The
Fifth Ages of the Church
The
age begin with crisis on crisis as if snowballs in hell that threatened the
very existence of Christendom’s survival.
On the one hand, there was the direct challenge of the theological
revolution of the Protestant Reformation which separated the greater part of
Northern Europe, especially Germany from Catholicism; and on the other, there
was the cultural revolution of the new lay culture of the Italian Renaissance.
The
Renaissance had replaced the theological and philosophical traditions of the
medieval university system with a plethora of secular studies and
disciplines. The external relations of
Western Christendom had been transformed by the discovery of America, opening a
new vista of the world to the west, while opening energetic European
exploration and trade to the Far East.
Man’s
horizons were exploding beyond comprehension with science in the wing
disproving many of the church’s sacred dictums such as the earth being the
center of the universe. It was an
exciting time to be alive for everyone except Doctors of the Roman Catholic
Faith.
All
these factors affected the character of Roman Catholicism in this Fifth Age of
the Church. The reaction to the
Protestant Reformation produced the so-called Tridentine Reform of the Church.
The
Tridentine Reform of the Church
The
word “tridentine” refers to anything or person pertaining to the city of Trent,
Italy (Latin: Tridentum). As common
experience to corporate man up to the present (2015), the inclination of our
corporate fathers when push comes to shove is to tweet the minutiae and avoid
the gross perturbations that are unraveling to corporate security threatening
legitimacy if not survival. This was no
different five hundred years ago when the Roman Catholic Church was threatened
with the Protestant Reformation.
The
Council of Trent, one of the ecumenical councils recognized by the Roman Catholic
Church, was held in that city in the 16th century. The teachings emphasized by the council
related to legislation issued by the Popes of the time, especially Pope Pius V.
The
council dealt with the Tridentine Mass, which supplanted the various versions
of the Pre-Tridentine Mass. In the 20th
century, Pope Paul VI in turn introduced his version of the Roman Rite which
meant ceasing many of the ordinary practices of the Tridentine Mass. These
changes became official in 1962.
The
Traditionalist Catholic movement and its members have adhered to the 1962 or
earlier editions of the Roman Missal.
The
Reverend John Connely writes of the Council of Trent:
The
Council of Trent's (1545-1563) primary focus, liturgically speaking, was to
standardize the worship of the West. This was done principally in two ways:
First,
the Council (together with Pope Pius V) suppressed all Western Rites that did
not have a continuous history of at least two hundred years. This effectively
eliminated all but the Ambrosian Rite of Milan, the Mozarabic Rite of Toledo,
Spain, and the Gregorian Rite of the City of Rome itself, sometimes called the
Roman Rite.
Simple
variations within the Roman Rite, such as existed among the Benedictines,
Dominicans, etc., were permitted to remain.
In
the 16th century, the Gregorian or Roman Rite already had a continuous
documented history of more than 1000 years. It therefore became the standard
Rite of most of post-Schism Western Christendom.
Secondly,
the Council of Trent standardized the rubrics of the Gregorian Rite. This meant
that when and how the celebrant and other ministers bowed, genuflected, turned
to the faithful, was no longer left to the whim or personal style of the
individual clergyman. For the sake of propriety, detailed instructions about
how to actually celebrate the liturgy were drawn up and imposed upon the whole
of the Western Church.
Most
of these rubrics were not new inventions, however. They were mostly adopted
from the customary rubrics of the cathedrals and parish churches of the City of
Rome and its surrounding countryside towns and villages. This was logical
because Rome was the de jure center of Western Christendom. Thus, by the 16th
century even the rubrics already had a long and venerable history and were
hardly an innovation of the Counter Reformation.
The
Rite of St. Gregory was not "created" by the Council of Trent.
Furthermore, as used in Orthodox Christianity today, this Rite contains a few
corrections and amplifications unknown to the earlier generations of Roman
Catholics; these were imposed in modern times by the wisdom of the Orthodox
Church in order to bring the Rite fully into harmony with the intent and
current practice of Byzantine liturgical theology. With the exception of new
Propers introduced to commemorate various saints of the post-schism Eastern
calendar, the Rite remains essentially identical to that which was already
ancient by the time of Trent.
These
Tridentine Reforms were part of the church’s Counter Reformation strategy to
the challenge of Protestantism. From the
beginning, corrupt as the church had been over the previous two centuries, the
council convened believing Protestant doctrinal error and not church
dysfunction had led to the eminence of Martin Luther and his followers. Consequently, this made rapprochement between
the two sides impossible.
Theologian
Barrett of Catholic University of America sees this as an ineffective Counter
Reformation ploy. He writes:
The
Catholic Church seemed to me very stupid and ignorant. She was an ostrich
thinking it could fly who nevertheless kept plunging her head into the dirt in
order to avoid any talk that might upset her fantasies. The abuses in the
Church that preceded the Protestant movement indicated, to me and the tradition
I was growing to love, a lack of contact with God through special revelation.
