Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Stepping Out Of Constantine’S Shadow, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Beginning in 1970 and continuing for forty years thereafter, Robert Markus informed and enlivened discussions of Constantinian Christianity. His impressive erudition still illumines our understanding of the period “during which Christian Romans came slowly to identify themselves with traditional Roman values, culture, practices, and established institutions.” Markus identifies the world in which that assimilation slowly occurred as “the secular.” Accustomed to hearing about assimilation of that sort when conversations turn to Christianity’s affirmations of—or accommodations to— democratic structures or, more pointedly, to civil religion, we may consider Markus politically correct. Yet because he conscripted Latin Christianity’s prolific paladin, Augustine of …

Clerical Leadership In Late Antiquity: Augustine On Bishops’ Polemical And Pastoral Burdens, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Augustine returned from Italy to North Africa in 388, apparently elated to have found his calling. The cities he had known, Thagaste and Carthage, and would soon come to know, Hippo Regius, were relatively prosperous, despite taxes collected for the central government which had been making increasing demands since the time of Emperor Constantine. The funds available for municipal improvements were depleted (gravement amputés), Claude Lepelley calculated, siting the African cities in “a history of inexorable decline” from the 380s into the 430s. In the coastal city of Hippo, however, Augustine, as bishop was busy from the late 390s, exchanging …

(Dis)Owning Constantinian Christianity, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

From 1970 until he took leave of the terrestrial city over forty years later, Robert Markus informed and enlivened our discussions of Constantinian Christianity. His impressive erudition still does. He was especially and insightfully concerned with the period “during which Christian Romans came slowly to identify themselves with traditional Roman values, culture, practices, and established institutions.” And he identified the world in which that assimilation “slowly” occurred as “the secular.” His readers were used to that assimilation in their time--our time--having heard references to civil religion, so Markus could well have been considered to be politically correct, and a number …

Deposito Diademate: Augustine’S Emperors, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

To assist colleagues from other disciplines who teach Augustine’s texts in their core courses, this contribution to the Lilly Colloquium discusses Augustine’s assessments of Emperors Constantine and Theodosius. His presentations of their tenure in office and their virtues suggest that his position on political leadership corresponds with his general skepticism about political platforms and platitudes. Yet careful reading of his revision of Ambrose’s account of Emperor Theodosius’s public penance and reconsideration of the last five sections of his fifth book City of God—as well as a reappraisal of several of his sermons on the Psalms—suggest that he proposes a radical …

Humility, Civility, And Vitality: Papal Leadership At The Turn Of The Seventh Century, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

In 416, Bishop Innocent I of Rome sent a colleague in Gubbio what was to become one of the most important set of liturgical instructions in early Christendom. Innocent composed his remarks on, inter alia, penitential discipline and prescribed gestures during the administration of the Sacraments to deter other bishops and their priests from improvising. He claimed that bishops of Rome, as successors of St. Peter, had the responsibility to authenticate ritual observances and achieve uniformity in Italy and elsewhere. Churches could not be left to alter or surrender valued practices because presiding priests or bishops thought them superfluous or …

Christian Realism And Augustinian (?) Liberalism, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Surely there is enough kindling lying about in the Bible and in subsequent moral theology to fire up love for neighbors and compassion for countless “friends” in foreign parts--and in crisis. And, surely, the momentum of love’s labor for the just redistribution of resources, fueled by activists’ appeals for solidarity, should be sustained by stressing that we are creatures made for affection, not for aggression. Yet experience, plus the history of the Christian traditions, taught Reinhold Niebuhr, who memorably reminded Christian realists, how often love was “defeated,” how a “strategy of brotherhood . . . degenerates from mutuality to a …

Dis-Manteling More, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, winner of the prestigious 2009 Booker-Man award for fiction, re-presents the 1520s and early 1530s from Thomas Cromwell's perspective. Mantel mistakenly underscores Cromwell's confessional neutrality and imagines his kindness as well as Thomas More's alleged cruelty. The book recycles old and threadbare accusations that More himself answered. "Dis-Manteling" collects evidence for the accuracy of More's answers and supplies alternative explanations for events and for More's attitudes that Mantel packs into her accusations. Wolf Hall is admirably readable, although prejudicial. Perhaps it is fair for fiction to distort so ascertainably, yet I should think that historians will …

Augustine And Corruption, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Augustine's political thought or, as it is often called, political theology is a matter of considerable dispute. 'Augustine and Corruption' approaches that dispute by examining the evidence that Ramsay MacMullen presented to substantiate his observation that Augustine 'approved of' corruption. I read that evidence differently and use Augustine's remarks about bribes paid to court clerks, schemes to defraud philanthropists, and tax evasion to support what has been aptly called 'a minimalist' interpretation of his political expectations.

