Church History — Part 2: When the World Captured the Church (AD 400–1400)

Note: This post is compiled from the second lecture in David Pawson's History of the Church series (Part 2: AD 400–1400), about 69 minutes long. As in Part 1, I do not guess or embellish: every major argument comes straight from Pawson. Wherever I looked something up, checked it against the sources, or corrected a detail, I left it as an amber margin note woven into the text. For this part especially, because the lecture touches the most contested stretches of church history, I also read other historians and preachers, so that you hear more than one voice.

The unhappier story

Part 1 told how the Church captured the world in the first four centuries: it won the physical battle by suffering, the mental battle by confronting heresy, and the spiritual battle by standing firm against other religions.

Pawson says there is one thing he forgot to mention last week, and it matters: the Christians won because they out-lived, they out-thought, and they out-died everyone else. They out-lived, and so won the spiritual battle. They out-thought, and so won the mental battle. They out-died, and so won the physical battle. And therefore they out-survived everything else.

But tonight, he says, the subject is far sadder and far more serious. The subject is: how the world captured the Church over the next thousand years.

There is a medieval painting of the Church as a lifeboat. In a tossing sea, the Christians in the boat reach out to pluck the drowning from the waves. It is a fine picture of the Church: a lifeboat gone out into the world in answer to the cry for help.

But Pawson pauses on one thing:

The lifeboat must be in the sea. But if the sea gets into the lifeboat, then there is real trouble. The church must be in the world if it is going to save souls. But when the world gets into the church, then it is finished and it sinks.

The next thousand years is the story of the sea getting into the boat. Pawson takes it in three chapters: the world began to get in even in the early ages (AD 100–400); then the Dark Ages (AD 400–1000); then the Middle Ages (roughly 1000–1500), which bring us to within a year or two of Martin Luther.

The Lifeboat Picture

The boat must be in the sea, but the sea must not be in the boat

Pawson opens with a medieval painting: the Church as a lifeboat in a tossing sea, reaching out to pluck the drowning from the waves.

"The church must be in the world if it is going to save souls. But when the world gets into the church, then it is finished and it sinks." — David Pawson

A Thousand-Year Timeline

AD 400–1517: from the fall of Rome to Luther

Four currents braid through a thousand years: decline, the rise of papal power, voices of protest, and an age of discovery.

Some dates are simplified for clarity; precise milestones are checked in the amber margin notes throughout the essay.

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How the World Got Into the Church (AD 100–400)

When there were martyrs like that, preachers like that, when the battle was being won, how did the world get in? Pawson names four things that began to water down the apostles' Church.

First, regional bishops. In the New Testament every church had a number of bishops, called elders or bishops or presbyters, all the same office: spiritual leaders. Then came a stage where each church reduced its bishops to one. Then a stage where one bishop ruled many churches. Leadership was concentrated in fewer hands. You cannot find this in the New Testament; it did not happen for the first hundred years; but in the second century there emerged men of considerable power and influence. Not many bishops to one church, but many churches to one bishop.

Second, a magic view of the sacraments. Take baptism. Instead of being an outward sign of the spiritual washing away of sins that comes when a man believes in Jesus, people began to believe that the actual water and the right formula saved a person from sin, whatever their age; and that if you sinned after baptism, you undid it. So people put off baptism until the deathbed: they waited until the doctor said there was no hope, then rushed for the minister. But others worried: what if our baby dies, we would rather have its sins washed away at once. Both views were superstitious. Sadly, infant baptism prevailed. The Lord's Supper too was treated magically: people began to think the bread actually was Christ's flesh and the wine his blood; since real flesh and blood were being offered, it was a sacrifice; and since it was a sacrifice, the one handling it must be a priest.

Third, established religion. When the emperor went to church, you can imagine everyone did. When the state declared Christianity the official religion, everyone climbed on the bandwagon. Going to the established church became fashionable and respectable. Pawson says plainly: an established religion is bound to produce fashionable, respectable Christianity, and he cannot find that in the New Testament.

✍︎Kit's note

Fourth, nominal membership. A writer at the end of the second century observed: around the year 50, to belong to the Church meant a person had received baptism and the Holy Spirit and called Jesus Lord; but by around 180, it meant a person acknowledged the rule of faith (the creed), the New Testament canon, and the authority of the bishops. In other words, people were joining for reasons other than believing in Jesus and receiving his Spirit. It was now an institution.

And whenever the Church went wrong, there were protests. In the first 400 years there were two movements: Montanism and monasticism. Both protested against a Church growing wealthy, worldly, and filled with people who had never even been converted.

