the opposition with the support of the French king and very much a conciliarist's council? Were not the first half-dozen sessions occupied almost exclusively with the condemnation of the activities of that council, the proscription of those who persisted in adhering to it and the reconciliation of those who had abandoned it? Did not the eleventh session witness the definitive rejection of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, the base from which for so long conciliarist thinkers had been able to operate with impunity? Did it not witness also the unambiguous assertion of the superiority of pope to council, and was not this principle underlined in practice by the craven responsiveness of the council fathers to papal demands? And so on. It is easy enough to envisage the questions, the queries, the dissents.1

Ecclesiastical discipline is the one area of church order in which Johannes Brenz, one of the most important architects of the sixteenth-century Lutheran territorial state church, signally failed to achieve his purposes.1 During his career in Schwäbisch Hall (1522–1548) and later in Württemberg (1550–1570) Brenz tried repeatedly, but ultimately without success, to establish an order of ecclesiastical discipline which would include effective use of the penalty of excommunication. An examination of the reasons for this failure may throw some light on the limits of what could be achieved within the context of the state church.

Newman's famous poem “Lead, Kindly Light” (originally titled “The Pillar of the Cloud”) was written on his return trip to England from Italy in 1833. He had been touring the Mediterranean countries for eight months, the last three of which were spent battling a near-fatal illness in Sicily. On recovering from this illness, he returned to England rejuvenated by his trip and eager for some pending ecclesiastical project. Immediately on his return to Oxford he became involved in the early organizational discussions from which the Oxford Movement evolved. In light of this intensified engagement in reform activities on his return to England, his poem “Lead, Kindly Light” has impressed his biographers as a revealing statement of his resolve to engage in those activities from which he had shrunk only months before. The lines “I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou shouldst lead me on” and “Pride ruled my will; remember not past years” seem especially to express this shift in resolve. The autobiographical thrust of the poem has therefore seemed quite unmistakable.1

Adolf Christian Stoecker (1835–1909) has been remembered as a court preacher in Berlin (1874–1890), the founder of the Christian Socialist Workers' Party in 1878, a conservative member of the Reichstag for most of the last thirty years of his life, an ardent nationalist, an early anti-Semitic voice, a prime mover in the Berlin City Mission, a prolific journalist, a powerful preacher and a leader in the freie Volkskirche movement. One significant aspect of this controversial political pastor that has been neglected is his critique of Marxist socialism.1 It should be noted that the significance of this critique is due as much to the fact that it was among the first to be formulated from within an explicitly Christian perspective as to the content of the critique itself.2

Extensive discussion of the origin and nature of Black Christianity in America has in recent years linked together two issues which are logically distinct: the degree of uniqueness attributable to the beliefs of Afro-Americans, and whether or to what extent their faith sustained resistance to the system of slavery. Abundant evidence that slaveowners hoped Christian instruction would persuade Black people to asquiesce in their bondage has been readily taken for proof that acquiescence was in fact the usual result of their conversion. This questionable conclusion has sometimes led to another: that such religious notions as occasionally inspired resistance were brought from Africa and were uniquely the heritage of Black men. According to this view, the biblical rationales for revolt such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner appear to have employed were merely a gloss upon ideas of freedom and justice which they and their people had long held.

Church historians have generally tended to ignore American Universalism. This was not because Universalists were unmindful of their past. Several works were produced in the nineteenth century trying to prove through Scripture and history the fact that the idea of universal salvation was always a part of the mesage of Christianity from the days of the apostles through the Reformation down to the modern era. It was an important argument in their voluminous debates and an essential ingredient of their theology. They were rather proud of this heritage. It cannot be said, therefore, that Universalism failed to produce its own historians. The problem for scholars of all disciplines has been that until recently there were no reliable sources available which dealt with American Universalism. Yet Universalism needs to be understood, for it helped to humanize the church through its teachings that God was a God of love and that he cared to save each and everyone of his children.

In the article entitled “English Civil War Politics and the Religious SettleInent” by Lawrence Kaplan in the September 1972 issue, page 314, the last two lines of the last paragraph should read: “It has been observed by many historians37 that the English Church was, by Scottish standards, a somewhat anemic affair. Certainly it had a distinct Erastian flavor to it.38”