Histoire de l’Église et Réforme
Histoire de l'Église — Partie 5 : Le siècle du cœur et les trois ismes (1800-1968)
Remarque : Cet article fusionne trois conférences distinctes de la série Histoire de l'Église de David Pawson : 1800–1850 (49,7 minutes), 1850–1900 (51,1 minutes) et 1900–1968 (53,…
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Parallèle
Remarque : Cet article fusionne trois conférences distinctes de la série Histoire de l'Église de David Pawson : 1800–1850 (49,7 minutes), 1850–1900 (51,1 minutes) et 1900–1968 (53,2 minutes, conférence donnée en 1967). J'ai rassemblé les trois en un seul essai parce qu'elles racontent une seule histoire : un XIXe siècle qui s'ouvre sur un réchauffement du cœur après la froide raison des Lumières, explose dans la plus grande expansion missionnaire de l'histoire de l'Église, puis se heurte à une contre-attaque systématique que Pawson lui-même appelle « ce que le diable a fait », et un XXe siècle qui doit vivre avec les conséquences de cette contre-attaque à travers deux guerres mondiales et trois ismes qui façonnent encore l'Église aujourd'hui.
Du salon des Wesley aux machines à vapeur
La partie 4 s'est terminée en 1800, le renouveau évangélique ayant réchauffé une Angleterre devenue froide au cours du XVIIIe siècle. Mais un renouveau n'est pas une destination, c'est un début. Les trois conférences qui composent cette partie 5 racontent l'histoire de ce qui s'est passé ensuite : jusqu'où ce cœur réchauffé s'est propagé dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle, comment il a explosé dans la seconde moitié et ce qu'il a coûté au cours des deux guerres mondiales du XXe siècle.
PREMIÈRE PARTIE : 1800–1850 — FERVEUR ROMANTIQUE ET EXPANSION DE L'ÉGLISE
Pawson ouvre la première conférence avec deux transformations concrètes et un changement de sensibilité. Sur le plan concret : l’Angleterre s’urbanisait à un rythme sans précédent sous l'effet de la révolution industrielle et sa population explosait. Sur le plan de la sensibilité : après un XVIIIe siècle froid et rationaliste, le XIXe siècle s'ouvre sur un renversement, le romantisme, le cœur prenant le pas sur la raison.
Il donne un chiffre précis : l'Angleterre comptait 5 millions d'habitants en 1800, passant à 9 millions en 1850, et cite l'ecclésiastique Malthus qui a écrit un essai mettant en garde contre la famine parce que la population augmentait plus vite que les ressources alimentaires.
Sur le romantisme, Pawson énumère une série de romans : Jane Austen écrivant Orgueil et préjugés, Victor Hugo écrivant Notre-Dame de Paris, Thackeray écrivant Vanity Fair, les sœurs Brontë écrivant Jane Eyre et Les Hauts de Hurlevent, Walter Scott écrivant Ivanhoe, Alexandre Dumas écrivant Les Trois Mousquetaires et Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, Macaulay écrivant L'Histoire de l'Angleterre. La liste est presque entièrement correcte en ce qui concerne les dates, à l'exception des deux qu'il ajoute à la fin, Barchester Towers de Trollope et Lorna Doone de Blackmore, qui appartiennent en fait à une génération victorienne beaucoup plus tardive (1857 et 1869), sept à dix-neuf ans après la limite de 1850 qu'il décrit.
Il en tire une conséquence religieuse : parce que le cœur l'a emporté sur la tête, la religion a explosé. Il donne un chiffre : en 1800, 5 % des fidèles étaient non-conformistes ; en 1850, ce chiffre était de 50 %. L'Église méthodiste s'est divisée en au moins trois grandes branches, l'Église d'Écosse s'est divisée en deux, et six églises baptistes, dont sa propre église, Gold Hill, fondèrent l'Union baptiste.
Le recensement face à la prédication
Population de l’Angleterre et du pays de Galles, 1801–1851 (en millions)
Pawson parle de « 5 millions en 1800, puis 9 millions en 1850 ». Les recensements racontent une tout autre histoire.
Source : recensements britanniques de 1801–1851 (ONS, Vision of Britain). Ligne grise en pointillés : chiffres cités par Pawson dans sa prédication. Ligne dorée : données réelles des recensements.
II. Les missionnaires partis à la rencontre du monde
Pawson donne la plus grande part de la première conférence aux missionnaires. Il raconte l'histoire d'Henry Martyn, qui « renonça à épouser sa fiancée » pour partir en Inde, traduisit le Nouveau Testament et le Livre de la prière commune en hindoustani, puis se rendit en Perse et mourut à l'âge de 31 ans.
Puis David Livingstone, né à Blantyre, en Écosse, voulait à l'origine partir en Chine, mais Dieu l'a envoyé auprès de Robert Moffat en Afrique du Sud. Il a épousé la fille de Moffat et a passé environ quinze ans à ouvrir l'intérieur de l'Afrique aux missionnaires.
Il nomme également Alexander Duff (le premier missionnaire de l'Église d'Écosse en Inde, parti en 1829), Samuel Marsden (« un missionnaire en Australie et en Nouvelle-Zélande ») et Robert Morrison (qui est allé en Chine avec la London Missionary Society et y a produit un dictionnaire chinois ainsi qu'une Bible).
Les missions du XIXe siècle n’ont jamais été constituées d’une histoire mais de trois histoires parallèles, anglo-protestante, catholique romaine et orthodoxe russe, presque invisibles les unes aux autres.
III. La conscience sociale d’une Église en éveil
Pawson s'attarde surtout sur William Wilberforce. Celui-ci écrivit un livre sur « l'esclavage spirituel du péché, et non l'esclavage physique », persuada le Premier ministre William Pitt de présenter en 1807 un projet de loi abolissant la traite des esclaves, puis, vingt-six ans plus tard, en 1833, vécut assez longtemps pour voir l'esclavage lui-même aboli avant de mourir.
Il décrit ensuite les conditions de travail en 1800 : des enfants de sept ans travaillaient de 5 heures du matin à 20 heures ; des enfants de cinq ans ouvraient et fermaient pendant douze heures les portes d'aération au fond des mines de charbon ; des femmes et des enfants rampaient à quatre pattes, tirant des chariots de charbon à l'aide de chaînes. Cela dura jusqu'à ce que Lord Shaftesbury fasse adopter au Parlement la loi de 1842 interdisant le travail dans les mines aux femmes et aux garçons de moins de treize ans, puis la « loi des dix heures », qui limitait les horaires et interdisait l'emploi des enfants de moins de neuf ans.
IV. Trois partis au sein de l'Église d'Angleterre
Dans la dernière section de la première conférence, Pawson se tourne vers l'Église d'Angleterre elle-même, où il voit trois groupes : Low (la Basse Église, évangélique, s'en tenant étroitement à l'Écriture et aux Trente-Neuf Articles), Broad (la tendance large, plus souple sur la doctrine) et High (la Haute Église, cherchant à retrouver la pratique catholique d'avant la Réforme).
Une Église, trois directions
Les trois courants de l’Église d’Angleterre, 1800–1850
✝
Basse Église
Évangélique et attachée à l’Écriture. Particulièrement forte à Cambridge sous Charles Simeon (1783–1836). Elle a donné naissance à le groupe de Clapham, avec Wilberforce, et à la conférence ecclésiastique d’Islington.
○
Église large
Peu rigoureuse en matière de doctrine ; selon Pawson, « morte, mondaine, froide ». C’est de ce milieu que les Frères de Plymouth se sont séparés, à Dublin, en 1827.
✞
Haute Église
Elle cherchait à retrouver les pratiques antérieures à la Réforme. Le mouvement d’Oxford (1833), 90 traités, puis la conversion de Newman à Rome en 1845.
Tous trois cherchaient à échapper à la même situation : une Église gouvernée par un Parlement qui, après 1828–29, n’était plus exclusivement anglican. Ils ont simplement choisi trois voies de sortie différentes.
Le parti Low était le plus fort à Cambridge, où Charles Simeon a prêché à l'église Holy Trinity pendant 54 ans (de 1783 à sa mort en 1836), la première décennie sous l'hostilité ouverte de la paroisse. De là sont nés deux réseaux : la « secte de Clapham » laïque (Wilberforce, John Thornton, premier trésorier de la Société biblique britannique et étrangère, et Zachary Macaulay) et la Conférence cléricale d'Islington.
Le parti Broad, selon Pawson, était « mort, mondain, froid », et c'est à cause de cela qu'en 1827 à Dublin, un groupe d'hommes mécontents — Anthony Norris Groves, missionnaire à la retraite, John Parnell, J.G. Bellett, le Dr Cronin, W. F. Hutchinson et John Nelson Darby, un vicaire anglican — a commencé à se réunir en dehors de la structure formelle de l'Église, rejetant le ministère ordonné et cherchant à revenir au modèle exact de culte du Nouveau Testament. De là naquirent les Frères de Plymouth, qui se divisèrent ensuite en Frères exclusifs, dirigés par Darby, et Frères ouverts, dirigés par George Müller et Henry Craik à la chapelle Bethesda, à Bristol.
Vient ensuite le courant de la Haute Église. Voici le récit de Pawson : en 1828, l'abrogation du Test Act permit aux catholiques et aux non-conformistes d'entrer au Parlement, ce qui alarma un groupe d'ecclésiastiques d'Oxford — John Henry Newman, Richard Hurrell Froude, Edward Pusey, John Keble et Frederick Faber — et donna naissance au mouvement d'Oxford. Ils publièrent environ 120 traités, enseignant que seuls les ministres ordonnés par un évêque étaient légitimes, que le baptême des enfants opérait leur régénération et que le pain et le vin devenaient réellement le corps et le sang du Christ. Le plus controversé, le Tract 90 de Newman (1841), affirmait qu'un ecclésiastique pouvait souscrire aux Trente-Neuf Articles tout en conservant son interprétation personnelle. Newman rejoignit Rome en 1845, devint cardinal, et beaucoup d'autres le suivirent.
Trois partis au sein d’une Église, chacun essayant d’échapper à la même chose : une Église aux mains de l’État. L’un s’est tourné vers l’Écriture. L’autre est retourné au Moyen Âge. Un seul est resté sur place.
Les cinquante premières années du XIXe siècle se terminent ainsi : un cœur réchauffé, une vague missionnaire traversant tous les continents, une conscience sociale suffisamment forte pour abolir l’esclavage et légiférer sur l’âge du travail, et une Église anglicane tirée dans trois directions à la fois. Mais ce n’était que le premier acte. La seconde moitié du siècle, comme Pawson le raconte dans la conférence suivante, est celle où l'histoire double de vitesse et où le diable, selon ses propres mots, commence à contre-attaquer.
