glossary

ANTINOMIANISM: (Greek anti, “against”; nomos, “law”), doctrine according to which Christians are freed by grace from the necessity of obeying the Mosaic Law. The antinomians rejected the very notion of obedience as legalistic; to them the good life flowed from the inner working of the Holy Spirit. In this circumstance they appealed not only to Martin Luther but also to Paul and Augustine.

The ideas of antinomianism had been present in the early church, and some Gnostic heretics believed that freedom from law meant freedom for license. The doctrine of antinomianism, however, grew out of the Protestant controversies on the law and the gospel and was first attributed to Luther's collaborator, Johann Agricola. It also appeared in the Reformed branch of Protestantism. The left-wing Anabaptists were accused of antinomianism, both for theological reasons and also because they opposed the cooperation of church and state, which was considered necessary for law and order. For similar reasons, in the 17th century, Separatists, Familists, Ranters, and Independents in England were called antinomians by the established churches. In New England, Anne Hutchinson was accused of the doctrine when she said that the churches were preaching “the covenant of works.” The Evangelical movement at the end of the 18th century produced its own antinomians who claimed an inner experience and a “new life,” which they considered the true source of good works.

ARIANISM: a Christian heresy first proposed early in the 4th century by the Alexandrian presbyter Arius. It affirmed that Christ is not truly divine but a created being. Arius' basic premise was the uniqueness of God, who is alone self-existent and immutable; the Son, who is not self-existent, cannot be God. Because the Godhead is unique, it cannot be shared or communicated, so the Son cannot be God. Because the Godhead is immutable, the Son, who is mutable, being represented in the Gospels as subject to growth and change, cannot be God. The Son must, therefore, be deemed a creature who has been called into existence out of nothing and has had a beginning. Moreover, the Son can have no direct knowledge of the Father since the Son is finite and of a different order of existence.

According to its opponents, especially the bishop Athanasius, Arius' teaching reduced the Son to a demigod, reintroduced polytheism (since worship of the Son was not abandoned), and undermined the Christian concept of redemption since only he who was truly God could be deemed to have reconciled man to the Godhead.

The controversy seemed to have been brought to an end by the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), which condemned Arius and his teaching and issued a creed to safeguard orthodox Christian belief. This creed states that the Son is homoousion to Patri (“of one substance with the Father”), thus declaring him to be all that the Father is: he is completely divine. In fact, however, this was only the beginning of a long-protracted dispute.

From 325 to 337, when the emperor Constantine died, the Arian leaders, exiled after the Council of Nicaea, tried by intrigue to return to their churches and sees and to banish their enemies. They were partly successful.

From 337 to 350 Constans, sympathetic to the orthodox Christians, was emperor in the West, and Constantius II, sympathetic to the Arians, was emperor in the East. At a church council held at Antioch (341), an affirmation of faith that omitted the homoousion clause was issued. Another church council was held at Sardica (modern Sofia) in 342, but little was achieved by either council.

In 350 Constantius became sole ruler of the empire, and under his leadership the Nicene party (orthodox Christians) was largely crushed. The extreme Arians then declared that the Son was “unlike” (anomoios) the Father. These anomoeans succeeded in having their views endorsed at Sirmium in 357, but their extremism stimulated the moderates, who asserted that the Son was “of similar substance” (homoiousios) with the Father. Constantius at first supported these homoiousians but soon transferred his support to the homoeans, led by Acacius, who affirmed that the Son was “like” (homoios) the Father. Their views were approved in 360 at Constantinople, where all previous creeds were rejected, the term ousia (“substance,” or “stuff”) was repudiated, and a statement of faith was issued stating that the Son was “like the Father who begot him.”

After Constantius' death (361), the orthodox Christian majority in the West consolidated its position. The persecution of orthodox Christians conducted by the (Arian) emperor Valens (364–378) in the East and the success of the teaching of Basil the Great of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus led the homoiousian majority in the East to realize its fundamental agreement with the Nicene party. When the emperors Gratian (367–383) and Theodosius I (379–395) took up the defense of orthodoxy, Arianism collapsed. In 381 the second ecumenical council met at Constantinople. Arianism was proscribed, and a statement of faith, the Nicene Creed, was approved.

Although this ended the heresy in the empire, Arianism continued among some of the Germanic tribes to the end of the 7th century. In modern times some Unitarians are virtually Arians in that they are unwilling either to reduce Christ to a mere human being or to attribute to him a divine nature identical with that of the Father. The Christology of Jehovah's Witnesses, also, is a form of Arianism; they regard Arius as a forerunner of Charles Taze Russell, the founder of their movement.

