A Bumpy Ride
How did the true Gospel survive the turbulant history of the Church?
I have been greatly troubled as I delved deeper and deeper into Church history. I couldn’t help but think, where was the true Christian witness during this troubled history? Where was the authentic Gospel message during the Dark Ages, or at other times when Christendom was stifling the life out of the faith? Where were the faithful remnant to keep the torch flickering?
The story so far was that, once upon a time, there was God’s authentic Church, founded by the apostles who had learned at the feet of Jesus himself. Then the apostles died and new ideas from Greece were allowed to mix with the pure doctrine of the Christian faith. Out of this tainted root came the established Western Church, the State Church of Augustine and Aquinas and the Catholics. When the Protestants appeared on the scene it was not from without, but from within; it was a reformation of the existing structures, not a spanking new broom sweeping clean. Yet out of all of this, the Gospel message has still reached us, despite the bumps and bangs of nearly 2,000 years of doctrinal turbulence.
My question is this, why didn’t the pagan seed from Greek thinking completely blot out the true message of the Gospel? We see the consequences of faulty theology, through the crusades, the inquisition, the religious wars and the hatred and conflicts that characterised so much of Church history. Even the Protestants eventually succumbed to the subtle perversions of Greek philosophy, so how was the true Gospel preserved?
Two ways
Then I dug deeper. It led me into some serious study and Holy Spirit nudges and a realisation that, since the days of the Church Fathers, there have in fact been two Church movements. I am not talking of Catholic vs. Protestant, or Roman Catholic vs. Greek Orthodox. It is far more clear cut, it is the Church tainted by Greek philosophy vs. the Church un-tainted by Greek philosophy. The first Church is basically the one with roots in the ancient Roman Empire and includes the Catholics and the vast majority of Protestant denominations. Although it is a Church compromised to a certain extent by Greek philosophy, it is not a Church that has been completely powerless as, through God’s grace, many have found true salvation within these religious structures.
But it’s the second Church, the one untainted by Greek philosophy, that interests me. If we can identify it, it would provide a direct link to the original Church of the first apostles, the Church of The Way. So, here the story begins … with Tertullian, a Church Father.
He tells us that Christianity had reached the British Isles before the Romans got there. The implication here is that Britain could have received the true faith, unadulterated by the Greek thinking that had polluted the Christian faith in Europe and the Middle East. So, where was this found and how did it get there? The fact is that, by the time Augustine (another one!) arrived on these shores in the 6th Century AD and was proclaimed the first Archbishop of Canterbury, there was already an indigenous form of the faith known as Celtic Christianity.
First stirrings
There’s a tiny island called Iona, off the coast of Scotland, one of the first places in the whole of these British Isles to really experience authentic Biblical Christianity, which spread throughout Scotland. One man brought this Gospel, this Good News untainted by the Greek additions, to Iona. He was an Irishman called Columba, who arrived in AD 563, after a dispute over a manuscript, which led to a kerfuffle. It was said that his arrival on the island was a personal act of penance for the blood that was shed in the dispute.
Columba established a Christian community on Iona that was very different from what was becoming the norm in Europe in the 6th Century AD, as it entered the Dark Ages. He had already planted forty one similar communities in Ireland, but none of them would have such far-reaching influence as this one on Iona. Here was real community, under the benevolent direction of the Abbot, of whom Columba was the first. Members of this community were allowed to marry, unlike their counterparts on mainland Europe, who were constricted by the Platonism that had infected their faith. They were extremely Bible literate and were taught to memorise whole passages of Scripture. They also only baptised those who professed faith and celebrated the death and resurrection of Jesus according to the Hebrew calendar.
From this base a relentless period of evangelism was launched, leading to the creating of around sixty similar communities in Scotland before Columba’s death. But the arrival of Augustine to these shores, within a year of Columba’s death, was to signal the beginning of the end of this independent expression of the Christian faith and Britain was eventually sucked into the paganised Roman Catholic system.
The next chapter …
So what happened to the pure faith of the apostles in the meantime? There surely had to be a surviving remnant somewhere? A good place to start is to investigate the groups that were hunted, denounced, persecuted and tortured at the hands of the Inquisition or the early Crusades. If they came to the attention of the Popes, the chances were that they were promoting a “different Gospel” to the corrupted version that had been synthesised by the philosophers and theologians and fed to the masses. This made them worthy of investigation.
