by Gavin White (London: SCM Press), 1990.

I bought this little (120 pp.) book when in London on a preaching/ seminar-trip. If you  thought church history was boring, this will cure you. It’s a popular  history of the church/es in the West and the USSR in the last couple of  hundred years. Its style is racy and humorous (a tongue-in-cheek send-up of  religious functionaries who took themselves too seriously, reminiscent of  1066 and All That). Essentially, White (lecturer in the Dept of Church  History, University of Glasgow) offers lots of things you always thought  you never wanted to know about the history of various Christian  denominations…

Some notes I jotted for edification – and a chuckle:  

* In the eighteenth century the Deists reduced religion to morality and God  to a building society… but David Livingstone lectured Africans ‘on the  works of God in creation and providence’, beginning with ‘the goodness of  God in giving iron ore’, which those people extracted and used.

* The Evangelicals came to the fore at the end of the 18th century, and a key  word for them was ‘surprise’. They believed in surprises (everyone else  believed in a set pattern of causes and effects). One of them, William  Wilberforce, was on the board of about forty companies. Another – Hannah  More – wrote a tract about a shepherd’s contentment while living in  poverty: two million copies were distributed in a single year when England  had but nine million people…

* The eighteenth century believed in a God who  did everything at the creation, the Evangelicals in a God who did  everything on the cross…

* There was political pressure to reform the  Church of England and sweep away all that was not useful, which meant most  of it.

* John Henry Newman, a delicate soul, was of extreme evangelical  background, but had little sense of the Church of England, and when he  turned from that body he might equally well have become Roman Catholic, as  he did, or Plymouth Brethren, as his brother did. Newman was the principle  writer of the Tracts from which the Tractarians got their name, though  Isaac Williams and Robert Wilberforce actually produced the most thoughtful  ones. (Newman was certainly sensitive, but if his early days as a Roman  Catholic were unhappy, they were probably no more unhappy than his days as  an Anglican. The truth of the matter was that nobody knew what to do with  him).

* There were 54,000 English Roman Catholics in 1780, but by 1840 there were  450,000, which was 2.8% of the population; and by that date there were  420,000 Irish-born in England, of whom the vast majority were Catholic.

* Methodists, says Eli Halevy, the distinguished French historian, gave  English workers and peasants an ideology which led them to work and not  agitate, thus preventing an English Revolution like the French one.  (Dissenters could join the Church of England by using Methodism as a  transit lounge). In due course Methodists were blamed for having condemned  millions to factory slavery. John Wesley was a ferocious opponent of  Calvinism, though it is not considered polite to mention this today. A  later Methodist, Jabez Bunting, a mysterious man who was a gifted  administrator, made Methodists honorary members of the establishment.

* Weber’s thesis (Protestants create wealth better than Catholics or others  do) is on shaky ground these days. The earliest states to engage in  industrial development were not so much united in religious outlook as  united in having coal, iron and waterpower. But Weber was right when he  affirmed that beliefs influence behaviour.

* Up in Scotland J.McLeod Campbell and a number of other ministers were  removed from their churches for teaching that salvation was offered for  all.

* A famous Evangelical was Thomas Chalmers, minister of Kilmany in Fife,  lecturer in chemistry and writer on political economy and astronomy and  just about everything else. He became a professor in St. Andrews of moral  philosophy which he also happened to know, and later at Edinburgh, of  divinity. He also invented a new way of washing his hands but, alas, that  perished with him…

* United Presbyterians were embarrassed by having to try  ministers for rejecting election as set forth in the Westminster Confession  when nobody actually believed it any more, and in 1879 they called it  ‘necessarily imperfect’…

* The Irish have always been law-abiding; their problem has been deciding  with which law they should abide. In the end all Irish have more in common  with one another than with anyone else. The Irish think more. They may not  think better, but they think more. If in modern Scottish history the  Evangelicals were being driven out of the church, in Ireland the  Evangelicals were able to drive the others out.

* America has produced only one original theologian, Jonathan Edwards…

* In  1893 the Canadian Anglicans took the title ‘archbishop’ and notified the  Archbishop of Canterbury on what he described as a half-sheet of foreign  notepaper. It took him two years to accept what had been done. But the  Anglican Communion is largely symbolic, and has resisted all attempts to  turn it into something practical…

* Had famine struck a generation earlier  the world might have been filled with Irish sceptics, rather than Irish  Catholic zealots; eg. the attempt to build a new Ireland in the Southern  Hemisphere, with Cardinal Cullen of Dublin putting his nephews and family  friends into Australian bishoprics five at a time. In all denominations the  need for colonial clergy was met by lowering standards. Irish overseas  priests were trained at All Hallows, and these were often the men who would  not have been accepted at Maynooth for work in Ireland itself; their  uncouth manners were to offend even the laity in roughest Australia.  Presbyterians were recruited in Scotland and Ireland, though a few of the  Scots sent to Canada turned out to seek nothing but a free passage, and two  proved to be imposters and not ministers at all. Overseas nations sometimes  excelled the British in some disciplines, but they did not do so in  theology.