Montanism arose in what we now call Turkey, Asia Minor. A man called Montanus saw that in scores of members there was no trace of the Holy Spirit, so he sought the Spirit of God afresh. A revival broke out. The gifts of the Spirit came back into the Church; life, vigour, and reality came back into worship. Pawson says if you want to know who they were most like today, they were Pentecostals. There was a tremendous emphasis on Christ's return, an insistence that no one be a member without a real faith, with holiness and fasting. But the bishops opposed it severely, and you can guess why.

The tragedy is that, as so often, this first Pentecostal movement went wrong. It went wrong because these people would not have teaching. They wanted the heat without the light. Pawson says: light without heat is cold; heat without light is too hot; you must have both. They would not listen to the Scriptures on how to exercise spiritual gifts. And the movement fizzled out in fanaticism. "That is a word every Pentecostal revival needs to know," Pawson says. "We can learn from history."

✍︎Kit's note

The second protest came in a very different way. Some years later certain Christians said: this Church is so worldly, so dead, that the only hope of recovering Christianity is to get out of the Church and out of the world.

The first of them did it alone. They were hermits. It is the strangest tale. Anthony was the first: he decided he would never be a real Christian until he got into the middle of the desert. The trouble was that when he got there, other Christians wanted to join him, and he did not want that; and above all, he found his temptations in a desert cave just as worldly as they had been in the Church. There was an even stranger hermit, Simeon Stylites: he built a pillar some sixty feet high, a yard across at the top, and lived up there for decades. He even stood on one leg for a year, as a protest declaring that Christianity is something hard and tough. And there he was, up the pole, covered in ulcers and worms, in a frightful state.

More successful than the hermits were those who started communities. The man who began this movement was Benedict. On Monte Cassino, halfway between Rome and Naples, he gathered a group of real Christians who saw the Church was too worldly to do anything with, and said: we will come and live together. We will not be wealthy but poor. We will not be lustful but celibate. We will not be rebellious but obedient. They took the threefold vow: poverty, chastity, obedience. And the monastery was run like a Roman soldier's garrison.

✍︎Kit's note

The tragedy is that this protest went wrong just as surely as the other. Christ never meant us to live the Christian life away from everybody else. Later these monks, who began with a good intention, became so wrapped up in their own salvation, so introverted, that they were isolated from the world and the Church. Worse, monasticism produced the idea that there are two kinds of Christians: second-class ones who marry and first-class ones who do not; second-class ones who live in the world and first-class ones who live out of it. But that is not the teaching of Jesus. Our Lord was not a monk. He did not withdraw from society; he lived a pure life in society, and told his disciples to be in the world without being of it.

Both said: the Church is not what Jesus Christ meant it to be. One said we will rediscover it by getting back into the Spirit. The other said we will rediscover it by getting out of the world and out of the Church. Both came to nothing, because they did not return fully to New Testament Christianity.

How the World Got In — AD 100–400

Four cracks and two protests

Even in the age of victory, four things began to water down the apostles' Church. And whenever it went wrong, voices of protest rose up.

Two protests

Both protests were sincere, yet both came to nothing because they did not return fully to New Testament Christianity.

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The Dark Ages: The Fall of Rome (AD 410)

Now the story truly begins. In 410, a catastrophe came. Barbarians from the north pressed down on the city of Rome. The Vandals came (from their name we get the word "vandalism"). The Franks came, the Huns came, the Goths came. These barbarians pressed into Rome and took it. The Rome of that day fell.

✍︎Kit's note

The Romans left Britain that year to defend Rome, but could not save it. And as soon as the Romans withdrew, the Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons charged into Britain and destroyed Christianity in England and south-east Scotland. The Christianity that Roman soldiers had brought here in the first 400 years vanished.

It seemed that when Rome fell, it was the end of everything. Jerome, writing in Jerusalem, said: "the human race is included in the ruins." People thought it was the end of civilization. And it puzzled the Church: Rome had survived for centuries as a pagan empire, yet as a Christian one it collapsed. Many Christians could not understand it.

✍︎Kit's note

But one man thought it through and made an incredible statement. He said: it is the best thing that ever happened. His name was Augustine.

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Augustine: A Restless Heart That Found Its Rest

You can buy his books at the railway bookstall today. And if I tell you some of the things this great man said, you would recognize them. He said: "Our hearts are restless, and they can find no rest until they find their rest in thee." Perhaps the most quoted prayer in history. It was Augustine who prayed: "Give me chastity, but not just yet." And it was Augustine who said: "Love, and do what you like."