DEUXIÈME PARTIE : 1850–1900 — CE QUE LE SAINT-ESPRIT A FAIT ET CE QUE LE DIABLE A FAIT
Pawson ouvre la deuxième conférence avec une affirmation : nous sommes à l'ère des femmes, l'ère victorienne, et au cours de chaque décennie de 1850 à 1900, le Saint-Esprit a fait quelque chose d'important. Il divise la conférence en deux moitiés claires : la première, « ce que le Saint-Esprit a fait » ; la seconde, « ce que le diable a fait ». C'est la structure la plus soignée de toute la série et je l'ai gardée intacte.
V. Le grand réveil de 1857-1859
Pawson raconte qu'en 1857, un réveil éclata, non pas d'abord en Angleterre, mais en Amérique, amenant environ un million de personnes dans l'Église en quelques années. Il se propagea « comme un feu de prairie » à l'Ulster, en Irlande du Nord, puis à l'Angleterre en 1859, où environ un autre million de personnes rejoignirent l'Église. Pawson cite comme source le livre du Dr J. Edwin Orr, The Evangelical Awakening. Et au milieu de ce réveil, un homme d'affaires de vingt ans nommé Dwight L. Moody se convertit.
Pas un seul feu, mais cinq
Le grand Réveil se propage dans cinq pays, 1857–1864
États-Unis
23/9/1857
Lanphier lance la réunion de prière de midi à Fulton Street, New York. Environ 1 million de convertis en 1858–59, selon l’estimation de J. Edwin Orr.
Ulster
1/1/1858
Premier converti à Kells, dans le comté d’Antrim : une origine indépendante du réveil américain. Environ 100 000 convertis (1859).
Pays de Galles
1859
Environ 80 000–110 000 convertis.
Écosse
1859
Environ 300 000 convertis.
Angleterre
jusqu’en 1864
Environ 600 000 convertis, total atteint sur plusieurs années, et non durant la seule année 1859.
Un total de « plus d’un million » dans l’ensemble du Royaume-Uni, cumulé sur plusieurs années jusqu’au milieu des années 1860. Il ne s’agit pas d’« un autre million en Angleterre » durant la seule année 1859, comme le laisse entendre la prédication.
VI. Trois figures des années 1860
De ce renouveau, selon Pawson, est née une génération de grandes figures. Il en choisit trois. Le Dr Thomas Barnardo, formé pour devenir médecin en Chine, resta à Londres après avoir découvert des garçons sans abri dormant sous des bâches au marché aux poissons de Billingsgate et fonda des foyers sous la devise « aucun enfant démuni ne se verra refuser l'entrée ». William Booth, pasteur méthodiste, se vit refuser l'autorisation de mener une évangélisation de rue non conventionnelle ; son épouse Catherine lui cria alors « Jamais, William, jamais ! » depuis la galerie, et ils fondèrent ensemble l'Armée du Salut. Enfin, Hudson Taylor fonda en 1865 la China Inland Mission, que Pawson présente comme interconfessionnelle et guidée par un principe de « foi » consistant à ne jamais solliciter publiquement de fonds.
Trois enfants dormant sous des bâches dans un marché aux poissons. Un cri depuis la galerie. Un soir sur la plage de Brighton, un homme ne supportait plus de communier. Le Saint-Esprit n'a pas besoin d'un comité pour démarrer un mouvement.
VII. Les années 1870–1890 : étudiants, congrès et cent étudiants au mont Hermon
Pawson fait parcourir à l'assemblée une succession d'événements : William Pennefather construisit Mildmay Hall en 1870 et invita Moody à y prêcher en 1872 ; Moody et le chanteur Ira Sankey arrivèrent en Grande-Bretagne en 1873 et prêchèrent devant 2,5 millions de personnes à Londres cette même année ; le premier congrès de Keswick eut lieu en 1875 ; CICCU fut fondée en 1876 et OICCU en 1879 ; la Bible Revised Version parut en 1880 sans jamais devenir populaire ; Moody prêcha à Cambridge en 1882 ; les « Cambridge Seven », dont le joueur de cricket de l'équipe nationale C. T. Studd, partirent pour la Chine en 1885 ; Robert Wilder lança à Princeton, en 1886, un appel à 1 000 étudiants volontaires, donnant naissance au Student Volunteer Movement, officiellement lancé à Édimbourg en 1892 avec pour devise « l'évangélisation du monde au cours de cette génération ».
VIII. L’âge des femmes auteurs d’hymnes
Pawson termine la section « ce que le Saint-Esprit a fait » par une observation : le XIXe siècle fut une époque de cantiques écrits par des femmes, contrairement au XVIIIe siècle de Wesley et Watts. Il cite Fanny Crosby, notamment pour « Fill Thou My Life », Frances Ridley Havergal, Christina Rossetti, Cecil Frances Alexander, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna Waring et Arabella Catherine Hankey, et note que même le Premier ministre Gladstone a écrit un cantique.
IX. Ce que le diable a fait en premier : Rome est devenue plus romaine que jamais
Le ton de Pawson change. Dans la seconde moitié de la conférence, il énumère cinq choses que « le diable a faites » au cours de ces mêmes cinquante années. La première : le pape rétablit l'ordre des Jésuites, restaura la hiérarchie catholique anglaise en 1850, proclama le dogme de l'Immaculée Conception en 1854 (« Marie est née sans péché »), et le premier concile du Vatican déclara en 1870 le pape infaillible lorsqu'il statue ex cathedra.
L’affirmation la plus forte, juste avant de tout perdre
Rome, 1773–1950
1773 / 1814
Suppression puis rétablissement des jésuites, plusieurs décennies avant Pie IX
1850
Rétablissement de la hiérarchie catholique en Angleterre : Wiseman devient archevêque de Westminster
1854
Dogme de l’Immaculée Conception (Ineffabilis Deus)
1869–70
Premier concile du Vatican : Pastor Aeternus proclame l’infaillibilité pontificale (18 juillet 1870)
20/9/1870
Les troupes italiennes prennent Rome, mettant fin aux États pontificaux qui existaient depuis le 8e siècle
1871
Döllinger est excommunié ; environ 60 000 laïcs forment l’Église vieille-catholique
1950
Première application ex cathedra du dogme de l’infaillibilité : l’Assomption
Au cours de ce même été 1870, Rome s'est déclarée plus infaillible que jamais et a perdu définitivement son royaume terrestre. Ce n’est pas une coïncidence que l’histoire oublie.
X. Ce qu'a fait le diable, deuxième : Darwin et la guerre imaginaire entre la science et la foi
Pawson accorde une attention particulière à Charles Darwin, soulignant qu'il n'a jamais dit que « les hommes viennent des singes ». Il affirme que De l'origine des espèces (1859) se termine par l'affirmation d'un Créateur et que la tragédie fut un malentendu mutuel, la science prétendant que l'évolution était un « fait prouvé » alors qu'elle ne l'était pas, et la foi affirmant que la Bible disait des choses qu'elle ne disait pas.
XI. Ce qu'a fait le diable, troisième : l'athéisme, l'agnosticisme et Karl Marx
Pawson dresse une liste de noms : Thomas Carlyle (formé pour le ministère, devenu agnostique), George Eliot (nom de plume de Mary Ann Evans, autrice de The Mill on the Floss), John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Schopenhauer et Feuerbach (« l'homme a créé Dieu à sa propre image, et Dieu n'est qu'un rêve »), Nietzsche (« la volonté de puissance », qui, selon Pawson, aurait jeté les bases de l'idéologie hitlérienne), Robert Ingersoll et enfin Karl Marx, qui a publié Das Kapital en 1867. Pawson lui attribue aussi la formule « la religion est l'opium des masses » et affirme que Marx l'aurait empruntée à Charles Kingsley.
XII. Ce qu'a fait le diable, quatrième : la « critique » et les savants qui ont perdu leur chaire
La quatrième chose, que Pawson appelle « l'arme la plus subtile du diable », consiste à traiter la Bible comme un livre entièrement humain, sujet à toutes les erreurs humaines. Il raconte l'histoire de l'évêque John William Colenso, « excommunié » pour avoir soutenu que Moïse n'avait probablement jamais vécu et que Josué était un mythe ; puis celle du professeur William Robertson Smith, qui perdit sa chaire d'hébreu « à l'Université d'Édimbourg » pour des opinions similaires.
XIII. Ce que le diable a fait, cinquième : de nouvelles sectes sur la côte américaine
Dernière chose : le diable suscita de « fausses sectes » sur la côte atlantique de l'Amérique, Bible à la main mais niant la divinité de Jésus. Pawson énumère les mormons (Joseph Smith, 1830), les adventistes du septième jour (1831), le spiritisme (1848), la Science chrétienne (1876) et les Témoins de Jéhovah, « le plus grand mouvement apparu durant cette période ».
Le Saint-Esprit n’a pas moins agi dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. Mais le diable, selon les propres mots de Pawson, avait « mobilisé ses forces et les avait fait attendre ». Les deux histoires sont vraies, et la seconde est la facture que le XXe siècle devrait payer.
Pawson termine la deuxième conférence par une image : deux hommes écrivant en 1850, inconnus l'un de l'autre et ne sachant pas qu'ils deviendraient le plus grand obstacle à la foi chrétienne pour les cent années suivantes. L’un d’eux est Karl Marx, qui travaille au British Museum à ce qui deviendra Das Kapital. L'autre est Charles Darwin, fraîchement revenu de son voyage sur le Beagle, qui écrit un livre sur la nature. Et, dit Pawson, c'est comme si le ciel savait que l'attaque allait arriver : le Saint-Esprit a choisi cette même année, 1859, pour susciter un réveil, préparant l'Église pour les cinquante années suivantes, puis pour un XXe siècle qui, comme le dira la troisième conférence, porterait le nom de trois autres ismes : le libéralisme, l'œcuménisme et le pentecôtisme.
TROISIÈME PARTIE : 1900–1968 — DEUX GUERRES MONDIALES ET TROIS ISMES
La troisième conférence, prêchée en 1967, s'ouvre sur les trois lettres de l'l’Apocalypse, adressées aux églises de Sardes (« tu as le nom d'être vivant, et tu es mort »), de Philadelphie (« J'ai mis devant toi une porte ouverte que personne ne peut fermer ») et de Laodicée (« tu es tiède, ni froid ni bouillant »). Pawson utilise ces trois images pour décrire l'ensemble du XXe siècle : la Grande-Bretagne y est entrée avec la certitude absolue que ce serait un siècle de paix et de prospérité, « allant de progrès en progrès », avant de connaître une confiance brisée par deux guerres mondiales.
