The History of the Christian Church

In this episode, we’ll take a brief look at what came to be called Spiritualism.Coming out of the 16th 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 than a rigid faith of set doctrines. Another factor encouraging this mindset was a burgeoning European middle-class. You see, it was only the wealthy nobility who possessed the resources for higher education need to foster an excessive emphasis on correct doctrine. Those who didn’t have that opportunity; who couldn’t wax eloquent on complicated matters of theology, were regarded as unsophisticates who depended on their betters to tell them what to believe.The Spiritualist Movement of the 17th and 18th Cs attracted people from all classes. From the cultured who’d tired of narrow-minded dogmatism, to uneducated commoners tired of having their lives turned over by endless religious tussles.The history of the Spiritualist movement is difficult to trace because it devolved into several streams that constantly mixed. Just as its beliefs were a hodge-podge, so is its history. We’ll examine it by taking a look at three of its leaders.Jakob Boehme was born in Silesia, Germany in 1575. His parents were strict Lutherans of humble means. By all accounts, the young Jakob had a real and rich faith.The sermons of that time were long dissertations on the theological debates of the day. These bored Jakob to tears and did nothing to spark a relationship with God.At fourteen, he was apprenticed to a shoe-maker. Shortly after, he began having visions. It might have been one thing if he’d kept these to himself, but he didn’t; he shared them. His master threw him out, saying he wanted an apprentice, not a prophet.Boehme became a traveling cobbler, moving here and there mending shoes. As he traveled and visited different churches, he came to the conclusion Church leaders had built a kind of confusing doctrinal Tower of Babel. He determined to set dogmatics aside and cultivate his inner spiritual life.  He read everything he could lay his hands on that might help in that pursuit.His meditations led him to some conclusions on the nature of the world and man’s place in it. These were then “confirmed” by visions and other spiritual experiences. But he kept his new-found convictions to himself for a time as he plied his shoe-mending-trade.At twenty-five, Jakob ended his wanderings and set up shop in Goerlitz, on the border between Germany and Poland, where he made a comfortable living as a cobbler.Although Boehme didn’t see himself as a preacher, he was convinced God wanted him to record his visions. The result was a book titled Brilliant Dawn.  In it, Boehme repeatedly asserts he’s writing what God dictated word for word, and that he’s no more than a pen in His hand. Boehme didn’t publish, but a manuscript reached a local pastor, who accused Boehme to the magistrates. Under threat of exile, Boehme promised to teach or write no more on religious matters.  For five years he kept his promise. But in 1618, compelled by new visions and the encouragement of admirers, he wrote anew. Without permission, one of his followers published three of his works. These reached the same pastor, who again accused Boehme of heresy. He was forced to leave Goerlitz.He ended up in the court of the Elector of Saxony, where several theologians examined his teachings without reaching a conclusion.  They confessed themselves unable to understand his meaning. They recommended Boehme be given time to clarify his ideas. Not long after, he fell ill and returned to Goerlitz to die among friends and followers. He passed at the age of fifty.The Saxony theologians’ response wasn’t just a dodge to avoid passing judgment on a likable guy. Boehme’s writings continue to be difficult to sort out. They’re a confusing mish-mash of this and that; which, to be frank, is a hallmark of much of what goes under the title “spiritualism.”  Boehme’s tomes are a mixture of traditional Christian themes with others taken from magic, alchemy, occultism, and theosophy. At points, it looks like Boehme gives a metaphor to help explain his point, but it never does. You read it and say, “What does THAT have to do with anything?” So the metaphors, striking as they may be, only serve to add to the confusion. And THAT may very well be the overall point of his inkings. There may not BE a meaning to be parsed from it all. There’s every possibility Boehme used words to produce phrases that conveyed singular ideas that weren’t connected.  He may have aimed for a state of mind that suspended rationality and logic; one that arises out of frustration at trying to make sense of what is senseless, so one gives up, lays reason down, and becomes hyper-suggestible.While the specifics of what Boehme aimed for aren’t clear, their basic direction is. He took aim at the lifeless dogmatism of theologians and the empty liturgy of the Church. Against these, Boehme exalted the freedom of the spirit with a belief in direct revelation from God to individuals. He declared that since “the letter kills,” believers ought not to be guided by Scripture, but by the Holy Spirit, who inspired the biblical writers and presently inspires believers. He said, “I have enough with the book that I am. If I have within me the Spirit of Christ, the entire Bible is in me. Why would I wish for more books? Why discuss what is outside, while not having learned what is within me?”Huh – ironic then that he wrote books.Boehme had few followers during his lifetime but later his writings gained admirers. In England, some formed a Boehmenist-movement. Some clashed with the Quakers who we’ll take a look at next. So, the Spiritualist Movement, born in part as a protest against the doctrinal debates of traditional theology, was eventually embroiled in similar controversies.George Fox was born in a small English village the same year Jakob Boehme died, 1624. Like Boehme, Fox was of humble origin and a cobbler’s apprentice. At 19, disgusted at the immorality of his fellow apprentices, he quit and began the life of an itinerant religious seeker. He attended meetings of all sorts, seeking spiritual illumination. He devoted himself to the study of Scripture until he’d committed most of it to memory.Fox’s pursuit of spiritual illumination was a roller coaster of highs and lows. There were times when he had a mystical experience that thrilled, followed by a season where he despaired of finding the path that would lead to what he sought. He came to the conviction all the various sects in England were wrong, and their worship was an abomination to God.Fox challenged much of traditional Christianity. He reasoned if God doesn’t dwell in houses made by human hands, as the Scripture said, how dare anyone call buildings where they gather “churches”? They are in truth no more than houses with bell towers.For Fox, pastors paid a salary aren’t real shepherds, but “priests” and “journeymen.” Hymns, orders of worship, sermons, sacraments, creeds, ministers—are all human hindrances to the freedom of the Spirit.Over against all these, Fox placed what he called the “inner light.” This was a seed that existed in all people, and was the true way to find God. Fox said the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity was a denial of God’s love. On the contrary, he maintained, there’s an inner light in all, no matter how dim it may be. Thanks to that light, pagans can be saved as well as Christians. This light, however, must not be confused with the intellect or conscience. It’s the capability all have to recognize and accept the presence of God. By it we’re able to believe and understand Scripture. So, communication with God thru the inner light is previous to and independent of, any communication by external means.Although those close to George Fox knew of the fire burning within him, for several years he abstained from proclaiming what he was convinced he’d discovered regarding the true meaning of faith and Christianity.At that time there were in England several religious sects, and Fox attended all without finding contentment in any. Finally, he felt called to speak out at a Baptist meeting, announcing what he now believed. From that point on, such urgings became more frequent. In gatherings of various religious groups, Fox declared he’d been commanded by the Spirit to announce his new vision of The Faith. He was often treated with contempt and hostility and was thrown out of meetings, beaten, and stoned. But all such didn’t stop him. Soon he was in another “house with a belfry,” interrupting the service and proclaiming his message.Fox’s followers grew rapidly. At first they called themselves “Children of Light” but Fox preferred the title Friends, which later become their official name. They were soon called Quakers by outsiders. The name came from their tendency to tremble with fervency as they prayed.In 1652, George Fox gained the support of Margaret Fell, a noble-woman widowed in 1658. She became a leader in the movement and used her position to lend it an air of credibility and protection. But political opposition grew and she was arrested for supporting the movement. Her property was confiscated and she was sentenced to life in prison. After being released by the king, she married Fox in 1669. The rest of their lives were spent teaching and in missions, which were repeatedly interrupted by rounds of imprisonment. Fox died in 1691, his wife Margaret a decade later.Since the Friends believed structure in worship was an obstacle to the Spirit, their services took place in silence. Any who felt called to speak or pray aloud were free to do so. When the Spirit moved them, women had the same right to speak as men. Fox himself did not prepare a message but simply allowed the Spirit to move him in the moment. There were times when many gathered, hoping to hear him speak, but he refused. Also, Quakers didn’t include the traditional sacraments of baptism and communion. They feared that physical water, bread, and wine would draw attention away from the spiritual.Fox was aware of the danger his emphasis on the freedom of the Spirit might lead to excessive individualism. Other movements with a similar emphasis hadn’t lasted long. The exercise of individual freedom inevitably leads to the dissolving of a group. Fox avoided this by underscoring the importance of community and love. In Friends’ meetings, decisions aren’t made by a majority. If a unanimous agreement was not reached, the decision was postponed, and the meeting continued in silence until the Spirit offered a solution. If one was not received, the matter was left pending for another occasion.Many disliked the teachings and practices of the Quakers. Religious leaders resented the way they interrupted their services to preach or read Scripture. Authorities saw the need to teach a lesson to these Friends, who refused to pay tithes, swear oaths, bow to their “betters,” or uncover their head before any but God. Quakers argued that, since God was addressed in the familiar “Thou,” no one else ought to be addressed by the more respectful “You.” To those used to the submission of their “inferiors,” that was intolerable insubordination.So Fox was repeatedly beaten and spent years in prison. He was sent to prison the first time for interrupting a preacher who declared the ultimate truth was to be found in Scripture. Fox said that wasn’t true; the ultimate truth was in the Spirit who inspired Scripture. On other occasions, he was accused of blasphemy and of conspiring against the government. When the authorities offered a pardon, he refused, declaring he wasn’t guilty. To accept a pardon for something he hadn’t done was to lie. On another occasion, when serving six months for blasphemy, he was offered freedom in exchange for service in the Army. He refused, declaring Christians ought not use weapons other than those the Spirit provided. His sentence was prolonged by an additional six months.When he wasn’t in prison, Fox spent his time in Margaret’s home, Swarthmoor Hall. It became the headquarters of the Friends. The rest of the time he traveled England and abroad, visiting Quaker meetings and taking his message to new areas. First, he went to Scotland, where he was accused of sedition; then to Ireland. He spent two years in the Caribbean and North America; and made two visits to the Continent. In all these places he gained converts, and by the time of his death, in 1691, his followers ran to the tens of thousands.Like Fox, they were persecuted. They were thrown in jail for vagrancy, blasphemy, inciting riots, and refusing to pay tithes. In 1664, Charles II issued an edict forbidding unlicensed religious assemblies. Many groups continued gathering in secret. But the Quakers declared it would be a lie to do so, and openly disobeyed the edict. Thousands were imprisoned, and by the time religious tolerance was granted in 1689, hundreds had died in prison.The most famous of Fox’s followers was William Penn, after whom the state of Pennsylvania was named. His father was a British admiral who tried to secure for him the best education available. While he was a student, William became a Puritan. Then, while studying in France, he came under the influence of the Huguenots. In 1667, back in England, he became a Quaker. His father, not knowing what to do with his “fanatical” son, threw him out of the house. Penn stayed true to his convictions and eventually spent seven months in the Tower of London. He sent word to the king that the Tower was the worst of arguments to convince him, so, no matter who was right, whoever uses force to seek religious assent is necessarily wrong. Finally, thanks to the intervention of his father and other well-placed friends, he was set free. He then spent several years raising a family, traveling throughout Europe, and writing in defense of the Friends.Penn then conceived the idea of what he called his “holy experiment.” Some friends had spoken to him about New Jersey, in North America. The crown owed Penn’s father a considerable amount of money. When William’s father died, that debt fell to the son. Since Charles wasn’t able to pay, Penn asked instead for a grant of land in the New World. It became known as Penns’ Wood – Pennsylvania. His purpose was to found a new colony in which there would be complete religious freedom. By then, other British colonies had been founded in North America. But, with the exception of Rhode Island, all were marked by religious intolerance. In Massachusetts, the most intolerant of the colonies, Quakers were persecuted, condemned to exile, mutilated, and executed. What Penn now proposed was a new colony in which all would be free to worship according to their own convictions. This seemed bad enough to an intolerant age. But even worse was Penn’s plan to buy from the Indians the land that the crown had granted him. He was convinced that the Indians, and not the crown, were the legitimate owners of the land. And he hoped to establish such cordial relations with them that the settlers would have no need to defend themselves by force of arms. The capital of this holy experiment would be called Philadelphia—the city of fraternal love.No matter how ill-conceived Penn’s experiment seemed to the more enlightened Brits, soon there were many, not only in England, but also in other parts of Europe, willing to take part in it. Many of them were Quakers, and therefore the Friends dominated the political life of the colony for some time. But there were also settlers of many different persuasions. Under the leadership of Penn, first governor of the colony, relations with the Indians were excellent, and for a long time his dream of a peaceful settlement was a reality.The last Spiritualist we’ll look at today is Emanuel Swedenborg.Born in 1688, three years before Fox’s death, Emmanuel Swedenborg was born to an aristocratic family in Sweden. He received an education at the University of Uppsala, and spent five years traveling England, the Netherlands, France, and Germany. The goal of these travels was the quest for knowledge. While Fox and Boehme pursued religious enlightenment, the young Swedenborg was after scientific knowledge.After many years of scientific inquiry, Swedenborg claimed he had a vision of being carried into the spiritual world where saw eternal truths. He wrote expansively on the true meaning of reality and Scripture. He said that all that exists is a reflection of the attributes of God.  Therefore, the visible world “corresponds” with the invisible one. The same is true of Scripture, which reflects truths that can only be known by those who’ve entered the spiritual world.Swedenborg was convinced his writings would form the beginning of a new era in the history of the world and religion. He claimed what had taken place when he received his revelations was what the Bible meant when speaking of the 2nd Coming of Christ. As expected, these ideas weren’t received well by his contemporaries. His circle of followers was small. He didn’t feel called to found a new movement, but to call the existing church to a new understanding of its nature and message.Since that didn’t work out so well, in 1784, twelve years after his death, his disciples founded the Church of the New Jerusalem, whose members were never many but which has survived to our time. In the 19th C, the Swedenborgian Society was founded with the purpose of publishing and distributing Swedenborg’s writings. 

