Conclusion

4

Christian History

An Overview

It is impossible to understand the present state and forms of Christianity without a knowledge of its history. To study Christian history is not about retreating from the present into the past, but about providing a lens that brings the present into sharper focus. The long shadows of past debates, discussions, and personalities figure large in contemporary Christianity. Given the importance of this history, we shall accord it careful attention. This large chapter considers the history of Christianity under five broad sections, as follows:

The Early Church, c. 100–c. 500

The first major era of Christian history (c. 100–451), during which Christianity began to expand rapidly throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond, is sometimes called the “patristic period.” The unusual and to many unfamiliar term “patristic” comes from the Greek word patēr (“father”), which was applied to a group of Christian leaders such as Athanasius of Alexandria or Augustine of Hippo; these are often referred to as “fathers of the church.”

It is difficult to make sense of the historical development of Christianity without a good grasp of this formative period, particularly its great theological debates, and the important implications of the unexpected acceptance of Christianity as the legitimate religion of the Roman empire. We shall therefore begin our discussion of early Christianity by reflecting on its emergence within Judaism and on its rapid transformation into a faith that refused to recognize ethnic or social boundaries.

The apostolic age

The first major period in Christian history is generally known as the “apostolic age.” The term “apostle” derives from the Greek verb apostelein, “to send,” and is often used to designate those commissioned by Jesus of Nazareth to continue and extend his ministry. Traditionally, this is understood as the period when the apostles were still alive, providing historical continuity between the church and the original community of faith that gathered around Jesus of Nazareth. We know frustratingly little about this period, even though it is clearly of immense historical importance. However, we can begin to sketch some of its aspects, providing an important transition to the better understood history of the early church.

As we noted earlier, at the heart of the Christian movement lay a series of reports and interpretations of the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth (pp. 3–5). His significance was presented in terms of both his identity and his function, using a rich range of Christological titles and images of salvation, often drawn from the Jewish roots of Christianity. Initially Christian groups appear to have been established in leading urban centers such as Jerusalem, by individuals who had personally known Jesus of Nazareth or were familiar with members of his immediate circle.

Other Christian communities were established by figures with more complex associations with the Jerusalem church, most notably Paul of Tarsus (pp. 26, 45). According to the New Testament itself, Paul was responsible for establishing Christian churches in many parts of the Mediterranean world. At first Christianity would almost certainly have been seen simply as one more sect or group within a Judaism that was already accustomed to considerable diversity in religious expression. As recent historical studies of this period have made clear, Judaism was far from being monolithic at the time.

These Christian communities were scattered throughout the Roman empire, each facing its own distinctive local challenges and opportunities. This raises two significant historical questions, neither of which can be answered with any degree of certainty. First, how did these individual Christian communities maintain their religious identity within their local cultural context? It is clear, for example, that early Christian worship served to emphasize the distinctiveness of Christian communities, helping to forge a sense of shared identity over and against society in general.

Second, how did these individual communities understand themselves as relating to a larger universal community, increasingly referred to as “the church” in the later writings of the New Testament? There is evidence that these small communities maintained contact with each other through correspondence, through traveling teachers who visited clusters of churches, and especially through the sharing of foundational documents, some of which (though not all) were later incorporated into the canon of the New Testament (pp. 45–47).

Women played an important role in Christianity during the apostolic or patristic age. As we have noted, Christianity emerged from Palestinian Judaism, which often adopted strongly negative attitudes toward women. For this reason, the gospels note that Jesus of Nazareth’s encounters with women occasionally provoked hostility and criticism from the official representatives of Judaism. The gospel’s accounts of the ministry of Jesus confirm that women were an integral part of the group of people who gathered around him. They were affirmed by him, often to the dismay of the Pharisees and other religious traditionalists. The gospel of Luke emphasizes the significant role of “many women” (Luke 8: 2–3) in the spreading of the gospel.

Our most important source for the history of apostolic Christianity is the Acts of the Apostles, generally agreed to have been written by the same Luke who compiled the third of the four gospels. Acts emphasizes the important role of women in providing hospitality for early Christian missionaries to Europe: women converts such as Lydia made their homes available as house churches and staging posts for missionaries. Luke appears to be concerned to bring out clearly the important historical fact that the early church attracted significant numbers of prominent women from cultures that gave them a much higher social role than they had in Judaism and offered them a significant role in its overall evangelistic and pastoral ministry.

In particular, Luke singles out Priscilla and Aquila as a husband and wife team that was engaged in an evangelistic and teaching ministry (Acts 18: 1–3, 24–26). Paul commends to the Roman church “our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at Cenchrea” (Romans 16: 1), commenting on how helpful she had been to him. Other passages in the New Testament letters (such as 1 Timothy 3: 11 and 5: 9–10) point to women exercising a recognized and authorized ministry of some form within the church. Amid the large number of folks whom Paul lists as sending greetings in his Epistle to the Romans are Prisca, a “fellow-worker”; and Tryphaena and Tryphosa, “workers in the Lord” – descriptions that Paul also applies to men in the same passage.

Paul’s extended list of greetings in his letter to the Romans also includes Junia, who is named, along with Andronicus, as “prominent among the apostles” (Romans 16: 7). Andronicus is a male name; Junia, a female name. (One early manuscript reads “Julia” rather than “Junia.”)

Early Christianity and the Roman empire

It is impossible to make much sense of the development of early Christianity without a good understanding of the Roman empire. Many historians regard this empire as having reached its zenith during the reign of Emperor Trajan, who ruled from 98 to 117. Christianity had its origins in the Roman province of Judaea, a relatively obscure and politically insignificant region, and would expand rapidly throughout the empire, eventually becoming its official religion. In view of the importance of the Roman imperial context to the rise and shaping of Christianity, we shall look at this context in more detail.

The expansion of Roman influence began during the period when Rome was a republic. However, political weaknesses led to power being centralized in a single figure of authority – the emperor (originally imperator meant “general” – “one who gives orders,” from imperare, “to command” and imperium, “power”). For political reasons, this supreme ruler was not referred to as “king,” as this term was always regarded as unacceptable by Romans, presumably on account of the kings’ abuses of power in the archaic period, before they were expelled. As dedicated republicans, Romans were anxious not think of themselves as having fallen back into odious monarchy – the power of one. The term translated by us as “emperor” – imperator – was used as a title for Rome’s supreme ruler mainly because it avoided language that could have linked his function to the discredited institution of kingship. It was during the reign of the first emperor, Augustus, that the gospel of Luke places the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

A significant degree of Roman territorial expansion took place during the reign of Augustus, especially in Egypt and in Northern Europe. The imperial province of Egypt became particularly important, providing substantial grain imports that fed the Roman population. Augustus’ successor Tiberius, who reigned from AD 14 to AD 37, proved an ineffective emperor, who preferred to live in seclusion on the island of Capri. Much later, under Trajan, the stability of the empire was initially restored, and a period of further expansion followed. A major program of public building in Rome enriched the city, emphasizing its status as the center of the greatest empire the world had then known.

Even in the New Testament there are clear signs of awareness of the Roman authorities’ antagonism toward Christianity. The Roman historian Tacitus (AD 56–117) provides some evidence of popular resentment in the aftermath of the Great Fire of Rome (AD 64) when he speaks of Christians as “a class hated for their abominations.” The Revelation of St. John, the final work in the New Testament canon, is widely regarded as reflecting active hostility toward Christian groups in the late first century AD. It is thought to reflect the situation during the final years of the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian, particularly around 95. Yet, although Domitian was a strong supporter of traditional Roman religion, there are no historical records of any official persecution of Christians during his reign.

A form of Roman “civil religion” began to emerge at this time; it was linked with worship of the emperor as an expression of allegiance to the Roman state and empire. A dead emperor who was held worthy of the honor could be voted the status of divus (state divinity) and incorporated into the Roman pantheon. Refusal to take part in this imperial cult was regarded as an act of treason. First-century Roman religion tended to draw a distinction between state cult, which gave Roman society stability and cohesion, and the private views of individuals. (The Latin noun religio derives from a verb meaning “to bind together.”) The role of the state cult was to give the city and the empire a stable and sacred foundation. Religion was primarily understood in terms of “devotion” (pietas) – a social activity and an attitude that promoted unity and loyalty to the state.

Roman citizens were free to adopt, in private, other religious practices and beliefs, so long as they did not conflict with this “official” civil religion. These private religions would take place in the household, the head of the family (paterfamilias) taking charge of domestic prayers and ceremonial rites in much the same way as the public representatives of the people performed the state ceremonial rites. During the first century AD these private religions often took the form of mystery cults, which originated in Greece or Asia and were brought back to Rome by soldiers and merchants. The best known was the cult of Mithras, which is thought to have originated in Persia.

At that time Christianity would have fitted easily into this pattern of Roman religious diversity. Yet Christians found it difficult to accept the distinction between public and private religious beliefs, holding that their allegiance to their one God prevented them from taking part in the official Roman cult. This became increasingly problematic in the face of the rise of the imperial cult in the late first century. Especially in the eastern regions of the empire, worshipping the emperor came to be seen as a mark of loyalty to Rome. Christians, who refused to worship any God other than their own, were perceived as potentially seditious on the grounds that they did not display this form of loyalty.

The imperial cult was so deeply rooted in the major cities of the eastern Roman empire that it was inevitable that some form of confrontation between Christianity and the state authorities would take place. One of the most frequently cited pieces of evidence here is the famous letter of Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan, which dates from about 112. In this letter Pliny asked advice as to how to deal with the growing number of Christians who refused to worship the image of the Roman emperor. It is quite clear from Pliny’s letter that Christianity had fallen under suspicion as a result of the refusal to worship the emperor, which suggested that Christians were bent on overthrowing the existing social order.

The negative attitude of Christians toward the imperial cult helps us understand one of the more puzzling developments of this age: the tendency of Roman critics to ridicule Christianity as a form of “atheism.” This makes no sense if “atheism” is understood in the modern sense of the term – namely as rejection of the belief in God. Yet the term “atheism” was widely used in classical culture to refer to a rejection of the official state religion. The classical Greek philosopher Socrates was condemned to death in 399 bc, four centuries before the apostolic age, for his “atheism” – that is, on the grounds that he rejected the “official” religion of the city of Athens. Socrates, of course, was no atheist in the modern sense of the word.

Early Christian worship and organization

Lacking any official religious recognition and protection, early Christianity could not be a public religion in the Roman empire. There were no buildings dedicated to public Christian worship. It is easy to see why the secrecy surrounding Christian gatherings and worship roused suspicions about this new faith within Roman society. Rumors rapidly developed that Christians indulged in orgies and cannibalism. And we can understand how this took place. There is much evidence that early Christian gatherings included a “love feast” (agapē, meaning “love” in Greek), which could easily be misunderstood as involving sexual behaviors. Equally, it is not difficult to see how the practice of consuming bread and wine as symbols of the body and blood of Christ could be misinterpreted by outsiders as some kind of cannibalism.

We possess several important witnesses to early Christian worship. One is a manual of church order and Christian living that dates from the late first or early second century and is known as the Didache (The Teaching: didachē is a Greek word meaning “teaching”). This work describes how Christians gathered together on the Lord’s Day – in other words, on Sunday – “to break bread and give thanks.” The service is clearly understood to take place in a private home, not in a public place.

Justin Martyr composed his First Apology in Rome, around AD 155. In this work he describes two early Christian worship services. First, he provides an account of the baptism of new converts. Following their baptism, the new recruits are led into the assembly of Christian believers. After prayers for the community and for the new converts, the worshippers greet one another with a kiss. Bread, wine, and water are then brought to the president, who offers a eucharistic prayer, ascribing glory to the Father in the name of the Son and Spirit, and expresses gratitude that the gathered worshippers have been counted as worthy of receiving the bread and wine. Justin does not use the term “priest” to refer to the president of this “thanksgiving” ceremony (eucharistia), presumably because the term had associations with Roman civil religion, which was then strongly hostile to Christianity.

The second event that Justin describes is a regular Sunday gathering of the community of faith. Why meet on a Sunday, rather than on the Jewish sabbath? Justin explains that the community gathers on Sunday – the first day of the week – both because it was the first day of creation and because this was the day on which Jesus rose from the dead. Only those who have been baptized are permitted to attend this service. The service begins with some readings from the “memoirs of the apostles” (almost certainly a reference to the gospels) or from the writings of the prophets, followed by a sermon based on these texts. This is in turn followed by prayers and the celebration of the eucharist along the lines just described. At the end of the service, those with sufficient means are invited to bring gifts to the president, who will distribute them to those in need.

Funeral rites were also important for early Christians. Romans tended to cremate their dead and to place their ashes in carved urns. Christians insisted on burial, seeing this as resting on the precedent of the burial of Christ. From the beginning of the second century, Christians constructed vast underground burial sites by digging into the soft porous pumice rock underneath the city of Rome and the neighboring area. This network – known as “the catacombs” – consisted of passages and tunnels with niches carved into the walls in which bodies could be placed, to await the resurrection. With the legalization of Christianity in the fourth century the catacombs gradually fell into disuse, as Christians were able to provide funeral rites for their dead openly, without fear of persecution.

Even in Rome, early Christianity was not well organized, partly on account of difficulties in coordinating while the Christian movement remained illegal. Although the movement had leaders, they were unable to offer any kind of centralized control. The terms episcopos (bishop), diakonos (deacon) and presbuteros (elder) were all used to refer to leaders of the Christian community. It is significant that all three of these words were widely used in secular culture too, to refer to administrative positions within large households of the day. An episcopos was a domestic supervisor, a diakonos a servant, and a presbuteros a senior member of the household. Christianity appears to have taken over familiar secular words here and to have invested them with specifically Christian meanings, in effect transferring these terms to the “household of faith.”

At this early stage there is no suggestion that a bishop had oversight of a group of churches or an ecclesiastical region. This development took place later, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire, even if there are some early anticipations of it. At the early stage, a “bishop” was often simply the leader of a single Christian community. The Roman churches of the second century are perhaps best compared to secular Roman clubs or societies (collegium, plural collegia), or to Jewish synagogues – essentially independent associations with no centralized control.

Women and early Christianity

As we noted earlier, women played an important role in the apostolic church (pp. 25–26). Yet, for reasons that are not fully understood, the churches tended to adopt more traditional, culturally accommodated approaches to headship and hierarchy. In the Greco-Roman world, the ideal woman was portrayed as self-effacing, industrious, and loyal to her family. Funerary monuments provide some of the clearest expressions of these cultural norms, celebrating a deceased woman’s conformity to what was expected of her. This inscription on a first-century Roman tombstone illustrates how these virtues were embodied and commended.

Here lies Amymone, wife of Marcus, best and most beautiful of women. She made wool, she was devoted to the gods and her family. She was modest, careful with money, and chaste. She stayed at home.

Inevitably, the assimilation of such cultural norms led to the exclusion of women from positions of communal and liturgical leadership, even if women may have exercised considerable social and political influence behind the scenes. There were three orders of ministry within the early church: bishops, priests, and deacons. Although women rapidly found themselves excluded from the former two roles, they remained active as deaconesses. This ministry is recorded from the second century on and played a significant role in the pastoral life of the churches.

The “Didascalia of the Apostles,” which seems to date from the first half of the third century, suggests that male deacons should be compared to Christ and deaconesses to the Holy Spirit. In practical terms, it seems that deacons undertook pastoral ministry to men and deaconesses to women. The Council of Chalcedon ruled that women should not be allowed to be ordained as deaconesses until they were 40; this suggests a need to regularize this ministerial order, which was already well established within the Christian world.

Martyrdom remained one of the most significant areas in which women played a leading role. Two of the most celebrated women martyrs were Perpetua and Felicitas, who were martyred together in Carthage in the first decade of the third century. The traditional account of their martyrdom offers some insights into the social dynamics of the churches at this time. Perpetua, a Roman noblewoman, was a nursing mother; Felicitas was her pregnant slave. Perpetua had been baptized against the explicit wishes of her father, indicating that she was prepared to break with familial traditions and loyalties on account of her faith. The fact that both a noblewoman and her slave were martyred together reflects a growing tendency for martyrdom to become a means of self-empowerment for women at this period, when imperial hostility to Christianity often led to sporadic harassment and occasionally to systematic persecution.

One of the most remarkable witnesses to the aspirations of women in the early church is found in the cult of Thecla of Iconium. This cult is thought to have originated in the second half of the second century and is described in a document of this period known as The Acts of Paul and Thecla. The document presents a noblewoman, Thecla, who is described as a traditional “stay at home” aristocrat. One day she overhears the preaching of Apostle Paul through an open window. Enthralled by what she hears, she leaves behind her fiancé and her home to follow Paul, and eventually to travel and proclaim the gospel herself.

One of the core themes of this intriguing work is the rejection of the social role assigned to women of noble birth at this time in imperial Roman culture – especially the traditional bonds of familial loyalty, the expectation that they will marry, and their dedication to their home – as an effect of the countercultural values and beliefs of the Christian faith. At one point Thecla is condemned to death by the Roman authorities at the instigation of her mother, who is outraged by her rejection of traditional cultural norms. Yet Thecla eventually wins out.

The story is important, because it affirms the role of women in carrying out church responsibilities that were then being increasingly allotted to males – such as public leadership and evangelism. Thecla is prepared to dress as a man in order to be able to carry out such a role. As early as 190, the Roman theologian Tertullian from Carthage expressed concern that some were using the story of Thecla to justify the public ministry of women in churches, especially in baptizing and preaching – something to which Tertullian was opposed.

Yet Christian women were now playing a significant role outside the mainstream of church life. The Montanist movement of the mid-second century, for example, centered on three charismatic individuals in the province of Phrygia: Montanus himself and two women colleagues, Prisca (sometimes called Priscilla) and Maximilla. Montanism is perhaps best understood as a religious renewal movement, similar in some ways to modern Pentecostalism (p. 212). Contemporary sources suggest that, among the movement’s followers, Prisca and Maximilla achieved greater status than Montanus himself. Although Montanism had considerable influence within the churches, especially in Africa, it is best seen as a movement operating outside the administrative and power structures of the church, thus allowing women to assume leadership roles that were becoming problematic within church structures, which were increasingly conforming to Roman social norms.

The same is true of the monastic movement, which often arose as a response to concerns about the morality and spirituality of mainline Christian communities, especially in the cities. The amma (meaning “mother” in Aramaic) became a recognized female figure of spiritual wisdom and discernment in the monastic spirituality of the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, especially during the fourth and fifth centuries. Syncletica of Alexandria (died c. 350) is one of a number of female spiritual writers whose sayings are included in the collection traditionally known as The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

If space permitted, other women of importance in early Christianity could be noted – such as Monica, the mother of Augustine of Hippo. Despite the increasing limitations placed on women within the churches, many found ways to subvert them and to exercise a significant public ministry.

The conversion of the Emperor Constantine

One of the most severe outbursts of persecution came about in February 303, during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian (284–313). An edict was issued ordering the destruction of all Christian places of worship, the surrender and destruction of all their books, and the cessation of all acts of Christian worship. Christian civil servants were to lose all privileges of rank or status and to be reduced to the status of slaves. Prominent Christians were forced to offer sacrifice according to traditional Roman practices. It is an indication of how influential Christianity had become that Diocletian forced both his own wife and his own daughter, who were known to be Christians, to comply with this order. The persecution continued under successive emperors, including Galerius, who ruled the eastern region of the empire.

In 311 Galerius ordered the cessation of the persecution. It had been a failure and had merely hardened Christians in their resolve to resist the re-imposition of classical Roman pagan religion. Galerius issued an edict that permitted Christians to live normally again and to “hold their religious assemblies, provided that they do nothing which would disturb public order.” The edict explicitly identified Christianity as a religion and offered it the full protection of the law. The legal status of Christianity, which had been ambiguous up to this point, was now resolved. The church no longer existed under a siege mentality.

Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus (272–337) – better known simply as “Constantine” – became emperor during a complex and difficult period in Roman imperial history, which is regarded by many historians as marking the transition between classical antiquity (taken as a whole) and late antiquity. A series of crises in the late third century (235–284) came close to bringing the Roman empire to collapse under the threat of invasion, a damaging civil war, outbreaks of the plague, and serious economic depression. In the end Constantine defeated his opponents and was proclaimed emperor in 313.

Constantine showed no particular attraction for Christianity in his early period. He declared himself to be a Christian shortly after his decisive victory at the Milvian Bridge, to the north of Rome, on October 28, 312, after which he was proclaimed emperor. This point is affirmed by both Christian and pagan writers. What is not clear is precisely why or when this conversion took place.

Some Christian writers suggested that this conversion may have taken place before the decisive battle, as Constantine saw a heavenly vision ordering him to place the sign of the cross on his soldiers’ shields. “In this sign you shall conquer” (in hoc signo vinces). Whatever the reasons for the conversion and no matter whether it dates from before or after the battle of the Milvian Bridge, the reality and consequences of this conversion are not in doubt.

Figure 4.1 Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor.

Source: Nimatallah/AKG Images.

The first change in imperial attitudes toward Christianity took place in 313, when Constantine and Licinus issued the Edict of Milan, proclaiming freedom of religion in both the western and the eastern parts of the Roman empire. This did not give Christianity any privileges; nevertheless, it opened the way to its playing a significant role in Roman society, allowing Christians to emerge from the shadows and the margins and to assume major social roles. In the years that followed Rome gradually became Christianized.

Yet Constantine proceeded cautiously. Initially he retained traditional Roman pagan symbolism, anxious not to create popular discontent against his program of religious reform. The triumphal arch constructed in 315 to mark Constantine’s victory in the Battle of the Milvian Bidge makes use of no Christian symbolism, but shows sacrifices being made to gods such as Apollo, Diana, and Hercules. In the late 310s Constantine often made moves that could be interpreted as a reaffirmation of traditional paganism as much as of Christianity.

An important turning point took place in 321, when Constantine decreed that Christians and non-Christians should worship on the “day of the Sun.” While this clearly reflected the Christian practice of meeting and worshipping on Sunday, it could also be presented as a reaffirmation of the sun cult favored by earlier emperors such as Aurelian. The Roman mints continued for some time to produce coins showing figures of traditional Roman deities, reassuring the population that traditional Roman paganism was still being taken seriously. Constantine proved to be an able diplomat, moving Rome toward Christianity while publicly retaining traditional religious symbols.

Yet alongside these traditional pagan images Christian symbols now began to appear on Roman coins. Furthermore, Constantine stipulated that his statue erected in the Forum should depict him bearing a cross – “the sign of suffering that brought salvation,” according to the inscription provided by the emperor himself. Christianity was now more than just legitimate; it was on its way to becoming the established religion of the empire.

A critical step in this process took place in 324–325, when Constantine led an army against the eastern Emperor Licinus. Licinus’ defeat made Constantine sole emperor over the entire Roman empire. Christianity would now be tolerated throughout the empire. The city of Constantinople (from the Greek Kōnstantinou polis, meaning “the city of Constantine”) was established as a “new Rome” and would become the administrative center of the empire.