Il donne un chiffre : en 1800, environ 19 % de la population mondiale se déclarait chrétienne ; à l'entrée du XXe siècle, ce chiffre était passé à 29,5 %. Il énumère ensuite les facteurs qui font du XXe siècle un champ de bataille : la progression de la sécularisation, le communisme dirigeant un tiers de l'humanité (la Chine en est l'exemple le plus clair : elle abritait autrefois des centaines de missionnaires, et n'en compte aujourd'hui aucun), le nationalisme qui fait que les missionnaires sont considérés comme des « impérialistes occidentaux », la désintégration de la civilisation occidentale (en citant le professeur Gilbert Murray) et une renaissance des religions anciennes. Mais il affirme aussi que l'Église n'a jamais été aussi grande qu'à son époque, avec « 15 nouveaux chrétiens chaque minute », et mentionne l'organisation Wycliffe Bible Translators, qu'il dit fondés en 1933 sous la devise « Encore 2 000 langues à traduire ».
Quelle part du monde se disait chrétienne ?
Part des personnes se déclarant chrétiennes dans la population mondiale, 1800–1970
Gris en pointillés : chiffres cités par Pawson dans sa prédication de 1967. Doré : reconstitution scientifique moderne (Barrett/World Christian Encyclopedia, Center for the Study of Global Christianity). La tendance à la hausse est correcte, mais la prédication en sous-estime l’ampleur.
Trois courants théologiques du vingtième siècle
Trois courants qui ont façonné l’Église du 20e siècle
1
Le libéralisme
L’expérience personnelle, plutôt que l’Écriture, sert de critère de vérité. Barth et Brunner ramènent partiellement le balancier en arrière ; Bultmann, Tillich et Robinson le repoussent en avant.
2
L’œcuménisme
D’Édimbourg en 1910 au Conseil œcuménique des Églises (1948). En parallèle, sans que Pawson le mentionne jamais : le deuxième concile du Vatican (1962–65).
3
Le pentecôtisme
Né dans une écurie située à Azusa Street (1906), il devient l’un des plus grands mouvements protestants et se propage ensuite jusque dans le catholicisme par Duquesne (1967).
XIV. Le premier isme : le libéralisme et un Dieu sans colère
Pawson dit qu'il parlera de trois ismes qui ont façonné l'Église du XXe siècle : le libéralisme, l'œcuménisme et le pentecôtisme. Le premier, dit-il, est originaire d'Allemagne et fait de l'expérience personnelle, plutôt que de la Bible ou de l'Église, le critère ultime de vérité, ce qui conduit à supprimer l'enfer, les miracles et la colère de Dieu. Il cite une phrase qu'il attribue à « Reinhold Niebuhr » : « un Dieu sans colère qui a introduit des hommes sans péché dans un royaume sans jugement, par le ministère d'un Christ sans croix ». Deux guerres mondiales, dit-il, ont poussé deux théologiens suisses, Karl Barth et Emil Brunner, à faire repartir le balancier dans l'autre sens en prêchant à nouveau le péché et l'expiation. Mais ils ne sont jamais complètement revenus à une conception littérale de la Bible comme Parole de Dieu ; le pendule a donc basculé à nouveau vers un « radicalisme » incarné par Bultmann, Tillich et l'évêque de Woolwich, John A.T. Robinson, dont les disciples, dit Pawson, ont proclamé : « Dieu est mort ». Il présente Billy Graham et son slogan « la Bible dit » comme le contrepoids évangélique.
Le pendule oscille du libéralisme à la néo-orthodoxie, puis revient au radicalisme et, à chaque mouvement, dit Pawson, il manque exactement une chose : revenir à croire que ce livre est véritablement la Parole de Dieu. Mais au même moment, un autre concile, en un autre lieu, essayait une troisième réponse dont il ne parle jamais.
XV. Le deuxième isme : l’œcuménisme et la porte que Pawson a fermée trop tôt
Pawson retrace l'histoire de l'œcuménisme depuis l'Alliance évangélique (1845), en passant par la devise de Keswick « Tous un en Jésus-Christ » (1875), jusqu'à la Conférence missionnaire mondiale d'Édimbourg en 1910, qu'il considère comme le point de départ formel, avec une anecdote sur un chrétien indien se présentant comme « un baptiste canadien ». De là sont nés deux mouvements, Foi et Constitution et Vie et Œuvre, fusionnés au sein du Conseil œcuménique des Églises, fondé en 1938 mais retardé par la Seconde Guerre mondiale jusqu'à sa première réunion à Amsterdam en 1948 avec 147 dénominations. Il parle d'unions d'Églises : au Canada (1925), l'Église d'Écosse (1929), le méthodisme britannique (1932) et l'Église de l'Inde du Sud (1947). Il note que le Conseil n'a jamais inclus les catholiques romains, mais qu'il a inclus de nombreuses Églises orthodoxes. Il prédit, en prêchant au début de 1967, que les pourparlers d'unité anglicans-méthodistes en cours échoueront mais qu'une tentative ultérieure réussira, et que les presbytériens et les congrégationalistes s'uniront dans les cinq à dix ans.
Deux voies parallèles, rarement racontées ensemble
Le Conseil œcuménique des Églises et Vatican II, 1910–1965
La voie protestante
1910
Conférence missionnaire mondiale d’Édimbourg
1937
Foi et Constitution et Vie et Action décident de fusionner
1948
Première assemblée, à Amsterdam : 147 confessions
1961
New Delhi : de l’« unité » à une « union » organique
La voie catholique, jamais évoquée par Pawson
1959
Jean XXIII annonce le concile
1962
Ouverture de Vatican II
1964
Unitatis Redintegratio ; Paul VI rencontre Athénagoras Ier à Jérusalem
1965
Levée des excommunications de 1054, annoncée simultanément à Rome et à Istanbul
Les deux plus grandes histoires œcuméniques du siècle se sont déroulées en même temps, dans la même décennie. Pourtant, elles ne se croisent presque jamais dans les récits protestants destinés au grand public de cette époque.
XVI. Le troisième isme : le pentecôtisme, né dans une étable
Le dernier de ces courants, dit Pawson, « comme le christianisme lui-même, est né dans une étable », sur Azusa Street, à Los Angeles, en 1906. Le pasteur méthodiste norvégien T. B. Barrett se rendit à New York avec l'intention de rejoindre Los Angeles, mais n'avait pas les moyens de poursuivre le voyage. Il entendit parler du réveil par correspondance et rentra en Norvège après avoir lui-même vécu une expérience pentecôtiste. Alexander Boddy, pasteur anglican à Sunderland, l'invita, et un réveil y éclata en 1907. En 1967, dit Pawson, le pentecôtisme rivalisait presque avec les baptistes pour la place de plus grand ensemble protestant au monde, avec une croissance particulièrement explosive en Amérique latine. Vers 1960, un « nouveau pentecôtisme », le mouvement charismatique, commença à apparaître dans les grandes confessions établies, d'abord chez des pasteurs épiscopaliens aux États-Unis.
D’une écurie à six continents
La propagation du pentecôtisme dans le monde, 1906–1967
Il s’agit d’un schéma, et non d’une carte géographiquement précise. La ligne dorée en pointillés représente la diffusion de la branche charismatique dans les Églises protestantes historiques et catholiques à partir de 1960.
Pawson termine cette section avec quatre choses qu'il dit avoir apprises du mouvement pentecôtiste : il donne aux gens ordinaires la capacité d'agir, quel que soit leur diplôme ou leur statut ; il montre que les langues déliées pour la louange le seront aussi pour le témoignage ; il rétablit le culte participatif, au lieu de le réduire à la prestation du pasteur ; et, surtout, il redonne la foi que Dieu est toujours à l'œuvre, la réponse la plus vivante au mouvement « Dieu est mort » qu'il vient de décrire dans la section précédente.
Trois ismes, trois réponses différentes à la même question : que reste-t-il lorsque deux guerres mondiales ont brûlé l'optimisme d'un siècle ? L'une s'est tournée vers l'expérience. L'une s'est tournée vers les autres. L'une s'est tournée vers la puissance. Pawson pensait qu'une seule des trois était pleinement juste. Mais toutes trois, à leur manière, prouvent que l'Église n'était jamais morte, même si on l'a déclarée morte maintes fois.
Clôture : Jésus construit son Église
Pawson termine la dernière conférence de la série avec une question à laquelle il ne répond pas complètement ce soir-là : l'Église gagnera-t-elle la bataille, ou va-t-elle disparaître ? Il promet de parler la semaine suivante de l'avenir, de 1968 jusqu'au retour du Christ. Mais il conclut par la même affirmation que celle qui clôturait chaque conférence de la série : Jésus construit son Église, et les portes d’Hadès ne prévaudront pas contre elle.
Note: This piece merges three separate lectures from David Pawson's History of the Church series: 1800–1850 (49.7 minutes), 1850–1900 (51.1 minutes), and 1900–1968 (53.2 minutes, preached in 1967). I've folded all three into one essay because they tell a single story: a 19th century that opens with the heart warming back up after the Enlightenment's cold reason, explodes into the largest missionary expansion in Church history, then runs into a systematic counterattack Pawson himself calls "what the devil did," and a 20th century that has to live with the consequences of that counterattack through two world wars and three isms still shaping the Church today.
From the Wesleys' parlor to steam engines
Part 4 closed in 1800, with the Evangelical Revival having warmed back up an England gone cold through the 18th century. But a revival is not a destination, it's a beginning. The three lectures making up this Part 5 tell the story of what happened next: how far that warmed heart spread in the first half of the 19th century, how it exploded in the second half, and what it cost in the two world wars of the 20th.
PHẦN MỘT: 1800–1850 — LỬA LÃNG MẠN VÀ MỘT HỘI THÁNH ĐANG MỞ RỘNG
Pawson opens the first lecture with two physical facts and one emotional shift. Physical: England was urbanizing at an unprecedented rate (the Industrial Revolution), and its population was exploding. Emotional: after a cold, rationalist 18th century, the 19th century opened with a reversal, Romanticism, the heart displacing the mind.
He gives a specific figure: England had 5 million people in 1800, rising to 9 million by 1850, and cites the clergyman Malthus writing an essay warning of famine because population was outpacing food.
Kit's note
Pawson's figure is off by roughly half. England's first census (10 March 1801) already recorded 8,892,536 people in England and Wales, not 5 million. By the 1851 census that had nearly doubled: 17,927,609. In other words England already had nearly 9 million people by 1800, then nearly doubled again to almost 18 million by 1850, one of the fastest sustained population expansions in English history, not a "5 to 9" story. On Malthus: he published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 (Pawson's date is right), arguing population grows geometrically while food supply grows only arithmetically, so unchecked growth, including growth encouraged by Poor Law relief, would inevitably outstrip food. This was an argument against a specific structure of poor relief, not a blanket case against charity as such.
Source: UK census returns 1801 and 1851 (ONS, Vision of Britain); Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798 edition.
