Storia della Chiesa – Parte 5: Il secolo del cuore e i tre ismi (1800–1968)
Nota: Questo pezzo unisce tre lezioni separate dalla serie Storia della Chiesa di David Pawson: 1800–1850 (49,7 minuti), 1850–1900 (51,1 minuti) e 1900–1968 (53,2 minuti, predicato…
In questo saggio, AI ha aiutato a cercare, verificare, tradurre e curare; argomento e conclusioni sono dell’autore.
Il filo dell’argomentazione, il significato e le conclusioni sono dell’autore. Scegliere a quali fonti affidarsi e come comprenderle è giudizio dell’autore, non degli strumenti.
Gli strumenti AI sono stati usati per cercare fonti, confrontare con esse le affermazioni, leggere ampiamente sul tema, portare il testo tra inglese e vietnamita e aiutare con grammatica, chiarezza e ritmo delle frasi.
Ciò che hanno trovato è materiale da valutare, non un verdetto. L’autore ha deciso cosa dire, cosa omettere e cosa significa questo saggio.
Il saggio esce con il nome dell’autore. L’autore ne risponde, compreso ogni errore che dovesse emergere.
Parallelo
Nota: Questo pezzo unisce tre lezioni separate dalla serie Storia della Chiesa di David Pawson: 1800–1850 (49,7 minuti), 1850–1900 (51,1 minuti) e 1900–1968 (53,2 minuti, predicato nel 1967). Le ho riunite tutte e tre in un unico saggio perché raccontano un'unica storia: un XIX secolo che si apre con il cuore che si scalda dopo la fredda ragione dell'Illuminismo, esplode nella più grande espansione missionaria nella storia della Chiesa, poi si imbatte in un contrattacco sistematico che Pawson stesso chiama «ciò che ha fatto il diavolo», e un XX secolo che deve convivere con le conseguenze di quel contrattacco attraverso due guerre mondiali e tre ismi che ancora plasmano la Chiesa oggi.
Dal salotto dei Wesley alle macchine a vapore
La parte 4 si è conclusa nel 1800, con il risveglio evangelico che ha riscaldato un'Inghilterra diventata fredda durante il XVIII secolo. Ma un risveglio non è una destinazione, è un inizio. Le tre conferenze che compongono questa Parte 5 raccontano ciò che accadde dopo: quanto si diffuse quel cuore riscaldato nella prima metà del XIX secolo, come esplose nella seconda metà e quanto costò nelle due guerre mondiali del XX secolo.
PARTE PRIMA: 1800–1850 — FUOCO ROMANTICO E UNA CHIESA IN ESPANSIONE
Pawson apre la prima conferenza con due fatti fisici e un cambiamento emotivo. Fisico: l’Inghilterra si stava urbanizzando a un ritmo senza precedenti (la Rivoluzione industriale) e la sua popolazione stava esplodendo. Emotivo: dopo un XVIII secolo freddo e razionalista, il XIX secolo si apre con un'inversione, il Romanticismo, il cuore che sostituisce la mente.
Fornisce una cifra specifica: l'Inghilterra aveva 5 milioni di persone nel 1800, che aumentarono a 9 milioni nel 1850, e cita il reverendo Malthus, autore di un saggio che metteva in guardia dalla carestia perché la popolazione stava superando le risorse alimentari.
Sul Romanticismo, Pawson elenca una serie di romanzi: Jane Austen che scrive Orgoglio e pregiudizio, Victor Hugo che scrive Notre-Dame de Paris, Thackeray che scrive Vanity Fair, le sorelle Brontë che scrivono Jane Eyre e Cime tempestose, Walter Scott che scrive Ivanhoe, Alexandre Dumas che scrive I tre moschettieri e Il conte di Monte Cristo, e Macaulay che scrive La storia dell'Inghilterra. L'elenco è quasi interamente corretto per quanto riguarda le date, ad eccezione delle ultime due aggiunte: Barchester Towers di Trollope e Lorna Doone di Blackmore, che appartengono in realtà a una generazione vittoriana molto più tarda (1857 e 1869), dai sette ai diciannove anni dopo il limite del 1850 qui descritto.
Da ciò trae una conseguenza religiosa: poiché il cuore ha avuto la meglio sulla testa, la religione è esplosa. Fornisce una cifra: nel 1800, il 5% dei fedeli era anticonformista; nel 1850, quella cifra era del 50%. La chiesa metodista si divise in almeno tre corpi principali, la Chiesa di Scozia si divise in due e sei chiese battiste, inclusa la sua stessa chiesa, Gold Hill, fondarono l'Unione Battista.
