Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

In the aftermath of the suppression of Munster, the dispirited Anabaptists of the lower-Rhine area gained new heart through the ministry of Menno Simons (about 1496–1561). Although always in great personal danger, Menno, a former priest, traveled widely to visit the scattered Anabaptist groups of northern Europe and inspire them with his nighttime preaching. Menno was unswerving in commanding pacifism. As a result, his name in time came to stand for the movement’s repudiation of violence. ...

Usually, Christians think one must understand (interpret) then obey; Anabaptist instinct is the opposite: only obedience yields understanding.

Over the centuries the descendants of Anabaptism lost many of the characteristics of their founders. In their search for a pure church, they often became legalistic. In the interests of sheer survival, they lost their evangelistic zeal and became known simply as excellent farmers, good people, and the “Quiet in the Land.” Not until the late nineteenth century did they experience revival and fresh growth. By the late twentieth century their worldwide membership had reached over a half million. Far beyond the boundaries of the Mennonite and Hutterite communities, however, Christians have embraced one or more of those principles for which the first generation of radicals were willing to die.

Calvin’s leadership in “the game” shaped a third reformation tradition. Today we call it Reformed or Calvinistic Christianity. It includes all Presbyterians, Dutch and German Reformed Churches, and many Baptists and Congregationalists.

If Luther’s ultimate text was “the just shall live by faith,” Calvin’s was, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Calvin saw the old doctrine of predestination taught by Paul, Augustine, and Luther as a source of religious devotion. More than a problem of the mind, Calvin considered divine election to eternal life the deepest source of confidence, humility, and moral power.

While Calvin did not profess to know absolutely who were God’s chosen (the elect) he believed that three tests constituted a good yardstick by which to judge who might be saved: participation in the two sacraments Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, an upright moral life, and a public profession of the faith. These were adequate for a disciplined church on earth.

Like many others, however, he was forced to flee England overnight when, in 1553, the country returned to the Catholic faith under Henry VIII’s daughter, Mary I. The queen’s persecution of Protestant leaders earned her the title Bloody Mary.

Knox escaped to the Continent, where he developed the theory that Protestants had the right to resist, by force if necessary, any Roman Catholic ruler who tried to prevent their worship and mission. That was farther than Calvin himself was willing to go, but many of the nobles in Scotland found the idea attractive. When civil war broke out in Scotland in 1559, Knox rushed home. By the summer of 1560 the Calvinists were in control of Edinburgh. Knox drafted the articles of religion that parliament accepted for the country, thereby abolishing Roman Catholicism.

If the Lutheran reformation began in a monastic cell, the Anabaptist reformation in a prayer meeting, and the Calvinistic reformation at a scholar’s desk, then the English reformation began in the affairs of state, specifically with the problem of succession to the royal throne.

The idea arose out of the marital problems of King Henry, whom Charles Dickens once described as “a most intolerable ruffian and a blot of blood and grease on the history of England.

A year later, 1534, the Act of Supremacy declared, “The king’s majesty justly and rightly is and ought to be and shall be reputed the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England called Anglicana Ecclesia.”

The pioneer in the translation of the English Bible was William Tyndale. A zeal to place the English Scripture into the hands of the common man burned in Tyndale’s soul. After receiving his ordination, he once expressed his frank amazement at the ignorance of the clergy. When a fellow priest resented this observation, Tyndale hotly replied, “If God spares my life, before many years pass I will make it possible for a boy behind the plow to know more Scripture than you do.

Protestantism. The truth is the movement was both a Counter Reformation, as Protestants insist, and a Catholic Reformation, as Catholics argue. Its roots run back to forces before Luther’s time, but the form it took was largely determined by the Protestant attack. Facets of the Counter Reformation 1. Ignatius became an important voice for Catholic spirituality, as well as organizing the influential Jesuit order. 2. The Counter Reformation also contributed to the emergence of other important voices in spirituality, including St. Teresa of Avila. 3. Catholics answered the academic and scholarly work of the Protestants with work in language (especially in Spain) and training for priests. 4. The council of Trent offered an articulation of doctrines in reaction to the Protestant teaching. 5. The Catholic Church initiated a global missionary expansion. 6. The Inquisition, an adaptation of an ancient Roman legal format, proved an effective yet brutal strategy to discover and stop heresy.

