I. INTRODUCTION#

In the 1830s nearly 50,000 English people crossed the English Channel to ports on the European continent. Many were tourists enthusiastic about the chance to explore foreign lands and cultures. On the eve of World War I, the annual wave of travelers had swollen to 660,000. Travelers imbued with an ethnocentric sense of Protestant England’s cultural and religious superiority often commented negatively about their perceptions of the restored strength of the Roman Catholic papacy’s influence in countries such as France.

Queen Victoria publicly proclaimed that her subjects in India, regardless of their religion, should “enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law.” By contrast, in the middle years of her reign she privately was alarmed by the growing power of English Roman Catholics who had received the “protection of the law” (1829). Queen Victoria was especially disturbed by the bull of Pope Pius IX that reinstituted the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England (1850). She was likewise offended by John Henry Newman’s claim that Pope Pius IX’s bold initiative intimated that “the people of England are about of their own free will to be added to the Holy Church.”

Members of the British public were not only separated from a predominantly Roman Catholic country such as France by the watery divide of the English Channel but more generally by a different mindset, an adherence to a different set of religious and cultural values. Like their queen, many identified their homeland with Protestantism, a stable monarchy, treasured liberties, a spirit of toleration, and intellectual inquiry. They associated the French with unstable radical republicanism, Roman Catholicism, oppression, intolerance, and superstition.

The British had heard stock anti-Catholic stories recounted. Some were well acquainted with the horrors of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), during which French Protestants had been slaughtered by Roman Catholics. The British also retained negative memories about the bloody atrocities of the French Revolution and the costly warfare of the Napoleonic era.

By contrast, Victorian Catholics did sometimes evidence an appreciation for French Roman Catholicism. Nuns from French congregations in England, for example, meditated on devotional literature originating in France. Moreover, three-fourths of the Irish population was Roman Catholic, and large numbers of Irish immigrated to England.

British travelers to the Continent frequently described Roman Catholicism and Protestantism as if they were monolithic religions. This perspective was not especially helpful. Sharp divisions in fact existed between continental:

• “Ultramontane” Catholics (also present in Ireland and outside of Europe), who defended the papacy’s authority sometimes without question

• “Liberal Catholics,” who often urged the papacy to accept democratic values including freedom of conscience

In the last decades of the century, “liberal Catholics” (sometimes known after 1905 as “modernists”) urged the papacy to evidence a greater openness to Darwinian science and higher biblical criticism. Moreover, certain regions of Europe were more “religiously devout” than others. In 1848 a report for the French Constituent Assembly proposed that Brittany, the Vendée, and the Pyrenees constituted areas of notable Roman Catholic religious observance, whereas Saintonge, Aunis, Périgord, the southwest, Provence, Burgundy, and the region around Paris were fairly “dechristianized.”

In a similar fashion, Protestants were sometimes divided by denominational, theological, and regional loyalties.

• Theological “conservatives” and “liberals” could dispute with each other in the same denomination.

• Theological “moderates” sometimes sought to find common ground between various theological factions within their churches.

Christians on the Continent, whether Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, on occasion shared with British believers a commitment to advance foreign missions. Some participated in religious renewal and “revivals.”

Many continental Christians belonged to religious institutions, religious orders, societies, church associations, and schools of theology that were supranational. The Roman Catholic Church represented one such prominent international institution. Its constituency numbered in the millions of the faithful dispersed throughout the European continent, the British Isles, and other regions of the world. Latin America had an especially large Roman Catholic population. The Roman Catholic faith likewise dominated the Caribbean Islands.

During the nineteenth century, the papacy reemerged as a vital force in European political, cultural, and religious life. Virulent anticlericalism episodically broke out in reaction to Roman Catholic advances.

• Some anti-Catholics were prepared to die as martyrs in the struggle to create national states such as “modern Italy.”

• By contrast some anti-nationalists were ready to die as martyrs for the cause of the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy.

II. THE RESTORATION OF THE ROMAN PAPACY#

Even though the Roman Catholic Church suffered rounds of anticlerical hostility, the loss of papal lands, diminished temporal authority, and the curtailment of long-standing privileges, “a flowering of Catholic religious life across Europe” also occurred. A thriving “New Catholicism” on occasion appeared quite expansive.

The “religious revival” was characterized by an increased devotion to the Virgin Mary, a renewed commitment to missions, a certain “feminization” of devotional life, and the Catholic Church becoming more “romanized.” Between 1805 and 1854, twenty-three foundations devoted to the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary were created. The faithful extolled not only Mary’s immaculate conception, but also her purity and exemplary morality.

In France, many Roman Catholic women participated in Marian devotions. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in places such as Lourdes, France, and Marpingen, Germany, fortified the Catholic faith of thousands.

The church’s renewed commitment to missions and evangelism took various forms.

• In 1822 the Society for the Propagation of the Faith was established in Lyons, France. It gave financial aid to missionary initiatives. France emerged as the lead sending nation of Roman Catholic missionaries overseas.

• In 1881 Eucharistic Congresses began to meet regularly and attracted and inspired large numbers of the faithful.

The papacy exercised a greater role in European-wide Catholicism than it had in the eighteenth century, when Jansenist-influenced clergy and laity, Gallicans, and Josephists seriously contested Ultramontane claims.

