記事データテーブル

設定の読み取り

文字サイズ
行間

教会史と宗教改革

教会の歴史 — パート 5: 心の世紀と 3 つの主義 (1800–1968)

注記: この部分はデイヴィッド・ポーソンの教会史シリーズに含まれる三つの別々の講義を融合したものです。1800〜1850年(49.7分)、1850〜1900年(51.1分)、そして1900〜1968年(53.2分、1967年に説教)を扱います。これらを一つのエッセイにまとめたのは、一つの物語を語っているからです。啓蒙主義の冷たい理性の後に心が再び温まる19世…

5 分で読めます以下でも利用可能です: 英語ベトナム語英語英語英語英語英語英語英語英語

この記事では、AIが資料、事実確認、翻訳、編集を補助しました。論旨と結論は著者のものです。

論旨の流れ、意味、結論は著者自身のものです。どの資料を信頼し、どう理解するかは、ツールではなく著者の判断です。

AIツールは、資料を探し、出典と照らして主張を確認し、主題を広く読み、文章を英語とベトナム語の間で翻訳し、文法・明瞭さ・文のリズムを整えるために使われました。

ツールが見つけたのは、吟味すべき材料であって結論ではありません。何を語り、何を省き、何を意味するかは著者が決めました。

この記事は著者の名で公開されます。記事の内容と、そこに後から見つかる誤りを含め、著者が責任を負います。

教会の歴史 — パート 5: 心の世紀と 3 つの主義 (1800–1968)

パラレル

ベトナム語 · 英語

ベトナム語教会の歴史 — パート 5: 心の世紀と 3 つの主義 (1800–1968)

注記: この部分はデイヴィッド・ポーソンの教会史シリーズに含まれる三つの別々の講義を融合したものです。1800〜1850年(49.7分)、1850〜1900年(51.1分)、そして1900〜1968年(53.2分、1967年に説教)を扱います。これらを一つのエッセイにまとめたのは、一つの物語を語っているからです。啓蒙主義の冷たい理性の後に心が再び温まる19世紀に始まり、教会史上最大の宣教拡大へと爆発し、その後ポーソン自身が「悪魔のしたこと」と呼ぶ組織的な反撃に直面し、二つの世界大戦と今日も教会を形作る三つの主義を通じて、その反撃の結果と共に生きなければならない20世紀へと続きます。

ウェスリー家のパーラーから蒸気機関まで

パート4は1800年に終わり、18世紀を通じて冷え切ったイングランドを福音のリバイバルが再び温めました。しかし復活は目的地ではなく始まりだ。このパート5を構成する三つの講義は、次に何が起こったのかを物語ります。19世紀前半にその温かい心がどれほど広がったか、後半にどのように爆発したか、そして20世紀の二つの世界大戦でどれほどの犠牲を払ったかを説明します。


ポーソンは最初の講義を、二つの物理的事実一つの感情の変化から始めます。物理的には、イギリスは前例のない速度で都市化が進み(産業革命)、人口が爆発的に増加しました。感情的には、冷酷で合理主義的な18世紀の後、19世紀は逆転のロマン主義で始まりました。心が頭に取って代わる

彼は具体的な数字を挙げています。イングランドの人口は1800年の約900万人から1850年の約1,800万人へ増加しました。そして、人口が食糧供給を上回れば飢餓が起こると警告した牧師マルサスを引用します。

ロマン主義について、ポーソンは一連の小説を挙げています。ジェーン・オースティンの*『高慢と偏見』、ヴィクトル・ユゴーの『ノートルダム・ド・パリ』、サッカレーの『虚栄の市』、ブロンテ姉妹の『ジェーン・エア』『嵐が丘』、ウォルター・スコットの『アイヴァンホー』、アレクサンドル・デュマの『三銃士』『モンテ・クリスト伯』、マコーレーの『イングランド史』です。このリストは年代についてほぼ正確ですが、最後に加えたトロロープの『バーチェスター・タワーズ』とブラックモアの『ローナ・ドゥーン』*は、実際には1857年と1869年の作品で、1850年の区切りよりかなり後のヴィクトリア朝に属します。

ここからポーソンは宗教的な帰結を引き出します。心が頭に勝ったため、宗教が盛んになったというのです。彼によれば、1800年には教会出席者の5%が非国教徒でしたが、1850年には50%になりました。メソジストは少なくとも三つの主要団体に分裂し、スコットランド国教会も二つに分裂しました。また、ゴールド・ヒルを含む45のバプテスト教会がバプテスト同盟を設立したとされます。

国勢調査と説教

イングランドとウェールズの人口、1801—1851年(百万人)

パウソンは「1800年に500万人、1850年までに900万人」と語った。実際の国勢調査はまったく違う数字を示す。

0M5M10M15M20Mパウソンの発言実際の国勢調査1801182118411851

出典:英国1801—1851年国勢調査(ONS、Vision of Britain)。灰色の破線=説教でパウソンが挙げた数字。金色の線=実際の国勢調査。

すべて正常
イングランド · 1801年 · 人口は500万人ではなく900万人近くに達し、まもなく倍増する

第一部:1800–1850 — ロマン主義の炎と拡大する教会

II. 世に出た宣教師たち

宣教師についての最初の講義で、ポーソンが最も長く語るのはヘンリー・マーティンです。マーティンは「婚約者との結婚を断念」してインドへ赴き、新約聖書と共通祈祷書をヒンドゥスターニー語に訳し、その後ペルシアへ向かい、31歳で亡くなりました。

ヘンリー・マーティン(1781—1812)、インドへ行くため婚約を解消した聖公会牧師。新約と『祈祷書』をヒンドゥスターニー語(ウルドゥー語)に訳し、31歳でペルシャに没した。
ヘンリー・マーティン(1781—1812)、インドへ行くため婚約を解消した聖公会牧師。新約と『祈祷書』をヒンドゥスターニー語(ウルドゥー語)に訳し、31歳でペルシャに没した。ウィリアム・M・ヘイ、19世紀。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。

