Reading: All Unit 11 readings

INTO ALL THE WORLD: THE CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT IN AN AGE OF UNCERTAINTY
By Dr. Timothy George

PROGRAM SCRIPT

On July 14, 1789, a mob of French peasants in Paris attacked the famous prison, the Bastille, stormed its gates and burned it to the ground. This act of violence marked the beginning of the French Revolution, the first in a series of political and religious revolts which were to shake Europe during the next two centuries. On November 9, 1989, citizens of East and West Berlin converged on the infamous Berlin Wall, which had symbolized the great divide between communism and the free world. With picks and hammers, they chipped away until the wall was reduced to rubble.

In this study, we will look at the history of Christianity between these two defining events — 500 miles and 200 years apart — the fall of the Bastille and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is the story of the church in an age of revolution.

William Carey

The tiny village of Paulerspury, in the Midlands region of England, is a far cry from either Paris or Berlin. Yet the little boy, who was born here in 1761, would have a revolutionary effect on the Christian witness in the modern world. His name was William Carey, and we remember him today as “the father of modern missions.”

Carey was a poor cobbler by trade, but he had an amazing gift with languages and taught himself Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Dutch. He had an unusual concern for the world and tried to persuade his fellow Baptists that they should pray for the conversion of those who had never heard the name of Jesus Christ! At one meeting, while he was making such a plea, a senior minister said to him, “Young man, sit down. When God wants to convert the heathen, He will do it without your help or mine!”

In those days, many Christians, even Baptists and other evangelicals, believed that the Great Commission had been fulfilled long ago and was no longer applicable to them. Sometimes they even joined in singing anti-missionary hymns:

Go ye into all the world, the Lord of old did say. But now where He has placed thee, there He would have thee stay.

Carey could not accept this theology. When he read the Great Commission, it was clear what Jesus meant: “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.” “Go ye,” Carey said, “means you and me. . . here and now.”

On May 31, 1791, he preached a famous sermon based on Isaiah 54:1-5. “Let us expect great things from God,” he urged, “and attempt great things for God.” In the following year, Carey published his ideas in a book, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. “We must pray, plan, give, and go,” he said. Carey’s Enquiry became the manifesto of the modern missionary movement.

 On June 13, 1793, Carey, his wife Dorothy, and their four children, including a nursing infant, sailed from England on a Danish ship headed for India. No one on board that ship would ever see their native homeland again. Carey spent 41 years in India translating the Bible into Bengali and scores of other Indian languages and dialects of the East. He and his fellow missionaries at Serampore, near Calcutta, had a phenomenal ministry among the people of India. They preached the Gospel, planted churches, built schools, and worked to overcome inhumane practices, such as infanticide and sati, the burning to death of widows.

Carey always insisted that the Gospel was addressed to the whole person. He would have agreed completely with E. Stanley Jones, the great twentieth-century Methodist missionary to India, who said, “A soul without a body is a ghost; a body without a soul is a corpse.” Jesus came to bring good news to the whole person — body and soul.

Although he lived in a radically pluralistic culture, Carey never compromised the essential Christian message. He always proclaimed Jesus Christ as the only way of salvation for all peoples everywhere. Through the publication of his letters and journal, Carey’s work in India became well known throughout the Christian world. Shortly before he died, Carey was visited by Alexander Duff, a preacher from Scotland, who had traveled many miles to see the famous missionary. Carey summoned him to his bed and whispered, “You have been speaking of Dr. Carey, Dr. Carey. When I am gone, speak no more of Dr. Carey; speak instead of Dr. Carey’s Savior.” When he died in 1834, Carey requested that two lines from a hymn by Isaac Watts be inscribed on the simple stone slab that would mark his grave: “A wretched, poor, and helpless worm, on Thy kind arms I fall.”

Although Carey’s work in India was sponsored by the Baptist Missionary Society, he worked closely with Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and other Christians who were committed to carrying out the “Great Commission.” The modern quest for Christian unity was born on the mission field. Those who fol-lowed in his footsteps, such as Henry Martyn, David Livingstone, Lottie Moon, and Hudson Taylor, were all guided by the same principle which informed his approach to ecumenical cooperation: In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity.

Carey’s mission to India was a catalyst for a great missionary awakening throughout the entire Body of Christ. In 1810, he called for Christians of all denominations to come together to devise a common strategy for world evangelization. Precisely 100 years after Carey had proposed such a gathering in 1910, the first International Missionary Conference convened at Edinburgh.

In recent decades, the modern ecumenical movement has lost influence, as the original vision for missions and evangelism has waned. And yet, the work of God cannot be stopped by official structures and bureaucracies. Today, Christians are cooperating in ways that would have surprised William Carey. Conservative Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants work and pray together for the sanctity of life, moral values in society, the translation and spread of the Scriptures, the struggle for religious liberty, and the sharing of the Gospel around the world.

The Church, Attacked and Criticized

During these two centuries, Christianity spread around the world at a phenomenal pace. But spiritual and theological storms were brewing in Western Europe, in the heart of what had once been “Christian” civilization. The church was like an army besieged by an unseen foe, unable to respond to new forms of attack and criticism.

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called religion “an opiate of the people.” They exhorted the workers of the world to unite against traditional Christian beliefs.

• Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution seemed to call into question the biblical account of creation.

• Sigmund Freud looked deep into the human soul and pronounced it void of religious significance.

• Few were as bold as Friedrich Nietzsche, who summed up the mood of his age in this way: “The most important of recent events — that God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God had become unworthy of belief — already begins to cast its first shadows over Europe.”

Amidst these shadows of doubt loomed the greater shadow of violence and war. Looking back on all of this, H. Richard Niebuhr characterized the theology which prevailed as the world hovered on the brink of chaos: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

Karl Barth

In the midst of this malaise, a young pastor in Switzerland, Karl Barth, spoke out for a new kind of theology, very much at odds with the prevailing liberalism of the day. Barth’s sermons were preached within sound of the gunfire of World War I. The liberal theology, he had been taught in the finest German universities, was inadequate to the crisis which engulfed him and his parishioners. Barth’s answer was to return to the witness of the Reformation and to the Bible, which lay behind it. In 1918, he published his commentary, On the Epistle to the Romans, which, as someone said, “fell like a bomb on the playground of the theologians.”

“One cannot speak about God,” Barth said, “simply by speaking about man in a loud voice.” What was needed was a recovery of the transcendent God, the God who speaks in the Bible, above all the God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ.

This medieval painting by Matthias Grunewald, which Karl Barth hung on the wall behind his desk, depicts one of his favorite scenes in the Bible. It shows John the Baptist pointing with his long bony finger to Jesus on the cross. The mission of every theologian, of every Christian, of the church itself, is not to draw attention to ourselves, our ideas, or our achievements. Our job, like that of John the Baptist, is to point others toward the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Barth was soon called on to put his theology into practice when he was offered a teaching post in Germany. It was the era of the Weimar Republic. Germany was still reeling from its defeat in World War I. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were already rising to power. Many Christians in Germany found Hitler’s appeal irresistible. On many issues, Hitler stressed pro-moral and pro-family values. He promised to eliminate pornography and prostitution. Nazism, he said, was the true fulfillment of Christianity, and many German Christians agreed with him. “The swastika on our breasts, the cross in our hearts” was their motto. But the real motive of the Nazi movement was better expressed by Heinrich Himmler who said, “We shall not rest until we have rooted out Christianity.”

The Confessing Church

In 1933, Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor in Berlin, organized resistance to the Nazi takeover of the church. That opposition set up an alternative church structure known as the “Confessing Church.” In May, 1934, Karl Barth drafted the famous “Barmen Declaration,” the theological standard of the Confessing Church.

Article I declares:

Jesus Christ, as He has testified to us in the Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, whom we are to hear, whom we are to trust and obey in life and in death. We repudiate the false teaching that the church can and must recognize yet other happenings and powers, images and truths as divine revelation alongside this one Word of God, as a source of her preaching. We also repudiate the false teaching that there are areas of our life in which we belong not to Jesus Christ but to another lord, areas in which we do not need justification and sanctification through Him.

Later that same year, Karl Barth found himself in trouble at the University of Bonn when he refused to begin his classes with the Nazi salute, “Heil Hitler!”

He was soon deprived of his teaching post and expelled from Germany.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

One of Karl Barth’s closest friends and disciples was a young theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Like Barth, he denounced the paganism and anti-Semitism of the Nazis. For awhile, Bonhoeffer served as the director of an underground seminary, training pastors for the Confessing Church. But near the end of the war, he became involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. The plot was uncovered, and Bonhoeffer was imprisoned by the Gestapo. Eventually he was executed in the concentration camp at Flossenberg. In one of his early books, The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer had written, “When Jesus Christ calls a man to follow Him, He calls him to take up his cross and die.”

Payne Best, an English officer, shared a prison cell with Bonhoeffer during his last days. “Bonhoeffer was all humility and sweetness,” he wrote. “He always seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive. He was one of the very few men that I have ever met to whom God was real and close.”

Bonhoeffer and Barth were part of a minority of Christians who dared to stand for the truth of the Gospel in a time of great darkness and distress. After World War II, many Christians publicly repented of their complicity in the evil deeds of the Nazi regime. In recent decades, many other Christians have suffered greatly under Communist totalitarianism in China and Russia. In fact, more martyrs have been put to death for their faith in Christ in the twentieth century than in all other persecutions in the history of the church. Now, as then, the price of religious liberty and spiritual integrity is eternal vigilance.

The Church's One Foundation

Nearly 100 years ago, a group of open-minded, progressive Protestants launched a new journal which they called The Christian Century. It is a label that is hard to justify from the record of the past ten decades: two world wars, the Holocaust, poverty, oppression, and dehumanization. Yet Christianity survives, and even thrives, especially in Africa and Latin America, and even in China, where decades of oppression and persecution were not able to extinguish the flame of Christian faith. Korea has also become a dynamic center of Christian witness in Asia, sending thousands of missionaries to people groups yet unreached with the Gospel. Nearly 2000 years ago, Jesus said to His disciples, “Upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Christians have often felt that they are here and there, up and down, without sure footing in this present evil world. But the church’s one foundation is still Jesus Christ her Lord. His purposes remain intact, undaunted, despite all the changes, successes, and disappointments in the annals of human history.

Eastern Orthodoxy

What is Christianity’s future? The German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg has said that the three vital forces within the Christianity of the third millennium will be Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and conservative evangelicalism. Of these three groups, the Orthodox churches of the East may be the least open to change, tied as they are to national identity and ethnic history. Yet the majesty and dignity of the Orthodox tradition continue to attract new believers while a prophetic figure such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn calls for renewal of the Christian faith in both East and West. Orthodox theologians have also been stalwart defenders of classical Christology and the historic doctrine of the Trinity, against more modernist views within the circles of liberal ecumenism. At the same time, others have raised the issue of religious liberty and the freedom to share the Gospel in many countries where orthodox churches are dominant.

Roman Catholicism

While Orthodoxy has pursued its own pathway, Roman Catholicism has emerged as an aggressive global movement of numerous national churches, all in fellowship with the Bishop of Rome, who claims to be the vicar of Christ for the whole Christian church. The direction of Roman Catholicism in the third millennium will be shaped by the legacy of the two greatest popes of the twentieth century, John XXIII and John Paul II.

John XXIII was elected pope in 1958. He surprised the world by announcing that he intended to summon a general council to consider many basic matters of church teaching and worship. It was time, he said, to open the windows and let some fresh air into the corridors of the Roman Catholic church. His favorite word for this process was aggiornamento, which means “bringing up to date.” The work of the Second Vatican Council, which Pope John convened in 1962, has led to major changes within the Catholic church, including an eager desire to read and study the Scriptures, and to conduct worship in the common language of the people. Non-Catholic Christians were no longer automatically condemned but regarded instead as “separated brethren.” Vatican II also lifted up the role of the laity in the life of the church and extolled the ideal of religious liberty for all people.

The election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II in 1978 was another signal of the worldwide significance of the Catholic church. Coming from Poland, John Paul was the first non-Italian pope since the sixteenth century. If John XXIII’s watchword was aggiornamento (bringing things up to date), John Paul II’s keynote theme has been ressourcement, (a returning to the resources of tradition and early church thinking). The Pope, supported by his chief theological advisor, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, has opposed the modernizing theology of scholars such as Hans Küng and the excesses of liberation theology in Latin America. He has also refused to ordain women priests, lift the ban on clerical celibacy, or change the church’s teaching about birth control, all controversial issues for many Catholics in America. At the same time, John Paul II has had an impact far beyond the bounds of the Church of Rome. His stand against communist oppression in Eastern Europe was a major factor in the dissolution of that totalitarian system. His opposition to what he calls “the culture of death,” including abortion and euthanasia, has struck a prophetic note when human life is increasingly regarded as cheap and dispensable. For all these reasons, John Paul II is widely regarded as the greatest living Christian statesman in the world today.

Evangelicalism

Pannenberg’s third vital force, in the Christianity of the third millennium, is evangelicalism. In 1942, a group of conservative Protestant church leaders met in Chicago to form the National Association of Evangelicals. They were unhappy with the narrow separatism and constant bickering of some of their fellow conservatives — the feudin’, fightin’, fussin’ Fundamentalists. But they were also wary of the liberal drift and compromising theology advanced by many leaders in the mainline Protestant denominations. They wanted to forge a third way between these two extremes.

The distinctive witness of evangelical Christians in the world today has been shaped by numerous entrepreneurial ministries and parachurch movements, such as Campus Crusade for Christ, Prison Fellowship, World Vision, and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Three of the greatest leaders of evangelicalism during the past half century have been theologian Carl F. H. Henry, British writer C. S. Lewis, and Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham.

Key Figures: Henry, Lewis, and Graham

Carl Henry was a founding member of the faculty of Fuller Theological Seminar, and also the founding editor of the evangelical journal Christianity Today. His 1947 book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, marked a decisive break with stilted patterns of the past in favor of a positive engagement with culture and contemporary social life. Henry’s six-volume magnum opus, God, Revelation, and Authority, defended a high view of biblical inspiration against looser views of scriptural authority.

While Henry wrote as a theologian, C. S. Lewis, himself a renowned scholar of English literature, produced numerous popular books on apologetics and the Christian life. His writings have been translated into numerous popular languages of the world and are treasured today as classics of Christian spirituality.

