The Book's Purpose

• Show the history of the Church as a story
• Present a broad-spectrum Church history
• Trace common links throughout all branches of the Church
• Illustrate the changing role of the Holy Spirit throughout Church history
• Assure readers that the Holy Spirit is still active in His Church today

The Book's Message

Rather than seeing the Holy Spirit in only part of the Church (and portraying that segment as the one “true” Church), Williams presents the development of all segments of Christendom as human history that has been energized by the Holy Spirit. There are no untarnished heroes and few unmitigated villains. Instead, in every era, the Church has been led~and continues to be led~by sinners, and the Holy Spirit is superintending the whole project to His ultimate glory. Since Charles Williams is best known as a novelist and poet, it is no surprise that his presentation of the history of the Church is a vivid story of complicated plot.

Definition of Christendom

Christendom~the Church~began at a specific point in time and space. Jesus of Nazareth, a wandering Jewish teacher, gathered a group of disciples around Him. During His life, the Roman authorities largely ignored Him. They considered His little band to be merely another Jewish sect. The Jewish authorities, however, saw Him as a threat to their well-established system.

When Jesus died, rose again, and ascended, His followers waited in Jerusalem for fulfillment of His promises. He revealed Himself to His disciples with a rushing wind and fire. Immediately after this event, the Holy Spirit spread the news to Jews from all the nations of the Roman Empire.

It was up to the apostles to continue the work which the Spirit had begun. All they had were the facts of what had happened. They were changed, and in the years that followed Pentecost they developed and propagated their message. Their ministry was accompanied by dramatic acts of the Spirit. The apostles also needed to decide key doctrinal issues, such as the status of the Jewish law. Though Jesus’ first disciples had been Jews, it was decided early that something key had changed. Grace was to be experienced by Jew and Gentile alike, and Gentiles did not need to first become Jews before becoming Christians.

The conversion of Saul, an intense Judaizer, gave the Church its first theologian, Paul. He wrote letters, and these letters were circulated among the churches. He helped the fledgling Church decide issues such as the relationship of faith and works, grace and morality, marriage and singleness, Jews and Gentiles, worship, and the future reign of Christ. He expressed the state of the Christian as co-inherence: Christ in us and we in Him.

The apostle John used this concept of co-inherence in his description of Jesus as God and man. God became man, inhabiting human flesh. His death redeemed not only the soul but the body also. The concept of coinherence was to persist as a key viewpoint throughout the history of the Church. Toward the end of first century, time became a great problem. Where was the promised second coming of Jesus? Where was the fulfillment of the kingdom promise? When it became clear that His arrival was not imminent, how was the Church to function? This problem was aggravated by the persecution meted out by Nero and other emperors. The Christians were not content to live peaceably among the many Roman gods, nor were they willing to be identified as simply another Jewish sect. Their brash monotheism was a direct affront to the emperor. The believers scattered.

As they established congregations throughout the world, they began to face internal conflicts. Some congregations began to embrace a kind of dualism known as Gnosticism. This belief system denied the co-inherence that was so central to the Christian faith. The leaders of the Church corresponded with one another on this and other issues. Within a century after Pentecost, this body of writings had succeeded in establishing a wide consensus on what constituted orthodoxy. The canon of Scripture was solidified~not by decree, but by common consent and practice.

The Reconciliation with Time

By the middle of the second century, “a kind of reconciliation between the Church and the ordinary process of things” was developing. “She suffered, she manipulated, she hierarchized, she intellectualized. All this she had done already, but now she entered upon it as a steady mode of behaviour.”

Under intense Roman persecution, leaders such as Polycarp, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus were executed. Many Christians were imprisoned and killed. In this time, supernatural events disappeared.

The Montanist movement attempted to reverse the trend by moral rigor and the practice of spiritual offices such as prophet. The leaders of the Church Universal put down the Montanist movement as heresy.

Tertullian argued that philosophy was of no use to Christianity because worldly wisdom leads to heresy. Clement and other Alexandrian Fathers disagreed. Instead they saw that philosophy could be conducive to piety and could be used to fight heresy and apostasy. Clement’s work was continued and further developed by Origen, one of the most influential of the Church Fathers.

Ignatius of Antioch said, “My Eros is crucified.” By this he meant not only his own physical passions but also the death of Christ.

This concept further reinforced the importance of co-inherence to the Christian faith.

This era ended with the ascension of Constantine to the imperial throne. He determined to unify Christendom as he unified the empire, and he called the first general council at Nicea. Williams sums up this period as follows: “The nature of the Church had not changed, and only fools suppose that it had. It remained reconciliation and sin redeemed; ‘my Eros is crucified’; ‘Another is in me.’ It was declared now by all the magnificence of this world, by the all-but-idol of the episcopate. It had become a Creed, and it remained a Gospel.”

The Compensations of Success

of Success In the fourth century, the Church faced the disadvantages of success: “Christendom had been expanding within the Empire, and the acceleration had already become greater than the morality of Christendom could quite control.” One of its major challenges was the Arian controversy.

