This Venetian printing of the translation of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fl. 500) into Latin made by Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439)—known after his entrance into the Camaldoese Order in 1400 as Fra (Brother) Ambrose of Camaldoli, or Ambrose the Camaldolite, but here as Ambrose the Florentine (the Camaldolese monastery of Sta Maria degli Angioli being situated in Florence)—was purchased from Phillip J. Pirages Fine Books and Medieval Manuscripts at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair and donated to the Seattle Pacific University Library by University Librarian Michael J. Paulus, Jr. in 2016.
The importance of Pseudo-Dionysius to the history of theology is well-known, but the fact that, though he wrote in Greek, “it was in Latin that his teaching reached” the West, and that “it was [precisely] the Latin text of the works of the pseudo-Areopagite that was for a thousand years and more one of [the West’s] principal sources of information on the theological thought of . . . the East on God, his angels, and his Church”, is perhaps less so anymore. “this multiform Latin text, cited by hundreds of authors” down through the years, was “translated and re-translated [(fait et refait)] in almost every century” (Chevallier, vol. 1, p. XII), and one of the most important of those translators was Brother Ambrose (Chevallier, pp. XXI ff., beginning, for Ambrose specifically, with p. XXII).
After teaching himself the language (into an even greater mastery of which he was probably helped later by his amanuensis, the Florentine Camaldolite Demetrius Skanaros), Ambrose translated a number of the Greek Fathers, including Sts. Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Ephraem, and above all John Chrysostom, and, abetted in this by his close friend, the wealthy Florentine bibliophile Nicolò de’ Niccoli, uncovered a number of unknown patristic manuscripts (Stinger). This expertise in Greek proved useful in the negotiations with the Eastern Orthodox at the Council of Florence that culminated in the Decree of Union signed on 5 July 1439, and the official Greek version of that document was Traversari’s doing.
SPU’s copy of his translation of the Celestial hierarchy, the Ecclesiastical hierarchy, the Divine names, the Mystical theology, and the eleven Epistles (at least one of which is now considered inauthentic) is no. 44 on p. XXXII of that list in Chevallier, and has been rebound in fragments of antiphonals of the Mass (front cover) and the Divine Office (back cover), on which it is possible to make out the following:
Front cover (Monday, Fourth Week of Lent, Antiphonal of the Mass or Graduale):
auribus per[cipe verba oris mei], give ear to the words of my mouth (Ps 53:4)
Psal[mus]. Quonia[m] a[lieni insurrexerunt adversum me,] & fortes quaes[ierunt animam meam], For s[trangers have risen up against me;] and the mighty [have] sou[ght after my soul] (Ps 53:5)
Graduale.
Esto mi[hi (domine) in deum protectorem], Be thou unto m[e a God, a protector] (Ps 70:3 LXX)
Graduale R. N.
Back cover (Matins, Epiphany, Antiphonal of the Office):
In Ep[iphania Domini], On the Ep[iphany of the Lord]
℣. Adorate Dominum, alleluja. ℟. In aula sancta eius, alleluja, ℣ Adore ye the Lord, alleluia. ℟ In his holy court, alleluia (Ps 28:2 LXX and 95:9 LXX, but with atrio (court) instead of, as here, aula (court))
Ad Nonam, ℟. br. At the ninth hour, an abbreviated (?) Response
I make no claims as to the authenticity of these manuscript fragments.
This volume is now the oldest in the Special Collections (or Emmanuel) Room of the Ames Library.
—Steve Perisho
Works cited:
As Craig R. Thompson points out at the beginning of the “Introduction” to his 1997 Toronto translation of the Colloquies, Erasmus has the Cyclops Polyphemus observe that “prophets these days declare [that] the end of the world is at hand”
because men behave now just as they did before the Flood overwhelmed them. . . . Kings make war, priests are zealous to increase their wealth, theologians invent syllogisms, monks roam through the world, the commons riot, [and] Erasmus writes colloquies [("Cyclops, or the Gospel-bearer," on p. 435 of the 1650 printing in hand, as well as Thompson, vol. 40, pp. 869-870; Thompson, vol. 39, p. xvii)].
But that could only have been said after the Colloquies had become famous. Whereas, they actually began in “apprentice work” (Thompson, vol. 39, p. xxv), as reading material for the classroom, set-pieces for the schoolboy designed to inculcate the conversational skills that would both form and reveal good character (xxv). Only later, after an initial batch of them (the formulae, as they were first called) had been published without permission in November of 1518, did Erasmus work them up (with additions) into the “literature” that they became over time. Thus, the first authorized edition appeared in March of 1519 (xxii, xxvi), but only in 1522, “The book as we know it—a book of dialogues with [fully] developed themes and characters and a great variety of subjects” (xxvii.2). Indeed, Erasmus continued to compose new conversations right up through the final authorized edition of 1533, published approximately three years before his death in 1536.
This octavo printing of 1650, which carries a version of the annotations (notae) that were soon attached to most editions (xviii, xxvi) and is not really all that rare, was donated to the SPU Library by the Rev. Dr. Glen V. Wiberg. It bears no additional marks of provenance.
—Steve Perisho
Work cited:
In 1651, the highly “controversial” republican (and of course Puritan) divine John Goodwin (1594?-1665) took (within a context of established controversy) an Arminian position on (universal) redemption in his book Ἀπολύτρωσις ἀπολυτρώσεως, or Redemption redeemed, the middle third of which consisted in an extended attack upon the closely related doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, a concept that, according to Goodwin, was both irreconcilable with the warnings and exhortations of Scripture and corrosive of a commitment to the pursuit of sanctification. John Owen (1616-1683) , one of the greatest Puritan theologians of the day, and an Independent committed to a strict Calvinism, considered this a caricature of the orthodox position (Goodwin’s mis“caricatur-ization” having angered Owen even more than his Arminianism (Knapp 2000, p. 72)), and followed George Kendall (1610-1663), Robert Baillie (1599-1662), and others into the lists with the volume on display, which outstripped all of the others in “‘sheer profundity of thought, thoroughness of exposition, and consistent rigor of application’” (Joel Beeke, as quoted by Kendall 2000, p. 71). It was not Owen’s first attempt at an articulation of Calvinistic orthodoxy, nor was it to be his last. θεομαχία αὐτεξουσιαστικὴ, or A display of Arminianism had appeared in 1643, and Salus electorum sanguis Jesu; or The death of death in the death of Christ, in 1648. Owen was to have a hand in the Savoy Declaration of 1658, whose 17th and 18th chapters dealt with the perseverance and assurance of the saints respectively, and his Exercitations on the Epistle to the Hebrews (1668-1684) was to be important for its treatment of passages such as Hebrews 6. Though he wrote on a number of other topics as well (an edition of his Works published together with a Life between 1850 and 1855 runs to 24 volumes), Owen’s Nature of apostasie from the profession of the Gospel, and the punishment of apostates declared, which appeared in 1676, was another that touched upon related themes. Thus, a tale reproduced on the blank frontispiece of this copy in the beautiful hand of a former owner (possibly James Vincent) is perfectly à propos:
The John Goodwin who is answered in this work, was nephew to Dr. Thos. Goodwin. When the Dr. was informed of the death of his nephew, he observed, “Than I trust there is another soul gone to heaven”; — Gone to heaven, Sir”! replied the person, “why he was a rank Arminian”. “True”, replied the Dr., “but he is not a rank Arminian now.”
(Cf., for example, “No Arminians in heaven,” The evangelical magazine and missionary chronicle n.s. 2, no. 1 (January 1824): 13 (under “ANECDOTES”).)
Another owner was the “N. Rowton” on the pastedown, but the book was purchased from the Rev. Dr. Glen V. Wiberg in February of 2014.
At some point it was bound in a published “Act” of some sort (back cover, 10th line from the bottom) pertaining to land in the vicinity of “the said parish of Turkdean” (back cover, 8th line from the bottom), Glouchestershire, England, and to the improvements to be made upon it.
—Steve Perisho
According to Johann Christoph Wolf, whose biography prefaces the third edition of this work published in 1738, Johann Lund(ius) (b. September 11, 1638, d. September 13, 1686) was
Lund’s father died when he was twelve, so he was raised by his father Thomas’ successor in Brarup, the Rev. Andreas Fabricius (c. 1617-1677), who married the widowed Margaretha (née Moth), and later procured for his stepson an appointment to [an assistantship in, and then] the deaconate of Tundern (below), in which he served faithfully until his death in 1686 at the age of 48.
Educated in the Flensburg school under the solicitous eye of Rector (1653-1660) Johann(es) Vort(ius), he crowned his studies there with the publication of a disputation De enunciatione negativa in 1656, and enrolled at the University of Leipzig, where he studied divinity (“Gottes-Gelahrtheit”) and the Hebrew language. While still (?) tutor to the children of the provost of Apenrade (Åbenrå) (he had begun with those of the Oberhofmeister von Pflug in Dresden), he delivered, at the age of 26, a funeral oration (“Leich-Rede”) that so endeared him to the people of Tundern that they invited him to serve as assistant to the aging deacon Laurent(ius) Widing(ius), whose death (and the influence of Lund’s stepfather) then opened up the pastorate itself (less the additional load of the academic co-rectorship that had been imposed upon his predecessors) to him in 1672.
At some point he married Widing’s daughter Maria Elisabeth, and, though the marriage did not turn out well (Wolf suggests that it gave Lund an excuse to disappear into his study and apply himself to the antiquities of the Jews and the intricacies of the Old Testament priesthood), sired eight daughters, as well as the son who was eventually to see his father’s life’s work through to publication.
It was 13 years in the making, and not just because Lund wanted to get the text just right, for, as an artist himself, he fussed over the illustrations, too (the professional he engaged to realize his sketch of the Temple saw his work returned at least ten times (Wolf, 3)). Finally, though, he was ready. He submitted the manuscript first to Stern in Lüneburg (still publishing today as “the oldest continuously family-run publisher in the world”) and Endter in Nürnberg, both famous for (among other things) their Luther Bibles, only to be rejected as an author who was unknown to the learned and had (supposedly) no real contribution to make. He then submitted it, presumably for an endorsement, to the faculty under which he had studied in Leipzig, but to no avail. For that reason, he did not live to see it published.
Some years after his death, however, Maria Elisabeth stumbled across the manuscript and sent it to Caspar Hermann Sandhagen (1639-1697), at that time “general superintendent [of the Lutheran Church] for Schleswig-Holstein and senior court chaplain in Gottorf.” Sandhagen, a “painstaking exegete” (RPP, sv Sandhagen, by Johannes Wallmann) “experienced in Jewish antiquities” (Wolf), liked what he saw, and allowed the work to go forward under the editorship of Lund’s son Thomas, who was by then himself a Leipzig-trained deacon in Tundern (Allgemeines gelehrten-Lexicon, ed. Jöcher (1750), sv Lund (Joh.) and Lund (Thom.); Cyclopaedia of biblical, theological and ecclesiastical literature, ed. McClintlock & Strong, vol. 5 (1873), sv Lund, Johann; Allgemeine deutsche Biographie 19 (1884), sv Lundius, Johannes). As a consequence, the book was first published in 3 separately-titled octavo volumes by Lorentz Eckstorf of Schleswig in 1695 (Öffentlicher Gottesdienst der alten Hebräer and Levitischer Hoherpriester und Priester) and 1696 (Ausführliche Beschreibung der Hütte des Stiffts).
But Thomas had reorganized (probably even de-selected some of) the material, taking the first 32 chapters of the first volume (1695) from Book V, and the remaining 43 from Books III and IV; the 54 chapters of the second volume (1695) from Books III and IV; and the 75 chapters of the third volume (1696) from Books I and II (which, however, did appear there in the order in which they were to appear in this improved edition of 1701). More importantly, he had neglected to include “the sketch of the [Jerusalem] Temple” promised in the title (!) of volume three (wobei zu finden der Grund-Riß des Tempels).