Il censimento contro il sermone
Popolazione di Inghilterra e Galles, 1801–1851 (milioni)
Pawson disse «5 milioni nel 1800, fino a 9 milioni nel 1850». Il censimento reale dice qualcosa di molto diverso.
Fonte: registri del censimento del Regno Unito 1801–1851 (ONS, Vision of Britain). La linea grigia tratteggiata indica le cifre citate da Pawson nel sermone. La linea dorata indica i dati reali del censimento.
II. I missionari che sono entrati nel mondo
Pawson dedica la maggior parte della prima conferenza ai missionari. Racconta di Henry Martyn, che «rinunciò a sposare la donna che amava» per andare in India, tradusse il Nuovo Testamento e il Libro della preghiera comune in hindustani, poi andò in Persia e morì a 31 anni.
Poi David Livingstone, nato a Blantyre, in Scozia, originariamente con l'intenzione di raggiungere la Cina ma mandato invece da Dio da Robert Moffat in Sudafrica, sposò la figlia di Moffat e trascorse circa 16 anni aprendo l'entroterra africano ai missionari.
Nomina anche Alexander Duff (il primo missionario della Chiesa di Scozia in India, partito nel 1829), Samuel Marsden («un missionario in Australia e Nuova Zelanda») e Robert Morrison (andato in Cina con la London Missionary Society, produsse un dizionario cinese e una Bibbia).
Le missioni del XIX secolo non furono mai una sola storia, ma tre storie che correvano in parallelo — anglo-protestante, cattolica romana e russo-ortodossa — quasi invisibili l'una all'altra.
III. La coscienza sociale di una Chiesa in risveglio
Pawson indugia più a lungo su William Wilberforce. Wilberforce scrisse un libro sulla «schiavitù spirituale del peccato, non sulla schiavitù fisica», convinse il primo ministro William Pitt a presentare un disegno di legge nel 1807 che abolisse la tratta degli schiavi e poi, 26 anni dopo, nel 1833, visse abbastanza da vedere la schiavitù stessa abolita prima di morire.
Poi descrive le condizioni di lavoro intorno al 1800: bambini di sette anni lavoravano dalle 5 alle 20, bambini di cinque anni scendevano nelle miniere di carbone e aprivano e chiudevano le porte di ventilazione per dodici ore, mentre donne e bambini strisciavano a quattro zampe trascinando carrelli del carbone legati, finché Lord Shaftesbury non fece approvare dal Parlamento una legge del 1842 che vietava alle donne e ai ragazzi sotto i tredici anni di entrare nelle miniere; seguì la «legge delle dieci ore», che limitava l'orario di lavoro e vietava l'impiego dei minori di nove anni.
IV. Tre partiti all'interno della Chiesa d'Inghilterra
Nella sezione finale della prima conferenza, Pawson si rivolge alla Chiesa d'Inghilterra, dove vede tre gruppi: il partito Basso (evangelico, aderente alle Scritture e ai 39 articoli), il partito Ampio (libero sulla dottrina) e il partito Alto (che cerca di recuperare la pratica cattolica pre-riforma).
Una Chiesa, tre direzioni
I tre partiti all'interno della Chiesa d'Inghilterra, 1800–1850
✝
Bassa
Evangelica, saldamente legata alla Scrittura. Più forte a Cambridge sotto Charles Simeon (1783–1836). Produsse la Setta di Clapham (Wilberforce) e la Conferenza del clero di Islington.
○
Ampia
Debole sul piano dottrinale, secondo Pawson «morta, mondana, fredda». Fu da qui, a Dublino nel 1827, che i Fratelli di Plymouth si separarono.
✞
Alta
Cercava di recuperare la pratica precedente alla Riforma. Il Movimento di Oxford (1833), 90 trattati; Newman si converte a Roma nel 1845.
Tutti e tre cercavano di sfuggire alla stessa cosa: una Chiesa governata da un Parlamento che, dopo il 1828–29, non era più esclusivamente anglicano. Semplicemente scelsero tre diverse direzioni d'uscita.