Christian theology now emerged from the hidden world of secret church meetings, to become a matter of public interest and concern throughout the Roman empire. Increasingly, doctrinal debates assumed both political and theological importance. Constantine wished to have a united church; he was thus concerned that doctrinal differences should be debated and settled as a matter of priority. This led to his calling of the Council of Nicaea in 325, which was to settle doctrinal disputes within the church and to allow Christianity to function in a way that Constantine believed was appropriate for the religion of an empire like his.

The conversion of Constantine and his victory over Licinus in 324 removed any remaining barriers to Christians openly practicing their faith throughout the Roman empire. Christianity was offered the same legal protection as other religions, and Christians were granted freedom to worship as and where they pleased. The most immediate result was that Christians felt confident enough to worship in public, no longer needing to meet secretly in private houses. The way was now clear for them to construct and own their own purpose-built churches.

Within a generation, Christianity had moved from being a persecuted movement on the fringes of imperial culture to being adopted by the establishment. The Christian church was simply not prepared for this radical transition. Its bishops were once merely leaders of congregations; they now became pillars of Roman society, with power and influence. Its churches were once private homes; they were now massive dedicated buildings, publicly affirming the important place of Christianity in imperial culture. The simple forms of early worship were replaced by ceremonies and processions of increased complexity, adapted to the splendor of the great basilicas that now sprang up in imperial cities.

There were setbacks – most notably, the curious reign of Julian the Apostate from 361 to 363, memorable mainly for its unsuccessful attempts to re-establish a fading and tarnished paganism as the official imperial religion. A later source reports that Julian’s final words were “You have won, O Galilean” (Vicisti, Galilaee). Yet Julian’s abortive attempt to restore the fortunes of paganism merely proved to be an interlude in the inexorable rise of the political, social, and intellectual influence of Christianity. His successor, Jovian, rescinded Julian’s legal measures directed against Christianity. Theodosius the Great, who reigned as emperor from 379 to 395, finally issued a series of measures that made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire, bringing to a conclusion the slow process of Christianization initiated by Constantine.

The cities and the rise of monasticism

Early Christianity established itself primarily in cities – such as the Greek-speaking port cities on the eastern Mediterranean coastline, including Ephesus and Pergamon – rather than in remote rural areas. Cities, especially ports, were centers of commerce and trade, hence one of the classical means by which new religious and philosophical ideas were spread in the ancient world. They also offered a greater degree of anonymity than was possible in the countryside, allowing Christians to conceal themselves during an age that was generally hostile to their beliefs and practices. Christian communities were able to meet in secret, celebrate their beliefs, and begin to share their vision with outsiders.

The link between Christianity and the cities of the Roman empire became so significant that later on, at a time when the empire had adopted Christianity as its official religion, the Latin term for a “country-dweller” (Latin paganus) began to be used in western Christian circles to characterize someone who retained older Roman religious beliefs. A Latin term that originally lacked religious associations of any kind thus came to refer primarily to someone who practiced traditional forms of religion.

As Christianity grew more deeply embedded in the imperial cities, a number of significant institutional developments began to take place. One was the rise of the “metropolitan bishop” – that is, a bishop who was seen to be the titular leader of all the churches in a city rather than of one specific Christian community. The most important of these were the bishops of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Rome. After the legalization of Christianity, these metropolitan bishops began to wield considerable political power – especially the bishop of Rome, who was considered to have a symbolic authority linked with the imperial authority of the city of Rome itself.

The growing presence of Christianity in the cities of the Roman empire was seen by many Christians as a positive development. Not only was it an important witness to the increasing influence of the Christian faith; it was a means by which Christianity could begin to work for the transformation of urban culture and society. Christianity, some argued, was like yeast in bread dough – a small presence, which would gradually grow and eventually change things for the better.

Other Christians, however, were not so sure that this development was quite such a positive thing. While they did not rule out the possibility that urban expansion of the Christian faith might bring about a moral and spiritual transformation of the degeneracy of the imperial cities, it was quite possible that the reverse might happen. Might the immorality and debauchery of the cities – a frequent topic of concern in early Christian sermons – end up contaminating and corrupting the church?

One of the most important developments to take place within early Christianity was the rise of monasticism. (The terms “monk” and “monasticism” both come from the Greek word monachos, meaning “solitary” or “alone.”) The origins of the monastic movement are generally thought to lie in remote hilly areas of Egypt and in parts of eastern Syria. Significant numbers of Christians began to make their homes in these regions, in order to get away from the population centers and all the distractions these offered. Anthony of Egypt, who left his parents’ home in 273 to seek out a life of discipline and solitude in the desert, is an excellent representative of this growing trend.

The theme of withdrawal from a sinful and distracting world acquired central importance for these communities. Yet it soon became clear that there were two quite different ways of withdrawing from the world. Some saw monasticism as a solitary and ascetic life; others as a form of communal religious life. The more communal approach began to gain the upper hand in the fifth century.

One important early monastery was established by Pachomius (c. 292–348) – who is generally recognized as the founder of this communal form of monasticism – during the years 320–325. This monastery developed an ethos that would become normative in later monasticism. Members of the community agreed to submit themselves to a common life that was regulated by a rule, under the direction of a superior. The physical structure of the monastery played an important role in reinforcing its spiritual values. The monastery complex was surrounded by a wall, a feature that highlighted the idea of separation and withdrawal from the world.

The monastic ideal proved to have a deep attraction for many people. By the fourth century, monasteries had been established in many locations in the Christian East, especially in the regions of Syria and Asia Minor. It was not long before the movement was taken up in the western church. By the fifth century monastic communities had come into existence in Italy (especially along the western coastline), Spain, and Gaul.

Figure 4.2 The Abbey of Montecassino.

Source: Pirozzi/AKG Images.

This development was consolidated after the fall of the western Roman empire. During the sixth century the number of monasteries in the region grew considerably. It was during this period that one of the most comprehensive monastic “rules” – the Rule of Benedict – made its appearance. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–c. 550) established his monastery at Monte Cassino (also known as “Montecassino”) at some point around 525. The Benedictine community followed a rule that was dominated by the notion of an unconditional following of Christ, which was sustained through regular corporate and private prayer and the reading of scripture. These monasteries acted as agents in the transmission of Christian theology and spirituality after the collapse of the Roman empire, preparing the way for the theological and spiritual renaissance of the Middle Ages.

The fall of the Roman empire

By the end of the fourth century Roman power was in decline in the West. In 387 a Gallic tribal army overwhelmed Rome’s defenses and briefly took control of the city. Yet the tipping point in the decline of Rome was 408, when a Visigoth army led by Alaric laid siege to the city. In August 410 Alaric invaded Rome and pillaged it. This invasion was only a temporary development, lasting a few days. Yet, before it withdrew, Alaric’s army burned many parts of Rome, shaking the confidence of an entire civilization. The Eternal City was in danger of being overthrown, if not completely destroyed.

But this sack of Rome did not mark the end of the Roman empire. The administration of the empire was increasingly located in the East, at the new imperial city of Constantinople. As a result of earlier decisions made with this possibility in mind, Rome was no longer even the capital city of the western empire. The government of the western empire continued without interruption for another generation. Most historians regard the western Roman empire as coming to an end sometime around the year 476; the eastern empire, whose capital was the great city of Constantinople, continued to exist for the best part of another thousand years. Yet the symbolic importance of the sack of Rome was massive. The era of the Eternal City seemed to be coming to an end.

The traditional date of the fall of the Roman empire in the West – 476 – is the year when Romulus Augustus, the last western emperor, was overthrown by the German military ruler Odoacer (433–493), who then declared himself king of Italy. The administrative changes Odoacer put in place in Italy effectively ended any idea of a “Roman empire.” A nominal imperial center was maintained at the city of Ravenna for some time, but it never had the symbolic (let alone the actual) power of Rome.

The real importance of the decline of imperial power for the Christian church is best appreciated from the standpoint of the emergence of the Middle Ages. Looking back at the period of the breakup of the Roman empire, it is clear that many of the characteristic features of the church in the Middle Ages were a result of this imperial decline. Three developments are of particular interest.

First, the erosion of Roman political and military power created a vacuum that was never really satisfactorily filled by the successors to the emperors. These rulers tended to see themselves as exercising local rather than international authority. Furthermore, such rulers often did not survive long enough to establish the traditions and institutions that would secure social and political stability. Gradually the institution of the church began to emerge as a focus of constancy and continuity. Gregory the Great, who was pope from 590 until his death in 604, brought about reform and renewal of the church and set in place missionary undertakings in Northern Europe that led to the further expansion of Christian influence within the territories of the former Roman empire.

Second, the rise of the monasteries created centers of learning, local administration, and leadership that were independent of national or international agencies. Although clearly affected to some extent by political and economic developments, the monasteries were able to offer intellectual and spiritual continuity in times of uncertainty and turbulence.

Third, the church continued to use Latin in its liturgy, preaching, administration, and works of theology. The language of the Roman empire had a long history of use in political, philosophical, and theological contexts and proved highly adapted to the needs of the western church. The emergence of Latin as an international language helped hold the western church together, enhancing its sense of being a coherent community. As academic communities gradually emerged from religious contexts – such as the great monastic cathedral schools – it was inevitable that Latin should function as the language of the academy in the Middle Ages.

These developments are all of major importance for an understanding of the history of Christianity in the West during the Middle Ages, which we shall consider in the next section.

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance, c. 500–c. 1500

With the collapse and gradual disintegration of the western Roman empire in the fifth century, the face of Europe began to change. A patchwork of regions and city-states began to emerge, each competing for territory and influence. Yet during this period of fragmentation the Christian church gradually began to develop a political and temporal role that placed it at the heart of western culture. As some degree of political and economic stability developed around the year 1100, the church was poised to exercise a major role in shaping the culture of the Middle Ages.

By the year 600 Christianity had established itself throughout much of the region of what we now know as the Middle East, including the coastal areas of western North Africa. To the north, Christianity extended up to the Danube and the Rhine. Christian expansion had also taken place to the east of the Roman Empire, in Persia, where a form of Christianity that came to be known as Nestorianism had gained influence. Christianity is also thought to have become established in India by the end of the third century.

The situation of Christianity in the Mediterranean region changed significantly through the rise of Islam – the religious belief system based on the teachings of Muhammad (570–632). After Muhammad’s death, Islam spread through military conquest throughout much of the Middle East, including the Roman colonies of North Africa. Islam established itself in Spain through invasions from Morocco and began to expand into France in the eighth century, until military defeat checked this development.

Christians were called by Muslims “the People of the Book” and allowed a degree of religious freedom in territories controlled by them. Yet, while Christians living under Islamic rule were not forced to convert, they were obliged to pay special taxes and to wear clothing that distinguished them from Muslims. While Muslim men were permitted to marry Christian women, Christian men were not permitted to marry Muslim women.

Fear of further Islamic expansion into Europe, whether from Spain in the southwest or from Turkey in the southeast, was a constant concern throughout the Middle Ages and extended well into the early modern period. The fall of the great Byzantine city of Constantinople to Islamic armies in 1453 caused concern throughout Europe, as some believed that it represented a tipping point, marking the possible end of a Christian Europe.

The emergence of the Middle Ages is a complex and fascinating story, involving the political and social renewal of Western Europe, the slow decline and fall of the great Byzantine empire in the East, the rediscovery of the philosophical and scientific writings of the ancient world preserved by Arabic scholars, and the great renewal of letters and arts that we know as the Renaissance. All of these shaped the narrative of Christian history, as we shall see in what follows.

The development of Celtic Christianity

The rise of Christianity in the Celtic regions of Europe – more specifically in Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany, and Wales – is of considerable interest, not least because this version of Christianity found itself in opposition to the more romanized forms that rapidly gained ascendancy in England. Although the origins of Celtic Christianity seem to lie in Wales, it is Ireland that established itself as a major missionary center during the fifth and sixth centuries. Other centers of missionary activity in the Celtic sphere of influence are known from this period, most notably Candida Casa (modern-day Whithorn, in the Galloway region of Scotland), which was established by bishop Ninian in the fifth century. The significance of this missionary station was that it lay outside the borders of Roman Britain and was thus able to operate without the restrictions then associated with Roman forms of Christianity.

The person who is traditionally held to be responsible for the evangelization of Ireland was a romanized Briton by the name of Magonus Sucatus Patricius, more usually known by his Celtic name, Patrick (c. 390–c. 460). There are some difficulties in clarifying the details of Patrick’s career. Many scholars argue that the confusion arises through some traditions that claim that Palladius (sent by Pope Celestine I as the first bishop to Irish Christians in 431) became attached to Patrick. According to the traditional account of his life, Patrick was taken captive in Wales by a raiding party at the age of 16 and sold into slavery in Ireland, probably in the region of Connaught. Here he appears to have discovered the basics of the Christian faith. After six years in captivity, he was able to escape and make his way back to his family.

It is not clear precisely what happened between Patrick’s escape from captivity and his subsequent return to Ireland as a missionary. A tradition dating back to the seventh or eighth century refers to Patrick spending time in Gaul before his return to Ireland. It is possible that some of Patrick’s views on church organization and structures may reflect first-hand acquaintance with the monasticism of certain regions of southern France. There is excellent historical evidence for trading links between Ireland and the Loire Valley around this time.

Patrick returned to Ireland and established Christianity in the region. It is clear that some form of Christianity already existed; not only does Patrick’s conversion account presuppose that others in the region knew about the gospel; contemporary records dating from as early as 429 speak of the “Palladius” noted earlier as the bishop of Ireland, indicating that at least some form of rudimentary ecclesiastical structures existed in the region. Irish representatives are also known to have been present at the Synod of Arles (314). Patrick’s achievement is perhaps best understood in terms of the consolidation and advancement of Christianity, rather than related to its establishment in the first place.

The monastic idea took hold very quickly in Ireland. Historical sources indicate that Ireland was largely a nomadic and tribal society at this time, without permanent settlements of any importance. The monastic quest for solitude and isolation was ideally suited to the Irish way of life and allowed local noble families to be integrated into monastic structures. Whereas in Western Europe as a whole monasticism tended to lie on the margins of the authority structures of the church, in Ireland it rapidly became its dominant form. The Irish church was monastic in its outlook, the abbot rather than the bishop being seen as the figure of spiritual authority.

The authority structures that emerged within Celtic Christianity thus differed significantly from those that dominated the Roman–British church around this time. The Irish monastic model came to be seen as a threat to the Roman model of the episcopate, in which the government of the church resided firmly in the hands of the bishops. None of the abbots of Iona ever allowed bishops to formally ordain them, rejecting the need for any such official recognition.

In Ireland, some of the older bishoprics (including Armagh) were reorganized on a monastic basis, while others were absorbed by monasteries. Abbeys were responsible for the pastoral care of the churches that grew up in their vicinity. The Roman episcopal system was thus marginalized. The Celtic church leaders were openly critical of worldly wealth and status, including the use of horses as a mode of transport and any form of luxury.

Figure 4.3 A Celtic Cross from Ireland, widely regarded as a symbol of the distinctive forms of Christianity that emerged in this region.

Source: Juergen Sorges/AKG Images.

Theologically, Celtic Christianity also stressed the importance of the world of nature as a means of knowing God. This is especially clear from the ancient Irish hymn traditionally ascribed to Patrick and known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate.” The theme of a “breastplate” was common in Celtic Christian spirituality. It is based upon Paul’s references to the “armor of God” (Ephesians 6: 10–18) and develops the theme of the believer being protected by the presence of God and a whole range of associated powers. Although strongly trinitarian in its structure, it shows a fascination with the natural world as a means of knowing God. The God who made the world is the same God who will protect Christians from all dangers.

The Irish monasteries acted as centers for missionary activity, often using sea lanes as channels for the transmission of Christianity. Brendan (died c. 580) and Columba (died c. 597) are excellent examples of this type of missionary. In a poem entitled “The Navigation of St. Brendan” (c. 1050), Brendan is praised for his journeys to the “northern and western isles” (usually assumed to be Orkney, Shetland, and the Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland).

Columba brought Christianity from the north of Ireland to the western Isles of Scotland and established the abbey of Iona as a missionary outpost. From there, Christianity spread southward and eastward. Aidan (died 651) is an excellent example of a monk from Iona who acted as a missionary in this way. At the invitation of the king of the region of Northumbria, he established a missionary monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, off the east coast of northern England. Celtic Christianity began to penetrate into France and became increasingly influential in the region.

The rise of the monastic and cathedral schools

For modern readers, the universities stand at the center of the world’s intellectual reflection and scholarly research. Yet the idea of the university had yet to develop in the ninth century; as we shall see, this new institution would not emerge until the late eleventh century. During the period 800–1100, it was schools attached to monasteries and cathedrals that began to achieve distinction as centers of scholarship. These were the precursors of the great universities of Europe.

The development of cathedral schools was often due to the educational vision of the bishop of the diocese. As the traditional educational structures of the Roman empire were getting eroded in the late fifth century, bishops made arrangements to ensure that their clergy would continue to be well educated. In part this was a pragmatic decision, reflecting the need to have a literate clergy, capable of writing and possessing basic administrative skills. Yet it was often a decision that was also based on a love of learning and a desire to keep scholarship alive in a time when there were limited opportunities for study and research.

Although the earliest cathedral schools developed in Spain during the sixth and early seventh centuries, some of the most important schools of this kind developed in England. The conversion of England to Christianity as a result of Gregory the Great’s decision to send missionaries to the region created an urgent need for theological education. Provision had to be made for the education of clergy in a region with little recent history of Christian scholarship. Cathedral schools initially developed at Canterbury (597) and Rochester (604) in Kent, in the south of England, soon to be followed by a major school at York Minster in the north of England (627).

The next wave of cathedral schools were established in France, especially at the cathedrals of Chartres, Laôn, Liège, Orléans, Paris, Rheims, and Rouen. The cathedral school of Paris would eventually become the University of Paris in the twelfth century. These schools were under the control of the local bishop and generally focused on educating the local clergy.

Yet cathedral schools were not the only centers of learning. Some of Europe’s great monasteries, most of which followed the Order of St. Benedict, emerged as centers of excellence in scholarship, building up large libraries. Indeed many monasteries considered scholarship to be essential to their calling. Three elements were of particular importance in Benedictine spirituality: liturgical prayer, manual labor, and lectio divina, which meant “divine reading” in Latin – a quiet, meditative reading of the Bible. Although many monks were able to commit biblical texts to memory, the important place given to lectio divina inevitably created a demand for texts of the Bible, which had to be copied out by hand.

Many monasteries established a scriptorium – a special room or section of the library dedicated to the copying of manuscripts – and built up libraries, which often contained classical works of history and literature alongside biblical texts and works of Christian theology. Monastic libraries of the Carolingian era were filled with Christian and pagan works, which were copied carefully for purposes of transmission. Many of the classical works widely consulted today have survived as a result of this copying process in the Carolingian period. For example, two of the earliest surviving manuscripts of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars were created in France in the ninth century. By copying manuscripts, monasteries kept alive some of the key sources of classical culture centuries before the dawn of the Renaissance saw them being rediscovered by the humanists and given new life.

The “Great Schism” between East and West (1054)

Relations between western and eastern Christianity were generally problematic throughout the history of early Christianity, often reflecting deep political rivalry between the pope at Rome and the emperor at Constantinople. Although clear and genuine theological differences were in the process of emerging between the two Christian churches – the eastern and western – from about 700 on, these were often not the primary cause of the tensions that culminated in the formal break between them in 1054.

Tensions had arisen between East and West during the Photian Schism (863–867), partly as a result of the western church’s introduction of the phrase ex patre filioque (“from the Father and from the Son”) into its versions of the creed (pp. 73–74), without consulting or securing approval from the eastern church. The western churches now spoke of the Holy Spirit as “proceeding from the Father and the Son”; the eastern churches retained the older form of words, which spoke of the Holy Spirit as simply “proceeding from the Father.”

The schism of 1054 was, however, a more serious matter. Tensions had risen over other differences between East and West. Should unleavened or leavened bread be used at the eucharist? Eastern Christians retained the traditional practice of using leavened bread (that is, bread made from flour to which yeast has been added, causing it to rise); the West increasingly used bread made without any yeast. The East resented the increasingly strident claims to universal authority on the part of popes and felt that Constantinople’s claims to spiritual and political authority were not being given due weight in the West.

Yet many scholars argue that the final breaking point was the intransigence of two leading Christians of the eleventh century: Leo IX, pope from 1049 to 1054, and Michael Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople from 1043 to 1059. Leo’s enforcement of western norms in southern Italian churches (which up until then had generally followed Byzantine liturgical and devotional practices) was seen as tantamount to a claim to papal sovereignty over the entire church. Cerularius seems to have come to the conclusion that the only way of safeguarding the identity of the Byzantine church was to break any remaining relations with Rome and to eliminate any papal influence at Constantinople.

Although various attempts were made during the Middle Ages to mitigate this breach of communion, none of them really achieved very much. In part, this reflected the bitter aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204; see 140). Although intent on neutralizing Islamic military expansion in the eastern Mediterranean, the western armies ended up besieging and finally occupying Constantinople in 1204. Whether this was an intended goal of the crusades remains disputed among historians. But, accidental or deliberate, the sacking of Constantinople solidified the alienation between East and West. Reconciliation between the eastern and western churches now became virtually impossible. As a result, the western church developed along more or less independent lines during the Middle Ages, without feeling under obligation to take Constantinople’s views into account.

The crusades: Spain and the Middle East

Although by 1100 the church in western Europe had established its own identity and concerns, it could not ignore developments elsewhere in the region. It was clear that the military expansion of Islam posed a major threat to the church throughout the southern flank or Europe. The origins of the crusades lie in eleventh-century requests for military assistance in stemming – or even reversing – Islamic territorial gains.

The term “crusade” is often used specifically, to designate a series of military campaigns carried over an extended period of time in the Balkans and the Middle East. The immediate cause of the First Crusade was the defeat of Byzantine armies by the Turks at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, which led to the loss of the interior of Asia Minor. Constantinople was now vulnerable, no longer having any buffer zone to protect itself against Turkish armies. Alexius I, the Byzantine emperor, appealed to Pope Gregory VII, asking for military assistance in the face of this critical threat. It was not the best time to make such an appeal. Relations between the eastern and western churches had plunged to new depths in 1054 on account of the Great Schism. Gregory turned down Alexius’ request.

Nevertheless, his successor Urban II responded positively. In 1095 Urban launched a passionate appeal for Christian princes across Europe to take up arms in a holy war in the Middle East. The First Crusade (1096–1099) was fueled by a religious passion that prompted armies made up of both knights and peasants to journey to the Middle East. Jerusalem was captured in 1099.

The historical roots of the First Crusade remain contested. Historians have offered various explanations – such as Urban II’s desire to extend his religious and political influence eastward, or rising concerns about Islamic encroachment in Europe. Some have suggested that the outcome of the crusade was a further destabilization of the Byzantine rulers, in that it showed them to be militarily and diplomatically incompetent.

Yet most historians agree that the crusade achieved a relatively small and short-lived victory. It would only be a matter of time before the four “crusader states” that resulted from this incursion – the principality of Antioch, the county of Edessa, the kingdom of Jerusalem, and the county of Tripoli (secured during a later campaign in 1101) – would fall back into Islamic hands. There is also widespread agreement that the religious fervor that made so many civilians volunteer for military service in the First Crusade diminished significantly in subsequent campaigns, which were generally conducted by military professionals and mercenaries and had little popular support.

