What Happend in Church History and How Should We Respond to it? (Pt 1)

Trivia : Pictionary

Ten Commandments

Tower of Babel

Golden Calf

Roman Empire

Passover

Sermon on the Mount

Tabernacle

The Burning Bush

Paul’s shipwreck

Pentecost

Introduction

This week we’re into a different sort of question, normally we focus on a specific doctrine or an apologetics question or a Spiritual formation practice, this week we’re going to be answering the question what happened in church history? And then next week we’re going to a part 2 answering the apologetics question: what do we do with it?

So, what happened in church history?

We know the church started in Acts, and we might know a little bit about what happened in the last little bit, but aside from that, a lot of us don’t know much about church history other than that at some point, there became denominations, and it kind of had something to do with a guy nailing paper to a door. In short, most of us don’t know a whole lot about church history, so this morning we’re going to take a look at an overview of it.

Church History Overview

Timeline

Early Church

So where do we start with church history? There’s a lot of things that happen in 2000 years, so its a tedious and overwhelming thing to try and understand. But we’ll try and start as simple as possible, and then we can build on that. The easiest place to start is at the start of the early church.

So Jesus is resurrected and he returns back to heaven, and the disciples are left there wondering what on earth do we do. So they meet in an upperroom, and the Holy Spirit descends upon them, we looked at this the other week. And they were filled with the Holy Spirit, Peter gives a sermon and 3000 are saved, and from that moment forward the church starts to spread out.

People start to take the gospel to all parts of the Roman Empire, and that’s what Acts is all about. Paul’s missionary journeys, as well as some of the other apostles. And from this point on for about 1000 years the church was more or less one unified entity. There were some different debates and things over this time, and there was slowly a divide between the church in the east and in the west, but they still remained unified for nearly 1000 years.

Great Schism

That changed in the year 1054, and this is kind of a wild story.

July 16, 1054, there was a church service at the Church of Holy Wisdom in Constantinople (modern day Turkey), and Pope Leo IX (who was in Rome) sent messengers to this church. The messengers entered the church and went up the sanctuary. They took “a Bull of Excommunication” (an official document from the Pope saying that that church and its leaders were getting kicked out of the church), they placed it upon the altar and marched out. There had been tension for a long time between the east and the west sides of the church, but this marked their official separation.

There was a number of things they disagreed on but one of the main things was the filioque clause. This was a debate about the nature of the trinity, essentially does the Spirit preceed from the Father only, or also from the Son. It seems like a simple question, but it was vitally important to the early church and at some point in the class we’ll talk more about the doctrine of the trinity and we’ll hopefully be able to spend some time unpacking it.

The separation of the Western Catholic church from Eastern Orthodox church marked the first separation in church history and the beginning of the first two major denominations. Today the Orthodox church woud still claim that their roots go back to the early church.

Reformation

The next major shift in denominations in church history is the reformation. The Catholic church remained the dominant western church for 500 years until in 1517, Martin Luther and a variety of others had had enough of what they deemed to be the heresies of the catholic church and the corruption of the Holy Roman Empire as well as the church leadership.

Like the Great Schism the seeds of the Reformation were planted long before 1517, but also like the Great Schism the primary moment happened when one day someone got mad in a church and put a piece of paper somewhere. This time the person was Martin Luther, and he nailed a document called the 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany.

This document was all about the corruption of the catholic church leadership in making people think they needed to pay the church money to decrease the punishment that they had to go through for sins. So Martin Luther decided to leave the church and he started his own church. Which became known as the Lutheran church, which still exists today.

Shortly after this, another church was formed. King Henry VIII of England was married and his wife could not bear him a male heir, and so he wanted to divorce her to marry someone who could bear him a male child. The catholic church refused to give him a divorce and so he started his own church, called the church of England, or the Anglican church, which in essence was the same as the catholic church in nearly everyway except that it was led mostly by the king, and it allowed for the king to get a divorce. This is of course, a very simplistic way of understanding it, but at its bare bones, this is essentially what happened.

Between the Lutherans and the church of England a new wave spread called protestantism, which allowed for a variety of break offs, and for new denominations.

More Denominations

One of the first groups to break off after Martin Luther was the Calvinists under John Calvin, although not an official denomination, many people still follow some of the teachings of John Calvin today.

Here are some of the dates for some of the major denominations you might recognize.

Baptists began in 1609.