次に、スコットランドのブランタイアで生まれたデイヴィッド・リヴィングストンです。彼は当初中国を志しましたが、神は代わりに彼を南アフリカのロバート・モファットのもとへ送りました。リヴィングストンはモファットの娘と結婚し、約16年を費やして、宣教師のためにアフリカ内陸部への道を開きました。

彼はまた、アレクサンダー・ダフ(1829年に出発したスコットランド教会初のインド宣教師)、サミュエル・マースデン(「オーストラリアとニュージーランドへの宣教師」)、ロバート・モリソン(ロンドン宣教協会とともに中国へ渡り、中国語の辞書と聖書を制作した人物)の名前も挙げています。

19世紀の宣教は決して一つの物語ではありません。イギリスのプロテスタント、ローマ・カトリック、ロシア正教という三つの物語が並行して進み、互いの姿はほとんど見えていませんでした。


Ⅲ.目覚めた教会の社会的良心

ポーソンはウィリアム・ウィルバーフォースに最も長く語りを割いています。ウィルバーフォースは名目上のキリスト教と真のキリスト教を対比する本を書き、ピット首相に奴隷貿易を廃止する1807年法案を進めるよう働きかけました。そして26年後の1833年、亡くなる前に奴隷制度の法的廃止を見届けました。ただし、実際の解放にはなお徒弟制度の期間と植民地の例外が残りました。

国会議員でクラパム派の中心人物ウィリアム・ウィルバーフォース。社会的良心を議会へ持ち込んだ福音派の平信徒たちの集まりだった。
国会議員でクラパム派の中心人物ウィリアム・ウィルバーフォース。社会的良心を議会へ持ち込んだ福音派の平信徒たちの集まりだった。アントン・ヒッケル、1794年。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。

次に、彼は1800年代初頭の労働条件を説明します。7歳の子どもが午前5時から午後8時まで働き、5歳の子どもが炭鉱で12時間換気扇を開閉し、女性と子どもが四つんばいになって鎖につながれた石炭車を運びました。こうした状況は、シャフツベリー卿が1842年の法律を成立させるまで続きました。ポーソンによれば、この法律は13歳未満の女性と少年の地下労働を禁じ、その後の「十時間法」は労働時間を制限し、9歳未満の雇用を禁じました。

◄◄巻き戻し · 上流
画面
API
キュー
ワーカー
出典
1842年 · 鉱山法 · すべての女性を救った一条項と、100年間も誤記された年齢制限

IV. 英国国教会内の三つの派閥

最初の講義の最後のセクションで、ポーソンは英国国教会そのものに目を向け、そこで三つのグループに注目します。低派(福音派、聖書と39箇条に忠実)、広派(教義に寛容)、高派(宗教改革以前のカトリックの実践を回復しようとしている)です。

一つの教会、三つの方向

イングランド国教会内部の三党派、1800—1850年

低教会派

福音派で聖書を重んじた。チャールズ・シメオン(1783–1836年)のもとケンブリッジで最も強く、クラパム派(ウィルバーフォース)とイズリントン聖職者会議を生んだ。

広教会派

教義的に緩く、パウソンによれば「死んで世俗的で冷たい」。1827年ダブリンで、プリマス・ブレザレンがここから分離した。

高教会派

宗教改革前の慣行を取り戻そうとした。オックスフォード運動(1833年)は90冊の小冊子を出し、ニューマンは1845年にローマへ改宗した。

三者とも、1828—29年以降、議会がもはや完全に聖公会だけではなくなった教会から逃れようとしていた。選んだ出口が三つ違ったのである。

Low派が最も強かったのはケンブリッジです。チャールズ・シメオンはホーリー・トリニティ教会で54年間(1783年から1836年に亡くなるまで)説教しましたが、最初の10年間は教区の公然たる敵意にさらされました。そこから二つのネットワークが生まれました。信徒による「クラパム派」(ウィルバーフォース、英国外国聖書協会の初代会計担当者ジョン・ソーントン、ザカリー・マコーレー)と、聖職者によるイズリントン聖職者会議です。

チャールズ・シメオン(1759—1836)、ケンブリッジのホーリー・トリニティ教会の福音派聖公会牧師。50年以上、国教会内の低教会派を支えた。
チャールズ・シメオン(1759—1836)、ケンブリッジのホーリー・トリニティ教会の福音派聖公会牧師。50年以上、国教会内の低教会派を支えた。作者不詳、19世紀初頭。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。

ポーソンによれば、Broad派は「死んでいて、世俗的で、冷たい」ものでした。そこから、1827年にダブリンで不満を抱く人々、すなわちアンソニー・ノリス・グローブス、ジョン・パーネル、J・G・ベレット、クローニン博士、W・F・ハッチンソン、そして英国国教会の副牧師ジョン・ネルソン・ダービーが、正式な教会組織の外で集まり始めました。彼らは叙任された聖職制度を退け、新約聖書の礼拝の型に正確に戻ろうとしました。ここからプリマス・ブレザレンが生まれ、後にダービー率いるエクスクルーシブ・ブレザレンと、ブリストルのベセスダ礼拝堂でジョージ・ミュラーとヘンリー・クレイクが率いたオープン・ブレザレンに分かれました。

ジョージ・ミュラー(1805—1898)。ヘンリー・クレイクとブリストルのベテスダ礼拝堂を率い、資金を募らず信仰によって孤児院を運営した。
ジョージ・ミュラー(1805—1898)。ヘンリー・クレイクとブリストルのベテスダ礼拝堂を率い、資金を募らず信仰によって孤児院を運営した。撮影者不詳。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。

