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In 1641, the Congregational minister Thomas Goodwin delivered a series of sermons to his independent church in London, expounding the letter to the Ephesians in characteristically meticulous detail. Goodwin had recently returned to England after a brief but formative period of religious exile in the Netherlands, and as the Sundays passed, his auditors were surely moved by the oratory of a speaker so “blessed with a rich invention and a solid and exact judgment.” The minister's breadth was equally impressive. The sermons opened up a cornucopia of Christian themes, flowing from one topic to the next as Goodwin's capacious mind found stimulus in the scriptural text. Seemingly eager to follow every possible digression, application, and excursus, Goodwin's unhurried pace required thirty-six sermons simply to exhaust the epistle's first chapter. And yet, amid this abundance of subject matter, one issue in particular arrested Goodwin's attention. While delivering his thirty-fifth discourse on Ephesians, Goodwin paused to consider what he described as “the Great question of these times” and, alternatively, “the great Controversy of the times.” By the middle of 1641, Goodwin's world was experiencing an unprecedented upheaval—England had been invaded by Scottish covenanters, the archbishop of Canterbury had been arrested and imprisoned, and the king had been forced to call a parliament he would be unable to dissolve. Yet Goodwin's “great Controversy” turned not upon political or cultural convulsion but rather upon a seemingly obscure point of ecclesiastical polity, a question not often considered by modern historians and even less often fully appreciated: “the great Question of these times,” said Goodwin, was “whether yea or no . . . many congregations, many Churches united in one may not be called one particular Church.” What did this strangely worded question mean to Goodwin and his hearers, and why did the future president of Magdalen College and religious adviser to the Lord Protector deem this rather specific query the very hinge upon which the nation's future turned? To answer these questions, we must consider how the early modern English mind understood the idea of a “national church”—for though he does not explicitly invoke the term, it was, as we will see, a concept embedded at the very center of Goodwin's “great Controversy.”

The Church of Ireland in the later seventeenth century faced many challenges. After two decades of war and effective suppression, the church in 1660 had to reestablish itself as the national church of the kingdom of Ireland in the face of opposition from both Catholics and Dissenters, who together made up nearly ninety percent of the island's population. While recent scholarship has illuminated Irish protestantism as a social group during this period, the theology of the established church remains unexamined in its historical context. This article considers the theological arguments used by members of the church hierarchy in sermons and tracts written between 1660 and 1689 as they argued that the Church of Ireland was both a true apostolic church and best suited for the security and salvation of the people of Ireland. Attention to these concerns shows that the social and political realities of being a minority church compelled Irish churchmen to focus on basic arguments for an episcopal national establishment. It suggests that this focus on first principles allowed the church a certain amount of ecclesiological flexibility that helped it survive later turbulence such as the non-jurors controversy of 1689–1690 fairly intact.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation . By Charles Keith . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2012. 333 pp. $49.95 hardcover.Book Reviews and NotesCatholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation, by Charles Keith, is a well-written and brilliantly researched investigation into the history of the church in colonial Vietnam. By exploring the trajectory of the church-congregant relationship, Keith provides a narrative that is significant not only for the colonial period, but for understanding the politics of early years of independence that led up to the U.S.-Vietnam War. In his analysis of the colonial period, Keith argues that while the French missionary-run church certainly affected inequalities that correlated with race, congregants and indigenous priests nonetheless maintained their faith in part because they developed ties to global Catholic community. After World War I, when Vatican reforms allowed for a national church to develop, Vietnamese Catholics came to envision themselves as part of a Vietnamese national, as well as a global, Catholic community. Consequently, Vietnam's Catholics began to reconsider their relationship with missionaries and colonialism, leaving the church in Vietnam deeply divided.The forte of Catholic Vietnam is its methodology. The author draws from a vast empirical base of Vietnamese and French language sources including church archives in the Vatican; the League of Human Rights archives, the Societe de Saint Sulpice archives, and the Foreign Missions archives in France; state archives in Vietnam and France; as well as an array of published sources, including Vietnamese- and French-language church bulletins and newspapers. As a result, Catholic Vietnam thoroughly explores the complexities of the colonial Catholic community, its multitude of voices, and the ways in which congregants understood their place as French colonized people in a global Catholic Church. In doing so, this book re-centers the historiographical discussion of the Vietnamese Catholic Church to focus on Vietnamese congregants and the development of a Vietnamese Church.The chapters of Catholic Vietnam are organized chronologically. Keith begins in the late eighteenth century by tracing the development of missionary activity and church life as France established colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. The first chapter--one of the most interesting in the book--reconstructs the village life of Catholic congregants. As a cultural history of the nineteenth century, this chapter is part of a recent refreshing turn in Vietnamese historiography to revisit the Nguyen Century, including recent works by Nguyen Van Marshall, Bradly Davis, and Katie Dyt.Chapter 2 explores how metropolitan debates over the separation of church and state played out in the early years of French colonization, when anticolonial rebels fought the colonial state. Keith found that within the context of this friction between the Catholic Church and the Republican-led colonial administration, the influence of European religious authorities over Catholic life grew repressive. In the 1920s, chapter 3 shows, the Vatican enacted new policies that, among other things, solve this problem as well as that of the decline European religiosity. This chapter demonstrates how those changes made by the Vatican put the Vietnamese Church on the road towards forming an independent national church. …