Presbyterians in 1630.

Wesleyans in 1843.

Pentecostals in 1901.

And United in 1925.

Each of these denominations have an interesting starting story of their own, but we don’t really have time to get into the specifics of each of them.

Tracing church history through denominations can be helpful to see how we got from point A (the early church0 to point B (us). But this method is far from perfect or all encompassing.

Phases

Introduction

Another way to think about church history is in phases. One book I’ve been reading for school that was really handy in putting this morning together is Church History in Plain Language by Bruce Shelley. In it Shelley lists eight phases of church history, and I think that they do a better job of getting the whole picture than our timeline.

Phase 1: Early Church

The first phase is pretty straight forward, it essentially just covers the events of the book of Acts.

Some of the major dates in this period are of course, the birth of Jesus which Shelley lists as 6 BC, when we went through Casket Empty they put it a year or so later with an emphasis on 4 or 5 BC, which is the more common date, but there isn’t a formal consensus on it.

The next dates are the death and resurrection of Jesus. Which happened in 33 AD.

The next important date that Shelley lists is the death of Stephen the first Christian martyr, which is recorded in Acts 7 & 8. This is a pretty substantial shift because from this point forwards a lot of Jesus’s followers start to be killed, and that’s recorded in the book of Acts as well as in other early documents.

The next important date is the beginning of the reign of Nero, and Nero was a very strong handed emperor, persecution significantly increased under Nero, and his reign really marked an increase in the original followers of Jesus in the early church being killed.

The death of Paul is another pretty important event, because we all know about the influence Paul had on the early church, and really on the church as whole. Arguably aside from Jesus no one has had more of an impact on our faith than Paul. So this date is pretty important for obvious reasons.

And finally in this period, the fall of Jerusalem really changes a variety of things for the church. Jerusalem was the “home base” for the early church, and so when Jerusalem falls Christians spreadout across the empire, and Christianity spreads even more rapidly.

Phase 2: Catholic Christianity

One of the confusing things in church history and in theology in general is the word catholic, because we can refer to the Catholic church, as in the Roman Catholic church that’s run by the pope. Or we can use the word catholic to mean unified, universal, world-wide, and that’s where the word came from, and what we’re talking about in this phase of Church history.

The big idea in this phase is that the church is unified, Christians are being heavily persecuted in this era, and it brings Christians together. What we read last time in Acts 2 about them having things in common and working for the common good of each other, that idea is still here, just at a much wider scale.

Some of the major things this period was known for were mass persecutions, here you can see the list of Roman Emperors and how Christians were persecuted by them in this period. (This chart is from one of my textbooks for school, so sorry for the bad quality, but I thought it was a helpful image to try and understand it)

Another thing that was a major theme in this era was the search for orthodoxy, that is right doctrine or right thinking. Because Christianity was so new, they were still working with a lot of different ideas and didn’t yet have the bible fully compiled in one book to guide them, and so trying to sort out what was true and what was false about God was a difficult process. And so a variety of heresies were started during this time, and here’s a list from the same textbook showing some of the major heresies, who started them, and what they were teaching.

I know its hard to see the chart and we don’t have time to dive into all of these, but each of these were important moments of the church sorting out a unfied doctrine, many of them ones we still believe now. We could spend weeks on just this chart, and so if you want to understand this more come see me later and I can give you more resources.

Finally, here is a list of some of the major theologians from this period. Not all of these people did everything perfectly, nor are all of their ideas completely orthodox, but each of them was important in making progress towards the church as a whole understanding our beliefs.

And one of the many ways that progress was made in this way was through councils over the next several hundred years, like the heresies, there was so much that happened in each of these, that it’s impossible to go through all of them right now. But these are very important to point out because in the councils were formed the doctrines of some of our most important beliefs. The divinity of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, the fact that Christ was not two people, all of these got sorted out here, and these are highly important. So again, if you have more questions I can point you to some resources on the topic, but they’re really interesting and I recommend checking them out.