He was born in North Africa. When he went as a student to Carthage, he fell in with the wrong crowd. Soon he had a concubine and a son by her, and lived in that illegal relationship for years. His father was pagan, but his mother was a godly woman who prayed for her wayward son with tears every day. Later, because of his brilliant mind, he was invited to be a professor of rhetoric in Milan. There he went to hear the saintly Bishop Ambrose preach. Under that preaching, the young man with the brilliant mind but the profligate life was brought into a deep conviction of sin.

Then one day, sitting in a garden weeping over the mess he had made of his life, he heard a child's voice over the garden wall: "Tolle lege, tolle lege" — "take up and read." He never knew who the child was. But he saw a scroll on the seat beside him, took it up, and read. It was Paul's letter to the Romans. Augustine read it through, and the light dawned. When he walked into the street afterward, the woman he had lived with saw him, and he ran from her. She ran after him crying: "Augustine, it is I, it is I." He answered over his shoulder: "But it is not I, it is not I."

✍︎Kit's note

He wrote the whole story of his conversion in a book called Confessions. Pawson says Augustine has had more influence on church history than any man after the apostle Paul.

When Rome fell, Augustine being in middle age, the whole world seemed to collapse about his ears. He thought it through, then wrote the second great book we remember: City of God. In it he says: it is a good thing this pagan city of Rome has collapsed, because now the city of God can replace it; it is a good thing an earthly empire has ended, because the heavenly empire can now be established. The book brought hope and new life to many, helping them see that a city of God still survived when the city of men had gone.

But that was the trouble. People began to ask: what is this city of God? Visible or invisible? Earthly or heavenly? And at this point Augustine led many into a misunderstanding. The funny thing is that centuries later, in the Reformation, the Protestants said "we follow Augustine," and the Roman Catholics said "we follow Augustine." But the Protestants were following the first book, Confessions; and the Catholics were following the second book, City of God.

For what happened was this: the Church said, if that is so, then the Church is now the new empire.

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The Church Becomes an Empire: The Rise of the Papacy

One of the first results was the rise of the bishop of Rome to the position of an emperor. In those days there was a great debate about the word "pope," which means essentially "father." Although Jesus had said never to call anyone on earth father, for you have one Father in heaven, people began to call the local priest "father." Then they called the regional bishop "father." Then finally the five great patriarchs said: if anyone is to be called father, it ought to be us five. And at last, the bishop of Rome said: the city of Rome is gone, but I am the emperor now; I am the chief bishop, and from now on you call only me pope, you call only me father.

And the papacy, as we know it, came into being. The striking thing is that the pope adopted the very titles and even the robes of the Roman emperor. He took the title Pontifex Maximus, known today as the pontiff — the Roman emperor's title. Augustine was misunderstood, and people thought the Church was the new empire. And an empire must have its emperor, its robes, its ceremonies, its throne. So the Church became an empire, and the pope became a king.

Of course, many Christians would have none of it. The French would not, the Irish would not, the Welsh would not, the Scots would not. Sadly, the English did.

When the Church Became an Empire

The ladder of power and the closing circle

Augustine wrote City of God to console a collapsing world; but people misread it to mean the Church was the new empire — and an empire must have its emperor, its throne, its robes.

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Two Streams of Christianity Meet at Whitby

Ireland, through St. Columba, brought the faith into Iona and Scotland, leading Scotland to Christ. Then Aidan came down to the island of Lindisfarne off Northumberland. Pawson recalls standing on Lindisfarne a few months earlier, by the ruins of Aidan's church, the little island from which he evangelized Northumberland. This non-papal Christianity, Celtic Christianity, came into England from the north through Ireland and Scotland.

But later the pope said: we must get England, we must get those Angles. He made the famous pun: they are not Angles but angels. And he sent a missionary also named Augustine. This Augustine landed on the island of Thanet, then went to Canterbury. Columba on the island of Iona in the north; Augustine on the island of Thanet in the south.

The two streams of Christianity met at Whitby. You can still see the ruins above Whitby harbour where they met. There, papal Christianity met Celtic Christianity, to see which would win. The tragedy is that papal Christianity won. The British Isles came under the papal throne. Scotland even changed its patron saint to St. Andrew. The whole situation was changed.

✍︎Kit's note

Two Streams Meet at Whitby

Which way would Britain go? (Synod of Whitby, 664)

Schematic, not to geographic scale. Whitby took place in 664 (Pawson says "660").

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East and West Divide (1054)

The other great group of Christians who would have none of this were the churches of the eastern Mediterranean: Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt. They said: we are not acknowledging this. That there should be one "papa," one father of the whole Church, is not in Scripture, not in the New Testament. And they began a split, finally completed by the year 1054. That division kept the eastern and western churches apart for a thousand years, and only in recent years have the two begun to talk again.

