by Lance Ralston | Nov 1, 2015 | English |
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 Hermanzoon better by his Latin name Jacobus Arminius.
Arminius took exception to Beza’s views on predestination and when he became pastor of a church in Amsterdam, created a stir among his Calvinist 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 and the standard-bearer for Calvinism, Arminius contradicted Calvin. Things came to a head when Arminius’ colleague Peter Planck began to publicly dispute with him.
Arminius hated controversy, seeing it as a dangerous distraction to the cause of the Gospel and pressed for a synod to deal with the matter, believing once his views were set alongside Scripture, he’d be vindicated.
In 1603, Arminius was called to the University at Leiden to teach when one of the faculty members died. The debate Arminius had been having with Planck was shifted to a new controversy with one of the other professors at Leiden, François Gomaer.
This controversy lasted the next six yrs as the supporters of both Calvinism and Arminius grew in number and determination. The synod Arminius had pressed for was eventually held, but not till nine years after his death in 1609.
In the meantime, just a year after his death, Arminius’ followers gathered his writings and views and issued what they regarded as a formal statement of his ideas. Called the Five Articles of the Remonstrants, or just the Remonstrance, it was a formal proposal to the government of Holland detailing the points of difference that had come to a head over the previous years in the debate between Arminius and Gomaer.
Those 5 points were –
- That the divine decree of predestination is conditioned on Faith, not absolute in Election.
- That the intent of the Atonement is universal;
- Man cannot of himself exercise a saving faith;
- That though the grace of God is a necessary condition of human effort it does not act irresistibly in man; and finally –
- By the enabling power of the Holy Spirit, believers are able to resist sin but are not beyond the possibility of falling from grace.
In 1618, the Dutch Church called the Synod of Dort to answer the Remonstrance. The results of the Synod, called the Canons of Dort, strongly upheld Theodore Beza’s formulation of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and developed their own five-point response to the Remonstrance.
It comes as a major surprise to most students of Church history to learn that TULIP, or the famous Five Points of Calvinism were a RESPONSE to the challenge of Arminianists; that they’d come up with their 5 points first. Most people who’ve heard of Calvinism and Arminianism have never even heard of the Remonstrance; yet it’s the thing that formalized the debate between the two camps; a debate that’s continued to today and has led to some prolific arguments and controversies among Christians.
Put a Presbyterian elder and Methodist deacon in a room together and let the fun begin!
Now, lest we think the Protestants fell out in the Calvinist-Arminianist brouhaha while the Catholics sat back, ate popcorn and watched the show, realize things were FAR from being all united and just one big happy family over in the Roman sector of the Church. Catholics were no monolithic entity at this time. It was a mixed bag of different groups and viewpoints with their own internal disagreements.
In the late 16th and early 17th Cs there was a long dispute between the Jesuits and the Dominicans over how divine grace and human free-will interacted.
In the late 17th C, Pope Innocent XI, spent his reign playing a power game with Louis XIV and the Gallic theologians who believed in the authority of the Church, but not the Pope.
More serious was the rise of Jansenism. This movement grew out of the work of Cornelius Jansen, a professor at Louvain University. Jansen published a book in 1640 titled Augustinus, in which he stated what he believed were the doctrines of Augustine. Jansen sounded a lot like Calvin and argued that divine grace can’t be resisted, meaning it overrides the human will. He fiercely opposed the doctrine of the Jesuits that salvation depended on cooperation between divine grace and human will. So, the Jansenists believed in predestination, which meant that although they were Catholics they were in some ways more like Calvinists.
Jansenism proved a thorn in the side of the Catholic Church, and especially the Jesuits, for quite a while. Its leading exponent after Jansen himself was Antoine Arnauld, an intellectual and cultural giant of the 17th C. Arnauld corresponded with such philosophical luminaries as Descartes and Leibniz. He possessed a penetrating critical faculty; and as a theologian he was no less brilliant.
But back to our previous theme, stated at the beginning of the last episode – Protestant Scholasticism, or the Age of Confessionalism, in which the various branches of the Protestant church began to coalesce around distinctive statements of their theology.
The Anglican Church of England occupied a curious position in the midst of all this. On the one hand it was a Protestant church, having been created in the 1530s when King Henry VIII took command of the existing Catholic Church in England. The Lutheran sympathies of his advisers, like Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, influenced the new church, but so too did the Catholic tendencies of later monarchs like Charles I and churchmen such as William Laud. Unlike other churches throughout Europe, the Church of England rarely had to struggle for the soul of its nation with another movement. So it had never been forced to define its beliefs and practices in the face of opposition to others. By the turn of the 18th C, the one thing all Anglicans agreed on was a shared distrust of Roman Catholics.
The doctrinal openness of the Church of England meant that it was in England that religious free-thinking had the greatest chance of taking root. In the late 16th C it was still possible to be burnt at the stake in England for denying the Trinity, but a C later those who asserted such things had no need to fear anything more damaging than government censure and a deluge of refutations by the clergy. The Church of England prided itself on its doctrinal orthodoxy, understood in terms of common sense, and a middle way between what were regarded as the bizarre excesses of continental Protestants and Catholics. This middle way was based on what its followers felt was a healthy respect, but refusal to fawn, for tradition. This took shape in the principle of the apostolic succession, an ancient Christian notion we’ve examined in previous episodes. Apostolic succession claims that Christian doctrines can be known to be trustworthy because they are taught in churches which were founded by the apostles or their immediate followers. In other words, great trust was placed in the notion of an unbroken chain of tradition going back to the apostles themselves. It was this ‘apostolic succession’, together with the Scriptures, themselves handed down as part of this authoritative tradition, that mainstream Anglicans felt guaranteed the trustworthiness of their church. By contrast, many thought, the Catholics had added to that tradition over the centuries, while the more extreme Protestants had subtracted from it.
There was considerable tension between the churches. The worst example was France, where after the Revocation of the Treaty of Nantes in 1685 Protestants were an actively persecuted minority: they felt especially threatened by surrounding Catholics, and all the more determined never to give in to them. Persecution only strengthened their resolve and inspired sympathy from Protestants throughout the Continent, who by the same token became increasingly hostile to Catholicism.
In England, Catholicism was the minority faith: officially banned, its priests had to operate in secrecy.
There’s a story from this time of a Catholic bishop who, functioning as a kind of religious spy, held Mass in an east London pub for a congregation of Irish workers disguised as beer-guzzling patrons.
Many people were scared of Catholics, whom they regarded as tools of a foreign power; those sneaky French or the Pope. There was also great suspicion of ‘Dissenters’—members of any churches other than the Church of England. ‘Dissenters’ and Catholics alike, it was feared, were eating away at the social fabric of the country, and the policies of tolerance followed by the Whig party were opposed by many. Some Anglican churchmen formed a party with the slogan ‘Church in Danger’, which spent its time campaigning against Catholics, Dissenters, deists, the principle of toleration and, essentially, everything that the Enlightenment had produced.
In 1778, the English Parliament passed the Catholic Relief Act, which decriminalized Catholicism—to the enormous anger of a sizeable minority in the population. Two years later a Scottish aristocrat named Lord George Gordon led a huge mob to London, resulting in a week of riots in which Catholic churches were looted, foreign embassies burnt, and nearly 300 people were killed.
But we ought not think it was all petty small-mindedness that ruled the day. There were some who worked tirelessly to effect peace between the warring camps of Christendom. In the 17th C, a number of attempts were made to open a dialogue between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches with the aim of reuniting them.
The godfather of this endeavor, sometimes known as ‘syncretism’, was a German Lutheran theologian named George Callixtus. He devoted huge effort in the early 17th C to find common ground between the different groups. Like his contemporary Hugo Grotius in the Reformed Church, he believed it should be possible to use the Apostles’ Creed, and a belief in the authority of the Bible alone, as a basis for agreement among Christians.
Callixtus made progress with Calvinists but the Catholics were less receptive. The Conference of Thorn, called by King Vladislav IV of Poland in 1645, attempted to put these ideas into practice, but after several weeks of discussions the Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist theologians were unable to pull anything substantive together.
Sadly, Callixtus’s efforts met with the greatest opposition from his fellow Lutherans.
Let’s turn now from the acrimony and controversy that marked Protestant Scholasticism for a moment to take a look at a guy more like the rest of us; at least we probably hope so.
He was an obscure, uneducated Frenchman of the late 17th C.
Nicolas Herman, a manservant from Lorraine, tried to live his life around what he called ‘the practice of the presence of God’. He was not a very good manservant, having a pronounced limp from his army days and appallingly clumsy; but he performed his duties diligently until 1651, when, at the age of 40, he went to Paris and became a Carmelite monk. His monk’s name was Lawrence of the Resurrection.
Brother Lawrence was put to work in the monastery’s kitchen—a task he hated, but which he did anyway because it was God’s will. To the surprise of the other monks, he not only did his work calmly and methodically, but spoke to God the entire time. Brother Lawrence declared that, to him, there was no difference between the time for work and the time for prayer: wherever he was, and whatever he was doing, he tried to perceive the presence of God. As he wrote to one of his friends:
“There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful, than that of a continual conversation with God: the only ones who can understand it are those who practice and experience it. But I do not advise you to do it from that motive. It is not pleasure which we ought to seek in this exercise, but let us do it from a principle of love, and because God would have us. If I were a preacher, I would, above all other things, preach the practice of the presence of God. And if I were a spiritual director, I would advise all the world to do it. That is how necessary I think it is—and how easy, too.”
Brother Lawrence became a minor celebrity among the hierarchy of the French Catholic Church, and he was visited by more than one archbishop, anxious to see if the reports of his humility and holiness were true. Lawrence’s sixteen Letters and Spiritual Maxims testify of his sincere belief in God’s presence in all things and his trust in God to see him through all things. They also testify to the way in which holy men and women continued to devote themselves to God’s will, both in and out of monasteries, even as the intellectual revolutions of the Enlightenment were at their height.
It’s easy when considering the Age of Reason, to suppose theology was increasingly being seduced by philosophy, and that the simple, heartfelt faith of the commoners of the Middle Ages and the Reformation was being replaced by rationalism. That was true in some quarters, but the 17th and 18th centuries had their share of sincere and pious saints, as well as heretics, as much as any age; and there were some important movements that recalled the faithful to a living and wholehearted religion. As the theologians bickered, ordinary Christians were getting on with things, as they always had.
As we bring this episode to a close, I want to end with a look at Blaise Pascal. That’s a great name, isn’t it? Blaise. Sounds like a professional skateboarder.
Pascal was a Jansenist, that is, a member of the Roman Catholic reform movement we took a look at a moment ago. While the Jansenists began as a movement that sought to return the Roman Church to the teachings of Augustine, since Augustine’s doctrines were considered as being based in Scripture, the Jansenists were a Roman Catholic kind of back to the Bible movement.
A few days after Blaise Pascal’s death, one of his servants noticed a curious bulge in the great scientist’s jacket. Opening the lining, he withdrew a folded parchment written by Pascal with these words . . .
The year of grace 1654. Monday, November 23rd.,… from about half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. >> Certainty, certainty, feeling, joy, peace. >> God of Jesus Christ, I have separated myself from Him. I have fled from Him, Renounced Him, crucified Him. May I never be separated from Him. Renunciation, total and sweet.
For eight years Pascal had hid those words in his coat, withdrawing them now and again to read them and be reminded of the moment when grace seized his soul.
Pascal’s mother died when he was only three. His father, Stephen Pascal, began the education of his children, Gilbert, Blaise, and Jacqueline. Occasionally he took the young Blaise with him to meetings of the Academy of Science. The youth’s scientific curiosity was aroused.
Before he reached the age of 27 Pascal had gained the admiration of mathematicians in Paris; had invented the calculating machine for his father who was a busy tax-collector; and had discovered the basic principles of atmospheric and hydraulic pressures. He belonged to the age of the Scientific Greats.
Blaise’s initial contact with the Jansenists came as the result of an accident his father had. On an icy day in January, 1646, Stephen tried to prevent a duel. He fell on the hard frozen ground and dislocated a hip. The physicians who treated him were devoted Jansenists. They succeeded not only in curing their patient but in winning his son to their doctrines.
They told the Pascals physical suffering was an illustration of a basic religious truth: man is helpless; a miserable creature. Blaise had seldom enjoyed a day without pain. He knew how helpless physicians could be, so the argument struck him with unusual force. It deepened his sense of the tragic mystery of life.
He also learned from these Jansenist physicians how profoundly the Bible speaks to the human condition. He became an avid student of Scripture, pondering its pages as he had atmospheric pressures. He came to see the Bible as a way to a transformed heart.
In 1651, Pascal’s personal tragedy deepened with the death of his father. The loss brought him to a crisis. His sister, Jacqueline, renounced the world by entering the Port-Royal convent, and Blaise was left alone in Paris.
He now gave himself to worldly interests. He took a richly furnished home, staffed it with servants, and drove about town in a coach drawn by four horses; an extravagance. He pursued the ways of elite but decadent Parisian society. After a year of pleasure he found only a “great disgust with the world,” and he plunged into quiet desperation. He felt abandoned by God.
Blaise turned again to the Bible, to the 17th ch of the Gospel of John, where Jesus prepares for His sacrifice on the cross. It was then that Pascal felt a new blaze of the Spirit. As he wrote, “Certainty, certainty, feeling, joy, peace.”
Pascal’s new faith drew him magnetically into the orbit of the Jansenists. Late in 1654, he joined his sister, Jacqueline, as a member of the Port-Royal community. He was then asked by one of the Jansenist leaders for assistance in his defense against the attack of the Jesuits.
Pascal responded brilliantly. He penned eighteen Public Letters exposing Jesuit errors in flashes of eloquence and sarcastic wit. As each letter appeared, the public snatched them up. They were instant best-sellers. Port-Royal was no longer an obscure Jansenist monastery; it was a center of public interest. The Pope condemned the Letters, but all educated French read them, as succeeding generations did for the next two centuries.
Upon completing the Letters in March, 1657, Pascal planned a book on the evidences for Christianity. He was never able to complete it. In June, ‘62, he was seized with a violent illness and, after lingering a couple months, died on August 19 at the age of just 39.
Friends found portions of his writing on faith and reason, and eight years after his death they published these notes under the title Thoughts (Pensées-Pahn’-sees). In the Pensées, Pascal is a religious genius who cuts across doctrine and pierces to the heart of man’s moral problem. He appeals to the intellect by his passion for truth and arouses the emotions by his merciless descriptions of the plight of man without God.
Man, Pascal said, is part angel and part beast; a Chimera. In Greek mythology the chimera was a she-goat with a lion’s head and a serpent’s tail. Pascal wrote, “What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! The glory and refuse of the universe. Who shall unravel this confusion?”
Reason, as great a faculty as it is, is no sure guide, Pascal warns. If we trust reason alone, we will doubt everything except pain and death. But our hearts tell us this cannot be true. That would be the greatest of all blasphemies to think that life and the universe have no meaning. God and the meaning of life must be felt by the heart, rather than by reason. It was Pascal who said, “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.”
He saw the human condition so deeply yet so clearly that men and women in our own time, after three centuries, still gain perspective from him for their own spiritual pilgrimage.
by Lance Ralston | Oct 25, 2015 | English |
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 and 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, their confessions, in contrast to everyone else. It resulted in what is sometimes referred to as Protestant Scholasticism, called this because the churches developed technical jargon to describe their doctrinal positions ever more accurately—just as medieval Roman Catholic scholastics had done three Cs before.
