 
### GODCHURCH

A Theistic Survey of Church History

_by_ Edwin Walhout

Published by Edwin Walhout

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Copyright 2012 Edwin Walhout

Cover design by Amy Cole

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### CONTENTS

PREFACE

Part One THE ROMAN EMPIRE ERA (30-500)

Chapter 1 OPPOSITION FROM JUDAISM

Chapter 2 OPPOSITION FROM GRECO-ROMAN CULTURE

Chapter 3 CHRISTIANITY TRIUMPHANT

Chapter 4 THEOLOGY IN THE GRECO-ROMAN MILIEU

Chapter 5 THE GRECO-ROMAN MINDSET

Chapter 6 THE APOSTLES' CREED

Chapter 7 THE NICENE CREED

Chapter 8 THE FORMULA OF CHALCEDON

Chapter 9 THE ATHANASIAN CREED

Chapter 10 THE PELAGIAN CONTROVERSY

Chapter 11 THE CHURCH HIERARCHY

Chapter 12 PERSPECTIVE ON THE ROMAN EMPIRE ERA

Part Two THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ERA (500-1500)

Chapter 13 THE CONVERSION OF EUROPE

Chapter 14 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM

Chapter 15 THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM

Chapter 16 CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION

Chapter 17 THE CHURCH-STATE CONFLICT

Chapter 18 REFORM MOVEMENTS

Chapter 19 PERSPECTIVE ON THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ERA

Part Three THE PROTESTANT ERA (1500-2000)

Chapter 20 THE REFORMATION

Chapter 21 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Chapter 22 EFFECTS OF THE REFORMATION

Chapter 23 MODERN MISSIONS

Chapter 24 THE CHURCH'S AGENDA

PREFACE

This book is a survey of the history of the Christian Church. It is addressed to the inquiring Christian who has become more than a bit dissatisfied with what he or she sees happening in the contemporary church world. It presupposes that the reader is a committed Christian but who is entertaining some unanswered questions about what is being taught and practiced in the churches. If we want to make accurate judgments about the church, we need to have some realistic insight into what made the churches what they are today, and this necessitates going back to the beginning to trace its development.

There are three levels on which this study of Church History is written: a) factual, b) connective, and c) interpretive.

The _factual_ level is concerned with basic knowledge of what actually happened, the questions of what and where and when and who. The difficulty on this level is not so much the accuracy of data, which competent historians have ascertained, but the selection of which items to include. This present survey selects minimum data to illustrate the larger patterns of development and change, leaving the more detailed information for collateral study.

The _connective_ level is the attempt to show developmental patterns from one era to the next. We are today the product of the choices and decisions that our ancestors made hundreds and even thousands of years ago. What happened in the ancient church shaped what happened later in the medieval church. Likewise what happened in the Reformation shaped what is happening still today in the twenty-first century. Our modern world is the product of everything that happened in previous centuries, the cumulative effect of prior human decisions.

The _interpretive_ level is the most definitive and important part of this project. It is the theistic level, the level which moves beyond the actual human events and beyond their connections to ask the question, What is God doing? Theism is the view that God, having brought the universe and the earth and the human race into existence, continues his work of shaping and forming that human race into the condition and achievement that he desires. This implies, of course, that everything that happens on earth, especially the variegated events in church history, is at the same time the action of God in the ongoing shaping of the human race into his image. The first two levels will be intertwined in the following chapters, but this third level of theistic interpretation will usually be found in separate sections entitled _Perspective_.

This present survey of church history takes its theistic orientation from the first chapter of Genesis, the passage that informs us that God created the human race in his image and commanded them to populate the earth, subdue it, and gain dominion over it. This is to be understood as a continuing process, not a once for all fiat. The human race, emerging as it does from prior forms of life, must learn how to utilize the givens of its natural environment, learn how to construct a flourishing civilization, and – most important – learn how to do this in such a way as to image the Creator. Church history is not only a part of this ongoing process, but is its shaping force.

The goal of church history is the formation of a godly civilization that has as its goal the betterment of the entire human race. God brought Jesus into the world precisely for the purpose of showing the Way for the human race to become what its Creator wishes. The process Jesus initiated becomes an interesting and often baffling movement from one level of development to the next, and that process is what these church history chapters will examine.

Part One: THE ROMAN EMPIRE ERA

For the first three hundred years of its existence, the Christian church existed in an environment that was hostile. That hostility was sometimes strong and active, sometimes weak and passive, but it was always there. And it came from two distinct sources: first from Judaism and later from the Roman Empire.

Chapter 1: OPPOSITION FROM JUDAISM

During the last week of his life Jesus changed from being loved to being hated. On Palm Sunday the people hailed him as the king of the Jews, "Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!" But by Friday they were clamoring, "Crucify him!" Why this abrupt change?

On Sunday the Jewish people were expecting Jesus to announce that he was starting a revolution that would drive out the Romans and set up an independent Jewish kingdom. When the days passed and he did not do that, the people turned against him as a false messiah, and their love turned into hate.

So the reasons the people turned against Jesus were mostly political. They wanted Jesus to gain Jewish independence from Rome, and Jesus simply had no plans to do that.

But there was another reason why the leaders of the Jews, the high priest and the scribes and Pharisees, were opposed to Jesus. Not so much for political reasons but for religious reasons.

Jesus had been challenging the people about the way they obeyed the Law of Moses, the Torah. Too often, Jesus kept telling the people, they merely went through the correct motions of keeping the rules. They observed the various prohibitions about what they could and could not do on the sabbath day, but without in the least thinking about God. They could eat kosher food and use kosher cooking implements without worrying about what God thought of them at other times. They could bring sacrifices to the temple as they were supposed to do, without even thinking that there should be some carryover into their daily living.

Jesus said on one occasion, "You tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith." And he followed that up by saying, "You clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence," and by accusing them of hypocrisy, "On the outside you look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness."

So these teachings of Jesus made the Jewish leaders angry. They saw Jesus as being opposed to the Law of God, the Torah, teaching people that there were more important things than keeping the traditions that made their religion what it was. The result was that they started looking for a suitable occasion to stop Jesus and, if possible, to execute him.

It is interesting to see how these two attitudes, political and religious, played out when Jesus was brought to Pontius Pilate for trial. At first Pilate simply told the Jewish leaders to take care of it on their own; he did not want to get involved in the religious squabbles of the Jews. But then the Jews changed their accusation to the political one, saying Pilate would get into trouble with Rome if he let someone who was starting a revolution get off free. So it was the political reason that finally persuaded Pilate to order Jesus to be crucified.

The hatred his countrymen showed to Jesus when they rejected him did not stop at his crucifixion. They kept hating his followers, and it continued for a long time, as long as the majority of people in Christian churches were converted Jews.

Unconverted Jews despised their Jewish brethren who chose to follow Jesus as the messiah, and made whatever trouble they could for them. We see examples of this in the stoning of Stephen, the martyrdom of James, and in the intense hatred of Saul prior to his conversion. But even later, in the churches that the Apostle Paul began, there was constantly an internal religious struggle between Christians who wanted to keep observing the Jewish laws, the Torah, and those who did not think that was necessary.

We can understand well enough why unbelieving Jews would oppose Christianity, but it may seem strange that the same legalistic attitude toward the Torah would continue even after they were converted and became good Christians. Some of these believers of Jewish background wanted to combine their previous religious habits with their new faith in Jesus. They were somehow able to accept Jesus as the messiah and continue to keep the Jewish religious customs. They insisted on doing both, being convinced that the Torah of Moses was indeed the final and permanent Law of God. If God gave the Torah and also sent Jesus, then we have to accept both – that was their argument.

The problem that Paul found in many churches was that there were influential church leaders insisting that all believers, Jews and Gentiles, must obey the traditional Jewish religious customs. This made Paul furious. He could sense that for these Judaizers (as we call them) the Law was more important than the Holy Spirit of Jesus, external religion was more important than internal religion, so he opposed them with all his might. Paul kept insisting that true Christian faith does not depend on keeping religious rules, no matter how helpful they may have been in the past, but upon receiving into one's heart and life the Spirit of Jesus which would create genuine obedience to God, not mere outward conformity.

There was a test that Paul gave to the churches. The test was whether or not Jewish Christians could accept non-Jewish Christians as members of the same church without insisting that they obey Jewish laws. If they could do this, fine; but if not, then their devotion to the Torah was pure legalism and must not prevail.

So this was one of the two major sources of hostility in the ancient church, from Judaism. It gradually disappeared within the church as time went on, as the great majority of Christians became non-Jewish with no connection to the Torah. But then a new source of hostility came into play, a much more powerful one, from the Greco-Roman culture.

Chapter 2: OPPOSITION FROM THE GRECO-ROMAN CULTURE

At first the Roman authorities did not distinguish between Christians and Jews. This was simply because most Christians were Jews. Whatever they thought about Jews they thought about Christians. For example, when the Apostle Paul was arrested in Jerusalem after his third missionary journey, Felix and Festus both simply assumed the trouble was a religious squabble among Jews. Festus, in his cover letter to the Emperor, wrote about the accusations made against Paul, "They had certain points of disagreement with him about their own religion and about a certain Jesus, who had died, but whom Paul asserted to be alive." Festus did not know how to handle that situation, very much like Pilate in his trial of Jesus.

Paul ran into a lot of trouble during his missionary work. Unconverted Jews would sometimes pursue him into nearby cities and persuade the authorities that Paul was a trouble-maker. In Ephesus his enemies started a riot and forced him out of town. In Philippi he was even put in jail for a while.

Then there was that notorious incident of Emperor Nero, who in AD 64 is said to have set Rome on fire in order to make space for constructing some magnificent public buildings, and then to have blamed Christians for arson. Dozens of Christians were hunted down at the time, crucified and burned to light the gardens of Nero. By that time Christians were being persecuted, not because they were Jews but because they were followers of Jesus.

We may wonder why people in general way back then were so anti-Christian. It was partly because Christians no longer did the things most people did, like worshipping the Roman gods, or buying religious trinkets, or joining them in their drunken parties. People regarded Christians as atheists because they did not have images of the gods to worship. In addition there was a rumor that Christians were eating somebody's flesh and drinking his blood at their secret meetings. That sounds like cannibalism. And of course when people heard that the leader of the Christians was supposed to have risen from the dead they couldn't believe such nonsense. So public opinion had it that these Christians were weird people who despised everyone else and were bad examples of citizenship.

Christians were not consistently and universally under open persecution. Sometimes the local Roman authorities were perplexed as how to handle problems concerning Christians. Pontius Pilate had such a dilemma with Jesus. Governor Festus did also with the Apostle Paul, finally sending him to Rome for trial.

Other examples of governor's dilemmas exist in records that are not in the Bible. For example, a man named Pliny who was governor of Bithynia, asked Emperor Trajan what to do about people who were accused of being Christian. It was assumed that being Christian was being criminal. The Emperor advised Pliny not to hunt them out, but if they were caught and were willing to reject that faith, to let them go. Punish them only if they persist in their faith.

Still, opposition did keep getting worse, until there were Roman emperors who regarded Christianity as a serious threat to the integrity of Roman government. In 176 Marcus Aurelius enforced a law against strange religions. Some emperors opposed Christianity, some ignored it, and some seemed even to favor it.

There was no empire-wide persecution until later, notably under two emperors: Decius and Diocletian. Decius, about the year 250, made it his major task as emperor to destroy Christianity. His aim was to compel Christians by torture, imprisonment, or fear to make sacrifices to the pagan gods. On a certain day everyone in the empire must make a sacrifice to the gods and to the emperor, and secure a certificate to that effect from the town officials. Here is a sample of such a certificate, found in Egypt in 1893, "I have always sacrificed to the gods, and now in your presence, in accordance with the terms of the edict, I have done sacrifice and poured libations and tasted the sacrifices, and I request you to certify to this effect. Farewell." As might be expected, though many Christians recanted temporarily, others bought a certificate or had a pagan friend get one.

Another emperor, Valerian, ordered that bishops, priests, and deacons should be punished, and that high ranking Christians in the Senate should be degraded and lose their property, and if they still remained Christians, then they should also lose their heads.

Hundreds of Christians all over the empire lapsed, many died, but the persecution soon diminished. It didn't stop altogether, but was not as severe until in 303, Emperor Diocletian renewed the empire-wide attempt to destroy Christianity, ordering that meetings of Christians should be abolished, churches be razed, scriptures burned, office-bearers deposed, and Christians in the imperial household become slaves; as well as requiring everyone in the empire to sacrifice to the idols. His attempt lasted for several years, until Emperor Constantine stopped the persecution and made it legal to be a Christian.

Constantine and his co-emperor Licinius issued the famous Edict of Milan in 313 which stated, "... the worship of God ought rightly to be our first and chiefest care, and that it was right that Christians and all others should have freedom to follow the kind of religion they favored, so that the God who dwells in heaven might be propitious to us and to all under our rule." That ended persecution once and for all in the Roman Empire, nearly three hundred years after the resurrection of Jesus.

Why would Roman emperors think Christianity was an enemy of the empire? Certainly not because Christians were agitating for armed rebellion, and not merely for the false rumors that were common among the people. In fact in many ways Christians were law-abiding citizens. But Roman leaders recognized that their empire depended on strong armies to keep the conquered nations in submission. It was this dependence on violence, supression, heavy taxation, slavery, and the resulting life-style that made Rome successful, and it was such matters that Christianity opposed. Throughout the empire there was a widespread feeling that the reason the empire was encountering all its troubles was because so many people, Christians, were no longer sacrificing to the ancient Roman gods.

So, besides the socio-political aspect there was the religious aspect. Roman civilization was thoroughly pagan, that is, based on polytheism, the notion that there are many many gods all of whom can influence life in one way or another, for better or for worse. Christians, of course, believe in one only God, the Creator and Lord of the universe, so that there are not internal conflicts among the gods, but only one unified and consistent Master of events. When Christians refused to attend the various temples of Roman gods, thus showing themselve contemptuous of Roman religion, they necessarily offended the Romans who practiced that religion regularly. The result was to be expected: discrimination, misunderstanding, and often violence.

Chapter 3: CHRISTIANITY TRIUMPHANT

The Christian Church, in its infancy, not only survived the most intense opposition that human beings can invent, but went on from there, after Constantine's Edict of Milan in 313, to complete victory over the Roman Empire, so that by the year 390 Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity to be the only legal religion in the empire. After about three hundred years the vaunted might of the powerful Roman Empire, directed in all its fury against Christianity, could not prevail. The simple truth about Jesus turned out to be stronger than the combined destructive power that Satan could muster.

When Jesus gave his final instructions to the disciples he informed them that "all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me." The proof of that claim is the fact that God raised him from the dead after the people had crucified him. There is no power on earth or in heaven that is greater than that of God, and God will have the final victory. So the story of persecution in the Roman Empire is one of the great demonstrations of the authority of Jesus. Not even the vaunted might of the powerful Roman Empire could destroy the church or silence the gospel. The ultimate victory of the gospel in Greco-Roman culture is a powerful evidence of the way God works. Let the devil do his worst, as in crucifying Jesus and persecuting the church. But out of seeming defeat final victory comes.

The story is told about Constantine, who was a powerful general of one of the empire's armies at the time, that he returned from a successful military campaign in Europe and was confronted by a dilemma as he returned to Rome with his army. The emperor Galerius had died, and he was one of four major contestants for the throne. What should he do?

One night as he was confronting this choice he saw a vision. It was of a cross in the sky, with the words, "hoc signo vinces," which is Latin for "in this sign conquer." Constantine took this vision to be of the cross of Jesus, the symbol of Christianity, and he understood the message to be that he must come back to Rome as a Christian and become the first Christian person to be emperor of Rome. This was in 311. He went on to defeat all the other claimants to the throne and installed himself as emperor. In 313 he issued the famous Edict of Milan which declared that Christians should be free to worship as they chose and should not be persecuted.

Here is part of that Edict of Milan: "We therefore announce that, notwithstanding any provisions concerning the Christians in our former instructions, all who choose that religion are to be permitted to continue therein, without any let or hindrance, and are not to be in any way troubled or molested." [NOTE: the "we" in the above sentence refers to Constantine and to Licinius, who were co-emperors, Licinius over the western empire and Constantine over the eastern empire; though Constantine was the dominant ruler. Constantine did not become sole emperor until he defeated Licinius in 323.] He wrote that his command "be promptly obeyed, for the fulfilment of our gracious purpose in establishing public tranquillity." Constantine's purpose in promoting Christianity, note well, was to establish public tranquillity, to keep the peace throughout the empire.

Constantine ordered that confiscated property of Christians should be restored. He gave financial gifts to ministers of "the most holy Catholic religion," and ordered that "clerics be completely exempt from public duties." He ordered that "all judges, city people and craftsmen shall rest on the venerable day of the Sun."

Constantine served as emperor until he died in 337, and all but one of the men who succeeded to the imperial throne followed the same policy of promoting Christianity. This exception was Julian the Apostate who in 362 insisted that worship of the ancient gods of Rome was "right and proper," but should not result in persecution of "the Galileans." These people, Christians, "are in the wrong in matters of supreme importance" and should be "objects of pity rather than of hate." Interestingly Julian wrote that "men should be taught and won over by reason, not by blows, insults and corporal punishments." Fortunately Julian ruled only from 361 to 363.

Besides Constantine, we should remember Emperor Theodosius, who served in that office from 379 to 395. Theodosius, himself a dedicated Christian, issued an edict "that all the various nations which are subject to our Clemency and Moderation should continue in the profession of that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter." This was making Christianity the official religion of the empire.

However, Theodosius also insisted that only those who accepted the doctrine of the equality of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as a holy Trinity could assume the title of Catholic Christians. Those who refused to accept that belief were "foolish madmen," heretics who were subject not only to divine punishment but to his as well. So here we have a situation in which the threat of imperial punishment is made against those who had differing ideas about Christian theology. Christianity has become the legal religion of the Roman Empire, but the threat of persecution remains for those who did not toe the Catholic line in theology.

Chapter 4: THEOLOGY IN THE GRECO-ROMAN MILIEU

THE BIBLE

There was no such book as the Bible in the early centuries of Church History. Christians inherited all the national literature of the ancient Jewish people, but these were all in the form of separate scrolls, not in one book. And there were a good many more of these scrolls than we now have in the Old Testament (we call them the Apocryphal books; some modern Bibles do include them). For that matter, very few early churches possessed copies of all those ancient documents, since they needed to be copied by hand and only a few men (scribes) knew how to do that. And not everyone could read them either.

As the years passed after the time of Jesus, some of the original disciples did write a letter or two: Peter, John, James, Judas, and these were copied and read in church services. Then early on came the convert Paul, and he was prolific in the pastoral letters he wrote to various churches. A Greek doctor by the name of Luke who was also an amateur historian, learned and wrote about the life of Jesus while associated with the Apostle Paul, and who also chronicled some of Paul's mission work. By the end of the first century there were at least four Gospels detailing the life of Jesus (and later more were written, like the Gospel of Thomas).

One can imagine how certain congregations gradually developed a collection of various letters and other documents. Paul wrote a letter to the church in Colosse, and when Ephesus heard about it they may have wanted a copy, so they would send a scribe to make a copy and put it in their own library. It is thought that Philemon eventually became a bishop in Ephesus, so his letter from Paul would get in that library. Way off in Corinth the church there would have several letters from Paul, and when they heard about letters to other Greek churches in Philippi and Thessalonica, they would want copies also. So over the years various churches would have a collection of a few of Paul's letters, and maybe a large church like Ephesus would manage to get copies of all his letters. And so it would go all over the eastern part of the church, libraries being developed much as our modern churches still do.

But, of course, as the centuries rolled on a lot of other men put down on papyrus their own ideas and insights, and these letters and treatises also found their way into church libraries here and there. But, as we shall soon see in this chapter, much of that later writing was rather weird. So it became necessary for Christian people to distinguish between the writings of the first apostles and their immediate disciples (like Paul and Luke and Mark) and the more speculative writings of later priests and bishops. There never was any one church council in those early centuries that officially adopted exactly the same books we now include in the Bible. That list, called the canon, came about simply by consensus of the Christian people who read and studied the various documents that were being circulated.

In some places books we now include in the Bible, like Hebrews and Revelation and 2 Peter and James were not included in the approved list, while some that are not in our Bibles did get approval , and were read in church services, like The Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas and the Apocalypse of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas. So it was not until about the year 400 that common usage sorted out the books that eventually made it into our modern Bibles. The principle for acceptance seemed to be that they were written either by one of the original disciples of Jesus or one of their close associates, such as Paul and Luke and Mark.

Even so, however, we need to remember that these documents were not part of one book named The Bible. There was no way for any given church or monastery to get all of the sixty-six scrolls into one volume. So it was a rare library that even included all of them, and when they did there were also numerous other documents on the shelf in addition. The library in Alexandria, for example, was noted for being one of the largest and best of all Christian libraries prior to being destroyed by the Moslems centuries later.

Perhaps this situation helps to explain why theologians in one part of the world developed certain ideas in ways that theologians elsewhere did not appreciate. Perhaps some of them were influenced by one or more documents that were not eventually accepted as canonical. Alexandria and Antioch, for example, were constantly at odds with each other in later centuries about how to understand Jesus and the gospel. And the theologians out west in Rome and Carthage would have their own distinctive insights, based upon some of the things they read in certain documents, translated into Latin from the original Greek. Remember that there was simply not one defined set of authoritative documents that everyone appealed to, such as our modern Bibles.

THE GOSPEL IN THE GREEK WORLD

When the gospel moved out of its Jewish milieu into the Gentile world of Greece and Rome it had to confront an entirely foreign way of thinking and of living. Those people out there had never heard of Adam or Noah or Abraham or Moses or David or Jeremiah, or for that matter, of Jesus either. How could they possibly understand what the story of Jesus was all about? What happened, as we can well imagine, was that they kept trying to understand the gospel in the light of their own patterns of thinking. The result was that some really strange ideas were expressed about Jesus in those early centuries.

In the late first century a man named Cerinthus taught that Christ descended upon Jesus in the form of a dove at the time of his baptism, at which time Jesus became the son of God. The idea was that Jesus was just an ordinary man until that time, and that he was then adopted to become God's son, that Jesus became Christ when he was baptized. However, Jewish Christians knew very well that Jesus became the son of God because God, not Joseph, caused virgin mother Mary to have a son – God was Jesus' father from the moment of his conception.

In the second century a man named Marcion taught that the God of the Old Testament is different from the God of Jesus, such that the material world the Old Testament God created is evil, and that salvation is for our souls only not for our bodies. There are two gods, a good God and an evil God. But Christians know very well there is only one God. The God who was Jesus' Father in heaven is the same God as the Yahweh who created the heavens and the earth.

A man named Praxeas taught that the Father himself descended into the virgin Mary, was himself born of her as a human being, himself suffered, and was himself Jesus Christ. This notion stems from the belief that the Greek gods could, if they so chose, take on human form for a while and then go back to being gods later. The Apostle Paul was twice identified as a god come down in the form of a man. But Christians of Jewish race knew very well that God the Father is not the same as Jesus the human Son.

Irenaeus wrote (c. 185), "The Son of God did not then begin to exist (when he was born of the virgin Mary), being with the Father from the beginning." This idea became very widespread among Christians in later centuries. Among Jewish Christians the term "son of God" meant a special human being, whereas among Greek and Roman Christians the term meant a divine being. So it became common for later Christians to regard Jesus as first a divine being, a god, who became a human being when he was born of the virgin Mary, a notion that no Jewish Christian would believe.

In the third century Tertullian described Jesus thus, "We see His double state, not intermixed but conjoined in one person, Jesus, God and man." This became standard theology in the Greco-Roman world of thought. Jesus is, at the same time, both a god and a man. No Jew, however, could believe Jesus to be a god; there is only one God, Yahweh the Creator.

Origen in the third century taught that at the resurrection and ascension Jesus' humanity became divine, no longer human, that Jesus changed from being human to being divine when he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven to sit at God's right hand. "From Him there began the union of the divine with the human nature, in order that the human, by communion with the divine, might rise to the divine, not in Jesus alone, but in all those who not only believe but enter upon the life which Jesus taught." That would imply that there are two gods, the Father and the Son sitting next to him; and it also means that we become divine when we believe in Jesus. What happened to Jesus will happen to us; Jesus became divine, so will we. But there is nothing like that in the Jewish Christian Bible.

Arius, about 321, wrote, "The Son is not unbegotten, nor part of the unbegotten in any way, nor is he derived from any substance; but that by his own will and counsel he existed before times and ages fully God, only-begotten, unchangeable. And before he was begotten or created or appointed or established, he did not exist; for he was not unbegotten." This confusing language means that to say Jesus is God's only-begotten Son means that the divinity of Jesus had a beginning, whereas God the Father does not have a beginning. So in some sense the Son is a divine being but less than the Father. Arius taught that Jesus is a kind of hybrid, partly human and partly God, a "tertium quid" (third substance), somewhere between God and man. Christian theology in the hands of the Greek and Romans was getting so complicated that no one can really understand it. But Arianism became very widespread, and almost became the official teaching of the churches. What do you think, is Jesus more than you are but less than God? That's Arianism.

About the year 375 Epiphanius, the bishop of Salamis, described the teaching of Sabellius as follows, "that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one and the same being, in the sense that three names are attached to one substance." The one God manifests himself in three ways: first as creator Father, later as redeemer Son, and now as Holy Spirit. Sabellius wanted to retain belief in one only God, but thinks of God revealing himself one way after another, first as Father, then as Son, and still later as Holy Spirit. But it is all so far from the simple Biblical teaching: the creator of the world is Yahweh; the person this God sends to save the world is Jesus, born of the virgin Mary; and the spirit of Jesus which, when controlling a person's life, actually produces that salvation. That is the Biblical trinity, and also the trinity as presented in the Apostles' Creed. There is no speculation about Jesus being a god next to the Father or existing from eternity.

Apollinarius, bishop of Laodicea (d. 392) taught that the divine Logos took the place of the human soul in Jesus, with the result that Jesus is partly human and partly divine; but by the same token, neither fully God nor fully man, a variety of Arianism.

Chapter 5: THE GRECO-ROMAN MINDSET

To understand these strange ideas that emerged during the first four hundred or so years it is necessary to understand the way people in general thought in the Greco-Roman world as contrasted with the way Jewish-Christian people thought. There is a vast difference. The Hebrew-Christian way of thinking was thoroughly monotheistic, whereas the Greco-Roman world was dominated by polytheism. In Jewish and Christian thinking this one God created the world and created it good; whereas in Greek and Roman thinking there was no one creator God – Zeus was the father of all the other gods, but not a creator. In addition, the Greco-Roman mindset in general looked upon matter as a hindrance to the good life, if not outright evil, whereas in Christianity the world of matter is precisely the area in which humans are created to live for the glory of God.

In the Jewish-Christian way of thinking the one Creator God was in charge of the way the world, including human history, developed; whereas in the usual Greek and Roman mentality life and history was a reflection of the tensions and conflicts between the gods for supremacy. In traditional Jewish thinking there was a purpose for time and history, often referred to as shalom; whereas in Greek thinking there was only the desire to get out of this present evil world into the world where only souls dwelt unhindered by the body.

This contrast helps us understand why people raised in the Greco-Roman world had so much difficulty in comprehending what they heard and read from the Jewish-Christian world. They kept trying to fit what the gospel was teaching into the religious and philosophical categories of their own non-Jewish world of thought. It just did not work, for they – none of them – did ever get out of their own framework of thinking into that of the Hebrew-Christian world. The theology that comes down to us from those ancient times is, accordingly, a curious mix of genuine Christian data forced into an incompatible Greek mindset. The result is a strange combination of ideas that does little to clarify the meaning and significance of God's plan for the salvation of the world he created and loves.

Much of the prevailing mindset of the times can be traced back to the philosophy of Socrates and Plato. (Plato was the person who put Socrates' teachings into writing.) Plato taught that reality was composed of two things: Matter and Idea. Every bit of matter as we see it has a certain form or shape or dimension or color. Those characteristics are what Plato means by Idea. Without Idea, Matter would simply be a shapeless blob. But Plato also noticed that in most cases Matter changes, decays, dies, is destroyed. So he concluded that Idea is permanent, Matter is temporary; Idea is eternal, Matter is transient; Idea is indestructible, Matter is perishable. Ideas, he believed, exist all by themselves in some unknown dimension, but when they are connected with Matter they are, so to speak, trapped, limited, inhibited, imprisoned.

Think about what that means for understanding what human beings are. Humans are Ideas trapped in Matter, or to put it into other terminology, Souls trapped in Bodies. The body is a prison-house of the soul. We read nothing like that in the Bible, in the Hebrew-Christian tradition, where humans are physical creatures made in the image of God.

But think some more about that. For Socrates and Plato, since Ideas are eternal and indestructible, what they call the Soul likewise is eternal and indestructible; that is, it can and does exist independently of the Body. Again, there is nothing like that in Genesis, where God created Adam from the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life.

