BELIEF SERIES LECTURE

God Alive

The Progress of Christianity since 1700

Chaired by Martin Sturge

Dr Kenneth Hylson-Smith

Church Historian

11 April 2005

I would like to make two preliminary remarks. First, in what I have to say I want to be somewhat audacious, impertinent, bold and provocative! Second, at the outset, let me clearly state my main aim. I want to confront, head on, those many atheists, agnostics, historians, sociologists, theologians and media pundits who in recent decades have described, derided and dismissed Christianity as a lost cause. I refer to those often brilliant and highly literate men and women who have declared Christianity, or at least the institutional church, to be in retreat and suffering from terminal illness. To such purveyors of pessimism or anti-theistic views, the seemingly inexorable march of rationalism, science, technology and modernism in its various guises, has marginalized the Christian God, and the Christian Church.

21^st century men and women ‘come of age’, are said by a not insubstantial number of people to have outgrown the need for God. After all such latter-day readers and interpreters of the signs of the time argue, the evidence is there for all to see. Despite such surges of interest in Christianity as exhibited in the last fortnight with the death of Pope John Paul II – an interest which is likely to continue for a while with the election of his successor – despite such occasional blips, the facts remain incontestable:

• Declining church membership, both absolutely and as a proportion of the population, empty pews, and the frequent apparent irrelevance of the Church and all that it does and says to 21^st century secular life, seems to point unmistakably and irrefutably to a parlous condition.
• Apathy towards the churches and any form of organized religion appears to be widespread.
• Much talk about ‘the death of God’ even within the Church itself.
• A sympathetic hearing, as never before, for atheists and agnostics, who have presented their case with unequalled competence and effectiveness.
• Gloom mongers setting the tone concerning Christian belief and practice, or its absence, successfully portraying the unhealthy condition of Christianity and its likely future.
• Low morale in many quarters, both within the churches and among their well-wishers; so often the attackers, or those who seek to undermine faith, seeming to be winning the day, and the upholders of Christianity appearing to be on the defensive.
• Though Christ said that Christians would always be in a minority, the beleaguered state of present-day Christianity goes beyond the mere counting of heads.
• The impression given by many commentators that the faith itself is facing annihilation, this being the culmination of a long-drawn-out process of decline.

I want to challenge this whole interpretation of both recent history and the contemporary state of health of Christianity. I want to assert that the detractors and the prophets of doom have misinterpreted both the historical and the present situation. Seen within the perspective of the last 300 years or so, and with an awareness of the current worldwide Christian scene, I maintain that the jeremiads have got it horribly and grossly wrong. Their interpretation of past trends, their analysis of the contemporary situation, and their prognostications, are a distortion of the facts. Their assessments are seriously warped. Far from being a saga of decline and imminent demise, the story of the post-17^th century global Church is one of unparalleled progress and expansion.

But, before I present and defend my thesis, I need to ‘set the scene’, with a brief account of the modern, post-Renaissance, post-Reformation, emergence and escalation of atheism, agnosticism, and all those beliefs that are anti-pathetic to Christianity and can be reckoned as the products of an apparently irreversible process of ‘secularization’. In their modern form they have a 500 year history, and they are now thoroughly embedded in the culture of Western society. Let us trace this development.

The 15^th and 16^th century Renaissance and the 16^th century Reformation were each, in their own right, epoch-making events. The one gave birth to the ‘new learning’ and the other to Protestantism. Nevertheless, as if these two achievements were not enough, the two movements together had a further unrealized result of massive significance. They inaugurated an unprecedented departure from Christian orthodoxy – a paradoxical outcome for the Reformers, if not for many Renaissance men and women.

The rediscovery of the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans exposed literate Europeans to a corpus of classical texts, which, although not specifically religious, quite typically had an agnostic or even atheistic flavour. These treasures from the long-distant past implicitly or explicitly enshrined opinions that were not reconcilable with core Christian dogmas. At best, from the Christian point of view, there was a belief in a pantheon of gods. At worse, there was more than a hint that there may be no god at all. The works of Pliny the Younger, Lucian, Lucretius, Plutarch, Senecca and others gave little theological comfort, succor or support to Christians. It all amounted to a massive intrusion of distinctly non-Christian perspectives that could, and sometimes did, give encouragement to attitudes that were decidedly unsympathetic to the creeds of the Church.