This, the 117th 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 attempt to find something damning in an otherwise innocent victim. What’s rarely mentioned is that while there was a brief flurry of witch-hunting that went on in the New England colonies, it was a long practice in Europe from the mid-15th thru mid-18th Cs. It reached its peak in the about fifty-year span from between 1580 and 1630. It’s difficult to sort out how many were executed but scholars say it was from a low of 40,000 to as high as 60,000.In light of such large numbers, the twenty executed in the Salem Trials seems trivial. But that even a single person was executed on the charge of witchcraft was a travesty of justice.Witch hunts began in the 15th C in southeast France and western Switzerland. The European witch craze was fueled by the publication of The Hammer of the Witches in 1486, by the inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger.The trials included men and women of all ages and classes.In New England, there’d been three hangings for witchcraft prior to Salem. But the first sign of trouble in Salem Village occurred during the winter of 1692, when Elizabeth Parris the nine-year-old daughter of the village pastor and her eleven-year-old cousin Abigail Williams, began displaying bizarre behavior. The girls screamed uncontrollably, hurled items, groaned, and threw fits of wild contortions. Witchcraft immediately surfaced as a possible explanation.Suspicion quickly centered on three women living on the margins of village life. One was a homeless woman named Sarah Good. Another was an infrequent church-attender and so obviously suspicious woman named Sarah Osborne. The third was Tituba, a slave known for fortune-telling. These three were interrogated in March, 1692 and sentenced to jail.Tituba’s ethnic origins are difficult to sort out but she appears to have been an African slave brought from the Caribbean to serve in the home of Pastor Samuel Parris, Elizabeth’s father. She regaled the young girls with tales of the occult and indulged their desire to have their fortunes read. When the girls were caught gazing into a crystal ball, they tried to shift blame by affecting bizarre behavior that made them appear victims of spells cast on them by something malevolent or better, some-one.For anyone’s who’s worked with adolescent girls likely knows, it didn’t take long before others of their age saw all the attention this gained them. So they affected similar behavior to get a slice of the attention pie. They accused the soft targets of women already considered odd and suspicious. Tituba was the first to be accused, but soon Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne were also implicated, questioned, and remanded to custody.Making matters more complicated was a long-running feud between the Putnam and Porter families. Charges and counter-charges of the damning charge of devil-worship flew on both sides. Pastor Parris used his pulpit to fan the flames of superstition that ANYONE in Salem might in fact be in league with Satan.In March, several more women were accused. Then, anyone who questioned the girl’s veracity was suspected. Sarah Good’s four-year-old daughter Dorothy was arrested and interrogated.Accusations began pouring in. More arrests made. But now many of those arrested weren’t just on the fringe of Salem village life. They were upstanding members of the community and church. As tension grew, Governor William Phips set up a special court to adjudicate the cases.The first to be brought to trial was Bridget Bishop, who was accused of being a witch because her immoral lifestyle and affinity for darks clothes suggested she was in league with hell. She was found guilty and was executed by hanging in June, 1692. Five more women were executed in July, and then four men and one woman in August. The last executions took place in September when six women and three men were hung.Some of those arrested confessed they had practiced witchcraft, and accused others of being their mentors. But scholars now believe these confessions were made under duress and with the promise that by implicating others they might be allowed to go free.Giles Corey, an eighty-year-old farmer and husband of one of the accused, was also arrested in September. Corey refused to cooperate with the authorities and was subjected to a form of torture in which the subject is placed beneath an increasingly heavy load of stones in an attempt to compel him to enter a plea. After two days, Corey died without confessing.The last trial occurred at the end of April, and all five accused were found not guilty, bringing an end to the episode. In the final count, twenty were hung, one was crushed to death, and four died in prison.Twenty years later, the Massachusetts court declared the entire ordeal had been a gross injustice and ordered indemnifications be paid to the victims’ families.At the time, two of New England’s most influential leaders were the father and son, Increase and Cotton Mather. Increase, who became president of Harvard, believed in the reality of witchcraft and has been blamed for much of what happened in Salem. But he severely criticized the proceedings and use of spectral evidence which was central to the case.Spectral evidence was the testimony of the young girls and their supporters who claimed they saw certain things that must mean the accused were in fact witches bent on the spiritual and social unraveling of the Salem community. They saw what they described as ghost-like images. Increase Mather decried the use of such spectral evidence as being inappropriate to condemn someone to death. His son Cotton took a similar position, first writing against witchcraft, then deploring the manner in which the trials were conducted.It was the two-fold whammy of the Mather’s condemnation of spectral evidence and that the girls apparently began to stretch out a bit to see just what they could get away with that moved people to begin to wonder what was going on in Salem. It’s one thing to accuse oddballs and misfits of being witches. But when some of the community’s most respected members and people known for their upstanding virtue were accused à Well, maybe we’ve been played by a handful of teens.While religious superstition fueled the panic that fired the Salem Witch Trials, it was in fact a failure of the judicial system that saw people hanged. And while Pastor Parris stirred the pot in Salem with his use of the pulpit to fuel suspicion, it was the work of two other pastors, Increase and Cotton Mather that moved the people of Salem and Massachusetts to calm down and end the trials.We turn now in the balance of this episode to tie off the Puritanism of New England.Within a single generation, the original Puritan vision of a City on a Hill was already dimming. A new cosmopolitanism from Europe had transformed cities like Boston. By the early 18th C, American Puritanism had split into three factions.First there were Congregational churches, which down-played Calvinist doctrines and looked to the Enlightenment. These came to be called the “Old Lights.”Then there were those who continued to practice the rigid Calvinism of their forebears, referred to as the “Old Calvinists.”The third group emerged from the “Great Awakening” with its pietistic emphasis on a “new birth.” The “New Lights.”Puritanism wasn’t static on either side of the Atlantic. It couldn’t be since their political contexts were vastly different. English Puritans were engaged in a civil war, while New England Puritans were carving a life out of a new world. Despite minor variations like the New England Halfway Covenant, the Puritan theological core remained the same. The Westminster Confession of Faith is a solid guide in identifying the theological tenets of Puritanism.The Confession was the work of the Westminster Assembly which met from 1643-9.The Assembly was a committee appointed by Parliament. It was charged with drawing up a new liturgy to replace the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and for implementing a new plan for church government. It met in what’s called the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey for the first time on July 1, 1643. Parliament appointed 121 clergy and 30 laypeople to the assembly.It replaced the Book of Common Prayer with the Directory of Public Worship in 1645, and the 39 Articles of the Church of England were replaced by the Westminster Confession in 1646. The House of Commons returned the original draft of the Confession with instructions to add biblical proof texts. Revisions were made, and the Confession was ratified by Parliament. Two catechisms were added. The Larger Catechism (designed for instructing adults) and the Shorter Catechism (a bit easier for children) were approved in 1648.The Church of Scotland also adopted it without amendment, satisfying compliance with the Solemn League and Covenant. Its work completed, the Westminster Assembly dissolved in 1649.

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 leveled native American cultures, that simply wasn’t the case. Yes, there were plenty of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestants who conflated the Gospel with their mother culture. But there were not a few missionaries who understood the difference and valued the uniqueness that was native American cultures. They sought to incarnate the Christian message in those cultures and languages. That often got them in trouble with officials back home who wanted to exploit indigenous peoples. In other words, it isn’t just modern Liberation Theology advocates who sought to protect the peoples of the New World from the exploitive injustices of the Old. Many early missionaries did as well.So, we considered the work of men like Jean de Brébeuf and Madame de la Peltrie in the northeast of North America. We considered the work of the Russian Orthodox Church in the far northwest and down the west coast to California. They were met by the Spanish coming north out of Central America.Protestants were a bit late to the game. One of the first real attempts was near Rio de Janeiro when the French Huguenot Admiral Villegagnon established a short-lived Calvinist settlement in 1555. It folded when the French were expelled by the Portuguese. A more permanent settlement was made by the Dutch when they captured Pernambuco at the easternmost tip of Brazil. This settlement remained a Calvinist enclave for forty years.North America presented a very different scene for missions than Central and South America. The voyage of the Mayflower with its ‘Pilgrims’ in 1620 was a historical pointer to the strong influence of Calvinism in what would become New England. The states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire were strongly Congregationalist or Presbyterian in terms of church polity and heavily influenced by English Puritanism. At least some of these pioneers felt a responsibility for spreading the Christian faith to native Americans.In episode 106, we talked about John Eliot, the Mayhews, William Carey, David Livingstone, David Brainerd, and, Jonathan Edwards. Besides Presbyterians and Congregationalists, Episcopalians achieved some success in evangelizing the Indians.And again, for those who missed my earlier comment … While it’s fashionable in some circles to eschew the use of the label “Indian” in favor of the assumed-moniker “Native American” for indigenous people of the New World, many of their modern day descendants have made clear their desire to be called “Indians” or referred to by their tribal identity, rather than “Native American.”  So please, those of non-New World descent who take umbrage at the label “Indian” on behalf of others, assuming you’re defending People of Color, no nasty emails or snarky reviews because you speak that of which you know not.If some frustration came through in that >> Sorry, Not Sorry. It’s just tiresome dealing with the comments of those who want to apply fleeting social concepts that appeared two-seconds ago as a blanket over hundreds and even thousands of years of history. It’s simply unconscionable to apply contemporary values and untested, highly-questionable social theories on prior ages, as though just because we live now, we’re somehow more enlightened, more civilized, in a word better than those who are thus cast as “worse” only because they lived before this moment of grand-enlightenment. The arrogance of that perspective is stunning.Okay, end of my tirade of personal pique …Being that we’ve just come up to the age of the Puritans in England, now would be a good time to take a little closer look at Puritanism in the New World.During the reign of James I, some Puritans grew discouraged at the pace of reform in England and separated entirely from the Church of England. After a sojourn of about eleven years in the Netherlands, a group of these “separating Puritans,” known to us as “Pilgrims,” set sail for the New World. The Dutch were generally welcoming of these English dissenters because they shared the same faith and as the English were such hard workers, added to their booming economy. But the English grew distressed after a little more than a decade that their children were becoming more Dutch, than English. They couldn’t return to England where tension was thick between the Crown and Puritans. So they decided to set sail for the New World and try their fortune there. They established a colony at Plymouth in 1620 in what is now southeastern Massachusetts.While it struggled greatly, it eventually succeeded and became something of a model for other English settlements in the region.Back in England, when Archbishop Laud suppressed Puritans, emigration to the New World increased. As the Puritans’ relationship with the new king soured, a Puritan lawyer named John Winthrop began plans for a colony in New England. In March 1629, Winthrop obtained a royal charter to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A year later he was joined by 700 colonists on eleven ships and set sail.While aboard the Arbella, Winthrop preached a sermon declaring to his fellow travelers, “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” Others were soon captivated by this vision of a Christian commonwealth, and from 1630 to the beginning of the English Civil War, well over 20,000 Puritans settled in New England. “The Great Migration” had begun.These later Puritans were different from the Separatists Pilgrims of Plymouth. They regarded themselves as loyal members of the Church of England, now established in NEW England. They had the chance to install the reforms they’d ached to achieve back in England. They may have separated geographically, but not in loyalty to The Church of England.The New England Puritans held a vision, not just of a pure church, but of a purified society, one committed to Biblical principles, not just in church affairs but in all facets of public life. The idea of “covenant” between God and his people was at the center of their enterprise. Following the pattern of God’s covenant with Israel, they promised to obey God and in turn, He’d bless them. This is why one often encounters the terminology that Massachusetts was a kind of New Israel. That required strict observance of the Sabbath. Families were structured as “little churches,” with the father bestowing blessing for obedience and vice-versa.This social structure required public piety. It prohibited what was called “secular entertainments”, like games of chance, dancing around maypoles, horse racing, bear-baiting, and the theater. Christmas celebrations were regarded as pagan rituals. Puritans adopted a rich view of piety that at times became excessive and became à What’s the word? Let’s just call it, odd.Following the Pietist tradition, New England Puritans required a genuine public declaration of conversion as a condition for church membership. Problems arose when children, who’d grown up in pious homes and had always counted themselves as Born Again, to give testimony to their dramatic conversion event. That led to many of them being excluded from membership in the Church, which was the heart and center of social life in the New England town. Divisions erupted, leading Puritan minister Richard Mather to developed the so-called “Half-Way Covenant” to solve the problem. The Half-Way Covenant gave a kind of quasi-membership that included baptism but not Communion to the children of church members. Puritan leaders hoped this would expose “halfway members” to an example that would see them having their own “born again” experience and usher them into full membership.Some historians assert the Puritans aimed for a theocracy. While Winthrop was governor, he certainly wanted to base the colony’s laws on biblical principles, but he didn’t permit clergy in civil governing. Church officials had no authority over civil magistrates. Winthrop and government officials sought the advice of ministers, but political authority rested in the hands of the laity. Theocratic tendencies certainly existed, but the colony’s congregationalism restrained them. New England never had enough unity to be a theocracy.While a minority in England, Puritans were the majority in New England. A less careful recounting of American history would say they fled the Old World for the New to obtain religious liberty. Not really. They left so they could establish a PURITAN system of Church and State. There was no religious liberty as we conceive it today. Puritan New England was quite IN-tolerant of dissenters; like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchison.Historian Ed Morgan describes Roger Williams as a “charming, sweet-tempered, winning man, courageous, selfless, God-intoxicated — and stubborn.” Arriving in Boston just a year after Winthrop, he was quickly asked to be pastor of the local congregation. Williams refused. He was a staunch Separatist who vehemently disagreed with the Puritan connection to the Church of England. It stunned his neighbors that a man would turn down the invitation to be a pastor. This and other behaviors so infuriated the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they expelled him.Five years later, Williams settled at the tip of Narragansett Bay on land purchased from the Indians. He named the settlement Providence and declared religious freedom — the first colony in the world in which religious liberty for all was genuine. Infant baptism was banned since Williams believed baptism was for those old enough to make a real profession of faith. He established the first Baptist Church in America in 1638.The Hutchinsons, William and Anne, arrived in Massachusetts in 1634. They’d followed their minister John Cotton, pastor of a Boston congregation. Like many Puritans, the Hutchinsons hosted a group in their home to discuss Pastor Cotton’s sermon from the previous week. Anne excelled at breaking down the message into topics that were engaging. The group grew to upwards of eighty adults.Then, controversy arose when Anne began to argue that all people are under either a covenant of works or grace. She was reacting against the public piety of the people of Boston who assumed good works proved the presence of salvation. She posited that works and grace were opposites and those who depended on works were lost.But Anne crossed the line in 1637 when she denounced some ministers as preaching a Gospel of Good Works. Critics accused her of antinomianism; that is the idea that the elect don’t have to obey God. It didn’t help her case that a woman was teaching the Bible to men.Anne was called to give an account before the General Court. She was anything but contrite. Sparks flew when she proved more adept at citing Scripture than her judges. The die was cast when she said that her knowledge of the issue had come “by revelation.” The magistrates, already suspicious of her orthodoxy, seized on this to banish her from the colony.We’ll pick it up at this point and the infamous Salem Witch Trials in the next episode.

