What Happend in Church History and How Should We Respond to it? (Pt 2)

Caleb Dixon

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Trivia

Who was Acts addressed to? (Theophilus)

Who was chosen to replace Judas? (Matthias)

Where did Jesus’s ascension take place? (Mount of Olives)

How many days after the resurrection was pentecost? (50 days)

How many people became Christians after Peter’s sermon in Acts 2? (3000)

Who tried to buy the Holy Spirit? (Simon the Magician)

Who was the first of the twelve disciples to be martyred? (James)

What is the name of the woman that God raised from the dead in Acts 9? (Tabitha/Dorcas)

What does the word apostle mean? (one who is sent)

People were first called Christians in what city? (Antioch)

Where was Paul shipwrecked in Acts 27? (Malta)

Who was Demetrius of Ephesus (profession and what he did in Acts)? (A silversmith who started a riot against paul)

Introduction

This week our question is: How do we respond to church history? Last week we took a look at what happened in church history, but not a lot of people were here, and so we’ll do a really quick overview.

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. When the Western and Eastern churches officially split. The Western church became what is today the Catholic church, and the Eastern church became what is today the Orthodox church. This was the beginning of the first two major denominations.

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. Following Luther’s reform and split, there was another split by King Henry VIII who started His own church, called the Church of England, or the Anglican church. Following Martin Luther and King Henry VIII’s examples, a variety of other denominations started to split off as well, the group of all of these is called protestant churches.

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 church) 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 gospels and the book of Acts. The first date listed is the birth of Christ, the end date is the fall of Jerusalem. The fall of Jerusalem marked the beginning of the major spread of Christianity because people were sent out to every corner of the known world, because they could no longer stay in Jerusalem.

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.

Part of the push in this period as well was stiving for a unified faith, and so there were many councils that met in order to sort out various doctrines such as the trinity, and the nature of Christ being God and man.

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.

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 I’m going to talk about quite a few times this morning is called Bullies and Saints, it’s ironically by by John Dickson. And it 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 more in depth in a moment. 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’ll come back to this period in a moment.

Phase 5: Reformation

We already coved the basics of the Reformation. The important part of this period was that it set the stage for 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.

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, last week we talked about two major people in these two areas, and ironically they’re both named William. William Carey is known as the Father of Modern Missions, and a lot of the way we think about missions is because of him. William WIlberforce was almost singlehandedly responsible for ending slavery in Britain.

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. One of the most notable opponents to Nazism was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and one of the most notable opponents to Communism was Christian Fuhrer. They both have really cool stoires if you want to hear them, look them up, or come see me afterwards.

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. This includes how we do church, how we read our bibles, how we pray, and how we learn about God as a whole.

How Do We Respond?

Introduction

History is cool, but like anything else unless we can learn from it in a way that feels relevants and we can apply it we are never really going to feel like it matters and we’re just going to forget about it and we really won’t have learned anything. So I have a way to make this feel relevant and applicable.

I’ve printed off 3 excerpts from the book Bullies and Saints by John Dickson, and I have a scenario for you.

If you were sitting in history class in school and your teacher presented on the period of history you’re about to read, and then you’re friend turned to you and said, “hey you’re a Christian, what do you think about this?” How would you respond?

Read Page 1 first, and then we’ll come back together.

So obviously, none of these scenarios are good. People did genuinely bad things in the name of Christ, but there’s also context to a lot of this, and some of it was fixed by other Christians within the perpetrators lifetime, so now read page 2. And here’s the new question, how does your understanding of the situation, and your response to your friend change?

There’s a quote by Timothy Paul Jones in Christian History Made Easy that really sums this up well, he says:

“It’s easy to try to dismiss medieval Christianity as empty and corrupt. Yet, when we allow ourselves to dismiss medieval church members in this way, we are guilty of the same misdeed as many people in the Middle Ages. We have become like Charlemagne, celebrating Christmas while 4,500 German widows mourned their spouses ... like Humbert hurling his notice of excommunication on an Eastern communion table ... like a horde of crusaders flooding the streets of Constantinople with innocent blood. How? We also have condemned before seeking to comprehend.

For every devilish pope or crusader, there were thousands of bishops, priests, and common people who sincerely believed they were following Christ. Some lived out their faith as farmers and merchants. Others lived out their faith as lords and kings. Some were probably Christians; others were not. [...]

Nothing can excuse any offense undertaken in Christ’s name. At the same time, instead of flinging my own notice of excommunication on the communion tables of the Middle Ages, I must remember that it is not my blameless deeds or my denomination’s theology that guards me against the same failures. It is grace and only grace.”