Il partito Basso era più forte a Cambridge, dove Charles Simeon predicò nella chiesa della Santissima Trinità per 54 anni (dal 1783 fino alla morte nel 1836), il primo decennio sotto aperta ostilità parrocchiale. Da esso nacquero due reti: la laica «Clapham Sect» (Wilberforce, Henry Thornton come primo tesoriere della British and Foreign Bible Society e Zachary Macaulay) e la clericale Islington Clerical Conference.
Il partito Ampio, secondo Pawson, era «morto, mondano, freddo»; da questo ambiente, nel 1827 a Dublino, un gruppo di uomini disillusi — Anthony Norris Groves, un missionario in pensione, John Parnell, J.G. Bellett, il dottor Cronin, W.F. Hutchinson e John Nelson Darby, un curato anglicano — iniziò a incontrarsi al di fuori della struttura formale della Chiesa, rifiutando il ministero ordinato e cercando di tornare all'esatto modello di culto del Nuovo Testamento. Da qui nacquero i Fratelli di Plymouth, che in seguito si divisero nei Fratelli esclusivi, guidati da Darby, e nei Fratelli aperti, guidati da George Müller e Henry Craik alla Bethesda Chapel di Bristol.
Poi viene il partito Alto. Pawson racconta che nel 1828 il Test Act fu abrogato, ammettendo cattolici e protestanti anticonformisti in Parlamento; ciò allarmò un gruppo di ecclesiastici di Oxford — John Henry Newman, Richard Hurrell Froude, Edward Pusey, John Keble e Frederick Faber — e contribuì al lancio del Movimento di Oxford. Pubblicarono circa 120 trattati, sostenendo che solo i ministri ordinati dal vescovo fossero validi, che il battesimo dei bambini fosse rigenerazione e che il pane e il vino si trasformassero effettivamente nel corpo e nel sangue di Cristo. Il più controverso, il Tract 90 (1841) di Newman, sosteneva che un sacerdote potesse firmare i 39 articoli mantenendo la propria interpretazione. Newman partì per Roma nel 1845 e divenne cardinale; molti altri lo seguirono.
Tre partiti all'interno di una chiesa, ognuno dei quali cerca di sfuggire alla stessa cosa, una chiesa controllata dallo Stato. Si tornava alla Scrittura. Si è tornati al Medioevo. Solo uno è rimasto fermo.
I primi cinquant'anni del XIX secolo si chiudono così: il cuore si è riscaldato, un'onda missionaria attraversa ogni continente, una coscienza sociale abbastanza forte da abolire la schiavitù e legiferare sull'età lavorativa, e la Chiesa d'Inghilterra si è mossa in tre direzioni contemporaneamente. Ma questo era solo l'atto di apertura. La seconda metà del secolo, come racconta Pawson nella conferenza successiva, è il momento in cui la storia raddoppia la sua velocità e il diavolo, secondo le sue stesse parole, inizia a contrattaccare.
PARTE SECONDA: 1850–1900 — COSA HA FATTO LO SPIRITO SANTO E COSA HA FATTO IL DIAVOLO
Pawson apre la seconda conferenza con un'affermazione: questa è l'era delle donne, l'età vittoriana, e in ogni decennio dal 1850 al 1900 lo Spirito Santo ha fatto qualcosa di significativo. Divide la conferenza in due metà chiare: la prima, «ciò che ha fatto lo Spirito Santo»; la seconda, «ciò che ha fatto il diavolo». È la struttura più ordinata dell'intera serie e l'ho mantenuta intatta.
V. Il grande risveglio del 1857–1859
Pawson lo racconta: nel 1857, scoppiò il risveglio, non prima in Inghilterra ma in America, portando nella chiesa circa 1 milione di persone in pochi anni. Si diffuse «come un incendio nella prateria» nell'Ulster (Irlanda del Nord), poi in Inghilterra nel 1859, aggiungendo all'incirca un altro milione. Cita il libro del dottor J. Edwin Orr, The Evangelical Awakening, come sua fonte. E nel contesto di quella stagione, un giovane commerciante di 18 anni, Dwight L. Moody, si era già convertito nel 1855.
Non un solo fuoco, ma cinque
Il Grande Risveglio si diffonde in cinque terre, 1857–1864
USA
23/9/1857
Lanphier inizia la riunione di preghiera di mezzogiorno, Fulton Street, New York. ~1 milione di convertiti nel 1858–59 (stima di J. Edwin Orr).
Ulster
1/1/1858
Primo convertito a Kells, contea di Antrim: un'origine indipendente dall'America. ~100.000 convertiti (1859).