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 land following the Thirty Years War. It’s estimated the population shrank from twenty million to just seven after it. There’s also the issue of Germany not really being a country. It was at that time a collection of independent statelets, united by language and culture, but divided between Catholics and Lutherans.The low regard for contemporary culture at that time in Germany is illustrated by the fact that while Newton, Locke, and Voltaire were regarded as heroes in their realms, Germany’s equivalent, Gottfried von Leibniz, was never popular during his lifetime. Yet he was one of the most brilliant men, not just of his day, but of all time. Born in 1646 in Leipzig, Leibniz was the son of a professor of philosophy. He studied law before taking up with a disreputable group of alchemists and worked for the Elector of Mainz.Leibniz came to the attention of the world in 1672, when he was sent on an unofficial ambassadorial mission to Paris. The purpose of this trip was to present Louis XIV with a plan he’d worked out for the invasion of Egypt, by which he hoped to distract the Sun King from ambitions he might have toward Germany. Nothing came of Leibniz’s diplomacy,  although Napoleon seems to have adopted his strategy a century later. In any case, while in Paris, Leibniz took the opportunity to meet with all the luminaries in the foremost city of culture in Europe. He studied mathematics, quickly becoming one of the foremost mathematicians in the world, and made a number of important discoveries, including differential calculus, for which tens of thousands of students have hated him ever since. He also proudly demonstrated an extraordinary mechanical calculator he had built.Leibniz’s interests were so wide-ranging he could never keep his mind on what he was doing. In 1676, he became Court Chancellor of Hanover and was put in charge of the library. But he was more interested in the mines at Harz and spent several years devising increasingly ingenious devices to solve the problem of draining them. He eventually worked for several German states, as well as the cities of Berlin and Vienna, for which he designed a number of civic improvements. In his spare time, he traveled extensively around Europe, meeting other rationalist luminaries, and carrying out his work in mathematics, chemistry, physics, metaphysics, and theology. He produced hardly any books of importance, but his vast correspondence, much of which is still in the process of being edited and published, dwarfed the output of most of his contemporaries; and there cannot have been any subject, however obscure, with which he did not deal, and on which he was not an authority. Leibniz died in 1716, an increasingly marginalized figure, defiantly wearing his long brocade coat and huge wig which had gone out of style decades before.Despite Leibniz’s virtual single-handed attempt to kick-start the German Enlightenment, it didn’t get rolling until the 18th C. Prussia, the largest of the German states, took the lead, as its rulers sought to drag their country into the modern era. Frederick Wilhelm, who came to the throne in 1713, reformed the economy after staying with relatives in the Netherlands.Wilhelm, a careful Lutheran, had no love for Catholic France, but his son, Frederick II, known as Frederick the Great, was a quite different person than his father. Upon his accession to the throne in 1740, he set about building on his father’s practical reforms with a program of cultural renovation. Among his first acts as ruler was to recall from exile Christian Wolff, the leading German philosopher, and Leibniz’s heir. Frederick II’s enthusiasm for French culture meant the usual coldness between the two realms saw a remarkable thaw. French was even spoken in his court, and it was at his invitation Voltaire moved to Prussia in 1749. Frederick was also keen to bolster the position of Prussia in Europe, which he did by engaging in a series of wars between the 1740s and 60s.During the late 17th C, the Russian Czar Peter the Great traveled all over Europe on a mission to learn all he could about the Enlightenment. He was eager to see what impact it had had on the realms of culture, economics, and engineering. His plan was to return to Mother Russia and drag it, if need be, into the modern world.Although Western Russia geographically is considered a part of Europe, it had for centuries been isolated. It was ruled by the Mongols for much of the late Middle Ages and was a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, a separate denomination from the Catholics and Protestants in the West. Westerners knew virtually nothing about Russian religion, and Russians cared virtually nothing for the West.It’s hardly surprising that, when Peter returned home, he had to enforce his reforms with an iron hand if he was going to make headway. Beards, a revered symbol of Orthodoxy, were banned in an attempt to get people to look more Western. Young men were happy to comply, as many women preferred. But most older men kept their beards in boxes, fearing they were bereft of salvation without them. Traditional Russian dress, which reached the ankle, was banned. Everyone had to dress like the French, and anyone who refused had their clothes force-tailored. English hairstyles were mandatory for women. Schools were built, the calendar reformed, military conscription introduced, and church hierarchy was placed firmly under State control. Like Louis XIV’s France, Peter’s Russia was an avowedly Christian country. As a symbol of the new, Westward-leaning Russia, Peter transferred the capital to a new city, St Petersburg, on the Baltic coast.But Peter was hardly a model of Enlightenment tolerance. In 1718, he had his son tortured to death for treason. Still, his reforms were extended and completed by Catherine the Great, a Prussian who became Empress of Russia in 1762. She organizing a coup against her own husband. Unlike Peter, Catherine grew up in Western Europe and had thoroughly imbibed Enlightenment principles. She corresponded with Voltaire and other leading cultural figures; patronized the arts, and founded the famous Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Catherine was also a skilled diplomat, and as the most powerful monarch in Europe, extended Russian influence throughout the continent.Okay, so, you’re wondering how this is church history. I thought it wise to spend a little time charting the broad outlines of the Enlightenment so we could see how the thinking it produced affected theology.That happens with the advent of Rationalism.Rationalism reached its apex in the 18th and 19th Cs. It’s characterized by an interest in the physical world and its confidence in the powers of reason. In Western Europe, there’d been a growing interest in Nature since the 13th C. That was the era of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, who reintroduced Aristotelian philosophy as a tool for doing theology. One of the points of contrast between Aristotelianism and the earlier Platonism that dominated theological thought was precisely that the new philosophy emphasized the importance of the senses and perception. The later Middle Ages, with its distrust of speculation, continued in the same vein. The art of the Renaissance, with its appreciation for the beauty of the human body and the world, was an expression of this interest. By the 17th C, many thought the goal of reason was understanding the world of nature.Parallel to that, there appeared growing confidence in the powers of reason. Often, these two trends were combined in an effort to show the degree to which the order of nature coincides with the order of reason. This can be seen, for instance, in the work of Galileo, who was convinced the entire natural world was a system of mathematical relations, and that the ideal of knowledge was the reduction of all phenomena to their quantitative expression. Every success of such efforts seemed to confirm the most optimistic expectations of the power of reason.This all led to the philosophy of René Descartes in the first half of the 17th C. His system was based on great confidence in mathematical reasoning, joined to a profound distrust of all that is not absolutely certain. He compared his philosophical method to geometry, a discipline that accepts only what is an undeniable axiom or has been rationally proven.In applying his method, Descartes felt he ought to begin with an attitude of universal doubt, making sure that, once he found something he could not doubt, he would be certain of its truth. He then found that undeniable first truth in his own existence. He could doubt everything, but not that the doubting subject existed. “I think, therefore I am,” became the starting point for his philosophy. But this I whose existence cannot be doubted is only the subject as a thinker. The existence of his body wasn’t proven, so must be doubted.Before proving his existence as a body, Descartes felt he could, get this >> Prove the existence of God. He found in his mind the idea of a “more perfect being,” and since his mind could not produce such an idea, which was above itself, it must have been placed there by God. Therefore, Descartes’s second conclusion was that God exists. It was only then, on the basis of the existence of God, and of trust in the divine perfection, that Descartes felt free to move on to prove the existence of the world and of his own body.Descartes was a profoundly religious man who hoped his philosophy would be found useful by theologians. But not all agreed with him. Many theologians feared the challenge of Cartesianism—as his philosophy was called. The universal doubt Descartes proposed as his starting point seemed to some a kind of crass skepticism. The faculties of several universities declared Aristotelianism was the philosophical system best suited to Christian theology, and there were those who declared Cartesianism lead to heresy. Dismayed, Descartes decided to leave his native France. He moved to Sweden, where he lived the rest of his life.But he was not without supporters. In France, those intellectual circles where Jansenism had been popular embraced Cartesianism. Eventually, others among the more orthodox also took it up, and debates continued for a long time.The main point at which Cartesianism led to further theological and philosophical developments was the question of the relationship between spirit and matter, between soul and body. It’s at this point we could really get into a sticky wicket as we parse all the various ways theologians and philosophers offered ideas on the inter-relationship between the thinking self and the thing that occupies space in the form of a body. But we won’t go into the theories of Occasionalism, Monism, and Preestablished Harmony.Let me just say this became a realm of contentious debate between a Dutch Jew named Baruch de Spinoza and our friend Leibniz.While these philosophical developments took place on the Continent, in Britain, philosophy took a different route in what’s called Empiricism. It’s drawn from a Greek word meaning experience. Its leading figure was Oxford professor John Locke, we considered in the previous episode. In 1690, Locke published his Essay on Human Understanding. He read Descartes and agreed the order of the world corresponded to the order of the mind. But he didn’t believe there was such a thing as innate ideas to be discovered by looking inward. He contended that all knowledge is derived from experience; the experience of the senses, and the working of our minds. That meant the only genuine knowledge is based on three levels of experience: Experience of self, Experience of the world around us, and Experience of God, whose existence is manifest by the existence of ourselves and the world.To this Locke added another level of knowledge, that of probability. Probability works like this; You and I have repeatedly experienced someone’s existence; let’s call him George. We know George. He’s a friend we see a couple of times a week. When George isn’t standing in front of us, we still have reason to believe He exists, even though at that moment, we have no purely empirical basis to believe in his existence. Still, sound judgment gives us reason to discern the probability of George’s existence. Locke said that this judgment of probability allows us to get on with the practical affairs in life.Faith, Locke said, is assent to knowledge derived from revelation rather than reason. Therefore, although highly probable, knowledge derived by faith can’t be certain. Reason and judgment must be used in order to measure the degree of probability of what we believe by faith. For this reason, Locke opposed the “fanatical enthusiasm” of those who think that all they say is based on divine revelation. For the same reason, he defended religious toleration. Intolerance is born out of the muddled thinking that confuses the probable judgments of faith with the certainty of empirical reason. Besides, toleration is based on the very nature of society. The state does not have the authority to limit the freedom of its citizens in matters such as their personal religion.In 1695, Locke published a treatise, The Reasonableness of Christianity, in which he claimed Christianity is the most reasonable of religions. He said the core of Christianity is the existence of God and faith in Christ as Messiah. But Locke didn’t believe the Christian Faith had added anything of importance to what could, in any case, have been known by the proper use of reason and judgment. In the final analysis, Christianity was little more than a very clear expression of truths and laws that others could have known by their natural faculties.Others would come along later and drive a wedge between faith and reason, divorcing them into different camps. And in the settlement, Faith would be left impoverished while Reason drove off with all the goodies.One of those who drove the wagon was David Hume in the mid-18th C. In my estimation, Hume can be blamed for the post-modern tendency of knee-jerk negativity toward absolutes. An illustration may best help to describe his philosophy, or better, his anti-philosophy. Hume was skeptical of reason, saying the only reason, reason seems to work is because of mental habits we’ve developed. In other words, In Hume’s system, Descartes’ doubt didn’t go far enough; he ought to have doubted his own ability to reason.Hume maintained, for instance, that no one has ever experienced what we call cause and effect. We’ve seen, for instance, when a pool ball collides with another ball, there’s a noise and the second ball moves off in some direction. If we repeat that several times, we see similar results. So we conclude by the power of reason that the movement of the first ball caused the movement of the other. But, Hume contended, we’ve not seen any such thing. All we’ve witnessed is a series of phenomena, and our mind has linked them by means of the notion of cause and effect. This last step, Hume claimed, taken by any who see a series of phenomena that are seemingly related, has no basis in empirical observation. It is rather the result of our mental habits. So, by an empiricists’ definition, that’s not rational knowledge.Hume’s uber-skepticism places such strict rules on interpreting what our senses tell us, there’s no room left for the working of logic and deduction. He cripples us and turns his followers into inveterate skeptics.It wasn’t long until some Enlightenment thinkers washed their hands of faith altogether and began to envision a world without God or religion.We’ll talk about later developments in Philosophy and their impact on theology in a later episode.