The fall of Edessa in 1144 triggered the Second Crusade (1145–1149). This crusade was followed by a series of campaigns. Some historians hold that there were altogether nine crusades; we here follow those who suggest that there were eight:

Although the crusades were presented primarily as an attempt to secure the holy sites of Christianity and prevent further Islamic expansion into Europe, it is clear that other agendas were being pursued as well. One of the most significant of these secondary agendas concerns the tensions between Rome and Constantinople. Simmering tensions exploded during the Fourth Crusade, when, as we have seen, an army that had been raised to capture Jerusalem ended up laying siege to Constantinople in July 1203, by accident or by design (see p. 139). The city fell in April 1204 and was sacked by the crusaders, with great loss of life – an action subsequently condemned by Pope Innocent III. The crusader armies, diverted by their attack on Constantinople, never continued their intended journey to Jerusalem.

The crusades can be seen as representing a period in history when the power and influence of the papacy was at its height. By the fourteenth century, a degree of decentralization was taking place across Europe, power being increasingly concentrated in nation-states, which were anxious to preserve their own identity and interests.

Academic theology: The rise of scholasticism

Scholastic theology is widely regarded as an intellectual landmark of the Middle Ages. It offered a systematic approach to Christian theology: one that was based on a rigorous rational foundation and made full use of the disciplines of rhetoric, dialectic, and logic (these were taught in the West in most academic contexts). The intricacy and comprehensiveness of leading works of scholastic theology led the great medieval scholar Etienne Gilson (1884–1978) to describe them as “cathedrals of the mind.”

In the late eleventh century Anselm of Canterbury produced a rational defense of the incarnation, demonstrating that this distinctively Christian doctrine was a proper and necessary consequence of basic beliefs concerning the nature of God and the human predicament. Anselm’s positive and orthodox approach to the relation of faith and reason – summarized in his motto fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”; see pp. 60–61) – created a new awareness of the possibility of a rational approach to theology.

This was taken a step further through the use of dialectical reasoning to resolve theological contradictions – for example, in the interpretation of biblical passages. Anselm of Laôn (died 1117) explored some disputed questions of biblical interpretation, noting how patristic commentators often offered quite different understandings of biblical passages. Having noted these divergences, Anselm of Laôn then offered means of resolving them – in effect producing a synthesis out of a dialectic.

This approach was continued by Peter Abelard (1079–1142) in his Sic et Non (Yes and No), in which he considered 150 debated theological points and set out the contested ones for resolution by his readers. A similar approach lay behind Peter Lombard’s twelfth-century textbook The Four Books of the Sentences, which presented a variety of patristic statements on various issues and left it to readers to resolve them. As a result, commentaries on the Sentences became one of the most widely used genres of academic theological literature in the Middle Ages.

By the beginning of the thirteenth century, there was a new theological appetite for the systematic articulation of theological positions, justified in terms of their rational and biblical basis, and the views of patristic writers. The most famous work of scholastic theology is Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae (The Totality of Theology, 1265–1274). Aquinas here wove together the reconciliation of competing biblical and patristic statements, within a rational framework that was intended to ensure that the Christian faith could be defended against its rational critics – such as Jews and Muslims, both of whom were present at Paris in the thirteenth century.

Figure 4.4 Thomas Aquinas, from the series of portraits of famous men in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino (c. 1476), by Justus van Gent (active between 1460 and 1480).

Source: Erich Lessing/AKG Images.

One of the most influential misrepresentations of scholastic theology is the asssertion that it debated how many angels might dance on the head of a pin. This suggestion dates from the seventeenth century and is not found in any medieval writings. This is not to deny that medieval writers did discuss a number of questions relating to angels. For example, Aquinas sets out a detailed theology of angels, distinguishing nine quite distinct types of angels and arranging them hierarchically.

One of the most distinctive features of scholastic theologies of the thirteenth century is its growing awareness of additional cultural and intellectual resources made available for Christian theology through increased contact with the Islamic world. One of these resources was the rediscovery of Aristotle, now rightly recognized as one of the most significant intellectual developments of the Middle Ages.

Secular and religious power in the Middle Ages

By the thirteenth century, the church in Europe had become a major influence in international politics and in the internal affairs of regions by fostering a sense of identity at the level of local communities and by giving individuals a sense of location and purpose within a greater scheme of things. The church has always played an important international role in European society. Medieval Europe bore little relation to its modern counterpart, composed as the latter is of individual well-defined nation-states. In the Middle Ages Europe consisted of an aggregate of generally small principalities, city-states, and regions, often defined and given a shared sense of identity more by language and historical factors than by any sense of common political identity.

The church was the only international agency to possess any significant transnational credibility or influence throughout the Middle Ages. It played a decisive role in the settling of international disputes. Under Innocent III (pope from 1198 to 1216), the medieval papacy reached a level of political authority without precedent in Western Europe. Although the church had vigorously asserted its independence from kings and emperors in previous decades, secular rulers regularly attempted to encroach on its claims to political influence. Innocent regarded the defense of the libertas ecclesiae (“freedom of the church”) as central to his program for the revitalization of the church.

This policy was given theological justification in a decree issued in October 1198, in which Innocent III set out the principle of the subordination of the state to the church. Just as God established “greater” and “lesser” lights in the heavens to rule the day and the night – a reference to the sun and the moon – so God ordained that the power of the pope exceeds that of any monarch. Just as the moon takes its light from the sun, to which it is inferior in size and quality, so the power of the king derives from the authority of the pope. The authority of the church was often recognized with great reluctance by secular rulers; there was, however, no other institution in Western Europe with anything remotely approaching its influence.

Innocent’s reforming agendas were given additional substance at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Aware of difficulties in securing the attendance of bishops from across Europe, in April 1213 Innocent III issued a summons to bishops and other senior church figures, calling them to a council to be held in Rome in November 1215. As a result, the council was unusually well attended and its decisions were seen as a landmark in the consolidation of the internal organization and external influence of the church.

Further reforms of papal elections were introduced in the thirteenth century. Alarmed by how long it took cardinals to choose a new pope, Gregory X, pope from 1271 to 1276, introduced rules designed to discourage delays. Cardinals were to gather and remain in a closed area (the “conclave”) until they had made a decision. Food was to be supplied through a window, in order to avoid contact with the outside world. After three days of conclave, the cardinals were to receive only one meal a day; after another five days, they were to receive just bread and water.

Yet there were many within the church at the time who were troubled by the soaring power and influence of the papacy and tried to prevent its getting out of control. The conciliarist movement argued that ecclesiastical power should be decentralized. Instead of being concentrated in the hands of a single individual, it should be dispersed within the body of the church as a whole and entrusted to a more representative and accountable group – namely “general councils.” This movement reached the height of its influence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Popular religion: The cult of the saints

To make sense of how Christianity developed during the Middle Ages, it is important to appreciate how it impacted on different groups of people. So how did Christianity relate to the everyday world outside the universities, monasteries, and royal courts? In recent years scholarship has paid increased attention to the phenomenon of “popular religion” or “folk religion,” in which Christian ideas and practices were implemented in rural life and adapted to it.

The phenomenon of “folk religion” often bore a tangential relation to the more precise yet abstract statements of Christian doctrine that the church preferred – but that many lay people found unintelligible or unattractive. In parts of Europe, something close to “fertility cults” emerged, which were connected and enmeshed with the patterns and concerns of everyday life. The agrarian needs of rural communities – such as haymaking and harvesting – were firmly associated with popular religion.

For example, in the early sixteenth century the saints were regularly invoked and asked to ward off animal and infant diseases, the plague, and eye trouble or to ensure that young women find appropriate husbands. The direct connection between religion and everyday life was taken for granted. The spiritual and the material were interconnected at every level.

The medieval Catholic church was encountered by ordinary people through its practices and images rather than through its abstract theological ideas. The liturgy of the church, especially the mass, enacted dramatically a visual “grand narrative” of human history and experience. Its ritual observance and symbolic gestures shaped the congregation’s perception of the world and of their own location within it. It offered spectacle and instruction, theater and dogma, in a form that reaffirmed the medieval worldview and the necessary place of the institutional church as an instrument and vehicle of salvation. Outside that church there was no salvation.

The drama of the liturgy was supplemented by images – often gospel scenes painted on church walls for the benefit of those who could not read; or images of saints, especially Mary, whose intercessory powers were affirmed and proclaimed by the church. Saints were mediators of divine grace who would hear and mitigate the prayers of ordinary people. In all churches throughout Western Europe the cult of the saints was represented iconically: through paintings, altarpieces, and statues.

But what was this cult of the saints, which had such a huge impact at the time? The recognition of the importance of the saints (Latin sancti, “holy ones”) dated back to early Christianity, where vigils were often held at the tombs of prominent Christian leaders, especially those who had been martyred for their faith. Gradually a cultic form of veneration of the saints developed, with three distinct elements.

The cult of the saints played a major role in medieval Christianity, especially at the popular level. One way of understanding this phenomenon is to consider the idea of a heavenly court. For many in the Middle Ages, God was to be compared to a monarch surrounded by a glittering company of courtiers – namely the saints. One of the key themes in the cult of the saints is the notion of a saint’s intercessory power – in other words, his or her ability to get heard at the court of heaven. The idea of saints as advocates gained a huge following in the Middle Ages.

This idea is perhaps best represented by the concept of a “patron saint” – that is, a heavenly intercessor or advocate on behalf of a nation, place, or profession. Some examples of this development may be noted.

The rise of the Ottoman empire: The fall of Constantinople (1453)

By the beginning of the fifteenth century, many had concluded that Constantinople was unable to survive as an independent city. The city had already fallen to crusaders in 1204 and was no longer regarded as invincible, despite its formidable system of defenses. By the late fifteenth century, Islamic leadership was in the process of passing from the Abbasid caliphate to the Ottomans, who regarded the conquest of Christendom’s greatest city as a jihad – a holy war. The expansionist policies of the Ottoman Turks led to the city’s being surrounded and deprived of any economic or political hinterland. The Second Rome was isolated. It had earlier been fatally weakened through a natural disaster. Between 1348 and 1350 the Black Death spread within the city, killing as much as a half of its population. It was just a matter of time before the city fell.

In 1452 the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (1432–1481) constructed a fortress on Ottoman territory, just north of Constantinople, which served the dual purpose of cutting off the city’s links with Black Sea ports and of acting as the launching point for the siege of Constantinople a year later. Mehmed II laid siege to Constantinople in April and May 1453. After 57 days the city fell. Strained relations between the Christian West and East led to a marked absence of support, political or military, for the besieged city. Having secured the city, Mehmed continued to expand Ottoman influence in the region now known as the Balkans. Bosnia was conquered in 1463; Albania in 1478; Herzegovina in 1482; and Montenegro in 1498.

Although western rulers had relatively little sympathy for the ailing Byzantine empire, which many regarded as religiously heterodox and politically degenerate, the advance of Ottoman forces into the western sphere of influence caused alarm. In 1521 Belgrade was captured. In 1539 Vienna was under siege. A surprise Ottoman naval victory at the Battle of Preveza in 1538 gave the Ottomans control over much of the Mediterranean Sea. It seemed to some that the advance of the Ottoman empire was unstoppable. An Islamic Europe seemed a real possibility.

Yet all was not well for the Ottoman empire. The siege of Vienna fizzled out inconclusively. An attempt to capture the island of Malta in 1565 pitted a large Ottoman force of around 50,000 with a much smaller Maltese army of around 6,000, including the crusader order of the Knights of St. John. The siege failed. The turning point was the Battle of Lepanto (1571), when a naval force put together by Southern European nations inflicted a decisive defeat on the Ottoman navy off the coast of southern Greece. This defeat is widely regarded as checking Ottoman expansion in the region.

Yet land-based expansion continued. Ottoman armies invaded the southern Ukraine and mounted a second siege of Vienna in the late summer of 1683. After two months, the large besieging army was attacked by a substantial army mustered by Emperor Leopold I (1640–1705). In 1699, following the Ottoman defeat at the Battle of Senta (1697), a peace treaty was signed between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs that ended the Ottoman control of large parts of Central Europe.

The Ottoman empire left a complex legacy in Eastern Europe. Many small nations in the Balkans developed complex religious demographies, Islamic, Orthodox Christian, and occasionally Jewish populations existing alongside one another. The Ottoman empire was generally tolerant of religious minorities thanks to its “millet” system, which allowed religious communities a significant degree of religious freedom and political autonomy. However, the Ottoman occupation generated unrest, leading to growing demands for national sovereignty in parts of Southeastern Europe, especially Serbia and Greece. In both cases, as we shall see later, the Orthodox church would be a leading force in nourishing and sustaining nationalist sentiments (pp. 169–170).

The rebirth of western culture: The Renaissance

The French term renaissance (“rebirth”) is now universally used to designate the literary and artistic revival in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, which had major implications for both the Christian church and western culture. It is not entirely clear why Italy became the cradle of this brilliant new movement. A number of factors may have some bearing on the question. For example, Italy was saturated with visible and tangible reminders of the greatness of classical antiquity. The ruins of ancient Roman buildings and monuments were scattered throughout the land and appear to have aroused interest in the civilization of ancient Rome at the time of the Renaissance, acting as a stimulus for its thinkers to recover the vitality of classical Roman culture at a time which was culturally arid and barren.

Furthermore, as Byzantium began to crumble – as we noted earlier, Constantinople finally fell to Islamic invaders in 1453 (p. 135) – there was an exodus of Greek-speaking intellectuals westward. Italy happened to be conveniently close to Constantinople, with the result that many Byzantine intellectual emigrés settled in her cities. Familiarity with Byzantine Greek was thus inevitable, and with it came a new interest in ancient Greek and classical culture.

A central element in the outlook of the Italian Renaissance was a return to the cultural glories of antiquity, which was accompanied by a marginalization of the intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages. Renaissance writers had scant regard for these, considering them outweighed by the greater achievements of antiquity. What was true of culture in general was also true of theology: they regarded the late classical period as totally overshadowing the theological writings of the Middle Ages, both in substance and in style.

The intellectual force within the Renaissance is generally referred to as “humanism.” Humanism was a cultural and educational movement, primarily concerned with the promotion of eloquence in its various forms and with the discovery and publication of ancient manuscripts and texts. Although the word “humanist” has acquired overtones of secularism and atheism in recent times, this was not true in the period of the Renaissance. To be a humanist was to be concerned with studia humanitatis (a Latin phrase referring to what is now known as “the humanities”). Humanism was essentially a cultural program that appealed to classical antiquity as a model of expression and eloquence. In art and architecture as in the written and spoken word, antiquity was seen as a cultural resource, which could be appropriated by the Renaissance. In much the same way, early Christianity came to be seen as providing both an example and a resource for its contemporary forms.

Although there are major variations within European humanism, two ideals seem to have achieved widespread acceptance throughout the movement: first, a concern for written and spoken eloquence, after the fashion of the classical period; second, a religious program directed toward the corporate revival of the Christian church. The Latin slogan Christianismus renascens, “Christianity being born again,” summarizes the aims of this program and indicates its relation to the “rebirth” of letters associated with the Renaissance.

A central element on the humanist agenda was return to the original sources of Western European culture in classical Rome and Athens. The theological counterpart to this agenda was a direct return to the foundational resources of Christian theology, supremely in the New Testament. One of the most important consequences of this attitude was a new appreciation of the foundational importance of the Bible as a theological resource. As interest in the Bible developed, it became increasingly clear that existing Latin translations of this source were inadequate. Supreme among them was the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible that achieved widespread influence during the Middle Ages (pp. 49–50). The reliability of this translation was soon called into question.

The rise of humanist scholarship would show up significant discrepancies between the Vulgate and the texts it purported to translate – and thus it would open the way to doctrinal reformation. It is for this reason that humanism is of decisive importance to the development of medieval theology: it demonstrated the unreliability of this translation of the Bible – and hence, it seemed, of theologies based upon it. The biblical basis of scholasticism came under threat, as humanism uncovered error after error in its translation.

The literary and cultural program of humanism can be summarized in the Latin formula ad fontes – “back to the original sources.” The “filter” of medieval commentaries – whether on legal texts or on the Bible – was abandoned, in order to engage directly with the original texts. In the case of the Christian church, this humanist program demanded a direct return to the title deeds of Christianity – to the patristic writers and, supremely, to the Bible – studied in their original languages.

Figure 4.5 Erasmus of Rotterdam, c. 1525/30, after the painting (1517) by Quentin Massys (1465/66–1530).

Source: Pirozzi/AKG Images.

The first printed Greek New Testament was produced by Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1516. Erasmus’ text was not as reliable as it ought to have been: Erasmus had access to a mere four manuscripts for most of the New Testament, and only to one for its final part, the book of Revelation. As it happened, that manuscript left out five verses, which Erasmus himself had to translate into Greek from the Latin of the Vulgate. Nevertheless, it proved to be a literary milestone. For the first time, theologians had the opportunity of comparing the original Greek text of the New Testament with the later Vulgate translation into Latin.

Developments like this undermined the credibility of the Vulgate translation and demonstrated the importance of biblical scholarship in relation to theology. Theology could not be permitted to base itself upon translation mistakes! The recognition of the vitally important role of biblical scholarship to Christian theology thus dates from the second decade of the sixteenth century. It also led to the theological concerns of the Reformation, which we shall consider in the next section.

Competing Visions of Reform, c. 1500–c. 1650

The sixteenth century and its immediate aftermath represent one of the most fascinating periods in the history of western Christianity. The Renaissance emphasis on returning to classic sources for inspiration and renewal began to take on a more specifically religious focus. As pressure grew for reform of the church “in head and members,” the humanist program of returning to the simpler form of Christianity represented in the New Testament seemed increasingly attractive to many.

Yet there were other factors emerging as significant for church life at this time. Nationalism was on the rise in many parts of Northern Europe, including Germany, France, and England. An emerging middle class was resentful at the power and privilege of the traditional aristocracy and wanted to flex its muscles. Lay literacy was increasing, and there was a growing mood for change within both church and society. Forms of Christianity began to develop that offered new ways of thinking about the place of individuals in society, and especially about their ability to change things.

It is against this background that the movement we now refer to as “the Reformation” emerged. Demands for reform, fueled partly by political and social agendas, were given additional energy through theological concerns – such as a desire to return to the simplicity of apostolic Christianity. Although most saw this process of reform as taking place within the mainstream of church life, the political and ecclesiastical situation of the time caused some to embark on such reforming programs outside the mainstream. This age of reformation thus led on the one hand to the emergence of the complex movement generally known as Protestantism and, on the other, to a renewed and reinvigorated Catholicism. In this section we will explore these developments, which are of major importance for the shaping of global Christianity.

Although a variety of terms were used to refer to the movements for reform within the church in the sixteenth century, historians now tend to refer to them using the general description “Reformation” or “European Reformation.” From an historical point of view, the movements in question are often designated according to their geographical region – for example, the German Reformation, the Reformation in England, or the French Reformation.

The broad movement known as the Reformation is generally agreed to include four distinct elements: Lutheranism; the reformed church (often referred to as Calvinism); the radical Reformation (often – though not entirely accurately – referred to as Anabaptism); and the Counter-Reformation or Catholic Reformation. In its broadest sense, the term “Reformation” is used to refer to all four movements. The more precise phrase “Protestant Reformation” is generally used to refer to the first three movements taken together.

Some recent studies of this age have used the plural, “Reformations,” to suggest that the Reformation was a multifaceted phenomenon – perhaps even that it was a set of loosely connected but distinct reforming movements rather than a single coherent movement with local adaptations. The Reformation in England illustrates this point neatly, as it developed in its own characteristic manner. The interaction of religion and politics in England gave rise to a local variant of the Reformation that was quite distinct from its counterparts in Switzerland or Germany.

Yet, before we begin to explore the debates and fractures that broke out within the western church in the 1500s, we need to note the expansion of Christianity in the New World, which was opened up by the voyages of discovery of European naval powers.

Christian expansion: Portuguese and Spanish voyages of discovery

In the late fifteenth century new trade routes were established between Europe and Asia and new lands were discovered – above all, the Americas. The European powers that spearheaded the Age of Discovery were Spain and Portugal, two staunchly Catholic nations, who regarded the spread of the Catholic faith as a natural expansion of national influence. They were later joined by another Catholic maritime power, France.

The great Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama (c. 1460–1524) opened up trade routes with the east coast of Africa and subsequently across the Indian Ocean to India itself. In addition to establishing the highly profitable spice trade route, da Gama’s exploration led to Portugal’s establishing the East African colony of Mozambique as a staging post on the route to India.

Christopher Columbus (1451–1506, often referred to by his Spanish name, Cristobal Colón) initially intended to establish a western trade route to India. Based on a mistaken measurement of the size of the earth, Columbus reckoned it would be just as quick to sail westward to India as it would to sail eastward. Although some popular accounts of Columbus’ voyages suggest that people believed the world to be flat, this report is clearly incorrect. The spherical shape of the world was widely accepted in the Middle Ages. Columbus intended to sail around the world to India, using a route that he believed would be faster. In the end he discovered the Americas and laid the foundation for the Spanish colonization and for the economic exploitation of this vast new territory, which soon became known as the New World. Portugese navigators such as Pedro Álvares Cabral (c. 1467–c. 1524) made landfall further south and established the colony of Brazil.

Yet these voyages of discovery were not merely of political and economic importance. They were partly motivated by religious concerns and given additional impetus by a growing awareness, within the Catholic church, of its missionary responsibilities. Individual popes were firmly committed to the importance of global evangelization. The Council of Trent laid the groundwork for Catholic missionary work through religious orders, especially the Society of Jesus. As a result, Catholicism underwent considerable expansion during the sixteenth century, establishing bases in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

The Jesuits spearheaded Catholic expansion in Asia. In 1542 Francis Xavier (1506–1552) arrived at Goa on the west coast of India, which was by then established as a Portuguese trading center in Asia. Over the next 10 years Xavier initiated a series of missionary projects in the region and many missions in India and in other parts of Asia, including the island of Sri Lanka. During the years 1546–1547 he established a mission in Ambon, a large island that is now part of Indonesia. In 1549 he began missionary work in Japan. He died in 1552, as he was preparing to undertake missionary work in China. Another Jesuit, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), continued Xavier’s work. After arriving at Macao, Ricci began a program of immersion in the Chinese language and culture, aiming to work out how best to express Christian ideas in Chinese culture. Ricci established missions in several major Chinese cities.

In 1521 the great Spanish explorer Ferdinand Magellan discovered a group of some 3,141 islands in Southeast Asia. The islands, now known as the Philippines, became a Spanish colony. Under Spanish rule a program of evangelization was undertaken by various religious orders, especially the Franciscans and the Dominicans.