To supplement and reinforce these inherently anti-theistic or polytheistic influences, the Reformation itself had an unintended secularizing tendency. Underlying the theology of Protestantism was the stress on the individual person standing alone before God, and finding salvation and sanctification in and through the Bible. This helped to make the truth seem increasingly subjective. Luther thought that reason standing alone was hostile to faith and could only lead to atheism, and his rejection of it actually contributed to the secularization of religion. His antagonism to any form of what would later be called ‘natural religion’, his intense focus on God as mysterious, hidden, and only accessible through faith, had a perhaps unrealized consequence of emptying the physical and rational world of the divine. Luther also secularized politics as a result of his passionate conviction that the mundane order was diametrically opposed to the spiritual; and the two should be kept apart. These, and other, forces and teaching resulted in the first signs in modern Church history of what Max Weber identified as the disenchantment of the world. One aspect of this was ‘the impoverishment of the reign of the invisible’.

Here we are witnessing an erosion of the very conceptual framework of religious thinking. It represented a profound ‘revolution in relations between heaven and earth, which decisively reconstructed the human abode separate from the divine’. Then there was the development of science. This provided the hammer blow to what was generally accepted as the biblical picture of a God-created world. Here we have a line of discovery and thinking traceable from Nicolaus Copernicus, through Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei, via Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton and others, whereby, by the 18^th century water began in real earnest to seep and then to pour through the cracks created in the previous seemingly impregnable ediface of Christian belief.

The ‘Age of Reason’ produced a surge of overt Enlightenment denials of the existence of God, or at least the God of orthodox Christianity. Mention need only be made of Deism, the philosophers Voltaire, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel. The trend continued into the nineteenth century, typified by the poet Shelly and the philosopher Feuerbach. By that time it was suggested that religion could be explained in completely human terms. In its scientific form in England, the 19^th century peak was, of course, reached in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin’s work, On the Origin of Species, and the subsequent pronouncements of T.H. Huxley (the originator of the term ‘agnostic’) and others. By the late 19^th century atheism and agnosticism had mushroomed. They had vastly extended their influence, and had assumed a greater and more pronounced image. They came into the open as never before, and were more daringly and audaciously owned and declared than in any former age, as epitomized in the lives, beliefs and activities of George Jacob Holyoake and Charles Bradlaugh. A National Secular Society was established in England, and in other countries, and Bradlaugh took his atheism into the House of Commons as an MP.

But it was Friedrich Nietzsche who more than anyone else set in motion the most recent phase in the unfolding saga of atheism and agnosticism, in such works as The Gay Science. If Nietzsche gave the initial thrust to the modern non-theistic view of life and of the world, Sigmund Freud provided a psychological and psychiatric in-depth rationale for discarding the very notion of a supreme supernatural being. By doing so, he made a massive contribution to the advancement of atheism in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. He regarded religion as an illusion, which, with the advance of human knowledge, and more particularly science, would gradually be whittled away. The 20^th century was peppered with a most distinguished and impressive galaxy of atheistic academics. There were the existentialist philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre; there was Albert Camus, and in England the philosophers G.E. Moore, John McTaggart, Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer. There were such writers, media personalities and scientists as A.N. Wilson, Ludovic Kennedy, Stephen Hawking and Daniel Harbour, who most ably expressed, and continue to express non-theistic opinions that were and still are cherished by countless others.

Then there is that unique phenomenon of the 20^th century Christian scene in the Western world, the appearance of a ‘death of God’ theology within the portals of Christianity itself. When it emerged in the 1960s it bewildered, bemused and often angered people who were staggered that so-called Christian theologians should apparently deny the continued existence of God, when it was thought to be their task to defend the very concept they seemed to be discarding. During the remainder of the century incarnational theology was repudiated, and radical alternative views were propounded by such academics as Maurice Wiles, G.W.H. Lampe and Don Cupitt. Then, to add to the whole drift of thinking so far covered, along came some sociologists, who made a strong case for the decline of the churches in continental Europe and Britain as part of a modernistic, secularization process. All of this undermining of Christianity did not, of course, escape the attention of the media, which in many cases was only too ready to propagate the new messages being set forth.