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 Peace of Westphalia. But decades of bitter conflict left Europe a ravaged land. People were weary of conflict whatever its nature; political, religious, or martial. And though the War was over, the following decades were by no means peaceful. Among other things, they witnessed the English Civil War with its execution of Charles I, and yet more wars between European powers, albeit on a smaller scale. Against this turmoil-laden backdrop, a new spirit was brewing in Europe: one desperate to make a break with the past with its religious tension, dry scholasticism, incessant bickering and the numerous occult fetishes the Renaissance spun off. By the mid-17th C, the seeds of the Enlightenment were well sown.A new breed of thinkers inhabited a Continent quite different from their ancestors. At the dawn of the 16th C Europe was dominated by the resolute Catholic power of Spain. In 1492, Spain both ended the lingering presence of Islam and discovered the New World. Italy, while having little political power, exercised massive cultural influence due to its claim as the birthplace of the Renaissance.Fifty years later, everything had changed. Spain was exhausted by the 30 Years War and political hegemony had moved to France, finally free of the threat of its powerful neighbors, Spain and Germany.  The Netherlands, previously under Spanish rule, won their freedom with the Treaty of Westphalia and almost overnight became the world’s leading trade nation. Amsterdam was the exchange capital of the world, and the Dutch merchant fleet was the largest on the planet.The threat once posed by Islam was uprooted. Though Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, 40 years later saw the Spanish remove the last Muslim strongholds from the Iberian Peninsula.  In 1683, despite being outnumbered five to one, the Polish king Sobieski routed the Ottomans besieging Vienna.Europe was a land of independent nations: of trade and colonialism, and a rising middle-class. Instead of the hegemonies of the past, when a single power, whether emperor or pope, sought to govern the Continent, a new idea arose of a ‘balance of power’ between states—and between churches too. The Pope’s hand was declawed, even in Catholic countries, by the Treaty of Westphalia, which permitted every state to follow whatever religion it saw fit. Although France, the new dominant force in Europe, was mostly Catholic, it tended not to listen too closely to Rome. The Netherlands were strict Calvinists. It was a world in which the notions of nationhood, human rights, and law were going to play an increasingly important role, and they were going to be rethought along rationalist rather than religious lines.The most vaunted ideal of the Age of Reason was Reason itself: the human capacity, by means of investigation, rather than by relying on external authority, to, in a word = Understand. In the first half of the 17th C, two philosophers, the Englishman Thomas Hobbes and the Frenchman René Descartes pioneered a new way of understanding the world and the mind. Instead of the Neoplatonic world of the Renaissance, dominated by occult forces, where objects exerted mysterious ‘influences’ on each other, they sought to understand the world in mechanistic terms. The universe was conceived as a complicated system of levers, pulleys, and bearings. Given enough time and the proper intellectual tools, the cosmos was comprehensible to almost anyone who took the time to study it.At the same time, there was a desire to forget the old divisions of the past and embrace what was common to all humanity. One important movement of the time we’ll talk about later was ‘syncretism’, which sought to reunite the churches of Europe. A leading figure in this was the Dutch Reformed thinker Hugo Grotius, who contended Christians of all denominations should come together on the basis of their common faith and heritage. Grotius was arrested in The Netherlands and spent some years in prison until he made a daring escape and fled the country.Despite his work as a theologian, Grotius is most remembered as a legal theorist. His On the Law of Peace and War of 1625 was the first major study of the theory of international law. In it, he sought to place binding human laws—transcending national boundaries—on a naturalistic and rational footing. This vein of thought was the result of the application to philosophy and theology of the laissez-faire principles which nations like the Netherlands applied to economics with such remarkable success.It took eighty years of on-and-off warfare before the Netherlands finally achieved its independence from Spain in 1648. The country had already become a great trading nation, and during the 17th C entered a golden age, quickly becoming one of the most powerful nations in Europe. Culture, the arts, and science flourished, with the works of the 17th C Dutch painters quickly becoming classics to rank alongside the best the Italian Renaissance had produced.The Netherlands was (not “were” I looked it up. So, The Netherlands was - the premier bastion of the Reformed faith in Europe. It was there Calvinists who’d suffered persecution elsewhere, emigrated. Dutch theologians defined and refined their faith, a process that led to the Arminian controversy. And while the persecution of Arminians was carried out in the Netherlands, it was nothing compared to what the French and English were dishing out to their religious dissidents. The rule of merchants meant the Netherlands were renowned for tolerance—racial, philosophical, and national. It was to the Netherlands a substantial Jewish community, fleeing the persecutions of Philip II in Spain, had come. Charles II of England sought refuge there after his father’s execution. It was there, too, fringy-ish philosophers and theologians like Descartes and his disciple Spinoza, found sanctuary and carried on their work. In providing an environment in which their ideas could develop, free of interference, the wealthy mercantile ruling class of the Netherlands played a key role in the evolution of the Enlightenment in the 17th C.If one person could have claimed to be the most powerful man in the world in the late 17th C, it would have to have been Louis XIV of France. The ‘Sun King’ of legend ascended to the throne at the age of four, in 1643. He remained there until his death in 1715. When Cardinal Mazarin, effectively the prime minister, died in 1661, the 23-year-old king decided not to appoint a successor to run the country and did it himself. Whether or not he really uttered the famous words, “I am the State,” under his personal rule, France was established as a leading force for culture and enlightenment. The magnificent palace of Versailles, completed in 1682 after twenty years of construction, symbolized the spirit of the age. It was an era of formalism, geometry, beauty, and intellect. And where France led, Europe followed. Fifty years earlier, scholars spoke Latin. Now, French became the language of scholarship.At the same time, Louis did everything he could to extend France’s political power, which he achieved by means of an aggressive foreign policy. The wealth of the Netherlands, so close at hand, tempted him into a series of wars with the Dutch. In 1689, he plunged the world into a conflict that threatened a level of devastation not seen for a half-century. This was the War of the Grand Alliance, during which the fighting covered Europe, Ireland, and North America. Barely had that finished, in 1697, before Louis launched the War of the Spanish Succession of 1701–14, which left his grandson occupying the throne of Spain.The age over which Louis presided was an avowedly Catholic one. His favored slogan was “One faith. One law. One king.” The Catholicism of France at that time was nationalistic, rather than a papal. People were devoted to the Church more because of the ancient roots of Catholicism in France than out of a sense of duty to Rome. This came to be called ‘Gallicanism.’ One of its leading proponents in the court of the Sun King was Jacques Bossuet [BOO-sway], the Catholic bishop of Meaux [Muh].Despite the pacific influence of men like Bossuet, Louis XIV’s determination to unite his subjects under a single faith became heavily coercive. Of the roughly fifteen million inhabitants of France—the largest population of any European state—about a million were Protestants-Huguenots. Their freedom to worship was guaranteed by the Edict of Nantes of a half-century before Louis, but he saw to it that things were not easy for them. They suffered restrictions on where they could go, what professions they could take up, where they could worship, and what schools they could attend. In 1681, oppression became suppression, when the army was ordered to harass Huguenots until they converted. Four years later, the king revoked the Edict of Nantes.Little wonder, then, that a growing number of French intellectuals began to think religion didn’t seem to offer much of a basis for an enlightened modern society. It wouldn’t be long before some questioned the point of religion altogether. In the meantime, many were impressed by their Dutch neighbors who’d worked out a far more satisfactory social philosophy of reason and liberalism.England had a harder time than France. Politically, most of the 17th C was something of a disaster, involving civil war, a short-lived republic, the overthrow of two monarchs—a Revolution and the eventual coronation of the Dutch William of Orange as King of England; who was invited to invade by a Parliament desperate to secure a Protestant monarch.As England finally established some political stability, it fostered major intellectual developments that would put the country on a cultural par with France. British thinkers pioneered new ideas about government, politics, ethics, and economics; ideas that aimed to avoid the extremes absolutist monarchs such as Charles I and despots like Cromwell had slipped into. While the nations of the Continent developed an ever-higher reverence for their monarchs, the political and military struggles of 17th C England saw an erosion of the monarchy. The idea took hold that kings rule by consent of the governed, who retain the ability to judge and even remove him if they don’t approve of his policies.The process was started by Thomas Hobbes, who sought to create a new political theory that was rational and humanist, without any reliance on religion. In his famous Leviathan of 1651, Hobbes put forward the claim that government is based on natural law, not on divine sanction, and that a government exists only by the will of the people.The appearance of modern ‘liberalism’, is associated above all with John Locke, one of the most prominent British intellectuals at the turn of the 18th C. Locke is most famous for his political ideas, and his values of tolerance and liberalism, which would have an enormous impact in both America and France. Like Hobbes before him, Locke was determined to develop a new understanding of how society and its members operate and interact. He was inspired in this by the advances in science over the preceding century—climaxing in the work of Isaac Newton, revered throughout England as a genius, a new Aristotle. If the exercise of cool mathematical reason could produce Newton’s Principia, regarded by many as the final word in the study of physics, who could say what it might produce in other spheres as well?Locke’s attempts to do this in philosophy, psychology, politics, and religion resulted in his starting the English Enlightenment virtually single-handedly. Locke believed human reason should be the final arbiter of what we believe, in politics, ethics, and religion alike; and he believed the values of tolerance and individual liberty, of education and freedom, would provide the proper environment for the exercise of reason. This was the philosophy of the Enlightenment in a nutshell. Yet despite his enormous prestige at home, Locke’s influence was greatest in Continental Europe. French intellectuals were impressed by the commonsense political philosophy coming from across the Channel. Between them, Britain and France were responsible for the most characteristic trends and movements of the Enlightenment.If Hobbes was the Enlightenment’s midwife and Locke birthed it, the man who epitomized its values and dreams was François Marie Arouet [Ah-roo-eh]; known by his pen name, Voltaire. He was the dominant cultural force of his day, and the smiling figure he presents in contemporary paintings, with a wicked glint in his eye, conveys the intellectual power, wit, and irreverence that characterized his version of the Enlightenment.Born in 1694 in Paris, Voltaire was educated by the Jesuits and quickly became known for his satirical poetry and biting wit. His penchant for attacking the aristocracy saw him holed up in the Bastille for almost a year. That wasn’t enough to teach him what the authorities hope and in 1726, we was sent into exile. He spent three years in England learning the values of liberalism, rationalism, and religious tolerance. On his return to France in 1729, Voltaire set out to enlighten France by extolling the virtues of the British philosophers, above all Locke and Newton. In his Philosophical Letters of 1734, which he called ‘the first bomb against the Old Regime’, he compared France’s government, science, and philosophy unfavorably to England’s. And as might be expected, he was expelled once again from Paris. Voltaire headed for the French countryside, where he immersed himself in the study of the natural sciences. In 1749, at the invitation of Frederick the Great, he moved to Prussia for a few years. He eventually ended up in Switzerland, where he devoted himself to writing plays, essays, novels, and articles. His success was so great, and his influence so enormous, his estate became a place of pilgrimage to writers, philosophers, and the celebrities of the time. So popular was his home he became known as ‘the innkeeper of Europe’. In 1778, in order to direct one of his own plays, Voltaire returned to Paris to enormous acclaim and died shortly after.Voltaire devoted his life and work to the principles of reason and tolerance that he saw exemplified in British philosophy. His slogan was ‘Crush infamy!’ and to Voltaire, the most infamous institution in France was the Roman Catholic Church, an organization which in his eyes demanded loyalty from its members, which forced on them a ridiculous and barbarous mythology, and which put down dissenters with the sword. Voltaire was not an irreligious man, and was one of the foremost proponents of ‘deism.’ Yet he was notorious as an arch-heretic and enemy of Christianity for the contempt with which he held what he regarded as the superstitious and authoritarian elements of the Faith. Voltaire attacked the doctrines and practices of Christianity as mercilessly as he lampooned the secular rulers of society.There is a story that his local bishop once ordered that under no circumstances was Voltaire to be admitted to Mass. Voltaire, who had no intention of letting a mere bishop exercise authority over him, therefore faked a terminal illness and forced a priest to give him the sacrament, which could not be denied to a man on his deathbed. The moment he had consumed it, Voltaire jumped out of bed and went for a walk. The notion that one could eat God was as blasphemous to him as it was ludicrous, and mockery seemed to him the only appropriate response.At the time of his death, Voltaire had produced some two thousand books and pamphlets. Probably the greatest was his Philosophical Dictionary of 1764, devoted primarily to ethical and religious subjects. The fact that this work was burnt throughout France showed that few in authority had heeded his Treatise on Tolerance of the previous year, in which Voltaire had condemned the atrocities that had been perpetrated throughout history in the name of religion and called for the freedom of each individual to practice whatever religion they chose.Because Voltaire was such a towering figure, his celebrity tends to diminish the many others who shared his views, though with less aplomb. He was no iconoclast, no lone voice in the wilderness. On the contrary, while he may have been the loudest voice, it was accompanied by a chorus of French critics, writers, and philosophers, all of whom extolled reason and human progress and critical of the traditional authorities and mores. The first and most famous of these philosophes, as they were known, was Baron Montesquieu. His Persian Letters, published in 1721, took the form of a series of letters by two fictitious Persians traveling Europe. Montesquieu bitterly satirized the Establishment of his day: the French king, government, society and, above all, the Catholic Church, which Montesquieu hated for much the same reasons as Voltaire. However, Montesquieu’s attitude to Christianity softened over the years, and he was much more sympathetic to it in his most famous work, The Spirit of the Laws of 1748, which attempted to set out legal principles.One philosophe who never moderated his views was Baron d’Holbach, another French aristocrat. D’Holbach wasn’t only an atheist, which was a much more daring position than the deism of Voltaire; he believed atheism was the only possible basis for a reasonable ethical system. Politically, he opposed all kinds of absolutism, including even the enlightened monarchies of the sort Louis XIV had tried. Here again, we see the influence of British thought. In his System of Nature of 1770, d’Holbach set forth a wholly materialistic and mechanistic understanding of the world. It’s hard to imagine a more different figure from Bossuet a century earlier: such was the radical turnaround, from supporting religion to undermining it, that the French Enlightenment had taken.Next on our stop will be the German Enlightenment. But we’ll have to leave that for next time.