Don’t forget; Roman Scholasticism helped spark the Reformation. It was the scholastics devotion to correct theology that highlighted the doctrinal and practical errors many in the Church began to call for reform over. But it was also the tendency of some Scholastics to forsake practical theology in favor of the purely hypothetical that fueled the Reformation’s drive to return the practice of faith to everyday life and made religion the sphere, not just of academics and sequestered clerics, but the common people.
So, we might conclude Protestant churches were now headed down the same path with their own version of Scholasticism. And in some cases, that’s what happened. But instead of turning a theology back to Scripture as the Protestant Reformation had done in reaction to Roman Scholasticism, the reaction to Protestant Scholasticism was a decided turn away from Scripture to a decidedly irreligious philosophy.
Many of the discussions of the Protestant Scholastics became dry and technical. Martin Luther sought to overturn centuries of medieval religious jargon and get back to the original message of the NT. John Calvin is often thought of as a more ‘systematic’ theologian, but his Institutes of the Christian Religion, though carefully arranged by topics, was intended to be no more than a faithful exposition of Scripture.
Luther’s and Calvin’s heirs, however, went beyond their intended simplicity. They didn’t abandon the Reformation principle of Sola Scriptura, but they sought answers to questions not found in the Bible. A prime example was the issue of predestination and the relation between grace and free will—which, at the start of the 17th C was THE hot theological topic among Protestants and Catholics. A new kind of scholasticism was produced with some Protestant theologians happy to use the terminology of Aristotle and regarding the premier Roman Catholic Scholastic Thomas Aquinas as an authority.
One of the key figures of this era was Theodore Beza, an aristocratic Frenchman who, although only ten yrs younger than Calvin, outlived him by forty and was widely regarded as Calvin’s successor. It was Beza, rather than Calvin, who was regarded by most Reformed theologians of the 17th C as the theological authority. He was especially good at recasting the terminology of Aristotle and the medieval scholastics in disputing with his opponents, who were most often Lutherans and Catholics.
Beza defined the doctrine of predestination and its role in Reformed theology. In doing so, he developed the doctrine of ‘double predestination’, the notion that God deliberately predestines the reprobate to damnation and the elect to salvation. He put forward the ‘prelapsarian’ position, which says God planned the Fall and the division of humanity into elect and reprobate before Adam sinned. These ideas were present in germ-form in Calvin, but weren’t the touchstones of Reformation orthodoxy they later become.
Beza was an eloquent author. That can’t be said of all who took up their pens in the service of the Lutheran and Reformed cause. In place of Luther’s and Calvin’s attempts to simply expound what Scripture said about doctrine and theology, the Protestant Scholastics were all about logical consistency and adherence to a pre-established orthodoxy.
The Age of Confessionalism is often thought of as a time when theologians conducted a war of words with sharp pens, rather than sharp swords. What comes as a surprise is how so much of their angry rhetoric was aimed, not at people far across the theological divide from themselves, but at their own, much closer colleagues.
With the hardening of orthodoxy, there were inevitable splits within churches as some rebelled against what their colleagues were laying down as required doctrine. The greatest of these fractures occurred in the Reformed Church at the end of the 16th C, after the preaching of Jacobus Arminius, a Dutch minister and professor taught by Beza himself. Arminius was initially a supporter of Beza’s views. But he rebelled against Beza’s distinctions regarding predestination and prelapsarianism, declaring them unjust. Arminius argued that if God condemns some and saves others, it must be on the basis of who has faith, not on the basis of some eternal decree God’s already worked out even before they’re born.
Arminius died in 1609, but the controversy he started rumbled on thru the centuries and has continued right on down to today.
His Dutch name was Jakob Hermanzoon – but as did many scholars of the day, he Latinized that to Jacobus Arminius; and it’s from that we get the theology derived from him – Arminianism – which as most listeners know, is usually posited as opposite to Reformed theology, or Calvinism. Now, before I get a pile of angry emails and comments – let me say what’s called Arminianism and Calvinism today would likely be disavowed by both John Calvin and Jakob Hermanszoon. If they attended a seminary class on these topics today they’d likely say, “What’ch you talkin’ about Willis?”
Both Arminianism and Calvinism have taken on theological accretions and associations their authors likely never intended. And strictly speaking, we can’t equate Calvinism with what’s known as Reformed Theology.
But, back to the story. è Arminius was born in the Netherlands near Utrecht. His father was a blacksmith and armorer who died shortly after Jakob was born. He was educated at the expense of family-friends who recognized his keen intellect. He’d just entered Marburg University in Germany at the age of 16 when news reached him of a tragedy back home in his hometown of Oudewater.
The Roman Catholic Spanish had occupied a good part of Holland for some time but were expelled from Oudewater when the city became a Protestant enclave. When the Spanish returned, they over-ran the town and carried out a brutal massacre that killed Arminius’ mother and siblings. Jakob spent 2 weeks in inconsolable mourning.
When the new University of Leiden opened nearby in 1576, he was the 12th student enrolled. At Leiden he adopted the controversial theology of the French scholar Peter Ramus, a Protestant progressive killed during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Leaving Leiden, Jakob went to Geneva where he enrolled in the Academy, then headed by Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor.
Arminius’s defense of Ramus angered the faculty of the Academy so he left for a trip to Basel where he declined the offer a doctorate, believing he’d not bring honor to the title.
Returning to Geneva, Arminius seems to have been more prudent in his approach. In 1585, Beza wrote to the city magistrates of Amsterdam who’d sponsored Arminius’s education, highly commending his ability and diligence and encouraging a continuance of their support in his studies.
After a short visit to Italy, Arminius returned home, was ordained, and in 1588 became one of the ministers of Amsterdam. His 1590 marriage to a merchant’s daughter gave him influential links.
From the outset, Arminius’s sermons on Romans 7 drew a strong reaction from staunch Calvinists who disliked his views on grace and predestination. The Calvinists said that while God’s saving grace is unearned, He offers it only to those He predestines to salvation. Arminius disagreed, saying God gives grace to those who believe.
In 1592, a colleague accused him of Pelagianism, a 5th C heretical distortion of grace and free-will already condemned by the Church. Arminius was also accused of …
1) An overdependence on the early church fathers,
2) Deviation from two early Calvinist creeds, the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, and
3) An errant views of predestination.
When Arminius and his supporters challenged his critics, urging them to point out specifically WHERE he was in error, they were unable to do so. The city authorities ended up on his side. The question of predestination was not raised in any substantive form until Arminius became professor of theology at Leiden, where he served from 1603–9. The last six years of his life were spent in controversy over his views as they stood in opposition to those of his old mentor, Theodore Beza.
In a 1606 message titled “On Reconciling Religious Dissensions among Christians,” Arminius argued that dissension damages people both intellectually and emotionally and creates doubt about religion that leads to despair. Left unchecked, it may ultimately lead to atheism. He proposed as a remedy to the controversy his ideas had stirred, the calling of a national synod. Arminius believed the proper arbiter between feuding clergy was a good and godly magistrate. The synod was eventually held at Dort in 1618, but Arminius had already been dead nine years.
In assessing Arminius’ theological position, we could say that in his attempt to give the human will a more active role in salvation than Beza’s brand of Calvinism conceded, Arminius taught a conditional election in which a person’s free will might or might not affect the divine offer of salvation. It’s important to distinguish between Arminius’s teaching and what later became known as Arminianism, which was more liberal in its view of free will and of related doctrines than was its founder. Arminius’s views were never systematically worked out until the year after his death, when his followers issued a declaration called the Remonstrance, which dissented at several points from Beza’s description of Calvinism. It held, among other things, that God’s predestination was conditioned by human choice, that the Gospel could be freely accepted or rejected, and that a person who’d become a Christian could “fall from grace” or forsake salvation.
Though he was mild–tempered, Arminius nevertheless spoke his mind in controversy and characteristically defended his position from Scripture.
We’ll pick it up at this point in our next episode as we continue our look at Protestant Scholasticism. There’s a whole lot more for us to learn about this period, including the Calvinist reaction to the challenge of the Remonstrance, as well as the career of a couple of major lights in Christian history, Brother Lawrence and Blaise Pascal – as well as several others.
by Lance Ralston | Oct 18, 2015 | English |
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 overview and 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 details can obscure the bigger picture. You fail to see a forest because all you see is a lot of trees.
As we’ve spent many episodes tracking the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, we may be so distracted by all the names, places, dates and movements, we miss the larger picture and the summary effect of all this on the people of 16th C.
Trends from the previous century came to fruition in the 16th that made for a monumental shift in people’s idea of what The Church was. Consider a couple of the things that happened in the 15th C.
- Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453.
- The New World was opened to Europe at the close of the Century.
Till then, European Christians felt hemmed in by Muslims to the S and E, and by the Atlantic to the W. Missions were conceived of almost exclusively as the conversion of Muslims. Challenges to Christianity were pretty much limited to the threat of an aggressive Islam. That view seemed potent when news of the Fall of Constantinople washed over Western Europe.
Yet in the hundred years of the 16th C, the situation changed dramatically. To the E and S, Islam was countered by the Spanish Reconquista and the failure of the Turks to take Vienna. The Battle of Lepanto in 1571 saw the end of Muslim naval power in the Mediterranean. Muslims armies, which had seemed irresistible till then, began to roll back.
Then, the Atlantic, once an impassable barrier, suddenly became a highway. New worlds opened with the discovery of The New World. Sailing W, Spanish conquistadors conquered a realm far larger than their homeland.
The Portuguese sailed S around Africa, setting up trade centers and missions in the Far East. And Islam, which had appeared the greatest barrier to Christian expansion, saw its main territory surrounded by the growing economic and military power of Europe. North Africa and western Asia shifted from being Muslim realms to European colonies.
In all these lands newly opened to Europeans, Christianity established a foothold. Some of them would centuries later become their own vibrant center of missionary outreach at a time when Europe was growing increasingly secular.
But, few who lived in the 15th C could comprehend the massive consequences of the events they witnessed. When Spain and Portugal came near to blows over who had the rights to what, the pope thought he could work a compromise by decreeing the W belonged to Spain while the E belonged to Portugal. But what about when sailing W leads to the E, and vice versa? The inevitable conflict was played out in the Philippines.
King Ferdinand of Spain and his grandson, the famous Emperor Charles V, before whom Luther appeared at the Diet of Worms, were far more concerned with the politics of Europe than the promises of a New World. That would be like a company in the Year 2000 being more concerned with the telegraph than mobile cellphones.
During the 16th C, when these vast geopolitical changes were taking place, the towering edifice of medieval Christianity collapsed. The Council of Trent tried to salvage what it could and set the scene for what became modern Catholicism. Protestantism diffused into dozens of groups amid the ruins of the medieval Church. The long-held ideal of a single church, with the vicar of Christ as its visible head, never a view held by the Eastern Church, lost its power in the West as well. From then on, Western Christianity was divided among a plethora of groups divided up along cultural and doctrinal differences.
In spite of corruption and the many voices calling for reform, there was agreement among Christians the Church was in essence one, and its unity ought to be manifest in its organization. Most chief figures of the Reformation at first held such an understanding of the Church. Only a few rejected it. Most Protestant leaders believed the unity of the Church was crucial to its nature, and that although it was temporarily necessary to break unity to be faithful to God’s Word, that faithfulness demanded all effort at regaining unity.
As in the Middle Ages, people of the early 16th C took for granted that the survival of a nation-state required religious agreement among its subjects. That notion, which Christians rejected when a minority in the old Roman Empire, became the prevailing view after the conversion of Constantine. All who lived in a Christian state must be Christian and faithful members of THE Church. A bare-few places allowed Jews and Muslims to live among them but only as a lower-class, disenfranchised and persecuted.
This view of national and concomitant religious uniformity is what led to the many wars of religion of the 16th and 17th Cs. Then, in some areas sooner than others, a conclusion was reached that religious tolerance was preferable to the devastation these wars brought. So began the long process, as one after another the various European states adopted policies of religious tolerance. That produced the modern idea of the secular state.
The 16th C also witnessed the collapse of the ancient dream of political unity under an Empire. Charles V was the last emperor who would harbor such illusions. After him, the so-called emperors were little more than kings of Germany with limited power.
The Conciliarist hope of reforming the Church was also shaken. For several decades, Protestant reformers hoped a universal council would set the pope’s house in order. But the opposite took place. The papacy achieved its own reformation without help from a council. By the time the Council of Trent met, it was obvious it wouldn’t be an ecumenical council so much as a papal tool.
Sincere believers, both Protestant and Catholic, saw many of the old certainties crumble around them. Discoveries taking place in the New World posed questions unanswerable by the old guidelines. Medieval foundations like papacy, empire, and tradition, no longer held. As Galileo had demonstrated the Earth wasn’t a fixed point of reference, now it seemed there was NO fixed point to be trusted.
Such were the times of Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Knox, and the other great reformers. While the world was in chaos, they resolved to stand firm in Faith and the power of the Word of God. Luther and Calvin insisted that the power of the Word was such that, as long as the Roman Church continued reading, even though the pope and his advisors refused to listen, there was always in the Roman communion a “vestige of the church.” So they anticipated the day when the Church would once again cleave to the Word and set aside their differences to emerge in a united church once more.
by Lance Ralston | Oct 11, 2015 | English |
This 107th episode is titled, “Reform Around the Edges.”
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 that 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. Mainstream Anabaptists advocated religious tolerance, but were persecuted for that stance.
As we’ve seen in the story of the Church in Germany and as was hammered out in the Peace of Augsburg, peace was secured by deciding some regions would be Lutheran, others Catholic by the principle of cujus regis eius religio [coo-yoos regio / ay-oos rel-i-gio] meaning, “Whose realm, whose religion.” The religion of a region’s ruler determined that regions subjects’ religion. Under Augsburg, people were supposed to be free to relocate to another region if a ruler’s religion didn’t square with their convictions.
Sounds simple enough >> for moderns who are highly mobile and have little sense of the historic connection between identity and place. Many think nothing today of packing up and moving to a new place across town, or across a state, nation, or even some other part of the globe. Not so most Europeans for most of their history. Personal identity was intimately connected to family. And Family was identified by location. That’s why long before people had surnames, they were identified by their town. John of Locksley. William of Orange. Fred of Fillsbury. Families built a house and lived in it for many generations. Losing that home to whatever cause was one of the great tragedies that could befall one. It was a betrayal of previous generations who’d handed down both a family name and home, as well as all those future generations who now would have no home to call their own.
On the surface, the Peace of Augsburg sounded like a sound solution to the religious conflicts that raged after the Reformation. But it was in fact, a highly disruptive force that ultimately helped spark the Thirty Years War.
The wars of religion that washed over Europe in general and France in particular is evidence that the rule a region could have but one religion wasn’t workable. Even the Edict of Nantes, passed by French King Henry IV after the bloody St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, only guaranteed the survival of French Protestantism by granting a number of Protestant cities as enclaves in an otherwise Roman Catholic realm.
We’ve given a thumbnail sketch of the spread of the Reformation over Germany, France, England, Scotland, the Low Countries and in Scandinavian.
Let’s take a look now at Spain.