The point to be noted here is that the dualism of Greco-Roman thinking in this regard became the pattern within which those early Christian Gentile thinkers interpreted the data of the Bible. The notion that humans are composed of body and soul, such that the soul can exist without the body, does not come from Christian thinking but from pagan thinking. For Socrates, to die is for his soul to be released from its prison-house of the body, such that he can then enter into the real world of souls without being hindered by a weak and aging and sickness-prone body. He can continue to exist as a disembodied soul in the pleasures of endless life with all the other souls he will find on the other side of death.

Consider what this might mean for understanding who Jesus is. Those early Greek and Roman thinkers had an impossible time of figuring out just what to think about that. Many of the examples in the previous chapter demonstrate that complexity. For, in their way of thinking, Jesus as a human being would have to be a combination of body and soul. But they had an awful time figuring out how this could be when the Bible describes Jesus as a Son of God. How can Jesus be a Son of God, that is a divine being, if he has a body and soul like the rest of humans? So some thinkers simply said his body was an illusion, not real, meaning that Jesus was not a real human being.

Others started from the fact that Jesus was a divine being, a Son of God, and then confronted the question of how the Father could be a god, and the Son could be a god, but that there was only one God. From these examples you can get a feeling for the theological problems that emerged in the first several centuries, problems that did not arise out of the original Hebrew-Christian way of thinking as reflected in the Old and New Testaments, but that were the result of thinking in a totally foreign and incompatible mindset.

Our task today, as we reflect on all those strange developments, is to try to sort out what is true and what is false. What comes from the Hebrew-Christian way of thinking, and what comes from the distortions of the Greco-Roman way of thinking? Try to get an understanding of the dualist way of thinking among Greek and Roman theologians – Matter and Idea – and something of the way that philosophy carried over into their thinking about God and Jesus.

Chapter 6: THE APOSTLES' CREED

There are four main theological creeds that have survived as influential from that early period of Church History: the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Formula of Chalcedon, and the Athanasian Creed. Of these, by far the most influential and thus the most important, is the Apostles' Creed. All Christian churches have accepted this creed as definitive of what it means to be a Christian. We will look first at how it was formulated, and second at its specifics.

ORIGIN

Where did the Apostles' Creed come from? It did not come from the original apostles appointed by Jesus, as the title might seem to indicate. The title does not mean that, but that the contents of the creed represent what the apostles taught. This creed is an "apostles" creed in the sense that it contains the main essentials of the faith that is passed down generation after generation all the way back from the original apostles of Jesus.

We notice first that the Apostles' Creed is divided into three parts: about God, about Jesus, and about the Holy Spirit. This threefold division is trinitarian, and we need to recognize that it means three different parts, three different items that Christians believe. We believe some things about God, we believe some things about Jesus, and we believe some things about the Holy Spirit. When we put all three of these beliefs together we get a true picture of what it means to be a Christian, a trinitarian picture.

Why just these three things? Because that is what Jesus taught the disciples when he gave them instructions about what they should do when he was gone. Near the end of his career on earth, Jesus instructed his disciples to "disciple the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you." Two steps, baptizing and teaching. So the first of these two steps is to baptize the nations in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. That's where this threefold division of the Apostles' Creed comes from.

We can visualize someone, having heard the story of Jesus, affirming that he or she believes in Jesus, and asking to be baptized. The church elders might then ask, What do you believe about God? And the new believer might respond, "I believe that God created the heavens and the earth, as taught in Genesis 1." Then the elders might ask, "And what do you believe about Jesus?" The believer would then list the various things that he or she knew about the life of Jesus, beginning with his birth of the virgin Mary and continuing on all the way to his ascension into the clouds. Lastly the elders might ask, "What do you believe about the Holy Spirit?" And the believer would respond by mentioning several of the things that the Holy Spirit does, like putting all believers into a congregation called a church, giving him or her a sense of forgiveness, enabling him or her to begin living a different kind of life, and whatever else he or she might be experiencing as a personal effect because of becoming a Christian – a personal testimony we might call it.

In the early years, of course, this kind of testimony of faith would vary considerably, as it still does today, in the actual words that a new believer might employ to describe his or her experience of faith in the Lord Jesus. But it would be always described in that threefold division: what do you believe about God, what do you believe about Jesus, and how is your life changing by receiving the Spirit of Jesus into your life?

We do not know exactly how this threefold understanding of Christian faith gradually became hardened into the precise form we now have in the Apostles' Creed, but we can imagine that as time went on the elders in the churches put the three items into some kind of catechism, teaching it to prospective church members, and requiring them to consent to it before being baptized. This would then become a teaching tool primarily as well as a personal confession of faith. Each church might well have its own variation of such a creed, perhaps according to the opinions of the local bishop.

As the centuries passed, the creed would become somewhat standardized in the form which we all know and love still today. It can be, of course, both an effective teaching tool as well as a genuine confession of personal faith. It does serve very effectively as a reminder to all Christians of whatever denomination that being a Christian is more than an individual commitment, it is being drawn into the saving work of God for all people. The Apostles' Creed is a thoroughly trinitarian and theistic document.

CONTENT

Now as a way of getting into the content of the Apostles' Creed, we will examine one of the earlier forms of that creed, known as The Old Roman Creed, dating to about the year 340. Incidentally, the full Apostles' Creed as we know it did not appear until the middle of the Dark Ages, about the year 750, when the item about descending into hell was added.

THE OLD ROMAN CREED

  1. I believe in God almighty.

  2. And in Christ Jesus, his only son, our Lord

  3. Who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary

  4. Who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried

  5. And the third day rose from the dead

  6. Who ascended into heaven

  7. And sitteth on the right hand of the Father

  8. Whence he cometh to judge the living and the dead.

  9. And in the Holy Ghost

  10. The holy church

  11. The remission of sins

  12. The resurrection of the flesh

  13. The life everlasting.

Concerning Article 1. Notice that the term "God" is used, not the term "Father." Also that there is no mention of creation, as it is in the Apostles' Creed. So in this creed at least there was no great focus on God himself or what he has done. Only one very brief statement about that.

Concerning Articles 2-8. Obviously the bulk of this creed, as is true also of the Apostles' Creed, is concentrating on what we believe about Jesus. Article 2 describes Jesus as God's "only son," the term that created enormous controversy in the ancient church. In its simplest meaning it means what we read in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke about Jesus' birth. Joseph was not Jesus' biological father because God caused Mary to become pregnant without human agency. It is in that sense that God is Jesus' father, but in Greco-Roman religion the term "son of God" meant a divine being, and that philosophy caused many ancient theologians to think that Jesus was a divine being before he became a human being. But none of that Christological speculation is intended here in the Old Roman Creed, nor in the Apostles' Creed itself. Both creeds are implying simply that God is Jesus' father, not Joseph.

Note also that in the list of items concerning Jesus' life, there is no equivalent of the Apostles' Creed statement that "he descended into hell." This has been a controversial item eliciting a wide variety of explanations, but it is not in the Old Roman Creed. It is this addition that explains why it wasn't until the Dark Ages that the full Apostles' Creed appeared.

We may note also an interesting variation in Article 8 from the Apostles' Creed. In this Old Roman Creed the present tense is used, "he cometh to judge," whereas in the Apostles' Creed the future tense is used, "he will come to judge." The Old Roman Creed looks on the judging aspect of Jesus' ministry as something happening now, all the time, in the present. The idea is that as Jesus sits at the right hand of God in heaven he is constantly at work by the gospel and the Holy Spirit to bring sinners to judgment and nations to conversion. The Apostles' Creed, on the contrary, looks upon it as a future item.

Articles 9-13 state what is believed about the Spirit of Jesus. Article 10 does not yet employ the term "catholic" to describe the church. It was inserted later in the Apostles' Creed to distinguish the church under the Roman bishop (the Pope) from the churches that had split off from papal control. Protestants understand the term "catholic" not in the Roman Catholic papal sense, but in the sense of universal – the church is found wherever people believe in Jesus.

Article 12 has also come under a great deal of misunderstanding, largely from the same difference between present and future as we saw in Article 8. The current idea is that the "resurrection of the flesh" will occur in the future when Christ returns, but in the theology of Paul it occurs in the present when we believe in Jesus. This latter meaning is clearly what is intended in both the Apostles' and the Old Roman creeds, since it is included in the section about what the Holy Spirit does. The flesh in which we live, now, in the present, is resurrected to a life of faithful obedience from the death of sin. We consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to righteousness, as Paul puts it. Note also that in Greek thought the soul has to escape from the flesh, but in Christianity the flesh itself is resurrected, that is, given life from heaven.

Similarly in Article 13, "the life everlasting." This does not refer to an unending existence in heaven after we die, but to the quality of life we now receive from the Holy Spirit when we believe in Jesus. This is the work of the Holy Spirit now, not in the future. We live by faith with the indwelling Spirit of God guiding us each day of our lives.

Chapter 7: THE NICENE CREED

The kinds of weird theologizing that we sampled above in Chapter 5 was going strong at the time Constantine became co-emperor and continued until he became full emperor in 323. There was no central religious authority to make any final solution to these theological controversies. Actually there were five competitors for that central authority, but none of them had the kind of authority to impose a solution on all churches. These five were the bishops (Patriarchs) of Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome. This situation meant that the only unifying authority in the Roman Empire was the political one, Constantine himself, and even that was often divided into two administrative districts, East and West.

But, being a first-generation Christian himself, Constantine was bothered by the unrest that he saw in the theological world, with various bishops becoming vociferously angry with one another over obscure and arcane theological issues. And so, in order to bring about harmony and peace religiously in his empire, Constantine summoned all the bishops in the empire to a great Council to meet in Nicea, a town just south of Constantinople, in the year 325. Note well, this is a political figure calling an ecclesiastical meeting. Did he have authority to do that? Well, who would dare _not_ to come? Such an empire-wide meeting was unprecedented, but it happened, and what those bishops did there influenced the subsequent development of the entire Christian world. Theologically, their job was to examine all the competing opinions, decide which of them were the true ones, and formulate a document defining the official position of Christian theology, as well as to settle some lesser issues.

While there were many differing opinions being expressed all over the empire, the main controversy that triggered Constantine's summons to Nicea began in Alexandria, Egypt, about 320. This was a controversy over who Jesus was, and the opponents were Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, and Arius, one of his priests in a nearby town. Arius taught that "the Son had a beginning, but ... God is without beginning." This view, obviously, distinguished between God and Jesus, and Arius taught further that in Jesus the human spirit (reason) was replaced by the divine Logos. So this meant that Jesus was neither fully human, since his reason was divine; but he was not fully divine either, since he had a human body. Jesus, in Arius' view, was a "tertium quid," a third substance, a being halfway between God and man.

Bishop Alexander did not approve of this view. He taught that Jesus was fully divine, that Jesus was fully as much God as was the Father, that they were both made of the same substance: divinity. Alexander called a Council of nearby bishops which condemned Arius. But Arius appealed to everyone he could. Alexander wrote about it to all the other bishops, until the entire eastern half of the empire was in turmoil about this theological question. Emperor Constantine sent his religious advisor, Bishop Hosius of Spain, to Alexandria with the message to get the issue settled, since it was "an unprofitable question." They didn't.

About 300 bishops arrived in Nicea in 325, of whom only six were from the west. All of them came at government expense. Two comparatively small groups were supporters of Arius and Alexander respectively, but the large majority of bishops were more or less uninformed about the issue at stake. A bishop from Caesarea named Eusebius presented his own creed as a starting point, and the others debated the issues involved and made numerous changes. In general the Council of Nicea decided in favor of Alexander and against Arius.

Two phrases that the Council adopted were of major importance: "begotten, not made," and "of one essence with the Father." "Begotten, not made" means that Jesus is not part of the created world, not made, but is from eternity the Son of God. "Of one essence with the Father" means that Jesus is equally divine with God the Father, so that whatever it is that the Father is made of is also what the Son is made of. Pressure from Emperor Constantine, for political purposes mainly, secured the near-unanimous consent of the Council (all but two signed it; they were banished by Constantine along with Arius).

Unfortunately for Constantine, however, bitter controversy over these issues continued for another fifty years. But when Bishop Alexander died, his successor, Athanasius, became the great defender of the Nicene faith. He made the controversy a matter of salvation. He taught, for example, that divinity entered into humanity when Jesus was born on earth, and this is the reason why we who are human can be saved, that is, become divine. Athanasius wrote that Christ "was made man that we might be made divine." This means that a divine being became a human being in order that human beings can become divine beings; that is what salvation meant to Athanasius. Other influential bishops, however, regarded such teachings to be wrong, not faithful to the gospel.

Controversy continued all over the empire, such that in 335 a Council met in Jerusalem, struck down all the defenders of the Nicene Creed, and voted to restore Arius, whereupon Constantine himself banished Athanasius to Gaul. In 341 the Synod of Antioch adopted a creed that omitted the controversial items in the Nicene Creed. In 357 a synod meeting in Sirmium declared the use of the term "ousia" (substance) in any of its forms to be unscriptural; which meant a clear rejection of Nicene theology. Instead of saying the Son is of the "same substance" as the Father, the church was now saying the Son is of a similar, a "like substance." Not "homo-ousios" but "homoios." Others wanted to compromise by saying "homoi-ousios," that Jesus was made of a similar substance as the Father.

The tide of theological opinion varied often according to the opinions of the various men who became emperor. Emperor Theodosius summoned a synod in Constantinople in 381, which rejected the "homoi-ousian" theology, and the subsequent developments are not at all clear. But by 451 the creed we know as the Nicene Creed was accepted and in general use.

What must we think today in the twenty-first century about that long, bitter, and rather indecisive theological struggle? It is the judgment of this book that all the parties involved, with all their permutations and combinations of theological thought, are wrong, including the Nicene Creed. Why?

Because of a misunderstanding of the Biblical term "son of God." In the Bible this term is normally used to describe a human being, for example, Adam, Solomon, an unnamed Israelite king, the whole nation of Israel, Jesus, all believers. When we believe in Jesus we become children of God. In no way does this mean we become divine or that we become little gods. It means we become the kind of humans God created us to be.

But in Greek religion the term "son of God" never referred to a human being, but always to a divine being, a god. Zeus is the father-God, Hera the mother-god, Pluto, Athena, Ares, Apollo, and many others were children of God. When a person whose vocabulary has been defined in this way became a Christian, that same connotation carried over into his new faith commitment. Accordingly, when he read that Jesus was the Son of God he automatically thought Jesus is like Apollo, a divine being who has a divine Father.

It is clear enough that all the parties in the ancient Christological disputes functioned with this understanding of Jesus, and that they were trying to figure out how this could be if there is only one God. How can God have children if there is only one God? Whether they argued that Jesus was first a god who then became a man, or that Jesus was first a man who became a god, or that Jesus was half god and half man, all of them were trying to figure out how it is possible that Jesus is divine, a god.

That problem never came up in Hebrew-Christian thinking, or in the writing of the New Testament, because it never occurred to them that Jesus was divine. Obviously he was a human being. When they confronted the question of how Jesus could do the mighty works he did, their conclusion was not that Jesus was himself a god, but that God was functioning in and through him. The fulness of the deity, Paul wrote, was in him, and the result was that Jesus became the fulness of a human being. God was in Christ drawing all men to himself. God spoke Jesus into existence precisely as he spoke Adam into existence in Genesis 1. Jesus was human, not divine.

Chapter 8: THE FORMULA OF CHALCEDON

The Nicene Creed eventually won the day in the ancient church, but controversy never did cease about it. Nicea defined the relation between the Son and the Father; they are of the same divine substance, so that the Son is not a created being, not part of the created order.

But then attention shifted a bit to the question of how it was possible for Jesus to be God and man at the same time. What is the relation between deity and humanity in Jesus? Are not the Creator and the creature two different kinds of beings, such that the Creator cannot become a creature, and a creature cannot become the Creator? So if Jesus is both, does he sometimes function as a human, like getting hungry or tired, and at other times function as a god, healing people, walking on water, raising dead people? Can he just turn on the deity whenever he needs it, and turn it off at other times? Is Jesus really suffering from being a split personality, two separate persons, sometimes a god and sometimes a man? Or, possibly, are deity and humanity just blended in him, so that he is, like Arius taught, a hybrid being, not fully human and not fully divine? How must we understand the connection between Jesus being divine and his being human?

Here is a sampling of the kinds of ideas being argued.

Apollinaris of Laodicea (c. 390) taught that Jesus had the body and soul of a man, but that the reasoning spirit in Him was the divine Logos. He also affirmed that "God in his own flesh suffered our sorrows."

Nestorius of Antioch (428) is reputed to have taught that there is one Christ but two persons in him.

Cyril of Alexandria (412-444) was of the opinion that Jesus was one divine person whose divinity absorbed the humanity.

Eutyches of Constantinople (448) wrote, "I confess that our Lord was of two natures before the union [the incarnation], but after the union one nature."

Pope Leo I (440-461) affirmed that in Christ were two full and complete natures, which "without detracting from the properties of either nature and substance, came together in one person."

All kinds of notions were being presented as ways of explaining this issue, but note that every one of them presupposed that Jesus was a divine being, which notion does not come from the Hebrew-Christian scriptures, but from the Greco-Roman mindset. All these theologians were arguing points that make no sense in the basic Biblical way of understanding theology. In the Bible the name Jesus is given to the baby born to the virgin Mary; it is never used to describe a divine being. Paul explains that the fulness (pleroma) of God was at work in Jesus, not to make Jesus divine, but to make him the fulness (pleroma) of humanity. The miracles of Jesus are demonstrations of this power of God at work in and through the man Jesus. Jesus is never a second god in the Bible, but is a second man, another Adam. So all of these ancient theologians, ante-Nicene as well as post-Nicene, were arguing a non-issue, and we do well to reject all of it as much ado about nothing.

But eventually the church called a great council again, to meet in Chalcedon, a town not too far from Constantinople. This was in 451, when the Western empire itself was on its last wobbly legs. Nearly six hundred bishops attended, almost all of them from the Eastern empire. The theological statement that comes from this Council is as follows.

We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach people to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood;

truly God and truly man, of a reasonable [rational] soul and body;

consubstantial [co-essential] with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood;

in all things like unto us, without sin;

begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood;

one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably;

the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten God (μονογενῆ Θεὸν), the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ;

as the prophets from the beginning [have declared] concerning Him, and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.

Perhaps the most significant part of this creed are the words toward the middle, _one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person._

The idea is that the human nature of Jesus and the divine nature of Jesus co-exist in him in such a way that each nature remains complete, and that they function together concurrently, at the same time. If all of this seems unreal, consider next that this Formula of Chalcedon in turn triggered another controversy, known as the Monophysite (one nature) Controversy.

Opponents of the Chalcedon creed wanted to insist that the two natures of Jesus, divine and human, were blended in him in such a way that they became one nature, a divine nature. Jesus would then be divine Person not a human person. That is what the term "monophysite" means, one nature. One such person was Peter the Fuller of Antioch who stated, "Holy God, holy Strong, holy Immortal, who was crucified for us." This monophysite theology eventually led to the formation of what we now know as the Coptic Church in Egypt, which is still monophysite in its Christology.

In time, by about 640, this controversy began to be focussed on whether Jesus had one will or two wills. If Jesus has two separate natures, each of them complete, then this would imply that he has two wills, one human and the other divine, one for each nature. But if Jesus has only one nature, that is, one in which the human and the divine are blended together, then this one nature has only one will. So we have the Monothelite (one will) Controversy, does Jesus have one will or two wills? It is a bit difficult for us to imagine how serious such controversies were in the churches, but great turmoil was created by them especially in the eastern churches.

In 681 the emperor (the empire was still functional in the east) called another ecumenical council at Constantinople to deal with this issue. Their conclusion was that Christ has "two natural wills or willings ... not contrary one to the other ... but His human will follows, not as resistant or reluctant, but rather as subject to His divine and omnipotent will." This Council finally put an end to this extensive Christological controversy that had raged for several centuries. Jesus has two wills because he has two complete natures, divine and human.

Chapter 9: THE ATHANASIAN CREED

Nobody really knows where this creed came from, who wrote it and why it was written. It appears in the churches of the west in the heart of the Dark Ages, about the time of Charlemagne (c. 800). It is of importance because it seems to be the first creed in church history that defines the traditional doctrine of an ontological trinity. That doctrine had been articulated often by early theologians such as Tertullian and Augustine, but, other than the intimations in Nicene Creed, had never appeared in any official creed of the churches. Actually this creed appears never to have been adopted officially by some Council in the ancient church, but simply came into general use and acceptance without that endorsement. Some modern denominations still today make it one of their major criteria of orthodox theology.

The term "ontological trinity" is not used in the Athanasian Creed, but it is a term used in Systematic Theology to distinguish this way of understanding the doctrine of Trinity from what is called "economic trinity." Ontological means three Persons within the Being of God; economical means the way the three Persons work. So the distinction is basically about what God is in himself, not what God does in the world. Also – the name of the creed is intended to suggest the theology that Athanasius promoted during his lifetime hundreds of years earlier, not that it was written by him.

THE ATHANASIAN CREED (first half)

Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith.

Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled; without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.

And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;

Neither confounding the Persons; nor dividing the Essence.

For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost.

But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal.

Such as the Father is; such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost.

The Father uncreated; the Son uncreated; and the Holy Ghost uncreated.

The Father unlimited; the Son unlimited; and the Holy Ghost unlimited.

The Father eternal; the Son eternal; and the Holy Ghost eternal.

And yet they are not three eternals; but one eternal.

As also there are not three uncreated; nor three infinites, but one uncreated; and one infinite.

So likewise the Father is Almighty; the Son Almighty; and the Holy Ghost Almighty.

And yet they are not three Almighties; but one Almighty.

So the Father is God; the Son is God; and the Holy Ghost is God.

And yet they are not three Gods; but one God.

So likewise the Father is Lord; the Son Lord; and the Holy Ghost Lord. And yet not three Lords; but one Lord.

For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity; to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord; So are we forbidden by the catholic religion; to say, There are three Gods, or three Lords.

The Father is made of none; neither created, nor begotten.

The Son is of the Father alone; not made, nor created; but begotten.

The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding.

So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts.

And in this Trinity none is before, or after another; none is greater, or less than another.

But the whole three Persons are coeternal, and coequal.

So that in all things, as aforesaid; the Unity in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity, is to be worshipped.

He therefore that will be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity.

This creed requires us to believe, on pain of going eternally to hell if we don't, that there are three Persons in the Godhead, that is in God, but there are not three Gods. How this can be is not explained; it is simply affirmed as an article of faith that requires to be believed. One God in three Persons. Whatever attributes you associate with God the Father you must apply equally to the Son and to the Holy Spirit: uncreated, unlimited, eternal, almighty, lord. Each Person is equally God, but there is still only one God.

Probably most people, when first confronting this doctrine, are perplexed, not able to figure it out. How can there be three Persons without God being divided into three? How can we say there are three Persons with three separate wills and minds and personalities, and still maintain a realistic monotheism? How can we avoid saying this doctrine is polytheistic monotheism, a contradiction in terms?

But the overwhelming pressure of ecclesiastical authority as well as the great weight of long tradition gradually suppresses this perplexity, so that one finally accepts it even though it makes no sense whatever.

Some modern theologians define this Trinity as a Social Trinity, the three Persons interacting among themselves in such a harmonious way that they set a pattern for how Christians should act among themselves on earth. As if this constitutes the heart of what it means for humans to be images of God – getting along cooperatively with one another. But this view is simply another variety of tritheism, polytheism.

We do better to take another good look at the basic Apostles' Creed, and accepting its way of defining the trinity. In that creed God the Father is defined as the Creator, reflecting accurately the teaching of Genesis 1 and the prevailing Hebrew-Christian mentality.

The second article in the Apostles' Creed affirms that we believe in Jesus Christ who is the son of God; and we understand this term in the Hebrew sense of a human being designated by God for important work in his plan of salvation. The bulk of the Apostles' Creed details the significant events in the life of Jesus, all of them human. There is no implication or suggestion anywhere in this creed that Jesus is anything other than a human being. All of these items reflect accurately the teaching of the Gospels.

The last division of the Apostles' Creed specifies what the Holy Spirit, that is the Spirit of Jesus, does within the life and community of people who believe in Jesus. So there is nothing in the Apostles' Creed to even suggest an ontological trinity. The trinity is simply the threesome of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, without any implication that all three are divine beings or persons. We do well to be guided by this Apostles' Creed rather than the Athanasian.

Here is the rest of the Athanasian Creed for those who wish to examine it.

Furthermore it is necessary to everlasting salvation; that he also believe faithfully the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess; that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; God, of the Essence of the Father; begotten before the worlds; and Man, of the Essence of his Mother, born in the world. Perfect God; and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead; and inferior to the Father as touching his Manhood. Who although he is God and Man; yet he is not two, but one Christ. One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by assumption of the Manhood by God. One altogether; not by confusion of Essence; but by unity of Person. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man; so God and Man is one Christ; Who suffered for our salvation; descended into hell; rose again the third day from the dead. He ascended into heaven, he sitteth on the right hand of the God the Father Almighty, from whence he will come to judge the quick and the dead. At whose coming all men will rise again with their bodies; And shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil, into everlasting fire. This is the catholic faith; which except a man believe truly and firmly, he cannot be saved.

Chapter 10: THE PELAGIAN CONTROVERSY

Besides the various permutations of the Christological and Trinitarian controversies in the ancient church there was another controversy beginning about 400. This controversy was about sin and grace: what is the function of the human will in the process of becoming saved? Do we have a free will such that it is our choice whether or not we will be saved?

Pelagius was a British monk who migrated to Rome about 400, and was shocked by the low level of morality in that important city of the empire. He began to press the issue that people must take their moral responsibility much more seriously and clean up their lives. He taught that if God requires something from us we have the innate ability to do it, so that if we do not obey God it is a failure of our will, we choose wrong. We must learn to choose right, and then simply get our will under control and do what God requires.

An African bishop, Augustine of Hippo, heard of Pelagius and soon realized that his own experience of salvation was considerably different from what Pelagius and his disciples were teaching. Augustine had lived a rather undisciplined and somewhat immoral life in his earlier years, and when he was converted to become a Christian he understood that it was the irresistible grace of God that had pursued him and had eventually brought him to repentance and faith. He understood that it was not first of all an effort of his own will that brought him salvation, but the greater grace of God.

"Give what you command, and command what you will." This was one of the ways in which Augustine prayed to God. It was his way of affirming that the ability to do what God commands does not reside within our own wills, but that we need the supernatural grace of God to be infused into us in order to bring us to obedience. I can obey God, not because of the innate moral strength I have, but because God provides me with the strength to do what he commands. Give me what I need, and then command whatever you wish; that is Augustine's stance.

And it horrified Pelagius. He thought Augustine's position was responsible for the moral carelessness he saw all around him. God doesn't give me the grace to do such and such, so I can't do it and so it doesn't much matter anyway. I can get my sins forgiven by being baptized, so it doesn't really matter. Pelagius was of the opinion that Augustine's teachings led to people not working hard enough to live the way God requires of us, moral carelessness.

One of the sidelights of this controversy developed as the doctrine of original sin. Pelagius taught that we all come into the world like Adam and Eve, with the necessity and ability to either obey God or to disobey him. Augustine disagreed vociferously. He insisted that when Adam and Eve sinned against God they plunged themselves and all their posterity into the quagmire of sin and evil, so that we today come into the world as sinners not as innocents. In other words, we inherit from our first parents both the guilt and pollution of sin. What is then required, according to Augustine, is that God by divine election and grace provides us with the spiritual and moral power to overcome our inherited original sin. If God does not give us this grace we remain wallowing in our sin.

So Pelagius was horrified also by this doctrine of original sin. If God does not give me the grace to overcome sin, then I'm stuck in it without resource and without hope. I simply cannot get out of it by myself, so I may as well forget it altogether. For Pelagius the doctrine of original sin takes all sense of moral responsibility away from us, and leaves us in moral indifference. There is nothing I can do about it.

The debate raged on in various places, Carthage, southern Italy, Constantinople, and was finally resolved at a great Ecumenical Council in Ephesus in 431, where Pelagianism was officially condemned. Later developments blunted some of the sharper edges of Augustine's theology, for example the teaching of irresistible grace and predestination, but in the main the Augustinian view of the fall of Adam and its deleterious effect on human nature prevailed.

What should we think about this controversy now in the twenty-first century after a millennium and a half has passed? One would think there is some truth and some error on both sides; that the issue can hardly be one of black and white. The Bible does teach that we are responsible for our sin, otherwise it would not be sin. We are responsible for the way we live, whether or not we are Christians. So we should not view the grace of God as something that bypasses our responsibility, as if we have no responsibility at all in the matter of converting to Christian faith. At the same time we must avoid the notion that our good works, that is our decisions to do good things, is what makes us Christian. The gospel requires that we die to sin and rise to righteousness. When this happens, and when we do indeed decide that way, we realize that we were able to make this choice, this decision, only because the Spirit of Jesus was working in us beforehand to bring us to that decision.

In short, there needs to be some kind of doctrine of concurrence involved. Not that God does half and we do half, but that the totality of our will is involved as well as the totality of the grace of God. Paul's insight is apropos, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you both to will and to do." Both our responsibility, our will, and the redeeming grace of God are involved in the process of salvation, and our theology must account for both equally. Salvation is entirely the work of God, but at the same time it is entirely the work of our will; concurrently.