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 egregious violation of British rights. So in fear for his own life, he packed up his family and headed out of town.Back in London, John Pym, a leader of Parliament, ruled as a kind of king without a crown. The House of Commons proposed a law excluding the royalist faction of bishops in the House of Lords from Parliament. Other members of the House of Lords surprisingly agreed, so the clergy were expelled. This commenced a process that would eventually disbar anyone from Parliament who disagreed with the Puritans. The body took on an ever-increasing bent toward the radical. Feeling their oats, Parliament then ordered a militia be recruited. The king decided the time had come to respond with decisive action. He gathered loyal troops and prepared for battle against Parliament’s militia. Civil War had come to England.Both sides began by building forces. Charles’ support came from the nobility, while Parliament found it among those who’d suffered most in recent royal shenanigans. Parliament’s army came from the lower classes, to which were added some from the emerging merchant middle-class, as well as a handful of those nobles who’d not been in favor at Court. The king’s strength was the cavalry, which of course was traditionally the noble’s military specialty. The Parliamentary forces strength was in their infantry amd navy, which controlled trade.At the outset of the war, there were only minor skirmishes. Parliament sought help from the Scots, while Charles sought it from Irish Catholics. In its efforts to attract the Scots, Parliament enacted a series of measures leaning toward Presbyterianism. English Puritans didn’t agree with the Presbyterian plan for church government, but they certainly didn’t like the episcopacy of the Church of England’s royalist bishops. English Puritans ended up adopting the Presbyterian model, not only because it irked those Bishops, but because it made more Biblical sense at the time, and because confiscation of bishops’ property meant Parliament could fund the war without creating new taxes.Parliament also convened a groups of theologians to advise it on religious matters. The Westminster Assembly included 121 ministers, 30 laymen and 8 Scottish representatives. Being that the Scots had the strongest army in Great Britain, though they numbered only 5% of the total participants in the assembly, their influence was decisive. The Westminster Confession which they produced became one of the fundamental documents of Calvinist orthodoxy. Although some of the Assembly’s members were Independents who followed a congregational-form of government, and others still leaned toward an episcopacy, the Assembly settled on a Presbyterian church government, and urged Parliament to adopt it for the Church of England. In 1644, Parliament joined the Scots in a Solemn League and Covenant that committed them to Presbyterianism. The following year the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, was executed on the order of Parliament.As Parliament built up its army, Oliver Cromwell came to the fore. A relatively wealthy man, he descended from one of Henry VIII’s advisors. Oliver was a devoted Puritan, convinced that every decision, both personal and political, ought to be based on the will of God as revealed in Scripture.  Though he was often slow in coming to a decision, once set upon a course, he was determined to follow it through to its conclusion, believing it to be, in fact, God’s Will. Respected by fellow Puritans, until the Civil War he was simply known as a member of the House of Commons. But when he was convinced armed conflict was inevitable, Cromwell returned home where he recruited a cavalry corps. He knew cavalry was the king’s main weapon, and that Parliament would need their own. His zeal was contagious, and his small force accomplished great deeds. They charged into battle singing psalms, convinced they were engaged in a holy cause. That attitude spread to the rest of the Parliament’s army which crushed the royal army at the Battle of Naseby.That was the beginning of the end for the king. The rebels captured his camp, where they found proof he’d been asking foreign Catholic troops to invade England. Charles then tried to negotiate with the Scots, hoping to win them with promises. But the Scots took him prisoner and turned him over to Parliament. Having won the war, Parliament adopted a series of Puritan measures, including setting the precedent that Sunday was to be reserved for solemn religious observances rather than the frivolous pastimes increasingly being adopted by the English nobility and emerging middle-class.The Puritans, who’ had to unite due to war, now returned to what they best at, arguing among themselves. Most of Parliament supported a Presbyterian form of church govt, which made for a national church without bishops. But the Independents who made up the majority of the army leaned toward congregationalism. They feared a Presbyterian church would begin to limit their ability to pursue their faith the way their conscience demanded. Tension grew between Parliament and the army.In 1646, Parliament unsuccessfully tried to dissolve the army. Radical groups gained ground. A wave of apocalyptic fervor swept England, moving many to demand a transformation of the social order thru justice and equality. Parliament and the leaders of the Army began to square off with each other.Then è The king escaped. He opened negotiations with the Scots, the army, and Parliament, making contradictory promises to all three. Somehow he managed to gain support from the Scots by promising to install Presbyterianism in England. When the Scots invaded, the Puritan army defeated them, captured Charles I, and began a purge of those factions in Parliament they deemed inconsistent with the reforms they envisioned. Forty-five MPs were arrested. What remained was labeled by its enemies the Rump Parliament because all that was left was the posterior of a real parliament.The Rump Parliament began proceedings against Charles, accused of high treason and of having thrust England into a bloody civil war. The fourteen lords who appeared for the meeting of the House of Lords refused to agree to the proceedings. But the House of Commons carried on, and Charles, who refused to defend himself on the grounds his judges had no legal standing, was beheaded at the end of Jan, 1649.Now, I’m sure someone’s likely thinking, “Is this Communio Sanctorum or Revolutions?” Yeah, this doesn’t sound much like CHURCH history. It’s more English History. So what’s up? Well, it’s important we realize the roll Puritanism and Presbyterianism played in this period of English history. The Reformation had a huge impact on the course of events in the British Isles.Fearing the loss of their independence from England, the Scots quickly acknowledged Charles’ son Charles II, as their sovereign. And in the South, England descended into chaos among several factions all vying for powerThat’s when Cromwell took the reins. He commandeered the Rump Parliament, stamped out a rebellion in Ireland and the royalists in Scotland. Charles II fled to the Continent.When Parliament moved to pass a law perpetuating its power, Cromwell expelled the few remaining representatives, and locked the building.  Seemingly against his will, Cromwell had become master of the nation. He tried to return some form of representative government, but eventually took the title Lord Protector. He was supposed to rule with the help of a Parliament that would include representatives from England, Scotland, and Ireland. In reality, the new Parliament was mostly English, and Cromwell was the real government.He set out to reform both church and state. Given the time, his policies were fairly tolerant. Although he was an Independent, he tried to develop a religious system with room for Presbyterians, Baptists, and even advocates of episcopacy. As a Puritan, he tried to reform English society through legislation. These laws were aimed at keeping the Lord’s Day devoted to sacred rites, ending horse races, cockfights, the theater, and so on. His economic policies favored the middle-class at the expense of the nobility. Among both the very wealthy and the very poor, opposition to his rule, which is called the Protectorate, grew.Cromwell retained control while he lived. But his dream of a stable republic failed. Like the monarchs before him, he was unable to get along with Parliament—though his supporters kept his opponents from taking their seats. Since the Protectorate was clearly temporary, Cromwell was offered the crown, but refused it, hoping to create a republic. In 1658, shortly before his death, in a move that seems politically schizophrenic, Cromwell named his son as his successor. But Richard was most definitely not his father. He resigned his post.Parliament then recalled Charles II to England’s throne. This brought about a reaction against the Puritans. Although Charles at first sought to find a place for Presbyterians within the Church of England, the new Parliament opposed it, preferring a return to the bishops’ episcopacy. The Book of Common Prayer was reinstalled after being out of favor for several years, and dissenters were banned. But such laws weren’t able to curb the several movements that had emerged during the previous unrest. They continued outside the law until, late in that 17th C, toleration was decreed.In Scotland, the consequences of the restoration were more severe. With the episcopacy reinstalled in England, the staunch Presbyterianism of the North was challenged anew. Scotland erupted in riot. Archbishop James Sharp, prime prelate of Scotland, was murdered. This brought English intervention in support of Scottish royalists. The Presbyterians were drowned in blood.On his deathbed, Charles II declared himself a Catholic, confirming the suspicions of many that he’d been an agent of Rome all along and thus all the blood of Puritans and Presbyterians.  His brother and successor, James II, moved to restore Roman Catholicism as the official religion of his kingdom. In England, he sought to gain the support of dissidents by decreeing religious tolerance. But the anti-Catholic sentiments among the dissidents ran so strong they preferred no tolerance to the risk of a return to Rome. Conditions in Scotland were worse, for James II placed Catholics in positions of power, and decreed death for any who attended unapproved worship.After three years under James II, the English rebelled and invited William, Prince of Orange, along with his wife Mary, James’s daughter, to take the throne. William landed in 1688, and James fled to France. In Scotland, his supporters held on for a few months, but by the next year, William and Mary were in possession of the Scottish crown as well. Their religious policy was tolerant. In England, tolerance was granted to any who subscribed to the thirty-nine Articles of 1562, and swore loyalty to the King and Queen. Those who refused, were granted tolerance as long as they didn’t conspire against the crown. In Scotland, Presbyterianism became the official religion of State, the Westminster Confession its doctrinal norm.But even after the Restoration, the Puritan ideal lingered and greatly influenced British ethics. Its two great literary figures, John Bunyan and John Milton, along with Shakespeare, long endured among the most read of English authors. Bunyan’s most famous work, known by its abbreviated title Pilgrim’s Progress, became a hugely popular, and the subject of much meditation and discussion for generations. Milton’s Paradise Lost determined the way in which the majority of the English-speaking world read and interpreted the Bible.

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 course between religious conservatives who sought to retain as much of the ancient practices and beliefs as possible, and Reformers who believed the entire life and structure of the church ought to adjust to what they saw as a Biblical norm. During Elizabeth’s reign, that delicate balance was maintained though tensions surfaced repeatedly. Her strength and decisiveness managed to restrained both sides, barely.Elizabeth left no heir when she died in 1603. But she’d made arrangements for the succession to pass to James, son of Mary Stuart, already serving as king of Scotland. The transition was fairly smooth, bringing the House of Stuart to reign over England. James VI of Scotland became James I of England. He didn’t find ruling his expanded realm an easy matter. The English regarded him a foreigner. His plan to unite both kingdoms earned him determined opponents on both sides.Elizabeth’s reforms of England’s economic policies were bearing fruit, especially among the growing merchant class, who resented the James’ royalist policies favoring the nobility. But James’s greatest troubles were with Reformers who wanted to see the English church purged of all Romanish influences. They regarded James as standing in the way. His native Scotland had moved further along that Reformation Road under the work of John Knox. English Calvinists felt the time was ripe for similar changes in their land.These Reformers didn’t comprise a single group, nor did they agree on all matters. So it’s difficult describing them in general terms. One of the most influential groups was given the name Puritans because they insisted on the need to purify the Church. They opposed many of the traditional aspects of worship the Church of England retained; things like the use of the Cross as a symbol, priestly garments, and the celebration of communion on an altar. They differed over whether there even ought to be an altar; wasn’t a simple table good enough? And if a table, should it be placed so as not to give anyone the idea it WAS an altar. Things like this led to bitter disputes They may have left behind the Scholastic argument of how many angels can dance ion the head of a pin, but they argued over now less inconsequential issues as how much lace their ought to be in a collar.Puritans insisted on the need for a sober life, guided by the commands of Scripture, and abstinence from luxury and ostentatious displays of wealth. Since a great deal of the worship of the Church of England appeared to them as needlessly elaborate, this caused further objection to such worship. Many insisted on the need to keep the Lord’s Day sacred, devoting it exclusively to religious exercises and charity. They also rejected the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and the use of written prayers in general, declaring such led to insincerity, so that even the Lord’s Prayer, rather than a set of words to be repeated, was to be used as a model for prayer. They weren’t opposed to the use of alcohol, for most of them drank moderately, but they were quite critical of drunkenness. They were also critical of all they considered licentious; like the theater, because immorality was often depicted and because of the inherent duplicity required for acting. They considered it a kind of lying because someone pretended to be someone else.This tone of super-critical Puritanism would much later move HL Mencken to describe Puritanism as, “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.”A precise definition of Puritanism has been a matter much debate, due in part to its multifaceted influence in not only religious and theological matters but in its impact on England’s politics and society.Some of the difficulty in defining Puritanism comes from its caricatures that began in the 16th C. As with so many of the labels that have been attributed to movements in Church History, the word “Puritan” was originally a slam applied by critics. They considered Puritans to be peevish, censorious, conceited hypocrites. That reputation, once applied, stuck to them all the way to our day.In truth, there was a surprising diversity among Puritans. They shared a common theological confession, while differing on how the Church ought to be organized. Some Puritans thought the existing Anglican hierarchy of bishops was fine while others wanted to restructure the Church along more Presbyterian lines. Still others embraced a congregational form of church government. Some advocated separation from the established church, while others remained. Some were royalist, others revolutionary, even to the point of regicide. While Puritans differed in worship styles and expressions of piety, they ALL wanted the English Church to more closely resemble the Reformed churches on the Continent.Many Puritans were opposed to bishops. They argued that the highly-structured church hierarchy of the Church of England was a late invention, not found in the Bible. They said the Church ought to look to Scripture as its constitution not only for doctrine, but also in its organization and governance. Moderate Puritans responded that the Bible didn’t actually give a prescription for a specific form of Church government. What it had were principles that could be applied in different ways. Others insisted that the New Testament Church was ruled by elders called “presbyters.” Then others claimed each congregation ought to be independent. They were creatively dubbed “Independents.”Baptists rose mostly among this last group. One of their early leaders was John Smyth, an Anglican priest who decided the Church of England had not reformed far enough. He established an independent, and at that time, illegal, congregation. As it grew, Smyth and his followers fled to Amsterdam. There he continued his study of the Bible, and came to the point of refusing to use translations of the Bible in worship, for only the original text had absolute authority. At church, he would read Scripture in Hebrew or Greek, and translate the text as he preached. Partly through his study of Scripture, and partly through contact with Mennonites—whose pacifism and refusal to take oaths, he adopted—e eventually becoming convinced infant baptism was wrong. He then re-baptized himself with a bucket and ladle and proceeded to baptized his followers.The move of Smyth and his flock to Holland was financed by a wealthy lawyer named Thomas Helwys, who eventually broke with the ever-reforming Smyth. The breaking point of contention was over the taking of vows.  