Before the Reformation reached the Iberian Peninsula, many hoped the Spanish Church would lead the way in long-overdue reform. Queen Isabella’s faith was earnest. She and Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros implemented a massive reform—including a renewal of biblical studies centered on the Complutensian Polyglot Bible. Today a polyglot is known as a parallel Bible, where multiple versions of the bible are arranged in side-by-side columns for comparison. But in parallel Biblr, these version are all the same language. A polyglot is the comparison of different languages. The Complutensian Polyglot had the Hebrew, Latin and Greek texts of the OT as well as the Aramaic of the Torah. The NT was both Greek and Latin. Spain also had many humanists scholars similar to Erasmus—some of them in high places—who longed for reform.
The arrival of the Protestant Reformation saw attitudes in Spain changed. At Worms, the upstart monk Martin Luther defied Emperor Charles V, who just happened to be King Charles I of Spain. Charles became the champion of opposition to Protestantism. The Spanish Inquisition, previously aimed at Jews and occultists, turned its attention toward those calling for reform and anything that smacked of the now-dreaded Lutheranism. Several leading humanists fled to places like the Low Countries where they were welcomed. Others stayed in Spain and tried to lay low, devoting themselves to their studies and hoping the storm would pass them by.
The Inquisition wasn’t able to halt the “Lutheran contagion,” as it was called. Valladolid and Seville became centers of Reformation despite frequent burnings at the stake by the Inquisition. A monastery in Santiponce near Seville was a reform center where Bibles and Protestant books were smuggled in barrels labeled as oil and wine. When one of the smugglers was captured and burned, a dozen of monks fled, agreeing to meet in a year in Geneva. One of them became pastor to a Spanish congregation there. Another, Casiodoro de Reina, spent the rest of his life translating the Bible into Spanish; a recognized masterpiece of Spanish literature released in 1569. A few years later, another of the 12, Cipriano de Valera, revised de Reina’s version, which is known as the Reina-Valera Bible. Back in their monastery in Santiponce and throughout the area around Seville, the Inquisition cleansed the Church of all trace of Protestantism.
We hop over now to Italy.
Among the inaccessible valleys of the Alps, some more reachable parts of Northern Italy and Southern France, the ancient community of the Waldensians continued a secluded but threatened existence. They were repeatedly attacked by armies hoping to suppress their supposed heresy. But they’d long stood firm in their mountain fastness. By the early 16th C the movement lost steam as constant persecution suppressed them. Many among them felt that the price paid for disagreeing with Rome was too high, and increasing numbers returned to Catholicism.
Then, strange rumors were heard. News of a great Reformation arrived. An emissary sent to inquire about these rumors returned in 1526 announcing they were true. In Germany, Switzerland, France, and even more distant regions dramatic change was afoot. Many of the doctrines of the Reformers matched what the Waldensians had held since the 12th C. More delegations met with leading reformers like Martin Bucer, who warmly received them and affirmed most of their beliefs. They suggested some points where they differed and the Waldensians ought to consider revising their stand to bring it into closer alignment with Scripture. In 1532, the Waldensians convened a synod where they adopted the main tenets of the Protestant Reformation. By doing so, they became the oldest Protestant church—existing more than 3 Cs before the Reformation.
Sadly, that didn’t make things any easier for the Waldensians. Their communities in Southern France, whose lands were more vulnerable than the secluded Alpine valleys, were invaded and virtually exterminated. The survivors fled to the Alps. Then a series of edicts ensued, forbidding attendance at Protestant churches and commanding attendance at Mass. Waldensian communities in southern Italy were also exterminated.
Large armies raised by the Pope, the Duke of Savoy, and several other powerful nobles wanting to prove their loyalty to Rome repeatedly invaded the Waldensian mountain enclaves, only to be routed by the defenders. On one occasion, only six men with crude firearms held back an entire army at a narrow pass while others climbed the mountains above. When rocks began raining on them, the invaders were routed.
Then, in what has to be a premier, “Can’t a guy catch a break?” moment, when the Waldensians had a prolonged respite from attack, a plague broke out decimating their population. Only two pastors survived. Their replacements came from the Reformed centers of Switzerland, bringing about closer ties between the Waldensians and the Reformed Church. In 1655, all Waldensians living in Northern Italy were commanded under penalty of death to forfeit their lands in three days as the lands were sold to Catholics, who then had the duty to go take them from recalcitrant rebel-Waldensians.
In the same year, the Marquis of Pianeza was given the assignment of exterminating the Waldensians. But he was convinced if he invaded the Alps his army would suffer the same fate as earlier invaders. So he offered peace to the Waldensians. They’d always said they’d only fight a war of defense. So they made peace with the Marquis and welcomed the soldiers into their homes where they were fed and housed against the bitter cold. Lovely story huh? Well, wait; it’s not over yet. Two days later, at a prearranged time, the guests turned on their hosts, killing men, women and children. This “great victory” was then celebrated with a Te Deum; a short church service of thanksgiving to God.
Yet still the Waldensians resisted, hoping their enemies would make peace with them. King Louis XIV of France, who ordered the expulsion of all Huguenots from France, demanded the Duke of Savoy do as the Marquis had done with his Waldensians. This proved too much for many of them who left the Alps to live in Geneva and other Protestant areas. A few insisted on remaining on their ancestral lands, where they were constantly menaced. It wasn’t until 1848 that the Waldensians and other groups were granted freedom of worship in Italy.
Ah, time for a breather, we’d hope. But again, it was not to be. Because just two years later, famine broke out in the long exploited and now over-populated Alpine valleys. After much debate, the first of many Waldensian groups left for Uruguay and Argentina, where they flourished. In 1975, the two Waldensian communities, one on each side of the Atlantic, made it clear that they were still one church by deciding to be governed by a single synod with two sessions, one in the Americas in February, the other in Europe in August.
The Waldensians weren’t the only Protestant presence in Italy. Among others, Juan de Valdés and Bernardino Ochino deserve mention.
Valdés was a Spanish Protestant Humanist of the Erasmian mold. When it was clear Charles V was determined to wipe Protestantism out of Spain, he fled to in Italy in 1531 where we settled in Naples and gathered a group of colleagues who devoted themselves to Bible study. They didn’t seek to make their views public, and were moderate in their Protestant leanings. Among the members of this group was the historically fascinating Giulia Gonzaga, a woman of such immense beauty the Muslim ruler Suleiman the Great tried to have her kidnapped so he could make her the chief wife of his huge harem. Another member of the group, Bernardino Ochino, a famous and pious preacher, was twice elected leader of the Capuchins. Ochino openly promulgated Protestant principles. When the Inquisition threatened him, he fled to Geneva, then went to Basel, Augsburg, Strasbourg, London, and finally Zürich. Ochino’s journeys from city to city marked a concurrent journey from Biblical orthodox to heresy. He became ever more radical, eventually rejecting the Trinity and defending polygamy; another reason he moved around a lot. He kept getting kicked out of town. He died of the plague in 1564.
Now we take the Communio Sanctorum train to HUNGARY
At the beginning of the Reformation, Hungary was ruled by the 10-year-old boy, King Louis II. A decade later, in 1526, the Ottoman Turks defeated the Hungarians and killed him. The Hungarian nobility elected Ferdinand of Hapsburg to take the throne while nationalists named John Sigismund as king. After complex negotiations, western Hungary was under Hapsburg rule while the East was Ottoman. Stuck between West Hungary ruled by devoted Catholic Hapsburgs and the East ruled by Muslim Ottomans, was Royal Hungary, known as Transylvania, where King Sigismund managed to carve out a small holding.
Sigismund knew that religious division would weaken his already tenuous hold on the realm, so he granted four groups to have equal standing; Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Unitarianism, which we’ll take a closer look at when we consider Poland.
The Ottomans, ever seeking to weaken the powerful Hapsburgs, supported whichever one of these four was weakest, so that it would continue to cause trouble to the others and so weaken the entire realm. If that group then began to gain power and influence, the Ottomans switched their support to the new underdog.
Lutheranism reached Hungary early. There’s evidence Luther’s 95 theses circulated in Hungary only a year after their original posting in Wittenberg. By 1523, the Hapsburgs ordered Lutherans to be burned to prevent their spread. A few years later, Zwingli’s teachings entered the scene, and similar measures were taken against them.
Though Ottoman rule was harsh and atrocities were committed against all Christians, it was in the territories occupied by Ottomans that Protestantism grew most rapidly.
Hungarians preferred the Reformed Tradition coming out of Switzerland to the church government advocated in Lutheranism. They already suffered under a highly centralized government. In the Swiss-Reformed tradition, pastors and laity shared authority. Also, this decentralized form of church government made it more difficult for Ottoman authorities to exert pressure on church leaders. Records make it clear that Ottoman authorities accepted the appointment of a parish priest on the condition the congregation pay if the priest was arrested for any reason. So, priests were often arrested, and freed only when a bribe was paid.
Both Hapsburgs and Ottomans tried to prevent the spread of what they called heresy by means of the printing press. In 1483, long before the Reformation, the Sultan issued a decree condemning printers to have their hands cut off. Now the Hapsburg King Ferdinand I issued a similar ruling; except that, instead of having hands amputated, printers were drowned. But that didn’t stop the circulation of Protestant books. Those were usually printed in the vernacular, the language of the common people, climaxing in the publication of the Karoly Bible in 1590 and the Vizsoly Bible in 1607, which in Hungary played a role similar to that of Luther’s Bible in German. It’s estimated that by 1600 as many as 4 out of 5 Hungarians were Protestant.
Then conditions changed. Early in the 17th C, Ottoman power waned, and Transylvania, supported by Hungarian nationalists, clashed with the Hapsburgs. The conflict was settled by the Treaty of Vienna, granting equal rights to both Catholics and Protestants. But the Thirty Years’ War—in which Transylvania opposed the Hapsburgs and their allies—brought devastation to the country. Even after the end of the War, the conflict among the Hapsburgs, Royal Hungary and Ottomans continued. The Hapsburgs eventually gained the upper hand, and the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699 gave them control over all Hungary—a control they retained until 1918 and the end of WWI. In Hungary, as elsewhere, the Hapsburgs imposed virulent anti-Protestant measures, and eventually the country became Catholic.
We end with a look at POLAND.
When Luther posted his theses on that door in Wittenberg, there was already in western Poland a growing number of the followers of the Pre-Reformer, Jan Hus; Hussites who’d fled the difficulties in Bohemia. They were amped by the prolific work of the German monk. The Poles, however, had long been in conflict with Germans, and distrusted anything coming from such a source. So Lutheranism did spread, but slowly. When Calvinism made its way to Poland, Protestantism picked up steam.
The king at the time was Sigismund I who vehemently opposed all Protestant doctrine. But by the middle of the 16th C, Calvinism enjoyed a measure of support from Sigismund II, who even corresponded with Calvin.
The leader of the Calvinist movement in Poland was Jan Laski, a nobleman with connections to a wide circle of people with Reformed leanings, including Melanchthon and Erasmus. He purchased Erasmus’ library. Exiled from Poland for being a Calvinist, he was called back by the nobility who’d come to favor the Reformed Faith. Laski translated the Bible into Polish, and worked for a meeting of the minds between Calvinists and Lutherans. His efforts led to the Synod of Sendomir in 1570, 10 years after Laski’s death.
The Polish government followed a policy of greater religious tolerance than most of Europe. A large number of people, mostly Jews and Christians of various faiths, sought refuge there. Among them was Faustus Socinius, who denied the Doctrine of the Trinity, launching a group known as Unitarians. His views were expressed in the Racovian Catechism, authored not by Socinius, but by two of his followers. Published in 1605, this document affirms and argues that only the Father is God, that Jesus is not divine, but purely human, and that the Holy Spirit is just a way of referring to God’s power and presence.
Throughout most of the 16th C and well into the 17th, Protestantism as affirmed at the Synod of Sendomir, had a growing number of Polish followers—as did Socinian Unitarianism. But as the national identity of Poland developed in opposition to Russian Orthodox Church to the East, and German Lutherans to the West, with both Russia and Germany repeatedly seeking to take Polish territory, that identity became increasingly Roman Catholic, so that by the 20th C, Poland was one of the most Catholic nations in Europe.
This brief review of the Reformation around the edges of Europe reveals that within just a few decades of Martin Luther’s time the ideas of Protestant theology had covered the continent and caused large scale upheaval. What we HAVEN’T considered yet, is the impact of the Reformation further East. In a later episode we’ll take a look at the impact it had on the Eastern Church.
by Lance Ralston | Oct 4, 2015 | English |
Since last week’s episode was titled Westward Ho! As we track the expansion of the Faith into the New World with Spain and Portugal’s immersion, this week as we turn to the other Europeans 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 iTunes and the CS FB page.
Last week we ended the episode on the expansion of the Faith into the New World by speaking of the Spanish missions on the West Coast. The Spanish were urgent to press north from what would later be called Southern CA because the Russians were advancing south from their base in Alaska. And as any history buff knows, they’d already established a base at San Francisco.
Russians weren’t the only Old World power feared by Spain. The French had New World possessions in Louisiana and French Jesuits were active in the Mississippi Valley. Some dreamed of a link between French Canada and the South down the Mississippi River. The gifted linguist Father Marquette, sailed south along the Mississippi and attempted a mission among the Illinois Indians. While in Quebec, he’d made himself master of 7 Algonquin languages and gained a mighty reputation as an Indian-style orator. He combined preacher, pastor, explorer and geographer in one. His writings contributed to local knowledge of Indian peoples, culture, and agriculture. As any high school student knows, the French were to lose New Orleans and Western Mississippi to Spain, while Eastern Mississippi went to the British. But French Carmelites, a 16th C branch of the Franciscans known as the Recollects, and the Jesuits accomplished much in French possessions before the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1763. They’d attempted a failed mission to the Sioux. Nevertheless, French Roman Catholic influence remained strong in Canada.
As I tell these ultra-bare sketches of mission work among New World Indians, it can easily become just a pedantic recounting of generalized info. A sort of, “Europeans came, Indians were preached to. Churches were planted. Movements happened, some guys died – blah, blah, blah.”
Our goal here is to give the history of the Church in short doses. That means, if we’re to make any headway against the flow of it all, we have to summarize a LOT. But that works against real interest in the history and what makes the story exciting.
It’s the individual stories of specific people that make the tale come alive. à Jesuit, Franciscan, and Protestant missionaries; and just ordinary colonists who weren’t set on a specific mission but were real-deal born again followers of Jesus who came to the New World to make a new life for themselves and their descendants, and just happened to share their faith with the Native Americans and they got saved and started a whole new chapter in the Jesus story. è THAT’S where the good stuff is.
So, let me mention one of these Jesuit missionaries we’ve been talking about who brought the Gospel to Canadian Indians.
Jean de Brébeuf was born to a family of the French nobility and entered the Jesuit order in 1617. He reached Canada 8 yrs later. He learned Algonquin and lived among the Huron for 3 yrs. After being captured by the British, he returned to France but renewed his mission in 1633. He founded an outpost called St Marie Among the Hurons in 1639. The Mission was destroyed by the Iroquois a decade later.
Because De Brébeuf was tall and strongly built, he became known as the Gentle Giant. Like the Jesuits in Paraguay we looked at in the last episode, he could see ahead into how European colonists would bring an unstoppable challenge to the Indian way of life and advocated the Hurons withdraw into a secluded missionary settlement in order to preserve their culture. He’s an example of the heroic pioneer Jesuit, of which there were many, whose missionary life ended in martyrdom in the field.
