Church History in Plain Language (Plain Language Series)

by Bruce L. Shelley

The various Christian movements for social concerns always faced another danger, the loss of the church’s true mission. They left us all an important reminder, however, that Christians cannot show their concern for people’s eternal destiny unless they also demonstrate their concern for people’s earthly needs.

Arnold Toynbee, the eminent historian, once suggested that the twentieth century marked the replacement of the great world religions by three post-Christian ideologies: nationalism, communism, and individualism. Each of these ideologies has assumed the character of a religious faith. Each makes ultimate demands—patriotism, class struggle, or secular humanism. Each has its sacred symbols and ceremonies, inspired writings, dogmas, saints, and charismatic leaders.

Christianity has been displaced by an ideology that creates a mass party for some totalitarian government. The party, however, is always led by a dictator or a small but dedicated ruling elite, who commands a political police force. By the use of sophisticated, psychological methods the rulers are able to direct the minds and the emotions of the people against the “enemies” of the regime. Propaganda and control of the media, along with the regulation of the economy, are aimed at producing a new type of people utterly lacking any hunger for personal freedoms. That is the totalitarian way.

The Nazis taught the world the meaning of totalitarianism. They were a right-wing version of dictatorial rule. We call this fascism. Such governments counter personal frustration and alienation, as well as social and economic tensions, by stressing class unity and reaffirming traditional values. Fascist movements glorify the nation—defining it in terms of its mission, or racial uniqueness, or the state itself. Fascist rulers permit private property and capitalist enterprise, but they tightly control them.

The distinctive Nazi trait was a rejection of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. They magnified, instead, a primitive, idealized past portrayed in Wagnerian operas and ancient Germanic sagas where the complexities of modern life had no place. The concern with race was central to Nazi ideology. They preached that Germans possessed unique qualities arising from their homeland. “Soil” and “blood” set the Germans apart from all other people, so the Nazis considered foreign ideas and persons as corrupting, especially Jewish people and ideas.

Nazi theoreticians developed a barbaric doctrine of anti-Semitism. To regain the lost innocence of the past, Germany, they argued, had to purge the present of its impurities. The Jews served as scapegoats. They were the source of all modern evils, the “culture-destroying race” that gave the world both capitalism and Marxism.

During his rise to power Hitler courted Christian support by emphasizing national pride and pretending to favor the churches’ role in the state.

The German churches’ resistance to Hitler was amazingly meager. They were exclusively concerned with individualistic personal faith, traditional submission to the state, and a conservative outlook that rejected all left-wing proposals for social and political reform and enabled them to accept the Nazis’ claim to be the only alternative to Communism.

“The West reacted with the counter-ideology of Anticommunism. The basic assumption was that there was a universal communist conspiracy controlled by Moscow, which master-minded all revolutionary unrest in the world. Anticommunism was, particularly, an American response to the East-West stalemate after World War II, and the frustration resulting from America’s inability to spread the virtues of liberal democracy to all nations.” Thus, the wall remained.

In terms of a checklist for public service, Schlesinger was undoubtedly right. The American Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office. But serious-minded Christians found it impossible to look at government or any other social institution—the family, the courts, the schools—through totally secular eyes.

In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter, the former Georgia governor, was a symbol of a revitalized evangelical Christianity in the United States. The old-time religion was showing remarkable signs of new life. Many Americans found this surprising. They had been brought up to think that revivalism was the province of faith healers, holy rollers, and counterfeit preachers—a thing of high emotions, bad taste, and simplemindedness. Yet in the 1970s prominent figures by the scores—in politics, sports, and entertainment—spoke freely about their faith in Christ. Religion that was supposedly confined to the Bible Belt suddenly appeared all over the country. America, it seemed, had discovered born-again Christianity. After a generation of steady growth, Evangelicals numbered 45 million in the United States, and had completely changed the face of American Protestantism.

Evangelicals represented no single approach to America’s problems. The movement included a number of distinct subgroups. Among them were the fundamentalists, the militant right-wing churchmen who opposed all accommodation to contemporary culture, and the Pentecostals, who had experienced the “baptism in the Holy Spirit” and practiced such divine “gifts” as speaking in tongues and miraculous healing by prayer. These Pentecostals, or Charismatics as some preferred, included everything from Episcopalians and nearly a million Roman Catholics, to faith healers and assorted tent preachers. Most Evangelicals, though, were basically conventional Protestants who held staunchly to the authority of the Bible and to orthodox Christian doctrines. They believed in making a conscious personal commitment to Christ—a spiritual encounter, gradual or instantaneous, known as the born-again experience.