✍︎Kit's note

And here is one of the most incredible things. Around the year 850, the pope said: I have discovered documents from the first century, proving that Peter appointed the first pope, who appointed the second, and so on down the line. Today even the Roman Church knows those documents were forgeries; they are called the forged decretals. And yet the papacy was built on a forgery. There was another forged document, the Donation of Constantine, claiming that all of Italy belonged to the pope. The pope "discovered" this forgery and said: there, all Italy belongs to me. That is the kind of foundation on which the whole structure was based, and even Rome knows it today.

✍︎Kit's note

The Great Schism, 1054

One Church split in two for nearly a thousand years

The mutual excommunications of 1054 were only lifted together by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in 1965 — close to Pawson's "the last ten years" when he preached in the 1960s.

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Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire (AD 800)

The power kept spreading, until the year 742, when a man was born with a dream: to restore the empire of Rome, put it back on the map, with himself as emperor and the pope beneath him. His name was Charlemagne. A ruthless man who said: we will have a Roman empire again, and its head will not be the pope but an emperor.

Charlemagne twice saved the pope's life: once from the barbarians, once from the crowds in Rome who were angry with him. The pope said: you have saved my life twice, what would you have me do for you? The emperor answered: on Christmas Day, crown me emperor. And in the year 800, on Christmas Day, in the largest church in Rome, at the Christmas morning service, the pope crowned the king of the Franks, Charlemagne, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. A thousand years later, the Holy Roman Empire still existed.

You see, we have come full circle. The empire of Rome collapsed in 410. The Church took over the empire. Then in 800 the emperor came back and took the empire from the Church. The whole thing seemed back to where it started.

Charlemagne did some good things and some bad. Among the good: he forbade the clergy to keep concubines, frequent taverns, and go hunting; he started many schools. Among the bad: he forbade the clergy ever to marry, and it is to Charlemagne that we owe the celibate priesthood. He also coined the word Christendom — the kingdom that would be Christian under the emperor. And the idea of Christendom persists to this day.

✍︎Kit's note

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The Rise of Islam

Because the Church was now wealthy and powerful, it became corrupt. And once again protests came, this time from the east and the north. From the east, the protest came from two things. The first was Islam.

Pawson calls this the greatest judgment ever to fall on the Christian Church. He had lived in Arabia and seen something of this religion. Mohammed was born in 571 in Mecca, the centre of Arab idolatry and superstition. In the middle of Mecca was a great square building draped in black, and inside it a sacred stone, the Kaaba, a meteorite fallen from the sky. Mohammed grew up amid the idolatry and superstition of the Arabs, and he was revolted by it.

Then he turned first to the Jews, then to the Christians, and asked: have you the true religion? The tragedy is that Mohammed never met a converted Christian. The tragedy is that he never saw the real Christianity of the New Testament. All he saw was the vestments of priests, images, and crucifixes. And he said: this is as idolatrous as the Arabs' religion. If only Mohammed had met one true Christian at the end of the sixth century. But he did not.

So he said: right, I will seek a new religion that is pure. He married a wealthy widow, spent years in the desert, and there he said he was spoken to: there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet. He began to preach this, writing down what he heard in his visions in a book, the Quran (Al-Quran). He was persecuted and had to flee to Medina in 622. That is the date from which the Arabs reckon their calendar. He returned to Mecca with an army and imposed the new religion. From then on everyone had to pray toward Mecca, and by a religion of good works — fasting, praying five times a day, keeping Ramadan, making the pilgrimage to Mecca, giving alms — one could get to heaven. And that religion was imposed by force of arms.

Islam swept Christianity out of the Mediterranean. It swept Christianity off the North African coast, where there was no church for centuries. It swept Christianity out of the Holy Land itself, out of Jerusalem, out of the place where Jesus died. It swept up through Spain, up through Asia Minor, into France as far as the gates of Lyon, into Eastern Europe as far as Vienna. It seemed Islam would crush Christianity in a gigantic pincer movement.

✍︎Kit's note

It is the greatest judgment God has ever allowed to come on the Christian Church. And it was deserved. But so far and no further. God was not going to have Christianity wiped out altogether.

He stopped them at Lyon and Vienna, and they withdrew to their present boundaries: the North African coast and up to Turkey.

Map of the Dark Ages

Two tides break over the Christian world (AD 410–732)

Orange arrows: barbarians pour south onto Rome. Green arrows: Islam sweeps the Mediterranean from Arabia, across North Africa and Spain, as far as Tours.