Among the members of the Oratory who later emerged as significant figures were Jacopo Sadoleto, who debated with Calvin; Reginald Pole, who tried under Bloody Mary to turn England back to Rome; and Gian Pietro Caraffa, who became Pope Paul IV.

Loyola came out of his struggle believing that both God and Satan are external to man, and man has the power to choose between them. By the disciplined use of his imagination man can strengthen his will so as to choose God and his ways.

The idea eventually grew into the Jesuits’ famed plan of studies, which measured out heavy but manageable doses of classics, humanities, and sciences.

“Pray as though everything depended on God alone;” Ignatius advised, “but act as though it depended on you alone whether you will be saved.

In 1534 some fisherfolk, living on the southeast coast, had sought the protection of the king of Portugal. Robbers on land and sea had been making their lives miserable. The Portuguese agreed to protect them providing they would accept Christian baptism. They did, but for the first eight years of their Christian profession they had no one to explain to them the mysteries of their new faith. Xavier, “the little dark man,” stepped into that need. He went everywhere over the burning sand hills where the fisher villages were scattered. He would ring a handbell to call the villagers together and recite the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Rosary. When the fisherfolk had learned the words and professed their belief in the Creed, Xavier would baptize them by the hundreds until his hands dropped from exhaustion. After three years he had an organized church to pass on to his successors.

The doorway to China that Xavier failed to find opened to his spiritual successor, Matthew Ricci (1552–1610). In 1567 a small island off the coast of China, Macao, became a Portuguese colony. For years, however, entrance to China seemed impossible. The ruling Ming dynasty had no interest in contacts with the outside world. They considered the Chinese as the givers of culture, not the receivers. Confucianism was dominant in the empire and the state; the family and ethics were governed by its ideals and teachings. According to one story Allessandro Valignani, a leader of the Jesuits in the Orient, looking out his window at Macao in 1579 cried out toward the Chinese coast, “Oh, Rock, Rock, when will you open?” Valignani recalled a thirty-year-old Italian Jesuit teaching at the time in a seminary in Goa. Matthew Ricci had studied mathematics, astronomy, and cosmology in Rome before heading for India. He seemed unusually prepared for work among the Chinese, so Valignani called Ricci to Macao and placed the burden of China upon his shoulders.

Ricci’s successor, Adam Schall, carried the scholarly work to an even higher level. He won the admiration of the Chinese scholar class by accurately predicting the time of an eclipse of the moon and became the Director of the Imperial Astronomical Service. In 1650 Schall built a public church in Peking and gained religious freedom for Christianity in the whole of the empire (1657). At Schall’s death there were almost 270,000 Christians in China. The imperial edict of toleration in 1692 rewarded the service of the Jesuits on behalf of China and the imperial house, and thus an independent Chinese church approached reality.

To put an army in the field Charles was forced to convene Parliament, which he, like his father, had tried to ignore for over a decade. Once Parliament assembled, conflicting loyalties led to a Royalist Party and a Parliamentary Party. The Parliamentarians, clearly a majority, were agreed on the broad Puritan principles but were divided over the form of the church. On the one hand were Presbyterians; on the other were Independents (or Congregationalists). United in their hatred of Archbishop Laud, the Parliamentarians succeeded in bringing him to trial and seeing him beheaded.

The Age of the Reformation (1517–1648) did not suddenly end and the Age of Reason and Revivals (1648–1789) appear overnight as historians’ dates might suggest, but times do change, and 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.

We may call it the denominational theory of the church. The use of the word denomination to describe a religious group came into vogue about 1740 during the early years of the Evangelical Revival led by John Wesley and George Whitefield. But the theory itself was hammered out a century before by a group of radical Puritan leaders in England and America.

In a similar way 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.