ARMINIANISM: Jacobus Arminius (Jakob Hermansz or Harmensz, 1560–1609) was a Dutch Reformed theologian, ordained in 1588. Study of the Epistle to the Romans led him to doubt the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. In 1603 he was appointed professor at Leiden and he was immediately drawn into controversy with F. Gomar. He obtained possession of his chair only after a disputation in which he cleared himself of charges of Pelagianism and Socinianism. He tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain the revision of the Belgic Confession and Heidelberg Catechism. Arminian doctrines, formally set out in the Remonstrance of 1610, were a theological reaction against the deterministic logic of Calvinism. The Arminians insisted that the Divine sovereignty was compatible with a real human free will; that Christ had died for all and not only for the elect; and that both the supralapsarian and the sublapsarian views of predestination were unbiblical. The Arminians were condemned at the Synod of Dort (1618–19); many of them were banished or persecuted. As representatives of a more liberal school of theology than the strict Calvinists, however, they influenced the formation of modern Protestant theology. The anti-Calvinist trend in 17th-cent. English theology was termed ‘Arminian’ by its opponents, though it is doubtful if Arminius' teaching had much direct influence in this case.

DEISM: an unorthodox religious attitude that found expression among a group of English writers beginning with Edward Herbert (later 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury) in the first half of the 17th century and ending with Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, in the middle of the 18th century. In general it refers to what can be called natural religion, the acceptance of a certain body of religious knowledge that is inborn in every person or that can be acquired by the use of reason, as opposed to knowledge acquired through either revelation or the teaching of any church. Though an initial use of the term occurred in 16th-century France, the later appearance of the doctrine on the Continent was stimulated by the translation and adaptation of the English models. The high point of Deist thought occurred in England from about 1689 through 1742, during a period when, despite widespread counterattacks from the established Church of England, there was relative freedom of religious expression following upon the Glorious Revolution that ended the rule of James II and brought William and Mary to the throne. Deism took deep root in 18th-century Germany after it had ceased to be a vital subject of controversy in England.

At times in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the word Deism was used theologically in contradistinction to theism, the belief in an immanent God who actively intervenes in the affairs of men. In this sense Deism was represented as the view of those who reduced the role of God to a mere act of creation in accordance with rational laws discoverable by man and held that, after the original act, God virtually withdrew and refrained from interfering in the processes of nature and the ways of man. So stark an interpretation of the relations of God and man, however, was accepted by very few Deists during the flowering of the doctrine, though their religious antagonists often attempted to force them into this difficult position. Historically, a distinction between theism and Deism has never had wide currency in European thought. As an example, when encyclopaedist Denis Diderot, in France, translated into French the works of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, one of the important English Deists, he often rendered “Deism” as théisme. The term is not in current usage as a metaphysical concept, and its significance is really limited to the 17th and 18th centuries.

In 1754–56, when the Deist controversy had passed its peak, John Leland, an opponent, wrote a historical and critical compendium of Deist thought, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers that Have Appeared in England in the Last and Present Century; with Observations upon Them, and Some Account of the Answers that Have Been Published Against Them. This work, which began with Lord Herbert of Cherbury and moved through the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Charles Blount, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Collins, Thomas Woolston, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, Thomas Chubb, and Viscount Bolingbroke, fixed the canon of who should be included among the Deist writers. In subsequent works Hobbes usually has been dropped from the list and John Toland included, though he was closer to pantheism than most of the other Deists were. Herbert was not known as a Deist in his day, but Blount and the rest who figured in Leland's book would have accepted the term Deist as an appropriate designation for their religious position. Simultaneously, it became an adjective of opprobrium in the vocabulary of their opponents. Bishop Edward Stillingfleet's Letter to a Deist (1677) is an early example of the orthodox use of the epithet.

In Lord Herbert's treatises five religious ideas were recognized as God-given and innate in the mind of man from the beginning of time: the belief in a supreme being, in the need for his worship, in the pursuit of a pious and virtuous life as the most desirable form of worship, in the need of repentance for sins, and in rewards and punishments in the next world. These fundamental religious beliefs, Herbert held, had been the possession of the first man, and they were basic to all the worthy positive institutionalized religions of later times. Thus, differences among sects and cults all over the world were usually benign, mere modifications of universally accepted truths; they were corruptions only when they led to barbarous practices such as the immolation of human victims and the slaughter of religious rivals.