No one person has represented the wide world of evangelicalism more fully than Billy Graham. Throughout his long and productive ministry, he has consistently stuck to one theme: salvation by grace through personal faith in Jesus Christ. The clarity of his witness and the integrity of his life, stand out in contrast to less worthy exemplars of the evangelical movement. In 1966, Billy Graham and Carl Henry convened the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. Eight years later, Billy Graham spoke to the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne. His five key principles may be taken as hallmarks of the world evangelical movement:

1. The authority of the Scriptures,

2. The lostness of human beings apart from Jesus Christ,

3. Salvation in Jesus Christ alone,

4. A witness to the Gospel in word and deed,

5. The priority and urgency of evangelism and missions in fulfilling the Great Commission of Christ Himself.

The Church: The Body of Christ

We close this series on the history of Christianity by remembering that the Church is the Body of Christ, extended throughout time as well as space. Between Jesus and the first disciples, there is a long line, a trail of brothers and sisters, a circle of forgiven sinners, a company of fellow pilgrims in the family of faith, forever united through the bond of Christ’s love and forgiveness. Although each of us may differ from one another in many respects, all who know Jesus Christ as personal Savior and Lord belong to His Body and share in His life.

The connection which binds God’s people together across the boundaries of nation and denomination, of culture and language and time, is nowhere better seen than in the witness of Irina Ratushinskaya, a Christian poet in Russia, imprisoned by the Communist Regime for her Gospel witness and her defense of human rights. From her gulag in Siberia, Irina wrote the following words:

Believe me, it was often thus: in solitary cells, on winter nights, a sudden sense of joy and warmth and a resounding note of love. And then, unsleeping, I would know as I huddled by an icy wall: Someone is thinking of me now, petitioning the Lord for me. My dear ones, thank you all who did not falter, who believed in us! In the most fearful prison hour we probably would not have passed through everything — from end to end, our head held high, unbowed — without your valiant hearts to light our path.

Christian History Magazine Issue 52

Pushing Inward

By Roger Steer

Whether he was battling despair or floating on euphoric faith, Hudson Taylor drove himself--and the gospel--ever deeper into China.

JAMES TAYLOR was intrigued by all things Chinese. It fascinated him that once-famous empires, like those in Persia, Greece, and Rome, had risen and fallen, but the Chinese Empire remained—the world’s greatest monument to ancient times. In the early months of 1832, he knelt beside his 24-year-old wife, Amelia, in the parlor at the back of his busy chemist shop in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England. “Dear God,” he prayed, “if you should give us a son, grant that he may work for you in China.”

When their child was born on May 21, 1832, James and Amelia called him James Hudson Taylor—Hudson was his mother’s maiden name. Immersed in a Methodist family fascinated with China, the young Hudson sometimes blurted out, “When I am a man, I mean to be a missionary and go to China"—though his parents were not to tell him of their prayer for some years.

Yet his faith and life calling were not always clear to him. By age 17, he was in the spiritual doldrums, experiencing, as one biographer put it, “teenage restlessness and rebellion” against his impatient father. He became the anxious prayer concern of his sister and mother, among others, which led to a story that has become a legend in missions circles.

According to Taylor, in June 1849, when he was 17, his mother locked herself in a room 50 miles from home. She was visiting her sister at the time, and she had felt moved not only to pray that Taylor would become a Christian but to stay in the room until she was sure her prayers had been answered. That same afternoon, Taylor later recalled, he picked up a gospel tract about the finished work of Christ and accepted “this Savior and this salvation.”

Such “coincidences” were to attend the rest of Taylor’s life—a single-minded, even strong-headed life completely dedicated to one thing: bringing the gospel to the interior of China.

Chinese Dressing

Within a few months of this “new birth,” as he called it, Taylor’s call to China was confirmed during a night of intense prayer when Taylor lay stretched “before Him with unspeakable awe and unspeakable joy.” He spent the next few years in frantic preparation, medical and language studies, and a deeper immersion into the Bible and prayer.

Finally, on Monday, September 19, 1853, the little three-masted clipper Dumfries, weighing less than 500 tons, slipped quietly out of Liverpool harbor with Taylor aboard headed for China. Just 21 years old, he said an emotional good-bye to his mother.

For Taylor life had become an adventure of faith, of learning to trust God in impossible circumstances. The first leg of this journey only reinforced the pattern.

Off the Welsh coast, the ship ran into a severe storm that lasted for hours. The captain described the sea as the “wildest he had ever seen.” Taylor alternated between dread and trust in God’s care. When the captain, a devout Methodist himself, grew convinced that they weren’t going to survive a half-hour longer, he turned to Taylor and asked, “What of your call to labor for the Lord in China?”

Taylor said that he wouldn’t wish to be in any other position and that he still expected to reach China. But if not, “The Master would say it was well that I was found seeking to obey his command.”

In fact they did survive the storm, and in March 1854, the ship arrived in Shanghai, one of the five “treaty ports.” The 1842 Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing), ending the first Opium War between England and China, had opened these trading links with the West, giving foreigners the right to live only in these cities. Taylor quickly settled in and began his work as an agent of the Chinese Evangelization Society, a fledgling independent missionary organization started under the inspiration of pioneer missionary Karl Gtzlaff. A local teacher taught Taylor the Mandarin dialect, variations of which were used all over China

That same year he made a radical decision for which he received both derision and praise: he decided to dress in Chinese clothes and grow a pigtail.

His decision was rooted in his deep respect for Chinese culture and his view of the missionary’s role. When incredulous fellow Protestant missionaries, who all wore western dress, criticized him for this unbecoming behavior, he pointed out that those who knew the Chinese best came to appreciate their customs. Many Chinese objected to Christianity, he argued, because it seemed to be a foreign religion that tended to mold converts in the ways of Western nations. Taylor, like the Roman Catholic missionaries who for decades had adopted Chinese dress, was ahead of his time.

First Steps Inland

The early years presented surprises to the young Taylor. Many Europeans lived in luxury in Shanghai, and Taylor thought some missionaries were “worldly.” Yet they were in great demand with government officials as interpreters. The general atmosphere of hearty sociability came as something of a shock to the child of a strict Methodist.

Furthermore, money quickly became a sore point. Whereas Church Missionary Society single men received the equivalent of $700 a year, not including rent, he was given a salary of only $80 a year, which was also supposed to cover rent.

Still, Taylor pressed on to get the gospel to the Chinese in the interior who had never heard it. China was composed of 18 provinces, of which only seven had missionaries, and even then, they tended to work in only a few coastal cities. Taylor carped about missionaries who confined themselves to the relative comfort of urban life. He worried about the countless unreached souls of inland China and immediately set about trying to reach them.

In December 1854, within nine months of his arrival, Taylor and Joseph Edkins hoisted sail, and with bags of Chinese Bibles and tracts over their shoulders, visited hamlets along the banks of the Huangpu River. At Songjiang, the extraordinary appearance of two foreigners drew crowds, who at one point made sport of the two men, mocking them and threateningly backing them down a street that ended at the river. Taylor and Edkins barely escaped (hopping onto a passing boat) and continued their 200-mile, round-trip journey. Taylor soon made other trips to the interior, eventually using the city of Ningpo (Ningbo), home to a number of mission organizations, as his base.

The Chinese Evangelization Society proved to be well-intentioned but increasingly incompetent; it failed to pay its missionaries in a timely manner and often sent missionaries unprepared for their work. After much prayer and wrestling, Taylor resigned from its service in 1857. He didn’t know exactly how his work would be financed, though he decided he would not ask for donations—nor even let friends and relatives know of his needs. He would simply trust God to supply him.

Taylor also had for some time been seeking a wife. He had been rejected by two women in England, one before and one after he left for China, leaving him deeply lonely. But in 1857, he met and immediately fell in love with 20-year-old Maria Dyer, the much-sought-after daughter of prestigious (though deceased) missionary parents. Despite snobbish and fierce opposition from some in the Ningpo missionary establishment (Taylor’s Chinese dress and lack of sophistication put them off), the young couple married in January 1858. It was an uncommonly happy marriage partly because they shared a deep passion to evangelize China even at great personal sacrifice.

Taylor continued to pour himself into his work, both treating the sick and preaching, and by March 1860, Taylor’s church on Bridge Street, Ningpo, had grown to 21 members. But by the summer of 1861, he had contracted some disease (probably hepatitis) that completely sapped his strength. After seven years of ministry in China, he was forced to return to England for an extended period of recovery.

Seeking the Impossible

Though he was supposed to rest in England, he continued his furious work pace, translating the Bible, recruiting missionaries, and obtaining a qualification in midwifery.

Taylor was troubled in England by the lack of interest in China. In 1865, as he paced the floor, he dictated to Maria China: Its Spiritual Need and Claims.

“Can all the Christians of England,” he wrote, “sit still with folded arms while these multitudes [in China] are perishing—perishing for lack of knowledge—for lack of that knowledge which England possesses so richly, which has made England what England is and made us what we are? What does the Master teach us? Is it not that if one sheep out of a hundred be lost, we are to leave the ninety and nine and seek that one? But here the proportions are almost reversed, and we stay at home with the one sheep, and take no heed to the ninety and nine perishing ones!”

Taylor became convinced that a special organization was needed for the evangelization of inland China—to go beyond the five treaty ports to which nearly all missionary work had been confined. He was determined not to cut the financial ground from under the feet of the older missionary societies, but what form should such an organization take?

He began making plans for recruiting 24 missionaries: two for each of eleven inland provinces of China that were without a missionary, and two for Mongolia. It was a visionary plan that would have left experienced missionaries breathless: at the time, a host of seasoned missionary organizations had, all told, only some 90 Protestant missionaries in China. Taylor single-handedly wanted to increase that by over 25 percent.

This would be an enormous financial commitment, so Taylor opened a bank account under the name of the China Inland Mission (CIM). Soon he had money and five missionary volunteers to send to China—even before he had formally committed himself to head a new missions society.

He hesitated to take that step because he found himself wracked with doubt. For months in 1865, a myriad of concerns raced through his mind; he rarely slept for two hours at a time, sometimes not at all. On the one hand, he agonized over the millions of Chinese who were dying without the hope of the gospel; on the other hand, he wrestled with what he called his “unbelief": he feared taking responsibility for sending young men and women into the China interior, where they would be subject to rejection, illness, and persecution—all of which he knew about first hand.

Taylor thought he might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown: he wrote in his diary later, “For two or three months, intense conflict . ...Thought I should lose my mind.” A friend, seeing that Taylor desperately needed a break, invited him to Brighton on the south coast of England for the weekend of June 24-26.

On Sunday morning, he slipped out after worship: “Unable to bear the sight of a congregation of a thousand or more Christian people rejoicing in their own security while millions were perishing for lack of knowledge,” he later recalled, “I wandered out on the sands alone, in great spiritual agony.”

Some time during that walk, he found relief. “There the Lord conquered my unbelief, and I surrendered myself to God for this service. I told him that all responsibility as to the issues and consequences must rest with him; that as his servant it was mine to obey and to follow him—his to direct, to care for, and to guide me and those who might labor with me . ...”

With that, he felt his halting steps had been confirmed. Immediately he wrote in the margin of his Bible, “Prayed for 24 willing, skillful laborers, Brighton, June 25/65.”

Taylor was determined that the CIM would have six distinctive features. First, its missionaries would be drawn from any denomination-provided they could sign a simple doctrinal declaration.

Second, they would have no guaranteed salary but trust in the Lord to supply their needs. Income would be shared. No debts would be incurred.

Third, no appeals for funds would be made.

Fourth, the work abroad would be directed not by home committees but by himself and eventually other leaders on the spot in China.

Fifth, the organization would press to the interior of China ("where Christ had not been named").

Sixth, the missionaries would wear Chinese clothes and worship in Chinese-styled buildings.

Challenges to the Vision

Within a year, a two-year-old clipper, the Lammermuir, sailed out of the East India dock in London bound for China. Aboard, with Hudson and Maria Taylor and their four children, were 16 young missionaries, six men and ten women, who looked forward to joining the four men and one woman already working under Taylor’s direction as cim missionaries in China.

In the inland towns of Hangchow (Hangzhou) and Hsiaoshan (Xiao-shan), the CIM began its work, a combination of medical care and evangelistic preaching amidst the hustle and bustle of Chinese life. CIM missionary John McCarthy, from Dublin, described the scene that greeted him when he arrived in Hangzhou in 1867. It was the Chinese New Year holiday, and a crowd hovered outside the CIM clinic. Sedan chairs lined up dropping off patients and waiting to be hired for the return journey. Food and drink vendors had moved in and were doing a good trade. In the midst of the seeming confusion, Taylor stood on a table preaching to the people. As McCarthy and his family were shown into the CIM house, Taylor waved his hand and acknowledged them with a brief word of welcome and then carried on preaching.

Taylor was seeing more than 200 patients daily. His operations to remove cataracts seemed like miracles to the Chinese. One convert, Mr. Tsiu, who had been converted under Taylor’s preaching in Ningpo, also preached to those who waited for medical treatment.

The visionary and indefatigable Taylor made enormous demands on himself, and as one would expect, equally high demands on CIM missionaries, and some of them balked.

One of his missionaries, Lewis Nicol, visited Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries and grumbled about things he thought were wrong at New Lane (CIM headquarters). He soon abandoned his Chinese dress, claiming that English clothes gave him more protection and respect. “I will not be bound neck and heel to any man,” he told Taylor. After nearly two years of unpleasantness, Taylor dismissed Nicol from the mission, mainly for spreading lies about the CIM. Three CIM missionaries resigned in sympathy with Nicol.

Around the same time, two cms missionaries complained that it was dangerous for so many unmarried men and women to live together at New Lane and that Taylor was too familiar with the young ladies (he and Maria kissed some of them on the forehead before they went off to bed). The ladies themselves denied any inappropriate behavior on Taylor’s part, but still the complaint reached London and for a while led to a fall in support for the mission. For appearance' sake, Taylor ended the kissing, but he refused to stop directly supervising single women.

Then Timothy Richard, an able young Welsh Baptist who arrived in China in 1870, began to win over some members of the CIM, particularly those who lived in the Shansi (Shanxi) area. Richard emphasized establishing the Kingdom of God on earth and protecting the poor and needy from tyranny. He also argued that God worked through other religions such as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism; if their similarities to Christianity could be pointed out, he believed, then followers could be won over to Christ, and thus, the whole life of China would eventually undergo a thorough Christian transformation. A handful of CIM missionaries were influenced by Richard’s more liberal views, and they left the mission.

In spite of controversy, the number of CIM missionaries grew. By 1876, 18 new missionaries set sail for China, bringing the total to 52, making CIM a fifth of the total missionary force in China. CIM missionaries moved increasingly into the interior provinces: to Honan (Henan), Shensi (Shaanxi), Kansu (Gansu), Hunan, Kweichow (Guizhou), and at least one brave soul reached Tibet.