Chapter 11: THE CHURCH HIERARCHY

THE PARACLETE

There were no priests, bishops, or popes when Christianity first started. Jesus never did appoint any one person to take his place as leader of the band of original disciples, certainly not Peter. Jesus did reinstate Peter but that forgiveness does not in any way imply that Peter replaces Jesus as leader of the group. Who does Jesus appoint as their Leader?

The Paraclete.

In his last meal with the disciples, recorded in John 16, Jesus explains that he is going away and that they will be better off with him gone. "It is to your advantage that I go away." The disciples, of course, were totally confused by that information. We've been following you as our potential messiah for three years, and now you tell us you're going away? How so?

The disciples were expecting Jesus to start a revolution against Rome, drive out the occupation army, set up an independent Jewish government in Jerusalem, declare himself the king of the Jews, and appoint the disciples to important prestigious positions in the new Jewish government. How can Jesus do all this if he's going away? And how will we be better off?

Jesus explained as best he could that when he went away he would send someone to take his place, and this person would be much more effective as their leader than he himself was. Who would that be? The Paraclete.

The word Paraclete comes from two Greek words, _para_ meaning alongside, and _kletos_ meaning called. Someone called to be _alongside_ the disciples, or _with_ them, just as Jesus had been for several years. Someone to replace Jesus when he went away, to be their new leader. This was not Peter or any of the other disciples. It was the Holy Spirit whom Jesus sent a month or two later, on Pentecost.

The point that Jesus was making was that their leadership was now to come from within, from the Spirit of God within them, no longer from without. No longer from another man in their group, but from a spirit that would animate and propel every one of them from the inside. The same spirit that was in Jesus was not yet motivating the disciples, but that is what Jesus wanted to accomplish. They wanted a visible kingdom, but Jesus said the kingdom of God does not come with observation but is within them.

We need to understand this situation clearly. So long as Jesus was with the disciples as one man among them, they would treat him that way. They would think of him in terms of a king like ancient David. They would look for the kind of campaigns and the kind of success that human beings can accomplish: defeating the Roman occupation forces and setting up a Jewish government. But Jesus had no intention of doing that.

Jesus was concerned with the basic problem of sin. He knew that he had to deal first with the inner thoughts and aspirations that people had, before the other problems of life could be successfully addressed. He had to do what he could to get people to straighten out their thinking, their aspirations, their goals. He was unable to do this so long as he remained with them as one human being among others.

So the disciples did not need another human being to become their new leader, they needed the Spirit of God to get their priorities and values in shape. They needed, in short, to see that the kingdom of God is not primarily a political kingdom based on military power, but an inward change of heart that understood that God rules a person by creating the desire for truth and righteousness and honesty and justice and peace and respect. That is what began to happen on Pentecost, a development that could not possibly happen so long as Jesus was with the disciples as one man among others. He had to go away in order for this Penteost event to happen. That's what made the disciples better off than with Jesus physically present.

THE HIERARCHY

But what actually happened as the centuries rolled by and the Christian faith expanded into the Greco-Roman world was that human beings gradually took over positions of authority in the churches in such a way that little by little the inner authority of the Holy Spirit began to be compromised and diluted. The model which the churches followed was the model of the Roman Empire, ruled by a hierarchy of officers. By the end of the first half millennium, about 500 or so, there was in place a very definite hierarchy of ecclesiastical offices that for all practical purposes ruled the church.

In the very earliest churches begun by the disciples and the Apostle Paul the affairs of the congregation were handled pretty much the same way as they were in the Jewish synagogues. The early Christians were mostly Jewish so it is natural that they would conduct their affairs the way Jews did it. In Christian churches this was by certain men appointed to be Elders (or the Greek term presbyters).

As time passed we can imagine that one of these Presbyters, being more capable than the others, would come to exercise sole control over the congregation. The name became shortened in time to Priest. So it came to be that each congregation had its own priest to run its affairs. Then, if there were a number of local congregations in the vicinity, one of these priests might naturally emerge as dominant over the others, and they would have what came to be known as an Overseer (the Greek term is episkopos), or as we know it today, a bishop.

So in general a gradual process of centralization of authority took place, so that the most prominent bishops came to exercise more authority and prestige than the others, until five of them emerged as most authoritative and powerful: the bishops of Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome. They were sometimes known as Patriarchs (the Greek term), or in Rome as Papa (Pope, the Latin term). That was the situation at the time of the Fall of the Roman Empire about AD 500. All except the bishop of Rome were in the eastern part of the church, the part that spoke Greek and were politically controlled by the Emperor in Constantinople. Only the bishop of Rome, the Pope, was in the Latin speaking part of the church, the part of the empire controlled politically by the western Emperor.

But the point for now is that in the west the most powerful person in the church was the bishop of Rome, largely because of the prestige of the city of Rome itself. When the western empire fell to the barbarians of Europe, the only authority figure remaining was the bishop of Rome. We will see later how decisive a role this bishop began to play in the history of the Europe.

Chapter 12: PERSPECTIVE ON ANCIENT CHURCH HISTORY

CONVERSION OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The most significant result of the first five hundred years of church history has to be the astounding fact that, in spite of vigorous opposition, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Consider that when Jesus was on earth, all the Jewish people expected him to do what a messiah was supposed to do, set up an independent government in Jerusalem, one patterned after that of David and Solomon. In order to accomplish that feat, Jesus would have to gather an army, get a revolution started, and drive out the Roman occupation forces by military skill.

That's what the Jewish people wanted, but it was not what Jesus wished to do. He did enter into competition with Rome, but he did it by means of the gospel not by means of the military. It became a contest between the power of truth and the power of social and political pressure, between the spirit of godliness and the spirit of imperial power.

What was it in the Christian gospel that slowly eroded the power of the opposition and drew people to the Lord and away from their former religions? Why would people convert to Christianity even when they saw the persecutions and sufferings imposed upon that faith? Why would they choose to come to the Lord Jesus in spite of Nero and Decius and Diocletian and all the other dignitaries of the Roman government?

We know why Jewish people converted to Christianity; they accepted that Jesus was their messiah, the proof of which was his resurrection from the dead. But why would Gentile people convert? The idea of a messiah meant nothing to them. They had never heard of Adam or Noah or Abraham or Moses or David. They did not have the Torah, God's Law. So why convert?

Part of the reason would be the realization that Christianity was much more realistic than their current religion. Who knows what is going on out there in the realm of the gods; we can only imagine what competition and argumentation is going on there. It makes much more sense to recognize that there is only one God, one who not only created the world but who is in charge of how it develops.

But probably another factor was still more important, the effect that belieiving in Jesus had upon the people who were converted. Believers left off participating in the religious and social customs and became more honest and loving and respectful and trustworthy. Most of them bore persecution and other forms of discrimination without becoming belligerent or resentful or hateful. Their everyday behavior as well as their endurance under pressure had a very large effect on the people who were observing them, and that very steadfastness and self-control was a major incentive for others to listen and perhaps be converted.

There is a third category accounting for conversions: follow the leader. When Emperor Constantine terminated persecution and himself adopted the Christian faith, large numbers of people followed his example – for whatever their personal reasons. In some of the barbarian tribes later something similar happened. For example when Clovis agreed to adopt his wife's faith, in short order many of his soldiers followed his example. We may well suspect such persons of a shallow faith, but nonetheless such conversions are significant, for they brought people into baptism and thus under the religious supervision of the church. Such conversions brought baptism, and they often started the second phase of discipleship: being taught what it means to obey the Lord.

But however we might wish to account for the it, the fact of the matter is that the Christian faith, by the year 500 had become the dominant commitment of the majority of people within the Roman Empire, as well as being widespread even outside the empire among the barbarian peoples of Europe. The sheer power of the gospel had conquered the full weight of imperial opposition, such that what the original Jewish people wanted their messiah to do was actually done so much more successfully than by military revolt.

Of course the kind of kingdom that the gospel establishes is much different from the kind of kingdom that political and military conquest establishes. The kingdom of Jesus is rooted inside a person, not imposed from outside. The kingdom of Jesus comes from persuasion, not from compulsion. The kingdom of Jesus produces people who are more humanitarian than the people who force their will upon others in unhuman coercive ways.

THEOLOGY AND CHURCH ORGANIZATION

But there are other things to say by way of evaluation and perspective about the developments in Christianity during the first five hundred years, particularly about the theology and the church organization that took place. There are basically two things to be said about the theology and organization of the ancient Church: 1. It was inevitable for the church at that time to do this; but 2. We can see today that much of the theology and organization of the period is erroneous.

Unfortunately, the general attitude of churches and theologians today is that the ancient church, in its theological decisions and ecclesiastical developments arrived at final definitive structures of the gospel. What we fail to see, too often, is that these ancient theologians and churchmen were reading the gospel through their own cultural glasses. Virtually everything of importance that the ancients adopted, other than the Apostles' Creed, is seriously flawed by the distortion caused by interpreting Christian facts within an alien mindset.

There is nothing in the Gospels, for example, that require us to regard Jesus as a divine being who became a human being. Of course, once you make that definition you can find scriptures that seem to support it. But the original Jewish Christians, and all those who wrote the New Testament, knew very well that Jesus was a human being in whom God was doing his mighty works. To say that Jesus is the Son of God in no way implies that Jesus is a second god alongside the Father, no more than to say you as a Christian believer and thus a child of God are thereby a divine being. The spirit of God works in you and me in the same way it worked in Jesus when he was on earth. So we ought not to regard these definitions that come from the ancient church as final and authoritative. We need always to be open to the leading and guiding of the Spirit, whom Jesus promised to send us precisely for that purpose, to lead us into all the truth.

Similar analyses need to be made about church organization. Many modern denominations have retained more or less of the ancient hierarchical patterns; bishops for example. Or perhaps only the notion that the priest or minister of the church is the ruler of the church. None of that hierarchical structure should be taken as definitive.

All of that being said, however, we need also to understand that the ancients did need to do what they did in theology and in church authority. They needed to find a path that for them was realistic and true to the gospel. They did a great deal of arguing, speculating, reasoning, which to us seems more than a bit unneccesary, but they needed to learn how to be Christian. They took the data they were presented with, from the sacred scriptures, and they did their best to assimilate that data into their own indigenous lifestyle.

It would not have been right for them to merely take over what the Jewish originators gave them. That would have made them proselytes, basically Gentiles who converted to Judaism, with a little Christianity sprinkled on top. This is what the Judaizers wanted, but what Paul opposed so strenuously. So in our thinking about those centuries, we need simply to let them do what they felt they had to do to make the Christian faith their own; to assimilate it into a new and vigorous renovation of the Greco-Roman lifestyle and mindset. For them what they attained in this struggle was valid in the sense that it represented the best they could do to enter into the life of Christ in a genuine and meaningful way. But it is not on that account definitive for us in later generations and different cultures.

THE PLAN OF GOD

So our evaluation of the theology of the ancient church needs to embrace both of these points, one negative, the other positive. And there is a bit more to learn from that insight. It is that God does not require us to become perfect in order to be genuinely Christian. God is leading the human race, step by step, closer and closer to the kind of life and civilization that is his goal. The plan of God is a work in progress. At each step God enables us to make one great stride forward, but with the understanding that future generations and future new nations will be continuing the same forward progress far beyond the point that we are able to achieve.

Consider, for example, that the human race originated in the animal world with all the limitations that pre-human creatures possessed. God had to take those pre-historical humans and slowly enable them to grow and develop over the thousands of years that have now passed since then; for example, simply to recognize that there is a God.

And then he had somehow to guide them in such a way that they would begin to know that there was indeed a God in heaven who not only created the universe but who is guiding it every moment of every day. How would you do this if all you had to work with were fighting and selfish persons desiring only their own ascendancy at the expense of the suffering of others? That will be the story of Old Testament Israel.

Consider next that it was God's purpose to extend the small beginnings of genuine human life beyond the nationalistic and racial confines of just one people group, the Jews, and somehow transfuse that basic lifestyle into an intensely hostile culture. How would you have done it? That is the story of the ancient Christian church.

What the history of the ancient Israelites achieved is by no means final – its legalism. Nor is what the history of the ancient Greco-Roman Christians achieved final – its Christology and its hierarchy. But both of those steps were necessary. There could be no further advance and progress without them.

And that insight needs to govern the rest of what we will be studying in this survey of Chuch History. We will see another major step taken when we examine the next Part Two of this project, Christianity under the control of the Papacy. We will see there also that a great deal of what was happening is wrong, but at the same time that the net result of it all was a major step forward in the development of God's ongoing plan of salvation. And, for that matter, while it may be very difficult for us to see ourselves and the modern church objectively, we will understand that whatever great faults we see – denominationalism for example – there is something very necessary happening even now that is bringing God's plan forward one more step.

Part Two: THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ERA

If we take the year AD 500 as a round number for the end of the Roman Empire, and the year AD 1500 as the end of the Middle Ages in Europe, then the interim period, a full millennium, can be seen as being dominated by the Pope, the bishop of Rome. This would be true not only religiously for the western part of Christianity, the European segment, but to a large extent also for the political control of Europe. The Popes were exercising a great deal of influence in social, economic, educational, cultural, and governmental affairs as well as in ecclesiastical affairs. In fact one Pope, Boniface VIII, even went so far as to claim that God had entrusted "two swords" to his representative on earth, namely the sword of the spirit (church) and also the sword of the government (state). He found, to his regret, that it did not work when he tried to exercise the sword of the state, but still he did claim it.

So in this second part of our study of Church History we will be examining what happened to Christianity, mostly in the western European half, under the aegis of the bishops of Rome, with the understanding that affairs in the east continued on their own path under the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Chapter 13: THE CONVERSION OF EUROPE

A major factor in the collapse of the Roman Empire was invasion by the tribes from beyond the Danube and Rhine Rivers. There were several of these tribes responsible, among them the Goths, the Franks, the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Saxons, the Angles, the Lombards, collectively known in history as "barbarian." This term comes from Greek cultural usage. It is customary for nation groups to divide everyone into two groups: we and you – with interesting terminology. Among the Jews it was we Jews and you Gentiles. In Greece it was we Greeks and you barbarians. Among some Dutch immigrants it was we Dutch and you Americans.

So the term barbarian means essentially non-Greek, but since Greeks were highly cultured in those days (Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pericles, Sophocles, Euripides, etc.) and non-Greeks were relatively unsophisticated, the term barbarian acquired the connotation of crude, ugly, backward, uncivilized.

This may well have been an accurate depiction of those peoples, but still they were vigorous people with loads of ambition and energy. They would have contact with Roman and Greek civilization and would envy its wealth and luxury and power. Many of them managed to secure residence within the borders of the Roman Empire, thousands of them became the backbone of the Roman legions, and later a few of them even became emperors.

But the time came when the western Roman generals could no longer secure the borders of the empire, and in several places the barbarian hordes swept over the Rhine and the Danube into the empire, pillaging and destroying and creating havoc such that the empire itself ceased to exist except in name. Between 455 and 476 there were nine emperors installed and soon deposed, the real power being exercised by the army generals. The date of 476 is sometimes mentioned as the date of the fall of the empire, this being the year when Romulus Augustus was deposed as the last real Emperor in the west. The empire did continue, of course, in the east where the eastern emperor lived.

However, there is another very important aspect of the barbarians that must not be overlooked. Many, if not most, of them were already Christians. And this made a very real difference in the way they went about their conquest of the empire. Typically they would come to a Roman city, kill the mayor and burn the town hall, but would spare the priests and the church buildings. They did this, of course, because they recognized the priests and bishops as their own religious leaders.

This is important because it resulted in all of them, in time, coming to accept the central religious authority of the bishop of Rome, the Pope. Generally speaking, these Christian barbarians were of the Arian type in theology (Jesus is a third substance, composed of a blend of deity and humanity), so it did take a long time for them to convert to standard Catholic teachings, but by the year 1000 virtually all of the various tribes in the entire continent of Europe had accepted the religious authority of the Pope, the bishop of Rome.

In our day, in the twenty-first century, we find it very hard to imagine the situation in which everybody accepts the authority of the bishop of Rome, not only religiously but in many social and political areas as well. But it did happen, and the cause of it was the conversion of several barbarian tribes way back in the time period of the ancient church. When the authority of the empire, vested in the emperor and his armies, fell into ineffectiveness, the only remaining authority from the early years was the church, in the persons of priests and bishops and the Pope. The Pope did, in fact, begin to take over some of the responsibilities of the emperor, and priests and bishops became political figures as well as religious. Note, for example, that in the game of chess the bishops figure prominently alongside the knights.

We will now look at the way in which a few of the prominent barbarian tribes became Christian, and what they did to the Roman Empire. It is important to realize that as the empire disintegrated, many of the barbarians who swarmed in were already Christians. This made all the difference in the world about what effect the fall of Rome had upon the fortunes of Christianity. Rather than being destroyed along with the empire, the church continued to be strong and influential in the civilization of the times.

THE GOTHS

It is very interesting and important that during the same time that Christianity was slowly gaining a foothold in the Roman Empire, some of that gospel work was also going on among the Goths, a large tribe north of the Danube. In their forays into the Roman Empire the Goths captured some people who were Christians and they became slaves and started a Christian church. Or perhaps some unnamed Christian missionary went to visit them, like the Apostle Paul did earlier in the Roman Empire.

That's how the Christian faith got started there, but then there came one man whose name we know, Ulfilas. He was born in the Christian slave community about 311 and when he grew up he became a bishop and did his best to bring the gospel to the Gothic people. For example, he translated the New Testament into their language. Thereafter the faith spread rapidly until one could say that the entire tribe of Goths had become Christian, adopting the Arian form of the faith rather than the Catholic form.

Of course we must understand that this does not imply that they automatically became mature Christians. They continued to be "barbarians" but the first step toward getting out of that situation and becoming the vigorous creators of what later became known as Gothic civilization – art and sculpture and cathedrals and literature – that first step was taken in their conversion already in the first 500 years of the gospel.

At this time the Goths were a very large tribe living north of the Danube River. When the Huns from the orient came pushing westward into Europe, the Visigoths crossed over the Roman border almost to Constantinople, into Greece and northern Italy. In 410 under their leader Alaric the Visigoths captured Rome itself, but then retreated back home. The Visigoths kept moving west into what is now modern France, and in time spread into Spain also, where they subdued the peoples already living there.

The Goths who remained in eastern Europe are known as Ostrogoths, and they pushed their way into the Italian peninsula, where they set up a short-lived kingdom.

THE FRANKS

This tribe became the most important nation in western Europe, gaining control eventually over almost the whole territory of Gaul, modern France. The leader of the Franks, Clovis, had married a Burgundian princess who was already a Christian, and when she insisted that their children be baptized as Christians, he agreed, and eventually accepted Christian baptism himself. This was in 496, just at the time when the Roman Empire in the west ceased to exist as a significant power in Europe. His army sooner or later followed his example and this tribe of Franks became part of the Catholic Church, accepting the religious authority of the bishop of Rome. Frankish culture and power reached its height during the reign of Charlemagne about the year 800. France is still today a strongly Catholic country.

THE BURGUNDIANS

This was a smaller tribe of people living north of the Rhine River, Christians of the Arian variety. When the empire could no longer defend its borders many of these Burgundians migrated south of the Rhine into Gaul, and soon (517) adopted the religion of the Frankish people who already lived there, namely the Roman Catholic faith, and became a part of the Frankish kingdom. There is still a province in central France southeast of Paris called Burgundy.

THE VANDALS

This tribe, which had been converted to the Arian form of Christianity, crossed the Rhine River in 406 into Gaul and kept pushing their way south all the way into Spain, arriving before the Visigoths did. When the Visigoths came, the Vandals crossed into northern Africa and set up a very strong kingdom which came to be known for its savage piratical control of the western Mediterranean Sea. This Vandal kingdom lasted until 534.

THE LOMBARDS

Starting in 568 this Germanic tribe, also embracing the Arian faith, invaded northern Italy and set up a strong kingdom which lasted for two centuries. Modern Italy still has a large region called Lombardy.

THE BRITISH

Patrick worked as a missionary among the Irish people from 432 to 461. He is credited with shaping a strong organization of Christian churches in Ireland, but with only loose connections with the ecclesiastical structures of the Roman Catholic churches on the continent.

What Irish Christianity came to be known for during this period (c. 500 ff) is the creation of very strong monasteries from which missionaries were sent over into the mainland of Europe. The name to be remembered here is Finian of Clonard (470-548) who is responsible for bringing into being those celebrated missionary monasteries.

The mission monastery movement spread to Scotland where such places as Iona and Lindisfarne became influential centers of Christian missions.

In 597 Pope Gregory sent a man named Augustine to persuade Ethelbert, king of the Anglo-Saxons in England, to adopt the Christian faith of the king's new wife. The mission was successful and Ethelbert and many of his subjects accepted Christianity and became part of the Roman Catholic church, thus enhancing the authority of the papacy.

THE GERMANS

There were several independent tribes in the area we now know as Germany, such as the Frisians, Hessians, Thuringians, Bavarians. A missionary from England named Willibrord began work among the Frisians in 695, but had little success. Some time later another missionary from England began work there in 716, and also had little success. His name was Boniface, who then in 719 received an appointment from the Pope to do mission work in Germany. Here he was eminently successful and in time organized much of that territory into bishoprics under direct control of the Pope. Helping him in this work were many others who came from England to evangelize the German tribes and bring them into conformity with Catholic religious customs. Boniface was also instrumental in purifying and strengthening the Frankish church which had succumbed to some extent to the inroads of political corruption.

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It's not important so much that we remember all these details. The point of the preceding sketches is to give some idea of how the Christian faith spread across Europe. Christian barbarian nations swarmed all over the western empire, destroying all vestiges of former Roman power, but maintaining and preserving the institutions of the church. The most important element to come out of that confusing time of history is the enormously enhanced prestige and power of the bishop of Rome, the Pope. From these events Christianity, under the leadership of the bishop of Rome, kept working for the conversion of all the tribes on the European continent, a task successfully achieved by the year 1000.

Note well: by the end of the first millennium, almost all the people of Europe had embraced the Christian faith and had voluntarily accepted religious control by the papacy in Rome – an amazing achievement! When Jesus instructed his disciples to disciple the nations by baptizing them and then teaching them, it would have been very difficult for John and James and Thomas and Matthew to visualize what would happen during the next thousand years. But happen it did, and it had enormous consequences for the way in which western civilization developed during the next thousand years. Kenneth Scott Latourette comments, "The formal conversion of Western Europe was, then, only the beginning of a process which went on for centuries and through which Christianity more and more penetrated the populace, was consciously appropriated by it, and gave rise to new movements." ( _The Thousand Years of Uncertainty AD 500 - AD 1500_ , Harper & Brothers, 1938, p. 353)

Chapter 14: THE SPREAD OF ISLAM

Who was Mohammed and how did he get Islam started?

Mohammed, born in 570, was an orphan raised by his uncle in Mecca, Arabia. When grown he became a merchant and a shepherd. He had a habit of taking a retreat occasionally in a cave for several nights. Once, at age 40, he reported that he received a revelation from God. Thereafter for the rest of his life he received many more such communications, and began preaching about them. His message was that God is One, that complete surrender to God is necessary (the word Islam means submission), and that he himself was the last and best prophet in the line of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.

In 622 he and his followers migrated to Medina, and managed to unite some of the Arab tribes, with the result that by his death in 632 most of the Arabian peninsula had adopted his religion. All the revelations that Mohammed claimed to have received from God were gathered into one book, the Koran, and this was regarded as the sacred book of God.

There are five main duties that Islam requires of its adherents, the "Five Pillars of Islam."

  1. Recitation of the creed: Allah is God and Mohammed is his prophet

  2. Prayer five times a day

  3. Almsgiving

  4. Fasting during the month of Ramadan

  5. Pilgrimage to Mecca, if possible, at least once in a lifetime

After Mohammed died, his followers embarked on an ambitious quest to conquer their neighbors and impose their religion on them. Here's the chronology of the Moslem conquests:

Mohammed died in Medina in 632.

Damascus fell in 635.

Jerusalem and Antioch in 638.

Alexandria in 641.

Persia in 651.

Carthage in 697.

By 711 the Mohammedan army conquered the Visigothic kingdom in Spain.

In 732 Moslems were defeated at the Battle of Tours in France and retreated into Spain.

Mohammed died in AD 632. Exactly one hundred years later, AD 732, the Moslem army, seeking to replace Christianity all over the Mediterranean world, was decisively defeated at the turning-point Battle of Tours in Central France, the French led by Charles Martel. Between the time of the Islamic founder's death and this history-changing battle, the Mohammedan armies conquered the Near East, all of northern Africa, Spain, and were in process of conquering Europe. The eastern Roman Empire stopped them in what is now Turkey, and the Franks in what is now France, but everywhere else the Moslems took over and Christianity practically disappeared in those regions.

What a devastating blow to the progress of Christianity! All the territory it was gaining in Europe it was losing in the Near East and Africa. And as we know, most of the Near East as well as all of the northern part of Africa is still solidly Moslem still today. All of that territory was wrested from the Christian Roman Empire by military power not by persuasion, and the Islamic religion replaced Christianity as the official religion in that part of the world.

PERSPECTIVE

It is difficult for us to imagine why God allowed this to happen. Why did the Christian faith become so dominant in the Near East and in Northern Africa, only to fall meekly to Islam and virtually disappear in those areas where it was once so strong, like Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Carthage? Why did Christianity become the accepted religion of the barbarians while being destroyed among the more civilized areas of the Mediterranean world? Whatever reasons we might like to suggest, the fact remains that happen it did, like it or not. All of the territory where Christianity started, as well as much of the area evangelized by the Apostle Paul – gone, now Moslem. Why?

This book suggests a theory: to get civilization started all over again from the bottom up. The Greco-Roman civilization of the day was based on polytheism and military suppression. It could not survive in a monotheistic and voluntary society. In other words, it would have been impossible for Christian faith to transform Greco-Roman civilization from the inside without undermining the very foundations on which it was constructed, pagan religion and brute force.

So, taking these major factors of the period into consideration, the conversion of the barbarians and the destruction of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam, one can see that the stage was being set for God to provide a way for the people of Europe to create a vigorous new civilization out of the ruins of the old, but on a very different foundation, that of monotheism and voluntary entrance into the kingdom of God by faith in Jesus and the gospel.

We should recall at this point the command that God gave to Adam immediately after creating him in God's image, "Replenish the earth, and subdue it." We may understand this to be a divinely inspired definition of what the human task is. Spread the human race all over the earth, and in the process learn how nature works and how to harness the powers of nature to construct a civilization that images the character of God.

All civilizations on earth up to the time of Jesus were based on sheer power, so that in spite of much progress in civilization there was always the presence of military and political and social suppression, such that some people prospered at the expense of others being held down. In that respect no civilization at the time successfully demonstrated the image of God. But now, during what we call the Dark Ages, the stage was being set for the construction of a new civilization, preserving what was valuable from the past, but now developed within a religion that comes directly from God himself, and therefore with the potential of producing a culture that does indeed image the creator.

That's the theory upon which this church history book is being written, and which will be explained in more detail as we move along through its chapters. Greco-Roman civilization was destroyed by barbarian peoples, but by Christian barbarians who put themselves voluntarily under the tutelage of the Christian Church. So that the task of the Church now became to build upon the baptism of the barbarians in such a way that the European peoples would reconstruct a culture upon Christian principles, teaching them to observe all the things that Christ has taught, as defined in the Great Commission of Matthew 28.

Chapter 15: THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM

Jesus gave his followers a two-stage bit of advice: Disciple the nations, and do it in two stages: 1) baptize them, and 2) teach them. We have seen how the first stage took place – by the year 500 the Roman Empire was converted (brought to baptism). In addition many of the barbarian tribes of eastern Europe had also been converted. In the next period of 500 years (roughly 500 to 1000) the church will be setting the stage for the second phase of its task, teaching the nations to obey everything the Lord requires. It will do this by completing the conversion of all the tribes of Europe, and by creating an organization capable of disciplining effectively the wild barbarians who were destroying the Empire.

How would the church do this, that is, how would the Roman Catholic Church figure out how to discipline the barbarians? If you were Pope with the responsibility to lead those barbarian hordes into a more constructive way of life, how would you go about it? The Lombards, the Franks, the Goths, the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Irish, the English, the Germans, the Frisians? They are all pretty wild, undisciplined, illiterate. How would you get them under divine control? That's the job the Pope faced in the Dark Ages from 500 to 1000. The only control you have over them is their willingness to accept you as the representative of God on earth. How do you start?

What actually happened is that the church invented a very useful and powerful set of behavior patterns that were imposed on everyone. This set became a very effective disciplinary tool to keep the people in line and to nudge them to a better set of values. It is called the Sacramental System.

Already in the second century there was a definite movement in the direction of putting the sacraments in charge of the church officials. Here, for example, is what Ignatius wrote to the church in Smyrna in 112: "Let that be considered a valid Eucharist over which the bishop (overseer) presides, or one to whom he commits it. ... It is not permitted either to baptize or hold a love-feast apart from the bishop."