In England at the turn of the 17th century this general religious attitude assumed a more militant form, particularly in the works of Toland, Shaftesbury, Tindal, Woolston, and Collins. Though the Deists differed among themselves and there is no single work that can be designated as the quintessential expression of Deism, they joined in attacking both the existing orthodox church establishment and the wild manifestations of the dissenters. The tone of these writers was often earthy and pungent, but their Deist ideal was sober natural religion without the trappings of Catholicism and the High Church in England and free from the passionate excesses of Protestant fanatics. In Toland there is great emphasis on the rational element in natural religion; in Shaftesbury more worth is ascribed to the emotive quality of religious experience when it is directed into salutary channels. All are agreed in denouncing every kind of religious intolerance because the core of the various religions is identical. In general, there is a negative evaluation of religious institutions and the priestly corps who direct them. Simple primitive monotheism was practiced by early men without temples, churches, and synagogues, and modern men could readily dispense with religious pomp and ceremony. The more elaborate and exclusive the religious establishment, the more it came under attack. A substantial portion of Deist literature was devoted to the description of the noxious practices of all religions in all times, and the similarities of pagan and Roman Catholic rites were emphasized.

The Deists who presented purely rationalist proofs for the existence of God, usually variations on the argument from the design or order of the universe, were able to derive support from the vision of the lawful physical world that Sir Isaac Newton had delineated. Indeed, in the 18th century, there was a tendency to convert Newton into a matter-of-fact Deist—a transmutation that was contrary to the spirit of both his philosophical and his theological writings.

When Deists were faced with the problem of how man had lapsed from the pure principles of his first forebears into the multiplicity of religious superstitions and crimes committed in the name of God, they ventured a number of conjectures. They surmised that men had fallen into error because of the inherent weakness of human nature; or they subscribed to the idea that a conspiracy of priests had intentionally deceived men with a “rout of ceremonials” in order to maintain power over them.

The role of Christianity in the universal history of religion became problematic. For many religious Deists the teachings of Christ were not essentially novel but were, in reality, as old as creation, a republication of primitive monotheism. Religious leaders had arisen among many peoples—Socrates, Buddha, Muhammad—and their mission had been to effect a restoration of the simple religious faith of early men. Some writers, while admitting the similarity of Christ's message to that of other religious teachers, tended to preserve the unique position of Christianity as a divine revelation. It was possible to believe even in prophetic revelation and still remain a Deist, for revelation could be considered as a natural historical occurrence consonant with the definition of the goodness of God. The more extreme Deists, of course, could not countenance this degree of divine intervention in the affairs of men.

Natural religion was sufficient and certain; the tenets of all positive religions contained extraneous, even impure elements. Deists accepted the moral teachings of the Bible without any commitment to the historical reality of the reports of miracles. Most Deist argumentation attacking the literal interpretation of Scripture as divine revelation leaned upon the findings of 17th-century biblical criticism. Woolston, who resorted to an allegorical interpretation of the whole of the New Testament, was an extremist even among the more audacious Deists. Tindal was perhaps the most moderate of the group. Toland was violent; his denial of all mystery in religion was supported by analogies among Christian, Judaic, and pagan esoteric religious practices, equally condemned as the machinations of priests.

The Deists were particularly vehement against any manifestation of religious fanaticism and enthusiasm. In this respect Shaftesbury's Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708) was probably the crucial document in propagating their ideas. Revolted by the Puritan fanatics of the previous century and by the wild hysteria of a group of French exiles prophesying inlivepage.apple.com London in 1707, Shaftesbury denounced all forms of religious extravagance as perversions of true religion. These false prophets were directing religious emotions, benign in themselves, into the wrong channels. Any description of God that depicted his impending vengeance, vindictiveness, jealousy, and destructive cruelty was blasphemous. Because sound religion could find expression only among healthy men, the argument was common in Deist literature that the preaching of extreme asceticism, the practice of self-torture, and the violence of religious persecutions were all evidence of psychological illness and had nothing to do with authentic religious sentiment and conduct. The Deist God, ever gentle, loving, and benevolent, intended men to behave toward one another in the same kindly and tolerant fashion.

Ideas of this general character were voiced on the Continent at about the same period by such men as Pierre Bayle, a French philosopher famous for his encyclopaedic dictionary, even though he would have rejected the Deist identification. During the heyday of the French Philosophes in the 18th century, the more daring thinkers—Voltaire among them—gloried in the name Deist and declared the kinship of their ideas with those of Rationalist English ecclesiastics, such as Samuel Clarke, who would have repudiated the relationship. The dividing line between Deism and atheism among the Philosophes was often rather blurred, as is evidenced by Le Rêve de d'Alembert (written 1769; “The Dream of d'Alembert”), which describes a discussion between the two “fathers” of the Encyclopédie: the Deist Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and the atheist Diderot. Diderot had drawn his inspiration from Shaftesbury, and thus in his early career he was committed to a more emotional Deism. Later in life, however, he shifted to the atheist materialist circle of the Baron d'Holbach. When Holbach paraphrased or translated the English Deists, his purpose was frankly atheist; he emphasized those portions of their works that attacked existing religious practices and institutions, neglecting their devotion to natural religion and their adoration of Christ. The Catholic Church in 18th-century France did not recognize fine distinctions among heretics, and Deist and atheist works were burned in the same bonfires.

