Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

Through all those years the popes—Leo XII, Pius VIII, and Gregory XVI—were not bad men. They simply refused to join the nineteenth century. They continued to defend the past and lost touch with the movements of their own time. None of them really understood the new world introduced by the French Revolution. They never figured out how to fight it or how to convert it.

Liberals initially welcomed Pope Pius IX (1846–1878). He was a warm, kindly, well-meaning man, and the liberals took him for a true reformer when, on March 14, 1848, he gave the Papal States a constitution that permitted the people a moderate degree of participation in their government. Some dreamed of an Italian federation under the pope. But Pius suddenly changed his mind about the Papal States when revolutionaries assassinated the first papal prime minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi. Revolution broke out in Rome, and Pius was forced to flee. With French military help he regained Rome and the Papal States, but this time Pius insisted on a return to the old absolutist rule.

Pius IX withdrew into the Vatican. In June 1871 Victor Emmanuel transferred his residence to Rome, ignoring all protests and excommunications of the pope. The new government offered the pope an annual subsidy together with the free and unhindered exercise of all his spiritual functions. But Pius angrily rejected the offer and continued his protests as the “prisoner of the Vatican.” He forbade Italy’s Catholics to participate in political elections. But this only left a free field to the radicals. The result was an increasingly anticlerical course in the Italian government. This unpleasant condition, the “Roman Question,” reached no solution until Benito Mussolini concluded the Lateran Treaty in February 1929. In the treaty, the pope renounced all claims to the former Papal States and received full sovereignty in the small Vatican State.

On December 8, 1854, Pius IX declared as dogma the traditional belief that Mary had been conceived without original sin: “It is a divinely revealed truth of faith that Mary in the first moment of her conception was freed by special grace from the stain of original sin in view of the merits of Christ.” The subject of the decision was not new. It was the way it was proclaimed. This was not a decision by a council, but an ex cathedra definition by the pope. The expression means “from the chair,” the official teaching role within the Church. Questions arose from all sides. Can the pope alone, without council, decide and proclaim dogma? The one great topic of the First Vatican Council was before the Church. The solemn proclamation of Mary’s immaculate conception was attended by 54 cardinals and 140 bishops, but the decision was made by the pope alone.

At the first balloting on July 13, 1870, 451 council fathers voted in favor of the definition of infallibility, 88 opposed it, and 62 accepted it with reservations. Many who opposed simply thought that the time was not right.

After further discussion a number were still uncertain, but rather than create a scandal, 55 bishops, with the consent of the pope, left Rome before the final vote. The vote for the record, on July 18, was 533 for the doctrine of infallibility. Only two against.

Thus the Council asserted two fundamental truths: the primacy of the pope and the i...

Unfortunately, fortresses have a decided disadvantage. They grow stuffy. They allow no enlargement of thinking, and after a time you begin to imagine that the only world of any importance lies within the walls.

We know that the church is under a twofold commission: God has sent his people into the world to proclaim salvation and to serve the needy. But he has also called his own from the world to worship and learn of him. Mission without worship can produce empty service, just as worship without mission can lead to careless religion. Thus the church’s life in the world involves a constant conversation: a yes here and a no there. Protestants in nineteenth-century England found society changing so rapidly that they were not always sure whether they were talking to friends or to enemies.

“In great contests,” he once said, “each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.” Another time, in his second Inaugural Address, he observed, “Both [Union and Confederacy] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other . . . . The prayers of both could not be answered . . . . The Almighty has his own purposes.” Lincoln knew that men should try to do God’s will as well as they could determine what it was for them, but the Almighty has his purposes that go beyond the plans of men.

H. Richard Niebuhr when he said in liberalism “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.

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’s presence in the world and working through nature. An extreme version of immanence is found in pantheism, which claims that God and the world are identical. Transcendence implies the reality of God apart from the world. An extreme version of transcendence is found among the deists, for whom God is as separate from the world as a watchmaker from his watch.

We are coming to understand that it is the recognition of the invincible reality of spiritual Christianity which is going to give our theology its great power in the future . . . . Criticism may assail the historical facts of revelation: rationalism may urge objections to its doctrines; but the surf on our coast of Maine might as easily overthrow the granite cliffs against which it breaks as criticism and rationalism disturb the Christian realities which stand firm in the experience of the individual believer and the church.

Schleiermacher was “the father of modern theology” primarily because he shifted the basis of the Christian faith from the Bible to “religious experience.”

To Ritschl religion had to be practical. It must begin with the question, What must I do to be saved? But if that question means, How can I go to heaven when I die? then it is a theoretical question. To be saved means to live a new life, to be saved from sin, selfishness, fear, and guilt.

“We find God instead in history, where movements arise dedicated to the values that make life meaningful. The task of theology is to turn men again to Jesus and remind them anew of what it means to follow him.”

The impact of liberalism was not limited to any single denomination or country. It challenged traditional orthodox bodies all over Europe and North America. We may take the Congregationalists in the United States as an example of many other Christian groups.