Instead of turning to the source of renewal, the Word of God, the Catholics
inoculated their communion against the cure. Everyone knew that the Vulgate had
acquired errors that provided purportedly divine authorization for the Catholic
view of justification, Purgatory, the penitential system, the veneration of
Mary and the saints, and spurious sacraments such as confirmation and marriage.
(Council of) Trent made it the official version in an astounding act of
arrogance, locking her faithful up in the prison of ignorance about the
Scriptures and thus about Christ. I believed this story as did several of my
friends.
Once
again, there was a revival of the religious life through the influence of new
religious orders. The cultural issue was
met by the development of a new form of Christian humanism and education. The age was followed by a great outburst of
missionary activity. Discouraged but not
defeated, thanks to the vigilance and courage of monastics, the church roamed
the world for new converts in an attempt to regain its power and theological
identity.
In
the first half of the seventeenth century, in Europe it found a new avenue of
expression in the emerging Baroque Culture that had commenced to dominate the
artistic and intellectual life of Europe.
Baroque was a style in art and architecture that used exaggerated motion
and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and
grandeur from sculpture, painting, literature, music and architecture.
It
was a time when the great cathedrals that would grace Europe to this day were
being built. Goethe was moved observing
the magnificence of these structures to refer to them as “frozen music.”
The
baroque style started around 1600 in Rome, Italy and spread to most of Europe.
In music the Baroque applies to the final period of dominance of imitative
counterpoint. The popularity and success
of the "baroque" was encouraged by the Catholic Church when it
decided that the drama of the baroque artists' style could communicate
religious themes in direct and emotional involvement.
The
secular aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of baroque architecture and art
as a means of impressing visitors and would-be competitors. Baroque palaces are
built round an entrance sequence of courts, anterooms, grand staircases, and
reception rooms of sequentially increasing magnificence. Many forms of art,
music, architecture, and literature inspired each other in the
"baroque" cultural movement.
At
the beginning of the seventeenth century, nearly ninety percent of the European
population could neither read nor write, so these magnificent cathedrals were
Catholic selling points. They encouraged
peasants in the feudal system to religiously attend Mass and do the bidding of
the Church Fathers.
The
canon promulgated at the Council of Trent recognized the power of imagery to
fulfill the church's mission viewing the representational arts such as
paintings and sculptures with contextual church themes as a way to speak
effectively to the illiterate instead of appealing to the tastes if the
well-informed. This was offered for
inspiration in the style of the Baroque a generation later.
The
turn toward a populist conception of ecclesiastical art is seen in the works of
Caravaggio and the Carracci brothers, who were working (and competing for
commissions) in Rome around 1600.
The
appeal of Baroque style turned consciously from the witty, intellectual
qualities of 16th century Mannerist art to a visceral appeal aimed at the
senses. It employed an iconography that was direct, simple, obvious, and
dramatic. Nothing did this better than
magnificent cathedrals or such sensual sculptures as Prometheus.
Baroque
art drew on certain broad and heroic tendencies in Annibale Caracci and his
circle, and found inspiration in other artists like Correggio, Caravaggio and
Federico Barocci, whose works are sometimes termed 'proto-Baroque'.
A
defining statement of what Baroque is provided by the series of paintings
executed by Peter Paul Rubens for Marie de Medici at the Luxembourg Palace in
Paris (now at the Louvre), in which a Catholic painter satisfied a Catholic
patron:
On
display was the Baroque conception of the monarchy, iconography, and the
handling of paint, exploring new dimensions of compositions in the depiction of
space and movement.
Representative
of this Baroque art is Bernini's "Saint Theresa in Ecstasy" for the
Cornaro chapel in S. Maria della Vittoria.
The Baroque brings together multiple arts, including sculpture and
opera. For a time, the engaging appeal to the senses of Baroque art lifted the
church out of its lethargy redirecting its critics away from its pervasive
dysfunction.
SURVIVAL
IS PREDICATED ON REINVENTION
Any
institution, the church included, must sooner or later acknowledge The Second
Law of Thermodynamics if it is to survive.
This law of physics deals with a phenomenon known as “entropy,” which is
that virtually everything returns to its original state. That means that “things” go back to elemental
forms, which is zero, or more poignantly stated, death. It is as true of man and of his collective
corporate constructions: that is, church, state, society. To postpone the inevitable calls for constant
recreation through reinvention.
This
reinvention is sometimes referred to as “negative entropy,” or constant
recreating or reinvigorating the organization or corporate body by finding new
ways of doing old things. This was the intended function of the Council of
Trent in 1545.
Reinvention
continues to occur to our day. It nearly
failed in the Fifth Age of the Church for the lack of imagination but for the
Renaissance.
The
church went beyond the theological to embrace the counterculture of the
Renaissance for its purposes and survival.