Phase 3: Christian Roman Empire

The next phase Shelley calls the Christian Roman Empire, and the major event that starts this period is the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine. All of the previous Roman emperors since the New Testament period persecuted Christians, but Constantine grew up with a mother who was a Christian, and so even from the start of his reign he was more lenient to Christians. But in 312 Constantine himself became a Christian, and it’s a good story, so I’m going to read it for you from another book I’ve been reading called Bullies and Saints by a guy ironically named John Dickson (spelled John Dickson)

“Around noon one day, so Constantine reports, the soon-to-be emperor saw a sign of pure light in the sky in the shape of a cross. It was inscribed with the words in hoc signo vinces or “in this sign conquer”! Constantine fell asleep that evening confused and disturbed by what he had seen. He was visited in a dream. “In his sleep,” Eusebius [the historian] tells us, “the Christ of God appeared to him with the same sign which he had seen in the heavens, and commanded him to make a likeness of that sign which he had seen in the heavens, and to use it as a safeguard in all engagements with his enemies.” He obeyed the dream. It worked. Within a week, he had defeated the more numerous forces of Maxentius. The western region was now Constantine’s.”

This was a major turning point for Christianity, because the group that was once persecuted now was united with the most powerful person in the empire. People debate whether or not Constantine was truly a Christian, but for the sake of history, he was at least the first Emperor that claimed to be a Christian, and the first one that was alligned with the church.

This is a significant turning point for the church and its mindset. The book by John Dickson called Bullies and Saints looks at how the church at various times is both far better and far worse throughout history than we realized. And he makes the claim that it was in this period that the church switched, the persecuted and bullied rose to power, and for the next several hundred years became a bully themselves.

Phase 4: Christian Middle Ages

Which brings us to the next phase the middle ages. This period was marked most significantly by the crusades. The nature of the crusades is questionable, many would say they were the darkest time in the church’s history. Some would claim that they were justified and more good than harm came out of them. That’s something we’ll look at next week. The point of the crusades was to forcefully spread Christianity by any means necessary, which included attacking many of the Muslims and Jews that lived near the Christian army which started in France and worked its way down to Jerusalem.

The belief spread at the time of the first crusade was that this was a form of ‘taking up your cross to follow Christ’, the idea was that was that “able-bodied Christian men should bear the cross of fighting against the enemies of Christ. The very word “Crusade” comes from the Latin crux or “cross,” referring to this ceremony of taking up the sacred emblem.”

There were several crusades, people disagree about exactly how many there were, but at least eight of varying sizes, and roughly five major ones.

We’re going to spend a lot more time on the crusades next week, so we’ll go deeper into them then.

Phase 5: Reformation

We already coved the basics of the Reformation. But some more highlights that happened around the same time as the Reformation. Prior to 1517 there were others that sought to make the same sorts of changes as Martin Luther in the church, Jan Hus, and John Wycliffe were among these people.

Wycliffe was the first person to oversee a translation of the bible into English, because he believed it was important for people to have the bible in their own hands, which was contrary to what the church taught at the time. He translated the Latin version of the Bible into Middle English.

About 200 years after him came William Tyndale who was the first one to translate the bible into English from the Greek and Hebrew, and it was the first one that was mass produced. This was because of the printing press that was built in 1454.

Wycliffe, Hus and a few others set the stage for Martin Luther’s reform. Following Luther’s reform there we begin to see the branching out of a number of new denominations.

Phase 6: Reason and Revival

The age of Reason and Revival coincides with the Enlightenment period which a lot of you have or will cover if you’re at Horton and take history with Brad Richards. It introduced a revolution of new philosophies and scientific discoveries, and the church was influended by these ideas. Some Christians, like Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal played a large role in this era.

It also led to an age of Revivals, we also sometimes call them Great Awakenings. The first one happened in this period and went on for a few decades, and following it almost every 50-100 years there has been another one.

The first one was led by many people, notably George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards

This awakening spread to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI, and was led by Henry Aline who started Wolfville Baptist Church which was the first Baptist Church in Canada in 1778.

The second was led by Charles Finney, and Alexander Campbell among many others.

Notable people from the third awakening are Charles Spurgeon, D.L. Moody, and William Booth.

And the Fourth Great Awakening is the same as the Jesus Revolution if you haven’t watched the movie that just came out about it you should, its great. Notable people from this period were Chuck Smith, Lonnie Frisbee, Greg Laurie, and Billy Graham.

So revivals went on far past this period in the 16 and 1700s. But this is kind of when it started.

Phase 7: Progress

The next phase is what Shelley calls the age of progress, and there’s a couple significant aspects to this phase, the big two are social change and mission.

Like everything else so far, there’s so much we could cover here, but I want to point us to two major people in these two areas, and ironically they’re both named William.

