The History of the Christian Church

[The substantive content of this and the entire “The Change” series of podcast-episodes for Communion Sanctorum is indebted to the excellent book by Alvin J. Schmidt titled How Christianity Changed the World. ] This episode is part 2 of our series considering the impact Christianity has had on history & culture. Today we dig a little deeper into how the Faith impacted the world’s view of the sanctity of life. In our last podcast, we talked about the ancient world’s widespread practice of infanticide & how Christianity affected a fundamental shift in the way people evaluated life. This elevation of the value of human life came from Christianity’s roots in Biblical Judaism with its revelation that human beings are created in God’s image, then taken further by the Incarnation; that God became man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The cross reveals how highly God values people. Therefore, God’s people must value them as well. So while the pagan world thought little of exposing unwanted infants to the elements & wild beasts, Christians rescued & adopted them, raising them as their own. It was an early & inventive church growth program. (more…)

[The substantive content of this and the entire “The Change” series of podcast-episodes for Communion Sanctorum is indebted to the excellent book by Alvin J. Schmidt titled How Christianity Changed the World. ] In a nod to Bilbo Baggins, in this 111th episode of CS, we’re changing gears a bit to begin a series of podcasts considering the impact Christianity has had on the world. We’ll unpack how the Faith has left its imprint on society. The Title of this episode is The Change – Part 1: The Sanctity of Life. Knowing my fascination with history and especially the history of Rome, a few years ago, someone recommended I watch a mini-series that aired on a cable network. While it was dramatic historical fiction, the producers did a good job of presenting the customs & values of 1st C BC Roman culture. While the series was suspenseful & entertaining, it was difficult to watch because of the brutality that was commonplace. And it wasn’t put in merely for the sake of titillation or to make the shows more provocative. It was an accurate depiction of the time. More than once, I found myself near tears, broken over just how lost the world was. Several times I said out loud, “They needed Jesus!” (more…)

The title of this episode is Faith in the Age of Reason, Part 2. In our last episode we briefly considered Jakob Hermanzoon, the Dutch theologian who’d sat under the tutelage of Theodore Beza, John Calvin’s successor at the Academy in Geneva. We know him better by his Latin name Jacobus Arminius. Arminius took exception to Beza’s views on predestination & when he became pastor of a church in Amsterdam, created a stir among his Calnvinsit colleagues. It was while teaching a series of sermons on the Book of Romans that Arminius became convinced Beza had several things wrong. The implication was that because Beza was Calvin’s successor & the standard-bearer for Calvinism, Arminius contradicted Calvin. Things came to a head when Arminius’ colleague Peter Planck began to publicly dispute with him. (more…)

The Title of this episode, is Faith in the Age of Reason.  Part 01 After the first flush of Reformation excitement died down, the Protestant churches of Europe went into a long period of retrenchment, of digging in both doctrinally & culturally. This period lasted from the late 16th to the later 17th C. and is referred to by church historians as the Age of Confessionalism. But “confession” here isn’t the personal practice of piety in which someone admits error; Confessionalism is the term applied to how the various Protestant groups were increasingly concerned with defining their own beliefs, or confessions, in contrast to everyone else. It resulted in what is sometimes called Protestant Scholasticism. It’s called this because the churches developed technical jargon to describe their doctrinal positions ever more accurately—just as the medieval Roman Catholic scholastics had done 3 Cs before. (more…)

This episode of CS is the 3rd Overview in the series so far. We’ve spent quite a bit of time tracking the Reformation and need now to give a brief over view & analysis of what we’ve seen as we prepare for launching into the next era of Church History. There’s a well-worn saying in English I’m not sure other languages duplicate. It says that “you can’t see the forest for the trees.” The idea is that the details of something can obscure the bigger picture. You fail to see a forest because all you see are a lot of trees. As we’ve spent many episodes tracking the Reformation & Counter-Reformation, we may be so distracted by the many names, places, dates & movements, that we miss the larger picture and the summary effect of all this on the people of 16th C. (more…)

This episode is titled, “Reform Around the Edges.” Stay tuned to the end of this episode for some important news about the CS 2017 Reformation Tour. It’s difficult living in the Modern World to understand the Late Medieval norm that a State had to have a single religion all its subjects observed. You’d be hard pressed to find a European of the 16th C who didn’t assume this to be the case. About the only group who didn’t see it his way were the Anabaptists. And even among them there were small groups, like the extremists who tried to set up the New Jerusalem at Munster, who did advocate a State Church. Classic Anabaptists wanted religious tolerance, but were most often persecuted for this stance. (more…)

Since last week’s Episode was titled Westward Ho! As we track the expansion of the Faith into the New World w/Spain & Portugal’s immersion, this week as we turn to the other European’s we’ll title this week’s episode, Westward Ho Ho, because I’m tired of saying Part 2. I know it’s lame, but hey, it’s my podcast so I’ll call it what I want. Before we dive into this week’s content, I wanted to say a huge thanks to all those who’ve left comments on the sanctorum.us site & the CS FB page. And for those who use iTunes as their portal to CS, thanks for rating the podcast & leaving a review. It those positive reviews on iTunes that go further than anything else, besdies word of mouth, of course, in boosting the podcast. (more…)