On Romanticism, Pawson lists a run of novels: Jane Austen writing Pride and Prejudice, Victor Hugo writing Notre-Dame de Paris, Thackeray writing Vanity Fair, the Brontë sisters writing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Walter Scott writing Ivanhoe, Alexandre Dumas writing The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, Macaulay writing The History of England. The list is almost entirely correct on dates, except for the two he tacks on at the end, Trollope's Barchester Towers and Blackmore's Lorna Doone, which actually belong to a much later Victorian generation (1857 and 1869), seven to nineteen years past the 1850 cutoff he's describing.
From this he draws a religious consequence: because heart won out over head, religion boomed. He gives a figure: in 1800, 5% of churchgoers were non-conformist; by 1850, that figure was 50%. The Methodist church split into at least three major bodies, the Church of Scotland split in two, and six Baptist churches, including his own church, Gold Hill, founded the Baptist Union.
Kit's note
The endpoint of the 50% figure has a real basis: the 1851 Religious Census (30 March 1851, organized by Horace Mann) found that of roughly 10.9 million church attendances that day (about 60.8% of the population), nearly half were at Nonconformist chapels, a finding so politically explosive Parliament never repeated the exercise. But that's a snapshot of one day's attendance in 1851, not proof that Nonconformity had grown from a flat 5% baseline in 1800. Clive Field's quantitative research shows Nonconformity's growth had already "more than quadrupled" mainly from 1760 onward, meaning the starting point was already well above 5% long before 1800. On "six Baptist churches": this figure matches no documented account. The Baptist Union of Great Britain was founded in 1813 by 45 Particular Baptist churches in London, not six. Gold Hill Baptist Church's own official history page (founded 1774) makes no claim to founding-member status in the Baptist Union, even though this is Pawson's own church.
Source: Clive D. Field, "Counting Religion in England and Wales," Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2012); Census of Great Britain 1851: Religious Worship; Baptists Together; goldhill.org/who-we-are/our-story.
The Census vs. the Sermon
Population of England & Wales, 1801–1851 (millions)
Pawson said “5 million in 1800, up to 9 million by 1850.” The actual census says something quite different.
Source: UK census returns 1801–1851 (ONS, Vision of Britain). Dashed grey line = the figures Pawson cites in the sermon. Gold line = the real census data.
Kit's note
Pawson's whole account in this section is told entirely from inside Nonconformist Protestantism. He skips a Catholic countercurrent running through these same fifty years that Catholic historians treat as at least as significant. The Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, passed under the Duke of Wellington's government amid fears of unrest in Catholic-majority Ireland, removed the barriers keeping Catholics out of Parliament and most public office, the single biggest change to England's religious settlement in this whole period. Then on 29 September 1850, Pope Pius IX's bull Universalis Ecclesiae re-established a Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales for the first time since the Reformation, naming Nicholas Wiseman Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, driven partly by the flood of Irish Catholic immigrants after the Great Famine (1845–1852). It ignited the "Papal Aggression" crisis: Wiseman burned in effigy, Catholic church windows smashed, "No Popery" processions filling English streets. In other words, England's religion in 1800–1850 was a three-cornered contest, expanding Nonconformity, the Anglo-Catholic pull of the Oxford Movement (more in Section IV), and a re-legalized, demographically swelling Roman Catholicism, not simply "rationalism giving way to Nonconformist Romanticism."
Source: John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850; Edward Norman, Roman Catholicism in England.
II. The missionaries who entered the world
Pawson gives the largest share of the first lecture to the missionaries. He tells of Henry Martyn, who "gave up marrying his fiancée" to go to India, translated the New Testament and Book of Common Prayer into Hindustani, then went to Persia, and died at age 31.
Kit's note
Emotionally true but wrong on one important detail: Lydia Grenfell was never formally Martyn's fiancée. He fell in love with her in Cornwall before sailing in July 1805, but had to leave when a berth suddenly opened, "without becoming engaged to her." He proposed by letter from India, and she declined, chiefly because her mother withheld consent. He died in 1812 still unmarried and, by his own account, still in love with her, a story of unrequited devotion and sacrifice, not a broken engagement. On the work: he reached India in 1806, completed an Urdu New Testament, then went to Persia, finishing a Persian New Testament in Shiraz in 1812, and died at Tokat, Armenia, on 16 October 1812, en route home to see Lydia one last time.
Source: John Sargent, Memoir of the Rev. Henry Martyn (1819); Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide.
Then David Livingstone, born in Blantyre, Scotland, originally intending China but God sent him to Robert Moffat in South Africa instead, he married Moffat's daughter, and spent about 15 years opening up the African interior for missionaries.
Kit's note
Close, but the standard figure is 16, not 15: Livingstone's own 1857 bestseller was titled "Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa: Including a Sketch of Sixteen Years' Residence in the Interior of Africa," covering 1841–1856. Counting his whole African career (until his 1873 death at Chitambo, Zambia), the real figure is 32 years.
Source: David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857); Livingstone Online Project.
He also names Alexander Duff (the Church of Scotland's first missionary to India, departing 1829), Samuel Marsden ("a missionary to Australia and New Zealand"), and Robert Morrison (went to China with the London Missionary Society, produced a Chinese dictionary and Bible).
Kit's note
The "missionary to Australia and New Zealand" label needs unpacking: in Australia, Marsden was chiefly the colony's senior chaplain and a magistrate (nicknamed the "flogging parson" for harsh sentencing), and his direct outreach to Aboriginal Australians was largely unsuccessful. His real missionary legacy is New Zealand: he preached the first Christian sermon on New Zealand soil at Oihi Bay on Christmas Day, 25 December 1814. On Morrison: he baptized exactly 10 converts in 27 years in China before dying in 1834, a modest figure usually left out of the inspiring version. And one thing Pawson doesn't mention at all: while these Protestant missionaries were at work, Pope Gregory XVI (1831–1846), called by Catholic mission historians "the greatest missionary pope of his century," was simultaneously reorganizing the entire Catholic mission system, creating more than 70 new dioceses/apostolic vicariates and naming 195 missionary bishops. And a Russian Orthodox priest, John Veniaminov (later St. Innocent of Alaska), arrived in the Aleutian Islands in 1824, invented a written Aleut alphabet, translated the Gospel of Matthew, almost exactly contemporaneous with Duff's arrival in Calcutta and Livingstone's move to Africa, an Orthodox voice almost entirely absent from Anglo-Protestant tellings of this era.
Source: Australian Dictionary of Biography; Te Ara Dictionary of New Zealand Biography; OrthodoxWiki "Innocent of Alaska"; Encyclopædia Britannica, "Propaganda Fide."
Nineteenth-century missions was never one story but three running in parallel, Anglo-Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Russian Orthodox, almost invisible to each other.
III. The social conscience of an awakening church
Pawson lingers longest on William Wilberforce. Wilberforce wrote a book about "spiritual slavery to sin, not physical slavery," persuaded Prime Minister William Pitt to bring an 1807 bill abolishing the slave trade, then 26 years later, in 1833, lived to see slavery itself abolished before he died.
Kit's note
Three corrections. One, Wilberforce's book, A Practical View of Christianity (1797), isn't organized around a "slavery to sin" metaphor, it contrasts nominal Christianity with real Christianity, a loose summary on Pawson's part. Two, William Pitt died on 23 January 1806, more than a year before the Slave Trade Act 1807 received royal assent (25 March 1807). Pitt did encourage Wilberforce to take up the cause at their famous 1787 conversation under the "Wilberforce Oak" at Holwood, but the 1807 Act itself was actually piloted through Parliament by Pitt's successor, Lord Grenville. Three, the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 passed its Commons second reading on 22 July 1833, one week before Wilberforce died (29 July 1833), but the Act imposed a mandatory "apprenticeship" system of unpaid forced labor lasting until 1838, and exempted territories held by the East India Company, Ceylon, and St. Helena, "fully abolished" overstates even the 1834 outcome. The £20 million compensation (roughly 40% of the UK's 1833 government spending, not fully paid off until 2015) went to slave owners, not the enslaved.
Source: Slave Trade Act 1807 and Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (Wikipedia, cross-checked against Britannica); History of Parliament, "1833 Slavery Abolition Act: The Long Road to Emancipation."
Then he describes 1800 working conditions: 7-year-olds working 5am to 8pm, 5-year-olds down coal mines opening and shutting ventilation doors for 12 hours, women and children crawling on all fours hauling chained coal carts, until Lord Shaftesbury got an 1842 Act through Parliament banning women and boys under 13 from mines, then the "Ten Hours Bill" limiting hours and banning employment under age 9.
Kit's note
The Mines and Collieries Act 1842 (passed 1 August 1842) banned all women and girls from underground work at any age, but set the minimum age for boys underground at 10, not 13. The "Ten Hours Bill" was actually the Factories Act 1847, limiting hours for women and 13-to-18-year-olds in textile mills to 10 hours a day, while the ban on employing children under 9 belongs to a separate, 14-years-earlier Act: the Factory Act 1833. Pawson has merged two Acts fourteen years apart into one. On Elizabeth Fry and John Howard in prison reform, correct, but Howard's work (he died in 1790) actually belongs to the 18th century, placing him inside an "1800–1850" frame is a slight chronological stretch.
Source: Mines and Collieries Act 1842; Factories Act 1847 and Factory Act 1833 (Wikipedia, UK Parliament "Later factory legislation").
IV. Three parties within the Church of England
The final section of the first lecture, Pawson turns to the Church of England itself, where he sees three groups: Low (evangelical, sticking closely to Scripture and the 39 Articles), Broad (loose on doctrine), and High (seeking to recover pre-Reformation Catholic practice).
One Church, Three Directions
The three parties inside the Church of England, 1800–1850
✝
Low
Evangelical, held close to Scripture. Strongest at Cambridge under Charles Simeon (1783–1836). Produced the Clapham Sect (Wilberforce) and the Islington Clerical Conference.
○
Broad
Doctrinally loose, per Pawson “dead, worldly, cold.” It was from here, in 1827 Dublin, that the Plymouth Brethren seceded.
✞
High
Sought to recover pre-Reformation practice. The Oxford Movement (1833), 90 tracts, Newman converts to Rome in 1845.
All three were trying to escape the same thing: a church governed by a Parliament no longer exclusively Anglican after 1828–29. They just chose three different directions out.
Kit's note
The Low/Broad/High framework is mildly anachronistic applied to 1800. The Low/High distinction genuinely goes back to the 17th-18th centuries, but the term "Broad Church" was only coined by A.H. Clough in conversation with Benjamin Jowett around 1848-1850, and only became current after W.J. Conybeare's 1853 Edinburgh Review essay "Church Parties." In 1800, the real division was more two-sided: a minority evangelical party (like Simeon's) against a doctrinally loose "orthodox" establishment majority; a self-conscious "Broad Church" party only crystallized after the Oxford Movement sharpened High Church identity from 1833 onward.
Source: W.J. Conybeare, "Church Parties," Edinburgh Review (1853); Encyclopedia.com, "Broad Church."
