History of Christianity 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 …

(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 …

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 …

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 …

New Perspectives On The Northampton Communion Controversy Iii: Count Vavasor's Tirade And The Second Council, 1751, Douglas L. Winiarski

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Jonathan Edwards’ fateful decision to repudiate the church admission practices of his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, provoked a bitter dispute with his parishioners that led to his dismissal in 1750. Scholars have long debated the meaning of this crucial turning point in Edwards’ pastoral career. For early biographers, the Northampton communion controversy served as an index of eighteenth-century religious decline. More recent studies situate Edwards’ dismissal within a series of local quarrels over his salary, the “Bad Book” affair, conflicts with the Williams family, and the paternity case of Elisha Hawley. This essay is the first a series that reexamines the …

New Perspectives On The Northampton Communion Controversy Ii: Relations, Professions, And Experiences, 1748-1760, Douglas L. Winiarski

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The second installment of a five-part series presenting documents relating to the “Qualifications Controversy” that led to Edwards’ dismissal at Northampton, this article presents a series of “relations,” or lay spiritual autobiographies presented for church membership. These relations come from other Massachusetts churches, many of whose pastors were aligned with Edwards, and yet reveal some significant differences from the form and content that Edwards came to advocate for such relations.

Exiling Bishops: The Policy Of Constantius Ii, Walter Stevenson

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Constantius II was forced by circumstances to make innovations in the policy that his father Constantine had followed in exiling bishops. While ancient tradition has made the father into a sagacious saint and the son into a fanatical demon, recent schol­arship has tended to stress continuity between the two regimes.¹ This article will attempt to gather together all instances in which Constantius II exiled bishops and focus on a sympathetic reading of his strategy.² Though the sources for this period are muddled and require extensive sorting, a panoramic view of exile incidents reveals a pattern in which Constantius …

[Introduction To] The Columbia Sourcebook Of Mormons In The United States, Terryl Givens, Reid L. Nielson

Bookshelf

This anthology offers rare access to key original documents illuminating Mormon history, theology, and culture in the United States from the nineteenth century to today. Brief introductions describe the theological significance of each text and its reflection of the practices, issues, and challenges that have defined and continue to define the Mormon community. These documents balance mainstream and peripheral thought and religious experience, institutional and personal perspective, and theoretical and practical interpretation, representing pivotal moments in LDS history and correcting decades of misinformation and stereotype.

The authors of these documents, male and female, not only celebrate but speak critically and …

New Perspectives On The Northampton Communion Controversy I: David Hall's Diary And Letter To Edward Billing, Douglas L. Winiarski

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Jonathan Edwards’ fateful decision to repudiate the church admission practices of his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, provoked a bitter dispute with his parishioners that led to his dismissal in 1750. Scholars have long debated the meaning of this crucial turning point in Edwards’ pastoral career. For early biographers, the Northampton communion controversy served as an index of eighteenth-century religious decline. More recent studies situate Edwards’ dismissal within a series of local quarrels over his salary, the “Bad Book” affair, conflicts with the Williams family, and the paternity case of Elisha Hawley. This essay is the first a series that reexamines the …

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 …

How Mormons Became American, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

A century ago, it was once a simple matter to assume a norm for American culture and situate the Mormon well outside it. Polygamy was likened to slavery in the nineteenth century (as the first Republican Party platform did in 1856). Brigham Young was compared to an Asian despot. Mormon women were victims in need of mythic frontier heroes like Captain Plum and Buffalo Bill to save them. Even Joseph Smith’s martyrdom could be seen as the penalty for his violation of the right to a free press. Mormonism made available to the playwrights of the Great American Saga the …

[Introduction To] Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul Of Mormonism, Terryl Givens, Matthew J. Grow

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After Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, Parley P. Pratt was the most influential figure in early Mormon history and culture. Missionary, pamphleteer, theologian, historian, and martyr, Pratt was perennially stalked by controversy--regarded, he said, "almost as an Angel by thousands and counted an Imposter by tens of thousands."

Tracing the life of this colorful figure from his hardscrabble origins in upstate New York to his murder in 1857, Terryl Givens and Matthew Grow explore the crucial role Pratt played in the formation and expansion of early Mormonism. One of countless ministers inspired by the antebellum revival movement known as the …

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 …

Mormon Worship, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints*, (LDS), worship God, the eternal Father, and Jesus Christ.

LDS doctrine designates temples as the most sacred sites of worship, the believers' homes as the second most privileged spaces for devotional acts, and the chapels, or meetinghouses, as the third most important. A temple (more than 100 worldwide in 2000) is a holy place, a "house of the Lord."