The papacy incorporated Renaissance art, architecture, music and
everything Baroque including dress, manner, pomp and circumstance, ritual and
rites of passage into the renewed identity of Roman Catholicism. Thus church survival was predicated on
Renaissance humanism and the spirit of Catholic tradition for its revival.
That
said the most distinctive feature of this Baroque period was not the Tridentine
Reforms, or things Baroque, but Catholic mysticism, which was a another form of
Catholicism, but also escape from pressing reality.
Nietzsche
would claim in the nineteenth century that “God was dead!" In the seventeenth century, God was not dead
but was thriving in this Catholic mysticism.
The secularism that the German philosopher was referencing was however
on the horizon.
Christian
mysticism refers to the development of mystical practices and theory within
Christianity. It has often been connected to mystical theology, especially in
the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions.
The attributes and means by which Christian mysticism is studied and
practiced are varied and range from ecstatic visions of the soul's mystical
union with God to simple prayerful contemplation of Holy Scripture.
With
the Renaissance came the Protestant Reformation, which in many ways downplayed
mysticism, although it still produced a fair amount of spiritual literature.
Even the most active reformers can be linked to medieval mystical traditions.
Martin
Luther, for instance, was influenced by the German Dominican mystical tradition
of Eckhart and Tauler as well by the Dionysian influenced ("essence
mysticism") tradition. Luther also published the Theologia Germanica,
which he believed was the most important book after the Bible. He credit St. Augustine for teaching him
about God, Christ, and humanity.
Even
John Calvin, who rejected many medieval ascetic practices and who favored
doctrinal knowledge of God over experience of the affect, had medieval
influence such as, Jean Gerson’s Devotio Moderna, with its emphasis on piety as
the method of spiritual growth. This
involved practiced dependence on God by imitating Christ and the son-father
relationship. Meanwhile, Calvin's notion that we can enjoy our eternal
salvation through our earthly successes would lead in later generations to
"a mysticism of consolation."
Alas,
the relevance and survival of the church proved too closely identified with and
dependent on the success of Catholic monarchies, such as the Hapsburgs, which
were in decline. The church read the tea
leaves correctly in the first instance getting on the Baroque bandwagon, but
misread the rise of individualism, the precipitous decline of the feudal
system, or the meteoric rise of capitalism and free enterprise as the Baroque
culture faded with the social cataclysm of the French Revolution (1789). This swept away the established order of the
church, state and European society as it was known.
Monasteries
and universities were destroyed, church property confiscated, and the pope
himself deported to France as a political prisoner. In the eyes of the secular man of the day,
the Catholic Church had been all but abolished, a relic of a dead past.
ANATOMY
OF THE UNRAVELING
At
the outbreak of the French Revolution, Pius VI (1775 -1799) witnessed the
suppression of the old Galican Church, the confiscation of pontifical and
ecclesiastical possessions in France, and was burned in effigy by the Parisians
at the Palais Royal.
In
1796, French Republican troops under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte invaded
Italy, defeated the papal troops and occupied Ancona and Loreto. Pius VI sued
for peace, which was granted at Tolentino on February 19, 1797.
But
on December 28 of that year, in a riot blamed by papal forces on some Italian
and French revolutionists, the popular brigadier-general Mathurin-Léonard
Duphot, who had gone to Rome with Joseph Bonaparte as part of the French
embassy, was killed and a new pretext was furnished for invasion. General
Berthier marched into Rome, entered it unopposed on February 10, 1798,
proclaiming a Roman Republic, demanded of the pope the renunciation of his
temporal authority.
Upon
the pope’s refusal, he was taken prisoner, and on February 20 was escorted from
the Vatican to Siena, and thence to the Certosa near Florence. The French
declaration of war against Tuscany led to his removal to Drôme, France where he
died six weeks after his arrival, on August 29, 1799, having then reigned
longer than any pope.
Pius
VI's body was embalmed, but was not buried until 30 January 1800 after Napoleon
saw political advantage to burying the deceased Pope in efforts to bring the
Catholic Church back into France. His entourage insisted for some time that his
last wishes were to be buried in Rome, then behind the Austrian lines. They
also prevented a Constitutional bishop from presiding at the burial, as the
laws of France then required, so no burial service was held.
This
return of the investiture conflict was settled by the Concordat of 1801. Pius
VI's body was removed from Valence on December 24, 1801 and buried at Rome
February 19, 1802, when Pius VI was given a Catholic funeral, attended by Pope
Pius VII.
The
Sixth Age of the Church
The
sixth age began in the atmosphere of defeat and disaster. Everything had to be rebuilt from the
foundation. The religious orders and
monasteries, the spine of church courage and resolve, the Catholic universities
and foreign missions, the phalanxes of its influence, but worst of all, the
church’s veritable identity was now associated with unpopular causes. The church once controlled the mainstream,
but now found itself outside that power center.