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)ForumDuring the nineteenth century, over 300 missionary periodicals were established in Britain,18 along with hundreds in North America, Europe, and the colonial world, yet little has been written about the rationale behind their establishment.19 From their beginnings as sources of intelligence, periodicals developed into vehicles of influence by the first decades of the nineteenth century, with missionary organizations also using this reduplicated commodity to deliberately persuade and mold public attitudes.20 This article examines some thirty inaugural editorials and first volume prefaces to Protestant missionary periodicals, including those from "new series," to uncover how editors justified their establishment to their potential readership.The growth in nineteenth-century evangelical Protestant missionary endeavors was reflected in increased numbers of missionary specific periodicals.21 Given the frequent presence of an "Editorial Notice," "Prospectus," "Introductory Remarks," "Unser Programm (our program)" or a more personable notice, such as "To our readers," in the inaugural issues it can be assumed that the establishment of a missionary periodical was not self evident, but required justification.22 These texts ranged from a short paragraph to ten pages long. Their positioning at the beginning of the periodical, or, very rarely, as an epilogue or "Salutatory,"23 was a didactical tool that encouraged the reading of the periodical in the way that the editor(s) intended.The predominantly male editors of these publications sought to create distinct audiences. Society periodicals justified their establishment by acknowledging their need to communicate with their disparate members, supporters, and patrons as well as with young missionary societies such as the Presbyterian Church's Western Foreign Missionary Society, hoping that their periodical would help them become known.24 Denominational periodicals, such as the General Baptist Magazine, Repository, and Missionary Observer (London, 1854), noted in their preface the "bond of union, and as such a source of strength" provided by their publication.25 In contrast, intra-denominational, non-denominational and supra-societal publications reached beyond any defined, single audiences. These latter periodicals can be divided between a national model and a digest model. The American Missionary Register (New York, 1820), as a national supra-societal publication, explicitly stated the seven societies in the United States that they would report upon, and thus positioned itself as the national authority.26 An early periodical, the New York Missionary Magazine (New York, 1800) justified its establishment in fulfilling a national need so that the American readership could obtain intelligence about the "heathen" mission work in "our own land" from a local, not foreign, periodical.27 Such periodicals intentionally and actively created national church identities separate to international churches.28 Digest publications, such as Evangelisches Missions-Magazin (Basel, 1857), aimed to synthesize material from multiple languages, providing the lay audience with missionary news, reports, and book reviews that spanned denominational, linguistic, and geographical boundaries.29 Subsequent periodicals, such as the Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift (Gutersloh, 1874), followed this model,30 with digests advertising themselves as saving both time and money.31 The increase in cheap secular as well as religious periodicals from the 1820s, due to affordable access to technology,32 ensured that the affordability of publication was stressed within inaugural addresses of missionary periodicals, so that all could be privy to "the progress of truth and righteousness in heathen lands."33 I.Respectability Through Didactic and Edifying MaterialNineteenth-century missionary periodicals aimed at respectability, by providing content that was informative, authoritative, edifying, and occasionally entertaining. …

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England . By Paul C. H. Lim . Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2012. xvi + 448 pp. $74.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesIn early modern England, religious disputation suffused the culture of Protestantism. The Reformation gave birth to a national church "established by law" and governed by the Crown, a profound restructuring of authority that ended papal hegemony but not discussion of what constituted an appropriately Protestant theology. For the past fifty years or so, scholars have mapped this religious culture in vivid depth and detail. Paul Lim's learned book takes up a theme that has been explored previously, but which is also in need of a fresh consideration. The doctrine of the Trinity opened up the question of Christ's divinity: was He to be worshipped in His own right, or was God the Father the sole focus of devotion? This was a question that engaged the attention of the early church, and it continued unabated in seventeenth-century England. Lim's book draws these two contexts together and offers some important insights into the religious, political and intellectual culture of early modern England.In 1645 the Independent minister John Owen made a marginal note on the doctrine of the Trinity. He described it as "that mysterious Arke that must not bee pryed into . . . wherein plain Scripture goeth not before." Here was the problem in its essence. That is, there were aspects of received doctrine that came under scrutiny and which could not be accepted as mere mysteries. To many, this reliance on mystery cut to the heart of what was wrong with Catholic theology: it elevated the clergy and traditions of the church to a level of authority that both usurped the scriptures and enslaved the reason of individual believers. However, Protestant ecclesiology did not depend on a wholesale repudiation of tradition; rather, it had to be re-interpreted and re-written. This process was aided by the parallel development in humanist textual and critical scholarship that defined the late Renaissance: for humanists ad fontes meant a return to the classical sources in their pure form, an impulse complemented by the Protestant attachment to sola scriptura --an unbending adherence to the authority of the Word. This is the view expressed in Owen's note to himself.Broadly speaking, Mystery Unveiled examines how writers active in theological disputes during the 1640s and 1650s engaged with the rich textual history of the church, poring over its patristic authors, scrutinizing the judgements of its councils (beginning with Nicea), and, of course, attempting to make plain what it was that the scripture said on the matter of the godhead. This is done in six chapters, each based on a deep and assured encounter with polemical and manuscript sources. The first examines the anti-trinitarianism of two prominent writers on trinitarianism: Paul Best and John Biddle, former Cambridge friends whose scholarly exchanges shed light on the approach to scriptural and patristic sources in the heat of polemical battle. …

