The controversy over Origenism that erupted in the last years of the fourth century and the opening years of the fifth has puzzled many students of the period: no single identifiable theological issue seemed at stake. At the center of the Arian controversy lay a debate over the subordination (or nonsubordination) of the Son to the Father; in the fifth-century christological disputes Jesus' “nature” or “natures” prompted disagreement. But what was the focus of the Origenist controversy: the subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the Father? the “fall” of the rational creatures into bodies? the restoration of the Devil? the interpretation of resurrection from the dead?

The fourteenth-century scholastic was obsessed with the problem of truth. One manifestation of this interest was the development of the highly abstract disciplines of formal logic and epistemology, by the study of which, philosophers and theologians believed, it would be possible to arrive at the truth with greater confidence. But the successors of Ockham and Holcot were interested in more than mere abstractions: they wished to establish a means by which the truth, once discovered, could be validated and its accuracy guaranteed to laity. When the truth in question was a point of Christian doctrine, this concern took on a special urgency. Confronted by an alarming array of both academic and popular heresies, the church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries could no longer be satisfied simply to assert the infallibility of Christian truth sub specie aeternitatis; it was ever more necessary to make determinations of Christian truth and falsehood in this life. There resulted occasionally heated and always interesting debates over the nature and distribution of doctrinal authority.

Melchior Hoffman, the Swabian furrier turned Reformation lay preacher, played a minor role in the early stages of the Danish Reformation, as preacher, polemicist, and printer. This paper will address some of the remaining problems in the narrative of Hoffman's Danish tenure and reassess some of the longstanding interpretations.

Many twentieth-century historians of early modern England have assumed that ecclesiastical jurisdication was a lost cause after the Restoration, and thus, in contrast to earlier periods, there has been little research on eighteenth-century ecclesiastical courts. However, an examination of the Correction Court records for the Diocese of Carlisle between 1704 and 1758 and a summary survey of other dioceses suggest that such archives may prove useful for historians. This article uses the Carlisle Correction Court archive to study the charges which were brought to the court in the first half of the eighteenth century and, after a brief description of the social and economic setting, looks at the characteristics of the people brought to book.

The 1988 Centennial of the American Society of Church History should make us pause long enough to try to see Philip Schaff(1819–1893) whole and to appraise (if I may borrow a phrase) “the transient and permanent” in his life's work. Complementing George H. Shriver's centennial biography, Philip Schaff: Christian Scholarand Ecumenical Prophet (1987), in this essay I propose to sketch an intellectual portrayal of Schaff. My aim is to highlight and appraise briefly what is theologically significant in his total career as well as to place his life in the larger context of the history of theology and of the churches on both sides of the Atlantic.