ACTS BIBLE
Two thousand years of teachings set over the Word, each named for what it put in the Word's place, with the pull of each stated before it is answered.
Thomas Chalmers, Scottish minister, later professor of divinity at Edinburgh and the man who led some 470 ministers out of the established church in 1843. He credited the idea to the Dutch theologian Episcopius, two centuries before him. · A lecture in 1814. · Kilmany, a country parish in Fife, where he was minister at the time; then the pulpits and chairs of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
In his own words, geology could be allowed the amplest time without infringing the literalities of the Mosaic record. He was not attacking Scripture. He was defending it against a science he could not answer by finding room in it, and the room was between two verses.
Every fossil, every ice core, every layer that seems to want millions of years can be assigned to the world before verse two. Genesis keeps its six ordinary days. The geology keeps its long clock. Nobody has to give anything up, and a believer under pressure gets to stop choosing.
{'title': 'it costs a verb, the fall, and the six days', 'points': ['It needs verse two to say something it does not say. The verb has to move from was to became, and it was not read that way until people needed the room.', 'It puts death before sin. If the fossils belong to the earlier world, things were dying before Adam ever ate. The gap does not delay that problem, it moves it earlier.', 'It leaves the six days doing nothing. Exodus 20:11 grounds the sabbath in God making everything in six days.']}
George Stanley Faber, English clergyman. It sat quietly for thirty years until Hugh Miller, the Scottish geologist and friend of Chalmers, gave up the gap reading and argued this one instead. · Faber in print in 1823; Miller in the 1850s. · Long Newton in County Durham, where Faber was rector; Miller in Edinburgh, editing The Witness.
The same pressure, one step on. The rock record had turned out to be a long ordered sequence rather than one catastrophe, and a single gap could no longer hold it, so the time moved inside the six days. Which tells you something: the gap theory was abandoned by its own side inside forty years, and not because the Bible changed.
It does not need a pre-Adamic world, it does not need Lucifer's flood, and it does not change a single word. It only asks yom to do something the word demonstrably does elsewhere. That is a real argument, and anyone who pretends otherwise is not listening.
{'title': 'the chapter defines its own days, and the order will not stretch', 'points': ['Every one of the six is closed with an evening, a morning and a number, and Hebrew uses that pattern for ordinary days. The word is not doing the work on its own.', 'Genesis puts the plants on day three and the sun on day four. Trivial across one night; fatal across an epoch.', 'It costs what the gap cost. If the ages are the ages the rocks record, the dying happened before Adam.']}
James Hutton proposed the slow-process account; William Whewell gave the assumption its name; Charles Lyell made it the working method of the field. Charles Darwin carried Lyell's first volume aboard the Beagle. · Hutton in 1795, Lyell from 1830, Darwin sailing in 1831 and publishing in 1859. · Edinburgh, Cambridge and London.
It replaced an older account in which the earth's features came from catastrophe. Slow and steady was the more tractable assumption for a young science, and it had the advantage of needing no events nobody had witnessed.
It is a reasonable working rule and it produced real results. Most of geology still runs on it, and it would be foolish to pretend the discipline built on it has learned nothing.
{'title': 'it rules out the one event the text reports', 'points': ['It is assumed rather than demonstrated. Rates observed for two centuries are extended over billions of years, and the extension is the claim being tested.', 'It excludes catastrophe by definition, which means the flood cannot be evidence against it, because it was never allowed to be evidence at all.', 'Peter names this exact posture and says it is chosen, not discovered: they are willingly ignorant that the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.']}
William Smith, an English canal surveyor with no university behind him, who noticed that the same fossils turned up in the same order wherever he cut. Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart were mapping the Paris basin the same way. Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison named the lower systems in the 1830s, and Arthur Holmes attached radiometric ages from 1913. · Smith's map of England in 1815; the ages added after 1913. · The canals and coal cuts around Bath, the Paris basin, and the hills of Wales, where the Cambrian and Silurian got their names.
Smith was not settling the age of the earth. He needed to know what rock a canal would hit before he dug it, and the fossils predicted it. The order was a working tool for engineers before it was ever a timeline, which is part of why it is hard to wave away as somebody's theology.
The succession is real and it is consistent, and it was found by men digging for money rather than men arguing about Genesis. The same order turns up on other continents. Independent radiometric methods often agree with each other. A class that pretends this is all invented will lose the first student who reads anything.
{'title': 'the order is one claim and the clock is another', 'points': ['The column as drawn is a composite, correlated across many sites. A few deep basins do preserve nearly the whole sequence, so this is a caution about how the picture is built rather than a claim that it is fictional.', 'That the layers lie in an order is an observation. That they took hundreds of millions of years is an inference, and it rests on the assumption named beside it. Separate the two when somebody hands you both at once.', 'Water sorts and stacks sediment too. Ordered layers are not by themselves the point in dispute; the rates are.']}
No single author, and the span matters more than any one name. Late rabbinic and medieval writers connected Ham with dark skin; the English explorer George Best put the reading into print in 1578; and the American defence ran through pulpits and books like Josiah Priest's 1843 defence of slavery, reissued in the 1850s as Bible Defence of Slavery. Naming an inventor would be tidier and false. · Best in 1578; hardest use in American pulpits from the 1830s to 1865. · The Atlantic trade, and then the American South, where it was preached from real pulpits to real congregations.
The system came first and the text was fetched afterward. That is the honest order of events, and it is what makes this the most dangerous example in the course: nobody sat down with Genesis 9 and derived an economy from it. They had an economy and went looking for a verse.
It let a man keep his Bible and his ledger without choosing. It came from Scripture rather than from convenience, which meant a slaveholder could hear it in church rather than admit it to himself. And it was preached by men who were not fringe.
{'title': 'the curse names Canaan, and Canaan is not Africa', 'points': ['Canaan is named in all three verses of the curse, and Ham is not named in any of them. The reading has to change the subject in its first sentence.', "Genesis 10 lists Canaan's descendants by name and they are the peoples of the land of Canaan, in the Levant. Ham's other sons are not cursed at all.", "Noah says it, not God. The chapter reports a drunk man's words the same way it reports the drinking, and reporting is not endorsing.", 'Scripture itself shows where it landed. Joshua records Canaan subdued under Israel, which is the fulfilment the text points at and has nothing to do with Africa.']}
Samuel George Morton of Philadelphia, who assembled the skull collection and published Crania Americana, and who is still called a father of American physical anthropology. Josiah Nott and George Gliddon carried it into Types of Mankind, and Louis Agassiz of Harvard lent it his name. · Morton from 1839; Types of Mankind in 1854. · Philadelphia, where the skulls were kept; Mobile, Alabama, where Nott practised; and Harvard.
It answered a question the slave states needed answered. Types of Mankind was dedicated to Morton and its use was not hidden. Agassiz left a letter to his mother recording his own revulsion on first meeting black Americans, written before he had measured anything, which tells you which came first.
It did not argue, it reported. Numbers taken off actual skulls by a serious collector, endorsed by a Harvard professor, at a time when measurement was winning every other argument. To a reader in 1854 this looked like exactly what science looks like.
{'title': 'it is dead as science, and it did not die of bad arithmetic', 'points': ['Every human population interbreeds freely, and the genetic variation inside any one group is larger than the variation between groups. There are no separate species to rank.', 'Do not lean on the fraud story. Gould argued in 1978 that Morton fudged his numbers; a 2011 remeasurement disputed that and found the measurements largely sound, and the argument has gone back and forth since. The case does not need Morton to have cheated.', 'What was wrong was the step from the numbers to the conclusion. That step was never measured, and it is the only part anyone was actually arguing about.', 'Genesis 10 had already said it and Paul says it in Athens: one blood, every nation, one map drawn by one God.']}
A movement rather than an invention, so the honest answer names the span and its earliest identifiable teachers: Basilides at Alexandria, and Valentinus, who taught at Rome and was reportedly considered for its bishopric. Irenaeus, who had been taught by Polycarp, wrote the long reply. · Roots in the first century; the named teachers through the second; Irenaeus answering them around 180. · Alexandria, Rome and Syria. The movement's own writings were lost until a jar of them turned up at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, which is why they can now be read rather than only their opponents.
It answers the problem every sufferer actually has. If the world is this cruel, either God is not good or God did not make it. Gnosticism takes the second door, and it keeps God clean at the price of the world being someone else's fault.
It explains evil without accusing God. It offers depth to people who are serious, a level past what the ordinary congregation gets. And it lets Jesus be too holy for a body, which sounds like reverence rather than the denial it is.
{'title': 'a Christ without a body cannot die, and a gospel for insiders is not the gospel', 'points': ['John was written against exactly this and does not hedge: the Word was made flesh, and the test of a spirit is whether it confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.', 'If the body is the problem, the resurrection is bad news. The whole hope of the New Testament is a body raised, not a soul released from one.', 'Genesis 1 calls the material world good, seven times, before anything has gone wrong. The account that says matter is evil has to start by contradicting the first page.', 'Secret knowledge for the qualified is the opposite of what was commanded: preach the gospel to every creature.']}
Pelagius, a British-born monk of blameless reputation who taught in Rome, and his follower Caelestius, who put the sharp edges on it. Augustine spent the last twenty years of his life answering them. · Teaching at Rome from about 380; condemned at Carthage in 418, at Ephesus in 431, and finally at Orange in 529. · Rome until Alaric sacked it in 410, then Carthage in North Africa, then Palestine, where a local synod at Diospolis cleared him in 415 before the African churches pressed the case again.
He was appalled by the moral slackness of Christian Rome. By Augustine's own account, what set him off was a line in the Confessions, a prayer that God would give what He commands and then command what He wills. Pelagius heard that as an excuse for doing nothing, and he was trying to get Christians to actually obey.
It takes the commandments seriously, which is more than a lot of preaching does. It makes holiness urgent. It seems to protect God's justice, since punishing a man for a nature he never chose looks unfair. And the man arguing it was not a scoundrel; he was a moralist who wanted better Christians.
{'title': 'it makes the cross a demonstration rather than a rescue', 'points': ['The rule underneath it, that a command implies the ability to keep it, is nowhere in Scripture. The law was given to stop every mouth, not to prove that every mouth could pass.', 'Ephesians 2 says dead, not weakened. A sick man wants medicine; a dead man needs raising, and those call for different saviors.', 'Romans 5 runs the parallel both ways. If Adam is only a bad example, then Christ is only a good one, and salvation becomes a matter of copying somebody.', "This was not one council's mood. Carthage, Ephesus and Orange refused it across one hundred and eleven years, and Orange went further: even wanting to believe is God's work first."]}
The practice grew out of the penitential system over centuries; Clement VI defined the treasury in 1343. The campaign Luther answered was preached by Johann Tetzel, a Dominican, funding two things at once: Leo X's rebuilding of St Peter's, and Albrecht of Brandenburg's debt to the Fugger bank for the offices he had bought. · Clement VI's bull in 1343; the Tetzel campaign from 1516; the ninety-five theses on 31 October 1517. · Rome, and the German towns of Jüterbog and Zerbst. Frederick the Wise had banned the sale inside Saxony, so Wittenbergers walked over the border to buy, and came home with receipts. Luther was their pastor and read the receipts.
A real pastoral fear, answered with the wrong currency. People were frightened for their dead, and the church had an answer that could be paid for today. That the answer also built a basilica and cleared a bishop's loan is documented.
It meets a grief nobody can otherwise touch, and it lets you do something for a mother already buried. It runs through the church that baptized you and buried her. And it never denies the cross out loud. It only says the cross left a balance you can help with, which is a far easier thing to believe than a flat lie.
{'title': 'it prices what the text gives away', 'points': ["A treasury of surplus merit standing beside Christ's is the whole argument in one word: surplus. If more was needed, His was not finished, and Hebrews says one offering perfected them forever.", 'Romans calls eternal life the gift of God. A gift with a price list is a sale, whatever it is called.', 'The purgatory the payment shortens rests on 2 Maccabees, which is not in the Hebrew canon Jesus and the apostles cite.', "Luther's own first thesis went at the root rather than the abuse: the whole life of a believer is repentance, which is not a debt to be worked off in instalments."]}
No single author. Prayer for the dead appears in catacomb inscriptions by the third century. Augustine writes about a cleansing fire cautiously and says he does not press it. Gregory the Great, around 590, tells stories that fix it in the popular mind. Aquinas gives it a framework in the thirteenth century. · Defined at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, again at Florence in 1439, and reaffirmed by Trent in 1547 and 1563. So the definition is medieval and the argument for it is older. · The Latin West. The Greek East prayed for the dead too and refused the Latin account of a purging fire, which is why it was on the table at Florence when the two halves of the church were trying to reunite.
A question every pastor is actually asked. A woman dies trusting Christ and still short-tempered, still holding a grudge she never let go. Scripture says nothing unclean enters. So what happens between her last breath and that gate? Purgatory is an answer to a real problem, and any church that mocks the question has not sat with the family.
It takes holiness seriously at exactly the point where easy preaching goes soft. It refuses to pretend the woman was already finished. And it gives the grieving something to do, which is the hardest thing to take away from anyone, because doing nothing feels like not loving her.
{'title': 'it answers a real question with an unfinished cross', 'points': ['The problem is real and Scripture already answers it. The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin, and to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Paul expects no interval.', 'Hebrews says he had made purification for sins before he sat down. A purification still owed after death is a purification he did not make.', 'The mechanism requires a punishment that outlives forgiveness. If God forgives the guilt and still collects the debt, then either the forgiveness or the collection is doing nothing.', 'It has one floor text and it is 2 Maccabees 12, which is not in the Hebrew canon Jesus and the apostles cite. Trent received that book in 1546 and defined this in the same council.', 'The thief on the cross had no time to be purged and was told today, which is the case Scripture chose to record.']}
It grew from the martyr cults of the third and fourth centuries, where Christians gathered at a grave on the anniversary and asked the martyr to remember them. The Marian titles came later and mostly from the East. · Grave inscriptions asking the dead to pray appear by the third century. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 settles the related fight over images. Trent defends invocation in 1563. The Immaculate Conception is defined in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950, both by papal declaration. · Everywhere there were relics, which by the fifth century meant almost everywhere, since altars were being built over bones on purpose.
It starts from something true. The church is one body and death does not remove a believer from it, so the Christians in heaven are alive and are not strangers. Asking a brother on earth to pray for you is ordinary Christianity. The move is to keep asking after he dies.
It is warm where doctrine is cold. A frightened person wants a mother, and a man ashamed of himself would rather ask a sympathetic saint to speak to Christ than speak to Christ. That instinct is exactly what the practice feeds, and exactly what Hebrews was written to kill.
{'title': 'it adds a queue in front of an open door', 'points': ['There is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. Paul says one, and the sentence has no room for a second desk.', 'Hebrews spends chapters arguing that we now come with boldness to the throne of grace, and that the curtain is torn. A practice that makes a sinner feel he needs somebody gentler first is arguing against that book.', 'Not one prayer in Scripture is addressed to a dead believer, in sixty-six books, including the ones written after saints had died and while the apostles were being martyred.', 'Israel was forbidden to seek the dead. Whatever the distinction between honour and worship on paper, the instruction about the direction of address was plain.', 'The practical test is what people actually do. When a man says a rosary because he cannot bring himself to ask Christ directly, the distinction between dulia and latria has stopped operating, whatever the manual says.']}
The word appears in the twelfth century and is used by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Aquinas supplies the philosophy in the thirteenth. The ninth-century argument between Radbertus and Ratramnus at Corbie shows the question was genuinely open long after the church had been celebrating the supper for eight hundred years. · Lateran IV, 1215. Defined against the Reformers at Trent in 1551, which also anathematised anyone saying Christ is present only as a sign. · The Latin West. The East holds a real presence and has never adopted the Aristotelian account of how.
It is trying to protect words Jesus actually said. This is my body is in every gospel and in 1 Corinthians, and a church that shrugs at those words is not being more biblical than one that overreads them.
It makes the supper enormous. Nobody drifts through a mass thinking it is a memorial snack. And it puts something in the hands of a man who cannot read, in a century when most could not.
{'title': 'it makes a finished sacrifice a repeated one', 'points': ['The same night he said this is my body he was sitting at the table in his body, unbroken, and the men could see him. Whatever he meant, the first hearers were not looking at a change in the bread.', 'He also said I am the door and I am the vine, in the same gospel, and nobody has ever been asked to believe he is made of wood.', 'Hebrews rests its whole argument on one sacrifice offered once. Trent calls the mass a true and proper sacrifice offered for the living and the dead, and once is the word the text keeps using.', 'A claim built so that no observation could count against it is a claim that cannot be tested by Scripture either, which is how it survived so long without the text supporting it.']}
Leo I in the fifth century makes the argument from Peter with real force. Gregory VII pushes jurisdiction hard in the eleventh. The First Vatican Council settles infallibility in 1870, with a minority of bishops leaving Rome rather than vote against it. · Claimed in stages from the fourth century; asserted against the East before the split of 1054; defined at Vatican I in 1870. · Rome, and everywhere Rome could enforce it, which for a long stretch was most of western Europe and never the East.
The church needed somewhere to settle disputes and Rome was the only apostolic see in the West, the capital, and for centuries the place that had been right when others wobbled. Its record in the Arian crisis was better than most. Authority accrued to it partly because it had earned trust.
It solves the problem every congregation feels. Who decides? A living voice that can settle a question this year is worth a great deal against a text that has to be read and argued over. That is not a foolish preference. It is the oldest trade in church history, certainty for final authority.
{'title': 'the office outgrew anything the New Testament gave it', 'points': ['Peter is rebuked to his face by Paul at Antioch for being wrong about the gospel, and Paul reports it in writing to churches he did not found.', 'The council in Acts 15 is chaired by James and decided in common, with Peter speaking as one voice among several.', 'Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome, wrote that anyone calling himself universal bishop was a forerunner of antichrist. He held the office and rejected the claim.', 'Part of the medieval case rested on documents that were forgeries. Lorenzo Valla showed the Donation of Constantine a forgery in 1440, from its history and its Latin both, and he was a Catholic doing it.', "If the rock of Matthew 16 is Peter's office rather than his confession, the promise should have been legible to the churches of the first three centuries, and it was not."]}
A movement, so the slot names the span. Friedrich Schleiermacher began it, and Ritschl, Herrmann and Harnack carried it. Julius Wellhausen gave the Old Testament its editorial theory. In America it reached the pulpit through Harry Emerson Fosdick, and J. Gresham Machen wrote the reply. · Schleiermacher's Speeches in 1799; Wellhausen in 1878; Harnack in 1900; Fosdick's sermon in 1922 and Machen's book in 1923. · The German universities at Halle, Berlin and Göttingen, then First Presbyterian and Riverside Church in New York, with Princeton on the other side of the argument.
Schleiermacher said the motive in his title: he was writing to religion's cultured despisers, the educated men of his own class who had stopped believing. The aim was to keep the faith credible to people who could no longer accept a miracle, and to keep the universities Christian.
It engages real objections instead of shouting at them. It keeps the ethics of Jesus, which are genuinely beautiful. It sounds like humility about what can be known. And it kept a great many thoughtful people inside a church they were otherwise leaving, which is not a small thing to have wanted.
{'title': 'it keeps the vocabulary and changes the religion', 'points': ["Machen's charge was not that it was liberal but that it was a different religion using Christian words, so the two could not share a pulpit without one of them being misrepresented.", 'Paul already priced this. If Christ is not raised, our preaching is empty and we are of all men most miserable. He does not offer the ethical remainder as a fallback.', 'A Jesus who only teaches leaves a heavier law and no atonement. The ethics that are kept are the hardest ones, and the help is what got dropped.', 'The method decides the result before the reading starts. Rule out in advance that God acts in history, and no text reporting that He did can ever be read as reporting it.']}
Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist pastor, and Washington Gladden before him. Rauschenbusch is the one to name, because he did not theorize it first. He pastored it, then wrote it down. · Roughly 1870 to 1920; Rauschenbusch's book in 1907. · Hell's Kitchen in New York, where he served eleven years, and Gladden's pulpit in Columbus, Ohio. The theology came out of industrial slums, not out of a seminary.
The tenements were killing children and the churches were largely quiet about it. Rauschenbusch buried those children. His starting point was not a theory about the kingdom, it was a funeral rate, and the theology came afterward to explain what he could not stop seeing.
It refused to call the suffering in front of it none of the church's business, and it had the texts to say so. Matthew 25 and James 2 are not liberal inventions. On the plain question of whether Christians should have cared about child labor, it was right and much of the church was wrong.
{'title': 'the compassion was right and the exchange was ruinous', 'points': ['It moved the kingdom from what God brings to what society builds, and a kingdom built by people is one that can also go unfinished.', 'If sin is mainly structural, the cross becomes solidarity with the poor rather than a substitute for sinners. The sympathy stays and the atonement goes.', 'It borrowed its doctrine from the liberalism beside it, so when the optimism died in the trenches after 1914 the movement had nothing underneath the ethics to stand on.', 'The right response is not to drop the mercy. Care for the poor is commanded, and it is commanded by the same book that says why they are poor and what actually saves them.']}
Marcion, a wealthy shipowner from Sinope on the Black Sea. He came to Rome about 139, gave the church 200,000 sesterces, tried to win the presbyters to his reading, and was put out in 144 with his money returned. Within twenty years there were Marcionite churches across the empire, with bishops of their own. · Rome, 144. Irenaeus answers him near 180 and Tertullian in five books around 207; the churches lasted into the seventh century. · Sinope in Pontus, then Rome. The oldest dated inscription on any Christian building, from 318, is over the door of a Marcionite meeting house in a Syrian village.
He read Paul on law and gospel and could not make the God of the law the Father of Jesus. Tertullian says the first idea came from one saying, that a good tree cannot bring forth corrupt fruit; set beside Isaiah's I create evil, that seemed to require two trees. His book, the Antitheses, laid Old Testament against gospel line by line to prove two authors.
The Old Testament has plagues, wars and a God who orders whole towns put to the sword, and a reader who has met Jesus feels the difference. Marcion felt it harder than anyone in his century and refused to smooth it over. He asked for no secret knowledge; he pointed to Paul, and Paul really does say law and grace, works and faith, wrath and mercy.
{'title': 'the knife had to keep cutting, because the Jesus he kept calls the Creator Father', 'points': ["It is a text cut, not a text read. Irenaeus says Marcion removed from Luke everything about the Lord's birth and every place where Jesus calls the Maker of the world His Father, and cut the prophets out of Paul. Tertullian: he used the knife, not the pen.", "What he kept still gave him away. His own Luke has Jesus thanking the Father as Lord of heaven, and the Paul he kept preaches at Athens the God who made the world and everything in it. Tertullian's fourth book argues from Marcion's gospel alone.", 'A god unknown until Tiberius is a god nobody had worshipped for the whole history of the world. Tertullian did the arithmetic: about 115 years lie between Christ and Marcion, so the god first preached under Antoninus was not the one who spoke under Tiberius.', "A God who did not make the world has no claim on it, and Marcion's own system ends by handing unbelievers to the Creator's hell anyway. Harnack, who called him the one man of his century who tried to understand Paul, added that a redeemer who is not the Lord of heaven and earth turns the gospel upside down.", "The church answered by naming its books. The oldest surviving list of the church's own Scriptures, the Muratorian fragment, names Marcion and throws out two letters forged in Paul's name for his sect. The first list the church wrote down was written with him in view."]}
Montanus, a recent convert, with Prisca and Maximilla, two women who left their husbands to prophesy beside him and were honoured above him. Those are the earliest names the record has; the movement outlived them by centuries. Its most famous convert was Tertullian of Carthage, the first great Latin theologian, who accepted the prophecies about 207. · Epiphanius puts the start in 156, Eusebius in 172. The bishops of Asia broke with the prophets around 178. Justinian was still expelling Montanist clergy in 530. · Ardabau, a village on the Mysian border of Phrygia in western Asia Minor; then Pepuza and Tymion, two small Phrygian towns named the New Jerusalem; from there to Rome, Gaul and Carthage. Gravestones in the Tembris valley confessed the New Prophecy openly in the third century.
Tertullian gives the reason in his own words. The rule of faith is one, immovable and irreformable, but discipline admits correction, and the Lord sent the Paraclete because human weakness could not take everything in at once. He cited John 16, where the Lord has many things still to say that the disciples cannot yet bear.
The church was settling, the fervour of the first generations was cooling, and Christians who wanted the hard old road, fasting, one marriage, martyrdom rather than flight, watched an institution making it easier to be a Christian. Montanism said the Spirit had not gone quiet. Prophecy is in the New Testament, the daughters of Philip had prophesied in that same country, and it kept the whole creed.
{'title': "the promised Spirit recalls Christ's words, and these prophets failed the tests", 'points': ["The Comforter's promised work is to bring to remembrance what Jesus said and to glorify Him (John 14:26; 16:14). Tertullian turns the disciples' inability to bear more into an open door for commandments about veils and fasts more than a century after Pentecost, every one a rule the apostles had not given.", "The form failed the church's own test. The anonymous writer quoted by Eusebius says Montanus fell into a frenzy and raved, prophesying in a manner contrary to the constant custom of the church; Paul says the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. A lyre with no mind is not the prophet of 1 Corinthians 14.", 'The content failed the older test. Maximilla foretold wars and the end; the same writer, more than thirteen years after her death, notes that there had been no war anywhere. Deuteronomy 18 says a word that does not come to pass was not from the LORD. Pepuza never became Jerusalem.', "It sets an open word beside a closed one. Once a living voice can add rules with the Spirit's authority, the apostles' written word is no longer the last word. The church's oldest surviving list of its books, from about these years, already refuses even the Shepherd of Hermas a place among the Prophets, whose number is complete.", "Its best defender kept the faith unchanged. Tertullian's own sentence leaves the rule of faith one and unalterable and adds only discipline, and the Montanists of the West held the New Testament to be the supreme rule of life. A rule the apostles did not give binds nobody, whatever voice delivers it."]}
Arius, a presbyter of the Baucalis church in Alexandria, an ascetic of strict life whom even his enemies called persuasive, and a pupil of the martyr Lucian of Antioch. He is the name, and the record says the school was wider than the man: Eusebius of Nicomedia, who baptized Constantine, carried the cause after Arius died in 336. Athanasius of Alexandria spent his life answering it. · Alexandria, 318. Constantine called the bishops to Nicaea in 325, and Arius was exiled. Then decades when emperors leaned the other way, to Sirmium in 357 and Rimini in 359, when, as Jerome put it, the whole world groaned to find itself Arian. Constantinople in 381 restated Nicaea. · Alexandria; Nicaea in Bithynia; the courts of Constantius II and Valens. Through the missionary Ulfilas it passed to the Goths, Vandals and Lombards, so Arian kings ruled Italy, Spain and North Africa long after the empire's churches had settled on Nicaea.
Arius says why in his letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia: we are persecuted because we say that the Son has a beginning, but that God is without beginning. Alexander was preaching always God, always Son, and Arius heard in it the error that Father and Son are one person under two names (Sabellianism). To keep the Father unbegotten and alone, the Son had to be begotten in the sense of made.
It sounds like the plainest monotheism, and it has verses. My Father is greater than I. The firstborn of every creature. The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, which the Greek Old Testament renders created me. Human sons come after their fathers, so a Son as old as His Father sounds like a contradiction. Arius asked for no new revelation; he asked only what the words meant.