English Deism was transmitted to Germany primarily through translations of Shaftesbury, whose influence upon thought was paramount. In a commentary on Shaftesbury published in 1720, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a Rationalist philosopher and mathematician, accepted the Deist conception of God as an intelligent Creator but refused the contention that a god who metes out punishments is evil. A sampling of other Deist writers was available particularly through the German rendering of Leland's work in 1755 and 1756. H.S. Reimarus, author of many philosophical works, maintained in his Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (“Defense for the Rational Adorers of God”) that the human mind by itself without revelation was capable of reaching a perfect religion. Reimarus did not dare to publish the book during his lifetime, but it was published in 1774–78 by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, one of the great seminal minds in German literature. According to Lessing, common man, uninstructed and unreflecting, will not reach a perfect knowledge of natural religion; he will forget or ignore it. Thus, the several positive religions can help men achieve more complete awareness of the perfect religion than could ever be attained by any individual mind. Lessing's Nathan der Weise (1779; “Nathan the Sage”) was noteworthy for the introduction of the Deist spirit of religion into the drama; in the famous parable of the three rings, the major monotheistic religions were presented as equally true in the eyes of God. Although Lessing's rational Deism was the object of violent attack on the part of Pietist writers and the more mystical thinkers, it influenced such men as Moses Mendelssohn, a German Jewish philosopher who applied Deism to the Jewish faith. Immanuel Kant, the most important figure in 18th-century German philosophy, stressed the moral element in natural religion; moral principles are not the result of any revelation but originate from the very structure of man's reason. English Deists, however, continued to influence German Deism. Witnesses attest that virtually the whole officer corps of Frederick the Great was infected with Deism and that Collins and Tindal were favorite reading in the army.

By the end of the 18th century, Deism had become a dominant religious attitude among intellectual and upper class Americans. Benjamin Franklin, the great sage of the Colonies and then of the new republic, summarized in a letter to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, a personal creed that almost literally reproduced Herbert's five fundamental beliefs. The first three presidents of the United States also held Deistic convictions, as is amply evidenced in their correspondence. “The ten commandments and the sermon on the mount contain my religion,” John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1816.

ERASTIANISM: Named after Thomas Lüber (Lat., Erastus; 1524–1583), Erastianism held that the civil magistrate exercised all sovereignty within the state, that the church possessed no coercive power, and that excommunication should not be exercised. The origins of the theory are found in the thought of Marsilius of Padua, who argued in his Defensor pacis (1324) that the same people formed the church and the civil communities and that the civil government, the executive agent of the whole people, exercised coercive authority over both the ecclesiastical and civil communities. Marsilius thus stripped the church of all coercive power, including excommunication, which he placed in the hands of the local congregation.

This sort of arrangement was institutionalized in Zurich in 1525 during the Reformation with the creation of the marriage court (Ehegericht) under the auspices of the city government. The court became the sole instrument of discipline in Zurich; there was no excommunication per se. While Huldrych Zwingli favored this approach, Heinrich Bullinger was an even more vocal advocate of civil control of discipline within the Christian community. Bullinger rejected every sort of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and he argued that the Christian magistrate was sovereign over the civil community and the church, just as the kings had been in ancient Israel. The task of the magistrate was to defend Christian morality and to protect true religion; he had the obligation to punish both sinner and heretic. This approach became the norm in the early Reformed churches.

The other Reformed program of church discipline was first proposed by Johannes Oecolampadius and then appropriated by Martin Bucer and John Calvin. They taught that the church needed a council of elders—a consistory or presbytery in addition to the civil courts—in order to discipline sinners and purify the church. This Calvinist approach assumed the necessity of a jurisdiction separate from the civil government, thus limiting the sovereignty of the magistrate.

In the late 1560s a controversy erupted in Heidelberg over the issue of discipline. The two chief protagonists were Kaspar Olevianus and Lüber. Olevianus, a student of Calvin's and professor of theology at the university, led the Calvinists, who wanted a strict church discipline, and a consistory that could discipline and excommunicate church members independently of the civil authority. Lüber, a member of the medical faculty, was the key figure in defending the existing system, which was similar to Zurich's.