And so, because this first edition turned out to be (though now rare) rather popular, there developed an interest in the book as it had come from his father’s pen, an interest that the Hamburg publisher Gottfried Liebernickel set out to satisfy. He wrote Lund’s widow, who wrote the Sandhagen estate (Sandhagen himself having died in 1697), but to no avail. The manuscript was nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, Lund’s own sketch of the Temple resurfaced, and later the manuscript, too—in the possession of a scholar in Hamburg left discretely unnamed by Wolf. An engraver—Johann Wilhelm Michaelis (d. 1737 in Stargard), who had been born in Wittenberg, mastered his trade in Hamburg, and was operating in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Stargard (Thieme-Becker; Busch)—was engaged, and this second, “more complete” and properly illustrated edition appeared under the editorship of Sandhagen’s successor, Superintendent Dr. Heinrich Muhlius, in 1701 (repr. 1704), and was entitled Die alten jüdischen Heiligthümer, Gottesdienste und Gewohnheiten [Ancient Jewish shrines, worship, and customs]. . . . Johann Wolfgang Fickweiler (rather than Liebernickel) published the editions of 1711 and 1722, and Antoni Schoonenburg and Nicolaas ten Hoorn, the Dutch translation published in Amsterdam in 1726. In 1738 the corrected and updated Hamburg edition annotated by Johann Christoph Wolf, on whose “Vorrede” I have been very largely dependent throughout, saw the light of day as published by Christian Wilhelm Brand.
Michaelis had more than the text of the work to go on, for Lund was, as I have said, also an artist in his own right, and sketched more towards the illustration of his book than just the Temple (Wikipedia). That said, it was his rendition of the latter that was most influential. Busch notes that Lund, writing (as Lund himself had stated) on 19 September 1678, mentions the Amsterdam model of the Temple of Solomon constructed by Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon (which Lund goes on to admit he has not seen; edition of 1722 and SPU copy of 1701, p. 256, near the top of col. 2), but not, of course, the more famous Hamburg model constructed between 1680 and 1692 (dates equidistant from the death of Lund in 1686), and concludes that though Michaelis, at least, would certainly have been familiar with the latter, neither his rendition of his author’s conception of the Temple, nor the evidence supplied by any of the subsequent editions of the book by Lund, indicate that there was much influence from that quarter. Instead, says Busch, the influence was outgoing, for Lund had, via Michaelis, a profound impact on the Halle model of 1717, as represented by illustrations of that model of both the Temple Mount and the Holy of Holies published in a book that clearly credits Lund and was published in 1718.
Thus, the book turned out to be more popular and influential than either Stern, Endter, or the Leipzig theological faculty had anticipated. Indeed, the historical theologian Carsten Erich Carstens was still saying in 1884 that, composed as it was by a man whom Johannes Moller (1661-1725) had called “erudite, hard-working, and eminently versatile in Hebrew antiquity” (Carstens: “‘vir eruditus, laboriosus et in hebraica antiquitate versatissimus’”), it had “not yet lost its worth” (Carstens).
In addition to the book on display, Lund published only the above-mentioned Latin disputation and a few funeral orations (“Gelegenheitsreden” (Carstens), “Leich-Predigten” (listed by Wolf on p. 2), etc.). As of 1884, at least, three of his paintings were still hanging in the town hall in Tondern (Carstens).
Die alten jüdischen Heiligthümer, Gottesdienste und Gewohnheiten was given to the Seattle Pacific University Library by Ellen Schnaible Breiten and her brother Marvin Schaible in 2016. Their father, the Rev. Fred Schnaible (1909-1987), pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Endicott, WA from 1948-1975, had inherited it from his predecessor, the Rev. Arthur R. Bethmann, pastor from 1923-1932. Prior to that it appears to have been owned by an Alfred K. Bethmann (though probably not the Alfred K. Bethmann who died in Lewiston, ID in 1984), after which point the trail, back to 1701, goes dark.
—Steve Perisho
The ancient Greeks pioneered the Western encyclopedic tradition with their enkýklios paideia or “circle of learning,” which later morphed into the seven traditional liberal arts (Gluck, 6). The Greek neologism enkyklopaideía, however, first appears in a 1490 letter addressed to the Florentine Humanist Poliziano (Gierl). With the 1620 publication of Johann Heinrich Alsted’s Encyclopaedia, the term became synonymous with “the methodical compilation of everything an individual can learn in a lifetime, in other words the ‘sum’ (Latin universitas) of all knowledge” (Gierl). Following Alsted came the publication of Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire Universel (1690) and John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum (1704) (Yeo, “A Solution to the Multitude of Books,” 63), both of which – unlike contemporary encyclopedias – were mostly composed of excerpts from other writings (Gierl). The same is true of the book on display here, namely Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia, or, An universal dictionary of arts and sciences.
Born in Kendal in the northwest of England (Yeo, “Ephraim Chambers’s,” 164; The Encyclopedia of Britain, 493), Chambers was educated at local grammar schools before moving south to become the apprentice of the London globemaker John Sennex (Yeo, “Ephraim Chambers’s,” 164). It was here that he began work on his Cyclopaedia. While most scholars regard Harris’s Lexicon as the “most obvious precursor to Chambers’s work” (Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 130), Chambers himself claimed to go beyond Harris’s contribution by “providing the option of a systematic reading” (132). Indeed, Chambers was unique in his belief that “alphabetical order was compatible with the recognition of intellectual system” (129). In other words, he sought to “retain the convenience of alphabetical access at the level of terms, while making the Cyclopaedia a book that respected the integrity of the various arts and sciences” (123).
Chambers brought this holistic vision to fruition through the use of a diagram illustrating “a classification of knowledge that backed his assertion that an alphabetical dictionary could be used systematically” (132). Each subject had a corresponding footnote which contained a list of terms so that, “with cross-references, the reader could reconstitute a science that had been scattered alphabetically” (Yeo, “A Solution,” 67). The motivation behind such painstaking detail was the editor’s anxiety about the exponential growth of books; knowledge, so he contended, had to be reduced to the essentials (71). For Chambers, then, all knowledge stemmed from “two root categories: natural and scientific knowledge formed one root; artificial and technical knowledge constituted the other. These two radical sources then exfoliated into some forty-seven definable branches of knowledge, each one representing a budding discipline” (Sullivan, 328). This comprehensiveness led Chambers to label his Cyclopaedia the “best Book in the universe” (64).[1]
All that being said, the work cannot be considered original, at least by contemporary standards. Rather, it was itself a sort of commonplace book containing information “culled from the best books available on many subjects, and as Chambers readily acknowledged, a representation of the writing of many other scholars” (Rosenberg, 4-5). Nevertheless, Chambers argued strongly for the originality of his work, stressing the way that he selected and organized the material as a sign of his own ingenuity (5).
The original work, dedicated to King George II, was published by James and John Knapton in 1728 (Collison, 103). A second edition was published ten years later and reissued again in 1741 (Yeo, “Ephraim Chambers’s,” 165). In 1745, a prospectus announced the publication of a French translation (Wilson, 75), which soon after came under the editorship of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. The French philosophes quickly began producing “more than a simple translation, delegating famous men of letters to write for them and thereby breaking considerably from the model of Harris and Chambers” (Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 125). They did, however, adopt in what later became known as the Encyclopédie some of the Cyclopaedia’s more unique characteristics, including its “genealogical tree of knowledge and extensive cross references” (Kafker).
While the Encyclopédie is undoubtedly the most famous of the Cyclopaedia’s successors, the book’s influence extends far beyond the French Enlightenment. Indeed, it is also considered the parent of the well-known Encyclopedia Britannica (Collison, 104), and Chambers’s 1726 Proposal is said to have partly formed the style of the great British lexicographer Samuel Johnson (Boswell, 134). More recently, Hermann Sanger has shown the influence of Chambers’s Cyclopedia on biblical exegesis (Sanger cited in Werner, 88) while Krista Kennedy has authored an entire “historical study of authorship and rhetorical agency” in both the Cyclopaedia and Wikipedia (Kennedy, 3).
Provenance: SPU obtained this copy of the Cyclopaedia in 1994 as part of a larger donation by Robert and Beulah Whitlow. Mr. Whitlow, a 1970 graduate of the University, had previously served as both alumni director (1973-75) and director of human resources (1975-88; “Robert Lester Whitlow," Whidbey News Times, 28 March 2017). According to his wife Beulah, it was given to them sometime between 1973 and 1984 by former professor of English Bonnie Heintz, who would have acquired it on an SPU summer study abroad trip to England, possibly in "a significant large old-book bookstore . . . in the west, near Wales." (The Whitlows, in Leeds for the graduate work that Robert had undertaken, met up with and helped host these groups in the summers of 1971 and 1972.) It thus came to be among the rare books that Mrs. Whitlow, a 1962 SPU B.A. in Education, shared with her sixth graders each year, the Cyclopaedia in order to illustrate the reading habits of the protagonist of the Newbery-Award-winning Carry on, Mr. Bowditch, a favorite "first read-aloud" of hers (note to Steve Perisho dated 5 March 2019).
---Colin Lewis (with additions under Provenance by Steve Perisho)
Works Cited:
Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. Everyman’s Library 101. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1992.
Collison, Robert. Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout the Ages - A Bibliographical Guide with Extensive Historical Notes to the General Encyclopaedias Issued Throughout The World from 350 B.C. to the Present Day. New York: Hafner Publishing, 1964.
The Encyclopedia of Britain. Oxford : Farmington Hills, Mich.: Helicon ; Gale Group, 1999.
Gierl, Martin. “Encyclopedia.” In Encyclopedia of Early Modern History Online, edited by Graeme Dunphy and Andrew Gow. Accessed November 28, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2352-0272_emho_COM_018801
Gluck, Carol. “The Fine Folly of the Encyclopedists.” Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library (1994): 5-48.
Kafker, Frank A. “Encyclopedias.” In Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment: Volume 1 – Abbadie-Enlightenment Studies, edited by Alan Charles Kors, 398-403. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Kennedy, Krista. Textual Curation: Authorship, Agency, and Technology in Wikipedia and Chambers’s Cyclopaedia. Studies in Rhetoric and Communication. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2016.
Rosenberg, Daniel. “Early Modern Information Overload,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no, 1 (Jan 2003): 1-9.
Sanger, Hermann. Juden und Alten Testament bei Diderot. Wertheim-am-Mein, 1933.
Sullivan, Lawrence E. “Circumscribing Knowledge: Encyclopedias in Historical Perspective,” The Journal of Religion 70, no. 3 (July 1990): 315-339.
Werner, Stephen. “A Note on Diderot and Chambers.” Romance Notes 15(1973-74): 88-89.
Whidbey News-Times. “Robert Lester Whitlow: Oct. 20, 1932-Feb.19, 2017.” March 28, 2017.
Wilson, Arthur M. Diderot. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Yeo, Richard. “A Solution to the Multitude of Book: Ephraim Chambers’s ‘Cyclopaedia’ (1728) as ‘The Best Book in the Universe,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (January 2003): 61-72.
Yeo, Richard. Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Yeo, Richard. “Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) and the Tradition of Commonplaces,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57, no. 1 (Jan. 1996): 157-175.
[1] According to Yeo, Chambers originally made this claim in Some Considerations offered to the Publick, preparatory to a second edition of Cyclopaedia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (no date or place of publication [1738]), 4. A copy of this resource can be found in the Bodleian Library (Yeo, “A Solution to the Multitude of Books,” 64n14).
Works cited
Brückner, Shirley. "Von biblischen Chartenspielen, geistlichen Lotterien und erbaulichen Stammbüchern: Einblicke in pietistische Geselligkeitspraktiken." In Geselligkeiten im 18. Jahrhundert: kulturgeschichtliche Überlieferung in Museen und Archiven Sachsen-Anhalts, Sachsen-Anhalt und das 18. Jahrhundert 7. Ed. Sebastian Görtz, Ute Pott, and Cornelia Zimmermann. Pp. 108-114. Halle (Saale): Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2012.