Much of the Northern wing turned to premillennialism, the belief that Christ’s return was imminent and that society would inevitably get worse before it occurred. By the late 1800s, the great evangelist Dwight L. Moody literally preached a lifeboat ethic: “I look on the world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said, ‘Save all you can.’” Thus, many conservatives withdrew from the social arena. Evangelical historian Timothy Smith describes this as the Great Reversal.

roots of fundamentalism lie in this surrender of social concern. In the 1880s and 1890s Bible study and personal holiness seemed more rewarding than the reform of American life.

The Baptist minister A. J. Gordon of Boston played a leading role in organizing two large prophecy conferences in New York (1878) and Chicago (1886) at which the essentials of premillennialism were hammered out: The world will continue to decline into sin until the Antichrist is loosed for one last orgy of destruction, at the end of which time Christ will return with his saints to establish an earthly reign of 1,000 years.

other Evangelicals turned to holiness conferences. Concern for a second blessing, entire sanctification, or Christian perfection had always been a main tenet of Methodist revivalism. In the late nineteenth century members of other religious communions came to share this concern. Holiness groups, such as the Church of the Nazarene, as well as deeper life conferences, urged believers to yield themselves to reliance on the Holy Spirit as a way to find the victorious Christian life. While increased attention both to the end times and to personal Christian living had firm biblical roots, it also gave traditional evangelicals a way of maintaining their faith in a culture over which they were steadily losing control. If they could not shape the affairs of men, they could find comfort in the world of the spirit.

Sixty-four authors were eventually chosen to appear in The Fundamentals. The American premillennial movement and the English Keswick Conference were well-represented. Other conservatives, however, were also among the contributors, including E. Y. Mullins of Southern Baptist Seminary and Benjamin B. Warfield of Princeton Seminary.

The Presbyterian champion of orthodoxy was Professor J. Gresham Machen of Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1929 the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church authorized a reorganization of the seminary. Machen and a small retinue of distinguished professors at the school felt that a merger of boards strengthened the liberal influence in the school. They withdrew from Princeton in protest and founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

Machen refused to break his ties with the Independent Board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions, he was brought to trial in his church’s courts and found guilty of rebellion against superiors. As a result conservatives in the denomination founded the Orthodox Presbyterian and the Bible Presbyterian churches.

the marks of early fundamentalism: (1) a supernatural Jesus attested by his resurrection from the dead; (2) a trustworthy Bible, the fountain of the Christian faith; and (3) the need of men to have “a new face upon life.”

This near end of his political career, however, only meant new opportunities in Bryan’s reforming and religious career. He soon threw himself into the Prohibition cause and played no small role in securing passage of the Eighteenth Amendment outlawing alcoholic beverages across the country after January, 1920. This was probably the last successful evangelical crusade for a moral America. Later, Americans tended to view Prohibition as the austere weapon of a pack of blue-nosed “Puritans” who found life a joyless thing and were determined that no one else should be allowed to distill a drop of pleasure from

Whether evolution was right or wrong was not his concern. He never intended to refute evolution on scientific grounds. “The objection to evolution,” he said, “is not, primarily, that it is not true. The principle objection is that it is highly harmful to those who accept it.”

When all was over, Scopes was found guilty and fined a token sum. Bryan, thus, won in Dayton, Darrow in the rest of the country. Five days after the trial Bryan passed away quietly in his sleep, leaving all of his reform causes behind. In a very real sense the evangelical crusade for a Christian America died with him.

In the first issue Henry said the magazine aimed to express historical Christianity to the present generation. The founders felt that theological liberals had failed to meet the moral and spiritual needs of people. The editors accepted unreservedly the “complete reliability of the written Word of God.” But they intended to present the implications of the gospel for every area of life.

The Pentecostal experience—“the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues”—was not new. The spark of twentieth-century Pentecostalism was a three-year-long revival, beginning in 1906, at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles. There were personal experiences of tongue-speaking earlier, but Azusa Street ignited worldwide Pentecostalism. Christians from all over North America, Europe, and the Third World visited Azusa Street and carried the fire back home.

The largest in the United States were the Assemblies of God, the Church of God in Christ, the Church of God, and the Pentecostal Holiness Church. These were usually filled with socially and economically depressed people.