In 1568 Lüber responded to the Calvinists with 103 theses, which he later condensed to 75. He argued that no one should be excluded from the Eucharist who professed the true faith, even if that person was culpable in matters of life. Moreover, the Christian magistrate's court was sufficient to punish offenses; an ecclesiastical court to rule over or to punish the people was unnecessary. Like the kings in Israel, the Christian magistrate was sovereign; he ruled over both the civil community and the church, although he ought to consult the clergy in matters of doctrine.

Lüber sent manuscript copies of his theses to Bullinger and to Théodore de Bèze. Bullinger fully supported Lüber's position, which, in fact, was simply a restatement of his own. Bèze totally disagreed and replied to Lüber with his Tractatus pius et moderatus de Excommunicatione. Lüber then wrote a reply to Bèze, his “Confirmatio.” Both men, however, agreed in the interest of peace not to publish their treatises. In 1589, six years after Lüber's death, both his theses and his “Confirmatio” were published in London as the Explicatio. It appears that Archbishop John Whitgift was instrumental in its publication. The Explicatio was reprinted in Amsterdam in 1649; the theses were published in an English translation in 1659 and reprinted in 1682. Bèze published the Tractatus, his reply to Lüber, in 1590.

Most Protestant cities and territories were “Erastian” well before the publication of the Explicatio. The Lutheran territories in Germany found a theorist in Johannes Brenz, who died in 1570. The Reformed church in the Netherlands was Erastian until communities were challenged by the Calvinists in the 1560s and 1570s. Until Calvin's victory in Geneva, all of the Reformed states in Switzerland followed the example of Zurich. In England royal supremacy over the church began with Henry VIII.

The basic elements of the Erastian theory, from Bullinger to Lüber, were (1) hostility toward any type of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and discipline, (2) rejection of excommunication, (3) civil control of the church, (4) the assumption of a common religion, and (5) the argument from ancient Israel. These ideas were the staple of English Erastianism. Though the term Erastianism was not commonly used until the 1640s, Lüber's ideas had immediate impact in England after the publication of the Explicatio. The Explicatio fortified Whitgift's argument against the Presbyterians Walter Travers and Thomas Cartwright, and it influenced the argument of Richard Hooker in the eighth book of his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. While Whitgift and Hooker argued for an Erastianism based on royal supremacy, William Laud connected divine right monarchy with an ecclesiastical Erastianism. The Erastians of the 1640s, however, advocated parliamentary supremacy. Though the parties in the Long Parliament differed on the form of a national church, the majority of its members were Erastian. In the Westminster Assembly, two Erastian clergy, Thomas Coleman and John Lightfoot, were aided by other advisers and theorists, such as John Seldon, Bulstrode Whitelocke, Henry Parker, and William Prynne.

Two writers of the 1650s can also be classified as Erastians. James Harrington's more secular approach held many elements of the traditional Erastian argument. Thomas Hobbes, who reverted to earlier arguments for royal supremacy over the church, was the ultimate Erastian, though he hardly had the reverence of earlier Erastians for the Christian faith.

FIDEISM: a philosophical view extolling theological faith by making it the ultimate criterion of truth and minimizing the power of reason to know religious truths. Strict fideists assign no place to reason in discovering or understanding fundamental tenets of religion. For them blind faith is supreme as the way to certitude and salvation. They defend such faith on various grounds—e.g., mystical experience, revelation, subjective human need, and common sense. A nonrational attitude so pervades their thinking that some assert that the true object of faith is the absurd, the nonrational, the impossible, or that which directly conflicts with reason. Such a position was approached in the philosophies of the 2nd-century North African theologian Tertullian, the medieval English scholar William of Ockham, the 17th-century French philosopher Pierre Bayle, and more recently in the works of the 18th-century German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann and the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. This modern attitude is often motivated by man's apparent inability to find rational solutions for the world's ills.

Moderate fideists, on the other hand, generally assert that some truths at least (e.g., God's existence, moral principles) can be known by reason subsequently reinformed and clarified by faith—reason can or must play a role in the search for religious truths. This position frequently affirms that reason can, in some cases, partially comprehend religious truths after they have been revealed; or at least it shows negatively that no contradiction is necessarily involved in them or that there is a rational basis for accepting truths of faith that the human mind can in no way comprehend. Faith predominates, but reason is not ignored. Thus, the 17th-century French writer Blaise Pascal held that natural faculties are inadequate for religious certainty but suffice to justify religious faith in matters otherwise unknowable.