Smyth rejected any form of vow while, as a lawyer, Helwys considered them a necessary convention safeguarding social order. Helwys and his followers returned to England, where in 1611 they founded the first Baptist Church in England.Eventually, to really no one’s surprise, a disagreement arose among English Baptists over theological issues similar to those that had risen between Calvinists and Arminianists. Those who favored the Arminian-flavored path were called General Baptists while Calvinist-leaning Baptists were referred to as Particular Baptists.The balance Elizabeth maintained in the Church of England began to wobble under James. While its theology was moderately Calvinist, its worship and governance followed the older Roman order. Puritans feared a movement was under way to return to what they called “Romanism.”They didn’t trust the new king, whose mother was none other than the Catholic Mary Stuart, AKA Mary, Queen of Scots, who’d been executed by Elizabeth on the charge of treason in plotting to assassinate Elizabeth and take her throne. James didn’t, in fact, favor Catholicism though Puritans assumed he would and hoped to gain concessions. They were repeatedly disappointed. James’ goal was the same kind of absolutist monarchy then in place in France. In Scotland, his Presbyterian subjects hadn’t allowed him to reign as he wished. He thought his chances for absolutism were better in the South. To that end he strengthened the bishops of the English Church as a prop to his own power. He declared, “Without bishops, there is no king,” meaning monarchy is better supported by a hierarchical church structure.James’ religious policy was similar to Elizabeth’s. The Anabaptists were persecuted because James was offended by their egalitarianism that threatened to up-end the highly stratified English society. For goodness sake; we can’t have peasants thinking they’re as important as nobles. What a catastrophe if humble commoners mixed with blue bloods. So, the Anabaptists with their calling everyone “brother” and “sister” had to be repressed. They were; brutally. And Catholics, who thought James would be their guy, were regarded by him as agents of the Pope, who everyone knew wanted to get rid of James. James said if the pope acknowledged his right to rule and condemned regicide, which a few of the more extreme Catholics pushed for, James would tolerate the presence of Catholics in his realm. Presbyterians, whom the king had come to hate in Scotland, were barely tolerated in England. James did grant them minor concessions, but only to keep them from making trouble.Tension between Anglican bishops and Puritans grew to a boil during James’s reign. In 1604, Richard Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury, had a series of canons approved offensive to Puritans. One affirmed that episcopal hierarchy was an institution of divine origin, and that without it there could be no true church. This ostracized the many Protestant churches in Europe that had no bishops. Puritans saw it as provoking a showdown between themselves and the Church of England. Some assumed it was all preparation by the Church of England to reunite with Rome.James called Parliament to sit for the approval of new taxes to complete some of England’s projects. The House of Commons included many Puritans who joined others in an appeal to the king against Bancroft’s canons. James convened a committee at Hampton Court to consider the canons, over which he presided. When one of the Puritans made reference to the church being governed by a “presbytery,” James announced there would be no closer connection between the monarchy and a presbytery than there COULD be between God and the Devil. All attempts at compromise failed. The only result of meeting was that a new translation of the Bible was approved.  It appeared in 1611 and is known today as the KJV. Produced at a high-point in the development of the English language, along with the Book of Common Prayer—the King James Bible became a classic that profoundly influenced later English literature.But, this marks the beginning of a growing hostility between the House of Commons and the bishops of the Church of England.Late in 1605, what’s known as the Gunpowder Plot was discovered. A repressive law against Catholics was issued the previous year on the pretext they were loyal to the pope rather than the king. The real purpose of the law was to collect funds. Authorities used it to impose heavy fines and confiscate property. Catholics came to the conclusion the solution was to be rid of the king. A property was rented whose cellars extended below the room where Parliament met. Several wine barrels were filled with gunpowder and set under the room. The plan was to detonate them as the king opened Parliament. This would rid England of James and many Puritans leaders. But the plot was discovered; the conspirators executed. This unleashed a wave of anti-catholic sentiment in England that saw many arrested and imprisoned. James used the whole affair a way to lay heavy fines on Catholics and confiscate more property.After those first years of his reign, James tried to rule without Parliament. But English law stipulated it alone could approve new taxes. So in 1614, when his finances were desperate, James relented and again convened Parliament. New elections brought in a House of Commons even more stubborn than the previous. So James dissolved it and again tried to rule without it. He turned to the few tariffs he could levy without Parliament’s approval. He borrowed from bishops and nobility.Then the Thirty Years’ War broke out. Frederick, King of Bohemia, was James’s son-in-law. But James offered no support. English Protestants named James a traitor and coward. Je replied that he WANTED to help, but that the Puritans held the purse and war is expensive! Finally, in 1621, James re-convened Parliament, hoping the House of Commons would agree to new taxes with the proviso that some, at least, of the revenue would support German Protestants in the war. But it was discovered James planned to marry his son and the heir to England’s throne to a Spanish princess, a Catholic Hapsburg! Such an alliance was regarded by the Puritans as an abomination. So, James once again dissolved the House of Commons and arrested several of its leaders. The marriage plans were abandoned for other reasons, and in 1624 James once again called a meeting of Parliament, only to dissolve it anew without obtaining the funds he required. Shortly thereafter, he died, and was succeeded by his son Charles, who’d been a good student of his father’s routine with Parliament.English Puritans welcomed Charles I to his throne with less enthusiasm than they had his father. Charles said that kings are “little gods on Earth.” Puritans knew this didn’t bode well for their future relations. Nor did it help that Charles immediately married a Roman Catholic princess, Henrietta-Marie de Bourbon, raising the specter of a Catholic heir to the English throne.The relationship between the Crown and the mostly Puritan Parliament went from bad to worse. Puritan antagonism toward the King rose in 1633 when the King appointed William Laud as archbishop of Canterbury. Laud embarked on a policy of High Anglicanism with a strong sacramentalism and a theological slant toward Arminianism that tweaked the Calvinist Puritans.In what proved his undoing, Charles tried to impose on the Scottish Church the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in 1637, which one Scot called the “vomit of Romish superstition.” When a marketplace grocer named Jenny Geddes heard the dean of St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh read from the new prayer book, she stood up and threw her stool at him, yelling, “Devil cause you colic in your stomach, false thief: dare you say the Mass in my ear?”Yep – them Scots! Peaceful lot they are. Which, I get to say, because I am one.Jenny’s reaction was a foretaste of a brewing rebellion. Riots broke out in Edinburgh, and in early 1638, the Scottish formalized their opposition to King Charles innovation by establishing the National Covenant. Many signed it in their own blood, making it clear they’d die before submitting to Laud’s Anglicanism. Charles led two military campaigns, known as the Bishops’ Wars (1639–40), in an effort to quell the Scottish rebellion. Both were turned back.The Scottish army then occupied northern England and threatened to march south. In November, 1640 King Charles HAD to once again convene Parliament. Never had there been a body more hostile to the monarch. They immediately passed a law forbidding him to dissolve it without its consent. This came to be known as the “Long Parliament,” since it stayed in session for 20 years.Archbishop Laud was charged with treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London.The conflict between King and Parliament reached a boiling point. Charles was convinced Puritan members of Parliament had committed treason by conspiring with the Scots to invade England. Charles, accompanied by 400 soldiers, burst into the House of Commons in January 1642, planning to arrest them. But the men had been warned and fled. This attack on Parliament by armed troops was an egregious violation of British rights. Charles realized his error and a few days later, fearing now for his own safety, fled London.We pick it up at this point in our next Episode.

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 failed miserably in the second. Those who want to use religion for personal ends don’t care what face the mask bears, so long as it gets the job done. Some of the more devastating wars included the French wars of religion, the Dutch revolt against Philip II of Spain, the attempted invasion of England by the Spanish Armada, the 30 Years War in Germany, and the Puritan revolution in England.The 17th C was a time of theological and political entrenchment. European Christendom was now divided into four groups: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and the Anabaptists. The first three became officially associated with regions and their governments, while Anabaptists, after their disastrous failure at Munster, learned their lesson and sought to live out their faith independently of entanglements with civil authority. During the 17th C, Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed developed impenetrable confessional bulwarks against one another.As we saw in a previous episode, Catholic orthodoxy achieved its definitive shape with the Council of Trent in the mid-16th C. The Jesuits played a major role at Trent, especially in answering the challenge presented by Luther’s view on justification and grace. The Council affirmed the importance of the sacraments and the Roman church’s theological position on the Eucharist. At Trent, the Jesuits affirmed the importance Thomism, that is, the work of Thomas Aquinas, in setting doctrine. The triumph of Thomism at Trent set the future trajectory of Catholic theology.In the last episode, we looked at the rise of Protestant Scholasticism in post-reformation Europe. While Protestant orthodoxy is concerned with correct theological content, Protestant Scholasticism had more to do with methodology.From the mid-16th thru 17th C, Protestant orthodoxy clarified, codified, and defended the work of the early Reformers. Then, after the careers of the next generation of Reformers, it’s convenient to identify three phases orthodoxy moved through. Early orthodoxy runs from the mid-16th to mid-17th C. It was a time when Lutheran and Reformed groups developed their Confessions.  High orthodoxy goes from the mid- to late 17th C. This was a time of conflict when the Confessions hammered out earlier were used as a litmus test of faith and formed battlelines to fight over. Late orthodoxy covers the 18th C, when the people of Europe began to ask why, if Protestant confessions were true, rather than leading to the Peace the Gospel promised, they lead instead to war, death, and widespread misery.In truth, people had been asking that question for a lot longer than that; ever since the Church and State became pals back in the 4th C. But it wasn’t till the 18th they felt the freedom to voice their concerns publicly without the certainty they’d be set on by the authorities.As Protestants and Catholics identified their differing theological positions, they became increasingly mindful of their methodology in refining their Confessions. Each appealed to the intellectual high ground, claiming a superior method for defining terms and reasoning. This was the age when there was a return by Christian theologians to Aristotelian logic.Once the Council of Trent concluded and the Roman Church fixed its position, the opportunity for theological dialogue between Protestants and Catholics came to a firm end. After that it was simply up to the various major groups to fine tune their Confessions, then fire salvos at any and everyone who differed. It was the Era of Polemics; of diatribes and discourses disparaging those who dared to disagree.In a previous episode we dealt with the career of Jacob Hermanzoon; AKA Jacobus Arminius. Arminius rejected the Calvinism promulgated by Calvin’s protégé Theodore Beza. Arminius’ followers developed what they called the Remonstrance, a five-part summary of what they understood Arminius’ positions to be on key issues of Reformed Theology. A theological and, wouldn’t you just know it, political controversy ensued that was addressed at the Synod of Dort. The Synod declared Arminius a heretic, the Remonstrance in error, and the five-petals of the Calvinist Tulip were framed in response to the five-points of the Remonstrance. A few Arminianist leaders were either executed or jailed while some two-hundred pastors were removed and replaced with Dort-aligned ministers. Despite this, the Arminianist-position endured and continued to hold sway over the conscience of many.A couple decades after the Synod of Dort, another controversy surfaced among Reformed churches in France. It centered on the work of the brilliant theologian Moses Amyraut, professor at the then famous School of Samur. Amyraut took issue with one of the articles of the Canons of Dort, the doctrine of limited atonement. He argued for unlimited atonement, believing that Christ’s atonement was sufficient for all humanity, but efficient only for the elect. His view is sometimes known as “Hypothetical Universalism” far more commonly as four-point Calvinism.In A Short Treatise on Predestination published in 1634, Amyraut proposed that God fore-ordained a universal salvation through the sacrifice of Christ for all but that salvation wouldn’t be effectual unless appropriated by personal faith.Amyraut’s modification of Calvinism came to be labeled as Amyraldism and led to recurring charges of heresy. Amyraut was exonerated, yet opposition endured in many churches of France, Holland, and Switzerland.Sadly, after Luther’s death, the movement that bore his name fell into disarray and in-fighting. Lutherans broke into 2 main camps. Those who claimed to stay strictly loyal to Martin, and those who followed his cheif assistant, Philip Melancthon. They remained at something of a theological stalemate until the Formula of Concord in 1577, the definitive statement of Lutheran orthodoxy. Much of the destruction of the Thirty-Years War took place on German soil. Agriculture collapsed, famine spread, and universities closed. By the end the war, there were at least 8 million fewer people in Germany.The Peace of Westphalia made room for Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, depending on the religious leaning of the ruler. Weary of bloodshed, the three communions withdrew behind polemic-firewalls. Instead of firing cannonballs at each other, they lobbed theological word-bombs.Pietism was a kind of war-weary reaction to the new scholasticism the theology of Lutheranism settled into. Pietists viewed what was happening in the retrenchment in Lutheran theology as a “deadening orthodoxy” that stole the life out of faith. Pietism didn’t set out to establish a new church. It simply sought a renewal that would turn dead orthodoxy in a living faith. Pietism saw itself as an Ecclesiola in Ecclesia, that is, “a little church within the larger church.”It seems Pietism has been loaded with a lot of emotional baggage and negative connotation of late. Critics today regard Pietists as aiming to privatize their faith, to withdraw from the public square and divorce faith from the wider world. To use Jesus’ term, they see pietism as an attempt to hide you light under a basket, to put the city, not just in a valley, but in a cave. While some Pietists did privatize faith, that wasn’t the goal of Pietism.It was a movement that simply sought to keep piety, the practice of godliness, as a vital and integral part of daily life. It was understood that godliness wasn’t the result of rules and regulations but of a genuine relationship with God. Pietism was a reaction to the dead orthodoxy of the State-approved Lutheranism of the early 17th C.This is not to say scholastic theologians were all lifeless profs. Some of them produced moving hymns and stirring devotional writings. But, if we’re honest, we’d have to say the practical faith of a large portion of Protestant scholastics had indeed become moribund.Philipp Jakob Spener is known as the “Father of German Pietism.” Born at Rappoltsweiler in 1635, Spener was raised by his godmother and her chaplain, Joachim Stoll who became Spener’s mentor. Stoll introduced him to writings of the English Puritans.Spener went on to study theology at Strasbourg, where his main professor was Johann Dannhauer, a leading Lutheran theologian of 17th C. Dannhauer deeply inspired the young Spener.When he entered his first pastorate in Frankfurt in 1666, Spener was convinced of the necessity of a reformation within Lutheranism. His sermons emphasized the necessity for a lively faith and holiness in daily life. His most significant innovation was the establishment in 1670 of what today we’d call small groups. These were gatherings of about a dozen church members in homes to discuss sermons, devotional reading, and mutual edification.In 1675, Spener was asked to write a preface for a collection of sermons by Johann Arndt. The result was the famous Pia Desideria (= Pious Wishes), which became an introduction to German Pietism.While this is a bit more detailed than our usual fare here on CS, I thought it might be interesting to hear the main points Spener made in the Pious Wishes.He enumerates 6 things as important for the Church to embrace. . .1) He called for “a more extensive use of the Word of God.” To that end, Spener advocated small groups to encourage greater study of the Bible.(2) He urged a renewed focus on the role of the laity in Christian ministry.(3) He placed an emphasis on the connection between doctrine and living.(4) He counseled restraint and charity in theological disputes.(5) He urged reform in the education of ministers. They ought to be trained in piety and devotion as well as academics.(6) He said preaching ought to edify and be understandable by common folk, rather than sermons being technical discourses only an educated few could understand.Spener’s Pious Wishes won him many followers, but aroused strong opposition among Lutheran theologians and not a few fellow pastors. Despite criticism, the movement grew rapidly.Pietism had the good fortune of seeing Spener succeeded by August Francke. Francke was born in Lübeck and graduated from the University of Leipzig, where he excelled in biblical languages. While a student in 1687, he experienced a dramatic and emotionally charged conversion, which he described as the “great change.” Francke’s conversion became something of a model for Pietism. In order for conversion to be considered legitumate, it needed to be preceded by a profound conviction of sin that’s a datable event to which one can point for confirmation.Returning to Leipzig, Francke led a revival in the college that spilled over into the town. It provoked conflict, and Francke was expelled from the city. At this point the term “Pietist” was first coined by a detractor, Joachim Feller, professor of rhetoric at the university. A Pietist, Feller asserted, was “someone who studies God’s Word and, in his own opinion, also leads a holy life.”By this time, Francke had become closely associated with Spener. It was due to Spener’s influence Francke was appointed to the chair of Greek and Oriental languages at the new University of Halle. Francke emerged as the natural successor to Spener. From his position at Halle he exercised enormous influence in preparing a generation of Pietist pastors and missionaries all over the world. Under his guidance, the university showed what Pietism could mean when put into practice. In rapid succession, Francke opened a school for poor children, an orphanage, a home for indigent widows, an institute for the training of teachers, a medical clinic, a home for street beggars, a publishing house for Christian literature, and the famous Paedagogium, a preparatory school for upper-class students.For 36 years his energetic endeavors established Halle as the center of German Pietism. Together, Spener and Francke created a true Ecclesiola in ecclesia.Spener and Francke inspired other groups of Pietism. Count Nikolas von Zinzendorf, was Spener’s godson and Francke’s pupil. Zinzendorf organized refugees from Moravia on his estate and later shepherded them in reviving the Bohemian Unity of the Brethren.The Moravians carried their concern for personal piety literally around the world. This was of huge significance for English Christianity when John Wesley found himself in their company during his voyage to Georgia in 1735. What he witnessed in their behavior and heard in their faith after returning to England led to his own spiritual awakening.

