A Very Brief Survey of Church History
By Jeff Jones
INTRODUCTION
In our age of ever-increasing technology and glorification of youth, history has been devalued. Sadly, many Christians don’t value history either, including church history. We believe history, and church history in particular, is a most valuable treasure trove of wisdom and knowledge.
Church history is valuable for a number of reasons. First, it helps us understand that the Gospel we believe today, the truths we cling to in the twenty-first century, are nothing new. They’re simply plain old orthodoxy, the same things that our brothers and sisters throughout the ages have taught. Second, it helps us flesh out the statements or confessions of faith that our churches today subscribe to, showing how the truths in them have been understood, discussed, debated, and even fought over throughout the ages. Church history can help us understand what happens when we devalue or reinterpret a doctrine, helping us to avoid the mistakes of the past. Third, church history can help us understand the unique “personality” of certain local churches or denominations. It helps us recognize some of the historical names that pastors and theologians tend to “drop” in their teaching and preaching; it introduces you to the authors and books that have shaped our pastors’ and our favorite teachers’ own thinking and practice; and it explains why a local church or a denomination tends to do things in a certain way that other churches, who might have developed out of a different Christian tradition, might do in another way.
Because church history is so valuable, I thought it would be useful to provide a (much too brief!) survey of church history in this article.
1. THE EARLY CHURCH
God creates his people by his Word. The Bible repeats this truth in several ways. In the Creation account of the first chapter of Genesis, God he spoke the universe into existence. In chapter 37 of the book of Ezekiel, the prophet is given a vision of a valley of dry bones being raised to life in response to proclamation. The very coming of God’s Son Jesus Christ is the pinnacle of this idea, as the Word of God, through whom all things were made (Col. 1:16), became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). It’s no wonder, then, that the emphasis of the New Testament church was on the teaching of the Apostles (Acts 2:42), that the Apostles refused to stop speaking of what they had seen and heard (Acts 4:20), and that the charge given to young Timothy was to “preach the Word; be ready in season and out of season” (2 Tim. 4:2).
The preaching of the Word saves and has always saved. Those saved were saved not merely as individuals but to be the people of God—the church. The church isn’t man’s idea; it’s God’s idea. Jesus Christ founds (Matt. 16), commissions (Matt. 28), builds (Acts), and rules the church.
Ever since the beginning, though, the church has had to struggle against false doctrine. The letters of the New Testament, such as those to the Corinthians, the Galatians, the Colossians, or that from James, are full of examples: perverse immorality, works-righteousness, proto-Gnostic heresy, gross personal favoritism. This was no surprise to the Apostles, however. Paul warned Timothy in his final letter that the “time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine” (2 Tim. 4:3).
Nothing comes to pass outside of the counsel of God’s will, including false teaching. Paul reminded the church that “there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized” (1 Cor. 11:19). Much good came through these struggles. In the face of heresies, the early church repeatedly returned to the Scriptures and came to agreement on what the Bible really teaches. That’s where we get some of the great confessions of the faith, such as the Nicene Creed, crafted in response to the heresy that Jesus was not God.
The early church held fast to their faith in the face of heresy, through the confession and systematization of their faith in the ancient creeds. They also held fast to their faith in the face of vicious persecution, at times with their very lives. Organized persecution of the church began almost right away, in Acts 7. Its first victim was one of the first deacons in the first church in Jerusalem. Over the centuries that followed, persecution was very severe at different times and in different places. Christians spread across the Mediterranean basin and to the far reaches of the Roman Empire and beyond, partly because of the pressure of persecution and the search for a safer place to practice their faith, and persecution often followed. Yet it failed to stamp out the young church, and the fearless witness of the early Christians resulted in supernatural growth so that the church father Tertullian later commented that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.”
