CH302 - LESSON 5 - Challenges to Faith

1.  introduction

Christendom was the Christian civilisation that characterised western European society during the middle ages. The culture then was (broadly) Christian, and church and state were seen as being coterminous. Princes and popes might squabble from time to time, but the medieval ideal – one state, one church – was generally held by all. Even the Protestant reformers (apart from the Anabaptists who insisted on the separation of church and state) thought that the civil magistrates were responsible for enforcing laws against heresy and dissent.

For all its attainments, and in ‘civilising’ pagan Europe they were impressive, Christendom did not last. Its demise was caused and hastened by

• the (Italian, not so much the Northern) Renaissance presented fundamental challenges to medieval/theological ways of thinking
• the rise of nationalism threatened the unity of catholic Europe
• the reformations of the sixteenth century split the unity of the church catholic
• the age of reason and the rise of secularism in the following centuries destroyed the ideal of Christian Europe.

This lesson touches on some of the movements and developments of the late 18^th and 19^th centuries which continued to bury the ideal of Christendom. In many ways Europe was still basically Christian but individual faith, the viability of the church, and the legitimacy of Christianity were threatened by new intellectual and social conditions.

The German philosopher Ernst Troeltsch argued that the great watershed between the medieval world and the modern world was the Enlightenment, not the Reformation. He pointed out that the Reformers were mainly medieval in their thinking; they gave different answers than their catholic compeers to the issues that bedevilled them, but their thinking was still shaped by their intellectual and religious contexts. However, he argued, after the Enlightenment Europe can no longer be called Christian. But what was the Enlightenment?

2. the Enlightenment

definition

The Enlightenment is the great epoch that separates the middle ages from the modern period. B.Ramm, After Fundamentalism. The Future of Evangelical Theology (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 3-5 describes it thus:

One way to understand the mood of the Enlightenment is to list those words and concepts that were given great approval and those which were regarded with distrust.  The approved concepts were reason, freedom, nature, utility, happiness, rights, tolerance, deism, rational Christianity, natural religion, social contract, science, autonomy, harmony, and optimism.  The disapproved concepts were authority, antiquity, tradition, church, revelation, the supernatural, and theological explanations.  The value placed on these terms will become clear in the following discussion.

The Enlightenment was the period when the radical secularisation of European culture began. In place of the state as a divine institution paralleling the church (as historically taught by both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians), the ‘enlightened’ state was now to be theoretically grounded in some version of the social contract.  The social contract theory of the state argued that a government was a mutual arrangement among its citizens (which could take many forms), not a divine institution.  Education began to be more and more grounded on humanistic presuppositions and less and less on Christian and classical presuppositions.  The schoolteacher became more important in the community than the pastor.  Along with the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment helped mould the vast secular populations that today characterise all the big industrial cities of the world.  It started a decline in church attendance that in the latter part of this century has become endemic, giving especially Europe the appearance of a religious territory long ago burned out.

Peter Gay, an accomplished student of the Enlightenment, calls the mentality that emerged from the Enlightenment ‘modern paganism’.  This character is seen clearly in university education today.  Education in the Middle Ages and at the time of the Reformation was based on Christian presuppositions, Christian revelation, Christian theology.  Modern universities are based on the modern paganism (sometimes disguised by the more tempered word humanism) that emerged from the Enlightenment.

In the Enlightenment, the scholars, the intelligentsia, the literati (les philosophes, as the French called them, or the eggheads, in recent jargon), gave up orthodox Christianity.  No longer were the great Christian presuppositions considered the basis of European civilisation, culture, education, law, or government.

Historian Henry F. May has written that only Christians are still worried about the Enlightenment.  This is right:  The Enlightenment sent shock waves through Christian theology as nothing did before or after.  Theology has never been the same since the Enlightenment.  And therefore each and every theology, evangelical included, must assess its relationship to the Enlightenment.

A number of ideas that characterised the Enlightenment died out because they were too narrow or too provincial or simply because they were wrong, such as the simplistic definition of Reason.  But among the numerous movements, philosophies, affectations, and ideologies, certain ideas did not die out.  On the contrary, they persist down to the present time and form part of what we may call ‘the modern mentality’.  Many of these ideas are discussed in detail later; here I list them without comment.