Reents, Christine. "Wie spiegeln sich Orthodoxie, Pietismus und Erweckung in der Zeit zwischen 1688 und 1850 in evangelischen Kinder- und Schulbibeln?: Bestandsaufname und theologische Einordnung." Pietismus und Neuzeit 40 (2014): 64-96.
Add this to the Edmund John Senkler display when complete.
A collection of 37 tracts, one (“The Sabbath at home,” by the Rev. Silas M. Andrews) published by the Presbyterian Tract and Sunday School Society of Philadelphia in 1837, one (“Man’s ability: Old School theology by an Old School minister,” [by the Rev. Aaron Church]) for the Presbyterian Synod of Illinois by Whitmarsh, Fulton & Co. of Chicago in 1853), seven by the Presbyterian Board of Publication (including one by the Rev. Dr. A[rchibald] Alexander of Princeton entitled “The immediate choice,” and a reprint of Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” minus only the opening text-cum-outline), and 26 by that “chief innovator of mass publication of religious material in early nineteenth-century America,” the interdenominational but “mainstream Calvinist” American Tract Society (Nord). Entirely congruent with the ethos of the early Seattle Seminary and Seattle Pacific College is, among those 26, no. 538, “One honest effort or the college student,” [by the Princeton-trained Baptist minister converted while an undergraduate at Brown, Thomas Shields Malcom (1821-1886)]. For a complete list of the tracts captured between this leather binding, see the SPU Library catalog. Needless to say, this is a collection owned by no one else.
Provenance: Gift of Dr. [Winifred E.] Weter, 26 June 1940.
Works cited:
Nord, David P. “American Tract Society.” Dictionary of Christianity in America. Ed. Daniel G. Reed. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990.
Three years after his 1817 blasphemy trial, William Hone (1780-1842) again provoked the ire of the British establishment with the publication of The Apocryphal New Testament (Martin). For those who had followed Hone’s career up to this point, this new endeavor was no great surprise. His experiments with atheism and radical politics had already cultivated in him a “suspicion and dislike for the rituals, dogma and establishment of the Church of England” (Hone, 55, 66). This anti-religious streak, when coupled with his penchant for “scholarly antiquarianism” (Martin), meant that Hone immediately capitalized on the discovery of “little-known New Testament apocrypha” in the British Museum (Martin). Indeed, The Apocryphal New Testament was ready for publication just six weeks after Hone stumbled upon them (Marsh, 12).
According to Marsh, “almost nothing had been written on the apocryphal texts in English or any other language until the eighteenth century” (Marsh, 43). The publication of Hone’s discovery was thus an equally intriguing and alarming event; many believed that in marketing the book to the common reader and printing it to look like Scripture (Marsh, 45-46), Hone was suggesting a “quasi-biblical status” for these texts which the early Christian community had rejected (Griffin, 11). The Tory Quarterly Review responded with derision, considering Hone’s sole aim to be the destruction of the “New Testament” (Quarterly Review, 38). In order to discredit Hone in the eyes of the public, they claimed that the work exhibited a “systematic disregard of truth and every claim to literary honesty” (Quarterly Review, 355). Despite the uproar, the book’s publication alongside the 1823 printing of Ancient Mysteries Described marked “Hone’s passage into the more generally acceptable antiquarian publishing activities which led to his fame in the nineteenth century” (Martin).
From 1826 onward, financial troubles consumed Hone’s attention. In 1832, he converted to Christianity and began attending Weigh House Chapel, then pastored by the famous Non-Conformist Thomas Binney. It is entirely possible, then, that Hone lost interest in these ancient texts (or at least in the scandal they caused); others, however, did not. There is strong evidence, for instance, that Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, owned a copy. According to Wayment, “In January 1844, the Prophet met with other leading citizens of Nauvoo to discuss the organization and creation of the Nauvoo Library and Literary Society. Subsequent to that meeting a number of books were donated by him to the fledgling library, and among them was an Apocryphal Testament” (42). Similarly, Martin Twain records having found a 1621 edition of the Apocryphal New Testament in a letter composed in the late 1860s: “It is rather a curious book, as one may judge by the titles to some of the chapters” (Twain, 251). Griffin, who believes that Twain mistakenly ready 1621 for 1821, contends that the author’s “The Chronicle of Young Satan” directly draws from Hone’s publication (8). As late as 1912, the book was still to be found on a list of radical literature published by the International Socialist Review. Perhaps most interesting for contemporary scholars, however, is the way in which Hone’s contention that the texts contained in The Apocryphal New Testament were the origin of certain mystery dramas performed in medieval England has been subsequently confirmed by modern scholarship (Marsh, 42). The book, a copy of which SPU obtained in 2016, thus remains a useful resource for anyone interested in the ancient world, English medieval theater, nineteenth-century literary culture, or the history behind the contemporary interest in/fascination with non-canonical texts.”
—Colin Lewis
Works Cited
Griffin, Benjamin. “Mark Twain’s Apocrypha: Infant Jesus and Young Satan.” The Mark Twain Annual 14 (2016): 7-19. https://muse.jhu.edu (accessed July 23, 2018).
Hone, J. Ann. “William Hone (1780-1842), publisher and bookseller.” Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand 16, no. 62 (1974): 55-70.
Marsh, Joss. Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Martin, Philip W. "Hone, William (1780–1842), political writer and publisher." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 14 Aug. 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-13659.
Quarterly Review. Unsigned review of The Apocryphal New Testament, being all the Gospels,Epistles, and other Pieces now extant, attributed in the first four Centuries to Jesus Christ, his Apostles, and their Companions and not included in the New Testament by its Compilers. Translated from the original Tongues, and now first collected into one Volume, printed for William Hone. 1821, no. 25.
Twain, Mark. “Letter XXIV.” In Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown Being Heretofore Uncollected Sketches Written by Mark Twain for the San Francisco Alta California in 1866 and 1867, Describing the Adventures of the Author and His Irrepressible Companion in Nicaragua, Hannibal, New York, and Other Spots on Their Way To Europe. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.
SPU owns only volumes 4, 6, and 7 (of eight), i.e. the Panégyriques and the first two (of three) volumes of the Mélanges.
The following is little more than a translation of Gandilhon, below:
Étienne-Antoine (de) Boulogne was “born in Avignon on 27 December 1747,” and “Died in Paris, on 13 May 1825.
Son of François [de Boulogne], chancellor of the company of light infantry maintained in Avignon by the papacy, he did his ecclesiastical studies at the seminary of St. Charles and was ordained a priest in 1771. His talents as [a] preacher were appreciated from the start. In 1774, he was named vicar of St. Margaret of Paris, and in 1776, to St. Germain of Auxerre. He preached several times before the court. Especially noteworthy was the panegyric of St. Louis that he pronounced at the request of the Academie des sciences and the Academie des belles-lettres in 1782 [(Panégyriques (1826), 1-66)]. Vicar general of Mgr. [Anne-Antoine-Jules] de Clermont-Tonnerre, bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne, canon of Châlons in 1784 and archdeacon of Vertus, he opened the provincial assembly of Champagne with a speech in 1789, was elected [and] in 1789 deputed to the bailliagère assembly of Paris [(l’Assemblée bailliagère de Paris)] and helped draft [its] copybook of grievances [(cahiers de doleances)] (Taylor). He prepared the pastoral letters [(mandements)] of Mgr. Clermont-Tonnerre, in which this bishop, elected deputy to the Constituent [Assembly of 1789], protested against the [recent] innovations in matter[s] ecclesiastical (28 July 1791); but when the latter decided to emigrate [to Germany], refused to follow him, secreted himself in Paris, and remained in communication with his bishop and the clergy of Châlons. He took refuge in a Gentilly insane asylum, abandoned that [hideout], was arrested, but then succeeded in recovering his liberty. [It was] at [about] that time that he published a number of pamphlets against the Constitutionalists [(constitutionnels)] of 1791], polemicized against Le Coz, the bishop of Ille-et-Vilaine, and Larévellière-Lépeaux, which entailed for [Boulogne (ce qui entraina pour lui)] a condemnation of deportation [(cf. Delacroix, 139-144)]. Nevertheless, he continued to collaborate no less than before with Annales philosophiques, morales et littéraires, then Annales religieuses, which took later the title Mélanges de philosophie, only to become, finally, the Ami de la religion. He composed also numerous articles for the Gazette de France and the Journal des débats, in which he defended the cause of the Church.
After the Concordat [of 15 July 1805 (finalized on 8 April 1802) (Nafziger)], he became Vicar General of the bishop of Versailles, Mgr. Charrier de la Roche, and preached before Cardinal Fesch, who obtained for him the title of chaplain [(aumônier)] to the Emperor. The latter named him in March of 1807 to the bishopric of Acqui in Piedmont, a post [Boulogne] refused. But on 8 March 1808, he was nominated bishop of Troyes, for which he was consecrated on 2 February 1809 in the chapel of the Tuileries. He preached on 3 December 1809 before Napoleon in [the Cathedral of] Notre Dame on the anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz, [and] in July of 1811 was tasked with delivering the inaugural address to the council reassembled to study the prickly question of the appointment of bishops without the consent of [(en dehors de l’intervention de)] the Pope. But for all his prudence, he was (his ideas being adjudged tententious) arrested on 11 July. His position was at the time contrasted with that of the bishops of Tournai and Gand, who [were said to have] resisted with nobility. Confined to Falaise, he was induced to tender his resignation as bishop. The Abbé de Cussy was named to his place, but despite the pressure [exerted] by the prefect of Aube on the chapter, the new bishop could not be installed. Accused by Napoleon of secretly inciting the resistance of the canons of Troyes, [Boulogne] was transferred to the keep of Vincennes. There he however refused to sign a second promise [(engagement complémentaire)] of resignation. The arrival of the allies liberated him and Louis XVIII reinstalled him in Troyes, where he was received triumphantly. During the Hundred Days he hid in Vaugirard, then took his post up again after [the Battle of] Waterloo. In 1817 he was named to the archbishopric of Vienne, but objections having been raised [(des difficultés s’etant élévées)], he was not installed, and received from the Pope in compensation the title of Archbishop of Troyes. In 1822 he was elevated to the dignity of a Peer of France, which made it possible for him to address the Chamber of Peers on the law of sacrilege in 1824 [sic (“Opinion sur la loi concernant le sacrilege, qui devoit être prononcée dans la Chambre des Pairs, en Fevrier 1825,” Panégyriques (1826), 558-576)]. As for his bishopric, he occupied himself actively with the administration of the diocese, created the minor seminary [i.e. high school] of Sens, and fostered devotion to the Sacred Heart, [activities] that did not prevent him from preaching before the King on many occasions and most notably delivering the funeral oration of Louis XVI [in Saint-Denis on 21 January 1815 (Panégyriques (1826), 227-289)]. He [himself] died in Paris on 13 May 1825.”
---Steve Perisho
Provenance: St. Benedict’s [(Mount Angel)] Abbey Library, St. Benedict, Oregon; Westminster Priory Library, Ladner (then Burnaby, now Mission), British Columbia; Gift of Robert and Beulah Whitlow, 14 September 1994.
Works cited:
Gandilhon, R. “Boulogne, Étienne-Antoine (de).” In Dictionnaire de biographie française 6 (1954), cols. 1372-1373. Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané. For more in the way of readily accessible detail, see the “Notice historique sur M. de Boulogne” on pp. xv-cxxxix of the first volume of the Sermons et discours inédits. For even more, see Delacroix, above.
Nafziger, George F. “Concordat.” In Historical dictionary of the Napoleonic era. Ancient civilizations and the historical eras 6. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2002.
Taylor, G. V. “Cahiers de doleances.” In Historical dictionary of the French Revolution. 2 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.
Speaking at the centenary of the celebrated hymnist’s birth, fellow Free Church of Scotland minister and influential editor of The Expositor W. Robertson Nicoll remembered Horatius Bonar (1808-1899) as a man “of quenchless zeal and unrelenting labour.... His name was fragrant in every village, and at most of the farms” (“‘His Reward is With Him,’” 99). The zeal Nicoll references was instilled in Bonar at a young age, both by his father – an elder in the staunchly evangelical Lady Glenorchy’s chapel – and his “godly mother,” who continued the boy’s spiritual education after her husband’s death (Haykin, 25).
