Sermon Tone Analysis

Recap

Martin Luther’s 95 Theses

Protestantism

War

The age of reason

Transition 1

The French Revolution unleashed new hopes for the common man, just as science raised new questions for traditional Christians.

Power seemed to be within the reach of the masses.

For Christianity this meant that new social unrest was added to the challenge of intellectual doubts.

How are Christians supposed to meet the needs of the urban masses?

Was man simply a product of evolutionary forces?

Christians were seriously divided over ways to face these problems.

Without the traditional support of the state many Protestants turned to voluntary societies to minister to the poor and the oppressed, as well as to carry the gospel to foreign lands.

The democratic gospel of the French Revolution rested upon the glorification of man rather than God.

The Church of Rome recognized this and struck back at the heresy as she had always done.

She saw more clearly than did most Protestant churches that the devil, when it is to his advantage, is democratic.

Ten thousand people telling a lie do not turn the lie into truth.

That is an important lesson from the Age of Progress for Christians of every generation.

The freedom to vote and a chance to learn do not guarantee the arrival of Utopia.

The Christian faith has always insisted that the flaw in human nature is more basic than any fault in man’s political or social institutions.

French Revolution

Stood on 3 big ideas:

Liberty (individual freedoms in the political and economic arenas)

Equality (Rights for men irrespective of their family background or financial standing)

Fraternity (Powerful sense of brotherhood)

The Church had to navigate these ideas.

Unfortunately 20 percent of France’s total population belonged to the privileged classes (nobility and clergy).

They controlled half of the nation’s land and held the best positions in government.

The other 80 suffered under heavy taxes to church and state.

Political unrest became the norm during the age of enlightenment.

The American Revolution in the 1770’s inspired these radicals in Europe.

In the brief ten years before the century ended, France formed a republic, executed a king, established an effective if faction-ridden revolutionary regime, and passed from that through a period of confusion that ended with a coup d’etat and General Napoleon Bonaparte’s accession to power.

Through it all, the French nation continually fought the rest of Europe.

The leaders of the revolution soon drove 30 to 40,000 priests out of their native towns into exile or hiding.

And that proved to be only a prelude.

The revolution began to take on a religious character all its own.

A new calendar removed all traces of Christianity and elevated the cult of “Reason.”

Soon parish churches were converted to “Temples of Reason,” and in the cathedral of Notre Dame revolutionaries enthroned an actress on the high altar as the “Goddess of Reason.”

This set the pattern for the provinces.

Young girls decked out as Reason or Liberty or Nature led processions through towns to altars erected to the new religion of the revolution.

By 1794 this parody of Christianity had spent its force and a decree early the following year guaranteed the free exercise of any religion in France.

All over the country Catholics returned to the altar.

The Church of Rome, however, never forgot: Liberty meant the worship of the goddess of Reason!

When Napoleon seized the reins of power he had the good sense to work out an agreement with the pope—the Concordat of 1801—that restored the Church of Rome to a special place in France.

It was called “the religion of the great majority of Frenchmen,” but the Church had lost forever its position of power.

The whole strategy of the ultramontanists, led by Pius IX, shaped the lives of Roman Catholics for generations to come.

Surrounded by the hostile forces of liberalism, socialism, and nationalism, Rome chose to withdraw for safety behind the walls of an exalted and infallible papacy.

Unfortunately, fortresses have a decided disadvantage.

They grow stuffy.

They allow no enlargement of thinking and after a time you begin to imagine that the only world of any importance lies within the walls.

In many ways the nineteenth century belonged to Britain.

England was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.

London became the largest city and the financial center of the world.

British commerce circled the globe; the British navy dominated the seas.

By 1914 Britannia ruled the largest empire in extent and in population ever fashioned by man.

The dawning of the Age of Progress found English Protestants either in the Established Church, Anglicanism, or in the Nonconforming denominations, Methodist, Baptists, Congregationalists, and a few smaller bodies.

The striking movements of the nineteenth century, however, did not surge along traditional denominational lines.

The increasing liberties of the age allowed Christians to form a host of religious societies to minister to English life in some vital way or to spread the gospel overseas.

These societies were not churches in the traditional sense of sacraments, creeds, and ordained ministers.

They were groups of individual Christians working for some specific objective, the distribution of Bibles, for example, or the relief of the poor.

At the opening of the Age of Progress, the greatest power in English religious life was the evangelical movement, sparked and spread by John Wesley and George Whitefield.

The chief marks of the movement were its intense personal piety, usually springing from a conversion experience, and its aggressive concern for Christian service in the world.

Both of these were nourished by devotion to the Bible, and both were directed by the central themes of the eighteenth-century revival: Gods love revealed in Christ, the necessity of salvation through faith, and the new birth experience wrought by the Holy Spirit.

This evangelical message echoed from a significant minority of pulpits in the Church of England and from a majority in the Nonconforming denominations.

The Clapham Sect

1759-1833

William Wilberforce:

Parliamentary statesman

Came to Jesus at age 25

Campaign against slavery

Multiple speeches in the House of Commons

First merely a pep talk

Second more researched, and support started to grow

“Never, never,” he said, “will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt, and extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic.”

Finally, victory crowned their labors.

On 23 February 1807, the back of the opposition was broken.

Enthusiasm in the House mounted with the impassioned speeches of supporters of abolition.

When one member reached a brilliant contrast of 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, and the tears streaming down his face.

That halted the legal traffic in human lives, but the slaves were still in chains.

Wilberforce continued the battle for complete 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 25 July 1833, four days before Wilberforce died.

American West

The great fact of the nineteenth-century world in America was the West, the ever moving frontier.

Early visitors beyond the Allegheny Mountains sang the praises of the region.

In 1751 Christopher Gist described it as “watered with a great number of little streams and rivulets, and full of beautiful natural meadows, covered with wild rye, blue grass, and clover.”

After the Revolutionary War so many Americans poured into the territory that the whole continent seemed to tilt toward the Pacific.

Between 1792 and 1821, nine new states were added to the original thirteen.

By mid-century half of the American people were west of the Appalachians.

At the birth of the United States of America, the denominations seemed ill prepared to face the opportunities of the West.

Christian influence was at an all time low.

Only five or ten percent of the American people were church members.

In time, however, the crude, turbulent, and godless society of the West was tamed and more than any other single force it was evangelical Christianity that did it.

As evangelicals faced the challenge of winning a nation to Christian obedience, two instruments were available to them: the voluntary society and the revival.

The Bill of Rights, with its provision of religious liberty for all, had in effect sanctioned the denominational concept of the church and had ruled out any direct influence of the churches upon the government.

The denominations were free, therefore, to define their own faith and practices.

But what about Christian responsibility for public life and morals?

That is where the voluntary society came in.

Thus, early in the nineteenth century a host of societies appeared seeking to shape some aspect of American life: the American Bible Society, the American Colonization Society, the American Sunday School Union, the American Education Society, and hosts of others.