In the sixteenth century only four major divisions separated the churches of the Reformation: Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, and Anglican. Soon, however, a number of denominations appeared on the scene, most of them established by believers convinced of the importance of some particular teaching of Scripture. By the twentieth century more than 200 denominations crowded the landscape in the United States alone. The force within Christianity was centrifugal—away from centralization—often independent, and sometimes divisive. In the twentieth century, however, another force, this one centripetal, drew Christians toward cooperation, merger and united action. We call this force ecumenism.

“Barth felt that the church had almost lost its soul in making adjustments to historical trends,” Visser’t Hooft once said. “He called the church again to be itself.” He recalled that the unofficial slogan of the men who launched the ecumenical movement was “Let the Church be the Church.” And this, said the Dutch leader, “did not mean that the church should run away from the world. It did mean that the church was not merely an echo of trends in the world.”

Vatican II was more than a show, much more. It revealed to the world the deep-seated presence in Roman Catholicism of a new spirit crying out for change in the Age of Ideologies, it shattered the Protestant view of the Catholic Church as a monolithic and absolutist system, and it marked the tacit recognition by the Catholic church, for the first time, that those who left it in the past may have had good cause.

Everywhere, John made a point of meeting and befriending non-Catholics. While in Turkey he helped rescue and provide for Jews escaping from Nazi Germany, and in France after the war he recoiled in horror when he saw films of Jewish bodies piled high at Buchenwald and Auschwitz: “How could this be? The mystical body of Christ!” When a group of Jews visited him after he became Pope he walked up to them and simply repeated the biblical greeting: “I am Joseph, your brother.”

From the beginning of that brisk October, when 2,540 out of 2,908 eligible cardinals, patriarchs, bishops, and abbots arrived in Rome, it was apparent Vatican II would be a council unlike any other. The sheer weight of numbers showed that. There had been only 600 to 700 fathers at the First Vatican Council, which proclaimed the infallibility of the pope in 1869–70. At the eighteen-year-long Council of Trent, which condemned the Protestant Reformation, only about 200 members voted on the decrees.

Vatican II was the first council not called to combat heresy, pronounce new dogmas, nor marshal the Church against hostile forces. The Council of Trent (1545–63), for example, reaffirmed the validity of indulgences— questioned by Luther—and built a doctrinal fortress against the Protestant Reformation. Pope John showed that Vatican II was called not against, but for something. The Pope’s opening speech was a mandate for a predominantly pastoral council rather than a doctrinal one. The days of the state church, he recognized, were over. In the age coming to birth, he said, the Church must not seek to maintain its authority by weapons of repression. It must “rule with the medicine of mercy rather than with severity.” The purpose of the Council, therefore, was to enable the Church “to bring herself up to date.” The modernization would bring nearer the time of the reunion of Christendom, when Christ’s prayer “that they may be one” should be fulfilled.

What many fathers interpreted as a harmless method of speeding up the elections he recognized as a maneuver to give the Council a special orientation. But the bishops showed they would not simply approve the decision of Curia specialists. When they elected the ten commissions two days later the final list was balanced and international.

That bit of strategy in the opening days of the Council drew the lines between the two main groups of bishops, who became known as “conservatives” and “progressives.” On the conservative side, said Father Francis J. McCool, a Jesuit Bible scholar from Maryland, were “those who see in the future a threat to the past.” On the progressive side were “those who see in the future the promise of the future.” The two conceptions collided on almost every issue.

The conflicting views of the conservatives and progressives were apparent from the start. During the first session the progressives wanted to change the liturgy of the church to allow for modern languages instead of the traditional Latin and to encourage the participation of laymen in the Mass. The conservatives objected, predictably.

Prepared by the theological commission under Cardinal Ottaviani, the statement uncompromisingly emphasized the two sources of revelation—Scripture and tradition—recognized by Roman Catholicism since the Council of Trent. The progressives, seeing no point in stressing Catholic-Protestant differences, wanted to present Scripture and tradition as two channels of a single stream. The central question was, were some truths of the faith found only in tradition or were all truths of the faith found in Scripture?

The declaration of the Council on the right to freedom of conscience proclaimed that no state had the right to prevent through external pressure the preaching and acceptance of the gospel. At the same time the Church turned away from the assumption held since the age of Constantine that wherever it possessed the means (as in Spain and Italy) it had the right to exercise public power to enforce its religious demands and to further its work of salvation.

Roman Catholicism solemnly renounced in principle any use of external force against the voice of conscience. Its proclamation on December 7 marked a radical break with a fifteen-hundred-year-old practice.