Base map: the Roman Empire (Wikimedia Commons, public domain). Arrows are schematic directions of advance, not exact routes. Vienna marks the later Ottoman limit — Pawson telescopes nearly a thousand years of frontier into one pincer.

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Hidden Witnesses in the Dark

For at that very time, all over Europe there were little groups of Christians meeting around the word of God. They saw that the official church was corrupt, so they simply met in tiny groups, read this book, and said: we will worship God in simplicity. We do not need priests, for we have Jesus our high priest. We do not need a pope, for we have a Father in heaven. We just need the word of God and the Holy Spirit.

We know hardly anything about them, because they were so persecuted that even the records of their history were destroyed. Pawson asks his hearers whether any have ever heard of a group called the Bogomils. They were a group meeting around the word of God, chiefly in Bulgaria and Bosnia; the word "Bogomil," Pawson says, is Bulgarian for "friends of God." There were the Paulicians, who met in Armenia, Thrace, and Asia Minor. There were the Cathars, a name meaning "the pure ones," the same root as the later word "Puritan"; they met in the Balkans and across Europe.

Pawson confesses: in his simplicity he used to think that for a thousand years there was only the Roman church and the eastern churches. That is not true. He was thrilled to discover that all through those centuries there was a continuous train of simple Christians meeting around the word of God in local churches. They paid for it with their lives, but they met, and the flame of faith was kept alight for the generations to come.

✍︎Kit's note

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The Middle Ages: Hildebrand Sets the Pope Above All

Now we come to the final chapter, from the year 1000 to 1500, called the Middle Ages because it lies between the Dark Ages and the Modern Age.

The first man to speak of is Hildebrand. This monk became pope, and he did not like being number two. By now there was a restored Roman Empire with a new emperor, but the pope was number two. Hildebrand decided the pope should be number one, and he achieved it. He did many good things: he cut out the simony in the church, the buying of priesthoods. But he did it because he believed the pope should control everything, including kings.

The clash between Hildebrand and Emperor Henry IV was settled in a most dramatic and terrible way. Henry IV defied Hildebrand, saying: I am number one. Hildebrand answered: you are not. Let the people decide. And the people decided that Hildebrand was. Up in the Alps, the pope met Emperor Henry IV, who came from the north. The pope was in a mountain house, and he kept Emperor Henry IV waiting outside in the snow, barefoot, for three days, before he would speak to him. In this way Hildebrand put the emperor decisively in a secondary place.

From then on, for the next 500 years, the pope was the most influential figure, and the papacy was the power that controlled the Western world. The Church was the empire again. It was this pope who began the symbol of the crossed keys of St. Peter: one key is the authority of sacred power over the Church, the other the authority of secular power over the state. Those crossed keys are Hildebrand's claim: to be top dog, over both the Church and the state.

✍︎Kit's note

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The Crusades: When the Church Took Up the Sword

This put the force of armies at the Church's disposal. And because Hildebrand thought that way, he began to use force to establish the kingdom of Christ. Never was a greater mistake made. The first outcome of the idea that force is valid for the Church to use was eight crusades to the Holy Land.

By now the holy places, Jerusalem and others, were in the hands of the Muslims, the Saracens, the Turks. The pope decided the Church would fight its way in and capture the Holy Land for Christ. The First Crusade was born in 1095. It was Hildebrand's idea, but he died before it could be done. People wore a cross on the shoulder, called a crux, and from that we get the word crusade.

The First Crusade was pulled together by an unkempt, fanatical preacher called Peter the Hermit. He set off with 600,000 men, and only a tenth arrived; most died in the high mountains of Turkey. But they got there, and they took Jerusalem. They pillaged it, raped the women, and established the so-called rule of Christ in Jerusalem by slaughtering all the Saracens of that city. Is that Christian? You say at once: of course not. But bear in mind, they were misled. Thousands thought this was what the Church was meant to be: an earthly empire establishing itself by force.

✍︎Kit's note

Of course there were incentives. People were promised absolution if they went to fight for Christ; promised indulgences, so many years off purgatory; promised their debts cancelled by law; promised pardon for criminals who would leave prison to go and fight. You can imagine the motley crew that resulted. King Philip of France was caught up in it. King Richard the Lionheart of England was caught up in it. Eight times they set off. One was a children's crusade: 2,000 little ones set off across Europe to try to get Palestine back for Jesus. Not one of them arrived. The pope said angels would miraculously provide food; but the food never came and the angels never appeared.

The last one was an utter failure. At the flat-topped mountain of the Horns of Hattin, the last crusader army died of thirst, besieged by the Saracen. And in 1270, Europe breathed a sigh of relief when the pope called the whole thing off.