Galles
1859
~80.000–110.000 convertiti.
Scozia
1859
~300.000 convertiti.
Inghilterra
entro il 1864
~600.000 convertiti, raggiunti nell'arco di diversi anni, non soltanto nel 1859.
Oltre un milione complessivamente nel Regno Unito, ma raggiunti cumulativamente nell'arco di diversi anni fino alla metà degli anni 1860, non «un altro milione in Inghilterra» soltanto nel 1859 come suggerisce il sermone.
VI. Tre figure degli anni 1860
Da quel risveglio, secondo Pawson, nacque una generazione di grandi figure. Sceglie tre nomi. Il dottor Thomas Barnardo si stava formando per diventare medico e partire per la Cina, ma rimase a Londra dopo aver scoperto ragazzi senza casa che dormivano sotto teloni al mercato del pesce di Billingsgate e fondò delle case con il motto «nessun bambino indigente ha mai visto rifiutarsi l'ammissione». William Booth, un ministro metodista, si vide negare il permesso di dedicarsi a un'evangelizzazione di strada non convenzionale; sua moglie Catherine gridò «Mai, William, mai!» dalla galleria, e insieme fondarono l'Esercito della Salvezza. E Hudson Taylor, che nel 1865 fondò la China Inland Mission, nota per il principio di «fede» di non sollecitare mai pubblicamente fondi.
Tre bambini che dormono sotto i teloni in un mercato del pesce. Un grido dalla Galleria. Una sera sulla spiaggia di Brighton un uomo non sopportava di prendere la Comunione. Lo Spirito Santo non ha bisogno di un comitato per avviare un movimento.
VII. Gli anni 1870–1890: studenti, convegni e un centinaio di studenti al Monte Hermon
Pawson accompagna la congregazione attraverso una catena di eventi: William Pennefather costruì Mildmay Hall intorno al 1869–70 e invitò Moody a predicare nel 1872; Moody e il cantante Ira Sankey arrivarono in Gran Bretagna nel 1873, mentre la campagna londinese culminò nel 1875 con 2,5 milioni di presenze complessive; la prima Convenzione di Keswick si tenne nel 1875; il CICCU fu fondato nel 1877 e l'OICCU nel 1879; la Revised Version del Nuovo Testamento fu pubblicata nel 1881; il «Cambridge Seven», tra cui il giocatore di cricket nazionale C.T. Studd, partì per la Cina nel 1885; nel 1886 Robert Wilder e Arthur T. Pierson guidarono a Mount Hermon 251 studenti, dei quali 100 firmarono l'impegno che diede vita al Movimento Volontario Studentesco; la prima convention internazionale dello SVM si tenne a Cleveland nel 1891, con il motto «l'evangelizzazione del mondo in questa generazione».
VIII. L'età delle donne scrittrici di inni
Pawson chiude la sezione «ciò che ha fatto lo Spirito Santo» con un'osservazione: il XIX secolo fu un'epoca di inni scritti da donne, a differenza del XVIII secolo di Wesley e Watts. Nomina Fanny Crosby (incluso «Fill Thou My Life»), Frances Ridley Havergal, Christina Rossetti, Cecil Frances Alexander, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna Waring, Arabella Katherine Hankey e nota che persino il primo ministro Gladstone tradusse un inno.
IX. Quello che ha fatto il diavolo, innanzitutto: Roma è diventata più romana che mai
Il tono di Pawson cambia. Nella seconda metà della conferenza elenca cinque cose che «il diavolo ha fatto» in quegli stessi cinquant'anni. La prima: il papa rianimò l'ordine dei gesuiti, nel 1850 restaurò la gerarchia cattolica inglese, nel 1854 proclamò il dogma dell'Immacolata Concezione («Maria fu preservata dal peccato originale») e nel 1870 il Concilio Vaticano I dichiarò il papa infallibile quando definisce formalmente una dottrina ex cathedra.
La pretesa massima, appena prima di perdere tutto
Roma, 1773–1950
1773 / 1814
I gesuiti vengono soppressi e poi restaurati, decenni prima di Pio IX
1850
La gerarchia cattolica inglese viene restaurata (Wiseman, arcivescovo di Westminster)
1854
Dogma dell'Immacolata Concezione (Ineffabilis Deus)
1869–70
Primo Concilio Vaticano; Pastor Aeternus dichiara l'infallibilità papale (18 luglio 1870)
20/9/1870
Le truppe italiane conquistano Roma, ponendo fine allo Stato Pontificio che esisteva dall'VIII secolo
1871
Döllinger scomunicato; ~60.000 laici formano la Chiesa vetero-cattolica
1950
Il dogma dell'infallibilità viene esercitato ex cathedra per la prima volta (l'Assunzione)
In quella stessa estate del 1870, Roma si dichiarò più infallibile che mai, e perse definitivamente il suo regno terreno. Non è una coincidenza che la storia trascura.
