Dear EFC Subscribers:

First of all, I want to apologize that our newsletters have become less frequent. With my taking on a full time ministry role, and with my simultaneously beginning a Masters in Religious Education from Rochester College, keeping up twice-monthly newsletters will not be possible.  I will be doing what I can.

The Christian Story, Volume III: Finding the Church in Church History.

After a bit of a delay, the third in what will eventually be four volumes on church history has now been published by Illuminations Publishers. Copies are now available.  This volume covers the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and what I call the Second Reformation. The years are 1500-1730.  Topics include the Catholic Reformation, Luther and Lutheranism, Zwingli and Reformed theology,  Anabaptism and the Radical Reformation, The Counter-Reformation, Calvin and Calvinism and the Second Reformation (including Arminius, Puritans, Baptists, Quakers and more).  To spark your interest, I am including the introduction to the book below as a bit of a teaser.

New Material

Now that I am preaching almost every week, there will be an ongoing article at the site which will contain all the audios, notes and power points. Right now we are in a series of classes on Hebrews.  I am also in the middle of a four-part class on Daniel.  In addition, I did a teaching weekend in Central Massachusetts, including classes on Science and God, Postmodernism and the Problem of Suffering.  The material on Postmodernism is relatively new. Check it out at the web site.  Also, I just completed a thirty hour class on Church History for the Los Angeles School of Ministry and Missions.  This is by far the most comprehensive class I have taught on the subject. As usual, all the material is free at the web site.

Introduction to Vol. III of The Christian Story

There is a sense in which our four-volume Christian Story has just begun. The majority of believers in Christ today are associated with Christian groups that had their beginning after 1500. This is not to demean those who belong to the truly ancient faiths such as the Roman, Eastern or Coptic Churches, or the tiny remnants of the Waldensian or Hussite movements, which formed during the pre-Reformation. However, most of us associate with a Christian group that formed either as a direct result of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century or during one of the waves of Christian revival since that time. Our faith and practice stem from movements that will be described in this volume. For most of us, our direct historical descent—our traceable Christian heritage—will be found in this segment of The Christian Story. And the story we are most interested in, naturally, is our own.

There is so much to be excited about in the last five hundred years of Christian history! So many victories won, so many saints who gave their lives in restoring Christianity to its roots. It was in this period that Christianity truly became a world religion, as Europeans explored the ends of the earth and brought belief in Christ to every corner of the globe. We will have many heroes of the faith in the pages of this and the next volume in our series. There will be the well-known Christian leaders such as Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Wesley. There will also be unsung men and women such as Theresa of Avila, Menno Simons, Francis Xavier, Thomas Cranmer, George Fox, George Whitefield, Nicholas Zinzendorf and Alexander Campbell, who can inspire us in our faith. As all of these men and women were obviously human, we will learn both from their strengths and their failures.

There have been many ups and downs in the Christian story in the past five centuries. Our story certainly will not be of one victory after another. We will have plenty of negative lessons to learn from those who opposed Christian reform and a return to the simplicity of biblical Christianity. We will even have some antiheroes, such as Pope Leo X, Theodore Beza, Voltaire, Mary Baker Eddy (Christian Science), Joseph Smith (Mormonism) and Charles Russel (Jehovah’s Witnesses).

The variety of forms of Christianity, if plotted out after 1500, would be an exponentially increasing curve. The principal causes of this accelerated fracturing of Christianity are twofold. First, the control of faith by Christian groups that can be traced to the ancient Church was broken in the Protestant Reformation. No longer was faith tied irrevocably to an all-confining tradition. At least in principle, Christianity was allowed to look to its historical and biblical roots. Believers were given access to the Bible in their vernacular language with the rise of Lutheran and Reformed theology. This was the result of the Protestant Reformation. But this book is not just about the Reformation—not even close. Much of what we believe and practice comes from well after the sixteenth century.

These first Protestant churches still relied on the state to control the beliefs of their subjects. With some exceptions, early Protestant churches were part of what is known as the Magisterial Protestant Reformation. In a sense, Christendom was still in place as long as the churches relied on the sword and forced citizens living in the states where they had been established to at least nominally accept the version of Christianity of their king, prince or magistrate. For the first two hundred years after the Reformation, the growth of Christian groups was suppressed to some extent by the power of the state.

The second wave of multiplication of Christian groups came when the previously inseparable tie between Church and state was broken and Christendom came to an end in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. This can be described as a second Reformation. Religious freedom became a reality first in Holland, then in the English colonies and England, and it eventually spread to France, Germany and the rest of the Christian world. The genie was let out of the bottle, and the explosion of Christian groups we have today began. In this and the final volume we will see the genesis of the Jansenists, Congregationalists, four-point Calvinists, Huguenots, Quakers, Shakers, Pietists, Universalists, Pentecostals, Millerites and seemingly infinitely more manifestations of Christianity. How will we wade through the morass? How can we assimilate the successes and mistakes of all these apparently sincere attempts to do Christianity? The task is almost overwhelming, and we certainly will not be able to give a detailed description of every important flavor of Christianity. But it is the intent of this and volume IV to give you access to understanding the historical beginnings of most important Christian movements in the past five hundred years and to help you see the parallels between different movements at different times, as well as to glean both the positive and the negative examples from each of these groups. It will truly be an adventure, but it is hoped that you will gain much spiritual insight from this third great chapter in the Christian story.

John Oakes