{'title': 'a creature cannot pay for creatures, and the verses were emptied one at a time', 'points': ['The whole New Testament fails if He is made. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God; all things were made by Him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made. A maker of all things is not one of the things made. Thomas says my Lord and my God and is not corrected.', 'The word greater is spoken by the one who, being in the form of God, took the form of a servant (Philippians 2). John 14:28 sits in the gospel that opens with the Word as God and ends with Thomas; keeping one verse and losing the frame is the text mishandled, not a rival authority set over it.', "It cannot save. Athanasius rested his whole case here: none could restore what was ruined but He who had made it, and to pay the debt of death He must die for us. If the one on the cross is a creature, the death is a creature's death and the debt stands.", "The proof texts were emptied one by one. Athanasius records that at Nicaea the bishops first tried the Bible's own words, from God, power, image, always, and the Arian party whispered that every one could be said of men too. So the council wrote one in essence, and asked which Scripture taught from nothing or once He was not; they had none."]}
Donatus Magnus, bishop of Carthage from 313, gave the movement its name; it began with a party under Secundus of Tigisis and the widow Lucilla, who set up Majorinus against Caecilian in 311. Donatus led it for forty years. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, wrote the long reply. · From 311, after Diocletian's persecution. Rome ruled against them in 313 and Arles in 314; the great conference at Carthage in 411 settled it in law, and the sect faded under the Muslim conquest of the seventh century. · Roman North Africa, mainly Numidia and the country around Carthage, where for a stretch the Donatists were the larger church and a town could have two bishops, one on each side.
The persecution had just ended, and it had produced martyrs who died rather than surrender a Bible and traditores who handed theirs over to be burned. When men of the second kind came back to their pulpits under Constantine, the rigorists could not swallow it. The demand rests on a rule taken from Cyprian, the martyr-bishop who had held that baptism outside the true church was no baptism, and from the older African custom of the Novatians.
It refused to let the men who had betrayed the Scriptures under fire pastor the church of those who had burned for keeping them. That is loyalty to the dead. It guards the holiness of the church, which Scripture does command. And it stood on Cyprian, a saint and a martyr, so it could claim the African church's own tradition rather than an invention of its own.
{'title': "it hangs the sinner's hope on the priest, when the grace was always Christ's to give", 'points': ["It makes salvation depend on a man. Augustine's answer to Petilian is that it is always Christ who gives faith and God who justifies the ungodly; Paul planted and Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. If the water works only when the minister is holy, every baptized person rests his hope on a conscience he cannot see.", "The Bible tells the baptized to look past the preacher. The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' seat, so do what they say though not what they do; the seed is the Word of God even from a man who does not keep it.", 'Their own authority turns against them. Augustine shows that Cyprian, whom they leaned on, recorded Peter himself corrected by Paul at Antioch, and at his own council refused to be a bishop of bishops. A custom that admits its own fathers could err cannot be the ground that Scripture is.', "The parable they cited answers them. The wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest, and the sorting is the angels' work at the end, not a bishop's now.", "The rule swallows itself. If a hidden sin voids the sacrament, no one baptized by anyone can be sure, since no one reads another's heart; and Donatus's side later split over which of them was pure enough, which is where a purity that runs through men always ends."]}
Nestorius, a celebrated preacher of the school of Antioch whom Theodosius II raised to the see of Constantinople in 428. His forceful opponent was Cyril of Alexandria. The label outran the man: Nestorius insisted he was orthodox, and his own defence, the Bazaar of Heracleides recovered in 1895, has led scholars to doubt he taught the two persons that bear his name. · Patriarch from 428; condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and again at Chalcedon in 451. The name outlived him by centuries in the East. · Constantinople and Ephesus, then far past the empire that condemned it. The Church of the East carried the name into Persia, to the Saint Thomas Christians of India, and to China, where a Persian mission reached the Tang capital in 635 and left the Nestorian Stele of 781 behind.
He was defending the two natures against confusion. Nestorius would not let the eternal Godhead be said to be born or to die, and he heard the cult of Mary as God-bearer sliding toward exactly that. In his own words he could not speak of God as two or three months old.
It protects a true thing. The divine nature did not begin in a womb and did not perish on a cross, and keeping the eternal from being called a few months old sounds like care for the honour of God. It takes the real manhood seriously, the man who grew and hungered and wept. And the man who argued it denied the heresy to the end.
{'title': 'the mediator has to be one person, or the one who dies is only a man', 'points': ["Cyril's answer, approved at Ephesus, is that the Word did not change into flesh but united flesh to himself in one person, so the natures stay distinct without becoming two who act. A Christ who is two Sons is not the one Lord of the Gospel.", 'The title Theotokos guards the union, not Mary. To call her God-bearer is not to say the Godhead began in her, but that the child she bore is God the Word made flesh. Deny it and the one born becomes a man the Word later joined.', "The atonement needs the sufferer to be the person of the Son. If a distinct human person is what hangs on the cross, a man's death is all that is offered, and Scripture says it was the Lord of glory who was crucified.", 'Chalcedon settled it in 451 in one sentence: one and the same Son, in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. That grants what Nestorius feared and refuses what he risked.', 'The churches that carried his name east now reject the two-person reading, and in 1994 they agreed with Rome that Mary may be called Mother of God. The objection stands against the doctrine, not the people charged with it.']}
Eutyches, an aged and respected archimandrite at Constantinople and godfather to a court official, who in his zeal against Nestorius pressed the one-nature formula until it went past anything Cyril of Alexandria had taught. Dioscorus of Alexandria backed him. The churches usually filed under this name reject him: they trace themselves to Cyril, not Eutyches, and call their faith miaphysite. · Eutyches condemned at Constantinople in 448, reinstated at the Second Council of Ephesus in 449, and the one-nature teaching condemned at Chalcedon in 451. · Constantinople and Alexandria. The split hardened in Egypt, Syria and Armenia, where the churches that refused Chalcedon became the Oriental Orthodox, Coptic and Syriac and Armenian and Ethiopian, some seventy million today and still apart from both Rome and the Eastern Orthodox.
He was fighting Nestorius and would not let Christ be divided into two. In stressing the one Lord he said the natures came together into one, and in his own words at his trial he confessed two natures before the union but one after. The concern was Cyril's own, one Christ, carried until the manhood was lost.
It refuses to split the Savior. It holds to what is true, that there is one Lord and not a divine partner beside a human one, and that the one born of Mary and the one who saves are the same. It rests on a real phrase of Cyril, one incarnate nature of God the Word. And in fairness the living tradition charged with this name is not Eutyches: the Oriental Orthodox confess a manhood fully kept and condemn him by name.
{'title': 'a manhood swallowed cannot be the manhood that saves', 'points': ['Scripture keeps the manhood real after the resurrection. The risen Christ says handle me and see, for a spirit has no flesh and bones, and Leo answers Eutyches that each nature keeps its own properties, the form of God not cancelling the form of a servant.', 'What is not assumed is not healed. If the humanity is absorbed it is no longer of one substance with us, and the rescue never reaches us. Hebrews says he was made like his brethren in all things, and Chalcedon confesses him consubstantial with us as to his manhood.', 'A nature with the properties of manhood boiled off cannot truly hunger or weep or die. The finished work needs a real death of a real man who is God, and a single fused nature blurs the very death it means to honour.', 'Chalcedon answered both errors at once: one Son in two natures, without confusion and without change against Eutyches, without division and without separation against Nestorius. The four words refuse the fusion without conceding the split.', 'The churches that rejected Chalcedon are not Eutychians. They confess a manhood united without mixture or change, reject Eutyches, and in modern statements with Rome and the Eastern Orthodox have owned the same faith under other words. The objection is to a swallowed humanity, not to them.']}
A movement, not one founder, so the honest slot is a span. It is first reported in the West at Cologne in 1143 and took shape in the Rhineland, northern Italy and above all the Languedoc, drawing on the older Bogomil dualism carried from the Balkans. Called Albigensians after the town of Albi. Naming an inventor would be false, the more so because the record is nearly all their prosecutors'. · First reported in 1143; strongest in the Languedoc across the 13th century; the last known Languedoc perfect executed in 1321. · The Languedoc of southern France, around Toulouse, Albi and Carcassonne, and the cities of northern Italy. The roots run east, to the Bogomils of Bulgaria and Thrace.
It answered the pain of the world the way older dualisms had. If the world is this cruel, perhaps a good God did not make it. And it was a protest against a rich and lax clergy: the Good Men were poor and chaste and honest, and people trusted lives that matched the words.
The Good Men were poor, chaste and truthful in an age when many priests were none of these, and they were believed for it. The teaching gave a clean answer to why the world is full of suffering, that a good God did not make this. It let a frightened person wait for the one sacrament and then die consoled, and it put the Scriptures into the common tongue when the church would not.
{'title': 'the world it calls evil is the one God called good, and the body it flees is the body Christ took', 'points': ["Genesis calls the material creation good and says God himself made it. A faith that the visible world is an evil power's prison has to contradict the first page to begin.", 'The Word was made flesh, and the hope held out is a body raised, not a soul let out of one. If matter is evil the Incarnation is a defilement, which is why the Cathars denied the resurrection and scorned the cross.', 'Scripture blesses marriage and childbearing rather than cursing them. Paul calls forbidding to marry a doctrine of devils and says every creature of God is good, which the Cathar horror of reproduction sets itself directly against.', "The record is almost entirely the prosecution's. The Cathar books were burned, and what survives comes through inquisitors like Bernard Gui and a few rare texts, so the doctrine must be judged from a thin and hostile witness, and some historians now ask how organised it ever was.", 'The answer to their protest was not reform but the Albigensian Crusade of 1209 and the Inquisition set against them in 1233. Beziers was put to the sword and 200 perfecti were burned at Montsegur. A crusade against a teaching is not a refutation of it.']}
The charge and the reality both, so the slot is a span with its earliest named figure. Luther coined the word for his friend Johannes Agricola, who from the 1530s taught that the law belongs in the courthouse, not the church. It surfaced again in Boston in 1637 around Anne Hutchinson, and again in the modern claim that grace leaves no commands. · Agricola's dispute from 1527, sharp from 1537; Luther's Against the Antinomians in 1539; Boston from 1636 to 1638; the modern form in the late twentieth century. · Wittenberg and Saxony; then the Massachusetts Bay Colony; then the English-speaking evangelical world.
To protect the freeness of grace and the comfort of the gospel. Agricola feared that preaching the law to Christians turned the gospel back into law and robbed troubled consciences of comfort, so he gave repentance to the knowledge of God's love and not the law's terror. Hutchinson feared a covenant of works, obedience made the proof of salvation.
It guards something precious and true. Salvation is the free gift of God and not wages, and a troubled believer's assurance rests on Christ and not on his own performance. Preaching the law as a way to be saved is the error Paul fought, and the antinomian is right that no one is justified by keeping commandments. The instinct is to keep grace from being sold back at a price.
{'title': 'it keeps the promises of Scripture and drops the commands of the same Scripture', 'points': ['The same Paul who says the believer is not under law asks in the next breath, shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound, and answers God forbid. Freedom from the law as a way of earning is not freedom from the law as a rule of love.', 'The commands stand in the New Testament, spoken to believers. If ye love me, keep my commandments, and the new-covenant promise is the law written on the heart, not erased from it. The gift produces the obedience; it does not cancel it.', "The Reformed answer names it plainly, the third use of the law. The Formula of Concord teaches that the regenerate, freed from the law's curse, are still not without law but have it as a rule for their lives, and rejects as pernicious the claim that the law should not be urged on believers.", 'Luther, whom the antinomians claimed, rejected both the name and the thing. Whoever abrogates the law must abrogate sin also, he wrote, and if there is no sin then Christ is nothing, because the law is what shows the sin that the cross answers.', 'The Boston form shows where it drifts. Hutchinson moved from free grace to a private revelation she held equal to Scripture, setting the inner word over the written one. The error is never that grace is free; it is that a grace which abolishes the command is a different grace than the book describes.']}
Fausto Sozzini, called Socinus, an Italian layman of a Sienese family of jurists, working from notes left by his uncle Lelio. He settled among the Polish Brethren in 1579, was refused membership over baptism, and came to direct their synods anyway. His students drew up the Catechism after he died. · Sozzini in Poland from 1579 to 1604; the Catechism printed at Rakow in 1605; the Brethren expelled from Poland in 1658. · Rakow, in Kielce County, where the Brethren kept a press and a school that trained a thousand students until 1638; Amsterdam, where the exiles printed their library and Locke and Newton read it; and London, where Parliament had the Catechism burned in 1652.
Sozzini set out to reduce Christianity to its fundamentals. His treatise on the Saviour holds that the work of Christ operates on man alone: He saves by teaching, example and the promise His resurrection confirms. The Catechism adds, in its own words, that a Christ who has paid the whole debt leaves nothing to be required of the sinner, and that opens a door to licentiousness. The tablet Siena raised to him in 1879 calls him the vindicator of human reason against the supernatural.
The Catechism opens by proving the Scriptures authentic, sufficient and clear, and argues verse by verse against creeds it treats as no authority. To a Protestant just told that Scripture alone decides, a church quoting nothing but Scripture looked like the Reformation finished. Its objections were hard: how a free pardon can be paid for, how one short death can weigh against innumerable eternal ones. It kept the virgin birth and the miracles, so it did not read as unbelief.
{'title': 'it sets a rule over the text, and the rule takes the cross', 'points': ['The rule is printed in the Catechism: reject every reading repugnant to right reason. Whether one God subsists in three persons is then settled by defining a person as an individual essence before John or Paul is opened. The definition decides what the text may say, and it is not in the text.', 'John 1 has to mean the beginning of the gospel rather than of the world, and verse three still says all things were made by the Word. Christ prays in John 17 for the glory He had with the Father before the world was, and Thomas calls Him my Lord and my God and is not corrected.', "The Catechism says the satisfaction, Christ's death as payment for sin, has no explicit texts. Isaiah says the LORD laid on him the iniquity of us all; Peter says He bare our sins in his own body on the tree; Paul says God set Him forth as a propitiation, in the sentence that calls justification free. Romans 6 raises the licentiousness objection itself and answers it without taking back the grace.", 'The rule outlived the doctrines it was first used on. The Polish Socinians kept the virgin birth and the miracles; their English and American heirs did not, because the test that struck the Trinity struck those next.']}
A current rather than a school, so the slot names the span. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, English ambassador at Paris, laid the foundation and is called the father of English deism. John Toland and Matthew Tindal made it a public fight; Thomas Paine, pamphleteer of the American Revolution, carried it to the common reader. · Herbert's De Veritate in 1624; Toland in 1696; Tindal in 1730; Paine's Age of Reason in 1794. The English movement was fading from the 1730s. · London and Oxford; Dublin, where the hangman burned Toland's book in 1697; Paris, where Voltaire took it home from exile and Paine wrote his in the winter the Revolution abolished the priesthood; and America, where Jefferson cut the miracles out of his gospels.
Weariness. A century of religious war and sects that could not agree had made educated men distrust the basis all of them claimed, and Newton's heavens made a God of laws easier to hold than a God of interventions. Toland's title states his motive: nothing in the gospel is contrary to reason nor above it. Paine wrote in Paris with the guillotine near, lest in the general wreck of superstition the true theology be lost with the false, and opened with his creed: one God, and no more.
It came from piety as well as doubt. Herbert prayed for a sign before printing his book and took a noise from a clear sky as one. It offered a religion needing no priest, no creed and no war, in a century that had bled over creeds. It rested on the argument from design when Newton had just made design look like the plainest fact in the world. And Franklin wrote that the sermons against deism made a deist of him.
{'title': 'it rules on the book before opening it, and keeps the part that condemns', 'points': ["Paine's rule, that a revelation at second hand is hearsay, would applied evenly remove every event no living reader saw. It is not a finding about the Bible but a rule adopted before the Bible is read, and it decides the verdict on every page.", 'Nature does speak, and Scripture says so first: the heavens declare the glory of God, and Paul says His power is clearly seen in what He made, so that men are without excuse. That is what the light of nature does; it does not tell anyone he is forgiven.', "Butler's answer in 1736 still stands: nature is as full of riddles and cruelties as the Bible is charged with, so a man who admits the author of nature has already admitted a God who does not explain Himself.", "The universal religion turned out to be held by nobody. Hume argued in 1757 that the earliest religion of mankind was polytheism, not a natural theism corrupted by priests; Herbert's five articles were the creed of a small circle of English writers. Romans 1 had told that story: men knew God from His works and went down into idols."]}
A movement, so the slot names the span. Theophilus Lindsey, an Anglican rector who seceded, held the first avowedly Unitarian service in London in 1774; Joseph Priestley, the chemist who isolated oxygen, gave the movement its doctrine and, after a Birmingham mob burned his chapel and laboratory in 1791, carried it to Pennsylvania. William Ellery Channing of Federal Street Church, Boston, became its American voice with one sermon. · Essex Street chapel in 1774; Ware at Harvard in 1805; Channing at Baltimore on 5 May 1819; the American Unitarian Association in 1825; the merger with the Universalists in 1961. · Essex Street in London and the Birmingham meeting houses; Boston, where at the opening of the nineteenth century every church but one had a Unitarian in its pulpit; Harvard, Unitarian from 1816 to 1870; and Baltimore, at the ordination of Jared Sparks.
Channing gives two motives in his own words. First, a revelation is a gift of light and cannot thicken the darkness: God gave men a rational nature and will call them to account for it, so a doctrine plainly repugnant to any known truth cannot be received. Second, revulsion at New England Calvinism: a God who brings children into life wholly depraved takes away the Father in heaven and leaves a being who cannot be loved.
Channing's principle, that the Bible is written for men in the language of men, is the Reformation's own rule, and he pressed it: God sent his Son, God anointed Jesus, the Father called God on page after page. It challenged its opponents to produce one passage where the word God means three persons. It protested a caricature of the atonement, Christ's death making God placable, that was and is preached. And it wanted a God who could be loved.
{'title': "the plain reading it asked for gives the Son the Father's name", 'points': ["The rule is not that Scripture is read like other books but that it may not say what reason finds repugnant. That decides what God is allowed to reveal before He is heard, and the one book that claims to be God speaking says His thoughts are not man's thoughts.", 'The New Testament never uses the word God for three persons. It says three things and lets them stand: the Father is God; the Word was God and was made flesh; the Spirit whom Ananias lied to is God. Thomas said my Lord and my God to a man and was not corrected.', 'Channing set the mercy of God against the sacrifice, and Scripture puts the sacrifice inside the mercy: herein is love, that He sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Take the payment out and the sermon itself admits what is left: a difference of opinion about what the death of Christ was for.', 'The movement went where the rule pointed. In 1865 its national conference still called its members disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ; by 1894 nothing in its constitution was an authoritative test; in 1961 the American Unitarian Association merged into a body that is non-creedal today and draws on humanism, Buddhism and nontheism. A test that admits only what reason will pass has no floor.']}
Clark Pinnock, a Canadian Baptist who had once written A Defense of Biblical Infallibility; Gregory Boyd, a Princeton PhD and pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul; John Sanders, who coined the phrase dynamic omniscience; with Richard Rice, William Hasker and David Basinger. Rice used the name first in 1980; the five essays of The Openness of God in 1994 made it a movement. Bruce Ware and John Piper led the reply. · Rice's book in 1980; The Openness of God in 1994; the Evangelical Theological Society's votes in 2003, which kept Pinnock by a wide margin and fell twenty-five votes short of the two-thirds needed to expel Sanders. · American and Canadian evangelical schools: McMaster, where Pinnock taught for twenty-five years; Bethel, where Boyd taught sixteen years and left over it; and Huntington in Indiana, which dismissed Sanders in 2004.
Sanders says his began with a death. When friends told him God had ordained his brother's accident to draw him closer, he refused it, then read theologians who said prayer never affects God. Boyd puts the axiom plainly: to know the future as one certain course would be risk-free, and it would rule out freedom, which in turn would rule out the possibility of love.
It takes prayer seriously at the point where exhaustive foreknowledge can make it feel like theater. It takes the texts seriously: Genesis says it repented the LORD that He had made man, and the Lord says to Abraham, now I know. It answers the question that empties pews, why God did not stop it, without making God the author of the evil. And its authors were not liberals: they held inerrancy, and Boyd had written a book defending the Trinity.
{'title': 'the axiom sorted the texts, and it is not in the book', 'points': ["The rule is philosophical before it is exegetical: freedom worth the name must be able to do otherwise, so an act known in advance cannot be free. Scripture never argues that; it names Cyrus long before his birth, announces Peter's denial to the hour and the cock, and in Isaiah 41 makes declaring what is to come the test of a true God against the idols.", 'The cross is the hardest case, and Peter preached it: delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, and taken and crucified by wicked hands. If the acts of Pilate and the priests were unknowable until made, the one event Scripture calls foreordained before the foundation of the world was a possibility God hoped for.', 'The relenting texts are real, and the same books say how to read them. 1 Samuel 15 says it repented the LORD that He had set up Saul, and eighteen verses later that He is not a man that He should repent. One chapter holds both and tells which is the figure. Open theism sorts them the other way.', "It moves the decisive act to the creature's side. If God did not know who would believe, He did not choose them before the foundation of the world, and Ephesians 1 says He did; if His will can be thwarted, the sheep can be lost, and John 10 says none shall pluck them out of His hand."]}
Joseph Smith, a farmer's son raised near Palmyra, New York, who published the Book of Mormon at twenty-four and had tens of thousands of followers when a mob shot him at Carthage jail in 1844. Brigham Young led the majority west; the church now reports more than seventeen million members. · The first vision, dated by Smith to spring 1820; the Book of Mormon on sale on 26 March 1830 and the church organized on 6 April; Kirtland from 1831, Nauvoo from 1839, Carthage in 1844, the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. · The farms round Palmyra and Manchester in western New York, where the grove and the hill are; Kirtland, Ohio; Missouri; Nauvoo on the Mississippi; then Salt Lake City.
In his own account, revival preaching left a boy of fourteen asking who of all these parties are right, or are they all wrong together. The sects, he wrote, understood the same passages so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible, so he took James 1:5 into the woods and asked God directly. The Bible had failed to settle it; a word from heaven would.
It answers the question a serious inquirer in a divided town could not: which church has the right to speak for God. It offers a living prophet who can settle this year's question in God's own voice, a book in the King James cadence that confirms the Bible, families sealed past death, and Moroni's promise that whoever asks with a sincere heart will have the truth manifested by the Holy Ghost. An answer felt inside is a strong thing to offer someone who has only ever been handed arguments.
{'title': 'a total apostasy breaks a promise, and the new word changes who God is', 'points': ['The restoration needs seventeen centuries with no church on earth. Christ said the gates of hell would not prevail against it, and Paul finds a remnant according to the election of grace in his own day, as Elijah was told of seven thousand who had not bowed. That remnant, kept in every century, is what the whole record from Acts to now shows.', 'God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, Smith preached in 1844, and section 132 says the sealed faithful shall be gods. Scripture says from everlasting to everlasting thou art God, and before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.', 'The eighth Article of Faith makes the Bible the word of God as far as it is translated correctly and the Book of Mormon the word of God without the qualifier; the ninth keeps the canon open. Jude names the faith once delivered to the saints, and Paul says an angel from heaven preaching another gospel is to be accursed.', 'It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do, says 2 Nephi, and section 132 has the faithful abide the law or be damned. Ephesians says by grace through faith, not of works. A salvation whose highest degree is earned by ordinance and obedience is one the cross did not finish.', "The whole case rests on a private test: Moroni's promise makes the proof an inward witness, and Smith's reason for the grove was that the Bible could not settle it. Isaiah sends the question to the law and to the testimony, and the Bereans searched the scriptures whether those things were so."]}
A movement with an identifiable founder. Charles Taze Russell, a Pittsburgh clothier's son of Presbyterian stock, sold his stores, started Zion's Watch Tower in 1879 and the Society behind it in 1881, and wrote some fifty thousand pages. Joseph Franklin Rutherford, the Society's lawyer, took the presidency in 1917 and gave the group its name. It reports about nine million members. · The first Watch Tower in July 1879; Russell's death in 1916; the name adopted on 26 July 1931 at Columbus, Ohio; the New World Translation from 1950 to 1961; dates set for 1914, 1918, 1925 and 1975. · Allegheny and Pittsburgh, then the Brooklyn headquarters from 1909, now Warwick, New York; and the doorstep of nearly every town, two by two.
Russell was sixteen when the contradictions in the creeds shook him, and an Adventist sermon in 1870 sent him back to the Bible as God's word. His study group concluded that the Trinity, hellfire and the immortal soul were not there. He wanted a God who would not torment forever, a Bible read without the creeds standing in front of it, and, from Barbour's chronology, a date for the kingdom.
They read the Bible, a great deal of it, and can put a verse under every teaching, which is more than most church members can. It gives a plain answer to hell, which many find unbearable, and to the Trinity, which many cannot explain. The refusal to fight or salute has been paid for in prisons and camps, the zeal at the door shames comfortable churches, and it holds out a paradise earth to the ordinary person.
{'title': "the verse it cannot answer it retranslates, and the dates it called God's did not come", 'points': ['John 1:1 was rendered the Word was a god. Greek has no indefinite article, so the a is a choice, and the same gospel ends with Thomas saying My Lord and my God to Jesus, who does not correct him. John 1:3 says without Him was not any thing made that was made; a created Word would have made Himself.', 'Hebrews 1 exists to say the Son is not an angel. Unto which of the angels said He at any time, Thou art my Son; let all the angels of God worship Him; unto the Son He saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.', "In 1894 the Watch Tower called its figures for 1914 God's dates, not ours; 1914 was to be the full end of human rulership. Then 1918, then 1925 for the patriarchs, then 1975 for six thousand years, and afterward the members were told their own understanding had rested on wrong premises. Deuteronomy's test: if the thing follow not, the LORD hath not spoken it.", "The Watchtower of 1989 said only Jehovah's Witnesses, as a united organization, have any Scriptural hope of surviving the end, and salvation is made contingent on membership, conduct and preaching. Hebrews says by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. A ransom whose effect depends on the organization did not pay in full.", "The name Jehovah stands 237 times in the Society's New Testament where no Greek manuscript has it, and the Governing Body establishes all doctrine, expelling those who question it. The Bereans searched the scriptures whether those things were so; a reading its readers may not check has moved the authority off the page."]}
Mary Baker Eddy of Bow, New Hampshire, an invalid most of her life, treated by the mind-curer Phineas Quimby in 1862 and convinced after a fall on the ice in 1866 that she had recovered by reading of Jesus healing. She self-published the book in 1875, taught some eight hundred students, and by 1936 her church had nearly 270,000 members. · The fall at Lynn on 1 February 1866; Science and Health in 1875; the church chartered in 1879 and the Mother Church built in Boston in 1894; Eddy's death in 1910. · Lynn, Massachusetts, at the corner of Market and Oxford Streets; Portland, Maine, where Quimby practised; and Boston's Back Bay, where the Mother Church stands.
In her own words, in the year 1866 I discovered the Christ Science, and she called it a final revelation. Decades of sickness, and the medicine of the day had failed her; Quimby's mind cure had helped, for a while. She read that back into the gospels: Jesus healed without drugs, so healing is a law, and a law can be learned. The church was founded, she said, to reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing.