Yet,
the church did recover. A church revival
took place in the nineteenth century finding the church by 1850 to be far
stronger than it had been a hundred years before. This revival captured the spiritual interest
or fueled its renewal in the life of a church from the level of the
congregation to the wider society, with a local, national and global impact.
This
church revivalism should be distinguished from the use of the term
"revival," which is more closely associated with evangelistic
meetings or activities.
Revivalism
is more often viewed traditionally as a Protestant phenomenon, but it was also
a central feature of Catholic life and activity in the 19th century. It
suggests that the religion of revivalism not only found a home among Catholics,
but was a major force in forming their piety movement (Dolan 1979). Since it was wider and more pervasive among
Protestant denominations, comments are limited to the phenomenon in those
churches.
Revivals
are seen as the restoration of the church itself to a vital and fervent
relationship with God after a period of moral decline. Mass conversions of
non-believers are viewed by church leaders as having positive moral effects.
Within
Christian studies, the concept of revival is derived from biblical narratives
of national decline and restoration during the history of the Israelites. In
particular, narrative accounts of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah emphasize
periods of national decline and revival associated with the rule of various
righteous and wicked kings.
Ancient
Judea historian Josiah writes of how revivalism reinstituted temple worship of
Yahweh while destroying pagan worship. Within modern church history, historians
have identified and debated the effects of various national revivals within the
history of the USA, Europe and other countries.
During
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American society experienced a number
of "Awakenings." In the twentieth century, revivals included those of
the 1904–1905 Welsh Revival, 1906 (Azusa Street Revival), 1930s (Balokole),
1970s (Jesus people) and 1909 Chile Revival which spread into the Americas,
Africa, and Asia among both Protestant and Catholic missionary outposts.
Many
Christian revivals drew inspiration from the missionary work of early monks,
from the Protestant Reformation to Catholic Counter Reformation, and from the
uncompromising stance of the Covenanters in 17th century Scotland and Ulster,
who came to Virginia and Pennsylvania with Presbyterians to other
non-conformists.
The
Covenanters were a Scottish Presbyterian movement that played an important part
in the history of Scotland, and to a lesser extent that of England and Ireland
during the seventeenth century.
Presbyterian denominations tracing their history to the Covenanters and
often incorporating the name continue the ideas and traditions in Scotland and
internationally.
They
derive their name from the term “covenant” after the covenant sworn by Israel
in the Old Testament. There were two
important covenants in Scottish history, the National Covenant and the Solemn
League and Covenant.
The
spirit of revivalism and its characteristics also formed part of the mental
framework that led to the American War of Independence and the Civil War.
The
18th century Age of Enlightenment had a chilling effect on spiritual movements,
but this was countered by the aggressive Methodist revivalism of John Wesley,
Charles Wesley and George Whitefield in England and Daniel Rowland, Howel
Harris and William Williams, Pantycelyn in Wales and the Great American
Awakening prior to the American Revolution. A similar (but smaller scale)
revival in Scotland took place at Cambuslang, then a village and is known as
the Cambuslang Work.
A
new fervor spread within the Anglican Church at the end of the 18th century,
when the Evangelical party of John Newton, William Wilberforce and his Clapham
sect were inspired to combat social ills at home and slavery abroad, and
founded Bible and missionary societies.
In
the American colonies, the First Great Awakening was a wave of religious
enthusiasm among Protestants that swept the American colonies in the 1730s and
1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American religion. It resulted from
powerful preaching that deeply affected listeners (already church members) with
a deep sense of personal guilt and salvation by Christ.
Pulling
away from ritual and ceremony, the Great Awakening made religion intensely
personal to the average person by creating a deep sense of spiritual guilt and
redemption. Historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom sees it as part of a "great
international Protestant upheaval" that also created Pietism in Germany,
the Evangelical Revival and Methodism in England.
It
brought Christianity to the slaves and was an apocalyptic event in New England
that challenged established authority. It incited rancor and division between
the old traditionalists who insisted on ritual and doctrine and the new
revivalists.
It
had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational, Presbyterian, Dutch Reform,
and German Reform denominations, and strengthened the small Baptist and
Methodist denominations. It had little impact on Anglicans and Quakers. Unlike
the Second Great Awakening that began about 1800 and which reached out to the
unchurched, the First Great Awakening focused on people who were already church
members. It changed their rituals, their piety, and their self-awareness.
The
new style of sermons and the way people practiced their faith breathed new life
into religion in America. People became passionately and emotionally involved
in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in
a detached manner. Ministers who used this new style of preaching were
generally called "new lights," while the preachers of old were called
"old lights." People began to study the Bible at home, which
effectively decentralized the means of informing the public on religious matters
and was akin to the individualistic trends present in Europe during the
Protestant Reformation.
Nineteenth
Century Revivalism
The
Hungarian Baptist church sprung out of revival with the perceived liberalism of
the Hungarian reform church during the late 1800s. Many thousands of people
were baptized in a revival that was led primarily by uneducated laymen, the
so-called "peasant prophets."