After leaving home, Bonar came under the influence of two well-known Scottish divines, Thomas Chalmers and Edward Irving. While the latter may be credited with influencing Bonar’s pre-millenial eschatology – a rare theology to subscribe to in the staunchly Calvinist circles of nineteenth-century Scotland (Mitchell) – it was Chalmers who left the most lasting impact on the budding preacher. Indeed, in 1843 Bonar followed Chalmer’s lead and left the Church of Scotland, helping to form the Free Church for which he would serve as moderator four decades later (Haykin, 35-37; Mitchell).
It was during this long ministry career that Bonar composed over 600 poems and hymns, which are his most enduring legacy and have led to his being recognized as the “greatest Scottish hymnwriter” (McGowan, 38). In contrast, Bonar’s other writings are now largely forgotten (Andrews, 117). One of these, How Shall I Go To God? And Other Readings, found its way into SPU’s Special Collections in January of 2017. Composed of nine short treatises, the book was originally published in 1831 (Horatius Bonar, D.D., 111) by the Religious Tract Society (est. 1799), an interdenominational organization considered to be the “most important evangelical contribution to tract publication” (Royle, 120). The society, which was in large part a response to the Sunday School movement’s effect on literacy rates (Fyfe, 165), saw as its primary goal the “evangelism of Britain, and the world, in the hope of ushering in the millenium and hastening the second coming of Christ” (170). Bonar’s intentions in writing books like How Shall I Go to God? were a bit more subdued in comparison with his publisher: “While it is obvious that Bonar had from birth a gift for writing, it was the needs of his people that prompted his extensive ministry in print” (Gordon, 11). As would be expected, then, one finds in this volume a very practical approach to the Christian life, filled as it is with illustrations and anecdotes. No complex theological or devotional texts are referenced; rather, the author draws solely upon experience and Scripture in his efforts to guide his readers “in Christ, all the way home” (Wilson, 124). This confirms the testimony of the Reverend George Wilson, pastor of St. Michael’s Parish Church, Edinburgh, who said that Bonar’s prose works are “always lucid, always unhurried, and always straight to the vital point of the Christian truth or Christian life with which they deal” (123-124).
Despite Andrews’s contention that works like How Shall I Go To God? are mostly forgotten, it is nevertheless the case that a volume did make its way to Seattle Pacific University, where it may help to resurrect interest in Dr. Bonar’s prose works and their unique influence on nineteenth-century Scottish piety.
—Colin Lewis
Works Cited
Andrews, John S. “Bonar, Horatius.” In Dictionary of Evangelical Biography 1730-1860, Vol. 1, edited by Donald M. Lewis, 115-116. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995.
Fyfe, Aileen. “Commerce and Philanthropy: The Religious Tract Society and the Business of Publishing,” Journal of Victorian Culture 9, no. 2 (2004): 165-188.
Gordon, James M. Evangelical Spirituality: From the Wesleys to John Stott. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1991.
Haykin, Michael G. “‘Christ is All’: Horatius Bonar (1808-1889) and his Christocentric piety.” Eusebeia 2 (Autumn 2004): 23-51. https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/eusebeia/03_023.pdf
Horatius Bonar, D.D.: A Memorial. New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1889.
Matthew, H.C.G. “Nicoll, Sr. William Robertson (1851-1923), journalist.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 5 Jul. 2018.
McGowan, A.T.B. “Bonar, Horatius (1808-1889).” In Encyclopedia of the Reformed Faith, edited by Donald K. McKim, 38. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992.
Mitchell, Rosemary. “Bonar, Horatius (1808-1889), Free Church of Scotland minister and hymn writer.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 6 Jul. 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-2814
Nicoll, W. Robertson. “‘His Reward is With Him.” In Memories of Dr. Horatius Bonar By Relatives and Public Men: Addresses delivered at the Centenary Celebration, 93-111. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier, 1909.
Royle, Edward. “Evangelicals and Education.” In Evangelical Faith and Public Zeal: Evangelicals and Society in Britain 1780-1980, edited by John Wolffe. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
Wilson, Rev. George. “‘A Vessel Unto Honour.’” In Memories of Dr. Horatius Bonar by Relatives and Public Men, 113-127. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier, 1909.
Elias Hicks (1748-1830) was a self-educated Long Island farmer and itinerant Quaker minister whose “traditional and stubborn opposition” to “the habits of the secular world,” to the “many modern developments” of his time (“Banks, chemistry, railroads, the Erie Canal, foreign trade, . . . [the] fine arts,” and perhaps even “civil government” (Ingle, “Hicks,” 744); “schools, and Thanksgiving as a national holiday” (Dandelion, 85)), to the accumulation of wealth, and to slavery, did not always endear him to the more citified of his co-religionists; and whose determination to purge the Society of Friends of an ascendant evangelicalism issued in “the most pivotal series of events in American Quaker history”: a “Hicksite reformation” (Ingle, “Hicks,” 745) of the 1820s that more or less permanently divided the Society of Friends into “Orthodox” and “Hicksite” branches (i.e. “Friends, and those who styled themselves Orthodox” (Hicks, 424)), often within one and the same Meeting (be that Yearly, Quarterly, or Monthly), as Hicks himself observes when he says that “a small minority of [our once peaceful society], in many places, separated themselves from the body, and set up separate meetings, assuming the names of the yearly, quarterly, and monthly meetings; and these, in their presumption, have taken upon them to deal with and disown the great body of the society” (Hicks, 409).
To Hicks the “Orthodox” opposed (in the words of his erstwhile friend Jonathan Evans) “‘the Atonement, the Mediation, and the Intercession, of our Lord, and Saviour Jesus Christ”, by and for whom “all things were created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities, or powers’”, who is the “‘King of Kings,’ ‘Lord of Lords,’ and ‘Judge of the quick and dead’” (Ingle, Quakers in conflict, 168-172).
Ingle treats that as a doctrine that, though far more ancient than its rival, was nonetheless “new to the Society to which both [Hicks and Evans] belonged” (Ingle, Quakers in conflict, 169). Not surprisingly, that was not how “the Orthodox evangelicals” (Ingle, Quakers in conflict, 26) saw it. According to them, it was they who were the conservators of early Quakerism. Take their well-known Declaration of 1828, for example. Although the “Christian Quaker” George Keith (c. 1553-1623) had, well over a century before, “inclined to a stronger assertion of historic and dogmatic Christianity than was palatable to some Philadelphia quakers”, “the majority of ministers and elders [of the time] was on his side” (Gordon, 1207, col. 2), and that—allowing for the intervenient rise of Methodist evangelicalism (Ingle, Quakers in conflict, 10-11; Pink, 83-85)—was how things shook down in 1828 as well: the Declaration of the Yearly Meeting of Friends, held in Philadelphia appealed from “the testimony of our ancient Friends” (Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends, 6); “those excellent Christian principles which our forefathers held, and suffered for” (8); “the writings of our early Friends” (8); and so forth, to “the doctrines always held by our religious Society” (7); to what “The Society of Friends has always fully believed in” (19); to “the faith which we have always held and promulgated to the world, ever since we have been a people”; to “our religious belief from the rise of the Society to the present day” (27); and so on. “This [Hicksite] doctrine”, claimed the Declaration, is not only “contrary to the Holy Scriptures”; “it is not, and never was, the faith of the Society of Friends” (26). “For we have always professed and sincerely believed, that” (27) . . . and there follows a remarkably fulsome Credimus.
Over the long term, though, it was something more like the Hicksite tradition that prevailed in the state founded by William Penn. For the monthly meetings in Pennsylvania today associated with Friends United Meeting (let alone Friends General Conference by way of Baltimore Yearly Meeting) greatly outnumber the two (?) monthly meetings affiliated with the Evangelical Friends Church International.
Though an example of the “fifth edition,” this copy was printed in the same year that the Journal first appeared, i.e. 1832. I have focused on the divisions within the jurisdiction of Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting because it was once owned by a Hicksite monthly meeting in the vicinity of Philadelphia, as noted under Provenance, below.
Provenance: “J. Edward Moseley, gift”; Friends Library, Norristown [PA] Preparative Meeting (Hicksite, 1860-1936); Norristown [PA] Meeting [(Hicksite, 1936- )], “15 Feb. 45”; Steven’s Book Shop [(Raleigh, NC?)]; SPU (from Steven’s): “11-1-89”. A J. Edward Moseley who lived from 1910 to 1974 was an obscure Disciples of Christ historian. But the historian may not have been the J. Edward Moseley who once owned this volume, given that he would have had to have “gift[ed]” it to the Norristown Hicksites while they still constituted a Preparative Meeting, i.e. sometime before 1936, when the historian would have been at most 26. (“J. Edward Moseley, gift” appears on the title page, whereas SPU’s (?) “11-1-89 Steve’s Book Shop” appears with “Norristown Meeting 15 Feb. 45 C.H.” in the usual place for such SPU markings, on the recto of the next leaf following.)
---Steve Perisho
Works cited:
Dandelion, Pink. An introduction to Quakerism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Gordon, Alexander. “Keith, George (1639?-1716).” Dictionary of national biography 10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1891-1892), 1206-1209.
Ingle, H. Larry. “Hicks, Elias (19 Mar. 1748-27 Feb. 1830.” American national biography 10 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 744-745.
Ingle, H. Larry. Quakers in conflict: the Hicksite reformation. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1986.
According to Maldwyn L. Edwards, Adam Clarke was “the greatest name in British Methodism in the generation which succeeded Wesley” (Edwards, 55). Born in 1762 in Moybeg, County Londonderry (present-day Northern Ireland), Clarke “fell under the influence of the Methodists in 1778” (Sellers). In 1782 he met Wesley, who sent him out as a circuit preacher later that same year (Taggart, 69). These early days as an evangelist left an indelible mark on Clarke; for the rest of his life he remained happiest when “evangelizing literally on the periphery of Wesleyanism: the Channel Islands, Cornwall, Ireland, rural Lancashire, and the Shetlands (where he was the effective planter of Methodism in the 1820s)” (Sellers). These missionary efforts were complemented by Clarke’s wide-ranging social interests and denominational responsibilities. In addition to serving three times as President of the British Methodist Conference and four times in the comparable position in his native Ireland (McElhenney and Yrigoyen, 414), he also established several Stranger’s Friend Societies – organizations originally founded by John Wesley to collect money for the “deserving poor” (Macquiban, 339-340) – and was known to house unemployed sailors in his own home (Hamilton, 226).
It was, however, Clarke’s prolific scholarship that set him apart from his early Methodist counterparts. He was a “gifted linguist, speaking some twenty languages” (Forsaith, 361), a skill-set that enabled him to descipher to the “Coptic langauge on the Rosetta Stone” (Langford, 35). Of all his works, the most popular remains the multi-volume Commentary on the Whole of Scripture, published from 1810-1824 (Sellers).
The volumes chosen for display better serve to illustrate the range of Clarke’s scholarly and ministerial interests. Volumes 1 and 2 of The Miscellaneous Works of Adam Clarke contain his Memoirs of the Wesley Family. Volumes 3 and 4 (the former of which SPU does not currently own) contain Clarke’s translation of the German Rationalist-era minister and noted hymn writer Christoph Christian Sturm’s (1740-1786) reflections. In volumes 5-8 one finds compiled a variety of Clarke’s own sermons, delivered over a long career that extended to the farthest reaches of the British Isles. Volume 9 provides another translation, this time of Fleury’s Manners of the Ancient Israelites. Fleury (1640-1723), was a lawyer turned priest who played a significant role in the court of French king Louis XIV. Known for his Gallican tendencies, Fleury published studies of the moral ethics of the Israelites and the Gentiles in addition to a twenty-volume history of Christianity from its origins to 1414 (Barry, 762). Volumes 10-12 include a variety of “Detached pieces including critiques on various publications, historical sketches, biographical notices, and correspondence.” Finally, volume 13 is devoted to the topic of Christian Missions, which we have seen played a signifciant role in Clarke’s career.