The Low party was strongest at Cambridge, where Charles Simeon preached at Holy Trinity Church for 54 years (1783 until his 1836 death), the first decade under open parish hostility. From it grew two networks: the lay "Clapham Sect" (Wilberforce, John Thornton as first treasurer of the British and Foreign Bible Society, Zachary Macaulay), and the clerical Islington Clerical Conference.
Kit's note
A notable name error: the first treasurer of the British and Foreign Bible Society (founded 1804) was Henry Thornton, banker and MP, the Clapham Sect's financial architect, not his father John Thornton, who died in 1790, 14 years before the Society existed, and so could not have been its treasurer. This is almost certainly a father/son conflation in the transcript.
Source: Wikipedia, "Henry Thornton (reformer)"; O. Hardman, "The Clapham Sect" (anglicanhistory.org).
The Broad party, per Pawson, was "dead, worldly, cold," and it was from this that, in 1827 in Dublin, a group of disaffected men, Anthony Norris Groves (a retired missionary), John Parnell, J.G. Bellett, Dr Cronin, W.F. Hutchinson, and John Nelson Darby, an Anglican curate, began meeting outside the formal church structure, rejecting ordained ministry, seeking to return to the exact New Testament pattern of worship. From this came the Plymouth Brethren, which later split into the Exclusive Brethren (led by Darby) and the Open Brethren (led by George Müller and Henry Craik at Bethesda Chapel, Bristol).
Kit's note
Core group and location correct, but a few details need fixing. The fifth man's name was Francis Hutchinson, not "W.F." Anthony Norris Groves was not yet a retired missionary in 1827, he was a surgeon-dentist in Exeter who had just given up his practice to train at Trinity College Dublin, preparing for mission work, he didn't actually depart for Baghdad until 1829, two years later. Academic historians (Sweetnam & Gribben, 2009; Timothy Stunt, 2000) also argue the movement's origins were more complex than a simple reaction to a "dead Broad Church," tied to the influence of the Swiss Réveil and Anglo-Irish prophecy-conference culture (later centered at Powerscourt from 1831). The 1848 Exclusive/Open split happened when Bristol's Bethesda Chapel received some Plymouth members into communion without requiring them to renounce B.W. Newton's views (Newton had been accused of Christological heresy in 1847), leading Darby to withdraw fellowship from Bethesda itself. On Müller: his charity received an estimated £1.38-1.46 million in his lifetime (not "a million"), caring for over 10,000 orphans across five houses built 1849-1870, but the original Ashley Down buildings were sold to Bristol City Council in 1958, nine years before Pawson's 1967 sermon, so calling it "still existing" at the time he preached needs a small correction, though the successor charity (now "Müllers") still operates in Bristol today.
Source: Sweetnam & Gribben, JETS 52/3 (2009); Wikipedia "George Müller" and "New Orphan Houses, Ashley Down"; mullers.org/our-history.
Then the High party. Pawson tells it: in 1828 the Test Act was repealed, letting Catholics and non-conformists into Parliament, which alarmed a group of Oxford clergymen, John Henry Newman, Richard Hurrell Froude, Edward Pusey, John Keble, Frederick Faber, and launched the Oxford Movement. They published about 120 tracts, teaching that only bishop-ordained ministers were valid, that infant baptism was regeneration, and that the bread and wine actually became Christ's body and blood. The most controversial, Newman's Tract 90 (1841), argued a clergyman could sign the 39 Articles while holding his own private interpretation. Newman left for Rome in 1845, became a Cardinal, and many others followed.
Kit's note
Several layers to unpack here. Pawson conflates two different Acts: the Test and Corporation Acts 1828 only removed barriers on Protestant non-conformists, while Catholic Emancipation was a separate Act the following year, 1829. And the movement's actual proximate trigger wasn't the 1828-29 Acts but the Irish Church Temporalities Act of 1833, suppressing ten Irish Anglican bishoprics, which is what prompted John Keble's famous "National Apostasy" sermon on 14 July 1833, the date traditionally marking the movement's start. Frederick Faber wasn't one of the four founders, he was a student influenced by the movement who converted alongside Newman in 1845. The tract count was 90, not 120, published 1833-1841. On doctrine: the Tractarians while still Anglican were actually quite wary of the word "transubstantiation" itself (Article 28 of the 39 Articles explicitly names it "repugnant to the plain words of Scripture"), they spoke of a "real presence" in a spiritual sense without yet using that scholastic language, Newman only embraced the term after his conversion. On consequences: only Newman among the core tract-writers actually seceded to Rome in 1845, Pusey and Keble remained practicing Anglican clergy for life, "many others followed" overstates what was actually a slow bleed across decades (Faber and W.G. Ward in 1845, roughly 14 clergy after the 1850 Gorham Judgment, Henry Manning in 1851) rather than a mass exodus.
Source: Wikipedia "Oxford Movement," "Tracts for the Times," "Tract 90"; Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part I (1966); C. Brad Faught, The Oxford Movement (2003).
Three parties inside one church, each trying to escape the same thing, a church held by the state. One turned back to Scripture. One turned back to the Middle Ages. Only one stayed put.
The first fifty years of the 19th century close this way: a heart warmed back up, a missionary wave crossing every continent, a social conscience strong enough to abolish slavery and legislate labor ages, and a Church of England pulled in three directions at once. But this was only the opening act. The second half of the century, as Pawson tells it in the next lecture, is when the story doubles its speed, and the devil, in his own words, begins to counterattack.
PHẦN HAI: 1850–1900 — NHỮNG GÌ ĐỨC THÁNH LINH ĐÃ LÀM, VÀ NHỮNG GÌ MA QUỶ ĐÃ LÀM
Pawson opens the second lecture with a claim: this is the age of women, the Victorian age, and in every decade from 1850 to 1900 the Holy Spirit did something significant. He splits the lecture into two clear halves: the first, "what the Holy Spirit did"; the second, "what the devil did." It's the tidiest structure in the whole series, and I've kept it intact.
V. The Great Revival of 1857-1859
Pawson tells it: in 1857, revival broke out, not in England first, but in America, sweeping roughly 1 million people into the church within a few years. It spread "like a prairie fire" to Ulster (Northern Ireland), then to England by 1859, adding roughly another million. He cites Dr J. Edwin Orr's book, The Evangelical Awakening, as his source. And in the middle of that revival, a 20-year-old businessman named Dwight L. Moody was converted.
Kit's note
A true story, but the starting point is smaller and more specific than "revival broke out" suggests. On 23 September 1857, Jeremiah Calvin Lanphier, a 48-year-old lay missionary, advertised a weekly noon prayer meeting in a room on Fulton Street, New York, six blocks from the Stock Exchange. No one came the first half hour; then six men joined. The Panic of 1857 (14 October) hit three weeks later, turning a trickle into a flood: by spring 1858 an estimated 10,000 people were gathering daily across more than 20 New York churches and YMCAs. The "roughly 1 million" figure is J. Edwin Orr's own estimate, not a census figure. No Orr book is titled exactly "The Evangelical Awakening," the real relevant works are The Second Evangelical Awakening in Britain (1949) and ...in America (1952), most likely Pawson (preaching from memory) shortened the title. On Ulster: the revival there didn't simply "catch fire" from America, it had its own independent start, four young men including James McQuilkin began a prayer group at a schoolhouse in Kells, Co. Antrim, in late 1857, the first convert coming 1 January 1858, before full news of the American revival had spread. On "another million in England": that figure is actually the sum across the whole UK over several years, not England alone in 1859: Ulster roughly 100,000, Wales roughly 80,000-110,000, Scotland roughly 300,000, and England reaching roughly 600,000 only by 1864, not 1859. On Moody: he was converted on 21 April 1855, at age 18, two years before Fulton Street began, by his Sunday school teacher, Edward Kimball, in a Boston shoe warehouse, not "during the revival" of 1857.
Source: J. Edwin Orr, The Event of the Century (1989); 1859 Ulster revival (Wikipedia, citing William Gibson, The Year of Grace); Christianity.com, "Dwight L. Moody Was Converted."
Not One Fire, But Five
The Great Revival spreading across five lands, 1857–1864
USA
23/9/1857
Lanphier begins the noon prayer meeting, Fulton Street, New York. ~1 million converted 1858–59 (J. Edwin Orr's estimate).
Ulster
1/1/1858
First convert at Kells, Co. Antrim, an origin independent of America. ~100,000 converts (1859).
Wales
1859
~80,000–110,000 converts.
Scotland
1859
~300,000 converts.
England
by 1864
~600,000 converts, reached across several years, not 1859 alone.
A combined “over a million” across the UK, but reached cumulatively over several years into the mid-1860s, not “another million in England” within 1859 alone as the sermon suggests.
VI. Three figures of the 1860s
From that revival, per Pawson, sprang a generation of great figures. He picks three names. Dr Thomas Barnardo, training to be a doctor bound for China, but staying in London after discovering homeless boys sleeping under tarpaulins at Billingsgate fish market, and founding homes under the motto "no destitute child ever refused admission." William Booth, a Methodist minister refused permission for unconventional street evangelism, whose wife Catherine shouted "Never, William, never!" from the gallery, and who together founded the Salvation Army. And Hudson Taylor, who in 1865 founded the China Inland Mission, distinctive for being interdenominational and for a "faith" principle of never publicly soliciting funds.
Kit's note
All three stories are true, with a few details to adjust. Barnardo opened his first home on Stepney Causeway in 1870; the "ever-open door" motto was only formalized in 1874, after the death of a boy nicknamed "Carrots" who'd been turned away because the home was full, four years after opening, not the founding motto. On Booth: he was ordained in 1858 not in mainstream Methodism but in the Methodist New Connexion branch; at the 1861 Liverpool conference he was refused release from settled ministry to focus on itinerant evangelism, and resigned within two months, the "drums and trumpets" story describes a much later Salvation Army phase (the 1880s), not the 1861 dispute, which was about denominational structure. Catherine's famous line also has several documented variants ("Never!", "No, never"), suggesting it wasn't recorded verbatim at the time but retold repeatedly afterward. On Hudson Taylor: his spiritual crisis happened on Brighton beach on 25 June 1865; and the claim that missions before this were "entirely denominational" overstates it, the London Missionary Society (1795) itself, home to Robert Morrison and later Livingstone, was founded with an explicitly interdenominational purpose, 70 years before CIM. What Taylor genuinely innovated was the "faith" principle (no public fundraising, no fixed salary) and accepting people without university degrees or elite backgrounds, not interdenominationalism itself.
Source: SOFII.org, "Dr Barnardo's Homes"; Wikipedia "William Booth"; Roger J. Green, The Life and Ministry of William Booth (2005); A.J. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor and China's Open Century (1981-89).