Constantine became emperor of the Western part of the Roman empire in 306 AD, and over the following years gradually cemented his control over the entire empire. After a key victory in 312AD at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, where Constantine claimed to have had a dream telling him to put the sign of Christ (the Greek letters chi and rho) on his army’s shields, Constantine issued the edict of Milan in 313 that ended persecution and endorsed Christianity. While this Edict was a welcome respite from persecution, it had negative consequences as well, as the imperial endorsement of the faith and the sudden social status that conferred on Christians opened the door to worldliness. The connection Constantine established between politics and faith by endorsing and promoting Christianity led to the growth of monarchical bishops as political figures in major cities, and eventually to the emergence of the Bishop of Rome as “pontifex maximus” (a term previously applied to a high pagan priest) and Pope. Over the next several centuries, the purity of the church deteriorated as Popes became increasingly occupied with political and diplomatic concerns at the expense of pastoral ministry.
In 1054 AD, centuries of theological controversy over the rule of the church, the West’s belief that the Spirit proceeded from the Son as well as the Father, and simmering rivalry and competition between Rome and the Eastern patriarchs in Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandra, and Antioch, all came to a head in the “Great Schism.” The Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople each excommunicated the other and the East broke with the West, forming what is now known today as the Orthodox churches. Protestant churches such as Baptists, Wesleyans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Reformed, and Pentecostals trace their theological heritage from the Western church, then led by the Bishop of Rome.
After the Great Schism, things went from bad to worse in the West’s so-called “Catholic” Church. The church came to believe and teach that it could dispense grace through an increasingly complex system of sacraments, claiming to forgive original sin through baptism and ongoing sin through confession and penance. The church became enslaved to money and greed, teaching the unbiblical doctrine of purgatory as a place for further purging of sins after death, and then selling indulgences that claimed to allow believers to reduce their future time in purgatory by purchasing merit. The ancient pagan Greek and Roman pantheons of gods and goddesses were increasingly imitated in the church’s encouragement of prayers to saints and Mary, the institution of feast days in celebration of particular saints, and the institution of “patron saints” with influence over and interest in particular areas of daily life.
2. THE REFORMATION
The increasing corruption of the Roman church resulted in a number of theological revolts. In the late fourteenth century, the English dissident John Wycliffe preached the centrality of the Bible in the Christian life over the sacraments, and advocated its translation into everyday language; this teaching, as well as his opposition to clericalism and the ostentatious wealth of the church, resulted in Rome exhuming his body and declaring him a heretic after the fact. A Czech priest named Jan Hus sparked a reformation in his homeland though his teaching of Wycliffe’s ideas and criticism of Rome, only to be burned at the stake as a heretic in 1415.
Almost a century later, a young law student named Martin Luther decided to enter the Augustinian order as a monk. Luther had long struggled with how, as a sinner, he could be accepted by God. He was passionate about Scripture and his skills as a scholar soon had him teaching theology at the University of Wittenburg. As he lectured through books like the Psalms, Galatians, Romans, and Hebrews, he came to realize that the Roman teachings of penance and infused sacramental grace were wrong. Luther read in Romans 1:17 about how in the Gospel “the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” Luther had always been taught that this referred to his own righteousness, but now understood it to be an alien righteousness: the righteousness of Christ, outside of him, yet counted to him
The Gospel teaches that sinners are justified, or declared righteous before God, not based on their own efforts, but as the free gift of God received by faith. Luther described this as the “sweet exchange:” Christ on the cross bore our sins, and died as a substitute in our place, removing God’s wrath and obtaining our pardon; while Christ’s righteousness was imputed to us by faith, bringing us into right relationship with God.
Gripped by this truth, and disgusted with the Roman church’s corrupt sale of indulgences, Luther tried to spark reform. He proposed a debate, nailing 95 debating points to the church door in Wittenburg on October 31, 1517. These “95 Theses” were soon reproduced across Germany. The Church of Rome responded by excommunicating Luther in 1520 and then having the secular authorities try Luther for heresy at the Diet of Worms in April 1521. Facing a demand to recant his teachings, Luther replied: “Unless I am convinced by testimonies of the Scriptures or by clear arguments that I am in error—for popes and councils have often erred and contradicted themselves—I cannot withdraw, for I am subject to the Scriptures I have quoted; my conscience is captive to the Word of God. It is unsafe and dangerous to do anything against one’s conscience. Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise. So help me God. Amen.”