The 12 volumes on display were donated to SPU by Messiah College in 2017 and were once owned by Raymond J. Wells, likely the author of this doctoral thesis on Adam Clarke (completed at the University of Edinburgh in 1957 and also held in SPU’s Special Collections). They continue to offer significant insight into early Methodism and its interaction with Continental scholarship.
—Colin Lewis
Works Cited
Barry, M.M. “Fleury, Claude.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., vol. 5. New York: Gale, 2003.
Edwards, Maldwyn L. “Adam Clarke, The Man,” Methodist History 9, no. 4 (July 1971): 50-56.
Forsaith, Peter. “Methodism and Its Images.” In T&T Clark Companion to Methodism, edited by Charles Yrigoyen, Jr, 350-268. London: T&T Clark International, 2010.
Hamilton, Barry W. “The ‘Eternal Sonship’ Controversy in Early British Methodism,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 40:2 (Fall 2005): 220-238.
Langford, Thomas A. Wesleyan Theology: A Sourcebook. Durham, NC: The Labyrinth Press, 1984.
Macquiban, Timothy S.A. “Strangers’ Friend Societies.” In A Dictionary of Methodism in Britain and Ireland, edited by John A. Vickers, 339-340. Peterborough: Epworth Press, 2000.
McEllhenney, John G. and Charles Yrigoyen, Jr. “Methodism A to Z.” In T&T Clark Companion to Methodism, edited by Charles Yrigoyen, Jr., 389-512. London: T&T Clark International.
Sellers, Ian. 2004. “Clarke, Adam (1762-1832), Wesleyan Methodist minister and scholar.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 17 Aug. 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-5483
Taggart, Norman W. “Clarke, Dr Adam (c. 1760-1832; e.m. 1782).” In A Dictionary of Methodism in Britain and Ireland, edited by John A. Vickers, 69. Peterborough: Epworth Press, 2000.
1847 and 1848. Whately, Richard. The errors of Romanism traced to their origin in human nature. 2nd ed. New York: Robert Carter, 1847. Bound behind 1848 Whately, below, BT94 .W45 1848. Provenance: “Edm. John Senkler, Nov. 29. 1851.” Reading notes in pencil in back.
1848. Whately, Richard. The kingdom of Christ, and the errors of Romanism. New York: Robert Carter, 1848. Bound before 1847 Whately, above, BT94 .W45 1848. Provenance: “Edm. John Senkler, Nov. 29. 1851.” Reading notes in pencil in back.
It was said of Oriel College, Oxford that during the first half of the nineteenth century its “Common Room stunk of logic” (Tuckwell, 59). It is thus no surprise to find among its most prominent fellows the well-known logician Richard Whately (1787-1863), author of these two volumes. Indeed, Whately belonged to what has since become known as the “Oriel Noetics,” a group of dons named after the Greek word for “intellectual” (νοητικός [OED}) and distinguished in large part by their opposition to the Tractarianism of Newman, Keble, and Pusey. Although later described as a “theological school, of a dry and repulsive character” (Newman, 232), the Noetics were in reality “leading agents in the process of Anglican renewal” based on a rational defense of revealed religion (Brent, “The Oriel Noetics,” 72-73).
Both The errors of Romanism and The kingdom of Christ delineated should be read as contributions to this larger mission of making Christianity intellectually defensible. First published in 1830, Errors traces controversial Catholic dogmas to their origin in human nature (Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics, 163), which, according to Whately, always leads to heresy if coupled with unchecked human passion (Brent, “Richard Whately”). In particular, it is the human tendency towards intellectual sloth which most precipitates the“identifiably Catholic failings of superstition and blind submission to revered authority” (Boylan, 37). With his emphasis on humanity writ large, Whately intends the argument to be universal in scope, useful against any religious group willing to sacrifice rationality for superstition or authoritarianism. Indeed, Whately regretted singling out Rome for the rest of his life (Fitzpatrick, vol. 1, 37).
The kingdom of Christ delineated, published 11 years later, provides a similar line of argument in its “attack on apostolic tradition as the true foundation of the church, as opposed to the scriptures. Whately asserted that the reformers had been scrupulous to distinguish, and not to blend, scripture and tradition” (Brent, “Richard Whately”). In order to illustrate that tradition is unnecessary for a successful Christian apologetic, the now Anglican Archbishop of Dublin proceeds in this publication to, among other things, offer a defense of Christ’s divinity based entirely on human logic (Fitzpatrick, vol. 2, 6-8).
While not direct rejoinders to either book, scholars have nevertheless read two Tractarian works as potential responses to the Noetic line of thought espoused in Whately’s work. The first is Newman’s 1831 sermon, “The Mystery of the Holy Trinity,” in which one can easily read Whately as an example of the preacher’s “misbeliever,” someone who overemphasizes the practical nature of revelation and promotes “scepticism about any real knowledge of the tri-unity of God in se” (Graham, 70). Similarly, Keble’s Tract 89 contends that Noetic rationality squashes any sense of the mystical within the Christian faith (Westhaver, 265).
The particular volumes on display at SPU were published in 1847 (The Errors of Romanism) and 1848 (The kingdom of Christ delineated) by Robert Carter and Brothers, an American firm dedicated to the publication of theological and religious books (Tebbel, 332). We can assume that these two were chosen carefully (Carter was known to spend hours reading potential books, rejecting five for every one he adopted [Cochran-Carter, 48]) and bound together precisely because they both constitute an attack on the authority of religious tradition. From Carter’s publishing house in New York, the book found its way to Ontario and into the collection of the Rev. Edmund John Senkler, who, incidentally, had been ordained to Church of England ministry by Henry Bathurst, the very bishop who had in 1831 refused the see of Dublin (Aston, “Henry Bathurst”), thereby paving the way for Whately’s arrival in the city that same year.
—Colin Lewis
Works Cited
Aston, Nigel. “Bathurst, Henry (bap. 1744, d. 1837), bishop of Norwich.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 28 June 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-1697.
Boylan, Ciara. The Life and Career of Archbishop Richard Whately: Ireland, Religion, and
Reform. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018.
Brent, Richard. Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion, and Reform 1830-1841. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
Brent, Richard. “The Oriel Noetics.” In Brock, M.G. and Curthows, M.C., The History of the University of Oxford Vol. 6, Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part I. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Brent, Richard. "Whately, Richard (1787–1863), Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin and philosopher." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 26 Jun. 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-29176
Cochran-Carter, Annie. Robert Carter: His Life and Work, 1807-1889. New York: Anson D.F. Randolph and Co., 1891.
Fitzpatrick, William John. Memoirs of Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin. With a Glance at His Contemporaries and Times, Vol 1. London: Richard Bentley, 1864. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=MdSKEIao7zcC&lr=&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PR3
Fitzpatrick, William John. Memoirs of Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin. With a Glance at His Contemporaries and Times, Vol 2. London: Richard Bentley, 1864. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89094732526;view=1up;seq=5
Graham, Donald. “Newman’s Sermon on ‘The Mystery of the Holy Trinity’: A Response to Richard Whately?” Newman Studies Journal 5, no. 1 (2008): 63-76.
Jones, Todd E. The Broad Church: A Biography of a Movement. Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003.
Mozley, Anne, Ed. Letters and Correspondence of Newman to 1845, vol. 1. London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1903. http://www.newmanreader.org/biography/mozley/volume1/file2.html
Newman, John Henry. Apologia Pro Vita Sua (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
"noetic, adj.1 and n.". OED Online. June 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/127626?rskey=UaPcrg&result=1 (accessed June 26, 2018).
Tebbel, John. A History of Book Publishing in the United States, Vol. 1, The Creation of an Industry, 1630-1865. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1972.
Tuckwell, Rev. W. Pre-Tractarian Oxford: A Reminiscence of the Oriel “Noetics.” London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1909.
Westhaver, George. “Mysticism and Sacramentalism in the Oxford Movement.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, edited by Stewart J. Brown, Peter B. Nockles, and James Pereiro, 255-270. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
David Bebbington, the noted scholar of British evangelicalism, has credited the nineteenth-century Scottish preacher Edward Irving with helping to transform British evangelicalism from a movement in which “reason, not emotion, had been the lodestar” to the a form more familiar to us today, namely an expression of faith that stresses “the place of feeling and intuition in human perception” (78, 80). Bebbington makes this argument in spite of the fact that at the time of his death and for many years thereafter Irving was considered a tragic figure, interesting but offering nothing for the future of the Christian faith. Born August 4, 1792, in Annan, Dumfriesshire, he was initially an assistant to the renowned Scottish preacher Thomas Chalmers before leaving in 1822 to serve a Church of Scotland parish in London (Brown). The acclaim he experienced among the upper echelons of London society shortly after his arrival, however, had ebbed by 1826, the year in which he began preaching an adventist message urging his followers to prepare for Christ’s second coming in 1868 (Brown). By the late 1820s, then, the inhabitants of the coroneted carriages which had once lined the streets of his church had been replaced by ardent premillenialists, many of whom believed that the “world was sinking into a state of evil and confusion which would culminate in the destruction of the church, the restoration of the Jews to Palestine, the return of Christ in glory, and the establishment of the 1000 years of rule by the saints on earth – to be followed by the last judgment and the end of the world” (Brown). Significantly, his preaching on such themes inspired another Scottish divine whose work is included in this display, namely Horatius Bonar. Many years later, Bonar would remember Irving’s 1828 sermon at St. Cuthbert's Church to be “one of the formative influences of his life” (Sandee, 26).
At the same time, Irving began teaching that “Christ at the incarnation assumed not human nature per se but fallen human nature” (Bebbington, 79). Despite asserting that Christ was saved from actual sin by the work of the Holy Spirit, early 1828 nevertheless saw the first accusations of heresy lobbed against the preacher by those concerned that he was espousing an errant Christology (Brown). Matters were complicated further in October 1831 when “much of London was excited and alarmed by an apparently sudden recovery of the apostolic gift of tongues in Edward Irving’s church” (Sandee, 26). Scandalized, the trustees barred Irving from the building; not to be outdone, Irving established the Catholic Apostolic Church, “purveying a strange blend of Adventism, tongues, elaborate liturgy, and punctilio over ecclesiastical order” (Bebbington, 79). This exacerbated his already strained relations with the Church of Scotland, and in 1833 Irving was formally deposed from ministry, though the reasons given pertained to his Christological formulations rather than his “heightened supernaturalism” (Bebbington, 81). By December of the next year, Irving was dead.
The foregoing life, which is detailed in the biography of Mrs. Oliphant on display here, seems at first glance to be unbearably tragic; yet, as noted above, church historians refuse to dismiss Edward Irving as simply one theologically oddity among many others. Bebbington considers Irving as the one who best adapted the language of Evangelicalism “into the Romantic idiom of the day” (Bebbington, 80) whereas Gordon Strachan has argued that, due to his dual emphasis on both Scripture and experience, Irving should be considered the “first Reformed-Pentecostal theologian. He is one of the few to whom it is given to uncover new systems of Scriptural truth that prove themselves subsequently to be a blessing and inspiration to millions” (Strachan, 21). In light of what both Strachan and Bebbington have said, it is safe to say that Mrs. Oliphant’s treatment – the first “satisfactory biography of the great London preacher” (Curry, 5) - is still worth having recourse to more than 150 years after its publication. Due caution is of course advised: as early as one year after its 1862 publication, David Curry was writing that Mrs. Oliphant had “made the not unfrequent mistake of supposing that the biographer’s office is that of the advocate rather than the judge, and so a kind of partisan aspect is given to her statements which detracts from their authority” (Curry, 5). Such bias was undoubtedly due in large part to her being asked to write the biography by Irving’s family. Moreover, Oliphant’s “religious position could best be described as dogmatic Christian unorthodoxy,” one which combined “worldly shrewdness with a naïve enthusiasm for the supernatural” (Jay). Such a description could perhaps also be applied to Irving himself.