続いてハイパーティー。ポーソン氏はこう語る。1828年に試験法が廃止され、カトリック教徒と非国教徒が議会に入ることができ、これがオックスフォードの聖職者、ジョン・ヘンリー・ニューマン、リチャード・ハレル・フルード、エドワード・ピューシー、ジョン・キーブル、フレデリック・フェイバーらのグループを警戒させ、オックスフォード運動を開始した。彼らは120件の小冊子を発行し、司教が任命した牧師だけが有効であること、幼児洗礼は再生であること、そしてパンとワインが実際にキリストの体と血になることを教えました。最も物議を醸したニューマン冊子 90 (1841) は、牧師が独自の個人的な解釈を持ちながら 39 条項に署名できると主張しました。ニューマンは1845年にローマへ向かい、枢機卿となり、他の多くの人が後に続きました。

ジョン・ヘンリー・ニューマン(1801—1890)、オックスフォード運動の知的指導者。1845年に国教会を離れてローマへ移ってから40年以上後、枢機卿に任命された後の1887年に撮影。
ジョン・ヘンリー・ニューマン(1801—1890)、オックスフォード運動の知的指導者。1845年に国教会を離れてローマへ移ってから40年以上後、枢機卿に任命された後の1887年に撮影。ハーバート・ローズ・バロー、1887年。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。

1 つの教会内の 3 つの当事者が、それぞれ同じものから逃れようとしています。国家によって管理されている教会です。ある人は聖書に戻りました。ある人は中世に戻りました。 1 つだけがそのまま残りました。

オックスフォード · 1833年7月14日 · 一つの説教、90編の小冊子、そして二度と元の姿には戻らない教会

こうして19世紀前半の最初の50年間が終わります。心が温まり、あらゆる大陸を横断する宣教の波が起こり、奴隷制度を廃止し労働年齢を法制化するのに十分な社会的良心が育ち、英国国教会は三つの方向へ引っ張られました。しかし、これは単なる前座にすぎませんでした。ポーソンが次の講義で語るように、世紀の後半は物語の速度が倍になり、彼自身の言葉を借りれば悪魔が反撃を開始する時期です。


ポーソンは第二の講義を、今は女性の時代、ヴィクトリア朝の時代であり、1850年から1900年までの50年間、聖霊が重要な働きをなさったという主張で始めます。彼は講義を二つの明確な部分に分けます。第一は「聖霊がなさったこと」、第二は「悪魔がしたこと」です。シリーズ全体の中でも構成が最も整っているため、そのまま保ちます。


第二部:1850–1900 — 聖霊がなさったこと、そして悪魔がなさったこと

V. 1857〜1859年の大復活

ポーソン氏は次のように述べています。1857年、リバイバルが起こったのは最初はイギリスではなくアメリカで、数年のうちにおよそ100万人を教会へ導きました。それは「大草原の火のように」アルスター(北アイルランド)へ広がり、さらに1859年までにイングランドへ広がって、およそもう100万人を加えました。彼はJ.エドウィン・オア博士の著書『The Evangelical Awakening』を出典として引用します。そしてそのリバイバルのさなか、20歳の実業家ドワイト・L・ムーディが改宗したと述べます。

ニューヨークのフルトン街とウィリアム街にある北オランダ教会。ジェレマイア・ランフィアが1857年に最初の昼の祈祷会を開き、その火花は「草原火災」のようにアルスター、さらにイングランドへ広がった。
ニューヨークのフルトン街とウィリアム街にある北オランダ教会。ジェレマイア・ランフィアが1857年に最初の昼の祈祷会を開き、その火花は「草原火災」のようにアルスター、さらにイングランドへ広がった。エドワード・ラムソン・ヘンリー、1869年。パブリックドメイン(CC0)、Wikimedia Commons/メトロポリタン美術館。

一つの火ではなく五つ

五つの土地へ広がる大リバイバル、1857—1864年

米国

23/9/1857

ランフィアがニューヨークのフルトン街で昼の祈祷会を始めた。1858—59年に約100万人が回心(J・エドウィン・オアの推定)。

アルスター

1/1/1858

米国とは独立した起源で、アントリム州ケルズに最初の回心者。1859年に約10万人。

ウェールズ

1859

約8万—11万人が回心。

スコットランド

1859

約30万人が回心。

イングランド

1864年までに

約60万人が数年にわたり回心し、1859年だけではない。

英国全体で「100万人超」だが、これは1860年代半ばまで数年かけた累積であり、説教が示すように1859年だけでイングランドに「さらに100万人」ではない。


VI. 1860年代の三人の人物

ポーソンによれば、そのリバイバルから偉大な人物の世代が誕生しました。彼は三人の名前を選びます。トーマス・バルナルド博士は、中国行きの医師になるための訓練を受けていましたが、ビリングスゲート魚市場で防水シートの下に眠るホームレスの少年たちを発見した後、ロンドンに留まり、「貧しい子供は入学を拒否されたことがない」をモットーに施設を設立しました。メソジスト派の牧師ウィリアム・ブースは型破りな街頭伝道の許可を拒否され、その妻キャサリンは「絶対に、ウィリアム、絶対に!」と叫びました。彼らは救世軍を設立しました。そして、1865年に中国内陸伝道団を設立したハドソン・テイラーは、超教派の働きと、公に資金を募らないという「信仰」の原則を特徴としています。

中国内地会(1865年)の創設者ハドソン・テイラー(1832—1905)。1893年、中国での宣教生活の後期に撮影。
中国内地会(1865年)の創設者ハドソン・テイラー(1832—1905)。1893年、中国での宣教生活の後期に撮影。ジェラルディン・ギネス『中国内地会の物語』より、1893年。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。

魚市場で防水シートの下で眠る 3 人の子供たち。ギャラリーから歓声が上がる。ある晩、ブライトンの海岸で、聖体拝領に耐えられなくなった男性がいた。聖霊は運動を始めるのに委員会を必要としません。