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 church in Amsterdam, created a stir among his Calvinist colleagues. It was while teaching a series of sermons on the Book of Romans that Arminius became convinced Beza had several things wrong. The implication was that because Beza was Calvin’s successor and the standard-bearer for Calvinism, Arminius contradicted Calvin. Things came to a head when Arminius’ colleague Peter Planck began to publicly dispute with him.Arminius hated controversy, seeing it as a dangerous distraction to the cause of the Gospel and pressed for a synod to deal with the matter, believing once his views were set alongside Scripture, he’d be vindicated.In 1603, Arminius was called to the University at Leiden to teach when one of the faculty members died. The debate Arminius had been having with Planck was shifted to a new controversy with one of the other professors at Leiden, François Gomaer.This controversy lasted the next six yrs as the supporters of both Calvinism and Arminius grew in number and determination. The synod Arminius had pressed for was eventually held, but not till nine years after his death in 1609.In the meantime, just a year after his death, Arminius’ followers gathered his writings and views and issued what they regarded as a formal statement of his ideas. Called the Five Articles of the Remonstrants, or just the Remonstrance, it was a formal proposal to the government of Holland detailing the points of difference that had come to a head over the previous years in the debate between Arminius and Gomaer.Those 5 points were –That the divine decree of predestination is conditioned on Faith, not absolute in Election.That the intent of the Atonement is universal;Man cannot of himself exercise a saving faith;That though the grace of God is a necessary condition of human effort it does not act irresistibly in man; and finally -By the enabling power of the Holy Spirit, believers are able to resist sin but are not beyond the possibility of falling from grace. In 1618, the Dutch Church called the Synod of Dort to answer the Remonstrance. The results of the Synod, called the Canons of Dort, strongly upheld Theodore Beza’s formulation of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and developed their own five-point response to the Remonstrance.It comes as a major surprise to most students of Church history to learn that TULIP, or the famous Five Points of Calvinism were a RESPONSE to the challenge of Arminianists; that they’d come up with their 5 points first. Most people who’ve heard of Calvinism and Arminianism have never even heard of the Remonstrance; yet it’s the thing that formalized the debate between the two camps; a debate that’s continued to today and has led to some prolific arguments and controversies among Christians.Put a Presbyterian elder and Methodist deacon in a room together and let the fun begin!Now, lest we think the Protestants fell out in the Calvinist-Arminianist brouhaha while the Catholics sat back, ate popcorn and watched the show, realize things were FAR from being all united and just one big happy family over in the Roman sector of the Church. Catholics were no monolithic entity at this time. It was a mixed bag of different groups and viewpoints with their own internal disagreements.In the late 16th and early 17th Cs there was a long dispute between the Jesuits and the Dominicans over how divine grace and human free-will interacted.In the late 17th C, Pope Innocent XI, spent his reign playing a power game with Louis XIV and the Gallic theologians who believed in the authority of the Church, but not the Pope.More serious was the rise of Jansenism. This movement grew out of the work of   Cornelius Jansen, a professor at Louvain University. Jansen published a book in 1640 titled Augustinus, in which he stated what he believed were the doctrines of Augustine. Jansen sounded a lot like Calvin and argued that divine grace can’t be resisted, meaning it overrides the human will. He fiercely opposed the doctrine of the Jesuits that salvation depended on cooperation between divine grace and human will. So, the Jansenists believed in predestination, which meant that although they were Catholics they were in some ways more like Calvinists.Jansenism proved a thorn in the side of the Catholic Church, and especially the Jesuits, for quite a while. Its leading exponent after Jansen himself was Antoine Arnauld, an intellectual and cultural giant of the 17th C. Arnauld corresponded with such philosophical luminaries as Descartes and Leibniz. He possessed a penetrating critical faculty; and as a theologian he was no less brilliant.But back to our previous theme, stated at the beginning of the last episode – Protestant Scholasticism, or the Age of Confessionalism, in which the various branches of the Protestant church began to coalesce around distinctive statements of their theology.The Anglican Church of England occupied a curious position in the midst of all this. On the one hand it was a Protestant church, having been created in the 1530s when King Henry VIII took command of the existing Catholic Church in England. The Lutheran sympathies of his advisers, like Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, influenced the new church, but so too did the Catholic tendencies of later monarchs like Charles I and churchmen such as William Laud. Unlike other churches throughout Europe, the Church of England rarely had to struggle for the soul of its nation with another movement. So it had never been forced to define its beliefs and practices in the face of opposition to others. By the turn of the 18th C, the one thing all Anglicans agreed on was a shared distrust of Roman Catholics.The doctrinal openness of the Church of England meant that it was in England that religious free-thinking had the greatest chance of taking root. In the late 16th C it was still possible to be burnt at the stake in England for denying the Trinity, but a C later those who asserted such things had no need to fear anything more damaging than government censure and a deluge of refutations by the clergy. The Church of England prided itself on its doctrinal orthodoxy, understood in terms of common sense, and a middle way between what were regarded as the bizarre excesses of continental Protestants and Catholics. This middle way was based on what its followers felt was a healthy respect, but refusal to fawn, for tradition. This took shape in the principle of the apostolic succession, an ancient Christian notion we’ve examined in previous episodes. Apostolic succession claims that Christian doctrines can be known to be trustworthy because they are taught in churches which were founded by the apostles or their immediate followers. In other words, great trust was placed in the notion of an unbroken chain of tradition going back to the apostles themselves. It was this ‘apostolic succession’, together with the Scriptures, themselves handed down as part of this authoritative tradition, that mainstream Anglicans felt guaranteed the trustworthiness of their church. By contrast, many thought, the Catholics had added to that tradition over the centuries, while the more extreme Protestants had subtracted from it.There was considerable tension between the churches. The worst example was France, where after the Revocation of the Treaty of Nantes in 1685 Protestants were an actively persecuted minority: they felt especially threatened by surrounding Catholics, and all the more determined never to give in to them. Persecution only strengthened their resolve and inspired sympathy from Protestants throughout the Continent, who by the same token became increasingly hostile to Catholicism.In England, Catholicism was the minority faith: officially banned, its priests had to operate in secrecy.There’s a story from this time of a Catholic bishop who, functioning as a kind of religious spy, held Mass in an east London pub for a congregation of Irish workers disguised as beer-guzzling patrons.Many people were scared of Catholics, whom they regarded as tools of a foreign power; those sneaky French or the Pope. There was also great suspicion of ‘Dissenters’—members of any churches other than the Church of England. ‘Dissenters’ and Catholics alike, it was feared, were eating away at the social fabric of the country, and the policies of tolerance followed by the Whig party were opposed by many. Some Anglican churchmen formed a party with the slogan ‘Church in Danger’, which spent its time campaigning against Catholics, Dissenters, deists, the principle of toleration and, essentially, everything that the Enlightenment had produced.In 1778, the English Parliament passed the Catholic Relief Act, which decriminalized Catholicism—to the enormous anger of a sizeable minority in the population. Two years later a Scottish aristocrat named Lord George Gordon led a huge mob to London, resulting in a week of riots in which Catholic churches were looted, foreign embassies burnt, and nearly 300 people were killed.But we ought not think it was all petty small-mindedness that ruled the day. There were some who worked tirelessly to effect peace between the warring camps of Christendom. In the 17th C, a number of attempts were made to open a dialogue between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches with the aim of reuniting them.The godfather of this endeavor, sometimes known as ‘syncretism’, was a German Lutheran theologian named George Callixtus. He devoted huge effort in the early 17th C to find common ground between the different groups. Like his contemporary Hugo Grotius in the Reformed Church, he believed it should be possible to use the Apostles’ Creed, and a belief in the authority of the Bible alone, as a basis for agreement among Christians.Callixtus made progress with Calvinists but the Catholics were less receptive. The Conference of Thorn, called by King Vladislav IV of Poland in 1645, attempted to put these ideas into practice, but after several weeks of discussions the Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist theologians were unable to pull anything substantive together.Sadly, Callixtus’s efforts met with the greatest opposition from his fellow Lutherans.Let’s turn now from the acrimony and controversy that marked Protestant Scholasticism for a moment to take a look at a guy more like the rest of us; at least we probably hope so.He was an obscure, uneducated Frenchman of the late 17th C.Nicolas Herman, a manservant from Lorraine, tried to live his life around what he called ‘the practice of the presence of God’. He was not a very good manservant, having a pronounced limp from his army days and appallingly clumsy; but he performed his duties diligently until 1651, when, at the age of 40, he went to Paris and became a Carmelite monk. His monk’s name was Lawrence of the Resurrection.Brother Lawrence was put to work in the monastery’s kitchen—a task he hated, but which he did anyway because it was God’s will. To the surprise of the other monks, he not only did his work calmly and methodically, but spoke to God the entire time. Brother Lawrence declared that, to him, there was no difference between the time for work and the time for prayer: wherever he was, and whatever he was doing, he tried to perceive the presence of God. As he wrote to one of his friends:“There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful, than that of a continual conversation with God: the only ones who can understand it are those who practice and experience it. But I do not advise you to do it from that motive. It is not pleasure which we ought to seek in this exercise, but let us do it from a principle of love, and because God would have us. If I were a preacher, I would, above all other things, preach the practice of the presence of God. And if I were a spiritual director, I would advise all the world to do it. That is how necessary I think it is—and how easy, too.”Brother Lawrence became a minor celebrity among the hierarchy of the French Catholic Church, and he was visited by more than one archbishop, anxious to see if the reports of his humility and holiness were true. Lawrence’s sixteen Letters and Spiritual Maxims testify of his sincere belief in God’s presence in all things and his trust in God to see him through all things. They also testify to the way in which holy men and women continued to devote themselves to God’s will, both in and out of monasteries, even as the intellectual revolutions of the Enlightenment were at their height.It’s easy when considering the Age of Reason, to suppose theology was increasingly being seduced by philosophy, and that the simple, heartfelt faith of the commoners of the Middle Ages and the Reformation was being replaced by rationalism. That was true in some quarters, but the 17th and 18th centuries had their share of sincere and pious saints, as well as heretics, as much as any age; and there were some important movements that recalled the faithful to a living and wholehearted religion. As the theologians bickered, ordinary Christians were getting on with things, as they always had.As we bring this episode to a close, I want to end with a look at Blaise Pascal. That’s a great name, isn’t it? Blaise. Sounds like a professional skateboarder.Pascal was a Jansenist, that is, a member of the Roman Catholic reform movement we took a look at a moment ago. While the Jansenists began as a movement that sought to return the Roman Church to the teachings of Augustine, since Augustine’s doctrines were considered as being based in Scripture, the Jansenists were a Roman Catholic kind of back to the Bible movement.A few days after Blaise Pascal’s death, one of his servants noticed a curious bulge in the great scientist’s jacket. Opening the lining, he withdrew a folded parchment written by Pascal with these words . . .The year of grace 1654. Monday, November 23rd.,… from about half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. >> Certainty, certainty, feeling, joy, peace. >> God of Jesus Christ, I have separated myself from Him. I have fled from Him, Renounced Him, crucified Him. May I never be separated from Him. Renunciation, total and sweet.For eight years Pascal had hid those words in his coat, withdrawing them now and again to read them and be reminded of the moment when grace seized his soul.Pascal’s mother died when he was only three. His father, Stephen Pascal, began the education of his children, Gilbert, Blaise, and Jacqueline. Occasionally he took the young Blaise with him to meetings of the Academy of Science. The youth’s scientific curiosity was aroused.Before he reached the age of 27 Pascal had gained the admiration of mathematicians in Paris; had invented the calculating machine for his father who was a busy tax-collector; and had discovered the basic principles of atmospheric and hydraulic pressures. He belonged to the age of the Scientific Greats.Blaise’s