Taylor made another bold move, for which other mission societies criticized him: he began sending unmarried women into the interior, a testimony to the courage of these women.

Taylor’s boldness seemed to know no bounds. In 1881 he had the temerity to ask for another 70 missionaries by the close of 1884-and he got 76. Late in 1886, Taylor was praying for another hundred missionaries by 1887. A veteran missionary told Taylor, “I am delighted to hear that you are praying for large reinforcements. You will not get a hundred, of course, within the year, but you will get many more than if you did not ask for them.”

“Thank you for your interest,” Taylor replied. “We have the joy of knowing our prayers answered now. And I feel sure that, if spared, you will share the joy of welcoming the last of the hundred to China!” By early November 1887, Taylor announced that 102 candidates had been accepted for service and that enough money had been given to pay for their passages to China!

Many of the early missionaries of the CIM had little formal education, but a number were university graduates. Some arrived idealistic and enthusiastic but mentally and spiritually unprepared for the rigor of interior mission work. Some were arrogant and insensitive to Chinese culture. Some found that once on the scene, they didn’t care for Taylor’s leadership or CIM’s high ideals. Some wilted under the pressure of sustaining a living and assimilating a new culture while trying to spread the gospel. Indeed, the toll on human health was great, but the mission remained true to its purpose and eventually became the largest missionary organization in China, and even more important to Taylor, with a Christian presence in all 18 provinces of China.

Setbacks and Heartaches

Whether in China or back in England, Taylor faced a relentless round of speaking engagements, personal visits, correspondence, and administrative tasks. Still he greeted each sunrise with prayer, and he often worked late into the night, catching sleep day or night when his body demanded it.

Unforeseen events of local history often slowed the work. Members of the mission, including Taylor’s family, were injured in an anti-foreigner riot that attacked the CIM house in Yangchow (Yangzhou) in 1868. When the news reached London, the House of Lords began debating whether allowing missionaries into the China interior was good for British trade.

Rivalry between the London and China councils of the CIM , which Taylor had established to run the mission, caused him enormous strain for a time and led to the resignation of nearly 30 missionaries. The issue was this: Taylor wanted the China Council, as closest to the work, to have executive powers; the London Council disagreed.

William Sharp of the London Council thought Taylor was dictatorial and ought to have his powers severely clipped. He told Taylor, “When it doesn’t accord with your views, you try to force your council to fall in with your views. I could wish you were led to let the mission get on by itself while you concentrated on expounding the Scriptures and stirring up the churches.”

Taylor could be demanding and seemingly autocratic, but in Taylor’s mind, he was merely anxious to protect the integrity of his mission. Writing to London about new recruits, he said, “I only desire the help of such persons as are fully prepared to work in the interior [of China], in the native costume, and living, as far as possible, in the native style. I do not contemplate assisting, in the future, any who may cease to labor in this way. China is open to all, but my time and strength are too short, and the work too great to allow of my attempting to work with any who do not agree with me in the main on my plans of action.”

As a man who had literally given all to Christ in China, he found it difficult to expect any less commitment from others: “China is not to be won for Christ by quiet, ease- loving men and women. ... The stamp of men and women we need is such as will put Jesus, China, souls, first and foremost in everything and at every time-even life itself must be secondary.”

In spite of his self-confessed periods of irritation and impatience, he could show forbearance and flexibility. It was only after two years of defiance that he reluctantly dismissed Lewis Nicol, and at times he even waived some of the mission’s rules (like the prohibition against single female missionaries marrying) to respond to local circumstances.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his work was that he managed to continue it in spite of constant poor health and regular bouts with depression. On a speaking tour of the United States in 1900, Taylor nearly had a complete physical and mental breakdown. As his wife, Maria, had noted decades earlier, “I am more intimately acquainted than anyone else can be with his trials, his temptations, his conflicts, his failures and failings, and his conquests.”

The personal cost was often high indeed: Maria died at age 33, and four of Maria’s eight children died before they reached the age of 10. (Taylor eventually married Jennie Faulding, another CIM missionary.) Even more devastating to the mission: while Taylor was convalescing in Switzerland in the summer of 1900, the Boxer Rebellion spread through China, murdering 58 CIM missionaries and 21 of their children.

The World Catches On

By the late 1880s, Taylor’s vision had begun to ignite imaginations all across the world. In 1888 Taylor visited Canada, and wherever he preached, young people offered themselves as missionaries to China. Taylor had been opposed to the idea of establishing a branch of the CIM in North America but grew convinced that it was God’s will. By the time his visit was finished, over 40 men and women applied to join the CIM.

By the end of his life, the very mission organizations that had scoffed at his methods had begun adopting many of them.

Just after Taylor died, a young Chinese evangelist looked upon his body and summed up Taylor’s most important legacy: “Dear and venerable pastor, we too are your little children. You opened for us the road to heaven. We do not want to bring you back, but we will follow you.”

Roger Steer is a free-lance writer living in Devon, England. He is author of J. Hudson Taylor: A Man in Christ (OMF, 1990).

Christian History Magazine, Issue 36

Why Did the 1800s Explode With Missions?

By Paul E. Pierson

What caused the surprising burst of Protestant world missions in the eighteenth-century?

AT THE TIME OF WILLIAM CAREY, there were probably only a few hundred Protestant missionaries in the world. They never numbered more than a few thousand during the following decades. By 1900, even after a second burst of Protestant missions, there were only 15,000 European and American Protestant missionaries throughout the world. Those who went had short careers; many died within the first two years on the field. Thus the numbers remained quite small.

But the magnitude of the modern missions movement must not be measured by the number of missionaries. It must be measured by the growth of the church.

In 1800, perhaps 1 percent of Protestant Christians lived in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By 1900, this number had grown to 10 percent. Today, at least 67 percent of all active Protestant Christians live in countries once considered foreign mission fields. And the church is still growing rapidly, even explosively, in many areasKorea, sub-Saharan Africa, Singapore, and the Peoples Republic of China.

Consider this remarkable turnaround. Only 200 years ago, Protestant Christianity was almost exclusively Western. Now Protestants are strongest in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. From a Christian standpoint, the modern missionary movement has turned the world upside down.

What caused this movement? Why did it start?

Powerful Pietists

The first European Protestant missionaries to Asia landed in India almost a century before Carey. Bartholomew Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Pltschau were Pietists from the University of Halle (in Germany) who went to the Danish colony of Tranquebar in India in 1706. More than fifty Pietist missionaries from Germany followed them to India during that century.

Pietism also influenced the young Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, who became the leader of the Moravian movement. In 1732 the Moravian believers began to send missionaries all over the world—to 28 different countries in 28 years.

Susannah Wesley, mother of John and Charles Wesley, was greatly influenced by reading the memoirs of Ziegenbalg and Plutschau. Her sons deeply felt the spiritual impact of the Moravians, and their Methodist movement birthed many missionaries in the 1800s.

Astounding Awakenings

Evangelical revivals in the 1700s were a second major factor in the explosion of missionary activity. Jonathan Edwards, a leader of the first Great Awakening in North America, had a deep concern for missions. He encouraged concerts of prayer, which were organized in Scotland and North America. Perhaps most important, he published the journal of David Brainerd, who died after a brief but intense ministry with native Americans in central New Jersey. Carey later was inspired by Brainerd's journal.

The evangelical awakening in England was led primarily by John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield. The movement led to renewal in various churches, and Carey was awakened in his faith by the movement. It is significant that Carey wrote his Enquiry missions manifesto only one year after John Wesley died.

Colonial Commerce

The political and commercial context was a third factor. During the 1500s and 1600s, missions from Europe were carried on almost exclusively by Roman Catholics. The mission efforts were supported by the major Roman Catholic maritime powers—Spain, Portugal, and later France.

But by the early 1600s, the British East India Company was trading in India. Great Britain gradually began to control land there, and a century later nearly all of India was incorporated into the British Empire. England, with its growing commercial interests, had become the dominant maritime power of the world. News of Captain Cooks explorations in the South Pacific came back to England, expanding peoples understanding of the world. When Carey read The Last Voyage of Captain Cook, it stirred his interest in missions.

Successive Societies

Thus, Carey arrived on the scene at a time of commercial and political expansion and religious revival. He insisted the Great Commission was binding on the church. He traced the historical roots of Protestant missions. And he recognized the changing historical context that made a missionary movement possible.

Careys call to mission launched a movement. More than any other individual, he moved European and North American churches to focus on the world beyond. For this reason he deserves to be called the Father of Protestant Missions.

In 1792, Carey sparked the creation of the Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Heathen. There soon followed an explosion of mission agencies: London Missionary Society (1795), Scottish and Glasgow Missionary Societies (1796), Church Missionary Society (1799), Religious Tract Society (1799), and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804).

Similar groups formed in continental Europe and America, including the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810) and, among Baptists, the General Convention for Foreign Missions (1814).

Carey Continued

The missionary movement has not stopped growing since 1792. There are now approximately 40,000 career Protestant missionaries who have gone from the United States to other parts of the world. Ten percent are from older mainline churches; 90 percent come from newer evangelical or charismatic groups.

However, the missionary movement launched by Carey has changed radically. In the 1800s, with rare exceptions, cross-cultural missionaries came from the West. Even until forty years ago missionary generally meant a Westerner going to Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Today, though, the number of cross-cultural missionaries is growing most rapidly among believers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Research indicates there were 3,400 such missionaries in 1972. Today, there are at least 48,000.

This is a new phenomenon in history. No message has been communicated so widely by so many people of so many races, languages, and cultures as the Christian message today.

Dr. Paul E. Pierson is dean emeritus and professor of history of mission in the School of World Mission, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

John Nelson Darby 1800-1882

Father of Dispensationalism 

"The Christian is directed to turn away from evil and turn to the Scriptures."

"The church is in ruins," wrote John Darby, then a successful Anglican priest in Ireland. Echoing the lamentations of Protestant reformers three centuries earlier, he believed that the Church of England had lost any notion of salvation by grace and that it had forsaken biblical ideas of what church should be. For Darby it was time to start afresh with a new church and prepare for Jesus' imminent Second Coming. What resulted from Darby's departure was a new way of viewing the church and history that still pervades much of evangelical Christian thought.

Ever-Changing Vocation

Born in London into a prominent Anglo-Irish family, Darby received the best education possible. He attended London's Westminster School until his parents moved to an ancestral castle in Ireland. He graduated from Dublin's Trinity College as a Classical Gold Medalist and continued his studies in law, being admitted to the Irish Chancery Bar in 1822.

But Darby's law career was to be short-lived. Within four years, largely due to his desire to help poor Irish Catholics, he was made a priest as a curate of the Church of Ireland. "I owed myself entirely to [God]," he explained of his career switch. "I longed for complete devotedness to the work of God."

He was assigned to a parish in the mountainous regions south of Dublin, and he quickly became an excellent pastor; rarely would he return to his cottage from pastoral visits before midnight. Still, as he read his Bible, he became frustrated with how "established" the church had become. The formalized Anglican church, so associated with the State, was lifeless beyond repair.

"It is positively stated (2 Tim. 3) that the church would fail and become as bad as heathenism," he wrote. "The Christian is directed to turn away from evil and turn to the Scriptures, and Christ (Rev. 2 and 3) is revealed as judging the state of the churches."

And so Darby resigned his position a mere two years and three months after receiving it. He joined a group of similarly disillusioned Christians who called themselves simply "Brethren." Committed to operate by strict biblical methods, the group had no professional ministers. Rejecting denominationalism, they believed the Holy Spirit would lead worship, so they focused their meetings on simple Communion services, served by a different individual each week.

Though officially no more a leader than anyone else in the group (now called the Plymouth Brethren because of their gathering in that city), Darby quickly became its most prominent voice. His pamphlet The Nature and Unity of the Church of Christ (1828), which described their beliefs and practices, quickly spread throughout the West. The former priest traveled to churches in Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand condemning denominationalism and calling believers to his new ecclesiology.

The End of the World

Believers came, drawn not only to Darby's view of the church but also to his view of history, especially the end of it. Premillennialism, the belief that the world will get worse until Christ returns to set up a visible, thousand-year reign of peace, had fallen out of favor for 1,500 years. Some occasional premillennialist movements had appeared over the centuries, but usually ended in disappointment after predicting Jesus' imminent return.

Darby, on the other hand, developed a new premillennialism, which he called "dispensationalism" after the division of history into eras or dispensations. Though later dispensationalists quibbled over the number and names of these periods, most agreed with Darby that there were seven, like the seven days of creation. Darby listed the ages as: Paradise, Noah, Abraham, Israel, Gentiles, the Spirit, and the Millennium.

Darby saw history as a "progressive revelation," and his system sought to explain the stages in God's redemptive plan for the universe. There was nothing especially radical about dividing history into periods. What separated Darby's dispensationalism was his novel method of biblical interpretation, which consisted of a strict literalism, the absolute separation of Israel and the church into two distinct peoples of God, and the separation of the rapture (the "catching away" of the church) from Christ's Second Coming. At the rapture, he said, Christ will come for his saints; and at the Second Coming, he will come with his saints.

Harsh Critic

Though Darby's teachings became increasingly popular (and became more popular still after his death when C.I. Scofield published Darby's ideas in the annotated Scofield Reference Bible in 1909), Darby's return to England brought a split to the Plymouth Brethren. Riled at a member's differences on issues of prophecy and church order, Darby excommunicated him even after the man admitted and repudiated his error. Darby demanded that public refutation of those beliefs be the basis of admitting people to the Lord's Table. When the Bethesda church refused to comply with the demand, Darby refused to receive any of its members.

Eventually, Darby's followers created a tight group of churches known as Exclusive Brethren (also called Darbyites), while the others, maintaining a more congregational church government with less stringent membership standards, were called Open Brethren.

Historians have criticized Darby's tendency to treat opponents harshly: "His criticisms of what he considered error were forceful and enlightening yet at times extreme, perhaps closing otherwise open doors," says one, noting that Darby condemned Dwight Moody (they disagreed on freedom of will), who made efforts to befriend his British colleague.

Though Darby may have burned his bridges, his message gained a larger and larger following. Today his dispensational premillennialism is the view of many modern fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals.

History Behind the Idea of a Secret Rapture

By David Feddes

Today many dispensationalist Christians assume that a secret rapture of believers at a secret coming of Christ is clearly taught in the Bible. They think that Bible-believing Christians have always believed in a secret rapture. However, before 1830 there is no record of Christians believing in a secret rapture.