The most significant expansion of Christianity during the early modern period took place in the Americas. Spain, Portugal, and France claimed sovereignty over vast areas of territory, within which Catholicism began to take root. Bishoprics were established by 1511 in the islands of Dominica, San Juan, and Haiti. Spain’s empire in the Americas extended over a vast region known as “New Spain,” which included Central America, Mexico, Florida, and much of what is now the southwestern part of the United States. Catholic priests built missions in all these areas to convert Native Americans. One of the best known missions is the Alamo in Texas, which was originally constructed as a Franciscan mission in 1722. Spanish influence also extended to the West Indies. Portugal colonized most of the southeastern coast of South America, while Spain took over the northern regions and the western coast.

The implications of these new discoveries could not be overlooked. Whom did they belong to? Which European powers had rights over these new territories? In 1481 Pope Sixtus IV confirmed Spanish rights over the Canary Islands and granted Portugal rights over all further territorial acquisitions made in Africa and eastward to the Indies. Yet the voyages of Christopher Columbus raised new questions about rights over hitherto unknown lands to the west. Pope Alexander VI, whose sympathies lay with Spain, ruled that any lands discovered after 1492 should belong to Spain. Portugal refused to accept this ruling. Bilateral discussions between Spain and Portugal eventually led to the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which allocated each nation certain areas of these new territories (which had yet to be mapped and explored).

Although there was uncertainty about precisely how this treaty was to be interpreted, in practice its consequence was that Portugal took possession of the vast tract of land along the Amazon River now known as Brazil and Spain took possession of territories to the north and west of this region, including what is now known as Latin America. The Treaty of Saragossa, signed on April 22, 1529, divided up the territories to the east. Although the pope was not party to those discussions, this division of territory is sometimes inaccurately referred to as “the Papal Line of Demarcation.”

This massive expansion of a Christian presence beyond Europe would have a transformative impact. Christianity had ceased to be a European phenomenon and was in the process of becoming a global faith. Yet in Western Europe Christianity was undergoing significant change as a result of controversies arising from Martin Luther’s views in Germany. The invention of printing meant that regional debates could easily be followed across Europe. Luther’s demands for a reform of the church proved to be of major importance, opening up fault lines within the western church that led to the emergence of Protestantism as a distinct form of Christianity in the region.

The Lutheran Reformation

The Lutheran Reformation is particularly associated with the German territories and the pervasive personal influence of one charismatic individual: Martin Luther (1483–1546). Luther was especially concerned with the doctrine of justification, which formed the central point of his religious thought. He believed that the church had fallen into some form of Pelagianism (pp. 103–105), teaching that individuals could achieve, or even purchase, their salvation. The sale of indulgences at Wittenberg in 1517 – a phenomenon widely seen as a trigger for the Reformation – seemed to confirm that the church had lost sight of the idea that salvation was something given by God.

In response to this situation, Luther developed the idea of justification by faith alone, according to which an individual receives salvation as a gracious gift from God. Luther did not take his doctrine of justification by faith to mean that the sinner is justified because he or she believes – that is, on account of his or her faith. He saw it as a recognition that God provides everything necessary for justification, so that all the sinner needs to do is to receive it. In justification, God is active and humans are passive. Perhaps the phrase “justification by grace through faith” brings out the meaning of the doctrine more clearly: the justification of the sinner is based upon the grace of God and is received through faith. The somewhat rambling title of Heinrich Bullinger’s 1554 work on this subject sums up the basic idea well: The Grace of God That Justifies Us for the Sake of Christ through Faith Alone, without Good Works, while Faith meanwhile Abounds in Good Works.

For Luther, this doctrine of justification was a core belief, which later Lutheranism described as the “article by which the church stands or falls.” Although this was the platform from which Luther developed his program of reform in the 1520s, other ideas were linked to it, including:

The Lutheran Reformation was initially an academic movement, concerned primarily with reforming the teaching of theology at the University of Wittenberg. Wittenberg was an unimportant university, and the reforms introduced by Luther and his colleagues within the theology faculty attracted little attention. It was Luther’s personal activities – such as his posting of the famous Ninety-Five Theses against the sale of indulgences (October 31, 1517) – that attracted considerable interest and brought the ideas in circulation at Wittenberg to the attention of a wider audience.

Strictly speaking, the Lutheran Reformation only began in 1522, when Luther returned to Wittenberg from his enforced isolation in the Wartburg. Luther was condemned by the Diet of Worms in 1521. Fearing for his life, certain well-placed supporters removed him in secrecy to Wartburg Castle, southwest of Eisenach, until the threat to his safety ceased. In his absence, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, one of Luther’s academic colleagues at Wittenberg, began there a program of reform that seemed to degenerate into chaos. Convinced that he was needed if the Reformation was to survive von Karlstadt’s ineptitude, Luther emerged from his place of safety and returned to Wittenberg.

Figure 4.6 Portrait of Martin Luther (1528); from the studio of Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553).

Source: AKG Images.

From this point on, Luther’s program of academic reform changed into one of reform of church and society. No longer was his forum of activity the university and its world of ideas – he now found himself regarded as the leader of a religious, social, and political reforming movement that seemed to some contemporary observers to open the way to a new social and religious order in Europe. In fact Luther’s program of reform was much more conservative than the one associated with his reformed colleagues such as Huldrych Zwingli. Furthermore, it met with considerably less success than some anticipated. The movement remained obstinately tied to the German territories, and – Scandinavia apart – never gained the foreign power bases that looked like so many ripe apples ready to fall into its lap. Luther’s understanding of the role of the “godly prince” (which effectively ensured that the monarch had control of the church) does not seem to have exercised the attraction one might have expected of it, particularly in the light of the generally republican sentiments of reformed thinkers such as Calvin.

An integral part of Luther’s reforming program was to give a new role to the laity, including women. Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers laid down that every Christian – irrespective of gender or social status – was a priest in God’s sight. He reacted against the isolation of Christians from the world, arguing that monasteries and convents prevented Christians from living out their calling in their world. One of Luther’s most interesting exploits took place in 1523, when he arranged for the liberation of a dozen nuns from the cloister of Marienthron. They were smuggled out in herring barrels provided by a merchant friend. Luther married one of them, Katia von Bora, in 1525. Up to this point women tended to exercise religious leadership only in monastic contexts, on account of the segregation of the genders. Katia’s role as mistress of the family household set the pattern for Lutheran women for many years and offered a significant social role for women outside the confines of monastic life.

The Calvinist Reformation

The origins of the Calvinist Reformation, which brought the reformed churches (such as the Presbyterians) into being, lie with developments within the Swiss Confederation. Whereas the Lutheran Reformation had its origins in an academic context, the reformed church owed its origins to a series of attempts to reform the morals and worship of the church (but not necessarily its doctrine) according to a more biblical pattern. It must be emphasized that, although Calvin gave this style of Reformation its definitive form, its origins are to be traced back to earlier reformers, such as Huldrych Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger, who were based at the leading Swiss city of Zurich.

Although most of the early reformed theologians – such as Zwingli – had an academic background, their reforming programs were not academic in nature. They were directed toward the church as they found it in Swiss cities such as Zurich, Berne, and Basle. Whereas Luther was convinced that the doctrine of justification was of central significance to his program of social and religious reform, the early reformed thinkers had relatively little interest in doctrine, let alone one specific doctrine. Their reforming program was institutional, social, and ethical – in many ways similar to the demands for reform emanating from the humanist movement.

The consolidation of the reformed church is generally thought to begin with the stabilization of the Zurich Reformation, after Zwingli’s death in battle (1531), under his successor, Heinrich Bullinger, and to end with the emergence of Geneva as its power base and of John Calvin as its leading spokesman in the 1550s. The gradual shift in power within the reformed church (initially from Zurich to Berne, subsequently from Berne to Geneva) took place over the period 1520–1560, eventually establishing the city of Geneva, its political system (republicanism), and its religious thinkers (initially Calvin, and after his death Theodore Beza) as predominant figures within the reformed church. This development was consolidated through the establishment of the Genevan Academy, founded in 1559, at which reformed pastors were trained.

Figure 4.7 Portrait of the Genevan reformer John Calvin.

Source: AKG Images.

Calvin is of fundamental importance for understanding the direction of the second phase of the Protestant Reformation. One of his most relevant contributions to this development was his textbook of Christian theology titled The Institutes of the Christian Religion. The first edition of this work appeared in 1536, setting out theological principles very similar to those already associated with Martin Luther. It went through several editions, the definitive one being published in 1559. Calvin organized his material into four books arranged as follows:

The logical arrangement of the material made this work an ideal resource for preachers and teachers.

Calvin was careful to present his textbook as a guide to the Bible, not as a substitute for it. Like Luther, he saw the Bible as being of supreme importance. “My object in this work,” wrote Calvin, “is to so prepare and train students of sacred theology for the study of the word of God that they might have an easy access into it, and be able to proceed in it without hindrance.” In writing his Institutes, Calvin clearly intended to offer what is essentially a doctrinal commentary on Scripture, allowing its reader direct access to its authentic meaning.

The term “Calvinism” is still used to refer to the religious ideas of the reformed church. Although still widespread in the literature related to the Reformation, this practice is now generally discouraged. It is becoming increasingly clear that later sixteenth-century reformed theology draws on sources other than the ideas of Calvin himself. To refer to later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reformed thought as “Calvinist” implies that that is essentially the thought of Calvin – and it is now generally agreed that Calvin’s ideas were subtly modified by his successors. The term “reformed” is now preferred in talking either of those churches (mainly in Switzerland, the Lowlands, and Germany) or of those religious thinkers (such as Theodore Beza, William Perkins, or John Owen) that, or who, based themselves upon Calvin’s celebrated religious textbook or upon church documents in turn based upon it (like the famous Heidelberg Catechism).

The Radical Reformation (Anabaptism)

Zwingli used the term “Anabaptism” to refer to his more radical opponents at Zurich. The word literally means “rebaptizing” or “second baptizing” and refers to what was perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Anabaptist practice: the insistence that only those who had made a personal public profession of faith should be baptized. Anabaptism seems to have first arisen around Zurich, in the aftermath of Zwingli’s reforms there in the early 1520s. It centered on a group of individuals (among whom we may note Conrad Grebel) who argued that Zwingli was not being faithful to his own reforming principles. He preached one thing, practiced another. Although Zwingli professed faithfulness to the principle sola Scriptura (“by Scripture alone”), Grebel argued that he retained a number of practices – including infant baptism, the close link between church and magistracy, and the participation of Christians in warfare – that were not sanctioned or ordained by Scripture. In the hands of reformed thinkers, the sola Scriptura principle should be radicalized; Christians should only believe and practice those things that are explicitly taught in Scripture. Zwingli was alarmed by this idea, seeing it as a destabilizing development that threatened to cut off the reformed church at Zurich from its historical roots and to break its continuity with the Christian tradition.

A number of common elements can be discerned within the various strands of the movement: a general distrust of external authority, the rejection of infant baptism in favor of the baptism of adult believers, the common ownership of property, and an emphasis upon pacifism and non-resistance. It is for this reason that “Anabaptism” is often referred to as the “left wing of the Reformation” (Roland H. Bainton) or as the “radical Reformation.” (George Hunston Williams). For Williams, the “radical Reformation” was to be contrasted with the “magisterial Reformation,” which he broadly identified with the Lutheran and reformed movements. These labels are increasingly being accepted within Reformation scholarship, and you are likely to encounter them in your reading of more recent studies of the movement.

The Catholic Reformation

This phrase is often used to refer to the revival of Roman Catholicism in the period following the opening of the Council of Trent (1545). In older scholarly works, the movement is often designated the “Counter-Reformation”: as this term suggests, the Roman Catholic church developed means of combating the Protestant Reformation, in order to limit its influence. It is, however, becoming increasingly clear that the Roman Catholic church countered the Reformation partly by reforming itself from within, in order to remove the grounds of Protestant criticism. In this sense, the movement was a reformation of the Roman Catholic church as much as it was a reaction against the Protestant Reformation.

The same concerns underlying the Protestant Reformation in Northern Europe were channeled into the renewal of the Catholic church, particularly in Spain and Italy. The Council of Trent, the foremost component of the Catholic Reformation, clarified catholic teaching on a number of confusing matters and introduced much needed reforms in relation to the conduct of the clergy, ecclesiastical discipline, religious education, and missionary activity. The movement for reform within the church was greatly stimulated by the reformation of many of the older religious orders and the establishment of new ones (such as the Jesuits). The more specifically theological aspects of the Catholic Reformation will be considered in relation to its teachings on Scripture and tradition, justification by faith, and the sacraments. As a result of the Catholic Reformation, many of the abuses that originally lay behind the demands for reform – whether these came from humanists or Protestants – were removed.

In its broadest sense, the term “Reformation” is applied to all four of the movements described above. It is also used in a somewhat more restricted sense, meaning “the Protestant Reformation” but excluding the Catholic Reformation. In this sense it refers to the three Protestant movements noted above. In many scholarly works, however, the term “Reformation” is applied, even more narrowly, to what is sometimes known as the “magisterial Reformation,” or the “mainstream Reformation” (p. 151) – a concept that links together the Lutheran and the reformed churches (including Anglicanism), but excludes the Anabaptists.

The Reformation in England

The English Reformation took a somewhat different direction from that of its continental counterpart. Although there was at least some degree of popular pressure for a reform within the church, the leading force for change was Henry VIII, who ascended the English throne in 1509. In 1527 Henry took the first steps toward dissolving his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. This decision resulted from Henry’s desire to ensure the succession to the English throne. The only child from this marriage, Mary Tudor, was female; Henry wanted a male heir. The pope refused to dissolve or annul the marriage.

Figure 4.8 Henry VIII (1540), by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543).

Source: Nimatallah/AKG Images.

The English Reformation was not primarily the result of the pope’s refusal to grant Henry his divorce. Nevertheless, this was unquestionably a factor in its development. Henry gradually appears to have shifted toward a policy that involved the replacement of papal authority in England with his own authority. The creation of an English national church was part of this vision. Henry seems not to have been particularly interested in matters of doctrine or theology, preferring to concentrate upon the practicalities of religious and political power. His decision to appoint Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) as archbishop of Canterbury led to at least some Protestant influences being brought to bear on the English church.

When Henry died in 1547, he was succeeded by his son, Edward VI. Edward was a minor on his accession; as a result, real power was exercised by his advisors, who were generally of a strongly Protestant persuasion. Cranmer, who remained in office as archbishop during Edward’s reign, was able to bring in noticeably Protestant forms of public worship and encouraged leading Protestant thinkers (such as Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli) to settle in England and to give theological direction to the Reformation. However, Edward died in 1553, leaving the nation in a state of religious flux.

Edward was succeeded by Mary Tudor, who was strongly Catholic in her sympathies. She set in motion a series of measures that suppressed Protestantism and restored Catholicism. Some of the measures were deeply unpopular, most notably the public burning of Thomas Cranmer at Oxford in 1556. Cranmer was replaced as archbishop of Canterbury by Reginald Pole, a moderate Catholic. At the time of Queen Mary’s death in 1558, Catholicism had not yet been entirely re-established. When Elizabeth I succeeded to the throne, it was not entirely clear what direction her religious policies might take. In the event Elizabeth pursued a complex policy, which seems to have been aimed at appeasing both Protestants and Catholics while allowing the queen to have supreme authority in matters of religion. What is usually referred to as the Elizabethan Settlement (1558–1559) established the national English church as a reformed episcopal church with a broadly Protestant articles of faith and a more Catholic liturgy. Nobody was really entirely happy with the outcome, which was widely seen as a compromise; however, it enabled England to emerge unscathed from a period of religious tension and to avoid the serious religious conflicts that were raging elsewhere in Europe at the time.

The Council of Trent

Scholars agree that the convening of the Council of Trent was a decisive landmark in sixteenth-century religious history. This council, which began its discussions in December 1545, was suspended at various points. In 1547 the outbreak of an epidemic at Trent forced the council’s relocation to Bologna; this was followed by its suspension until 1551. A further suspension resulted in 1552 in the aftermath of the revolt of the German princes against the authority of the emperor (which was eventually settled by the Religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555). It was not until 1562 that the council could meet again; it concluded its work the following year.

Why did the Council of Trent not meet earlier? The most important reason was the war between Emperor Charles V and the king of France. While this war was taking place, it would have been impossible for French and German bishops to sit down at the same conference table. An attempt was made to convene a reforming council at Mantua in 1537, but it had to be aborted due to the war. Another attempt was made in 1542; once more, it failed. However, in September 1544 the Peace of Crépy brought hostilities between the French and Germans to an end. Two months later Pope Paul III issued a document that convened the Council of Trent. The council had the objectives of settling theological disputes, reforming the church, and liberating Christians from Turkish invaders. It was scheduled to begin in March 1545, but delays crept in for a number of reasons.

The impact of the council on the development of Catholicism during the remainder of the sixteenth century and beyond was considerable. It is widely regarded as the most important church council between the Council of Nicaea (325) and the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Its main achievements can be summarized as follows.

An important development that took place around this period was the that of the Society of Jesus, whose members are more generally known as Jesuits and to which we now turn.

The Society of Jesus

The Jesuits were founded by Ignatius Loyola, a professional soldier. While convalescing from a leg wound in 1521, he read biographies of the saints and became convinced of the need for a tightly disciplined life of faith, modeled on military lines. The importance of discipline is clearly formulated in a work that represents Loyola’s most important contribution to the field of Christian spirituality: the Spiritual Exercises, which he drew up during the period 1522–1523. These set out a four-week program of prayer, meditation, and reflection – all aimed at deepening the reader’s commitment to Christ. The work can be seen as a training manual for future combatants in a spiritual war.

Figure 4.9 Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (1556), by Jacopino del Conte (1510–1598).

Source: AKG Images.

Loyola and six colleagues constituted the original nucleus of the Society of Jesus, which was formally founded in Paris in 1534 and received papal approval from Paul III in 1540. From that point on it expanded rapidly. By 1556, the year of Loyola’s death, there were more than a thousand members of the order, which became a significant presence in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Their influence was felt especially in the fields of missionary work and education. Jesuit missions were established during the sixteenth century in areas as diverse as Brazil, China, India, Japan, and Malaya. In education, the Jesuits developed a rigorous program of studies, designed to ensure the intellectual excellence of their order.

The Wars of Religion

The rise of Protestantism and the renewal of Catholicism inevitably caused political and social tensions throughout Europe. Emperor Charles V had felt the force of these tensions and was eventually obliged to agree to an uneasy truce in the form of the 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg, which put an end to the long-standing conflicts between the Lutheran princes and the Catholic emperor. Yet it was not long before conflict broke out elsewhere.

The first major European war that can be shown to be directly due to religious issues broke out in France. The specific tension in this case was between Catholics and Calvinists (or “Huguenots,” as the latter were locally called). We noted earlier that Calvin was French. He appears to have taken his mission in life to be (at least in part) to convert his native country to the reformed faith, using Geneva as a base. In April 1555, Genevan records document several agents sent out from Geneva to evangelize parts of France likely to be fertile ground for Calvinism. Others followed rapidly, in response to requests for help from French Calvinist congregations.

The whole affair was cloak and dagger. Secrecy was essential to the entire operation, at both the Genevan and the French ends of the operation. Safe houses, complete with hiding places, were established, a day’s journey apart. An underground network similar to that employed by the French Resistance during World War II allowed men from Geneva to slip undetected into France. By 1560 Calvinism was firmly established in many leading French cities and was gaining influential converts. Given this explosion in the growth of Calvinist congregations and influence, a complete Reformation in France seemed a real possibility. Perhaps one third of the nobility had signaled its acceptance of Calvin’s religious ideas.

According to a list prepared for Admiral de Coligny in March 1562, there were 2,150 Huguenot churches in France at that point. It is difficult to verify these figures; it would, however, seem reasonable to suggest that there were at least 1,250 such churches, with a total membership in excess of 2,000,000, out of a national population of 20,000,000. Tensions rose. In 1562 a war broke out. The issue was only settled through the Edict of Nantes (1598), which guaranteed the rights of French Protestants. However, the edict was widely ignored by subsequent French monarchs and was finally revoked by Louis XIV in 1685. This decision caused a substantial exodus of Protestants from the country.

Other religious conflicts erupted in the region. The Dutch War of Independence (1560–1618) had strongly religious dimensions. An increasingly Calvinist Dutch population wished to rid itself of a Catholic Spanish colonial power. In England, the Civil War (1642–1649) clearly had religious aspects, reflecting deep-seated disagreements between Royalists and Puritans over the manner of government and the doctrines of the national Church of England.

By far the most important religious conflict, however, was the Thirty Years War, which rumbled on from 1618 to 1648. The context within which this war emerged was the tension after the Peace of Augsburg (1555). The peace did not take account of Calvinism, which became a major presence in the region from 1560. As a result, Calvinism was given no official protection, in contrast to both Lutheranism and Catholicism. As Calvinism continued to expand, tensions increased. The trigger for the conflict was the outbreak of anti-Protestant riots in Bohemia that partly reflected the vigorous Catholicism of Ferdinand II. The Bohemian nobles protested to the emperor over these developments. On failing to receive any satisfactory assurances for their safety, they revolted and demanded to be ruled by a local Calvinist prince instead.

The revolt sparked a wider conflict, drawing in surrounding states and principalities. Its impact on the German economy was disastrous. When the war was finally resolved through the Peace of Westphalia (1648), any remaining enthusiasm for religious warfare had evaporated. People had had enough. The yearning for peace led to a new emphasis on toleration and to growing impatience with religious disputes. The scene was set for the Enlightenment’s insistence that religion was to be a matter of private belief rather than one of state policy. Our attention now turns to the curious cultural climate that amalgamated rationalism, revival, and revolution and gained ascendancy in the eighteenth century.

Puritanism in England and America

The term “Puritan” was originally intended to be abusive. It was used to stigmatize those members of the Church of England during the reign of Elizabeth I who wanted to adopt more reformed beliefs and practices (such as the abolition of bishops). The University of Cambridge became a major center for Puritan activity, Emmanuel College establishing itself as a significant seedbed of Puritan theological and pastoral thinking. Official hostility toward these trends led to the formation of small separatist congregations, which “withdrew” from the national church as a protest against the latter’s failure to reform itself completely. The most important of these separatist groups was that of the Brownists, named after Robert Browne (c. 1550–1633).

Following official harassment, separatists initially found refuge in the Netherlands; some, however, were able to return to England later and to establish congregations. These groups, which may be regarded as forerunners of the modern Baptists, flourished particularly during the period of the Puritan commonwealth, when it is estimated that there were 300 such congregations in England. Following the restoration of Charles II, the Baptists found themselves facing official hostility once more; it was not until the late eighteenth century that they would achieve a significant degree of acceptance and stability.

One group of particular interest should be noted. A separatist congregation was established at Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, in 1606, with John Robinson (c. 1575–1625) as its pastor. Growing official hostility forced the congregation to move to Leiden in the Netherlands in 1609. However, the Dutch situation was still not ideal. The congregation set its sights on America, which was then opening up to European settlers. On September 6, 1620, 102 members of the congregation set sail for America in the Mayflower. The resulting colony that was established in Massachusetts would be seen as a model by many Europeans dissatisfied with the restrictions of religious life at home.