From all that has been said so far, it may at first sight appear to be flying in the face of the ‘facts’, not only to contest some of the arguments raised, but to question underlying theories, assumptions and interpretations. Nonetheless, that is just what I now want to do. I suggest that the two main premises undergirding most of the theories and views that I have just reviewed – that traditional Christian doctrine has increasingly become unacceptable to modern men and women, and is currently being discarded by people en-masse, and that the post-1700 period has witnessed the decline of Christianity to what is now a sad and sorry condition – are both ill-founded.

The very reverse is, I contend, the true state of affairs. Since 1700 Christianity has undergone its greatest period of expansion ever, and is currently more vigorous, healthy and widely embraced than at any previous time. To make such assertions may seem at best to be whistling in the wind, and at worse evidence of some mental derangement. It may appear to represent an excessively optimistic response to a situation that should more appropriately be met with pessimism and defensiveness by any convinced and committed Christian. Nonetheless, that is the picture, and that is the landscape, that will be depicted in the rest of this lecture.

Now let me present and defend my thesis.

First, I want to demonstrate that for the last 300 years there has been a strand of powerful and effective Christianity – ever expanding and widening its influence. It’s an exciting record. My story of vibrant Christianity begins in the late 17^th century and the early 18^th century. The evangelical revival was the principal, most dynamic and significant feature in the Protestant world of the 18^th century. It transformed Protestantism, and it was to have untold consequences in the following 300 years. It all began in central and eastern Germany, and it was mainly a result of the emergence of continental European Pietism and Moravianism. Pietism owed much, if not its foundation to Philipp Jakob Spener who, from the late 1660s onwards set out a programme of Lutheran Church renewal in Frankfurt and the surrounding region. In 1694 a new university was founded at Halle, which for many years was the centre of the movement. It was a kind of early headquarters of reformed and outgoing Protestantism. Under the leadership of August Francke, Halle was developed not only as an important educational centre, but as a massive institution embracing an orphan house accommodating 3,000 people, a Bible institute, a dispensary, and a press, all of which were on a gigantic scale. The total complex must have been unbelievably impressive.

In the third and fourth decades of the 18^th century one of Francke’s pupils, Count Nicholas Zinzendorf assumed centre stage in this unfolding drama of vigorous evangelical Protestantism. It was he who provided a settlement for Protestant refugees from Moravia at Herrnhut. In the winter of 1731-2 there was a great exodus of such Moravians, together with Huguenots, Palatines and Salzburgers into various parts of Protestant Europe and America as a result of persecution. They were instrumental in helping to generate and sustain a transatlantic Christian revival of huge proportions.

In England, this revival began suddenly and dramatically, initially as a consequence of the preaching of the young, dynamic George Whitefield. Soon, he was joined in what became a national crusade, by the brothers John and Charles Wesley. As the movement spread from London, Bristol, and to an extent Bath, the converts were gathered together in societies, classes and bands, and collectively became known as Methodists. In parallel with this ever burgeoning work, a less dramatic, but nevertheless significant movement was taking place within the Church of England, with such leaders as Samuel Walker at Truro, William Grimshaw at Haworth in Yorkshire, William Romaine in London, John Newton in Olney and then London, taking prominent parts. The Countess of Huntingdon exercised a great influence in promoting the work among the aristocracy, with one of her chapels located in Bath.

The revival was not confined to England. In Wales it grew rapidly under the guiding hands of Griffith Jones, Howell Harris, Daniel Rowlands and Howell Davies. In Scotland it gained particular fame at Cambuslang and Kilsyth. At the same time as the revival in Britain, North America was experiencing one of the most powerful and influential religious events in the whole of its history: the Great Awakening in the 1730s and 40s. The Awakening occurred largely in New England, and it was most notably associated with the ministry of Solomon Stoddard, and then most famously Jonathen Edwards, at Northampton. The fire that was ignited by them was fanned into a greater conflagration by visits from George Whitefield, who thus started his career as the first truly international evangelist. He became Anglo-America’s first religious celebrity, the symbol for a dawning modern age. In the latter part of the century a Second Great Awakening occurred, mainly in the Southern colonies, and largely in the form of camp meetings.