We need to recognize that we’re (both Christians, and non-Christians) looking at these scenarios from a modern lens. We need to try to understand things in their context. Yet, at the same time to claim to be a follower a Christ, means that we’re claiming to be His representatives, and that we belong that we are called to a higher standard. And so any evil that we do in the name of Christ needs to be taken very seriously.

When we compare the actions of the church both in the past and today to the teachings of Christ, we see how far we’ve really messed up. And we need to take ownership of that, the church may not always be as bad as the world, but the world isn’t our standard, Christ is. And we constantly are falling short of that standard. So the question remains what are we going to do with that?

Something that I’ve wondered about for a while, is this: when the church does something wrong, do we owe people an apology? When it’s not necessarily our fault individually but we’re part of the overall team, religion, group, family (call it what you will) do we owe people an apology on how they have been hurt by the church both in the past and present? (This feels like an especially relevant question in relation to the residential schools in our own country, and the sexual scandal reports that have been released to the public by the Southern Baptist Convention.) So what do you guys think?

I want to read one more quote by John Dickson before we finish the class. This is his story about filming a documentary on the site of the bloodiest battle of the first crusade.

“Retelling these horrible details to camera as I stood in the sacred plaza outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque was the moment I sensed a loss of faith in the church. It was not simply that I had read the sources, rehearsed my lines, and now found myself standing in the hideous spot where it all happened. It was because directly in my line of sight as I delivered the lines, just a metre to the left of camera, was our Muslim guide and “minder” assigned to us to show us around the site and keep onlookers satisfied that we really did have permission to film in this spot. Her name was Azra, a Jerusalem Arab Muslim with perfect English. She watched me deliver my lines, over and over until I got them right (I am not a one-take wonder). By the time we got the take the director liked, I could see that Azra had a tear in her eye. I suddenly realised this is not just a gory piece of history. For Jerusalem Muslims—for many Muslims, actually—this event is a source of pain, shame, and even anger. Not that Azra was at all bitter. As we were packing up, I said to her, “I’m so, so sorry. That must have been difficult for you to watch!” She was beautiful. “No, no,” she replied, “It’s fine. It’s all fine.” But I could tell it was not fine. The date, 15 July 1099, has left a nine-hundred-year-old wound in the soul of many. Any triumphalist feelings I harboured about the historic church died that day. I could not get the juxtaposition out of my mind: Azra’s quiet tear and Raymond of Aguiler’s ecstatic “splendid judgement of God.” Declaring my belief in the “holy Church” could never have the same meaning again. I still say the words of the Creed, but they function as much like an aspiration as they do an affirmation of the history of Christianity through the ages. I acknowledge that this experience at the Al-Aqsa Mosque was not wholly or strictly rational. Does it make sense for me to say “Sorry” to Azra? I was not there in 1099. I like to think I would never have taken part in the massacre of her Jerusalem forebears. I am not morally responsible for any of it. I certainly do not bear the guilt of it. All of this is true. So why does “Sorry” still seem like the right thing to say? I suppose it is because I am connected to my “team,” just as Azra has a connection to her “team” (“family” might be the better metaphor). As someone representing Christianity in that moment, it was appropriate to feel some shame that blood was spilled in the name of Christ. And it was right to communicate that sentiment to Azra.” (3-4)

I think that that last line is really poignant. When we reflect on how we should respond, we need to recognize that we are all a part of the body of Christ. If the hand hurts someone, it might not be the eye’s fault. But the whole body should act as Christ would, and in love communicate that we are sorry for their hurt. We may not be individually responsible, but collectively as the global, as the Catholic church (like the word we used before), as the body of global believers through both space and time, we are called to respond in love, and to bear the name of Christ, and in both of these things, in many situations the Christ-like thing to do is to apologize for the pain someone has had because of the church, not for the sake of some token of recognition. But because we should genuinely feel empathy for the person who is hurt, because that’s what Christ did, he went out of his way to help the people that the religious people hurt. Our response to church history should be the same, genuinely and empathetically apologize for the times the church got it wrong, and learn to emulate the times the church got it right. Ultimately, we aren’t going to always succeed, but the times the church got it the most right in history were the moments that they in humility sought after Christ with all of their hearts, and allowed the love of Christ to be shown in their words, thoughts, and actions. For every bad thing we read today, there’s hundreds more of simple people following Christ the best they could and helping people in incredible ways. So that’s how we respond to church history, we learn to emulate the good, and respond in love when people have been hurt by the bad.

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