This system started out as the two sacraments practiced by the very earliest Christians: baptism and the Lord's Supper. Baptism was the sacrament that united all believers; if you are baptized you confess that you believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior along with all the others who have done the same. The Lord's Supper was the sacrament that symbolized their common devotion to Jesus. Baptism was practiced only once in a person's lifetime; whereas the Lord's Supper became part of each of their weekly meetings, a ritual designed to keep their memory of Jesus alive and functional.

Over the centuries various churches experimented with adding other rituals to their Sunday worship services. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), for example, named exorcism, ordination, marriage, and even the salt given to catechumens, as sacraments.

Here is what Augustine wrote about the need for sacraments, "The churches of Christ maintain it to be an inherent principle, that without baptism and partaking of the Supper of the Lord it is impossible for any man to attain either to the kingdom of God or to salvation and everlasting life." You can't get into the kingdom of God without partaking of the sacraments. It is very clear that the church was moving farther away from the simple style of worship of the very first Christians, into a growing externalizing and institutionalizing of religion.

But by the end of the Dark Ages (500 - 1000) the Roman Catholic Church had experimented with numerous items and finally settled on seven sacraments: Baptism, Eucharist (Lord's Supper), Penance, Confirmation, Marriage, Extreme Unction (Last Rites), Ordination. This system, covering as it does the entire range of human life, became an extremely effective tool by which the church brought the barbarian tribes of Europe into a growing self-discipline, a powerful inner energy of spirit such as to trigger the redevelopment of western civilization. So just how did the Sacramental System work?

BAPTISM

In the New Testament people were baptized when they came to faith in Jesus Christ. In the case of Stephen baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch, the ceremony was spur of the moment, informal, done by the person who had been explaining the gospel. In the cases when the Apostle Paul baptized people in Philippi, much the same situation occurred. They were done at the moment of conversion, by the person doing the gospel presentation, using whatever water was at hand.

Clearly the ceremony of baptism stems from Jesus' instruction to baptize the nations in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Why these three? We look to the Jewish context for the answer. Converts were expected to know that there is only one God and that this God is the Creator of the world and its sovereign Lord. In addition, now that the gospel of Jesus Christ has been explained, they would be affirming that they understood and believed that Jesus was the messiah sent by God, including all the data about Jesus' life, death, resurrection, and ascension. But there is more required, belief in the Holy Spirit as well. This is required to ensure that faith in God and in Jesus does take root in and transforms the hearts and lives of those who are receiving baptism. Faith must be internalized, changing the entire orientation of the believer. That is why Christian baptism is always a trinitarian function.

Here is an early statement, from the second century, about how baptism was being administered at that time. From the _Didache_ (Teaching of the Twelve Apostles): "Baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, in living water. But if you have not living water, baptize with other water; and, if thou canst not in cold, in warm. If you have neither, pour water thrice on the head ...."

It is interesting also to note that some Christians had the notion that baptism actually does wash away all previous sins. Emperor Constantine himself, it is reported, postponed his own baptism until near the end of his life, figuring that baptism would take care of all his past sins. If we jump forward in time to Thomas Aquinas (13th century) we find that the sacrament of baptism is regarded as actually giving the grace of regeneration, new life of the Spirit – baptismal regeneration, as it has come to be known.

When, as the centuries passed, all the citizens of some particular area were Christians, the ceremony of baptism was administered to the children soon after they were born. This was a sign that they were a part of the Christian community and would grow up in the faith. In the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, however, if the priest thought the parents were not acting as Christians should, he might refuse to perform the sacrament of baptism for the child of that couple, signifying that the condemnation of God was still resting on the child, that sin and guilt was not removed from the baby.

EUCHARIST
The Lord's Supper (Eucharist) is a ceremony reminiscent of the Last Supper that Jesus ate with his disciples the night before he died. It is designed to keep reminding believers that their lives need to be centered around Jesus, not around themselves. Very early in church history this celebration became a sacrament regularly observed by Christian congregations.

In the second century, one document which is a kind of church order (the _Didache_ ) counseled as follows: "Let none eat or drink of your Eucharist, save such as are baptized into the name of the Lord." So, after the public worship service was held, baptized members would remain for this sacrament. We can understand that when outsiders heard about this practice, and also heard rumors about what was going on, they sometimes concluded that Christians were cannibals because they were eating flesh and drinking blood.

In the very earliest centuries the meetings of Christians were called "love feasts." They were usually held on the first day of the week, the day of the sun, since that was the day Jesus rose from the dead, and also the day he ascended into heaven. Believers would come together at some designated place, perhaps a wealthy person's home, or some other convenient room. There they would share a common meal, take time to read the scriptures, pray, listen to someone speak, welcome visitors, and then, when that was finished, the baptized persons would observe the ceremony of the Lord's Supper with an additional morsel of bread and cup of wine.

Eventually, as the centuries passed, this sacrament also came to be considered the domain of the priest or the bishop. People should not do this on their own initiative or in their own homes; it has to be performed by the priest or it is not valid. So when we come to the Dark Ages and the time of the barbarians (500-1000) we see that all religious ritual was considered to belong to the priests, and that the priests were the people whom God appointed to distribute his divine favor and blessing. This the priests would do by means of the sacraments. When the priest conducted the ritual of Eucharist he was thereby dispensing God's grace to the people who received it. This was the general attitude in that period of time and still today in the Roman Catholic Church.

There is another very important facet to this subject of the Eucharist, centering around the question of what exactly is meant by saying, "This is my body," and "This is my blood." Our first response would be that Jesus meant that the bread is a symbol of his body, and the wine a symbol of his blood. But during the Dark Ages and afterward a different meaning began to be attached to that language. The times were steeped in superstition and magic and the notion gradually developed that something magical was happening when the Eucharist was celebrated. The bread of communion was actually transformed into flesh, and the wine of communion transformed into actual blood.

If we now jump ahead a bit in time, we note that the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 declared that "the body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine; the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood by the power of God." And in that same time frame, famous Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas opined, "for the whole substance of bread is converted into the whole substance of Christ's body ... Hence this conversion is properly called transubstantiation." This doctrine of transubstantiation is still the official position of the Roman Catholic Church today. In their theology, to participate in this sacrament is actually to eat Jesus' flesh and drink his blood, thus receiving the grace of God.

PENANCE

In the ancient church the sacrament of baptism was thought to wash away all prior sins, but what about sins committed after baptism? The sacrament of penance takes care of that.

In the full development of this sacrament it is expected that a Christian person will begin by understanding his own sin and being sorry for it – contrition. Then he will come to the priest with an honest acknowledgment of his sin – confession. The priest will then suggest certain actions to compensate for the sin – satisfaction. And finally, when the sinner reports back to the priest, the priest pronounces forgiveness – absolution. In the Catholic Church it is required that all church members do actually perform this sacrament, even if it is only once a year.

None of this, of course, is required in the Bible or practiced in the time of the apostles, but the practice developed as a result of the need to discipline the barbarian peoples into an effective transformation of their culture and society. Christian people, even barbarians, must know that following Jesus does require dying to sin and rising to righteousness. The sacrament of penance in the Middle Ages was designed to help this process along. It could well be argued that penance became the most useful and powerful sacrament in shaping the morality of the barbarian tribes because it kept such persistent control of behavior.

CONFIRMATION

Confirmation is a rite connected with baptism. If baptism is administered to an infant who has no notion whatever of what is happening, then the church thought something ought to be done when baptized children came to an age of responsibility. They must be encouraged to ratify their own baptism by seeking and receiving, from the nearest bishop, the sacrament of Confirmation. The bishop lays his hands on these young people and confirms that they are indeed children of God.

We will recognize that something on this order is surely necessary. Baptized children must at some point in their lives make a personal decision to follow the Lord Jesus. In the Catholic churches this takes the form of Confirmation, a sacrament for young people who have reached the age of puberty, usually around twelve years old. Also we will recognize that in the Dark Ages this would be a very important step. Children must not think they can ride on their parents' coattails in the matter of serving the Lord. They must do their best to emerge out of superstition and tradition to personally embrace Jesus as Lord as they absorb the teachings of Jesus into their own daily lives.

MARRIAGE

Marriage customs have varied a great deal over the centuries. One can imagine a man and a woman simply getting together in prehistoric times, without anything resembling our marriage ceremonies. There have been cultures in which marriages were arranged entirely by the parents, with little or no consultation of the parties involved. In some countries girls are virtually bartered off to the highest bidder, and consequently the wife is looked upon as being the property of the husband.

So in the Dark Ages among the newly Christianized peoples, the Catholic Church gradually took over the supervision of marriage in order to avoid some of the horrid things that might happen in contemporary barbarian culture. The idea developed that only priests could approve of and solemnize marriages, and this would provide also some authority for the church to do what it could to keep household arrangements from deteriorating and to keep autocratic husbands from domineering and demeaning their wives. In this context marriage itself became a sacrament to be administered only by the church. Weddings not performed by a priest, technically still today in the Roman Catholic Church, are not valid.

One might disagree with that, considering that because God created Adam and Eve for each other, this makes marriage a matter of nature rather than of the church and redemption. But for medieval times when very stringent measures were needed to discipline the wild barbarian spirit, it might be defensible, at least understandable.

LAST RITES

The sacramental system of the Roman Catholic Church, developed in the Middle Ages and still functional today, covers the entire life of its members from the cradle to the grave, from birth (Baptism) to death (Last Rites) and everything in between (Penance).

This sacrament of the Last Rites, sometimes called Extreme Unction, when the priest anoints a dying person with holy water, signifies the removal of all the guilt of sin, and supposedly makes the person ready to meet God in the life to come. It presupposes, simply by the fact that it happens, that the dying person, being a Roman Catholic, not only wishes this sacrament but has a heart ready to receive its blessing. One suspects that this is not always the case, but even so the sacrament is supposed to do whatever is necessary to get the person ready for purgatory or for heaven as the case might be.

ORDINATION

There is one other sacrament in the Roman Catholic system, Ordination. That is, becoming a priest. Holy Orders. Young men undergo a rigorous education in church theology, church law, and learn how to administer the sacraments, which is the major task of the priest – conducting Mass. So this sacrament is only for those men who become priests, and since it is under the control of the church it means that no one can simply begin to function as a priest or minister on his or her own initiative. One must be so designated by the officials of the church.

This is, of course, the church's way of controlling its own functions. Only properly prepared men can become priests, and if a priest becomes wayward the church can defrock him, that is, strip him of his office. Roman Catholicism makes much of its insistence on Apostlolic Succession. This term means that the priesthood goes back to the Apostle Peter and can be traced generation by generation ever since. Only people ordained in this line of succession are considered valid ministers of God.

* * * * *

What is unique and very effective about this set of seven sacraments is that they cover the entire expanse of life from birth to death, leaving little outside of the sacramental control of the church. It was the church's way of exercising total control over the life of every person and every tribe in Europe, kings as well as serfs. If every last thing you do with your time and energy is controlled by the church, and you agree to let the church have this control, then the church has pretty effective control over you, and over European life in general. That's what was happening, beginning already in the Dark Ages.

The net purpose of this system is to develop internal self-discipline. The external rituals made sense only in the perspective of strengthening the inner working of the Holy Spirit, and this would be shown in the way people actually lived.

It is not difficult to imagine that the church did not have an easy time of this. The one thing the church could count on was the deepset loyalty of people to the church and to the Pope. And the church found ways to get even the most recalcitrant and stubborn folk back in line. The point here is that the Catholic Church learned how to employ the sacramental system as a disciplinary tool to force people into conformity. But always, do not forget, based on the voluntary prior acceptance of the authority of the Pope, and with the goal of genuine obedience to God not merely to the church. The Pope is the Vicar of Christ, they believed, and so exercises the authority of God among us. That faith, taking shape during the Dark Ages, carried everyone in Europe until the time of the Protestant Reformation about AD 1500.

But now, all of this being said, there was yet another feature of the church's hold on the people that made the sacramental system so effective. It was otherworldliness. Protestants today can get along fine without the Catholic sacramental system, so just what was it that kept the people of the Middle Ages in the thrall of sacraments? The threat of going to hell if they disobeyed. The people of Europe were being held hostage to the church by the promise of heaven if they kept the sacraments, and the threat of hell if they did not. The priests and bishops of the church were the persons designated by God to dispense the grace of God, so that if a person did not receive the sacraments he did not receive God's grace and would therefore be consigned to eternal punishment in hell after he died.

Purgatory, a place of purging, was the belief that Christians who were less than perfect would need to undergo additional cleansing after they die and before they can enter heaven. The better a person you are in this life, the less time you will need to spend in purgatory. The worse a person you have been in this life, the longer you will spend in purgatory.

Of course the few people who did not believe this did not care one way or another what the priests did, but the general run of people during those centuries believed in the existence of heaven, purgatory, and hell and submitted to the church's control over their lives.

Chapter 16: CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION

We jump now into the last half of the Middle Ages, 1000 to 1500, which in general we can describe as the Renaissance. That term means rebirth, and it implies that the people of Europe were now taking what was valuable from past civilizations and using it in the construction of a new civilization. The most significant feature of this new civilization is that it was being constructed under the direct control and supervision of the Roman Catholic Church. For that reason this rebirth of civilization is called Christian civilization; it is the kind of culture that the converted barbarians of Europe designed and created, a cultural system that emerged out of the heart of the Christianized barbarian peoples.

Here is an interesting quotation from a book by Kenneth Clark, _Civilisation_ , published in 1969. "Three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthinkable under ordinary evolutionary conditions. One such time was about 3000 BC, when quite suddenly civilisation appeared, not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia but in the Indus Valley; another was in the late sixth century BC ... Another was round about the year 1100 ... In every branch of life – action, philosophy, organisation, technology – there was an extraordinary outpouring of energy, an intensification of existence. Popes, emperors, kings, bishops, saints, scholars, philosophers were all larger than life ...

"How had all this suddenly appeared in Western Europe? Of course there are many answers, but one is overwhelmingly more important that the others: the triumph of the Church. It could be argued that western civilisation was basically the creation of the Church, ... as the twelfth century thought of her, as a power – ecclesia – sitting like an empress."

Clark's point was that the great outburst of civilization that happened in Europe, beginning about AD 1100, and that is still continuing in western civilization, is a creation of the Roman Catholic Church. The work of the Christian Church in the conversion and disciplining of the barbarian tribes that destroyed the Roman Empire is now producing results, enabling these Christianized nations to reverse their efforts from destructive to constructive, from destroying the pagan civilization of Rome to reconstructing western civilization on an entirely new and Christian foundation.

Here we remind ourselves that this is exactly what God wants from his people, to construct a civilization that embodies his image. God created humans to be his images, and he expects them to do what he created them to do, replenish the earth and subdue it in such a way that glorifies God and embodies all the attributes of godliness. Previous civilizations did not do this, so now, for the very first time in history, a civilization is beginning that is based firmly on Christian foundations. We will not expect it to be perfect, but we will see genuine beginnings, a very real attempt to put into practice the Christian principles of freedom and responsibility and justice, as well as to channel all human potential into creative and positive ends.

ARCHITECTURE

Probably the most noticeable product of this period, at least for travelers today, are the numerous Gothic cathedrals found in many European cities. What is interesting is the fact that this is where the money went. In modern America the huge sums of money do not usually go to church buildings but to factories, athletic stadiums, hotels, and office buildings. Where the money goes shows to some extent where the heart is, what society values as important.

The famous Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was started in 1163 and this first phase of construction lasted till 1240. The tourist attraction, Cathedral of Rheims, was begun in 1218. Canterbury Cathedral, various dates: 1070, 1174, 1377. Chartres Cathedral: south tower completed in 1164; rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1194. The Vatican's Cathedral of St. Peter was begun in 1506 and completed in 1626.

We should understand that additions and modifications and rebuilding were constantly being done, so that any given cathedral would be the product of different periods of building. But many of these cathedrals go back to this great outburst of constructive energy by the formerly barbaric peoples of western Europe – all built without power equipment.

This was also the period of construction of castles. Europe is dotted with impressive castles, many of them built in this period of time, 1000 – 1500. Europe was producing great wealth, and much of it was being channeled into these huge establishments of political and ecclesiastical grandeur.

SCULPTURE

One of the prominent features of these medieval cathedrals and castles is the various sculptures that adorn the buildings. Statues of prominent people, intricate designs for doorways and arches – gifted sculptors were kept at work for years carving out these works of art, usually with Biblical or religious themes, but often statues of important persons. Some of the most intricate sculpting was done on reliquaries, ornate containers for relics of the saints.

Here are some of the names of famous artisans of sculpture from this period: Rossellino, Botticelli, Donatello, Ghiberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo. The vast majority of these works of art are religious, even Biblical, in nature.

ART

Not only sculpture, however, but also paintings, demonstrated great advances in the artistic world. We think of Michelangelo's painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, of the incredible beauty of illustrated Bible manuscripts, of the gorgeous paintings adorning the walls of cathedrals and palaces, much of it now in museums worldwide. Remember that these gifted artists were descendants of the cruel barbarians who overran the Roman Empire a half-millennium earlier. The Church has disciplined them to the point where they could now rechannel their efforts into beauty rather than arson and murder.

LITERATURE

Here we mention two of the medieval authors whose works are still studied extensively in modern times.

Dante (1265-1321) was an Italian poet. His greatest work, the epic poem _The Divine Comedy_ , is considered the greatest literary statement produced in medieval Europe. _The Divine Comedy_ describes Dante's journey through Hell ( _Inferno_ ), Purgatory ( _Purgatorio_ ), and Paradise ( _Paradiso_ ), guided first by the Roman epic poet Virgil and then by his beloved Beatrice.

Geoffrey Chaucer began writing _The Canterbury Tales_ sometime around 1387, and apparently they were published unfinished after his death in 1400. _The Canterbury Tales_ is a collection of stories written in Middle English. The tales (mostly written in verse) although some are in prose) are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. Chaucer uses the tales and the descriptions of its characters to paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time, and particularly of the Church.

THEOLOGY

There are many famous names here. Most influential, however, are two men, Anselm and Aquinas, both of whom have crafted theological doctrines that are still widely accepted today.

Anselm of Canterbury (1033 – 1109), was a Benedictine monk who held the office of  Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. He is famous as the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God. God is that than which no greater Being can be conceived. This is how he put it: "So true is it that there exists something than which a greater is inconceivable, that its non-existence is inconceivable: And this thing art Thou, O Lord our God!"

Anselm is also famous for his Satisfaction Theory of the Atonement, still the dominant theory today in Protestantism as well as in Catholicism. We sinners, Anselm argued, owe God perfect obedience, and since we cannot pay that price we need to pay the penalty. However, the justice of God requires more than we poor sinners can pay, so we all deserve the punishment of eternal hell. God knows that, so he sends his divine Son Jesus to pay the penalty of death on our behalf. Jesus thus satisfies God's demand for absolute obedience, and when we believe in him his obedience is transferred to us by faith and we can thus escape the punishment of hell. Here are his actual words: "If God only _can_ , and man only _ought_ to make this satisfaction, then necessarily One must make it who is both God and man."

Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) was an Italian Dominican priest and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian. The works for which he is best-known are the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles. As one of the 33 Doctors of the Church, he is considered the Church's greatest theologian and philosopher. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII stated that Thomas's theology was a definitive exposition of Catholic doctrine.

In his _Summa Theologica_ , Thomas asks the questions that are being considered by theologians, and he provides his own answers. His theological system is a dualistic system built upon the two aspects of reality, nature and grace. Nature is good but it does not enable us to serve God perfectly. For that we need something additional, namely grace. This is provided by the Church through the sacraments.

Aquinas' dualism carries over into all phases of life. Clergy represents the side of grace, laity represents the side of nature. Lay people can do all kinds of good things, but none of that is sufficient to get into heaven. There must be a _superadditum_ , something added, and this is what only the Catholic Church can provide. Nature is like a truncated pyramid, and grace is the upper point that makes the pyramid complete.

EDUCATION

There were few schools to speak of during the Dark Ages, only for privileged people. A flame of education was indeed kindled in England by Venerable Bede (673-735) and Alcuin of York (735-804). Charlemagne of France did make a valiant attempt to encourage education, but even priests in that day (c. 800) were semi-illiterate.

But during this second half of the Middle Ages (after 1200) all kinds of schools were started, some of them even for girls. Monastery schools, Cathedral schools, Court schools, Private schools, Guild schools, Municipal schools. In short order these schools developed into higher educational levels, universities, and charters for them were obtained from – where else? – the Pope. Furthermore, what is interesting is that in almost all of these schools the teachers were priests or monks; there were few others capable of teaching.

On the University level there were four major specialties: Arts, Law, Medicine, and Theology. Often a given university would specialize in one of these faculties (though Arts was the basic requirement for all). The University of Bologna specialized in Law, both civil law and canon law. Medicine was the specialty of the universities in Salerno and Montpellier. The University of Paris was known for its faculty of Theology.

It is worth noting the observation of Edward J. Power in his book, _Main Currents in the History of Education_ , p. 323, "The Church was considered to have the first right in education ... and the right to teach, then, was in the beginning granted by the Church to the university, or at least recognized by the Church when the right was granted by the emperor or some other civil authority."

SCIENCE

The natural sciences were having a very hard time in the religious climate of the Middle Ages. The theological and philosophical opinions of the church leaders did not allow much opportunity for men to experiment with new insights into the tangible world of nature.

Actually, the main impetus for scientific study did not come directly from the church or Christianity or the Pope. It came, of all things, from the rediscovery of the philosophy of Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher of c. 330 BC.

Here is how that worked. Aristotle's predecessor, Plato, taught that the most important part of reality was Idea, so that to know something meant to know the Ideas involved. Aristotle modified that philosophy by insisting that Ideas are only knowable in connection with Matter, so that to know something meant to know how Matter functioned.

You can see how that insight of Aristotle could produce a greater interest in physical science. Previously, church leaders were concerned mostly with Ideas, that is, with logic and rational theology, and it was very difficult for others to get permission to study scientific matters. Nonetheless, some real progress was made, though the real flowering of science did not come until, say, about 1500, the end of the medieval period.

For example, men who wanted to learn how the human body works often had to do it secretly, for the church would not allow a human body to be desecrated by being dissected. Still, real progress was being made to bring health issues out of the realm of witchcraft, sorcery, and sheer chicanery.

LAW

In those days there were two main kinds of law: Canon Law (Church Law) and Civil Law. The ecclesiastical establishment that was headed by the Pope was an extremely complex system by the time of the later Middle Ages. All kinds of rules and regulations were involved, and every new Pope would have new kinds of policies to put in place. It was all very complicated and it took specialists to keep it all straight. This was the study of Canon Law, and the University of Bologna in Italy was the main institution that taught these subjects.

Then, of course, there was civil law, different in the different countries. So there were schools, universities, specializing in these studies also.

GOVERNMENT

The system of government that emerged in western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire is known as feudalism. This is a hierarchical system patterned after the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, it is likely that this system evolved as a direct product of copying the ecclesiastical authority system of the Dark Ages.

We take note, for example, that the division between lords and serfs is the counterpart of the church's division between clergy and laity. And within the lords there are several grade levels, at the top the Holy Roman Emperor (a remnant of the original Roman Empire), kings of the various European countries, dukes, earls, counts, barons, knights, all of these counterparts to the church's hierarchy of Pope, Cardinal, Archbishop, Bishop, and Priest.

BUSINESS

Characteristic of the Middle Ages is the economic system dominated by various guilds. There would be a guild for every major part of the business world, specialists in various kinds of business skill.

EXPLORATION

As commerce developed across the Mediterranean Sea and along the rivers of Europe, there gradually came to be an interest in exploring the lands beyond Europe. Marco Polo, for example, made his famous 24-year trek to China beginning in 1269. Sailors explored the southern shores of Africa, the coasts of India, Greenland and across the Atlantic Ocean. All this was beginning already in the late Middle Ages.

MISSIONS

The emphasis during this half-century from 1000 to 1500 was not so much on the expansion of the church through the gospel mission to the non-Christian world, as on the consolidation of the mission successes of the past, gradually learning how to apply the teachings of the Lord Jesus in the burgeoning culture of Christian Europe.

CRUSADES

From time to time there were pilgrims from western Europe who wanted to visit the places where Jesus and the disciples lived. These territories were now under the control of Mohammedans, who usually made little trouble for these pilgrims. But occasionally stories would trickle back to Europe of molestation and various other difficulties when pilgrims sought to visit sacred sites in the holy land of Palestine. In 1071 Jerusalem was captured by the Seljuk Turks, who then changed policy toward the Christian pilgrims who were coming in large numbers, and the Turks violated the holy places and made pilgrimages difficult.

Plans were made in 1074 to send fifty thousand men under Henry IV of Germany, but it was not done. Not until 1096 did the first crusade occur, and then it was not soldiers but common ordinary peasants led by a few knights, who never did get anywhere near Jerusalem. But later in the next year three great armies set out from Belgium, France, and Italy. They captured Antioch in 1098 and a year later Jerusalem. The Crusaders set up a kingdom there which lasted about fifty years and then the Moslem armies once again gained control and set up conditions which triggered later Crusades. There were eight distinguishable Crusades, a few of which were moderately successful, but most of which were sad failures. In 1291 the last remnant of the Crusaders' kingdom was lost and the entire effort must be deemed a failure.

Today Moslem people, understandably, become incensed by the mere term "crusade," which brings to their mind these persistent attempts of European Christians to wrest back control of areas which had by that time become solidly Mohammedan. But, to keep it all in perspective, one must also continue to ask just how did the Moslems get control of these territories in the seventh century? By military force.

PERSPECTIVE

This sketch gives us an overall view of what the period of the later Middle Ages was like. Of course we do not get a feeling for what everyday life was like for young people growing up, the interplay of social and religious and political forces, or even of the deep-seated superstition of the times. And we will devote another complete chapter to the medieval struggle of the state versus the church. Yet it is of supreme importance for us to understand as clearly as we can just what is happening from the point of view of God.

God created the human race on this planet in such a way that humans will be able to exercise their unique abilities to fashion a godly civilization. God has been leading the human race, step by step, rung by rung, steadily in that direction, from the very beginnings of pre-history, through the ancient cultures of Israel, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Now Christian principles are working within the culture of western Europe. In time these principles must embrace the entire human race. We today in the twenty-first century are still a developing part of that story of divine guidance, and need to do our part responsibly and faithfully.

Chapter 17: THE CHURCH-STATE CONFLICT

This story is so important a part of the later Middle Ages as to require a complete chapter to sketch it out. It was essentially a power struggle. Who would have the final say in how a certain country would be run, or how the churches in that country would be run? We today have a non-interference policy, such that churches do not run politics, and the government does not run the churches. But this was not at all the case in the Middle Ages.

There were at least two major factors in this struggle. Who would be responsible for choosing the bishop of Rome (Pope)? And who would be responsible for appointing bishops in the various countries of Europe? These are questions of investiture, who has the authority of investing men into church office? Understand that bishops exercised a great deal of power in political affairs because the church owned huge areas of the country, and this is why kings wanted the authority to appoint them.

Often whenever the bishop of Rome would die, the leading nobles of Rome would compete with one another for the right to appoint the next one. The noble who succeeded would, as often as not, appoint a friend, someone even who was unqualified, just so he could exercise control over the wealth and policies of the church in Rome. So in the Middle Ages there were various attempts to set up a reliable system for choosing the Pope, but the competing nobles of Italy often found a way to get their man elected.

For a while conditions were really bad; from 897 to 955 seventeen different men occupied the papal throne. As often as not these bishops of Rome were political appointees, some even the result of actual military warfare against the forces of the reigning Pope and his allies. There are several stories to tell that demonstrate just how this conflict between Popes and Kings played out in the later Middle Ages.

POPE GREGORY VII (HILDEBRAND) AND KING HENRY IV OF GERMANY

A churchman named Hildebrand became Pope in 1073 under somewhat irregular circumstances and took the title of Gregory VII. Henry IV was a king in Germany who had authority also in some areas of northern Italy. When the Archbishopric of Milan fell vacant in 1075, Henry appointed a successor. Hildebrand objected severely. The issue was investiture – who has the authority to appoint bishops? Henry denounced Hildebrand as a false Pope and rejected his authority. Hildebrand retaliated by excommunicating Henry, terminating Henry's authority in Germany and in Italy, and released all Henry's subjects from the necessity of obeying him.

So who would win? It depended on the people. If the people supported their king as against their Pope, Henry would win. If the people supported the Pope as against their king, Hildebrand would win. The nobles in Germany supported the Pope, meaning that Henry was in danger of losing his throne. In order to keep the throne he had to remove his excommunication. So he met the Pope at a castle high in the Alps, in Canossa, Italy. The Pope was on his way to an assembly in Augsburg where the king would be officially dethroned. At Canossa the king came as a penitent, appearing three days in a row barefooted in the snow, asking for absolution. So the Pope had to give in, and granted absolution on January 28, 1077.

Henry kept his throne, and in that sense he won. But the picture of the king standing before the Pope, barefoot in the snow, remained in the mind of many people a picture of the tremendous authority that the Pope had.