During
the 18th century England saw a series of Methodist revivalist campaigns that
stressed the tenets of faith set forth by John Wesley and that were conducted
in accordance with a careful strategy. In addition to stressing the evangelist
combination of "Bible, Cross, Conversion, and Activism," the
revivalist movement of the 19th century made efforts toward a universal appeal
– rich and poor, urban and rural, and men and women. Special efforts were made
to attract children and to generate literature to spread the revivalist
message.
England
did not undergo a social revolution in the period 1790 – 1832, a time that
appeared ripe for violent social upheaval.
Apparently, a politically conservative Methodism forestalled revolution
among the largely uneducated working class by redirecting its energies toward
spiritual rather than temporal affairs.
The
thesis has engendered strong debate among historians, and several have adopted
and modified this thesis. Some historians suggest that evangelical revivalism
directed working-class attention toward moral regeneration, not social
radicalism. Others claim that Methodism, though a small movement, had a
politically regressive effect on efforts for reform; that Methodism was not a
large enough movement to have been able to prevent revolution, implying
antiradicalism has been misunderstood, arguing instead that it was a socially
deviant movement and the majority of Methodists were moderate radicals.
Early
in the 19th century the Scottish minister Thomas Chalmers had an important
influence on the evangelical revival movement. Chalmers began life as a
moderate in the Church of Scotland and an opponent of evangelicalism. During
the winter of 1803 – 1804, he presented a series of lectures that outlined a
reconciliation of the apparent incompatibility between the Genesis account of
creation and the findings of the developing science of time, geology.
However,
by 1810 he had become an evangelical and would eventually lead the Disruption
of 1843 that resulted in the formation of the Free Church of Scotland.
The
Plymouth Brethren started with John Nelson Darby at this time, a result of
disillusionment with denominationalism and clerical hierarchy.
The
established churches too, were influenced by the evangelical revival. In 1833,
a group of Anglican clergymen led by John Henry Newman and John Keble began the
Oxford Movement. Its objective, however, was to renew the Church of England by
reviving certain Roman Catholic doctrines and rituals, thus distancing
themselves as far as possible from evangelical enthusiasm.
Many
say that Australia has never been visited by a genuine religious revival as in
other countries, but that is not entirely true. The effect of the Great
Awakening of 1858 -1859 was also felt in Australia fostered mainly by the
Methodist Church, one of the greatest forces for evangelism and missions the
world has ever seen.
Records
show that the Methodist Church grew by a staggering 72 percent between 1857 and
1864, while the Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians and other evangelicals also
benefited. Evangelical fervor was its
height during the 1920s with visiting evangelists, R.A. Torrey, Wilbur J
Chapman, Charles M Alexander and others winning many converts in their
Crusades.
The
Crusades of American evangelist Billy Graham in the 1950s had significant
impact on Australian Churches. Stuart
Piggin (1988) explores the development and tenacity of the evangelical movement
in Australia, and its impact on Australian society.
Evangelicalism
arrived from Britain as an already mature movement characterized by commonly
shared attitudes toward doctrine, spiritual life, and sacred history. To set
the history of the movement in Australia to a certain period calls for
examination of the role of revivalism and its oscillation between emphases on
personal holiness and social concerns.
The
revival movements in Scandinavia require special attention to the growth of
organizations, church history, missionary history, social class and religion,
women in religious movements, religious geography, the lay movements as a
counterculture, ethnology, and the social forces at work.
Some
historians approach Scandinavia as a cult process since the revivalist
movements tend to rise and fall over time without particular distinction.
Others study it as minority discontent as expressed by Scandinavians with the
status quo. For once the revivalists
gain wide acceptance, the majority tend to impose their own standards. For example, the
Grundtvigian
and Home Mission revival movements arose in Denmark after 1860 and reshaped
religion in that country, and among immigrants to America.
In
the United States, the Second Great Awakening (1800 – 1830s) was the second
great religious revival in United States history and consisted of renewed
personal salvation experienced in revival meetings. Major leaders included
Asahel Nettleton, James Brainerd Taylor, Charles Grandison Finney, Lyman
Beecher, Barton Stone, Alexander Campbell, Peter Cartwright and James B.
Finley.
Rev.
Charles Finney (1792 – 1875) was a key leader of the evangelical revival
movement in America. From 1821 onward, he conducted revival meetings across
many north-eastern states and won many converts. For him, a revival was not a
miracle but a change of mindset that was ultimately a matter for the
individual's free will.
His
revival meetings created anxiety in a penitent's mind that one could only save
his or her soul by submission to the will of God, as illustrated by Finney's
quotations from the Bible. Finney also conducted revival meetings in England,
first in 1849 and later to England and Scotland in 1858 – 1859.
In
New England, the renewed interest in religion inspired a wave of social
activism, including abolitionism. In western New York, the spirit of revival
encouraged the emergence of new Christian denominations such as the Latter Day
Saint Movement (including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and
the Community of Christ), and movements such as the Restorationist and the
Holiness Movement.
