Church History in Plain Language (Plain Language Series)

by Bruce L. Shelley

The Puritan view of the church rested upon their understanding of the covenant of grace. Early New Englanders realized that the visible church could never be an exact copy of the truly elect but God willed the church so far as possible to be a church of visible saints. That is why the first generation insisted that conversion precede church membership, a practice reaffirmed in 1648 with the adoption of the “Cambridge Platform.”

In a short time a controversy arose over the question of “educated” versus “converted” ministers and the whole Presbyterian Church divided into “New Side” men, favoring the revival, and “Old Side” men opposing

Basic to the Baptist position was the belief that all direct connections between the state and institutionalized religion must be broken in order that America might become a truly Christian country.

By resisting established churches the revivalists never intended to surrender their dream for a Christian America. They had found in the Great Awakening the answer to their needs. The kingdom of God would come to America if a majority of the citizens could be persuaded to submit voluntarily to the laws of God. Revivals were God’s means to that end.

A clue to the depth of the Awakening’s break with the past, however, lies in the revivalists’ message. By concentrating on the individual’s need for salvation, the Awakeners tended to neglect the Puritan concern for the political and social implications of the gospel. With the “covenant of grace” limited to individuals—twiceborn men and women—the “covenant people” idea shifted easily from the church to the American people in general. As a result the mission of the “elect people” shifted subtly from a Puritan “holy commonwealth” to the American people’s struggle for “liberty.”

The democratic gospel of the French Revolution rested upon the glorification of man rather than God. The Church of Rome recognized this and struck back at the heresy as she had always done. She saw more clearly than did most Protestant churches that the devil, when it is to his advantage, is democratic. Ten thousand people telling a lie do not turn the lie into truth. That is an important lesson from the Age of Progress for Christians of every generation. The freedom to vote and a chance to learn do not guarantee the arrival of Utopia. The Christian faith has always insisted that the flaw in human nature is more basic than any fault in man’s political or social institutions.

In the processes of government, de Tocqueville warned, rule of the majority can mean oppression of the minority, control by erratic public moods rather than reasoned leadership.

Fraternity, the third idea, represented a powerful sense of brotherhood unleashed in the nineteenth century. The rebels who stormed the Bastille were united by an ambition to be masters of their own territory and national destiny. In short, they were driven by nationalism, which not only swept across nineteenth-century Europe, but in the twentieth century went on to engulf Asia and Africa.

In the brief ten years before the century ended, France formed a republic, executed a king, established an effective if faction-ridden revolutionary regime, and passed from that through a period of confusion that ended with a coup d’etat and General Napoleon Bonaparte’s accession to power.

The leaders of the revolution soon drove 30 to 40,000 priests out of their native towns into exile or hiding. And that proved to be only a prelude. The revolution began to take on a religious character all its own. A new calendar removed all traces of Christianity and elevated the cult of “Reason.” Soon parish churches were converted to “Temples of Reason,” and in the cathedral of Notre Dame revolutionaries enthroned an actress on the high altar as the “Goddess of Reason.” This set the pattern for the provinces. Young girls decked out as Reason or Liberty or Nature led processions through towns to altars erected to the new religion of the revolution.

The Church of Rome, however, never forgot: Liberty meant the worship of the goddess of Reason!

The Lord and his apostles had spent little time talking about freedom and personal independence and a man’s right to his own opinions. And through the Middle ages and the Reformation, Augustine’s axiom that liberty comes by grace and not grace by liberty had been at the bottom of the organization and imposition of Christian belief. To be properly free man must be in a state of salvation, so throughout these centuries Christians had little enthusiasm for the idea of man’s improper freedom—free in a political sense.

The year 1870, however, marks not only the end of the earthly rule of the pope; it also signifies the declaration of the supreme authority of the Bishop of Rome and the doctrine of papal infallibility. That is more than symbolic. The First Vatican Council represented the culmination of a movement called “ultramontanism.” It means “across the mountains”—the Alps—and stands for devotion to Rome.

Thus, the Council asserted two fundamental truths: the primacy of the pope and the infallibility of the pope. First, as the successor of Peter, vicar of Christ, and supreme head of the Church, the pope exercises full and direct authority over the whole Church and over the individual bishops. This authority extends to matters of faith and morals as well as to discipline and church administration. Therefore, the individual bishop owes the pope obedience, “not only in matters concerning faith and morals, but also in those of habits and administration of the church.” Second, when the pope in his official capacity (ex cathedra) makes a final decision concerning the entire Church in a matter of faith and morals, this decision in itself is infallible and immutable, and does not require the prior consent of the Church.