Donatism Revisited: Moderates And Militants In Late Antique North Africa, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The little we know about the relationships between moderate and militant Donatists in the late fourth and early fifth centuries tells us more about the opposition that both groups stirred among the Caecilianists. What follows is an effort to reenter the Caecilianists’ polemic to discover what we can learn about Donatism and its critics, chiefly Augustine, by reading the evidence with some useful conclusions drawn from the study of more recent religious violence.

"To Assyst The Ordynaryes": Why Thomas More Agreed To Become Chancellor, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Revisionists' explanations for Thomas More's willingness to serve as Chancellor have him scheming to support the Aragonese faction at Court-or conspiring with Hapsburg agents to revive papal influence in England in the wake of Campeggio's departure and Wolsey's "fall." In late 1529, More was obviously concerned with lay disaffection, troubled by the prospect that sectarian dissidents might capitalize on it to reform the church recklessly, and confident that the realm's bishops, assisted by the government, could outmaneuver the critics of Roman and English Catholicism, whose arguments for an alternative ecclesiology and soteriology he had opposed earlier that year. "To Assyst" …

Patience And/Or Politics: Augustine And The Crisis At Calama, 408-409, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Few scholars would quarrel with Ernst Dassman's observation that early Christian "reserve" toward the political cultures of antiquity--a mixture of difference and indifference, which only occasionally gave way to hostility--turned Christians' outcast status into something of a virtue.Still fewer are likely to dispute the assertion that influential fourth-century Christians unreservedly welcomed the changes that came with Constantine and anticipated the "Christianization" of imperial, if not also local, politics. But evaluations of Augustine's enthusiasm later that century and early the next never fail now to elicit disagreement

Fasting In England In The 1560s: "A Thinge Of Nought"?, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

We continue to learn about the unsettled condition of the Elizabethan religious settlement in the early 1560s. “Perceived deficiencies” associated with a woman's sovereignty and supreme governance of the realm's reformed church dictated that counsel be “insistently proposed to and, at points, imposed upon” Elizabeth I “by her godly male subjects.” We now appreciate, however, that the queen was not drawn or driven to the left by puritans, as John Neale influentially suspected in the 1950s. And we may conclude from David Crankshaw's recent study of the Canterbury provincial convocation of 1563 that the bishops her government appointed were not …

Prophesying Again, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Discusses the lay involvement in the prophecies or exercises devised by Elizabethan reformers in England as in-service training during the 16th century. Attitude toward prophesying during the period; Exercises of the refugee churches; Efforts to suppress the prophesying.

How Socially Conservative Were The Elizabethan Religious Radicals?, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Social historians have long suspected that religious convictions made a difference in the sixteenth century, and historians of the late Tudor religious and political settlements have recently emphasized the differences that advanced forms of Calvinism are alleged to have made. They say that religious radicals--puritans and precisianists, to their contemporary critics--were social conservatives who thought wealth was a blessing and poverty a curse. According to Keith Wrightson and David Levine, the "firmly committed Puritans among the yeomen of the parish" promoted a "sense of social distance" between themselves ("the better sort") and the less respectable. The 1995 republication of Wrightson's …

Diehard Homoians And The Election Of Ambrose, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

It has been an excellent stretch in English for the Latin Arians of the fourth century. They have gotten heftier, more robust, more formidable. Daniel Williams' Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts challenges what he calls "the prevailing view" that they "posed little, if any, serious threat" to the Nicene faith of the western European churches from the 350s through the 380s. Neil McLynn's Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital insists that the Milanese Arians complicated Ambrose's career more than previous chroniclers of christological conflict and the biographers of the bishop ever …

Religion On The Run, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

"At one time English religion had emphasized the static or the recurrent aspects of worship. Then for a century or more, England was conscious of acting a sacred history as opposed to reenacting it". Sommerville's observation should shock no one familiar with his "century or more," roughly 1530 to 1660, although the declared opposition between "acting" and "reenacting" is likely to strike those who still read Bale, Foxe, Dering, or Dell as rather forced. Yet, so many of the contrasts in Secularization are terribly suggestive, announcing that religion "was changing from devotion to deliberation".

What may surprise some historians, however, …

Much In Prayer: The Inward Researches Of Elizabethan Protestants, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Examines some Elizabethan Protestants' reasons for praying and the controversy over forms of prayer during the period. Calvinists' rejection of prescribing times for prayer; Premium on feeling of misery in prayer; Godly sorrow; Suppression of rational judgment; Debate on fixed and impromptu prayers; Prayer as art.

Social History, Psychohistory, And The Prehistory Of Swiss Anabaptism, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The article discusses a variety of issues concerning social history, psychohistory and the prehistory of Swiss Anabaptism. It explores the contextualist approach to the history and practice of Anabaptism. It traces the prehistory of Swiss Anabaptism and the normative vision of Anabaptist origins. The article also examines the theology of martyrdom according to Conrad Grebel, father of Anabaptist.