JANSENISM: The church in France was the scene of controversies other than those connected with administration and politics. In his posthumously published work Augustinus (1640), the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen defended the doctrines of Augustine against the then-dominant theological trends within Roman Catholicism. The book's special target was the teachings and practices of the Jesuits; Jansen and his followers claimed that the theologians of the Counter-Reformation, in their opposition to Luther and Calvin, had erred in the opposite direction in their definition of the doctrine of grace. By emphasizing human responsibility at the expense of divine initiative, they had relapsed into the Pelagian heresy, against which Augustine had fought in the early 5th century. Jansenism instead asserted the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, including the teaching that man cannot keep the commandments of God without a special gift of grace and that the converting grace of God is irresistible. Consistent with this anthropology was Jansenism's rigoristic view of moral issues and its condemnation of the tendency, which it claimed to discern in Jesuit ethics, to find loopholes for evading the uncompromising demands of divine law.

When it was espoused by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal in his Lettres provinciales (“Provincial Letters”), the campaign against Jesuit theology became a cause célèbre. The papacy struck out against Jansenism in 1653, when Innocent X (reigned 1644–55) issued his bull Cum occasione (“With Occasion”), and again in 1713, when Clement XI (reigned 1700–21) promulgated his constitution Unigenitus (“Only-Begotten”). The Lettres provinciales was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1657. Theologically, Jansenism represented the lingering conviction, even of those who refused to follow the Reformers, that the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church was Augustinian in form but not in content; morally, it bespoke the ineluctable suspicion of many devout Roman Catholics that the serious call of the gospel to a devout and holy life was being compromised in the moral theology and penitential practice of the church. Although Jansenism was condemned, it did not remain without effect, and in the 19th and 20th centuries it contributed to an evangelical reawakening not only in France but throughout the church.

LATITUDINARIANISM: the progressive and tolerant approach to religion associated with a group of late seventeenth-century Church of England notables, including John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury; Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester; Simon Patrick, Bishop of Chichester and Ely; Gilbert Burnet, the Reformation historian and Bishop of Salisbury; and Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury. The term originated in the 1660s, applied critically to a cluster of Anglican clergymen who stressed practical morality more than theological speculation. Latitudinarianism developed an inclusive Protestantism, emphasising the accord of relevation with reason. In the 18th cent. it could encourage a prosaic, common-sense piety which occasionally harboured heterodoxy on the Trinity. From its early association with the scientific revolution until its weakening in the 1770s, it gave the Enlightenment in England a Christian complexion.

PELAGIANISM: also called Pelagian Heresy, a 5th-century Christian heresy taught by Pelagius (q.v.) and his followers that stressed the essential goodness of human nature and the freedom of the human will. Pelagius was concerned about the slack moral standards among Christians, and he hoped to improve their conduct by his teachings. Rejecting the arguments of those who claimed that they sinned because of human weakness, he insisted that God made human beings free to choose between good and evil and that sin is a voluntary act committed by a person against God's law. Celestius, a disciple of Pelagius, denied the church's doctrine of original sin and the necessity of infant Baptism.

Pelagianism was opposed by Augustine, bishop of Hippo, who asserted that human beings could not attain righteousness by their own efforts and were totally dependent upon the grace of God. Condemned by two councils of African bishops in 416, and again at Carthage in 418, Pelagius and Celestius were finally excommunicated in 418; Pelagius' later fate is unknown.

The controversy, however, was not over. Julian of Eclanum continued to assert the Pelagian view and engaged Augustine in literary polemic until the latter's death in 430. Julian himself was finally condemned, with the rest of the Pelagian party, at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Another heresy, known as Semi-Pelagianism (q.v.), flourished in southern Gaul until it was finally condemned at the second Council of Orange in 529.

SEMI-PELAGIANISM: in 17th-century theological terminology, the doctrine of an anti-Augustinian movement that flourished from about 429 to about 529 in southern France. The surviving evidences of the original movement are limited, but it is clear that the fathers of semi-Pelagianism were monks who stressed the need of ascetic practices and who were highly respected leaders in the church. The writings of three of these monks had positive influence on the history of the movement. They were John Cassian, who had lived in the East and who founded two monasteries in Massilia (Marseille); Vincent, a monk of the celebrated Abbey of Lérins; and Faustus, bishop of Riez, a former monk and abbot at Lérins, who at the request of Provence bishops wrote De gratia (“Concerning Grace”), in which semi-Pelagianism was given its final form and one more naturalistic than that provided by Cassian.

Unlike the Pelagians, who denied original sin and believed in perfect human free will, the semi-Pelagians believed in the universality of original sin as a corruptive force in man. They also believed that without God's grace this corruptive force could not be overcome, and they therefore admitted the necessity of grace for Christian life and action. They also insisted on the necessity of Baptism, even for infants. But contrary to Augustine, they taught that the innate corruption of man was not so great that the initiative toward Christian commitment was beyond the powers of man's native will.