VII. 1870年代〜1890年代:マウント・ヘルモンの学生大会と100人の学生

ポーソンは一連の出来事を会衆に案内します。ウィリアム・ペネファーザーはミルドメイ・ホール(1870年)を建て、ムーディを1872年の説教に招きました。ムーディーと歌手のアイラ・サンキーは1873年に英国へ到着し、その年ロンドンで250万人に説教しました。1875年には最初のケズィック大会が開かれ、CICCUは1876年、OICCUは1879年に設立されました。改訂英訳聖書は1880年に出版されましたが、決して広く普及しませんでした。1882年にはケンブリッジで学生のための説教が行われ、1885年には「ケンブリッジ・セブン」(国際クリケット選手C.T.スタッドを含む)が中国へ出発しました。1886年、プリンストン大学でロバート・ワイルダーが1,000人の学生ボランティアを呼びかけ、学生ボランティア運動を結成し、「この世代の世界の福音化」をモットーに1892年のエディンバラ大会で正式に発足しました。

1885年の「ケンブリッジ・セブン」。C.T.スタッドを含む7人の学生が宣教師として中国へ渡り、清朝の官服姿で撮影された、19世紀末の学生宣教運動を象徴する写真。
1885年の「ケンブリッジ・セブン」。C.T.スタッドを含む7人の学生が宣教師として中国へ渡り、清朝の官服姿で撮影された、19世紀末の学生宣教運動を象徴する写真。撮影者不詳、1885年。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。
マウント・ハーモン · 1886年7月 · 千人ではなく百人の署名と、まもなく世界に広がる合言葉

Ⅷ. 女性賛美歌作家の時代

ポーソンは「聖霊がなさったこと」のセクションを次のような観察で締めくくっている。19世紀は、ウェスリーとワッツの18世紀とは異なり、女性によって書かれた賛美歌の時代だった。彼はファニー・クロスビー(「フィル・トゥー・マイ・ライフ」を含む)、フランシス・リドリー・ハヴァーガル、クリスティーナ・ロセッティ、セシル・フランシス・アレクサンダー、ハリエット・ビーチャー・ストウ、アンナ・ウェアリング、アラベラ・キャサリン・ハンキーの名前を挙げ、グラッドストン首相さえも賛美歌を書いたと指摘している。


IX. 悪魔のしたこと、第一に: ローマはこれまで以上にローマになった

ポーソンの口調が変わります。講義の後半では、同じ時代に「悪魔がしたこと」を五つ挙げます。第一に、教皇はイエズス会を復活させ、1850年には英国のカトリック教階制を回復し、1854年には無原罪の御宿りの教義(「マリアは罪なく生まれた」)を宣言し、1870年には第一バチカン公会議で、教皇がex cathedraで裁定するとき不可謬であると宣言しました。

1870年の版画。聖ペテロ大聖堂内で開かれる第1バチカン公会議を描く。トリエント(1545—1563年)以来初の公会議で、ピウス9世が招集し教皇不可謬の教義を正式に定めた。
1870年の版画。聖ペテロ大聖堂内で開かれる第1バチカン公会議を描く。トリエント(1545—1563年)以来初の公会議で、ピウス9世が招集し教皇不可謬の教義を正式に定めた。作者不詳、1870年。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。

最大の主張、そのすべてを失う直前

ローマ、1773—1950年

1773 / 1814

イエズス会が抑圧され、後に復活。ピウス9世より数十年前のこと。

1850

英国カトリック教階位が回復(ワイズマン、ウェストミンスター大司教)

1854

無原罪の御宿りの教義(『Ineffabilis Deus』)

1869–70

第1バチカン公会議。『永遠の牧者』が教皇不可謬を宣言(1870年7月18日)。

20/9/1870

イタリア軍がローマを占領し、8世紀以来存在した教皇領を終わらせた。

1871

デリンガーが破門され、約6万人の信徒が旧カトリック教会を結成。

1950

教皇不可謬の教義が初めて「教皇座から」行使された(聖母被昇天)。

同じ1870の夏、ローマは自らをこれまで以上に無謬であると宣言し、地上の王国を永久に失いました。それは歴史が見落とした偶然ではありません。


X. 悪魔のしたこと、その2:ダーウィンと科学と信仰の間の想像上の戦争

ポーソン氏はチャールズ・ダーウィンに細心の注意を払い、ダーウィンは決して「人間はサルから来た」などとは言っていないこと、種の起源 (1859) は創造主を肯定することで終わっていること、悲劇は相互誤解であったこと、科学は進化論がそうではないのに「事実が証明された」と主張し、信仰は聖書に書かれていないことを主張していることを強調した。

チャールズ・ダーウィン、約1854年。1859年の『種の起源』出版より前で、この本が19世紀の科学と信仰の論争の中心に彼を置いた。
チャールズ・ダーウィン、約1854年。1859年の『種の起源』出版より前で、この本が19世紀の科学と信仰の論争の中心に彼を置いた。モール&フォックス、約1854年。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。

XI. 悪魔のしたこと、その3:無神論、不可知論、そしてカール・マルクス

ポーソンは名前のリストをざっと調べます。トーマス・カーライル(宣教のために訓練を受け、不可知論者になった)、ジョージ・エリオット(メアリー・アン・エヴァンスの筆名、Mill on the Flossの著者)、ジョン・スチュアート・ミル、ハーバート・スペンサー、ショーペンハウアーとフォイエルバッハ(「人間は自分の姿に似せて神を作った、そして神は単なる夢である」)、ニーチェ(「〜への意志」)、ポーソンがヒトラーのイデオロギーの基礎を築いたと述べる人物、ロバート・インガソル、そして最後に、1867年にDas Kapitalを出版したカール・マルクスです。さらに「宗教は大衆のアヘン剤である」という一文(ポーソンはマルクスが「チャールズ・キングズレーから借りた」と述べています)も挙げます。