X. Quello che ha fatto il diavolo, secondo: Darwin e la guerra immaginaria tra scienza e fede
Pawson presta particolare attenzione a Charles Darwin, sottolineando che non ha mai detto "gli uomini vengono dalle scimmie", che Sull'origine delle specie (1859) finisce con l'affermare un Creatore e che la tragedia è stata un malinteso reciproco, la scienza affermava che l'evoluzione era un "fatto dimostrato" quando non lo era, la fede affermava che la Bibbia diceva cose che non dicevano.
XI. Ciò che ha fatto il diavolo, terzo: ateismo, agnosticismo e Karl Marx
Pawson scorre un elenco di nomi: Thomas Carlyle (formato per il ministero, divenne agnostico), George Eliot (pseudonimo di Mary Ann Evans, autrice di Mill on the Floss), John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Schopenhauer e Feuerbach ("l'uomo ha creato Dio a sua immagine e Dio è semplicemente un sogno"), Nietzsche ("volontà di potenza", che secondo Pawson gettò le basi per l'ideologia di Hitler), Robert Ingersoll e, infine, Karl Marx, che pubblicò Das Kapital in 1867, e la frase "la religione è l'oppio delle masse", che Pawson dice che Marx "prese in prestito da Charles Kingsley".
XII. Quello che ha fatto il diavolo, quarto: la "critica", e gli studiosi che hanno perso la cattedra
La quarta cosa che Pawson definisce "l'arma più sottile" del diavolo: trattare la Bibbia come un libro interamente umano, soggetto a ogni errore umano. Racconta del vescovo John William Colenso, "scomunicato" per aver sostenuto che Mosè probabilmente non è mai vissuto e che Giosuè era un mito; e il professor William Robertson Smith, che perse la cattedra di ebraico "all'Università di Edimburgo" per opinioni simili.
XIII. Quello che ha fatto il diavolo, quinto: nuovi culti dalla costa americana
L'ultima cosa: il diavolo ha suscitato "falsi culti" dalla costa atlantica dell'America, tenendo in mano una Bibbia ma negando la divinità di Gesù. Pawson elenca: i Mormoni (Joseph Smith, 1830), gli Avventisti del Settimo Giorno (1831), lo Spiritismo (1848), la Scienza Cristiana (1876) e i Testimoni di Geova, "il più grande nato in questo periodo".
Lo Spirito Santo non ha operato di meno nella seconda metà del XIX secolo. Ma il diavolo, secondo le parole di Pawson, aveva «mobilitato le sue forze e le aveva fatte aspettare». Entrambe le storie sono vere, e la seconda è il conto che il XX secolo avrebbe dovuto pagare.
Pawson chiude la seconda conferenza con un'immagine: due uomini che scrivono nel 1850, sconosciuti l'uno all'altro e ignari del fatto che sarebbero diventati il più grande ostacolo alla fede cristiana per i successivi cento anni. Uno era Karl Marx, che scriveva Das Kapital al British Museum. L'altro era Charles Darwin, appena tornato dal viaggio sul Beagle, che scriveva un libro sulla natura. E, dice Pawson, è come se il cielo sapesse che l'attacco stava arrivando, perché lo Spirito Santo scelse proprio il 1859 per riversare un risveglio, preparando la Chiesa per i successivi cinquant'anni e poi per un XX secolo che, come dirà la terza conferenza, avrebbe portato il nome di altri tre ismi: liberalismo, ecumenismo e pentecostalismo.
PARTE TERZA: 1900–1968 — DUE GUERRE MONDIALI E TRE ISMI
La terza conferenza, predicata nel 1967, si apre con tre lettere dell'l’Apocalisse, indirizzate alle chiese di Sardi («hai nome di essere vivo e sei morto»), Filadelfia («ho posto davanti a te una porta aperta che nessuno può chiudere») e Laodicea («tu sei tiepido, né freddo né caldo»). Pawson usa queste tre immagini per inquadrare l'intero XX secolo: la Gran Bretagna vi entrò con assoluta fiducia che sarebbe stato un secolo di pace e prosperità, «su e su e su», una fiducia infranta da due guerre mondiali.
