The History of the Christian Church

This episode of CS is titled Awakening. The tide of Pietism that swept portions of Europe in the 17 th C, arrived in North America in the 18 th . Like the Charismatic Movement of the 1960s, Protestant denominations were split over how to respond to Pietism. Presbyterians were divided between those who insisted on strict adherence to the teachings of the Westminster Confession and those whose empha...

This episode is titled Colonies .The 16 th C saw the growth of the Spanish and Portuguese overseas empires. The Spanish Empire included Mexico, extending well into what is now the western half of North America. In the 17 th C, other Europeans began their own empire-building. The most successful of the new colonial powers was Great Britain . Among its first overseas enterprises were the thirteen co...

This episode of CS is titled Results .Now that we’ve taken a look at some of the movements and luminaries of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment, it’s time for a review of the results and their impact on The Church. Once we embark in the next Era of Church History, we’ll find ourselves in the weeds of so many movements we’re going to have to back up and take it in an even more summary...

This episode is titled, Kant .At the conclusion of episode 115 –Part 2 of The Rationalist Option, I said we’d return later to the subject of the philosophy of the Enlightenment to consider its impact on theology and Church History. We do that now. We saw that John Locke placed a wedge between faith and reason when his system of Empiricism said the only genuine knowledge was that of experience. But...

The title of this episode is Moravians and Wesley .We took a look at Pietism in an earlier episode. Pietism was a reaction to the dry dogmatism of Protestant Scholasticism and the reductionist rationalism of Enlightenment philosophers. It aimed to renew a living faith in a living Christ. As a movement, it was led in the 17 th C by Philip Jakob Spener and August Francke .Spener’s godson was a Germa...

In this episode, we’ll take a brief look at what came to be called Spiritualism. Coming out of the 16 th C, the, what seemed to many at the time, endless debates on doctrine and dogma, the intolerance of Christians toward one another, and the lack of any apparent movement toward resolving the mess, moved many across Europe and the New World to seek refuge in more of an abstract religious sentiment...

This, the 117 th episode of CS is titled, “ Which Witch? ” and is a brief review of the well-known but poorly understood Salem Witch Trials .They’re often brought up by critics of Christianity as examples of religious intolerance and superstition. And while they did indeed carry a bit of that, they were far more a case of a breakdown in the judicial system . The phrase “witch-hunt” refers to an at...

This episode is titled, A City on a Hill, and returns to our look at the Propagation of the Christian Faith in the Americas. Back in Episodes 105 and 6, we breached the subject of Missions in the New World. We looked at the role the Jesuits played in the Western Hemisphere. While the post-modern view of this era tends to reduce all European missionaries in a monochromatic Euro-centrism that levele...

This is Part 2 of The Rationalist Option on Communio Sanctorum, History of the Christian Church. In our last episode, we took a look at the genesis of the Enlightenment in England and France. We’ll come back to France a bit later after taking a brief look at the Enlightenment in German and Russia. Germany took a bit longer to join the Enlightenment. That was due in part to the condition of the lan...

The title of this episode is, The Rationalist Option Part 1. I want to give a brief comment at the outset that this episode doesn’t track much of church history per se. What we do over the next minutes is take a brief look at the European Enlightenment. We need to because the ideas that came out of the Enlightenment influenced theology and the modern world. The 30 Years War ended in 1648 with the...

This is the second episode in which we look at English Puritanism .We left off last time with King Charles I fleeing London after breaking into The House of Commons to arrest the Puritan members of Parliament he accused of treason. The men had been warned and had fled. What Charles had hoped would be a dramatic show of his defense of the realm against dangerous elements, ended up being an egregiou...

In this episode, we’ll take a look at English Puritanism. In Episode 96, English Candles, we considered the arrival of the Reformation in England and the career of Thomas Cranmer , Archbishop of the Anglican Church. When Catholic Queen Mary ascended the throne, she persecuted Protestants. But when Elizabeth became queen, a new day dawned for the Reformation there. Queen Elizabeth followed a median...

