On 26 May 1434, the sisters of the Abbaye Saint-Georges de Rennes filed into their chapter house. Their abbess had died two days previously, and following her burial in the abbey church the abbey's prioress had called a meeting to plan the election of a new leader for the community.

Like many great theologians, Jonathan Edwards was a polemicist. Although he kept extensive personal notebooks in which he developed his views concerning scripture interpretation and doctrinal theology, in most instances he did not publish these views without the catalyst afforded by theological controversy. Throughout the course of Edwards's ministry Arminianism was his constant foe. In the 1730s he published a number of anti-Arminian sermons and actively opposed the ordination of Robert Breck, an Arminian sympathizer. He also viewed the revivals as falling within the scope of this anti-Arminian polemic. In Faithful Narrative (1737) he expressed concern over the spread of Arminianism in the Connecticut Valley and portrayed the revival as working directly against this tendency. Likewise in Some Thoughts (1743) he predicted that the activity of the Holy Spirit in the revivals would “entirely overthrow their scheme of religion” and suggested, “Now is a good time for Arminians to change their principles.” In the late 1740s on several occasions he recorded his intention to write “something particularly and largely on the Arminian controversy, in distinct discourses on the various points in dispute.” Although he was temporarily distracted from this proposed project by the communion controversy in Northampton, he began to carry it out soon after the move to Stockbridge, publishing Freedom of the Will in 1754.

John Orvis, Eliab W. Capron, Mary L. Cox, and Abraham Brooke were four Quakers who had much in common. Geographically they were widely separated: Orvis lived at Ferrisburg, Vermont; Capron at Walworth, New York; Cox near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; and Brooke in Clinton County, Ohio. All, however, were Hicksite Friends committed to abolition, the principles of nonresistance, and the repudiation of all coercive force. All selfconsciously patterned themselves on the early Friends by bearing witness to what they saw as truth, whether in Friends' meetinghouses or in the churches of the “world's people.” And all shared the same fate: disownment for “disunity.”

Methodist studies of the last four decades have insisted that Methodism be seen as a distinctive intellectual tradition with its own integrity. These studies have corrected the excesses of an earlier experiential interpretation. Although some may still characterize Wesley's Christianity as “almost totally devoid of intellectual content,” the subjects of Wesley, of Methodism, and of the American Holiness Movement can now no longer be reduced to merely an unreflective warm-hearted piety. Current studies have especially highlighted several distinct Wesleyan theological developments. These include the displacement of election and predestination by a religious assurance from the witness of the spirit, the tension between salvation by holy living and salvation by faith alone, an emphasis on vital Christian experience in theological reflection, and especially the development of a Protestant understanding of Christian perfection or holiness. As Henry Rack states, Wesley “softened the hard edges of Calvinism” with an Arminian accent and moved the center of Protestantism so that justification became “the door into the pilgrimage of holiness” rather than the Lutheran cradle or the Calvinist promise. Wesley's prominence in Jaroslav Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine indicates the growing acceptance of this Methodist intellectual history.

The Third Reich's Kirchenkampf (church struggle) is sometimes mistakenly understood as referring to the Protestant churches' resistance to National Socialism. In fact, the term refers to an internal dispute between members of the Bekennende Kirche [Confessing Church (hereafter BK)] and members of the Deutsche Christen [German Christians (hereafter DC)] over control of the Protestant church. While not all members of the BK opposed Hitler's policies, the movement called for an autonomy of the church from National Socialist legal measures, particularly the racial laws, motivated both by theological and political considerations. The DC, by contrast, sought to introduce National Socialist policies and ideology into the church, especially Nazi racial laws, and modify church doctrine in accord with National Socialist ideology. Yet the antisemitism at the heart of the DC has been either ignored or marginalized by most historians. Indeed, some historians have incorrectly suggested that the DC underwent a dissolution at the end of 1933, from which it never recovered, or have presented the DC as a political creation of National Socialism, ignoring its theological roots.