✍︎Kit's note

It is one of the saddest stories in the history of the Church. It did nothing. Nothing. And indeed it did worse than nothing.

The Eight Crusades

When the Church used the sword instead of love (1095–1291)

Hildebrand believed force could establish the kingdom of Christ. "Never was a greater mistake made," says Pawson.

By 1270 the pope called it off. "It did nothing. Nothing. And indeed it did worse than nothing." — David Pawson

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The Inquisition, Two or Three Popes, and the Corruption

From using force outside the Church, the pope now decided to use force inside the Church, opening another dreadful chapter called the Inquisition. Pawson says he dare not describe the things done in the name of Christ. The bishops refused to run this machine of cruelty, malice, and suspicion; but the Dominicans took it up. And for many years, countless people lived in fear of their lives through that dreadful thing.

All the way through, what was wrong was this: the Church thought of itself as an earthly empire allowed to use force to establish the cause of Christ. We now know this is not the way. The Church must use no force but love, and must never force anyone, except through love and through preaching the gospel, to accept Christ.

And this kind of corruption soon turns in on itself. Power tends to corrupt, said Lord Acton, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. Soon there were two popes fighting for the throne, then three. There was a pope at Avignon, a pope at Rome. Who was pope now? They managed to pull the papacy back together, but then the corruption spread further down: the monasteries became corrupt and too wealthy, the bishops too powerful, the parishes corrupt.

✍︎Kit's note

And the practices of ordinary Christian religion became corrupt. There were prayers to Mary, though we were never told to pray to Mary; she is a human being like the rest of us. There were prayers for the dead, prayers to the saints. There was the doctrine that caused the greatest fear: purgatory, how many years of suffering after you die. There was the doctrine of the mass as a sacrifice. There was confession to a priest. There were indulgences, so that for a sum of money you could buy so many years off purgatory. There were pilgrimages. There was the worship of relics. There were images in worship. Not a scrap of this is in the New Testament.

The Medieval Accretions

"Not a scrap of this is in the New Testament"

One practice at a time, added across the centuries. The right column gives the (approximate) date each became official or was formally defined.

Dates are approximate: many began as customs and were only later defined at councils (e.g. Lateran IV 1215, Florence 1439). This is Pawson's Protestant reading of them; see the "other voices" box for Catholic & Orthodox perspectives.

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The Basic Fault: The Church Thought She Was Christ

So what was the basic fault behind all this? If you forget most of what I have said tonight, this is important. I will tell you what was wrong in one sentence:

The Church had begun to think she was Christ. And she still does.

Pawson recounts asking a leading priest: is this still true? He answered: yes, and it will not change. Pawson said: my one problem is that I do not believe the Church is Christ, and I do not believe she is prophet, priest, and king. I believe Jesus is. The Church is not our prophet, or our priest, or our king. And the priest answered frankly: we will not discuss that, because it will never change.

That is the basic fault. If I believe I am the prophet to the world, I can tell the world what to believe, and declare infallibly what is true. If I am the world's priest, I can say: you must come to my sacraments, you must confess to me if you are ever to be saved. And if I think I am the king of the world, I will establish my authority as widely as I can.

It is a confusion between the head and the body of the Church. The head is divine; the body is human. It is Christ who is the head, and he who is prophet, priest, and king. The Church is not. That is the fundamental difference between Protestantism and Catholicism, and it is as big today as it ever was. Christ said: I will build my church. He did not say: you build it. And Christ is the head of the church; no one else is the head, and no one else may be.

The Basic Fault

The Church began to think she was Christ

If you forget everything else in this essay, Pawson says, remember this. Every distortion flows from one confusion: between the head and the body.

"The government shall be upon his shoulder." (Isaiah 9:6) Christ is the head, and no one else may be.

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The Voices of Protest in the Middle Ages

But Pawson is glad to say that all through the Middle Ages, from 1000 to 1500, there were always people who said: this is not true, this is not Christianity, this is not what Jesus meant. Little groups appeared again, bearing all sorts of names from the places they lived.

There were the Beghards of the Netherlands, just people who met around the book and said: Christ is the head of our church. There were the Waldenses, named after the Waldensian valley; they believed this book told them what Jesus meant the Church to be. To their credit, they went to the pope and asked: this is what we see, could we be recognized as a valid part of the Church if we practise this book? Could they have done more? They wanted to stay in the Roman church but follow the book. The pope said: no, if you do what you intend, we will persecute you. And they were persecuted, fleeing from one valley to another.