Arius, the deacon of Alexandria, raised issues relating to the nature of Christ. In what sense is Jesus God? Was He co-eternal and co-equal with the Father? Arius summarized his view with this formulation: “There was when He was not.” The Synod of Alexandria excommunicated Arius, but the bishop of Nicomedia welcomed him. The archdeacon of Alexandria, who was named Athanasius, wrote vigorously against Arius.

Constantine became involved. When it became obvious that the controversy would not go away, he summoned the council of Nicea. Arius was denounced.

The desert ascetic movement began to take roots during this era, beginning a long trend of associating self-denial with holiness. A new Gnostic movement also began to develop in the form of Manicheanism. The Gnostic notion that matter is evil, or that the Fall had affected the body more than the soul, added support to the ascetic movement. In reply, the official Church position was that bodily pleasures were to be seen as gifts of God. These two approaches came to be called the Way of Negation and the Way of Affirmation, respectively, and they would continue to co-exist through the history of the Church.

Another Christian giant emerged during this era: Augustine. Augustine built on the theological foundation of Nicea, breaking new ground in the doctrines of grace and original sin. His controversies with Pelagius solidified Augustine’s thinking, and Augustine’s writings became the foundation of the Church’s teaching on this subject. Centuries later, Augustine’s writings on election and predestination would have a great impact on John Calvin.

The War of the Frontiers

the Frontiers After the fall of Rome, the seat of the empire moved to Constantinople. However, the bishop of Rome continued to exert an inordinate amount of influence. Churches in the western empire looked to Rome as its final authority, and Rome spoke for much of Christendom.

Jerome’s Vulgate translation of the Scriptures, along with the number of official Church documents emanating from Rome, soon established Latin as the official ecclesiastical language of the western empire. The churches in the east, however, tended to see Greek as the official language.

As the influence of the Church grew, the priesthood began to be seen as a desirable career for young men of promise. Prominent laymen were pressured into becoming priests and bishops, and the Church became a vast organized institution. As new people groups entered the former Roman Empire, the Church organized its evangelization and conversion, often in large groups. Many were converted through military action.

Three books survive this era, and they represent major trends of that age: Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius, the poems of Beowulf, and the Dream of the Rood. They spread Christianity’s influence throughout society.

The Irish missionaries also made their mark on the world. Following the Order established by Basil the Great, Irish monks spread across Europe. Others, following the Rule of Benedict, founded monasteries that kept alive the scholarly endeavors of the Church and promulgated the practice of Christian piety.

During this era, the followers of Mohammed began sweeping across the Middle East, conquering the former Persian Empire and spreading across northern Africa. The Mohammedans conquered Spain and came close to occupying southern Gaul. One of the effects of the conflict with Islam was the iconoclast controversy in the Western Church. The Eastern Church still held to its icons, and the resulting disagreements can be seen as one of the seeds of the later Great Schism.

In the western empire, Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. This began a long period of linkage between imperial and ecclesiastical power as the papacy in Rome took upon itself the right to elevate and depose kings. The filioque creedal controversy (whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father or from both the Father and the Son) exacerbated the tensions between Rome and Byzantium. This era ends with a tug-of-war between ecclesiastical authorities in the east and west.

The Imposition of Belief

As the wars of the frontiers settled down, a period of relative peace and stability ensued. Universities were formed. People engaged in trade with other towns and countries. Literature and the other arts were developed. The Church became more organized and more devoted to the spread of Christendom. The powers of the clergy grew and exerted a greater influence upon the populace.

Church leaders increased their emphasis on the need for orthodoxy. The devil became a more prominent subject of theology, and heresy was seen as his tool to destroy the faithful. The Inquisitorial Service was formed. “The Church committed herself, on the highest possible principles, to a breach of the highest possible principles.”

Torture was permitted, and even encouraged, in the service of doctrinal purity. Why did the Church not see this internal contradiction? “Deep, deeper than we believe, lie the roots of sin; it is in the good that they exist; it is in the good that they thrive and send up sap and produce the black fruit of hell.”

While the Inquisition was gathering strength, another movement began: scholasticism. William of Champeaux, Abelard, Anselm, Bernard, Aquinas, and many others debated, lectured, and wrote scholarly works in Paris and other cultural centers.

Some Church leaders began to write and speculate on the nature of the Presence in the sacrament of the eucharist. Popes declared that the bread and wine were the literal body and blood of the Lord, and these formulations were added to creedal documents. Juliana, a Belgian nun, in response to a vision of the Body of Christ, persuaded the Church to institute a new feast: the feast of Corpus Christi.

Two new Orders were established: the Dominicans (the Preaching Friars), and the Franciscans (the Friars Minor). The writings of Aristotle made their way to Europe, and they were studied and popularized by Thomas Aquinas and others. Duns Scotus, more influenced by Plato than by Aristotle, promulgated an opposing view. The Dominicans tended to favor Aquinas; the Franciscans, Scotus.