Despite its growing influence within the national English church, Puritanism continued to encounter strong hostility from both church and state in the early seventeenth century. However, mounting popular discontent with the monarchy made Puritanism appear identifiable with the forces of democracy. As the tension between king and parliament grew, Puritanism was seen as a vigorous supporter of parliamentary authority. The resulting Civil War led to the execution of Charles I and to the establishment of a Puritan Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell during the 1650s. However, the restoration of Charles II led to the withering of Puritanism as a significant political and social force in England.

Yet Puritanism was set to exercise a major influence elsewhere. Dissatisfaction with the religious situation in England led many English Puritans to immigrate to America, taking their faith with them. Massachusetts Bay became a center of Puritanism. The impact of this development on American history was decisive in the opinion of many scholars and laid the foundations for the emergence of the United States of America as a nation with a strong sense of a distinctively religious identity.

A Protestant religion of the heart: Pietism

As Orthodoxy was increasingly influential within mainstream Protestantism, its defects became clear. At its best, Orthodoxy was concerned with the rational defense of Christian truth claims and with doctrinal correctness. Yet, all too often, this came across as an academic preoccupation with logical niceties instead of a concern for relating theology to the issues of everyday life. The term “Pietism” derives from the Latin word pietas (best translated as “piety” or “godliness”) and was initially a derogatory term, used by the movement’s opponents to describe its emphasis upon the importance of Christian doctrine in everyday Christian life.

The movement is usually regarded as having been inaugurated through the publication of Philip Jakob Spener’s Pia desideria (Pious Wishes) in 1675. In this work Spener lamented the state of the German Lutheran church in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War and set out proposals for the revitalization of the church of his day. Chief among these proposals was a new emphasis upon personal Bible study. These proposals were treated with derision by academic theologians; nevertheless, they were to prove influential in German church circles, reflecting a growing disillusionment and impatience with the sterility of Orthodoxy in the face of the shocking social conditions endured during the war. For Pietism, a reformation of doctrine must always be accompanied by a reformation of life.

Pietism developed in a number of different directions, especially in England and Germany. In Germany, the movement became influential in the first half of the eighteenth century. Nikolaus Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf (1700–1760) founded the Pietist community generally known as the Herrnhuter, named after the village of Herrnhut. Alienated from what he regarded as the arid rationalism and barren Orthodoxy of his time, he stressed the importance of a religion of the heart, based on an intimate and personal relationship between Christ and the believer. A new emphasis was placed upon the role of feeling (as opposed to reason or doctrinal orthodoxy) within the Christian life, which may be regarded as laying the foundations of romanticism in later German religious thought. Zinzendorf’s emphasis upon a personally appropriated faith finds expression in the slogan “a living faith,” which he opposed to the prevailing nominalism of Protestant Orthodoxy.

Many of these ideas took root in England through the influence of John Wesley (1703–1791), a founder and early leader of the Methodist movement within the Church of England, which subsequently gave birth to Methodism as a denomination in its own right. Convinced that he “lacked the faith whereby alone we are saved,” Wesley paid a visit to Herrnhut in 1738 and was deeply impressed by what he found. The Pietist emphasis upon the need for a living faith and the role of experience in the Christian life led to his conversion experience at a meeting in Aldersgate Street in May 1738, in which he felt his heart to be “strangely warmed.”

Wesley’s emphasis upon the experiential side of Christian faith, which contrasted sharply with the dullness of contemporary English deism, led to a minor religious revival in England. Selina, countess of Huntingdon (1707–1791), played a particularly significant role in this revival by establishing throughout England pulpits served by leading revivalist preachers in rotation.

Tensions emerged within English Pietism, particularly in relation to the doctrine of grace: both Wesleys were Arminians, while their colleague George Whitfield was Calvinist. Yet, despite their differences, the various branches of Pietism succeeded in making Christian faith relevant to the experiential world of ordinary believers. It is of some importance to note that the strongly anti-religious tone of the French Revolution during the eighteenth century is partly due to the absence of any real equivalent of Pietism in the region. Pietism may be regarded as a reaction against a one-sided emphasis upon doctrinal orthodoxy and affirming a personal faith that relates to the deepest aspects of human nature.

American Protestantism and the Great Awakening

Christianity was brought to North America largely by refugees seeking to escape from religious persecution, which was then endemic in Europe. As a result, the first settlers in North America were generally deeply committed to their Christian beliefs. Most early settlers were English-speaking Protestant, fleeing from persecution in England, especially during the reigns of James I and Charles I.

The earliest New England settlements were in the Massachusetts Bay area. However, the tidewater district of Virginia was also of importance. Jamestown was founded in 1607, and the colony attracted many refugees from England, especially under the reign of Charles I. Relationships with local Native American tribes were a matter of particular concern. John Eliot, who arrived in Massachusetts in 1631, was interested in the culture and language of the Native Americans who lived in the Boston area and made a point of studying and learning Natic (a regional variant of Algonquian). He began to preach in this language and was able to attract support for his missionary work in the region, eventually managing to gain parliamentary approval in 1649 for the establishment of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England.

Many of those settling in this region at this time were Puritans, fleeing what they regarded as an oppressive England to find religious toleration in the New World. America was to be their promised land, the Atlantic Ocean their Red Sea, and England under Charles I and Archbishop William Laud their new Egypt. The resonances with the great biblical account of the exodus of the people of God from Egypt and the settlement in a new land, prepared for them by God, were too obvious to miss.

In 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers made their landmark voyage from Plymouth. Between 1627 and 1640 some 4,000 individuals made the hazardous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean and settled on the coastline of Massachusetts Bay. For them, America was the promised land and they were the chosen people. Expelled from their Egypt by a cruel Pharaoh, they had settled in a land flowing with milk and honey. They would build a new Jerusalem, a city upon a hill, in this strange land. Puritan communities emerged as strongly cohesive social and political bodies, with a strong sense of being called by God.

By the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century, however, it seemed to many that Christianity had lost its way in the New World. In the early seventeenth century New England churches would only admit to full membership individuals who could testify to a personal experience of conversion. As the century progressed, fewer and fewer individuals could testify to such an experience. Yet most individuals wanted some kind of connection with the church – for example, to have their children baptized, or to have a Christian burial service. From about 1660 on, a “half-way” membership was recognized: anyone who was prepared to accept the truth of Christianity and the moral discipline of the church could have his or her children baptized.

The result was that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, a large proportion of church members saw themselves as “nominal” or “half-way” Christians. They might attend church and learn from the preaching of the word of God; they might have their children baptized; they might recognize Christianity as true and morally helpful – but they were, in the final resort, unconverted. Christianity and church membership were viewed as just another part of American society. Being baptized and attending church formed one aspect of being a good American citizen.

Yet in 1734 the religious landscape of the American colonies changed radically. The Great Awakening erupted, especially at Northampton, Massachusetts, in response to the preaching of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards published accounts of the events at Northampton in the form of a book, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, which drew international attention to the awakening. As the revival continued in New England, it was given a new sense of direction by George Whitefield (1714–1770), recently arrived from England.

The revival had a lasting impact on American Christianity. It established the role of wandering preachers, unattached to any particular church. It undermined the authority of the clergy of established churches, whose members felt their positions to be deeply threatened by the upsurge in popular religious interest. The foundations of a mass popular culture were laid, in which Christianity was not the preserve of a clerical elite committed to the conservation of the existing social order, but a popular movement with a direct appeal to the masses. The established clergy refused to allow Whitefield to preach in its churches; he responded by preaching in the fields around towns and by attracting vast audiences, which could never have been contained within the churches from which he was barred.

Perhaps the group to be most deeply threatened by this development was the colonial clergy of the Church of England – the guardians of the existing social order. It is no exaggeration to say that the roots of the American Revolution lay in the growing religious alienation between the new popular American religion and the established religion of England. Within a generation of the Great Awakening, the colonies were in revolt against the colonial power.

The Modern Period, c. 1650–1914

During the second half of the fifteenth century, Christianity became increasingly a European religion. Islam had launched a jihad (“holy war”) against it several centuries earlier. By about 1450, as a direct result of its military conquests, Islam was firmly established in the southwestern and southeastern parts of Europe. Although Christian communities continued to exist outside Europe (most notably in Egypt, Ethiopia, India, and Syria), Christianity was becoming geographically restricted. Its future seemed insecure.

One of the most dramatic developments to take place during the last few centuries has been the recovery of Christianity from this crisis. By the twentieth century, Christianity was firmly established as the dominant religion in the Americas, Australasia, southern Africa, and throughout many of the island nations of the South Pacific. Despite this dramatic expansion outside Europe, however, Christianity suffered a series of internal setbacks in Europe. In this section we shall explore something of this complex story of advances and retreats, consolidation and weakening. We begin by noting one of the most significant reactions against wars of religion in Europe: the rise of indifference to religion.

The rise of indifference to religion in Europe

With the ending of the Wars of Religion, a degree of stability came upon the European continent. Although religious controversy continued intermittently, it became generally accepted that certain parts of Europe were Lutheran, Catholic, Orthodox, or reformed. The sense of weariness that had been created by the Wars of Religion led to a new interest in religious toleration. The classic argument for toleration of diversity in matters of religion may be found in John Locke’s A Letter concerning Toleration (1689).

Locke, one of England’s most influential philosophers, argued for religious toleration on three grounds. First, it is impossible for the state to adjudicate between competing religious truth claims. Locke points out that no earthly judge can be brought forward to settle the matter. For this reason, religious diversity is to be tolerated. Second, Locke suggests that, even if it could be established that one religion was superior to all others, the legal enforcement of this superior religion would not secure the latter’s desired objective. Third, Locke argues, on pragmatic grounds, that the results of trying to impose religious uniformity are far worse than those of continuing to live in diversity. Religious coercion leads to internal discord, or even to civil war. Toleration is the only way of coping with the religious diversity of early modern Europe.

Locke’s analysis can be seen as leading to the view that religion is a private matter of public indifference. What individuals believe should be regarded as private, with no relevance to the public field. This approach at one and the same time upheld religious toleration and indicated that religion was a purely private matter. This perception was strengthened by the rise of the Enlightenment, which regarded the religions as different expressions of the same ultimate reality, which could be known through reason.

Locke’s views on toleration were one response to the growing hostility toward those who took their religion too seriously, threatening the peace and prosperity of Europe. Another was the rise of rationalism. If religion was such a source of rage, abuse, and intolerance, why not undermine it completely? The Enlightenment regarded reason, rather than God, as the source and arbiter of all good and true beliefs – as we shall see in what follows.

The Enlightenment: The rise of rationalism

The movement that is now generally known as “the Enlightenment” brought new challenges for Christianity in Western Europe and North America. If the sixteenth-century Reformation challenged the church to rethink its external forms and the manner in which it expressed its beliefs, the Enlightenment saw the intellectual credentials of Christianity itself (rather than any one of its specific forms) facing criticism on a number of fronts.

The Enlightenment’s criticism of traditional Christianity was based upon the principle of the omnicompetence of human reason. A number of stages in the development of this belief may be discerned. First, it was argued that the beliefs of Christianity were rational, and thus capable of standing up to critical examination. This type of approach is in John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), which argued that Christianity was a reasonable supplement to natural religion. The notion of divine revelation was thus maintained.

Second, it was argued that the basic ideas of Christianity, being rational, could be derived from reason itself. There was no need to invoke divine revelation. As this type of approach was developed by John Toland in his Christianity not Mysterious (1696) and by Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), Christianity was essentially the re-publication of the religion of nature. It did not transcend natural religion but was merely an example of it. All so-called “revealed religion” is actually nothing but the reconfirmation of what can be known through rational reflection on nature. “Revelation” was simply a rational reaffirmation of moral truths already available to the enlightened reason.

Third, the ability of reason to judge revelation was affirmed. As critical reason was omnicompetent, it was argued that it was supremely qualified to judge Christian beliefs and practices, in order to eliminate any irrational or superstitious elements. This view placed reason firmly above revelation and may be seen as symbolized in the enthronement of the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame de Paris in 1793, in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

The Enlightenment was primarily a European and American phenomenon, and thus it took place in cultures in which the most numerically significant form of religion was Christianity. This historical observation is of importance: the Enlightenment critique of religion in general was often particularized as a criticism of Christianity. It was Christian doctrines and Christian sacred writings – rather than, for example, those of Islam or Hinduism – that were subjected to an unprecedented critical scrutiny, both literary and historical, the Bible being treated as if it were any other book. The cultural context of the Enlightenment meant that it was the life of Jesus of Nazareth that was subjected to critical reconstruction, rather than that of Mohammed or Buddha.

The Enlightenment’s attitude to religion was subject to a considerable degree of regional variation, reflecting a number of local factors peculiar to different situations. One of the most important such factors is Pietism, perhaps best known in its English and American form of Methodism. As noted earlier, this movement placed considerable emphasis upon the experiential aspects of religion (for example, see John Wesley’s notion of “experimental religion”). This concern for religious experience served to make Christianity relevant and accessible to the situation of the masses, contrasting sharply with the intellectualism of, for example, Lutheran Orthodoxy, which was perceived to be an irrelevance. Pietism (pp. 160–161) forged a strong link between Christian faith and experience, thus making Christianity a matter of the heart as well as one of the mind.

As noted earlier, Pietism was well established in Germany by the end of the seventeenth century, whereas in England it only developed during the eighteenth century and in France not at all. The Enlightenment thus preceded the rise of Pietism in England, with the result that the great evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century significantly blunted the influence of rationalism upon religion. In Germany, however, the Enlightenment followed after the rise of Pietism and thus developed into a situation that had been significantly shaped by religious faith, even if it would pose a serious challenge to its received forms and ideas. (Interestingly, English deism began to become influential in Germany at roughly the same time as German Pietism began to exert influence in England.) The most significant intellectual forces in the German Enlightenment were thus directed toward the reshaping (rather than the rejection or demolition) of the Christian faith.

In France, however, Christianity was widely perceived as both oppressive and irrelevant, with the result that the writers of the French Enlightenment were able to advocate the total rejection of Christianity as an archaic and discredited belief system. In his Treaty on Tolerance, Denis Diderot (1713–1784) argued that English deism had compromised itself, permitting religion to survive where it ought to have been eradicated totally – an agenda that many pursued during the French Revolution of 1789. But what of the earlier American Revolution of 1776, which served as a model for many French revolutionaries?

Christianity in the American Revolution

The causes of the American Revolution are complex, involving a number of interrelated issues. Perhaps the dominant theme is that of a desire to break free from the influence of England, which was increasingly seen as paternalist, oppressive, and exploitative. This desire for freedom expressed itself in the political, economic, and religious arenas. The Church of England was increasingly viewed as the religious dimension of British colonialism.

During the 1760s, vigorous efforts were made by American Protestants to resist the expansion of the Church of England’s authority in the region. The Church of England was established by law in all the southern colonies, and its influence seemed destined to increase still further. The Quebec Act of 1774, which established Catholicism in French-speaking regions of Canada, was seen as particularly provocative. If Britain could decide what the established religion in Canada should be, what would it do in America? Suspicion and hostility grew unchecked.

The imposition of the Stamp Tax (1764) brought demands for “no taxation without representation.” The 1773 decision of the British parliament to give the East India Company exclusive rights to sell tea in North America led to the episode known as the Boston Tea Party and to widespread unrest in Massachusetts. British troops were sent to restore order; this action was interpreted as an act of war by the colonists. A series of battles were fought in 1775, leading to the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. A full-scale war of independence (1775–1783) ensued, in which church pulpits often served as rallying points for revolutionary activity. In effect the American Revolution united Christian groups of more or less all persuasions in the service of a greater goal.

American revolutionaries saw themselves as called to break the spiritual and temporal power of the Church of England in America. Like their forebears at the time of the English Civil War, they saw the conflict as a moment of purification, a time in which the true identity of a nation would be shaped. The battle was not between Christianity and atheism, but between a compromised state church and a pure gospel church. It would be a battle for the soul of America. While some revolutionaries had economic and political goals, others had religious objectives – objectives that demanded the purification of religion, not its elimination. Political republicanism was not seen as entailing atheism. Was not Calvin’s Geneva, that city of God set upon a hill for all to see and imitate, itself a republic? And might not republicanism and the cause of true religion thus be united, whereas in England they were seen as opposite?

The constitutional separation between church and state can be argued to rest upon a fundamental desire to avoid any specific form of Christianity defining the establishment after the manner of the Church of England, which was widely regarded as corrupt and degenerate in American republican circles. The First Amendment to the constitution declared that Congress would ensure religious freedom, and not privilege any particular form of religion. The constitution thus prevented any formal establishment of religion, meaning that no Christian church (such as the Church of England) was to be given a favored legal status by the state. Although some modern constitutional theorists argue that this was intended to remove religion from American public life, or that it justifies this practice today, it is clear that the intention of the constitution was simply to avoid giving legal or social precedence to any specific Christian grouping.

Church and state in America: The “wall of separation”

The process of shaping the constitution of the United States of America took more than a decade. There was widespread agreement that any constitution should avoid the European model of giving preference or privilege to any Christian denomination. There would be no “established” church, although a number of individual states initially retained a form of establishment in which multiple denominations received government support.

Three distinct opinions emerged in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Traditionalists such as Patrick Henry (1736–1799) argued that state support for religion was essential to maintain social order. In 1784 Henry submitted a bill to the Virginia Legislature that would impose a tax to support churches, while allowing each citizen to determine which specific church his or her taxes should support. Rationalists such as Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and James Madison (1751–1836) argued that the separation of church and state was essential to guarantee liberty of conscience. A third group, consisting mainly of Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists, believed that Christian churches would be corrupted if they were given positions of political power or social privilege and argued for the churches to be protected from the corrupting influence of government.

The second of these positions soon achieved political dominance. Jefferson and Madison believed that that a separation of the religious and civil realms was the best way to ensure domestic peace and to avoid any oppression and injustice that could arise from the religious establishment. They had no desire for the new American republic to be damaged by wars of religion like the ones that had caused such damage in Europe in the seventeenth century.

The constitution of the United States was finally adopted on September 17, 1787, by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and was subsequently ratified by conventions in 11 states. The constitution itself famously omits any reference to Christianity. The First Amendment, passed in September 1789, is widely regarded, however, as being of fundamental importance for any understanding of the place of Christianity in American public life. It declares: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

This amendment made two statements concerning the public role of Christianity in the United States. First, there was to be no legislative “establishment of religion.” No specific church group could become the “established religion” of the United States. This was not understood at the time to mean that the government was prohibited from bringing religious language, symbols, beliefs, or values into the public arena. However, more radical interpretations of this “establishment clause” emerged later, including the view that the government of the United States is prohibited from preferring religion to anti-religion, so that the judiciary is neutral not simply in settling disputes between religious groups, but also in settling disputes between religion and its critics.

The first two presidents of the United States – George Washington (1732–1799) and John Adams (1735–1826) – are generally regarded as having been positive about the role of religion in public life, whatever their private religious views may have been. The third and fourth presidents – Thomas Jefferson (president from 1801 to 1809) and James Madison (president from 1809 to 1817) – were more emphatic about the separation of church and state and used the image of a “wall of separation” between the two.

This striking phrase seems to have first been used by the Puritan writer Roger Williams (1603–1683) in 1644. Williams spoke of a “wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” In using this phrase, Williams was setting out an understanding of the church that was common among separatist Puritans: the world was a wilderness, but the church was a garden. To prevent the wilderness from encroaching on the garden and overwhelming it, the garden had to be enclosed – an important image, reflecting the biblical idea of paradise as a “closed garden.” For Williams, it was axiomatic that the state and the church must be separate – for the good of the church.

Jefferson picked up on this image and developed it for his own somewhat different ends in 1802. A group of Baptists from the town of Danbury in Connecticut wrote to Jefferson shortly after his election as president, expressing their concern that their religious liberty was not sufficiently protected by their state legislature. A religious majority, they suggested, might easily win the magistrate over to their cause, with damaging consequences for religious minorities. Jefferson responded by emphatically asserting the separation of church and state, in terms that seem to go beyond the constitutional amendment; thus he spoke of “building a wall of separation between church and state.” Determining the boundaries between the church and the state would remain a significant theme of American religious life until the present day.

The French Revolution and “dechristianization”

The French Revolution of 1789 marked the beginning of a new period of political radicalism and uncertainty in Western Europe, which was linked with growing criticism of the Catholic church and its ideas. Although many French revolutionary activists saw the American Revolution as an inspiration, the French Revolution, unlike its American counterpart, quickly assumed an anti-Christian tone. Generations of accumulated popular resentment and intellectual hostility against king and church could finally be contained no longer.

The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 was widely seized upon as an icon of liberation, symbolizing the sweeping aside of an old order, based on superstition and oppression. A brave new world lay ahead, firmly grounded in nature and reason, and equally firmly committed to the liberation of humanity from “tyranny” and “superstition.” The wisdom of the day was as simple as it was powerful: eliminate God, and a new future would dawn. It was a vision that thrilled many across Europe, drawing aside a curtain on a once forbidden world, which now seemed about to become reality.

It was clear that both pillars of traditional French society – the monarchy and the church – needed reform. Even late in the summer of the momentous year 1789, the general feeling was that the French monarch had allowed a series of measures that would abolish feudalism and remove some of the grievances felt by ordinary people against the power and privileges of the church. On November 2 it was agreed that all church lands should be nationalized; a basic minimum wage for priests, guaranteed by the state, was set in place. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 1790) rejected the authority of the pope and reorganized and slimmed down the dioceses and the cathedral clergy. Although radical, the measures were not anti-Christian. The clergy split into a group that wished to remain loyal to Rome and one that wished to comply with the new civil authority.

Yet a more radical revolutionary faction, headed by Robespierre, gained power shortly afterward and launched the celebrated Reign of Terror. Louis XVI was publicly guillotined on January 21, 1793. A program of dechristianization was put in place during the period 1793–1794. The cult of the Goddess Reason was given official sanction. The old calendar was replaced by a republican calendar, which eliminated Sundays and Christian festivals, replacing them with secular alternatives. Priests were placed under pressure to renounce their faith. A program of church closure was initiated. Although the impact of these measures seems to have been felt mostly in urban areas, they caused considerable disruption and hardship to the church throughout all France.

The religious policies of the French Revolution were soon extended to neighboring regions. In November 1792, French revolutionary armies embarked on a campaign of conquest in the region. By 1799 six satellite republics had been established, embracing areas such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, parts of northern Italy, and areas of the Rhineland. In February 1798 the papal states were occupied and the pope was deported to France, where he died six months later. The French Revolution, it seemed to many, had destroyed not only the French church, but also the papacy.

On the eve of the nineteenth century, the future of Christianity in Europe thus seemed remarkably fragile. Many saw Christianity as linked with the politics of a bygone era, an obstacle to progress and liberty. Its faith and its institutions seemed to be in irreversible decline. In fact this would prove to be a false perception. The revolutionary experimentation with a secular state eventually fizzled out. Under Napoleon, relations with the pope were re-established, although on very different terms from those in operation before the revolution.

The Bourbon monarchy was restored. In 1814 Louis XVIII returned to claim the throne of France and re-established Catholicism. The situation was never easy, and real tensions between church and state continued unabated throughout most of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the church was able to regain at least some of its lost influence, prestige, and clergy. The period 1815–1848 witnessed a series of popular revivals in French-speaking Europe (often referred to as “le Réveil”).