In fact, Darby and other Plymouth Brethren first began to believe in a secret rapture, not because they found it in the Bible, but because of a supposed “prophetic utterance.”

This utterance was spoken by someone in a church led by Edward Irving, who claimed a gift of prophecy revealing new things not written in Scripture.

Biblical scholar S. P. Tregelles was among the Plymouth Brethren along with John Nelson Darby at the time. Tregelles wrote, “I am not aware that there was any definite teaching that there should be a secret rapture of the Church at a secret Coming until this was given forth as an ‘utterance’ in Mr. Irving’s church from what was then received as being the… voice of the Spirit it was from that supposed revelation that the modern doctrine and the modern phraseology respecting it arose.” (S. P. Tregelles, The Hope of Christ’s Second Coming)

Tregelles did not accept this as a revelation from the Spirit, and he did not find a secret rapture taught in the Bible. Darby, on the other hand, accepted the idea of a secret rapture, continued to teach it, and claimed support for it from a few Bible verses that had never before been viewed as teaching a secret rapture. Darby soon saw serious problems in Edward Irving that accompanied supposed revelations from the Spirit, and Darby separated from Irving. However, the idea of the secret rapture, which originated in a “prophetic utterance” in Irving’s church, remained part of Darby’s teaching. It then spread much more widely through the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible and later through books such as The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series.

Christian History Magazine, Issue 36

The Life and Times of D.L. Moody

By Dr. David Maas

How an awkward country boy with a grade-school education became the greatest evangelist of the Gilded Age.

MOST AMERICANS TODAY probably would fail even to identify Dwight Lyman Moody as a nineteenth-century evangelist. Yet during his day, he was internationally renowned. Moody often spoke to audiences of ten thousand to twenty thousand people. He presented the plan of Salvation, by voice or pen, to at least one hundred million people. D.L. Moody might well be considered the nineteenth century's "Mr. Protestant.”

The Victorian Age

Moody was born in 1837, a few months before Queen Victoria began her reign, and he died in December, 1899, just nine days before the turn of the century. Moody’s ministry took place in the Gilded Age, a period of dramatic industrial expansion, urbanization, and economic growth. One historian, obviously critical of both the excesses of the Gilded Age and evangelists like Moody, sarcastically wrote: “There was revivalist Moody, bearded and reckless, with his two hundred and eighty pounds of Adam’s flesh, every ounce of which belonged to God.” Such a narrow perspective, however, fails to understand Moody..

Moody was not only a product of his age, but also a herald of a new one. He pioneered techniques of evangelism that remain largely unchanged today. He proclaimed a new eschatology of premillennialism and fostered a new ecumenical spirit.

As one ponders Moody’s deprived, rural boyhood, his career as an evangelist and educator, and his role as a father, he quickly sheds the image of a Victorian antique and emerges as a real person.

Moody's Youth

Moody’s youth contains no hints that he would later become a famous evangelist. He was born in Northfield, Massachusetts, into a brick-mason’s family. His father died when he was only 4, leaving his mother, Betsey, in charge of raising nine children, all under 13 years of age..

Possibly because of the size of her brood, Betsey Moody never encouraged Dwight to acquire a good education or to study the Bible. Consequently, his total schooling was the equivalent of a fifth-grade education today. At age 18, when he attempted to join a Congregational Church, he failed a simple test of Bible knowledge administered by the deacons. Moody’s education was, by most standards, inadequate: he never went to college or seminary, nor was he ever ordained as a clergyman. He spelled phonetically, so his adult letters and sermon outlines abounded in spelling errors, as well as grammatical ones.

If Moody’s education was inadequate, other aspects of his childhood did equip him for his future career. His humble beginnings meant that as an adult he never lost touch with common folk; he disliked pretense or deference toward those of higher social position. From his mother’s heroic efforts to hold the family together, Moody learned the virtues of thrift, hard work, and close family ties. From her he also acquired tenderheartedness. As an adult he repeatedly broke into tears upon realizing that he had unwittingly hurt or offended someone. His public apologies to the offended person were profuse and sincere. Growing up in a farm village that, during his childhood, became a town with several businesses, meant that he felt comfortable in both rural and urban environments. So comfortable, in fact, that at age 17 he struck out on his own to seek employment as a shoe salesman in his uncle’s Boston store.

Moody as Evangelist

In Boston, Moody worked in his uncle’s shoe store and joined the local YMCA because it offered excellent educational and social opportunities. At age 18, at the urging of his Sunday school teacher, he trusted Christ for forgiveness of sin and was converted. Shortly after this he moved to Chicago, where he had such great success selling shoes, for a variety of employers, that within four years he had saved $7,000. Contemporaries who knew him during these years recalled his boundless physical energy, natural shrewdness, self-confidence, and eternal optimism. Moody might have become an industrial statesman like John D. Rockefeller or a robber baron like Jay Gould, but instead he was drawn away from business and toward missionary work among poor German and Scandinavian immigrants in the inner city.

In 1858 he established a mission Sunday school at North Market Hall. (From this work, six years later, the precursor to Moody Memorial Church was formed.) In 1861 he gave up business to work full time in social and evangelistic endeavors at the YMCA and his Sunday school. Moody’s ecumenical spirit and nondenominational preference permitted him great latitude in enlisting teachers and pupils. Tireless, innovative, and unconventional, he recruited new students by offering them candy and free pony rides. Although a monotone singer, he enthusiastically led songs, taught the Bible lesson, and dismissed each student by name. Meanwhile Moody relentlessly sought financial contributions from rich evangelical businessmen such as John Farwell and Cyrus McCormick. Despite Moody’s direct, blunt, impetuous personality, philanthropists recognized that he genuinely cared for the urban poor.

Moody also devised ministries to the adult community of Chicago. Under his leadership the YMCA developed a citywide distribution of tracts and held daily noon prayer meetings. His mission held prayer meetings in the evening for adults, as well as Friday teas, and classes in English for recent immigrants. In 1864 he expanded his mission into a church—the Illinois Street Independent Church—for immigrant families. As president of the Chicago YMCA for four years and a successful church organizer, he became a popular speaker at YMCA conventions and once spent four months visiting and speaking in YMCAs in England.

The Great Chicago Fire in October 1871 caused Moody to leave church work for a career as a traveling revivalist. The famous fire destroyed his church, his home, and the local YMCA. At first he was spiritually depressed, but eventually he realized that too much of his energy had been spent in committee work and fund raising. He determined now to focus on preaching the gospel of Christ, for he was convinced that the world would be changed not by social work, but by the return of Christ and the establishment of his millennial kingdom on earth. His conscious rejection of the old notions of postmillennialism and acceptance of premillennialism impelled him in a vigorous missionary effort for the “evangelization of the world in this generation.”

In the summer of 1873 he boldly set out on faith for England with his song leader, Ira Sankey, and their families. After preaching for two years in England, Scotland, and Ireland, he returned to America as an internationally famous revivalist. Immediately, representatives from numerous American cities lobbied him to hold a crusade in their cities. For the next three years, from 1875 till 1878, Moody conducted revival campaigns in both large cities like Philadelphia and small towns like Newburyport, in structures ranging from converted skating rinks to abandoned railroad depots. During these crusades he pioneered many techniques of evangelism: a house-to-house canvass of residents prior to a crusade; an ecumenical approach enlisting cooperation from all local churches and evangelical lay leaders regardless of denominational affiliations; philanthropic support by the business community; the rental of a large, central building; the showcasing of a gospel soloist; and the use of an inquiry room.

Moody as Educator

Although continuing to conduct evangelistic crusades, in 1879 D.L. shifted the main focus of his ministry to education. In that year he established Northfield Seminary for girls, followed two years later by Mount Hermon School for boys. Finally, in 1886, Moody launched the Bible Work Institute of the Chicago Evangelization Society (renamed the Moody Bible Institute shortly before his death). He hoped that providing a Bible-centered education would produce an army of trained lay people for the work of evangelism in the growing cities of America.

In 1880, Moody invited adults and college-age youths to the first of many summer Bible conferences at his home in Northfield. His ecumenical spirit and lack of theological training kept Moody from rigid doctrinal positions, such as those that characterized contemporaries in the holiness, perfectionism, or dispensationalist movements. He invited speakers from diverse theological traditions to these summer conferences. At one conference, The Student Volunteer Movement was founded by one hundred collegians who pledged to work in foreign missions after their college education. In 1894, as part of the lay training at Moody Bible Institute, he started the Colportage Association, an organization using horse-drawn “Gospel Wagons” from which students sold religious books and tracts throughout the nation.

Moody as Father

Moody is usually seen only as a tireless, solidly built revivalist always pleading with sinners on the sawdust trail.

While it is true he preached six sermons a day just a month before his death, it was in his role as a father that his personality is best revealed. In 1862 he married Emma Revell, who became the proverbial personality behind the scenes. She mothered his three children—Emma, William, and Paul—while also serving as his personal secretary.

All three Moody children fondly recalled experiences with a fun-loving, “muscular Christian” father. Paul proudly remembered his dad as “the greatest man and the best man I have ever known.”

Moody loved those vacations with his family on his Northfield farm where he could discard his black suits and dress in “disreputable” old clothes. Here he played the role of a gentleman farmer, daily riding horse and buggy at breakneck speed through the fields, taking an afternoon nap, or huddling over hundreds of letters that he personally signed and then spread around the room for the ink to dry. Dinner guests observed his quick-witted, goodnatured personality and his unceasing activity verging on restlessness; they were frequently startled when he opened his mail and then flipped the letter at them, brusquely remarking, “Answer that!”

As a son remembers him at home, Moody was “a stout and bearded Peter Pan, a boy who never really grew up.” Possibly compensating for his earlier deprived childhood, he did everything on a dramatic scale. He took baths three times a day in ice-cold water. Noting a shortage of china, he ordered barrels of the same pattern. He bought ascots and suspenders by the gross. His son recalls how once his dad couldn't decide which of several Oriental rugs to buy, so he impulsively bought them all. Moody was a wonderful storyteller, spending time with both his children and his beloved grandchildren. He relished practical jokes, from mild pranks of hiding a deck of playing cards in his son’s college room, to dumping a bucket of water on some unsuspecting Northfield students. His advice to his children was often expressed in pithy mottoes: “Don't wait for something to turn up. Go and turn up something.” Or, “The devil tempts most men, but a lazy man tempts the devil.”

Questions

The life of Dwight Lyman Moody poses a set of fascinating questions:

Why did God choose such a poorly educated, sometimes self-indulgent man?

Would Moody have become a wealthy tycoon had he channeled his dynamic energies into the business world?

If Moody lived in our sophisticated age, would multitudes throng to hear him preach in his rapid style of 230 words per minute, or was he a man that appealed only to hearers of the Victorian era?

In the end, we must answer that it is best to avoid such speculations and instead recognize that God empowered a willing, tireless servant who often said, “There is no use asking God to do things you can do yourself.”

Dr. David Maas is professor of history at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Colorful Sayings from Colorful Moody

Moody's common sense and quick wit led to many pithy sayings. A sampling.

On Prayer

We ought to see the face of God every morning before we see the face of man.

If you have so much business to attend to that you have no time to pray, depend upon it that you have more business on hand than God ever intended you should have.

A man who prays much in private will make short prayers in public.

Some men’s prayers need to be cut short at both ends and set on fire in the middle.

Keep short accounts with God.

On the Gospel:

God never made a promise that was too good to be true.

If you can really make a man believe you love him, you have won him; and if I could only make people really believe that God loves them, what a rush we would see for the kingdom of God!

God hates sin, but he loves the sinner.

Law tells me how crooked I am; grace comes along and straightens me out.

As I go into a cemetery I like to think of the time when the dead shall rise from their graves. . . . Thank God, our friends are not buried; they are only sown!

On Christian Living:

It is better to be a little too strict than too liberal.

I thought when I became a Christian I had nothing to do but just to lay my oars in the bottom of the boat and float along. But I soon found that I would have to go against the current.

Character is what a man is in the dark.

I believe the religion of Christ covers the whole man. Why shouldn’t a man play baseball or lawn-tennis? . . . Don’t imagine that you have got to go into a cave to be consecrated, and stay there all your life. Whatever you take up, take it up with all your heart.

Excuses are the cradle . . . that Satan rocks men off to sleep in.

Forgiveness is not that stripe which says, “I will forgive, but not forget.” It is not to bury the hatchet with the handle sticking out of the ground, so you can grasp it the minute you want it.

My friends, you are no match for Satan, and when he wants to fight you just run to your elder Brother, who is more than a match for all the devils in hell.

When a man thinks he has got a good deal of strength, and is self-confident, you may look for his downfall. It may be years before it comes to light, but it is already commenced.

On the Bible:

It is easier for me to have faith in the Bible than to have faith in D.L. Moody, for Moody has fooled me lots of times.

I am glad there are things in the Bible I do not understand. If I could take that book up and read it as I would any other book, I might think I could write a book like that.

On Service:

The reward of service is more service.

When a man gets up so high (spiritual mountaintop) that he cannot reach down and save poor sinners, there is something wrong.

If there had been a committee appointed, Noah’s ark would never have been built.

If this world is going to be reached, I am convinced that it must be done by men and women of average talent. After all, there are comparatively few people in the world who have great talents.

On Himself:

I suppose they say of me, “He is a radical; he is a fanatic; he only has one idea.” Well, it is a glorious idea. I would rather have that said of me than be a man of ten thousand ideas and do nothing with them.

On his not enlisting in the Civil War: There has never been a time in my life when I felt that I could take a gun and shoot down a fellow-being. In this respect I am a Quaker.

I know perfectly well that, wherever I go and preach, there are many better preachers known and heard than I am; all that I can say about it is that the Lord uses me.

[Doctors] are called devils by the faith healers. Do you ask what I would do if I were ill? Get the best doctor in town, trust in him, and trust in the Lord to work through him.

Life is very sweet to me, and there is no position of power or wealth that could tempt me from the throne God has given me.

Some day you will read in the papers that D.L. Moody, of East Northfield, is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now. I shall have gone up higher, that is all-out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal; a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint, a body fashioned like unto his glorious body. I was born of the flesh in 1837. I was born of the Spirit in 1856.* [* Editor’s Note: When Moody said this, later in life, he apparently misspoke, for it is well documented that his conversion took place in 1855. ] That which is born of the flesh may die. That which is born of the Spirit will live forever.