In
the West (now Upper South) especially Kentucky and Tennessee, the revival
strengthened the Methodists and Baptists. The Churches of Christ and Christian
Church (Disciples of Christ) arose from the Stone-Campbell Restoration
Movement. It also introduced into America a new form of religious expression,
the Scottish camp meeting.
A
movement in Swiss, eastern French, German, and Dutch Protestant history known
as le Réveil (German: die Erweckung, Dutch: Het Reveil). Le Réveil was a revival of Protestant
Christianity along conservative evangelical lines at a time when rationalism
had taken a strong hold in the churches on the continent of Europe.
In
German-speaking Europe Lutheran Johann Georg Hamann (1730 –1788) was a leading
light in the new wave of evangelicalism, the Erweckung, which spread across the
land, cross fertilizing with British movements.
The
movement began in the Francophone world in connection with a circle of pastors
and seminarians at French-speaking Protestant theological seminaries in Geneva,
Switzerland and Montauban, France, influenced by the visit of Scottish
Christian Robert Haldane in 1816 – 1817. The circle included such figures as
Merle D'Aubigne, César Malan, Felix Neff, and the Monod brothers.
As
these men traveled out, the movement spread to Lyon and Paris in France, to
Berlin and Eberfeld in Germany and to the Netherlands. Several missionary
societies were founded to support this work, such as the British based
Continental Society and the indigenous Geneva Evangelical Society.
As
well as supporting existing Protestant denominations, in France and Germany the
movement led to the creation of Free Evangelical Church groupings: the Union
des Églises évangéliques libres and Bund Freier evangelischer Gemeinden in
Deutschland.
In
the Netherlands, the movement was taken forward by Willem Bilderdijk, with
Isaäc da Costa, Abraham Capadose, Samuel Iperusz Wiselius, Willem de Clercq and
Groen van Prinsterer as his pupils. The movement was politically influential
and actively involved in improving society.
At the end of the 19th century, it brought about anti-revolutionary and
Christian historical parties. At the
same time in Great Britain, figures such as William Wilberforce and Thomas
Chalmers were active, although they are not considered to be part of the Le
Reveil movement.
From
1850 to 1900, in North America, the Third Great Awakening began from 1857
onward in Canada and spread throughout the world including America and
Australia. Significant names include Dwight L. Moody, Ira D. Sankey, William
Booth and Catherine Booth (founders of the Salvation Army), Charles Spurgeon
and James Caughey. Hudson Taylor began the China Inland Mission and Thomas John
Barnardo founded his famous orphanages.
Representative
was Rev. James Caughey, an American sent by the Wesleyan Methodist Church to
Canada from the 1840s through 1864. He brought in the converts by the score,
most notably in the revivals in Canada West 1851 - 1853.
His
technique combined restrained emotionalism with a clear call for personal
commitment, coupled with follow-up action to organize support from converts. It
was a time when the Holiness Movement caught fire, with the revitalized
interest of men and women in Christian perfection. Caughey successfully bridged
the gap between the style of earlier camp meetings and the needs of more
sophisticated Methodist congregations in the emerging cities.
In
England, the Keswick Convention movement began out of the British Holiness
movement, encouraging a lifestyle of holiness, unity and prayer. Subsequently the period 1880–1903 has been
described as a period of unusual evangelistic effort and success, and again
sometimes more of a "resurgence" of the previous wave.
Moody,
Sankey and Spurgeon are again notable names. Others included Sam Jones, J.
Wilber Chapman and Billy Sunday in North America, Andrew Murray in South
Africa, William Irvine in Ireland, and John McNeil in Australia. The Faith
Mission began in 1886.
On
September 21, 1857, Jeremiah Lanphier, a businessman, began a series of prayer
meetings in New York. By the beginning of 1858 the congregation was crowded,
often with a majority of businessmen.
Newspapers
reported that over 6,000 were attending various prayer meetings in New York,
and 6,000 in Pittsburgh. Daily prayer meetings were held in Washington, D.C. at
five different times to accommodate the crowds. Other cities followed the
pattern. Soon, a common midday sign on business premises read, "We will
reopen at the close of the prayer meeting." By May, 50,000 of New York's
800,000 people were new converts.
In
1857, four young Irishmen began a weekly prayer meeting in the village of
Connor near Ballymena. This meeting is generally regarded as the origin of the
1859 Ulster Revival that swept through most of the towns and villages though
out Ulster and in due course brought 100,000 converts into the churches. It was
also ignited by a young preacher, Henry Grattan Guinness, who drew thousands at
a time to hear his preaching.
So
great was the interest in the American movement that in 1858 the Presbyterian
General Assembly meeting in Derry appointed two of their ministers, Dr. William
Gibson and Rev. William McClure to visit North America. Upon their return the two
deputies had many public opportunities to bear testimony to what they had
witnessed of the remarkable outpouring of the Spirit across the Atlantic, and
to fan the flames in their homeland yet further.