POPE INNOCENT III AND KING JOHN OF ENGLAND

When the Archbishopric of Canterbury fell vacant, King John secured the election of a friend of his to the position. Pope Innocent III objected and appointed someone else. Again the issue was investiture, who appoints church officials? King John refused to accept this appointment. Innocent retaliated in 1208 by placing the whole country of England under an Interdict. This meant that the regular services of the church, including the sacraments, were cancelled. King John retaliated by driving out of the country those churchmen who supported the Pope. In 1209 Pope Innocent then excommunicated King John and in 1212 deposed him from being king.

The nobility of England sided with the Pope and against their unpopular king. In 1213 King John had to surrender in order to keep his throne and to remove the excommunication and the Interdict. In his submission the king had to acknowledge that England was now a fief of the papacy, meaning the Pope was the feudal lord over all of England, and England had to pay an annual tax to the Pope of a thousand marks.

Here is part of King John's concession. After acknowledging his sin of "offending God and our mother the holy Church in many things," King John went on to say, "we, willing to humble ourselves ... under no compulsion of force or fear ... offer and freely grant to God and His holy apostles Peter and Paul, and the holy Roman Church, our mother, and to our lord the Pope Innocent and his catholic successors, the whole realm of England and the whole realm of Ireland with all their rights and appurtenances ...; and from now receiving back and holding these, as a feudal dependant ... do and swear fealty for them to the aforesaid our lord the Pope Innocent and his catholic successors and the Roman church."

England retained this vassal status for three hundred years, paying the feudal tax of "1000 marks sterling each year," until the time of King Henry VIII in 1534. Clearly the papacy was at the very height of its power during the papacy of Innocent III, for he exercised comparable authority in many other countries of Europe.

POPE BONIFACE VIII AND KING PHILIP IV OF FRANCE

There was a war between France and England. Both countries tried to raise funds for the war by imposing a tax on the clergy, who possessed huge wealth. In 1296 Pope Boniface VIII issued a proclamation that anyone who demanded taxation from church property, without papal permission, would be excommunicated. The French king, Philip IV, retaliated by forbidding the export of all funds from France. This meant that the Pope would receive no revenue whatever from France. Under pressure from Italian bankers, the Pope relented, and thus King Philip secured a royal victory.

But in 1301 the struggle between Pope and King began again. The Pope sent a bishop to the king with the Pope's demands, but the king had him arrested and charged with treason. Pope Boniface VIII ordered him released, and summoned King Philip IV to Rome. The king, however, convened the first French States-General, in which clergy, nobles, and commoners were represented, to adjudicate the issue. This body sustained the king, whereupon Pope Boniface VIII issued one of the most famous bulls (proclamations) ever issued by any Pope. It is known as _Unam Sanctam_ , which means One Holy, and in it the Pope declared "that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human being to be subject to the Roman pontiff." Pope Boniface VIII also affirmed that all temporal powers (governments) are subject to the spiritual authority designated by God, namely the Pope. He affirmed that there are "two swords," the sword of the church and the sword of the government, and claimed that God gave both of them to the Pope. Pope Boniface VIII was claiming that the Pope was the ruler not only of the church but also of the state, all churches, all governments.

Philip IV was in no mood to accept any of that, and so he gathered an army, marched against the Pope, arrested him in Anagni just before the Pope actually excommunicated the king. Boniface VIII would not concede anything and his friends did secure his release; but he died a month later in 1303. What was happening was that the sentiment of people in general was shifting away from supporting the Pope to supporting their King. Boniface VIII put forth grandiose ideas of papal authority, but was unable to put them into actual practice.

KING PHILIP IV OF FRANCE AND AVIGNON

In 1305 a Frenchman was elected as the new Pope. The French king, Philip IV, persuaded the new Pope to cancel Boniface's bull _Unam Sanctam,_ and then in 1309 to move his residence from Rome to an independent city on the border of France, Avignon. This is where the Popes lived until 1377, and this period of time has come to be known as the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy.

In 1377 Pope Gregory XI transferred the papacy back to Rome, but he died the next year. The cardinals met in Rome to elect a new Pope, who took the name of Urban VI. But four months later this same body, disillusioned by Urban, met again, deposed Urban and elected a new Pope who took the name of Clement VII. But when Urban refused to resign, Clement settled in Avignon again. So now there were two Popes, each elected by the same body of cardinals, one in Rome, the other in Avignon. Each of them also received the allegiance of about half of the churches of Europe.

In 1409 a great church Council met in Pisa to settle the issue of two Popes. They decided to depose both of the existing Popes, and then proceeded to elect a new one. This new Pope took the title of Alexander V. Unfortunately, however, neither of the original two Popes was willing to recognize the authority of the Council of Pisa and both refused to relinquish his office. So now there were three Popes, each of them retaining significant support in various parts of Europe: Urban VI in Rome, Clement VIII in Avignon, and Alexander V in Pisa. All of them could claim to have been elected by legitimate authority.

Finally, in 1417 another Council met in Constance. This Council made a momentous decision, that this Council "has its power immediately from Christ, and every one, whatever his position or rank, even if it be the papal dignity itself, is bound to obey it." The Council was thus transferring final authority from the Pope to the Council. After considerable careful planning the great schism ended when a new Pope was elected, who took the name MartinV and returned the papacy to Rome.

The net effect, however, of all this confusion in the papacy was to end forever any pretense that the Pope was supreme even over the political leaders of Europe. Never again did the papacy exercise the power that Gregory VII and Innocent III wielded in Europe.

PERSPECTIVE

The previous chapter sketched out the positive valuable things that were going on in the later Middle Ages. Civilization was being reborn out of the ruins of the ancient Roman Empire. The Catholic Church, having succeeded brilliantly in the first phase of Christ's instruction to disciple the nations, that is baptizing them, was now entering into the second phase, teaching them to obey everything God requires. We must not fail to see this most important development.

This present chapter, however, shows us another side to the times, the negative side. While a very important and necessary step was being taken in Western history in the renascence of civilization, there were also severe and serious deficiencies yet for the future to confront. Ideally there ought to be no conflict between religion and politics, so that in the ideal political situation everyone would receive perfect justice, live in honesty and trust, and practice their religious rites in full cooperation and respect from everyone else. Life and civilization should proceed without jealousy, greed, selfishness, abuse of power, or suppression of enemies.

It is not hard to see that, while magnificent improvements were being made in the cultural side of western civilization, there were disastrous shortcomings in the bickering and hate and struggle that kept the Church and State at odds with one another; not to speak of the internal depravity that often swept the highest offices of the Church and of the State.

Chapter 18: REFORM MOVEMENTS

One of the most important tests of faith is what effect it has on people. What kind of people do they become? Jesus said, "By their fruits you will know them." The Apostle James wrote that faith without works is dead. The Apostle Paul insisted over and over that to be a Christian means to rise with Jesus out of the mire of sin into the life of righteousness. So we need to look farther than merely at their theology or their church organization, past all that to discover how the gospel is being worked out in their personal life, in their church life, but also in their community and national life.

In the preceding two chapters we have seen two aspects of how Christian faith carried over into the life of Europe: a wonderful burgeoning civilization, and an inconclusive struggle between church and state. One may be applauded, the other regretted. But there it is, and Christianity had to work its way through all of that in order to get where we are today. And we today have our own strengths and weaknesses that coming generations of Christians will have to work their way through.

From time to time throughout the history of the church there were people who tried hard to correct wrong conditions in the church. In fact there are always such people around, but as often as not they find themselves close to powerless to do anything about institutionalized wrongdoing. What could anyone do about a Pope who was put into office by the most powerful noble in Rome? What could anyone do about a King who despised the principles of justice and truth and integrity? Oppose such people and the likelihood, in the Middle Ages, was that you would be accused, arrested, tried, and executed the next day. The Middle Ages did not tolerate dissent and had little room for out-of-office do-gooders.

Still, there were some notable attempts from time to time in calling the church and its officials back to the simple truth and integrity of the gospel. We will look at several of them in this chapter.

  1. IN THE ANCIENT CHURCH

MONASTICISM

One of the oldest forms of protest and reform was simple withdrawal. In church history this took the form of various kinds of monasticism, getting as far away the ordinary business of life and from priests and lords and Kings and Popes as one could, and setting up private conditions of pure worship and obedience. Men or women would judge that society was so corrupt that one had to leave it altogether in order to attain the perfection of faith that God desires.

Anthony was a rich young man in central Egypt who was impressed with Jesus' command to another rich young man to sell all his possessions and follow him. Anthony decided to do that and about AD 285 became a hermit, living absolutely alone. Eventually dozens and hundreds of others followed his example in Egypt, some of these choosing to live in small groups. Then, about 315 a man named Pachomius started the first Christian monastery in southern Egypt. The monks who joined had assigned work to do, regular hours of worship, similar dress, and cells to live in – all under the direction of an abbott. By 346, when Pachomius died, there were ten such monasteries in Egypt.

One man became famous for living the hermit lifestyle on top of a pole for thirty years: Simeon Stylites, east of Antioch in Syria, until he died in 459.

In the western part of the church similar developments took place, but there was little or no organization, and in some places conditions in monasteries became very lax. Then in 529 a monk named Benedict started a new monastery at Monte Cassino north of Rome, and wrote a very detailed and rigorous Rule for it. Nobody could become a monk except after a year's probation, but once the vow was taken it could not be revoked. Absolute obedience to the abbott, four hours of manual labor, assigned hours for reading, prayer, worship – all of this was prescribed and rigorously enforced.

As the centuries passed, this _Benedictine Rule_ became the dominant form of monasticism throughout Europe. From the Benedictine monasteries came missionaries and some of the very best and ablest persons in the church of the times. They became centers of learning with extensive libraries, as well as havens of refuge for distressed persons.

We today might properly criticize the entire monastic movement as undercutting God's command to replenish the earth and subdue it, but nonetheless it did serve a very useful and important purpose in seeking to maintain a genuine sense of worship and devotion to God in a rather wild and undisciplined culture.

SCHISMS

Another evidence of great dissatisfaction is schism. People who become severely unhappy with conditions in the church sometimes resort to the form of withdrawal that results in the establishment of a parallel church organization, or in modern terminology, a new denomination.

Two of the earliest schisms happened after the two most severe persecutions in the Roman Empire, that of Decius in 250, and of Diocletian after 290. In both cases there was a problem concerning church leaders who lapsed during persecution but who wanted to be reinstated after persecution ceased. Some of the people who had suffered severely but who had maintained their Christian commitment were unwilling to restore the lapsed, at least not if he was a priest or bishop.

In 251 Novatian, a capable bishop who was being considered for election as bishop of Rome, was bypassed because he opposed easy restoration of the lapsed. He took the minority of people who supported him and started a new church, known at the Novatian Schism. This denomination lasted, mostly in North Africa, until the Mohammedan invasions destroyed it.

Some years after persecution ceased in 313, a dispute arose in Carthage, North Africa. The new bishop of Carthage was ordained by another bishop who had lapsed during persecution, and many people opposed him for that reason, holding that his ordination was invalid. So in 316 Donatus was elected bishop of Carthage; but he was very strict against those who had lapsed. When the church councils rejected the strict point of view, Donatus led his followers into schism. And again this separation lasted until the Mohammedans conquered the land.

We should mention also that Christianity in Egypt, once one of the strongest centers of Christian faith, did not disappear entirely under Mohammedan rule, as it did in many other places. Still today there is a faithful church in Egypt, known as the Coptic Church, numbering by one estimate about eight million persons.

The date that is often associated with the split between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church is 1054. This date obviously is not in the ancient period, but the very real causes for the split were a gradual growth over the centuries going back to the ancient rivalry between the various Patriarchs – Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, Rome. No one Patriarch was able to impose his will on the entire church, and there were considerable differences among them, especially in theology and sometimes in church practices.

When the Moslem conquests were finished, the churches in Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria were gone. This left the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Rome, and while there continued to be mutual respect and cooperation there was also a growing sense of difference. They spoke different languages, for example, Latin in Rome, Greek in Constantinople. The west had the Apostles' Creed, and the east had the Nicene Creed. They generally followed different forms of worship in their church services.

Then when the Roman Empire collapsed in the west, but survived in the east, the task of the two branches of the church changed radically. The Bishop of Rome had to supervise the discipline of the barbarian invaders, whereas the Bishop of Constantinople had to work harmoniously with the Roman Emperors who lived there. So that orientation made great differences in time between the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches.

Without going into detail for the reasons, in 1054 the Pope excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, whereupon the Patriarch returned the favor by excommunicating the Pope's delegates. Since that time the two branches of ancient Christianity have gone their own way.

All Christian churches that embrace the Apostles' Creed confess that they believe in "one holy catholic church." Obviously this cannot mean the organizations we call churches.

B. IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

As might be expected there were always people who were unhappy with conditions in society and in the church. They could see shortcomings all around them and some people had the courage to try to correct them. There were good priests and bishops who tried hard to remedy the flaws that put political appointees into church office. And there were occasional good kings and nobles who tried to improve justice in the feudal system of the Middle Ages. But perhaps the most effective force for reform and integrity came, surprisingly, from the various kinds of monastic movements that seemed to proliferate in this period of time, 1000 to 1500.

We today in the twenty-first century might wonder why so many men and women, thousands and thousands, opted to become monks or nuns, forsaking entirely the normal home and business of regular living. They were attempting, in their own way, to live out their genuine Christian commitment, thinking the way of withdrawal from regular society was the best means of doing this. We today might well think the opposite, that the way to serve the Lord best is to do what one can to live honestly and productively in a vibrant Christian culture. But the peoples of Europe in those centuries were just emerging out of abject barbarism with all its violence, suspicion, rivalry, selfishness, dishonesty, and injustice. It takes a long long time for the power of the Holy Spirit to shape the character of entire nations.

The social order of feudalism may have been one step out of that condition, but it simply took centuries for people to really absorb the Christian faith and to make it part of their national consciousness and character. So the monastic movement was one way in which these peoples of Europe tried to keep their Christian priorities intact and functional. Unfortunately, some of these monastic movments, begun in all sincerity and faithfulness, slowly succumbed to the same temptations of wealth and power that were common in ordinary church life.

CLUNY MONASTERY

Founded in 910, the monastery at Cluny in eastern France was destined to become a very powerful force for reform. It functioned with the _Benedictine Order_ , applied very strictly. As such its reputation grew rapidly and many other monasteries were started under its auspices, until its influence in France and Italy did much in the eleventh century to promote integrity and morality not only in the monasteries but also in the priesthood. Two practices they opposed strenuously were simony, the purchase of church office by bribery, and Nicolaitanism, violating clerical celibacy.

CISTERCIANS

This was a monastic order that dominated the twelfth century as Cluny had dominated the eleventh. This movement began as a monastery in Citeaux, France whose purpose was to cultivate a strong ascetic life at the simplest level possible. It too followed the _Benedictine Rule_ , interpreted and enforced very strictly. Numerous other monasteries were founded under its auspices, extensions so to speak, until by 1168 there were 278 of them, and a century later as many as 671. The abbott of Citeaux exercised authority over all of these satellite monasteries scattered throughout Europe.

In 1115 one of the Cistercian monks in Citeaux led a group of likeminded monks to begin a new monastery in Clairvaux. This was the man known in church history as Bernard of Clairvaux, who became one of the greatest saints of the age. Bernard was a man of genuine piety whose example inspired countless others. He became a great preacher, one of the best of his age. But he was also a man of action, not confined to the limits of his own monastery. He was influential, for example, in healing the Great Schism when there were three competing Popes. Actually also one of his monks from the Clairvaux monastery was eventually elected a Pope, taking the name Eugene III. Bernard died in 1152, widely mourned throughout Europe.

TEMPLARS AND HOSPITALLERS

There were two military orders that rose from the Crusaders in Palestine, requiring very strict allegiance to the monastic rules of the order. The Templars began in 1119, and took that name because they were given quarters near the temple in Jerusalem. Their pledge was to defend the Holy Land and to protect pilgrims. When the Crusades ended and the members returned to Europe, they often became great landowners and a great thorn in the flesh to the kings and bishops.

The Hospitallers began about the same time as the Templars, but their monastic vows included maintaining the hospital in Jerusalem, which was destroyed in 1010 and then rebuilt. These men were also known as the Knights of St. John, from the fact that their hospital was near the church of St. John the Baptist in Jerusalem.

DOMINICANS

Dominic was a Spaniard who decided that he would follow the example of the Apostle Paul and go about preaching the gospel. In 1216 he obtained papal approval of a new preaching order of monks. The movement attracted many capable men who in short order became known as Dominicans and who were fluent and persuasive preachers. Dominic sent them, following Paul's example, to all the leading cities of Europe. His goal was to influence the universities and the students who would become the future leaders of the church and society. The most famous of these Dominican monks was Thomas Aquinas, whose theology later was designated the official theology of the Roman Catholic Church.

FRANCISCANS

Francis was an Italian who was a disappointment to his merchant father (he sold his father's cloth and donated the money to rebuild a church). The time came when he too heard Jesus' command to the rich young ruler to sell all and follow him. From then on (1209) he would preach repentance, wear only the plainest clothing, and eat whatever people might give him. Together with a dozen companions he applied to Pope Innocent III for approval to preach the gospel. He gave the group the name Minor Brethren, but in time they were known as Franciscans. Two by two they went about preaching repentance, singing much, aiding the peasants in their work, caring for the sick and outcasts.

By 1221 the movement became a full-fledged monastic movement, well-organized. Then they shifted their emphasis away from preaching to deeds of mercy, leaving the preaching part of the gospel to the Dominicans. Francis himself was declared a saint in 1228, two years after he died, and St. Francis of Assissi is still regarded by many as the greatest saint of the Middle Ages. In England the Dominicans were known as the Black Friars, and the Franciscans as the Grey Friars.

CATHARI

There was a very large breakaway from the Roman Catholic Church right about this time, say around 1200. They were very numerous in southern France, northern Italy, and northern Spain. They were dualists, believing that God had two sons, one good and one bad. Christ was the good son, Satan was the bad son. So everything that happens in the world shows the conflict between these two sons of God, the conflict between good and evil always and everywhere. The tangible world is the product of the evil powers, and the soul is the product of the good powers. Humans are composed of a good part, the soul, and an evil part, the body, such that to have children is an evil thing because it increases the number of prison-houses of the soul. Thousands and thousands of common folk gave allegiance to this movement.

These people were known as the Cathari, a term meaning pure or cleansed, or Albigenses, after a city in southern France where they were strong. They were a threat to the Roman Catholic Church and they were supported by the leading nobles in southern France. Eventually, when missionary efforts to bring them back to the Catholic faith were unsuccessful, the Pope and the King of France joined in what is known as the Albigensian Crusade to destroy the movement by sheer military force, a war lasting twenty years from 1209 to 1229. Incidentally, the Pope at the time was the same one who humbled King John of England, Innocent III.

It is clear enough that the Cathari people, while considering themselves Christians, were certainly not theologically correct. Still, the very fact that so many thousands of people opted for this movement shows that there was widespread dissatisfaction with the way the Roman Catholic Church was controlling life. Unhappy with the various faults they could see, they opted out from under that church's discipline altogether, though what they chose could hardly be considered an improvement.

WALDENSES

Waldo was a rich merchant of Lyons, France, who sold all his property, provided for his wife and children, and gave the rest away. He determined to live simply, depending entirely on what others might give to him. Others joined him and in 1177 they began preaching repentance, using the Bible as a law book giving rules about how Christians should live. When the church forbade them to preach, they continued anyway, and in 1184 they were excommunicated. So this was going on at the same time as the Cathari. Efforts of the Roman Catholic Church to suppress them were partially successful, but a group of them was able to continue in Switzerland, where the Waldenses exist as Protestants to this day.

JOHN WYCLIF

John Wyclif was a prominent professor at the University of Oxford in England. As his influence grew he began to criticize the extreme wealth of the priests and bishops, and to oppose the interference of the Pope in political affairs. This would be about 1376, long after King John ceded the country to the Pope as a fief. Wyclif was supported by many of the nobles of England who had their eyes on the abundant wealth of the clergy, and who protected him from the Archbishop of Canterbury who attempted to arrest him.

Wyclif was constantly writing pamphlets and books, and then in 1382 began supervising the translation of the Latin Bible into English. He sent out men, two by two, known as "poor priests" or Lollards, to bring the scriptures and the gospel throughout England. They were immensely successful until Wyclif began attacking the popular doctrine of transubstantiation. People began to turn away from him for this, and the church succeeded in getting him released from his professorship. But he did die a natural death on the last day of 1384. His movement, the Lollards, soon died out, though many of his ideas kept having influence in England and elsewhere.

JOHN HUSS

John Huss was a famous professor and preacher in Prague (Bohemia) who considered himself a disciple of John Wyclif of England. This was during the time of the Great Schism, when there were three Popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon, and then another one in Pisa (c. 1410). Huss became involved in this ecclesiastical dispute which had political implications in Bohemia as well. He taught much the same message as Wyclif, except not the transubstantiation attack.

You will recall that the problem of three Popes was settled finally at the Council of Constance in 1415 (the Council met from 1414 to 1418). One of the other things happening at this Council was that John Huss, whose teachings had been condemned two years earlier, was summoned for examination. He was promised a "safe-conduct," that is, guaranteed safety in the trip. However when he arrived he was arrested, imprisoned, and after examination, condemned and burned at the stake. The Council also ordered that the bones of John Wyclif be exhumed and burned.

The followers of John Huss developed great disagreements among themselves, and many of them returned to the Roman Catholic Church, though some eventually became known as Moravians and became Protestants when that movement started a century later.

DISCIPLINARY TACTICS

Roman Catholic discipline in the Late Middle Ages took two forms: positive and negative. Positive discipline is that which is designed to build up and strengthen the internal faith and commitment of Christian people. Negative discipline is that which is designed to inhibit and destroy beliefs and practices that the church considers wrong.

The entire sacramental system as sketched in an earlier chapter is the major effort of the church to inculcate positive discipline of the spirit. But also, in the Middle Ages, as a deterrrent to the various heresies and schisms that occurred, the church invented several tools of negative discipline: Excommunication, Interdict, Index, and Inquisition.

_Excommunication_ means being put out of the church. In the Middle Ages this was much more serious than it is today, because to be out of the church carried with it the prospect of being out of heaven. Most of the people of the time took this seriously, but occasionally there would be a person who did not care, not believing what the church said about it anyway. Nonetheless, if a prince or a king would be excommunicated, his subjects could be very worried.

_Interdict_ meant prohibiting certain specified religious services from being done, putting an entire country or region under this disciplinary procedure. For example if all the sacraments were prohibited, no one could get married, the Last Rites could not be administered to the dying, sins could not be forgiven, children could not be baptized. This was rarely done, but when it was, it was very effective.

_Index_ meant that only approved books could be copied, printed, or read. This procedure came into importance after the printing press was invented, but even before that this disciplinary tool could keep certain books or pamphlets from being copied and distributed. So it was a sin to be found reading any document that did not have the approval of the church.

_Inquisition_. This was an ecclesiastical court of law whose task it was to arrest, try, and sentence any person thought to be teaching things contrary to the church's official stance. Its proceedings were secret, and the names of the accusers were never given to the accused. If convicted, a person's property could be confiscated. This tool was begun in 1229 and used extensively against the Cathari. Later, in 1480 King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella revived the Inquisition in Spain, where it was used fearfully against Mohammedans and Jews, as well as Christian heretics. The term Spanish Inquisition has ever since been a term of opprobrium.

Chapter 19: PERSPECTIVE ON THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH ERA

All of the above features of church history from 1000 to 1500 are, cumulatively, strong evidence that the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church, that is, its sacramental system, was having powerful effect in molding and shaping the character of European people. However, what many people saw as they internalized the power of the Holy Spirit was how much more needed to be done on the road to spiritual integrity in society and in church. The fact that they protested or left or worked for reform, all of that came from hearts that had been shaped meaningfully by the gospel, precisely by what was delivered to them via the Roman Catholic Church. There would not have been these protest developments had the church been unsuccessful entirely.

So what we need to see in this turbulent time is not only the shortcomings and failures of the papal hierarchy which, though real enough, elicited these calls for reform. We need to see even more clearly that the gospel had indeed penetrated into the heart of the European nations in such a way that they were beginning to see all kinds of ways in which Christian progress could and should be made.

The situation could be compared somewhat to what happens in the development of a child out of infancy. So many things to be learned, so many false avenues explored, so much of learning the hard way, but nonetheless through all of it a genuine growth and maturing sense of personal worth and responsibility. The church in this barbarian culture was just beginning to emerge out of its infancy and by trial and error finding its way through the vicissitudes of Christian living, not only individually and ecclesiastically, but also communally and politically. Protestants are often guilty of seeing only the deficiencies of the church in this chaotic period, shortcomings of Popes and Kings crying out for major reform, but we ought not miss the work of the Lord in enabling even this stage of Christian growth in the nations who had been barbarians just a half-millennium earlier.

If we want to maintain a theistic point of view, we need to be asking, What is God doing during this strange period from 500 to 1500? The study of church history, of course, necessarily looks at what is actually happening in the churches and in the civilization of the times, but when all of this is duly examined the question still remains, Does God have a purpose in all of these events, and if so, what is it?

Our answer must always be consistent with the original purpose of God as Genesis defines it. God wants from the human race a vigorous and successful effort to utilize the forces of nature in such a way as to reflect his own goodness and holiness. Genesis presents these two factors as the image of God and the cultural mandate. We humans are created to be God's image in this world, and we must learn to live that way within the actual work of understanding and developing the world's resources. All of this means to create a godly civilization. That's what God wants, and it is what he is actually achieving in our history.

We may recognize that there is still a very long way for the human race to go before it fulfills God's purpose. Think of the entire human race, of whatever nationality or religion or current state of civilization. Think of the entire human race actually being what God wants it to be. That is the meaning of history, and it is the overview of what we must see also in the era we call the Middle Ages, the era of Roman Catholic domination in Europe. This era is one step in an ongoing process pointing in the direction of what Genesis shows us about God's intention.

Perhaps the most decisive insight we can recognize here is the fact that all the barbarian nations of Europe voluntarily placed themselves under the religious supervision of the bishop of Rome, the Pope. Contrast this with the way the Roman Empire had acquired control over the various nations that constituted its empire: involuntary military conquest.

Secondly, we should recognize that the Roman Church developed a very effective method of religious control, the sacramental system, and that this system was the main reason why the destructive efforts of the earlier barbarians was transformed into the constructive efforts of the Renaissance nations of Europe. Criticize it as we might from a modern point of view, for the actual times the Roman Church was eminently successful in this effort to get the gospel, the Holy Spirit, rooted in the character of the peoples of Europe.

Only after we see this development as a major step in God's plan for the world may we then take another look at the times and try to analyze what still needs to be done, that is, in what ways the work of the church could be improved. So we have noted the church-state conditions that needed to be sorted out as time passed, as well as some other features of the medieval culture that invited abuse and error. And we have noted some of the efforts of various people and groups to show the way to more faithful and obedient lives of Christian discipleship.

So we must constantly be trying our best to see how God is actually working out his purpose for the human race in the developments of time and culture, in history. And this means recognizing that we today are still in that process and that there is still a very long way for the church to go before the entire human race is at the point where God wants it to be. The goal of Christianity is the sanctification of the entire human civilization, everywhere. Each of us as Christians is involved in this process and is called by the Creator to do his or her little bit toward that goal.

PART THREE: The Protestant Era

If we take the year 1500 as a round number we can see another burst of progress taking place right about that time. We all know about Christopher Columbus whose daring trek to find India by going west took him to what we now know as Central America, part of a process that opened up the entire globe to travel and commerce. That was in 1492. About fifty years earlier Gutenberg invented a new way of making books, with movable type, the printing press, an invention that revolutionized communication and opened up the process that is still going on in developments such as computers and ebooks today. In the study of medicine the circulation of the blood was not understood until 1553 when first published by Michael Servetus, and not confirmed until Harvey in 1628.

In 1453 Constantinople was attacked and captured by the Mohammedan Turks, putting an end to the eastern Roman Empire and Byzantine civilization. But in the meantime a greater freedom of spirit was occurring in Italy, due partly to the removal of the papacy from Rome to Avignon and the absence of any broader political force than the city-states of Italy, a freedom that expressed itself in another great outburst of art, sculpture, architecture.

This book is using the term Renaissance to include the entire process of the renewal of civilization beginning in 1100, but the term is sometimes used in a narrower sense, the Italian Renaissance, concentrating largely on the amazing development of art in and around 1500 in Italy. This was the time of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Raphael (1483-1520), and Michelangelo (1475-1564), as well as numerous famous names in sculpture and in architecture.

What happened then was that many bishops and Popes became patrons of the arts, sponsoring great cathedrals and castles, filling them with priceless works of art and sculpture. It may seem to us that these church leaders were more interested in the promotion of artistic beauty than in the spiritual welfare of people. And of course all of that required money, huge sums to build the cathedrals and subsidize the artists. And all of that money came in one way or another from church members or from the church taxes levied on the nobles and on the church-owned lands (which were very extensive in Italy at this time).