Fornisce una cifra: nel 1800, circa il 19% della popolazione mondiale era cristiana nominale; entrando nel XX secolo, quella cifra era salita al 29,5%. Poi elenca i fattori che rendono il XX secolo un campo di battaglia: la diffusione del secolarismo, il comunismo che governa un terzo dell'umanità (la Cina è l'esempio più chiaro, un tempo patria di centinaia di missionari, ora casa di nessuno), il nazionalismo che fa sì che i missionari siano visti come «imperialisti occidentali», la disintegrazione della civiltà occidentale (citando il professor Gilbert Murray) e una rinascita delle antiche religioni. Ma afferma anche che la Chiesa non è mai stata così grande, con «15 nuovi cristiani ogni minuto», e menziona i Wycliffe Bible Translators, fondati nel 1933, con il motto «2.000 lingue da raggiungere».
Quanto del mondo era cristiano?
Quota nominale dei cristiani nella popolazione mondiale, 1800–1970
Grigio tratteggiato = le cifre citate da Pawson nel suo sermone del 1967. Oro = la moderna ricostruzione accademica (Barrett/World Christian Encyclopedia, Center for the Study of Global Christianity). La direzione verso l'alto è quella corretta; l'entità è sottostimata nel sermone.
Tre correnti teologiche del XX secolo
Tre correnti che plasmarono la Chiesa del XX secolo
1
Liberalismo
L'esperienza personale, non la Scrittura, come criterio della verità. Barth e Brunner riportano indietro il pendolo in parte; Bultmann, Tillich e Robinson lo spingono di nuovo in avanti.
2
Ecumenismo
Da Edimburgo 1910 al Consiglio Ecumenico delle Chiese (1948). In parallelo, e mai menzionato da Pawson: il Concilio Vaticano II (1962–65).
3
Pentecostalismo
Da una stalla di Azusa Street (1906) a uno dei più grandi movimenti del protestantesimo, poi diffusosi anche nel cattolicesimo attraverso Duquesne (1967).
XIV. Il primo ismo: liberalismo e un Dio senza ira
Pawson dice che parlerà dei tre ismi che hanno plasmato la Chiesa del XX secolo: liberalismo, ecumenismo e pentecostalismo. Il primo, dice, ha avuto origine in Germania, facendo dell'esperienza personale, e non della Bibbia o della Chiesa, la prova finale della verità, il che porta alla rimozione dell'inferno, dei miracoli e dell'ira di Dio. Cita una frase che attribuisce a «Reinhold Niebuhr»: «un Dio senza ira che ha portato uomini senza peccato in un regno senza giudizio, attraverso i ministeri di un Cristo senza croce». Due guerre mondiali, dice, spinsero due teologi svizzeri, Karl Barth ed Emil Brunner, a far oscillare il pendolo indietro, predicando di nuovo il peccato e l'espiazione; ma non tornarono mai completamente a credere che la Bibbia fosse la Parola letterale di Dio. Il pendolo oscillò quindi di nuovo in avanti, verso un nuovo «radicalismo»: Bultmann, Tillich e il vescovo di Woolwich, John A.T. Robinson, i cui seguaci, dice Pawson, proclamavano «Dio è morto». Egli pone Billy Graham, con la sua frase «la Bibbia dice», come contrappeso evangelico.
Il pendolo oscilla dal liberale al neo-ortodosso e di nuovo verso il radicale e, a ogni oscillazione, dice Pawson, manca esattamente una cosa: tornare a credere che questo libro sia davvero la Parola di Dio. Ma proprio in quello stesso momento, un altro concilio, in un altro luogo, stava tentando una terza risposta di cui non parla mai.