This commitment was called by John Cassian initium fidei (“beginning of faith”) and by Faustus of Riez credulitatis affectus (“feeling of credulity”). According to this view, man by his unaided will could desire to accept the gospel of salvation, but he could not be actually converted without divine help. In later semi-Pelagianism, divine help was conceived not as an internal empowering graciously infused by God into man but as purely external preaching or the biblical communication of the gospel, of the divine promises, and of the divine threats. The strong point for all semi-Pelagians was the justice of God: God would not be just if man were not natively empowered to make at least the first step toward salvation. If salvation depended initially and unilaterally only on God's free election of the saved, those not chosen could complain that they were doomed by the mere fact of being born.

The result of semi-Pelagianism, however, was the denial of the necessity of God's unmerited, supernatural, gracious empowering of man's will for saving action. It contradicted St. Paul and St. Augustine, and the latter was by papal declaration the approved Catholic doctor in the question of grace and thus beyond attack.

In its early stages, semi-Pelagianism was opposed in Gaul by two polemicists, Prosper of Aquitaine and an otherwise unknown Hilary. After Faustus' death (c. 490), semi-Pelagianism was still highly respected, but the doctrine declined in the 6th century, primarily through the action of Caesarius of Arles. At the instigation of Pope Felix IV (526–530), Caesarius condemned semi-Pelagianism at the second Council of Orange (529). The condemnation was approved by Pope Boniface II, Felix's successor. From that point on, semi-Pelagianism was recognized as a heresy in the Roman Catholic church.

PIETISM: German Pietismus influential religious reform movement that began among German Lutherans in the 17th century. It emphasized personal faith against the main Lutheran church's perceived stress on doctrine and theology over Christian living. Pietism quickly spread and later became concerned with social and educational matters. As a phenomenon of personal religious renewal, its indirect influence has persisted in Germany and other parts of Europe into the 21st century.

A brief treatment of Pietism follows. For full treatment, see Protestantism.

Pietistic movements have appeared throughout Christian history whenever religion seemed to become divorced from experience. By the beginning of the 17th century, Lutheranism had created a scholastic system useful for contending with Roman Catholic and Reformed opponents but not for spiritual nourishment. Consequently, many German Lutherans sought an alternative expression of faith and drew from both internal and external impulses to create one. English Puritanism reached the European continent through the translation of works by Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, and others. Religious exiles in the Netherlands, among them William Ames, developed Dutch Pietism, which soon spread into Germany as part of the movement that had begun to take shape among Lutherans there as “Reform Orthodoxy.” The “pectoral heart theology” of these orthodox Lutherans found its highest expression and widest audience in the writings of Johann Arndt (1555–1621). Lutheran hymnody of the period contributed significantly to the atmosphere of spiritual renewal. Notable signs of renewal, including interest in devotional literature and the mystical tradition, also emerged out of the devastation wrought in Germany by the Thirty Years' War (1618–48).

The various streams of the renewal movement initially converged in the life and work of Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705). As a pastor in Frankfurt am Main, Spener became distressed by the degeneracy and the absence of piety in the city; in response, he organized the first collegia pietatis (“assemblies of piety”), in which Christians met regularly for devotional reading and spiritual exchange. The practice quickly characterized the movement, and those who attended the conventicles acquired the name Pietists.

In his most famous work, Pia Desideria (1675; Pious Desires), Spener assessed contemporary orthodoxy's weaknesses and advanced proposals for reform. His proposals included greater private and public use of the Scriptures, greater assumption by the laity of their priestly responsibilities as believers, greater efforts to bear the practical fruits of a living faith, ministerial training that emphasized piety and learning rather than intellectuality, and edifying, spiritual preaching. The collegia pietatis were the ideal instruments for such reforms.

From Spener the leadership of German Pietism eventually passed to August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) of the University of Halle. Francke's capable leadership made Halle a thriving institutional centre of Pietism. Among the illustrious figures sent out from Halle was Henry Melchior Mühlenberg, the organizer of colonial American Lutheranism.

Another Halle alumnus, Nikolaus Ludwig, Graf (count) von Zinzendorf (1700–60), founded the Moravian church among Moravian refugees on his estate in Saxony. Unlike the Halle Pietists, who called for penitential remorse, Zinzendorf's followers preached that Christ's atonement was the only requisite for salvation. Zinzendorf's efforts provided Pietism with its greatest direct influence outside Germany.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, received inspiration among the Moravians and incorporated Pietistic elements, such as the emphasis on saving grace, into his movement. Other denominations felt the influence of Pietism in their pastoral theology, mission activity, and modes of worship. Pietism reached its zenith by the mid-18th century, but the movement continued to exist and still survives, both explicitly in Germany and in the Moravian church elsewhere and implicitly in Evangelical Protestantism at large. The religious revival movements of the 19th and 20th centuries were influenced by Pietism and in turn influenced it.

