More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 17, 2019 - February 11, 2021
FOR DECADES critics have called them “a scandal,” “a blight,” “factionalism,” and “a caste system,” but denominations remain the institutional hallmark of modern Christianity. Criticism is understandable. Any Christian reading his New Testament senses the difference between the faith of the apostles and the Christianity of our day. The apostle Paul, for example, speaks of the church as the temple of God, unified in devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ, but we find in our time only a menagerie of cults, sects, denominations, and isms. We sense deeply that this divided state of Christianity ought
...more
The simple fact is Christians are divided today, in part at least, because they have the freedom to differ. In earlier centuries they did not.
We may curse denominations or try to ignore them, but they are not going to disappear soon because the cost of their removal is greater than most of us want to pay. We are shocked by this fruit of modern Christianity, but few of us want to lay the ax at its root.
one marked difference between the sixteenth century and the seventeenth was the acceptance of religious differences.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” And most Christians today—even if they cannot identify its source—accept the sentiment of that oft-quoted manifesto. They accept it not because it is Christian but because it is modern. SUPPRESSION OF THE NONCONFORMIST The statement probably belongs to Voltaire (1694 –1778) the proud, self-sufficient humanist of the Age of Reason.
In the light of the Reformation, dissent was neither a Christian virtue nor a human right.
The Reformers were as eager as Catholics to suppress nonconformity. That was because both camps believed that Christian truth held societies together. It was an instrument of power. And only one side in a religious conflict had the truth. The idea that God’s Word could be found on both sides of a battleline was a revolutionary concept that only gained a hearing after both sides fell from exhaustion.
Christianity’s alliance with power including its barbaric results—going back to Constantine was crumbling at last. The modern age, separating faith from regimes, was fast approaching.
Denominationalism, as originally designed, is the opposite of sectarianism. A sect claims the authority of Christ for itself alone. It believes that it is the true body of Christ; all truth belongs to it and to no other religion. So by definition a sect is exclusive. The word denomination by contrast was an inclusive term. It implied that the Christian group called or denominated by a particular name was but one member of a larger group—the church—to which all denominations belong. The denominational theory of the church, then, insists that the true church cannot be identified with any single
...more
Calvin in the preface to his Institutes indicated that it is impossible to draw precise boundaries to the Church of Christ. No one can determine with precision who is numbered among the elect of God.
These Dissenting Brethren of Westminster articulated the denominational theory of the church in several fundamental truths: First, considering man’s inability to always see the truth clearly, differences of opinion about the outward form of the church are inevitable. Second, even though these differences do not involve fundamentals of the faith, they are not matters of indifference. Every Christian is obligated to practice what he believes the Bible teaches. Third, since, no church has a final and full grasp of divine truth, the true Church of Christ can never be fully represented by any
...more
Finally, the mere fact of separation does not of itself constitute schism. It is possible to be divided at many points and still be united in Christ.
This tolerant attitude was not born of doctrinal indifference. The Independent had no intention of extending Christian unity to all religious professions. The identity of the “one true church” was restricted to those who shared a common understanding of the core of the Christian faith.
Few advocates of the denominational view of the church in the seventeenth century envisioned the hundreds of Christian groups included under the umbrella today. They had no intention of reducing the basic beliefs of Christianity to a general feeling of religious sincerity. But they could not control the future.
In the end, then, the denominational form of the church has marked the recent centuries of Christian history, not because it is ideal, but because it is better than any alternative the years have offered.
IF AMERICANS believed in saints, Benjamin Franklin would be among them. He exemplified so many virtues Americans have come to admire. People found him practical, earthy, affable, witty and, above all, tolerant.
What was immensely more important was behavior. Do our beliefs make us more tolerant, more respectful of those who differ with us, more responsive to the true spirit of Jesus? If that hatred of religious bigotry, coupled with a devotion to tolerance of all religious opinions, has a familiar ring, it is because the attitudes of the Age of Reason are not a thing of the past. They live on today in the values of the Western world.
The Middle Ages and the Reformation were centuries of faith in the sense that reason served faith, the mind obeyed authority. To a Catholic it was church authority; to a Protestant biblical authority, but in either case God’s Word came first, not man’s thoughts. Man’s basic concern in this life was his preparation for the next. The Age of Reason rejected that. In place of faith it set reason. Man’s primary concern was not the next life, but happiness and fulfillment in this world; and the mind of man, rather than faith, was the best guide to happiness—not emotions, or myths, or superstitions.