カール・マルクス(1818—1883)、『資本論』(1867年)と『共産党宣言』の著者。1875年撮影、フランクフルトのシュテーデル美術館所蔵。
カール・マルクス(1818—1883)、『資本論』(1867年)と『共産党宣言』の著者。1875年撮影、フランクフルトのシュテーデル美術館所蔵。ジョン・ジャベズ・エドウィン・メイオール、1875年。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。

XII. 悪魔のしたこと、その4:「批判」と椅子を失った学者たち

ポーソンが悪魔の「最も巧妙な武器」と呼ぶ4番目のことは、聖書を完全に人間の本として扱うことであり、人間のあらゆる間違いが存在することです。彼は、モーセはおそらく生きておらず、ヨシュアは神話であると主張して「破門」されたジョン・ウィリアム・コレンソ司教について語ります。ウィリアム・ロバートソン・スミス教授も同様の見解を理由に「エディンバラ大学」でヘブライ語の椅子を失った。


XIII. 悪魔のしたこと、その5:アメリカ沿岸からの新たなカルト

最後に、悪魔はアメリカの大西洋岸から聖書を手にしながらイエスの神性を否定する「偽りのカルト」を起こしました。ポーソン氏は、モルモン教(ジョセフ・スミス、1830)、セブンスデー・アドベンチスト(1831)、心霊術(1848)、キリスト教科学(1876)、そして「この時期に発足した最大の団体」であるエホバの証人を挙げている。

ニューヨークの「焼け跡地区」 · 半世紀に4つの新宗教を生んだ、何度も焼かれた土地

聖霊は19世紀後半にも働きを続けました。しかし、ポーソン自身の言葉によれば、悪魔は「軍隊を動員して待機させた」のです。どちらの話も真実であり、後者の話は、20世紀が支払わなければならない請求額です。


ポーソン氏は第三の講義を次のイメージで締めくくります。1850年、二人の男が互いに面識なく、今後100年間キリスト教信仰にとって最大の障害となることを知らずに、それぞれの仕事に取り組んでいました。一人はカール・マルクスで、大英博物館で『資本論』を書いていました。もう一人は、ビーグル号の航海から戻ったばかりのチャールズ・ダーウィンで、自然についての本を書いていました。ポーソン氏は、天が攻撃の到来を知っていたかのようだと言います。聖霊はまさにその年、1859年をリバイバルを注ぐために選び、教会を今後50年間、そしてその後の20世紀に向けて備えさせました。第3部で分かるように、自由主義、エキュメニズム、ペンテコステ主義という別の三つの主義の名を冠することになる反撃に備えたのです。


1967年に説教された第三の講義は、サルディス(「あなたには生きているという名があるが、死んでいる」)、フィラデルフィア(「私はあなたの前に、誰も閉じることのできない開いた扉を置いた」)、ラオデキア(「あなたは冷たくも熱くもなく、生ぬるい」)の教会に宛てたの三つの手紙で始まります。ポーソン氏はこの三つのイメージを用いて、20世紀全体を構成します。英国は、この世紀が平和と繁栄の世紀になると絶対の自信を持って20世紀を迎えました。二度の世界大戦で打ち砕かれた自信

彼は次のように数字を挙げます。1800年頃、世界人口の約19%が名目上のキリスト者でした。20世紀に入ると、その数字は29.5%になりました。次に、彼はその要因を列挙します。20世紀は世俗主義の広がり、人類の約3分の1を支配する共産主義(中国が最も明白な例で、かつては数百人の宣教師がいたのに、今は誰もいない)、宣教師が「西側帝国主義者」と見なされたナショナリズム、西洋文明の崩壊、そして古代宗教の復活によって戦場となりました。しかし彼は、「教会は今ほど大きくなったことはない」とも断言します。「毎分15人の新しいキリスト者が増えている」と述べ、1933年に設立されたウィクリフ聖書翻訳者のモットー「2,000の言語へ」にも触れます。

1916年6月9日、西部戦線で対峙する英独前線塹壕の航空写真。進歩が必然だという20世紀初頭の信仰を打ち砕いた塹壕戦の典型的な像である。
1916年6月9日、西部戦線で対峙する英独前線塹壕の航空写真。進歩が必然だという20世紀初頭の信仰を打ち砕いた塹壕戦の典型的な像である。RFC第10飛行隊/帝国戦争博物館、1916年。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。

世界のどれほどがキリスト教徒だったのか

世界人口に占める名目上のキリスト教徒の割合、1800—1970年

0%10%20%30%40%180019001970

灰色の破線=パウソンが1967年の説教で挙げた数字。金色=現代の学術的再構成(バレット/『世界キリスト教百科事典』、世界キリスト教研究センター)。上向きが正しく、説教では規模が過小評価されている。

