It is not easy to edit an issue of a journal without the knowledge or participation of one of the two coeditors. But the editorial assistants, special editor, and I have done just that in the case of Jerald C. Brauer. He turns seventy late this summer, and in the name of the American Society of Church History, its Council, and the editorial advisory council of Church History and its staff, we dedicate this issue to him. Members of the Society and readers of this journal will be glad to hear that the Council asked him to remain in his coediting post and named him to another term.

At the recent meeting of the American Society of Church History in New York I was recollecting with a friend our common experience in a graduate seminar at the University of Chicago. In the course of that conversation we came to realize that the majority of the papers from the seminar eventually had found their way into print, in one form or another. We noted with satisfaction how seeds planted years ago had borne some fruit, but with that curious admixture of emotions that men and women reserve for their academic mentors, we also understood that finally the seminar was another page of testimony to the energetic intellectual leadership of the professor who had conducted it, Jerald C. Brauer.

Tertullian understood the apostle Paul to have suggested there would always be heretics (1 Cor. 11:19), and he presumed God had supplied scripture for their use. Without sacred literature heretics would have nothing of consequence to misread. Without contests over critical passages, there could be no winners, no losers—no heretics.1 The difficulty, Tertullian acknowledged, was that heretics were the poorest of losers; they never conceded defeat. He advised against trying to take (or take back) scripture passage by passage. The only way to get the best of heretics and get on with the work of interpreting texts correctly was to deny heretics' right to appeal to scripture.2 It had been supplied for them, but only to enable wayward expositors to identify themselves as heretics. This was Tertullian's version of “enough rope.” Heretics' expositions showed others how far the expositors deviated from the precious tradition originating with the apostles, and to assist those others apologists introduced a rule of faith condensing the apostles' instruction and tradition. Tertullian's several presentations of the rule of faith raise important questions; discrepancies prompt suspicion that no precise formulation or rule inspired consensus, that rules were rather makeshift. At the time, however, Tertullian obviously was more interested in another discrepancy, the one between his rule(s) expressing Christianity's incontrovertible truths and the opinions and exegesis of benighted heretics, for God provided heretics, apologists, and controversy to keep traditional or “regular” Christianity advancing on its proper course.3 Tertullian's confidence in the advance of Christianity is the subject of this paper. How did he come by it and just how did he relate the persistence of heresy to the progress of Christianity?

With the death of Duke George of Saxony on 17 April 1539, the Reformation lost one of its fiercest enemies, a leader of great prestige who not only resisted the Reformation, but actively campaigned against it.1 With the accession of his brother Heinrich, the Reformers gained an important ally, for the new duke had converted to Lutheranism in 1537. The union of Saxony, which had been divided a half-century before, under the banner of Protestantism would have been one of the great political triumphs of the new religious movement.2 The Reformers themselves certainly considered it a good sign.3

In 1566 when the Puritan ministers John Gough and John Philpot were suspended from their pulpits and banished from London for their refusal to wear the white outer robe, or surplice, marking their special holiness as priests of the church, a crowd of more than two hundred women gathered at London Bridge to cheer them on as they left the city. As Gough and Philpot crossed the bridge, the women pressed bags of food and bottles of drink on them, all the while “animating them most earnestly to stand fast in the same their doctrine.” That same year, when John Bartlett was also ordered to step down from his pulpit in London for refusing to wear the surplice, sixty women assembled at the home of his bishop to protest the suspension. Such demonstrations of women's support for Puritan ministers were not isolated events. As the historian of Elizabethan Puritanism Patrick Collinson asserted, “it was the women of London who occupied the front line in defence of their preachers, and with a sense of emotional engagement hardly exceeded by the suffragettes of three and a half centuries later.”

The history of Congregationalism in early eighteenth-century Boston has long been dominated by the figure of Cotton Mather (1663–1728), the learned pastor of Boston's Second Church. From Benjamin Franklin's notice of Mather's “do-good” campaign of Christian charitable works to recent scholarly studies of Mather's closet piety, historians have measured the religious mood of the period by the yardstick of ideas, joys, and complaints in Mather's voluminous writings. In the process, some questions about the history of Congregationalism have been answered, but historical understanding of the period has been hindered by the relative lack of scholarly attention to the theology of other members of the clergy who served Boston congregations in the decades leading up to the Great Awakening. Given the fact that the Boston clergy was divided between two parties, namely the Matherians1 and those opposed to them, it should be obvious that any assessment of this stage of Congregationalism that is based primarily on the testimony of one party will be untrustworthy. My purpose here is to outline the thinking of that other party, the “catholicks,” with particular attention to how they addressed Congregationalism's most pressing issue, the nature of public piety.

Throughout the 1720s and 1730s evangelical preachers sparked revivals from New England to New Jersey. In his long pastorate at Northampton, Massachusetts, Solomon Stoddard reported five “harvests” of souls in the Connecticut Valley. His grandson Jonathan Edwards succeeded him and led a spiritual awakening in 1734 and 1735 resulting in the “Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton and Neighboring Towns and Villages.” In the late 1720s the pietist minister Jacob Frelinghuysen inspired a renewal of piety among the Dutch Reformed in New York. At the same time the Presbyterian evangelists William and Gilbert Tennent reported revivals in the churches they had established between New Brunswick, New Jersey and Staten Island, New York.1 While sharing a common message, these evangelical revivals remained local, private affairs, contained within specific geographic and denominational boundaries. Although each proclaimed the necessity of a spiritual new birth and the primacy of divine grace in salvation, theawakenings did not expand into a larger, united movement.

When Canadians showed themselves off to the world at the international exposition at Montreal in 1967, Canadian Christianity presented itself in strikingly symbolic fashion.1 In the ecumenical spirit flourishing at the time, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches—which together represented the vast majority of Canadians—jointly sponsored a pavilion. In the experimental and critical spirit also flourishing at the time, the pavilion offered some disturbing reflections upon the fair's theme, ”Man and His World.“ A kaleidoscope of dramatic pictures and texts celebrated the possibilities of the “secular city,” but also reminded visitors how badly so many men (and women and children) were faring in their world.