Four thousand miles of ocean divided the plantation colonies of the first British Empire from the English metropole, a great physical distance that was augmented by the cultural divergence that divided those slave societies from England. Colonists in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina thus made the re-creation of English ritual ways central to their ordering of the colonial experience. In particular, the preservation of the English liturgical year and its ritual enactment offered opportunities to connect colonial experience to metropolitan ideal. Confronted with seasons and crops that did not square meteorologically with English experience, colonists sought the comfort of maintaining English calendrical norms as much as possible. Within parish boundaries, colonists built churches in which the parish community could gather for the carefully scheduled, well-ordered worship of the English national church. The English Sabbath was central to the passage of time in weekly units, a day set apart for the church's liturgy, rest from labor, and social gatherings. The great and minor festivals of the Christian year and the daily office offered similar opportunities for Christian teaching and social fellowship, just as the celebration of state holidays connected these distant outposts of the empire to the Protestant national narrative that held an increasingly British people together. These ways of ordering time lent meaning to days that otherwise slipped by amid the routines of agricultural, commercial, and domestic life.

The first generations of black Christians in Southern Africa went through a painful process of critical examination and experiment as they struggled to assimilate new economic, social, and religious values. These values were presented to them mainly by white missionaries and were based largely on European models. It was as part of this dialectical process that an independent black churches movement—quickly labeled by friends and foes the “Ethiopian Movement”—had emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. The independent black churches spread and multiplied rapidly in South Africa. By 1919 there were seventy-six recognized sects; however, there were many more which were not officially recognized. A black newspaper reported in 1921 that there were “at least one thousand natives within the municipal boundary of Johannesburg who call themselves ministers, but who are unattached to any recognised chuch, and who live on the offerings of their respective flocks.” Although many members of these churches were active politically, the most pervasive influence of the movement was on the ideology of African nationalism, as the role of the church became a recurring theme in debates on the development of an African national identity.

The national church of Armenia has enjoyed an autonomous status within the community of Christian churches since the late fourth century. At that time King Pap broke its ties with Caesarea of Cappadocia, the city in which Gregory the Illuminator, the apostle of Armenia, had received his mandate and consecration. Thereafter the hierarchy of the church was chosen within the nation according to its own rules. The head of the church, the catholicos, was the chief bishop of the Armenians and, like the kingship, the catholicate became an hereditary office according to a custom established by Gregory himself.

In April 1895, the Pittsburgh Catholic, the official diocesan newspaper, proudly reported: the “progress” of Catholicism “is conspicuously marked in this diocese by the steady increase of churches to accom[m]odate the faithful”.This glowing assessment was prompted by news that the city's first Slovak Catholic church, Saint Elizabeth's, had been organized. Saint Elizabeth's came into existence because Slovak lay Catholics had taken it upon themselves to found a national church. If the diocese defined “progress” as an increase in the number of churches, Pittsburgh's Slovak immigrants certainly contributed to that progress during the next decade. By 1909, lay-initiated movements had led to the formation of three more Slovak Catholic churches in Pittsburgh.

Over one hundred years have passed since the conception in 1865 of what became known as the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. This statement of Episcopalian, ecumenical principles was conceived by William R. Huntington (1838–1909), acknowledged leader of the denomination's House of Deputies, liturgical scholar, and “first presbyter” of his generation.1 Huntington was inspired by the national disunity of the Civil War years and by the reunion of the states in 1865 to seek some means of uniting the country's churches. At the same time he recognized that the Episcopal church stood in need reform if it were to serve in any way whatever as an agent of reconciliation. The result was the famous Quadrilateral. Its author designed his proposal both as a statement of “the true Anglican position” and as a basis for church unity, soon to be expressed, it was hoped, in a comprehensive, national church for America.