The British revival, and the North American Awakenings had immense impact at the time, and their repercussions were profound and longlasting. They helped to colour not only the religious, but also the political, social and cultural life of their respective countries from then until the present day. Their effects were woven into the very fabric of their nation’s corporate, political, social, economic and cultural, as well as religious life to a degree that has only recently started to be appreciated in all its subtlety and pervasiveness. Most importantly, however, from our point of view tonight, is the huge humanitarian and missionary impulse they generated. In Britain, this was epitomized by two groups of evangelicals: the Clapham Sect and the Eclectic Society. They were largely responsible for much government legislation for humanitarian purposes, and most notably the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and they were entirely responsible for the founding of the Church Missionary Society in 1799. The 1790s also saw the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792, and the London Missionary Society in 1795.

In North America, the missionary impulse, as one of the fruits of revivalism, was typified in 1810 with the creation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which was mainly Congregational, and in 1814 with the establishment of the American Baptist Missionary Board. The modern era of worldwide missionary enterprise was about to begin.

The revivals of the 18^th century provided the launching pad for a mighty lift off in the 19^th century. In both Britain and North America, this took three particular forms: vibrant local church life, incredibly far-ranging charitable work, a number of revivals, and a series of global missionary initiatives. Two examples will indicate the remarkable energy and effectiveness of some local church ministries.

First, from Oxbridge: Charles Simeon of Holy Trinity church, Cambridge. It was said of him by Lord Macaulay – no mean judge of people and situations – that ‘his authority and influence extended…to the most remote corners of England’ and ‘his sway over the church was far greater than that of any primate’. It is of local interest to us, that the Trust Simeon established took Bath Abbey under its wing among a host of important churches in England – and it is still a Simeon Trust church today.

Second, a sample of powerful parochial ministry can be taken from nearby Cheltenham. There, Francis Close so dominated the life of the community that it was said that during his tenure of Holy Trinity, ‘the history of the town…was the history of a single clergyman’. He ruled Cheltenham from his pulpit throne to such an extent that the wits described it as ‘a Close borough’. The Times portrayed him as the ‘Pope of Cheltenham, with pontifical prerogatives from which the temporal had not been severed. In the bosom of hundreds and thousands of households’, the paper declared, ‘his social decrees were accepted without a thought of the possibility of opposition’. Ministries of comparable forcefulness were exercised by Hugh McNeile in Liverpool, William Pennefather at Mildmay Park, London, William Farqhar Hook in Leeds, the High Church ‘slum priests’ in the East End of London, and a host of others. The Nonconformists were especially influential in their preaching ministries, with Joseph Parker, John Clifford, R.W. Dale, Hugh Price Hughes and Charles Haddon Spurgeon being outstanding. Church philanthropic work may best be illustrated by the foundation and vigorous activities of the Salvation Army and the Church Army, the quite staggering array of societies for the relief of suffering and the meeting of all manner of human needs, and the labours of such Church stalwarts as Lord Shaftesbury. Almost all individuals and organizations striving to help the underprivileged or those in want in any way in the age of Victoria were church inspired, initiated or supported.

In North America, the same pattern was discernable. And it was likewise with revivals. These occurred at various times during the century, and especially in the period 1857 to 1860. They were supplemented by evangelistic campaigns, most notably by Charles Finney and Dwight L. Moody.

Then there was world mission during the 19^th century. After the missionary impulse of the last decade of the 18^th century, it took some time for a worldwide mission to be inaugurated and to gain momentum. Nevertheless, it did happen. Gradually, the number of missionary societies increased, the churches gave increasing support, and individuals volunteered for service in South America, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia in particular. By the end of the century, the combined efforts of the societies and churches, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox, had become phenomenal, and the Christian faith was on the way to becoming literally a worldwide religion for the first time. The foundations had been well and truly laid for the staggering, remarkable, 20^th century.