1. the beginnings of scientific history
2. the contention that whatever is claimed as truth must justify itself before  the bar of reason
3. the primacy of nature as the source for answers to fundamental human questions
4. the necessity for literary and historical criticism of all documents of the  past - secular, ecclesiastical, and biblical
5. the need for freedom to advance progress and human welfare
6. the need for a critical philosophy
7. the belief that ethics is autonomous and not dependent on religion or theology
8. the fundamental suspicion of all truth claims grounded in authority, tradition, or divine revelation
9. the high evaluation of the sciences and the virtue of progress in scientific knowledge
10. the affirmation that tolerance is the supreme disposition in matters of religion
11. the need to continue the humanism that first broke through into Western consciousness in the time of the Renaissance

See too D Bosch, Transforming Mission. Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 264-73.

3.  industrialisation and urbanisation

The modern world is in large part determined by industrialisation and urbanisation –phenomena which have had profound economic, demographic, social, and political consequences. They have also confronted the church with challenges it had never faced before. Industrialisation and urbanisation have affected all of the western world; we will concentrate on the English experience. [click industrialisation & urbanisation in Penguin Dictionary of Sociology]

The industrial revolution began in England in the 18^th century and gathered pace in the 19th. This was a new kind of revolution; a case of gradual growth rather than sudden upheaval, and which did not involve the overthrow of government. It consisted in the development of modern forms of industry which saw the first large scale (mechanistic) production of goods, and Britain become the world’s first major industrial power. Its major constituent parts were, first, the invention of machines such as the spinning jenny; the harnessing of power – especially steam power – to run them; the building of factories to house them; and the need of capital to buy and run industries limited the role and hopes of the small manufacturer.

Coterminous with the industrial revolution was a transport revolution. Railways were built to overcome the limitations of geography by allowing industries to focus in a certain area – eg the cotton mills in Lancashire – and to readily transport its production to other parts of the country, and overseas.

As a natural consequence the industrial revolution also saw a demographic revolution as workers crowded into suburbs and slums of the great industrial cities to work in the factories. Industrial cities became bywords for overcrowding and unhealthy living and poor working conditions. Workers worked long hours in often intolerable conditions. They worked long hours in their former rural employment too, but the new precision of the machine age was different to the more relaxed pace of farm work. One could see the sun while labouring in the fields, but not in those ‘dark Satanic mills’. The factory clock and bells replaced the natural rhythm of daytime and night and the seasons.

the challenges

All this presented the church with a threefold challenge. First, there was the traditional pastoral concern and care. The Church of England in particular was geared to ministry in a rural England with a church in every village, where the minister knew each member (whether nominal or not), baptised them, married them, baptised their children and then buried them. But when people flocked to the cities seeking work they left behind their traditional links with the parish church, losing touch with their roots. Their new living and working environments did not provide the same sense of belonging they had left behind. They were also much less ‘accessible’ to clergy in their slums and factories. The 1851 census was a sobering statement that the churches in general and the Church of England in particular did not command the allegiance of much of the people. (see O  Chadwick, The Victorian Church part II (London: A & C Black, 1972), 363-9) As well as this, there was a shortage of churches in the big cities. To meet this the Church of England embarked on a building campaign to provide sufficient seats for more of its members, many of whom of course still did not come. Mention should also be made of the many devoted priests who laboured faithfully in tough, depressing slum parishes. Another response was to take seriously clergy training. Previously a degree (not necessarily in theology) from Oxbridge was considered adequate training for a Church of England clergyman. To rectify this a number of theological colleges, both high church and evangelical, were established to give clergy the kind of biblical and theological training one would expect of a minister. For example Ridley Hall at Cambridge was established in 1881, largely through the efforts of Bp Charles Perry, the first bishop of Melbourne. The nonconformist churches, their members excluded from gaining admittance to Oxbridge, had long had their institutions of learning, many of which provided a higher standard of education than the ancient universities.

Second, there was the challenge of evangelising the masses, many of whom had lost contact with their churches. Aiming to echo somewhat the revivals of the preceding century, evangelists plied their craft with enthusiasm, and new methods. C G Finney adopted what he called ‘scientific means’ to present the gospel first in America and then in his trips to Britain. These means included prayer, protracted meetings, and a reasoned presentation of the claims of Christianity. But it was the irenic, affable D L Moody with his city-wide campaigns involving churchmen of all denominations that were deemed most successful. Moody combined a simple, earnest, good-natured presentation of the gospel of a God of love with the popular hymns of his song leader I D Sankey. These were only the best known of a number of evangelists from both side of the Atlantic who aimed at saving as many as they could from the forces of unbelief and scepticism.