The gospels are full of healing, and it named healing as the lost element the churches had dropped. To a chronic sufferer in the age of morphine and the water cure it offered a God who is wholly good, with no evil in Him and no pain that is final. It requires daily reading of the Bible, and it kept the words Christ, atonement and resurrection, so a convert from a Congregationalist pew lost few words, only their meanings.
{'title': 'if matter is not real, neither is the body that was nailed to the tree', 'points': ['Genesis says God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. Eddy accepts Genesis to 2:6 and rejects the rest as the story of the false and the material. A system that calls the created world an illusion begins by cutting the book it names as its guide.', 'The Word was made flesh; the risen Christ said handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have; Hebrews says He took part of flesh and blood so that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death. If matter is error, so are the incarnation, the cross and the resurrection.', 'Science and Health says one sacrifice, however great, is insufficient to pay the debt of sin, and that the material blood of Jesus was no more efficacious shed on the tree than flowing in his veins. Hebrews says by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified, and without shedding of blood is no remission.', "The Key tells the reader that Adam means error, Jesus the highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea, matter mythology, and death an illusion, and calls these the words' original meaning. A key that changes what every word means makes the Book say the Key. Isaiah sends the question to the law and to the testimony.", "Sickness is real in the record. Paul left Trophimus at Miletus sick, told Timothy to take wine for his often infirmities, and asked three times for his own thorn to go and was given grace instead. When a healing fails the system lays it to the patient's thought, a claim built so that no outcome can count against it."]}
A movement, so the slot names its earliest figure and the span. E. W. Kenyon, a Baptist pastor in Massachusetts, wrote that the atonement gave the believer a legal right to healing, claimed by faith-filled speech. Oral Roberts, a Pentecostal healer from Oklahoma, taught it from 1947; Kenneth Hagin, raised off a sickbed in 1934, founded the school that trained ten thousand; Kenneth Copeland carried it to television, and Joel Osteen's books have sold four million copies. A 2006 poll found seventeen percent of American Christians identifying with it. · Kenyon writing to 1948; Roberts from 1947; Hagin's RHEMA school in 1974; Copeland's ministry from 1967; the 1980s televangelists; Osteen's books from 2004; the surge across Nigeria and the Global South after 2000. · Spencer, Massachusetts; Tulsa and Broken Arrow, Oklahoma; Fort Worth; and Nigeria, where it now grows fastest.
It came out of the sick and the poor. Roberts began in poverty and nearly died of tuberculosis at seventeen; Hagin, born with a deformed heart and paralyzed at fifteen, says he got up on 8 August 1934 on Mark 11:23, whosoever shall say unto this mountain. Roberts said his Bible fell open in 1947 at 3 John 2, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health. The motive was a boy who found a verse and stood up.
For a mother in Nigeria or a poor boy in Oklahoma, a God who wants her children fed and well is the God she prays to anyway. The texts are real texts: Malachi's opened windows, Philippians 4:19, Mark 11:24, by his stripes we are healed. Jesus healed everyone who came. It offers dominion over circumstance to people who have had none, dignity in giving, and a refusal of the resignation that calls poverty God's will and does nothing.
{'title': 'the finished work made a down payment, and the apostles were poor', 'points': ['Paul asked three times for his thorn to go and was told my grace is sufficient for thee, for my strength is made perfect in weakness. He left Trophimus at Miletus sick, told Timothy to take wine for his often infirmities, and wrote the promise of every need supplied from a prison, a few verses after saying he knew how to be hungry.', "Peter puts by whose stripes ye were healed directly after bare our sins in his own body on the tree, and Paul says those with the firstfruits of the Spirit still groan for the redemption of the body. The healing the cross bought is finished at the resurrection. Drawing on it now as a bank account makes the believer's faith the missing payment; in Price's words, whether the believer wins or loses is not up to God.", 'Godliness with contentment is great gain, Paul says, and men supposing that gain is godliness are to be withdrawn from. The Son of man had not where to lay His head; those of whom the world was not worthy were destitute and afflicted, and all that will live godly shall suffer persecution.', 'Confession is not command. Job said the LORD gave and the LORD hath taken away, and Habakkuk that though the fig tree shall not blossom, yet I will rejoice in the LORD. Faith in Scripture trusts a Person who may say no; faith as a force the believer wields is faith in faith.', "The seed is sown into a ministry, and the harvest is on record at the ministry's end: a 120 million dollar a year organization, a hospital that closed, an announcement that God would call the preacher home unless eight million came in by March, jets, and a Senate inquiry."]}
John Nelson Darby, a Church of Ireland curate and a leading figure among the Plymouth Brethren, made it a system; the pieces are older, and Charles Ryrie himself traced the outline of the ages in Scofield to Isaac Watts. Cyrus Scofield put it in the margins of a King James Bible. Lewis Sperry Chafer built it a seminary in Dallas, where Ryrie and John Walvoord taught it for a generation. · Darby's reading formed after a fall from a horse in 1827; Powerscourt from 1831; Geneva in 1840; the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909; Dallas Theological Seminary from 1924. The popular form is The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970 and Left Behind from 1995; the progressive dispensationalists softened the parenthesis in the 1990s. · Dublin, and Powerscourt House in County Wicklow, where the prophecy meetings ran; Plymouth, which gave the Brethren their name; Geneva; St Louis and the Niagara conferences, where Scofield learned it; Dallas.
Darby said the thought came while he was laid up after the fall: the kingdom promised in Isaiah was not the church. At Geneva he gave God two names for two peoples, Jehovah to the Jews and Father to the church. The resolve underneath was to take every prophecy at its plain word and let none of Israel's promises dissolve into the church.
It takes prophecy seriously and reads it plainly. It made ordinary people students of the whole Bible: the notes sat on the same page as the text, and a farmer with one book could follow a theme from Genesis to Revelation. It answers the charge that God broke His word to Israel by saying He has not finished keeping it, and its men fought modernism when much of the church would not.
{'title': 'it needs a gap Daniel does not have and a wall Christ tore down', 'points': ["The seventy weeks of Daniel 9 run as one count. Scofield's note puts the entire church age between the sixty-ninth week and the seventieth, and the passage has no interval in it. The gap is put in to make room for a system already in hand.", "1 Thessalonians 4 has the Lord descending and the living caught up to meet Him in the air, and nothing about the church leaving before a tribulation. Paul's next letter puts that gathering after the falling away and the man of sin (2 Thessalonians 2:1-3).", "Galatians settles who Abraham's heirs are: if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. Ephesians 2 says He made both one and broke down the middle wall; Hebrews 8 applies Jeremiah's new covenant with the house of Israel to the church; Hebrews 12 tells its readers they are come unto mount Sion. Two peoples with two destinies has to read past all of it.", "The apostles break the rule that the Old Testament must be read on its own. James reads Amos's rebuilt tabernacle of David as the Gentiles coming in (Acts 15:16-17); Peter hands Israel's titles, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, to churches in Asia Minor (1 Peter 2:9). A method the apostles did not use is not the plain one; held over their reading, it sets a rule above the Word."]}
Rousas John Rushdoony, an Orthodox Presbyterian minister and the son of Armenian refugees, who founded the Chalcedon Foundation and wrote the Institutes of Biblical Law. Greg Bahnsen, a student of Van Til, made the tightest case in Theonomy in Christian Ethics and lost his seminary post over it. Gary North, Rushdoony's son-in-law, carried it into economics and politics. · Chalcedon founded in 1965; Van Til disclaimed the movement in 1972; the Institutes of Biblical Law in 1973; Bahnsen at Reformed Theological Seminary from 1975 and out within four years; Rushdoony died in 2001. · Los Angeles, then Vallecito, California, where Rushdoony settled and published; Tyler, Texas, where North published; Jackson, Mississippi, where Bahnsen taught. Its widest reach was the Christian homeschooling movement, which it helped build.
Rushdoony's parents fled the Armenian genocide, and he distrusted any state that answered to nothing above itself. His answer was Van Til's: there is no neutral law, so a nation legislates God's law or somebody else's. In his own words, the redeemed are called to exercise dominion under God, man is summoned to create the society God requires, and the heresy of democracy has worked havoc in church and state.
It refuses to be embarrassed by the law of God, and most of what it says is true. Crimes are crimes against God; the call to obey is for all; a ruler is God's servant and will answer to Him. Moses asked what nation has statutes so righteous as this law, and hyper-theonomy answers none, and means it. It answers the question every legislature faces, by what standard, and it saw before most that a state claiming neutrality is not neutral. And it built things: schools, curricula, a homeschooling movement. Christianity Today called the Institutes the most impressive theological work of 1973.
{'title': 'the truth is the ruler answers to God; the step past it is a code that expired with the nation', 'points': ["The confessions it claims to stand in say so in one sentence. Westminster 19.4 and the 1689's 19.4 both say the judicial laws expired together with the state of that people, their general equity only being of moral use. Theonomy reads general equity as the whole code with its penalties, and the sentence says expired.", 'The priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the law (Hebrews 7:12), and the change reaches the penalties. Deuteronomy uses the words put away the evil for a stoning; Paul quotes them in 1 Corinthians 5:13 for putting a man out of a church. The apostle had the death-penalty text in front of him and applied it as excommunication.', "Rushdoony's list of capital crimes includes idolatry, apostasy and public blasphemy. That hands the magistrate's sword to matters of faith, the paragraph the Particular Baptists cut from Westminster 23 in 1677 and American Presbyterians reversed in 1788. Romans 13 gives the ruler the sword against him that doeth evil, and the same 1689 chapter that keeps it for justice removes it from conscience.", "It is hyper-Calvinism's move on the other side of the ledger: a true premise, that God's law binds the magistrate, carried by inference to a conclusion the text does not draw, that the Mosaic penalties bind him. It measures the kingdom's advance by statute. Daniel's stone was cut out without hands, and Christ told the disciples who wanted fire from heaven that they knew not what manner of spirit they were of. A magistrate may write God's commands into statute as a servant, and that is real work; it is not how the kingdom comes."]}
Joseph Hussey, a Congregational minister at Cambridge, is the earliest identifiable figure; the title of his book, God's Operations of Grace but No Offers of His Grace, is the position. John Brine carried it. Whether John Gill, the first great Baptist theologian, held it is still argued: Peter Toon says yes, Tom Nettles and Timothy George say no. It grew inside the churches that held Dort, not outside them. · Hussey's book in 1707; the Modern Question fought out in the 1730s; Gill's pastorate 1719 to 1771; Fuller's Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation in 1785 and the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792, both against it; Spurgeon in Gill's own pulpit by 1858. · Cambridge, then London: Hussey moved to Petticoat Lane in 1719, the year Gill took the Southwark church that became the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Kettering in Northamptonshire, where Gill was born, Fuller pastored, and the missionary society was formed.
It was a fence around sovereign grace. Richard Baxter had taught universal redemption and a gospel that was a new law of grace, and the free offer looked like the road back to that. Hussey's own reasons: to preach Christ is Scriptural, to offer Him is not, offers lack the texts to prove that proffering and preaching are the same thing, and an offer helps no sinner, since irresistible grace alone makes a Christian.
It is the doctrine of grace held with both hands. Every text it stands on is real: no man can come except the Father draw him, and faith is the gift of God. It protects God from the charge of insincerity. Its men were not idle; Gill wrote an exposition of the whole Bible. And it appears to follow, which is the whole force of it.
{'title': 'an inference held over a command', 'points': ["The command is universal and it is God's. He now commandeth all men every where to repent, said Paul in Athens to a crowd with no believer in it; repent ye, and believe the gospel is how Jesus opened His preaching. An inference from election cannot repeal a command in the same book.", "The rule underneath it is Pelagius's rule, that a command implies the ability to keep it, run backwards: since sinners cannot, they are not commanded. Carthage and Orange refused the premise, and Owen had drawn the line: the decree of God is not the rule of duty, and ministers command and invite all from the revealed will.", 'Dort, the synod the position claims to guard, says the promise together with the command to repent and believe ought to be declared to all persons promiscuously and without distinction, and that as many as are called are unfeignedly called. The high men were higher than the synod.', "Where it held, churches kept the doctrine and stopped sending. Carey's Enquiry of 1792 opened by asking whether the commission was still binding, and answered that if teach all nations was for the apostles only, so was baptizing. The Baptist Missionary Society exists because Fuller and Carey wrote against the position.", "Spurgeon, preaching in 1858 as Gill's successor and calling him not my Rabbi, said the system of truth is not one straight line but two, and asked whether God was sincere in His offer: God forgive the man that dares to say He was not."]}
A movement rather than an invention, so the slot names the span. Blake Chastain coined the hashtag; David Hayward says he took the word from Derrida as his beliefs eroded. Its public faces were Joshua Harris, whose 1997 book shaped purity culture and who then announced he was no longer a Christian, and Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, once full-time with Cru and later YouTube hosts with millions of subscribers, who told their audience in two podcast episodes. · The hashtag in 2016; Harris withdrew his book in 2018 and left the faith in 2019; the McLaughlin and Neal episodes in February 2020; by early 2022 nearly three hundred thousand Instagram posts carried the tag. · American evangelical churches, and then the internet: Twitter, Instagram, podcasts and TikTok, where a process that used to happen alone in a pew happened in public. Also noted in Brazil.
The reasons people give are specific: purity culture and what it did to women, sexual abuse in churches that preached purity, a politics that could not be told apart from the gospel, and officials who did not keep what they preached. McLaughlin's own words: the deeper he dug into Christianity with a thirst for the truth, the more difficult it became, and in the end impossible; so, a hopeful agnostic.
The wound is real. Every reason on the list names something Scripture condemns first, and some of the cases are matters of record: a youth pastor convicted, and Harris's own admission that his church kept a child abuse case from the police. Russell Moore said the leavers have come to think the church does not believe its own moral teachings. It also sounds like honesty, and it offers company to people who had carried doubt alone.
{'title': 'the wound is real and the self is not the judge', 'points': ['The test is the wrong way round. Jamieson describes each article of the received faith critiqued on whether the individual will appropriate it, which makes the self the standard. The Bereans searched the scriptures daily whether those things were so: the teaching was tested against the text, and the heart Scripture calls deceitful above all things was not the court.', 'Inheritance is not the mark against a belief. Paul tells Timothy to continue in the things he has learned, knowing of whom he learned them, and that from a child he had known the holy scriptures. Psalm 78 commands the handing down. Where a belief came from settles nothing about whether it is true.', "Being right about the shepherds is not being right about the Shepherd. The millstone of Matthew 18:6 is Christ's own sentence on those who wreck a little one's faith, and Jeremiah 23 is God's woe on pastors who scatter the sheep. The hypocrisy is condemned by the standard the process is leaving.", "The Bible already holds the questions. Job, Psalm 73, Psalm 88 and Habakkuk are doubt spoken inside the covenant and addressed to God, and the father in Mark 9 said help thou mine unbelief and was answered. Deconstruction turns a question into an exit, and it has no floor: the outcomes catalogued run from a rebuilt faith to none. Peter's answer when many walked away was not that the church was fine but that there was nowhere else to go: to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life."]}
A recurring position rather than one man's invention, so the slot names the earliest teacher and the span. Origen of Alexandria, around 185 to 254, taught the restoration of all things (apokatastasis). In America it became a church: John Murray, a convert of the Welsh preacher James Relly, preached it in 1770, and Hosea Ballou wrote its doctrine in A Treatise on Atonement. In the twentieth century Karl Barth's doctrine of universal election was read as a hopeful universalism, and then came Rob Bell's Love Wins and David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved. · Origen in the third century; anathemas at Constantinople in 543 and 553. Murray's first sermon on 30 September 1770; the Winchester Profession in 1803; Ballou's Treatise reprinted in 1812. Bell in 2011, Hart in 2019. · Alexandria, and Constantinople for the condemnation. Good Luck, New Jersey, where Murray landed, then Gloucester and Boston; Ballou's pulpit at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church at Grandville, Michigan; Hart's book from Yale.
Ballou said it in his preface. That sin is infinite and that Jehovah 'suffered death on a cross, to satisfy his infinite justice' are ideas 'unfounded in the nature of reason, and unsupported by divine revelation'; his book argues that sin is finite, so an endless penalty is unjust. Origen reasoned that 'the end is always like the beginning'; Hart argues that a good creator of all must be the savior of all. Each begins from what a good God can and cannot do, and reads Matthew 25 by that light.
It takes the love of God with full seriousness and refuses to let it lose. It has texts of its own: God will have all men to be saved; as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive. Gregory of Nyssa held a form of it and was never condemned. And it answers the grief of every believer with an unbelieving parent. Bell wrote that a person may object to it and still admit that it is Christian to long for it.
{'title': 'one word rules both halves of the sentence, and the wish is not the text', 'points': ["Matthew 25:46 uses one word for the punishment of the goats and the life of the sheep. If the punishment is only for an age, so is the life. Hart's translation has to render both halves 'of that Age', which is what the doctrine costs.", 'Revelation 20 has the devil tormented for ever and ever and whoever is not in the book of life cast into the same lake. Jesus says of Judas that it had been good for him if he had not been born, which is not true of a man who ends in glory.', "The restorationist majority holds a purging punishment after death, so a fire completes what the cross did not; Ballou's wing denies that the cross satisfied anything, since God 'was not the unreconciled party'. On either wing the finished work is unfinished.", 'Election is kept as a word and emptied as a choice. If everyone is chosen, God chose no one over another, and the warnings of Jesus become threats he never meant to carry out.', 'The Universalist Church of America merged with the Unitarians in 1961 into a body that does not confess itself exclusively Christian, and its own conventions had split for thirty years over whether hell exists at all.']}
Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest of Quechua and Spanish descent who trained at Leuven and Lyon, pastored a parish in Lima, and gave the movement its name and its book. He did not invent the concern: the bishops at Medellín had already spoken, and he drafted their final report. Leonardo Boff in Brazil and the Jesuits Jon Sobrino and Juan Luis Segundo carried it; its Protestant cousins were Rubem Alves and José Míguez Bonino, and James Cone's black theology in the United States. Cardinal Ratzinger wrote the reply. · Medellín in 1968, Gutiérrez's outline at Chimbote in July of that year, and A Theology of Liberation in 1971. The Vatican instructions of 6 August 1984 and 22 March 1986; Boff silenced in 1985. · Lima, where Gutiérrez was pastor of Cristo Redentor in Rímac; Medellín in Colombia; the base communities across Latin America, where the poor met to read the Bible; El Salvador, where Archbishop Romero became its symbol; and Rome, where the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith answered it.
Gutiérrez put the question in one sentence: 'How do we convey to the poor that God loves them?' The bishops at Medellín called the poverty of the continent 'institutionalized violence', and Câmara said the rest: 'When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.' Gutiérrez had read Marx at Lyon; the question was asked from a parish in Lima.
The concern is Scripture's own. The prophets, the sabbath year, the Magnificat, and James on the rich man's wages were not written by Marxists, and Paul was told to remember the poor. The base communities put Bibles into the hands of people who had never read one. Even the instruction written against it called the term thoroughly valid and allowed no excuse for neutrality before human misery. It looked at the poor and did not look away.
{'title': 'it keeps the poor of the gospels and trades the salvation', 'points': ['Salvation is moved into history and handed to men. Gutiérrez wrote that salvation could be brought about by human action, on three interdependent levels, political, personal and from sin, and that only socialism could give the continent true development. The angel said Jesus would save his people from their sins.', 'The Exodus is ordered to Sinai. Israel was freed so that it might serve God, and Paul reads the crossing as a figure of baptism. A reading that makes the political freedom the point keeps the first half of the story and drops the second.', 'Class struggle as the law of history is an axiom held before the text is opened. Not every form of it holds the axiom, but where it is in, the rich man is a class enemy, the poor of Scripture become the proletariat, and right practice replaces right belief as the test of truth.', 'An exclusively political reading of the death of Christ denies its value for salvation, as the 1984 instruction said. Colossians says the deliverance is from the power of darkness, through his blood, the forgiveness of sins.', 'Jesus was offered the political role and refused it: his kingdom was not of this world, and he would not be a divider of inheritances. Care for the poor stays commanded, by the same book that says what saves them.']}
Alfred North Whitehead, the Cambridge mathematician who wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell and took up philosophy at Harvard at sixty-three. Charles Hartshorne, who had assisted him there, made it a doctrine of God at Chicago; John B. Cobb, a Methodist missionaries' son taught by Hartshorne, made it a school at Claremont. Open theism, the evangelical cousin of the 1990s, grew up beside it: Gregory Boyd's dissertation was on Hartshorne. · Whitehead's Gifford Lectures of 1927 to 1928, printed as Process and Reality in 1929; Hartshorne's Divine Relativity in 1948; Cobb's Center for Process Studies in 1973; The Openness of God in 1994. · Edinburgh for the lectures, Harvard for the writing, then the Divinity School at Chicago for thirty years, and Claremont, California, from 1958.
Whitehead did not start from Scripture. His God was required by his metaphysics first and was 'the great companion, the fellow-sufferer who understands' afterward. Cobb went to Chicago in 1947 to test his faith against 'the worst the world could offer', found within six months that 'my prayers bounced back from the ceiling unheard', and rebuilt a faith on Whitehead's terms. Griffin gave the motive its sharpest form: a God with the power to prevent Auschwitz who did not prevent it is 'too gross' to worship.
It takes suffering seriously and refuses to make God its author. Scripture does speak of a God who grieved at the flood and wept at a tomb, and a frozen deity untouched by his creatures is a caricature the classical doctrine never meant. It makes prayer and human choice matter to God's own life. Whitehead helped build modern logic and Hartshorne revived Anselm's argument for God's existence. To a reader who has buried a child, a God doing his best is easier to love than a God who could have stopped it.
{'title': 'a God who can only persuade has nothing to promise', 'points': ['The God of Scripture does what he pleases. He declares the end from the beginning and says his counsel shall stand; none can stay his hand. The flood he sent and the promise never to send another both need the power the system denies him.', "It makes God need the world. Whitehead's God is 'deficient in actuality' until creatures complete him, and 'the World creates God' as truly as the reverse. Paul told Athens he is not served as though he needed anything.", "It has an account of the cross, but not the one Peter preached: Jesus delivered 'by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God', and Herod and Pilate doing what his hand and counsel had determined before. A God who only offers possibilities did not plan Calvary.", "Salvation stops being God's work. If God only persuades and never moves a will, the new birth is finally the man's own decision, and a prayer for an unbeliever can ask God to lure him and never to raise him. John says born of God, not of the will of man.", 'Election disappears with the decree. Paul says God works all things after the counsel of his own will and chose before the foundation of the world; a God who determines no outcome chose nobody.']}
A movement, so the slot names the man who named it and the span. C. Peter Wagner, a former missionary to Bolivia and professor of church growth at Fuller Seminary, tested the name in 1994 and said he had only described churches he observed; the roots run through the Latter Rain revival of the 1940s. He then built its networks of apostles and prophets. Bill Johnson's Bethel Church and Mike Bickle's International House of Prayer became its best-known centres, though both said they were never Wagner's. · The name in 1994 and the Pasadena symposium in 1996; the coalition of apostles in 1999; the second apostolic age, by Wagner's count, from 2001; Dominion! in 2008. Wagner died in 2016. · Fuller Seminary at Pasadena; Redding, California, where Bethel left the Assemblies of God in 2006; and Kansas City, where the prayer room has run night and day since 1999, though the ministry cut ties with Bickle in 2023 and closed its church and university in 2024.
Wagner said which change was the radical one: apostolic governance. 'I take literally St. Paul's words' in Ephesians 4:11 and 1 Corinthians 12:28, first apostles, second prophets, 'a divine order'. God 'reveals new things to prophets', and new revelation 'cannot contradict what has already been written in the Bible. It may supplement it, however.'
It expects God to act now, as he did in Acts. Wagner confessed the Apostles' Creed, the authority of Scripture and justification by faith, and said the change was governance, not doctrine. It reads Ephesians 4:11 as it stands where others explain two of the five gifts away. The prayer room at Kansas City has sung and prayed without a break since 1999, and the churches grew, three million American attenders by one 2015 count.
{'title': 'the foundation was laid once, and a word that supplements Scripture stands beside it', 'points': ["Ephesians answers Ephesians. The letter that lists apostles and prophets among Christ's gifts in chapter four says in chapter two that the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ the cornerstone. A foundation is laid once.", "The office had qualifications. Matthias had to have walked with the Lord and seen him risen; Paul had seen him 'last of all'. Ephesus was praised for testing men who called themselves apostles and finding them liars.", "Prophecy in Scripture had a test with a penalty: if the word did not come to pass, the prophet had spoken presumptuously. In 1990 a Kansas City pastor wrote of the Kansas City Fellowship's prophets that 'a prophet who admits he is right only 40 percent of the time is not only a non-prophet, he is dangerous'. Moses set the bar higher.", "'It may supplement it, however' sets a second word beside the first. Jude says the faith was once delivered, and Hebrews says God, who spoke by the prophets, has in these last days spoken by his Son.", "The Assemblies of God, which prays for healing and prophecy, wrote in 2001 that it recognises no one by the title of apostle or prophet, and warned of leaders 'unaccountable to the members' whose decrees go unchallenged. Jesus said the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and it was not to be so among his disciples."]}
William Miller of Low Hampton, New York, a captain in the war of 1812, who lectured from 1831 and drew, by one estimate, fifty to a hundred thousand followers. After the disappointment, Hiram Edson supplied the sanctuary explanation, and Ellen Harmon, seventeen, reported her first vision in Portland, Maine, in December 1844; as Ellen White she reported over two thousand visions and dreams. The Seventh-day Adventist Church organized at Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1863 and reports 24 million members in over 215 countries; the Advent Christian Church, founded in 1860, kept the sleep of the dead and kept Sunday. · Miller's conclusion in 1818; the first lecture in the summer of 1831; the year 1843, then 22 October 1844; Edson's field the next morning; Ellen Harmon's first vision in December 1844; the Advent Christian Church in 1860; the church organized at Battle Creek on 21 May 1863. · Low Hampton, New York, and Dresden, where a boy's invitation took Miller to give the first lecture in 1831; the towns of Vermont and New York where he lectured; Portland, Maine, where Ellen Harmon saw her first vision; Battle Creek, Michigan, where the church organized.
Miller's own account: a deist who came to see that the Bible brought to view just such a Saviour as he needed, he determined to lay aside prepossessions and compare Scripture with Scripture, with Cruden's concordance, letting every word have its proper bearing. By 1818 the prophetic numbers had brought him to the solemn conclusion that in about twenty-five years all the affairs of the present state would be wound up. Go and tell the world of their danger, kept ringing in his ears, so he vowed to go if invited. After 1844 he confessed the time was mistaken and said his faith was unchanged in any essential feature.
It took the plainest rule a reader can hold, that the Bible explains itself, and got a date out of it, so a man with a concordance could check it. It made the return of Christ near, personal and expected this year rather than a doctrine on a shelf. It keeps the fourth commandment as written, a God who does not torment the lost forever, and, in Ellen White, a living voice claiming heaven's counsel for the church. When 1844 failed, the sanctuary teaching turned the worst day in the movement's life into the key which unlocked it, and a disappointment explained is easier to carry than one merely survived.