There was another important spirit developing hand-in-hand with the Renaissance in many of the universities of Europe, that of humanism. In art, for example, it would be seen in scenes that depict human life without any religious overtones, rather than scenes taken from the Bible.

Humanism is the attitude of developing the potentials of human existence without taking religion into consideration. But this would be almost impossible for the people of the Middle Ages, since the Christian faith was so thoroughly involved in all of life. What humanism meant therefore at this time was not the paganism of the ancient world, or atheism, but the development of human potential independent of the church's control. Independent of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. We might call it Christian Humanism.

The most famous humanist name here is Erasmus, a Dutchman who could poke fun at the church while maintaining his own membership in it. He could write a book, _In Praise of Folly_ (1509), while still keeping his ordination as a priest. One of his most important contributions was the preparation of the Greek New Testament (1516), which enabled scholars to move back from the Latin Vulgate to the original language of the New Testament.

All of this was going on when God was raising up an obscure monk in faraway Germany to make his naive personal way through the mysterious workings of the Roman Catholic system. This was Martin Luther (1483-1546), destined to become the unwitting leader of an enormous division in the Christian Church: Protestantism.

Chapter 20: THE REFORMATION

MARTIN LUTHER

Martin was the son of a peasant German miner who had great ambitions for his son, and who enabled his son to study in various schools in the area. Martin entered the University of Erfurt at the age of 18 and graduated in 1505 with a Master of Arts degree. Concerned mightily for his soul's salvation, he then decided not to study Law as planned but to become a monk. Two years later, as an Augustinian monk he was ordained to the priesthood. He then studied theology and earned his Th. D. in 1512 at the University of Wittenberg, and was promptly appointed a professor of theology there.

The strange thing, however, was that although Luther took everything he did with the greatest seriousness and faith in God, it did not produce the peace of soul that he knew he should have. He felt always the enormity of his own sinfulness, but could not discover the secret of forgiveness. No matter how hard he tried, how seriously he took the sacraments, how faithfully he executed his office, how much he prayed and chastised himself, none of it gave him inner serenity and peace with God.

In time, as he was lecturing on Paul's letter to the Romans, he came to understand that the Roman Catholic system of sacraments simply was not working. It did not give him the grace that was promised. Something was lacking.

So it was when he realized that a person becomes right with God simply by trusting in Jesus for forgiveness, and that all his efforts to gain that forgiveness by way of sacraments was unproductive, that Luther understood the Roman Catholic system was simply wrong. Luther understood that there was nothing wrong with the way he practiced his faith, but that there was an inherent insufficiency in the system itself. Luther saw that salvation and peace of soul comes not by faithful exercise of the sacraments but simply by faith in the Lord Jesus, not by works but by faith. Through the eyes of Paul, who vigorously disparaged routine works of the Law, Luther came to see the simplicity of genuine faith and trust. Interestingly, it was precisely because the sacraments were as effective as they were in making Luther a Christian, that he was able to sense the inherent limitations of the system.

Pope Leo X had no idea yet who Martin Luther was because he was busy with his own project, raising money to build the lavish church of St. Peter in Rome. In return for appointing a friend to hold the title of archbishop in three different districts at the same time, the Pope received a handsome gift of money for his project. Then he helped this person regain some of these funds by sending a priest around to sell indulgences. An indulgence is a document saying that a certain amount of time in purgatory will be canceled. People could buy these indulgences for themselves, for a loved one, or even for someone who has died.

This priest, named Tetzel, announced that "as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs." Luther was horrified. He began preaching against this abuse and then wrote one of the most famous documents in the history of the church, _The Ninety-five Theses_. These were 95 items presented for debate. On October 31, 1517 Luther simply tacked them on the church door in Wittenberg, challenging anyone who disagreed to a public debate. Here is a sampling of these theses.

"6. The pope has no power to remit guilt, save by declaring and confirming that it has been remitted by God; or, to be sure, by remitting the cases reserved to himself. If he neglects to observe these limitations the guilt would remain.

"27. Those who assert that a soul straitway flies out of purgatory as a coin tinkles in the collection-box, are preaching an invention of man.

"28. It is sure that when a coin tinkles greed and avarice are increased; but the intercession of the Church is in the will of God alone.

"32. Those who think themselves sure of salvation through their letters of pardon will be damned forever along with their teachers.

"36. Every Christian who is truly contrite has plenary remission both of penance and of guilt as his due, even without a letter of pardon.

"51. Christians are to be taught that the pope (as is his duty) would desire to give of his own substance to those poor men from many of whom certain sellers of pardons are extracting money; that to this end he would even, if need be, sell the basilica of Saint Peter.

"65. Thus the Gospel treasures are nets, with which of old they fished for men of riches.

"66. The treasures of indulgences are nets, with which they now fish for the riches of men.

"81. This wanton preaching of pardons makes it hard even for learned men to defend the honor of the pope agains calumny, or at least against the shrewd questions of the laity.

"82. They ask: Why does not the pope empty purgatory on account of most holy charity and the great need of souls, the most righteous of causes, seeing that he redeems an infinite number of souls on account of sordid money, given for the erection of a basilica, which is a most trivial cause?

"86. The pope's riches at this day far exceed the wealth of the richest millionaires, cannot he therefore build one single basilica of S. Peter out of his own money, rather than out of the money of the faithful poor?"

Somehow the printers got hold of this document and began printing copies. These copies became so inflammatory that they eventually spread all over the country. Prestigious theologians opposed him, others supported him. Complaints about Luther reached the Pope in Rome the next year. He was ordered to retract but refused to do so. Then, after a few years of constant debate Luther was summoned to be tried by the government's Reichstag in the city of Worms in 1521. He admitted that occasionally he had expressed himself too strongly, but that he could not recant his basic points unless convinced by Scripture or adequate argument. He said, "Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen." The highest tribunal of the nation condemned him and authorized him to be seized for punishment. Luther remained under this condemnation for the rest of his life, but his local prince, Frederick, kept it from being enforced.

Without going into detail, what happened as a result of Luther's reforms was that opposition came from two sources: from the humanists who thought Luther went too far, and from some followers who thought he should go farther in his reforms. Erasmus in 1524, disliking Luther's vigorous writings on determinism and predestination, challenged him on the subject of free will. On the other side, Karlstadt thought Luther was a half-way reformer and so he went much farther; and Thomas Munzer became a fanatic leading riots against monasteries.

Then in 1525 a group of peasants in Munster set up a reign of terror in that city; Luther condemned them and wrote a blistering pamphlet, _Against the Murderous and Thieving Rabble of the Peasants_ , whereupon the local authorities stamped them out in frightful bloodshed. Luther had alienated the peasant population, and eventually what happened in Germany was that the ruling Prince in any given province determined whether the province would be Catholic or Lutheran.

ULRICH ZWINGLI

While this was going on in Germany, there was another priest in Switzerland who was making similar criticisms of the church. His name was Ulrich Zwingli. While Luther's criticisms came from a deeply-felt sense of sin, Zwingli's came from a rational conviction that the scriptures ought to be the sole source of authority in church affairs. He was doing his work about the same time as Luther was, but independently.

In 1519 Zwingli was elected the people's priest in Zurich where he began a systematic preaching exposition of whole books of the Bible, beginning with Matthew. He preached vigorously against the practice of mercenary soldiering, which till that time was common for Swiss young men. From 1522 till 1525 the Swiss Canton of Zurich, following Zwingli's lead, accomplished the following reforms: priests and nuns married, fees for baptism and burials were abolished, images and relics and organs were disposed of, monasteries were confiscated and their properties used to establish schools, Mass was abolished, the authority of bishops was thrown off, worship services were done in German instead of Latin, sermons replaced the Mass as central in worship.

Luther and Zwingli never did get along, though much of their work was similar. They were different personalities and after they learned of each other's work they argued a great deal. The main point of contention was concerning the Lord's Supper. What did Jesus mean by saying, "This is my body"? Zwingli insisted he meant, "This represents my body." Luther wanted to retain something of the Catholic notion that Jesus' body was physically present in the sacrament, claiming that the ominiprescence of Christ's divine nature was communicated to his human nature, so that it could be present everywhere, even in the bread and wine of the Supper. The result of this great disagreement was that these two reform movements never could come to a unified front to oppose the Roman Catholic establishment.

What happened in Switzerland was that Zwingli was killed while serving as a chaplain in a war in 1531. The various cities and cantons of Switzerland were deciding themselves whether or not to reject the Roman Catholic Church. In 1526, for example, under the instigation of a fiery preacher named Farel, the cities of Aigle, Ollon, and Bex adopted the Reformation, destroyed images and ended the Mass. After a long struggle the city of Geneva gained independence in 1536 from the Duke of Savoy and the archbishop, adopting Protestantism as much for political reasons as for religious.

JOHN CALVIN

That same year, 1536, a 27 year old French traveler happened to be passing through Geneva on his way north. Farel heard about it and induced him to remain under threat of disobeying God. Why? Because this young man had written a book entitled _Institutes of the Christian Religion_ and Farel needed someone like that to help him organize the Protestant churches in Geneva. The young man's name was Jean Cauvin, anglicized to John Calvin.

It is important to know a bit about Calvin's education to understand his mentality as a leader of the Reformation in Geneva. His father had intended him to study Theology but changed his mind after he got into trouble with church authorities. So instead he sent his son John to the University of Orleans and then to the University of Bourges to study Law, where he earned his Law degree. After his father died in 1531 John studied Greek and Hebrew in Paris. He published his first book in 1532, a _Commentary on Seneca's Treatise on Clemency_. This book was a thoroughly humanist book, reflecting that he was a lawyer not yet showing any interest in theology. This educational pattern is important to understand in light of the way he functioned later as a pastor in Geneva. He was as much concerned for the establishment of justice and prosperity in the city as for the right administration of the church.

We know little about the "sudden conversion" he underwent in 1533, other than to note the effect it had on him. He was impressed that God was speaking to him in the scriptures and that he was under divine compulsion to spend his life in serving God. By 1536 he completed the first edition of what by 1559 became a very large book of theology, _The Institutes_. John Calvin was a humanist lawyer who became a Protestant pastor.

Calvin's first stint of pastoral service in Geneva was a resounding failure. The mentality of the citizens of Geneva was shaped by their struggle for independence from the Duke and Archbishop, so when Farel and Calvin presented a plan for rigorous church discipline and excommunication of the unworthy, the people objected highly. They did not want foreign preachers coming in and telling them what they might and might not do in their churches. After a stormy two years of this opposition both Farel and Calvin were banished from the city.

For the next three years Calvin served happily as the pastor of French refugees in Strassburg, and developed an excellent reputation for his ability to defend Protestant ideas against the accusations of Roman Catholic theologians. In 1540 he married Idelette de Bure. Meanwhile in Geneva internal conditions went from bad to worse, so that the city fathers decided something drastic had to be done to bring order into the church and city. They invited Calvin to return.

Though he accepted the invitation in 1541, he wrote to a friend, "There is no place under heaven of which I can have a greater dread, not because I have hated it, but because I see so many difficulties presented in that quarter which I do feel myself far from being equal to surmount." He went, not because he wanted to, but because he felt God was compelling him. And to be sure, for twelve years he was constantly harassed by opponents, and only from 1555 to his death in 1564 did he enjoy relative peace in the city.

Calvin kept busy, often preaching or teaching every day. He produced commentaries on every book in the Bible except the Apocalypse of John. The town leaders often picked his brains as a lawyer concerning civic affairs. He encouraged local businesses, watchmakers for example, to provide employment for the hundreds of refugees seeking asylum in Geneva. He was in constant correspondence with friends and opponents all over Europe, even with Luther. He occasionally attended church assemblies in other countries, seeking cooperation or at least understanding. He started a school for children in Geneva, including girls, and in time saw this school expand to become a college, and then the University of Geneva. Students came from Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, Germany, and Italy to study under Calvin. One of the students who came from Scotland was John Knox, who became the leader of the Reformation in Scotland.

To summarize, it was Calvin's view that Christian faith is much more than a personal commitment, that it needs to be formative of the entire life of cities and countries as well as of individuals. He looked upon the work of any individual Christian person as a calling from God, so that a blacksmith or shoemaker or watchmaker was fully as much a servant of the Lord as were monks and nuns and priests and bishops. Actually the countries that adopted the Protestant form of Christian faith became the leaders of the vigorous growth of western civilization, and within Protestantism the Calvinist nations were right there in the forefront.

The main crisis of Calvin's stay in Geneva came in 1553. That year a notorious person came to Geneva, a brilliant doctor who had been condemned to death by Catholic authorities in France for heresy, but who had escaped. Coming to Geneva he challenged the teaching and integrity of Calvin in such a way that if he was sustained by the town council, Calvin would be released and he would take Calvin's place. The town council arrested him, however, on Calvin's recommendation. He was tried. Calvin's enemies took the doctor's side. The advice of several neighboring cantons was sought and given, with the result that the town council had him burned at the stake. Calvin approved the penalty of death but tried unsuccessfully to have a more humane form of execution. The doctor's name was Michael Servetus. So from that date onward Calvin's opponents in Geneva were defeated, and Calvin could live free of the tensions coming from them.

Calvin's influence has continued strong through the centuries since, being seen in the various Presbyterian churches that stem from Scotland, the Reformed churches that originated in the Netherlands or France or Hungary, the Puritan and Congregational churches of England and America, as well as to some some extent in the theology of the Church of England. Lutheran churches have been prevalent in Germany and Scandinavia. Zwingli's influence is seen still in the Anabaptist traditions of Europe and America.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

Henry the Eighth was a loyal subject of the Pope – for a while. In 1521 he wrote a tract against Martin Luther entitled, _Assertion of the Seven Sacraments_. For it Pope Leo X awarded him the title, Defender of the Faith. However, after a while King Henry wanted to divorce his wife Catherine, but the Pope would not give his consent. After a few years of manipulation Henry secured the appointment of Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, who quickly gave consent to divorce. In 1534 Henry persuaded Parliament to renounce the authority of the Pope altogether, and instead to appoint the king as head of the Church of England. The Act of Supremacy in that year affirmed that "the king's majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England, and so is recognized by the clergy of this realm." Formerly the Pope had been recognized as the feudal lord of England; now the king is recognized as the religious head of the church – a complete reversal.

With a few reversions back to Catholicism (Queen Mary in 1553-1558, and King James II in 1685-1688), the king or queen of England has been the official head of the Church of England ever since. Not much else changed at the time; much of the Catholic church practice and organization continued, but without the Pope. The Church of England (Episcopal) adopted a Protestant theological document known as the _Thirty-Nine Articles_ in 1563, and later, in 1648 the _Westminster Confession_. So churches of the Episcopal tradition have a curious combination of Catholic liturgy and organization with Protestant theology.

ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTER-REFORMATION

Prior to the Reformation the Catholic Church had been successful in eliminating people and movements it did not like. But sometimes that was due to the cooperation of the political forces involved. For example, when the church and state cooperated to wipe out the Cathari movement. Stopping the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia required mostly the ecclesiastical tools available. But sentiment in Europe seemed to be changing, so that the Pope no longer had the prestige and power he had exercised earlier.

The Pope could not stop Luther, for example, even using all the influence he could, excommunication by the church and condemnation by the government. The reason for this was because the feudal Prince of the area refused to let Luther be arrested. Similarly the church could not silence Zwingli because the canton of Zurich refused to cooperate. Calvin was safe from Catholic interference precisely because the city of Geneva had thrown off the authority of the Duke of Savoy as well as its Archbishop.

So the problem of church-state relationships in the later Middle Ages has that aspect to consider also. Without the protection of the civil authorities the various leaders of the Reformation would not have been successful, and could well have disappeared like the Cathari, or suppressed like the Waldenses, the Lollards, and the Hussites. Of course the other side of it is true also, the Catholic Church would not always have been successful in squashing these opponents without the cooperation of the civil authorities.

But what the Pope and the Catholic authorities could do they did – church history knows this as the Counter-Reformation – and one of these things was to convoke a great Council to deal with the growing success of the Protestant Reformation. This was the Council of Trent, a city in northern Italy serving then as the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. This Council met twenty-five times between the years 1545 and 1563 (almost the same as the time of Calvin's second stay in Geneva). The Council of Trent dealt with two main things: the genuine abuses that needed to be corrected, and the teachings of the Protestants.

Among the changes it made were the following: better supervision of the sale of indulgences, better morals in convents and monasteries, education of the clergy, residence of the bishops (they often lived far away from their parish), better control of disciplinary procedures, and the forbidding of dueling.

The Council of Trent affirmed that the official way the Catholic Church defined the scriptures was final and could not be challenged. Also that the ancient doctrinal traditions of the church were as authoritative as the Bible itself. The sacramental system was reaffirmed as actually conveying the grace of God. Other Catholic practices were strongly reaffirmed also, such as the sale of indulgences, pilgrimages, veneration of saints and their relics. Also veneration of the Virgin Mary.

The net result of the Council of Trent was that the most serious abuses were corrected, traditional Catholic doctrine and practice was reinforced, and the spread of Protestantism was pretty much stopped. For the most part the territories that were then Catholic stayed Catholic, and the territories that had become Protestant stayed Protestant. But, though Protestantism was stopped it was not by any means eliminated. Generally speaking, and of course with exceptions, northern Europe had become Protestant and southern Europe remained Catholic.

THE JESUITS

The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was begun in Spain by Ignatius Loyola and six friends in 1534, and authorized by the Pope in 1540. Organized like an army, the central feature of this Society of Jesus was that they put themselves at the complete disposal of the Pope. They became the Pope's army, so to speak, having vowed to do whatever it might be that the Pope would assign to them. Here is part of the Rules by which they were governed: "That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity with the Church herself, if she shall have defined anything to be black which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black." Whatever the Pope says is absolute truth, even if it might appear false to us. The Jesuits practiced what is called "mental reservation," which means that even under oath they could in their own minds withhold the truth and even give a false impression. Under the Pope's orders to enforce the Inquisition and other Counter-Reformation measures the Jesuits developed a fearsome reputation for dishonesty, untrustworthiness, and injustice.

PERSPECTIVE ON THE REFORMATION

At the heart of Christianity is the matter of freedom. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. If the Son shall make you free you will be free indeed. Stand fast in the freedom in which Christ has made you free. By 390 the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its imperial religion without coercion, simply by the constant faithfulness of the followers of Jesus and the power of the Spirit which that demonstrated. During the Dark Ages the barbarian tribes of Europe put themselves voluntarily under the control of the bishop of Rome, the Pope. Now in the Reformation this force of freedom is liberating Europe out from under what had become an intolerable religious despotism.

The Protestant Reformation is a major step forward in the process of liberation from the inhuman forces that are constantly suppressing human life under God. There is some similarity to an adolescent child who has received excellent training from devout parents. The child is maturing, ready to step out from under parental controls, and make his own way in the world. Something like that was taking place on a much larger level when so many churches of Europe were breaking away out from under the oppressive yoke of Rome. Rome had achieved great success in training the barbarian peoples of Europe, changing them dramatically from destructive to constructive, and now the evidence of this success is seen in the exercise of the freedom of the Spirit to move ahead as the Lord was leading them.

As we take a closer analytical look at the Reformation period we can see there are certain things the Reformation achieved, but those very achievements contained the seeds also of other things that still needed to be achieved, unresolved problems.

For example, the Reformation rejected decisively and unambiguously the authority of the Pope. There were no Reformation churches that continued to recognize the Pope as head of the church. But at the same time this rejection did not always extend to the way the church was organized and run, that is, the hierarchical system itself. On one end of a continuum is the Church of England whose major difference in this regard is that the entire church hierarchy continued as is with the sole exception that the King of England is now the head of the church instead of the Pope. Lutheran and Methodist churches also maintained a modified form of bishop control. Calvinist churches (Presbyterian and Reformed) have no hierarchy but do maintain the difference between clergy and laity. At the other end of the continuum are the churches with no officers at all, Quakers, Moravians, Amish, Brethren. So church order and church government remains to this day an unsolved problem in Protestant church history.

We may cite also as an unsolved problem the proliferation of denominations in the Protestant churches. The Reformation freed Europe from papal domination, and that freedom resulted in people going whatever way the Spirit of Christ led them; but their freedom did not yet mature into the mutual respect that would enable them to put their differences into the embrace of unity. They did not know how to maintain the unity of the church while blossoming into the freedom of the Spirit. The result is what we see today in the uncountable diversity of the various branches of Christianity we call denominations. The unity of the church thus remains another of the unsolved problems that future generations of Christians will have to solve.

Similar observations can be made about other facets of the Reformation. Take the matter of sacraments. Roman Catholicism settled on seven sacraments during the Middle Ages, and that remains their position still today. Protestantism pretty much reduced that number to two, baptism and the Lord's Supper, but there is still considerable dispute about just what value these sacraments have: are they just symbols or do they somehow convey the grace of God? Luther and Zwingli and Calvin each had their own view. In addition there are occasional attempts here and there to add certain rituals to worship services that, while not called sacraments, do function as if they were. There are some Protestant churches, for example, who practice the imposition of ashes on the forehead on Ash Wednesday. Other Protestant churches have attempted to introduce foot-washing as a ceremony of worship. We do not call such rituals sacraments, but nonetheless they do function as such.

It is also interesting to examine how various Protestant churches use the Bible. Prior to Reformation times Bibles were very scarce, since they had to be copied by hand. During the Reformation period they were becoming more accessible, being printed. But it would take a long long time before common ordinary people would become literate enough and wealthy enough to own a copy and be able to read it. But as the scriptures became more accessible more and more students came to recognize that the way the Roman hierarchy explained it the more doubtful such explanations became.

Protestants recognized that the Bible does not sustain the Roman Catholic belief that Jesus appointed Peter as his successor, or that the process of apostolic succession was inviolable. What happened was that any given student of the Bible would find in it certain things that seemed to be of prime importance, but that needed to be seen in broader context. There was a great deal of argumentation and debating and Biblical exegesis going on during Reformation times, and this vigorous debate produced three major lines of tradition within the Protestant movement: Lutheran, Anabaptist, and Calvinist (Reformed). All of these (and others since that time) all appeal to the Bible as the final authority, finding and quoting those passages that support the tradition, but there is no unanimity on how the Bible needs to be used and understood. It is one of the unsolved problems that the Reformation generated.

But even more important than these ecclesiastical challenges is the matter of how the gospel is sanctifying the culture. This is not done first of all by legislation, but by the shaping of our thinking and our perceptions of what is just and true and good. The good news of the gospel needs to be internalized, not only by individual believers but by entire nations. This takes not only time but understanding. Often sincere Christians understand certain problems of life in different ways, so that the solution to them is not always clear. Still, that is what needs to be done. People need to come to some unanimity in their perception of reality and life and its challenges. So this involves theology. It involves philosophy. It involves the way we see the importance of faith and the way this faith is implemented.

Accordingly, we need to see the pattern that God is using in the process of getting the human race where he wants it to be. Approximately every five hundred years or so there seems to be a very major development in this process. Going back to the time of Abraham and the commitment to monotheism, for example, there was a major development about a half-millennium later in the time of Moses and the exodus and the giving of the Torah. Give a couple of hundred years again and you have the beginning of the kingdom in Israel: Saul, David, Solomon. Another five hundred years, and we see the Babylonian Captivity and the return. Still another five hundred years and we see Jesus and the expansion of the gospel to the Gentiles. Five hundred years into that era and we see the conversion of the Roman Empire and its overthrow by the barbarian tribes of Europe, as well as the depredations of the Mohammedan armies. And then the rebirth of western culture beginning shortly after the turn of the millennium; and again a half-millennium to the time of the Reformation, 1517.

Furthermore, and of significant interest, we today are living at that juncture also, a half-millennium after the Reformation. It would appear that the initial impetus of the Reformation has run its course and that some change of major importance is currently taking place in the history of Christianity. How will the Spirit of the Lord, whose task it is to lead us into all the truth, be guiding us and succeeding generations of Christians in the direction God wishes us to go? What great problem will this development solve, and what will be the deficiencies exposed for still future generations to confront in yet another half-millennium?

Chapter 21: SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

It was not easy for European Christians to break out of the shackles of medieval Catholicism, but break out they did. Similar breakouts were being made at the same time in the scientific world. We think of Copernicus and Galileo. In 1543 Copernicus first published his theory that the Earth and the other planets rotated around the sun, rather than the sun revolving around the Earth. A generation later Galileo championed this heliocentric view of the solar system, but both of these men encountered stiff opposition from the church authorities and from their fellow scientists.

The growing maturity of the European Christians not only produced church reforms but also enabled scientists to study more freely how nature works. Scientists of the time broke out of the medieval superstitions in much the same way theologians did, discovering that traditional worldviews were simply inaccurate and needed to be updated. Like Protestant leaders, these scientists were also being disparaged by the existing authorities. In 1615, for example, Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, found guilty, forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Still, the power of mature Christian freedom could not be suppressed indefinitely, and slowly the Christian thinkers of Europe found themselves able to do their work without undue interference from church and political authorities. One history of philosophy book (Fuller) devotes a chapter each to the following modern philosophers: DesCartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Herbart, and Comte, plus numerous lesser thinkers. Most of these thinkers were Christians of one sort or another, but who did not themselves feel bound to the thought patterns of traditional ways of thinking, just as the theologians and scientists of the times likewise were experimenting with new avenues of thought and knowledge.

Philosophy is basically our attempt to understand reality, our attempts to say in human language what life and nature and time and history are all about. What these modern philosophers were trying to do was to evaluate whether or not the way that Christian leaders explained life was accurate. They were testing the traditional world-view of Christianity. For the first time in European history since the fall of the Roman Empire philosophers and theologians felt free to examine whether or not Christianity was true. Prior to the Reformation people who questioned the truthfulness of the church or its teachings were rapidly and successfully squelched, often burned to death. You cannot question the Pope or the creeds of the church.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

But now, after the Reformation, thinking men and women could discuss these matters publicly and to some extent fearlessly. One important result of this process of philosophy is the Enlightenment. The term means to suggest that the traditional way of thinking was still part of what is called The Dark Ages, and that now at last we can emerge out of that period into a new time of freedom to think as we please without some church authority telling us what we can believe and what we cannot believe.

The Enlightenment can best be understood in the philosophical system of a philosopher named Immanuel Kant, who lived in Germany (1724-1804) about the same time as George Washington in America. Kant distinguished between two realms: phenomena and noumena. Phenomena is what we know by our physical senses, in general, science. Noumena is what we believe but that we cannot know by our senses, in general, religion. Science is what we know, religion is what we believe – two different areas of life.

Take God for example. We cannot know anything about God by way of our senses; we cannot see him, hear him, touch him, smell him, or taste him. So God is a noumenal Being whom we _believe_ but cannot _know_ (in the strict sense of those words). Similarly with all the matters of religion as contrasted with science. We can believe that Jesus died for our sins, but we do not have scientific proof that he did. We can believe that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, but there isn't any proof of that scientifically. We can believe in the Holy Spirit, but who ever saw him?

Kant writes, "It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the objects; ... Let us make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics, if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition." He means that knowledge refers only to what goes on in our brains, not what actually exists out there in the outside world. He goes so far as to say, "If we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves, disappear; ... these, as phenomena, cannot exist in themselves but only in us." Understand that last sentence: space and time do not exist in themselves but only in our brains; they are the way we process our sensory stimuli.

The Enlightenment is that philosophical system that distinguishes sharply between what we know and what we believe. What we know or claim to know can be tested scientifically, but not what we believe. "I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief," says Kant. They do not overlap, knowledge and belief. I know certain things, I believe certain other things.

So what happened as a result of this way of thinking is that religion, Christian faith, became a matter of personal commitment, not a matter of objective truth. There is no way to prove one way or another that Christianity is true or that Buddhism is true or that Islam is true. So, in the end it doesn't really matter whether or not any religion is true, since it can't be proved anyway. One person believes this way, another person believes that way – it doesn't matter so long as you live decently.

What comes out of this philosophy of The Enlightenment is a kind of agnostic humanism. Agnostic is a word that means _no knowledge_. It doesn't matter one way or another whether you believe in God or whether you are an atheist. What matters is how you live in relation to other people. If religion helps in this, fine; if it doesn't, that's fine too. Maybe there's a God, maybe there isn't – it doesn't matter because nobody really knows. The only thing that counts is how you live and how you treat other people.

Another consequence of this philosophy is that many Christian people, people who take their faith very seriously, have come to distrust science. They tend to concentrate on scientific theories and claims that are difficult to accept in their theological system. The most glaring example of this is the long-standing horror that some Christians have when confronted with the theory of evolution. They think this theory blatantly contradicts Genesis where we are taught that God created the world in six days and that Adam and Eve were our first parents. Such Christians resist the discoveries that the universe is billions of years old, and that humans and chimpanzees have common ancestry about 150,000 years ago, facts that cannot well be denied on scientific grounds. The attitude this engenders is that scientists are unreliable and work in a non-Christian atmosphere, that science and religion are opponents, that science is untrustworthy.