Three children sleeping under tarpaulins at a fish market. A shout from the gallery. One evening on Brighton beach when a man couldn't bear to take Communion. The Holy Spirit doesn't need a committee to start a movement.
VII. The 1870s-1890s: students, conventions, and a hundred students at Mount Hermon
Pawson walks the congregation through a chain of events: William Pennefather built Mildmay Hall (1870), invited Moody to preach in 1872; Moody and singer Ira Sankey arrived in Britain in 1873, preaching to 2.5 million people in London that very year; the first Keswick Convention in 1875; CICCU founded 1876, OICCU 1879; the Revised Version Bible published in 1880 but never becoming popular; Moody preaching at Cambridge in 1882; the "Cambridge Seven" (including national cricketer C.T. Studd) departing for China in 1885; Robert Wilder at Princeton in 1886 calling for 1,000 student volunteers, forming the Student Volunteer Movement, formally launched at Edinburgh in 1892 with the motto "the evangelization of the world in this generation."
Kit's note
This is the most accurate chain of proper names but the loosest on dates in the whole lecture. Pennefather built Mildmay around 1869-70 but died on 30 April 1873, before Moody actually set foot in England that June, he never saw the campaign he'd set in motion. The "2.5 million people in London in 1873" figure belongs to a different event: it's the total attendance at the climactic finale at the Royal Agricultural Hall, Islington, held March-July 1875, not 1873 (in 1873 Moody had only just begun modestly in York). CICCU was formally founded on 9 March 1877, not 1876 (1876 was a preparatory week of preaching). The Revised Version New Testament was published in 1881, not 1880; and it was actually the first post-KJV Bible to gain real popular acceptance, though it never displaced the KJV in ordinary use, "never became popular" needs nuance. On the "Cambridge Seven": correct, they departed February 1885, reaching Shanghai 18 March 1885. On Robert Wilder and Princeton: the pivotal event didn't happen at Princeton but at Moody's summer conference at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, in July 1886, where Wilder and Arthur T. Pierson led 251 students from roughly 89 colleges; 100 signed the pledge (the "Mount Hermon Hundred," including John R. Mott), not 1,000. And SVM's first international convention was held in Cleveland, Ohio, in February-March 1891, not Edinburgh 1892; what happened in Britain around 1892 was the founding of a sister organization, the British Student Volunteer Missionary Union.
Source: J.C. Pollock, Moody: A Biographical Portrait (1963); CICCU official history (ciccu.org.uk); Wikipedia "Student Volunteer Movement"; Dana L. Robert, "Occupy Till I Come: A.T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World."
VIII. The age of women hymn writers
Pawson closes the "what the Holy Spirit did" section with an observation: the 19th century was an age of hymns written by women, unlike the 18th century of Wesley and Watts. He names Fanny Crosby (including "Fill Thou My Life"), Frances Ridley Havergal, Christina Rossetti, Cecil Frances Alexander, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna Waring, Arabella Catherine Hankey, and notes that even Prime Minister Gladstone wrote a hymn.
Kit's note
The broad observation has real basis but is drawn too narrowly, and there's one notable misattribution. "Fill Thou My Life, O Lord My God" isn't Fanny Crosby's, it's by Scottish Presbyterian minister Horatius Bonar (1866), notable because it inserts a male writer into a list meant to illustrate women's hymn writing. Hankey's full name is recorded as Arabella Katherine Hankey (not "Catherine"). Gladstone's "hymn" was actually an 1848 Latin translation he made of Toplady's "Rock of Ages," not an original composition. Christina Rossetti and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote those texts as poems, set to music as hymns only after their deaths (Rossetti died 1894, Gustav Holst's "Cranham" tune came in 1906). Most importantly: hymn historians like Ian Bradley (Abide With Me, 1997) and J.R. Watson (The English Hymn, 1999) show male Victorian hymn writers, Henry Francis Lyte ("Abide With Me"), Sabine Baring-Gould ("Onward Christian Soldiers"), John Ellerton, were equally prolific in the same decades, and the 18th century itself already had a major female hymnist, Anne Steele (1717-1778). Worth adding: the parallel Catholic hymn revival of this same period was almost entirely male, convert-priests from the Oxford Movement: Newman ("Lead, Kindly Light"), Faber ("Faith of Our Fathers"), Caswall, an interesting counterpoint to Pawson's "age of women" framing, which holds only for the Nonconformist Protestant side.
Source: Hymnary.org, "Fill Thou My Life"; Ian Bradley, Abide With Me (SCM Press, 1997); J.R. Watson, The English Hymn (Oxford, 1999); CBE International, "English Women Hymnwriters."
IX. What the devil did, first: Rome became more Roman than ever
Pawson's tone shifts. In the second half of the lecture, he lists five things "the devil did" in those same fifty years. The first: the Pope revived the Jesuit order, in 1850 restored the English Catholic hierarchy, in 1854 proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception ("Mary was born without sin"), and in 1870 the First Vatican Council declared the Pope infallible when ruling ex cathedra.
Kit's note
Four things to untangle. One, the Jesuit order wasn't "revived" in this period at all, it was suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 and restored by Pius VII in 1814, both events decades before Pius IX's papacy (1846-1878), not part of the "wave" Pawson is describing. Two, the Immaculate Conception dogma (Ineffabilis Deus, 8 December 1854) concerns Mary being preserved from original sin "from the first instant of her conception," not "born without sin," a common conflation with Christ's virgin birth. And the belief wasn't suddenly "pressured" by Jesuits, it had circulated in Catholic theology since at least Duns Scotus (13th century); Pius IX polled every Catholic bishop worldwide from 1849 before proclaiming it. Three, the definition of papal infallibility (Pastor Aeternus, 18 July 1870) is far narrower than popular understanding: it applies only when the Pope, as supreme pastor, formally defines a doctrine of faith or morals ex cathedra, not to his everyday statements, opinions, or disciplinary acts, and the dogma has been formally exercised only once since then, in 1950, when Pius XII proclaimed the Assumption of Mary. Four, the Vatican I vote was hardly "uncontested": the German Catholic historian Ignaz von Döllinger publicly rejected the dogma and was excommunicated, roughly 1,400 German Catholics signed a declaration of protest, and eventually some 60,000 laypeople left Rome to found the Old Catholic Church. And just two months after the dogma was proclaimed, Italian troops captured Rome (20 September 1870), ending the Papal States that had existed since the 8th century, Pius IX declared himself a "prisoner of the Vatican" until 1929, a coincidence of maximal spiritual claim and total loss of temporal sovereignty historians don't treat as accidental.
Source: Wikipedia "Suppression of the Society of Jesus," "Ineffabilis Deus," "Pastor aeternus," "First Vatican Council"; Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes 1830-1914 (Oxford, 1998).
Maximal Claim, Right Before Losing It All
Rome, 1773–1950
1773 / 1814
Jesuits suppressed, then restored, decades before Pius IX
1850
English Catholic hierarchy restored (Wiseman, Abp. of Westminster)
1854
Immaculate Conception dogma (Ineffabilis Deus)
1869–70
First Vatican Council; Pastor Aeternus declares papal infallibility (18 Jul 1870)
20/9/1870
Italian troops capture Rome, ending the Papal States that had existed since the 8th century
1871
Döllinger excommunicated; ~60,000 laity form the Old Catholic Church
1950
Infallibility dogma exercised ex cathedra for the first time (the Assumption)
In that same summer of 1870, Rome declared itself more infallible than ever, and lost its earthly kingdom for good. That's not a coincidence history overlooks.
X. What the devil did, second: Darwin and the imaginary war between science and faith
Pawson gives extended attention to Charles Darwin, stressing that he never said "men come from monkeys," that On the Origin of Species (1859) ends by affirming a Creator, and that the tragedy was mutual misunderstanding, science claiming evolution was "proved fact" when it wasn't, faith claiming the Bible said things it didn't.
Kit's note
Pawson is right on the core point, Darwin's real claim was common ancestry, not "men from monkeys," but two things need adjusting. One, the famous closing line invoking "the Creator" ("breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or into one") is not in the original 1859 first edition. The phrase "by the Creator" was only added in the second edition, released just seven weeks later, on 7 January 1860, plausibly a concession to religious reaction, and Darwin himself later regretted it: he wrote to Hooker in 1863, "I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion." His personal faith eroded gradually, compounded by his daughter Annie's death in 1851, and he identified as agnostic, explicitly stating he had never been "an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God." Two, and more importantly: the "warfare between science and religion" framing both Pawson and most popular tellings assume is now considered by historians of science (Ronald Numbers, John Hedley Brooke) to be a historiographical myth, manufactured chiefly by two late-19th-century polemical books (John William Draper, 1874; Andrew Dickson White, 1896). The reality was far more accommodating: Presbyterian botanist Asa Gray defended the compatibility of natural selection and divine design directly in correspondence with Darwin; conservative Princeton theologian B.B. Warfield wrote "I do not think that there is any general statement in the Bible... that need be opposed to evolution"; and Cardinal John Henry Newman himself, in 1868, suggested God could have established natural laws "millions of ages ago" and let them work out evolutionary outcomes. Not "two sides at war then reconciled," but many sides accommodating almost immediately.
Source: Darwin Online (darwin-online.org.uk), collating 1st and 2nd editions of Origin of Species; Darwin Correspondence Project, letter to Hooker, 29 March 1863; Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Harvard, 2009).
XI. What the devil did, third: atheism, agnosticism, and Karl Marx
Pawson runs through a list of names: Thomas Carlyle (trained for the ministry, became agnostic), George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans, author of Mill on the Floss), John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Schopenhauer and Feuerbach ("man has made God in his own image, and God is simply a dream"), Nietzsche ("will to power," whom Pawson says laid the foundation for Hitler's ideology), Robert Ingersoll, and finally, Karl Marx, who published Das Kapital in 1867, and the line "religion is the opiate of the masses," which Pawson says Marx "borrowed from Charles Kingsley."
Kit's note
This is the most serious error in the entire second lecture. Marx's line, "Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes" ("Religion ... is the opium of the people"), appears in his Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, written in 1843, published February 1844. Charles Kingsley's comparable line ("an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient") dates to 1847, three to four years later. Marx could not have "borrowed" from a text that didn't yet exist. If there was any influence, the nearest precedents are Novalis (1798) and Heinrich Heine (1840), Marx's close friend in Paris in the early 1840s. On Nietzsche and Hitler: this too is a documented historical distortion, not a real lineage of ideas. Nietzsche explicitly and repeatedly opposed antisemitism and German nationalism in his own writings; it was his own sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, an actual ultranationalist, who edited his unpublished notes after his 1889 mental collapse to fit völkisch ideology, manufacturing the Nazi-friendly "Nietzsche" later promoted by the Third Reich, a posthumous fabrication scholar Walter Kaufmann exposed from 1950 onward. On Robert Ingersoll: no English lecture tour is recorded in his standard biography, his career was overwhelmingly American, making the bus-stop anecdote most likely a recurring preaching illustration, not a historical event. Worth adding: Pawson's whole "19th-century atheism" frame is told entirely as a battle of ideas among British Protestant intellectuals. It was actually Russian Orthodoxy that paid the steepest price for this atheism in the following century: after the 1917 Revolution, the Soviet state executed 28 Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 priests in 1922-1926 alone, and the number of functioning parishes collapsed from roughly 54,000 before WWI to about 500 by 1940.