Although it surely would have grieved him had he lived to see it, Martin Luther’s legacy in the years after his death a Century of war. This war didn’t only pit Catholics against Protestants. Various factions among the Protestants warred with each other. If the Reformers hoped to purify the Church of both theological error and political corruption, they may have succeeded in the first endeavor but...

The title of this episode is Faith in the Age of Reason, Part 2. In our last episode we briefly considered Jakob Hermanzoon , the Dutch theologian who’d sat under the tutelage of Theodore Beza , John Calvin’s successor at the Academy in Geneva. We know Hermanzoon better by his Latin name Jacobus Arminius. Arminius took exception to Beza’s views on predestination and when he became pastor of a chur...

The title of this episode, is Faith in the Age of Reason.  Part 01 After the first flush of Reformation excitement died down, the Protestant churches of Europe went into a long period of retrenchment, of digging in both doctrinally and culturally. This period lasted from the late 16 th to the later 17 th C and is referred to by church historians as the Age of Confessionalism. But “confession” here...

This episode of CS is the 3 rd Overview in the series so far. We’ve spent quite a bit of time tracking the Reformation and need now to give a brief overview and analysis of what we’ve seen as we prepare for launching into the next era of Church History. There’s a well-worn saying in English I’m not sure other languages duplicate. It says that “you can’t see the forest for the trees.” The idea is t...

This 107 th episode is titled, “ Reform Around the Edges .” It’s difficult living in the Modern World to understand the Late Medieval norm that a State had to have a single religion all its subjects observed. You’d be hard pressed to find a European of the 16 th C who didn’t assume this to be the case. About the only group who didn’t see it that way were the Anabaptists. And even among them there...

Since last week’s episode was titled Westward Ho! As we track the expansion of the Faith into the New World with Spain and Portugal’s immersion, this week as we turn to the other Europeans we’ll title this week’s episode, Westward Ho-Ho, because I’m tired of saying Part 2. I know it’s lame, but hey, it’s my podcast so I’ll call it what I want. Before we dive into this week’s content, I wanted to s...

In this episode of CS, we take a look at the Expansion of Christianity into the New World. Following Columbus’s voyages at the end of the 15 th C to the Caribbean, the expansion of Christianity into the New Word was chiefly dependent on the 2 great colonial powers, Portugal and Spain . From the outset of their adventures in the New World, a religious intention was central to the efforts of the exp...

The title of this episode is – A Needless Tragedy. We backtrack now a bit. We’re going back to that period of European history following the Reformation called the Wars of Religion . We do so to take a look at a single day; Aug 24, 1572 in Paris, and the infamous event that happened then and there = the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. We do this because while it’s a lot more detailed look at somet...

This episode of CS is titled, Back in the East – Part 2 Last time we took a brief look at the Jesuit missions to the Far East; namely Japan, China, Vietnam and India. We encountered the revolutionary approach to mission work of Alessandro Valignano and his spiritual heirs, Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci. Their accomodationist approach to evangelism, where the Gospel was communicated by seeking...

This episode of CS is titled, Back in the East – Part 1 In our last foray into the Church in the East, we stopped our review with the Mongols . You may remember while the Mongols started out generally favorable to Christianity, when later Mongol Khans became Muslims, they embarked on a campaign to eradicate the Gospel from their lands. That rang the death knell to The Church in the East, which for...

This episode of CS is titled, “ And to the South . . . ” -- We move aside now from our review of the Reformation in Europe to get caught up with what’s happening in Africa. In many, maybe most, popular treatments of Church history, the emphasis is on what’s going on in Europe. That’s what most church-based Christian history courses and many western colleges and seminaries focus on. We’ve already d...

This is the 100 th episode of CS.Because this is something of a milestone for the podcast, we’re taking a break from our usual episodic fare for something different. For those listeners who subscribe only for the historical narrative, you’ll want to skip this one altogether because we won’t be looking at Church History at all in this episode. This Century mark for CS will be about the podcast itse...

This episode is titled “In the Low Countries.”Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxemburg are referred to as “the Low Countries.” The get this name because laying along the coast NW of Germany and NE of France, they are at or slightly below sea level. That and there’s not really much in the way of mountains. There are some low hills, but for the most part the region today called Benelux is pretty flat...