At the opening of the Age of Progress, the greatest power in English religious life was the evangelical movement, sparked and spread by John Wesley and George Whitefield. The chief marks of the movement were its intense personal piety, usually springing from a conversion experience, and its aggressive concern for Christian service in the world. Both of these were nourished by devotion to the Bible, and both were directed by the central themes of the eighteenth-century revival: God’s love revealed in Christ, the necessity of salvation through faith, and the new birth experience wrought by the Holy Spirit. This evangelical message echoed from a significant minority of pulpits in the Church of England and from a majority in the Nonconforming denominations.

A host of evangelical causes sallied forth from quiet little Clapham: The Church Missionary Society (1799), the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), The Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor (1796), The Society for the Reformation of Prison Discipline and many more. The greatest labor of all, however, centered on the campaign against slavery. The first battle was for the abolition of the slave trade, that is, the capturing of Negroes in Africa, and shipping them for sale to the West Indies.

Two years later, after exhaustive preparation, Wilberforce delivered another speech to Commons seeking to introduce a bill to prevent further importing of slaves into the West Indies. “Never, never,” he said, “will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt, and extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic.”

The workers for abolition came to see that hopes of success lay in appealing not only to Parliament but to the English people. “It is on the feeling of the nation we must rely,” said Wilberforce. “So let the flame be fanned.”

Stage by stage the Clapham Sect learned two basics of politics in a democracy: first, how to create public opinion; and, second, how to bring the pressure of that opinion on the government. The Evangelicals secured petitions; they published quality abolitionist literature; they lectured on public platforms; they campaigned on billboards. They used all the modern means of publicity. Nonconformists rallied in support, and for the first time in history women participated in a political contest. The Evangelicals “fanned the flame,” then they carried the fire to Parliament where Wilberforce and four colleagues from Clapham—the “Saints” in Commons—tried to arouse complacent leaders to put a stop to the inhumane slave trade.

Wilberforce, overcome with emotion, sat bent in his chair, his head in his hands, and the tears streaming down his face.

The certainty of the passage of the Emancipation Act, freeing the slaves in the sprawling British Empire, came on 25 July 1833, four days before Wilberforce died.

The significance of this action before the European colonial powers partitioned Africa is enormous. No one has described the impact better than Professor G. M. Trevelyan in his British History in the Nineteenth Century: “On the last night of slavery, the negroes in our West Indian islands went up on the hill-tops to watch the sun rise, bringing them freedom as its first rays struck the waters. But far away in the forests of Central Africa, in the heart of darkness yet unexplored, none understood or regarded the day. Yet it was the dark continent which was most deeply affected of all. Before its exploitation by Europe had well begun, the most powerful of the nations that were to control its destiny had decided that slavery should not be the relation of the black man to the white.” For this reason above all others, the Clapham Sect remains the shining example of how a society—perhaps the world itself—can be influenced by a few men of ability and devotion.

The Oxford men felt that the Church of England needed to affirm that its authority did not rest on authority from the state. It came from God. Bishops of the Church were not empowered by social position but by an apostolic commission. Even if the Church were completely separated from the state, the Church of England could still claim the allegiance of Englishmen because it rested on divine authority.

Public worship was vital to the Oxford men. They believed strongly in the religious value of symbolic actions in worship, such as turning toward the altar, bending the knee and elevating the cross. The worship of God, they said, demands the total response of man, so ritual should appeal to the senses: rich clerical garments, incense on the altar, music by trained voices. In short, Tractarian Christianity was a zealous version of “High Church” Christianity.

Gradually the names “Oxford movement” and “Tractarian” gave way to “Anglo-Catholic,” which meant Anglicans who valued their unity with the catholic tradition in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, but who refused to accept the supremacy of patriarch or pope.

He thought in terms of the evangelization of whole countries, and of what happens when whole populations become Christian. He held that the foreign missionary can never make more than a small contribution to the accomplishment of the work that has to be done, and that therefore the development of the local ministry is the first and greatest of all missionary considerations. Above all, he saw that Christianity must be firmly rooted in the culture and traditions of the land in which it is planted. For all these reasons and more Carey gained the title, “Father of Modern Missions.”