Taking a global view of Christianity, the 20^th century was a period of astounding, unprecedented growth. It is of interest that one phenomenon especially is shared by the church in the Western world and the non-Western world: the emergence and growth of Pentecostalism and the associated charismatic movement. It is unquestionable that Pentecostalism ‘has made more dramatic and rapid advance than any other branch of the Christian church’. An expansion from zero in 1900 to about 500 million in the year 2000 represents a growth ‘which is unique in church history not excluding the early centuries of the church’. No movement that started at the beginning of one century and by the end of the same century accounted for one out of every four Christians worldwide can be regarded as anything but exceptional.

The mammoth importance of Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement is undeniable. They have each separately been key elements in the as yet largely unsung revolution that has made Christianity into a world religion as never before. Taken together they may represent the most significant and important factor in that astounding development. But these movements alone do not account for a rate and extent of expansion that eclipses anything that had previously taken place within the span of a single hundred-year period. A brief look at South America, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia will help us to visualize and appreciate what took place during that momentous century.

In the first half of the century the overwhelming majority of the population of South American countries would, if questioned, have protested that they were Roman Catholics. But it has been calculated that, by the most generous estimate, only about 10% were actually practicing their faith. However, a new and very different form of Christianity – evangelical, and more particularly Pentecostal and charismatic – was assuming prominence. By 1990 it was calculated that evangelicals had doubled their proportion of the total population in Chile, Paraguay, Venezuela, Panama and Haiti; tripled their share in Argentina, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic; quadrupled it in Brazil and Puerto Rico; quintupled it in El Salvador, Costa Rica, Peru and Bolivia; and sextupled it in Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador and Columbia. The growth of Pentecostalism was especially striking. Take one example – Rio de Janeiro.

• One study has shown that over a three year period in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1990s, no less than 700 new Pentecostal churches opened.
• According to a recent estimate, one new church per day was opened in the early 1990s; and another puts this figure as high as approximately 40 every week in the opening years of the 21^st century.

Let us turn to Africa. The number of Christians in Africa rose phenomenally in the course of the 20^th century.

• In 1900 there were about 10 million, representing about 9% of the total continental population. By 1950 this had risen to 34 million and approximately 15%. In 1965 there were 75 million Christians, constituting a quarter of the population.
• At the dawn of the present century the number had soared to 360 million. From 10 million to 360 million in one hundred years!

This massive growth includes a phenomenal move away from missions to indigenous African churches, and a multiplication of independent African churches. Once more, Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement were, and remain to the fore.

Finally, a quick look at some countries of Asia reinforces this story of astonishing growth, health and vitality. I will just take two outstanding examples: China and South Korea. China is not only the most populous country in the world, but the leading Asian contender to become a super-power within the next fifty years or less. Around 1890, there were probably about 37,000 Protestants in the country. Despite the dominance of Confucianism, much persecution, especially after the establishment in 1949 of the communist People’s Republic of China, the expulsion of missionaries, and the church being forced underground, by the year 2000 there were, according to ‘official’ figures, about 15 million Protestant believers – and it has been reckoned that the true figure was more like 50 million, with an additional 10-12 million Roman Catholics. Behind these bald figures there was a lively, dedicated, sorrow-bearing, resolute, steadfast, outward-looking body of believers. They persisted in their Christian beliefs and practices despite much opposition and suffering, and in the face of fellow-believers being imprisoned, tortured and martyred. Here indeed was and is a church that has risen from the ashes.

Lastly, South Korea. This has been the scene of a remarkable and virtually continuous Christian revival ever since the early years of the 20^th century. As with South America and Africa, statistics give some indication of what went on. There were only about 300,000 Christians in the country in 1920, but this rose to between 10 and 12 million in the following 80 years. At the beginning of the 21^st century the country can exhibit one of the most vibrant and thriving examples of Christian faith and church life anywhere in the world. Take three illustrations of this:

1. The Kwang Lim Methodist Church in Seoul reported 150 members in 1971, but 85,000 by the end of the century.
2. .Even more staggering for size is the Full Gospel Central Church in Seoul, which by the year 2000 had well over half a million members, thus earning itself a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s largest congregation.
3. By the end of the 20^th century there were almost twice as many Presbyterians in this small country as in the United States.