Such
was the strength of emotion generated by the preachers' oratory that many made
spontaneous confessions seeking to be relieved of their burdens of sin. Others
suffered complete nervous breakdown.
Twentieth
Century Revivalism
The
20th century Final Great Awakening (1904 onward) had its roots in the holiness
movement which had developed in the late 19th century. The Pentecostal revival
movement began, out of a passion for more power and a greater outpouring of the
Holy Spirit.
In
1902 the American evangelists Reuben Archer Torrey and Charles McCallon Alexander
conducted meetings in Melbourne, Australia, resulting in more than 8,000
converts. News of this revival travelled fast, igniting a passion for prayer
and an expectation that God would work in similar ways elsewhere.
Torrey
and Alexander were involved in the beginnings of the great Welsh revival
(1904). In 1906, the modern Pentecostal movement was born in Azusa Street, in
Los Angeles (see Wikipedia, “Christian Revival").
Catholic
Revivalism
Protestant
revivalism, as we have seen, had an energy and fire, you might even say a kind
of rage that propelled it from one success to another, breaking new ground and
experimenting along the way to a new sense of focus and purpose.
Catholicism,
on the other hand, especially American Catholicism, appears strangely similar
to the ground zero stage of Christianity in the time of Jesus and the Apostle
Paul. Peter and Paul ventured into a
primarily urban type of society with most of the people clustered in
cosmopolitan urban centers.
Christianity,
over the years, including during and after the Protestant Reformation, became
firmly rooted in the peasant population which was often if not primarily
rural. As many of those from the peasant
class became transplanted to urban centers in the United States with the
Industrial Revolution. American
Catholicism likewise adjusted its missionary zeal to essentially urban centers
where most rural peasants lived in urban ghettos.
Pause
to Reflect
The
reason for writing this tract on The Six Ages of the Church was not so much to
dwell on the historical reality but to read some of the organizational changes
that were essential to these spiritual trends.
At the heart of them all was a new sense of organizational life. Demonstrable as well is that Christianity in
general, and Catholicism in particular has never been able to remain static or
rest on its laurels but has has to continually generate positive energy to
combat encroaching negative entropy in order to survive. In that sense, Christianity and Catholicism
are evolutionary movements.
Apostle
Paul, although putting in place a somewhat rudimentary organization,
sociologist Max Weber would applaud Paul's sagacity to read the spiritual needs
of his time introducing and disseminating an appealing theology to catch the
attention and devotion of the masses (Weber 1944).
Inherent
in Apostle Paul’s efforts in those early days of the Christian church was a
strategy that allowed maximum flexibility and latitude for ingenuity and
improvisation. The many sects of
Christianity that have failed to be so prudent have faded into history.
Even
so, Christianity has done some stupid and crassly immoral things that have
threatened her survival. There was the
tenth century's Pornocracy or the Rule of the Prostitutes/Rule of the Harlots
or more politely stated the Saeculum obscurum (Latin for the Dark Age) with the
debauchery commencing in the reign of Pope Sergius III in 904 and lasting until
963.
Three
hundred years later there was the Avignon Papacy (1309 - 1377), where a
plethora of popes, antipopes or would-be-popes including a possible Pope Joan
would grace the papacy for nearly a century.
Small wonder there was the Protestant Reformation.
Despite
pervasive criticism of the church’s rigid structural hierarchy and the laity’s
desire for limits on church dogma and papal infallibility, little has changed
in the twenty-first century Catholic Church.
The
Roman Curia still reigns supreme, which lacks transparency and accountability
or seemingly papal control, as scandals continue to surface involving money
laundering, financial corruption, malfeasance, spy gates, assassination plots,
and clerical misconduct. Meanwhile, more
than a billion souls claim to be Roman Catholics, the majority in Third World
nations.
The
church has demonstrated an amazing capacity to survive scandals, change
directions, cut her losses and continue seemingly without losing her
momentum. Weber sees this as a
manifestation of the girth of her bureaucracy that has accumulated over twenty
centuries becoming nearly an impossible to barrier to destroy (Weber 1954).
Does
the church have a conscience? Current
Pope Francis I, as we have noted, is the moral physician who is working on the
prognosis to prescribe the treatment, as there is no apparent cure. On balance, as Apostle Paul in his ministry
demonstrated, the church’s dedication is to survive and to do end doing
whatever it takes. Roman Catholicism is
a political entity; her mission is a theological one, which as we have seen in
this survey is often placed on the back burner.
ANNOTATED
BIBLIOGRAPHY: SIX AGES OF THE CHURCH
W.
A. Billy Sunday, Useful Quotations: A Cyclopedia of Quotations, Tryon Edwards,
Grosset & Dunlap, 1933, p. 82
Ibid,
Robert Andrew, p. 82
Ibid,
Cardinal James Gibbons, p. 82
Ibid,
Willard L. Speey, p. 82
E.