De Brébeuf stands as a little known, but ought to be lauded, example of the fact that not all Europeans who came to the New World, especially not all missionaries, conflated following Christ with European culture and lifestyle. That’s an assumption many moderns have; that it wasn’t until the modern era that missionaries figured out people could remain IN their culture and follow Jesus, that they didn’t have to become converts to Western Civilization BEFORE they could become Christians. While it has certainly been true that some missions and eras equated the Faith with a particular cultural milieu, throughout history, MOST believers have understood that the True Gospel is trans-cultural, even super-cultural.
Many Jesuit missionaries in the New World like De Brébeuf tried to preserve the native American cultures – while filling them with the Gospel. They saw the emerging European colonies as a THREAT to the Indians and wanted to protect them.
With the end of the 7 Years War, or as it’s known in the US, the French and Indian War, French Canada became a British possession. The Jesuits, on the verge of their being banned from the New World, expanded their work among the Indians to include the Mohawks, Oneidas, Cayugas, and Senecas, as well as those Algonquins yet unreached in Quebec. While converts were made among the Iroquois tribes, the majority remained hostile. Among the converts, there was a huge problem with disease introduced by the missionaries themselves, and the influence of alcohol brought by Europeans. Indian physiological tolerance to hard alcohol was low and addiction quick. Jesuit missionaries reached the Hudson Bay area and baptized thousands. Even after the British won Canada and the Jesuit order was suppressed, some remained in Canada as late as 1789.
In the far NW, Russians entered Alaska in 1741. Russian Orthodox Christianity had begun on Kodiak Island, just off Alaska, in 1794. By ‘96 thousands of Kodiaks and the population of the Aleutian Islands had been baptized. They met hostility from the Russian American Company but the mission received fresh invigoration by the arrival an Orthodox priest from Siberia named Innocent Veniaminoff. He reached the Aleutians in the 1820s and mastered the local dialect well enough to translate the Gospel of Matthew and write a devotional tract that became a classic, titled = An Indication of the Pathway into the Kingdom of Heaven. After working among the Aleutians for some years, Veniaminoff served among the Tlingit people. After his wife died, he was appointed bishop of a vast region stretching from Alaska to CA. Between 1840 and 68 he carried out a massive work. Although 40 yrs of missionary service, often in conditions of tremendous physical hardship, left him exhausted and longing to retire, he was appointed Metropolitan of Moscow, a position he used to found the Russian Missionary Society as a means of support for Orthodox missions. His outstanding service was recognized in 1977 by the Orthodox Church of America conferring on him the title of ‘Evangelizer of the Aleuts and Apostle to America.’
Alaska was sold to the United States in the 1870s but the Orthodox Synod created an independent bishopric to include Alaska in 1872. By 1900 there were some 10,000 Orthodox Christians in the diocese. Of the 65,000 Alaskan and Aleutian people today, some 70% claim to be Christian and many of these belong to the Orthodox community.
The Roman Catholic orders had a great advantage in missions due to their central organizing body called The Sacred Propaganda for the Faith. Today this structure is called the Congregation for the Evangelization of the Nations.
In contrast to Roman monastic orders and their missionary zeal, Protestant churches had little missionary vision in the 16th C. When they engaged in missions in the 17th they had no organizing center.
French Protestants, led by the Huguenot Admiral Coligny, attempted a short-lived experiment off Rio de Janeiro when Admiral Villegagnon established a Calvinist settlement in 1555. It folded when the French were expelled by the Portuguese. A more permanent Calvinist settlement was made by the Dutch when they captured Pernambuco, a region at the eastern tip of Brazil. This settlement remained a Calvinist enclave for 40 years.
North America presented a very different scene for missions than Central and South America. The voyage of the Mayflower with its ‘Pilgrims’ in 1620 was a historical pointer to the strong influence of Calvinism in what would become New England. The states of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire were strongly Congregationalist or Presbyterian in church life and heavily influenced by English Puritanism. At least some of these pioneers felt a responsibility for spreading the Christian faith to the native Americans.
John Eliot is regarded as the driving force behind the early evangelization of the Indians. He was the Presbyterian pastor at Roxby, a village near Boston in 1632. He learned the Iroquois language, and like the Jesuits in Paraguay, though surely with no knowledge of their methodology, founded ‘praying towns’ for the Indians. These were communities that, over a period of 40 yrs, came to include some 3,000 Christian Indians in Natick and other settlements. Eliot translated the entire Bible into Iroquois by 1663 and trained 24 native American pastors by the time of his death.
A remarkable family called The Mayhews were pioneers in missionary work in Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Elizabeth Islands off Cape Cod. Thomas Mayhew bought the islands in 1641 with an Indian population of around 5,000. His son, Thomas Jr., began a mission and by 1651 200 Indians had come to faith. After the death of Thomas Sr. and Jr., John, youngest son of Thomas Jr., along with his son Experience Mayhew continued the mission. Experience had the advantage of fluency in the Indian language with the ability to write it. Zechariah, his son, carried on a tradition that lasted all the way to 1806 and produced many Indian clergy and a Harvard graduate. The ministry of the Mayhews spanned almost 2 centuries.
Another New England figure who became a missionary icon to such great spreaders of the faith as William Carey and David Livingstone, was David Brainerd. Brainerd was born in the farming country of Haddam, Connecticut, and studied for the ministry at Yale College, from which he was wrongly expelled in 1741. He impressed the local leadership of the Scottish Society for the Propagation of the Gospel enough for them to employ him for missionary service in 1742. He worked among the Indians of Stockbridge and then, after ordination as a Presbyterian, he worked in western Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. There he experienced genuine religious revival among the Delaware Indians, which he recounted in detail in his journals.
Brainerd died young but his diary and the account of his life by the great preacher, theologian, and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, became immensely influential in the Protestant world. Edwards, also a student at Yale, was himself a missionary at Stockbridge among the Indians from 1750–58.
While it’s risky to do a diagnosis on someone 270 years later, we glean from David Brainerd’s logs that he suffered from at least a mild case of a depression-disorder, and maybe not so mild. It’s his honesty in sharing with his journals his emotions that proved to be a tonic to mission-luminaries like Carey and Livingstone.
New England Presbyterians and Congregationalists were matched by other Protestants in their efforts among Indians. Episcopalians and the missionary society of the Church of England achieved some success in evangelizing them.
Work among the Iroquois of New York was initiated by Governor Lord Bellomont, and a converted Mohawk chief, Joseph Brant, who helped establish a Mohawk church. Queen Anne of England even presented silver communion implements to 4 Mohawk Christians in London in 1704 for use in one of their chapels.
In Virginia, the royal charter declared one of the aims of the colony was the conversion of Indians. The first minister of the village of Henrico, Alexander Whitaker, did significant missionary work and introduced the Indian princess, Pocahontas, to the faith.
BTW: Pocahontas was her nickname – which translates roughly to “Little Hellion.” Her real name was Matoaka, but she was so precocious as a child her nickname became her favored label.
Whitaker established a college at Henrico for the education of Indians and there were appeals for funding for Indian missions back in England by King James I and his archbishops so that 1 of 6 professorships at the College of William and Mary was set apart for teaching Indians.
Methodists had the example of John and Charles Wesley when they were Anglican priests and missionaries for the Society of the Proclamation of the Gospel in Georgia from 1735. Though John’s primary assignment was a chaplain for the English settlers, he tried to reach out to the Choctaw and Chickasaw. He had little response from the Native Americans. No wonder, since he’d later say he was most likely unconverted at that point.
After his break with the Church of England, Wesley’s chief lieutenant in the New World was Thomas Coke who became a driving force for Methodist missionary work, attempting a mission in Nova Scotia in 1786 before being re-directed to the West Indies by a storm. Methodist missions came into their own in the 19th C after Coke’s death and took the form of frontier preachers and ‘circuit riders’ under the direction of Francis Asbury, who traveled some 300,000 miles on horseback in the cause of the Gospel and whose vision included both Indians and black slaves for Methodist outreach. By the time of Asbury’s death in 1816 Methodist membership had risen from just 13 to 200,000 over a 30-yr period.
The 19th C in North America saw the far north reached by Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Methodists.
The 19th C was a time of extraordinary development in North America, despite the ravages of the Civil War in the 1860’s. Great numbers of immigrants flooded into the country from Europe, estimated at 33 million between 1820 and 1950. Of British emigrants between 1815 and 1900, 65% found their way to the US. Of African-Americans, whereas only some 12% belonged to a church in 1860, by 1910 that number was 44%. Many joined the Baptist and Methodist congregations of the southern states after the abolition of slavery. In the Nation at large, the extraordinary achievement to any non-American was the blending into one nation of so many different peoples, so that their American citizenship was more prominent than their roots as Italian, Irish, Jewish, German, Scandinavian or English. This influx posed great challenges to the churches but Americans largely became a church-going people. And while differences over Religion had become the cause of so much misery and bloodshed in Post-Reformation Europe, Americans learned to live in civil harmony with people of other denominations.
by Lance Ralston | Sep 27, 2015 | English |
In this episode of CS, we take a look at the Expansion of Christianity into the New World.
Following Columbus’s voyages at 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, Portugal and 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 of 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 Southwest of the Azores [ah-zores] Islands. Spain was given the West Indies and the Americas; while Portugal, because it had already explored the west coast of Africa and moved towards India thru Vasco da Gama’s explorations, was given the right to colonize Africa, India and the East.
It seems monumentally arrogant to us today that these Europeans assumed they were “discovering” lands that already had people living there for generations. And how do you plant a colony in a place indigenous people had called their home for centuries? Yet that was the attitude of many Europeans in the late 15th C and as the scope of geography for the New World was understood, other Europeans joined the rush to grab as much territory as they could. è Because religion was a central and defining part of the European worldview, they took their Faith with them.
Priests accompanied da Gama’s voyages as they were a central part of Spanish colonization, combining the roles of missionaries, explorers, secretaries and chroniclers. Often they belonged to religious orders like the Franciscans and Dominicans, then later, the Jesuits.
It was with a sense of religious mission, as well as the longing to acquire wealth from indigenous peoples, that men like Cortez and Pizarro began their conquest of the Aztec and Incan empires. Modern students of history know that the Spanish conquistadors seemed not to think forced baptisms of native Americans was all that bad of an option. What we do well to remember was that these explorers didn’t originate the policy. Charlemagne had practiced a similar program of forced conversions. That doesn’t make it right, but it provides a little historical context.
Cortez was born in Medellin, Spain. He attended the University of Salamanca and left Spain for Cuba in 1511. At the age of 33 he mounted an expedition against the Aztec capital in Mexico with only 700 fellow Spaniards, but equipped with canons and muskets, reinforced by thousands of Indian allies who’d been brutally dominated by the blood-thirsty Aztecs for generations.
Although he experienced a serious reverse after a massacre of Aztec nobles and temporarily had to withdraw from the capital of Tenochtitlan, he returned to the city in August 1520 and systematically destroyed it. He founded and built Mexico City on the same site, then became governor of New Spain and captain-general of the forces in 1522, titles that were confirmed by Emperor Charles V, when Cortez returned to Europe in 1529. He was later replaced by a viceroy and died in 1547.
His contemporary, Pizarro, directed his attention to the Inca Empire in what would later be the nation of Peru. He obtained authority from Spain for its conquest in 1528–29 and attacked the Incas in 1530. A massacre of native Americans assembled at Cajamarca was followed by the capture of the Inca capital of Cuzco in November 1530.
You may remember from an earlier episode, one of the major debates between the Church and civil rulers of Europe was over who had the right to appoint bishops. While there were seasons when civil rulers took control of this, it was usually the Church that maintained control over church appointments. The New World presented a new challenge and opportunity. The Pope was already busy enough with internal affairs and the threat of the Reformers to be bothered with selecting hundreds of new bishops for lands that hadn’t even been properly mapped yet. So he granted the monarchs of Spain and Portugal the right to select church leaders in their new colonies.
On the colonialist front, a system was developed called encomienda. By this method, a number of native Americans were assigned to a colonist-landlord. He was given rights to both tribute and labor but it was understood he was responsible for Christianizing those committed to his charge. As we’d suspect, the encomienda system became a by-word for oppression and cruelty and resulted in the virtual slavery of the Indians after its introduction in 1503. Brave Dominican priests denounced the system with one of the earliest protestors being Antonio de Montesinos on the island of Hispaniola in 1511.
Bartholemew de las Casas was another Dominican, whose father accompanied Columbus on one of his voyages. When he witnessed the live burial of an Indian leader in 1514 in Cuba, he became a champion of Indian rights for the next 50 years.
I pause at this point to speak to those offended by my use of the term “Indian” for the native Americans of the New World. There are those who believe it’s a slight to refer to inhabitants of the new World as “Indians” because it was a historical mistake on the part of previous generations of Europeans who labeled them as such. BUT! It turns out many native Americans want to be identified, NOT as Native Americans, but as Indians. While they know the errant origin of the term, they’ve embraced it as a self-designation and ask that others identify them as “Indians.”
This is akin to today, to followers of Jesus being more than happy to be known as Christians, though the best evidence says the terms was originally a slur applied by opponents of the Faith to its adherents.
In any case, De las Casas had to confront a widespread European mindset based on a philosophical position going all the way back to Aristotle, that viewed New World Indians as inherently “less human” and so fit to be slaves by nature, an inferior race intended for menial labor and to serve their betters. He worked tirelessly in America and Spain to change this attitude and to convince those in authority that the use of force was contrary to a Christian understanding of the Indians as worthy of respect for those created in God’s image. His efforts to lobby support at home in influential circles, received recognition from the Emperor, against the activities of the colonists. It included a debate in 1550 at Valladolid with the Aristotelian philosopher and scholar, Sepulveda. Before he died, de las Casas’s campaign for just laws for the Indians was responsible for what’s called “the New Laws” of 1542–3, which prohibited slavery and caused the Council for the Indies to be reorganized. After serving as bishop of Chiapas, de las Casas used his pen on behalf of the Indians, most famously in his Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a hard-hitting critique of Spanish practices, in which some claimed he exaggerated abuses. But the work was widely read and proved influential in turning the tide in Europe toward a greater empathy toward the people of the New World.
The Franciscans and Dominicans were the first in the field of the New World from 1510 onwards, but in the 2nd phase of the mission the Jesuits were active.
José de Anchieta was a great Jesuit missionary who gave 44 years of his life and became known as the ‘apostle of Brazil’. He was one of the founders of both the Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro Jesuit missions. Another heroic figure and defender of Indian rights in Brazil was the Jesuit, Antonio Vieira, who in equal measure opposed both the Inquisition and colonists, was admired by King John IV of Portugal but almost lynched in 1661 after the king’s death.
In the 17th C, Jesuits were active in Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay. In the early 1600s they created a missionary system known as the ‘Reductions.’ These were settlements of Indians that sought to protect them from European colonization while at the same time evangelizing them. In total, these communities comprised some 100,000 people. Each settlement had a church, school and workshops and led an ordered life. The colonists resented the removal of their labor pool but the Jesuits steadfastly defended the Indians against enslavement.