—compiled by Mary Ann Jeffreys

Christian History Magazine, Issue 94

The Postmodern Maze

By Richard Mouw

Abraham Kuyper reminds us that only Christ can bring wholeness to our fragmented age.

In a 1990 forum in Harper's Magazine, five specialists on urban life--two architects, an urban planner, a sociologist, and a sculptor--discussed what has been happening to our public spaces. While they differed about how best to design our shopping malls, subway systems, and city centers, they were unanimous about the underlying problem: Our lives are increasingly characterized by "fragmentation and difference,” and we need a new "sense of what we have in common while knowing our difference--a sense of wholeness.”

This sense of wholeness seems even more unattainable now that we are into the 21st century. Jerry Springer regularly takes us from shouting match to shouting match, with no resolutions--and certainly no "meta-narrative,” no overarching story of human existence--ever in sight. Zealous religious believers denounce each other, even as they are all being condemned by equally zealous critics of religion. Influential political leaders complain about growing incivility in their own ranks that they seem incapable of reversing. And many social commentators seem resigned to a world in which no light at all can be shed on the possibilities for unifying either our individual or our collective lives. Psychologist Kenneth Gergen argues that we can only resign ourselves to an "endless wandering in the maze of meaning”; indeed, we may need to come up with a new hymn to sing along the way: "Mazing Grace.”

In 1880, the Dutch statesman-theologian Abraham Kuyper issued a bold proclamation that spoke to the growing fragmentation of society and social roles in his own day-- and in ours: "There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry 'Mine!'”

A Christian World-and-Life View

Kuyper did not want to return to the ways in which people and governments had attempted to unify life in the past. He feared both an all-powerful state and a social order dominated by a single church. Kuyper was a Calvinist who recognized that his own spiritual forebears had often propagated political schemes that denied people the right to live by their basic convictions. God calls people freely to offer him their obedience, Kuyper insisted. Nothing is gained by imposing patterns of "Christian” behavior on human beings whose hearts have not been turned to the Lord.

Kuyper was an important political leader in the Netherlands. After a brief period as a pastor, he waged a successful campaign for election to the Dutch Parliament. For the next several decades, he led the Anti-Revolutionary Party (which he helped found)-- and even served a term as Prime Minister from 1901 to 1905. But his interests extended far beyond politics. Though he had relinquished his clergy credentials when he entered political life, he continued to function as a theologian. He founded the Free university of Amsterdam in 1880. He led a breakaway movement out of the state-sponsored Reformed church to form the second largest Reformed denomination in the country. And all the while he wrote regularly for a daily newspaper he had established earlier in his career, as well as spending much time urging Christians to acknowledge Christ's lordship over all aspects of life--including farming, the arts, business, labor-management relations, and education.

In a series of lectures that he gave at Princeton Seminary during an American tour in 1898 (still in print as Lectures on Calvinism), Kuyper set forth the contours of what he labeled "a Christian world-and-life view” that provided a faith-based perspective on a variety of cultural areas, including politics, art, and the life of the mind. Christians must have such a perspective, he argued, if we truly believe that Jesus Christ is sovereign over all of creation's "square inches.”

One Creation, Many Spheres

Kuyper's many leadership roles corresponded nicely to his idea of "sphere sovereignty,” a perspective that has strong affinities to contemporary discussions about civil society. Social scientists and philosophers have recently stressed the importance of "mediating structures.” Neighborhood associations, the Rotary Club, Boy Scouts, churches and synagogues, amateur soccer leagues, extended families--these "living subcultures from which people derive meaning and identity” (as sociologist Peter Berger calls them) protect us from the all-encompassing tendencies of the state on the one hand and isolated individualism on the other.

Kuyper's teaching offers a Christian perspective on these matters. For one thing, he believed that the importance of these mediating structures goes beyond their practical value. The family, he insisted, is grounded in God's creating purposes for humankind. The state, therefore, does not grant rights to families; rather, political authorities must recognize the sphere of family life as having a right to exist and flourish--a right that is not theirs to grant or deny.

In Kuyper's view, God programmed the diverse spheres of human interaction into the original creation. When the Lord told the first human pair to "be fruitful and multiply,” he was surely talking about procreation. But when he instructed them to "fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over [it],” he was issuing a "cultural mandate,” according to Kuyper. As Adam and Eve began to fashion tools and work schedules and patterns of interaction, they were "filling” the Garden with culture--and eventually, even without the appearance of sin, the Garden would become a City.

In that sense, not only family but art, science, technology, politics (as the patterns of collective decision-making), recreation, and the like were all programmed into creation so that culture would flourish in many different ways. God wanted artists to bring aesthetic excellence to the creation and scholars to advance the cause of knowledge. Economic activity would foster stewardship, while politics would promote justice.

Sin and Grace

Human sin deeply affected all of this. Kuyper believed that humankind is in a state of rebellion against God--our natural tendency is to work against God's purposes. God's saving grace redirects our wills away from idolatrous projects, making it possible once again for us to glorify God in our personal and corporate activities.

According to Kuyper, there is an "antithesis” between believers and unbelievers in the present world: People of faith view life in a radically different way than others do. And there was no doubt in Kuyper's mind that the public square is a particularly strategic place for waging the ongoing battle between righteousness and unrighteousness.

But Kuyper also put forward a doctrine of "common grace” that tempered this picture: In addition to the saving grace that renews human hearts, God shows gracious favor even towards those who will not end up in heaven. He does this by working mysteriously to restrain sin and to stimulate works of culture that will fulfill his providential purposes. Some very positive gifts result from this divine activity in sinful human hearts.

We can see the fruits of common grace at work, Kuyper wrote, "wherever civic virtue, a sense of domesticity, natural love, the practice of human virtue, the improvement of the public conscience, integrity, mutual loyalty among people, and a feeling for piety leaven life.”

Christ the King

Kuyper's overall prescription for how to order society has come to be labeled "principled pluralism.” In our fallen world there are many worldviews at work, and Kuyper wanted people to be explicit about how their deepest convictions shaped their various activities--politics, schooling, farming, labor-management relations, etc. In politics, for example, there should be a variety of political parties based upon worldviews, each contending for their specific policies but none of them having any kind of favored status. The state should function not as a coach or cheerleader but as a referee, seeing to it that all perspectives--religious and irreligious--are treated impartially as they compete in an arena characterized by fair play.

Kuyper had begun his pastoral ministry as a liberal, but under the influence of ordinary Calvinist folks in his parish, he had soon experienced a profound evangelical conversion. He said their simple faith had been "a blessing for my heart, the rise of the morning star in my life.” He referred to them affectionately as "the little people” and shared with them a deep personal faith in Jesus Christ. As he lay dying, no longer able to speak to his family gathered around, he pointed to the symbol of the Savior on the Cross that hung above his bed.

But for Kuyper it was not enough simply to trust in a personal Savior. Christ was for him also the risen and reigning Sovereign; one of his favorite phrases was pro rege, "for the King.” The ascended Christ-- to whom "all authority in heaven and on earth has been given”--rules over a very complex creation. And its complexity, though distorted by sin, still shows forth God's creating purposes, which will be renewed at the return of Christ.

Like the urban planners convened by the Harper's editors in 1990, Kuyper called for a sense of wholeness to remedy the increasing fragmentation of life. But he insisted that recognizing this need should not lead to nostalgia for the past. Instead, we must look for an integrated worldview drawing together all the complexities of life, a worldview grounded not in an intellectual scheme but in the One who rules over all the square inches of the creation that he still loves--and that he will some day renew.

Richard Mouw is president and professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Nothing symbolized their defeat more powerfully than the Scopes Monkey Trial held in Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925. A high school teacher named John T. Scopes was solicited by the fledgling American Civil Liberties Union to test his state's new law against the teaching of evolution. Celebrity lawyer Clarence Darrow was retained for his defense. The prosecution's legal team included William Jennings Bryan, a Presbyterian and famous politician. Fundamentalists won the case (at least temporarily), but they were ridiculed by Darrow and the press. Despite their intellectual rigor and strength in northern urban areas, the fundamentalists have been portrayed ever since as country bumpkins.

Christian History Magazine, Issue 94

Setting the Captives Free: Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922)

By Robert Eric Frykenberg

Oppressed women around the globe await those willing to carry on the legacy of Pandita Ramabai.

Scripture reminds us that some people lie awake at night imagining new forms of evil. More often than not, such evil involves wasting the lives of women and children. In India alone, millions of girls, some as young as eight years old, are “hired,” “rented,” or simply “sold” or “married” to old men. Victims of drudgery or sexual exploitation, many do not live long, and those who survive—the “broken” or “used up”—are thrown into the street to beg. Widow burning was outlawed in 1828, but today thousands of lives are lost each year to “bride burning,” when a mother-in-law “accidentally” spills burning oil on a new bride in the kitchen—usually for the sake of the dowry. About two million children around the world still succumb to “sex tourism” every year.

Many champions of women's rights have given their lives to alter such situations. Christian and non-Christian activists look back for inspiration to the 19th-century Indian social reformer Pandita Ramabai.

No word better epitomizes the lifelong quest and career of Ramabai than mukti— the term for liberty, freedom, release, or salvation. It expresses her own personal journey to Christianity. It is the name she gave to her school for rescued girls. Emblazoned on the Mukti Mission's newsletter, the “Mukti Prayer Bell,” was an engraving of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, along with the ringing words, “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the inhabitants thereof—Lev. XXV, v. x.”This was her hope for millions of oppressed people, especially women and children for whom she fought throughout her life.

Ramabai's concern for the plight of women came from her father. A renowned Sanskrit scholar who had been ostracized for daring to teach his child-bride to read Sanskrit, he had been forced to wander the length and breadth of India with his small family, living on alms. He left his daughter a priceless legacy: rigorous training and a disciplined memory that enabled her to recite an enormous corpus of classical lore. After her parents and sister starved to death in a famine, Ramabai continued to wander until, at the age of 20, she was “discovered” by pandits (scholars) of Calcutta. Overnight, she became a national sensation.

In 1882, after social reformers invited her to teach young women, she spoke out against the degradations of child-marriage—which almost invariably resulted in homeless child-widows—and castigated men for their treatment of women. “I am the child of a man who had to suffer … on account of advocating Female Education. … I consider it my duty, to the end of my life, to maintain this cause … in this land.”

Meanwhile, Ramabai had been growing more and more disillusioned with ancient religious texts indicating that women had no souls, nor any place in eternity. Not long after she stumbled upon a copy of the Gospel of Luke, she had long discussions with Nehemiah Gore, a renowned Brahman Christian convert. She publicly declared her faith in Christ while she was visiting England. “I realized, after reading the fourth chapter of St. John's Gospel, that Christ was truly the Divine Saviour he claimed to be, and no one but He could transform and uplift the downtrodden women in India.” Her quest for mukti had reached its goal: “I was hungry for something better … I found it in the Christian Bible and was satisfied.”

When Ramabai attended her cousin's graduation from Women's Medical College in Philadelphia, her cause found an international audience. Her speeches made her famous throughout America as a pioneer in the battle for women's rights. Frances Willard, president of the Women's Temperance Christian union, described Ramabai as “a woman-lover … not man-hater, for she is too good-natured not to love all humanity … but because women need special help.”

Revenue from Ramabai's first English book, The High Caste Hindu Woman, and fund-raising efforts in America enabled her to found “Sharada Sadan” (“Home of Learning”) for downtrodden women in Pune, India, in 1889. But when one of her students turned to Christianity, public outcries forced her to look for a new location. In the village of Kedgaon 30 miles away, on 100 acres of “base, stony, treeless and waterless” wilderness, Ramabai and her helpers dug wells, built housing, and set up schools. She called her new mission Mukti.

In 1895, Ramabai disguised herself as a sannyasini (female mendicant) and traveled on foot to the sacred sites of her youth, determined to rescue destitute women who were being forced into servitude and sexual degradation. She beheld unspeakable horrors: hundreds of agents enticing abandoned and helpless child-widows into institutions where they were shut up or rented out to men. Later such women were turned out onto the streets after they were deemed wasted and worthless, to “die a death worse than a starved street dog.” Her initial effort to rescue seven wretched women nearly cost her life. She returned twice, during a terrible famine, to rescue and carry away scores of victims in her train of bullock carts— starving little girls (and on occasion a few boys) clad in filthy rags—and to give them a new life at the Mukti Mission. Literate and skilled “graduates” of Mukti went out into the world. Many became teachers or widely sought-after wives. Some attended colleges in America and became medical doctors.

Pandita Ramabai died in 1922, having just finished translating the Bible into the local language, Marathi. Her name, long banished from public memory in her own country because of her Christian faith, is being resurrected today by feminists and others who are carrying on her vision to help the downtrodden. “Pandita Ramabai Sarawati,” wrote Amritlal B. Shah, “was the greatest woman produced by Modern India and one of the greatest Indians in all of history. Her achievements as a champion of women's rights … remain unrivaled even after the lapse of … a century.”

Ramabai believed that, since all have been made by God and can be redeemed through Christ, no human being should be oppressed or excluded from the blessings of liberty. Reactionary forces could neither crush her spirit nor defeat her mission. Indeed, she often declared, everything she accomplished had been made possible by the mukti she had found in the Lord to whom she turned for strength.

Robert Eric Frykenberg is professor emeritus of history and South Asian studies at the university of Wisconsin-Madison.

Christian History Magazine, Issue 65

Pentecostalism: William Seymour 1870-1922

By Vinson Synan

What scoffers viewed as a weird babble of tongues became a world phenomenon after his Los Angeles revival.

OF ALL the outstanding black American religious leaders in the twentieth century, one of the least recognized is William Seymour, the unsung pastor of the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles and catalyst of the worldwide Pentecostal movement. Only in the last few decades have scholars become aware of his importance, beginning perhaps with Yale University historian Sidney Ahlstrom, who said Seymour personified a black piety “which exerted its greatest direct influence on American religious history"—placing Seymour’s impact ahead of figures like W. E. B. Dubois and Martin Luther King, Jr.

William Joseph Seymour was born in Centerville, Louisiana, on May 2, 1870 to former slaves Simon and Phyllis Seymour. Raised as a Baptist, Seymour was given to dreams and visions as a youth. At age 25, he moved to Indianapolis, where he worked as a railroad porter and then waited on tables in a fashionable restaurant. Around this time, he contracted smallpox and went blind in his left eye.

In 1900 he relocated to Cincinnati, where he joined the “reformation” Church of God (headquartered in Anderson, Indiana), also known as “the Evening Light Saints.” Here he became steeped in radical Holiness theology, which taught second blessing entire sanctification (i.e., sanctification is a post-conversion experience that results in complete holiness), divine healing, premillennialism, and the promise of a worldwide Holy Spirit revival before the rapture.