Source: Wikipedia "Religion is the opium of the people," citing Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (1844); Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950); Dimitry Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917-1982 (1984).
XII. What the devil did, fourth: "criticism," and the scholars who lost their chairs
The fourth thing Pawson calls the devil's "most subtle weapon": treating the Bible as an entirely human book, subject to every human error. He tells of Bishop John William Colenso, "excommunicated" for arguing Moses probably never lived and Joshua was a myth; and Professor William Robertson Smith, losing his Hebrew chair "at the University of Edinburgh" for similar views.
Kit's note
Both stories are true but oversimplified, and one location detail is flatly wrong. Colenso, consecrated Bishop of Natal in 1853, published The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined (1862-1879) questioning the historicity of the Flood and the Exodus based on population figures that seemed impossible, not a flat statement that "Moses never lived." In December 1863, Bishop Robert Gray of Cape Town purported to "excommunicate" him and consecrated a rival bishop, but the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London ruled Gray had no legal jurisdiction over Natal, voiding the sentence. Colenso remained the officially recognized Bishop of Natal until his 1883 death, never accepting the excommunication as valid. On Robertson Smith: this is a location error, he held the Hebrew chair at the Free Church College, Aberdeen (from 1870), not the University of Edinburgh. His article "Bible" for the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1875) triggered a heresy process in 1878, he was dismissed from his Aberdeen chair in 1881 (an administrative decision, not a formal heresy conviction), then moved to Cambridge, became Professor of Arabic, and died in 1894 aged 47. Both Wellhausen (who systematized the "documentary hypothesis" Pawson describes without naming) and Robertson Smith considered themselves devout Christians doing historical philology, not secretly planted atheists, a point modern historians of the movement (John Rogerson) stress but Pawson skips entirely.
Source: Jeff Guy, The Heretic: A Study of the Life of John William Colenso (1983); Bernhard Maier, William Robertson Smith: His Life, His Work and His Times (2009); Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, In re the Bishop of Natal (1865).
XIII. What the devil did, fifth: new cults from the American seaboard
The last thing: the devil raised up "false cults" from the Atlantic seaboard of America, holding a Bible in hand but denying the deity of Jesus. Pawson lists: the Mormons (Joseph Smith, 1830), the Seventh-day Adventists (1831), Spiritism (1848), Christian Science (1876), and the Jehovah's Witnesses, "the biggest one that started up in this period."
Kit's note
All five movements are real, and Pawson's shared geography is close but imprecise: rather than "the Atlantic seaboard," the real common thread was the "Burned-over District," an inland strip of western New York state, named by revivalist Charles Grandison Finney because it had been swept by so many waves of revival there was nothing left to "burn," which directly produced Mormonism (Palmyra/Fayette), the Miller/Adventist movement, and Spiritualism. On dates: Mormonism is correct, the Church of Christ was organized by Joseph Smith on 6 April 1830. Adventism is the most badly off: 1831 was only the year William Miller began public preaching, while the Seventh-day Adventist Church itself was not formally founded until 21 May 1863, in Battle Creek, Michigan, after the 1844 "Great Disappointment" when Miller's predicted Second Coming failed to occur, a 32-year process compressed into a single figure. Spiritualism is correct: the Fox sisters' "spirit rapping" began in Hydesville, New York, on 31 March 1848. Christian Science is off by one to four years depending on the milestone: Mary Baker Eddy self-published Science and Health in 1875; the Church of Christ, Scientist was chartered in Massachusetts in 1879; no milestone lands on 1876. Jehovah's Witnesses is a six-decade process, not an event: Charles Taze Russell formed a Bible study group in 1870, Zion's Watch Tower magazine launched in 1879, the Society was established in 1881, and the name "Jehovah's Witnesses" was only adopted on 26 July 1931, 15 years after Russell's death. On the shared theological claim of "denying Jesus's deity": true for Jehovah's Witnesses and, differently, for Christian Science, but false for Seventh-day Adventism, which is fully Trinitarian, a point the very reference book of Protestant counter-cult apologetics, Walter Martin's The Kingdom of the Cults (1965), later acknowledged too, removing Adventism from the "cult" category in later editions.
Source: Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-over District (1950); George R. Knight, Millennial Fever and the End of the World (1993); M. James Penton, Apocalypse Delayed (1985/1997); Seventh-day Adventist Church, "28 Fundamental Beliefs."
The Holy Spirit didn't work any less in the second half of the 19th century. But the devil, in Pawson's own words, had "mobilized his forces and had them waiting." Both stories are true, and the second one is the bill the 20th century would have to pay.
Pawson closes the second lecture with an image: two men writing in 1850, unknown to each other, not knowing they would become the greatest hindrance to the Christian faith for the next hundred years. One was Karl Marx, writing Das Kapital in the British Museum. The other was Charles Darwin, freshly back from his voyage on the Beagle, writing a book about nature. And, Pawson says, it's as if heaven knew the attack was coming, because the Holy Spirit chose that very year, 1859, to pour out a revival, preparing the Church for the next fifty years, and then for a 20th century that, as the third lecture will tell, would carry the name of three other isms: Liberalism, Ecumenism, and Pentecostalism.
PHẦN BA: 1900–1968 — HAI CUỘC THẾ CHIẾN VÀ BA CHỮ ISM
The third lecture, preached in 1967, opens with three letters from Revelation, addressed to the churches of Sardis ("you have the name of being alive, and you are dead"), Philadelphia ("I have set before you an open door which no one is able to shut"), and Laodicea ("you are lukewarm, neither cold nor hot"). Pawson uses these three images to frame the whole 20th century: Britain entered it with absolute confidence that this would be a century of peace and prosperity, "up and up and up," a confidence shattered by two world wars.
He gives a figure: in 1800, roughly 19% of the world's population were nominal Christians; entering the 20th century, that figure had risen to 29.5%. Then he lists the factors making the 20th century a battleground: spreading secularism, communism ruling a third of humanity (China the clearest example, once home to hundreds of missionaries, now home to none), nationalism causing missionaries to be seen as "Western imperialists," the disintegration of Western civilization (quoting Professor Gilbert Murray), and a revival of ancient religions. But he also affirms: the Church has never been bigger than now, with "15 new Christians every minute," and he mentions the Wycliffe Bible Translators, founded in 1933 under the motto "2,000 tongues to go."
Kit's note
The percentage figure is understated, likely because Pawson was drawing on an older missionary-statistics source (like the World Christian Handbook, editions 1949-1968) rather than modern scholarly data. By today's standard reconstruction (David Barrett, World Christian Encyclopedia, 1982, and the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell), the Christian share in 1900 was roughly 34.5% of world population (about 558 million of 1.6 billion), well above Pawson's 29.5%, though the upward direction is correct. One striking detail Pawson doesn't mention: in 1900, roughly 93% of the world's Christians lived in Europe and the Americas, a geographic concentration that would completely invert over the following century, a thesis historian Philip Jenkins made famous in The Next Christendom (2002). On Wycliffe: William Cameron Townsend founded "Camp Wycliffe" and the Summer Institute of Linguistics together in 1934, not 1933, and Wycliffe Bible Translators only split off as a separate sending agency in 1942. The phrase "2,000 tongues to go" comes from the title of a popular biography published in 1959/1964, not a founding-era motto from 1933. The "15 new Christians every minute" figure couldn't be traced to a verifiable source in this pass, possibly a rhetorical statistic characteristic of mid-century evangelical mission literature. And one large gap: Pawson tells the whole communism story through the lens of Protestant mission statistics. The parallel, and far more brutal, story is Russian Orthodoxy's survival under Stalin (see Section XI above) and the Soviet Union's forced "reunification" of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church into the Moscow Patriarchate at the staged "Synod of Lviv" in 1946, a church that survived only underground until its legal re-emergence in 1989-91.
Source: Todd M. Johnson & Gina A. Zurlo, Center for the Study of Global Christianity; David B. Barrett, World Christian Encyclopedia (1982); Wikipedia "William Cameron Townsend"; Dimitry Pospielovsky (1984); Bohdan Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State, 1939-1950 (1996).
How Much of the World Was Christian?
Nominal Christian share of world population, 1800–1970
Dashed grey = the figures Pawson cites in his 1967 sermon. Gold = the modern scholarly reconstruction (Barrett/World Christian Encyclopedia, Center for the Study of Global Christianity). The upward direction is right; the magnitude is understated in the sermon.
Three twentieth-century theological currents
Three currents that shaped the 20th-century Church
1
Liberalism
Personal experience, not Scripture, as the test of truth. Barth/Brunner pull the pendulum partway back; Bultmann/Tillich/Robinson push it forward again.
2
Ecumenism
From Edinburgh 1910 to the World Council of Churches (1948). Running in parallel, and never mentioned by Pawson: the Second Vatican Council (1962–65).
3
Pentecostalism
From a stable on Azusa Street (1906) to one of Protestantism's largest movements, then spreading into Catholicism itself via Duquesne (1967).
XIV. The first ism: Liberalism, and a God without wrath
Pawson says he'll speak about three isms that shaped the 20th-century Church: Liberalism, Ecumenism, and Pentecostalism. The first, he says, originated in Germany, making personal experience, not the Bible or the Church, the final test of truth, leading to the removal of hell, miracles, and God's wrath. He quotes a line he attributes to "Reinhold Niebuhr": "a God without wrath who brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment, through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." Two world wars, he says, drove two Swiss theologians, Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, to swing the pendulum back, preaching sin and atonement again, but they never fully returned to believing the Bible was the literal Word of God, so the pendulum swung forward again, into a new "radicalism," Bultmann, Tillich, and the Bishop of Woolwich, John A.T. Robinson, whose followers, Pawson says, proclaimed "God is dead." He sets Billy Graham, with his catchphrase "the Bible says," as the evangelical counterweight.