Third, there was the social concern for men’s bodies as well as their souls. The often-appalling living and working conditions that many ordinary folk put up with stirred many. This was more than simply a matter of being charitable, for the churches and individuals took seriously their place in the social fabric of the nation, and made a great contribution to 19^th century English civilisation. For Christian involvement in social reforms see Gonzalez 2, 271-73, and C Calver ed, Evangelical Faith and Public Zeal. Evangelicals and Society in Britain 1780-1980 (London: SPCK, 1995).

The members of the Clapham Sect [click ODCC] were the best known of a number of earnest Christians who invested their time and energy, and often their money, in worthy causes. The influence on Victorian England was immense. The best known are William Wilberforce (1759-1833) [click ODCC] and Lord Shaftesbury (1801-1885). [click ODCC] Against great opposition Wilberforce led the anti-slavery movement both in and out of parliament. In what was possibly his last letter written a week before he died, John Wesley encouraged Wilberforce at the beginning of his efforts against the slave trade:

My dear Sir, Unless the Divine Power has raised you up to be an Athanasius contra mundum I do not see how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of man and devils; but, if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? Oh, be not weary in well doing. Go on, in the name of God and in the power of His might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish away before it. That He who has guided you from your youth up may continue to strengthen you in this and all things is the prayer of, Dear Sir, your affectionate servant John Wesley

Shaftesbury was famous for his espousal of causes aimed at alleviating the conditions and distress of the working classes. With Wilberforce, he was an outstanding example of a politician motivated by his Christian principles which included, in his own words:

• ‘by everything true, everything holy, you are your brother’s keeper’
• ‘creed and colour, latitude and longitude, make no difference in the essential nature of man’
• 'social reforms, so necessary, so indispensable, require as much of God’s grace as a change of heart’
• ' what is morally right can never be politically wrong, and what is morally wrong can never be politically right’
• 'no man … can persist from the beginning of his life to the end of it in a course of generosity, [or] in a course of virtue … unless he is drawing from the fountain of our Lord himself’

He was known as ‘the poor man’s earl’; and tens of thousands of London’s poor stood in silent and impressive tribute when his funeral courtage passed by. [click quotation in Dowley 524] Shaftesbury’s concern was echoed later in the century by some evangelicals such as the Baptist F B Meyer who, while possessing impeccable deeper life credentials, also identified with the social gospel. Though, generally, by then evangelicals tended to disengage from social and political activism in what American historian T L Smith called ‘the great reversal’.

Christian socialism was a movement which arose in the middle of the 19^th century comprising members of the Church of England who were frustrated by the conservative attitudes of the established church to social and economic questions. They aimed at a reform of individuals and society by applying Christian principles in all social relationships. The main members were F D Maurice, C Kingsley and T Hughes. The movement failed, but it put social questions on the agenda and was influential in the forming of early trade unions and in working class education.

On the continent the RC church displayed an impressive social conscience as it engaged with the social, economic and political problems of the new age, culminating in the profoundly important 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. [click ODCC]

The Methodists were actively involved in the nascent labour movement. Though on the other hand the Methodist William Booth began the Salvation Army in part out of frustration with the Methodist church’s abandoning its traditional identification with the poor. See lesson 7.

In short, Christians were involved, either individually or as members of an interest group, in politics and the labour movement, movements for social improvement, and philanthropy, as well as their ‘church involvement’. And they did it voluntarily, for the 19^th century was the great age of voluntarism. [click quotation in Dickey/Wolffe 47] Moreover this was not done in an ad hoc way. B Dickey, referring to evangelicals, in Wolffe, Evangelical Faith and Public Zeal, 39, notes:

.. while nineteenth-century evangelicals could indeed separate social action from spiritual religion, they were well aware of the many conditions. What is more, their responses in the field of social action were intelligently based upon relevant understandings of social issues and feasible responses. Despite Tawney’s claims that the church had ‘stopped thinking’, evangelicals did have some worked out theories. They did have some deliberate methods. These theories and methods were revealed in a complex range of particular applications. Evangelicals, more than most other social theorists and practitioners, addressed people in their individual circumstances. Their faith emphasised personal salvation and the vulnerability of elaborate social organizations to the consequences of human sinfulness. Modern scholars, deeply influenced by that idealist thinking which so discounted the directness, pragmatism and particularity of evangelical philanthropy, have generally failed to appreciate the importance of their contribution.