General agitation against the Jesuit order in Europe and colonies of the New World led to their expulsion from Portuguese territory in 1759, then from Spanish possessions 8 yrs later. The Jesuits were suppressed in the New World in 1773. All this was a disastrous blow to the Reductions. It also exposed the weakness of a form of mission that was essentially paternalistic, with little or no authority passed over to the indigenous people or attempt to develop leaders among the Indians. With the removal of the Jesuit leaders, the Reductions collapsed and whole villages were engulfed by jungle after 150 years as oases of Christian community.
The region of modern Venezuela was an area for further Jesuit exploits. They penetrated the jungles of the Amazon to reach large numbers of Indians. One early Jesuit pioneer, Rafael Ferrer, began a mission in 1599 that saw his martyrdom in 1611. Further Jesuit efforts achieved more and by 1661 many thousands were baptized in the region. The Jesuits found that these people were less easily led than the Guarani people who lived around Sao Paulo. There was opposition from the Portuguese; but with assistance from the Franciscans, half a million people were reached.
Central America was pioneered by the Franciscans, Dominicans and a Catholic order we’ve not seen before; the Mercedarians.
Founded by the Spaniard, Peter Nolasco in 1235, their original goal was to ransom captives and redeem properties that had fallen into Muslim hands during the Moorish occupation of Spain. The Mercedarians began as a lay order but by the 14th C the clergy had taken control. Following the Reconquista, when the Moors were expelled from Spain, the Mercedarians continued their mission by traveling to Muslim lands to seek freedom for Christian captives. Gradually, academic, theological, and educational work was included in its work and an order of nuns was founded. They joined the Franciscans and Dominicans in taking the Gospel to Central America.
The first church in Panama was built in 1510. Missionaries entered Guatemala in 1526. By 1600 there were 22 Franciscan and 14 Dominican bases in Guatemala.
Mexico, after the era of Cortez, attracted the orders, so that Franciscans landed at Vera Cruz in 1524, Dominicans in 1526, Augustinians in ‘33, and later, Capuchins and Jesuits. The Franciscan, Juan de Zumarraga, became bishop of Mexico City in 1528 and proved to be a firm defender of Indian rights and a believer in an indigenous clergy. He became the archbishop of Mexico in 1546. The University of Mexico, founded in ‘53, reflected the church’s emphasis on education.
In the north of the country a famous Jesuit missionary, Eusebio Kino, arrived in 1681 and did missionary work in Baja California, up into the modern state of Arizona, and reaching as far as Colorado. Described as a modest, gentle, humble man who was an upholder of the welfare of Indians, he traveled perpetually in the interest of the mission. He hoped to reach the fierce Apaches but died before he could in 1711. Before their formal removal from the region, the Jesuits achieved 37 bases in Baja by 1767.
In the modern state of California, a string of Franciscan missions are still to be found between San Diego and San Francisco. Father Junipero Serra, born in Majorca, became the leader of the mission and founded the communities of Monterey, Carmel, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and several others. While many of the original buildings are gone, Catholic churches continue on in several of these sites to this day. By 1800, some 100,000 Californian Indians, many from the Chumash people, had been reached by the mission and 18 Franciscan mission compounds were established. At least some of the thrust to the N was driven by Spanish fear of Russian incursion, moving S from Alaska. Father Serra also spent some years establishing a work in Texas.
Regarding Junipero Serra, when I originally composed this episode, Pope Francis had recently arrived in the US where he addressed both the US Congress and the United Nations. While in the US, he canonized, that is, he conferred sainthood, on Serra. That had been an issue of some controversy for a while as Serra’s career came under fire from some historians and human rights advocates.
Critics claim Serra’s methods ranged from harsh to brutal. Lashings of the Indians were used liberally in the missions for infractions as small as asking for more food. The friars kept meticulous records so historians are able to document this treatment. The problem comes in interpreting these records. The language isn’t the problem; it’s the cultural context that makes interpretation difficult.
On one hand, Serra was devoted to protecting the Indians from exploitation by adventurers and settlers who wanted to reduce the native population to slavery. Serra understood people are led to faith by kindness and love rather than heavy-handedness. That he traveled so far, pioneering several missions proves he wasn’t driven by some kind of personal profit motive. So why the harsh treatment of the Indians at so many of the missions? Defenders of Serra say such treatment was necessary because of the nature of the cultures of the natives where the Missions were located.
What we can say is that the Missions definitely went far to alter the tribal life of the Indians where they were based. If they began as attempts to Christianize Indians while allowing them to continue some of their native traditions, they ended up going much further in converting the Indians not just to the Faith, but to the Spanish culture. And it seems that more than anything raises the ire of at least some of Serra’s critics.
As we end, just a quick reminder that CS is supported by the donations of subscribers.
by Lance Ralston | Sep 20, 2015 | English |
The title of this episode is – A Needless Tragedy.
We backtrack now a bit. We’re going back to that period of European history following the Reformation called the Wars of Religion. We do so to take a look at a single day; Aug 24, 1572 in Paris, and the infamous event that happened then and there = the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
We do this because while it’s a lot more detailed look at something than we usually get into, it illustrates the impact the Reformation had on Europe and, I think, the Modern World.
John Calvin was French but his reforming work was centered in Geneva, Switzerland. It didn’t take long for his influence to spread back to his native homeland so that by 1555, Calvinism had firm roots there. French Calvinists were called Huguenots – a word of unknown origin but was meant as a mockery of Protestants. Calvinism spread rapidly and soon there were a couple thousand French Reformed churches with close to half the French switching from Catholic churches to Huguenot fellowships.
What made things difficult for the French Monarchy, which remained firmly Catholic, was that many of the nobility were Huguenots. Bear in mind that at that time, religious affiliation and political alignment were regarded by most Europeans as one and the same. A showdown between French Catholics and Protestants seemed inevitable.
Enter the scheming Queen Mother of France, Catherine de Medici; a die-hard Roman Catholic. She arranged for her daughter, Margaret of Valois, to be married on August 18th of 1572 to the Protestant King, Henry of Navarre. The hope in Paris was that this marriage would bring peace between warring Catholics and Protestants. Nobles who’d fought each other the previous decade turned out for the celebration. Thousands of Protestants came to Paris for the wedding, and the festivities lasted for days.
But while Catherine de Médici planned her daughter’s wedding, she was also plotted the assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny [koh-LEE-nee], one of the main leaders of the Huguenots.
On Aug. 22nd, the assassination attempt failed. The plot, so soon after the royal wedding, threatened to badly embarrass the royal family. Near midnight the following day, Charles IX, the 22 yr-old French king and brother of the bride, in a fit of rage, screamed at his mother, “If you’re going to kill Coligny, why don’t you kill all the Huguenots in France, so there’ll be none left to hate me.”
Catherine wasn’t one to put up with the pique of her petulant son and decided to follow up on his suggestion. She ordered the murder of all Huguenot leaders still in Paris, including those who’d attended the wedding. The massacre began on Aug 24, 1572, St. Bartholomew’s Day. Admiral Coligny was murdered first as he knelt in prayer.
Many of the Huguenot nobles were lodged at the Louvre. They were called into the courtyard and shot one by one as they appeared. During the night, the homes of Paris Huguenots were each marked with white crosses. Before daybreak, messengers were sent throughout the city crying out, “Kill! Kill! The King commands it.” A murdering frenzy fell on the whole city. Entire Huguenot families were taken into the streets and murdered. The dawn of St. Bartholomew’s Day revealed many thousands of martyred Huguenots.
The craze spread to the provinces in the following days and weeks, the death toll somewhere between 30 and 40 thousand. Admiral Coligny’s head was embalmed and sent to Rome as a gift to Pope Gregory XIII. When it reached Rome, the Pope and his cardinals staged a Mass of Thanksgiving.
The massacre was not without cost to Charles IX. He began having horrific nightmares. In less than two years, he lay dying at the age of only 24. His last days were plagued with visions of his victims. He cried to his nurse, “What bloodshed, what murders! What evil counsel have I followed? O my God, forgive me!. . . I am lost!”
That’s the short version of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Now for a little more depth.
The massacre marked a turning point in the French Wars of Religion. The Huguenot political movement was crippled by the loss of many of its most prominent leaders, as well as many re-conversions by commoners back to Catholicism while those who remained Protestant were increasingly radicalized.
Though by no means unique, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was the worst of the century’s religious atrocities. Throughout Europe, it impressed on Protestants the firm conviction Catholics were bloody and treacherous. But some of those Protestants ought to have seen how they treated other Protestants of a different flavor, as well as Catholics, with the same kind of brutality when they had the chance.
While the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre seems a violent but quickly burnt-out fit of hatred, it was in truth the culmination of a series of events.
1st – The Peace of Saint-Germain in 1570 put an end to 3 years of terrible civil war between French Catholics and Protestants. But the peace was precarious since many Catholics refused to accept it. The famous Guise [gice] family led this faction and so fell out of favor at the French court. Meanwhile, the Huguenot political and military leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny was readmitted to the king’s council in September of 1571.
Catholics were shocked by the return of Protestants to the court, but the king and queen mother, the afore-mentioned Charles IX and Catherine de Medici were determined not to let war break out again. Being were well aware of the kingdom’s financial difficulties, they knew more war would bankrupt them so they were determined to stay friendly with Coligny. The Huguenots were in a strong defensive position as they controlled not a few of the fortified towns across France.
To cement the peace between the two groups, Catherine offered to marry her daughter Margaret to the Protestant prince Henry of Navarre, the future King Henry IV. The royal marriage was arranged for 18 August 1572. But it was rejected by staunch Catholics. Both the Pope and King Philip II of Spain strongly condemned Catherine’s plan.
2nd – The impending marriage led to the gathering of a large number of well-born Protestants in Paris, who’d come to escort their prince. But Paris was a violently anti-Huguenot city, and Parisians, who tended to be extreme Catholics, found their presence unacceptable. Encouraged by Catholic preachers, they were horrified at the marriage of a Catholic princess to a Protestant. The French Parliament snubbed the marriage ceremony altogether.
3rd – Compounding this bad feeling was the fact that recent harvests were poor and taxes had risen to pay for civil wars. The rise in food prices, set against the backdrop of the obscene luxury displayed by the nobles on the occasion of the royal wedding increased tension among the people. A particular point of complaint was a cross erected on the site of the house of Philippe de Gastines, a Huguenot martyred a couple yrs before. A mob tore down his house and erected a large wooden cross in its place. Under the terms of the Peace of Saint-Germain, the cross was removed in Dec. 1571. That led to riots that killed fifty and saw massive property damage. In the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, relatives of the Gastines family were among the first to be killed by the mob.
4th – The royal court itself was divided. Catherine hadn’t obtained the Pope’s permission for the royal marriage; so the French clergy hesitated about what to do. It took all Catherine’s considerable skill to convince Cardinal de Bourbon to officiate the wedding ceremony. And note who were’ talking about here. This is Catherine DE MEDICI, of the eminently famous and powerful Italian banking family.
5th – In the years leading up to the massacre, Huguenot political rhetoric had for the first time taken a tone against, not just the policies of the monarchy, but following the trend of Protestant thought, toward monarchy in principle. This trend would grow greatly after the Massacre as the Huguenots laid blame for it at the foot of the throne.
6th – Tensions were further raised in May, 1572 when news reached Paris that a French Huguenot army under Louis of Nassau crossed into a Dutch province and captured a couple of Catholic strongholds. This was all so Louis could assist his brother William in his political ambitions. French Catholics were furious that all of France was being dragged into a war with the Netherlands and Spain they had nothing to do with.
All these ingredients mixed in the pot to produce a tension just waiting for a spark to ignite.
After the wedding on August 18, Coligny and leading Huguenots remained in Paris to discuss some grievances about the Peace of St. Germain with the king.
On the 22nd, an attempt was made on Coligny’s life as he made his way home from the Louvre. He was shot from the upstairs window of a home owned by the Guises and seriously wounded. The would-be assassin escaped in the confusion that followed.
The attempted assassination of Coligny triggered the crisis that led to the massacre. Coligny was the most respected Huguenot leader and enjoyed a close relationship with the king. Aware of the danger of reprisals from the Protestants, the king and his court visited Coligny on his sickbed and promised the culprits would be punished.
While Catherine was eating dinner, Protestants burst in to demand justice, some going so far as to threaten her. The fears of Huguenot reprisals grew in the palace. Coligny’s brother-in-law led a 4,000-strong army that was at that moment camped just outside the city, and though there’s no evidence it was planning to attack, Catholics feared it might take revenge on the Guises or the general populace of the city.
So that evening, Catherine held a meeting with her Italian advisers. On the evening of the 23rd, Catherine went to see the king to discuss the crisis. Though no details of the meeting survive, it seems Charles and his mother decided to eliminate the Protestant leaders, meaning between 2 and 3 dozen of the noblemen still in Paris. They thought this would gut the Huguenots of their leadership and leave the Protestants powerless. They hoped it would squelch any real attempts at attacking the royals.
Shortly after this decision, municipal authorities of Paris were summoned. They were ordered to shut the city gates and arm the citizenry in order to prevent any attempt at a Protestant uprising. The king’s Swiss Guard was given the task of killing a list of leading Protestants. It’s difficult to determine the exact chronology of events and know the moment the killing began. It seems a signal was given by ringing bells at a church near the Louvre. The Swiss guards expelled the Protestant nobles from the Louvre castle, then slaughtered them in the streets.
A group led by the Duke of Guise dragged Admiral Coligny from his bed, killed him, and threw his body out a window. And all the tension building since the Peace of St. Germain exploded in a wave of popular mob violence. Commoners hunted Protestants throughout the city, including women and children. Chains were used to block streets so Protestants couldn’t escape from their houses. The bodies of the dead were collected in carts and thrown into the Seine. The massacre in Paris lasted 3 days despite the king’s attempts to stop it.
The leading Huguenot prince, Henry of Navarre just 19 and newly married to Catherine’s daughter, was spared and pledged to convert to Catholicism. He later renounced his feigned conversion when he escaped the madhouse that was Paris.
On Aug 26th, the king fabricated an “official” version of events—saying that he ordered the massacre to thwart a Huguenot plot against the royal family. A celebration and parade were held, while the killings continued in parts of the city.
Although King Charles dispatched orders to the provincial governors on Aug. 24th to prevent violence and maintain the terms of the Peace of Saint-Germain, from August to October, massacres of Huguenots took place in a dozen French cities. In most of them, the killings swiftly followed the arrival of the news of the Paris massacre, but in some places there was a delay of a month.
In many cities across France, the loss to the Huguenot communities after the massacres was far larger than those actually killed. Because in the following weeks there were mass conversions to Catholicism. For instance, in Rouen [ruin], where a few hundred were killed, the Huguenot community shrank from over 16 thousand to fewer than 3 thousand as a result of conversions and emigration to safer cities and countries.
Soon afterward, both sides prepared for a fourth civil war, which began before the end of the year.
The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre with the ensuing turmoil that fell out from the Reformation in all Europe went far in shaping the mindset of succeeding generations. You can make a good case for the emergence of the Enlightenment’s suspicion of religion because of the horrendous bad behavior of people in the name of God during the Wars of Religion.
Of course, as we’ve said in previous episodes, it was often politicians and power-hungry prelates who hid behind religion and used the name of God in a bald grab for temporal power. They knew the common people could be manipulated by a religious argument more easily than by admitting they just wanted more land or power. Today, politicians seek to dispatch their opponents by saying they’re wrong on this or that political issue. In 16th and 17th C Europe, they did so by accusing their opponents of heresy.