Canon law delineated the different powers of sacred and secular rulers. The crusades showed a misguided fervor that, especially in the case of the Children’s Crusade, ended in tragedy. Works of literature and poetry, including the Arthurian legends, flourished.

Consummation and Schism

At the end of the Middle Ages, two literary events captured the spirit of the age. The first is the Cloud of Unknowing; the second is the works of Dante. The themes of love and devotion were explored as they applied to relationships~both those between human beings and between human beings and God.

Dante, in extolling the virtues of human love and in associating human love with divine love, represents the Way of Affirmation. The author of the Cloud of Unknowing, in repudiating anything associated with this world, represents the Way of Negation. Christian expression during this era demonstrates the tension between these two positions.

Two other events caused a massive upheaval. The first was the Black Death. Whole cities were left desolate, and vast numbers of people died. Social institutions dissolved as their populations were decimated.

The other event was the Great Schism. For a number of years, there were two popes in the west: one in Avignon (under the protection of the French kings) and the other in Rome. Kings and ecclesiastical authorities declared their allegiance to one or the other, and military conflicts ensued. Many suggestions for reconciliation and union were made, but none seemed to be workable (or at least were not agreeable to one or other of the parties). In England, John Wycliffe went so far as to say that the Italian pope was “a member of Lucifer.”

The Renewal of Contrition

of Contrition With the failure of organized efforts at reconciliation, the baton seemed to pass to the laity. The leaders of the Renaissance tended to be scholars and artists: Erasmus, Leonardo, Machiavelli. The focus was on Man, even in the Church.

During this time, a thirteenth-century doctrine called the Treasury of Merits was revived. Under papal authority, the Church declared that actions performed in this world had effects in the next. The practice of indulgences was formally established. Popes and archbishops became master fund-raisers.

A young monk named Martin Luther experienced a dramatic conversion upon reading Paul’s epistle to the Romans. He began to write to other monks about his concerns. When he directly challenged, on scriptural grounds, the practices of a local seller of indulgences, a fire was ignited that would consume much of Europe.

In 1534, Luther was translating the Bible into German (while in exile after the Diet of Worms), and a Spaniard named Ignatius Loyola entered the priesthood. In the same year, a young Frenchman named John Calvin wrote a small book that was to become the first draft of the Institutes of the Christian Religion. These three men began theological movements that swept throughout Christendom.

The Quality of Disbelief

of Disbelief The era that came to be known as the Enlightenment began with the life and writings of St. John of the Cross. His description of the dark night of the soul as a means of acquiring spiritual insight added a new dimension to the practices of the ancient ascetics.

Meanwhile various religious wars were begun with the goal of producing nations that were militarily and theologically united, whether Catholic or Protestant. Henry VIII of England triggered a split with Rome over his marriages. In the following years, England became Catholic and Protestant in turn, depending on its rulers.

As an effect of all these religious wars, “something general and very deep in man awoke to revolt ... It was a quality of spirit, not clarity (though it may involve clarity). It is a rare thing, and it may be called the quality of disbelief ... It is a qualitative mode of belief rather than a quantitative denial of dogma.” It was a method for distinguishing between what one knows and what one believes.

Perhaps the premier example of this quality of disbelief was Montaigne. He was an orthodox believer and a man of letters. The following quotation summarizes his approach to knowledge and belief: “We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.”

Other thinkers, such as George Herbert, George Fox, and William Law, dealt with the Deist movement. Pascal urged believers to return to the truths of the faith. Voltaire railed against the abuses of the Church.

The Return of the Manhood

Manhood While the eighteenth century was reeling from political revolutions and intellectual controversies, there was an undercurrent of the Spirit’s work. Two men illustrate this spiritual movement: Alphonsus Ligouri in Italy and John Wesley in England. Both men were heard gladly by the common believers.

Ligouri had a great influence on the papacy of that era. He was influential in the promulgation of the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and of Infallibility. He helped establish devotion to the Heart of Jesus and the Heart of Mary. He influenced the spread of personal devotion throughout the Catholic Church.

Wesley stirred the Protestant believers to personal devotion as well. The movement he triggered had a broad influence not only in England but throughout the world. Missionaries carried the faith to wherever the British traders and merchants traveled.

Catholic missionaries also made their mark. Francis Xavier preached in Japan, and others carried the faith to the New World.

In England, John Newton influenced William Wilberforce, who became instrumental in enacting laws banning the slave trade. Meanwhile, in France, a political revolution erupted. Kierkegaard called the Church from a stagnant dogmatism to a passionate authenticity.

The nineteenth century presented the Church with major challenges from the scholarly community. Lecky and Huxley explained away the miraculous. Meanwhile, William Booth founded the Salvation Army, putting Christianity in shoe leather. The Plymouth Brethren began.

Christianity was socially prominent. Social movements identified Christianity with oppression by the wealthy, and political revolutions were often anti-religious. This sentiment was expressed in Das Kapital. The government of revolutionary Russia confiscated church property and disenfranchised the clergy. The position of the Russian church was ambiguous at best.