See too J Stott ed, Issues Facing Christians Today. New Perspectives on Social and Moral Dilemmas (London: Marshall Pickering, 1990).

Writing on the American scene, Mark Noll, (The Old Religion in the New World. The History of North American Christianity Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 67, comments:

The religious efforts of those who led the Methodists, Baptists, and Restorationists would not have influenced American society so directly if religion had remained neatly separated from the wider world. As it happened, however, American Protestants developed an innovative and powerful vehicle to link private faith and public life. That vehicle was the voluntary society, which became an ideal means for taking advantage of the constitutional separation of church and state. Protestant societies had existed  in Britain for some time, but they came into their own in America in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Voluntary societies were organisations set up independently of the churches and governed by self-sustaining boards for the purpose of addressing a specific problem. Their genius lay in providing individuals from different denominations a way to pool their concerns, energies and money in order to provide a flexible response to the changing needs of a rapidly developing American society. …

4.  biblical criticism

During the nineteenth century the methods and results of grammatical, historical and literary criticism were systematically applied to (the study of) the Bible. Previously, generally speaking, there had been a tendency to regard the Bible rather woodenly as a quarry for proof texts, without paying enough attention to its various genre, contexts, and reasons for writing. The background to the critical approach was the Enlightenment, the growth of secularism, and evolutionary theory.

Note: ‘critical’ can be used in a neutral or a negative way. In the former sense it simply means, after examining the evidence, making a judgement. In the latter sense it refers to being used in a destructive way: ie to discount the (religious) value or authority of the text. I am using it in the former sense, though recognising that some scholars used in the latter sense, and some believers automatically think of it in the latter sense.

examples

The 19^th century was an age of great intellectual ferment. In just about every area of scientific and academic endeavour new methods were developed, new discoveries made, and new hypotheses suggested. This was no less the case in the (academic) study of the Bible. Some of the seminal names in this new approach to the Bible were:

G E Lessing (1729-81) [click ODCC] laid the foundations for German Protestant liberalism in the 19^th century, rejecting Christianity on the grounds that ‘accidental truths of history can never become the necessary truths of reason’. At issue here are two different types of truth: rational truth, which is necessary, and historical truth, which is contingent. Between the two said Lessing is ‘the broad ugly ditch which I cannot get across, often and earnestly as I have tried the jump. If anyone can help me over, let him do so; I beg him, beseech him to do so. By me he can reap a reward in heaven’.

H E G Paulus (1761-1851) [click ODCC] operated from rationalist presuppositions. He attempted to reconcile belief in the substantial accuracy of the gospel narratives while not believing in the miracles or the supernatural. A Schweitzer noted that he ‘had an unconquerable distrust of anything that went outside the boundaries of logical thought.’

D F Strauss (1808-74) [click ODCC] was more radical in his scepticism. He applied the category of ‘myth’ generally to the gospel narratives, denying the supernatural elements. Myth was an unintentional creative legend about Jesus that the primitive church

E Renan (1823-92) [click ODCC] wrote a vivid, attractive life of Jesus. It was well written, but its subject was really a Romantic creation of its author; charming and amiable, but which repudiated the supernatural element. He confused rhetoric with profundity, and sentimentality with genuine religious feeling. He did not pursue the historical problems of life of Christ, or take the gospels seriously/critically enough. His Jesus presented no challenge of faith or disbelief.

response

The most famous response to the (negative) critical conclusions of scholars like those just mentioned came from the work of the Cambridge trio of J B Lightfoot, B F Westcott and F J A Hort. They met the challenge to Christian orthodoxy and the church not by assertion but by using critical methods themselves; they were just as ‘critical’ as their European colleagues. They came to what might be called more positive conclusions concerning the historical reliability of the NT documents, and of the traditional doctrines of the church. They were English and Church of England, and thus were perhaps more naturally inclined to be ‘moderate’. (They are usually regarded as ‘conservative’ scholars; actually they are better regarded as liberal Anglicans)