✍︎Kit's note

The next group were the Albigenses of southern France; they too read the book and saw what the Church was meant to be. Sadly, the most bloody campaign ever launched from the papacy was against these people. The pope sent two Spanish noblemen to put them to death. But they came back and told the pope: these are good Christians, not criminals, not fighting you, they only want to be in the Church and practise their understanding of Scripture. And one of them, named Dominic, said: we will bring this within the Church. And they founded the Dominicans, a copy of the Albigenses but inside the church. The tragedy is that later the Dominican order so corrupted itself that it was willing to run the Inquisition. There were also the Brethren of the Common Life in Germany. All were independent of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, based everything on the Bible in the people's language, and all were persecuted to the death. The true Church has always been persecuted.

Among those inside the church who also saw this were people who withdrew and held the faith privately. One was Bernard of Clairvaux. A very serious young man, though in his youth he had led a real gang of thieves. After two years as a prisoner of war in Italy, he came to himself and realized he was wasting his life. The son of a French baron, he gave up his riches and withdrew with twelve friends into a valley full of robbers. There he lived on cooked beech leaves and herbs, a terribly poor life; he got his friends up at two every morning for prayer, did not let them stop work until eight at night, and they built a community in the valley of Clairvaux.

✍︎Kit's note

Bernard became one of the most powerful Christians in Europe, without office, without money, without any material or psychological force. He was called the "pope maker." In private, he loved Jesus; Martin Luther said that of all the monks and priests of history, he held Bernard of Clairvaux in the highest esteem. But in public, he felt bound to support the papacy. Someone has wisely said he set back the Reformation by at least two centuries.

The other man, almost contemporary, was Francis, born in the little town of Assisi. Francis was brought to face life by meeting a leper in the street. He walked past the leper on the other side. But as he passed, he asked himself: what kind of man am I to turn away from a fellow man? He went back and kissed the leper. From then Francis began to be serious about life. He sought Christ, and he found him. He gathered around him a group of friends who went out two by two, in utter poverty, preaching the gospel, winning people for Christ.

Though he is remembered more for his way with animals and birds and his unique love of nature, Pawson says Francis ought to be remembered for something else: he was the first missionary to the Muslims. Risking his life, he went to the Sultan himself to preach the gospel of Jesus to the head of the Muslims. Instead of going with 600,000 soldiers to fight them, Francis went alone in poverty to preach the love of Jesus. And he was the first and last missionary to the Arab Muslims for many a century, until Raymond Lull. Francis's followers wore grey robes, so they were called Greyfriars; the Dominicans wore black, so they were called Blackfriars. Both tried to bring the simple Christian life back into the church, but both failed and became corrupt: the Franciscans became professional beggars, and the Dominicans ran the Inquisition.

The whole situation was crying out for a man to speak the truth, and to speak it so well that everyone would hear and understand. Arnold of Brescia, in 1150, began it when he said: wealth and worldly power should not be in the Church's hands. But Bernard of Clairvaux opposed him and got him silenced. Then came Marsilius, a medical doctor, who read his Bible and said: the Bible is the standard of the Church, and no other; bishops and popes are human inventions. But he was silenced. An Englishman who was a professor at the University of Paris, William of Ockham, also spoke up and was silenced.

Until it fell to the lot of a Yorkshireman to be what is called the morning star of the Reformation. The morning star is the star you can still see when the sun is coming up. And the morning star of the Reformation was a Yorkshireman who came to Oxford as a brilliant student, became a professor at Oxford, travelled widely, and was nicknamed Doctor Evangelicus. His name: John Wycliffe.

That man rediscovered the Bible, perhaps more than anyone else until Martin Luther. He protested against papal abuse. Five decrees (called bulls in those days) were issued against him. He was taken to trial at Canterbury. But he turned to the Scriptures, the only law of the Church, and said: I am going to put this Bible from Latin into English; I will cause the plowboys to know this book. And Wycliffe laboured at the translation, knowing that if you put the Bible into ordinary people's hands, you have given them the answer to all corruption in the church. He gathered around him a band of preachers who walked the villages, preaching and singing the gospel in the market square. People mocked them as singers of lullabies, calling them Lollards.

✍︎Kit's note

Go to Amersham. Up Station Road, turn left through the houses, out into the field. There is a monument to people burned alive by their own children, who were forced to light the bonfires and burn their parents to death. Why? Because their parents were caught in Amersham woods reading their Bibles. That was the result of Wycliffe and the Lollards. And Wycliffe himself died peacefully as the rector of Lutterworth.