It should be clear enough how The Enlightenment changes what Christianity has always understood, that God created the world and continues to control and guide it in its development. God is not just some unknowable Being way out in a noumenal world out of touch with us. God is the Being who is present with us every day everywhere, who causes grass to grow, apples to ripen, wind to blow, water to be wet. We cannot possibly escape the presence of our Creator because everything that exists is there because God put it there. So when we listen to scientists who tell us what nature is like, we are listening through scientist's ears to what God is saying. Christianity does not posit a God out there, but a God in here, a God whose presence we know in and through the testimony of our senses. When we touch something we are touching something God made and by which God is telling us something. God gave us our five senses in order to know and understand the world he created for us, and he gave us brains in order to put that knowledge to use in creating a godly civilization.

THE GOD QUESTION

Approach the subject from a somewhat different perspective. Presumably animals do not have any notion of God. They may cower in fear during a violent thunderstorm, seeking shelter in any convenient cave. Humans have this reaction also, but there is more. Humans think about that storm and begin to wonder about it. What causes it? What is lightning? What is thunder? Why does water fall down from the sky? Why is it hot sometimes and cold at other times?

So, in the process of human thinking about these things, it occurred to them that thunder is noise, and in some respects like the noise we make when we speak. Perhaps there are enormous beings out there, as much larger than us as we are larger than ants, and perhaps thunder is the way these beings speak to each other and to us. So, as primitive man evolved gradually out of its animal origins this primitive form of religion also evolved. There are unseen gods out there who are in charge of everything that happens in nature. In time specific names were given to specific functions of nature, personal names indicating personal beings whose responsibility was to operate these functions. So we have in the distant past the emergence of what we now know as polytheism, belief in many nature-gods.

In the Babylonian tradition, we find a man named Abraham, raised in this pervasively polytheistic culture of ancient Babylon, thinking seriously about life and the gods. He perhaps noted that there was an interesting correspondence between the way humans competed with one another and the way people thought about the gods (different aspects of nature) as competing with one another. Apparently it occurred to him that we would be better off if we no longer thought of many gods functioning at odds with one another, but that there might be just one such great Being in charge of everything that happened. And if we then, as human beings, imitated that one great God, then we ought to be able to find a way to live together as humans without all that intense rivalry and hatred and warfare that spoils human society.

Abraham then acted on his new belief and did his best to begin such a society, based on belief in one God only, and reflecting this insight in the mutual cooperation of his children and descendants. This was the beginning of the Jewish tradition of monotheism and of a nation functioning within that faith.

Jumping then to the time of Jesus, we see that Christianity inherited this basic monotheism, building upon the Jewish tradition and modifying it in such a way that it could embrace all nations rather than just the one nation of Israel. The polytheism of the ancient Greco-Roman culture gave way eventually, by 390, to the monotheism of Christianity, as did the polytheism of the barbarian tribes that caused the downfall of the empire. The entire period of the Middle Ages, under papal domination, inculcated this unchallenged monotheism into the very fabric of the European soul. Until now.

Until the philosophical revolution we know as The Enlightenment. Subsequent thinkers who embraced that way of thinking were now addressing the question raised by Kant. Is there such a Being as God, that is, is there the kind of Being which Christianity has been presuming all these centuries? Kant's answer, as we have seen, is that we have no way of knowing one way or another. There is no way to prove that there is such a Being, and there is no way to prove that there isn't. That kind of agnosticism seems to be the common characteristic of much of the mentality of thinking people in our world today.

Is it possible to have any contact with such a noumenal Being as God, and if so, how? That was the question that theologians after Kant had in mind and which they attempted to answer. We will note that this question, How can we know the unknowable Being we call God?, is a different question than the one that is basic to the Bible and to the church's main interest in the past. That traditional question is the question of sin, How do we deal with the devastating reality of human sin? Traditional church life revolved around that question of how to get out from under the negativity of sinful behavior in such a way as to make human society better. The modern Enlightenment question is the rather abstract question of how to know an unknowable Being, and then there is the next question as to what difference this might make in our daily lives.

There have been four major answers that theologians gave to Kant's question. Friedrich Schleiermacher said we can know God from our sense of absolute dependence. Albrecht Ritschl said we can know God from our inner sense of right and wrong. Fundamentalist thinkers said we can know God from the Bible. And Karl Barth said we can know God from Jesus Christ. We will take a brief look at each of these answers.

FEELING OF DEPENDENCE

Is there anything in our human experience that we could connect with a Being who exists outside our experience? A German professor and preacher, Friedrich Schleiermacher, was the first theologian to reconstruct Christian theology within the lines of Enlightenment philosophy, and he answered, Yes. We find in ourselves a very deep and profound sense that our existence is dependent on something much greater and larger and more powerful than we are. There is something that gives us life, that keeps the world going, that is behind all the vast powers of the tangible universe. That sense of absolute dependence is where we encounter God. Schleiermacher writes, "the consciousness of being absolutely dependent ... is the same thing [as] being in relation with God."

To believe in God is to recognize that our existence as human beings is absolutely and completely dependent on some Other Being, a Being we name God. The idea of God, in Schleiermacher's theology, "is nothing more than the expression of the feeling of absolute dependence." "God signifies for us simply that which is the co-determinant in this feeling and to which we trace our being in such a state." We have to presume that God does exist from the fact that we sense ourselves dependent on such a power or force, of which we can know nothing directly via our senses.

Interestingly, then, in this subjective type of theology, Christian doctrines do not describe external reality, not even in God, but only what we feel within ourselves. "Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech." The attributes of God say nothing about what God is really like in himself, but only how we experience him. "The individual attributes in their differences correspond to nothing real in God." So Schleiermacher.

MORALISM

The next generation of theologians, while recognizing some validity to Schleiermacher's theory, thought there was not much of real value in it from the point of view of what good it does for human society. If religion is a matter of our feeling, even the feeling of absolute dependence, what difference does that make for matters of social justice or human behavior? So they were looking for some way of describing religion in terms of morality, our human behavior in society.

Albrecht Ritschl, for example, as well as numerous others, looked at our inner human sense of right and wrong, what Kant earlier had described as "the moral law within" and "the moral imperative." All humans have some inner sense of right and wrong, and this, Ritschl and others described as the way in which the noumenal Being we call God makes his presence known in our lives.

In America, shortly after the first World War, a theologian named Walter Rauschenbusch wrote a book entitled, _A Theology for the Social Gospel_. In it he writes, "Our consciousness of God is the spiritual counterpart of our social consciousness." He was making the case for understanding Christianity as the force that makes religion relevant to our everyday life as social creatures.

Wherever we see this idea in operation we see what is known as the Social Gospel, that Christianity is a matter of enforcing our inner human sense of right and wrong, and in this way making social life better, correcting various forms of injustice and immorality. John Dewey recommends that "churches show a more active interest in social affairs, that they take a definite stand upon such questions as war, economic injustice, political corruption, that they stimulate action for a divine kingdom on earth."

BIBLICISM

The moralistic description of the Christian religion was examined by many other theologians, and was found lacking. How do we determine what is right and wrong in our national life? Currently one of the questions confronting American society is the right-to-life movement as opposed to women's rights and freedom of choice regarding abortion. There are all kinds of social questions concerning which Christian people have different opinions. Christian thinkers recognized that simply appealing to one's inner sense of right and wrong was simply not adequate. They wanted something more objective and solid, and they found this in the Bible. The Bible tells us what is right and wrong, not our own inner drives.

So the movement they began is known as Fundamentalism, a term that comes from a series of pamphlets that various men wrote about 1910, describing the basic doctrines that the Bible taught, a series they called _The Fundamentals_. The point of view is that God reveals objective truth for our lives by means of the Bible, which they soon began to call The Word of God. Wayne Grudem puts it this way, "The authority of Scripture means that all the words in Scripture are God's words in such a way that to disbelieve or disobey any word of Scripture is to disbelieve or disobey God."

The God who is out there in the noumenal realm beyond our sensory perceptions has come to us in the Bible with his Word. That is where we must get our doctrines and our ethical instructions. That is how we know the otherwise unknowable Being we call God, from the Bible – really one answer among several to the question proposed by Kantian philosophy.

CHRISTOCENTRISM

Several theologians, first among many being Karl Barth, found the previous answers to the question unsatisfactory. They were either too subjective, as in the case of Schleiermacher and the Social Gospel, or too rationalistic, legalistic, and impersonal as in the biblicism of the Fundamentalist movement. So the twentieth century found a vigorous new direction for theology which we know as Neo-Orthodoxy.

This new movement explained that the God who is otherwise unknowable breaks into our phenomenal world from his noumenal world in the person of Jesus Christ. Do we want to know anything about this noumenal Being we call God? There is no way for us to get to him from our world by using our five senses. So what we need to recognize is that this Being has taken the initiative from his side to break into our side, to break out of the noumenal realm of unknowability into the phenomenal realm where we can see and hear and touch him.

That then is who Jesus is. Jesus is God having broken into the phenomenal world from out of the noumenal world. There is no way to know God in his own eternal incomprehensible glory, but only as he puts on the flesh and blood we know as Jesus. Jesus is God incarnate, the invisible God in visible flesh, the noumenal deity revealed in phenomenal humanity.

Karl Barth writes, "For as He is in Himself, in his naked majesty, God cannot be known." This is the same as Kant affirming that God is a noumenal Being beyond the reach of our senses. Barth also says, "God is not only unprovable and unsearchable, but also inconceivable." We humans cannot even make concepts of God. "We cannot or ourselves bridge the gulf between ourselves and God," he writes, but "we can perceive the truth of God only in the fact that He gives Himself to us to be known." Barth means in the incarnation of Jesus. Jesus is the incarnation of the otherwise unknowable God. "God's revelation is Jesus Christ, God's Son."

* * * * *

These are four different and incompatible ways of dealing with the philosophy of the Enlightenment as defined by Immanuel Kant. All of them presuppose that God is a noumenal Being outside the possibility of our sensory knowledge, just as Kant defined the difference between phenomena and noumena. All of them present one aspect of our phenomenal experience as the area in which the noumenal Absolutely Other breaks into our world and makes himself available to us: our feelings, our moral sense, the Bible, and Jesus.

But precisely because each of these theologies presupposes the philosophical problem of a noumenal God, it is necessary to address the philosophy first rather than simply the theology involved. There is always a lot of good theology involved in each of these movements, but the underlying philosophy makes them all unsatisfactory. If the basic question being addressed is wrong, then all the answers to the question are equally wrong. We have to ask whether the philosophy is wrong, and if so, why.

So this is one of the problems engendered by the Protestant Reformation, and which calls to the future for study. It's a product of the intellectual freedom that Protestants achieved, and which encouraged all kinds of thinking about the issues of human life and about the character and nature of God. Christianity will have to confront all these issues and will have to come eventually to a resolution of them, but this will only come with open and honest confrontation of the alternatives and by a vigorous examination of what Christianity is all about.

DEISM

During the Roman Catholic era (500-1500) people in general understood that God was fully involved in everything, in nature, in history, in civilization, in government, in church life, in family life – God is actively involved in everything that happens. That was simply taken for granted, part of everyone's understanding of life. Everything we do is responsible to God, so that if we sin we need to be forgiven, if we obey we need to give thanks. In everything we think or say or do we are in the living presence of God. Even when we do not understand why something happens, we know that God is somehow in control and he will cause his will to be done. God was a very real and important part of everyday life.

However, with the sense of liberation engendered by the Reformation and the Enlightenment, that sense of daily dependence on the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives is slowly eroding. Philosophers began thinking that nobody can prove that God is present everywhere, or that God is in control of everything that happens, or even that God exists. So why pretend that such a remote Being has anything to do with the way we live in our world?

The Reformation meant that people were no longer allowing the church hierarchy to control their lives. They were experiencing the exhilarating removal of religious inhibitions. What actually happened is that this freedom from ecclesiastical control produced an emphasis upon human freedom that tended sometimes even to become freedom from divine control – even in the churches. Religion is what we make of it. Jesus is who we make him out to be. Churches are the religious associations that we decide to make.

People in America did not stop being Christians but they did begin to consider their Christianity to be their own product to do with pretty much as they pleased. What a wide diversity of churches emerged as the United States gained independence and began to make its own way in the world! Any charismatic person able to preach convincingly could get a following and start a new church, even if it was "way out" in terms of traditional church structures and emphases. Churches, cults, religious groups of all varieties proliferated as the United States provided religious toleration and protection.

One prevalent attitude in modern church development is known as Deism. It is the product of The Enlightenment mentality that God is a noumenal figure way out in the far-off distance of eternity, with little or no connection with our daily human life here on earth in the world of phenomena. Deism is the view that God, having created the world, sits back and lets it run on its own power. God becomes a spectator of what happens on earth, only rarely interfering with human life and history. For its practical value, then, Deism teaches that we humans are on our own in life, responsible to none but ourselves. It may or may not catch up to us after we die in a future existence, but for now it's all up to us.

The net result of this way of thinking is that God becomes a non-factor in the way we live. He may or may not exist somewhere in another world, but not in our world, not in the world we know anything about. Even if somehow he is active in our world we have no sure way of figuring out where or how or when. Christianity becomes the way we humans decide we want to do our religion.

Other people, in other parts of the world, have their way of doing religion. One way is not necessarily any better than any other way, since none of it is objectively true, so Moslems and Hindus and Confucians and Shinto and Taoists do their thing religiously. The only way to critique them is to see what effect it has on the way they live and the kind of society they construct out of their religion. In Deism one way is as good as another religiously, but what people do in politics or economics or social relations is the only thing that really matters.

So Deism does not mean people are not Christians or that they do not believe in God or in Jesus or in the Holy Spirit. It means that as Christians they tend to carry on the Christian traditions in any way they please, interpret the Bible any way they please, and emphasize whatever social programs they please.

Chapter 22: EFFECTS OF THE REFORMATION

PERSPECTIVE

In analyzing the effects of Protestant ways of thinking and living we need to keep in mind a theistic, not deistic, perspective. That is, while we are looking at what really happened in post-Reformation Europe and in America in the five hundred years from 1500 to 2000, we need to do our best to see how God is developing his plan and purpose in and through these events. Not that God is an interested spectator ready to pounce in once in a while, but that he is actively and methodically doing his thing in all these events. What is God's purpose and how is he moving it forward in this half-millennium?

God's purpose, as definitively expressed in Genesis 1, is that the human race shall become his image, and that this image shall be demonstrated in the way humans construct their civilization, how they manage to subdue the earth and utilize its potential. Note clearly that the purpose of God is not, emphasize not, to get some humans out of this world into another world, but precisely and exactly to get all humans to become what he intends them to become within this world. This understanding of Genesis 1 must become and must remain the basic underlying substratum of everything we say and think about church history and about what Christianity is trying to accomplish. Christianity is trying to shape the entire human race into the image of God, and its success is measured by how well this is incorporated into the socio-political systems that we create.

Among other things this Genesis perspective means that when we compare and contrast religions we need to do it in terms of what kind of culture each religion creates. This principle applies equally to the various segments within Christianity, as well as to the relative value of various religions worldwide. Look at the kind of cultures that Eastern Orthodoxy has supervised in such countries as Greece and Russia, the Balkans and eastern Europe. Examine the cultures in predominantly Roman Catholic countries like Spain and France and Italy, and also Central and South America. And then what was happening culturally in countries that adopted mainly the various forms of Protestantism, like Germany, Britain, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Canada and the United States. The Bible tells us, By their deeds you shall know them. That's where we must look to evaluate the effect of religion.

It will take, of course, a more detailed and scholarly effort than this church history survey, but it should be helpful to try to get at least some idea of what was happening in this regard. How is Protestantism affecting the way people develop their socio-political structures?

  1. Political Freedom

MAGNA CARTA

About the same time that Pope Innocent III was punishing King John of England and making England a fief of the papacy, the feudal barons of England were also pressuring King John to limit his power over them. In 1215 they forced him to accept the Magna Carta (Great Charter) which specified that any group of 25 barons could not only challenge the king's decisions but reverse them, even to the extent of confiscating the king's property. King John soon repudiated it, but nonetheless the Magna Carta, with periodic modifications, became the law of the land in Great Britain.

In western civilization the Magna Carta is seen as the beginning of a movement in the political realm that eventually produced the various forms of democracy that we see today. Some of the Protestant nations of Europe have developed modified forms of democracy in such a way as to retain their monarchy but with severely limited authority. The real decision power is in the hands of the parliament. Great Britain and The Netherlands are examples.

MAYFLOWER COMPACT

In 1620 a group of Protestant people began a British colony in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. Prior to their debarking from their ship, the Mayflower, some 41 of the 101 passengers prepared a document to "covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic." This was done with due respect to the King of England, but it contained the seeds of what 150 years later became the Declaration of Independence, a document which rejected entirely the authority of the king. Here is the full text of the _Mayflower Compact_.

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc.

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620.

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

The Protestant Reformation severed the bonds between the papal establishment and the common people. This was the beginning of a great tsunami wave of liberty that swept over northern Europe and infused itself into all the segments of human life and civilization. Politically it could be said that this Protestant-inspired liberty is at the root of the liberty which the British colonists in America proclaimed in 1776, the famous _Declaration of Independence_.

Note particularly in the first paragraph the reference to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." It was understood by all the signers of this document that the God who created the world is also in charge of it, such that the laws of nature are at the same time the laws of nature's God.

Note also in the second paragraph the confession that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Our human rights are given, not by the government or by the church, but by the Creator. The _Declaration_ then goes on to spell out the implications of this basic insight for the establishment of an independendent government. Here is the first part of the text of the _Declaration of Independence_.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

  2. Economic Development

MEDIEVAL GUILDS

In the feudal system of the Middle Ages the land was owned by the lords and the work was done by the serfs. But as craft specialties developed, there was a growing call for skills and goods that did not come from farming. The wealthy lords and bishops wanted artists and sculptors and architects and builders to construct their castles and churches. Individual persons could not do much to protect their own interests in this kind of business climate, so in 1170 the first guilds were licensed, similar to our modern-day unions.

The word _guild_ comes from a word meaning _to pay_. The idea was that members paid an annual fee to the guild, and in return the guild would protect the rights and benefits of its members. Guild members would support one another if one became sick. The guild would set prices for their products, prevent excessive taxation by the lords, supervise product quality, discipline unsatisfactory behavior of the members, set appropriate working conditions, arrange for apprentices and journeymen standards, and whatever else might be necessary for the protection and promotion of their specific crafts.

### MERCANTILISM

### The burgeoning spirit of freedom inspired by the Protestant Reformation gradually made its way also into the commercial world. Among the great variety of ways this spirit of freedom displayed itself was the vigorous exploration of the world. Earlier, in 1492, Columbus sailed west to get to India but found America instead. Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean. Captain Cook explored the South Pacific islands. Magellan's fleet sailed around the world. Dozens of others explored hitherto unknown areas of the globe.

### While the motives for this exploration were many, including political and religious reasons, perhaps the most prominent was mercantile, the desire of merchants to increase their wealth. As the centuries passed, trade routes were established in which products of different countries would be exchanged for profit. In colonial North America, for example, animal furs would be sent to Europe in exchange for whatever household or farming or factory needs the people in America might have. Lucrative trade became heavy and competitive from Europe to the East Indies.

### As part of this mercantile competition, slave trade, especially from Africa, made its ugly appearance. European traders would contract with willing African men to purchase any African people that could be captured and delivered to the foreign merchants. These captured Africans would be shipped in horrid conditions back to some European country or to America and sold to the highest bidder. That is how slavery began in western civilization, until becoming such an irritant to the Christian conscience that strenuous efforts were made to abolish it.

### It requires to be noted, accordingly, that while this free trade is a genuine step forward in civilization, the very freedom which enabled it to exist carried with it in the beginning gross abuses. It was only with the passage of time and stricter control of economic behavior that some of these abuses were overcome. The unfettered profit motive, here as well as elsewhere, was subject to great abuse, causing suffering and injustice often to the weakest and most vulnerable people. It was only with difficulty and persistent attention to fairness and integrity and justice that slowly these abuses came to be controlled.

CAPITALISM

Mercantilism gradually merged into outright capitalism. Which means that it was not so much the wealthy merchants and shipowners who controlled the economic functions of the world, but the wealthy business owners and manufacturers, the men who had the funds to finance very expensive machinery and who could start businesses that needed huge sums of money, capital funds, to get started.

In the Middle Ages these huge sums of money were controlled by the bishops and the feudal lords, and the funds went into the building of castles and cathedrals. Now in the modern world of Protestantism these huge sums are controlled by the business leaders and they are being spent on factories and office buildings that produce consumer goods. The result is that these monies are being used in such a way as to benefit all people in general, not merely the few in power.

Capitalism too has been abused, particulary when factory owners paid their employees poorly or neglected safe working conditions. Labor unions eventually emerged out of the sense of freedom and responsibility to force employers into more humane and just working conditions and wages. The exercise of freedom is always subject to wrongful excesses by people in whom truth and honesty have not taken root, but that very sense of freedom in the majority takes shape also in modifying and rectifying those errors as much as possible.

  3. Expanding Education

SCHOOLS

As we have seen earlier, the rebirth of civilization in Europe also brought into existence a greater emphasis on formal education in schools. What learning there was in the Dark Ages was mostly in the monasteries. But in the guild culture of Europe there was intensive and effective training informally from master craftsman to apprentice. As the Reformation principles gradually penetrated into the psyche of European and American people it was recognized that literacy is to be desired for everyone. People are more free to develop their own personal potential if they know how to read and write and handle finances, if they have some notion of how government runs, how business operates, how history is developing, if they develop more accurate notions of what is right and wrong, if they learn how to express themselves fluently, and if they are encouraged to rise above the social status in which they were raised. All of this was intensified by the principles of the Protestant Reformation.

And, to be fair, the Enlightenment contributed substantially to the development of education by concentrating attention, not so much on the religious angle as on the social and economic angles, the humanitarian emphasis. New England colonial schools were largely dominated by the religious goals of Biblical literacy and Christian living, as for example, Harvard College which was founded for the preparation of educated Protestant clergy. But as the philosophy of Enlightenment gained headway people in general began to emphasize more the sciences and the day-to-day relevance of what was being taught in the classroom. The result was that the content of schooling on all levels gradually moved away from the Latin-oriented medieval religious concept to the more pragmatic secular concept.

Schools, of course, cost money. There must be a building, there must be classroom desks and equipment, and teachers must be employed and paid. So if people in general chose to have schools at all, they needed to have enough funds to provide these finances. This was no great problem for wealthy persons who could afford to hire a teacher for their own children, but it came to be a real problem for working class persons who barely made enough to live comfortably.

So what happened is that any group of people who could raise enough money to start a school did so. Early on, guilds started schools for their own members. Many churches did so for their members. Neighborhood groups of parents might start a school for their area. Individual teachers might set up their own school and hope enough parents would pay tuition for their children to attend. But often the poor and underprivileged people would be left out and would remain illiterate their entire lives.

In time, and particularly in America, people agreed to raise taxes publicly for the purpose of providing schools for all community children, so that the schools came under the control of local school boards but receive their finances from the government. And eventually this type of school became the public school system, available to all and dependent upon taxation for its finances. The United States now requires all children to be educated, compulsory education whether in private, parochial or public schools, or even home-schooling. It can well be argued that the character of education as it now exists in the modern western world is to a large extent the product of the spirit of freedom begun by the Protestant Reformation.

  4. Wars and Rumors of War

THE THIRTY-YEARS WAR

The success or failure of Protestantism rested to a very large extent upon political support. As we have seen there was a constant tension during the Middle Ages between the Pope and the various kings and nobles of the European countries. The power of the Pope was often dependent on the cooperation of one or more of the political powers in any given country, or upon the general attitude of the people in general. That close connection between church and state continued to be strong in the Protestant countries as well as in the countries that remained Roman Catholic. Luther was protected by Frederick, Zwingli by the Zurich authorities, Calvin by the Genevan councils.

There was much fighting in Europe after the Reformation. How much of this was caused by religion and how much by politics or economics is probably impossible to say definitively because the interests of church and state were so closely intertwined in those centuries.

Beginning in 1618 in Bohemia, the Thirty Years War pitted Protestants against Catholics there and in Moravia and Austria. Fighting spread to Germany and Hungary. Catholic forces were at first triumphant, but then King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden landed on the German coast in 1630 and gained significant victories for the Protestant forces. Fighting continued in Germany, devastating the country, until in 1648 the famed Peace of Westphalia was signed, granting specific rights to Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists.

FRENCH HUGUENOTS

Early on, Calvinism made strong inroads in Catholic France, such that one estimate is that by 1559 there were as many as 400,000 Protestants, known as Huguenots. After almost constant warfare between Catholics and Huguenots the French king issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which gave Protestants freedom of religion in France. This lasted until 1685 when King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, forcing thousands of Huguenots out of the country, thus decimating the middle class, the most industrious citizens in France. France remains a Catholic country to this day.

THE LOWLANDS STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE

In the early years of the Reformation period the Lowlands (now Belgium and The Netherlands) were under the control of Spain, whose kings were fierce and loyal Catholics. Their despotic reign precipitated strong opposition from the growing number of Protestants in the Lowlands, so in 1567 King Philip of Spain sent his cruel general, the Duke of Alva, to quell the uprising. William of Orange, originally a Catholic and the leading political force in the Lowlands, came to realize that the struggle against Spain was as much a religious as a political struggle, and became a convinced Calvinist. While William was gathering an army, the Duke of Alva slaughtered the Protestants in the southern provinces. But, led by William of Orange until his death in 1584, the Protestants in the north fought for decades until at last in 1609 they achieved independence from Spain. So the southern provinces became Belgium and remained a Catholic country, whereas the northern provinces became The Netherlands and became a Protestant country whose national church was the Dutch Reformed Church.

Actually, this uprising by the Low Countries was supported by England, whose ruler was Queen Elizabeth I at this time. In 1588 King Philip of Spain sent his navy, the famed Spanish Armada, to invade England and depose the Queen, but during the naval battle the Spanish ships were defeated, and bad weather claimed many more as they fled around Scotland and Ireland. Of the 150 Spanish ships of the Armada, only about 100 succeeded in returning to Spain.

* * * * *

What did all this fighting accomplish? It left the countries of Europe pretty much divided between Catholic countries and Protestant countries.The southern countries remained solidly Catholic: Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Ireland. The northern countries adopted either Lutheranism (Scandinavia, Germany) or Calvinism (Switzerland, Holland, England, Scotland).

Neither Catholicism nor Protestantism produced the international harmony we call peace. International peace remains one of the unsolved problems of modern Christianity. Perhaps a harbinger of better things to come are peacekeeping goals for military forces. Employed not to subdue other peoples, but to safeguard justice and peace and human dignity, military forces seem to be gaining new dimensions of usefulness in some Christian countries.

  5. Creeds And Confessions

One of the products of the freedom of the post-Reformation age is the proliferation of creeds and confessions. Once a significant group of people had come together in their faith, they found it necessary to explain to others exactly what they believed, and to do this in a carefully crafted concise way. This was certainly a laudable thing to do, for it not only explained to others what the group believed, but also served as a teaching tool for the instruction of younger members. As the centuries passed, of course, these documents became outdated in some respects, so the question arose as to how much authority they retain, but for the times of their writing they were very effective tools of the gospel.

LUTHERAN

In 1530, Luther's assistant, Philip Melanchthon, prepared what is known as the _Augsburg Confession_ for the Lutheran churches, in which he tried to define Protestant thinking without giving great offence to the papal authorities. Sometime later, in 1577, the Lutheran groups agreed on a common creed, called the _Formula of Concord_ , still a major Lutheran creed today.

REFORMED

In Germany, which was not yet a unified country but an area of independent provinces, the religion of the province would be decided by the Prince of that territory. Most of these German provinces opted for Lutheranism, such that still today the Lutheran Church is the official state church of Germany. But one of these independent provinces, whose capital city was Heidelberg, opted for Calvinism. So, in 1563 the Prince of that province authorized the writing of a catechism for the religious instruction of all the people in the province. The result was the _Heidelberg Catechism_ which remains to this day an important creed of Calvinist churches.

In 1536 a group of Swiss Protestants wrote what is known as the _First Helvetic Confession_. When it was discovered that this document was too Lutheran to suit the Swiss people of Calvinist bent, a _Second Helvetic Confession_ appeared in 1562. This second document became recognized by most of the Reformed churches of Switzerland as their official doctrinal position. It was adopted by the Reformed Church not only in Switzerland but in Scotland (1566), Hungary (1567), France (1571), Poland (1578), and next to the Heidelberg Catechism is the most generally recognized confession of the Reformed Church.

Prior to the Lowlands gaining independence from the king of Spain, in 1561 the Calvinists explained what these rebellious Protestants believed in the _Belgic Confession_. After the Dutch gained independence, they produced a document called the _Canons of Dort_ , 1618.

ANGLICAN

After Catholic Queen Mary died in 1563 and her half-sister Elizabeth became queen, the church in England once again rejected papal authority and adopted a new set of theological definitions. This document, known as _The Thirty-Nine Articles_ , was Calvinistic in tone, resulting in a curious combination of a hierarchical church organization that resembled the Catholic church but with a Protestant theology.