The copy which SPU has in its possession contains pencil notes on the inside front cover detailing the book’s original owners: “Janetta Alexander from her Brother Archibald Alexander.” Presumably, these were the daughter and son of Archibald Alexander, first president of Princeton Theological Seminary, and his wife Janetta. Little is known about either of them, except that Janetta nursed her father in his final days (Alexander, 504). It is nevertheless an interesting choice for a gift, considering their father’s - and the seminary’s - place as the bastion of Reformed orthodoxy. Nothing is known about how the copy came to be in SPU’s possession.
—Colin Lewis
Works Cited
Alexander, James W. The life of Archibald Alexander, D.D., first professor in the Theology Seminary, at Princeton, New Jersey (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication,1855. https://archive.org/details/lifeofarchibalda185500alex
Curry, Daniel. “Art. 1. – Edward Irving. The Life of Edward Irving, Minister of the National Scotch Church, London. Illustrated by his Journals and Correspondence. By Mrs. Oliphant. 8vo., pp. 627. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1862,” The Methodist Quarterly Review 45 (1863):5-29.
Bebbington, D.W. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Brown, Stewart J. 2014. “Irving, Edward (1792-1834), preacher and theologian.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 17 Sep. 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-14473
Jay, Elisabeth. 2004. “Oliphant, Margaret Oliphant Wilson (1828-1897), novelist and biographer.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 18 Sep. 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-20712
Sandee, Ernest. R. The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism 1800-1930. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House.
Strachan, Gordon. The Pentecostal Theology of Edward Irving. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1973.
Eugène-Jacques Jacquier was born in the southeastern French commune of Vienne (located about 16 miles south of Lyon, in the department of Isère) on 15 April 1847. Ordained a priest in 1871, he served the Grenoble parishes of Saint-Alban-de-Roche (1872- ) and Bourgoin (1876- ) as vicar, and then Valencin (1878- ) and Sérezin-du-Rhône (1888- ) as pastor. An avocational interest in geography (which arose in the course of the teaching he did at the minor seminary of Rondeau (Podechard, 15)) drew him to “the map of Palestine,” and, from there, into biblical studies. A “autodidact” (Bride) at a time when there were, as yet, no “free faculties of theology” (Podechard, 15), Jacquier did go on to undertake doctoral studies at the Catholic University of Lyon, which had only opened for its very first classes on any level in 1877. In 1891, he published a widely noticed (“remarquée” (Trinquet)) dissertation on the Didache, the only extant (and 11th-century Constantinopolitan) manuscript of which had been discovered (in 1873) by Philotheos Bryennios less than 20—and first published (in 1883) less than 10—years before. In 1894 he was appointed to the faculty that had awarded his doctorate, which he, being by that point “one of the French exegetes” most conversant with the emergent literature, became responsible for ushering into the new “scientific” age of biblical scholarship (Bride; Wittich). (According to Podechard, a colleague in Old Testament almost twenty years his junior, Jacquier was, however, unlikely to have read all of the scholarship in French, Latin, German, English, Dutch, and Italian that he captured in the bibliography to his first book (15).)
Widely admired by even the “rationalist” scholars who considered themselves “adversaries” of the Church, but praised him as “an honorable [(honnête)] man” (“Mort”; Bride), Jacquier developed a reputation for the careful, painstaking, well-substantiated, austere, independent, and abiding quality of his work (Duplacy; Trinquet; Wittich) across many articles in major journals such as the Revue biblique (during its first two years especially (Podechard, 15)) and the Revue des sciences religieuses (from 1921 (Podechard, 17)), as well as many books “still consulted” today (Trinquet).
Take just the one on display, for example, the title Podechard, writing in 1932 (17), considered the book by Jacquier likely to enjoy the longest-lasting impact. Though it does not appear in the indices to Craig S. Keener’s massive four-volume 2012 “exegetical commentary” on Acts, or, for that matter, the short “Bibliography” to the extensive 2002 New Interpreter’s Bible commentary on Acts by SPU’s own Dr. Robert W. Wall (who inherited this very copy once owned by the great Manchester biblical scholar F. F. Bruce (who, in his Greek and English commentaries both, cites Jacquier on the death of Judas at Acts 1:18)), there are four references to Jacquier in the 1998 Anchor Bible commentary on that book by Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and twelve in the 2009 Hermeneia commentary on Acts by Richard I. Pervo. Or take Le texte du Nouveau Testament (1913, vol. 2 of his Le Nouveau Testament dans l'Eglise chrétienne (1911-1913)). That Ellens claims was one of the books that “set the course of [the] scholarly life” of the great Princeton textual critic Bruce M. Metzger (1914-2007; Ellens, 729).
If Jacquier had a weakness, it was his distaste for “general ideas, a certain defiance, even a bit of disdain, for all forms—more or less ambitious—of synthesis”; a tendency to remain content with the accumulation of detail; an intemperate suspicion of premature closure (Podechard, 17-18).
Though a bit of a loner (Podechard says he “lived in great isolation”), Jacquier remained a pastor all his life, translating the gospels into a form designed to appeal to the non-academic; cultivating, over a long period of time, the conversion of an Anglican friend; and venturing out across the Tilsit bridge in the bitter cold of a Lyonnais winter, though “already in poor health” himself (not to mention notorious for his inability to tolerate an open window in even the heat of summer when still in good health!), to receive an old classmate whom he had been visiting regularly—by that point a famous doctor on his deathbed—back into the Catholic Church (Podechard, 18-19).
Jacquier served the Catholic University of Lyon until paralyzed in 1927 (?) at the age of about 80.
He had assembled, with a long patience and real ability, an impressively complete library on the New Testament. These books, they had been his entire life. Yet the moment came when[, unable to hold a pen or even, later, read,] he had to part with them. While they were being removed, he, already paralyzed and immobile in his wheelchair, put up a brave front. But when [his] whole world had gone and the door had been shut [behind it], the tears came unbidden [(Podechard, 19)].
That said, “thanks to his great faith, to his force of character,” and to the loving care with which he was surrounded, he remained gentle, pious, uncomplaining, and serene. Indeed, “his countenance [(front)], his eyes, and his smile” continued to emerge out of the quicksand that rose about him until his death in 1932. His funeral mass at Saint-Irénée in Lyons was graced by the assistance of Cardinal Archbishop of Grenoble [Alexandre Caillot], who was the one to pronounce the liturgical absolution (“donner l’absoute”) over his coffin (“Mort”; Robert, sv Absoute; Podechard, 19).
—Steve Perisho
Gift of Robert W. Wall, Paul T. Walls Professor of Scripture and Wesleyan Studies, in 2017.
Provenance: Hurst Bros. Bookbinders, Shaw Heath, Stockport, England; F. F. (Frederick Fyvie) Bruce; Robert W. Wall.
Works cited:
Bride, A. “Jacquier (Eugène-Jacques).” Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, Tables générales 2 (1967): 2381.
Duplacy, J. “Jacquier, Eugène.” Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche2 5 (1960): 851.
Ellens, J. Harold. “Metzger, Bruce Manning.” Dictionary of major biblical interpreters (2007).
Podechard, Emmanuel. "Eugène Jacquier. Bulletin des facultés catholiques de Lyon 54, [no. 2] (mars-juillet 1932): 14-19. Many thanks to Claudine Fréchet, Directrice of the Bibliothèque Universitaire Henri de Lubac and Professeur en Sciences du Langage at the Université Catholique de Lyon, for supplying this obituary, unavailable in any North American library.
Robert, Paul. Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française: les mots et les associations d’idées. 6 vols. Paris: Société du Nouveau Littré, 1962-1965.
Trinquet, J. “Jacquier (Eugène-Jacques).” Catholicisme: hier, aujourd’hui, demain 6 (1967): 288.
Wittich, Gunda. “Jacquier, Eugène-Jacques.” Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon 2 (1990): 1424.
This collection of “seven end-historical reflections” was owned by the Rev. Otto W. Henn (1913-2014), a Presbyterian pastor who left Heidelberg for the United States in 1938, in part because his new bride, Herta Werner, whom he had married “illegally” under the Nazi regime, was a quarter Jewish on her father's side. It was given to the SPU Library by his son Werner Henn in 2016, and is one of but two copies in the whole of North America. (For more on the Henns, see 1946, below, by Colin Lewis.)
Had I not 
misplaced my notes on the text itself, I might have attempted a summary of sorts, with an eye on the rapidly shifting political situation in Germany at the time. For preliminary indications are that Mumssen—who pastored Christuskirche Eimsbüttel from 1903 until his retirement in 1934, and was Provost of the Western District of the established (i.e. Lutheran) church in Hamburg from July of 1933 to March of 1934 (Fix, Nicolaisen, and Pabst, eds., 180)—was among those who embraced Adolf Hitler. Elmer Spohn recently summarized a couple of articles that Mumssen contributed to the October 1933 issue of Dein Reich komme! as follows:
One should . . . not be surprised that the world flees from the Schöpfungsordnungen of God, since [the church?] has modelled . . . this flight for years. Now [though] one can ‘be glad’ of heart that from 30 January [1933, the day Hitler was appointed Chancellor,] a new movement has been inaugurated in ‘our German nation and fatherland’ ‘which’ may lead ‘us again’ ‘into God’s Schöpfungsordnungen’. . . . What remains unclear, however, is, on the one hand, [1] whether this new movement will be able to prevail throughout the whole world, and, on the other, [2] whether the Schöpfungsordnungen will lead to the worship of the Creator or the idolization of the self
(Spohn, 103-104). And according to the Rev. Julius Hahn (1880-1956), writing his former vicar, the Rev. Heinz Harten (1908-1987), on 28 October 1933, the Revs. Walter Gerber (Mumssen’s son-in-law), Bernhard-Heinrich Forck, and Mumssen himself, along with the Rev. Hans Mumssen (his son), “had become German Christians,” albeit only “in order to protect [Landesbischof Simon] Schöffel” (1880-1959), and with a readiness to “forsake this movement immediately when Schöffel requires it of them” (Hahn, 121). Two months later, on Friday, 30 December, Hahn spoke of “an Advent celebration in the Gemeindhaus of the Kreuzkirche” in which the Provost—according to editorial note no. 666 probably Mumssen, but just possibly Provost of the Southern (rather than Western) District the Rev. Dr. Hermann Junge—
spoke once of Christ, [but] otherwise of Hitler, [while] Pastor Bunz, in his main address (“Dein König kommt”), only of Hitler and not at all of Christ. It is certainly a shame! As are the new 28 theses of the German Christians, which were disseminated after worship in Wandsbek. Almost all heresies!
(Hahn, 136) That, though, was back in Advent. Later in this same letter dated 30 December, by contrast, Hahn adds that
In the forenoon [of Friday, 29 December?] I was two hours with [Rudgar] Mumssen. True to character, he has effected the [promised] break with the German Christians and upbraids them [now] even more than I. In the same way [he upbraids Walter] Birnbaum and [Freidrich] Engelke, about whom he hasn’t a good word to say. Whereas I seek to understand and am sorry for them. [His son] Hanni Mumssen came to this [position] also
(Hahn, 137).