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 single ecclesiastical structure. 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.

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. They simply knew that the traditional bigotry and bloodshed in the name of Christ was not the way forward. 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.

Finally, the Age of Reason sprang from the soil of a new faith in law and order. Modern science arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and filled men with visions of a new day of peace and harmony. These pioneers of modern science forced men to think in a new way about the universe: Copernicus (1473–1543), who insisted that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our universe; Johann Kepler (1571–1630), who concluded that the sun emitted a magnetic force that moved the planets in their courses; and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who made a telescope to examine the planets and proved that the acceleration of falling bodies is constant. 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). In 1687 Newton published his momentous work, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, in which all laws of motion, in the heavens and on the earth, were harmonized in a master principle for the universe, the law of gravitation.

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 comes to be called deism, a movement especially popular among English speakers. Deism served as a halfway house on the road to atheism. One could keep the idea of God and dismiss the concept that God would engage or interfere with the world.

The God of the deists has sometimes been called the watchmaker God. God created the world as a watchmaker makes a watch, and then wound it up and let it run. Since God was a perfect watchmaker, there was no need of his interfering with the world later. Hence the deists rejected anything that seemed to be an interference of God with the world, such as miracles or special revelations recorded in the Bible.

The deists believed that their religion was the original religion of man. From it had come, by distortion, all other religions. These distortions were the work of priests who concocted the theologies, myths, and doct...

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. The 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 was to function in the private realms confined to church, home, and heart. That is what we find today in modern secular societies.

Some experts in this science of casuistry were strict interpreters of the moral law; others were lenient. The Jesuits were lenient—very lenient. They argued that it might be possible to withhold the truth by “mental reservation” or even tell a lie if some high purpose called for it. They made so many allowances for sinful human nature that many earnest people protested what seemed to them “cheap grace,” forgiveness without contrition.

The most aggressive opposition to the Jesuits came from a movement called Jansenism. Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638) was a Dutchman who had adopted St. Augustine’s views of sin and grace at the University of Louvain. He came to believe that the best way to defend Catholicism against the Calvinist challenge was to return to the doctrines of the great North African and establish a rigorous moral code for the Catholic clergy to combat the easygoing ethics of the Jesuits. Jansen carried on his campaign against the Jesuits as professor of Scripture at Louvain and later as Bishop of Ypres. At his death in 1638 he left, not quite finished, a major treatise, Augustinus, which soon after its publication in 1640 became the platform for Jansenism in France.

To correct the errors of Catholicism in his own day, Jansen went back to Augustine and argued that God, before the foundation of the world, had chosen those men and women who should be saved. The good works of men could never earn salvation without the help of divine grace because man’s will is not free and his nature is corrupt beyond self-salvation. Only God’s grace, available through Christ’s death, can save him.

They taught the Pascals that physical sufferings were but illustrations of a basic religious truth: man of himself is a helpless and miserable creature. Blaise had seldom enjoyed a day without pain. He knew how helpless physicians could be, so the argument struck him with unusual force. It deepened his sense of the tragic mystery of life.

Any religion that becomes the religion of the majority and slowly turns into a social habit tends to grow humdrum and flat, regardless of its original glow of enthusiasm. So it proved in many areas of Lutheran Germany.

Pietism arose as a reaction to this ossification of the Reformation. Just as Jansenism opposed the cheap grace of the French Jesuits, so the Pietists challenged the nominal faith of German Lutheranism. The aims of the Pietists were twofold. First, they stressed the importance of personal faith. They left behind all dreams of Catholic Christendom and Puritan commonwealths. They believed that Christianity started with the individual. So, for the first time in Christian history, the idea of conversions of baptized Christians (as well as pagans) came to prominence. The essence of faith, said the Pietist, is a personal experience of God’s grace in the believer’s heart. Second, the Pietists wanted to shift the center of the Christian life from the state churches, in which a person was born and brought up, to intimate fellowships of those who had a living faith in God. Revitalized laymen from these centers were expected to spread the Word of God through all classes of men. Three men—Philip Jacob Spener, August Hermann Francke, and Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf—highlight the history of Pietism.