In that year Erasmus’s Diatribe on Free Will appeared. It made clear the cardinal differences between the two men. Luther believed that the human will was enslaved, totally unable, apart from grace, to love or serve God. But Erasmus considered this a dangerous doctrine since it threatened to relieve man of his moral responsibility. What Luther regarded basic to biblical religion, Erasmus dismissed in the name of scholarship. The differences in the Reformation and the Renaissance lie right there, in the view of man. The Reformers preached the original sin of man and looked upon the world as
...more
More and more people felt only disgust at the burning or drowning of an elderly woman accused of witchcraft or heresy. Religious prejudice seemed like a far greater danger than atheism. So a thirst for tolerance and truths common to all men spread.
All these discoveries, however, had to be united in one all-embracing principle that would explain the motion of bodies in the heavens and present the universe as one great machine operating according to unalterable laws. This was the feat of the most illustrious scientist of the Age of Reason, Isaac Newton (1642–1727).
The reading public of Europe was captivated by the wonder of Newton’s world-machine. The medieval world of unseen spirits—angels and demons—could now be dismissed as superstition. In its place moved a universe subject to physical laws expressed in mathematical symbols.
If the universe is a smooth-running machine with all its parts coordinated by one grand design, then man only has to think clearly to find life’s meaning and true happiness. This fundamental idea—that man has the ability to find the truth by the use of his senses and reason—gave rise to the label, Age of Reason.
Christianity could scarcely escape the fallout from this intellectual revolution. For 1,200 years Augustine’s ideas had ruled Christendom. Man was an enslaved sinner, who needed above all else the supernatural grace of God. To insure the availability of this grace through the Christian Church, God had ordained the powers of the state, to protect truth and punish error.
now intellectuals were arguing something else: Man is no sinner. He is a reasonable creature. He needs the grace of God less than common sense.
Curiously enough, atheism was not at all fashionable in this “polite society.” Most of the prominent “infidels” who ridiculed Christianity during the eighteenth century believed in a “Supreme Being” but regarded it superstitious to hold that he interfered with the world-machine. This belief was called deism.
These intellectuals judged Christianity by the simple human standards of good and evil. If the church in the name of purity of doctrine sanctioned the bloody carnage of fellow Christians—as it had in the wars of religion—then Christianity, far from being sacred and holy, was a wicked institution. It had prevented peace, harmony, and progress among the peoples of the earth.
In the end, however, deism collapsed from its own weaknesses. It was based on a false optimism. It had no explanation for the evils and disasters of life. Because the laws of nature were clear and unalterable, deists assumed that man’s moral choices drawn from nature were also simple and unchanging. If asked, “Why don’t men always see clearly the religious truths in nature?” the deist could only respond with, “the lies of priestcraft.” But that was too simple to be true, and few were convinced.
eventual rejection of deism, however, did not restore Christianity to a central place in Western culture. The negative work of the Age of Reason endured. Modern culture—its art, its education, its politics—was freed from formal Christian influence. Men made a deliberate attempt to organize a religiously neutral civilization. This meant that faith had to be confined to the home and the heart. That is what we find today in modern secular societies.
Pietism made an enormous contribution not only to the German people but to Christianity worldwide. It shifted emphasis in eighteenth-century churches from avid controversy to the care of souls. It made preaching and pastoral visitation central concerns of the Protestant ministry. It enriched Christian music enormously. And it underscored the importance of a spiritual laity for a revived church.
In this sense Pietism was the fountain of all modern revivals. It set the experience of new life in Christ at the center of the Christian message and the Christian ministry. For this reason it is impossible to think of evangelical Christianity today without the imprint of Pietism.
Evangelicals inherited two important traits from Pietism. First, emotion played so large a part in the Pietist’s religious life that reason was endangered. Since the mind of man could not fathom the mysteries of human destiny, feelings were left to carry the meaning of faith. Consequently Pietism had little to say about God’s place in nature or human history. And it presented few challenges to the spread of secularism. Evangelicals often surrendered to the same weakness.
The Age of Reason saw a dramatic spiritual renewal in Western Christianity called the Evangelical Awakening. The movement was interlaced by personal ties of the leaders, but three regions were significantly changed: Germany by the rise of Pietism, the British Isles by the preaching of the Methodists, and the American colonies by the impact of the Great Awakening.
