Five ages, Five struggles, Five lessons (intro 206 +178 conclusion = 384)
The Early Church Fathers (70-312): The Age of Heresy and Correction (246)
The Catholic Church (312-1517): The Age of Power and Unity (289)
The Reformation (1517-1648): The Age of Pluralism and Revitalisation (389)
The Enlightenment (1648-1914): The Age of Reason and Mission (283)
Globalisation (1914-2015): The Age of Persecution and ? (324)
I’ve been asked to come and speak tonight about church history, and I think that’s fantastic, because history is really important, for lots of reasons. Tonight I’m just focusing on two. Most importantly, history informs our identity. Church history tells us who we are as the Church, the worldwide people of God. So you’ll notice that throughout this talk, I will refer to ‘we’ and ‘us’ – meaning you, me, and the church of the past. We share a common identity.
History also records our responses. Church history keeps track of the problems we have faced in the past, how we responded to them, and what the results were. Not only can we learn from our mistakes, but we can learn from our successes.
Now, church history is huge. We’re looking at 1,900 years or so – more than both the Old and New Testaments together. And we’re doing it in 15 minutes. Of which I have about 12 minutes left.
So let’s get into it! I’m dividing church history into five different periods, which highlight five different struggles the church has faced, and five different successes we accomplished. This will help to highlight how the church’s history informs our identity, and how it records our responses.
The first period of church history is all about the early church fathers. These are the people that learned directly from Jesus’ apostles and then taught others. By this time, we as a church had realised that Jesus was not coming back straightaway, and so we had to figure out a few things. One was how to survive – this was a time of great persecution, especially from the Roman government. Christianity was made illegal and Christians were systematically persecuted if they made their views public.
But not only were we under attack physically, we were under attack mentally as well! Intellectuals attacked Christianity as stupid. False teachers were trying to fit Christianity into their beliefs or philosophies. The big struggle of this age was heresy – false teaching. Many foundational Christian truths come from the early church fathers, like the trinity, and the inspiration of the New Testament as scripture. And they weren’t decided in quiet, considered reflections on God’s word, but whilst trying to combat heresies that were rising up against the church! So the lesson we can learn from this age is correction. We have a huge body of Christian teaching that stretches all the way back to this time period – like the Apostle’s Creed – that teaches us the true way of Jesus. We need to stick to it, and speak against those who undermine it.
Then in 312, something amazing happened. The emperor, Constantine was his name, was converted to Christianity. Not only did he become a Christian, but he changed the whole Roman Empire to being Christian, made Christianity the state religion, and made Sunday a holy day. This period I call the Catholic Church period, and it is the longest one – it goes for about 1,200 years! The popes, the crusades, the monasteries, the cathedrals – all of that happened in this era. The church grew and grew, and even when the Roman Empire fell, it became the religion of the whole of Europe. We owned more land than any kingdom. We had more gold than any emperor. We controlled schools, universities, libraries, law courts and even armies. Awesome, right?
Well, the old saying goes “power corrupts”. And that’s the struggle in this period: power. The more we got involved in running countries, the more we slowly got infected by corruption. Instead of glorifying God, we wanted to keep hold of our power, and we changed our beliefs to do it. The church got greedy. We were trying to usher in God’s kingdom on earth – we should be trusting God to usher in a new heaven and a new earth.
But during this time, the church was in unity. That’s what catholic means – universal. It was the one church. Early on in this period, we sat down as a church and worked out what the way forward was in this new era of church and state together. And the reason we could accomplish so many enormous things – good and bad – was because we were a global, united church. We should remember what we can achieve when we all work together for God’s glory.
Slowly but surely, as power began to corrupt the church, cracks started forming in its unity. In 1054 the Pope excommunicated the Eastern Orthodox Church – the first major division of the church in our history. But this was as much a division on political and cultural lines as it was religious lines, so it had little impact on either side’s churches. So our next period starts in 1517, when a guy called Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 problems with the church up on a door in Germany. That’s a lot of problems! He wanted to see the church reform, so we call this the Reformation. Luther wasn’t the only person railing against the Catholic Church during this time. Because they were all protesting against the Catholic Church, we call them Protestants. They didn’t agree on everything, but they did all agree the Catholic Church had it wrong.
And so wars started. The terrible Thirty Years’ War involved basically all of Europe. I can’t tell you how many people died, but for example, Germany lost 50% of its male population during that time. And it all started because Catholics and Protestants felt that there should only be one church, and they were it. While the newly created America wasn’t involved in the European wars, they were having the same struggles with religious freedom.