Let me attempt to summarise what I have swiftly, and superficially covered. Since about 1700, and more especially since about 1800, the world has passed through a Christian revolution of gigantic proportions. In an astonishing period of 2 or 3 hundred years the position of Christianity in the world has changed out of all recognition. What has been charted in my resume of events represents the most remarkable movement in the Church since the time of the apostles. The medieval period is widely regarded as having been a golden age of Christianity. But, this is a very Euro-centric view. In fact, in 1492 less than 20% of the world’s population was Christian, but over 90% of these lived in Europe. For all its regional, confessional, and ecclesiastical differences, Christianity bore the imprint of a broadly European cultural identity. Only a small fraction of the non-Christian population of the world, estimated at 2%, had come into contact with Christianity. This remained essentially the situation until the late 18^th century, and arguably even until the 20^th century.

The present-day picture is very different indeed. Just over five centuries after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the Christian centre of gravity has shifted astoundingly. There are roughly 2 billion Christians in the world, about one third of the planetary total population. Although the two largest blocks remain Europe and North America, South America is already close behind Europe with 480 million, Africa has 360 million, and there are 313 million professing Christians in Asia.

Extrapolating present figures, by 2025 there may well be in the order of 2.6 billion Christians worldwide of which over 1.8 billion will be in South America, Africa or Asia. To project even further ahead, by 2050 it seems that only about 20% of the world’s 3 billion Christians will be non-Hispanic whites.

The massive expansion and revivification of Christianity during last 300 years may be compared to a similar span of time after the life, death and resurrection of Christ. In the earlier period, there was the dynamism of the early, small band of Christians, followed by the spreading of the faith throughout the known world of the day. This was facilitated by the Roman Empire, with its roads and its far-flung reach. Quite rapidly, local churches were established with local leadership – and they consolidated and propagated the faith in their regions. By the spreading of the Christian faith, the world was turned upside down. In the recent period there was the dynamic of the 18^th and 19^th century revivals, awakenings and powerful church life. There was then the 19^th century flourishing of British and other European empires, in which the flag helped to pave the way for the cross. This was followed by the astonishing witness and growth of indigenous churches. The pattern is remarkably similar to that of the early church. Whether such a comparison is valid or not, to be able to speak of the two periods together in one breath is not outrageous or outlandish. Christians today live in exciting and momentous times – not in a period of dullness and decline.

The only two great monotheistic, proselytizing world faiths in the contemporary world are Islam and Christianity. Much focus has been given to Islam in recent years, little to a resurgent, vibrant, world Christianity. The confrontation of the two, however, represents one of the major factors in the world political, social and religious scene – and one of the most potentially fragile and inflammable situations.

To come full circle back to those bearers of sad tidings for Christianity and the Church with whom I started, let me quote from one of the leaders of the ‘death of God’ movement of the 1960s, Harvey Cox. In 1996, he declared:

Just one or two concluding remarks. More, perhaps, than at any time in the past, the battle lines are drawn between those who embrace Christian belief and those who reject it. The issues are probably clearer and more freely and openly debated than ever before. The opponents of Christianity cannot, without blatantly defying the facts, say that the Christian God is dead, and that Christianity is in desperate need of either a major blood transfusion or serious plastic surgery.

The Christian faith is a world power and presence to be acknowledged. With all its faults and failings the worldwide Christian body is in fairly good shape. Many things are needed, and there are many deformities and shortcomings in the life of global Christianity that need to be righted.

But arrangements for a funeral are a waste of time. Throughout the last few centuries and in the contemporary world the Christian God has not been, is not, and on the evidence never will be dead or dying. God is alive.

Approximate number of Christians by regions (in millions)

Date Europe N. America South America Africa Asia Global

2002 560 260 480 360 313 1973

2025 555 270 640 633 460 2558

Source: Philip Jenkins. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (OUP, 2002):2-3, 90.