First, William Carey, who’s been coined the “Father of Modern Missions”

Shelley says this about him:

“William Carey introduced Protestants to missions on a grander scale. He thought in terms of the evangelization of whole countries and of what happens when whole populations become Christian. He held that the foreign missionary can never make more than a small contribution to the work that has to be done, and that therefore the development of the local ministry is the first and greatest of all missionary considerations. Above all he saw that Christianity must be firmly rooted in the culture and traditions of the land in which it is planted. For all these reasons and more Carey gained the title Father of Modern Missions.”

Second, William Wilberforce was a member of parilament in England in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Wilberforce saw the slave trade going on around him and realized that it was wrong, and so he set forth to put an end to it. He spent over 20 years working at it, making speeches in parilament, writing and persuading people and gaining support in government for the abolition of slavery.

Shelley says this:

“After almost twenty years, victory crowned their labors. On February 23, 1807, Parliament finally voted to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. Enthusiasm in the House mounted with the impassioned speeches of supporters of abolition. When one member brilliantly contrasted Wilberforce and Napoleon, the staid old House cast off its traditional conventions, rose to its feet, burst into cheers, and made the roof echo to an ovation seldom heard in Parliament. Wilberforce, overcome with emotion, sat bent in his chair, his head in his hands, tears streaming down his face.

That halted the legal traffic in human lives, but the current slaves were still in chains. Wilberforce continued the battle for emancipation until age and poor health forced him from Parliament. He enlisted the skills, however, of a young evangelical, Thomas Fowell Buxton, to assume leadership of the “holy enterprise.” Buxton was a wise choice. The certainty of the passage of the Emancipation Act, freeing the slaves in the sprawling British Empire, came on July 25, 1833, four days before Wilberforce died.”

Both of these men gave their whole lives to serve God and others to and to make a change in the world that put in motion something that would last for hundreds of years.

Phase 8: Ideologies

The next phase in church history that Shelley talks about is the age of ideologies. And this isn’t just about church history it’s history in general, the beginning of this phase is WWI, and going forward from WWI are ideologies that we still talk about all of the time today. Communism, Nazism, Nationalism, these are all ideas that played a large role in the last hundred years, in WWI and WWII, in the Cold War, and even now in our politics these ideas still pop up. In this era, as these ideas were popping up, Christians were also writing about and engaging with them.

Again I want to point out a couple people out of many. First, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a German Christian leader during WWII who was very openly against Nazism and Hitler. Bonhoeffer wrote a substantial piece of theology called the Cost of Discipleship in the late 1930s, and later in the war he was involved in a plan to kill Hitler, but he was arrested before it came to fruition and killed in a concentration camp.

Another person who wrote a lot , but from a very different persepctive, about the war was Corie Ten Boom, her work is really incredible as she wrote about love and forgiveness and the difficulty of it in her own context because she had been in a concentration camp, I really recommend checking out her story.

Finally, in this period I also want to point out a man named Christian Führer, he was a pastor in Germany during the cold war, at St. Nickolai church in Leipzig, Germany. And he started holding prayer meetings in 1988 for those who were being arrested by the East German police, and for a year they kept praying, and their meetings kept growing in number, until in October of 1989 there were hundreds of thousands that met for a Monday night prayer meeting and then marched peacefully holding candles through the city. A month later the Berlin wall fell and West and East Germany was unified.

Just as Bonhoeffer tackled Nazism, Christian Fuhrer was an opponent of the communism of Eastern Germany and the USSR.

Phase 9: Technology and the Spirit

The final phase is the one that we are in now. Shelley calls it Technology and the Spirit and I think that there is validity to that. If we think about the past 20 years, well for some of us our whole lives, the number one thing that has changed our lives on every front is technology. The way that we read our bibles, the way that we communicate with people, the way that we make church accesible to people through live steaming, the way that we find new bible studies and worship music. All of it has been changed drastically by the advancement in technology, and we don’t really need to go into the history of this, because we know it, we’ve lived it. And we can see both the good and bad sides to it. On the one hand, the vast majority of us are addicted to our cell phones, on the other hand apps like the Youversion bible app, and the BibleProject app, among others have drastically changed how we can access scripture. We can reach many more people with the gospel through the internet, and now shows like the Chosen are coming out and making the Bible way more accessible to people who may have never read it before.

So that is church history in a nutshell.

(If time: where do you think we’re headed?)