XV. Il secondo ismo: l'ecumenismo, e la porta Pawson si è chiusa troppo presto
Pawson ripercorre la storia dell'ecumenismo partendo dall'Alleanza evangelica (1846), passando per il motto di Keswick «Tutti uno in Cristo Gesù» (1875), fino alla Conferenza missionaria mondiale di Edimburgo del 1910, che considera il punto di partenza formale, con un aneddoto su un cristiano indiano che si presenta come «un battista canadese». Da ciò nacquero due movimenti, Fede e Ordine e Vita e Lavoro, che si fusero nel Consiglio Mondiale delle Chiese, la cui costituzione fu preparata nel 1938 ma il cui primo incontro, ad Amsterdam, fu rinviato dalla Seconda guerra mondiale al 1948, con 147 denominazioni. Racconta di unioni di chiese: Canada (1925), Chiesa di Scozia (1929), metodismo britannico (1932), Chiesa dell'India meridionale (1947). Egli nota che il Consiglio non ha mai incluso i cattolici romani ma ha incluso molte chiese ortodosse. Predice, predicando all'inizio del 1967, che i colloqui sull'unità anglicano-metodista in corso falliranno, ma un tentativo successivo avrà successo e che presbiteriani e congregazionalisti si uniranno entro cinque-dieci anni.
Due percorsi paralleli, raramente raccontati insieme
Il Consiglio Ecumenico delle Chiese e il Vaticano II, 1910–1965
Percorso protestante
1910
Conferenza missionaria mondiale, Edimburgo
1937
Fede e Costituzione + Vita e Lavoro concordano di fondersi
1948
Prima Assemblea, Amsterdam, 147 denominazioni
1961
Nuova Delhi: da «unità» a «unione» organica
Percorso cattolico (Pawson non lo menziona mai)
1959
Giovanni XXIII annuncia il concilio
1962
Si apre il Vaticano II
1964
Unitatis Redintegratio; Paolo VI incontra Atenagora I a Gerusalemme
1965
Le scomuniche del 1054 vengono revocate, con la dichiarazione letta simultaneamente a Roma e Istanbul
Le due più grandi storie ecumeniche del secolo si svolsero esattamente nello stesso periodo, nello stesso decennio, e quasi non si incontrano mai in alcun racconto protestante popolare di quell'epoca.
XVI. Il terzo ismo: il pentecostalismo, nato in una stalla
L'ismo finale, dice Pawson, «come il cristianesimo stesso, è nato in una stalla», ad Azusa Street, Los Angeles, nel 1906. Il ministro metodista norvegese Thomas Ball Barratt andò a New York con l'intenzione di raccogliere fondi per un progetto edilizio; non potendo proseguire fino a Los Angeles, ne venne a conoscenza per corrispondenza e tornò in Norvegia con la sua esperienza pentecostale. Il vicario anglicano Alexander Boddy lo invitò a Sunderland, dove nel 1907 scoppiò un risveglio. Entro il 1967, dice Pawson, il pentecostalismo era quasi alla pari con i battisti come maggiore gruppo protestante del mondo, con una crescita particolarmente esplosiva in America Latina; intorno al 1960 un «nuovo pentecostalismo» (il movimento carismatico) cominciò ad apparire nelle denominazioni principali, a cominciare dai ministri episcopali in America.
Da una stalla a sei continenti
La diffusione mondiale del pentecostalismo, 1906–1967
Diagramma schematico, non una mappa geograficamente precisa. La linea dorata tratteggiata indica il ramo carismatico che dal 1960 si diffonde nelle chiese storiche e cattoliche.
Pawson chiude questa sezione con quattro cose che dice di aver imparato dal movimento pentecostale: dà potere alla gente comune, indipendentemente dal grado o dallo status; mostra che le lingue sciolte nella lode saranno sciolte anche nella testimonianza; ripristina il culto partecipativo, non solo la prestazione di un ministro; e soprattutto ripristina la fede che Dio è ancora all'opera, la risposta più viva al movimento «Dio è morto» appena descritto nella sezione precedente.
Tre ismi, tre risposte diverse alla stessa domanda: cosa resta quando due guerre mondiali hanno bruciato un secolo di ottimismo? Una risposta si è trasformata in esperienza. Una si è rivolta gli uni agli altri. Una si è rivolta al potere. Pawson credeva che solo una delle tre avesse pienamente ragione. Ma tutte e tre, a modo loro, sono la prova che la Chiesa non è mai stata morta, per quanto spesso sia stato dichiarato il contrario.
Chiusura: Gesù edifica la sua Chiesa
Pawson conclude la conferenza finale della serie con una domanda a cui quella sera non ha risposto completamente: la Chiesa vincerà la battaglia o svanirà? Promette di parlare del futuro la settimana successiva, dal 1968 fino al ritorno di Cristo. Ma conclude con la stessa cosa con cui ha chiuso ogni conferenza dell'intera serie: Gesù sta costruendo la sua Chiesa e le porte dell'Ade non prevarranno contro di essa.
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.