After 1880 every one of these beliefs came under heated fire from the liberals. The most celebrated controversy erupted at Andover Seminary. The seminary had been established by New England Congregationalists in 1808 to counter the Unitarian tendencies of Harvard. Attempting to preserve Andover’s orthodoxy, the founders required faculty subscription to a creed summarizing their inherited Calvinism. By 1880, however, faculty members, under the influence of liberalism, found this requirement impossible and said so. The spark that lit the flames of controversy was a series of articles in the Andover Review. Egbert C. Smyth, William Jewett Tucker, and George Harris of the faculty argued that heathen who die without any knowledge of the gospel will have an opportunity in the future life either to accept or to reject the gospel before facing final judgment. Step by step in the debate that followed faculty members moved toward the public defense of liberal theology. The Board of Visitors, one of the ruling bodies of the seminary, finally brought charges against Smyth for his departure from the Creed: a kind of test case. After years of moves and counter-moves, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in 1892 voided the action of the Board of Visitors in dismissing Smyth. By that time almost every American denomination had on its hands its own celebrated case of heresy.

Life was suddenly changed. Gone, for many, was rural or small-town life where the pace of work was determined by night and day, sowing and harvest. In its place people found the precision and the regimen of the factory world. God’s sun was hid behind the smoke and in its place was the factory whistle: symbol of man’s time, not God’s.

These early socialists were utopians because their theories of model communities were based upon the naïve notion that men naturally loved one another and that they could live happily together. It was capitalist competition, they said, that set man against man.

The most outstanding example of ministry to the dispossessed was the work of a pietistic Evangelical, William Booth (1829–1912). He started his ministry with the Methodist New Connection but soon withdrew to work with London’s poor. His street preaching in London’s East End in 1864 met with phenomenal success. Within eleven years he had thirty-two stations promoting evangelism and social service among London’s destitute. His workers, organized like a military unit, were soon called the Salvation Army. Evangelist Booth became General Booth. By 1888 the General had established 1,000 British corps and had dispatched patrols to many other nations. His book In Darkest England and the Way Out appeared in 1890, graphically comparing the social darkness in England to Africa’s darkness pictured by David Livingstone. In London, in one year, he reported 2,157 people had been found dead, 2,297 had committed suicide, 30,000 were living in prostitution, 160,000 had been convicted of drunkenness, and more than 900,000 were classed as paupers. Booth went on to describe the Army’s enormous rescue efforts. The whole picture was one of dire need.

In general, workers in nineteenth-century England slowly gained both political power and better working conditions. Step by step, act by act, England whittled away at the old laissez faire doctrine and improved life for her working citizens: no children under ten could work, women and children were limited to a ten-hour day, safety inspections were introduced in factories, and many others. England had provided many benefits for laboring people before many in the United States recognized a social crisis existed.

Throughout its history the church had tried to improve man’s life on earth even as it prepared him for the world to come. It was always possible to concentrate on the next life so much that Christians appeared insensitive to the pain of the present. Certainly, the Social Crisis of the last century made that obvious. The various Christian movements for social concerns faced the danger of reducing the gospel to social activism. 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.

And the “new” Christianity in the Third World and beyond emerges and expands at an incalculable rate. This new Christianity eclipses inflamed Muslim voices in which it discerns both danger and call to mission.

A backward glance over the last two generations reveals the Christian message scribbled across the decades like so much graffiti, surrounded by other messages equally arresting and perhaps more demanding: Nazism, Marxism, Capitalism.

Arnold Toynbee, the eminent historian, once suggested that the twentieth century marked the displacement of the great world religions by three post-Christian ideologies: nationalism, communism, and individualism.

Toynbee’s theory, however, is only partly right. People in the West seem to rightly understand the twentieth century in terms of this secularizing process; the emerging ideologies of nationalism, communism, and individualism largely displaced or tamed the great religions, making them appear marginally important. Many predicted that this process would continue. Reason and science would explain more and more about the world and its people. As people became more educated, they would not need religion, at least not in the same way. Voices of secularization forecasted that fewer people would believe in God, and the God they believed in would be less of a God. Although many Westerners continue to embrace the secularization model, the theory is ridiculously inaccurate when the entire world is considered. The world is more religious than ever, even hyper-religious. Believers in the West may still believe that Christianity is in retreat and be unaware of its unparalleled expansions. Before the century was finished, theorists reversed much of Toynbee’s theory; we will understand the future better by paying attention to religious and cultural issues rather than to the political and economic ones.

The spark to ignite it came on June 28, 1914, when a young student inspired by Serbian nationalism assassinated the Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary.

After World War I right wing governments sprang up all over Europe, but the greatest was German National Socialism, better known as Nazism. The Protestant churches in the lands of Luther lost millions of people to this new political religion. Many were compromised or coopted; others abandoned traditional Christianity.

Most of the Protestant clergy in postwar Germany were monarchists. They had no sympathy for socialism or for democracy. But many people did. The industrial workers came to hate a socially and politically reactionary church. At the same time the German cultured class were ripe for Nazism because they had turned to a romantic view of Germany’s past. It was a heroic view, aristocratic and often pantheistic.