CHURCH HISTORY II CHURCH HISTORY II Lesson 33Lesson 33

Review of Nineteenth Century Review of Nineteenth Century EuropeEurope

Nineteenth Century Europe

I. Revival in French speaking Europe

A. Swiss revival

Background: Francis Turretin (1523-1600)

Robert Haldane (1764-1847)

Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans

J. H. Merle d’Aubigne (1794-1872)

History of the Reformation

1849 Free Reformed Church - Geneva

B. New life in France

Background:

1802 – Reformed churches legally recognized

Monod brothers

Adolph Monod (1802-1856)

AN UNDIVIDED LOVELoving and Living for ChristAdolphe Monod, Translated and Edited by Constance K. Walker

Farewell

•“I have a Savior! He has freely saved me through his shed blood, and I want it to be known that I lean uniquely on that poured out blood. All my righteous acts, all my works which have been praised, all my preaching that has been appreciated and sought after—all that is in my eyes only filthy rags.”

“as a dying man to dying men”

Church in the desert

II. Renewal in the Netherlands

A. Revolutionary (Enlightenment) thought

B. Groen van Prinsterer “The Secession” of 1834

Reformed ChurchC. 1886 “De Doleantie” or “the weeping”

D. 1892 Reformed Churches in the Netherlands

Abraham Kuyper1837-1920

Pastor, newspaper editor, Prime Minister

Educator: Free University of Amsterdam (1880)

Theologian: Stone lectures at Princeton Seminary (1898)

“God’s greatness and almightiness do not limit and bind themselves to the narrower domain of salvation of souls but permeate our whole human life. And with every one of us, according to our talents and calling, love for God must express itself in every department of life with equal zeal and power.”

To Be Near Unto God

Neo-Calvinism = Reformed world and life view

“Christianity & Liberalism”

“False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the Gospel. We may preach with all thefervor of a Reformer and yet only succeed in winning a straggler here and there if we permit thewhole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas, which by theresistless force of logic prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than aharmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy theobstacle at its root. Many would have the seminaries combat error by attacking it as it is taughtby its popular exponents. Instead of that, seminaries confuse their students with a lot of Germannames unknown outside the walls of the universities. That method or procedure is based simplyupon a profound belief in the pervasiveness of ideas. What is today a matter of academicspeculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.”

J. Gresham Machen

How or why did many churches fall away from orthodoxy to liberalism?

The Importance of Ideas

B. Five influence books

Ideas came from renaissance, romanticism, rationalism

1. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799)

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1824)

Christianity is not in ideas, books, morality, but in religious consciousness

The moving of religion from confessions, propositional truth, to subjective, what I feel inside me

2. Origin of the Species (1859) Charles Darwin (1809-82)

“An explanation for almost everything; the place God had previously held in people’s minds”

“No matter how crooked the road from Darwin to Hitler, clearly Darwinism and eugenics smoothed the path for Nazi ideology, especially for the Nazi stress on expansion, war, racial struggle, and racial extermination” From Darwin To Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany Richard Weikart

3. Essays and Reviews (1860)

Liberal Manifesto by 7 clergymen of the Ch of England

Basic premise: “read the bible like you read any other book”

11,000 clergymen opposed

Ideas never fully go away

4. The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (1874) Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89)

Christianity is not what you believe but what you do

Social Gospel

“the Fatherhood of God and the

Brotherhood of Man”

Liberal sermon theme: “Let me suggest that you try to be good”

5. What is Christianity? (1900) Adolph Harnack (1851-1930)

What is the ‘essence’ or the ‘kernel’ of Christianity?

The personality of Jesus

Why would anyone crucify the Christ of liberal Protestantism?

C. Failure of liberalism in life and doctrine: World War I

Optimistic humanism dies in the face of the evil of WWI

1)Failure to produce real answers

Paul Tillich

1886-1965 2) Failure to produce real Christians

2 reasons for liberalisms failure:

“All that horrible long night I walked along the rows of dying men, and much of my German classical philosophy broke down.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844-1900

“They would have to sing better songs to me that I might believe in their redeemer: his disciples would have to look more redeemed”

H. Richard Niebuhr

1894-1962

Liberalism taught that “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

II. Orthodoxy What was it doing during this time?

A. Two sermons of 1922

1. “ Shall the Fundamentalists Win”

Riverside Church

First Presbyterian Ch, NYC

Harry Emerson Fosdick

1878-1969

2. Shall Unbelief Win? Clarence E. McCartney

B. Christianity and Liberalism 1923) J. Gresham Machen

1891-1937

Outline of Christianity and Liberalism

1. Introduction

2. Doctrine

3. God and man

4. The Bible

5. Christ

6. Salvation

7. The Church

III. Neo-orthodoxy

Karl Barth (1886-1968)

1. Trained as a liberal

2. Crisis: what do I preach?

3. Rediscovery of the Bible4. Rediscovery of the Reformers and the Protestant orthodox theologians

Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics

God is God !