Orthodox resurgence: The Greek War of Independence

The Ottoman empire continued to be a significant force in Southeastern Europe well into the eighteenth century. The conclusive defeat of Ottoman armies by the Habsburgs in the 1690s had put an end to any possibility of Turkish expansion into Europe. Yet the resulting peace treaty left many parts of Southeastern Europe under Ottoman control. The growing influence of Russia – an Orthodox nation – in the region was consolidated by its defeat of Ottoman armies in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774. Russia’s victory over the Ottoman forces increased its territory and gave it influence over the Christian nations of the Ottoman empire – including Serbia and Greece, both of which were traditionally Orthodox.

Resentment against the Ottoman empire within both regions was rising, partly due to perceived religious discrimination against non-Muslims, who were required to pay a poll tax (jizyah). A Serbian revolt against Ottoman rule in 1788 was supported by the Austrians. However, the Austrian withdrawal from Serbia in 1791 led to the Ottomans’ return and to their resuming control over the region. Following a massacre of Serbian nobles in 1804, a popular uprising took place, encouraged by the Russian empire. France supported the Ottoman empire, fearing the growing power of Russia, as did Austria, which believed that the liberation movement of the oppressed Slavic peoples would quickly spread to its own territory. Yet the popular uprising gained momentum. In 1806 Belgrade was besieged. Following its capitulation to the revolutionaries, it was proclaimed the capital city of an independent Serbia.

The hopes of Greek nationalists now began to soar. Secret nationalist societies were formed in Greece with the objective of securing liberation from Ottoman rule. Western European intellectuals promoted the idea of Greek independence. Many – such as the influential British poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) – were influenced by philhellenism, a movement that considered the resurgence of Greece as a modern nation-state to be linked with the recovery of its classic cultural status. The insurgency began in March 1821, but rivalry between its leaders limited its efficacy; in the end the revolt failed. Lord Byron traveled to Greece to join the rebellion, offering financial support to the fledgling Greek navy. But Ottoman reinforcements from Egypt were able to suppress the insurrection in southern Greece. By July 1827 the revolt had stalled.

However, the revolt was now of interest to the great powers. Russia, Great Britain, and France all sent naval task forces to the region. After what appears to have been a misunderstanding, most of the Ottoman navy was sunk at Navarino in October 1827. Now deprived of any means of transporting reinforcements or munitions, the Ottoman army began to lose ground. In the end it withdrew from central Greece. A series of conferences brokered by Russia, Great Britain, and France created the new state of Greece during the 1830s.

As noted earlier, the Ottoman period gave rise to religious tensions throughout the Balkans. The religion of the Ottoman empire was Sunni Islam; that of the occupied regions of Europe was generally Orthodox Christianity. It was inevitable that any wars of independence would have religious components. The Greek War of Independence signaled the return of Orthodoxy as official religion of the nation. Nationalist movements developed close links with the church, which was seen by many as having preserved the Greek language and culture during the long period of Turkish occupation. Whereas the French Revolution of 1789 identified Catholicism as an enemy, the Greek revolution of 1821 saw Orthodoxy as an ally.

A new expansion of Christianity: The age of mission

Although missionary work had always been undertaken by the church, it is widely agreed that a new age of evangelism began in the eighteenth century, with England playing a particularly significant role in the spreading of Christianity. The twentieth century, for some nineteenth-century pundits, was to be the Christian century. A series of triumphalistic congresses and writings in the late nineteenth century had confidently proclaimed the inevitability of the conversion of the world within the next generation. The First International Convention of the Student Volunteer Movement met in Cleveland in 1891, and adopted as its motto “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” It was the largest student conference assembled in its time and was carried along by a confidence typical of the great age of mission, which came to an end with the outbreak of the First World War in 1918.

A major cultural concern may be noted from the outset. The interplay of British economic agendas and imperial ambitions on the one hand, religious issues on the other has always been conceded to be complex. There is no doubt that many missionaries – and by no means all English – saw the adoption of western culture as going hand in hand with the spreading of the Christian faith. This led inevitably to the growing perception that Christianity was essentially a western religion.

This was a particularly sensitive matter in parts of Asia such as India and China. In the case of India, the first major Protestant mission there was based at Tranquebar on the Coromandel Coast, about 200 kilometers south of Madras. Among the German Lutheran missionaries of note were Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (who directed the mission from its founding in 1706 until 1719) and Christian Frederick Schwartz (director from 1750 to 1787). However, the growing political power of Britain in the region inevitably favored the activities of British missionaries, the first ones of which – for instance the Baptist William Carey – began work in Bengal in 1793. This activity was assisted to no small extent by Clement XIV’s decision to suppress the Society of Jesus. The bull Dominus ac Redemptor noster (July 21, 1773) formally terminated all the functions and ministries of the Society, thus ending the missionary activity of the Jesuits in India and elsewhere. Nevertheless, at least 50 Jesuits are known to have continued missionary work in India after the suppression of their order, despite the efforts of the Portuguese to repatriate them.

British missionary societies and individuals were thus able to operate in India without any major opposition from other European agencies. Nevertheless, they received no support from the British authorities; the East India Company, for example, was opposed to their activities on the grounds that they might create ill will among native Indians and thus threaten the trade upon which it depended. However, the Charter Act (passed by the British parliament on July 13, 1813) revised the conditions under which the company was permitted to operate: the new charter gave British missionaries protected status and a limited degree of freedom to carry out evangelistic work on the Indian subcontinent. The result was inevitable: as the historian Stephen Charles Neill observes,“since 1813, Christian missions have never been wholly free from the stigma of undue dependence on government.”

The new charter also made provision for the establishment of an Anglican bishopric at Calcutta. Under Reginald Heber (1783–1826; bishop of Calcutta from 1823 to 1826), missionary work was expanded considerably and restricted to Anglicans (Lutheran missionaries had to be re-ordained if they wished to continue operating in the region). Further revisions to the East India Company’s charter in 1833 removed some of the restrictions imposed earlier upon missionary work. It was inevitable that religious tensions would develop. The uprising of 1857 (generally referred to as “the Indian Mutiny” by contemporary English writers) is often regarded as the outcome of this growing resentment at westernization.

Western missionary efforts in China also met with limited results. One of the many effects of the First Opium War of the 1840s was to open up China – “the Middle Kingdom,” as this name translates – to at least some western attitudes. China chose to remain isolated from the West until the nineteenth century, when growing interest in commerce opened it up to western missionaries. Of these, James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) may be singled out for special comment.

Hudson Taylor was initially a missionary with the Chinese Evangelization Society. Dissatisfaction with this organization led him to found the China Inland Mission in 1865. This mission was unusual in several respects, not least on account of its willingness to accept single women as missionaries and on its interdenominational character. Hudson Taylor showed an awareness of the cultural barriers facing Christian missionaries in China and did what he could to remove them – for example, he required his missionaries to wear Chinese rather than western dress.

Nevertheless, despite Hudson Taylor’s concessions to Chinese cultural sensitivities, western attempts to evangelize Christianity were of very limited value. Christianity was seen as something western, and hence un-Chinese. The defeat of China by Japan in an ill-fated war during the years 1894–1895 was widely regarded as a direct result of the presence of foreigners in the country. This led to the I Ho Ch’uan crusade of 1899–1900, with its fanatical opposition to foreign investment and religious activity.

If missionary work in Asia met with limited success, this was balanced by successes elsewhere, especially in Africa and Australasia. Growing missionary interest in Africa developed during the late eighteenth century, especially in reaction to the brutality of the slave trade. Major British missionary societies that were active in Africa during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century include the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS, founded 1792, and initially known as The Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel); the London Missionary Society (LMS, founded 1795 and initially known as The Missionary Society); and the Church Missionary Society (CMS, founded 1799 and originally known as The Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East). Each of these societies developed a particular focus on specific regions: the BMS focused on the Congo basin, the LMS on Southern Africa (including Madagascar), and the CMS on West and East Africa.

All of these societies were Protestant and in general strongly evangelical in their outlook. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that Catholic mission groups began to be seriously involved in the region. The trauma of the French Revolution (1789) and its aftermath had severely shaken the Catholic church. Only after the Congress of Vienna (1815) had settled the future shape of Europe could the church turn its attention to evangelism.

The dominant feature of sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth century is the growing importance of colonialism. Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands had all established colonies in this region during the period. The forms of Christianity dominant in these European nations varied considerably, with the result that churches of a great diversity were established in Africa. Anglicanism, Catholicism, and Lutheranism were all well established by the end of the century; in South Africa, the Dutch reformed church had a particularly strong influence among European settlers. It must, however, be stressed that other missionaries from radically different backgrounds were also active in the region. For example, at least 115 black American missionaries are known to have been present and active in Africa during the period 1875–1899.

Reports of the voyages of Captain Cook during the eighteenth century, which included the discovery of Australia, led to a renewed interest in evangelizing this hitherto unknown region. In 1795 the LMS was founded with the primary objective of sending missionaries to the islands of the “South Sea” – that is, Australia and the whole of Oceania (all the islands of Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, including New Zealand). The first major missionary expedition to the region set off in August 1796, when 30 missionaries set sail for Tahiti in Polynesia. Although this mission faced considerable difficulties – not least on account of the very different sexual mores of England and Tahiti – it can be seen as marking the beginning of a sustained effort to establish Christianity in the region.

The geographical nature of Tahiti rendered impossible one of the most reliable means of evangelization: the establishment of mission stations. Also, the populations of the islands were generally too small to justify the building and maintenance of such settlements. The most successful strategy to be adopted was the use of missionary vessels, which allowed European missionaries to direct and oversee the operations of native evangelists, pastors, and teachers.

The most significant Christian missions were located in Australia and New Zealand, which eventually came to serve as the base for most missionary work in the region. Christianity came to Australia in 1788. The circumstances of its arrival were not entirely happy. The fleet that arrived in New South Wales was transporting convicts to the penal settlements that were being built there. At the last moment, William Wilberforce persuaded the British naval authorities to allow a chaplain to sail with the fleet. With the dramatic increase in British immigration in the following century, the various forms of British Christianity became established in the region. The formation of “bush brotherhoods” in 1897 laid the basis for the evangelization of the interior of the continent.

The first missionaries arrived in New Zealand in 1814. The consolidation of Christianity there was largely due to Bishop George Selwyn (1809–1878), who was appointed missionary bishop of New Zealand in 1841. During his time in the region he had a marked impact on the development of Christianity, particularly in relation to education. He returned to England in 1867.

This brief overview of the great age of mission helps explain how Christianity broke free from its European context to become a global religion. Although Christianity was apparently landlocked in Europe as a result of Islamic expansion in the sixteenth century, the growing maritime ambitions of Western European nations led to its being diffused throughout the world – yet often in a decidedly westernized form. This legacy of western influence, as events demonstrated, was often a mixed blessing. One of the most remarkable developments of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Christianity has been a process of indigenization whereby in many parts of Latin America, Asia, and Africa Christianity broke free from its western origins and developed in forms much more adapted to the distinct cultural heritages of its new homes.

The shifting fortunes of Catholicism

After the trauma of the French Revolution, Catholicism began to regain something of the confidence it had known in earlier periods. The rise of romanticism had a powerful effect on the reawakening of interest in Catholicism, particularly in Germany and France. Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme (Genius of Christianity), which appeared in 1802, did much to develop this new interest in the Christian faith, which can be seen reflected in many aspects of nineteenth-century culture. Other writers who drew on romanticism in their defense of Catholicism included Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) in Italy and Friedrich von Stolberg (1750–1819) in Germany. Rationalism was widely regarded as having led to the catastrophes of the past; there was a new sympathy for the view that Christianity was a major source of artistic inspiration and cultural excellence.

There can be no doubt that Catholicism needed to renew itself after the French Revolution and its aftermath. It is helpful to reflect on the extent of Catholic territory after the end of the Napoleonic era in 1814. Although Catholic missions had led to the establishment of communities in regions such as South America, Japan, and India, Catholicism was largely a European religion at this stage, bounded by the new nation of Belgium in the northwest, Spain in the southwest, Austria in the northeast, and Italy in the southeast. Most of the 100 million European Catholics were to be found in the Habsburg empire, Italy, and France.

It fell to Pius VII to renew his church after his return to Rome in May 1814. The task seemed enormous; nevertheless he proved equal to it. The groundwork was laid down by the papal secretary of state, Consalvi, who negotiated concordats with a series of states during the Congress of Vienna (1815). The Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs was established in 1814 with the objective of rebuilding Catholicism throughout Europe. The success of these measures can be measured by the fact that, in a traditionally strong Protestant nation such as England, the Catholic hierarchy was re-established in 1850.

Catholicism also became a major influence in the United States during this period. Although revolutionary America was dominated by Protestantism, waves of immigrants from Ireland and Italy began to alter the religious balance of power as the nineteenth century progressed. Archbishop John Carroll (1735–1815) did much to encourage the social acceptance of Catholicism at a time when its numbers were rapidly increasing. During the 1840s it is estimated that 2.5 million Irish Catholics emigrated to the east coast of the United States, with dramatic demographic consequences for eastern cities such as Boston and New York. The emergence of American Catholicism as a major force in the life of the new nation was partly due to the ethnic loyalty of its adherents, who saw Catholicism as an integral aspect of their identity. Their European origins thus served to mold the religious views of American immigrants at this critical period in the history of the United States. The founding of major Catholic educational institutions, such as the University of Notre Dame in 1842, laid the foundations for the emergence of Catholicism as a significant intellectual force.

The re-emergence of the pope as a major figure within Catholicism during the nineteenth century can be attributed, at least in part, to the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. In the decades prior to the French Revolution, the pope seems to have been largely ignored by the Catholic faithful, who regarded him as isolated and distant. However, Napoleon’s fairly vicious treatment of the pope caused the latter to regain his prestige in the eyes of both the faithful and European governments. Even in France, the heartland of movements that advocated nationally governed churches, there was a new respect for the pope. The scene was set for the re-emergence of the papacy as a leading institution within Catholicism and beyond. The movement that advocated increased papal authority was known as ultramontanism and merits further attention in its own right, not least because of its importance in connection with the First Vatican Council – to which we now turn.

The First Vatican Council: Papal infallibility

The rise of revolutionary movements in France, Italy, and Germany during the late 1840s led to increasing concern over the political stability of Catholic countries, and particularly over the position of the pope himself. The First Vatican Council was convened by Pius IX in 1869 to strengthen the church against nationalists, liberals, and materialists, who had challenged some leading themes of the Catholic faith and deprived the church of control over schools and property in various parts of Europe, including Italy. Despite political uncertainty in Italy at this time, nearly 750 out of some 1,000 eligible bishops and heads of religious orders traveled to Rome to attend the council.

The council issued two major documents: Dei Filius (The Son of God), which reasserted the harmony between reason and faith and the supremacy of the latter; and Pastor aeternus (The Eternal Pastor), which set out the doctrine of papal infallibility. Dei Filius reaffirmed fundamental Catholic doctrines in the light of the challenges of the age. Given the rise of rationalism, which rejected the notion of divine revelation partly through a belief in the supreme authority of reason, the council reaffirmed the rationality of faith on the one hand and the inability of reason to penetrate to deeper spiritual realities on the other.

Yet most historians consider the most important decision taken at the council to have resided in its formulation of the dogma of papal infallibility in Pastor aeternus. According to this doctrine, the pope has “full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church.” When the pope “speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church,” he possesses the “infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.”

This notion of papal infallibility enjoyed much support – but not total support – within the Catholic church. The topic had not initially been proposed for discussion at the council; it emerged during debate in 1870. The dogma caused some concern, particularly in Germany. Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) was appointed chancellor of Prussia in 1864. He embarked on a policy of German unification, which was pursued with increasing vigor after the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Bismarck regarded the dogma of infallibility as an insult to German Protestants and as a potential threat to the emerging authority of the German state.

Bismarck embarked on a policy of discrimination against German Catholics during the 1870s. This Kulturkampf (“culture war”) eventually fizzled out in 1886. Yet anti-religious feeling was growing elsewhere in Europe, most notably in France, where the 1901 Association Law and the 1905 Separation Law virtually eliminated religion from public life, including education.

In Italy the position of the pope became difficult following the rise to power of King Victor Emmanuel (1820–1878), who in effect stripped the pope of all his territories except for the Vatican, the Lateran Castle, and Castel Gandolfo. While the Law of Papal Guarantees ensured the pope’s independence and safety, it nevertheless placed restrictions on his rights. This law was eventually replaced by the Lateran Treaty of 1929, which was more favorable to the pope. The Vatican remains an independent state to this day, despite its miniscule size.

Theological revisionism: The challenge of modernism

One of the concerns to preoccupy the bishops assembled at the First Vatican Council was the rise of modernism, which was portrayed as a serious threat to the wellbeing of the church. So what was this movement, and why did it raise such anxieties?

Modernism is best understood as designating a set of attitudes within Catholicism that was shaped by the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment. Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) and George Tyrrell (1861–1909) were two of the most influential Catholic modernist writers. During the 1890s Loisy established himself as a critic of traditional views of the biblical accounts of creation and argued that a real development of doctrine could be discerned within Scripture. His most significant publication, The Gospel and the Church, appeared in 1902, by which time his views had been severely criticized by the Catholic church hierarchy. This important work was a direct response to the views of the liberal Protestant Adolf von Harnack, set out two years earlier in What Is Christianity? Harnack’s controversial views on the origins and nature of Christianity rested on the assertion that Christianity had only a loose connection with Jesus of Nazareth.

Loisy rejected Harnack’s suggestion that there was a radical discontinuity between Jesus and the church; however, he made significant concessions to Harnack’s liberal Protestant account of Christian origins, and these included an acceptance of the role and validity of biblical criticism in interpreting the gospels. Three features of his work merit closer attention.

The British Jesuit writer George Tyrrell followed Loisy in his radical criticism of traditional Catholic dogma. In common with Loisy, he criticized Harnack’s account of Christian origins in Christianity at the Crossroads (1909), dismissing Harnack’s historical reconstruction of Jesus as “the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.” The book also included a defense of Loisy’s work, arguing that the official Roman Catholic hostility to this book and its author has created a general impression that it is a defense of liberal Protestant against Roman Catholic positions and that “Modernism is simply a protestantizing and rationalizing movement.”

In part, this perception reflects the growing influence of modernism within the mainstream Protestant denominations. In England, the Churchmen’s Union was founded in 1898 for the advancement of liberal religious thought; in 1928 it altered its name to the Modern Churchmen’s Union. Among those especially associated with this group may be noted Hastings Rashdall (1858–1924), whose Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) illustrates the general tenor of English modernism.

Drawing somewhat uncritically upon the earlier writings of liberal Protestant thinkers, Rashdall argued that the theory of the atonement associated with the medieval writer Peter Abelard was more acceptable to modern thought forms than traditional theories that made an appeal to the notion of a substitutionary sacrifice. This strongly moral or exemplarist theory of the atonement, which interpreted Christ’s death virtually exclusively as a demonstration of the love of God, made a considerable impact upon English – and especially Anglican – thought in the 1920s and 1930s.

The rise of modernism in the United States followed a similar pattern. The growth of liberal Protestantism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was widely perceived as a direct challenge to more conservative evangelical standpoints. Newman Smyth’s Passing Protestantism and Coming Catholicism (1908) argued that Roman Catholic modernism could serve as a mentor to American Protestantism in several ways, not least in its critique of dogma and in its historical understanding of the development of doctrine. The situation became increasingly polarized through the rise of fundamentalism in response to modernist attitudes.

Although criticisms were made of some aspects of Catholic modernism by Pope Leo X in 1893, the fullest condemnations came from his successor, Pius X, in September 1907. In the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis (The Feeding of the Lord’s Flock), Pius declared that the Catholic church now faced a threat from enemies within as much as from its critics outside the church. Modernism, whether it originated from laity or from priests, was the “most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church.”

Pius’ campaign to eliminate modernism from Catholic educational institutions and from positions of authority and influence within the church came to an end with his death in 1914. The election of Benedict XV in September 1914 put a stop to any systematic drive against modernism. While Benedict strongly reaffirmed the substance of earlier condemnations of this phenomenon, he was restrained in their implementation. By then, the influence of anti-modernism had dwindled.

The Victorian crisis of faith

As will be clear from our discussion of modernism, religious belief in many European nations went through a period of decline and uncertainty during the nineteenth century, particularly toward the end of this period. In this section we shall consider developments in England. Although these can be paralleled from the narrative of American and other European societies at the time, England’s status as an economic, military, and cultural power gave these developments particular significance.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was little sign of any emerging crisis of faith. There was little public appetite for radical change, religious or political. Although the extremism of the French Revolution was warmly welcomed by some young radicals of the 1790s and early 1800s, such enthusiasm soon dissolved. The poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) illustrates an initial enthusiasm for the abolition of a corrupt order along with a growing unease about the violence and bloodshed it created. Atheism gained few supporters in England on account of the revolution; most English people seem to have judged anti-religious views as socially destabilizing and irresponsible.

Yet deeper forces were at work in English culture, creating a context within which a new and more distant attitude to faith would emerge. One such force was the Industrial Revolution, which developed earlier and more rapidly in England than in many other nations. While rural churches were often deeply embedded in the life of rural communities, the migration of rural populations to cities led to a disconnection between the working class and the church. Urban churches often failed to connect up with burgeoning communities of industrial workers.

A second development was the rise of biblical criticism, which became increasingly important in the second half of the nineteenth century. The edited collection Essays and Reviews (1860) caused a scandal on account of its critical attitude toward the Bible on the part of its seven liberal Anglican authors. The most controversial of the essays was Benjamin Jowett’s “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” which argued that the Bible ought to be read “like any other book.” The impact of this collection of essays was perhaps greater than it might otherwise have been, as it was published a year after Darwin’s Origin of Species had opened up debate about the reliability of the Bible’s account of human origins.

Yet perhaps the most celebrated exponent of biblical criticism was John William Colenso (1814–1883), a colonial bishop of the Church of England. Colenso was one in an increasing number of writers to raise doubts about the factual reliability of the Old Testament. In his The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined (1862), Colenso questioned the accuracy of the narratives in the historical books of the Old Testament. He disputed whether Moses had written the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and argued that its spiritual value did not imply its historical accuracy. “Though imparting to us, as I fully believe it does, revelations of the Divine Will and Character, it cannot be regarded as historically true.” These views from the pen of a colonial bishop caused a scandal in Victorian England, in that they were seen to challenge the basic idea that the Bible could be trusted.

A third area of tension concerned the growing popular influence of science, which was increasingly coming to be seen as a cultural authority independent and critical of religion. The Darwinian debates added significantly to these discussions. For many later Victorians, science was about the future and religion was about the past. This perception was intensified by the publication of works arguing for the permanent “warfare” of science and faith, such as John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).

Victorian Christianity responded to these developments in a number of manners. The Oxford Movement, which emerged during the 1830s, was critical of German New Testament scholarship and developed a program for the renewal of the “high church” movement within the Church of England. Some advocated disengagement from these cultural trends, anticipating some of the themes that were later associated with American Protestant fundamentalism during the 1920s.