Livingstone realized that the slave trade could not continue apart from the African’s own participation in it. When slave-raiding was the way to wealth, the temptation was always present to engage in those raids on weaker neighboring tribes that made life perilous for the defenseless. Only if the Africans could be persuaded to engage in legitimate commerce, exchanging the products of their own fields and forests for those desirable things the white man could supply, would the evil and destructive commerce be brought to an end.

The voluntary society, of which the missionary society was one early form, transformed nineteenth-century Christianity. It was invented to meet a need rather than for theological reasons, but in effect it undermined the established forms of church government. It made possible interdenominational action. Anglican, Baptist, Congregationalist and Methodist could work together for defined purposes without raising troublesome questions of church structure. It also altered the power base in the church by encouraging lay leadership. Ordinary Christian men, and later women, came to hold key positions in the important societies, something thought impossible elsewhere in the church.

Many times these early missionaries were unaware of the conflicts that the gospel produced in other cultures. To most of them, Christianity in its Western form was Christianity. Therefore to make an Indian or a Malaysian a Christian was in great measure to turn him into a Dutchman or a Portuguese. It is easy today to condemn this attitude. Yet every Christian society, and every individual Christian, combines with the faith much that is cultural tradition.

In 1790 evangelicals faced a dual evangelistic challenge: to regain the East and to win the West. In the East, especially in a number of colleges, fresh enthusiasm for the life of the Spirit was apparent before 1800. This revival came to be known as the Second Great Awakening. It provided the next generation with skilled and dedicated leaders for the western crusade. The great western frontier revival took place in newly settled regions between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi and centered in Kentucky and Tennessee. This awakening took on the characteristics of the inhabitants. It was rugged, wild, and boisterous.

We now look back to Gasper River as the first “camp meeting”—that is, the first religious service of several days’ length held outdoors, for people who had traveled a distance to attend. They camped on the spot—thus the name. McGready was a pacesetter. For almost two centuries the revival preacher and the camp meeting have endured in America. Time, however, had its way and the intensity of the preaching cooled. It was inevitable. Man does not live by fire alone. Under the leadership of men like Charles Finney, D. L. Moody, and Billy Graham, the camp meeting moved indoors and continued its winning ways in rural chapels and urban auditoriums.

A deadly cancer, however, spread through the tissues of “Christian America.” How could a democracy infused with Christian principles continue to sanction the enslavement of millions of human beings? The American practice of slavery had begun on 20 August 1619, when 20 Negro slaves were unloaded from a Dutch frigate at Jamestown, Virginia. By 1830 their number had increased to about two million. As a nation spread west, the institution became the issue. Every time a new state came into the Union, every time settlers moved out to fresh land, the white-hot issue of slavery burned the national conscience more deeply. Should the new territory be slave or free? Was slavery to be extended indefinitely? In the passion to preserve both liberty and union, if one must choose, which must come first?

Looking back on it, it is difficult to see how any Christian could ever have defended slavery. Most didn’t try until the 1830s. We sometimes forget that during the first three decades of the nineteenth century the antislavery movement was stronger in the South than in the North. For a combination of reasons, however, the antislavery movement faded and a Southern defense of the institution arose. Some of the arguments for slavery were drawn from the Bible, thanks to Southern churchmen.

The war was fought; blood was shed; the nation endured. The vision for a Christian America also survived but like the nation itself it was greatly weakened. Black churches arose in large numbers, the primary institutional expression of freedom, and the constant reminder of the blind spot in the vision for a Christian America.

The first shock came from Charles Darwin’s pen. In 1859 he published The Origin of Species—perhaps the most important book of the century. Darwin’s evolutionary theory presented a major challenge to evangelicals. If there was no overseeing eye of Providence in creation, if in fact there was no creation at all but merely an evolution from simple to more complex forms of matter and energy, what was left of traditional Christian belief in a creating and sustaining God? If Darwin was right, how could the Bible be true?

Taken together these shocks were part of the general shift in Western culture from Christian to secular forms of thought and behavior. And Christians disagreed about what actions they should take to meet the new challenges. Among traditionally evangelical denominations, two rather distinct parties developed. One party chose to embrace the changes as blessings sent from God; another chose to resist the changes as threats to the biblical message.

Professor Martin Marty suggests that we call the parties “Public” Protestants and “Private” Protestants. His terms arise from the fact that one group spoke of Social Christianity, Social Gospel, Social Service, and so on, while the other, often using the term evangelical, stressed the need for individual salvation.

The “private” party continued in the tradition of revivalism. They threw their energies into the crusade for individual conversions, believing that if a man’s heart was right with God then economic and social problems would take care of themselves.