In 1903 Seymour moved to Houston, Texas, in search of his family. There he joined a small Holiness church pastored by a black woman, Lucy Farrow, who soon put him touch with Charles Fox Parham. Parham was a Holiness teacher under whose ministry a student had spoken in tongues (glossolalia) two years earlier. For Parham, this was the “Bible evidence” of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. When he established a Bible school to train disciples in his “Apostolic Faith” in Houston, Farrow urged Seymour to attend.

Since Texas law forbade blacks to sit in classrooms with whites, Parham encouraged Seymour to remain in a hallway and listen to his lectures through the doorway. Here Seymour accepted Parham’s premise of a “third blessing” baptism in the Holy Spirit evidenced by speaking in tongues. Though Seymour had not yet personally experienced tongues, he sometimes preached this message with Parham in Houston churches.

In early 1906, Seymour was invited to help Julia Hutchins pastor a Holiness church in Los Angeles. With Parham’s support, Seymour journeyed to California, where he preached the new Pentecostal doctrine using Acts 2:4 as his text. Hutchins, however, rejected Seymour’s teaching on tongues and padlocked the door to him and his message.

Seymour was then invited to stay in the home of Richard Asberry at 214 Bonnie Brae Street, where on April 9, after a month of intense prayer and fasting, Seymour and several others spoke in tongues. Word spread quickly about the strange events on Bonnie Brae Street and drew so much attention that Seymour was forced to preach on the front porch to crowds gathered in the street. At one point, the jostling crowd grew so large the porch floor caved in.Seymour searched Los Angeles for a suitable building. What he found was an old abandoned African Methodist Episcopal church on Azusa Street that had recently been used as a warehouse and stable. Although it was a shambles, Seymour and his small band of black washerwomen, maids, and laborers cleaned the building, set up board plank seats, and made a pulpit out of old shoebox shipping crates. Services began in mid-April in the church, which was named the “Apostolic Faith Mission.”

What happened at Azusa Street during the next three years was to change the course of church history. Although the little frame building measured only 40 by 60 feet, as many as 600 persons jammed inside while hundreds more looked in through the windows. The central attraction was tongues, with the addition of traditional black worship styles that included shouting, trances, and the holy dance. There was no order of service, since “the Holy Ghost was in control.” No offerings were taken, although a box hung on the wall proclaimed, “Settle with the Lord.” Altar workers enthusiastically prayed seekers through to the coveted tongues experience. It was a noisy place, and services lasted into the night.

Though local newspaper coverage spoke cynically about the “weird babble of tongues” of “colored mammys,” on street corners and trolley cars, the news intrigued the city. Whole congregations came en masse to Azusa Street and stayed while their former churches disappeared. Other Pentecostal centers soon sprang up around town.

Reporting on all this was Frank Bartleman, an itinerant Holiness preacher and rescue mission worker, who wrote to the Way of Faith in South Carolina that “Pentecost has come to Los Angeles, the American Jerusalem.” His reports, which were printed and reprinted in the Holiness press, spread a contagious fever of curiosity about the Azusa Street meetings all across the country.

In September, Seymour began publishing his own paper titled The Apostolic Faith. At its height, it went free to some 50,000 subscribers around the world.

Though many came to mock and scorn, many others heard messages in known earthly languages uttered by uneducated blacks and whites that convinced them of the reality of the revival. Soon whites made up the majority of members and visitors, and black hands were laid on white heads to receive the new tongues experience. Soon an avalanche of “Azusa Pilgrims” descended on the mission to receive what were thought to be “missionary tongues,” which would enable preachers to go to the far corners of the world proclaiming the gospel in languages they had never learned.

A list of Azusa pilgrims reads like a hall of fame for the new order of Pentecostal priests. From North Carolina came Gaston B. Cashwell, who later spread the Pentecostal message to the southern Holiness churches. From Memphis came Charles Mason who returned to lead the Church of God in Christ into the Pentecostal fold (now the largest black Pentecostal denomination in America). From Chicago came William Durham, who later formulated the “Finished Work” theology that gave birth to the Assemblies of God in 1914.

To Seymour, tongues was not the only message of Azusa Street: “Don’t go out of here talking about tongues: talk about Jesus,” he admonished. Another message was that of racial reconciliation. Blacks and whites worked together in apparent harmony under the direction of a black pastor, a marvel in the days of Jim Crow segregation. This led Bartleman to exult, “At Azusa Street, the color line was washed away in the Blood.” Seymour dreamed that Azusa Street was creating a new kind of church, one where a common experience in the Holy Spirit tore down old walls of racial, ethnic, and denominational differences.

Seymour’s dream was rudely shattered even before the “glory days at Old Azusa” came to an end. When his mentor Charles Parham visited Azusa Street in October of 1906, Parham was appalled at what he called “darky camp meeting stunts” and “fits and spasms of spiritualists” who invaded the meetings. Although Seymour recognized him the “projector” of the movement, the Azusa Street elders rejected Parham. For the rest of his life, Parham denounced the Azusa Street meetings as “spiritual power prostituted.”

Perhaps the most damaging challenge to Seymour came in 1909 when white female co-workers Florence Crawford and Clara Lum moved to Portland, Oregon, carrying with them the mailing list for The Apostolic Faith magazine. This cut off Seymour from his followers and effectively ended his leadership of the emerging movement.

Rumors circulated in the black community that Crawford may have left in a fit of jealousy. It was said that she had wanted to marry Seymour but was discouraged from doing so by C. H. Mason because the world was not prepared for interracial marriages. When Seymour decided to marry Jennie Moore, a black leader at Azusa Street, Crawford opposed it “because of the shortness of time before the rapture of the church.”

After the “glory years” of 1906 to 1909, the Azusa Street mission became a small black church pastored by Seymour until his death on September 28, 1922, and then by his wife, Jennie, until her death in 1936. It was later sold for unpaid taxes and demolished. Today, a Japanese Cultural Center occupies the ground.

By the year 2000, the spiritual heirs of Seymour, the Pentecostals and charismatics, numbered over 500 million adherents, making it the second largest family of Christians in the world. Today, practically all Pentecostal and charismatic movements can trace their roots directly or indirectly to the humble mission on Azusa Street and its pastor.

Vinson Synan, dean of the School of Divinity at Regent University, is author of The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition (Eerdmans, 1997).

Timeline

1867 National Holiness Association forms

1870 William Seymour born in Louisiana

1901 Agnes Ozman speaks in tongues under Charles Parham’s ministry in Topeka, Kansas

1905 Seymour accepts Parham’s Pentecostal doctrine in Houston

1906 At the house on Bonnie Brae Street, Los Angeles, Seymour speaks in tongues for the first time

1906-1909 Azusa Street revival

1907 G. B. Cashwell brings Pentecostal fervor to churches in the South

1908 Seymour marries Jennie Moore; the next year, Florence Crawford departs Azusa Street with the mailing list of The Apostolic Faith

1914 The Assemblies of God forms

1922 Seymour dies; his wife takes over leadership of the Azusa Street Mission

1943 American Pentecostal churches become charter members of the National Association of Evangelicals

1960 Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett speaks in tongues, inaugurating the charismatic movement

Christian History Magazine, Issue 58

Pentecostalism's Global Language

Interview with Walter J. Hollenweger

It's not tongues but a different way of being a Christian.

Why is Pentecostalism so popular? It is nearly half a billion strong worldwide, and has been and continues to be the fastest growing Christian movement in the world. It has made inroads not only in third-world regions like Africa and Latin America, but it also continues to attract huge followings in the United States and Europe.

What is a Pentecostal?

Worldwide there is so much variety that about all one can say is that a Pentecostal is a Christian who calls himself a Pentecostal. Though Americans tend to focus on the gift of tongues, overall Pentecostals emphasize that God has given several gifts—not just speaking in tongues but also healing and the so-called rational gifts like organization or building a school. Diverse gifts to diverse people. It’s not a strictly theological definition but a phenomenological one.

Why is speaking in tongues the focus in America?

There are many reasons, of course, but one is that American and other middle-class cultures, as in Switzerland, find tongues an extraordinary phenomenon, so these experiences get a lot of attention. In Africa or Mexico, on the other hand, speaking in tongues and healings are not considered extraordinary—they can even be found in some indigenous pagan religions. (Speaking in tongues is not even “supernatural,” as many Pentecostals have found out.) Tongues aren’t even spoken in a lot of third-world Pentecostal churches. Instead, third-world Pentecostals focus on corporate worship, singing together, and Christian education. American Pentecostals don’t seek education as much as an experience of the supernatural.

Our issue covers Pentecostalism up to about 1950. What have been the key changes in Pentecostalism since then?

First, more and more young Pentecostals are becoming scholars through reputable universities. It’s true for Pentecostals in Europe, North America, and Latin America. It’s also true for Africa and for Asia.

There are now several hundred young Pentecostal scholars with doctorates, and that, of course, changes the breadth and depth of Pentecostalism. Most of them have maintained their roots in Pentecostalism, so they are now bilingual. They can speak in the university language, in the language of concepts and definitions, but they can also speak in the oral language of Pentecostalism, and I think that is an extremely important part of their success.

Second, this increase in education has led in many places to more ecumenical openness. In the past, nobody wanted to talk to the Pentecostals, and the Pentecostals didn’t want to talk to any of the other churches because they saw them as a lost cause. Now, for instance, there is a worldwide dialogue between Pentecostals and Roman Catholics that has been going on for 20 years. There have also been many contacts with the World Council of Churches, and the latest example is a global dialogue with the Presbyterian churches.

David du Plessis, a pioneer in ecumenism, has been instrumental in both these changes. He went to the Catholics. He went to the World Council of Churches. He went to all the universities. And the fact that he was a reasonable man and also a Pentecostal astonished many people. They thought Pentecostals were all a little crazy and could not think properly. But when they got to know him, they realized that it is possible to speak in tongues and be a critical scholar.

Another change, of course, is the worldwide explosive growth to nearly half a billion adherents. Why is Pentecostalism so popular?

Some scholars think it has to do with its theology and doctrine. But Pentecostal theology is not homogeneous. Others think it’s because of Pentecostals’ aggressive evangelism. That is partly true because a real Pentecostal is by definition an evangelist, whose faith is as infectious as the flu.

The most important reason is that it is an oral religion. It is not defined by the abstract language that characterizes, for instance, Presbyterians or Catholics. Pentecostalism is communicated in stories, testimonies, and songs. Oral language is a much more global language than that of the universities or church declarations. Oral tradition is flexible and can adapt itself to a variety of circumstances.

Can’t oral tradition drift off into sub-Christian and even heretical beliefs?

Certainly, but overall there is a basic evangelical consensus among Pentecostals. They are similar to the early church in this respect. Early Christians didn’t have a formal, written confession of faith, as Presbyterians and others do today. They had the stories of Jesus. Even Jesus didn’t spell out doctrine; he gave his followers stories of miracles, and taught through proverbs and parables.

The earliest church was united, but not as much through their theology as through the Lord’s Prayer, Paul’s collection for Jerusalem (his theological “enemies"), baptism, and the Eucharist. Their statements of faith were simple, and the simplest was “Jesus is Lord.” It was a very different way of achieving togetherness, and it was achieved through these oral forms.

Ironically, when the ecumenical confessions came later, they did not unite the church. They divided it, as propositional theology always does. But across divided theology, it is possible to pray together, to sing together, and to act together. That’s what Pentecostals do at their best.

Is it fair to say that when you convert to Pentecostalism, you are converting not to a certain theology but to a new experience of faith?

Yes, and that has important evangelistic consequences for Pentecostals.

In many circles, when you become a Christian, you talk about gaining a new understanding of the Lord’s Supper and baptism (they are either more or less sacramental), but other people are not terribly interested in that. When you become a Pentecostal, you talk about how you've been healed or your very life has been changed. That’s something Pentecostals talk about over and over, partly because people are interested in hearing that sort of thing.

Pentecostalism today addresses the whole life, including the thinking part. More mainline forms of Christianity address the thinking part first and that often affects the rest of life, but not always.

Yet it seems most Pentecostals are far more right-brained and intuitive than left-brained and rational.

Indeed, the “orality” of Pentecostalism—the singing, the dancing, the speaking in tongues—accents the intuitive. But a mature Pentecostal will try to connect the intuitive and the rational. Always emphasizing the analytical will destroy faith. But only emphasizing the intuitive leads to chaos. A challenge of the Pentecostal movement is to combine rational thinking with its spontaneous emotional side.

This is the challenge for all Christians, really. The rationalist needs the Toronto Blessing and has to be slain in the Spirit to realize that. It sometimes seems silly to me, but you’ll notice that it is rationalists and intellectuals who fall down. People who have a balanced emotional and intuitive life don’t need that. True, some rationalists dance, sing, go walking in the mountains, or play a musical instrument, but then they go back to their science, to rational lives, and the two are not connected.

What most concerns you as you think about Pentecostalism in the coming century?

First, Pentecostalism must confront its tendency to segregate and separate into countless denominations. It’s happening all the time, and it really is a scandal.

The other challenge is common to all Christian churches: What do we do with the ecological threat to the world? What do we do with the threat of hunger and the plight of refugees? It’s a challenge that will hit Pentecostals harder than any other churches because their largest churches are on the poor side of the world. But as Christians, we have a contribution to make —not just in money but in prayer and in developing solutions that politicians cannot.

But Pentecostals are not known for their social activism.

That’s true in some ways, but it is a misconception in others. Many of Martin Luther King’s marchers were black Pentecostals. In Brazil there are many Pentecostals sitting in parliament. And in many third-world countries, Pentecostals are trying to develop new ways of gaining political influence without the game playing we have in the West. In Latin America, for example, they try to work with sectors of the Catholic church to get water or a school or a new street for a poor district. So there are quite a number of places where Pentecostals take up the structural issues, but they do not take them up by founding political parties. They start from the local needs and the local misery people experience every day.

Walter J. Hollenweger is the leading expert on worldwide Pentecostalism, which he has been studying for more than 40 years. Having grown up in the Pentecostal church, he later became ordained in the Reformed Church of Switzerland. From 1965 to 1971 he was executive secretary of the World Council of Churches, then served as professor of mission at England’s University of Birmingham for 18 years. His seminal book The Pentecostals (Hendrickson, 1972) was recently followed up by Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide (Hendrickson, 1997).