R. Chamberlin, The Bad Popes, Barnes & Noble, 1969, pp. 77-123. Benedict Gaetani, Pope Boniface VIII
(1294-1303) was known as “the Lord of Europe.”
The other six bad popes were popes John XII (955-963), Benedict IX
(1032-1046), Urban VI (1378-1389), Alexander VI (1492-1503), Leo X (1513-1521)
and Clement VII (1523-1534).
Surprisingly
missing in Chamberlin’s listings are Sergius III (904-911), Anastasius III
(911-913), Lando ( 913-914), John X (914-928), Leo VI (928), Stephen VII (VIII)
(228-931), John XI (931-935), Leo VII (936-939), Stephen VIII (IX) (939-942),
Marinus II (942-946), Agapitus II (946-955), John XII (955-964).
It
is during this sixty year period that the Church slipped seriously into the
embarrassing abuses that was known as “The Rule of the Harlots in Rome”
(904-964), as the tenth century papacy of the Roman Catholic Church fell under
the influence of harlots in an era termed Pornocracy or the Rule of the
Prostitutes/Rules of the Harlots, but was politely known as Saeculum obscurum (Latin
for the Dark Age), It began in 904 with
the installation of Pope Sergius III who was completely under the control of
Theodora, the beautiful wife of Roman consul Theophylactus, who used sex to
wield power.
S.
M. Miller, Max Weber, Selections from his Work, Thomas Y. Crowell Col, 1963,
pp. 59-82.
Omer
Englebert, Lives of the Saints, Barnes & Noble, 1994, p. 218 (St.
Boniface); Boniface I and Boniface IV, (St. Boniface) Wikipedia; E. R.
Chamberlin, The Bad Popes, Barnes & Noble, 1969, (Pope Boniface VIII) pp.
75-123; Richard P. McBrien, Lives of the Popes, HarperSanFranciso, 1997 (St.
Pope Boniface I), pp. 68-69; (St. Pope Boniface IV), pp. 99-100.
Will
Durant, The Renaissance: History of Civilization from 1304-1576 A.D., Simon
& Schuster, 1953, (Charlemagne) pp. 261, 271, 374, 450 (Charlemagne)
Wikipedia.
Christopher
Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture, Harper Torchstone, 1960, p.
54 (quote of Pope Gregory VII).
Op.
Cit., McBrien: Pope Gregory VII, pp. (multiple); Wikipedia; Will Durant, The
Age of Faith: History of Medieval Civilization – Christian, Islamic, and Judaic
– from Constantine to Dante: A.D. 325-1300, (Pope Gregory VII), pp. (multiple).
Ibid,
McBrien, (Pope Innocent III), pp. (multiple).
Will
Durant, The Reformation, History of European Civilization from Wyclif to
Calvin: 1300-1564, Simon & Shuster, 1957, (Wycliffe), pp. 26-57.
Catholic
Encyclopedia (Great Schism of 1378 – Avignon Papacy (Internet)
Avignon
Papacy (Wikipedia); Great Western Schism – Cause & Effect (Wikipedia).
Op.
Cit., Durant, Renaissance – Council of Trent, pp. (multiple), Tridentine Reform
(Wikipedia).
Encyclopedia
Britannica – Baroque Art & Architecture; Baroque Styles & Movements
(Wikipedia).
Will
and Ariel Durant, Rousseau and Revolution: History of Civilization in France,
England and Germany from 1756, and in the Remainder of Europe 1715-1789, Simon
& Schuster, 1967, (Collapse of Feudal France), pp. (multiple).
Christian
Revivalism (Wikipedia).
Stuart
Piggin, "Toward A Bicentennial History of Australian Evangelicalism,"
Journal of Religious History, Feb 1988, Vol. 15 Issue 1, pp 20–37
Catholic
Revivalism (Wikipedia).
Op.
Cit., Miller (Weber), pp. 75-82.
Op.
Cit., Duffy, pp. 11-13.
GENERAL
REFERENCE
Nicholai
Berdyaev, Christian Existentialism, Harper Torchstone, 1965.
Gustave
Weigel, Catholic Theology in dialogue, Harper Torchstone, 1960.
N.
R. Wilders, An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin, Harper & Row, 1968
Stanford
M. Lyman, Seven Deadly Sins, St. Martin Press, 1978
Jay
P. Dolan, Catholic Revivalism, University of Notre Dame Press, 1979
Patrick
Madrid, Holy Apostles College (essay on Catholic Revivalism)
Paul
Johnson, Jesus: A Biography from a Believer, Viking, 2010.
Michael
Baigent, The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History,
HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.
James
Cleugh, Love Locked Out: A survey of love licence and restriction in the Middle
Ages, Spring Books, 1963.
A.
N. Wilson, Jesus: A Life, W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.