{'title': 'a finished work reopened in 1844, and a date the Lord said no man knows', 'points': ['Hebrews says Christ entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption, and that after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, he sat down on the right hand of God. The Great Controversy has the High Priest entering the most holy in 1844 to perform the last division of His solemn work. A work closed in 1844 was not finished at the cross, and a priest who sat down had nothing left to enter.', "Miller set the year 1843 and then the day, 22 October 1844, and confessed that he had been mistaken in the time. Jesus said of that day and hour knoweth no man, but my Father only. Edson's answer the next morning kept the date and moved the event to heaven, beyond checking, and Deuteronomy 18 says that when the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken.", 'Colossians lists the sabbath days among things which are a shadow of things to come, but the body is of Christ. The Great Controversy makes the seventh day the seal of God and the change to Sunday the mark of the beast. In Ephesians the seal is the Spirit: ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise. A shadow cannot be the seal, and a day cannot be the mark.', 'The Great Controversy takes Ecclesiastes, the dead know not anything, as the whole state of the dead, and has Satan and sinners blotted from existence. Jesus told the thief, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise, and Paul had a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better. Of the lost Jesus said these shall go away into everlasting punishment, the same word, in the same sentence, as the righteous into life eternal.', "The church's belief on the gift of prophecy says Ellen White's writings speak with prophetic authority, while the Bible is the standard by which they are tested. Paul says all scripture is given by inspiration of God, that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works. A book already furnishing everything needs no second voice with authority, and a voice that only repeats the Bible adds nothing but the claim."]}
John Thomas, born in 1805 and trained as a surgeon in London, sailed for America in 1832; a near shipwreck left him vowing to find out the truth about God by his own study of the Bible. He joined Alexander Campbell's movement, broke with it, and was rebaptized in 1847; his followers took the name Christadelphian, Greek for brethren in Christ, in 1864, when the Civil War required conscientious objectors to name their body. Robert Roberts organized the ecclesias after him and edited The Christadelphian from 1869. There are about 50,000 Christadelphians in some 120 countries, the largest numbers in Mozambique, Australia, Britain and Malawi. · Thomas in America from 1832 and rebaptized in 1847; the British tour of 1848 to 1850, in which Elpis Israel was written and published, its preface signed in London on 1 January 1850; the name Christadelphian in 1864; Thomas's death in 1871. · London, where Thomas trained and where the preface to Elpis Israel was signed; America from 1832; Britain, where he lectured from 1848; Birmingham, whose amended statement of faith most ecclesias hold; today Mozambique, Australia, Britain and Malawi hold the largest numbers.
Thomas's own reasons, from the preface to Elpis Israel: the State clergy and the Dissenting ministry are ignorant of the Gospel, and the great want of the time is the Gospel of the Kingdom, which the book will show the people. He claimed to be the echo of no living sect but the advocate only of what is written in the oracles of God, and asked the reader to study it with the Bible at his right hand. Behind that lay a young surgeon's vow after a near shipwreck in 1832, to find out the truth about life and God by his own study of the Bible.
It hands the Bible back to the reader with no clergy and no creed between him and the page; every claim can be checked with a concordance. It offers a God who is one in the plain arithmetic of the word, a Jesus who was truly a man and truly tempted, a devil the reader can find inside himself, and no everlasting torment. Its hope is solid ground: a kingdom on this earth, Jerusalem its capital, Israel restored, Christ reigning in person. A fellowship of lay brethren meeting in ecclesias, with a statement of faith the reader can test line by line, looks a good deal like the first century.
{'title': 'a plain reading kept for the kingdom and dropped for the Son, the Spirit and the devil', 'points': ["Jesus said, Before Abraham was, I am, and the Jews took up stones, because they heard the claim. In John 17 he prayed for the glory which I had with thee before the world was, and Micah said of the ruler to come out of Bethlehem that his goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. The Doctrines to be Rejected refuse a Son co-eternal with the Father; the Son's own prayer puts him there before the world.", 'Elpis Israel makes the serpent an allegory of sin in the flesh and the devil a name for it. Matthew says Jesus was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, who quoted a psalm at him and was told, Get thee hence, Satan; Peter says the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. Sin in the flesh does not walk about, and cannot be told to go.', 'Peter asked Ananias why Satan had filled his heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and said thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. A power cannot be lied to, and a lie to a power is not a lie to God. Jesus sent his disciples to baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, one name with three in it.', 'The wicked, says the Statement of Faith, are consigned to shame and the second death, and the Doctrines to be Rejected refuse eternal torture in hell. Jesus said these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal, one word for both; the rich man in hell lift up his eyes, being in torments; and Revelation says the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever. A punishment that ends is not everlasting.', 'The way to obtain salvation, says the Statement of Faith, is to believe the Gospel and be immersed. The thief on the cross was never immersed, and Jesus told him, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise. Paul says to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. Baptism follows salvation in the record; it does not buy it.']}
Edward Irving, born at Annan in 1792, the Scottish preacher of Regent Square, London; Henry Drummond, whose Surrey seat, Albury Park, hosted the conferences on prophecy from 1826 and who became one of the twelve. Irving was never an apostle; he died in December 1834, six months before the twelve were set apart. The church grew more in Germany and America than in Britain. When the last apostle, Francis Woodhouse, died in 1901, the church held that no further ordinations were possible. The German branch that broke away in 1863 became the New Apostolic Church, which counts some nine million members in nearly two hundred countries. · Irving's London ministry from 1822; the Albury conferences 1826 to 1830; the first tongue in Scotland in March 1830 and in Regent Square in October 1831; Irving removed from his pulpit in 1832 and deposed at Annan in March 1833; the twelve set apart 14 July 1835; the Hamburg split of 1863; the last apostle's death on 3 February 1901. · Annan in Dumfriesshire; Hatton Garden and then Regent Square in London; Albury Park in Surrey; Fernicarry, a Scottish farmhouse where the first tongue was heard in 1830; Hamburg, where the 1863 split began; Zurich, the New Apostolic Church's seat today.
Irving's own reason, in the preface to his book on the Lord's human nature: Christ's flesh was in its proper nature as the flesh of His mother, mortal and corruptible, and was preserved sinless and incorruptible by the Holy Ghost's quickening and inhabiting of it; to deny this, he wrote, would root out atonement, redemption, regeneration, the work of the Spirit and the human nature of Christ altogether. If the Spirit kept Christ's flesh holy, the same Spirit, it followed, could do in believers what he did then, and the reports from Scotland in 1830 of tongues and healing looked like the proof.
It looked like the church of the Acts: apostles, prophets, tongues, healing, and a Christ who was tempted in flesh like everyone's and won by the Spirit, so that His holiness is a promise and not only a spectacle. It told a Christian that what the apostles had was not gone for ever. It kept the old worship, drawing its service book from the Anglican, Roman and Greek liturgies, so that a convert lost nothing of the church's beauty and gained its youth. And it preached that the Lord was coming soon, which gives every hour weight, and counted Holy Sealing by an apostle's hands a sacrament.
{'title': 'holiness borrowed for a sinful nature, and apostles that men could name but not replace', 'points': ["Irving wrote that Christ's flesh was in its proper nature as the flesh of His mother, preserved sinless by the Holy Ghost inhabiting it. Gabriel told Mary that that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God: the holiness is in the thing born, not in a later keeping. Hebrews says he was tempted in all points, yet without sin, and is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.", 'Hebrews says Christ needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and Peter calls Him a lamb without blemish and without spot. If His flesh was in itself corruptible, as Irving wrote, and only kept sinless by the Spirit dwelling in it, the Lamb was made spotless rather than being so, and the finished work rests on a rescue inside the Redeemer.', "Paul says the church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, and John saw the wall of the city with twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. A foundation is laid once; twelve more names set apart in 1835 would be twenty-four names on twelve stones. The church's own end after 1901, when it held that no ordinations were possible, concedes it.", "The twelve were named by voices at prayer meetings, and the first tongue in Regent Square, in 1831, interrupted the service with unintelligible discourse. Paul's rule for Corinth was that the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets, that two, or at the most three, should speak, and that if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church. A word that names an apostle is tested by the written word, not the other way about.", "Peter's rule was a man who had companied with the eleven from the baptism of John to the day the Lord was taken up, to be a witness of his resurrection, and Paul counted himself the last to whom the Lord appeared: last of all he was seen of me also. No man set apart in 1835 had seen Him, and an office that ends by its own rule with twelve deaths was not the office Peter described."]}
Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist born in Stockholm in 1688, who turned to theology after a vision in a London tavern in 1745 and wrote Heaven and Hell in 1758 and True Christian Religion in 1771; he died in London in 1772 and founded no church. Readers organized the New Church in London in 1787, an American General Convention in 1817, and the General Church of the New Jerusalem at Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, in the 1890s. About 1,300 belonged in Britain and about 2,000 in the Convention in 2000, and 6,760 in the General Church in 2006. Emerson admired him; John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed, carried his books through Ohio. · Swedenborg's opening of the spiritual eyes in 1745; the Last Judgment he dated to 1757; Heaven and Hell in 1758, True Christian Religion in 1771; his death in 1772; the New Church organized in London on 7 May 1787 and the General Convention in America in 1817. · Stockholm, where he was born; London, where the tavern vision came in 1745, where he died, and where the New Church first met in 1787; America from 1817; Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania; the Ohio country where Chapman planted his nurseries and left the books.
In Swedenborg's own words, it has been granted him to associate with angels and to talk with them as man with man, and this for thirteen years, so that ignorance might be enlightened. At the end of the church, he wrote, when there is no longer any love and so no faith, the Lord opens the internal meaning of the Word, and such immediate revelation is what is meant by the Coming of the Lord. True Christian Religion adds that the second coming is not in person but in the Word, by means of a man filled with His spirit to teach the doctrines of the New Church.
One God with a human face, and no arithmetic of three persons to defend. A heaven and a hell described room by room by a sober scientist who said he had walked there. A Bible in which no verse is idle, since every line carries a second meaning about the soul. Salvation by a life of love and use rather than by a courtroom transaction, and death as a door. It drew the reader who found the creeds crude and the sceptic who found the churches dead; Emerson wrote of him, and a barefoot planter carried the books through the Ohio country.
{'title': 'a second coming that only one man saw, and a cross that was only a temptation', 'points': ['At the Jordan the Son stood in the water, the Spirit of God descended like a dove, and a voice from heaven said, This is my beloved Son. True Christian Religion says this Trinity did not exist before the incarnation and is soul, body and operation in one person. A body is not addressed by its own soul, and in John 17 the Son prays for the glory which I had with thee before the world was.', 'True Christian Religion calls it a fundamental error of the church to believe that the passion of the cross was redemption, and says the cross was the last temptation the Lord endured. Isaiah says it pleased the LORD to bruise him, when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin; Jesus said his blood was shed for many for the remission of sins. A temptation endured is not an offering made.', 'The General Church holds the Writings to be the Heavenly Doctrine revealed by the Lord in His Second Coming, with authority equal to the Old and New Testaments. The last chapter of the Bible says, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. A revelation given to one man, and tested by nothing outside him, is the thing the book forbids on its last page.', 'Jesus said, When the Son of man shall come in his glory, before him shall be gathered all nations, and the angels said he shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven. True Christian Religion puts the Last Judgment in the world of spirits in 1757 and says the second coming is not in person but in the Word. A judgment no nation saw is not the event the text describes.', 'The inner sense is read by correspondences, a key given to one man, and the New Church holds that not every book of the Bible carries it. Paul says all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine. The Bereans searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so; a meaning hidden under the words and known only through Swedenborg cannot be searched.']}
Phineas Quimby, mesmerist and healer, died in 1866. Emma Curtis Hopkins, once editor of Mary Baker Eddy's journal, opened a school in Chicago in 1886 and trained the founders of the next movements, earning the name teacher of teachers. Malinda Cramer and Nona Brooks founded Divine Science in 1888; Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Kansas City real estate people, founded Unity in 1889. E. W. Kenyon, whose positive confession later fed the Word of Faith preachers, spent 1892 at Boston's Emerson school, where critics say New Thought reached him. New Thought publishing and teaching reach about 2.5 million people a year. · Quimby's practice until his death in 1866; Myrtle Fillmore's healing from 1886; Hopkins's school in Chicago from 1886; Divine Science in 1888; Unity in 1889; Kenyon's year at the Emerson school in Boston in 1892; Fillmore's book Prosperity in 1936. · Boston, where Hopkins sat in Eddy's class in 1883 and where Kenyon spent 1892 at the Emerson school; Chicago, where Hopkins taught from 1886; Kansas City, where the Fillmores heard Weeks and founded Unity; Unity Village, Missouri, the headquarters today.
Quimby held that illness begins in the mind as the result of mistaken belief, and the movement still says right thinking heals. Myrtle Fillmore was ill all her life with what doctors called tuberculosis, and at forty was given six months to live. In 1886 she heard E. B. Weeks lecture in Kansas City and took hold of one idea: I am a child of God, and therefore I do not inherit sickness. She prayed for hours a day, recovered, lived to eighty-six, and said she had done it by changing her thinking. A recovery like that makes a doctrine.
It offered a God who is All-Good, in whom sickness has no source, and a method a person could practise alone: deny the error, affirm the truth, and expect the body to answer. It kept the Bible, prayer, Jesus, and the word Christ, so a churchgoer lost no vocabulary. It made religion sound testable, results instead of creeds, in an age of patent medicine and bad diagnoses; a woman given six months who lived forty more years was an argument hard to wave away. And it promised plenty: think plenty, talk plenty, give thanks for plenty, and plenty comes.
{'title': 'it makes God a law to be worked and sin a thought to be corrected', 'points': ["Fillmore's first lesson names God Principle and Law, dwelling in man as the mind dwells in the body. Isaiah 55 has the LORD say His thoughts are not man's thoughts, as the heavens are higher than the earth; Jeremiah 17 says the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. A heart that deceitful is not where God is found, and a God that high is not a law a man can work.", "New Thought calls sin an error of thought, to be corrected by denial and affirmation. Paul in Romans 3 says all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; there is none righteous, no, not one; and the remedy he names is a propitiation through faith in Christ's blood. Sin in Scripture is guilt before a Judge, and guilt is not removed by a better thought; it was removed by a death.", "Unity's teachers say Jesus became the Christ in expression and demonstrated a divinity that is every person's true identity: a Way-shower, one who points down a road. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. He did not point to a road; He said He was the road, and Peter told the council in Acts 4 that there is none other name under heaven given among men.", "Myrtle Fillmore wrote, begin right now to talk plenty, think plenty, give thanks for plenty, and Charles's Prosperity says the substance behind all wealth answers demands on it. Paul warned Timothy of men supposing that gain is godliness and answered that godliness with contentment is great gain; James told the traders planning a year of buying and selling, ye know not what shall be on the morrow, and, for that ye ought to say, If the Lord will.", "Unity's Bible Interpretations read the text for an inner meaning: Christ names a presence every person already is, and its page on the name says that calling him Jesus the Christ suggests a uniqueness inconsistent with spiritual truth. Peter says no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation, and Isaiah sends every claimed light to the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them."]}
Kate and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, New York, and their elder sister Leah, who ran their exhibitions; Andrew Jackson Davis, the Poughkeepsie Seer, whose Principles of Nature was dictated in trance in 1847; trance lecturers such as Cora Scott and Emma Hardinge Britten. By 1897 the movement was said to have more than eight million followers in the United States and Europe. Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 and moved it to India in 1879. The National Spiritualist Association of Churches, formed at Chicago in 1893, reported 144 congregations in 2002. · The raps at Hydesville on 31 March 1848; the first demonstration before a paying public at Rochester on 14 November 1849; the Theosophical Society in 1875; Margaret Fox's confession at the New York Academy of Music on 21 October 1888, and her recantation in November 1889. · Hydesville and Rochester, New York; the parlors of New York City, where the sisters held séances for hundreds; London, after a Boston medium's visit in the winter of 1852 and Home's arrival in 1855; New York for the Theosophical Society, then Bombay and Madras from 1879.
Grief first. The spirit at Hydesville claimed to be a murdered pedlar, and at Rochester communication was established with lost relatives and deceased eminent men. Where the churches asked for faith, Spiritualism offered a test: a rap that answered a question, a message from someone the sitter had buried. It also offered a gentler afterlife, one of life and progress after death, with no doorway ever closed. Blavatsky claimed a higher source still: Masters who are living men, born as other men are born, keepers of a Wisdom-Religion that had been one in antiquity.
A mother who had buried a child could hear that child speak. No sermon competes with that. It claimed the standing of science: the Association's fifth principle calls communication with the dead a fact scientifically proven, and the Rochester demonstration of 1849 was staged before a paying hall like an experiment. It kept God, prayer, the Golden Rule, and the language of spirit while removing the judgment. Theosophy added a brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, colour, or creed, and a reading in which every religion is a branch of one trunk.
{'title': 'the dead are the one source Israel was told never to consult', 'points': ["Spiritualism's whole practice is what Deuteronomy 18 calls a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer, and the chapter says all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD. Leviticus 19 tells Israel, regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them. The command does not turn on whether the raps were real; it forbids the seeking.", "When Isaiah's hearers were urged to seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter, he answered, should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? and then, to the law and to the testimony. A movement that takes its doctrine from what the spirits say has put the séance where the prophet put the Book.", 'In Luke 16 the rich man begged that Lazarus be sent back to warn his five brothers, and Abraham answered that a great gulf was fixed between the two places so that none could cross, and that the brothers have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. The one man in Scripture who asked for a message from the dead was refused, and a Summerland with an open doorway back is that gulf denied.', "Saul at Endor is the Bible's one recorded séance, held by a king who had himself put away those that had familiar spirits out of the land, and the word that came through the woman was a sentence of death; Chronicles adds that Saul died for asking counsel of one that had a familiar spirit. The practice appears once in the record and is condemned in the telling.", "Hebrews 9 says it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment, and in the same breath that Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many. Blavatsky's answer to injustice is rebirth, life after life under karma, and she calls vicarious atonement a pernicious dogma; the Spiritualist principles promise a doorway never closed. One death, then judgment, then a Saviour offered once, leaves no room for either."]}
Noyes, born in Vermont in 1811 and converted in Finney's revival of 1831, lost his licence to preach after the 1834 announcement and gathered a school at Putney, beginning with his own family. Complex marriage began there in 1846; indicted for adultery in 1847, he moved to Oneida, New York, where the community grew from 87 members to 306 by 1878. The Shakers were the opposite error: followers of Ann Lee, an Englishwoman who came to America in 1774, received by them as the second appearing of Christ, they required celibacy, reached 5,000 by 1840, and number three today. · Noyes's announcement of salvation from sin in February 1834; the Putney Bible School from 1836; complex marriage from 1846; Oneida from 1848; stirpiculture from 1869; complex marriage given up on 26 August 1879; the joint-stock company from 1 January 1881; Noyes's death in Ontario in 1886. · Putney, Vermont, at his father's house; Oneida in Madison County, New York, on Jonathan Burt's invitation, where the successor company still makes silverware; Niagara Falls, Ontario, where Noyes fled in 1879 and died; Sabbathday Lake, Maine, the last Shaker village.
In Noyes's account, study of the Bible under Moses Stuart, Edward Robinson, and Nathaniel Taylor, under the increasing influence of the revival, landed him in a new experience and new views of the way of salvation, which took the name of Perfectionism. Revival had put the millennium at the door; Perfectionism, he wrote, rapturously affirmed it had already begun. If the second coming was past, the resurrection life was present, where they neither marry nor are given in marriage. A man sure that Christ had come could not see why the church should live as though He had not.
It took the Bible's largest promises at their word: if sin shall not have dominion over the believer, Noyes meant to prove it in a houseful of them. It answered the revival's exhaustion, offering a convert who had been told to be perfect, and failed, a doctrine that said he could be. It built a working society, with mutual criticism instead of courts, shared goods instead of poverty, and a trap and silk business selling two million dollars a year by 1879. The Shakers offered the same peace by the opposite road: order, neatness, regularity, and no marriage at all.
{'title': 'a resurrection claimed early and a marriage bed the Bible calls honourable', 'points': ['Noyes announced in 1834 that he was saved from sin. John, writing to believers, says that whoever claims to have no sin deceives himself, and the truth is not in him, and that whoever claims not to have sinned makes God a liar. The same letter names the provision Noyes thought he had outgrown: an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, who is the propitiation for sins.', 'Paul, writing as an apostle, said, the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do; and to the Philippians, not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after. If the man who wrote Romans had not attained, the claim that a Vermont convert had is an inference set against the plainest testimony in the New Testament.', 'Everything rests on the second coming having happened at the fall of Jerusalem. Hebrews 9 says Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time, and 1 Thessalonians 4 has that appearing with a shout and the dead in Christ rising first. A coming that went unseen in the year 70 is not the one the apostles were told to look for.', 'Proposition 5 says the marriage that gives one woman to one man does not exist in the kingdom. Jesus answered the same question from Genesis: they twain shall be one flesh; what therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder; and Hebrews 13 says marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled. The Shakers fail on the other side, since 1 Timothy 4 lists forbidding to marry among the marks of departing from the faith.', "Salvation from sin was, in Noyes's own index, the primary reform, and mutual criticism was the community's tool for it. Paul says it is God who works in believers both to will and to do, and that He who began a good work will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ; John says that when He appears, believers shall be like Him. Perfection is promised as God's finishing at Christ's appearing, not as a village's achievement in 1834."]}
John Wilson, whose lectures were printed in 1840; Edward Hine, who heard Wilson as a youth, published his Identification in 1871 and reported a hundred thousand copies sold in three years. A 1906 reference work claimed two million adherents. Herbert W. Armstrong made it the central plank of his Radio Church of God and gave away more than six million copies of The United States and Britain in Prophecy; that church renounced the teaching in 1995. Christian Identity, an American offshoot from the 1920s, turned it into a racial creed against the Jews, whom Hine had honoured as Judah. · Wilson's lectures printed in 1840; Hine's Identification in 1871 and Forty-seven Identifications in 1874; the British-Israel-World Federation in 1919; Armstrong's first broadcast in 1934 and his book in 1954; the book withdrawn in June 1988 and the doctrine dropped in July 1995. · London, where Wilson lectured and where Hine's British-Israel Identity Corporation sat in Paternoster Row from 1880; Ireland, where Dan and Jeremiah's princess were said to have landed; Eugene, Oregon, where Armstrong's radio church began, and Pasadena, California, where he died.
Wilson's argument was that God's promises to Israel must be literally fulfilled or they are empty, and that a fulfilment only in the church would make them mean nothing; Ephraim's multitude of nations needed a nation to land on. Hine looked at a seafaring, law-giving empire whose colonies encircled the earth and read the descriptions of Israel in exile, the isles, the ends of the earth, as a map with Britain on it. Armstrong took it as the key that unlocked prophecy: if the English-speaking peoples were Israel, then every word about Israel's future was about them.
It read the Old Testament as history still happening. To a Victorian it explained the empire without pride, as inheritance rather than achievement, and gave the coronation a genealogy back to David and the coronation stone a place in Genesis. It took the prophets at their word when much of the church had turned them into metaphor, and in Wilson's and Hine's hands it was warmly friendly to the Jews, as Judah, brethren awaiting reunion. Armstrong's version let an ordinary reader feel he held the key to the headlines, and more than six million copies went out.
{'title': 'the tribes were never lost and the seed is counted by promise', 'points': ["The theory needs the ten tribes to be missing after Sargon's deportation. Paul told Agrippa in Acts 26 that the twelve tribes, instantly serving God day and night, hoped to come to the promise, and James wrote to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad. Two apostles could name twelve tribes and post a letter to them in the first century; a people that gets mail is not lost.", "Hine's identifications turn on blood: physiognomy, race, and descent. Paul says he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly, but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and in Romans 9, they are not all Israel, which are of Israel, for the children of the promise are counted for the seed. Israel in Paul's mouth is defined by promise and faith, not by the ship an ancestor sailed on.", "The birthright blessing is claimed for Britain and America. Galatians 3 gives the inheritance a different address: if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise, and there is neither Jew nor Greek. Ephesians 2 says Christ hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition, to make in himself of twain one new man. A doctrine that rebuilds the wall by ancestry has undone what the cross did.", "The redeemed in Revelation 5 are out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation, and in Revelation 7 the sealed of every tribe stand beside a multitude which no man could number, of all nations. Hine's map has Israel encircling the other nations of the earth; John's has the nations inside the kingdom on the same footing, with the throne belonging to the Lamb.", 'The case is built from outside the Book: Scythian migrations, the legend of Tea Tephi, the coronation stone, Hebrew roots in English words. When the church that had spread the teaching furthest examined it in 1995, it found folklore, legends, quasi-historical genealogies, and dubious etymologies, and no credible evidence in the biblical account. A reading that needs so much carried in from outside is not the plain sense; it is a key held over the text.']}
Ralph Waldo Emerson, born in Boston in 1803, a Unitarian minister who left the Second Church in 1832 over the Lord's Supper and published Nature in 1836. The Transcendental Club, founded at Cambridge in September 1836 by Emerson, Frederic Henry Hedge and George Putnam, drew Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau and Theodore Parker. Parker carried the teaching into the pulpit: when nearly every pulpit around Boston was closed to him, his own society grew to about two thousand. The movement fed New Thought, and the phrase spiritual but not religious is now listed among its modern kin. · Nature in 1836; the Transcendental Club from September 1836; the Divinity School Address on 15 July 1838; Parker's discourse on 19 May 1841; Emerson's death in 1882. · Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts: the Divinity College at Harvard, where the address was given to the graduating class, and the Hawes Place Church in Boston, where Parker preached his discourse at an ordination.
Emerson's reasons are in the address itself. Religious truth cannot be received at second hand; from another soul a man can get provocation but not instruction. Historical Christianity had fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion: not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal. The word Miracle, as the churches pronounced it, gave a false impression; it is Monster. Nature had opened by asking why the present age should not enjoy an original relation to the universe and a religion by revelation to itself rather than the history of someone else's.
It took the soul seriously when the Unitarian churches around it offered sobriety, mildness and calm rationalism, and it asked for first-hand religion instead of inherited habit. It honored conscience, called every person capable of insight, and made nature a place to meet God rather than a machine. It gave the young men of Harvard permission to think, and it wrote beautifully, as the transparent eye-ball passage in Nature shows. In Parker it became courage against the Fugitive Slave Act. A serious person who had felt nothing in a pew could feel something here.