* E.R.Norman’s conclusion is that ‘each generation of Christians offers up in  each age what they judge most to convey the presence of Christ. A lot of  what is transient gets caught up in the process…’

* Darwin and Creation. Whether by accident or design, the universe is there.  But whether it is there by accident or design has always mattered. If the  world was made by accident, then it was suggested that God did not care  enough about people to make them, but just took them on when they happened  to appear… The first giraffes stretched their necks to reach the high  branches of trees, and later giraffes were born with pre-stretched necks,  though the process did not seem to work backwards by giraffes in zoos  having baby giraffes with pre-shrunk necks suitable for eating out of  buckets…

* The founding fathers of Fundamentalism published pamphlets  called The Fundamentals early in this century: three of the essays accepted  evolution, though two did not. A constant complaint against teaching  evolution in the schools has been that it is not proven fact, but only a  theory. But if it was normal to think of science as fact in the past, it is  not so now. Since Max Planck and Einstein there has been a new approach to  physics, which has treated the theories as useful guides to reality, rather  than actual laws. Furthermore, Max Born has argued for the instability of  matter, saying that ‘stability and life are incompatible.’

* Missionaries went to Africa and Asia with cultural baggage; nobody goes  anywhere without cultural baggage, and Christianity can no more live  without a culture than bacteria in a laboratory can live without a culture.  Missionaries divided on doctrinal grounds before they were out of sight of  the British coast. In the 1840s it was discovered that most missions were  undertaken by unofficial societies. It was also discovered that Christ’s  promise at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel was made to his disciples  collectively, and not to a missionary sub-committee. David Livingstone was  not a typical missionary. He believed that God showed his benevolence in  long rivers which allowed trade and civilization, and he found it hard to  believe in the existence of waterfalls which denied the benevolence of God,  so he imagined rivers to be longer than they really were…

* In one  generation the numbers of African Christians have grown from twenty-five to  a hundred million, which is perhaps the most significant fact in all modern  church history. In other places the Christian presence was established in a  specific decade, after which the shutters came down and future growth  proved impossible. And in some countries many years of missionary work had  no effect at all.

* The spread of Pentecostalism has been erratic. Nobody knows why it has been  successful in South Africa but scarcely elsewhere in Africa. Nobody knows  why it flourishes in parts of Latin America, but not in most of Asia. The  gift of tongues is not given to every Pentecostalist, and the desperate  attempts to keep it alive suggest that it may be declining. It is something  which most world religions seem to produce for periods in their history.  Does the emphasis of the charismatics on their own happiness justify  accusations of self- indulgence? The classic Pentecostalists, after  three-quarters of a century have done virtually nothing in works of  mercy…

* It would be wrong to think that the [communist] Soviet leadership saw  themselves as engaged in a battle with Christianity. Christians tend to  think that only Christians suffered, and Jews tend to think that only Jews  suffered, and so on. But everybody suffered. Christians, Jews, Muslims,  peasants, workers, geneticists, economists, until eventually Stalin devoted  himself to killing off the old Bolsheviks. Before 1959 there were about  twenty thousand churches open in the Soviet Union, with about thirty  million regular worshippers: mostly the uneducated masses and the  intellectuals, but not those in between, which is utterly contrary to the  experience of the churches in the West. Skilled workers and clerks and  managers, who are the backbone of church life in Britain or America tend to  be moved to activism rather than   ontemplation, and find the Orthodox  liturgy boring and meaningless. They are more likely to feel at home with  the Baptists, if they are attracted to religion at all.

* Is persecution good for the church? Does it lead to growth? Does the blood  of the martyrs become the seed of the church? The answer to this question  must be a resounding no. Mild and temporary persecution may lead to a  feeling of community amongst Christians, but real persecution, in any age,  leads to division, denial of Christianity, and mutual suspicion amongst
Christians.

* In 1942 William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, said that the ecumenical  nature of the church was ‘the great new fact of our time’. Divisions in the  church have always existed, and there have always been occasions when it  has been necessary for somebody, somewhere, to leave and set up a rival  body. Yet in time the reasons for the divisions become less pressing, or  are overcome by new developments, and it is possible to put back together  the fragments of an earlier age.

* Rome is conservative and slow, but Roman Catholicism is not: it has a  tendency to go to extremes… It cannot be coincidental that the  infallibility of the Pope and the infallibility of Scripture were defined  at about the same time in quite different places and circumstances. If  Vatican Two at least did some of what it was supposed to do, Vatican One  did not. It was side-tracked on to the subject of infallibility. (The final  vote, on 18 July 1870 occurred in a thunderstorm, which could be argued to  mean divine approval or divine disapproval according to taste). The  infallibility which meant so much to so many was only used once, to declare  the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary to heaven, which was hardly a vital  question. Infallibility may never be used again. Nobody wants infallibility  anymore, with or without The Times at breakfast. Vatican Two produced a  chapter praising the Virgin Mary but adding, ‘no creature could ever be  counted equal with the incarnate Word and Redeemer’. There could only be  one Mediator. This disappointed many devout Catholics, but in the years to  come devotion to Mary became more restrained quite apart from the results  of the Council.

* Churches in this [20th] century have been declining, and they have finally  admitted this even if they have not understood it. Result: a whole string  of campaigns to correct whatever has been going wrong. It has usually been  assumed that what has gone wrong has been inside the church and so it can  be corrected by more faith, more new-fashioned theology, more old-fashioned  theology, more good works, or whatever it is that will make the church  irresistible to modern people. Behind this thinking is the notion that  people outside the church are without free will. They are robots, ready to  march into church when somebody presses the right button at mission  control. And it is only a matter of finding the right button. Henry Scott  Holland put it this way in 1914 when the Bishop of Zanzibar wrote a  pamphlet asking where the church stood. Scott Holland said that it did not  stand at all, but ‘moves and pushes and slides and staggers and falls and  gets up again, and stumbles on and presses forward and falls into the right  position after all.’

That is church history.

Rowland Croucher