Later, in 1611, a definitive translation of the Bible into English appeared, called the _King James Authorized Version_ because it had been authorized by King James I. Still later, in 1648, both the British Parliament and the Scottish General Assembly approved three of the most notable expressions of Calvinism: the _Westminster Confession_ , together with a _Shorter Catechism_ for the instruction of children and a _Larger Catechism_ to guide preachers.

PERSPECTIVE

It is important for us when we study history, including church history, to see developments as best we can from a theistic perspective. We need to ask and answer the question, What is God doing in this particular era of time to bring the human race closer to the goal he has in mind for us? This is never an easy task, and probably one which none of us is able to do flawlessly. Yet it is possible to see a divine pattern in past eras, and it is possible to extrapolate from that sequence of progress the direction in which history is taking us, so as to help us take a realistic look at our own life and times.

So that is the primary perspective: What progress is being made? But there is always a secondary focus, and that is, What still needs to be done? In other words, we need first to see the positive and only then take note of the negative. In this modern era, accordingly, we need to see the amazing expansion of human freedom that the Reformation unleashed into Europe and America; and only then take note of the deficiencies in civilization that still exist and that define the path of future progress.

Christianity is deeply embedded in western civilization. The countries of Europe and America and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa would not be what they are were it not for the powerful presence of Christian faith in disciplining from the inside the peoples of these countries. If we lose this Christian spirit western civilization will slowly decline and lose its integrity and position of truth and justice and progress.

The point here is that the effect of Christian faith is not to be seen merely in the size of churches and relative numbers compared to other faiths, but in the effect it has on the culture and communal lives of the nations it disciplines. In our current world there are several countries that do not have a Christian commitment but who are imitating and borrowing the cultural progress that Christian countries have been making. It remains to be seen whether these countries will eventually adopt the Christian faith from which these developments derive, or whether they will begin to utilize their finds in ways that are detrimental to the human race in general.

Chapter 23: MODERN MISSIONS

ROMAN CATHOLIC MISSIONS

Some of the earlier exploring expeditions, such as those of Columbus, Balboa, and Magellan, were happening about the same time Martin Luther was getting the Protestant Reformation started. Columbus' famous discovery of America was in 1492; Balboa's crossing of the Panama isthmus was in 1513; and Magellan's round-the-world cruise was in 1519-22; Luther's posting of the 95 Theses was in 1517.

Most of the Catholic countries of Europe were heavily involved in these explorations and in the commerce they eventually generated: Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Belgium. It was not until much later that the Protestant countries got involved: England, Holland, Germany mainly. These highly competitive expeditions eventually resulted in colonies of European settlers being planted in foreign lands all over the world, and a side effect was the proliferation of Christian missions, earlier by Roman Catholics and later by Protestants.

INDIA The most notable person in early Catholic missions was a Portuguese man named Francis Xavier. Xavier was one of the founding fathers of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), of which Ignatius Loyola was the head. When the King of Portugal requested the Jesuits to send missionaries to the Portuguese colonies in East India, Xavier was the first to go. This was in 1541, about the same time John Calvin was beginning his second term in Geneva. During the next ten years Xavier worked hard to keep the Portuguese colonists faithful to Catholicism, not only in India but all the way to Japan, while doing what he could also to win the natives in the land.

CEYLON The history of missions in Ceylon is interesting. Originally Buddhist in religion, many of these Ceylonese became Roman Catholic during the years of Portuguese control. But as the Protestant explorers, in this case the Dutch, began their competition, the Dutch drove out the Portuguese by 1658. The Dutch introduced the Reformed Church to Ceylon and by 1722 it was said that there were over 400,000 Protestant Christians on the island.

PHILIPPINES The Philippine Islands were conquered by Spaniards who came, interestingly, by way of Mexico rather than from the west. In short order Catholic missionaries converted almost the entire population. This was happening around the year 1600 already. The Philippines are still a predominantly Catholic country today.

JAPAN The Jesuits were given the country of Japan as their mission field, and they had enormous success in the early years. But when political conditions changed, a new emperor of Japan began serious persecution of Christians until what was left of Catholicism had to go underground. Not until relatively recent times have western missionaries been welcomed in the country, so that today missionaries are still stuggling to promote the gospel in a curious but largely unresponsive nation.

CHINA In China there was a Portuguese colony at Macao, and it was here that another Jesuit missionary named Matteo Ricci began his work in 1582. His missionary methods were to accept whatever seemed reasonable in the existing culture of China, for example the veneration of ancestors, so that they did not have to make a total break with Confucianism. This method was controversial, and produced some significant opposition, but in time Roman Catholic successes enabled the Pope to establish bishoprics in many of the Chinese provinces.

MEXICO As the Spanish explorer Cortez cruelly subdued all opposition in Mexico, the king of Spain sent scores of Franciscans and other monks to convert the Indian people. In 1529 a Franciscan, Peter of Ghent, and an associate baptized fourteen thousand persons in one day, and claimed to have baptized 200,000 people altogether. In time the ancient religious practices of the Mexican people disappeared, but some of the original attitudes and lifestyles did persist. Similar procedures in Peru resulted in the baptism of thousands of native Peruvians.

BRAZIL Here the Portuguese explorers and settlers were under the direction of the king of Portugal. Due partially to the vast territory and the sparse population the Catholic church in this country resulted in a very poor quality of Christian life in the Portuguese colony, such that Kenneth Scott Latourette could summarize, "The low state of the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had its roots in the early days of the colony." ( _A History of Christianity_ , p. 950)

PROTESTANT MISSIONS

INDIA The period of modern Protestant missions is usually associated with the work of William Carey, who in 1793 sailed from England to India for the purpose of bringing the gospel to the Hindu people, India then being under British control. A brilliant linguist, Carey mastered several local languages while supporting himself and his wife as the superintendent of a factory. He was then appointed a teacher of these languages in a college in Calcutta, using this salary to support his colleagues as well, and set out also to translate the Bible, compile dictionaries and grammars, all the while engaging in preaching and seeking the conversion of individuals. He was instrumental in persuading the government to abolish such inhuman practices as throwing children as sacrifices into the Ganges River and burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. William Carey died in 1834, having earned a description as "The Wycliffe of the East."

CHINA During the same time Carey was working in India, a man named Robert Morrison was doing similar things in China. In 1807 the London Missionary Society sent him out to China, even though he was opposed by almost everyone else in authority, including the Chinese themselves. His first task was to learn the language in Canton and Macao, which secured for him an appointment as a translator for the East India Company. He then set about translating the Bible into Chinese and doing what he could to preach the gospel. While his work did not result in large numbers of conversions, it did do much to set the stage for future missionaries. Morrison died in China in 1834.

AFRICA Among the numerous missionaries to Africa during this nineteenth century expansion of Protestant missions are Robert Moffat and David Livingstone. Moving north from Capetown in 1819 Robert Moffat succeeded in converting a previously barbarous native chieftain, and then spent many years in the area north to the Zambesi River bringing the gospel to the African tribes. During this time he translated the Bible into the Bechuana language, and his work inspired his son-in-law David Livingstone to continue it.

David Livingstone was as much of an explorer as missionary, tracing the Zambesi river to its source, discovering Victoria Falls on his way to the Indian Ocean. Impressed with the atrocities of the burgeoning slave trade he did what he could to crush it. Later in his life he explored the source of the Nile River, traced the upper sources of the Congo River, all the while putting his evangelistic purpose ahead of his exploring purpose. He died exhausted in Africa in 1873. His exploratory work opened up the way for generations of later missionaries to bring the gospel to what was then the "the dark continent."

What is happening now on Protestant mission fields is that the young churches are increasingly taking over their responsibility in thoroughly indigenous ways. The gospel is being assimilated, taken in, made a part of their personal and collective nature, and is leading them in ways that are unique and proper to their own development. They are becoming missionaries to their own tribes, and sometimes even to peoples who have been Christian for ages, but who are faltering. The Christian churches in Korea, for example, are a shining light for the gospel.

NIGERIA A specific example is the work of the Christian Reformed Church in Nigeria. The work in Nigeria had been begun by Calvinistic churches in South Africa, but had become almost defunct. One lady from the United States secured an appointment in 1919 from the Sudan United Mission to go to this field as a missionary. She, Johanna Veenstra, worked there in Nigeria until her death in 1933. Others, however, continued the work, and finally in 1940 the Christian Reformed Church took over the responsibility for this mission field from the SUM.

Over the next few decades several missionary families did dedicated and effective work, organized the churches into a denomination like the CRC, and started Bible schools and a theological seminary. As the Nigerian church emerges into maturity the CRC Board of Foreign Missions now sends missionaries, not to do the work of planting new churches, a task being prosecuted effectively by local churches, but as teachers and advisors to the pastors and leaders of the churches. The CRC has pretty much withdrawn from positions of authority, leaving the Nigerian church to make its own way in the faith as indigenous people should. That Nigerian church is now larger in numbers than its sponsor in America.

RELIGION IN THE AMERICAN COLONIES

Scattered across Central and North America are numerous cities that bear religious names. Most of these began as early Spanish colonies or mission posts. For example, we have St. Augustine in Florida; Corpus Christi in Texas; San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and numerous others in California.

Later, when Protestant colonies were established, they tended more to take political names, often of prominent persons: Virginia, after the virgin queen Elizabeth I; Maryland, after Queen Mary; Pennsylvania, after its founder William Penn; Georgia, after King George; Carolina after King Charles; Delaware after its founder. Or, alternatively, they might choose names reminiscent of places the settlers came from, such as New Jersey, New Netherlands, New York, New Hampshire. Here and there a French name will suggest that it bears French ancestry, as Vermont, Quebec, Montreal, Mackinac, Marquette, Detroit. As colonists pushed westward in North America, they often retained Indian names for states and cities: Massachusetts, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Mississippi, Iowa, Chillicothe, Saskechewan, , Dakota, and others.

In the original thirteen colonies of the United States, religious liberty was usually not practiced. It was something that gradually developed as the necessities of political and economic cooperation demanded. When the Constitution was being hammered out in 1787, it became obvious that no one denomination should be designated the official church of the United States. This had been the practice in all the European countries from which the colonists came, but had often produced conflict and sometimes war. So the United States is based on the idea that the church should run its own business without interference from the government, and vice-versa, the government should run its business without being dictated to by church officials.

The Massachusetts colony allowed non-Puritan persons to live in it, but without voting rights, and was quite rigorous in controlling what variety of gospel was being advocated by its preachers and teachers. Harvard University was established in 1636 as a school for the training of ministers for the Congregational churches of the colony. Roger Williams, advocating a more Baptist style of faith, was forced to leave the colony; he went elsewhere and began a colony named Providence, which eventually became Rhode Island. Virginia, though mostly Episcopal in religion, did provide a certain amount of leeway for other churches.

Maryland was founded by Roman Catholic owners, but since few Catholics chose to come, religious liberty was granted for the purpose of attracting settlers. Pennsylvania was perhaps the only colony to be founded on freedom of religion to begin with. New York was founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam (city) and New Netherlands (colony), and changed its name in 1664 when conquered by the British. Georgia, like Australia, was founded as a prison colony. So all of this religious diversity continued until the colonies decided to set up their own government independently from England.

The fact that this form of separation of church and state became the official policy of the United States does not, of course, mean that the country is no longer Christian. All of the original colonies were thoroughly religious, with their own specific variety of Christian faith, so when they came together they did not abandon that faith, but agreed simply that no one variety should become official. Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution clearly give evidence of this religious commitment, speaking as they do of "Nature and Nature's God" and of the "Creator" who guarantees our inalienable rights.

RELIGION IN THE NATIONAL PERIOD

The churches that grew the most during the westward expansion period of the United States were the Baptists, the Methodists, and the Presbyterians. The Methodists, founded by John and Charles Wesley in England, devised a system known as Circuit Riders. Methodist ministers would set up preaching stations at scattered intervals and, visiting perhaps three a Sunday, would conduct services for whoever cared to come. Eventually, as these small stations grew in size they would become full-fledged congregations able to put up their own building and support their own ministers.

Baptists were originally Calvinists who rejected infant baptism. On the frontier these groups would begin without a minister, and be content with getting an occasional visit from an ordained minister at which time sacraments could be observed and marriages take place. The simplicity and informality of these congregations enabled them to grow rapidly as the American people moved farther and farther west.

Presbyterians also grew fairly fast, though they generally required a large enough group of believers to form a fairly stable and self-reliant church.

Besides these denominations, there were numerous Congregational churches, Calvinist in theology but congregational in church government, as well as the Dutch Reformed and Lutheran churches. Other groups sprang up here and there. Unitarians, Universalists, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Amish, and after emancipation a wide variety of churches serving the black community, many of them store-front groups without denominational affiliation. Repeated divisions among these denominations over the years has resulted in a plethora of groups almost defying classification. Roman Catholicism has grown also mostly by massive immigration in the nineteenth century from countries like Ireland, Italy, and Poland.

The predominantly Protestant character of the United States is surely the single most significant factor in the way the culture and politics of the nation has developed. We have been able to welcome all varieties of Christian faith, including Roman Catholic and the quasi-Christian groups – even minorities of atheists and Buddhists and Moslems – and have been able to translate this basic faith into constant struggle for justice and truth and honesty and reliability in our political, economic, educational, and social spheres. Which is exactly what Jesus' original Great Commission requires: first baptism, then constant teaching.

PERSPECTIVE

Jesus instructed his friends to disciple the nations, and to do it in two stages. First, baptize them, and second, instruct them in how the children of God should live. The Protestant churches of the modern era took a while to assess the situation. They had to assimilate the sense of freedom they had just earned, and then they recognized that the gospel needed to spread throughout the earth, especially to the peoples the world explorers were discovering, India, China, Japan, the east Indies, the Americas, Africa. There were millions of people yet that God wants to be baptized and learn how to live as Christians in their own country.

How do you persuade someone in a foreign culture to become a Christian? How do you demonstrate that Christian faith is better than their current religious practices? How do you make contact in such a way as to get the others to take seriously what you are saying? Especially if the people with whom you are working are illiterate and uneducated and in an altogether foreign culture that you do not understand?

Some modern missionaries made the mistake of confusing western mores with the gospel. For example, if they found native women wearing clothing the missionaries found indecent, they might make the matter of clothing a part of their message. Other missionaries made highly creditable efforts to get schools and hospitals started, only to find that when revolutionary forces invaded the country, these institutions were simply taken over also, leaving no Christian presence behind. However, in spite of such false starts the gospel is getting a hearing all around the globe.

Protestant missionaries would sometime accompany explorers to Africa or the far East or to North America – even an attempt was made from Calvin's Geneva to establish a church in Brazil, with no success – but the great expansion of Protestant missions came a little later when more was known about the distant lands and peoples.

What remains to be done, for example in Africa and all over the world, is that the gospel's principles of truth, justice, progress, and all-around godliness be incorporated into the national cultural life of the country – this being a long long process, pointing always to the development of a godly civilization for the entire human race.

Chapter 24: THE CHURCH'S AGENDA

The matter of identifying the task of the church in the twenty-first century and following is certainly a risky thing to attempt. One must have a sense of the direction in which God has been guiding the church in the past, one must also have a sense of where the remaining deficiencies are, and one must have some notion of what needs to be done to improve the situation. Here are a few items that bear discussion.

  1. Effectuating the Great Commission

The Christian church has been doing this faithfully ever since the time of Jesus. We must continue to do so for as long as the world lasts – forever. But we need to be clear about what this involves. It involves disciplining the human race, making disciples of the nations. Jesus requires us to disciple the peoples in two stages: baptism and instruction. People must come to know Jesus Christ, the gospel, and to submit willingly to his call to repentance and faith. This produces baptism, the first step in the two-step process.

When one looks at the world in the twenty-first century, one sees numerous nations that have long ago received the gospel and have been absorbing it into their national lives. But one also sees other nations functioning with other religions and philosophies. This should be for us the definition of our task as Christians. We must work patiently and believingly always in the direction of persuading the non-Christian nations of the world that the way of Jesus is the way the human race must go in order to achieve the kind of world we all want. This means first baptism, the voluntary commitment of entire people groups to the tutelage of the Lord Jesus, and then second constant attention to the character of justice and honesty and all-around goodness that constitutes obedience to the Creator. And all of this in the volatile pressures of time and change in the real world that history is shaping.

The test of the effectiveness of the church's work does include the numbers of people won to to the Christian faith – that's baptism. But that is only the first step. The next step is to teach these new Christians how to obey the Lord in all their personal and communal lives, and that involves politics and business and education as well as church-related items. How well is the nation doing in carrying over Christian principles into government and business affairs, that is, how honest and just and humanitarian are the policies actually being followed and practiced? What kind of culture is being created?

We can see by looking back into our western history how the gospel has actually worked in the affairs of European and American countries. It is not difficult to see that the negativity of the barbarian tribes that overcame the ancient Roman Empire was changed in five hundred years into a vigorous and positive reconstruction of civilization on Christian principles. It is also not difficult to see the glaring deficiencies that continue to plague us in our attempts to construct a godly and just social structure. So we need to be realistic, not despairing of creating a better civilization, nor ceasing our attempts to identify and remedy the continuing problems that face us. It is obviously not done in one lifetime, but the progress we have made in the past should be enough to keep us working at the issues we can identify for our times. We won't create Paradise on earth in our lifetime, but we can and should be moving in that direction. That is the summons that our Creator and Savior present to us always in the Great Commission.

  2. Theological readjustment

One of the most pressing and important tasks the Christian community has at any given time in history is to understand developments in a theistic perspective, in other words to understand as clearly as possible what Christianity is all about, what it is trying to do, how God is directing the course of history, what God is doing by means of the Christian gospel and church, within the ongoing development of human civilization. More concretely, this means to become more accurate in our philosophy and theology, ready to update our thinking as the Lord reveals more and more of his plan and purpose. There are at least two major areas where this readjustment requires to be made in our times: a) in our _philosophical_ underpinning, and b) in our controlling _theological_ paradigm.

PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNING

The prevailing philosophy in the modern western world seems to have become that of

the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, that which has been definitively articulated by Immanuel Kant. It is the philosophy that distinguishes between a phenomenal world and a noumenal world, the world of knowledge and the world of belief respectively. In this scenario God exists in the noumenal world and is unknowable in the phenomenal world. He is an object of belief as contrasted with an object of knowledge. God cannot be known in terms of anything available to the human senses.

Several modern versions of Christian theology have been developed in such a way as to demonstrate that it is indeed possible for us to have knowledge of God even in such a philosophy. Four of these schemes are the subjectivism of Schleiermacher, the moralism of Ritschl and Rauschenbush, the biblicism of Fundamentalism, and the neo-orthodoxy of Barth and Brunner.

We need, however, to recapture the original philosophy taught in Genesis, namely that God created the world by speaking. This method, by speaking, means that it is indeed possible for humans to derive knowledge about God via the tangible world of our senses. God is constantly speaking in and through the various aspects of the natural world. There is no distinction in the Bible between a phenomenal world and a noumenal world. We see God at work precisely in the way nature functions, "nature's God." We see him at work in what is happening in the vast reaches of space, in the galaxies and stars and planets of astronomy. And in the same way we need to learn how to read history as the way God is creating the human race in his image.

But to do this we need to consciously reject the philosophy of the Enlightenment and return to the simple but profound philosophy of the ancient Hebrews who were taught by Genesis. We know God in his deeds, in what he is doing in the world he created for himself.

THEOLOGICAL PARADIGM

For one and a half millennia, say from 500 to 2000, much of the Christian church has been operating theologically under what might be called the Augustinian paradigm. This perspective has been the basic staple of Christian theology, whether Catholic or Protestant, whether Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist, pre-millennial or independent, for all this time.

This paradigm has three parts: the original creation of sinless humans in a pristine Garden of Eden, a historical Fall into sin that plunges the entire human race into ungodliness, and the redemptive work of Christ that brings believers out of this Fall into the eternal bliss of heaven. A Latin version goes as follows: _posse non peccare_ (able not to sin), _non posse non peccare_ (not able not to sin), and _non posse peccare_ (not able to sin). This paradigm has been pretty much standard for both Catholics and Protestants, in spite of their other differences.

Modern developments in the scientific world, however, are compelling Christian thinkers to reconsider these and other basics of historic Christian doctrine. The notion, for example, that the world is six thousand years old, still held in many Fundamentalist circles, simply cannot be accepted any longer. Without being too precise, it seems clear to most scientists who study the matter from various viewpoints, that an age of about fifteen billion years is more likely.

But that insight compels us to think also about what it means that God created the world. The traditional view is that of a fiat creation, that is, that God by speaking the creative word, brought the various components of the universe into being instantaneously in a matter of six literal days. That view can hardly be reconciled with a universe of fifteen billion years, so theological adjustment is required here as well.

But the really difficult point of revision is concerning the origin of the human race. Since 1859 when Darwin published his book on the _Origin of Species_ the Christian community has by and large thought that evolution is contradictory of Genesis, and that science in that regard is unBiblical. But recent discoveries have pretty much proven that some form of _developmental_ theory needs to be accepted. For example, that human DNA is 97% the same as that of chimpanzees, and that human DNA can be traced back to a female ancestor who lived as part of a much larger community about 150,000 years ago. It seems clear enough that these and other scientific discoveries relating to the origin of the human race cannot be coordinated with the traditional theological views that we have held for 1500 years.

Furthermore, if we take seriously the enormous age of the universe, about fifteen billion years, and if we then extrapolate that time is an ongoing and unending process, then it seems necessary also to reconsider our eschatology. Traditional eschatology envisions an end of the world and a re-creation of it such that all humans who have ever lived will be resuscitated in new indestructible bodies, either in heaven or in hell. But if we do not posit an end of the world, but visualize a continuation of time as God works out his plan for the human race, then all of that eschatology will require reconsideration. The current view that Christianity exists for the purpose of getting people out of this world into another world simply cannot be maintained.

So it appears, from a theistic perspective, that God is requiring Christians to make these difficult and necessary steps forward in the plan of divine destiny. The implications are vast and will require diligent and honest and respectful examination for decades to come. Further, it would appear that this theological readjustment is a major priority of the church at present. We will not know how to prosecute the gospel's imperative unless we are clear about what the Creator Lord of the church is doing by means of the gospel and the church. Our aims and goals need to be defined by God's aims and goals, and we need to be careful about keeping our own activities within that plan of God. The _developmental paradigm_ seems, accordingly, to form the framework in which our future theological adjustments need to be made.

  2. Church unity

One would think that the rampant denominationalism we see today can hardly be the ideal expression of what we like to call the "one holy catholic church." On the one hand it does perpetuate the needed liberty of Christian people to serve the Lord in the way the Spirit leads. But on the other hand it tends to encourage the notion that we are better in this respect than others. As often as not the splitting of churches is accompanied by bitterness, occasionally even hatred; seldom are church schisms the product of loving concern for one another.

Going back to the past can hardly be the answer either, as both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox recommend: come back to Mother Church. The hierarchical systems of both these churches are based on inaccurate understandings of scriptural precedents and teachings. Jesus never appointed any one person to be his successor as leader of the Christian churches. He appointed the Holy Spirit to do that.

So we need to understand quite well that official church government and church polity is not of primary importance. What is important is what the Holy Spirit is doing inside the hearts and lives of all Christians. Church leaders who interfere with that leading of the Spirit are doing their parishioners no favor, and are actually functioning outside the parameters of the gospel.

Church union and church merger have been tried in the twentieth century, with negligible success. Ecumenical cooperative efforts have been made, and these seem to hold some promise of favorable results. On the local level one would think that neighboring churches might well try to figure out how they could cooperate in promoting the gospel. But what form such cooperation might take in the decades to come is highly uncertain. It's a continuing condition that only persistent and patient attention can address.

  2. Christian Education

This is the question of continuity. How to bring the next generation into the stream of life and civilization in such a way as to 1) preserve the basic ingredients of the gospel, and 2) allow for the modifications of tradition that are required by truth and new insights.

Not all of generally accepted tradition needs to be preserved, since much of it is dated and of minimal usefulness in a changing culture. On the other hand, if the essentials of the past that have produced the modern world are abandoned too quickly or even mistakenly, then the great progress we have made will also be in jeopardy. Generally we learn by trial and error in the growth and development of western civilization. Politically we have tried monarchy, fascism, communism, and have found them to be wanting. They do not produce what is needed in the way of humanitarian equality and justice and progress. While democracy in its various forms also has its problems, it does seem to be the way to proceed in the future.

So the question of education is how to get the younger generations to enter into this phase of life responsibly and creatively, recognizing and accepting what is good and right about our past, but also then experimenting with new and vigorous ways of confronting our mistakes and failures.

Now, since this is a survey of church history, what has the church to do about this issue of education? Here are three suggestions.

First, the church needs to keep reminding the peoples of the world that we live under a Creator. We need to be theists. We live under "Nature and Nature's God" in such a way that the rights we have and which we exercise daily come from our Creator. Why is this important? It is important because there are greater forces at work in the universe than our puny human efforts, so that we need to recognize that what we humans do needs to be tuned to what God is doing.

God has created a universe long ago, and he has been working at developing its potential ever since. What we see today, therefore, is today's product, today's phase, of a constantly developing universe, and our bit part here on planet Earth is a tiny but important step in the great universal project that the Creator has undertaken. There is no way for us to project the future or define what will happen as the centuries roll on. But what is required of us is to see as best we can what our present task is in the direction of making human life and civilization better. The process of church history, seen in the context of western civilization, gives us some useful insights into the direction in which God wishes us to go, and we should be as faithful as we can in promoting that task of making the human race display the image of God in its culture.

Second, the church needs to keep reminding people that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Way of Jesus is the way human civilization must travel if it is to achieve the kind of life that God intends for us to have. Not the way of Buddha or the way of Mohammed. The Way of Jesus. It is, accordingly, necessary that the younger generations be adequately trained to know who Jesus is, what he has done, and what he means for us. This is Christian education.

The point here is that this requires intentional and unabashed Christian commitment and context in our educational systems. There is currently no commonly accepted definition of Christianity in the churches, so at present this matter of Christian education varies widely in scope, and in public education is all but missing. The church at large must therefore continue its vigorous discussion as to the heart and essence of Christian faith, and it must in the meantime do what it can to train the younger people to see life and country in that context.

Third, the church needs to keep reminding people that Christian religion is a matter of internal conviction, not of external rituals. Out of the heart are the issues of life. This, in Christian theology, is the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Christian persons are people whose inner life and feeling and morality is a gift from God, not merely an acceptance of certain rules. Christianity is a religion of freedom, of liberty to become all that God enables us to become, not only as individual persons but as entire nations. The drive, the motivation, the impulse that we work with is not personal glory but the pressure of justice and truth and virtue, all combining to become a spirit of holinesss within us.

So this is not something that education can guarantee, nor can political legislation. There will undoubtedly be persons who are taught the truth but who do not internalize it, who understand intellectually what is good and right but who choose to go their own sweet way and ruin themselves in the process. There will also be people who want to enforce Christian morality by means of social legislation. While some of this may be needed, we need to recognize that it is only when such legislation is backed by solid internal conviction that it will achieve its purpose.

That is why each generation must model the obedience of the Spirit honestly and vigorously, and in such a way that it is catching. That the younger generation can see clearly and meaningfully that Christian faith is genuine and is the only right way for human beings to go. Children must "catch" the spirit from their parents and the older persons they know.

The reader will recognize in the above three recommendations the doctrine of trinity. This is how that doctrine should work in our thinking and in our lives. It is a doctrine that makes sense and does not thrust us into unintelligible and useless speculations about what God is like within himself. God created us; God shows us the way he wants us to live in the career of Jesus; and he provides his own Spirit to propel us inwardly on our way in life. That's the trinity, and that's all the doctrine should mean.

CONCLUDING PERSPECTIVE

This survey of Church History demonstrates one important principle. Each culture must incorporate the gospel in terms of its own indigenous mindset. It may well turn out in the future that this mindset is severely lacking, or even partially wrong, but in order for the gospel to become internalized it must do so in the terms that make sense to the people-group involved. We are able to see, now in the twenty-first century, that the mindset of the ancient Greco-Roman culture was wrong, and consequently that the theological understandings they developed are also wrong. But it was necessary at that stage of the development of God's purpose for this to happen.

The same applies to the theology and structure of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. So much error included, but necessary nevertheless for the needs of the time, the disciplining of the barbarians.

Similarly we can also see now that the philosophy of Enlightenment is wrong, and that the theological systems that have been constructed in that mindset need complete reworking. No doubt future millennia will come to additional clarity about things we today cannot discern.

So the insight is important for us to recognize. God is able to do his thing, using even inadequate means, to further his own control of human destiny. And we can rest comfortably recognizing that God can, in ways perhaps that we cannot understand, utilize even error to achieve his ongoing purpose in his church. We need to be constantly at work, listening to what the Creator is saying, aligning our efforts as best we can with God's work in the establishment and development of GODCHURCH.

THE END

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edwin Walhout is a Minister Emeritus of the Christian Reformed Church, currently residing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He holds five degrees from Calvin College, Calvin Theological Seminary, and Andover-Newton Theological School. Rev. Walhout has extensive experience in high-school teaching, pastoral ministry, editing, and writing. If you are interested in pursuing this author's work, kindly consult Smashwords.com, where you will find more than two dozen of his books available as e-books.