Yet the dominant response within mainline British Christianity was to attempt to reach a religious accommodation of these cultural developments. The willingness of the Victorian churches to come to terms with biological and geological science, social science, archaeology, comparative religion, and biblical scholarship can be seen partly as a pragmatic response to the changing cultural situation. To resist these changes, many senior churchmen believed, would only lead to the increasing cultural marginalization and isolation of organized religion within English society.

Pentecostalism: The American origins of a global faith

Many of the Christian denominations making up American society had their origins in Europe – such as Presbyterianism, Episcopalianism, and Methodism. Yet the religious entrepreneurialism of the United States led to the emergence of numerous new denominations and visions of faith that originated within America itself. Most of these had Christian roots wherever their subsequent development might lead them. Joseph Smith (1805–1844) founded Mormonism in the 1820s in New York State as a form of Christian primitivism. Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) founded Christian Science in Massachusetts in 1879. The Jehovah’s Witnesses emerged from the Bible Student Movement founded in the late 1870s in Pennsylvania by Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916). Yet perhaps the most significant form of Christianity to emerge within the United States is Pentecostalism.

The first phase of the emergence of Pentecostalism took place on the first day of the twentieth century – January 1, 1901 – at Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas. The institution had been founded the previous October, in the holiness tradition, by Charles Parham (1873–1929), a former pastor in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Parham asked his students to investigate the New Testament evidence for the continued activity of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life.

This was seen as an empty, pointless question by many. The theological wisdom of the day took the form of “cessationism,” widely taught by the Protestant theological establishment. This view held that the active gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as “speaking in tongues,” belonged to the age of the New Testament itself and were no longer available or operational. The New Testament was thus read from within a “cessationist” interpretative framework, which had already determined that such spiritual phenomena were things of the past. Parham was not so sure. Within his own holiness tradition, reports were circulating of what seemed to be charismatic phenomena. He asked his students for their views.

The students reported that a straightforward reading of the biblical texts suggested that such charismatic gifts were still a possibility. Impressed by the clarity of this response, Parham and his students began a prayer vigil on December 31, 1900, in the hope that the gift might be renewed. At 11 o’clock the following evening, on the first day of the twentieth century, one of the students – Agnes Ozman (1870–1937) – reported having such an experience. A few days later others, including Parham himself, followed suit.

Parham and his students began to tell others about this apparent recovery of the “gift of tongues.” One of those who heard Parham speak in 1905 was the African American preacher William J. Seymour (1870–1922), who was forced by the southern segregationist policies of that period to listen to Parham’s lectures through a half-opened door. Sadly, Parham – noted for his white supremacist views – did nothing to break down this racial wall of separation. Inspired, Seymour went on to open the Apostolic Faith Mission in a dilapidated church, then used only for storage, at 312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles, in April 1906.

Over the next two years a major revival broke out at Azusa Street, characterized by “speaking in tongues.” The term “Pentecostalism” began to be applied to the movement. This name alludes to the “Day of Pentecost” – the occasion, according to the New Testament, when the phenomenon of “speaking in tongues” was first experienced by the early Christian disciples (Acts 2: 1–4). Significantly, at a time of ruthless racial segregation in American culture brought about by the notorious Jim Crow segregation laws, the Azusa Street mission pointedly ignored racial issues. A black pastor led a diverse ministry team comprised of white people, black people, and Hispanics.

Primarily (though not exclusively) from this California base, Pentecostalism spread rapidly in America, appealing particularly to the socially marginalized and especially through Seymour’s important concept of an ecstatic egalitarian ecclesiology. Unusually, it seemed to appeal to and be embraced by both white and African American Christian groupings. Charles Parham, however, had no time for the racial inclusiveness proclaimed and practiced by Seymour and Azusa Street. In an abortive and counterproductive move, Parham attempted to take control of the Azusa phenomenon, being particularly disturbed by its commitment to interracial fellowship. Among other things, Parham later went on to teach that the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were the privileged descendants of the lost tribes of Israel; and he spoke in glowing terms of the Ku Klux Klan. He was never reconciled with Seymour and eventually died in disgrace.

Yet Pentecostalism rapidly transcended its American roots and became a global faith. We shall consider this further later in this work (pp. 212–213).

The Twentieth Century, 1914 to the Present

The assassination by a Serbian nationalist of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the heir to the throne of Austro-Hungary, on June 28, 1914 sparked off an international conflict of unparalleled destructiveness. The European great powers were linked together by treaty obligations that virtually guaranteed that a declaration of war by one would lead to a Europe-wide conflict. On the one side were Great Britain, France, and Russia; on the other, Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Italy.

The Great War had a massive impact on Christianity globally. Christianity was still a predominantly western phenomenon in 1914. At one level, the war fractured relationships between nations and churches and between national bodies – such as mission agencies and churches. It would be a long time, for example, before German and British Christians were able to restore any kind of meaningful working relationship between them.

The Great War also put an end to the notion of “Christendom.” This idea had been largely discredited following the fragmentation of Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It had now received a mortal wound, from which it never recovered. European Christian nations had regularly fought one another in the past – but never with such ferocity.

The situation of Russia was of particular importance. Russia soon found itself overwhelmed by German technological superiority and was forced to sue for peace. This caused existing internal tensions to reach breaking point, and there is wide agreement that this situation has been a trigger for the Russian Revolution – unquestionably one of the most important developments in the twentieth century for the fortunes of Christianity in Europe and far beyond.

Yet the Great War was not a religious war in any sense of the term. It did not arise over religious issues, nor did religious beliefs or agendas play any significant role in its prosecution. It was a war between “nation-states,” based primarily on nationalist objectives and agendas. A complex network of alliances and counterbalances had developed between the various European powers since the Franco-Prussian War; these were intended to neutralize the capacity of any great power to achieve continental dominance. In the end, the mechanism that was intended to prevent a conflict locked the great powers into a delicate state of equilibrium that, once disturbed, had the potential to escalate uncontrollably into total war.

Any account of the history of Christianity in the twentieth century must give due weight to the instability and disillusionment that arose in the aftermath of the Great War. Two events that took place during the Great War proved especially important in shaping the course of Christianity in the twentieth century.

The Armenian genocide of 1915

The twentieth century opened with a catastrophe that traumatized Christians in the eastern Mediterranean region and was an ominous portent of things to come later that century. The ailing Ottoman empire found itself caught up in the Great War and began to fragment following a series of rebellions against Ottoman rule in the Middle East and beyond. This empire was a predominantly Islamic region and was home to a significant number of non-Islamic peoples, including Armenian Christians. The Armenian people had adopted the Christian faith in AD 301 and regarded themselves as the oldest Christian nation in the region. In 1915 a series of massacres and forced deportations claimed the lives of between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians – an event now referred to as “the Armenian genocide.”

The events of 1915 did not come entirely as a bolt from the blue. There had been a series of massacres of Armenian Christians in many Turkish cities during the period 1895–1897, in which about 200,000 people are thought to have died. While the massacres of April 1915 were directed against non-Islamic religious minorities in general rather than against Christians in particular, the people most severely affected were the Armenians. These events took place deep within the Ottoman empire, under wartime conditions that made communication and intervention virtually impossible. Nothing could be done to stop the killings.

The impact of this genocide upon world Christianity has been mixed. Regionally it was seen as a catastrophe. Christians in the Middle East were stunned and numbed by the events. Many of them lived as religious minorities under Islamic rule and feared that this massacre might lead to a more general repression of Christians by other Islamic powers in the region. Many drew the conclusion that geographical dispersion into Christian nations was the only way of ensuring their safety. As a result, the largest Armenian communities today are to be found in the United States, where they found sanctuary.

In the dark days of 1915, some Armenians had looked to Russia for help. Was not this great nation a bastion of Orthodox Christianity? Might not its great resources be brought to bear on their desperate situation? Yet in 1917 events took a turn that few could have predicted. The Russian Revolution overthrew the czarist state and ushered in an altogether new state ideology. No longer was Russia an Orthodox nation. If anything, it would be a nation committed to the elimination of religion from its territory – and, if possible, far beyond.

The Russian Revolution of 1917

The political philosopher Karl Marx had argued that the origins of religion – Christianity included – lay in social and economic alienation. People turned to religion for consolation, because they could not bear the weight of sorrow and pain caused by their poverty and alienation from their rights. In Marx’s famous words, religion is the opium of the people: a narcotic, which soothes the pains of life under capitalism and makes people disinclined to take action so as to bring about radical social and political change.

For Marx, religion would die out if radical social change were effected. Eliminate capitalism through a communist revolution, and the pain it created would disappear – and, with it, any need for the comfort of religion. Religion, Marx argued, owed both its origins and its continued appeal to its power to comfort and soothe in the face of the ills of capitalism. Religion thus offered an indirect support to capitalism, in that it diminished the human will to rebel against its iniquities and to bring about the socioeconomic transformation that alone would change the world.

Figure 4.10 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), leader of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

Source: AKG Images.

Marx’s ideas never achieved significant influence in the heartlands of capitalism – in Western European nations such as Germany or Great Britain, or in the United States of America. They may have attracted the attention of academics and social critics; yet they failed to gain acceptance among those with power and to influence the course of events. The Russian Revolution of 1917 changed this situation radically and irreversibly. Marx’s ideas were taken seriously and put into practice by a state, which was prepared to use force to ensure their success. For Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), religion was a tool of oppression, cynically used against the peasants by the Russian ruling classes. The Soviet Union now became the first state to have the elimination of religion as its ideological objective.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 took place in two stages. An initial uprising against the czarist regime took place early in 1917 in St. Petersburg, then the capital of Russia. This “February Revolution” (which actually occurred in March 1917, according to the western calendar) took place against the background of massive Russian losses in the Great War and increasing disillusionment with the policies of the czar. In the chaos of the situation, members of the Duma – the Russian imperial parliament – seized power and declared themselves to be the provisional government of the nation. The czar and his family were placed under house arrest. At this stage, the intentions of the revolutionaries were to bring about a liberal democracy within the collapsed Russian empire.

Yet a more radical group, led by Lenin and informed by Marx’s ideas, was in the process of consolidating its influence. The Bolshevik faction (“Bolshevik” comes from the Russian word for “majority”) seized its opportunity in the “October Revolution” (which actually took place in November 1917), establishing a workers’ state. Civil war broke out, in which the Bolsheviks’ Red Army fought the White Army of foreign troops and internal opponents of the Bolsheviks. By 1924 the czar and his family had been executed and opposition to the Bolsheviks eliminated.

Lenin always regarded the intellectual, cultural, and physical elimination of religion as central to the socialist revolution, and he had identified atheism as an essential element of his ideology long before the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. In laying down how the revolutionary cause was to be advanced in Russia, he wrote: “Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.” In an attempt to win the people from Christianity through argument, Lenin suggested that it would be necessary “to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.” Yet it soon became clear that religion was obstinately persisting. A barrage of repressive measures, from banners to bullets, from pamphlets to prison camps, was unleashed against the religionists of the Soviet Union.

Initially attention was directed toward the religious group that was dominant in Russia itself – Orthodoxy. On January 23, 1918 Lenin issued a decree depriving the church of any right to own property or to teach religion – in private or state schools or to any group of minors. In a Soviet variant of Henry VIII’s suppression of English monasteries, Lenin proposed the confiscation of the wealth of churches and monasteries and the execution of any who opposed it.

A key player in this atheist crusade was the League of Militant Atheists, a semi-official coalition of various political forces that operated within the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1947. With the slogan “The Struggle against Religion Is a Struggle for Socialism,” the group set out to destroy the credibility of religion through social, cultural, and intellectual manipulation. Its carefully orchestrated campaigns involved using newspapers, journals, lectures, and films to persuade Soviet citizens that religious beliefs and practices were irrational and destructive. Good Soviet citizens, they declared, ought to embrace a scientific, atheistic worldview.

Churches were closed or destroyed, often by dynamite; priests imprisoned, exiled, or executed. On the eve of World War II , as a result of the anti-religious policies of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1878--1953), there were only 6,376 clergy remaining in the Russian Orthodox Church, compared with the pre-revolutionary figure of 66,140. On February 17, 1938 55 priests were executed. In 1917 there were 39,530 churches in Russia; by 1940 only 950 remained functional.

Stalin’s suppression of religion, however, extended to other faiths, in line with his general ideological commitment to the forcible elimination of religion. Attacks on Jews were endemic throughout the period of the Soviet Union. Stalin was especially fearful of a secessionist Islamic movement that was gaining momentum in the southeastern republics of the Soviet Union, and he forcibly suppressed Islam throughout the region.

The long-term impact of the Russian Revolution on the history of Christianity was considerable. Christianity was initially suppressed only throughout the Soviet Union. However, after substantial Soviet military gains in World War II, Eastern Europe came under its sphere of influence, and this led to the imposition of often repressive measures against Christian churches and believers.

America: The fundamentalist controversy

Fundamentalism arose as a religious reaction, within American conservative Christianity, to the development of a secular culture during the 1920s. The aftermath of the Great War in American culture was seen by many as marking a departure from America’s traditional Christian (and especially Protestant) moorings. In part, this was a response to the greater mass production of consumer goods – especially autos – and a drive toward consumerism and a credit economy, which many regarded as encouraging materialism. Divorce rates soared. To many religious Americans, the nation seemed to have embraced new secular values and to have moved away from older values of self-denial and from the Protestant work ethic to a form of self-indulgence and materialism.

Despite the wide use of “fundamentalist” to characterize religious movements within Islam and Judaism, the term designates, originally and properly, a movement within Protestant Christianity in the United States. By a series of historical accidents, “fundamentalist” came to us from a series of 12 books that appeared from a small American publishing house in the 1910s. The series was unremarkably entitled The Fundamentals and was intended to be an exploration of the “basics of faith” from a conservative Protestant perspective.

To begin with, fundamentalism did not have the overtones of obscurantism, anti-intellectualism, and political extremism that many now associate with it. It was seen as a movement on the fringes of American mainline Protestantism, which believed that culture was moving in anti-Christian directions and wanted to safeguard the Christian heritage. Fundamentalists initially saw themselves simply as returning to biblical orthodoxy. This point was recognized at the time by Kirsopp Lake (1872–1946), a leading British modernist writer who described fundamentalism as “the partial and uneducated survival of a theology which was once universally held by all Christians.”

Yet polemical associations were not slow to develop. Fundamentalism rapidly became a reactive movement, defined by what it opposed as much as by what it affirmed. A siege mentality came to be characteristic of the movement. Fundamentalist countercommunities saw themselves (to evoke the pioneer spirit) as circles of wagons, defending their distinctive beliefs against an unbelieving and increasingly secular culture.

The negative consequences of this polarization can be seen especially from the painful history of the Presbyterian church in the United States during the 1920s. In 1922, an ill-tempered controversy broke out over whether traditional doctrines should be modified in the light of modern scientific and cultural knowledge. The conservatives seemed to be winning ground. In response, Henry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) preached a polemical sermon in May 1922 entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Fosdick rejected core beliefs of fundamentalism, arguing that belief in the virgin birth was unnecessary; that belief in the inerrancy of Scripture was untenable; and that the doctrine of the Second Coming was absurd. The sermon was rewritten by a skilled public relations expert and funded by the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1839–1937). It is estimated that 130,000 copies of the sermon were circulated. A vigorous riposte soon followed from the conservative side. Clarence Edward Macartney (1879–1957) entitled his reply “Shall Unbelief Win?”

The situation rapidly polarized. There seemed to be no middle ground, which made toleration impossible. There could be no compromise or way out of the situation. Presbyterians were forced to decide whether they were, to use the categories of the protagonists, “unbelieving liberals” or “reactionary fundamentalists.” The church was shattered. There were other options, and saner voices too; yet the highly politicized climate of opinion made it impossible for them to gain a hearing. “Oppositionalism” made the issue be perceived in highly simplistic terms within conservative Presbyterian circles: either an unbelieving culture would win, or victory would go to the gospel. There were no alternatives.

Conservatives soon discovered that there seemed to be little they could do to stop the influence of modernist thinkers such as Fosdick from growing within their denominations. The slide into modernism seemed inexorable. The result was a growing demand within fundamentalist circles for separation from allegedly corrupt denominations. If it proved impossible to reform denominations from within, the only course open was to break away from the denomination and form a new, yet doctrinally pure church body. Such a separatist approach can be traced back to the dawn of American Protestantism. Roger Williams (c. 1604–1684), founder of Rhode Island, was one of the leading proponents of a pure separatist church, arguing that Christian believers were under an obligation to separate themselves from apostate churches and from a secular state.

The fundamentalist war against modernity led to a closed, cautious, and defensive attitude on the part of its protagonists toward what they regarded as a secular culture and largely apostate mainline churches. Separatism seemed the only way ahead. If culture and mainline denominations could not be converted or reformed, there was no option but to become a voice in the wilderness.

One of the main enemies identified by fundamentalism was Darwinism. Although several of the essays in The Fundamentals were actually supportive of evolution as a scientific theory, radical opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution quickly became a litmus test of fundamentalist orthodoxy. Although some scholars suggest that this opposition arose primarily because Darwinism seemed to pose a threat to traditional methods of biblical interpretation, it is more helpful to see it as a reaction against what was seen as a defining characteristic of secular culture at that time.

This opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution led many fundamentalists to agitate for its exclusion from the curriculum of public schools. This led to the famous Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925. John T. Scopes (1900–1970), a young high school science teacher, was prosecuted for disobeying a recently adopted statute that prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee’s public schools. The American Civil Liberties Union moved in to support Scopes, while William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) served as prosecution counsel on behalf of the World Christian Fundamentals Association. It proved to be a public relations disaster for fundamentalism.

Bryan, who had billed the trial as a “duel to the death” between Christianity and atheism, was outmaneuvered by the celebrated agnostic attorney Clarence Darrow, who called Bryan to the stand as a witness for the defense and interrogated him concerning his views on evolution. Bryan was forced to admit that he had no knowledge of geology, comparative religions, or ancient civilizations. In the end, Bryan succeeded in winning the trial in the courtroom. Scopes was fined $100. The state supreme court reversed the verdict against Scopes on a technicality, allowing Scopes to walk free. Bryan died five days after the trial.

But a perhaps somewhat more important trial was taking place in the nation’s newspapers, in which Bryan was declared to be unthinking, uneducated, and reactionary. Fundamentalism might make sense in a rural Tennessee backwater, but had no place in sophisticated urban America. In particular, the journalist and literary critic H. L. Mencken successfully portrayed fundamentalists as intolerant, backward, and ignorant, standing outside mainstream American culture.

From that moment on, fundamentalism became as much a cultural stereotype as a religious movement. It could not hope to win support among the educated and cultural elites within mainline Protestantism. The damage inflicted would never be undone. It was only with the emergence of a new form of evangelicalism after World War II that fundamentalism regained some of its earlier momentum and credibility.

The German church crisis of the 1930s

Germany was economically weakened and nationally humiliated by its defeat in the Great War. Where the economies of other nations gradually began to recover in the 1920s, Germany remained locked into political and economic stagnation. Things were made worse by the reparations that Germany was required to pay its former enemies and by the emergence of rampant inflation in German economy.

Although parliamentary democracy had been imposed on Germany following the ending of the monarchy, the Weimar Republic failed to live up to public expectations and hopes. In March 1920 the first attempt by right-wing nationalists to overthrow the government took place, setting a pattern of instability that would continue into the 1930s. An attempt made by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists to seize power in November 1923 – the famous “Beer Hall Putsch” – failed ignominiously.

Things went seriously wrong in 1929. The German economy was already slowing down early that year. The Wall Street crash of October 1929 marked the beginning of a worldwide slump of unprecedented severity, which proved fatal for the political stability of the Weimar Republic. A chain of events was unleashed that led to the political triumph of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party, widely known as the “Nazis.” Adolf Hitler was installed as German chancellor in 1933.

Under Hitler, the German churches would face considerable challenges. National socialism was not in any sense a Christian philosophy. Its origins are still poorly understood; however, it is clear that it reflects long-standing nationalist beliefs concerning Germanic culture, especially the role of a pan-Germanic alliance in dominating Central Europe. Hitler’s program demanded control over most aspects of German life, including the German churches. Unlike Stalin, however, Hitler believed that it might be possible to secure the compliance of the churches without the use of force and oppressive measures.

Nazi rule was at first welcomed by many German churchmen, partly because it offered a bulwark against the ominous state atheism sponsored within the Soviet Union, and partly because it seemed to offer a new cultural role for religion. The German Christian movement developed, adopting a positive response to Hitler’s program for national reconstruction and unity.

Yet the unity of the German Christians did not last for long. Division arose from September 1933, partly over the so-called “Aryan clause,” which demanded that no Jew should hold office in the church. The strongly anti-Jewish rhetoric of the Nazi party divided those who saw supporting Hitler as a temporary and pragmatic accommodation to German political realities from those who wanted to reconstruct Christianity totally.

Theologians Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer developed a radical theological critique of any political system that placed anything but God at the center of an individual’s or a nation’s life. Leaders of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) – a movement within the German Protestant churches that rejected any compromises with Nazism – met at Barmen in late May 1934 and issued a document often known as the Barmen Declaration. This declared that the church could not adjust its ideas according to “prevailing ideological and political convictions.” It had to remain faithful to its Christian roots, as witnessed in the person of Jesus Christ and in the text of the Bible. Yet such protests proved ineffective against the rhetorical and political power of a totalitarian state.

The anti-Jewish attitudes and policies of Adolf Hitler were ultimately expressed in the Holocaust, a program of extermination that played a major role in shaping relations between Christianity and Judaism in the period after World War II. Although others too were judged by the Nazis to be enemies of the state and sent to the gas chambers in World War II, by far the greatest number was that of Jews, who had fallen foul of the institutionalized anti-Semitism of the Third Reich. Hitler had learned from the Armenian genocide that actions committed in a situation of total war did not attract international attention, and he appears to have assumed that his own program of genocide would not attract international condemnation.

The Holocaust had a strong impact on Jewish–Christian relations after World War II, raising difficult questions about Christian complicity in Hitler’s wartime policies and projects. It was also an important factor in leading to the creation of the state of Israel in May 1948.

The 1960s: The emergence of a post-Christian Europe

In 1900, five of the world’s ten most populous Christian countries were in Western Europe: Britain, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. Three of the others – Russia, Poland, and Ukraine – lay in Eastern Europe. Europe was the heartland and focus of the Christian faith; in that it was rivaled only by North America. Today the situation has changed radically. In 2005 only one Western European nation featured on the list of most populous Christian countries.

Every Western European nation has become secularized, as indicated by four key indicators.

Western Europe is now the most secular area in the world. How did this happen? How did a region that was instrumental in missionary work throughout much of the world from about 1600 to 1900 become a post-Christian society? This question is often asked in the context of the religious renewal and revival that can be seen in most parts of the world. Why is Western Europe the exception? Why did this development take place there and not, say, in the United States?