{'title': 'the judge it trusts is the witness Scripture calls deceitful above all things', 'points': ["Emerson told the graduates to go alone and to dare to love God without mediator or veil, because the soul's own intuition is its proof. Jeremiah 17 says the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? Proverbs 3 says trust in the LORD with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. A judge that cannot know itself cannot be the final court.", 'Nature says the currents of the Universal Being circulate through the writer, who is part or particle of God, and that the Supreme Being puts nature forth through man. Romans 1 describes that exchange and names it the oldest error: men who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.', 'The address says the soul knows no persons, and that Jesus, alone in all history, estimated the greatness of man and said that God acts and speaks through him. Hebrews 1 says God hath in these last days spoken by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things; in John 14 Jesus says no man cometh unto the Father, but by me; and 1 Timothy 2 names one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.', 'Parker held that the authority of Jesus must rest on the truth of his words, and not their truth on his authority, and that Christianity would stand if Jesus had never lived. Isaiah 8 sends every claim to the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. Peter says no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.', "Emerson's soul is invited to expand to the full circle of the universe; it has no fall to repair and no second birth to undergo. Jesus told Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God, and again, ye must be born again. Paul warned the Colossians to beware lest any man spoil them through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, and not after Christ."]}
German professors first. Ferdinand Christian Baur of Tübingen, from an essay of 1831, read the New Testament as the record of a fight between Peter's party and Paul's, and kept only four of Paul's letters as genuine. David Friedrich Strauss dated the preface of his Life of Jesus at Tübingen in May 1835; Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus followed in 1863, and Julius Wellhausen's history of Israel in 1878. In England seven churchmen, Benjamin Jowett among them, published Essays and Reviews in 1860, and Bishop Colenso examined the Pentateuch in 1862. In America Charles Briggs of Union Seminary was tried for it. Archibald Hodge and Benjamin Warfield answered in 1881. · Baur's essay in 1831; Strauss's preface dated May 1835; Essays and Reviews in 1860; Renan in 1863; Wellhausen's history of Israel in 1878, retitled Prolegomena in its second edition of 1883; Hodge and Warfield in 1881; Briggs's inaugural in 1891 and his sentence in 1893. · Tübingen, the university where Baur taught and Strauss dated his preface; Union Theological Seminary in New York, where Briggs taught Hebrew from 1874; and Washington, where the Presbyterian General Assembly judged him in 1893.
Wellhausen told his own story in the Prolegomena. As a student he was drawn to Saul and David, and the discourses of Amos and Isaiah laid strong hold on him; the Law, when he came to it, only disturbed that pleasure. When he learned at Göttingen in 1867 that Graf placed the Law later than the prophets, he was prepared to accept it almost without knowing the reasons. Strauss said the supernatural and the rationalist readings of the Gospels had both failed and a mythical reading must replace them, and insisted that the essence of the Christian faith was perfectly independent of his criticism.
It asked honest questions and did real work; the men who did it were professors of Hebrew, like Briggs, who read every line. Jowett's rule, to read the Bible like any other book, sounded like fairness, and the volume that carried it outsold Darwin's Origin. It promised to move faith somewhere criticism could not reach: Strauss told his readers that the supernatural birth, the miracles, the resurrection and the ascension remain eternal truths whatever doubts may be cast on their reality as historical facts. And it gave a young scholar the excitement of getting behind the text to the history.
{'title': 'Christ vouched for the authors the critics removed', 'points': ["Wellhausen placed the Law after the prophets and cut the books of Moses into documents from centuries after him. Jesus said to the Jews, had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me, and then, if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words? John 5 makes the writing of Moses the ground of Christ's own claim, not a detail he left open.", 'Strauss made the miracles myths that grew in the community after Jesus, sincere, unintended and untrue. Peter said the apostles had not followed cunningly devised fables when they made known the power and coming of the Lord, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty, and Luke wrote from those which from the beginning were eyewitnesses. The method has to hold that the eyewitnesses were mistaken about being eyewitnesses.', "Jowett's rule was to interpret the Scripture like any other book. Jesus did not: till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled, he said in Matthew 5; the scripture cannot be broken, he said in John 10; and on the Emmaus road, beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.", "Briggs taught that errors may have existed in the original text of Scripture and that authority rests also in reason and the church. Paul wrote to Timothy that all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and Peter that holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. Hodge and Warfield's answer of 1881 stood there: the Scriptures not only contain but are the Word of God, and all their affirmations are without error.", "Baur's school rebuilt the New Testament on a fight between Peter and Paul, and within a generation it had lost its standing through the discrepancy between its axioms and historical fact. Isaiah 40 says the grass withereth and the flower fadeth, but the word of God stands for ever. A method whose findings change every generation cannot sit in judgment on a book that has not changed."]}
Horace Bushnell, a Connecticut Congregationalist born in 1802, pastor of the North Church in Hartford from 1833 until ill health retired him in 1859. Christian Nurture came in 1847, God in Christ in 1849, The Vicarious Sacrifice in 1866; he died at Hartford in 1876. Attempts to bring him to trial failed, and in 1852 his church withdrew from the local consociation so that none could follow. The view has a medieval ancestor in Peter Abelard, who set it against Anselm's satisfaction, and a later champion in Hastings Rashdall; the standard account of the theory names Bushnell beside them. · Christian Nurture in 1847; God in Christ in 1849; the consociation left in 1852; The Vicarious Sacrifice in 1866, its view taught publicly more than ten years before by his own account; Bushnell's death in 1876. · Hartford, Connecticut, and the North Congregational Church there, which he served for twenty-six years. The theory's older home is the twelfth century, in Peter Abelard, who lived from 1079 to 1142.
Bushnell's reasons are in his own books. In God in Christ he set a dissertation on language before three discourses, and in Christ in Theology he concluded that spiritual truth can be expressed only in approximate and poetical language. The old doctrine, he wrote in The Vicarious Sacrifice, had no beauty in it to charm a new feeling into life; on the contrary there was much to revolt the soul, and it would not pacify the conscience of transgression, because there is no justice in such kind of suffering. To get a pain out of somebody, he wrote, is not justice.
It begins from a text everyone loves: God commendeth his love toward sinners in that Christ died for them. It keeps the cross at the center and makes it moving rather than mechanical, a Father who suffers with his children rather than a judge who must be paid before he can forgive. It answers the mocker who asks how punishing an innocent man can be fair. It makes every Christian a bearer of others' burdens, since love itself is vicarious. And it let a pastor speak of Christ's love to a Hartford congregation without a courtroom in the sermon.
{'title': 'the cross changed hearts because it first settled something before God', 'points': ["Bushnell read propitiation as a change of relationship on the sinner's side. Paul's word in Romans 3 is hilasterion, the Greek name of the mercy seat where the blood was sprinkled, a sacrifice that turns wrath away, and Paul says what it was for: God set Christ forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness, that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.", "He said Christ bore sins on his feeling, as a friend takes a friend's losses. Isaiah 53 says the LORD laid on him the iniquity of all who had gone astray, that it pleased the LORD to bruise him and put him to grief, that his soul was made an offering for sin, and that he shall bear their iniquities. The bruising comes from the LORD, and an offering for sin is made to God, not to onlookers.", "What the theory leaves behind, that Jesus died as the demonstration of God's love, is in the Bible with its other half attached. John's first letter says herein is love, that God sent his Son to be the propitiation for sins, and that he is the propitiation for the sins of the whole world; Paul told Corinth God made him who knew no sin to be sin, that sinners might be made the righteousness of God in him.", 'Part IV of his book files sacrifice and blood among the lustral figures, pictures of a change in the worshipper. Hebrews 9 says without shedding of blood is no remission, and that Christ by his own blood entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption; Hebrews 10 says that by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. The letter takes the figure and calls it the fact.', 'Christian Nurture said the child is to grow up a Christian, not remembering the time when he went through a technical experience, against the assumption that he grows up in sin to be converted after he comes to a mature age. Nicodemus was a ruler of the Jews, and to him Jesus said, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God, and ye must be born again. Nurture is commanded; it is not the birth.']}
Edward White, a Congregational minister who found the idea in a book by James Fontaine around 1838, published Life in Christ in 1846 and was shut out of Nonconformist pulpits for it; he opened his own chapel in London in 1852, chaired the Congregational Union in 1886, and died in 1898. Frederick Denison Maurice, whose Theological Essays of 1853 cost him his chair at King's College London. President E. C. Smyth and the Andover faculty of the 1880s. Seventh-day Adventists, Christadelphians and Jehovah's Witnesses hold the annihilation of the lost, and John Stott gave it a hearing among evangelicals in 1988. · White's first edition in 1846 and his third, revised and enlarged, in 1878; Maurice's essays and dismissal in 1853; the Andover controversy from 1886 to 1892, after Progressive Orthodoxy in 1885; Stott's Essentials in 1988. · London: White's chapel at Hawley Road in Kentish Town, and King's College, where Maurice taught; Andover, Massachusetts, whose seminary the Calvinists founded in 1807 after Harvard gave its divinity chair to a liberal.
White wrote that the doctrine of endless torment rested on a Platonic falsehood, the necessary immortality of the soul, carried in from Greek philosophy. Read plainly, he said, the Bible threatens death, destruction and perishing, and means them; God alone hath immortality, and John 3 offers life so that the believer should not perish; and God's justice and goodness fit this better than torment without end. Maurice wrote that he dared not pronounce what a human will can do against the loving will of God, and that he was obliged to believe in an abyss of love deeper than the abyss of death.
It answers the objection most people feel first, that endless torment for a short life is out of proportion, and it answers from the Bible's own words: death, destruction, perish, the wages of sin is death, who only hath immortality, fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. It clears out what its holders took for a pagan idea, the deathless soul. Future probation answered a question every missionary is asked, what becomes of those who never heard. And Maurice's refusal to pronounce sounded like humility before a mystery.
{'title': 'one word, one sentence, two destinies of the same length', 'points': ['The annihilationist reads everlasting punishment as everlasting in its effect, the destroyed staying destroyed. In Matthew 25 Jesus did not say everlasting destruction; he set the two ends in one sentence: these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal. One sentence measures both, and nobody who holds this doctrine believes the life runs out.', 'Revelation 14 says the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever, and they have no rest day nor night; Revelation 20 says the devil was cast into the lake of fire, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever. Torment is a word for someone still there to feel it, and day and night is a word for time going on. Ceasing to exist is the one thing those sentences exclude.', 'Daniel 12 says many that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt; the contempt is given the same word as the life. Jesus in Mark 9 describes hell as the place where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched, taking the words from the last verse of Isaiah. A fire that has burned its fuel to nothing is a fire that went out.', 'Future probation puts a second offer after death. Hebrews 9 says it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment; in Luke 16 Abraham tells the rich man there is a great gulf fixed which none can cross; and Paul says behold, now is the day of salvation. His question in Romans 10, how shall they hear without a preacher, is answered by sending preachers, not by an offer beyond the grave.', 'Maurice granted that to turn the word eternal the least awry to meet convenience deals unfaithfully with the book, then declined to pronounce where the book had pronounced. Isaiah 8 sends the question to the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. A hope the text does not give is not humility before a mystery; it is a claim to know better than the text.']}
Gottfried Thomasius, professor of dogmatics at Erlangen from 1842, set it out in Christi Person und Werk (1852 to 1861), aiming to explain the limited consciousness of Jesus without denying that deity and humanity were one in him. Gess went further: the Word became, rather than assumed, the human soul of Christ. In England Charles Gore (1853 to 1932), principal of Pusey House, edited Lux Mundi in 1889 and gave the Bampton Lectures of 1891, then was bishop of Worcester, Birmingham and Oxford in turn. P. T. Forsyth and H. R. Mackintosh carried it on. · Thomasius's volumes from 1852 to 1861; Lux Mundi in 1889, with its tenth edition and a defensive preface in 1890; Gore's Bampton Lectures in 1891 and his resignation from Pusey House in 1893. · Erlangen, where Thomasius taught; Oxford, at Pusey House and before the university in the Bampton Lectures; then Worcester, Birmingham and Oxford, Gore's three sees.
Gore gave two reasons. The Gospels show a Jesus who grew in wisdom and said that of the last day not even the Son knew; the usual explanations, he wrote, did not interpret such texts but explained them away. And a Christ not subject to human limits of knowledge would not be as other men, nor tempted as they are. Behind both lay the new criticism of the Old Testament, which dated Deuteronomy after Moses: if the Lord spoke of the Deuteronomist as Moses, it was because anticipating the slow growth of natural knowledge would have violated the whole principle of the Incarnation.
It kept the whole creed. Gore was no rationalist; he wrote to defend the Incarnation, and the theory let a believer hold the full deity of Christ while granting every point the critics pressed about the Pentateuch. It read Philippians 2 as an act of love, a Saviour who does not save from a height by acts of power but comes down into another's condition to lift him from below. And it gave the pulpit a Jesus tempted as men are, because he faced the world with a man's knowledge and no more.
{'title': 'an emptying read as unloading, when Paul says it was done by taking', 'points': ["Philippians 2 says Christ made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant. The emptying is described by what he took, not by what he set down, and the next words, he humbled himself, are the act of a will still his. Warfield's summary of the passage holds: Paul does not teach that the Lord was once God and had become instead man, but that though he was God he had become also man.", 'Colossians 2 was written of the incarnate Christ and in the present tense: in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. A fulness laid aside for thirty years cannot be said to dwell in a body. The same sentence calls him the head of all principality and power, which is not the estate of one who had abandoned his prerogatives for the length of a human life.', 'John records the opposite of a mind bounded by its age. Jesus knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man; he saw Nathanael under the fig tree; and at the end his disciples said, thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee. Gore grants that the record shows supernatural knowledge, so the theory must decide, case by case, which knowledge the Son kept.', 'Hebrews 13 says Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever, and Malachi has the LORD say, I am the LORD, I change not. A Son who ceased for a lifetime to know all things is a God who changed. The older teaching put the change where Paul put it, in what was taken: a true human nature, with a human mind that grew, joined to a Person who lost nothing.', "The theory was built for one use: to keep the Lord's words about Moses, David and Jonah from settling what the critics had reopened. Yet Jesus said the scripture cannot be broken, and that Moses wrote of him. A rule that files his statements about Scripture under the science of his age while keeping his statements about God is a rule the reader supplies, and it decides beforehand which words of Christ bind."]}
Henry Ward Beecher of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, whose building seated two thousand or more and whose congregation was probably the largest in the country, preached the series printed as Evolution and Religion in 1885 and called himself a cordial Christian evolutionist. Lyman Abbott, who followed him at Plymouth in 1888 and edited The Outlook, wrote The Theology of an Evolutionist in 1897 out of sermons preached there; Henry Sloane Coffin judged him, by the numbers reached, the greatest teacher of religion of his generation. Charles Hodge of Princeton answered the theory itself in What Is Darwinism? in 1874. · Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 and Descent of Man in 1871; Hodge's answer in 1874; Beecher's sermons from May to July 1885, printed that autumn; Abbott's book in 1897. · Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, where Beecher preached the sermons and Abbott after him; Peekskill, New York, where Beecher signed the preface; Princeton, New Jersey, where Hodge wrote.
Beecher's own reason: he had hailed the evolutionary philosophy with joy and accepted its underlying truth as a law of nature. He grew up in the Boston quarrel over total depravity and thought both sides half right: man is universally sinful, but the cause is not a body and soul corrupted by the fall of Adam. Evolution gave him a cause to preach: a creature made to start at the bottom and go up. Abbott's reason was plainer: the picture of a Creator who made the world and sometimes intervened was rejected by the great mass of scientific thinkers.
It took science seriously when many pulpits were calling evolution atheistic, and it kept the young men who were reading Darwin inside the church. It was hopeful: a theology of hope and of love that should cast out fear, in Beecher's phrase, with progress written into the order of things. It made sin concrete and near, the greed and appetite a man can feel in himself, rather than a debt from a garden six thousand years ago. And it honoured the goodness of creation, reading every discovery as one more line of God's thought deciphered.
{'title': 'no Fall leaves no second Adam, and no wound for the cross to heal', 'points': ["Jesus read Genesis as history. Asked about divorce, he answered, have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and quoted the words of Genesis 2 as God's own. Beecher said Jesus never alludes to Adam and lets the legend rest; the Lord's answer to the Pharisees puts the first pair at the beginning, made, and made by God.", "Romans 5 rests the gospel on one man: by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; by one man's disobedience many were made sinners. Every clause is matched by a clause about the one man Jesus Christ. Remove the first Adam and Paul's argument for the second has nothing to stand on.", 'Paul told Corinth that as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive, and that the first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Death there is an entrance, not the old machinery of survival, and Adam is a man, made, not a stage passed through. Abbott called the question whether Adam fell immaterial; Paul argues the resurrection from it.', "Hebrews 11 says it is through faith that the worlds are understood to have been framed by the word of God. Hodge's point was exact: the one distinctive element of Darwin's theory is that selection is without design, worked by unintelligent causes, and to exclude design from nature is, in Asa Gray's phrase, tantamount to atheism. A theology built on the theory keeps its conclusion and hopes to escape its premise.", 'Abbott found no authority in Scripture for God putting the penalty due to a guilty person upon an innocent one. Jesus said he came to give his life a ransom for many, and at the table, this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. A ransom paid and a remission bought are a transaction; the climb of the race is not what those words describe.']}
Count Leo Tolstoy (1828 to 1910), born on his father's estate in the province of Tula, an artillery officer at twenty-three, who after a crisis at fifty set his art aside for religion. His followers, the Tolstoyans, kept to the teachings of Jesus rather than his miracles or divinity, lived simply, ate no meat, drank no spirits and refused military service; their colonies across Europe mostly failed. Gandhi read the 1894 treatise on the kingdom of God in South Africa, said it overwhelmed him, and in 1910 named the 1,100-acre colony he founded near Johannesburg Tolstoy Farm. · What I Believe, printed in English as My Religion, dated Moscow, January 1884; the treatise on the kingdom of God finished at Yasnaya Polyana in May 1893 and first published in Germany in 1894; the Synod's decree of 22 February 1901 and Tolstoy's reply that April; his death in November 1910. · Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate in the province of Tula, south of Moscow; Moscow, where What I Believe was dated; Germany, where the banned treatise was first printed; Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg.
Tolstoy said the key came when he read, resist not evil, and understood that Jesus meant neither more nor less than what he said. He had been taught the soldier's trade, to resist evil by homicide, and had confessed Jesus with his lips while his heart was far from him. The Church, he found, made the Sermon on the Mount an ideal and the creed the substance; he reversed them. A doctrine that could be lived, simple, clear and practicable, drove his doubt away; a man saved by redemption and sacraments, he held, needs no good works.
It takes the hardest sayings of Jesus at their word when nearly everyone else explains them away, and it asked the question the churches of his day would not answer: how their sanction of war, courts and capital punishment squares with resist not evil. It is honest about the gap between confession and conduct. It made a nobleman work with his hands and give his goods away, and it gave Gandhi the shape of nonviolent resistance. And it offers a Jesus a modern reader can admire without the offence of miracle, blood or an empty tomb.
{'title': 'a teacher kept and the risen Lord who gave the teaching sent away', 'points': ['Paul staked the whole faith on the fact Tolstoy set aside: if Christ be not raised, faith is vain, sins remain, and they which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished; Romans 4 says he was raised again for justification. Tolstoy held that Jesus never affirmed a personal resurrection and denied it whenever he met it; the earliest Christian writing says the opposite and puts it first, with above five hundred witnesses named.', 'The teacher said what a teaching alone cannot carry: at Bethany, I am the resurrection, and the life; at the table, this is my blood of the new testament, shed for many for the remission of sins. Strip these away and the Sermon remains, but its speaker was gravely mistaken about himself; Lewis called accepting Jesus as a great moral teacher while refusing his claim to be God the one thing that must not be said.', 'Tolstoy read judge not as the abolition of every court, yet Jesus claimed the last court for himself: the Father hath committed all judgment unto the Son, that all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. And in the Sermon itself, not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven. A merely human teacher who said such things would be no moral example at all.', 'The five commandments are lifted out of a sermon that opens with a kingdom and ends with a house on the rock. Jesus said that he came not to destroy the law but to fulfil, and that not one jot or one tittle should pass from the law; the law he fulfilled includes sacrifice and remission. A reading that keeps five passages of Matthew 5 and drops the rest of Matthew has chosen its Jesus first and read afterward.']}
Nathaniel William Taylor (1786 to 1858), Timothy Dwight's student and secretary, pastor of the First Church of New Haven from 1812 and from 1822 Dwight Professor of Didactic Theology at Yale, founder of what became Yale Divinity School. His system, called Taylorism or the New Haven theology, was meant to line up Calvinism with the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, and it prevailed in New England; Charles Finney's writings run close to it. Bennet Tyler set up a rival seminary at East Windsor, and the Presbyterians Albert Barnes and Lyman Beecher were tried for holding it and acquitted. · The sermon in the Yale chapel on 10 September 1828, reprinted in 1842; Beecher's trial at Cincinnati in 1835 and Barnes's in 1836; the Old School majority's annulling of the Plan of Union in 1836 and its cutting off of four synods in 1837; reunion in 1869. · New Haven, in the chapel of Yale College; East Windsor, Connecticut, where Tyler's institute rose against it; Cincinnati, where Beecher was tried; Philadelphia, where Barnes preached and where the General Assembly split.
Taylor preached from Ephesians 2, by nature the children of wrath, and called the Bible a plain book on sin. His reason was moral: does God create in men a sinful nature, and damn them for the very nature he creates? Believe this, who can. A God who could have kept a moral system free of sin but chose not to would not be good. He held the Spirit's work necessary; without that transforming grace, he said, all are dead men for eternity. What he refused was any sin, or inability, that was not the sinner's own act.
It let a revival preacher press the sinner with full force: the guilt is all his own, the choice is his, and nothing in his nature stands between him and repentance but his will. It answered the objection the awakened hearer raised, that he could not help being what he was born. It kept the words of Calvinism, depravity by nature, the necessity of the Spirit, the certainty of sin, while removing what its critics found monstrous, the punishment of the unborn for another's act. Its men were pastors and college presidents, and it prevailed in the churches of New England.
{'title': "a plain book read with an axiom in hand, that guilt must be a man's own act", 'points': ["David confessed a sin older than any act of his: behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. Paul traced the same line to its head: by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation, and by one man's disobedience many were made sinners. Taylor denied that anyone is one with Adam or acted in his act; Romans 5 makes Adam's one act the ground of many men's condemnation.", "Taylor's own text says more than he allowed. Paul calls his readers dead in trespasses and sins before he calls them by nature the children of wrath, and the cure is that God, being rich in mercy, quickened them together with Christ: by grace ye are saved. Dead men do not choose their way back to life, and a nature that is only the occasion of sin is not what Paul describes when he says dead.", "Romans 8 describes the sinner's power: the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. Taylor's certainty without necessity leaves a real ability to do otherwise; Paul denies the ability in as many words, and says it of the mind, not merely of the acts.", "Jesus said, no man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him, and again that no man can come except it were given unto him of the Father. Taylor made God's part a government by means and ends, an urging that the sinner is able to answer. Jesus places a cannot at the door and a drawing by the Father before every coming, which is a rescue and not a persuasion.", "Taylor confessed the necessity of the Spirit and then defined the change so that it must be the sinner's own act, since only a free act can be holy. John says the children of God are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Ezekiel's promise is a new heart given and a stony heart taken away, work done on a man before it is done by him."]}
Charles Grandison Finney, born at Warren, Connecticut, in 1792, a lawyer converted in 1821, licensed to preach in 1824, revivalist in upstate New York and then in Rochester in 1830 and 1831; professor of theology at Oberlin from 1835 and its president from 1851 to 1866; died at Oberlin in 1875. Lyman Beecher and Asahel Nettleton opposed the measures. The method outlived him: the anxious seat and mourner's bench became the altar call of D. L. Moody, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham. Warfield of Princeton wrote that God might be eliminated from the theology entirely without essentially changing its character. · Converted 1821; the Rochester revival 1830 to 1831; Lectures on Revivals of Religion 1835; Lectures on Systematic Theology 1846, 1847 and 1851; president of Oberlin 1851 to 1866; died 1875; Memoirs 1876. · Warren, Connecticut; Adams and Evans' Mills in upstate New York; Rochester; Oberlin, Ohio, where he taught from 1835 until his death; and the chancel rails and mourner's benches of the revivals that came after him.
Finney had watched a doctrine kill effort. Tell farmers that God is a sovereign and will give them a crop only when it pleases him, he said, and they will not sow; he had seen churches wait for revival likewise. His own conversion came suddenly and with feeling, and he preached for a decision on the spot. He found the country around Evans' Mills what the western phrase called a burnt district, scarred by a wild excitement passed off as revival that had left many convinced that religion was a delusion, and he answered with method rather than waiting.
It refuses to let anyone hide behind the sovereignty of God, and it expects results. Rochester in 1830 stirred a whole city, with religion the talk of house, shop, office and street. Finney preached without notes, aiming at the will, and gave Christians something to do for the lost. His lecture on measures leaves the church free to decide from time to time what measures shall be adopted, and the measures were kept because they appeared to work. A method that can be taught can be repeated, and a pastor whose church has gone cold wants that.
{'title': 'a birth from above turned into a technique, and a payment turned into a display', 'points': ["Finney's lecture on regeneration says the new birth consists in the sinner changing his ultimate choice. Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3 that the wind bloweth where it listeth, so is every one that is born of the Spirit; John 1 says the children of God are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. A birth is not a decision.", 'The first revival lecture says a revival is as naturally a result of the use of the appropriate means as a crop is of its cause. Paul told the Ephesians that God quickened them when they were dead in sins, and that by grace are ye saved through faith, not of works, lest any man should boast. A dead man does not answer a well-run meeting; he is raised.', 'The lecture on justification calls the imputed righteousness of Christ a most false and nonsensical assumption, and denies that justification is forensic, a verdict pronounced in court (from the Latin forum, the place of judgment). Romans 4 says that to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness, and that God imputeth righteousness without works; Romans 5 says by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.', "The same lecture makes the atonement only a condition or means by which God's love could safely justify sinners, and not the ground of justification: the cross makes pardon safe. Paul wrote to Corinth that God hath made him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that believers might be made the righteousness of God in him. Sin laid on Christ and righteousness given back is an exchange, and an exchange is a payment, not a display.", 'The lecture lists repentance, present full consecration to God, and perseverance in faith and obedience among the conditions of justification; the anxious seat asks for a pledge, and the altar call that grew from it asks for the same walk forward. Titus 3 says God saved not by works of righteousness done, but according to his mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost. A walk forward that can be counted is a work.']}
Asa Mahan, first president of Oberlin, with Charles Finney beside him; Phoebe Palmer of New York City, whose sister began the Tuesday Meetings in 1835 and who led them by 1839, after her own experience in 1837; John Inskip, who led the first holiness camp meeting at Vineland; William Boardman, whose Higher Christian Life of 1858 named the English movement; Hannah Whitall Smith, a Philadelphia Quaker, and her husband Robert Pearsall Smith; Harford-Battersby at Keswick. Its churches: the Free Methodists, the Salvation Army, the Church of God at Anderson, the Nazarenes. Pentecostalism grew from its soil and kept its vocabulary. · Tuesday Meetings from 1835; Mahan's Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection 1839; Palmer's Way of Holiness 1843; Boardman's Higher Christian Life 1858; the Vineland camp meeting 1867; Broadlands and Oxford 1874; Brighton and the first Keswick Convention 1875; Smith's Christian's Secret of a Happy Life 1875; Ryle's Holiness written against it. · Oberlin, Ohio; a parlor in New York City; a camp ground at Vineland, New Jersey; the Broadlands estate, then Oxford and Brighton, in 1874 and 1875; and St John's Church at Keswick in England.
Palmer's account opens with a question: is there not a shorter way of getting into this way of holiness? Yes, brother, there is a shorter way. She resolved to let every high state of grace in name alone and seek only to be conformed to the will of God as recorded in his written word, and with the promise before her she stopped saying thou wilt receive me and said, thou dost receive me now. Mahan argued that believers could enjoy the blessing by simply trusting Christ for it. Under it was a hunger ordinary church life had not fed.