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. Second, Pietism assumed the existence of the institutional church. It made no frontal attacks upon it. But it shifted what was essential to Christianity—the new birth and the spiritual life—from the traditional state churches to intimate fellowship groups or voluntary associations of believers. In the United States, where no state church ever prevailed, Evangelicals made an alliance with the denominational concept of the church and simply multiplied religious movements stressing evangelism or some aspect of the Christian life. Clearly, then, Pietism lives on, not only in the Moravian denomination, but also in evangelical Christianity at large, the spiritual descendants of John Wesley and George Whitefield.

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.

The 1730s in America, Scotland, Wales, and England saw a sudden explosion of apostolic concern to preach the gospel to the unconverted. Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts; Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine in Scotland; Howel Harris in Wales; and George Whitefield in England all preceded John Wesley in the evangelical 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.

John’s frustrations were compounded by his pitiful love affair with Sophy Hopkey, the eighteen-year-old niece of Savannah’s chief magistrate. Wesley was so mixed up emotionally and spiritually that he didn’t know his own mind. Sophy finally resolved the affair by eloping with John’s rival. The jilted lover then barred her from Holy Communion, and her incensed husband sued John for defaming Sophy’s character. The trial dragged out, and after six months of harassment, Wesley fled the colony in disgust. 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?

Peter Bohler had exhorted him to “preach faith till you have it and then because you have it, you will preach faith.

In his tireless preaching 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 appear arbitrary. He insisted that God willed the salvation of all men and that men could receive or refuse divine grace. This conviction brought his friendship with Whitefield to the breaking point. Whitefield defended the doctrine of predestination because it underscored God’s sovereign authority. He felt Wesley’s “Arminianism” dulled the all-important sense of sin and compromised the vital concept of an almighty God. Both men sought to advance the work of the awakening, so they agreed to differ in mutual respect. In Wesley’s sermon at Whitefield’s funeral in 1770, he spoke of the evangelist’s “most generous and tender friendship.” But the controversy did lead to two camps among the Methodists: Arminian societies following Wesley and Calvinist societies following Whitefield.

Charles Wesley, who had experienced God’s forgiving grace three days before John, wrote over seven thousand 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.

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.

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. Backus, like Jefferson and Madison, believed that “Truth is great and will prevail.” But unlike his “enlightened colleagues,” by truth he meant the revealed doctrines of Scripture. His fundamental assumption was that “God has appointed two different kinds of government in the world which are different in their nature and ought never to be confounded”; one is civil, the other ecclesiastical. “Our civil legislature,” said Backus, does not function as “our representatives in religious affairs.” They were elected as representatives for civil or secular affairs, and when they act in ecclesiastical affairs, they meddle in matters upon which their constituents did not empower them to legislate. Furthermore, legislative power is inappropriate for faith. “Religion is a voluntary obedience unto God which force cannot promote.

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.

Liberty in numerous ancient settings meant more than the mere notion that an individual may choose a course of action. Liberty was typically tied to nature. Mankind possessed a nature or essence. Consequently, in keeping with the nature of humans, people could, for example, think and reason with great potential. Liberty was linked to a person being able to live up to and according to their nature. A man crawling on hands and knees in slop would not be praiseworthy on the grounds that some human had decided to act like a pig. Freedom was noble and important because a person could pursue the goal of living up to their nature or potential. Social barriers restricting a person’s progress should be removed when possible. People today often understand liberty apart from nature. They do not wish to be free so they can become a good version of what they are (by nature); they think freedom is being able to choose what they want to be. On a similar note ancient understandings of human flourishing or happiness were tied to being or becoming good, not just to feeling good. Aristotle, for example, would think it odd that our contemporary culture might take satisfaction in someone feeling good while not being good. Again living in sync with one’s nature was foundational for liberty and happiness. Our founding fathers assumed this ancient notion of nature when speaking of life, liberty, and happiness. Contemporary notions of liberty are often impoverished by comparison.