Mormon, Book Of, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

In 1830 Joseph Smith* published a book he claimed to have translated "by the gift and power of God" from ancient gold plates buried in a hillside in upstate New York. The book records the details of three ancient peoples who had inhabited the North American continent.

Young, Brigham, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Upon Joseph Smith's murder in 1844, Young, as president of the Quoram of the Twelve Apostles, was recognized as the new leader by most members of the Church of the Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Latter-Day Saints, Church Of Jesus Christ Of, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints emerged in the 19th c. out of a Restoration* rather than a Reformation* ideology. Joseph Smith* organized the Latter-day Saints in Fayette, New York, in 1830, shortly after he produced the Book of Mormon* which, he claimed, he received from the angel Moroni and translated from an ancient record.

Smith, Joseph, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

An influential 19th-c. US religious figure, Joseph Smith was a 14-year-old boy living in New York, when, by his own account, God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him.

John Chrysostom, Maruthas And Christian Evangelism In Sasanian Iran, Walter Stevenson

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Neither John Chrysostom’s efforts to evangelize in Sasanid Persia nor the conflict fought between Rome and Persia in 421 have drawn a great deal of attention.¹ So this paper will attempt to navigate the 20 years from John’s initial efforts up to the outbreak of the war without much modern support. Beginning from a series of clues in ancient sources I will try to gather apparently unrelated narratives into a story of how John inadvertently contributed to the even that Kenneth Holum called ‘Pulcheria’s Crusade’. Not that this war earned any of the historical significance of the later crusades. …

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" …

[Introduction To] People Of Paradox: A History Of Mormon Culture, Terryl Givens

Bookshelf

In People of Paradox, Terryl Givens traces the rise and development of Mormon culture from the days of Joseph Smith in upstate New York, through Brigham Young's founding of the Territory of Deseret on the shores of Great Salt Lake, to the spread of the Latter-Day Saints around the globe.

Throughout the last century and a half, Givens notes, distinctive traditions have emerged among the Latter-Day Saints, shaped by dynamic tensions--or paradoxes--that give Mormon cultural expression much of its vitality. Here is a religion shaped by a rigid authoritarian hierarchy and radical individualism; by prophetic certainty and a celebration …

The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon or LDS church, constitute an organization that transcends simple denominational status. Though the Mormons were originally one of a multitude of restorationist churches emerging out of the ferment known as the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, a number of factors conspired to forge an entity variously considered a religion, a people, a global tribe, and a New Religious Movement (NRM), the only "indigenously derived ethnic group" in the United States and an emerging world religion. Mormonism's distinctive doctrines challenge the boundaries of …

Mormons, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Mormonism was one of many religious movements that emerged in antebellum American during the ferment known as the Second Great Awakening. In 1820 a youthful Joseph Smith (1805-1844) told his family and skeptical neighbors that he had been visited by Jesus Christ in response to his prayerful request for guidance in choosing a true religion. All Christian denominations had gone astray, the personage told him. Smith created little subsequent stir on the religious stage until ten years later, when he produced the Book of Mormon, a lengthy narrative purportedly written by ancient American prophets of Israelite origins and revealed to …

[Introduction To] The Latter-Day Saint Experience In America, Terryl Givens

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Provides the most comprehensive overview of Mormonism—one of the fast growing religions in the World—available in one volume.

Scholars have labeled the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormonism as it is better known, both the American Religion, and the next world faith. The Mormon saga includes early persecution, conflict, and pioneer resilience, against a backdrop of revolutionary religious, social, and economic practices. The greatest colonizing force in American history, Mormonism has outgrown its 19th-century isolation and theocratic roots to become one of the most prosperous and respected Christian communities in the country. This book examines the history …

Roman Catholicism: Theology And Colonization, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The Catholic tradition in the Latin West grew up on the foundations laid by Rome. It accepted as fact the urban establishments that had started as colonial settlements and the need for such settlements to safeguard the imperial order. Thus in Catholic religious thought colonization and colonialism have no independent status; they are matters for legal and political reflection. Nonetheless, Catholic moral theology, particularly as it dealt with mission and conquest, had much to say about the activities that made colonization possible.

[Introduction To] Thinking Of The Laity In Late Tudor England, Peter Iver Kaufman

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Thinking of the Laity explains why proposals for expanding lay prerogatives failed to shape the Elizabethan religious settlement from the 1560s through the 1580s. It also greatly adds to our understanding of the policy debates that are closely associated with the origins of puritanism, presbyterianism, and congregationalism. This book will be essential reading for people interested in the history of early modern England and in the progress of sixteenth-century religious reform.

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