While the Emperor had condemned Luther at Worms and permitted anyone to kill him, Luther was protected by a powerful political patron named Frederick, the Elector of Saxony. Frederick had Luther kidnapped and removed to Wartburg Castle, where he translated much of the Bible and wrote extensively on theology and against the Roman church. Soon there were Reformers popping up all over Europe: Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich, John Calvin in Geneva, Martin Bucer in Strasbourg, and Thomas Cranmer in England. These Reformers came to be called “Protestants” because they were “protesting” the theological and moral abuses of Rome. The Reformation flourished through the use of the printing press, which allowed widespread dissemination of its ideas. Politicians across Northern Europe, in particular, also took advantage of the Reformation to shake off the political influence of Rome, and many protected Reformers and Protestant churches.
3. THE BAPTISTS
Among the Protestants, there soon arose several major and distinct groups. The Lutherans, following Martin Luther, believed in the Gospel and the final authority of Bible, emphasizing a stark distinction between law and grace in their teaching. Luther, however, was unwilling to re-examine the practice of infant baptism and could not bring himself to fully reject Roman ideas about the elements of the Lord’s Supper being literally Jesus’ body and blood. Luther’s successor, Philip Melancthon, was less enthusiastic about Luther’s embrace of doctrines of grace such as predestination, and the Lutheran movement after him remained functionally closer to Rome than to Scripture on the question of fallen man’s ability to respond to grace. The Lutherans also accepted a close relationship between church and state, and many northern European nations instituted official state Lutheran churches.
A group of more radical Reformers in Switzerland and Germany became known as Anabaptists because of their rejection of infant baptism. Many of them went even further, sometimes rejecting original sin and civil authority. Many embraced ardent pacifism. Modern-day Mennonites and smaller groups such as the Hutterites, Amish, and Doukhoubors trace their lineage from the Anabaptists. Certain Anabaptists would later have some influence on some Puritan Congregationalists who later became Baptists. However, despite much confusion about this, the Baptists are not directly descended from the Anabaptists.
The third major stream of the Reformation was the Reformed churches, a varied movement in itself that included the Church of England (Anglicans), Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, and (later) the Baptists. All the Reformed churches emphasized God’s sovereignty in salvation, but differed on the organization and structure of the church. Presbyterians believed that churches should be ruled by groups of elders (“presbyters”) and that all the elders in a region collectively in “presbyteries” exercised rule over all the churches in that region. Congregationalists rejected the idea that individual congregations were subject to a structure above them and promoted a more democratic understanding of church rule. The Anglicans tried to marry the Gospel and a Reformed understanding of grace in salvation with a Catholic structure of bishops and deacons and a liturgy similar to the Roman rites. English monarchs attempted to impose this Anglican understanding across Great Britain, resulting in many dissident preachers, churches, and believers agitating for reform in the Anglican churches.
This reform movement within Anglicanism, known as Puritanism, included advocates of Presbyterianism and Congregationalism. Some of those Congregational Puritans fled Britain for continental Europe and, while in exile, came to reject the baptism of infants, understanding that the church is to be a gathering of born-again, confessing believers in Jesus rather than simply a group of believers alongside other people descended from believers. These Puritans became known as Baptists, and their ideas spread across Britain. Persecuted by the state Anglican church and royal authorities, many, like John Bunyan, were imprisoned for their beliefs. Some fled to North America only to be persecuted there by Anglicans and even fellow Puritan Congregationalists.