20世紀の三つの神学潮流

20世紀の教会を形づくった三つの潮流

1

自由主義

聖書ではなく個人的経験を真理の試金石とする。バルト/ブルンナーが振り子を途中まで戻し、ブルトマン/ティリヒ/ロビンソンが再び前へ押した。

2

エキュメニズム

1910年エディンバラから1948年世界教会協議会へ。並行して進み、パウソンが一度も触れない第2バチカン公会議(1962—65年)もあった。

3

ペンテコステ派

アズサ通りの一つの馬小屋(1906年)からプロテスタント最大級の運動の一つへ、さらにデュケイン(1967年)を通してカトリック内部へ広がった。


第三部:1900–1968 — 二つの世界大戦と三つのイズム

XIV. 第一主義:自由主義と怒りのない神

ポーソンは、20世紀の教会を形作った三つの主義、すなわち自由主義、エキュメニズム、ペンテコステ主義について語ります。自由主義はドイツで生まれ、聖書や教会ではなく個人の経験を真理の最終的な試験とし、地獄、奇跡、神の怒りを取り除く方向へ進みました。彼は「怒りのない神が、十字架のないキリストの働きを通して、罪のない人間を裁きのない王国へ導く」という一節を引用します。二度の世界大戦の後、スイスの神学者カール・バルトとエミール・ブルンナーは振り子を戻して罪と贖いを再び説きましたが、聖書を文字どおり神の言葉とする信念へ完全には戻りませんでした。振り子は再び前へ振れ、ブルトマン、ティリッヒ、そしてウーリッジ司教ジョン・A・T・ロビンソンらによる新たな急進主義へ傾きました。ポーソンによれば、ロビンソンの読者たちは「神は死んだ」と宣言しました。彼は「聖書にはこう書いてある」を合言葉とするビリー・グラハムを、福音派の対抗勢力として置きます。

カール・バルト(1886—1968)、スイス改革派神学者で新正統主義の主要な声。1956年撮影。『教会教義学』は19世紀自由主義に対抗し、人間の罪とキリストにおける神の主権的啓示を再確認した。
カール・バルト(1886—1968)、スイス改革派神学者で新正統主義の主要な声。1956年撮影。『教会教義学』は19世紀自由主義に対抗し、人間の罪とキリストにおける神の主権的啓示を再確認した。ドイツ連邦公文書館、Bild 194-1283-23A/ハンス・ラッハマン、1956年。CC BY-SA 3.0 DE、Wikimedia Commons。

振り子はリベラルから新正統派へ、そしてまた急進派へと揺れ動くが、ポーソンによれば、それぞれの揺れにはまさに一つのものが欠けている、それは、この本が本当に神の言葉であると信じるところに立ち返ることだという。しかし、まさにその瞬間、別の場所で、別の評議会が、彼が一度も言及したことのない第三の答えを試みていた。


XV. 第二の主義:エキュメニズム、そしてポーソンが早く閉めた扉

ポーソンは、準備会議が1845年、正式な設立が1846年だった福音同盟から始まり、ケズィックのモットー「キリスト・イエスにおいて皆は一つ」(1875年)を経て、正式な出発点とみなす1910年のエディンバラ世界宣教師会議に至るエキュメニズムの歴史を、あるインド人キリスト教徒が「カナダのバプテスト」と自己紹介した逸話とともにたどります。そこから「信仰と秩序」と「生活と仕事」という二つの運動が生まれ、世界教会協議会に統合されました。世界教会協議会は1938年に設立されましたが、第二次世界大戦で延期され、1948年にアムステルダムで147の教派が参加して最初の会合が開かれました。彼は、カナダ(1925年)、スコットランド教会(1929年)、英国メソジズム(1932年)、南インド教会(1947年)の教会合同について語ります。評議会にはローマ・カトリック教徒は含まれなかった一方、多くの正教会は含まれていたと指摘します。1967年初めに説教した彼は、当時進行中だった聖公会とメソジストの統一交渉は失敗するが、その後の試みは成功し、長老派と会衆派は5〜10年以内に合同すると予測しています。

1910年世界宣教会議。エディンバラ大学ニュー・カレッジの集会堂で、第一次世界大戦に砕かれる前の20世紀初頭の宣教的楽観主義を象徴する。
1910年世界宣教会議。エディンバラ大学ニュー・カレッジの集会堂で、第一次世界大戦に砕かれる前の20世紀初頭の宣教的楽観主義を象徴する。WCC写真、1910年。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。
1960年代初頭、第2バチカン公会議の作業会期に聖ペテロ大聖堂内で集う公会議の教父たち。パウソンが1967年の説教で一度も触れなかった出来事である。
1960年代初頭、第2バチカン公会議の作業会期に聖ペテロ大聖堂内で集う公会議の教父たち。パウソンが1967年の説教で一度も触れなかった出来事である。ロタール・ヴォレ、1960年代初頭。CC BY-SA 3.0、Wikimedia Commons。

二つの平行する道、ほとんど一緒に語られない

世界教会協議会と第2バチカン公会議、1910—1965年

プロテスタントの道

1910

エディンバラ世界宣教会議

1937

信仰と職制+生活と働きが合併に同意

1948

第1総会、アムステルダム、147教派

1961

ニューデリー:「一致」から有機的な「連合」へ

カトリックの道(パウソンは言及しない)

1959

ヨハネ23世が公会議を発表

1962

第2バチカン公会議が開会

1964

『Unitatis Redintegratio』。パウロ6世がエルサレムでアテナゴラス1世と会見。

1965

1054年の相互破門が解除され、ローマとイスタンブールで同時に読み上げられた。

同じ時期、同じ10年間に起きた世紀最大の二つのエキュメニカルな物語は、当時の一般的なプロテスタントの物語ではほとんど交わらなかった。

一つの願い · 使い切った

ローマとイスタンブール · 1965年12月7日 · 同じ時刻、二つの都市、一つの宣言が相互破門の911年を消し去った

XVI. 第三の主義:馬小屋で生まれたペンテコステ主義

最後の主義は、キリスト教そのものと同じように、馬小屋で生まれました。それは1906年、ロサンゼルスのアズサ・ストリートで起こったとされます。ノルウェーのメソジスト牧師トーマス・ボール・バラットは、ロサンゼルスへ行くためではなく建築計画の資金を集めるためニューヨークへ向かい、1906年10月7日にそこで聖霊のバプテスマを経験してノルウェーへ戻りました。サンダーランドの聖公会牧師アレクサンダー・ボディが彼を招き、そこで1907年にリバイバルが起こったとされます。1967年の講演でポーソンは、ペンテコステ派がバプテスト派に匹敵する規模となり、特にラテンアメリカで爆発的に成長したと語ります。また、1960年頃から「新しいペンテコステ派」、すなわちカリスマ運動が、米国聖公会の牧師を皮切りに主流派教派へ現れ始めたと述べます。