Vatican II turned the face of Roman Catholicism toward the world, not in anger but in concern. The work of the Council was sufficiently earth-shaking to launch a tidal wave of change in the Church. The decade after the close of the Council proved to be the most tumultuous in the modern history of the Church. So many spiritual and religious landmarks were suddenly swept away that the average Catholic was left in a state of complete bewilderment.

Having been taught to think of the Mass as a mysterious unchangeable set of ceremonies originating with Christ himself, the average Catholic was not intellectually, spiritually, or emotionally prepared for what happened. He saw the altar brought forward and the priest face the congregation; instead of whispering the prayers in Latin, he now read them aloud in the language of the people. Many of the old ceremonies were discarded.

The Church of Rome reached a state of extreme tension in 1968 when Pope Paul issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae, condemning the use of artificial methods of contraception. He put his authority on the line— making his decision against the overwhelming majority of his birth control commission. The whole affair precipitated the most serious crisis for papal authority since Luther.

Almost as serious as the birth control crisis was the Church’s prohibition of divorce. According to this law, no truly sacramental marriage between baptized Catholics can be dissolved—even by the pope. In cases where the partners no longer can live peaceably together, they might be granted the Church’s permission to separate but without the right to remarry as long as either partner remains alive. In spite of the tremendous hardships this policy created for those involved in broken marriages, few dared to challenge the law until Vatican II.

After personal contacts with Protestant charismatics in the Pittsburgh area, several Duquesne faculty members received the Pentecostal baptism, marked by speaking in tongues. By the middle of February, 1967, at what historians of the movement call “the Duquesne weekend,” the experience had come to a group of students and faculty on a wider scale.

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, however, introduced the distinction now familiar to us between sacred and secular. Today we consider religion only one activity of man. It isn’t his whole life. Other areas, such as politics, have staked out their own claim upon life. If God’s existence is not totally ignored in these areas, no one thinks of making his law binding on everyone. God has no more of a practical role in American politics or American laws of sexual morality than he did in the former Soviet Union. Marxism was simply more consistent than the West in carrying to its extreme the secularization of all things.

At the same time church membership figures outpaced the growth in population. In 1910 it was 40 percent of the population. By 1950 this had risen to over 60 percent, and by 1976 to 77 percent. Missionary interest grew in such a way that by the time the USA had become a world power, it had also become the main headquarters of the Protestant missionary movement and had begun to contribute greatly to Roman Catholic missions. In 1973, 70 percent of all Protestant missionaries in the world and an even higher proportion of the total cost of the missionary operation came from North America.

Many of these missionaries took to the Third World, however, not only the gospel, but their sacred/secular distinctions. They explained disease and disaster in terms of the natural law of cause and effect. They restricted the supernatural to a small area of human experience. And most of all, they said politics lay outside the realm of the religious life. As a result many leaders of the new nations considered Christianity irrelevant to practical life.

Pentecostal groups proved unusually successful in bringing large numbers of Latin Americans to faith in Christ. Approximately two-thirds of Protestants in Latin America are Pentecostals. They are especially prominent in Brazil and Chile, but by 1975 they had become a significant force from Mexico to Argentina. Some of their church buildings seat 20 to 25,000.

Vatican Council II produced a radical change in Latin American Catholicism. A new ecumenical spirit appeared, bishops encouraged Bible reading, priests said the mass in the language of the people, and a social conscience awakened. These innovations created divisions among Catholics. A large number of the clergy remained conservative and attempted to preserve the past. Among the progressives some chose to emphasize the social message of Christianity and cast their lot with a form of Marxism. Other progressives took a spiritual line by stressing a return to the Bible and Christian living.

The world today does not need greater social organization but a Savior: man today needs someone who will answer the fundamental problems of his existence, which no social structure has ever been able to answer. The bishops at Vatican II tended to agree with Danielou. The “Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity” affirms that missionary activity is concerned with “the task of preaching the gospel and planting the church among peoples or groups who do not yet believe in Christ.”

In sharp contrast, conservative Protestants, including evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic and Pentecostal church groups, were, in general, flourishing. While these churches also reflected the imprint of the Age of Self, they retained their faith in “the life above” and preached it. Signs of this were found in surveys of the nation’s 500 fastest-growing Protestant churches, in the growth of many of the smaller evangelical denominations, and in the phenomenal growth of independent nondenominational “megachurches.” To take one striking example during this age, the Pentecostal Assemblies of God quadrupled from a half million to more than four million.