It takes holiness seriously and says a Christian need not stay defeated. Ryle, its most careful opponent, called scriptural holiness a cause exciting much interest, and said the details of holiness in daily life ought to be pressed on believers. Its churches were founded on abolition, and Catherine Booth took from Palmer the case for women preaching. Its promise is rest: the believer hands the matter to Christ and trusts Him to do it, and a tired Christian hears that gladly. Nobody in it thinks sin a small thing; the movement is a refusal to make peace with it.
{'title': 'growth cut into two tiers, and a promise the apostles did not claim for themselves', 'points': ["Paul wrote from prison in Philippians 3, not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect, but I follow after. Palmer's altar covenant claims in an afternoon what the apostle would not claim of himself, and the Old Testament had already answered the claim: who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin, asks Proverbs 20, and Solomon's prayer in 1 Kings 8 says there is no man that sinneth not.", "John wrote to believers that anyone who says he has no sin deceives himself and the truth is not in him, then gave the remedy: if any man sin, there is an advocate with the Father. Wesley's own definition, that nothing is sin, strictly speaking, but a voluntary transgression of a known law of God, is the hinge; narrow sin to what is deliberate and known, and a perfection becomes claimable that the apostle's wider word refuses.", "The second tier needs a second baptism, and Mahan named his 1836 experience a baptism with the Holy Spirit. Paul told the Corinthians that by one Spirit all had been baptized into one body, and told the Ephesians that after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise. The Spirit's baptism belongs to conversion; the growth after it is what 2 Corinthians 3 calls being changed into the same image from glory to glory.", "Keswick's life of rest has Galatians 5 against it: the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other. Paul in Romans 7 says the good that I would I do not. Ryle read the same texts and found a holy violence, a conflict, a warfare, a fight, a soldier's life, a wrestling, and no sudden, instantaneous leap from conversion to consecration anywhere in the Bible.", "It is a redefinition of growth, not a denial of the gospel. The fault is the tier, a Christian with the blessing and one without it, built on a verse in Matthew 23 about the temple altar, which is not about sanctification, and on Acts 19, where the question, have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed, was put to disciples who knew only John's baptism. Neither text describes a second stage for the converted."]}
Barton W. Stone, a Presbyterian minister at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, where some 20,000 gathered in 1801; Thomas Campbell, who wrote the Declaration and Address at Washington, Pennsylvania, in 1809; his son Alexander, editor of The Christian Baptist; Walter Scott, the Mahoning association's evangelist from 1827. Today the Churches of Christ count about 1.1 million members in the United States and near two million worldwide; the Christian churches and churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ are the other two bodies. Stone himself ranked the Son below the Father, and denied that Jesus died in the sinner's place. · Cane Ridge, August 1801; the Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, 28 June 1804; the Declaration and Address, 1809; The Christian Baptist from 3 August 1823 to 1830; Walter Scott sent out 1827; Baptist associations cutting off the Reformers' churches from 1827; the Mahoning association dissolved 1830; union at Lexington, 1832. · Cane Ridge in Kentucky; Washington, Pennsylvania, where the Declaration was printed at the office of The Reporter; Buffaloe, later Bethany, in Brooke County, Virginia, where The Christian Baptist was printed; the churches of the Mahoning association; the High Street meeting house in Lexington, Kentucky.
Thomas Campbell wrote that division among Christians is a horrid evil, anti-christian, anti-scriptural, anti-natural, and that the church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one. Stone's presbytery willed that it die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large, and that the people take the Bible as the only sure guide to heaven. On a frontier of quarrelling parties the way home looked plain: drop every creed, keep every command, preach the simple gospel without philosophy, vain deceit, traditions of men, and the churches would find each other in the New Testament.
It wanted union and said so in 1809. Its rule, that nothing be required as a term of communion but what is expressly taught in the word of God, guards a conscience against other men's inferences. It read the Bible with everyone, kept the Lord's supper weekly as the first churches did, and put a plain command in front of every hearer: believe, repent, be immersed. Campbell's first number in 1823 held up a church whose only bond of union was faith in Christ and submission to his will, with no subscription to abstract propositions framed by synods.
{'title': 'forgiveness moved from faith to the water, and the Spirit shut inside a book', 'points': ["Campbell's Christian System says that those who believe and repent have changed views and feelings but remain unpardoned, unjustified, unsanctified, unreconciled until immersed. Luke 23 has Jesus say to a dying thief, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise, and in Acts 10 the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word while Peter was still speaking, before anyone asked for water. God pardoned first in both places.", "Peter's call at Pentecost in Acts 2 is one verse, and the same book has Paul tell the jailer, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. Romans 4 gives the order: Abraham was counted righteous before he received the sign, that he might be the father of all them that believe, though they be not circumcised. A sign that seals a righteousness already given cannot also be the cause of it.", 'Paul told Corinth, Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel, and thanked God that he had baptized only a few of them. If immersion were the moment of forgiveness, the apostle to the Gentiles left his converts unpardoned on purpose. Ephesians 2 puts salvation as by grace through faith, not of works, lest any man should boast, and an act done in water is still an act.', "The movement's prevailing view was that the Holy Spirit acts only through the influence of inspired scripture. Jesus said in John 3 that the wind bloweth where it listeth, so is every one that is born of the Spirit, and Acts 16 says the Lord opened the heart of Lydia, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul. The Lord did the opening; a book does not open a heart by being read.", 'No creed but Christ is a creed; the earliest confessions stand inside the Bible: without controversy great is the mystery of godliness, God was manifest in the flesh, in 1 Timothy 3, and the form Paul delivered in 1 Corinthians 15, that Christ died according to the scriptures, was buried, and rose the third day. Campbell allowed no subscription to abstract propositions framed by synods; the apostles handed such propositions down and told the churches to hold them fast.']}
James Robinson Graves, sole editor of the Tennessee Baptist from 1848, claiming twelve thousand readers by 1860 and the country's widest Baptist readership; James Madison Pendleton of Kentucky, who wrote the tract at Graves's request; Amos Cooper Dayton, the third of the Great Triumvirate. James Milton Carroll drew the chain in The Trail of Blood in 1931, still influential among Independent Baptist churches. Its bodies today: the American Baptist Association, formed at Texarkana in 1924 under Ben Bogard, reporting 1,600 congregations and 100,000 members in 2009, and the Baptist Missionary Association of America, which walked out of it in 1950. · Cotton Grove, 24 June 1851; Pendleton's An Old Landmark Re-set, 1854; the Southern Baptist Convention's resolutions disapproving of the movement, 1859; Graves's Old Landmarkism: What Is It?, 1880; the American Baptist Association, 1924; The Trail of Blood, 1931; the Baptist Missionary Association, 1950. · Cotton Grove Baptist Church near Jackson, in west Tennessee; Memphis, where Old Landmarkism was printed; Texarkana, Texas; Lakeland, Florida, where the 1950 walkout happened; and the Baptist South, where the movement rose and where it still has churches.
Graves put five questions to the Cotton Grove meeting: can Baptists, consistently with their principles or the Scriptures, recognize societies not organized according to the pattern of the Jerusalem church as churches of Christ, or their ministers as gospel ministers? By Graves's account the answers were unanimously no. Under it lay a plain worry: Baptists were treating men who sprinkled infants (Pedobaptists, from the Greek pais, a child) as fellow ministers and their societies as churches, and Graves held that this gave away the whole case for being Baptist. Pendleton wrote his tract to set the old landmark back.
It refuses to let the local church become nothing. It guards believer's baptism as the door of the church and the Lord's Supper as the church's own table, and insists that a New Testament church is a real assembly, with officers and discipline, and not a mood. It gave Baptists a lineage to the apostles and a reason not to be ashamed of the name. Pendleton's case is orderly: where there is no baptism there are no visible churches. A Baptist who takes his own baptism seriously feels the pull.
{'title': 'a church the New Testament calls one body, cut down to the congregation on the corner', 'points': ['Graves wrote that Christ never set up but one kingdom, and if this is visible, he has no invisible kingdom or church. Ephesians 1 calls the church his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all; Ephesians 4 says there is one body, and one Spirit; Colossians 1 says he is the head of the body, the church. One body with one head is not a Tennessee congregation, and a Tennessee congregation is not the whole of it.', 'Hebrews 12 tells believers they are come unto the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, whose members include the spirits of just men made perfect, who sit in no local congregation. Jesus in Matthew 16 said, I will build my church, one church, with the gates of hell against it, and Ephesians 3 gives him glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages.', "The chain from John the Baptist runs through Novatians, Paulicians, Donatists and Waldensians, groups the record does not connect and whose teachings were not Baptist, and the usual account puts Baptist beginnings among the English Dissenters of the seventeenth century. Galatians 3 gives the ground of union another way: ye are all one in Christ Jesus, and if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed. Union with Christ, not a pedigree of immersions, makes a Christian a member.", "Pendleton's rule, where there is no baptism there are no visible churches, makes the ordinance the maker of the church. Paul in 1 Corinthians 12 has the order the other way, one Spirit baptizing all, Jews or Gentiles, bond or free, into one body, and Acts 10 has the Spirit fall on Cornelius's house before Peter commanded water. Water marks membership; the Spirit makes it; and the Spirit is not confined to one denomination's baptistries.", 'The 1689 Baptist Confession, written a century and a half before Cotton Grove, confesses in chapter 26 the catholic or universal church, which may be called invisible, consisting of the whole number of the elect gathered into one under Christ the head, and only then the particular congregations. A movement calling itself the old landmark is younger than the landmark it claims, and the fathers it appeals to had set the stone it removed.']}
Daniel Parker, born in Virginia in 1781, preached in Tennessee and Illinois, printed Views on the Two Seeds in 1826, formed the Pilgrim Predestinarian Regular Baptist Church with seven members in 1833 and carried it to Texas, where he died in 1844. Samuel Trott, Gilbert Beebe and the ministers who met at Black Rock, Maryland, in 1832 became the Old School or Primitive Baptists: about 64,000 in 1995, with some 50,000 more in African American churches by 2005. In England William Gadsby's Gospel Standard magazine, begun at Manchester in 1835, gave the Strict Baptist chapels their name and their Articles. Parker's Two-Seed churches held about eighty members by 2003. · Parker's Two Seeds pamphlet in 1826; the Kehukee declaration of 1827; the Black Rock meeting on September 28, 1832; the Gospel Standard from 1835 and its Articles settled in 1878; the Earthen Vessel attack on Spurgeon in January 1855. · Frontier churches of Tennessee, Illinois and Texas; Black Rock church in Baltimore County, Maryland; Manchester, and the Strict Baptist chapels of England; Surrey Tabernacle and New Park Street in London.
The Black Rock men argued from the sufficiency of God's Word. If a little tract of four pages can lead a soul to the knowledge of Christ, why the whole Bible? Sunday schools 'were never established by the apostles, nor commanded by Christ'; 'each gospel church acts as the independent kingdom of Christ in calling and sending forth its members', so a society outside the church has no standing; and a man who says God has called him to preach, then goes to college to fit himself, contradicts his own call. Parker held that since the decision was made before birth, missions were not only unscriptural but useless.
It takes the sovereignty of God with complete seriousness and refuses every hint that a convert is a product of machinery. Its churches asked for no money, no boards, no paid agents and no college-trained clergy: a Bible, a congregation and a man they believed God had called. The Black Rock Address wanted religion to 'remain unchangeably the same at this day' as the New Testament delivered it, a test any Baptist would accept, and beside the worked-up excitement of the protracted meeting a church that would not manufacture conversions looked like the honest one.
{'title': 'the secret will of God used to cancel His revealed command', 'points': ["The commission was given to the church, with no date on which it lapses. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, said Jesus in Matthew 28, and in Mark 16, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. Black Rock called mission societies inventions of men; the sending itself is the command, and the Gospel Standard's own Article 29 grants that the gospel is to be preached in or proclaimed to all the world.", 'Preaching cannot be cut off from calling. Paul in Athens said that God now commandeth all men every where to repent, to a crowd of pagans, and in Romans 10 he asked how shall they hear without a preacher? and how shall they preach, except they be sent? Fuller argued in 1785 that it is the duty of every man to believe what God reveals, and the society formed at Kettering in 1792 sent Carey.', 'God Himself pleads with the lost. Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live, is Ezekiel 33, and the verse ends in a double call, turn ye, turn ye. Isaiah 55 cries, Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters. Article 24 keeps the invitations for the already awakened; the prophets did not.', "The last invitation in the Bible is open, and the tightest verse on election keeps the door open too. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely, says Revelation 22. All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out, says Jesus in John 6, in one breath. Parker's two seeds keep the first half of that verse and delete the second.", "The two-seed reading breaks on its own verse. Genesis 3 promises enmity between the serpent's seed and the woman's, and Paul in Galatians 3 names the woman's seed: And to thy seed, which is Christ. As for the lost, he told the Ephesians that they had all been by nature the children of wrath, even as others, and were then quickened by grace: one fallen stock, some of it made alive, not two stocks from the womb."]}
John Keble, whose Assize sermon of July 14, 1833, against Parliament's handling of the Irish bishoprics is taken as the start; John Henry Newman, who wrote the last of the Tracts for the Times in 1841 and was received into the Roman Catholic Church at Littlemore on October 9, 1845; Edward Pusey, whose name the critics used for the whole, Puseyism. Henry Manning followed Newman to Rome in 1851. J. C. Ryle, later bishop of Liverpool, answered it in Knots Untied, in its tenth edition by 1885. Newman was made a cardinal in 1879 and canonized on October 13, 2019, and Anglo-Catholic parishes carry the movement on. · Keble's sermon on July 14, 1833; the Tracts for the Times from 1833 to Tract 90 in 1841; Newman received at Littlemore on October 9, 1845, the year of his Essay; Manning to Rome in 1851; the Public Worship Regulation Act given royal assent on August 7, 1874; Newman canonized on October 13, 2019. · Oxford, from the pulpit of St Mary's; Littlemore, where Newman waited for Rome; then the Ritualist parishes of England, whose vestments and ceremonial brought court cases and sent five clergymen to prison under the 1874 Act.
Keble preached that Parliament, by treating the apostolic Church as 'one sect among many', had 'virtually usurped the commission' Christ gave His Church, and asked what answer was left to Rome's taunt of 'a mere Parliamentarian Church'. The Tracts answered by grounding the ministry on apostolic succession rather than on the state. Newman's Essay went further: 'To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant', because the doctrines Protestants reject, purgatory and the papal claims among them, have as much early witness as some they keep, and the highest truths need 'longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation'.
It took the Church seriously as something Christ founded rather than something Parliament ran, and asked the clergy to behave like men under orders from heaven. It gave worship back its beauty and its awe, and a troubled conscience a priest to hear it. Its men were learned and prayerful, and Newman's challenge was fair: the papal claims have as much early witness as the real presence the Anglicans kept, so why accept one growth and refuse the other? Whoever holds the creed of Nicaea has accepted some development already; the Essay only asks how far it goes.
{'title': 'a growing tradition set beside a finished work and a closed book', 'points': ['The sacrifice is finished and the priest has sat down. Every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God, says Hebrews 10. An altar where a priest offers Christ again is what that chapter exists to deny, and Ryle refused to admit that Christian ministers are in any sense sacrificing priests.', 'The priesthood passes to no successor because its holder does not die. This man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood, says Hebrews 7, and Paul in 1 Timothy 2 knows one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. Peter, one of the apostles the Tractarians traced their orders to, gave the priesthood to the whole church: Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood.', 'New birth comes by the Word and the Spirit, not by the font. Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, wrote Peter, and Jesus told Nicodemus, The wind bloweth where it listeth, so is every one that is born of the Spirit. Ryle protested the Tractarian idea that water in the name of the Trinity is invariably and necessarily accompanied by regeneration, and the texts are on his side.', "Tradition is judged by Scripture, never the reverse. Jesus charged the Pharisees in Mark 7 with making the word of God of none effect through the tradition they had delivered, and Luke praises the Bereans in Acts 17 because they searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so, and the things they searched were an apostle's. Newman's hypothesis is that the highest truths need longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation; the Bereans needed a day.", "Tract 90's method failed by its author's judgment. It read Article 31 as condemning 'the sacrifice of Masses', private abuses, not 'the sacrifice of the Mass'; in 1877 Newman added a note that 'the suggested distinction between Mass and Masses' was 'as unfounded as the original thesis'. Paul told the Galatians that if he himself, or an angel from heaven, preached any other gospel, let him be accursed: the standard was delivered once and does not wait on development."]}
Pius IX, who had written to the bishops of the world from Gaeta and received overwhelmingly favourable replies, defined it in Ineffabilis Deus. Apparitions bracketed the decree: a single appearance at La Salette in France in 1846; eighteen to Bernadette Soubirous, aged fourteen, at the grotto of Massabielle near Lourdes between February 11 and July 16, 1858, in one of which the figure said 'I am the Immaculate Conception'; and a silent one at Knock in Ireland in 1879. The bishop of Tarbes declared the Lourdes visions supernatural in 1862, and the shrine now receives between four and six million pilgrims a year. · Bernard's letter to the canons of Lyons about 1140; La Salette in 1846; the definition on December 8, 1854; Lourdes from February 11 to July 16, 1858, approved by the bishop of Tarbes in 1862; Knock in 1879; the Assumption defined on November 1, 1950. · Rome, at St Peter's; Lyons, whose canons Bernard rebuked for keeping the new feast; the grotto of Massabielle, less than a mile from Lourdes in France; La Salette in France and Knock in Ireland.
Ineffabilis Deus argues from Scripture read through tradition. Genesis 3 sets enmity between the woman and the serpent, and the angel of Luke 1 greets her as full of grace; a woman at enmity with the serpent and full of grace, the document reasons, was never under his power. The Church had long kept a feast of her Conception, popes from Sixtus IV in 1476 had protected the belief, and the doctrine, it says, 'always existed in the Church'. The bishops consulted from Gaeta agreed, and four years later a girl at Lourdes reported the title from the lady's own lips.
It honours the Son through the mother, which is how Rome argues it: the merits of Christ reach back to keep her clean before she could fall, so the grace is His and the privilege is hers. It gives ordinary people a figure wholly human and wholly pure, near enough to be asked, and the decree names her 'the most powerful Mediatrix and Conciliatrix in the whole world' with her only-begotten Son. A girl of fourteen at a grotto, a rosary, a spring to drink from and wash in: it is religion with a face, and the millions at Lourdes say what that is worth.
{'title': 'a sinless mother in a book that says all have sinned', 'points': ["Paul leaves no room for one exception. There is none righteous, no, not one, he wrote in Romans 3, and all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; in Romans 5, death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. Ineffabilis Deus calls Mary's freedom a singular privilege, which is to say an exception, and Romans was written without one.", "Mary's own words place her among the saved. My spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour, she sang in Luke 1, and a Saviour is needed only by someone who needs saving. Aquinas saw the difficulty six centuries before the definition: if she had never incurred the stain of original sin, she could never have needed redemption and salvation which is by Christ, and that, he wrote, would imply that Christ is not the Saviour of all men.", 'The oldest voices did not hold it. Bernard of Clairvaux, writing to the canons of Lyons about 1140, called the new feast a rite which the Church knows nothing of, and which reason does not prove, nor ancient tradition hand down, and held that Mary was sanctified in the womb after conception but not conceived without sin, since the Lord Jesus alone was conceived by the Holy Ghost, because He alone was holy before He was conceived.', 'Jesus turned praise of His mother to the Word. When a woman cried, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, He answered in Luke 11, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it. The last page of that Word warns, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. A dogma no apostle taught, with penalties for doubt, is an addition.', 'The decree calls her the most powerful Mediatrix and Conciliatrix in the whole world with her Son; Paul in 1 Timothy 2 counts one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. The method has since been used again: in 1950 Pius XII took the same steps, a question to the bishops, an almost unanimous reply, a definition with a warning, to add the Assumption, and called the two privileges most closely bound to one another.']}
Pius IX issued Quanta Cura with the Syllabus on December 8, 1864, and opened the First Vatican Council on December 8, 1869. On July 18, 1870, the bishops present voted 533 to 2 for Pastor Aeternus, about sixty opponents having left Rome rather than vote. Ignaz von Döllinger, professor of theology at Munich since 1826, wrote that as a Christian, a theologian, an historian and a citizen he could not accept the doctrine, and was excommunicated on April 18, 1871; the Old Catholic churches formed among those who refused, though he never joined them. By common count the power has been used twice, in 1854 and 1950. · Quanta Cura and the Syllabus on December 8, 1864; the council opened on December 8, 1869; Pastor Aeternus voted on July 18, 1870; Italian troops in Rome on September 20 and the council adjourned on October 20, 1870; Döllinger excommunicated on April 18, 1871. · Rome, in St Peter's, in the last months before the kingdom of Italy took the city; Munich, where Döllinger had taught since 1826; Germany above all, where the Old Catholic withdrawal began.
Pastor Aeternus presents itself as 'faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the christian faith', with Christ's words to Peter in Matthew 16 as the ground. Quanta Cura names the fear behind it: that 'liberty of conscience and worship' claimed as 'each man's personal right', and an 'absolute liberty' of speech and press 'restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil', would dissolve religion into indifference. So the Syllabus condemned the proposition that every man is free to embrace the religion he considers true, and refused any peace with modern liberalism. One voice that could not err looked like the last anchor.
It puts a floor under the office. Whatever a pope's private life, when he defines from the chair he cannot lead the Church into error, and to anyone who has watched councils argue for years that is a real comfort. To a church about to lose its own city, one fixed point that no parliament or press could overrule looked worth more than any argument. And the dogma is narrower than its critics feared: it covers faith and morals only, spoken from the chair as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, and by common count it has been used twice.
{'title': 'a chair set above the council, the apostle and the text', 'points': ['The title is forbidden. In Matthew 23 Jesus told the disciples, be not ye called Rabbi, and all ye are brethren, and again, Neither be ye called masters, since one is Master, even Christ; and to call no man on earth father, since there is one Father in heaven. Paul adds in 1 Corinthians 3 that other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.', "Pastor Aeternus says the pope's definitions stand of themselves, and not by the consent of the church. Peter's own conduct did not stand so. But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed, wrote Paul in Galatians 2, on a matter that touched the truth of the gospel, and the correction came from a brother apostle, not from any chair.", 'The first council decided in common. The apostles and elders came together for to consider of this matter, says Acts 15, and after Peter had spoken it was James who said, Wherefore my sentence is. If anyone in that room held immediate jurisdiction over every Christian, it was Peter, and he neither claimed it nor used it.', 'Scripture names its own judge. To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them, says Isaiah 8. Paul told Timothy that all scripture is given by inspiration of God and profitable for doctrine, that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works. A book that furnishes a man for every good work is not waiting on a chair.', 'The rock is the confession. Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, says Matthew 16, and the Greek keeps two words, Petros for the man and petra for the rock. Chrysostom read it so: upon this rock, not upon Peter, for He built His Church not upon man, but upon the faith of Peter. Rome reads the rock as the man; the older reading is the faith he had just confessed.']}
Charles Fox Parham, born in Iowa in 1873, who opened Bethel Bible School at Topeka in 1900; Agnes Ozman, his student, the first to speak; William Seymour, son of freed slaves and Parham's student at Houston in 1905, who carried it to Los Angeles. The Assemblies of God, organized at Hot Springs, Arkansas, in April 1914, is the largest body holding it: 88.9 million members and adherents in 2025, in a movement of over 279 million classical Pentecostals. These churches are Trinitarian and evangelical. The fault is the required second stage and its required sign, not the gospel they preach. · Bethel Bible School opened October 1900; Ozman's tongues 1 January 1901; tongues at Bonnie Brae Street 9 April 1906 and the Azusa Street mission from that month until about 1915; the Assemblies of God at Hot Springs, April 1914, and its Statement of Fundamental Truths, October 1916; Parham died 1929. · Stone's Folly at Topeka, Kansas; Houston; a house on Bonnie Brae Street and a former stable at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles; Hot Springs, Arkansas; and today, most of all, the Global South, where the movement grows most.
In Parham's account, before leaving Topeka he set his students to find the Bible evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and on his return the answer was unanimous, speaking in other tongues. On New Year's night Ozman asked him to lay hands on her; he had scarcely repeated three dozen sentences, he wrote, when a glory fell upon her and she began speaking in the Chinese language. These were real languages, so missionaries need not learn them, and Acts seemed to settle what Holiness teaching had left vague: how a believer knows the baptism has come.
It answers a question every earnest believer asks: whether the Spirit has truly come to him, and how he would know. It offers a sign that can be heard, on a date that can be remembered, and it says the power of the book of Acts was never withdrawn. Azusa Street met in a former stable rented for eight dollars a month, and Black, White, Asian and Native American worshippers knelt together there in 1906, in the Jim Crow years. It has produced churches that pray, expect God to act, and grow, most of all in the Global South.
{'title': 'a story pattern read as a rule, and a sign Paul said not all would have', 'points': ['The Statement says the baptism is distinct from and subsequent to the new birth. Paul told the Corinthians that by one Spirit all of them had been baptized into one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, bond or free, and had all been made to drink into one Spirit. The baptism belongs to everyone in the body and is what put them there; a second baptism for some would make two bodies.', 'Paul wrote to the Ephesians that after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, and to the Romans that if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. The Spirit comes with believing, and a Christian without him is no Christian at all. A stage in which the converted wait for the Spirit is not in either letter.', "Paul asked the Corinthians, do all speak with tongues? in a run of questions whose answer is no, because the Spirit divides to every man severally as he will. He added that tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not, and that all things be done decently and in order. A sign meant for unbelievers cannot be the required proof of a believer's baptism.", 'Three chapters carry the pattern and two break it. At Samaria in Acts 8 the apostles laid their hands on the believers and they received the Holy Ghost, with no tongue recorded, and at Damascus in Acts 9 Ananias told Saul he would be filled with the Holy Ghost, after which Luke records his sight returning and his baptism, nothing else. A rule drawn from three stories must explain the two that leave out its sign.', 'At Pentecost, Luke writes, every man heard them speak in his own language, and Parham held to that: the tongues were real languages, so missionaries need not learn them. Missionaries went out believing the blessing would let them speak to the natives, and it proved untrue; at Azusa Street Parham himself heard chattering, jabbering and sputtering, speaking in no language at all. The sign of Acts 2 was a language understood; the sign now required is not.']}
R. E. McAlister, who preached at the Arroyo Seco camp meeting in 1913 that the apostles baptized in the name of Jesus; Frank Ewart, born in Australia in 1876, a Baptist missionary turned Pentecostal pastor in Los Angeles, who with Glenn Cook rebaptized each other in Jesus' name in 1914 and spread it through his paper Meat in Due Season. A third of the Assemblies of God's ministers left over it in 1916. The United Pentecostal Church International, formed in 1945, reports nearly 6.2 million constituents in 45,000 churches in 203 nations; Wikipedia counts some 30 million Oneness Pentecostals. · The Arroyo Seco camp meeting from 15 April 1913; Ewart and Cook rebaptized 15 April 1914; the Assemblies of God's Statement of Fundamental Truths, October 1916; the United Pentecostal Church formed 25 September 1945; Ewart died 13 August 1947. · A camp meeting at Arroyo Seco near Los Angeles; a tank in Ewart's tent; St. Louis, where the United Pentecostal Church was formed in 1945; its headquarters at Weldon Spring, Missouri; and Rome, where Sabellius taught the same shape of doctrine about the year 215.