Wycliffe was at Oxford, and there was another university in Europe closely linked with Oxford: the University of Prague. The rector of Prague was a poor peasant boy who had risen by sheer hard work. His name was also John: John Huss. Huss heard of Wycliffe, began to read Wycliffe's books, and began to preach the same thing in Prague. Finally John Huss was arrested, and the pope condemned him to be burned to death; the Hussites too were put to death.

When word reached England that the pope had burned John Huss, what did they do? Church authorities went to Lutterworth, dug up the body of John Wycliffe, burned it on a bonfire, and threw the ashes into the River Swift at Lutterworth. But someone said of that:

As the River Swift will bear those ashes into the Avon, and the Avon into the Severn, and the Severn into the channels round our shores, and the channels into the oceans, so will the teaching of John Wycliffe spread throughout the world.

And that was an amazing prophecy.

✍︎Kit's note

The River of Witnesses

The flame of faith was never quite put out

Pawson admits he once thought that for a thousand years there was only the Roman church. Not true. There was always a continuous train of simple Christians who paid with their lives but kept the torch for the next generation.

Note: some groups (Paulicians, Bogomils, Cathars) were in fact dualist, closer to Gnosticism than to New Testament Christianity as Pawson paints them — see the amber note in that section.

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The Dawn: The Age of Discovery and the Reformation

We are on the brink of something exciting. You can see that such abuse of the Church of Christ could not go on forever. People were beginning to see, and the one thing enabling them to see was that they were beginning to read this book in their own language. This book, wherever it goes, will put things right.

But there was another thing that caused the Reformation, not just the abuse of the church. It was that men were entering an age of discovery. In the material realm: Columbus discovered America in 1492; Copernicus discovered that the earth goes round the sun and not the other way; Galileo put the telescope to his failing eyes and looked at the stars. It was the dawn of the age of science, when men began to question things.

In the mental realm, men were rediscovering Greek literature and art. In Raphael's paintings you see ancient culture rising again, because Constantinople had fallen to the Turks and the Greek art treasures had been swept into Rome and Italy. The new learning was spread because the printing press had just been invented. One of the great scholars of the new age was Erasmus. He began to rediscover the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament. Erasmus said: I will make a New Testament so accurate that even the humblest will get the message. And he produced an accurate New Testament in which, instead of the word "penance," the word "repentance" appeared. Many things wrong in the Bibles they had were put right.

✍︎Kit's note

But this is the final thing Pawson wants to say. In all that great discovery of mental things, of art, music, and sculpture, the whole great movement we call the Renaissance, men discovered one thing: that if people are intellectually better, they are not therefore morally better. It was the age when the popes filled their palaces with art treasures, the age of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, the most immoral papal family there has been. An age when men studied art, music, and literature, studied the heavens, and were still immoral.

The Renaissance was a purely mental and cultural thing. It did not meet the need of sin. The whole world was waiting for a man to rediscover salvation.

Waiting for a man to grapple with the moral problem of the human race, of the church and the world; a man who would go to this book and, out of his own experience of sin and salvation, rediscover the secret of Christian power to change the world. And that man was Martin Luther, a monk. This very month 450 years ago, he made his discovery public. The Renaissance was mental, but the Reformation was moral. It tackled the real problem, which is not our lack of knowledge, science, or culture, but our lack of Jesus Christ and the gospel of salvation. His story is Part 3 of this series.

✍︎Kit's note

Renaissance & Reformation

The Renaissance was mental; the Reformation was moral

"The Renaissance addressed the head; the Reformation addressed the heart." Part 3 of this series will tell Luther's story.

More Than One Voice

How other historians and preachers read this millennium

Pawson preaches from a strongly Protestant stance. For fairness, and so you hear more than one side, here is how others tell the same story, some agreeing, some pushing back.

Drawn from standard church-history surveys and the messages and books of contemporary teachers. The aim is not to rebut Pawson, but to hear him within a chorus.

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A Closing Prayer

Pawson ends not with a summary, but with a prayer, after so many years and centuries have rolled by before his hearers' eyes:

"Father, may we be the sort of church you want us to be. May we learn from the mistakes of the past, the lessons of history. We thank you that through all those ages you were never without witness, never without those who knew the truth, who often paid for it with their lives, but kept alight that flaming torch of faith which we inherit to pass on to succeeding generations. Where the church is corrupt, cleanse it. Where it is in error, lead her to the truth. Where she is divided, unite her. And above all, may Jesus Christ be seen to be the head of the church, and the only head of the church."

A thousand years of the sea seeping into the boat. But the flame was never quite put out. And at the end of that long tunnel, the dawn is breaking. Part 3 will tell the story of the monk who saw what had gone wrong, and who, with one book, set it all right again.

All green