No satisfactory answers have yet been given. Some sociologists have argued that Protestantism’s distinctive desacralization of nature and society – or “disenchantment,” in Max Weber’s specific use of this concept – encouraged the emergence of the natural sciences, secularism, and atheism. Peter Berger suggested that Protestantism caused “an immense shrinkage in the scope of the sacred in reality.” Protestants, he argued, did not see themselves as living in a world that was “ongoingly penetrated by sacred beings and forces.” Instead they understood that world to be “polarized between a radically transcendent divinity and a radically ‘fallen’ humanity” that was devoid of any sacred qualities or connections.

In contrast, Berger argued, Catholicism had contained secularizing forces through its deeply symbolic understanding of the natural world and of humanity’s place within it. Without realizing what it was doing, Protestantism opened the floodgates for the forces that would shape modernity and would ultimately cause Protestantism such grief in its European heartlands.

Although the secularization thesis is now regarded with suspicion, it was widely held during the 1960s. This led many churches to ask deep questions about their future in what they believed would be an increasingly secular world. The most significant attempt to engage this question was the Second Vatican Council, in which Catholicism sought to confront such cultural trends and to forge robust and realistic strategies to meet them. We shall consider this landmark council in what follows.

The Second Vatican Council: Reform and revitalization

The Catholic church was well aware of the radical social and cultural changes that seemed to be sweeping through western culture in the postwar period, especially in Western Europe. There was a clear need for theological reconstruction and reformulation, in order to be able to translate the Catholic faith into terms that connected it with the new cultural situation. Yet Pius XII, who was pope from 1939 until his death in 1959, did not believe that there was any pressing need to engage these issues. There was no mood for reform within the papal establishment.

The death of Pius XII led to the election of a new pope, John XXIII, in October 1958. Elected at the age of 78, John XXIII was expected to be an “interim pope.” His was to be a transitional papacy, without any expectation of major changes. Less than three months later, John XXIII took the church’s establishment by surprise when he announced that he would be convening an ecumenical council to formulate the church’s responses to the realities of the postwar world. The general mood in the Vatican was that there was a need for a few “house-keeping measures” within the church. The announcement of a reforming council was unexpected. The Italian word used to refer to this process of reform and renewal was aggiornamento – “updating.” In many ways, this would be the watchword of the council. John XXIII spoke frequently of the need to open the windows of the church to let in some fresh air. He expressed the hope that such opening would be the beginning of a new Pentecost for the church.

The council held its deliberations in the Vatican. It began under John XXIII, on October 11, 1962, and closed under Paul VI, on December 8, 1965. The death of John XXIII on June 3, 1963 did not derail it; Paul VI immediately declared his intention to continue his predecessor’s project.

What were the achievements of the council? How did the idea of aggiornamento work out in practice? The council took place against a backdrop of resurgence of confidence within Catholicism, in response to developments such as the election of a Catholic – John F. Kennedy – as president of the United States. Perhaps this sense of confidence contributed to the council’s bold declarations about the role of the church in the world, which urged all Catholics to dialogue with developments they saw around them. Catholicism would not be like American fundamentalism in the 1920s and 1930s. It would not retreat into a ghetto; it would engage with the world. In many ways, this spirit of positive, constructive, and confident engagement remains one of the most striking characteristics of the council.

Figure 4.11 The opening of the second session of the Second Vatican Council, September 29, 1963, with Pope Paul VI (formerly Giovanni Battista Montini).

Source: Keystone/Getty Images.

Its decisions, however, must also be given due weight. The council reaffirmed the collegiality of bishops without calling into question the authority or status of the pope; it emphasized their important role in governing and guiding the church. A new accent was placed on the role of the laity, whose members were encouraged to engage with their social and political context. The Catholic church’s attitude to other churches became more relaxed and positive: it was an attitude of acknowledging that these other churches were indeed Christian bodies, although they were separate from the Catholic church.

This new generosity toward other Christians was matched by a commitment to positive and respectful engagement with other faith traditions. Of particular importance was the council’s recognition that the Catholic church had been complicit in creating prejudicial attitudes toward Jews, particularly by suggesting that they had been responsible for the death of Christ. This was an important gesture of conciliation toward the world’s Jews, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

One of the most important decisions of the council was the reforming decree Sacrosanctum concilium (literally “holy council,” officially translated as The Council’s Constitution), which was approved on December 4, 1963 by a landslide majority. There were 2,147 votes in favor and 4 against. This reforming decree laid the foundations for liturgical renewal. One of its most important decisions concerned the project of translating the liturgy into the vernacular. This significant development was coupled with a growing willingness to authorize vernacular translations of the Bible.

The radical decisions taken by the council were met with suspicion in more conservative parts of the Catholic world, such as Ireland. Observing this resistance, many concluded that the “spirit of the council’ could not be implemented until an older generation of bishops, who were fixed in their ways and locked into older habits of thought and action, had given way to a new generation. Yet there was little doubt that the Second Vatican Council marked a landmark in Catholic life and thought, signaling a new way of engaging the world.

Christianity and the American Civil Rights Movement

The American Civil War led to a number of tensions within the Union, in which the former southern “slave” states developed state and local laws that allowed them to maintain racial segregation along antebellum lines. The Jim Crow laws, enacted between 1876 and 1965, mandated policies of racial segregation similar to those in force in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s under the name of apartheid (apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning “separateness”). These laws laid the foundation for racial segregation in all public facilities in the southern states of the former Confederacy.

It is widely agreed that, despite the importance of individual activists and campaigners, the key to the success of the Civil Rights Movement in America was the black churches of the southern states. These represented the most significant social and political force to emerge from the former slave communities. Although socially marginalized in the southern states during the period between the two world wars, these churches were the only institutions with the finances, structure, and mass membership needed to bring about a mass mobilization of African Americans with the power to change society.

The strongly religious tone of the rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement partly reflects the failure of American liberalism to achieve any success in civil rights legislation and policy at the height of its power during the 1930s. In the end, the ideology of political liberalism became subordinated to the religious vision and worldview that characterized large parts of the movement at grassroots level. The struggle for civil rights was widely understood to be a religious struggle, echoing the great themes of the Old Testament narratives about the liberation of Israel from its bondage in Egypt. Mass political meetings of the civil rights campaign often mimicked the structure and tone of church services, partly because they were seen as a natural extension of the religious and social visions, deeply rooted in the history of the black South.

The event that triggered the Civil Rights Movement closest and most familiar to us was the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. In December 1955 a black woman – Rosa Parks (1913–2005) – was arrested under the Jim Crows laws for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, on a public bus in the city of Montgomery, Alabama. Opposition to this arrest and to the discriminatory attitudes toward black people that lay behind it was led by the black Baptist pastor Martin Luther King (1929–1968). The resulting boycott lasted for more than a year and generated national publicity. A United States District Court ruling of 1956 finally ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses.

Encouraged by this development, King sought to mobilize opinion to end segregation on buses throughout the South. After a series of meetings early in 1957, King launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, specifically with the aim of harnessing the social capital of black churches to challenge existing laws on segregation. It was a controversial move, as many pastors and church leaders – both black and white – believed that the churches should concentrate their attention on the spiritual and pastoral needs of their congregations rather than become engaged in political action.

Yet, despite this tendency to political quietism, the churches became increasingly involved in nonviolent protests. A successful campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, was followed by a massive march on Washington in August 1963. The Kennedy administration, spurred to activity largely by the media coverage of police’s overreaction against demonstrators in Birmingham, began to roll back southern legislation, ending much – though not all – of the racial discrimination in the South.

The Civil Rights Movement is notable for bringing about two developments, which marked the re-entry of the churches into the political process in the United States. First, King’s program of social action was clearly seen to be based on a theological vision of transformation and renewal rather than on the agenda of a specific political party. King chose to align himself with neither Republicans nor Democrats, but operated outside the political establishment.

King’s speech “I Have a Dream” (August 28, 1963), widely hailed as a rhetorical masterpiece, is deeply rooted in the Old Testament’s vision of justice and freedom, providing a theological defense for acting for change. Prophetic themes from Isaiah 40 are woven into the fabric of the speech, articulating both hope and vision.

Second, King’s success made it clear that churches could become involved in political debates and in direct action without compromising their principles. The civil rights campaign made it religiously acceptable for churches and individual Christian leaders to become politically engaged.

Faith renewed: John Paul II and the collapse of the Soviet Union

The situation in Europe after World War II was complex and posed particular challenges for the Catholic church. The establishment of the Soviet bloc meant that many Catholic parts of Eastern Europe unexpectedly found themselves under communist control and severe restrictions were placed on the activities of churches and religious believers. In the West, the radical questioning of traditional structures of authority and beliefs in the 1960s created a cultural context that challenged many Catholic ideas.

The Second Vatican Council began to address some of the issues raised for Catholicism in the West, although their implementation provoked some impatience, particularly in the area of artificial contraception. Yet the influence of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states arguably caused a much greater problem. There seemed little that the papacy could do to engage the situation. Influence was seen as resting on pragmatic factors – such as military force. On being criticized by Pope Pius XII, the Soviet leader Josef Stalin dismissed this intervention as inconsequential. “How many divisions has the Pope?”

Pope Paul VI died in August 1978. Like his predecessor, John XXIII, Paul VI was an Italian pope who had worked hard to improve relations with other Christian churches and to open the windows of the church to the world. It was unclear who his successor would be. Some favored Cardinal Giuseppe Siri (1906–1989), the conservative archbishop of Genoa, whose criticisms of the Second Vatican Council suggested that he would lead the church in a more conservative direction. In the event, the papal conclave elected the Italian Albino Luciani (1912–1978), who took the name “John Paul I.” It soon became clear that he would be a reforming pope, concerned to implement the decisions of the Second Vatican Council.

John Paul I died suddenly on the thirty-third day of his reign – September 29, 1978. His unexpected death prompted speculation that he had been assassinated, although this is not regarded as persuasive by historians. A papal conclave was convened once more. The cardinals appear to have initially divided along traditionalist and reformist lines, adepts of tradition favoring Giuseppe Siri and adepts of reform the archbishop of Florence, Giovanni Benelli (1921–1982). Although Benelli came close to being elected, it was clear that neither of the leading contenders commanded sufficient support to be elected. A compromise candidate was therefore sought.

To the surprise of the outside world, the conclave elected Karol Józef Wojtyła (1920–2005), the Polish Archbishop of Kraków. Wojtyła announced that he would be known as “John Paul II,” which was interpreted both as a tribute to his predecessor and as an indication that he would continue his reforming trajectory. John Paul II was only 58 at the time of his election, which made him one of the youngest popes in recent history.

Although the appointment created huge interest throughout the world, its impact was greatest in Wojtyła’s native land. Poland lay within the Soviet bloc at the time of his election and was one of the most devoutly Catholic countries in Europe. The communist authorities had proved unable to suppress Catholicism and had instead concentrated their efforts on limiting its influence. The election of a Polish pope – the first non-Italian pope for nearly 500 years – caused a surge of national pride in Poland and gave a new significance to the nation’s Catholic identity.

During a pastoral visit to Poland in June 1979 – the first of nine such visits to his homeland – John Paul II was overwhelmed by the enthusiastic crowds. As the national mood changed, partly in response to Catholic resurgence, resistance against the communist authorities grew. In a landmark development, the trade union Solidarity was established in August 1980, at the Lenin Shipyard at Gdańsk, under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa (born 1943). The imposition of martial law in December 1981 failed to repress the movement, even though its regional leaders were imprisoned.

The events in Poland served as a trigger for comparable developments throughout the Soviet bloc. Central control began to weaken, especially during the period when Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (born 1931) served as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On being elected as general secretary in 1985, Gorbachev enacted a policy of perestroika (Russian “restructuring”) and glasnost (Russian “openness”). Though intended to liberate the economy of the Soviet Union from an excessive bureaucracy, this move ended up by significantly weakening the grip of the Communist Party over both the Soviet Union and its allies.

It became increasingly clear that religion was no longer being repressed. For example, in February 1988 a Red Army choir performed “Ave Maria” before John Paul II at the Vatican. In the same year Mikhail Gorbachev both permitted and promoted the celebration of a millennium of Christian faith in Russia and the Ukraine. Three years later the Soviet Union ceased to exist. It was formally dissolved on December 25, 1991, its 15 component republics becoming independent sovereign states. Within a decade, Orthodoxy had re-established itself as a major spiritual and political force within the new Russian Federation.

Mikhail Gorbachev remarked that the fall of the Iron Curtain would have been impossible without John Paul II. This is correct, provided it is not understood to imply that the pope was the sole cause of the collapse. Many factors were involved, and many would argue that the resurgence of religion – catalyzed to no small extent by this charismatic pope – was one of the factors that destabilized the eastern bloc. John Paul II himself took a different view, suggesting that communism collapsed on account of its own inner contradictions. “It would be simplistic to say that Divine Providence caused the fall of Communism. In a certain sense Communism as a system fell by itself.”

The reign of John Paul II saw major challenges developing for Catholicism, including a decline in priesthood and church attendance in western nations, the growing numerical strength of evangelicals and Pentecostals in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and debates over the decentralization of power to local parishes. Although John Paul II was initially regarded by some as a reformist, his reign was chiefly notable for its reassertion of traditional papal attitudes and for a distinct cooling of relations between Catholics and other churches. Yet many would argue that the most significant event of his reign was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new order in Eastern Europe.

Challenging the church’s establishment: Feminism and liberation theology

The rapid social changes following World War II led to challenges to many traditional Christian beliefs and practices. One of the most important is the emergence of “liberationist” movements, which sought to free groups from the domination of cultural or political power groups. In this section we shall note two such groups: feminism, originally known as “women’s liberation,” and Latin American liberation theology.

In the West, one of the most significant critiques of monotheistic religions emerged from the growing feminist movements, which argued that the fundamentally male notions of God embedded within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were linked with their original patriarchal cultures. These notions were no longer defensible in cultures in which women asserted their own identity and authority.

Though there are clear historical precedents – such as the women’s suffrage movement, which campaigned for the right to vote in the early twentieth century – feminism emerged during the late 1960s. Some feminists focused their attention on specific political or social issues, but others argued for the need to undermine sexual domination as the pervasive ideology of western culture, showing that this ideology lay behind many of its political structures and cultural beliefs or practices.

More recently the movement has become increasingly heterogeneous, partly as a result of the fact that women within different cultures and ethnic groupings accepted a diversity of approaches. Thus the writings of black women in North America are increasingly coming to be referred to as “black womanism,” a label that recognizes that the notion of “women’s experience” does not refer to a universal but to a value shaped by gender and class.

The impact of feminism on Christianity has been primarily in the West and has led to two significant developments. First, the movement campaigned for a greater representation of women within the churches, especially among the clergy. This campaign complemented the activities of others, who argued for the ordination of women on biblical grounds, holding that the New Testament questioned all social, gender, and power relationships on the basis of the new order of the gospel. Some denominations had begun to ordain women before World War II. The Salvation Army, for example, had 41 women officers and 49 men officers in 1878. Denominations that emphasized the importance of tradition (Catholicism and Orthodoxy) and churches that interpreted the New Testament as prohibiting women from exercising leadership have resisted such developments.

Second, the movement argued that traditional Christian language showed a bias toward male role models and language. A number of post-Christian feminists, including Mary Daly in her Beyond God the Father (1973) and Daphne Hampson in Theology and Feminism (1990), argued that Christianity, with its male symbols for God, its male savior figure, and its long history of male leaders and thinkers, is biased against women, and therefore incapable of being salvaged. Women, they urged, should leave its oppressive environment. Others, such as Carol Christ in Laughter of Aphrodite (1987) and Naomi Ruth Goldenberg in Changing of the Gods (1979), argue that women may find religious emancipation by recovering the ancient goddess religions (or by inventing new ones), and by abandoning traditional Christianity altogether.

Other feminists have reacted against such curt dismissals of Christianity and argued for a more nuanced and informed reading of the Christian tradition. Feminist writers have stressed how women have been active in the shaping and development of the Christian tradition from the New Testament on and have exercised significant leadership roles throughout Christian history. Indeed many feminist writers have shown the need to reappraise the Christian past, giving honor and recognition to an army of faithful women whose practice, defense, and proclamation of their faith has hitherto passed unnoticed by a large part of the Christian church and its (mainly male) historians.

The maleness of Christ has been a topic of particular discussion by feminist writers, who have noted how this feature has sometimes been used as a theological foundation for the belief that only the male human may adequately image God, or that only males provide appropriate role models or analogies for God. In response, feminist writers have argued that the maleness of Christ is a contingent aspect of his identity, on the same level as his being Jewish. It is a contingent element of his historical reality, not an essential aspect of his identity. Thus it cannot be allowed to become the basis of the domination of females by males, whether in the church or in society, any more than it legitimates the domination of Gentiles by Jews, or of plumbers by carpenters.

The rise of liberation theology in Latin America during the 1960s is also of importance. One of the most dramatic developments to take place globally in the aftermath of World War II was the spread of Marxism. Although imposed by force in many parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, its ideas proved inspirational for many groups in Latin America, Africa, and Asia – groups of people who were disillusioned with the existing social order and wanted to change it radically. Marxism offered a worldview that promised to transform society – and it was a worldview without God. It seemed to provide a way of throwing off colonialist and imperialist shackles and of finding liberation.

In Latin America Marxism quickly gained the initiative, Cuba functioning as a revolutionary template and base from 1965: Fidel Castro had overthrown the US-backed Cuban President Fulgencio Batista (1901–1973) in a violent revolution of 1959 and had declared Cuba a communist state in 1961. In Brazil, Marxism adapted to the local situation, as theorists such as Caio Prado (1907–1990) enabled it to present its socioeconomic vision as the remedy for the nation’s ills. Recognizing the importance of dealing with the social issues that this vision reflected, some prominent Catholics in the region developed a “liberation theology” that sought to emphasize the transformative social vision of the gospel.

Liberation theology began to emerge in 1968, when the Catholic bishops of Latin America gathered for a congress at Medellín, Colombia. This meeting – often known as CELAM II, an acronym for Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (Latin American Episcopal Council) – sent shock waves throughout the region by acknowledging that the church had often sided with oppressive governments in the region and by declaring that in future it would be on the side of the poor.

This theme was picked up and developed by liberation theology. The church is oriented toward the poor and oppressed – the authentic source for understanding Christian truth and practice. In the Latin American situation, the church is on the side of the poor. The fact that God is on the side of the poor leads to a further insight: the poor occupy a position of special importance in the interpretation of the Christian faith. All Christian theology and mission must begin with the view from below – that is, with the sufferings and distress of the poor.

Liberation theologians defended their use of Marxist ideas on two grounds. First, Marxism is seen as a “tool of social analysis,” which allows insights to be gained concerning the present state of Latin American society and the means by which the appalling situation of the poor may be remedied. Second, it provides a political program by which the present – unjust – social system may be dismantled and a more equitable society created. Liberation theology is thus critical of capitalism and affirmative of socialism. God’s preference for and commitment to the poor is a fundamental aspect of the gospel, not some bolt-on option arising from the Latin American situation or based purely on Marxist political theory.

Liberation theology was a significant response to the revolutionary fervor of many parts of Latin America in the 1960s and the two decades that followed. Since then its appeal has dwindled, partly because it focused on distant goals and partly on account of the rise of another religious option for the poor of Latin America: Pentecostalism (which we shall discuss on pp. 212--213). Yet the ideals of liberation theology live on. The election of the Argentinian Jorge Mario Bergoglio as pope in 2013 is seen by some observers as marking a renewed papal interest in the poor on the one hand and in an informed critique of capitalism on the other.

Christianity beyond the West: The globalization of faith

The great European missionary ventures of the early modern period, initially undertaken by the Catholic church and subsequently by Protestants, vastly extended the geographical range of the Christian faith. In quantitative–numerical terms, the center of Christianity as a whole shifted decisively away from the West between 1900 and 2000. Christianity is now predominantly a religion of the global South. Population growth in this area, when set alongside the evangelistic and missionary successes of the twentieth century, mean that an increasing proportion of an increasingly large population is now Christian. For example: in 1900 the population of Africa was 10 million people, of which 9 percent were Christian; in 2005, the population was more than 400 million, of which 46 percent are Christian.

The case of Korea is particularly important. Korea is an Asian nation that, in the course of a single century, has become a majority Christian nation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the only predominantly Christian nation in Asia was the Philippines – a strongly Catholic country with a small Protestant minority. Although Catholicism was established in Korea by the 1880s, its adepts formed a very small community. The serious growth of Christianity in Korea is probably to be traced back to two American Protestant missionaries: the Methodist Henry Appenzeller (1858–1902) and the Presbyterian Horace Underwood (1859–1916). Both actively promoted education as a means of embedding Christianity in Korean society. Some form of Pentecostal revival appears to have developed around 1907 and to have been significant in bringing about conversions among the native population.

Korea underwent partition into a communist north and a democratic south following the Korean War, which broke out on June 25, 1950. The heavy involvement of missionary agencies in the relief programs that followed the ending of the war created a powerful stimulus to the development of Christianity, which was catalyzed still further by the Korean churches’ programs of social action during the 1960s.

Today Korea sends out Christian missionaries to nations throughout Asia, and increasingly to the large Korean diasporas of major western cities – from Sydney to Los Angeles, from Melbourne to New York. These are now closely linked with a network of churches, which serve more and more as a focal point for community action, mutual support, and spiritual nourishment. In 1979 Korean churches sent 93 missionaries overseas. In 1990 that number had increased to 1,645; in 2000, to 8,103.

Christianity is also becoming an increasingly significant presence in China, despite the communist revolution of 1949. Wishing to avoid any suggestion that Christianity was a tool of western imperialism or an unwelcome western cultural import, Y. T. Wu (1893–1979), a Chinese Christian leader, initiated the Three Self Patriotic Movement. This movement advocated the “Three Self” strategy of “self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation” as a means of eliminating foreign influences from the Chinese churches and of reassuring the new communist government that the churches would be committed to the newly established People’s Republic of China.

Since 1990 Christianity has grown substantially in all its forms within China. The reasons for this development are not fully understood. The Chinese government appears to have taken a pragmatic attitude toward this development, especially in working to secure a better relationship with the Vatican. Although some are suggesting that China may become the nation with the greatest number of Christians in the next few decades, it is clearly unwise to speculate about such a poorly understood phenomenon.

In Africa Christianity has adapted in the light of indigenous values and customs. With the departure of colonial powers in the decades following World War II, leadership within the African churches gradually devolved from Europeans to Africans, resulting in a growing adaptation of the colonial churches to local customs and traditions. Yet many indigenous churches now began to emerge without any historical connection with European denominations. These African initiated churches (AICs) are strongest and most numerous in Southern Africa, West Africa, the Congo Basin, and central Kenya. Three major categories of AICs can be identified:

Conclusion

This brief overview of Christian history can only offer the most basic survey of its themes, which need to be considered in much greater detail. Happily, there are many useful volumes available, if you wish to explore this field further. Some suitable starting points are noted in the Further Reading section, which will help you take things further.

From this historical analysis it will be clear that Christianity has a complex history, which has made it develop in quite distinct ways in different parts of the world and appear in quite different forms in the same geographical regions. In the next chapter we shall explore the different forms of Christianity encountered today.

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