References to Mumssen in Heinrich Wilhelmi's Die Hamburger Kirche in der nationalsozialistischen Zeit 1933-1945 (Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht,1968), however, for example those on pp. 109-110, make it pretty clear where his sympathies really lay. There Mumssen is quoted as 1) reaffirming for his fellow former German Christians a commitment to National Socialism even while 2) accounting for the break with them in terms of the allegiance they (these erstwhile German Christians) owed to Landschaftbischof Simon Schöffel (1880-1959), himself a Nazi sympathizer, albeit one of a more cautious stripe than his rival and imminent replacement, Landschaftbischof Franz Eduard Tügel (1888-1946): The issue was not National Socialism or even Hitler, but a higher allegiance perfectly consistent with that owed also to Reichsbischof Ludwig Müller. "He who at this point remains [1] a German Christian," Mumssen was to declare on 28 November 1933, "breaks his oath of office to [2] the Landesbischof" (Wilhelmi, 110). Wilhelmi tells the story as follows:
There can be no doubt that [the announcement of 27 November 1933] was a calculated disruption. Only, the effect was other than the one expected. A storm of indignation arose among the pastors. The one who gave expression to this indignation [(ihr)] at the conclusion of the session in a vote of confidence [in Landbischof Simon Schöffel] was the [very] man who had been the leader of [the] Hamburg district[‘s] German Christians, P[astor Hans] Lehman (who who was for this reason, however, expelled from the German Christian movement that very night). All of those present with the exception of three or five (both numbers were given) agreed, although [Karl] Boll had distributed the watchword [(Parole)]: 'Should a vote of confidence in the Landesbischof be held, the German Christian [party] is to remain seated. District order [(Gaubefehl)]!” Yet that same night [Bernhard-Heinrich] Forck released, on [Theodor] Knolle's order, the vote of confidence to the press, naturally in vain, and to the Federal representative. The provosts of the three urban church districts, [Rudgar] Mumssen, [Johannes] Wehrmann, [and] Dr. [Hermann] Junge telegraphed the Reichsbischof [as follows]: 'Hamburg’s Lutheran [(evangelische)] population in great agitation. Landesbischof D. Schöffel enjoys full trust of even the vast majority of German Christians.' Even the leader of [the] Lutheran [(evangelischen)] youth at St. Michaelis and the co-leader of the men’s association there made a similar declaration that same evening. Many of the participants in the pastoral assembly gathered again afterwards in the restaurant Jalant. Knolle reported on this vividly that same night in a letter to [Franz Eduard] Tügel: “Invited there by telephone, I accepted [that] there would be German Christians [present]; but [I] found to my astonishment a large mixed gathering [(Kreis)] of all positions. Upon request I took over the leadership, in order to clarify from my point of view the question under discussion, namely the that of a withdrawl from the German Christian [party] into something personal [(einer persönlichen)].” Knolle—“[having] become with sincere conviction [a] German Christian . . . out of confidence in Tügel’s ecclesiastical leadership in Hamburg[,] . . . and still convinced today that the fundamental idea of the German Christian [movement]—[that] of bringing National Socialism and Christianity, people [(Volk)] and church, into a perfectly intimate bond—must be passionately affirmed”—saw the conflict as one between duty to the Landesbischof [on the one hand] and the leadership of the German Christians” in Hamburg [on the other]. Altogether 41 pastors disengaged from the German Christian [movement] on that day (28 November 1933; W. Remé to Tügel on 4 January 1935), for the most part in clusters; they claimed [that] the reason [for their dissociation] lay 'not in a changed position with respect to the guiding principles of the movement of faith [(Glaubensbewegung)] or even to the Third Reich, which I [(namely Rudgar Mumssen)] 100% affirm, but in the conflict between district leadership [(Gauleitung)] and [the] Landesbischof, who [governs] me [(der es mir) considered] as [a] true follower of the ecclesiastical leader” and so forth (Mumssen Sr. and 12 others who had gathered at Fischer-St. Jakobi on the evening of 28 November 1933). They cited the order of the Reichsbischof dated 16 November 1933, in which they 'discerned the duty of exclusive obedience to their Landesbischof' and the impossibility of standing 'under [any] secondary [(doppelter)] authority' (P. Brüning and 14 companions).
What Mumssen’s position was at the time of his death in 1944 (what, by then, he had come to think of the despised Confessing Church, for example), I can’t say, having read all of this material out of context, and little not readily available to me from here. Landesbischöfe Simon Schöffel (whom Mumssen supported) and Franz Eduard Tügel (whom, in a kind of forced retirement, he undoubtedly did not), for all of their intense personal "Odium" (Wilhelmi, 284 ff.), seem to have concurred in a determined opposition to that whole crowd. Tügel is said to have been an opponent of Martin Niemöller (Wilhelmi, 285) and the Confessing Church in general (Wilhelmi, 291), and Schöffel, of Niemöller and Karl Barth (Wilhelmi, 285, 287). (Other entries in the index could be examined, but I'll stop with those for now.) As it was in relation to these two bishops of Hamburg in particular that Mumssen took his stand on National Socialism and the German Christian movement, it should be noted that they were both—each in his own way and degree—Nazis. As Wilhelmi asserts and then procedes to demonstrate, it would be a gross 'oversimplification' of the facts to claim that "Tügel was a National Socialist and a German Christian, and Schöffel, never either" (Wilhelmi, 284 ff.).
Having set that whole question aside for further research at some future time, I will now content myself with a translation of the Rev. Carl Richter’s obscure “Recollections,” a copy of which InterLibrary Loan Specialist Vance Lindahl was able to procure for me from the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky. Since Special Collections here consists primarily in Wesleyan, Wesleyan Holiness, and Free Methodist materials, I ask my readers to watch for the Rev. Mumssen’s broadly Pietistic and specifically Wesleyan sympathies, and to compare what Richter says below with these words from Voigt (139):
The effects of the Welsh Revival (1904-1905) on the Gemeinschaftsbewegung has deserved more attention than it has attracted hitherto. Here I mention, by way of example, the debate between [two] Hamburg pastors, Max Glage and Rudgar Mumssen. National Conservative pastor of St. Anschar Max Glage understood himself, with his independent chapel community, as a confessionally conscious Lutheran free churchman, [and] his independent chapel community [as a confessionally conscious Lutheran free church]. He wanted, in the wake of the revival in Wales, a clarificatory decision between Lutheran Wittenberg [one the one hand] and British Wales [on the other]. Noteworthy is the answer of established-church pastor Rudgar Mumssen, who was closely associated with the Gemeinschaftsbewegung. After [the publication of] Glage’s Wittenberg oder Wales? (1905), Mumssen answered with his rejoinder Wittenberg und Wales (1905). While Glage the confessionalist opposed ‘Lutheran Christendom’ to the Methodists in claiming [that] this Wittenberg branch of the church of Christ ‘preaches another Christ than that promoted by the Methodists,’ Mumssen sees in this a confessionally Lutheran polemic ‘against another tendency within [one and] the [same] Protestant church’. This ‘other tendency’ was, of course, not the Methodist Church [itself], but the Gemeinschaftsbewegung. [It is] from this perspective that he writes at the end of his remarks, ‘So we [would] unite the established-church principle with our [!] Methodism, and represent in this way that union which we in [our] title have captured: Wittenberg und Wales.’ In the sense of the concept of Methodism mentioned earlier, Mumssen elucidated his notion of an ‘established-church’ Methodism to which he gave explicit allegiance and to the hand of which he held conclusively fast: ‘The maxim “both together!” encompasses the two principles of established-church Methodism’.
(It would be interesting to know whether Mumssen remained this generous on into the 1930s and 1940s. See, for example, Wilhelmi's comments on the strict confessionalism of Mumssen's more or less beloved Landesbischopf Simon Schöffel on pp. 286-287.)
And now for my translation of Richter's 1962 "Recollections":
Pastor and Provost Rudgar Mumssen, Hamburg
(born 7 December 1876, died 30 March 1944)
Recollections of the life of my confirmator
[1] Rudgar Mumssen was the youngest son of a professor in the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneum in Hamburg [founded by Johannes Bugenhagen in 1529]. “God in his kindness gave me a Christian home.” His father he lost at the age of five, his grandmother at the age of eight. “My mother remained with me much longer,” until her 90th year of life. When he was seven, fifteen, and twenty-seven, “the Lord intervened noticeably and decisively in my life” at the ages of seven, fifteen, and twenty-seven. “My whole life was a chain of acts of God, wonders, and answers to prayer”.
As a student at the [Neue Gelehrtenschule or] Wilhelm-Gymnasium, and indeed as first in his class, he became such a distinguished classicist that as a student, for example, he translated German folk songs into a Greek that could be sung to the [original] melodies; and such a student and master of mathematics that during the First World War he taught not only religion but mathematics to the seniors and those preparing for the Abitur. When he visited us, his first question to our daughter was, “What is mathematics good for? . . . Truly, mathematics, the logarithm, is something heavenly!” A confirmand, now Prof. Dr. Ing., wrote me just now [as follows]: “What characterized his life of faith and his theology may even be closely connected to this mathematical gift for seeing, and so also describing, all things as transparently as possible.” He acquired his comprehensive philosophical and theological foundations as a student in Tübingen with Adolf Schlatter and in Halle with Loofs and Stange and above all Martin Kähler, whose famous prayer became concrete and intuitive in Mumssen’s life: “Help [me] out of thought into life, to be wholly [and] without wavering your own!” [(Kähler, 304)] From an early age alert to and shrewd in the face of every false personality cult, he taught his school-aged son th[is] game of question and answer: “‘What are you?’ ‘The animating element in the family circle.’ ‘What do you want to become?’ ‘A thoroughly noble personality through [the] conscientious fulfillment of [my] duty.’” A book review [he wrote in his twenties] stresses something that applies to his own inner way on into the third decade of his life: “A word to the learned, for whom Hellenism and Idealism block the way [in]to Scripture.”
He took both of his theological exams in Hamburg. On the day of his choice for [(Wahl an)] Christ Church in Eimsbüttel (22 February 1903), he made public also the other choice [(Wahl)] that he had already made in secret, and was engaged to the daughter of a Wandsbek gymnasium instructor, Helene Sproessel, an enthusiastic confirmand of Pastor Nikolai von Ruckteschell of the Eilbek Church of Peace, with an eye to marrying [her] on 23 June 1903; in this way he became the brother-in-law of a friend from his student days, Pastor Johannes Wehrmann. Another [2] friend from his student days, [the Disciple of Christ Friedrich Siegfried Heinrich] Ludwig von Gerdtell [(1872-1954)], became for him the “heavenly suitor” (Hos 2:19-20). On 6 April 1904 the latter sought him out on the occasion of his apologetic lectures at [the] Sagebiel [establishment (Hahn, 79n398)] and attacked him, as Mumssen himself once told me[. What von Gerdtell said was]: “You pastors of the established church are so [non-committal]: to the people you say, ‘Here is the way and the door to heaven,’ but you yourselves remain standing without!”
This was the third intervention of God into his life, which transformed him from a “positive theologian” into a witness to Christ [(Christuszeugen)] certain of [his own] salvation. “From that point on I began to preach ‘conversion’ in the sense of a complete surrender to the Lord on the ground of the certainty of becoming accepted by him on the spot. Obviously it was still some time before I grasped the full significance of the cross of Christ, not only as [a] presupposition of forgiveness, but as [the] foundation of an abiding certainty of salvation, [so] that I henceforth could preach ‘conversion’ as [a] turning towards the cross, and faith as a fixation on [(als den Blick auf)] the cross.” From that point on he never tired of testifying repeatedly to [the benefit of] Is 53:5 for [both] himself and his hearers. “The punishment lies on Him in order that [(auf daß)] we might have peace, and by his wounds we are healed” [(Luther Bible)]. It sounds like the self-description of his own concept of “office,” when he—in 1929 in, by the way, the lectures on the [Small] Catechism [he delivered] in his grandfather Hermann Mumssen’s (1804-1859) community of Hamburg-Hamm—interpreted Luther’s exposition of the phrase “in order that [(auf daß)] I may be his, . . . and serve him” (II.2[; Book of concord: “auf das”; WA 30.1, 249: “auff das” | “up dat”]) as follows: “In this auf daß lies on the one side the simplest wisdom of the Evangelists [(Evangelistenweisheit)], and on the other, the deepest theology of salvation.”