Its own reason is the Bible read at face value. Acts records five baptisms, at Jerusalem, Samaria, Caesarea, Ephesus and Damascus, every one in the name of Jesus and none with the threefold words, so McAlister preached in 1913, and his hearers read the one name of Matthew 28 as that name. Add Moses' Hear, O Israel, Isaiah's child called The mighty God, The everlasting Father, and Paul's in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and the conclusion followed: one God, and his name is Jesus. Ewart and Cook were rebaptized to obey what they read.
It is simple, and it takes the deity of Christ seriously: no God stands behind Jesus, and the God who made the world is the man on the cross. It uses the Bible's words, one God and one name, and asks nothing the apostles are not recorded doing. It gives a convert three plain steps with dates. Even the Assemblies of God's Statement calls the mode of the distinction inscrutable and incomprehensible, because unexplained; Oneness offers a God with no such remainder. Its holiness costs something, and its missionary drive grew 521 churches in 1945 into more than 45,000.
{'title': 'three present at the Jordan together, and a thief saved without the plan', 'points': ['Oneness teaches that Father, Son and Spirit are manifestations of one person, shown one at a time. At the Jordan in Matthew 3 the Son stood in the water, the Spirit of God descended like a dove and lit upon him, and a voice from heaven said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Three are present in one scene, one speaking to another about a third. A single person does not do that.', "The Articles say baptism in Jesus' name obeys and fulfils Matthew 28. But the Lord's words there are, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: three named under one name. Acts reports baptisms in the name of Jesus without giving any spoken formula; Luke tells whose authority the baptism was under, not which words were said over the water. A report is being made to overrule a command.", 'Jesus prayed, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was: one speaking to another of a glory shared before creation, when on Oneness terms the Son had not yet begun, since the Son is the incarnation. He promised to pray the Father, who would give another Comforter: one who asks, one who gives, one who is given. The pronouns are the doctrine.', "The Fundamental Doctrine makes baptism in Jesus' name and tongues conditions of full salvation. Paul wrote, by grace are ye saved through faith, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. The thief on the cross was neither baptized nor spoke in tongues, and heard, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise, and Cornelius in Acts 10 received the Holy Ghost before any water touched him.", 'The shape is old. Sabellius taught at Rome about 215 that Father, Son and Spirit are modes of one person, modalism (Latin modus, a mode), and Tertullian wrote of its champion that he put to flight the Paraclete and crucified the Father. At the cross the Son cried, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: if the two are one person, the Father died, and the church set the teaching aside in the third century.']}
George Hawtin, born 1909, and Percy Hunt, formerly of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, who brought about 70 students to Herrick Holt's Sharon Orphanage and Schools in October 1947; Ern Hawtin, George's brother. Myrtle Beall carried it to Detroit, Ivan Spencer to Elim Bible Institute, and Stanley Frodsham left the Assemblies of God to support it. It had no central organization and by 1950 had split into pieces; Hawtin later taught that the Anglo-Saxons were the house of Israel. Its ideas passed to the Kansas City prophets and the New Apostolic Reformation, which has its own card. · Branham's Vancouver meetings, November 1947; Sharon's school opened at North Battleford, October 1947; the prophecy of 11 February 1948 and the outpouring of 12 February; camp meetings 30 March to 4 April and 7 to 18 July 1948; Resolution 7 of the Assemblies of God at Seattle, September 1949. · Sharon Orphanage and Schools at North Battleford, Saskatchewan; Vancouver, where the Hawtins heard Branham in 1947; Bethesda Missionary Temple in Detroit; Elim Bible Institute; and Seattle, where the Assemblies of God answered in 1949.
The Hawtins came home from Branham's Vancouver meetings in November 1947 and led staff and students in fasting and prayer. On 11 February 1948 a young woman prophesied a great revival; the next day, Ern Hawtin wrote in the Sharon Star, students lay under the power of God or knelt, until the Lord spoke to one of the brethren, Go and lay hands upon a certain student and pray for him, and a revelation was given of that student's life and ministry. George Hawtin wrote that some had prayed twenty years for the nine gifts to return.
It promised that the gifts were for any believer, not a few famous evangelists, given and named by a word spoken over him with hands laid on. It answered a Pentecostalism whose gifts, Riss wrote, had declined since the century's turn; the long drought seemed over. It read Israel's founding in May 1948 as a sign that the church too was being restored, and took Ephesians 4 at its word, asking why apostles and prophets should be missing if evangelists and pastors were not. Thousands came to the July camp meeting from at least twenty states.
{'title': 'a foundation laid twice, and a likeness promised at the appearing claimed before it', 'points': ['Resolution 7 named the teaching that the Church is built on the foundation of present-day apostles and prophets. Paul told the Ephesians they were built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone. A foundation is laid once, at the bottom; a builder who lays a new one in 1948 is not adding a storey but starting another building.', "Peter's rule for filling Judas's place was a man who had companied with the eleven from the baptism of John to the day the Lord was taken up, to be a witness of his resurrection, and Paul, the last, wrote that the risen Lord was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time. An apostle named by prophecy in Saskatchewan had seen nothing; the office cannot be restored because its qualification cannot be.", "The latter rain, on the Sharon reading, is an outpouring still falling. Peter, at Pentecost, said of Joel's words, this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel, and it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh. The apostle dated the last days from that morning; the outpouring is not a season the church awaits but the age it has lived in since.", 'The manifested sons were to come into the full stature of Christ in the last days. Paul wrote, not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect, and John, that it doth not yet appear what the sons of God shall be, but that when he shall appear they shall be like him, for they shall see him as he is. The likeness comes at the appearing, and by seeing him, not by hands laid on beforehand.', "Sharon's personal prophecies named gifts, ministries and life decisions, and the first of them gave minute details of the great thing God was about to do. Moses gave the test: when a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken. George Hawtin later said they had been too full of themselves, and by 1950 the movement was in pieces."]}
William Marrion Branham, born in 1909 in the hills of southern Kentucky to one of the poorest of families, raised at Jeffersonville, Indiana. Gordon Lindsay joined him as manager in late 1947 and with him founded The Voice of Healing in 1948. Weaver's study dates the healing revival 1947 to 1955 and the turn from healer to prophet after it. Message Believers were estimated at 300,000 in 1986; by 2000 there were missions on every inhabited continent and 1,600 churches in Latin America; Voice of God Recordings put the total at two to four million in 2018. · Baptisms in the Ohio River, 11 June 1933; the angel, 7 May 1946, and St. Louis in June; Vancouver, November 1947; The Voice of Healing, April 1948; the serpent's seed, 1958; the church ages, December 1960; the seals, 1963; the crash, 18 December 1965, and death on Christmas Eve. · Burkesville, Kentucky, where he was born; Jeffersonville, Indiana, and the Branham Tabernacle, where the later sermons were preached; St. Louis, Shreveport and Vancouver in the revival years; Durban, where the 1952 campaign drew 200,000; Tucson, Arizona; a highway east of Friona, Texas.
Branham's account begins with a light over his bed at birth and a voice at the river in 1933 promising that his message would run before the second coming. In 1946, praying in a trapping cabin, he saw a man walk in and heard that he was sent from the presence of Almighty God: Branham's peculiar birth and misunderstood life meant he was to pray for the sick of the world, and nothing would stand before his prayers, not even cancer, if the people believed him. He had gone there because clergymen called the things coming to him wrong.
A prayer line in which a stranger was told his name, his address and his disease before he opened his mouth, in front of thousands. Lindsay counted 70,000 at fourteen days of meetings in Vancouver; Durban in 1952 was the largest crowd of his career. He wore cheap suits, refused large salaries, left a gift Cadillac in the garage out of embarrassment, and preached a church restored to the shape of the church in Acts. For a Pentecostal in a small congregation, here was a prophet to the generation, a plain man who spoke quietly, on tape for any village.
{'title': "a prophet tested by Moses' rule, and a book that names Cain's father", 'points': ["Branham preached in 1958 that Eve was already pregnant by Satan when she went to Adam, and that Cain was the son of Satan. Genesis 4 opens, And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD. The book names Cain's father in its first sentence about him, and Genesis 3 says the sin was eating: she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.", 'He held that three persons make three gods and required rebaptism in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ alone. At the Jordan in Matthew 3 the Son stands in the water, the Spirit of God descends like a dove, and a voice from heaven says, This is my beloved Son: three at once in one scene. In Matthew 28 the risen Christ commanded baptism in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.', 'In December 1960 he said he predicted, rather than prophesied, that the Laodicean age would end by 1977, and his followers expected his own resurrection into that year. Deuteronomy 18 gives the test: when a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken. Calling the word a prediction does not take it out from under the rule.', "He said the messenger of the last age would be one like Elijah, hating denominations and loving the wilderness, and his followers took him for the Elijah of Malachi 4. Jesus answered the question in Matthew 11 and 17: this is Elias, which was for to come, and Elias is come already, and they knew him not; the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist. Malachi's Elijah has a name in the Gospels.", "Message Believers keep his sermons as oral scripture and expect from them rapturing faith. Hebrews 1 says that God, who spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken by his Son; the last word is already the Son's. Revelation 22 closes the Bible with a warning: if any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues written in this book. A second canon on tape adds."]}
George Baker by the FBI's files, born about 1876, a Baltimore gardener who met Charles Fillmore's New Thought in 1906 and in 1912 parted from Samuel Morris, called Father Jehovia, declaring himself God. Peninnah, his first wife, whose free dinners became the banquets. Edna Rose Ritchings, Sweet Angel, married in 1946 as the second Mother Divine, who led the Mission from 1965 until her death in 2017. Time guessed two million followers; the true figure was probably a few tens of thousands. Few converts have joined since 1965, the doctrine forbids sex, and the Mission has nearly dwindled to extinction. · The claim to be God in 1912; Sayville from 1919; the arrest of 8 May 1931; the sentence in June 1932 and Judge Smith's death on 9 June; Harlem from 1932; Philadelphia from 1942; the marriage of 29 April 1946; death on 10 September 1965; Mother Divine's death in 2017. · Sayville, Long Island, the first black-owned house in town; the Rockland Palace and the Heavens of Harlem, over a hundred across the Northeast; the Promised Land farms of Ulster County; Philadelphia's Divine Lorraine and Divine Tracy hotels; Woodmont at Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, a National Historic Landmark.
The Depression. The Mission's dates page says a meal at its Harlem headquarters in 1933 cost ten or fifteen cents, and that at Sayville he fed up to three hundred a day without taking a penny. He said he had commissioned himself to prove the Gospel could be preached without money, that Christ died so that people might live and not go to the grave, and that God made all nations of one blood. Then the judge who called him a menace died days after sentencing him, and the papers reported his comment: I hated to do it.
Food, a bed and a job, in a house where no one was called colored and everyone bore a name he had chosen. A leader who turned away tips, gifts and welfare, wrote an anti-lynching bill that gathered 250,000 signatures by 1940, and sent integrated busloads through the South in 1936. A religion with no afterlife to wait for: heaven was the banquet table, and a body that would not die was promised to people who had buried too many. And a God one could see and hear on the radio, who wrote to Hirohito in 1945 urging surrender.
{'title': 'a man who took the name of God and then died like a man', 'points': ["The Mission's tenet is that Father Divine is God, Jesus Christ returned in the Fathership Degree. In Isaiah 42 the LORD says, I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another; in Isaiah 43, before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. A God formed in Maryland about 1876 is a God formed after, and the glory was never handed over.", "When Herod sat on his throne and the people shouted, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man, Acts 12 says the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory. Father Divine let the banquet hall chant, Yes, he's God, and let his own histories call him the Embodiment of God Consciousness. Herod's fault was not the crowd's cry but his silence at it.", 'John 1 says the Word was made flesh, once, and that John bare witness of him, pointing at Jesus of Nazareth. Father Divine taught that his own life fulfilled every prophecy of the second coming, that he was Jesus Christ reborn. The second coming in Scripture is the same Jesus: this same Jesus, said the angels in Acts 1, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven, not a gardener from Baltimore.', "He taught that those who know him cannot be sick and that Christ died so that his people need not go to the grave; Peninnah's death in 1943 and his own on 10 September 1965, which the Mission names his Personal Sacrifice, answered that in fact. Hebrews 9 answers it in words: it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment, and in the same breath, Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many.", "The Mission requires celibacy of every member, separates husbands from wives, and gives children to assigned guardians. Paul told Timothy that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, forbidding to marry; and Hebrews 13 says marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled. A rule that empties a church of children was named in advance as a departure, and the Mission's own decline is its arithmetic."]}
Guy Ballard, born at Newton, Kansas, in 1878, a mining engineer long read in Theosophy and the occult, writing as Godfré Ray King; his wife Edna, called Lotus, who recorded dictations after his death; their son Donald. The three claimed to be Saint Germain's sole accredited messengers. A Los Angeles crowd of 6,000 in 1935 grew to a claimed million followers in 1938. The Saint Germain Foundation at Schaumburg, Illinois, reported 300 groups in 2007 and hundreds of Sanctuaries and Temples in 2025. From Theosophy it took the Masters, their messengers and the name Saint Germain; from New Thought, the affirmation. · Mount Shasta in August, September and October 1930; Unveiled Mysteries and the first conclave at Philadelphia in October 1934; Ballard's death on 29 December 1939; the fraud verdict in 1942, the Supreme Court's ruling on 24 April 1944 and the dismissal in 1946; the Church Universal and Triumphant in 1975. · Mount Shasta in northern California, site of the rumored Brotherhood and the August pageant; Chicago, where the Saint Germain Press printed the books and the I AM Temple stands; the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles; Santa Fe from 1942; Schaumburg, Illinois, the headquarters today.
Ballard wrote that he was on government business at a town below Mount Shasta and chased a rumor of a Brotherhood of divine men on the mountain. Filling his cup at a spring, he felt an electric current pass through his body; a young man offered a drink more refreshing than spring water, filled the cup with a creamy liquid, and later named himself the Count of Saint Germain. Ballard insisted the experiences were as real and true as mankind's existence, all in August, September and October 1930, and that the Master had chosen America to carry the Cup of Light.
It made God near enough to command: not a judge in heaven but a Presence above one's head on a chart, pouring light into the body. It promised health, supply and youth to anyone who decreed them, and a flame of forgiveness that asked no confession. It kept Jesus, honored as a Master who had shown the way, and its meetings, a Chicago paper noted in 1938, took no collections. It wrapped all this in the flag, with Saint Germain behind the Declaration of Independence and America the seat of a coming golden age, in a decade that wanted one.
{'title': "the name God gave Moses, claimed for every man's own self", 'points': ["The Foundation teaches that whoever says I AM uses the creative attribute of the Godhead and announces creation at his point in the universe. In Exodus 3 the name is God's answer to Moses, I AM THAT I AM, with the words, this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations. The name that sets the LORD apart from everything made is handed here to the made thing as a formula for health and supply.", 'When Jesus said, Before Abraham was, I am, John 8 says the men listening took up stones to cast at him, because they heard the name of God claimed by one man. The I AM teaching hears the same words as a truth about everyone. The crowd at least understood what was being said: if I AM belonged to every self in the temple court, no one would have reached for a stone.', 'Unveiled Mysteries ranks Jesus among the Ascended Masters and calls his coming an initiation to the people of the world; the Foundation lists him beside Saint Germain. Paul wrote to Colosse that in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, in the same chapter that warns against philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. A fulness has no peers on a chart.', "The movement's authority is a hierarchy of Masters who dictate through messengers, and the Ballards claimed to be the only accredited ones. Hebrews 1 says that God, who spake in time past by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken by his Son, and asks of the angels, are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister? Beings sent to serve do not govern the planet or dictate new scriptures through a press in Chicago.", "Ballard taught that the Ascension raises the body into light, and his followers held that the ascended bodies were already prepared for him and Edna. He died of arteriosclerosis in Los Angeles on 29 December 1939, was cremated, and on New Year's Day Edna announced his Ascension. Deuteronomy 18 says that when the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken; Isaiah 8 adds, to the law and to the testimony."]}
Robert Hastings Nichols, professor of church history at Auburn Theological Seminary in Auburn, New York, had the idea; he and Henry Sloane Coffin did most of the drafting for an eleven-member Conference Committee. It went out in January 1924 over 150 names, and the final printing of 5 May 1924 carried 1,274 ministers, with Union Seminary paying to circulate it; the document claimed hundreds more who agreed but would not sign. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a Baptist preaching at First Presbyterian Church in New York, supplied the occasion, and J. Gresham Machen of Princeton had already written the answer. · The five doctrines declared in 1910, 1916 and 1923; Fosdick's sermon on 21 May 1922; the Affirmation issued from Auburn on 26 December 1923, published in January 1924, final list 5 May 1924; the Special Commission appointed in 1925, its report adopted in 1927; Princeton reorganized in 1929. · Auburn, New York, where the committee had its headquarters at 10 Nelson Street; First Presbyterian Church in New York, Fosdick's pulpit; Union Seminary, which paid for the circulation; Princeton, reorganized in 1929, and Philadelphia, where Machen opened Westminster.
The signers said the Assembly had broken the church's constitution: doctrine could be declared only by the concurrent action of the Assembly and the presbyteries, so a deliverance passed by one Assembly was "without binding authority". They said the church does not require assent "to the very words of the Confession, or to all of its teachings", and that the Adopting Act of 1729 gave Presbyterians a heritage of doctrinal liberty. And they said the Fosdick case threatened to split a church whose business was a united testimony "to the gospel of Christ". Peace and liberty were the stated motives.
It asked a fair question about process: who may add tests that the constitution never listed, and by what vote? It let a minister say he held the resurrection as a fact while admitting he could not explain it, which sounded like honesty rather than evasion. It kept a large and learned party inside the church instead of driving them out. And it wore the oldest Presbyterian clothes, the Adopting Act and the rights of presbyteries, so that a conservative who loved the polity could sign without feeling he had signed anything liberal; traditionalists as well as liberals did.
{'title': 'the facts were kept by name and the doctrine was made optional', 'points': ['The Affirmation split the "facts" from the "theories" explaining them and made the theories optional. Paul allows no such gap. In 1 Corinthians 15 he writes that "if Christ be not raised" faith is "vain", and that "now is Christ risen from the dead": a bodily event carrying its meaning. Machen agreed: the event is history, the event with its meaning is doctrine, and "without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity".', 'The signers affirmed that the Bible\'s writers were "inspired of God", and set inerrancy aside as one theory among several. Peter does not offer his account as a theory. In 2 Peter 1 he says the apostles did not follow "cunningly devised fables", and that "holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost". If the Spirit moved the speaking, the words carry His authority, which is the doctrine the Assembly named.', 'The substitutionary atonement was likewise filed among the theories a minister may hold or not. Romans 3 does not present it as a theory but as what God did: Christ Jesus was "set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood". Propitiation (from the Latin propitiatio, a placation, the appeasing of anger) means wrath turned aside by a sacrifice. Drop it, and the cross becomes an example or an influence, which is a different gospel.', 'The Affirmation let every minister keep the words of the creed and supply his own explanation of what they mean. Galatians 1 measures a gospel by its content: if anyone, even "an angel from heaven", preaches "any other gospel", then "let him be accursed". The test is what is preached, not whether the old words are used. Machen\'s charge was this, that liberalism "makes use of traditional Christian terminology" while being "a totally diverse type of religious belief".', 'Liberty of interpretation was the Affirmation\'s principle, and it won: after 1927 the Assembly held that it could not define essential beliefs without amending the constitution. Jude writes of "the faith which was once delivered unto the saints" and says "earnestly contend" for it; Paul in 1 Timothy 6 says "keep that which is committed to thy trust". A deposit is fixed by its giver; the keeper is free in how he guards it, not in what it holds.']}
William Ernest Hocking, a Harvard philosophy professor, chaired the fifteen-member Commission of Appraisal. Behind it stood thirty-five lay directors, five from each of seven denominations, and John D. Rockefeller Jr., at whose request the laymen had met in January 1930 and who paid for much of the work. The book sold over 43,000 copies within six months. Pearl S. Buck, a Presbyterian missionary teaching at the University of Nanking and author of The Good Earth, called it "literally true in its every observation" and, after her Harper's article of January 1933, resigned from the mission board. J. Gresham Machen answered. · The laymen met in January 1930; the Commission toured India, Burma, China and Japan and published in November 1932; Buck's article in January 1933; Machen's overture on 24 January 1933; the Independent Board organized on 27 June 1933; Machen tried in 1935 and suspended in 1936. · New York, where the laymen met and Buck spoke at the Hotel Astor; India, Burma, China and Japan, the fields surveyed; Nanking, Buck's university; the Presbytery of New Brunswick, which heard Machen's overture, and Cleveland, where the 1934 Assembly met.
The Foreword gave the occasion: the old fervor gave way to "questionings if not by indifference", and "subscriptions have been falling off", while nationalist feeling in Asia was turning against the missionary. The deeper reason was a change of belief. Western Christianity, the report said, had become "less a religion of fear and more a religion of beneficence", with "little disposition to believe that sincere and aspiring seekers after God in other religions are to be damned". With no one lost, the urgency was gone, and a mission that saw other religions as "ways to God" needed a new aim.
It took the complaints against missions seriously, and some were fair: the Commission found evangelism that was "casual and perfunctory" and asked for "a much more critical selection of candidates". It gave the missionary a way to love the people he lived among without treating their civilization as an enemy, and to speak fairly of "the evils he desires to cure". It promised higher standards in schools and hospitals, leadership passed to nationals, and a single organization for Protestant missions. And it offered patience, a universal church arriving "by its own mode of building, and in God's own time".
{'title': 'the commission was to make disciples and the report changed the errand', 'points': ['The report kept the word evangelism and redefined it: "ministry to the secular needs of men in the spirit of Christ" is "evangelism, in the right sense of the word", and the missionary "will certainly not wait for a change of confession" before doing good. The commission in Matthew 28 is narrower and harder: "teach all nations, baptizing them". Baptism is a change of confession. A mission that counts service as its preaching has changed the errand.', 'The report faulted the older missions for being slow to see that the surrounding religions "were religions, and as such were ways to God". Peter in Acts 4 allowed no second way: "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men". John 14 has the claim from Christ himself, "no man cometh unto the Father, but by me". Two ways cannot both be true when one says there is only one.', 'The relation between religions, said the report, "must take increasingly hereafter the form of a common search for truth". Paul at Athens in Acts 17 noted the city\'s devotions and its altar "To The Unknown God", then told it that God "now commandeth all men every where to repent", because "he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world". Courtesy toward a religion and a summons to leave it were, for Paul, one speech.', 'Among the best results of missions the report counted "the leavening influence of the spirit of Jesus in the common life of each country". Romans 10 asks what such a hope skips: "how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?" Influence improves societies. It cannot tell a man the name to call on, and the chapter\'s promise is to "whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord".', 'The report welcomed a Christianity "less concerned in any land to save men from eternal punishment", and Pearl Buck said openly that she did not believe in original sin. In 2 Corinthians 5 Paul describes his errand as an ambassador "for Christ" with one message, "be ye reconciled to God". An ambassador does not revise the terms he carries, and reconciliation presupposes an estrangement. A mission that drops sin and judgment has nothing left to reconcile anyone to.']}
Thirty-four signers out of sixty-five asked. Raymond B. Bragg, secretary of the Western Unitarian Conference, organized it and had Roy Wood Sellars, a philosopher at Michigan, write the first draft. John Dewey of Columbia, one of the most prominent American scholars of his day, signed. About fifteen of the thirty-four were Unitarians and twelve were Unitarian ministers, among them John H. Dietrich of Minneapolis, called the father of religious humanism, Curtis W. Reese of Chicago, and Edwin H. Wilson, who edited The New Humanist where it appeared. A rabbi, two Ethical Culture leaders and a Universalist minister signed as well. · Reported in the press on 1 May 1933 and printed in the May-June 1933 issue of The New Humanist; Dietrich had taken the name humanism for his religion in 1915; Potter's First Humanist Society opened in 1929; Humanist Manifesto II followed in 1973. · Chicago, where The New Humanist was edited and Reese led the Abraham Lincoln Center; Minneapolis, Dietrich's First Unitarian Society, since called the birthplace of congregational humanism; Columbia and Michigan, the universities of Dewey and Sellars; Unitarian pulpits from Los Angeles to Rochester.
The preamble gives the reason. "Science and economic change have disrupted the old beliefs", with "great danger of a final" and fatal "identification of the word religion with doctrines and methods which have lost their significance". Man's "larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood" required "a new statement of the means and purposes of religion". Behind it stood ministers like Backus, who rejected "God as a personal being who hears and answers prayer" and kept the word religion for "a heightened sense of personal life" and "a cooperative effort to promote social well-being".
It is honest about what its authors no longer believed, in numbered theses anyone can check. It keeps the moral seriousness of the churches its signers came from: the "existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate", and humanists "demand a shared life in a shared world". It promises to face "the crises of life" with "knowledge of their naturalness and probability" instead of "sentimental and unreal hopes". And it refuses to excuse anyone: "Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams".
{'title': 'the first thesis is a creed and it is the one Genesis denies', 'points': ['The first thesis reads: "Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created." The first sentence of Genesis answers it word for word: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Both are claims about the same question, where everything came from, and neither is a finding of science; the Manifesto\'s own verb is "regard". So the two documents open with rival creeds, and the rest of each follows from its first line.', 'The Manifesto keeps the word religion while removing its object: religious emotion becomes "a heightened sense of personal life" and "a cooperative effort to promote social well-being". Romans 1 describes that move as the oldest one there is, men who "changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator". Reverence does not vanish when God is dropped. It settles on humanity, the highest thing the second thesis leaves in view.', 'The last line puts the weight on man: he "alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams". Jeremiah 17 answers that posture: "Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm", against "Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord". Humanist Manifesto II (1973) admitted that National Socialism and world war made the first "seem too optimistic", and repeated the trust: no deity will save mankind; it must save itself.', 'The fifth thesis rules out "any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values", and the eleventh files hopes beyond nature under "wishful thinking"; no judge stands behind the world. Ecclesiastes 12 ends the other way: "God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing". Paul told Athens the same in Acts 17: God "hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world", with the resurrection as the assurance.', 'The sixth thesis announces that "the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism", as if belief in God were a stage a culture outgrows. Psalm 14 puts unbelief somewhere else: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." The verdict falls on the heart, not on the century. Dating God\'s departure to the 1930s is itself a claim about hearts, and the psalm made the opposite one first.']}
Karl Barth, born in Basel in 1886, was pastor of Safenwil from 1911 to 1921, then professor at Göttingen, Münster and Bonn, which forced him out in 1935 for refusing an oath to Hitler; Basel took him in. His Church Dogmatics ran from 1932 to 1967 and past six million words. Emil Brunner, professor at Zurich from 1924, wrote Truth as Encounter and Revelation and Reason. Friedrich Gogarten, Eduard Thurneysen and Rudolf Bultmann stood with them at first; Reinhold Niebuhr was the American voice, and thousands of American pastors took the teaching up in the 1940s and 1950s, mostly from Brunner and Niebuhr. · The Epistle to the Romans in 1919, rewritten for its second edition of 1922 and put into English in 1933; the Church Dogmatics from 1932 to 1967; Barmen and the break with Brunner in 1934; Barth's dismissal from Bonn in 1935; his death in 1968. · Safenwil, the Swiss village where Barth wrote the Romans commentary as its pastor; Göttingen, Münster and Bonn, his German chairs; Basel, his birthplace and last post; Zurich, Brunner's university; Barmen, where the declaration he largely wrote was adopted in 1934.