QUIETISM: a doctrine of Christian spirituality that, in general, holds that perfection consists in passivity (quiet) of the soul, in the suppression of human effort so that divine action may have full play. Quietistic elements have been discerned in several religious movements, both Christian and non-Christian, through the centuries; but the term is usually identified with the doctrine of Miguel de Molinos, a Spanish priest who became an esteemed spiritual director in Rome during the latter half of the 17th century and whose teachings were condemned as heretical by the Roman Catholic Church.

For Molinos, the way of Christian perfection was the interior way of contemplation to which anyone with divine assistance can attain and that can last for years, even for a lifetime. This contemplation is a vague, undetermined view of God that inhibits man's interior powers. The soul remains in “dark faith,” a state of passive purification that excludes all definite thought and all interior action. To wish to act is an offense against God, who desires to do everything in man. Inactivity brings the soul back to its principle, the divine being, into which it is transformed. God, the sole reality, lives and reigns in the souls of those who have undergone this mystic death. They can will only what God wills because their own wills have been taken away. They should not be concerned about salvation, perfection, or anything else but must leave all to God. It is not necessary for them to perform the ordinary exercises of piety. Even in temptation the contemplative should remain passive. According to Quietist tenets, the devil can make himself master of the contemplative's body and force him to perform acts that seem sinful; but because the contemplative does not consent, they are not sins. Molinos' teachings were condemned by Pope Innocent XI in 1687, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Quietism was perhaps paralleled among Protestants by some of the tenets of the Pietists and Quakers. It certainly appeared in a milder form in France, where it was propagated by Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon, an influential mystic. She gained the support of François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai, who developed a doctrine of pure love, sometimes called semi-Quietism, which was condemned by Pope Innocent XII in 1699. Both Fénelon and Guyon submitted.

SOCINIANISM: member of a Christian group in the 16th century that embraced the thought of the Italian-born theologian Faustus Socinus. The Socinians referred to themselves as “brethren” and were known by the latter half of the 17th century as “Unitarians” or “Polish Brethren.” They accepted Jesus as God's revelation but still a mere man, divine by office rather than by nature; Socinians thus rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. One of the Socinians' doctrines was that the soul dies with the body but the souls of those who have persevered in obeying Jesus' commandments will be resurrected. The Socinians also advocated the separation of church and state, stressed the importance of the moral life, minimized dogma, and held that Christian doctrine must be rational.

The movement originated in Italy with the thought of Laelius Socinus (Socini) and his nephew Faustus Socinus. In 1579 Faustus resettled in Poland and became a leader in the previously established Minor Reformed Church (Polish Brethren). Socinus succeeded in converting this movement to his own theological system, and for 50 years after his arrival, the Minor Church had a brilliant life in Poland, with about 300 congregations at its height. The movement's intellectual centre was at Racow, north of Kraków, where the Socinians founded a successful university and a famous printing operation that turned out many Socinian books and pamphlets. This press issued the Racovian Catechism (1605), which formally enunciated the Socinian creed.

In 1638, however, in response to the Counter-Reformation, the Polish Diet closed the academy and the press at Racow, and in 1658 the Diet gave the Socinians the choice of either conformity to Roman Catholic doctrine or forced exile or death. A mass migration of Socinians ensued, chiefly to Transylvania, the Netherlands, Germany, and England, while in Poland the movement came to a complete end. Some small Socinian groups survived in Europe until the 19th century, primarily in Transylvania, and in England. Socinian ideas influenced John Biddle, the father of English Unitarianism.

VOLUNTARISM: any metaphysical or psychological system that assigns to the will (Latin: voluntas) a more predominant role than that attributed to the intellect. Christian philosophers have sometimes described as voluntarist: the non-Aristotelian thought of St. Augustine because of its emphasis on the will to love God; the post-Thomistic thought of John Duns Scotus, a late medieval scholastic, who insisted on the absolute freedom of the will and its supremacy over all other faculties; and the position of the French writer Blaise Pascal, who in religion substituted “reasons of the heart” for rational propositions. Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative as an unconditional moral law for the will's choice of action represented an ethical voluntarism. A metaphysical voluntarism was propounded in the 19th century by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who took will to be the single, irrational, unconscious force behind all of reality and all ideas of reality. An existentialist voluntarism was present in Friedrich Nietzsche's doctrine of the overriding “will to power” whereby man would eventually re-create himself as “superman.” And a Pragmatic voluntarism is evident in William James's reference of knowledge and truth to purpose and to practical ends.