Westward – Ho! • In this episode of CS, we take a look at the Expansion of Christianity into the New World. Following Columbus’s voyages of the end of the 15th C to the Caribbean, the expansion of Christianity into the New Word was chiefly  dependent on the 2 great colonial powers of Portugal & Spain. From the outset of their adventures in the New World, a religious intention was central to the efforts of the explorers, however secondary it may have become to conquest and treasure-seeking for themselves and their royal patrons back in Europe. By means of a papal bull in 1493, Pope Alexander VI, divided the world between the 2 kingdoms. Although the line was later moved to allow Portugal to colonize Brazil, the original division was a line drawn from North to South west of the Azores Islands. Spain was given the West Indies & the Americas; while Portugal, because it had already explored the west coast of Africa & moved towards India thru Vasco da Gama’s explorations, was given the right to colonize Africa, India & the East. (more…)

The title of this episode is – A Needless Tragedy. This episode sees us backtracking a bit. We’re going back to that period of European history following the Reformation called the Wars of Religion. We’re taking a look at one day – August 24, 1572 and one city – Paris & the infamous event that happened then & there = the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. We do this because while it’s a lot more detailed & specific event that we usually get in to here on CS, it illustrates for us the impact the Reformation had on Europe &, I think, the Modern World. (more…)

This episode of CS is titled, Back in the East – Part 2 In our last episode, we took a brief look at the Jesuit missions to the Far East; namely Japan, China, Vietnam & India. We encountered the revolutionary approach to mission work of Alessandro Valignano and his spiritual heirs – Michele Ruggieri & Matteo Ricci. Their accomodationist approach to evangelism, where the Gospel was communicated by seeking to build a cultural bridge with the high civilizations of the Far East, was officially suppressed by Rome, even though it had amazing success in planting a healthy & vibrant church. So healthy was the Church in Japan it came under fire from a fierce resurgence in Japanese nationalism that expelled the Jesuits and persecuted the Church, driving it underground. (more…)

This episode of CS is titled, Back in the East – Part 1 In our last foray into the Church in the East, we stopped our review with the Mongols. You may remember while the Mongols started out generally favorable to Christianity, when later Mongol Khans became Muslims, they embarked on a campaign to eradicate the Gospel from their lands. This pretty much rang the death knell to The Church in the East, which for centuries boasted far more members and covered a much wider geographic area than the Western Church. And again, let me be clear to define our terms, when I speak of the Church in the East, I’m not referring to the Eastern Orthodox Church HQ’d in Constantinople; not the Greek Orthodox Church or it’s close cousin, the Russian Orthodox Church. The Church in the East was also known as the Nestorian Church and looked to the one-time Bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius who was officially labeled a heretic, but who became the patriarch of a wide-ranging church movement that reached all the way to Japan. (more…)

This episode of CS is titled, “And to the South . . . ” as we take a break from our review of the Reformation in Europe to get caught up with what’s happening with the Church in Africa. In many, maybe most popular treatments of Church history, the emphasis is on what’s going on in Europe. I mean, that’s what most church-based Christian history courses and many western colleges & seminaries focus on. We’ve already devoted several podcasts to the Church in the East, both the Eastern or Greek Orthodox church, as well as what’s called “The Church IN the East,” or the Syrian, sometimes referred to as the Nestorian Church. We’ll soon be jumping the Atlantic to take a look at the Church in the New World. But before we do, we need to shift our gaze south to Africa. (more…)

This is the 100th episode of CS. Because this is something of a milestone for the podcast, we’re taking a break from our usual episodic fare for something very different. For those listeners who subscribe only for the historical narrative, you’ll want to skip this one altogether because we won’t be looking at Church History at all in this episode. This Century mark for CS will be about the podcast itself. A few weeks back I posted a query, asking who might be interested in an episode that was a more personal look at CS & the host. There were enough positive replies that it made doing this reasonable. I remember listening to my first podcast series some years back; Mike Duncan’s index-level podcast, The History of Rome. About a dozen episodes in, I began to look for Duncan’s cryptic personal comments, rare as they were. Then as the series progressed, he’d share a few more details about himself. Though the content on Rome was sterling, it was the personal comments & his dry wit that kept me interested à & in an odd way, seemed to personalize the information so that it wasn’t just a dry academic pursuit. Maybe some prefer the personal element of a podcast be left out. I suspect they are the exception, not the rule. (more…)

This episode is titled “In the Low Countries.” Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxemburg are referred to as “the Low Countries.” The get this name because laying along the coast NW of Germany & NE of France, they are at or slightly below sea level. That and there’s not really much in the way of mountains. There are some low hills, but for the most part the region today called Benelux is pretty flat. During the Reformation, as in most of northern Europe, Protestantism in the low countries gained adherents early on. In 1523, in Antwerp, the first 2 Protestant martyrs were burned. From that point on, there’s solid evidence Protestantism made headway across the region. But the political situation there hitched the advance of Protestantism to a long and bitter struggle for independence. (more…)

This episode is titled “Cracks.” One of the great concerns of the Roman Church at the outset of the Reformation was just how far the Reformation would go, not so much in terms of variance in Doctrines, although that also was a concern. What Rome worried over was just how many different groups the Faith would split into. After all, division wasn’t something completely new. There’d already been a major division in the Church between East & West a half century before. And in the East, the Church was already fragmented into dozens of splinter groups across Central Asia. But up till the Reformation, the Western Church had managed to keep new & reform movements from splitting off. Most had eventually been subsumed back into the larger reach of the Church structure. (more…)