In August 1914 Barth's teachers, Harnack among them, signed the wartime manifesto of ninety-three German intellectuals, and he concluded he could not follow their reading of the Bible and history any longer. Liberal theology had made God humanity writ large. His answer was a God utterly distinct from men, who speaks for himself. Brunner put the order of faith this way: not because he believed the Scriptures did he believe in Christ, but because he believed in Christ he believed the Scriptures. And if God was not ashamed of the fallibility of the Bible's human words, Barth held, a reader need not be either.
It was a road back. After a century of liberal theology, here were men saying again that God is God, that sin is rebellion against him and not ignorance, that Christ and not the historical Jesus of the critics is the centre, and that the Bible is to be preached because God speaks through it. It welcomed the critics' findings and lost nothing of the pulpit. Barth largely wrote the Barmen Declaration of 1934 and gave up his chair rather than swear to Hitler, so the teaching had stood a test of the kind his liberal teachers failed in 1914. Time put him on its cover in April 1962.
{'title': 'a Word that must become the Word, and an election that will not say whom', 'points': ["Barth's Bible is a witness that becomes the Word of God when God chooses to speak through it. Paul wrote to Timothy that all scripture is given by inspiration of God; the word he used, theopneustos, God-breathed, describes the writing itself, not a meeting over it. The verse before says that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation. The writings were holy, and able, before any encounter.", "Revelation is an event, and the Bible is the record left by men it happened to. Peter describes the writing differently: the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. What the Spirit moved was the speaking, and Peter calls the result a more sure word of prophecy. The sureness sits in the word, not in the hearer's moment.", "Barth wrote that the Bible's capacity for error extends to its religious and theological content, and that God made use of its expressions in all their fallibility. In John 10 Jesus, arguing from one word of a psalm, said that the scripture cannot be broken. Psalm 119 says thy word is true from the beginning. A book that cannot be broken and is true from the beginning is not a book waiting to become true when it is read.", 'Barth made Christ both the elected man and the rejected man, so that in him God elected humanity, and he would not say whether any are finally lost: he did not preach universal salvation, but could not exclude the possibility that God would save all men at the Judgment. Paul in Romans 9 says of two brothers, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated. Election in Paul distinguishes between persons, and it names them.', 'An election that may in the end include everyone has to be read against the Judgment scene in Matthew 25, where the Son of man separates the sheep from the goats and closes with two destinations: these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal. Jesus, who on this teaching is the elected and the rejected, spoke of two ends. What he left open was the day and hour, not the outcome.']}
Rudolf Bultmann taught New Testament at Marburg from 1921 until he retired in 1951. His History of the Synoptic Tradition of 1921 helped found form criticism, the sorting of Gospel stories by type to ask what use the early church had for each, and he held that faith needs only the kerygma, not any particular facts about the historical Jesus. Heidegger was his colleague at Marburg from 1923 to 1928. He joined the Confessing Church and called the Aryan paragraph incompatible with the essence of the Christian church. His pupils Ernst Käsemann, Günther Bornkamm, Ernst Fuchs and Helmut Koester carried the school on; he died at Marburg in 1976. · The History of the Synoptic Tradition in 1921; the lecture New Testament and Mythology in 1941, printed that year and again in Kerygma und Mythos in 1948, with the English Kerygma and Myth in 1953; the Lutheran bishops' declaration against it in 1952 and Jaspers's answer in 1953; retirement in 1951, death in 1976. · Marburg, the university where Bultmann taught for thirty years and where Heidegger was his colleague; the VELKD, the united Lutheran church of Germany, whose bishops declared against the programme in 1952; London, where the English translation appeared in 1953.
No man can adopt a view of the world by his own volition, Bultmann wrote; it is already determined for him by his place in history, and it is impossible to use electric light and the wireless, and modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles. Faith, he argued, must be freed from every world view expressed in objective terms, mythical or scientific, and he called the whole attempt a parallel to Paul's and Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone, carried to its conclusion in the field of knowledge.
It promised to keep the Gospel for people who could no longer believe the picture it came in. Bultmann kept the kerygma: it is God's decisive act in Christ and not a lesson in ethics, he insisted, and he faulted the older liberals, Harnack among them, for cutting the myths out and losing the proclamation with them. The method left the modern believer nothing to hide from: no required belief in demons or a three-storied sky, only a summons to decide before God. And a faith immune from proof, he said, is thereby secured against the charge of being mythological.
{'title': "a resurrection turned into the disciples' faith, when Paul staked everything on the fact", 'points': ['Bultmann wrote that an historical fact which involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable, and that all criticism can establish is that the first disciples came to believe in it. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 names witnesses, above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present, and draws the line himself: if Christ be not raised, faith is vain, and they which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.', 'Bultmann held that faith in the resurrection is really the same thing as faith in the saving efficacy of the cross, and that history can establish only that the first disciples came to believe. In Luke 24 the risen Jesus says, handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones; in John 20 he tells Thomas, reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands. The disciples did not rise to faith; they were shown wounds.', "Bultmann's premise is that the New Testament's miracles and risen Christ are myth, speech whose real purpose is to express man's understanding of himself, not to report what happened. In 2 Peter 1 the apostle ruled that reading out in advance: the apostles had not followed cunningly devised fables in making known the power and coming of Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. The writer knew the difference between a fable and a thing seen, and said so.", "If the resurrection were only the disciples' new self-understanding, the first sermon would have been the wrong sermon. Peter in Acts 2 preached at Pentecost in Jerusalem, the city of the tomb, that this Jesus hath God raised up, whereof the apostles were all witnesses, and that David's sepulchre was still in the city while Christ's flesh did not see corruption. A claim made where it could be checked is not the shape a myth takes.", "The cross, for Bultmann, saves by what it does in the believer's self-understanding, and the resurrection adds nothing to it but restates the same faith. Paul ties both to a fact outside the believer: Christ was delivered for offences, and was raised again for justification. In Romans 4 the saving is done by what God did to a body, and believing is trust in the God who did it. Remove the event and the trust has nothing to hold."]}
Joachim Hossenfelder, a Berlin pastor, wrote the Guidelines and founded the Faith Movement of German Christians on 6 June 1932. In the church elections of 23 July 1933 it took about two thirds of the vote, and in September a national synod at Wittenberg made Ludwig Müller Reich Bishop. Some 600,000 people belonged. Against them stood Martin Niemöller's Pastors' Emergency League, about 6,000 pastors by the end of 1933; the Confessing Church, which met at Barmen in May 1934 and declared that the church was not an organ of the state; and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who ran its seminary at Finkenwalde and was executed at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945. · Guidelines published in June 1932; church elections on 23 July 1933; the Aryan paragraph in the Prussian church in September 1933, and Müller made Reich Bishop the same month; the Sports Palace rally on 13 November 1933; Barmen from 29 to 31 May 1934; the Eisenach institute founded in 1939; the movement's end in 1945. · Berlin, where the movement was founded and where 20,000 filled the Sports Palace; Wittenberg, where the national synod met; Barmen, where the Confessing Synod answered; Eisenach, seat of the institute for removing Jewish influence from church life; the German Evangelical Church, to which most of Germany's 40 million Protestants belonged.
The Guidelines gave the reasons. The church's leadership had proven too weak in the fateful struggle for German freedom; it had not risen to a determined struggle against godless Marxism, and it belonged at the front of the battle for the people's life, not on the sidelines. Faith in Christ does not destroy race but deepens and sanctifies it, and the foreign mission had long admonished the German people to keep its race pure. Krause told the Sports Palace that Luther held the law of Moses to concern the Jews alone. Behind it lay the wish for one strong church gathered around Christ and his Word.
It offered a church that mattered. To Protestants who thought their church weak and split among twenty-nine regional bodies, the Guidelines promised one national church, externally one and strong in spirit, gathered around Christ and his Word, standing at the front of the people's struggle instead of on the sidelines. Its Home Mission was to be rooted in obedience to God's will and gratitude for Christ's death on the cross, not in mere compassion. The path to the Kingdom of God, it said, leads through struggle, cross and sacrifice, not through a false peace. In July 1933 two thirds of the church electorate found that worth a vote.
{'title': 'a church drawn by blood, when Christ had broken the wall between Jew and Greek', 'points': ['The Guidelines called race an order of life that faith deepens, and the Aryan paragraph put Christians of Jewish descent out of the pulpit. Paul in Galatians 3 says there is neither Jew nor Greek, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus, and in Ephesians 2 that Christ hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition. A church that rebuilds the wall in its pulpit has undone what Paul says the cross did.', "Krause's call for a church without Jewish blood, and the Eisenach institute's plan for a de-Judaized Bible, run against Paul in Romans 9, who calls the Jews his kinsmen according to the flesh, to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the covenants. In Romans 11 he asks, hath God cast away his people? God forbid, and warns the Gentile branch, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee. The Gentile church is the graft, not the tree.", 'Krause demanded liberation from the Old Testament, with what he called its cattle-dealer and pimp stories, and a heroic Jesus in place of the Crucified. Jesus said in Matthew 5, think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. To the woman at the well he said, in John 4, salvation is of the Jews. A Jesus cut loose from Moses contradicts his own words.', "The German Christians carried the state's Aryan paragraph into the church, and the Guidelines set race beside Scripture as an order given by God. Peter answered the council in Acts 5 that one ought to obey God rather than men. Barmen said the same in May 1934: Jesus Christ, as he is attested in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, and the church may not acknowledge other events and powers, figures and truths as God's revelation beside him."]}
Herbert W. Armstrong, 1892 to 1986, ordained in 1931 by the Oregon Conference of the Church of God (Seventh Day). His Radio Church of God, begun on a 100-watt station in Eugene, Oregon, became the Worldwide Church of God in 1968, with income above 200 million dollars in 1990. Under Joseph W. Tkach the church gave up his teachings and lost 80 percent of its members; as Grace Communion International it reports 30,000 members in 550 churches in 70 countries. The Philadelphia Church of God (1989) and the United Church of God (1995), the largest to leave, keep his doctrine. · Ordained in 1931; the first broadcast on the first Sunday of 1934 and The Plain Truth from February 1934; Ambassador College opened 8 October 1947; the Worldwide name on 5 January 1968; Armstrong's death on 16 January 1986; the New Covenant sermon of January 1995; Grace Communion International from 2009. · Eugene, Oregon, where station KORE gave free time in October 1933; Des Moines, whose 50,000-watt WHO carried the broadcast nationwide from 1942; Pasadena, California, headquarters from 1946 and home of Ambassador College, which later added campuses in Texas and Britain.
Armstrong's own account: in 1926 his wife Loma took up the seventh-day Sabbath, and he set out to prove her wrong from the Bible. His marriage, he wrote, was at stake on the question, and he was forced into an in-depth study and research into the Bible. Months of night-and-day study convinced him that the Sabbath was right, that the Trinity and Easter were pagan, and that the Church had been infiltrated during the first century with another gospel. The Bible's mysteries were a coded message, not allowed to be decoded until his own time.
It read the whole Bible as one rule of life, with the Sabbath, the festivals and the food laws as a calendar a family could keep at its own table, and it promised a destiny larger than going to heaven: to be born into the Family of God itself. It reached people where they lived, through a magazine with a press run of eight million and a broadcast on 382 television stations, and it tied the prophets to the morning paper. It had a college for the serious and a Church that could name the month its true era began.
{'title': 'the shadows of Colossians kept as law, and men made gods beside the only God', 'points': ["Armstrong's heirs in the Living Church of God keep the Leviticus 23 festivals as seven steps in God's plan of salvation. Paul told the Colossians to let no man judge them in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ. To Galatians observing days, and months, and times, and years he feared his labour was in vain.", 'Armstrong taught that salvation requires law-keeping; Joseph Tkach later confessed the church had held faith in Christ not sufficient without Sabbath observance. Galatians 2 says a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, and Ephesians 2 that by grace are ye saved through faith, not of works, lest any man should boast. A law required for entrance makes the cross a down payment and obedience the balance.', 'Mystery of the Ages says God is now a Family of Persons, so far only two, and that the faithful shall become born sons of God who rule all nations. In Isaiah 43 the LORD says that before him there was no God formed, neither shall there be after him, and in Isaiah 44, Is there a God beside me? there is no God; I know not any. Sons adopted by grace are not gods added to God.', 'The same book calls the Holy Spirit a power poured out like water, not a person, so the Trinity did not come from the Bible. John 1 says the Word was God, and Peter told Ananias that in lying to the Holy Ghost he had not lied unto men, but unto God. In Acts 13 the Holy Ghost says, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. A power does not say me and I.', "Armstrong held that the Church was infiltrated in the first century with another gospel and that the Bible's mysteries were a coded message decoded only in his day, from October 1933. Jesus said of his church that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, and Ephesians 3 says the mystery of Christ is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. A church lost for eighteen centuries is one the gates prevailed against."]}
Victor Paul Wierwille, born in New Knoxville, Ohio, on 31 December 1916, ordained in the Evangelical and Reformed Church in 1941 and out of it by 1957. His Vesper Chimes broadcast from Lima, Ohio, in 1942 became The Way, Inc., in 1955, headquartered on his family farm from 1959. Followers met in home fellowships called twigs and gathered each year at the Rock of Ages festival. Active membership reached about 35,000 in the 1970s and fell below 10,000 after his death on 20 May 1985, as nearly a dozen groups broke away. The Way reports fellowships in over 30 countries. · Vesper Chimes first aired on 3 October 1942; the first Power for Abundant Living class in 1953; The Way, Inc., in 1955; the Way Corps from 1970; Jesus Christ Is Not God in 1975; Wierwille's death on 20 May 1985; the Rock of Ages festival from 1970 to 1995. · New Knoxville, Ohio, Wierwille's birthplace and the headquarters on his family farm from 1959; Lima, Ohio, where the 1942 broadcast went out; Van Wert, Ohio, where the first class was taught in 1953; home fellowships across the United States and in over 30 countries.
Wierwille's own account is that in 1942 God spoke to him audibly and said he would teach him the Word as it had not been known since the first century if he would teach it to others. The ministry's reason follows: the Bible is not understood when read, because people have not been taught figures of speech, Eastern customs and the accuracy of the Word, and translations carry errors that research must strip away to reach the God-breathed original. A believer so taught, it promised, could manifest power from on high and live the more abundant life of John 10.
It took the Bible seriously, word by word, and handed an ordinary person tools: figures of speech, Eastern customs, the rule that the Word explains itself. It promised that the power of the first century could be had now, and that the proof was audible, since any believer could speak in tongues. It met in private homes, with a short teaching, prayer and singing, and it welcomed the young with a Woodstock-style festival. Its founder offered no new scripture, only the old one read rightly, and a student could check each claim against the verses on the page.
{'title': 'the Word that was God read as only a man, and a Spirit reduced to a gift', 'points': ["Wierwille's 1975 book is titled Jesus Christ Is Not God, and The Way teaches that he is a sinless man brought into existence by God, the man Christ Jesus. John 1 says that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and that the Word was made flesh. When Thomas answered him, My Lord and my God, Jesus did not correct him but blessed those who would believe without seeing.", "The Way's statement rests on the man Christ Jesus, the one mediator between God and men, and reads the Son as a creature. Paul also wrote that in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and that being in the form of God, he thought it not robbery to be equal with God. A mediator who is both God and man fits the verse; the fulness of the Godhead does not dwell in a mere man.", 'The Way splits the Holy Spirit, who is God, from holy spirit, an impersonal power, and holds that speaking in tongues, which any believer can do, is the only proof of the new birth. Paul asked the Corinthians, do all speak with tongues? and said the one Spirit divides to every man severally as he will. Peter told Ananias that lying to the Holy Ghost was lying unto God. A power is not lied to and does not choose.', "Wierwille taught that when a Christian dies he goes to hades, to gravedom, and stays there until the resurrection. Paul was willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord, and Jesus told of a beggar who died and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom while the rich man, in hell, lifted up his eyes, being in torments. A grave that is Christ's presence, or torment, is not sleep.", 'Wierwille said God would teach him the Word as it had not been known since the first century, placing true understanding out of reach from the second century to 1942. Jude wrote of the faith which was once delivered unto the saints and told his readers to earnestly contend for it; Jesus said the gates of hell shall not prevail against his church. A faith delivered once was not lost for eighteen centuries and returned to one man in Ohio.']}
Frank Buchman, 1878 to 1961, a Lutheran minister from Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, ordained in 1902. His First Century Christian Fellowship of 1921 became the Oxford Group when a South African railway porter wrote the name on a travelling team's windows. House parties drew 5,000 in 1933, among them nearly 1,000 clergy and twelve bishops, and 15,000 at Birmingham in 1936. Bill Wilson, who founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, said early AA took self-examination, restitution and work with others straight from the Group. Renamed Moral Re-Armament in 1938 and Initiatives of Change in 2001, it has met at Caux since 1946. · Keswick in July 1908; the First Century Christian Fellowship in 1921; the Oxford Group name by 1929; the seventeen-day Oxford house party of 1933; Moral Re-Armament launched at East Ham on 29 May 1938; Caux opened in 1946; Buchman's death in 1961; Initiatives of Change from 2001. · Keswick, in a little stone-built chapel; Oxford, whose colleges housed the house parties; East Ham Town Hall in London; Caux, Switzerland, the conference centre from 1946; Calvary Rescue Mission in New York, where Bill Wilson met the Group in 1934.
Buchman's account begins in a small stone chapel at Keswick in July 1908, where Jessie Penn-Lewis spoke on the Cross of Christ. He saw his resentments against the board of a Philadelphia hospice he had run standing out like tombstones in his heart; that big I, he said, had to be crossed out, and a wave of strong emotion, following the will to surrender, rose up within him. He wrote to each board member asking forgiveness and thereafter helped people as a forgiven sinner. Thirty years on he judged the nations' crisis fundamentally moral and offered the same cure.
Honesty, purity, unselfishness and love are standards a bishop and a docker can both fail, and confessing to a friend, paying back what was taken and listening for God before breakfast can begin tomorrow. It cut across the churches rather than founding another, and it changed drinkers a doctor had called nearly hopeless: Alcoholics Anonymous grew out of it. In 1938 it told the nations that their crisis was fundamentally a moral one and that they must re-arm morally. A man who had watched his own hatred dissolve at Keswick had reason to think a nation's could.
{'title': 'guidance from a notebook, sin without guilt, and change without the new birth', 'points': ["Guidance came in a morning quiet time, pen and paper in hand, thoughts written down and tested against the four absolutes; when man listens, Buchman said, God speaks, and gives His programme for the day. Isaiah 8 points elsewhere: to the law and to the testimony; if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. A thought is not God's word for being written down, and four adjectives are not the testimony.", "The test of a guided thought was whether it was honest, pure, unselfish and loving, judged by the one who had it. Jeremiah 17 says the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? and answers that the LORD searches the heart. A method that makes a man's own morning impressions the voice of God trusts the one organ Scripture says is not to be trusted.", 'The 1933 handbook puts sin bluntly as anything that keeps a person from God or from another person, cleared by sharing and restitution. Romans 3 says all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God, and sets the cure in Christ, set forth to be a propitiation, a sacrifice that turns wrath aside, through faith in his blood. Sin in Paul is guilt before a Judge answered by sacrifice; restitution to a neighbour is not atonement.', "The 1938 East Ham speech names God and never Christ, the Cross, sin, the Bible or the church; God alone can change human nature, it says, and when men change, nations change. Jesus told Nicodemus, Ye must be born again; except a man be born of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. Paul called any other gospel accursed, and a changed nature without the new birth is another gospel with God's name on it.", "The handbook makes surrender the passing from a life of sin to a life God-guided and Christ-conscious, with four absolutes as the keys to the spiritual life God wishes; Buchman called them Christ's standards. Ephesians 2 says by grace are ye saved through faith; it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. A life keyed to standards is a life under law, and Bishop Henson judged the Group's Christianity far too meagre and limited."]}
Pius XII, who on May 1, 1946 asked every bishop whether the Assumption could be defined as dogma and whether their people wanted it; 1,191 had answered by August 1950, and the constitution calls the reply 'almost unanimous', petitions having come 'by the thousands' since Pius IX. The century's devotion stood behind it: at Fátima in Portugal three shepherd children, Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, reported a lady six times between May 13 and October 13, 1917, and a crowd put at 30,000 to 100,000 watched the sun spin on the last day. Rome counts between 1.28 and 1.41 billion baptized members today. · Epiphanius, who died in 403, finding no tradition of her end; the feast fixed for Constantinople on August 15 in the year 600; Fátima from May 13 to October 13, 1917, approved on October 13, 1930; the letter to the bishops on May 1, 1946; the definition on November 1, 1950, the feast of All Saints. · Rome, at St Peter's; Jerusalem and Ephesus, which both claim the place of her departure, though the first six centuries knew no tomb of Mary at Jerusalem; Constantinople, where Emperor Maurice set the feast; the Cova da Iria near Fátima, where up to a million pilgrims gather on May 13 and October 13.
The constitution argues from the 1854 definition: 'these two privileges are most closely bound to one another', and one who 'completely overcame sin by her Immaculate Conception' was 'not subject to the law of remaining in the corruption of the grave'. It argues from the liturgy, East and West having kept the feast 'since ancient times'; from the Fathers, John Damascene holding it 'fitting' that she who was virgin in childbirth 'should keep her own body free from all corruption even after death'; and from consent, the 'outstanding agreement of the Catholic prelates and the faithful' showing 'in an entirely certain and infallible way' that it is revealed.
It says the grave does not have the last word over a human body, and shows it first in the body that bore Christ. Pius XII wrote for an age 'weighed down by ever so many cares' and offered a mother already in glory, 'Queen' at her Son's right hand, whose 'powerful protection' he had 'time and time again experienced'. The dogma is narrow, deciding nothing about whether she died, and claims no novelty, only that the principal feast of Mary, kept since the sixth century, had always meant this. Fátima gave it a face: a promised miracle 'so that everyone may see and believe', and the crowds came.
{'title': 'a taking up no apostle wrote and a body Paul says still waits', 'points': ["The constitution calls the Scriptures the 'ultimate foundation', yet its verses are Genesis 3, Psalm 131 and Revelation 12 read as figures, and its reasoning is from what 'seems impossible to think'. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907 granted that of her death 'nothing certain is known' and that the belief rests on an apocryphal treatise. Revelation 22 warns, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.", "Peter argued the resurrection from a tomb: David, he said in Acts 2, is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre still stood, so the promise that his flesh should not see corruption must mean Christ. Of Mary, the same encyclopedia admits 'the first six centuries did not know of the tomb of Mary at Jerusalem'; her empty-tomb story reaches the record through John of Damascus in the eighth century, reporting what a bishop told an emperor in 451.", "The document quotes Paul's Death is swallowed up in victory, but that chapter, 1 Corinthians 15, fixes the order: every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ's at his coming. The constitution concedes it: Mary 'did not have to wait until the end of time for the redemption of her body', an exemption from what it calls 'the general rule'. Paul knew one firstfruits and one harvest day, and Mary is in the harvest.", "The Assumption hangs on the 1854 definition: because she 'completely overcame sin by her Immaculate Conception', it reasons, 'she was not subject to the law of remaining in the corruption of the grave'. Romans 3 says all have sinned, and Mary sang in Luke 1, my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. One who needs a Saviour was under the general rule; remove the 1854 exemption and the 1950 one has nothing to stand on.", "The constitution seats Mary 'as Queen' at 'the right hand of her Son' and commends her 'powerful protection'. Jesus said in John 3, no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven; Peter said in Acts 2 that David is not ascended into the heavens, and the one bidden to sit at the right hand is the Lord. Paul in 1 Timothy 2 counts one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."]}
Howard Rand, a lawyer who coined the name and founded the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America in Detroit in 1930 with Henry Ford's editor William J. Cameron as president; Rand held that the Jews descended from Esau or Canaan but never called them Satan's children. Wesley Swift, from Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple, founded a congregation in Lancaster, California, in the 1940s, helped revive the Klan there, preached daily on radio, and renamed it Church of Jesus Christ Christian in 1957. His convert Richard Butler moved it to Hayden Lake, Idaho, as the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations. Estimates run from two thousand to fifty thousand adherents; the ADL says 25,000 to 50,000. · Rand's claim about Esau from 1924; the Federation founded in Detroit in 1930; Swift's congregation in the 1940s, incorporated by 1948 (one source says 1946) and renamed in 1957; Butler introduced to Swift in 1962; Swift's death in 1970; the move to Idaho in 1973; The Order's robberies and murders in 1984. · Detroit, where the Federation held its first convention in May 1930; Lancaster, California, in the Antelope Valley, where Swift preached and formed a Klan chapter; Hayden Lake, Idaho, the Aryan Nations compound; Elohim City in Oklahoma; and since then radio, tapes and websites rather than any one place.
British-Israelites already read the promises to Israel as literal and as their own, and Rand's Federation taught that Britain and the United States fulfilled them; Swift kept the premise: 'This great nation of ours is one of the great nations of Israel.' The next question was who the Jews were. Rand answered Esau and Canaan; Swift, reading Genesis 3 through the two seedlines, answered the serpent. Historians find it separated from British-Israelism 'primarily over issues of racism and antisemitism rather than over issues of Christian theology', and grew in the 1950s and 1960s among nuclear fears, fear of Communist infiltration and fury at the civil rights movement.
It told a white American that he was not a nobody but Israel, heir of the covenants, with the Bible as his family record, and it argued this with chapter and verse. It made one story of his fears: if the Jews were Satan's line and Communism their tool, then the Cold War, the United Nations and desegregation were one prophesied war with the ending already written, in which his side wins. It asked for courage rather than escape, since there would be no rapture, and it gave a lonely grievance a church, a daily radio voice, a chosen people to belong to and an enemy with a name.
{'title': "one blood, Cain's named father, and a seed counted by faith", 'points': ["Paul told Athens that God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. Identity divides mankind into Adam's white line and soulless 'mud peoples' made before him and not in God's image. One blood means one creation, one fall and one Redeemer for every nation, and Paul said it in Acts 17 to Greeks, who were no part of Israel.", "The serpent-seed reading needs Cain to be Satan's son. Genesis 4 names his father in its first verse: And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD. Eve credits the child to Adam and to the LORD, and no serpent is in the sentence. Swift's doctrine rests on the one verse of the chapter that rules it out.", "The claim that white blood alone is Abraham's seed meets Paul's rule for who the seed is, in Galatians 3: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. The seed is counted by being Christ's, which Paul says of Greeks; ancestry is not on the list.", "Paul, an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, wrote in Romans 9 of the Jews of his day as my kinsmen according to the flesh: who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came. In Romans 11 he asked, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. Identity says those kinsmen were Satan's children; Paul says the covenants were theirs and Christ was born among them.", "John saw the end, and it was no race war: in Revelation 7 a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb. The same John wrote in 1 John 3, Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him. The Order, Eric Rudolph and Buford Furrow are answered in the apostle's own letter."]}