initial contact with the Jansenists came as the result of an accident his father had. On an icy day in January, 1646, Stephen tried to prevent a duel. He fell on the hard frozen ground and dislocated a hip. The physicians who treated him were devoted Jansenists. They succeeded not only in curing their patient but in winning his son to their doctrines.They told the Pascals physical suffering was an illustration of a basic religious truth: man is helpless; a miserable creature. Blaise had seldom enjoyed a day without pain. He knew how helpless physicians could be, so the argument struck him with unusual force. It deepened his sense of the tragic mystery of life.He also learned from these Jansenist physicians how profoundly the Bible speaks to the human condition. He became an avid student of Scripture, pondering its pages as he had atmospheric pressures. He came to see the Bible as a way to a transformed heart.In 1651, Pascal’s personal tragedy deepened with the death of his father. The loss brought him to a crisis. His sister, Jacqueline, renounced the world by entering the Port-Royal convent, and Blaise was left alone in Paris.He now gave himself to worldly interests. He took a richly furnished home, staffed it with servants, and drove about town in a coach drawn by four horses; an extravagance. He pursued the ways of elite but decadent Parisian society. After a year of pleasure he found only a “great disgust with the world,” and he plunged into quiet desperation. He felt abandoned by God.Blaise turned again to the Bible, to the 17th ch of the Gospel of John, where Jesus prepares for His sacrifice on the cross. It was then that Pascal felt a new blaze of the Spirit. As he wrote, “Certainty, certainty, feeling, joy, peace.”Pascal’s new faith drew him magnetically into the orbit of the Jansenists. Late in 1654, he joined his sister, Jacqueline, as a member of the Port-Royal community. He was then asked by one of the Jansenist leaders for assistance in his defense against the attack of the Jesuits.Pascal responded brilliantly. He penned eighteen Public Letters exposing Jesuit errors in flashes of eloquence and sarcastic wit. As each letter appeared, the public snatched them up. They were instant best-sellers. Port-Royal was no longer an obscure Jansenist monastery; it was a center of public interest. The Pope condemned the Letters, but all educated French read them, as succeeding generations did for the next two centuries.Upon completing the Letters in March, 1657, Pascal planned a book on the evidences for Christianity. He was never able to complete it. In June, ‘62, he was seized with a violent illness and, after lingering a couple months, died on August 19 at the age of just 39.Friends found portions of his writing on faith and reason, and eight years after his death they published these notes under the title Thoughts (Pensées-Pahn’-sees). In the Pensées, Pascal is a religious genius who cuts across doctrine and pierces to the heart of man’s moral problem. He appeals to the intellect by his passion for truth and arouses the emotions by his merciless descriptions of the plight of man without God.Man, Pascal said, is part angel and part beast; a Chimera. In Greek mythology the chimera was a she-goat with a lion’s head and a serpent’s tail. Pascal wrote, “What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! The glory and refuse of the universe. Who shall unravel this confusion?”Reason, as great a faculty as it is, is no sure guide, Pascal warns. If we trust reason alone, we will doubt everything except pain and death. But our hearts tell us this cannot be true. That would be the greatest of all blasphemies to think that life and the universe have no meaning. God and the meaning of life must be felt by the heart, rather than by reason. It was Pascal who said, “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.”He saw the human condition so deeply yet so clearly that men and women in our own time, after three centuries, still gain perspective from him for their own spiritual pilgrimage.

The title of this episode, is Faith in the Age of Reason.  Part 01After 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 16th to the later 17th C and is referred to by church historians as the Age of Confessionalism. But “confession” here isn’t the personal practice of piety in which someone admits error. Confessionalism is the term applied to how the various Protestant groups were increasingly concerned with defining their own beliefs, their confessions, in contrast to everyone else. It resulted in what is sometimes referred to as Protestant Scholasticism, called this because the churches developed technical jargon to describe their doctrinal positions ever more accurately—just as medieval Roman Catholic scholastics had done three Cs before.Don’t forget; Roman Scholasticism helped spark the Reformation. It was the scholastics devotion to correct theology that highlighted the doctrinal and practical errors many in the Church began to call for reform over. But it was also the tendency of some Scholastics to forsake practical theology in favor of the purely hypothetical that fueled the Reformation’s drive to return the practice of faith to everyday life and made religion the sphere, not just of academics and sequestered clerics, but the common people.So, we might conclude Protestant churches were now headed down the same path with their own version of Scholasticism. And in some cases, that’s what happened. But instead of turning a theology back to Scripture as the Protestant Reformation had done in reaction to Roman Scholasticism, the reaction to Protestant Scholasticism was a decided turn away from Scripture to a decidedly irreligious philosophy.Many of the discussions of the Protestant Scholastics became dry and technical. Martin Luther sought to overturn centuries of medieval religious jargon and get back to the original message of the NT. John Calvin is often thought of as a more ‘systematic’ theologian, but his Institutes of the Christian Religion, though carefully arranged by topics, was intended to be no more than a faithful exposition of Scripture.Luther’s and Calvin’s heirs, however, went beyond their intended simplicity. They didn’t abandon the Reformation principle of Sola Scriptura, but they sought answers to questions not found in the Bible. A prime example was the issue of predestination and the relation between grace and free will—which, at the start of the 17th C was THE hot theological topic among Protestants and Catholics. A new kind of scholasticism was produced with some Protestant theologians happy to use the terminology of Aristotle and regarding the premier Roman Catholic Scholastic Thomas Aquinas as an authority.One of the key figures of this era was Theodore Beza, an aristocratic Frenchman who, although only ten yrs younger than Calvin, outlived him by forty and was widely regarded as Calvin’s successor. It was Beza, rather than Calvin, who was regarded by most Reformed theologians of the 17th C as the theological authority. He was especially good at recasting the terminology of Aristotle and the medieval scholastics in disputing with his opponents, who were most often Lutherans and Catholics.Beza defined the doctrine of predestination and its role in Reformed theology. In doing so, he developed the doctrine of ‘double predestination’, the notion that God deliberately predestines the reprobate to damnation and the elect to salvation. He put forward the ‘prelapsarian’ position, which says God planned the Fall and the division of humanity into elect and reprobate before Adam sinned. These ideas were present in germ-form in Calvin, but weren’t the touchstones of Reformation orthodoxy they later become.Beza was an eloquent author. That can’t be said of all who took up their pens in the service of the Lutheran and Reformed cause. In place of Luther’s and Calvin’s attempts to simply expound what Scripture said about doctrine and theology, the Protestant Scholastics were all about logical consistency and adherence to a pre-established orthodoxy.The Age of Confessionalism is often thought of as a time when theologians conducted a war of words with sharp pens, rather than sharp swords. What comes as a surprise is how so much of their angry rhetoric was aimed, not at people far across the theological divide from themselves, but at their own, much closer colleagues.With the hardening of orthodoxy, there were inevitable splits within churches as some rebelled against what their colleagues were laying down as required doctrine. The greatest of these fractures occurred in the Reformed Church at the end of the 16th C, after the preaching of Jacobus Arminius, a Dutch minister and professor taught by Beza himself. Arminius was initially a supporter of Beza’s views. But he rebelled against Beza’s distinctions regarding predestination and prelapsarianism, declaring them unjust. Arminius argued that if God condemns some and saves others, it must be on the basis of who has faith, not on the basis of some eternal decree God’s already worked out even before they’re born.Arminius died in 1609, but the controversy he started rumbled on thru the centuries and has continued right on down to today.His Dutch name was Jakob Hermanzoon – but as did many scholars of the day, he Latinized that to Jacobus Arminius; and it’s from that we get the theology derived from him – Arminianism – which as most listeners know, is usually posited as opposite to Reformed theology, or Calvinism. Now, before I get a pile of angry emails and comments – let me say what’s called Arminianism and Calvinism today would likely be disavowed by both John Calvin and Jakob Hermanszoon.  If they attended a seminary class on these topics today they’d likely say, “What’ch you talkin’ about Willis?”Both Arminianism and Calvinism have taken on theological accretions and associations their authors likely never intended. And strictly speaking, we can’t equate Calvinism with what’s known as Reformed Theology.But, back to the story. è Arminius was born in the Netherlands near Utrecht. His father was a blacksmith and armorer who died shortly after Jakob was born. He was educated at the expense of family-friends who recognized his keen intellect. He’d just entered Marburg University in Germany at the age of 16 when news reached him of a tragedy back home in his hometown of Oudewater.The Roman Catholic Spanish had occupied a good part of Holland for some time but were expelled from Oudewater when the city became a Protestant enclave. When the Spanish returned, they over-ran the town and carried out a brutal massacre that killed Arminius’ mother and siblings. Jakob spent 2 weeks in inconsolable mourning.When the new University of Leiden opened nearby in 1576, he was the 12th student enrolled. At Leiden he adopted the controversial theology of the French scholar Peter Ramus, a Protestant progressive killed during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Leaving Leiden, Jakob went to Geneva where he enrolled in the Academy, then headed by Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor.Arminius’s defense of Ramus angered the faculty of the Academy so he left for a trip to Basel where he declined the offer a doctorate, believing he’d not bring honor to the title.Returning to Geneva, Arminius seems to have been more prudent in his approach. In 1585, Beza wrote to the city magistrates of Amsterdam who’d sponsored Arminius’s education, highly commending his ability and diligence and encouraging a continuance of their support in his studies.After a short visit to Italy, Arminius returned home, was ordained, and in 1588 became one of the ministers of Amsterdam. His 1590 marriage to a merchant’s daughter gave him influential links.From the outset, Arminius’s sermons on Romans 7 drew a strong reaction from staunch  Calvinists who disliked his views on grace and predestination. The Calvinists said that while God’s saving grace is unearned, He offers it only to those He predestines to salvation. Arminius disagreed, saying God gives grace to those who believe.In 1592, a colleague accused him of Pelagianism, a 5th C heretical distortion of grace and free-will already condemned by the Church. Arminius was also accused of …1) An overdependence on the early church fathers,2) Deviation from two early Calvinist creeds, the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, and3) An errant views of predestination.When Arminius and his supporters challenged his critics, urging them to point out specifically WHERE he was in error, they were unable to do so. The city authorities ended up on his side. The question of predestination was not raised in any substantive form until Arminius became professor of theology at Leiden, where he served from 1603–9. The last six years of his life were spent in controversy over his views as they stood in opposition to those of his old mentor, Theodore Beza.In a 1606 message titled “On Reconciling Religious Dissensions among Christians,” Arminius argued that dissension damages people both intellectually and emotionally and creates doubt about religion that leads to despair. Left unchecked, it may ultimately lead to atheism. He proposed as a remedy to the controversy his ideas had stirred, the calling of a national synod. Arminius believed the proper arbiter between feuding clergy was a good and godly magistrate. The synod was eventually held at Dort in 1618, but Arminius had already been dead nine years.In assessing Arminius’ theological position, we could say that in his attempt to give the human will a more active role in salvation than Beza’s brand of Calvinism conceded, Arminius taught a conditional election in which a person’s free will might or might not affect the divine offer of salvation.  It’s important to distinguish between Arminius’s teaching and what later became known as Arminianism, which was more liberal in its view of free will and of related doctrines than was its founder. Arminius’s views were never systematically worked out until the year after his death, when his followers issued a declaration called the Remonstrance, which dissented at several points from Beza’s description of Calvinism. It held, among other things, that God’s predestination was conditioned by human choice, that the Gospel could be freely accepted or rejected, and that a person who’d become a Christian could “fall from grace” or forsake salvation.Though he was mild–tempered, Arminius nevertheless spoke his mind in controversy and characteristically defended his position from Scripture.We’ll pick it up at this point in our next episode as we continue our look at Protestant Scholasticism. There’s a whole lot more for us to learn about this period, including the Calvinist reaction to the challenge of the Remonstrance, as well as the career of a couple of major lights in Christian history, Brother Lawrence and Blaise Pascal – as well as several others.