Christian History Magazine, Issue 79

William Wadé Harris 1860-1929

By Elizabeth Isichei

William Wadé Harris - a Liberian activist - left an unsuccessful local ministry to trail across the Ivory Coast. In 18 months, he baptized 100,000 converts.

In 1910, a middle-aged African sat in a jail cell in Liberia. Locked up for political activism, he now found his mind turning to God. He little suspected something was about to happen that would make him one of the most effective evangelists Africa has seen and the founder of an influential denomination.

According to William Wadé Harris’s later testimony, what happened was that the angel Gabriel entered his jail cell. With a sound like gushing water, the Spirit descended on the incarcerated Episcopalian.

“You are not in prison,” the angelic messenger assured him. “God is coming to anoint you. You will be a prophet. Your case resembles that of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. You are like Daniel.” Gabriel instructed him to replace his western clothes with a white gown and to shun alcohol.

Harris’s wife, Rose, hearing the news, assumed her husband had gone mad. Overcome by grief, she fell ill and died.

Who was William Wadé Harris, and why was he in jail?

Harris was a member of the Grebo ethnic group, a people of southern Liberia, closely related to the Kru. The Kru were famous as seamen. For centuries, every ship coming to trade on the West African coast would stop to take on board Kru seamen, who were fearless, skilled, and loyal. Wadé, pronounced Woddy, was his Grebo name. He was born between 1860 and 1865, and to understand his life we must know a little about the history of Liberia.

Liberia’s ruling class were free black settlers from America. Only a relatively small number of African Americans ever took this step—17,000, some of whom were forced to emigrate, since they were freed on this condition. (There were about 200,000 free African Americans in the States in the early nineteenth century, and most of them chose to stay in the nation they and their forebears had done so much to build.)

The Invisible Liberians

The first settlers arrived in 1822. In 1847, Liberia became an independent black republic; it was the only African nation to retain its independence throughout the colonial period. (Ethiopia, the other exception, was ruled by Italy for a short time.) The founders originally intended to call the capital of their new state “Christopolis,” but in the end it became Monrovia, after the American president of the day.

The new state mirrored American political institutions—Capitol, Senate, and all. It had many weaknesses, some of them economic in origin. Under the True Whigs, who ruled from 1878 until a military coup in 1980, the settlers monopolized political power and controlled the economy. They rendered the indigenous peoples of Liberia invisible in the motto on their national crest; “The love of Liberty brought us here.”

Meanwhile the Grebo and Kru, in particular, welcomed both Christianity and western education. Since the settlers were Christians already, white missionaries concentrated on this field, encouraging literacy both in English and in local languages. The Kru and Grebo were hostile to the settlers and their monopoly of power. In 1873 they had attempted to found an independent Christian state under the motto “In God We Trust.” This was the world into which young Wadé was born.

His father was not a Christian, but he was brought up by an uncle who was a Methodist pastor. Harris became literate in English and Grebo. The name he adopted and the lifestyle of his uncle’s household show how much the settlers and educated indigenous people had in common. Harris signed on as a sailor and made several coastal voyages as a youth, and in his old age would refer to himself humbly as a “Kru boy.”

In 1881 or 1882, Harris was soundly converted in a Methodist meeting. In 1888 he became an Episcopalian and began working for that church as a teacher and catechist, and for the government as an interpreter. He lost both jobs because of his political activism. He landed in prison for raising the Union Jack. The Kru and Grebo hoped that their region would become a British Protectorate, though this never happened. When he was in jail, in fact, there was an unsuccessful Grebo uprising.

Drumming Up a Crowd

For several years after his vision, Harris preached in Liberia but had little impact.

Then on July 27, 1913, he set out on a remarkable missionary journey to the east. His goal was the French colony of Ivory Coast. A mosaic of ethnic groups, the colony was at that time primarily a Catholic mission field—but that church had had little impact.

Harris traveled with two female companions: Helen Valentine, an educated widow, and Mary Pioka, who later bore him a son. The women drew audiences by singing songs as they beat time with gourd rattles (see photo, p. 5).

The man who had once, as a respectable Episcopalian, ordered his shoes from the States now went barefoot. He wore the costume revealed to him—a white gown, with black bands or straps, and a white turban. Such distinctive garments, often though not always white, are characteristic of many African prophetic churches, a symbol of purity and a transformed life, and of separation from an unregenerate world.

Wherever he went, Harris also carried a Bible (the English Authorized Version), a cross-like staff, a gourd rattle, and a bowl for baptism. The staff may have been an echo of Moses; it was adopted independently by many other African prophets. Harris sometimes destroyed his staff and got a new one, afraid people would begin to worship it.

Harris’s message was simple, much the same as that taught by the mission churches, but he struck a deep chord among his hearers. He asked them to burn the images of their traditional gods—“God has sent me to burn the fetishes,” he said. Harris emphasized avoiding work on the Sabbath (Sunday) and keeping it holy.

Most important, he offered his hearers immediate baptism—a privilege denied by the mission churches. These churches required years of study and preparation before baptism, which meant that the new Christian felt vulnerable, without the protection offered by his old religious practices on the one hand, and by baptism on the other. During a single 18-month period during 1913-14, Harris baptized between 100,000 and 120,000 new Christians.

Power Evangelist

William Wadé Harris was larger than life—a biblical prophet in modern Africa. Many stories are told of his “power encounters” with the land’s traditional religious specialists (diviners or priests of ancient divinities). His miracles of healing entered legend. It was said that he could call down rain from the heavens, and that he inflicted madness on some who resisted his message. On one occasion, people hid some of their religious statues in the bush, to avoid the bonfires—only to see them destroyed by a mysterious fire.

How did Harris communicate with these villagers? He did not speak French, but neither did they. Pidgin English was the lingua franca of the coast, even in French colonies, and he made much use of it. But he usually preached through interpreters, often young men living locally and working as clerks for trading firms. He relied on them to continue his work after he left, and he appointed twelve Apostles in each congregation.

The prophet and his companions got as far as Axim, in the far west of what was then the Gold Coast. It was there that he met a famous African lawyer and nationalist, Casely Hayford, who was so impressed by Harris that he wrote the first book about him, published in 1915. Said Hayford, “He is a dynamic force of a rare order—It seems as if God made the soul of Harris a soul of fire.”

Many African prophetic leaders founded churches. Harris, however, did not intend to do so. Wherever he went, he told his followers to wait for “Christians with Bibles.” Some who responded to Harris’s message joined the Catholic missions—which saw their 80 baptisms in 1914 jump to 6,700 per year from 1917 on. In 1924, Methodist missionaries reached Ivory Coast. They found to their amazement that they were welcomed by thousands of Harris converts. Today the Methodist church there dates its foundation, not from 1924 when the missionaries arrived, but from 1914 when Harris did. Harris Christians contacted the Prophet, who sent a message urging those he had baptized to join the Methodists, not the Catholics.

Soon some difficulties developed. The missionaries, attempting to build up self-supporting churches, insisted that Christians pay a tithe—not an easy thing for an impoverished villager who also had to find money for taxes. The missionaries also opposed polygamy, and they questioned Harris closely on that issue.

Precious Legacy

The Prophet and his companions turned back at Axim and retraced their steps along the coast. By this time World War I had broken out, and colonial officials were anxious about potential disturbers of the peace. Ministering where his heart led him—in the Ivory Coast—Harris was stopped by authorities and deported to Liberia. Through the following years, he would make at least eight attempts to return. Always, he was turned back at the border.

Harris continued to preach in Liberia and made several missionary journeys to Sierra Leone, but he never again had the success of his Ivory Coast days. He continued to wear his distinctive dress and to marvel at what God had achieved through a “Kru boy.” A missionary who met him in 1926 said, “He lives in a supernatural world in which the people, the ideas, the affirmations, the cosmogony and the eschatology of the Bible are more real than those he sees and hears materially.”

William Wadé Harris died in his daughter’s house, in extreme poverty, in 1929. Harris would live until 1929, but his prophetic mission lasted just those 18 months. This pattern—a brief but hugely effective ministry ended by the intervention of a colonial government—also characterizes the ministries of two great prophets who were his contemporaries. Garrick Sokari Braide, in the Niger Delta, was called by God in 1912, imprisoned in 1916, and died in 1918. Simon Kimbangu (p. 32), in what was then the Belgian Congo, had a public ministry that lasted less than a year, and spent the last 30 years of his life in prison. His followers compared this with Jesus’ 30 years of hidden life and three years of public ministry.

Not all his spiritual children became Catholics or Methodists. In 1979, it was estimated that Ivory Coast, with a population of 5 million, had 1 million Muslims, living in the north, 200,000 Protestants, and 500,000 Catholics. (Most Ivorians were still traditionalists.) There were also 100,000 (the figure is now closer to 200,000) members of Harrist churches—strongest near the capital, Abidjan.

The largest of these was founded by amalgamating a number of different congregations under the leadership of John Ahui. Grace Tani (Thannie), who died in 1958, founded the Church of the Twelve Apostles in western Gold Coast. She was a traditional religious specialist whom Harris converted, and she considered herself one of his wives. This church strongly emphasized healing, and it carried on Harris’s practice of denouncing traditional religion. It used the Bible in rituals (though it did not read Scripture in services) along with the cross-staff, rattles, and Harrist hymns.

The Deima Church, founded in 1942 by Marie Lalou, who died in 1951, is the second largest Harrist church in Ivory Coast. Lalou saw herself as Harris’s spiritual successor; she believed that he had driven witchcraft away, but that it had returned, and that she was the one chosen to expel it again. Like Harris, her followers destroyed traditional cult objects.

William Wadé Harris was without a doubt the most successful missionary in West Africa’s history. Unlike some other African church leaders, he concentrated totally on the conversion of non-Christians. His own favorite hymns, according to his grandchildren, included “Jesus Lover of My Soul” and “What a Friend we have in Jesus.” A “shout” preserved from his public ministry runs like this:

Let’s try hard, so we will conquer
The devil and his kingdom,
That when Jesus comes
We will wear white robes.

Elizabeth Isichei is a professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and an advisory editor of Christian History. She is author of A History of Christianity in Africa (Eerdmans, 1995).

Christianity and Rationalistic Statism

By David Feddes

What would society be like if it was run by intellectuals? What if the best and brightest minds controlled the government?  What if we had leaders who were taught from a young age by leading thinkers? What if these leaders implemented the ideals of the geniuses who taught them? For centuries people have dreamed of philosopher-kings, rulers of brilliant intellect who would set high goals, rule rationally, and use education to build a bright future for society. That would be a great thing, wouldn't it?

Not necessarily. Let's take a walk back through history to see what happened in various societies under philosopher-kings.

One major philosopher was Karl Marx. Many people saw Marx as the most rational of thinkers and believed that a society built on Marx's philosophy would be almost heaven on earth. What was the result? Hell on earth. Lenin, Stalin, and other Russian philosopher-kings tried to build a society on Marx's philosophy and murdered millions in the process. In China another philosopher-king, Chairman Mao, aimed at an ideal society and murdered millions. In Cambodia Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge government—educated in the best universities of Europe and inspired by Marx—murdered millions.

Marx was not the only philosopher whose ideas became the basis for government. Another was Friedrich Nietzsche. He had a brilliant mind and lived in Germany, the world's most educated country at the time. A few decades later a man came to power who liked Nietzsche's philosophy and tried to implement it. The name of this philosopher-king (or should I say philosopher-Fuhrer) was Adolph Hitler. He massacred millions in his own country, caused the worst war in history, and then killed himself.

Going a few centuries further back, we find Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another philosopher who inspired a ruler. Rousseau fathered five illegitimate children and abandoned them all to a public orphanage, but he had a powerful intellect and was admired by many. His ideas on human nature, education, family, and politics moved a political leader in the late 1700s to declare, "Rousseau is the one man who, through the loftiness of his soul and the grandeur of his character, showed himself worthy of the role of teacher of mankind." The man who said this, Maximilien Robespierre, was so committed to his philosophy that he was called "the Incorruptible." The result? Robespierre's "incorruptible" principles of governing were so inhuman he kept the guillotines busy chopping off people's heads in the Terror of the French Revolution. Finally Robespierre himself was beheaded.

Let's take a long leap further back to a much earlier era and another philosopher-king. At the time the New Testament was being written, the foremost philosopher in the Roman Empire was Seneca. He personally tutored a young man who went on to become emperor. Seneca's pupil was the philosopher-king Nero, one of the most vile, vicious rulers who ever lived. Seneca was a leading figure in Nero's administration. In some respects Seneca was better than Nero, but Seneca's philosophy saw some humans as dispensable. Seneca declared, "We drown children who at birth are weakly and abnormal." Seneca praised suicide whenever quality of life was lacking, and his influence continues today in people who call suicide "death with dignity." Seneca's failure to respect all human life was magnified in his pupil, Nero, and led to countless atrocities, including Nero's murder of his own mother, which Seneca defended. Eventually the philosopher Seneca committed suicide under pressure from Nero, and a few years later, Nero the philosopher-king killed himself as his reign collapsed.

Going back still earlier, more than 300 years before Christ, we come to Aristotle, later known simply as "the philosopher" because of his mighty intellect and logic. Aristotle had the opportunity to train a philosopher-king, teaching Alexander the Great as a youth. Alexander was a great military genius, but you wouldn't think Alexander the Great was so great if you lived in one of the many countries he invaded or if you were in one of the towns he destroyed or if you were the close friend he murdered in a drunken rage or if you were one of the countless other people massacred or sold into slavery by his armies or if you were forced to bow to Alexander as a god. Alexander was driven by personal ambition, but he also saw himself as a philosopher-king who would educate the world. Alexander's mentor, Aristotle, was brilliant, but he considered women inferior and promoted eugenics and population control. According to Aristotle, for a society to be healthy, it must kill some kids. He wrote, “There must be a law that no imperfect or maimed child shall be brought up. And to avoid an excess in population, some children must be exposed [on a trash heap to die]. For a limit must be fixed to the population of the state.” This view was common among the Greeks and Romans, and Aristotle saw slavery and baby-killing as matters of rational government. No wonder Aristotle's pupil, Alexander, was so willing to destroy human lives in his conquests. By the way, Alexander himself died in his early thirties after years of war and wild living.

Maybe we shouldn't be too eager for a society run by intellectuals, given this track record. Marx's monsters, Nietzsche's Nazis, Rousseau and Robespierre's Reign of Terror, Seneca's Nero, and Aristotle's Alexander all placed abstract ideas ahead of real people, with deadly results. These philosophies differed from each other in various ways, but they had in common the hope of producing an ideal society through the perfect combination of education and government.