5.  Darwinism

Charles Darwin’s (1809-82) interest in natural history was fostered when he sailed as naturalist on HMS Beagle in 1831. Beagle’s brief was to survey the southern part of South America, and return to England via the Pacific. The journey lasted five years and gave Darwin the opportunity to study the wild life of the south west of South America and the Pacific Islands. Returning to England he spent the next twenty years developing his ideas before publishing his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859)

Darwin did not invent the idea of evolution. Rev W Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) presented the argument from design and was long used as a work of popular apologetics. Though Paley worked from a Newtonian ie a static mechanical model of a world of design rather than one of development; it focused on the order of nature, not the history of nature. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-3) cautiously suggested an evolutionary model. Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) was also evolutionary, but with uniform laws of development; evolution was an expansion of God’s mind and plan. Thus Lyell and Chambers, in particular, helped prepare for Darwin. But some thinkers noted that that uniform laws of nature was a threat to the idea of a providential control of nature; providence became just another name for order.

Darwin took the next step. In his Origin he argued that natural selection provided a more reasonable account of evolutionary process than an intervening Providence. His theory carried the inference that man was not different in kind from other animals, and in his The Descent of Man (1871) he traced man’s descent back through monkeys. His theory did not deny the possibility of an original creator, but his interpretation of nature did exclude the idea of a superintending providence. If there was a God he was a radically remote and impersonal deity. This was a great challenge to the foundations to Christian belief, and more threatening to a Christian view of the world than the theories of Copernicus.

In some Christian circles there was uproar. Darwin was opposed, though usually on moral or religious rather than scientific grounds; to imagine one’s mother descended from an ape was offensive to romantic Victorian sensibilities about the status of women. A clash between science and religion was perceived; the conclusions of science supposedly counter to the accepted teaching of the church, eg by saying that the earth was older than 6000 years. Science was sovereignly independent in the physical sphere; it needed no evidence or authority from a non-physical source. Religion was perceived as being authoritarian, repressive, obscurantist, and opposed to freedom of thought and expression. The issue was epitomised by a famous debate at Oxford in June 1860 between Bp Samuel Wilberforce (the high church son of William Wilberforce) and the agnostic promoter of Darwinism, T H Huxley. Huxley is popularly supposed to have won, and he did make some telling points; but contemporary witnesses say that, in spite of an unfortunate use of sarcasm by Wilberforce and the jeers of the undergraduates, the bishop won the debate. For an account of the debate and its significance see O Chadwick, The Victorian Church vol 2 (London: A & C Black, 1972), 9-12.

Not all churchmen though were uncritically opposed to Darwinism, or science. Many cautiously accepted the theory of evolution, though within a theistic framework. The Cambridge exegete F J A Hort thought it acceptable, and the Free Church of Scotland Henry Drummond, scientist and revivalist, welcomed natural selection. When Darwin died in 1882 ‘Huxley considered briefly the possibility of burial in Westminster abbey and dismissed it, confident that the request would be refused. Canon F W Farrar said to him, “we clergy are not all so bigoted as you suppose” … So Darwin was buried in Westminster abbey with full Christian rites, Huxley .. among the pallbearers.’ (Chadwick, Victorian Church 2, 28)

social Darwinism

Evolutionary theory was applied to mankind (and religion) as well as to the natural sciences. This, when allied to 19^th century notions of progress, made it easy to see Christianity as a stage in human development. It also carried racist overtones; some races were seen as being more primitive and destined to give way or die out before more ‘advanced’ races and their civilisation. [click social Darwinism in Penguin Dict of Sociology]

6.  conclusion

At the end of the 19^th century the church’s confidence had been shaken, especially by the Enlightenment and the general spread of secularism that marked the end of Christendom. During the century change happened very quickly in just about every area of human endeavour. In the midst of it all was the church, a venerable institution jealous of its traditions and ways of seeing things, and, not infrequently nervous about change. In this lesson we have noted some of the social changes and intellectual changes and the challenges they posed. We have also noted the responses that different Christians made. It was a very complex time, and very threatening for the church. Yet this was the century, according to K S Latourette, which saw the greatest missionary advances since the first.