One such group was the Waldenses. This group lived in the valleys of the alpine regions of Northern Italy. They may have shared a country with the Roman Catholics, but they couldn’t have been more different. Unsullied by the Greek pagan virus, they had a high view of Holy Scripture, it was their rule of life, it was a living book for them. They firmly believed in preaching and were very good at it. But they also firmly believed that the Pope was not God’s representative on Earth and offered allegiance to Jesus Christ alone. The Pope and his advisors decided that the World wasn’t big enough for both of them, so one had to go. The Waldenses were officially classed as heretics and suitable fodder for the inquisition. The next few centuries are a sorry story that parallels the fate of the Jews at the hands of the Catholic Church. It was a period of great persecutions, such as in Merindol, in France, where many hundreds were massacred in 1545.
A circular journey …
But now back to England. It is the 14th Century and a remarkable man steps onto the stage. This is John Wycliffe, the man who had both the cheek and the grace to translate the Bible from the Latin into English, something unheard of in the Catholic World, where the clear words of Scripture were hidden from the common man. As a result of this, he made a remarkable discovery that was to revolutionise the Christian faith and start a process that led to the sweeping changes of the Reformation many years later. His discovery was … the Word of God. Through translating the Bible into English, its very words began to grip his soul and others who followed him. These were the Lollards, a derisive name (the ‘babblers’) given to them by others, a movement labelled a heresy by the Pope and also resisted in this country by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It resulted in the first execution of a layman in England as a heretic; that was John Badby in the 15th Century.
A man called Jerome had listened intently to Wycliffe’s sermons in Oxford and took the message of reform for the Catholic Church back to his home city of Prague, in Central Europe. He in turn was listened to by John Huss, a man already influenced by the Waldenses and a new movement was born, the Hussites. Huss was immediately excommunicated by the Pope, who also publicly burned Wycliffe’s writings, then a few years later, both Jerome and Huss were burned at the stake. This was serious business, indeed.
Many years earlier our old acquaintance Tertullian had said, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. God had ensured that Jerome and Huss didn’t die in vain. Around fifty years after John Huss’s death a group of his followers, the Bohemian Brethren, morphed into the Moravians, one of the first true Protestant Churches. In the early 18th Century, under the leadership of the German nobleman, Count Zinzendorf, they had an encounter with God. On August 13th 1727 the Holy Spirit came down on a group of them with such power that, according to one of them, “we hardly knew whether we belonged to earth or had already gone to Heaven.” It was a revival.
Out of this came the following: A 24/7 prayer initiative that lasted 100 years, the first ever publication of a daily devotional, the planting of 30 churches, the formation of hundreds of “house churches” and the first ever Protestant mission movement, sending out hundreds of missionaries all over the world. In 1738, one such missionary, Peter Boehler, had a meeting in London with one John Wesley, informing him that what he needed was true saving faith. Three months later, during a meeting in Aldersgate Street, Wesley relates, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
Thus was born Methodism, that started out as a major revival of the Church of England, before becoming a denomination of its own. It is perhaps safe to say that this was the first time the visible and the invisible Churches crossed paths, without bloodshed. The Church of England, a dissident branch of the established Western Church with its roots in Rome and the ideas of the Greek philosophers had collided with the fruit of the long history of the dissident Church, from the Paulicians and Waldenses through to the Lollards, Hussites and Moravians. And the result was … revival! England and the USA were transformed by the Methodists, who took God to the people, with their relentless open-air preaching. They transformed society from the bottom up.
The Methodists were very disciplined in their religious life and practices, with an emphasis on personal holiness, living the life that they preached (which has not always been the case with Christians). They had regular private devotions and met daily for prayer and Bible study. Eventually they organised themselves into regional groups, stressing discipleship, fellowship and pastoral care. Eventually they split from the Anglicans and became a worldwide movement, still active today, albeit without the doctrinal purity of those early days.
The true Gospel of Jesus Christ may have had a bumpy ride, but we owe much to those brave souls living away from the mainstream to ensure that it survived to this day. The rest of the story is ours …