ロサンゼルス、アズサ通り312番地の使徒信仰伝道所。約1907年撮影で、アズサ通りのリバイバルの場所、現在は近代ペンテコステ運動の誕生地と広く見なされる。
ロサンゼルス、アズサ通り312番地の使徒信仰伝道所。約1907年撮影で、アズサ通りのリバイバルの場所、現在は近代ペンテコステ運動の誕生地と広く見なされる。写真、約1907年。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。
ウィリアム・J・シーモア(1870—1922)、アフリカ系米国人牧師で、1906年4月ロサンゼルスで始まったアズサ通りのリバイバルの中心指導者。パウソンは「馬小屋」で生まれた近代ペンテコステ運動と描くが、彼の名を一度も挙げない。
ウィリアム・J・シーモア(1870—1922)、アフリカ系米国人牧師で、1906年4月ロサンゼルスで始まったアズサ通りのリバイバルの中心指導者。パウソンは「馬小屋」で生まれた近代ペンテコステ運動と描くが、彼の名を一度も挙げない。写真、約1910年代。パブリックドメイン、Wikimedia Commons。

一つの馬小屋から六大陸へ

ペンテコステ派の世界的拡大、1906—1967年

南北アメリカヨーロッパロサンゼルス、1906年アズサ通り。シーモア。ニューヨーク、1906年10月T.B. バラットサンダーランド、1907年アレクサンダー・ボディオスロ、1906年12月バラット帰還サンパウロ、1955年以降キリストのためのブラジルヴァンナイズ、1960年4月デニス・ベネットピッツバーグ、1967年2月デュケインの週末

概略図であり、正確な地理地図ではない。金色の破線=1960年から主流教会とカトリック教会へ広がったカリスマ派の流れ。

ポーソンは、ペンテコステ運動から学んだ四つのことを挙げて、このセクションを締めくくります。第一に、賛美のために解かれた舌は、証しのためにも解かれること。第二に、牧師のパフォーマンスだけでなく、参加型の礼拝を回復すること。第三に、神が今も働いておられるという信仰を回復すること。そして第四に、前のセクションで述べた「神は死んだ」運動に対する、最も生きた答えとなることです。


三つの主義、同じ問いへの三つの異なる答え。二つの世界大戦が一世紀にわたる楽観主義を焼き尽くした後、何が残るのでしょうか。一つの答えは経験へ向かい、一つは互いへ向かい、一つは権力へ向かいました。ポーソンは三つのうち一つだけが完全に正しいと信じていました。しかし三つとも、それぞれの仕方で、教会が何度「死んだ」と宣言されても決して死んでいなかった証拠です。


結び: イエスは教会を建てる

ポーソンはその夜、十分には答えられなかった質問でシリーズの最終講義を終えました。教会は戦いに勝つのでしょうか、それとも消滅するのでしょうか。彼は来週、1968年からキリストの再臨までの将来について話すと約束しました。しかし、彼はシリーズ全体のすべての講義を締めくくったのと同じ言葉で締めくくっています。「イエスはご自分の教会を建てておられるのであり、ハデスの門はそれに打ち勝つことはできない」。

英語Church History — Part 5: The Century of the Heart, and Three Isms (1800–1968)

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.

0M5M10M15M20MPawson saidReal census1801182118411851

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.

All green
england · 1801 · nearly nine million people, not five, and the number is about to double

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.

Henry Martyn (1781–1812), Anglican chaplain who gave up his engagement to go to India, translated the New Testament and Book of Common Prayer into Hindustani (Urdu), and died in Persia at age 31.
Henry Martyn (1781–1812), Anglican chaplain who gave up his engagement to go to India, translated the New Testament and Book of Common Prayer into Hindustani (Urdu), and died in Persia at age 31.William M. Hay, 19th century. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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.

William Wilberforce, Member of Parliament and the central figure of the Clapham Sect, the circle of evangelical laymen who carried their social conscience into Parliament.
William Wilberforce, Member of Parliament and the central figure of the Clapham Sect, the circle of evangelical laymen who carried their social conscience into Parliament.Anton Hickel, 1794. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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").

◄◄rewind · upstream
UI
API
Queue
Worker
Source
1842 · the mines act · one clause that saved every woman, and an age limit misremembered for a hundred years after

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.

Charles Simeon (1759–1836), evangelical Anglican vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge, who kept the Low Church evangelical wing alive within the Church of England for over fifty years.
Charles Simeon (1759–1836), evangelical Anglican vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge, who kept the Low Church evangelical wing alive within the Church of England for over fifty years.Artist unknown, early 19th century. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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).

George Müller (1805–1898), who with Henry Craik led Bethesda Chapel in Bristol, famed for the faith-based orphanage he ran without ever soliciting funds.
George Müller (1805–1898), who with Henry Craik led Bethesda Chapel in Bristol, famed for the faith-based orphanage he ran without ever soliciting funds.Photographer unknown. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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.

John Henry Newman (1801–1890), the intellectual leader of the Oxford Tractarian movement, photographed in 1887, after being made a Cardinal, more than four decades after leaving the Church of England for Rome in 1845.
John Henry Newman (1801–1890), the intellectual leader of the Oxford Tractarian movement, photographed in 1887, after being made a Cardinal, more than four decades after leaving the Church of England for Rome in 1845.Herbert Rose Barraud, 1887. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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.
oxford · 14 july 1833 · one sermon, ninety tracts, and a church that would never look the same again

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.