Kit's note
Several layers to unpack. First, the section's most famous quotation is misattributed: the "a God without wrath..." line is H. Richard Niebuhr's, not his brother Reinhold's, from The Kingdom of God in America (1937), an easy mix-up since both brothers were prominent theological ethicists of the same era. On Barth: his mature position (Church Dogmatics I/1, 1932) is the "threefold form of the Word of God," holding Scripture as a fallible human witness to revelation, not identical with revelation itself, he did genuinely reject verbal-plenary inspiration in the conservative Protestant sense, which makes Pawson's critique a real theological point, made precisely by J.I. Packer in Fundamentalism and the Word of God (1958), not a fabrication, but saying Barth "never" held Scripture to be the Word of God also overstates it, he affirmed Scripture becomes the Word of God in the event of revelation, just not as a static, inerrant text. On Bultmann, Tillich, and Robinson: each needs separate treatment. Bultmann (his 1941 lecture "New Testament and Mythology") saw himself as correcting both liberal rationalism and naive literalism, not simply reviving liberalism. Tillich (Systematic Theology, 1951-63) redefined God as "Being-itself" but never joined America's "Death of God" movement. And Robinson, though his book Honest to God (1963) genuinely popularized Tillich's and Bonhoeffer's ideas for lay readers and provoked fierce controversy (Archbishop Michael Ramsey publicly rebuked it, C.S. Lewis quipped "I prefer being honest to being honest to God"), Robinson himself, on his deathbed in 1983, said he had "never doubted the essential truth of Christianity," an important distinction from the actual American "Death of God" theologians (Thomas J.J. Altizer, William Hamilton, the phrase itself coined by Gabriel Vahanian, 1961), which made Time magazine's famous cover on 8 April 1966. And what Pawson doesn't mention at all: right in the middle of this period, the Second Vatican Council promulgated Dei Verbum (18 November 1965), drafted with input from Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) and Yves Congar, offering its own distinctly Catholic answer, fusing Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium while cautiously endorsing historical-critical method, a third path different from both Protestant liberalism and literal biblical inerrancy. And Orthodoxy, entirely absent from Pawson's account, has its own voice through theologian Georges Florovsky, who in 1937 diagnosed Orthodox theology as trapped in a "Western captivity," borrowing uncritically from both Catholic Scholasticism and Protestant Idealism, and called for a return to the Greek Fathers, a view that treats the whole "Scripture vs. Church authority" axis Pawson constructs as a specifically Western argument.
Source: H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (1937); Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1 (1932); J.I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God (1958); Wikipedia "Honest to God," "Death of God"; Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum (1965); Georges Florovsky, Puti russkogo bogosloviya (1937).
The pendulum swings from liberal, to neo-orthodox, and back toward radical, and each swing, Pawson says, is missing exactly one thing: coming back to believing this book is really God's word. But at that very same moment, another council, in another place, was trying a third answer he never once mentions.
XV. The second ism: Ecumenism, and the door Pawson closed too soon
Pawson traces the history of ecumenism starting from the Evangelical Alliance (1845), through Keswick's motto "All One in Christ Jesus" (1875), to the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, which he treats as the formal starting point, with an anecdote about an Indian Christian introducing himself as "a Canadian Baptist." From this came two movements, Faith and Order and Life and Work, merging into the World Council of Churches, founded in 1938 but delayed by WWII until its first meeting in Amsterdam in 1948 with 147 denominations. He tells of church unions: Canada (1925), the Church of Scotland (1929), British Methodism (1932), the Church of South India (1947). He notes the Council has never included Roman Catholics but has included many Orthodox churches. He predicts, preaching in early 1967, that the ongoing Anglican-Methodist unity talks will fail but a later attempt will succeed, and that Presbyterians and Congregationalists will unite within 5-10 years.
Kit's note
On dates: the Evangelical Alliance was actually founded in 1846, not 1845 (1845 was a preliminary meeting). The 1910 Edinburgh conference happened as described, chaired by John R. Mott, an American Methodist layman, but notably it excluded Roman Catholics and Orthodox entirely, and only 18 of roughly 1,215 delegates came from outside the Western world. Faith and Order (first conference at Lausanne, 1927) and Life and Work (first conference at Stockholm, 1925) agreed to merge in 1937, drafted a provisional constitution at Utrecht in 1938, and the World Council of Churches genuinely first met in Amsterdam 22 August-4 September 1948, as Pawson says. His prediction about Anglican-Methodist union turned out remarkably accurate: the unity scheme was rejected by the Church of England's Convocations in 1969 (only 69%, six points short of the required 75%) and failed again in 1972 (65.81%). And his prediction about Presbyterian-Congregationalist union was also exactly right: the United Reformed Church was formed in 1972, squarely inside the "5-10 years" window he gave. But there is one large gap, and I've deliberately not left it just in a margin note: Pawson's sermon, preached in 1967, never once mentions the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), arguably the single most consequential ecumenical event of the entire 20th century, unfolding in the exact middle of the years he's narrating. Convened by Pope John XXIII (announced 25 January 1959, opened 11 October 1962) and completed under Pope Paul VI across four sessions ending 8 December 1965, the council produced Sacrosanctum Concilium (permitting Mass in vernacular languages), Unitatis Redintegratio (the decree on ecumenism, calling other Christians "separated brethren" in "imperfect communion"), Nostra Aetate (repudiating collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion), and Dignitatis Humanae (affirming religious liberty, reversing Pius IX-era teaching). Separately, Pope Paul VI met Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I in Jerusalem in January 1964, and on 7 December 1965 both sides simultaneously read a Joint Declaration in Rome and Istanbul, lifting (without formally ending) the mutual excommunications of 1054, though some Orthodox voices, like Metropolitan Philaret of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, publicly denounced the move as a dangerous ecumenist compromise. Why would a British evangelical preacher, speaking to an evangelical congregation in 1967, stay completely silent about this? Probably not for lack of knowledge, but because his narrative frame, from the Evangelical Alliance to the World Council of Churches, is a genealogy of his own tradition, in which Rome, however significant its own council, is still treated as outside that story.
Source: Ian Randall & David Hilborn, One Body in Christ (2001); Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (2009); John W. O'Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Harvard, 2008); Wikipedia "Second Vatican Council," "Unitatis Redintegratio."
Two Parallel Tracks, Rarely Told Together
The World Council of Churches and Vatican II, 1910–1965
Protestant track
1910
World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh
1937
Faith and Order + Life and Work agree to merge
1948
First Assembly, Amsterdam, 147 denominations
1961
New Delhi: from “unity” to organic “union”
Catholic track (Pawson never mentions)
1959
John XXIII announces the council
1962
Vatican II opens
1964
Unitatis Redintegratio; Paul VI meets Athenagoras I in Jerusalem
1965
1054 excommunications lifted, read simultaneously in Rome and Istanbul
The century's two biggest ecumenical stories ran at the very same time, in the very same decade, and almost never intersect in any popular Protestant telling from that era.
XVI. The third ism: Pentecostalism, born in a stable
The final ism, Pawson says, "like Christianity itself, was born in a stable," on Azusa Street, Los Angeles, in 1906. Norwegian Methodist minister T.B. Barrett went to New York intending to reach Los Angeles but couldn't afford to travel further, heard about it by correspondence, and returned to Norway with his own Pentecostal experience. Anglican vicar Alexander Boddy in Sunderland invited him, and revival broke out there in 1907. By 1967, Pawson says, Pentecostalism was nearly tied with Baptists as the world's largest Protestant grouping, with especially explosive growth in Latin America, and from around 1960, a "new Pentecostalism" (the charismatic movement) began appearing in mainline denominations, starting with Episcopal ministers in America.
Kit's note
The "born in a stable" detail turns out to be literally true: 312 Azusa Street was originally built as an African Methodist Episcopal church, then converted into a livery stable with rooming space above (rent $8/month). But there's the largest gap in all three lectures here: Pawson never once names the revival's central leader, William J. Seymour, the son of former slaves, blind in one eye, who had studied under Charles Parham in Houston (listening through a doorway because Jim Crow segregation barred him from the classroom), then led the Azusa Street Mission continuously for nearly a decade. What astonished contemporary observers was that the crowds there were Black, white, Latino, and Asian worshipping together, startling for the Jim Crow era. Omitting Seymour erases the revival's Black leadership and its extraordinary interracial character. On Barratt: the correct name is Thomas Ball Barratt (not "Barrett"), born in Cornwall, England, emigrated and naturalized in Norway; his 1906 New York trip was originally to raise funds for a building project, not to reach Los Angeles; he received his Spirit baptism experience right there in New York on 7 October 1906, not after visiting Azusa Street. On the 1967 scale: no independently verifiable source was found for the "nearly tied with Baptists" or "30 million members" claim, though explosive growth was real, especially in Brazil (from roughly 100,000 adherents in 1930 to over 3 million by 1965). On the "new Pentecostalism" from 1960: the most clearly documented event is Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett at St. Mark's, Van Nuys, California, announcing from the pulpit on 3 April 1960 that he had received Spirit baptism, an event generally regarded as the formal starting point of the charismatic movement in mainline denominations. And one thing Pawson, preaching in exactly February 1967, couldn't have known: just weeks before this sermon, the "Duquesne Weekend" (17-19 February 1967) at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, launched the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, later embraced by Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and Francis, claiming over 160 million members by 2013, a remarkable, nearly simultaneous parallel, never mentioned in a sermon by a Protestant minister speaking about that very phenomenon.
Source: Cecil M. Robeck Jr., The Azusa Street Mission and Revival (2006); Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition (1997); Wikipedia "Thomas Ball Barratt," "Dennis Bennett," "Catholic Charismatic Renewal."
From One Stable to Six Continents
Pentecostalism's spread across the world, 1906–1967
A schematic diagram, not a geographically precise map. Dashed gold line = the charismatic branch spreading into mainline and Catholic churches from 1960.
Pawson closes this section with four things he says he learned from the Pentecostal movement: it empowers ordinary people, regardless of degree or status; it shows that tongues loosened for praise will also be loosened for witness; it restores participatory worship, not just a minister's performance; and above all, it restores faith that God is still at work, the most living answer to the "God is dead" movement he'd just described in the previous section.
Three isms, three different answers to the same question: what's left when two world wars have burned away a century's optimism? One answer turned to experience. One turned to each other. One turned to power. Pawson believed only one of the three was fully right. But all three, in their own way, are evidence the Church was never dead, however many times it was pronounced so.
Closing: Jesus builds his Church
Pawson ends the series' final lecture with a question he doesn't fully answer that evening: will the Church win the battle, or will it fade away? He promises to speak the following week about the future, from 1968 until Christ's return. But he closes with the same thing he closed every lecture in the whole series with: Jesus is building his Church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.
Kit's note
This isn't a correction, it's a personal note, one I want to leave unedited. After weeks spent researching, cross-checking, and finding dozens of places where Pawson misremembered a date or merged two events into one, what I came away with wasn't that he'd been careless. What I came away with was that fifty minutes of preaching was never going to hold a century and a half of history, and that the act of filling that gap, with research, with cross-checking, with inviting in a Catholic or Orthodox voice the original sermon had no room for, is the most honest way to honor what he was actually trying to do: tell the story of a Church that, surrounded by Marx, Darwin, two world wars, and three isms, never once stopped growing.