Nevertheless, Baptist churches continued to multiply on both sides of the Atlantic. While not all Baptists were “Particular” or Calvinistic, holding to Reformed convictions about God’s sovereignty in salvation, a vast majority of 17th and 18th-century Baptist churches did confess the doctrines of grace. Baptists distinguished themselves in many fields, such as John Bunyan in literature, John Leeland as an advocate for religious freedom, and men like William Carey, Adoniram Judson, and Luther Rice in advancing world missions and evangelization. The late 18th century saw Baptist churches multiplying across the United States and Atlantic Canada at an astonishing rate.
4. MODERN EVANGELICALISM
The spectacular growth of evangelical Protestant denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists (who emerged as a reform movement within, and then out of, Anglicanism) across North America and in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries did not escape problems. In the late 19th century, the Christian faith discovered another formidable heretical threat rising in its own midst: theological liberalism.
The Enlightenment had arguably benefitted the Protestant Reformation with its stress on going back ad fontes (to the source) in examining what the ancients, including the biblical writers and the early church fathers, had actually written in their own languages as opposed to simply accepting the traditions of the Roman church. However, the humanism of the Enlightenment would bear more bitter fruit, as philosophers and scientists began to abandon God as a necessary reference point for human understanding and turned instead to the notion of unaided human reason as sufficient to make sense of the world. The exaltation of human reason began to undermine, in the culture of the day, those ideas that reason could not adequately explain—ideas like miraculous events and predictive prophecy in Scripture. This led to an academic movement within Christian seminaries and denominations that questioned the authority of Scripture. This manifested itself explicitly, toward the end of the 19th century, in rejection of Christ’s virgin birth, the deity of Christ, miracles, and the idea of a bodily resurrection for Christ or anyone else.
Liberalism was extremely attractive to many. It promised to reconcile Christianity to recent scientific theories and ideas, and touted its own ability to keep the faith relevant in its changing culture. By 1930, almost every Protestant denomination in North America has been captured by theological liberalism. In Canada, mainline denominations such as the Anglican Church of Canada and the new United Church of Canada (born of a union between liberal Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregational churches) abandoned themselves fully to these new ideas. Among the Baptists, 77 churches withdrew from the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec in 1927 over a professor at McMaster University who was teaching liberalism; similar incidents happened elsewhere in Canada as what came to be known as the “Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy” raged. The term “fundamentalist” was coined in this era after an evangelical Christian named R.A. Torrey wrote a work called “The Fundamentals” which defended biblical truth against liberal heresies.
A typical fundamentalist response to liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s was, therefore, to preserve orthodoxy by withdrawing not only from liberal fellowships but from culture in general. Over time, many evangelicals began to adopt a slightly different approach. This so-called “neo-evangelical” response was to attempt to re-engage culture in the public square while also defending inerrancy and the necessity of supernatural grace for salvation. The neo-evangelical movement was varied in its theology and background, with leaders like Billy Graham, Carl F. H. Henry, John Stott, and J. I. Packer. At its best, neo-evangelicalism kept its focus on the vital message and beliefs of the Christian faith while seeking to understand the world that it was reaching out to with the Gospel.
In more recent years, the theological precision and foundations of the neo-evangelical movement began to take a back seat to the desire to find common ground with the culture, with the result that complex theology and biblical preaching began to be de-emphasized in many churches. The assumption spread that biblical truth by itself was insufficient to make the church relevant and that the church needed to change to be more like the culture in order to survive. Various attempts to make evangelical churches more palatable to the unbelieving culture, such as the “seeker-sensitive” movement of the 1980s and 1990s and the postmodern “Emergent” movement of the early 21st century, failed to either effect lasting change in a rapidly paganizing Western culture or train a new generation of Christians passionate for biblical truth and lost sinners. Young evangelicals who were increasingly disaffected by secular methodology and compromise in the church began to rediscover biblical theology in the ministries of Reformed teachers, preachers, and organizations such as John Piper, R.C. Sproul, and Banner of Truth. Later labeled the “Reformed Resurgence” or the “Young, Restless, and Reformed,” a rediscovery of Reformation theology has begun in many established churches and denominations, and has seen many new churches planted as well.