The North Dutch Church at Fulton and William Streets, New York, where Jeremiah Lanphier held the first noon prayer meeting in 1857, the spark that spread “like a prairie fire” to Ulster and then England.
The North Dutch Church at Fulton and William Streets, New York, where Jeremiah Lanphier held the first noon prayer meeting in 1857, the spark that spread “like a prairie fire” to Ulster and then England.Edward Lamson Henry, 1869. Public domain (CC0), Wikimedia Commons / Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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.

Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), founder of the China Inland Mission (1865), photographed in 1893 late in his missionary career in China.
Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), founder of the China Inland Mission (1865), photographed in 1893 late in his missionary career in China.From “The Story of The China Inland Mission” by Geraldine Guinness, 1893. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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."

The “Cambridge Seven” in 1885, seven Cambridge students (including C.T. Studd) who left England as missionaries to China, photographed in Qing-dynasty mandarin dress, an iconic moment of the late-19th-century student missionary movement.
The “Cambridge Seven” in 1885, seven Cambridge students (including C.T. Studd) who left England as missionaries to China, photographed in Qing-dynasty mandarin dress, an iconic moment of the late-19th-century student missionary movement.Photographer unknown, 1885. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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."

mount hermon · july 1886 · one hundred signatures, not a thousand, and a watchword about to circle the globe

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.

An 1870 engraving depicting the First Vatican Council in session inside St. Peter's Basilica, the first ecumenical council since Trent (1545–1563), convened by Pius IX, which formally defined the dogma of papal infallibility.
An 1870 engraving depicting the First Vatican Council in session inside St. Peter's Basilica, the first ecumenical council since Trent (1545–1563), convened by Pius IX, which formally defined the dogma of papal infallibility.Unknown artist, 1870. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Charles Darwin, c. 1854, years before the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, the book that placed him at the center of the 19th-century science-faith debate.
Charles Darwin, c. 1854, years before the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, the book that placed him at the center of the 19th-century science-faith debate.Maull & Fox, c. 1854. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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."

Karl Marx (1818–1883), author of Das Kapital (1867) and the Communist Manifesto. Photographed in 1875; held at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.
Karl Marx (1818–1883), author of Das Kapital (1867) and the Communist Manifesto. Photographed in 1875; held at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.John Jabez Edwin Mayall, 1875. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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 burned-over district · new york · a strip of land scorched so many times it birthed four new religions in half a century
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 , 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."

Aerial photograph of opposing British and German front-line trenches on the Western Front, 9 June 1916, the archetypal image of the trench warfare that shattered early-20th-century faith in inevitable progress.
Aerial photograph of opposing British and German front-line trenches on the Western Front, 9 June 1916, the archetypal image of the trench warfare that shattered early-20th-century faith in inevitable progress.No. 10 Squadron RFC / Imperial War Museums, 1916. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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

0%10%20%30%40%180019001970

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.

Karl Barth (1886–1968), Swiss Reformed theologian and leading voice of neo-orthodoxy, photographed in 1956. His Church Dogmatics reasserted human sinfulness and God's sovereign revelation in Christ against 19th-century liberal Protestantism.
Karl Barth (1886–1968), Swiss Reformed theologian and leading voice of neo-orthodoxy, photographed in 1956. His Church Dogmatics reasserted human sinfulness and God's sovereign revelation in Christ against 19th-century liberal Protestantism.Bundesarchiv, Bild 194-1283-23A / Hans Lachmann, 1956. CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, Wikimedia Commons.

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.

The 1910 World Missionary Conference, Assembly Hall, New College, University of Edinburgh, a symbol of early-20th-century missionary optimism, before it was shattered by World War I.
The 1910 World Missionary Conference, Assembly Hall, New College, University of Edinburgh, a symbol of early-20th-century missionary optimism, before it was shattered by World War I.WCC Photo, 1910. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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."

Council fathers during a working session of the Second Vatican Council inside St Peter's Basilica, early 1960s, the event Pawson never once mentions in his 1967 sermon.
Council fathers during a working session of the Second Vatican Council inside St Peter's Basilica, early 1960s, the event Pawson never once mentions in his 1967 sermon.Lothar Wolleh, early 1960s. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

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.

one wish · spent

rome and istanbul · 7 december 1965 · the same hour, two cities, one declaration erasing nine hundred and eleven years of mutual excommunication

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.

The Apostolic Faith Mission building at 312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles, photographed c. 1907, the site of the Azusa Street Revival, now widely regarded as the birthplace of the modern Pentecostal movement.
The Apostolic Faith Mission building at 312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles, photographed c. 1907, the site of the Azusa Street Revival, now widely regarded as the birthplace of the modern Pentecostal movement.Photograph, c. 1907. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
William J. Seymour (1870–1922), African American pastor and central leader of the Azusa Street Revival that began in April 1906 in Los Angeles, the event Pawson describes as the modern Pentecostal movement being born “in a stable,” though Pawson never names Seymour in his account.
William J. Seymour (1870–1922), African American pastor and central leader of the Azusa Street Revival that began in April 1906 in Los Angeles, the event Pawson describes as the modern Pentecostal movement being born “in a stable,” though Pawson never names Seymour in his account.Photograph, c. 1910s. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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

The AmericasEuropeLos Angeles, 1906Azusa Street. Seymour.New York, Oct 1906T.B. BarrattSunderland, 1907Alexander BoddyOslo, Dec 1906Barratt trở vềSão Paulo, 1955+Brazil for ChristVan Nuys, Apr 1960Dennis BennettPittsburgh, Feb 1967Duquesne Weekend

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.

英語とベトナム語を比較する

Editorial Dispatch

静かな元帳

あなたの通信相手に瞑想的なエッセイを直接お届けする、控えめで不定期の派遣です。マーケティングはありません。いつでも購読を解除してください。

読者の感想 (0)

この記事への感想と静かな応答。

この記事にはまだ感想がありません。

感想を残す

このエッセイについての静かな感想を共有するには、サインインしてください。

サインイン →

聖書の一節

聖書の一節