This dream of social engineering and philosopher-kings was described most famously by Aristotle's predecessor, the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato wrote, "Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one ... cities will never have rest from their evils,--no, nor the human race, as I believe, --and then only will our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day." Ever since Plato, intellectuals and politicians have dreamed of an ideal society controlled by human wisdom and human power.

Wisdom and Power

In contrast to all this, what does the Bible say? To those tempted to trust in human wisdom, Scripture says, "Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" (1 Corinthians 1:20). To those tempted to trust human power, Scripture says, "The rulers of this age ... are coming to nothing" (1 Corinthians 2:6). The Bible says it, and history confirms it: humanistic geniuses turn out to be fools, and humanistic governments come to nothing, one after another. The most basic human problem is so serious that it can't be solved by human wisdom or human power.

Plato and the philosophers who came after him thought that our biggest problem is ignorance and that if, through education, we developed the powers of human reason and conditioned people properly, our main personal problems would be solved. They assumed that the biggest problem with society is lack of good government and that if only society was governed well, our main social problems would be solved. Many people still think this way. Despite the message of the Bible and the hard lessons of history, people still hope for philosopher-kings to save the day.

The Bible teaches that our problem is much more serious that humanistic philosophers and politicians realize, and so the solution must be something unlike anything human wisdom and power can offer. Our basic problem is sin, alienation from God. No amount of reasoning and education can bring us back to God. No political system can make a wicked society into a wonderful place to live. Sin infects our individual character and our society so badly that nothing short of divine intervention can save individuals and change the world. We need not just human education but divine revelation. We need not just human politics but the reign of God.

God's wisdom comes to us in a revelation that human wisdom would consider foolish. God's power comes to us in an action that human politics would see as weakness. God's wisdom and power come to us in Jesus Christ: born in poverty, raised without any great school or educator, executed as a criminal. The cross of Jesus Christ—his suffering, death, and resurrection—is not the sort of thing humanistic educators and politicians count on to change people or improve society. And yet Christ crucified and risen has done more to save individuals and change societies for the better than all philosophers and politicians combined.

In the Bible book of 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul wrote to Christians surrounded by a culture that adored education and power. Paul said that Christ sent him "to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1:17-18,25). Did any philosopher ever reason that humanity's worst problem could be solved by the life and death of a lowly Jewish carpenter? Did any ruler figure out the secret gospel power of God's Spirit to liberate and glorify people? No, says Paul, "None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (2:8).

To any philosopher-king, Jesus and his gospel would have seemed like foolishness and weakness, but Christ crucified and risen turned out to be smarter than any philosopher and stronger than any king. "For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength" (1:25). It's in this context that Paul says "God made foolish the wisdom of this world" and speaks of "the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing."

Does this mean that Christianity is totally anti-education and anti-government? Not at all. But it does mean that education and government don't matter as much as Jesus Christ, and that education and government often do more harm than good apart from Christ. Education can impart real, transforming wisdom only if it's Christ-centered education. Government can rule well only if it honors the higher government of the King of kings and Lord of Lords, There's a sharp contrast between "Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1:24) and the humanistic hope for philosopher-kings to make things better. For a more detailed understanding of this contrast, let's look at Plato's ideal society and see how Christ's kingship is very different.

Plato's Republic

Plato's Republic, his most influential book, introduced the idea of philosopher-kings. Plato wrote the Republic about 24 centuries ago, but it raises ideas that have affected history and that still haunt us today. Plato taught the salvation of society through education and government action. Plato wanted the higher classes of people to do away with marriage, family, and private property. In an ideal State, he said, the best children would be raised and educated not by their own father and mother but by the State as a whole. Upper class women would focus more on politics and military action than on raising their own children. Plato praised homosexual relationships between youths and older men. He said men and women could have sex with whomever they please, so long as they got rid of unwanted babies. Plato said that it's necessary for government to tell some major lies in order to rule the lower classes properly. And he taught these things, mind you, to show what an ideal society, based on justice and reason, would look like. That's a quick sample of Plato's plans. Now let's take a closer look at some details.

Plato's ideal society would have three different classes: workers, soldiers, and rulers, who would be philosopher-kings. The rulers would be enlightened people with an amazing grasp of reality. They would provide people with an education of sorts, but much of this education would be lies to keep people in their proper place, enabling the enlightened rulers to manage and manipulate them—all for the good of the people, of course! As Plato put it, "Our rulers will find a considerable dose of falsehood and deceit necessary for the good of their subjects." Government knows best; lesser folks can't handle the truth.

Plato wanted to blur differences between masculine and feminine. Sex should not be limited to just a union of husband and wife. Plato praised the common Greek practice of homosexual relations between a military officer and a teenage boy in training or between a teacher and a youth he was teaching.

Plato also wanted to educate women in the upper classes to be as much like men as possible. He wanted both sexes to exercise naked in the same gymnasiums. He wanted women in the military. "Let them share in the toils of war," he said, "wearing armor and riding on horseback." Because women are weaker, he said, they should receive lighter duties, but they should be trained to be like men as much as possible and treated like men as much as possible. Plato compared the guardians—the ruling and military elites—to watchdogs. He pointed out that watchdogs must do their job. You don't divide watchdogs into male and females, and you don't leave the females home to care for puppies.

Among the elite, Plato said, there should be no marriage of one husband to one wife, and parents should not raise their own biological children. All the men and women would live together, sharing their property and their bodies. Plato wanted a law that "the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent." Kids would be raised not by individual parents but by the State as a whole.

Children would be produced through planned matings. The strongest, smartest, bravest men would be matched with the best women. After all, said Plato, we breed only the best hunting dogs and horses and birds, so why not do the same with people? In Plato's words, "God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers... that there is nothing ... of which they should be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race."

In Plato's ideal society, anytime a woman had a baby, officers would immediately take the baby. If it was a baby from inferior parents, or if it had good parents but was deformed for some reason, it would be disposed of in "a mysterious, unknown place." When superior babies were born from a mating of superior parents, the officers would bring them to nurses who lived in separate quarters. This would enable elite women to have babies, improve the genetic pool of the State, and still return almost immediately to their work. It takes a village to raise a child and liberate a woman to live like a man.

Only babies born from approved matings between men and women in their prime would be allowed to survive. Men and women not of the proper age could have intercourse with anyone they wished, as long as they understood that any offspring must be destroyed. "We allow them to range at will," said Plato, "accompanying the permission with strict orders to prevent any embryo which may come into being from seeing the light; and if any force a way to the birth, the parents must understand that the offspring of such a union cannot be maintained, and arrange accordingly."

Plato pushed promiscuity, population control, abortion, and infanticide, with a eugenic goal of breeding a master race and having a perfect State. The right education and social engineering among the elite classes, in Plato's words, "will be their salvation, and they will be the saviors of the State." Plato declared, "Our state, if rightly ordered, is perfect." All would be peaceful and happy, with no quarreling or division.

Christ's Kingdom

The kingdom of God revealed by Jesus in the Bible is very different from the society imagined in Plato's Republic. Jesus upheld marriage between one man and one woman, not homosexuality or promiscuity. In Scripture, fathers and mothers are responsible to love and instruct their own children, not count on government institutions to care for them from cradle to grave. Jesus taught that all babies are to be cared for; none may be despised or destroyed. The Bible honors men as men and women as women, without twisting women into junior men. Jesus taught people to give their ultimate allegiance to God, not to the State. Jesus taught people to seek ultimate truth in God's Word, not in their own thinking. Jesus identified the basic human problem as sin, not ignorance. He provided salvation not through an education program but through dying to pay for our guilt. Whereas Plato believed bodies are temporary hindrances and thought eternity would include only the intellectual, not the physical, Jesus rose from the dead to give us new life and to provide us with resurrection bodies someday.

Many an intellectual throughout history has come up with his own version of Plato's dream, and many a philosopher-king has tried using education and legislation to create a superior civilization. Many are still trying today in various ways. But such efforts have led to one horror after another, while the crucified and risen Christ has brought life and love, and has also improved education and government and every other sphere of culture more than all the non-Christian philosophers combined.

If there's one lesson to learn from history, it's that human wisdom and human power, apart from God, produce human misery and degradation, while God's wisdom and power in Christ produce human dignity and joy. Greek and Roman civilization is often admired by humanist scholars as a golden age. But in that "golden age," it's estimated that about three-fourths of the people of Athens were slaves, and about half of all people throughout the Roman Empire were slaves. Countless children were killed or abandoned without a qualm of conscience. Around the time Jesus was born, a man named Hilarion wrote to his pregnant wife, "If you are delivered of a child, if it is a boy keep it, if it is a girl, discard it. Males outnumbered females by 30% because so many girl babies were destroyed as babies. Pornography was everywhere. Dishes were decorated with scenes of orgies between men and women, between people of the same sex, and between people and animals. The famous and cultured Demosthenes said matter-of-factly, "The prostitutes are for our amusement; our slave women are for our personal service, and our wives are to bear us children."

In contrast to this, Christianity taught that slaves are as important to God as kings, and that to be a wife and mother is a glorious thing. One pagan exclaimed in amazement and admiration, "What women these Christians have!" Followers of Jesus sought to be sexually pure and faithful in marriage. They cared for their own children and often rescued and adopted the children who had been abandoned by others. When Christ changed their hearts, he also changed their thinking and behavior.

Christians have never produced a perfect society and never expected to produce one. A perfect society will not exist until Christ's return. But give thanks for wonderful ways that the wisdom and power of Christ have already changed the world for the better, and by faith, we can rejoice in the assurance of future salvation. As we look forward to a new heaven and earth, we spend our time on this earth honoring Christ and serving others as best we can, humbly recognizing our limits.

As we depend on Christ, we must beware of every effort to build a better society based on humanistic education and humanistic legislation. That's been tried before. Philosopher-kings always fail. "Where is the philosopher of this age? The rulers of this age are coming to nothing."

Christianity and Rationalistic Statism

By David Feddes

Rationalistic Statism

• Rationalistic:

-Intellectuals and experts know best.

-Society gets salvation through education.

-Ultimate truth is human thinking without divine revelation

• Statism: Government officials, not families or individuals or churches or businesses, should have the final say in everything.

• Rationalistic statism: Government uses ideas of intellectuals to control society.

Philosopher-Kings: Thinkers who shaped rulers

•Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

•Karl Marx (1818-1883)

•Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

•Seneca (1 BC – 65 AD)

•Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC)

•Plato (428 BC – 348 BC)

Friedrich Nietzsche

•  God is dead

•  No eternal truth, just will to power

•  Re-think everything in terms of evolution without morals

•  Envisioned a new level of evolution: the Superman

Adolph Hitler

•  Wanted to apply Nietzsche’s philosophy and Darwin’s biology

•  Envisioned Germans as the new super race

•  Started worst war ever

•  Massacred millions of Jews and others

•  Killed himself

Karl Marx

•  Said God is not real

•  Said economics controls everything

•  Private property and family prevented fair, rational equality.

•  Assumption: man is basically good, except for the bourgeoisie

•  Workers’ paradise?  No, hell on earth

Murderous Marxist Regimes

• Russia: Lenin and Stalin

• Mao Zedong’s China

• Pol Pot's Cambodia

• North Korea: Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong-Il

Jean Jacques Rousseau

•  Said people are born good but corrupted by family and social institutions

•  Children flourish in state-run institutions

•  The people’s will is expressed by the government

•  Blend of selfishness and statism

Maximilien Robespierre

Said: "Rousseau is the one man who, through the loftiness of his soul and the grandeur of his character, showed himself worthy of the role of teacher of mankind."

Robespierre led the French Reign of Terror.

Rousseau’s self esteem

• “Show me a better man than me, a heart more loving, more tender, more sensitive.”

• "My consolation lies in my self-esteem.”

• "If there were a single enlightened government in Europe, it would have erected statues of me."

• "I feel too superior to hate. I love myself too much to hate anybody.”

 
Seneca: tutor and advisor to Nero

• Leading Stoic philosopher in New Testament times.

• Seneca defended Nero killing his own mother.

• Eugenics: “We drown children at birth who are weak and abnormal.”

• Seneca favored suicide when quality of life was lacking (assisted suicide movement).

• Seneca was forced by Nero to kill himself.

• Nero blamed Christians for burning Rome and massacred many.

• Nero provoked civil war and killed himself.

Aristotle

• Often simply called “the Philosopher”

• Considered women inferior to men

• Slavery and baby killing were rational

• Promoted eugenics and population control:

-“There must be a law that no imperfect or maimed child shall be brought up.”

-“To avoid an excess in population, some children must be exposed [to die]. For a limit must be fixed to the population of the state.”

• Aristotle personally tutored Alexander the Great, an aggressive invader of nations who died in a drunken stupor at a young age.

Plato

"Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy... cities will never have rest from their evils,--no, nor the human race, as I believe,--and then only will our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day."

Plato’s Republic

• Salvation of society through social engineering based on a blend of education and government

• Elite classes abolish marriage, family, property

• Children educated not by parents but by state

• Women in combat and politics

• Homosexual relations of men with youth

• Male-female promiscuity is okay, but only babies from planned matings may live. Abort or kill others.

• Main goal: “the purity of the race”

• "Our rulers will find a considerable dose of falsehood and deceit necessary for the good of their subjects.”

Philosopher-Kings

• Plato: The Republic

• Aristotle: Alexander

• Seneca: Nero

• Rousseau: Robespierre

• Marx: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim

• Nietzsche: Hitler

“Never have so many been murdered in the name of a doctrine as in the name of the principle that human beings are naturally good.” (Anatole France)

What is our problem?

• Lack of knowledge is not our main personal problem, so education can’t cure our deepest personal flaws.

• Lack of the right system is not our main social problem, so government can’t solve our social ills.

• Sin/separation from God is the main personal and social problem.

• God’s solution may seem foolish and weak to those who trust rationalistic statism.

Foolishness and weakness?

• Corinth was immersed in a culture that adored Greek rationalism and Roman governance.

To the Corinthians Paul wrote, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Cor 1:18)

• Christ has done more to transform individuals and societies than all thinkers and rulers:

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength." (1 Cor 1:25).

The gospel nullifies rationalistic statism

• Want to trust human wisdom?

"Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" (1 Cor 1:20).

• Want to trust human power?

"The rulers of this age ... are coming to nothing" (1 Cor 2:6).

Thief vs. shepherd

Plato: The right education and social engineering among the elite classes "will be their salvation, and they will be the saviors of the State… Our state, if rightly ordered, is perfect."

"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep" (John 10:10).