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by Lance Ralston | Sep 13, 2015 | English |
This episode of CS is titled, Back in the East – Part 2
Last time we took a brief look at the Jesuit missions to the Far East; namely Japan, China, Vietnam and India.
We encountered the revolutionary approach to mission work of Alessandro Valignano and his spiritual heirs, Michele Ruggieri and 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 and 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.
From the dawn of the 17th C, both Dutch and English trading interests moved into Asia. Their commercial and military navies dominated those of other European nations.
The Dutch established bases in Indonesia and created a center at Jakarta. The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602, and carried the Dutch Reformed Church to the East Indies. But don’t think this means the Dutch conducted missionary work among indigenous peoples. It merely means they carried their religious institution with them and built chapels so Dutch nationals had a place to worship when doing business there. Any converts from among the native population was by accident, not any kind of planned outreach. Dutch interests in the Far East were exclusively commercial.
The English equivalent of the Dutch East India Company was, the creatively named à English East India Company. Though the directors of the Company were suspicious of missionaries, they appointed chaplains to their trading communities. This provided an opening for those with missionary vision in England and India, such as Parliamentarian William Wilberforce and Charles Grant, an employee of the company.
Two outstanding East India Company chaplains were Henry Martyn and Claudius Buchanan. Martyn was a leading Cambridge intellect and winner of numerous academic prizes. He and other Cambridge students were influenced by the long ministry of Charles Simeon, whose preaching urged that the Gospel be taken to All Peoples. Martyn was a brilliant linguist and translator. He was appointed a chaplain in 1805, translated the NT into Urdu and Persian and prepared an Arabic version before his early death from tuberculosis at 31. His Indian assistant, Abdul Masih, converted from Islam to become a Christian missionary and advocate of the Faith. He was ordained in 1825 as the first Indian Anglican clergyman. Many others were inspired by Martyn’s life of scholarship and devotion.
William Carey, often regarded as the father of Protestant English missions, was both a shoemaker and Baptist preacher in Northamptonshire. He arrived in India in 1793. He was soon joined by 2 other Baptist giants, Joshua Marshman and William Ward, making what came to be known as the ‘Serampore Trio.’ Serampore being the region where they lived and worked. The trio greatly admired the Moravians and shaped their community on the Moravian model.
Carey’s passage to India had been denied by the East India Company, the de facto government of English holdings in India, with their own hired army enforcing their will on the regions they operated. That would be like Amazon being the City Council and Law Enforcement for Seattle. Later British colonies and India came under control of the Crown. The East India Company opposed Carey’s plan to take the Gospel to the Indians. Chaplains for the British in India was fine, but they didn’t want to foment hostility with the faiths of their trading partners. Carey had ONE goal in going to India; to evangelize the lost. His passion to raise support in England for foreign missions led to his being derided by critics like Sydney Smith, a clergyman and author of satire who wrote for the Edinburgh Review.
But by steady perseverance, monumental labor at biblical translation, longsuffering through family tragedies and the loss of precious manuscripts by fire, Carey faced down all critics, became Professor of Sanskrit at Fort William College and earned the accolade from Bishop Stephen Neill, himself a missionary in India: “In the whole history of the Church, no nobler man has ever given himself to the service of the Redeemer.”
For North Americans, an equivalent figure to Carey as a pioneer was the great missionary to Burma, Adoniram Judson. Judson received his inspiration to become a missionary from reading the sermons of Claudius Buchanan in 1809. After ordination as a Congregationalist minister, he applied to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. On his voyage to India, he and his wife adopted a Baptist statement of Faith. On arrival in India he was baptized, having made his change of mind known to William Carey. He was refused permission to work by the East India Co as a Baptist missionary in India but began work in Rangoon in 1813. His work among the Karen people met with rousing success. The first Karen to be baptized was Ko Tha Byu, who came from a background of violent crime. Byu became a notable evangelist. The Karen became the largest Christian group of the region. In modern Myanmar they number 200,000 Christians in over 1,000 churches. Judson himself became a missionary icon and hero in mid-19th C North America.
China closed its doors to foreigners of all kinds after imperial edicts against Christian preaching in 1720. Robert Morrison was the lone Protestant missionary from 1807, often at risk of his life. Although the East India Co was hostile to his mission, in 1809 he was employed by them as an interpreter so he could remain on Chinese soil. With the help of William Milne, he translated the entire Bible into Chinese and created a Chinese dictionary, which became a standard work for language studies. He and Milne founded an Anglo-Chinese school in Malacca.
But any missionary incursion into wider China was impossible until the treaties of the mid-19th C opened the country by slow degrees.
First, the so-called ‘treaty ports’ became accessible in 1842 in the Treaty of Nanking, forced on China by British commercial interests. The Chinese were desperate for opium from India, supplied by the British, a major source of revenue.
A bit later, the Treaty of Tientsin opened the interior to missionaries, preparing the way for the China Inland Mission.
James Hudson Taylor was born in Yorkshire, England to a devout Methodist family. He trained as a doctor, but, before he qualified, offered himself as a missionary to the China Evangelization Society. Because of the political conditions in China during the pro-Christian Taiping Rebellion, he was sent to Shanghai in 1853.
Hudson Taylor was inspired by Karl Gutzlaff, who’d travelled to the Chinese interior between 1833-9 as a freelance missionary.
Gutzlaff was a German educated at a Moravian school. Drawn to the Far East by the urge to see China won to Christ, he began with the Netherlands Missionary Society in 1824 by serving in Thailand where he translated the Bible into Thai in just 3 years.
In 1828 he broke with Netherlands Missionary Society because they wouldn’t send him to China. From his perspective, that’s why he was in the Far East. So, he became a freelance missionary, distributing Christian literature along the coast. He became an interpreter for the East India Co in Shanghai and helped negotiate the Treaty of Nanjing. He recruited Chinese nationals as evangelists to the interior and raised funds for their support through his writings in Europe, only to find that many of his recruits had deceived him and taken the money for other purposes. Although discredited in the eyes of some, Gutzlaff’s strategy of using nationals as Christian workers was sound. No one doubted his missionary zeal. Hudson Taylor looked on him as the ‘grandfather’ of the China Inland Mission and its work in the interior provinces.
Hearkening back to the accomodationist policy of Valignano, Taylor experimented with identification in Chinese dress and the ‘queue’; that is, the pigtail hairstyle worn by Chinese men. But Taylor caught grief from other members of the missionary community, by his “going native” as it was called. In 1857, he resigned from the China Evangelization Society he’d been working with. Stirred deeply by the needs of the Chinese of the interior, Taylor founded the China Inland Mission in 1865, aiming to put 2 missionaries in each province, recently open to foreigners after the Treaty of Tientsin. He was now a fully qualified doctor and married to Maria Dyer, daughter of a missionary and a leader in her own right, he set out with a party of 16 from London to Shanghai in 1866, narrowly avoiding total loss by shipwreck.
From the beginning the CIM was to be a so-called ‘faith mission’, with no public appeals for funds; and its missionaries accepted the absolute, if gently applied, authority of Hudson Taylor, described by some as the ‘Ignatius Loyola of Protestant missions.’
The CIM came to number over 800 missionaries, including Methodists, Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians and others. It planted churches that had a membership of some 80,000 by 1897. The public profile of the CIM was greatly enhanced in the 1880s by the arrival of the “Cambridge 7”, 2 of whom were well-known sports heroes and popularized as making great sacrifices for the Cause of Christ. CT Studd was 1 of these, later to found of the World Evangelization Crusade and the Heart of Africa Mission, which worked in the Belgian Congo.
Hudson Taylor’s publication, China’s Millions, achieved a circulation of 50,000 and helped put the mission in front of the public. The society suffered heavily in the nationalist Boxer Rebellion of 1898 to 1900. A total of 200 missionaries, many of them Roman Catholic, and 30,000 Chinese Christians lost their lives. CIM lost 58 missionaries and several children. Even with this tragic set-back, the CIM continued to be an influential group under its 2nd director, Dixon Hoste, 1 of the Cambridge 7. In 1949 all missionary personnel were expelled by the Communists.
Hudson Taylor is described by the eminent Church Historian Kenneth Scott Latourette as “1 of the 4 or 5 most influential foreigners who came to China in the 19th C for any purpose, religious or secular.”
by Lance Ralston | Sep 6, 2015 | English |
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. That rang the death knell to The Church in the East, which for centuries boasted far more members and covered a wider 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.
While today, Nestorianism is officially labelled a heresy in its view of the nature of Christ, it’s doubtful Nestorius taught that. Nor did The Church in the East believe it. The Nestorianism that bears the label “Heresy” is more a thing found in books than in the hearts and minds of the people who made up The Church in the East.
In any case, the once vibrant Church in the East came to a virtual end with the Mongols. It wasn’t till the 16th C that the Faith began a renewed mission to the East, and this time it was by a concerted effort of Europeans. It came because of the expansion of the Portuguese and Spanish empires in the 16th and 17th Cs, then to Dutch, English, French and Danish traders in the 18th and 19th.
Even before the Jesuit order was recognized by Rome, Ignatius Loyola was aware of the need for an able overseer of missions to the East. Though loath to lose his assistant, in 1540 Loyola sent his ablest lieutenant and close friend, Francis Xavier to the Portuguese colony of Goa in India. Xavier remains one of the greatest of all Christian missionaries. He possessed an immensely attractive personality and a Paul-like determination to preach the Gospel where Christ had not been named.
Xavier moved from Goa to the fishermen of the Coromandel coast of India, where he baptized thousands and engaged in discipleship, though by his own admission his command of the language was marginal. He visited Sri Lanka from 1541–45, and Indonesia for 2 years before entering Japan in 1549. He established a Jesuit mission there and had a couple Christian books translated into the language. Exposure to Japan, with its, at that time, deep respect for all things Chinese, convinced him to do whatever it took to enter China. He was poised to do so when he died in 1552.
Allesandro Valignano was born to Italian nobility and obtained a Doctor of Law degree at the University of Padua. But a profound religious experience we’d have to call a dramatic and genuine conversion, hijacked his previous career path and set him on mission. He became a Jesuit in 1566 because they were about the only ones doing missions at the time. He was appointed Visitor to Eastern Missions in 1573 and sailed to Goa from Lisbon in 1574.
After a period of study in Macau, he came to the conclusion the Church was going about the task of spreading the faith to new people all wrong. He was determined to take the Gospel into China, but realized that meant he’d need to learn the language and customs. The Chinese were an ancient and proud race. They weren’t going to be wowed by relatively uneducated and backward Europeans, regardless of how superior they might think they were. Valignano knew learning Chinese would open a door for the Gospel.
He vehemently opposed the conquistador approach to China and Japan both Portugal and Spain used in their conquest of the Philippines. He made 3 trips to Japan from 1578 to 1603. Like Francis Xavier, Valignano was convinced of China’s importance as a mission field but failed to make it there.
That would be left for 2 other Jesuits who carefully followed his missions philosophy – Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci [Richie].
Ricci and Ruggieri entered China in 1583. They and their successors earned the deep respect of the Chinese, not least for their mathematical and astronomical abilities but because of their high regard for Chinese culture.
Ruggieri, a lawyer from Italy, worked with Ricci in Portuguese Macau before moving to the mainland. Together, they produced a Portuguese—Chinese dictionary, and Ruggieri later composed the first Chinese-Catholic catechism. He was proficient enough in the language to compose Chinese poetry.
Ricci, an outstanding intellectual, mastered the Confucian classics and came to believe that the kind of grounding he’d received in the works of Thomas Aquinas and his use of Aristotle was compatible with the moral ideals set out by Confucius. Ricci’s work of 1603, titled The Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, adopted this approach in reaching the Chinese literati, among whom he was deeply admired. Ricci believed participation by Chinese Christians in ancestor rites did not compromise their faith.
And yes: We’d probably disagree with him on that one.
From 1600, Ricci was allowed to live in Beijing. His successors, like Ferdinand Verbiest and Schall von Bell, were also greatly admired by the Chinese and were given official positions by the first Q’ing emperor in the late 17th C. They carried such influence, they were able to secure positions of honor for other missionaries.
It’s a tragedy that after the influence of Valignano’s policy was followed through with such success by Ruggieri, Ricci and their fellow Jesuits, it was eventually overturned in Rome. The so-called Rites Controversy at the opening of the 18th C, hinged on how far the honoring of ancestors was a civil versus a religious act. Rome ruled against Valignano’s position, saying Chinese Christians were engaging in superstitious and unbiblical acts. This led immediately to an alienation of the Jesuits and the loss of all the good-will they’d earned. Christianity became viewed as a religion of foreigners.
The issues raised by the Rites dispute weren’t laid to rest until 1939, when Catholics were finally allowed to take part in ancestral veneration and the rites were accepted as mere civil demonstrations of honor, which had lost any of their earlier pagan associations.
In India, another Jesuit apostle of accommodation, Robert de Nobili immersed himself in the philosophy and culture of Hinduism as a way to first understand, then build a bridge to the people of India to share the Gospel. Like Valignano, the Italian de Nobili was determined to detach himself from European models of Christianity and incarnationally manifest the Gospel in India. He succeeded and was able to see several high-caste Brahmins become Christians. But his methods raised controversy among his superiors and for a time he was forbidden to baptize.
In Vietnam of the 17th C, Jesuit pioneer Alexandre de Rhodes followed the same accomodationist policy and advocated ordaining national clergy to carry on the work of evangelism and church-planting. This was unheard of and got him into trouble with his superiors.
The idea of the religious superiors was “You can lead people to faith all day long. But you can’t make them priests! Priests come from Europe, for goodness sake. Everyone knows that. I mean, just imagine what a nightmare you’re making if you start ordaining Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese as priests. I mean come on! Let’s not get carried away.”
De Rhodes knew it was right to ordain nationals and disregarded the ban placed on him, eventually leading to his expulsion from the Jesuits. Nevertheless, by 1640, there were some 100,000 Vietnamese Christians.
After Francis Xavier left Japan, it enjoyed a period of great progress. Valignano was deeply impressed with the quality of Christianity found there. By 1583 there were 200 churches and 150,000 Christians. In one town south of Kyoto, 8,000 were baptized in 1579.
But there was a sharp change in attitude by Japanese political authorities later in the 16th C due to a fiercely-resurgent nationalism. In 1614, all Jesuits were expelled. Persecution broke out for the 300,000 Japanese Christians in a population of 20 million. Christians were crucified in Nagasaki and there were more mass executions in 1622. The policy was pursued with great savagery between 1627-34 and resulted in many, what came to be known as ‘hidden Christians’, whom 19th C missionaries found retained their knowledge of many of the symbols of the Christian faith, when Japan opened 2 Cs later. Despite the eventual persecution of Christians in Japan in the later 16th and early 17th Cs, Andrew Ross, a Protestant, judged the Jesuit mission in Japan to be the most successful approach to a sophisticated society since the conversion of the Roman Empire.
We’ll continue our look at the Eastward Expansion of Christianity in the 16th and 17th Cs next time as we consider how the Dutch and English began to reach the East.
by Lance Ralston | Aug 30, 2015 | English |
This episode of CS is titled, “And to the South . . . ” — We move aside now from our review of the Reformation in Europe to get caught up with what’s happening in Africa.
