Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

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 fallen from God’s intended place. The Renaissance had a positive estimate of human nature and the universe itself. This confidence in man and his powers flowered and filled the air with fragrance during the Enlightenment.

Religious prejudice seemed like a far greater danger than atheism. So a thirst for tolerance and truths common to all men spread.

the rise of modern science is absolutely dependent upon Christian convictions and is carried on by minds trained in Christian environments and institutions.

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.

Christians do not arrive at Christian conviction as the conclusion of a long argument; they believe because they received witness from the first eye witnesses. This witness was powerfully vindicated by the ongoing power of God.

according to Locke, revelation shows Christianity’s reasonable character. Belief in Jesus as Messiah and man’s ethical behavior are all Jesus and the apostles required for righteousness. Both of these are basically rational.

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.

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 doctrines of the various religions to enhance their own power.

Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752). His monumental work, The Analogy of Religion, virtually ended the debate for thinking people. Skirmishes continued for years, but after Butler it was clear the fundamental issues had been settled.

Reason, said Butler, provides no complete system of knowledge, and in ordinary life it can offer us only probabilities.

Pascal’s important witness did not rest in some pretentious, omniscient, self-sufficient version of human reason, but in a deeper wisdom of reason’s link to the heart.

“cheap grace,” forgiveness without contrition.

Jansenism.

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.

Pascal responded brilliantly. He penned eighteen Provincial Letters exposing the Jesuit theology and practices by flashes of eloquence and sarcastic wit.

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.

Pietism arose as a reaction to this ossification of the Reformation.

The aims of the Pietists were twofold. First, they stressed the importance of personal faith.

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.

Johann Arndt’s sermons were published and Spener wrote an introduction to them. He called it Pious Desires.

Spener’s thought was that a cell of experiential Christians should be gathered in each congregation to cultivate a stricter and warmer Christian life. He hoped that this leaven would permeate the whole church.

old Hussite movement, the Bohemian Brethren (Unitas Fratrum). The brethren flourished in Bohemia and Moravia at the time of the Reformation but had been nearly crushed during the Thirty Years’ War,

Herrnhut, “The Lord’s Watch.”

The Moravians had in mind a town inhabited only by Christians, separate from the World, a real “communion of saints.” It was a free and social monasticism, without celibacy.

Evangelicals inherited two important traits from Pietism. First, emotion played so large a part in the Pietist’s religious life that reason was endangered.

Second, Pietism assumed the existence of the institutional church.

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.

Latitudinarians.

From Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, and William Law’s Serious Call to a Holy Life, Wesley learned that the Christian life is the consecration of the whole man in love to God and neighbor.

“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;

Wesley felt no special debt to Arminius, but he did staunchly oppose Calvin’s doctrine of predestination.

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.

the controversy did lead to two camps among the Methodists: Arminian societies following Wesley and Calvinist societies following Whitefield.

the only way each group could attain religious liberty for themselves was to grant it to all the others.

To keep membership from shrinking drastically, many churches in 1662 had to settle for the Half-Way Covenant. Under this policy the “unawakened” could enjoy a kind of partial membership, baptizing their children and joining in congregational activities, but not taking full Communion.

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.

Ten thousand people telling a lie do not turn the lie into truth.

Clapham.

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.

The first Protestants to attempt to reach distant peoples with the gospel were the Pietists. Moravian concern, however, was focused on individuals in some European colony perishing without the knowledge of Christ.

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.

Fuller, a strong Calvinist, broke with some of his fellow Calvinists who pictured vigorous evangelism and appeals to conversion as inconsistent with God’s election of certain individuals to salvation.

In the United States the first foreign missionary society was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810). It was formed on the initiative of a group of students at the newly created Congregational Andover Theological Seminary.

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.

The decisive character of the half century between the Civil War and World War I is evident in two statements, one at the beginning of this period and the other at the end.

Liberals believed that Christian theology had to come to terms with modern science if it ever hoped to claim and hold the allegiance of intelligent men of the day.

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.