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The Fifth and Sixth Ages of the Church

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 9, 2015

The Fifth Age 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.  

THE 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 17th 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.

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.

A 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.

It 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.

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).

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.

       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.