The editors of Vox Theologica have asked me for a “survey of Zwingli research in the last five to ten years.” However, to understand this subject thematically and methodologically one must go farther back. For the prevailing image of Zwingli today has been formed by three well-known books: 1) Die Kirchenratsauswahl, 1918; 2) Paul Wernle, Zwingli, 1919; 3) Walther Köhler, Huldrych Zwingli, 1943/1954. Walther Köhler (1870–1946), a native of strongly Reformed Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Professor of Church History in Zürich from 1909 to 1929, himself theologically of liberal orientation, was one of the foremost authorities not only on the Reformation as a whole but also on the other movements of the sixteenth century, especially Humanism and Anabaptism. Through countless books, articles and reviews, and through his introductions in the great critical edition of Zwingli's works, he became actually the dean of Zwingli research. Even those who, like this writer, did not know him personally and who differ from him on essential points owe him reverence.

Historians for some time now have tried to solve the extremely complex and very interesting problem of whether or not the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth-century represented a reaction against or an extension of Renaissance attitudes and ideas. Debate over whether or not the Reformation was essentially medieval or modern has taken several forms. One of the methods used to approach the problem has been that of studying in detail the life and thought of certain leaders of the Protestant movement in order to ascertain whether they were basically men of the Middle Ages or individuals who contributed substantially to the making of the modern world. Pierre Viret was one of those early champions of the Protestant drive for reform, in particular of that branch of the Protestant Reformation later known as Calvinism. This study represents an attempt to demonstrate to what extent he was influenced by Renaissance attitudes and ideas.

Four hundred years ago, on December 4, 1563, the Council of Trent held its twenty-fifth and last solemn session. During eighteen difficult years it dominated the ecclesiastical affairs of Europe and its influence was felt far and wide even in the temporal order. No one in Christendom was indifferent to its proceedings, for the issues involved in this Council touched in one way or another the lives of all. In the course of the years it was supported and resisted in turn by their Catholic majesties, Charles V and Francis I, as well as by the Protestant Estates of Germany. Vituperated by Luther and Calvin and avoided by the evangelical theologians it became a wall of separation between the old and the new orders. United Christendom, which witnessed its convocation in 1545, had vanished as a reality before its closure in 1563. Assembled under trying conditions it was almost doomed to failure before it commenced; the task, which confronted this reform council, was gigantic. For it was asked to revitalize and renew the Church weighed down with the burden of the centuries. In effect, the reform, which the Fathers of this Council achieved, initiated the transformation of the medieval into the modern Church.

As a result of Father Albert J. Loomie's recent volume, The Spanish Elizabethans, this descriptive phrase would appear to be a dramatic designation for English Catholic exiles in Philip II's dominions. However, it seems equally appropriate to use the appelation with reference to a much less known and smaller group, the Spanish Calvinist refugees of Elizabethan London. The latter were organized into a congregation in the early 1560's by Cassiodoro de Reina; to a very considerable extent the success and collapse of this church parallels its pastor's career, as we shall see.

The classical period for the establishment of the legal guarantees of religious freedom in America is the final quarter of the eighteenth century, otherwise known as the Revolutionary Era. Yet, enshrined in our national memory as the great hero of liberty of conscience is not a man of this classical period, but a doughty seventeenth century colonial—Roger Williams. The object of the present study is to view this hero in time and space—in that particular time remembered as the Revolutionary Era and that particular space occupied by thirteen colonies out to become a nation.

Shortly after the turn of the century Ernst Troeltsch joined Max Weber in examining the history of religious organizations from the point of view of the newly evolving discipline of sociology. Of the contributions Troeltsch made in his monumental study, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, the one which has proved most stimulating when applied to American church history was his differentiation of sect-type from church-type religious organization. In 1929, H. Richard Niebuhr in his Social Sources of Denoniinationalisrn elaborated Troeltsch's ideas, especially as they related to American developments, suggesting that in the American environment the denomination occupied a midway position between church and sect. While Troeltsch hints at the tendency of the sect to acquire churchly characteristics in time, Niebuhr spells out the steps in the process of transformation from sect to denomination which he sees as following inevitably, arguing that each generation's sects must become denominations in the next generation. These in turn leave behind a new group of disinherited whose needs are unmet and from which spring the next sect movement.