In many, maybe most, popular treatments of Church history, the emphasis is on what’s going on in Europe. That’s what most church-based Christian history courses and many western colleges and seminaries focus on. We’ve already devoted several podcasts to the Church in Asia, both the Eastern or Greek Orthodox church, as well as what’s called “THE Church IN the East,” AKA the Syrian, sometimes and the Nestorian Church.
We’ll soon jump the Atlantic to take a look at the Church in the New World. But before we do, we shift our attention south, to Africa.
As we’ve seen, North Africa was one of the formative cradles of Christianity. That’s where Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine, 3 of the great Latin Fathers of the Faith kicked it. The Church at Alexandria was 1 of the 4 main churches in the early centuries. Egypt was highly influential in defining what the Faith looked like throughout much of Christendom because of men like Antony and Pachomius; the “desert fathers.” Their strict asceticism is credited with forming the early picture of what popular, but not necessarily Biblical, holiness looked like and which framed the thinking of Christians for hundreds of years. It led in large part to monasticism.
In this episode, we’ll track the course of Christianity as it made its way across the African continent.
The genesis of Ethiopian Christianity rests in Acts 8 where a deacon in the Jerusalem church named Philip was used by God to lead an Ethiopian eunuch and royal treasurer to Faith in Christ. There’s no record of what impact this man had when he returned home, but the fact he made a special trip to Jerusalem in the 1st C reinforces the idea that there was already a Jewish-influenced community in Ethiopia. Like so many of the Jews scattered around the world, meeting in local synagogues, these were prime candidates for the preaching of the Gospel because Jesus was indeed the Jewish Messiah. The Book of Acts shows us it was among God-fearing Gentiles who attended synagogues that the Gospel found it most receptive audience. So it’s likely when the Ethiopian eunuch returned home, he shared what he’d learned and a church was birthed. But not nurtured by apostolic leadership in Jerusalem, it went into decline. Before doing so, it may have left some seeds behind waiting for a later watering.
The best record we have attaches the planting of the church in Ethiopia to a slave named Frumentius around ad 300. Frumentius was on a trading voyage when he was captured by pirates and sold to the king of Axum. He proved of such service to the king, he was granted his freedom 40 years later. He immediately went to Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, telling him of Ethiopia’s need of missionary activity. Athanasius consecrated Frumentius as bishop of Axum. Thus began a long tradition, in which Ethiopian Orthodoxy looked to Alexandria and later, the Egyptian Coptic church to appoint its leaders. This continued all the up to 1959.
Frumentius’s pioneering work was furthered by what are known as the Nine Saints from Syria who arrived about 150 years after Frumentius. Their work saw Ethiopia become a Christian kingdom. The government remained focused on a Christian monarch in several periods of upheaval thru the centuries, till the reign of Haile Selassie in the 20th C.
There are characteristics of Ethiopian Christianity that deserve notice. It was an extremely Jewish form of Christian tradition and for long periods observed a Saturday-Sabbath rather than Sunday as the day of worship. It shared with the Falasha Jews of Ethiopia a great respect for the history of King Solomon and his visitor, the Queen of Sheba. They bore a tenacious legend that, after their meeting, the Ark of the Covenant was removed from Jerusalem and taken to Ethiopia where it was stored in secret. Various reasons were given for this; most notably that as Solomon began his slide into apostasy, a faithful priest recognized the day would come when foreigners would destroy the temple. To preserve the ark, a duplicate was made, switched out with the real ark, which was then packed off for safe-keeping to Ethiopia. This led to the production of multitudes of miniature ‘arks’, called ‘tabot’, displayed in places of Christian worship. The Ethiopian account of the royal meeting between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is a document called the Kebra Nagast, which dates to the early 6th C. Ethiopian Christians considered themselves Christian–Jews. They retain the practice of circumcision alongside baptism. Monarchs regard their dynasty as from Solomon. One of Haile Selassie’s titles was ‘Lion of Judah’.
Like the Egyptian church it’s derived from, the Ethiopian church has a strong monastic tradition. The Nine Saints founded a number of communities around Axum; places like Dabra Damo, which lasted 1,000 years. Around 1270, the famous monastery Dabra Libanos became a center of renewal. Axum had a large, 5-aisled cathedral destroyed by Muslims in the 16th C. At that point, the whole kingdom would have become permanently Muslim had it not been for Portuguese military assistance in a decisive battle of 1543.
Much credit for the survival of the Ethiopian church goes to their ancient translation of the Bible into Ge’ez [Gee-ehz]; a musical worship tradition practiced by the laity. Over the centuries different Christian groups have rallied to their aid to assist them against oppressors. Despite their appreciation, the Ethiopian church has resisted attempts to align themselves with any outside group. Estimates are that the Ethiopian Orthodox church has about 45 million members today and is the majority religious group. The 12th and 13th C rock-cut churches of the Lalibela region still delight tourists with the uniqueness of their architecture and the improbability of their construction.
The survival of the church in Ethiopia underlines the tragic fate of the Church next door in ancient Nubia, or what today we know as the Sudan. Nubia possessed a flourishing Christian kingdom from the 8th to 12th C. Centered at the capital of Khartoum, Nubian bishops, like their Ethiopian peers, were consecrated by the patriarch of Alexandria. When a Muslim king ascended the throne, it spelled the end of Nubian Christianity. Best evidence suggests the church in Nubia began as a mission sent out by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora in 543. By 580 the entire population were followers of Jesus. But by 1500, the entire region was Muslim and what had been a flourishing church disappeared. In the 1960s, prior to the flooding of northern Sudan for the Aswan dam, excavations revealed the rich remains of Nubian churches.
Remember now back to your world history class in your freshman or sophomore year of High School à What ethnic and national group sailed down the west coast of Africa, looking for a way to get to the rich trading ports of the Indian Ocean?
Right. The Portuguese. Their progress down the west coast of Africa resulted in trading centers at Elmina on the Gold Coast, modern day Ghana, in 1482 and expeditions up the River Zaire in 1483-7. An expedition in 1491 saw a local king named Mbanza Congo, baptized and renamed as Joao I [joe-ow], after the reigning Portuguese king Joao II; Joao is Portuguese for John.
Following King Congo’s conversion, the Christianization of the region continued under his successor, King Mvemba Nzinga, renamed Afonso. He made Christianity the religion of the nobility, taking titles like ‘marquise’ from the Portuguese aristocracy. Afonso’s son, Henrique, was sent to Lisbon for education and was made a bishop in 1521. Unfortunately, he died not long after his return to Africa in 1530.
King Afonso made regular appeals to the Portuguese for assistance in establishing the Christian faith from 1514 onwards. A Portuguese priest of the time left a vivid portrait of Afonso, still regarded in the Congo as the ‘Apostle of the Congo’. He was a skillful preacher who established a tradition of royal preaching. By all reports, this Congolese king was a genuine Billy Graham to his time and people.
Now that’s a very Western-centric way to put it, isn’t it? IT would be just as accurate to say Billy Graham was an American King Afonso, or even better, an American Mvemba Nzinga.
After Afonso’s death in 1543, the story of the Congo is one of missed opportunities. Though he made frequent appeals for missionaries to come and work in Africa, the contest between Spain and Portugal stalled their efforts. Since the Jesuits were international, they arrived in the capital of Sao Salvador and opened a seminary in 1624. A Congolese ambassador visited Pope Paul V in 1608, an event commemorated in a Vatican fresco.
A minor order of the Franciscans called the Capuchins tried to carry on outreach to the Congo, but conditions were brutal and many died. By 1700, Christianity was fading from the region. It wasn’t until Baptist missionaries arrived in the 19th C that things picked up once more.
By the late 18th C, the slave-trade from West Africa to the New World ran into the thousands. After the successful campaign for abolition led by William Wilberforce, with the help of a remarkable African in England, Olaudah Equiano, a British naval squadron patrolled the coast from 1807 searching for slavers. But the Portuguese still exported thousands across the Atlantic to the slave fields of Brazil, as the English had done to the sugar plantations of the West Indies by the notorious ‘middle passage.’
Sierra Leone became a dumping ground for the British Navy’s spoils from captured slavers. The Church Missionary Society, founded in 1799, set to work providing relief and evangelism for ex-slaves. By 1860, 60,000 freed slaves were dropped off at Freetown. But uprooted from their tribal structures and unable to return to their homes, they were gradually settled in what in many cases became model Christian villages.
Among the arrivals in Sierra Leone was a group of 1200 freed American slaves. These had organized themselves into 15 ships at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and arrived singing hymns as they came ashore with their Baptist, Methodist, and other pastors. In time, Methodist life was greatly strengthened by the arrival from England of Thomas Birch Freeman, the son of an African father and English mother. Being of African descent, Freeman was able to survive the West African climate, fatal for European missionaries, and gave long service in West Africa.
Eventually, some of the repatriated Africans of Sierra Leone caught the vision of returning to their tribes with the Gospel. Among them was Samuel Crowther. Crowther had been liberated from a Portuguese slaver in 1821. He was one of the first students at the new missionary college at Fourah Bay. He became a missionary to his branch of the Yoruba tribe in the 1830s, at the same time translating books of the NT. Crowther was part of a growing trend in missions; that of planting indigenous churches that were self-supporting, self-governing ,and self-extending.
Johannes van der Kemp helped found the Netherlands Missionary Society. A retired soldier, he became a doctor before arriving in Cape Town, South Africa in 1799. His arrival among the Boers was like a match lit to a powder-keg. The Boers were Dutch farmers of South Africa who tried to maintain their distance from the British and constant conflict with local tribes.
Van der Kemp was brilliant and upset the conservative-minded Boers with his marriage to a Malagasy slave girl, to say nothing of his virulent opposition to slavery and the oppression of Africans. He immediately went to work bringing the Gospel to South Africans and showed a special care for those displaced by armed conflict.
Arriving in Cape Town from England at this time was Robert Moffatt whose style of mission work was very different from that of the indigenous designs of Crowther and his European friends. Moffat’s philosophy of missions was more old-school. He built a mission compound which sought to preserve a little slice of England inside its fence. Africans were then invited to come TO the missionaries for preaching and teaching of a European-brand of Christianity. He gave 50 years to the mission north of the Orange River.
This was where the famous Scottish missionary David Livingstone spent his first years after arriving in Africa. Livingstone married Moffat’s daughter Mary; and Moffatt guided Livingstone in his early years in the field.
Livingstone became a physician in Glasgow in 1840 and arrived in Cape Town in 1841. His and Mary’s first child died in 1846. They lost another 4 years later. In 1852, Mary took their other children back to Scotland, but this proved a bad move. She moved in with David’s parents. >> In–laws, you know how it goes! Well, things didn’t go well and Mary began tipping the bottle in her loneliness. After Livingstone’s epic journeys of 1853–56 thru the interior of Africa and his triumphant reception back home, they were reunited. Mary accompanied him on his Zambezi expedition of 1858, but died. Livingstone’s eldest son, Robert, also died in 1864 as a soldier in the Union cause of the American Civil War. Though Scottish, Robert Livingstone joined the Union Army to help the cause of abolition; a value he learned from his courageous and monumentally giving father. As you know, David Livingstone was found by the explorer H.M. Stanley in 1871 and died in May 1873. His funeral, paid for by the British government, was held in Westminster Abbey on April 18, 1874, with 2 royal carriages for the family, who included Moffatt, 2 of Livingstone’s sons, and his daughter, to whom he’d been particularly close in his last years.
Livingstone spent his first 11 years at the Moffatt mission-station but felt that style of mission work wasn’t effective. He conceived his plan of exploration, which took him west to the Loanda coast of Angola, then east to the mouth of the Zambezi.
You’ve likely heard the story, true it turns out, that the Africans came to love Livingstone so intensely, because they knew he loved them so much, that when he died, they consented to allow his body to return to his native Scotland, but claimed his heart for Africa.
While there were scattered attempts to take the Gospel into East Africa throughout the centuries, nothing ever really took hold. It wasn’t till Protestant missionaries of the 19th C arrived that a consistent work began. Then the church began to grow in Kenya and Uganda. But Protestants weren’t the only ones bringing the Gospel to East Africa. The Roman Catholic archbishop of Algiers, Charles Lavigerie founded the Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa, known as the White Fathers. A group arrived in Uganda in 1878. This brought a wave of conversions and an outbreak of violence between competing groups of Muslims, Catholics, and Anglicans. Infrequent but brutal atrocities moved the British to send in troops to quell the disturbances and the region became a British protectorate in 1893. The colonial period that followed was a time of mass response to Christianity in the country.
by Lance Ralston | Aug 23, 2015 | English |
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 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.
I need to make comment at this point. This recording is a revision of an original made some years ago. While the content is essentially the same, the original series used a sound bed under the material I decided after a while I didn’t like. There was also a lot of time-sensitive material and news in the original that no longer applied. So I began this revision of the podcast, cutting out all that.
I thought about just cutting this episode altogether but remembered how many listeners said they appreciated the original.
At one point on the CS Facebook page, I posted a question, asking who’d be interested in an episode that was a personal look at CS & the host. There were enough positive replies that made doing it reasonable.
I remember listening to my first podcast years ago now; Mike Duncan’s stellar 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 those 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. I suppose some prefer the personal element of a podcast be left out. But I suspect that’s the exception rather than the rule.
So, this being a 100th episode of CS, I thought we’d do a kind of history of Communio Sanctorum-History of the Christian Church.
As I just said, my introduction to the amazing world of podcasting was listening to The History of Rome by Mike Duncan. I’m a bit of a nut for all things Roman and found his podcast on iTunes without much of a search. I even have a full set of Roman armor in my office. No – I do not dress up and do re-enactments.
When I finished listening to The History of Rome, I wanted more, so I subscribed to Lars Brownworth’s Twelve Byzantine Emperors; another outstanding podcast. Next I decided to find something similar to Duncan’s podcast on Church History. By similar, I mean, short episodes of about 15 to 20 mins in length. That had proven perfect for listening while working out, doing yardwork, going for a run and so on. But my search for something in the Church History genre was unfruitful. What I found were long lectures delivered in college & seminary classrooms. And while the content was, I’m sure, solid, they tended to be rather dry and tedious.
So, drawing inspiration from Duncan, who really did sound like a guy with a computer, a mic, and a love for his subject, I decided to give it a shot and do my own church history podcast. What it meant was that I was going to need to do what Duncan had done, and that was – read a lot and seek to cull the material from trusted sources.
So, I got started and over the next couple years churned out a hundred episodes. It didn’t take long before I realized the early episodes were of poor audio quality. And as the narrative progressed, the timeline got jumbled and confused. That was probably inevitable for a noob like myself since the history of Christianity means following the Faith where ever it went. But I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the number of times the narrative jumped around. So I decided to stop at a hundred episodes and go back to redo the series to that point. As we slowed down a bit, the first version’s about 80 episodes became version 2’s 100. Not including a dozen episodes in the first version on the difference the Christian faith has made in World History & Modern Civilization. Those episodes became the upcoming “The Change” series.
Some subscribers asked how far we’ll go in CS. The plan is to track Church History up to the dawn of the 21st C. Then I’d like to go back and do some far more in-depth studies in certain moments, places, trends, and figures in the History of the Faith. These will be spotlight episodes that will drill down into a lot more depth on key chapters in the story.
Here’s a little about your host for CS.
As of this recording in February of 2021, I’m 65, blissfully married to Lynn for 41 years. We have 3 adult children and 4 grandchildren.