It might be helpful to think of liberal theology as a suspension bridge. The footing of one tower is planted upon “modern thought” and the foundation of the other rests upon “Christian experience.” Unfortunately, the ground around both towers is shifting soil, and those who take the bridge disagree over which is the safer side. That is why Professor Kenneth Cauthen finds two fundamental types of liberalism. He calls them “evangelical liberalism” and “modernistic liberalism.”

Two technical theological terms are crucial here—“immanence” and “transcendence.” Immanence carries the idea of God dwelling in the world and working through nature. Extreme immanence is pantheism, which says that God is the world and the world is God. Transcendence implies the reality of God apart from the world. Extreme transcendence is found in the faith of the deists, for whom God is as separate from the world as a watchmaker from his watch.

This immanent view of God seemed to fit the results of scientific studies. Instead of suddenly breaking through the clouds to create the world, God, they said, had been working for ages through natural law, slowly building the universe as we find it today. Most liberals agreed with the poet who said, “Some call it evolution, and others call it God.”

In 1859 Darwin’s views appeared in his Origin of Species. He contended “that species have been modified during a long course of descent . . . chiefly through the normal selection of numerous successive, slight, favourable variations.” The Origin of Species, the most important book of the century, revolutionized the concepts about the origin and evolution of life on planet earth. Darwin followed his first bombshell by a second. In 1871 his Descent of Man applied the natural selection to human beings and reached the controversial conclusion that man’s ancestors were probably monkeylike animals.

Romanticism insisted that man was no cog in human society; he was a vibrant part of nature. Revolting against society’s rules, human reason, and traditional authority, Romanticism stressed the individual, his spirit, and his longing for the ultimate.

Sin occurs, says Schleiermacher, “when man tries to live by himself, isolated from the universe and his fellow men. He lives for his own selfish interest, but in so living he finds that he is miserable.” But his very misery is proof of his oneness with God. To overcome the sin that separates man from God and man from his fellow man, God sent a mediator in Jesus Christ. The uniqueness of Christ, says Schleiermacher, is not in some doctrine about Jesus or in some miraculous origin such as the Virgin Birth. “The real miracle is Jesus himself. In Jesus we find a man who had the sense of God-consciousness to a supreme degree.” Where we all have flashes of God, he had complete knowledge. Where we give fitful obedience, he gave complete obedience. “As the Godfilled man,” Jesus was “our great pioneer” in the realm of the spirit and morality.

In Schleiermacher, then, the center of religion shifted from the Bible to the experience of the believer. Biblical criticism cannot harm Christianity, for the heart of the Bible message speaks to the individual, and it speaks even more clearly because the critics have enabled us to understand it. Schleiermacher was “the father of modern theology” primarily because he shifted the basis of the Christian faith from the Bible to “religious experience.”

For Ritschl religion rests upon the values of men, not upon the truth of science. Science tells us the facts, things as they are; but religion weighs the facts and counts some more valuable than others. “The great fact about man is that, although he is a product of nature and evolution, he has a sense of values.” We can explain this only if we recognize that the universe creates not only atoms and molecules but also values. “God is the necessary postulate to explain this sense of worth in man.” Many Christians in the late nineteenth century, says Hordern, found Ritschl’s approach helpful. It appeared to free the Christian faith from the destructive impact of history and science. It allowed biblical criticism to take the way of science: to decide the facts about authorship, date, and meaning of the biblical books. But it also recognized that religion is much more than facts. Science cannot rule on values, the stuff of religion.

With their victory had come an economic philosophy called laissez faire. The theory held that the social ills of industrialism defied correction. Every individual should be left alone to pursue his own interests: then everything was supposed to work out for the happiness of the greatest number.

The early attack upon the capitalist’s laissez faire philosophy came from a new concept called socialism. At this early stage the term did not stand for a militant workers movement. It was mostly a theory that condemned the concentration of wealth and called for public or worker ownership of business. Above all, the socialist insisted that harmony and cooperation—not ruthless competition—should control economic affairs.

Booth went on to describe the Army’s enormous rescue efforts. The whole picture was one of dire need. No such ministry came from the Church of England. It was so wed to the past that it had great difficulty adjusting to the social crisis. New parishes in the mushrooming industrial towns required an act of Parliament. This was time-consuming and costly. As a result the new urban masses usually grew up beyond the care of the Church of England.

The crux of the Social Gospel was the belief that God’s saving work included corporate structures as well as personal lives.