The Church in History

This is the sixty-fifth in this series of articles on Church History, and since they’ve appeared roughly twice a month, that seems to indicate that it’s been pretty close to three years since we started this trip together. It’s been fun, but now it’s time to take a short break, get our breath, and change direction, a little. That is to say, we’ve dealt with the earliest days of the Church, then the Romanization of the Church, then the Middle Ages and the division of the Church, and finally, the Reformation. That’s quite a lot, but now it’s time to come completely to these shores and look in detail at the Church as it grew, here. Here in America, and specifically here in the United States. We’ve already glanced at the Colonial Church, or rather Churches; how they came here and how they grew. In fact, the American “Church” in all its diversity looked much like the Church in Europe by the 1740s, but that was about to change. That change is what we’ll be reading about for the next year or so. It is fascinating to explore the process through which the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Anabaptists and the Huguenots (and a few others) “morphed” into Unitarians, Baptists, Mormons, Pentecostals and goodness knows how many others (some three hundred, in all!) and yet became stronger in every case so that we’re now the most religious Christians anywhere in the world! Logic would seem to dictate that such fragmentation ought to have made us weaker. It did not. It made us much stronger.

So: to recap: The Church started on the Day of Pentecost in about 35 AD. It was made up, initially, of a dozen Jews, mostly uneducated hillbillies from Galilee, but on that one day grew to more than 3,000 men of every nation then known in the world. For the next 300 years, it endured terrible persecution from the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, and just about every heathen nation you can name. In the process, it continued to grow and in spite of itself developed a plan for leadership, a liturgy of worship, and a system of Theology that explained the happenings that predated that day in 35 AD.

Then, from 325 AD until about 1000 AD, the Church grew in three directions. In the West, under the firm leadership of the Bishop of Rome, the Roman Church developed a Latin liturgy, a Latin Bible, and a strict hierarchy. In Greece and Asia Minor, The Orthodox Church remained under the domination of the Byzantine Emperor, and so never developed the kind of hierarchy that the Romans did (though they did develop a structure, under the Emperor’s control), and their literature and liturgy remained Greek. In the East, the Nestorian Church expanded all the way to China and perhaps further, keeping their very early Syriac liturgy and Bible (the Peshita). Then catastrophe befell the East, and Islam soon erased most of the Eastern two-thirds of Christendom. After 1054, the Roman Church was all that remained to amount to anything, and it remained so for four hundred years. Then, tottering and corrupt, it, too fell, but not to pagans or Mohammedans: to other Christians! The Protestant Reformation began in 1517, with Luther, continued into the middle 1500s with Calvin, and peaked in the 1600s with Elizabeth I’s “settlement” of Henry VIII’s “Church of England.

And, that brings us to these American shores. Ready?