The struggle we as a church faced during the period of reformation was that of pluralism – people had different views about God, how churches should run, parts of Scripture. We thought that to be Christian, we must all be the same – we thought unity required uniformity. The Thirty Years War ended with no winner. All sides realised they couldn’t defeat the others, and so in the end they had to make peace. They had to learn to live with each other, and in 1648 they signed the Peace of Westphalia.
Thankfully, this focus on the Bible and people’s personal faith started a period of great revitalisation in Christian spirituality. This time of division actually caused both Catholics and Protestants to really think about what it means to be Christian, the importance of Jesus and salvation, and made people really come to grips with what they believed. We too can put our focus on the Bible, and on the key elements of Jesus and salvation, and be revitalised in our faith, instead of distracted by petty divisions.
While the ink was still drying on the Peace of Westphalia, there was another revolution taking place – an intellectual revolution. It is called the Enlightenment, and represents the movement of thinking away from God, faith and sinfulness, and towards reason, science and human goodness. People were sick of religious wars and people being burned at the stake for witchcraft. This is the era of Isaac Newton describing the world as a machine whose intricate workings we could understand by way of reason and experimentation.
When people realised that the physical world could be explained by use of reason, they assumed that the spiritual world – that of angels, demons, miracles and life after death – simply mustn’t exist, because it can’t be explained by reason, only by God’s revelation in the Bible. The logic of that assumption is actually pretty weak, but it was, and still remains, hugely powerful! This is the struggle of reason. We as a church struggled with reason, because for over a thousand years everyone had simply done what we told them. Now when we gave the answer, “The Bible tells us so,” it wasn’t good enough anymore.
But as the church began to really reflect on why God, Jesus, the resurrection and eternity are so important, we realised that God is not just important to us, but to the whole world. And we regained our passion for world mission. The 1700s and 1800s saw the rise of huge missionary endeavours, reaching from Africa to India to China and everywhere in between. The stories of brave missionary families travelling to far‑flung places with their belongings packed in coffins, knowing they would probably die – they come from this period in our history. Likewise, if we reflect on why God and Jesus and resurrection and eternity are so important, God will awaken in us the realisation of how important his gospel is to all people, not just to us.
Then came the Great War, the First World War in 1914, with machine guns, and tanks, and mustard gas, and aeroplanes. Then came the Second World War, with submarines, and battleships, the Holocaust and the nuclear bomb. The promises of Enlightenment were looking shaky. Science, reason and human goodness were not delivering the universal happiness we had been promised. That’s the period we now live in. I call it the age of globalisation. For the first time, we are realising that what happens in one part of the world can have global effects. Pollution in America affects sea levels in Polynesia. Ebola in West Africa could mean Ebola in Australia. ISIS in Iraq means the deaths of thousands in Nigeria. This is true inside the church too – a prayer meeting in California in 1906 where people started speaking in tongues started the Pentecostal movement, which now has 280 million followers worldwide, and saw charismatic gifts awakened in people from both Catholic and Protestant churches.
What’s the struggle for our church in this period in which we live? Living in Australia, you might think it is secularism, or decline in numbers, or struggling to remain relevant. But actually, the struggle for us, for the church, in the age of globalisation is persecution. The last 100 years has seen more of us suffer and die for our faith than in all the 1900 years previous. A hundred years ago this year Turkey systematically killed 1.5 million Armenian Christians. Communist Russia killed perhaps 20 million Christians by the 1970s. Conservative estimates think about 8 to 10,000 of us have been killed for our faith every year since 2000. And that’s just killings. The numbers for rape, torture, arrests, fines, church and house burnings, confiscation of bibles, beatings and exclusions from family are uncountably huge.
What’s the lesson we can learn from our current time in church history? I don’t know. At the moment it’s hard to see the church’s response clearly. But one thing I can guarantee: in every period of our history, the big lesson to be learned has always revolved around coming to grips with what we really believe. Every time, in every age, the church has turned to God, seeking his will in the face of their situation, and God has given guidance, and the church has moved forward. Every single time. There is no reason for us to believe that it will be any different, even in the face of violent persecution.
That is the big lesson church history teaches us. We can look back and see what shapes us as Christians, and we can look back and see how God has guided us to where we are today. And that should lead us to continue seeking God’s will to guide us in our struggles, whatever they are now, and whatever they might be in the future.