My favorite era of history is the Roman Era, everything from the later Republic through Constantine. I’ve read a few dozen books on the subject and as I said, have a complete set of Roman armor. I once wore it while presenting the story of the resurrection from the perspective of the Centurion assigned the task of guarding Jesus’ tomb.
I love backpacking in the Sierra Nevada mountains of CA, word-working in the garage, vacationing in Maui, working out at the gym, and reading in the backyard under the usually clear Southern CA skies.
I’m lead pastor at Calvary Chapel in Oxnard, CA, a church I founded in 1982 along with David Guzik. Some of you may know David. He’s one of the finest Bible expositors on the planet. His Enduring Word online commentaries are featured in the Blue Letter Bible. Hundreds of thousands of pastors & Bible teachers all over the world refer to David’s commentaries in their sermon and study preparation. Look it up at EnduringWord.com.
David and I co-pastored CC for 6 years, then he and his wife planted a CC church in a nearby community. They then moved to Siegen, German where they lead a Bible college for several years, returned to Santa Barbara to lead the CC there for several years. David now leads the Enduring Word ministry full-time.
Calvary Chapel Oxnard, where I serve as lead pastor, is part of a voluntary association of like-minded churches that began in the late 60’s and the counter-cultural hippie movement in Southern California. Calvary Chapel is technically a non-denominational movement that unites churches around a core set of doctrinal and practical distinctives. If you’re interested, you can find us at calvaryoxnard.org.
Our fellowship has about 1200 adults and a swarm of children. We have 3 Sunday services and a mid-week Bible study. The hallmark of CC is that we teach expositionally through the entire Bible, verse by verse. We’re now on our 5th journey through. The pattern of teaching we follow is that I teach 1 to as many as 5 chs on Wednesday night, then on Sunday, we take a closer look at just a few verses from that same passage in more of a sermon format. We cover 2 OT books, then a NT book, then rotate back to the OT. And go through the entire Bible that way.
For those interested in my education, I have a Masters in Ministry & 1 in Biblical Studies. My education in the realm of church history is, as I’ve shared in previous episodes, not something gleaned from formal education in a classroom. It’s born from a lot of reading and personal study. I’ve loved history since I was in junior high.
The people of CCO know my passion for history because I use it a lot in teaching.
Now for some more technical details that no one but maybe other podcasters, or those considering podcasting will find interesting. I’ll keep this brief so as not to boor the bejeebers out of 99% of you.
I record in my office at church using a Blue Snowball USB microphone. The software is Audacity on a PC running Windows 10.
I write the script, usually a little more than 4 pgs of 12 point Font means about a 15 min episode. Then I record into Audacity, go back and edit out the gaffs, then run a Compressor and Normalize effect. Once that’s done, I slap on the intro & outro. Export it as an MP3, then post it to the site.
Some time back Lem Dees, a subscriber who’d become a friend, told me he does professional voice work and offered to assist any way he could. I asked him to record an intro and outro, which he graciously did. Thanks, Lem!
The sanctorum.us website is hosted at Win at Web where webmaster Dade Ronan does an absolutely stellar job helping with all the tech stuff that I’m clueless about. Thanks, Dade!
If you need a solid WordPress based web-service, check out Win At Web.com
CS is a member of the History Podcasters Network. There are some excellent podcasts on the Network & I encourage anyone who loves history to check it out.
CS is being translated into Spanish by Roberto Aguayo, pastor of CC Merida Centro. Many thanks to Roberto for the excellent job he’s doing.
At its peak, when CS was posting regularly, we had about 45k subscribers. Not shabby for such an amateur effort. That’s dropped way off now since no new content’s been posted for a while.
While CS began as a labor of love and was able to run without a request for support, things changed a while back when I had to move to a paid site. So we started a donation feature. All the content is still free to subscribers, but donations do help defray the cost of the service.
Okay. Back to our regular fare next time.
by Lance Ralston | Aug 16, 2015 | English |
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 and 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 two 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.
Near the mouth of the Rhine River, there was a region known as the Seventeen Provinces, in what today is the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. These territories were part of the holdings of the Hapsburgs. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was born and raised there. So he was well-liked by the people, and under his rule the Seventeen Provinces grew close -er. That is,c loser than they’d been before, but not in fact, close.
Their political unity was fragile since each province had a unique identity, traditions, and ruling nobles. Cultural unity was lacking since the French-speaking south and Dutch-speaking north were at ever at odds. Then there was the problem of ecclesiastical complexity with bishops vying with one another other over who’s domain was the most prestigious.
In 1555, Charles placed the Seventeen Provinces under the rule of his son Philip. He assumed the young man would continue his rule of slow-paced unification. But it was under Philip that what little unity there was cam apart. The low countries honored Charles because of his Flemish roots. Flemish was his mother-tongue. But Philip was raised in Spain. Both his language and outlook were Spanish. In 1556, having received the crown of Spain, he became Philip II, and made it clear his most important possession was the Iberian Peninsula. The Low Countries were put at the service of Spain and her interests. This provoked the resentment of the Seventeen Provinces, who resisted Philip’s efforts to complete their unification, and to treat it as part of the hereditary possessions of the Spanish crown.
Even before the Reformation broke out in the Low Countries, there’d been a strong movement toward reform. This was the birthplace of the Brethren of the Common Life, and of the greatest of humanist reformers, Erasmus of Rotterdam. One of the major themes of the Brethren was the reading of Scripture in the native language of the people. So the Protestant Reformation found fertile ground in the Low Countries.
It wasn’t long before Lutheran preachers entered the area, gaining large numbers of converts. Then the Anabaptists made headway. Last, there was an influx of Calvinist preachers from Geneva, France, and southern Germany. Eventually, these Calvinist preachers were most successful, and Calvinism became the main brand of Protestantism.
That’s not to say the advance of the movement went without opposition. Charles V took strong measures against the spread of Protestantism there. He issued edicts against it, in particular against Anabaptists. The frequency with which these edicts followed one another is proof of their failure to stem the tide of Protestant conversions. Tens of thousands died for their faith. Leaders were burned, their followers beheaded, and many women were buried alive. But, in spite of such punishments, the Reformation continued its advance. Toward the end of Charles’s reign there was growing opposition to his religious policies. But Charles was a popular ruler, and many in Central Europe were convinced Protestants were heretics who deserved their punishment.
Philip, on the other hand, never popular in the Low Countries, prompted even greater ill will through a combination of folly, stubbornness, and hypocrisy. When he returned to Spain and left the Provinces under the regency of his half-sister Margaret of Parma, he sought to strengthen her authority by quartering Spanish troops in the Low Countries. These troops were sustained financially by the locals. Clashes soon developed between the Spanish soldiers and the natives, who chafed under the presence of foreign troops. Since there was no war requiring their presence, the only possible explanation was that Philip doubted their loyalty. And if they were going to be assumed to be disloyal, why not actually BE disloyal?
To this was added the appointment of new bishops given inquisitorial powers. But the locals said, “Wait! What? We’ve heard about the Spanish Inquisition. We do NOT want that here! NO way, NO How! Our King isn’t treating us like citizens; He’s treating us like the worst kind of enemy.”
Philip and his regent Margaret paid no attention to their most loyal subjects. William, Prince of Orange, a close friend of Philip’s father, and the Count of Egmont, who’d given outstanding military service to Charles, were made members of the Council of State. But they were mere figureheads who were never consulted. Philip and Margaret took advice instead from a foreign advisor named Bishop Granvelle, whom the people of the Low Countries blamed for every injustice and humiliation they suffered. After repeated protests, the king recalled Granvelle. But it soon became clear Granvelle had really only carried out Philip’s instructions. Philip was to blame.
The leaders of the Seventeen Provinces sent the Count of Egmont to Spain to carry their grievances to the King. Philip received him with honors and promised change. Egmont returned home, confident things would turn around. But when he opened the letter from the King to be read to the other leaders, it contradicted everything the king had promised. Philip had already sent Regent Margaret the decrees of the Counter Reformation Council of Trent. Protestantism was to be rejected. All who opposed them were to be executed.
These orders caused massive unrest. The magistrates of the Seventeen Provinces had no mind to execute the vast number of their fellow citizens the king decreed should die. In response to Philip’s commands, hundreds of the nobility and joined in a petition to Margaret that such policies not be implemented. Margaret received them, and when she evidenced signs of an agitation so great her attendants feared she might have a seizure, one of her courtiers calmed her by calling the nobles “beggars.”
That label captured the imagination of local patriots. If their oppressors thought them beggars, they’d bear that name proudly. The leather bag of a beggar became the symbol of rebellion. Under it the movement, until then limited to the nobility and merchant class, took root among the entire populace.
Before coming to outright warfare, the movement took on a religious overtone. There were frequent outdoor meetings in which Protestantism and opposition to the authorities were preached under the protection of armed Beggars. In fear of greater disturbances if they didn’t allow them, Regent Margaret’s troops allowed these meetings. Then roving bands of iconoclasts invaded churches, overturned altars, and destroyed images and symbols of the Roman Church.
Finally, the magistrates appealed to William of Orange. Thanks to his pleas, and those of his supporters, the violence dimmed, and the iconoclasts ceased their attacks. The Inquisition was suspended and a limited freedom of worship was permitted.
But Philip was not the kind of ruler to be swayed by his subjects’ opposition. He loudly declared he had no desire to be a “lord of heretics.” Appealing to the old principle that there was no need to keep faith with the unfaithful he set about to re-assert control of those troublesome low countries. While promising to abide by the agreements reached in the Provinces and pardon the rebels, he raised an army with which to force his will on the Low Countries. William of Orange, aware of the king’s duplicity, advised his friends to join in armed resistance. They foolishly put their trust in the king’s promises while William followed his own advice and withdrew to Germany.
The storm arrived quickly. Early in 1567, the duke of Alba invaded the low countries with an army of Spanish and Italian troops. The king gave him powers similar to Regent Margaret who became a figurehead. Alba was the true ruler. His mission was to obliterate all rebellion and heresy.
Protestants were condemned for their heresy, and Catholics for not having been sufficiently firm in resisting heresy. Even to express doubt as to Alba’s authority was high treason. The same charge was brought against any who opposed the reorganization of the church, or declared the provinces had rights and privileges the king couldn’t overturn. So numerous were those put to death under these ordinances chroniclers of the time speak of the stench in the air, and of hundreds of bodies hanging from trees along the roads. The counts of Egmont and Horn were arrested and brought to trial. Since William of Orange was not available, Alba captured his 15-year-old son and sent him to Spain. William responded by investing all his financial resources in raising an army, mostly German, with which he invaded the Low Countries. But Alba defeated him repeatedly and, in retaliation, ordered the execution of Egmont and Horn.
Alba was in full command of the situation when the rebels received support from an unexpected quarter. Orange granted licenses to privateers, in the hope they’d harass Alba’s communication and supply lines back to Spain. These pirate Beggars of the Sea achieved a measure of organization Philip’s naval forces couldn’t contain. Queen Elizabeth of England gave them support by allowing them to sell their booty in English ports. In a brilliant maneuver, the Sea-Beggars captured the city of Brill and, after that, their ongoing success made them a legend that inspired the patriots who resisted on land. Several cities declared themselves in favor of William of Orange, who once again invaded the provinces, this time with French support. But the French also were dealing in treachery, and William was approaching Brussels when he learned of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. That put an end to collaboration between Protestants and the French crown. Lacking funds and military support, William was forced to disband his mercenary troops.
Alba’s vengeance was terrible. His armies took city after city, and repeatedly broke the terms of surrender. Prisoners were killed for no other reason than revenge, and several cities that had resisted were put to the torch. Women, children, and the elderly were indiscriminately killed along with the rebels. Soon every rebel stronghold was in Alba’s hands.
It was only on the sea that the rebels remained strong. The Sea Beggars continually defeated the Spanish, at one point capturing their admiral. This made it difficult for Alba to receive supplies and funds. The Spanish troops began showing signs of mutiny. Tired of the long struggle, and bitter because Spain didn’t send the resources he required, Alba asked to be appointed elsewhere.
The new Spanish general, Luis de Zúñiga y Requesens, had the wisdom to exploit the religious differences among the rebels. He sought a separate peace with the Catholics of the southern provinces, driving a wedge between them and the Protestants, who were more numerous in the north. Up to that point, the religious question was just a minor one among many in what was really a national rebellion against foreign rule. William of Orange, the leader of the uprising, was a liberal Catholic until his exile in Germany. Then in 1573 he declared himself a Calvinist. But Requesens’s policies underscored the religious element of the struggle, neutralizing the Catholic provinces of the south.
The Protestant cause was desperate as its armies were repeatedly defeated. Its only hope was the Beggars of the Sea. The main crisis came at the Siege of Leiden. The important trade center declared itself for Protestantism. The Spanish surrounded it. An army sent by William of Orange to break the siege was defeated, and 2 of William’s brothers were killed. All was lost when William, whose enemies called him William the Sly, suggested that the dikes be opened, flooding the land around Leiden. This meant the destruction of many years of hard work, and the loss of a great deal of farmable land. But the citizens agreed. In spite of a shortage of food, the besieged continued their resistance during the four months it took the sea to reach Leiden. Riding in on the flood, the Sea Beggars also arrived, shouting they’d rather be Turkish than Popish. Lacking naval support, the Spanish were forced to abandon the siege.
At that moment, Requesens died. His troops, having neither leader nor pay, mutinied, and set about sacking the cities of the Catholic south, which were easier prey than those of the Protestant north. This served to reunite the inhabitants of the Seventeen Provinces, who, in 1576, agreed to the Pacification of Ghent. This alliance among the provinces made it clear what was at stake was national freedom, not religious differences. The agreement was hailed by William of Orange, who’d repeatedly argued religious dogmatism and sectarian intolerance were an obstacle to the unity and freedom of the low countries.
The next governor was Don Juan de Austria, an illegitimate son of Charles V, so half-brother of Philip II. Although he was one of the most admired military heroes in Christendom for his defeat of the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto, he was not allowed to enter Brussels until he’d agreed to the stipulations of the Pacification of Ghent. But Philip II would not give up the struggle. A new army was sent into the region, and once again the southern provinces abandoned the struggle. Then the northern provinces, against the advice of William of Orange, formed a separate league for the defense of their faith and freedom.
The struggle dragged on for years. Though they were firmly in control of the south, the Spanish could not conquer the north. In 1580, Philip Il issued a proclamation promising a reward of 25,000 crowns and a title of nobility to anyone who would kill William the Sly. William and his supporters responded with a formal declaration of independence. Three years later, after several unsuccessful attempts, an assassin on a quest for the reward was able to kill William. And once again, Philip proved untrue to his promise, at first refusing to pay the reward, then paying only a portion of it.
Philip hoped William’s death would put an end to the rebellion. But William’s nineteen year old son Maurice, proved to be a better general than his father, and led his troops in several victorious campaigns.
In 1607, almost a decade after the death of Philip II, Spain decided her losses in the struggle weren’t worth the effort and cost of continuing the war, and a truce was signed. By then, the majority of the people in the northern provinces were Calvinist, and many in the north equated their faith with their nationalist loyalty, while the southern provinces remained Catholic. Eventually, religious, economic, and cultural differences led to the formation of three countries; the Netherlands, which were Protestant, and Belgium and Luxembourg, both Catholic.