It was into this new situation that, in 1904/05, I came to him for instruction preparatory to confirmation [(zum Konfirmandenanmeldung, enrollment as a confirmand)]. My fellow confirmands from this or the next year all agree in speaking of the unusual methods of advertising he had to employ in order to prevail against pointed counter propaganda. One [of these] mentions, for example, countercurrents among his fellow students: “Don’t go to Pastor Mumssen; under him you’ll have to be ‘converted.’ [Indeed,] our teacher announced officially in front of the class, ‘You don’t have to allow yourself to be confirmed by Pastor Mumssen!’ But as a young student in the children’s choir and children’s worship of Christ Church I had already allowed myself to be captured by him[, i.e.] by his captivating friendship, [and] to my blessing. He visibly accompanied me and all of us for the rest of his life [(bis heute)] and even, happily, influenced our son (who is now a Hamburg pastor).[”] The secret of his management of those hours of confirmation class [was this]: before the first hour he had set the seating chart for each group down in writing and spent so much time memorizing it that, without a note or list, [was able] to call upon each individual by name without fail, so that none dared to be inattentive [(aus der Reihe der Aufmerksamen auszubrechen)] or engage in [any] monkey business.
How much Mumssen wrestled with the problem of confirmation from the beginning [of his ministry the] following explanation indicates already in 1906: “If the pastor stands on Wesleyan [(methodistischem)] ground, . . . then he does not address his confirmands as ‘young Christians’ whom he has to perfect in knowledge and character; rather, he rejoices that month after month [(Monate hindurch)] he can till with care one and the same mission field, lead an attack on many young souls, in order to conquer them for Jesus; he concerns himself with all groups, in order that he ‘might make some blessed,’ all the while aware that there are always a few only who find the way of life. [And] he will work constantly to win these few right up to the conclusion of his [final] confirmation address. [3] It follows, then, that the general confession of the confirmation [ritual] must be composed in such a way as to render it suitable for those born again and those not born again. My memory is that one year he put but one question to his confirmands: “If you are able to confirm . . . [(mir)] that I have born witness to this faith in your presence [(euch)], then answer . . . [(mir)] Yes.”
In his instruction he offered us, besides [a] sound theology stamped by the Luther of the Small Catechism and others, sermons by the evangelists Finney (America) and Spurgeon (England); reported on the revivals of the period in Wales and Norway; and taught us a new “Kingdom song” [(“Reichslied”)] at every meeting. In [the] mid-week worship services that were held at first in Christ Church and usually packed, he arranged [(ließ)] for the “Kingdom songs” that were sung there, too, to be accompanied not by the organ, but by the trumpet ensemble [(Posaunenchor, alternatively trombone ensemble, brass ensemble)]. His sermons on selected texts, even those from the Old Testament, always ended in an invitation to the decision for Jesus. He gave us opportunities for private discussion and, kneeling, prayed with us at the high altar of his study. “But it was about the ninth hour” on the evening of 1 March 1905, after a sermon on Lot’s wife (“Hurry and save your soul! 1) Don’t stand still! 2) Don’t look back!”) that [(da)] I knew myself to have been grasped by Christ, who laid on [my] heart and lips the [following] plea and vow: “Allow me to be yours; allow me to become your servant!”
For a small group of confirmands who lived at a distance he provided also on Sundays before his worship service special hours of instruction in order to spare them long weekly trips [into Hamburg]. He began every hour of [instruction for his] confirmands with the hearing of his last sermon according to text, theme, and parts; the lead-in and introduction to the preached Word was for him more important than the memorization of a lot of material. In the regular morning and evening worship service, he treated always different texts. For the worship services in Philipp’s Church he put together an order of worship [all] his own. Especially important to him was the eschatological arrangement of the closing liturgy around [(mit)] his reading of Rev 22:13, 16-17, and 20 (“I am the Alpha and the Omega. . . . Surely I am coming soon”). And around [(mit)] the concluding response of the chorus composed later by the organist of Christ’s Church (“Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”).
The fruit of confirmation instruction and community proclamation of this sort was the assembly of those awakened thereby in accordance with Acts 2:42: into weekly Bible studies [(Bibelstunden)], into male and female youth groups, into the BK (Bibelkreis für Hochschüler), into the Landeskirchliche Gemeinschaft, and into a mixed choir that persisted for 25 years and sang, after every sermon, a choral piece with whose incipit the sermon had closed. Like this, the [antiphonal] singing that alternated between the solo of the pastor and the refrain of the congregation, too, stemmed from [the songbooks] Reichsliedern, Rettungsjubel, and Heilsklängen. Both compositions [(Gesänge)] were, like all [such] arrangements, published beforehand in the leaflet of Philipp’s Church [entitled] Komm und sieh! [The] high points of the community life of all of [the] community circles were the “tea evenings” with mostly outside special speakers. [But] Mumssen was [also] tirelessly active well beyond his community and [constantly] in transit between Schleswig-Holstein and Baltenland, Siegerland, and Ergebirge; he served [(war)] year in and year out [as a] speaker at Bible conferences.
All remember with thanksgiving the parsonage’s “open door”: “We went in and out of his house as if we belonged to the family”—“That parsonage was always our second home.” After worship, some of the [4] young people went not to their own homes, but first [(erst mal)] to the pastor’s. There (almost) all of the rooms were (soon) occupied. If at that point another visitor (perhaps a member of the family) appeared and we were as quietly as possible ushered to the door, our beloved pastor’s wife would appear at the open window: “Come back this afternoon at about 4:00 for coffee with fruit loaf [(Klöben)]!” When the youth group was preparing for the Ascension-Day excursion to the valley of the source of the Rodenbeck, or even the large children’s service, for the trip into the village of Harburg [(now a borough of Hamburg)], then one heard it rumored [about] for a long time before, “Mumssen is once again offering his tours!” When youth-group members or Bible-study students [(BKler, short for Bibelkreis für höhere Schüler)] found themselves in the parsonage before or after auditions for the Christmas nativity play; when the missions seminarian from Kropp or Neuendettelsau, and the budding divinity student from the boarding school in Plön, stopped in at the parsonage on semester break, then they all got together with the pastor’s servants and children on the steps of the staircase for [a] joyful exchange. Many of the most devoted young people [though] were snatched away in the First and Second World Wars.
Mumssen was radically opposed to all ecclesiastical liberalism, e.g. in the great demonstration of the “Church Union” at [the] Sagebiel [establishment] on 31 October 1911, on the occasion of the election of Pastor [Wilhelm] Heydorn [of the 100 Thesen of 1911] to St. Katharinen[, Hamburg]. He threw bridges from the church to the Gemeinschaftbewegung, from the established church to the free churches and the Hamburg “chapels,” and indeed not through conformism to the form of organization, but through a sense for [the] unity [(Sinneseinheit)]-in-content of proclamation. Unforgettable for me was his feast-day sermon in the collegiate church on 23 March 1911 on Mt 20:18a: “Look, we draw near to Jerusalem! 1. We seek the cross, therefore we urge evangelization. 2. We seek the temple, therefore we urge the pledge of community. 3. We seek the crown, therefore we urge [an] Alliance.” In this way he taught brethren at variance with one another to listen to one another. [And] so he emphasized that “Wesley, the ‘father of Methodism,’ was a spiritual child of Luther, by whose Preface to Romans he was brought to faith,” and: “We don’t allow our Spurgeon”—about which “prince among preachers” he delivered a lecture in the Roosenhaus of the city mission—to be taken from us!”
In March of 1934 he submitted his application for [a] discharge [from his responsibilities] as Pastor and Provost, effective July of 1933. A number of our correspondents took part in his farewell [service of] worship on 1 October 1934 in Christ Church. “Pastor Siebel based his address on the saying, ‘Zeal for your house has consumed me!’, and I believe [that] no other text of Scripture can capture the essence of his attitude as well as this one.” God gave him for almost a whole decade after that point a more contemplative but not [5] less joyful and blessed service to the Community of the Resurrection and St. Paul’s Mission to the Nations. His whole joy was for him his large family, indefatigable service to Scripture and the Word, and [the] faithful cultivation of old friendships [(alter freundschaftlicher Beziehungen)] via correspondence, visits, and travel.
We can scarcely conclude this biographical sketch better than with established Bishop [(Landesbischof)] Schöffel’s "Foreward" to the new 1949 edition of the booklet that first appeared in 1929/30, Neutestamentliche Gotteszeugen: “Mumssen was himself a witness to God rooted in Holy Scripture via daily intimacy with it, in exemplary self-discipline and burning love for the Word of God. He read a chapter of the Old and the New Testament in the original every day. The delight he took in preaching, to which he surrendered and sacrificed himself, although long since afflicted with a challenging illness, had become for him a necessity of life [(Lebenselement)]. Full of a radiant love for his Lord and Savior, whom to follow and confess was for him an inner necessity, and equipped with [the] power of comfort and revival seldom seen [(wie selten einer)], he testified before hundreds and thousands to the authority of the Gospel. Simultaneously, he went in daily pastoral care—often to the point of exhaustion—into the loneliest rooms in order to seek out the suffering, that their hearts, too, might not despair. . . . He knew and confessed that . . . the king of all witnesses, the ‘true witness’ Jesus Christ himself, had opened his eyes, set his heart on fire, and given him knowledge. . . .”
Pastor in retirement [(i. R.)] Carl Richter, 493 Detmold, Goethestr[aße] 7
—Steve Perisho
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Works of (Unconfirmed) Potential Relevance Not Consulted (in progress)
Despite the confusion in WorldCat, this (though a 6th edition) has to be 1938, because according to the inscription, it was gifted at Christmas of 1938.
In May of 1946 Karl Barth arrived in the German city of Bonn (Busch, 333) for a brief stint teaching at the university he had once served as Professor of Systematic Theology (“Karl Barth: Biography”). In addition to his official academic load, the noted theologian also delivered a series of what he called “extra-mural” lectures (Barth to Basle Department of Education, cited in Busch, 338), one of which was later published in a small booklet entitled Christlich Ethik, Ein Vortrag (Christian Ethics, A Lecture).
In this brief treatment, Barth details how “the question about the dignity of human activity has at heart always been answered by Christians” (Barth, “Christian Ethics,” 86). At its most basic, Christian ethics is an “attempt to repeat in human words and with human concepts the divine commandment” (Barth, “Christian Ethics,” 87). This divine commandment, however, always exists within human history; thus the moral good must at all times correspond to the revealed actions of God in the world (Barth, “Christian Ethics,” 89). Consequently, Christian ethics must always be considered with an eye toward the totality of Christian revelation and, more specially, to the climax of God’s revelation in the person of Jesus Christ. In this way, “Christian ethics is the imperative of the indicative of Christian dogmatics” (Barth, “Christian Ethics,” 93). Commenting on this, Nigel Biggar has noted how Barth’s ethical method proceeds “from the Bible through its notion of salvation history to incarnational Christology, out into a systematic trinitarian theology and then on to ethics” (Biggar, 224). Although not as complex as other Barthian treatments of such issues, Christlich Ethik nevertheless expounds the underlying principles of Barth’s vision in a fairly accessible fashion.
Christlich Ethik was published soon after the lecture’s delivery by Christian Kaiser Verlag, a Munich-based firm that had been Barth’s primary publisher until the Nazis forbid it from distributing his books (Busch, 339). SPU’s copy was a gift from Reverend Otto W. Henn (1913-2014), via his son Werner Henn. Born in Heidelberg, Germany, Henn studied theology at the universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen in addition to the School of Theology at Bethel (“Otto William Henn – His Life in Words and Pictures”). In 1938 he immigrated to the United States alongside his wife Herta, whose Jewish ancestry had made their marriage questionable in the eyes of the Nazi government (“Herta Henn – Her Life in Pictures and Music”). For the next several decades, Rev. Henn served as pastor of congregations in Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and California before retiring in Issaquah, WA, where he continued preaching to his neighbors at a local assisted living facility. It is unknown when Rev. Henn acquired his copy of Christlich Ethik, though we can safely assume that Barth would have been a significant figure in his theological formation. Indeed, many of the Nazi-era publications Werner Henn donated to SPU were written by Karl Barth.
For those who do not read German, a translation of Christlich Ethik may be found in God Here and Now, published in 1964 as part of Routledge and Kegan Paul’s Religious Perspective Series. Both can hopefully contribute to the study of Barth’s ethical thought, which the late John Webster believes is “now coming to light as one of the clues to understanding [Barth’s] project as a whole” (Webster, 13).
—Colin Lewis
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Another Henn Gift.