Signs of reason’s deadening influence upon the churches appeared in a large group within the Church of England called the Latitudinarians. The eloquent John Tillotson, the Archbishop of Canterbury (1691 –1694), was among them. He vigorously denounced what he called religious “enthusiasm.” This included any emotional expression encouraged by fervent preachers. He and his fellow Latitudinarians stressed instead proper behavior. Men should reform their conduct; they should be generous, humane and tolerant, and avoid bigotry and fanaticism.
He found little at Oxford to stimulate his mind or his soul, but he read widely and was especially impressed by the early church fathers and the great devotional classics. The early Greek fathers taught him that the goal of the Christian life was “perfection,” a process of disciplined love, rather than a religious state.
Wesley learned that the Christian life is the consecration of the whole man in love to God and neighbor. These men, he said, “convinced me of the absolute impossibility of being half a Christian. I determined, through His grace, to be all devoted to God.”
John welcomed a chance to preach to the Indians so the brothers boarded the Simmonds in October with youthful idealism and missionary zeal, totally unaware of the storms on sea and soul just ahead. The whole Georgia episode proved to be a fiasco. John discovered that the noble American savages were “gluttons, thieves, liars and murderers.” And his white colonists deeply resented his rigid highchurch ways, his refusal to conduct the funeral of a Nonconformist, and his prohibition of the ladies’ fancy dresses and gold jewelry in church.
On his way home, he had a chance to ponder the whole experience. “I went to America,” he wrote, “to convert the Indians, but, oh, who shall convert me?”
He landed back in England on 1 February 1738, sadly discredited and painfully uncertain of his faith and his future. For a dozen years he had been toiling up the path to perfection, striving by the best models he knew to attain true blessedness. And the Georgia mission only revealed his spiritual bankruptcy.
Justification by faith, said Bohler, is not merely a doctrine. It is a personal experience of God’s forgiveness. But how, asked Wesley, can faith be given in a moment of time?
He discovered the answer for himself on 24 May 1738, “In the evening,” he wrote, “I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter to nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt that I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
Wesley and the Moravians soon parted ways. He owed much to them, especially their message of justification by faith and their system of small groups for spiritual growth.
Edwards and Whitefield had shown him that the Word rightly preached bears visible fruit. And now, before his eyes, was a harvest of such fruit. He had preached faith until others had it, and now his own was confirmed by theirs!
In 1751 Wesley married Molly Vazeille, the widow of a London merchant, who nursed him back to health after a fall on the ice. He was not an easy man to live with. For two years she tried to travel with him on his hectic rounds, but her health and nerves broke and she left him. As late as 1777 Wesley was considering the possibilities of a reconciliation, but when Molly died in 1781 he was unaware of her death and did not attend the funeral. She had simply married a man who was wed to his mission.
Wesley stressed what we now call “Arminian” beliefs; he was the only prominent leader of the Awakening who did. The name came from Jacob Arminius (1560 –1609), a Dutch professor who tried to modify the Calvinism of his time. Wesley felt no special debt to Arminius, but he did staunchly oppose Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. He thought the belief made God an arbitrary devil. He insisted that God willed the salvation of all men and that men had enough freedom of will to choose or refuse divine grace.
Charles Wesley, who had experienced God’s forgiving grace three days before John, wrote over 7,000 hymns and gospel songs for these Methodist meetings. Perhaps his best loved was “Jesus Lover of my Soul.” It was sung in societies all over Britain and America. Some historians believe Charles’s hymns are the revival’s greatest legacy.
But Wesley’s impact and the revival he represents carried far beyond the Methodist Church. It renewed the religious life of England and her colonies. It elevated the life of the poor. It stimulated missions overseas and the social concerns of evangelicals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Reformation unintentionally shattered traditional Christendom. It prayed and preached and fought for the true faith until no single church remained, only what we now call denominations.
Probably all the Christian groups were unanimous on one thing: each wanted the complete freedom to proclaim its own view. It soon became obvious, however, that the only way each group could get such freedom for themselves was to grant it to all the others. Thus, the churches were forced to shoulder the burden alone for evangelizing the unconverted and nurturing the believers—no state support, no state protection. Christianity was on its own.
“voluntaryism” because the churches, deprived of state support, were compelled to maintain their mission of preaching and teaching on a voluntary basis. Men could accept or reject the gospel as they pleased. The state had nothing to do with it. The denominations had to win converts and raise funds without state aid.