A. The Papacy and the Birth of Modern Italy#

During the nineteenth century the papacy confronted particularly serious challenges from revolutionaries such as the gifted organizer Guiseppe Mazzini, forced into exile in London and founder of Young Italy (a secret society); the anticlerical fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi; and the aristocratic Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, who sought the unification of Italy. They wanted to absorb the Papal States into that union.

The Papal States in 1859 consisted of 16,000 square miles and stretched across the center of the peninsula between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Sea.

• To the north, the Austrians controlled both the republics of Lombardy and Venice.

• Also to the north were the states of Piedmont and the Kingdom of Sardinia, Parma, Modena, Romagna, and Tuscany.

• To the south was located the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; it arched from the boot of Italy up toward Rome and belonged to the French Bourbons.

Nationalistic revolutionaries and politicians made repeated attempts to drive foreign powers such as the French and the Austrians out of Italy. Many assumed that the Papal States would have to be incorporated by force of arms if diplomatic accommodations with the papacy failed. The absence of the Papal States from any “unified Italy” would effectively split the new state into two geographically separated entities.

During the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era the papacy’s political power and influence had plummeted to a perilous low point. The troops of Napoleon had entered Rome and deposed Pope Pius VI in 1798 and incarcerated him in France, where he died.

In 1800 Pope Pius VII succeeded Pope Pius VI. In 1813, having likewise been subjected to physical and mental abuse by Napoleon, he agreed to the “Concordat of Fontainebleau”.

According to its terms, the pope ceded the temporal power of the Roman Catholic Church to the emperor. Napoleon even contemplated transferring the seat of the papacy to a French location.

Troubled by this concession, Pius VII bravely renounced the concordat. In 1814 the defeat of Napoleon facilitated the pope’s return to Rome. That same year, the pope reestablished the Society of Jesus; the order grew rapidly from approximately 800 members in 1814 to 2,000 in 1820 and 6,000 in 1850.

By the time Pius VII died in 1823, the restoration of papal power was noticeably under way. The conclave of 1823 elected Pope Leo XII (1823–29). The new pope proceeded to enforce rigorous standards of ethical conduct among Roman Catholics. He launched an attack on secret societies, targeting in particular ruthless antipapal rebels, the Carbonari (“Charcoal Burners”), who had perpetrated assassinations.

After Leo XII’s death in 1829, the conclave of 1830 elected Pope Pius VIII. He died that same year. However, he did condemn the vernacular (Protestant) translations of the Bible that he said were “rarely without perverse little inserts to insure that the reader imbibes their lethal poison instead of the saving water of salvation.” Also that same year, revolts broke out in France, Parma, and even in the Papal States. Revolutionary turmoil became widespread in Europe.

Pius VIII’s successor, Pope Gregory XVI, who consecrated a bishop after his election as pope, faced daunting issues. Prior to this, state governments had been naming the vast majority of bishops. This egregious infraction of the pope’s perceived apostolic authority to appoint bishops hindered his ability to shepherd the bishops in question.

Gregory XVI (1831–46), an Ultramontanist, also confronted revolutionaries intent on seizing the Papal States as they pursued the goal of Italian unification. He called on the Austrian government to provide troops to thwart the efforts of Guiseppie Mazzini’s revolutionaries, who were members of “Young Italy” and touted the ideal of “God and People.” This reliance on the Austrian troops precipitated alarm, especially among French and German diplomats.

Whereas Pope Gregory attempted to remove the “shame from all the Christian nations” by condemning the slave trade (1839), he stoked anger among theological liberals by ultimately disciplining radicals who had called for “a Free Church in a Free State.” In the encyclical Mirari Vos, Gregory castigated political liberalism and “the poisonous spring of indifferentism that has flowed from that absurd and erroneous doctrine or rather delirium, that freedom of conscience is to be claimed and defended for all men.”

Gregory XVI’s policies reflected his deep-seated suspicions about liberal political and intellectual currents of the day. One of the pope’s personal goals was to elevate the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary.

B. The Pontificate of Pius IX#

The pontificate of Pius IX (1846–78) constituted one of the longest and most controversial in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

• In 1848 he rejected the politically and religiously impractical proposal that he become the president of a federation of Italian states.

• He then attempted to impede the creation of a “new Italy.”

Revolutionaries such as Garibaldi and his soldiers (“Thousands of Redshirts”) were constructing this new Italy through warfare and annexation.

Despite a falling out between Garibaldi and Cavour, the pieces of the national puzzle continued to fall into place.

• Between 1857 and 1866 such regions as Lombardy, Tuscany, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and a portion of the Papal States became part of the new Italy.

• In early 1861 Victor Emmanuel II, King of Piedmont-Sardinia (1848–61), with Garibaldi’s support, became the king of the new Italy in the making.

In 1864 Emperor Louis Napoleon III indicated he would remove French troops from Rome and did so by 1866. But in 1867 the papal army once again did receive some help from French forces. In 1870 the Franco-Prussian War erupted and prompted Louis Napoleon III to withdraw the remaining French military contingent in Rome.

On September 20, 1870, Italian troops occupied Rome and the surrounding papal territory. In a controversial plebiscite that October, 153,681 voters to 1,507 overwhelmingly approved Rome’s annexation to Italy. For the Italian nation builders, the last piece of the new Italy appeared in place.

Pius IX categorically refused to accept the loss of his rights to temporal authority. In the encyclical Ubi Nos (“On Pontifical States”) he promptly condemned the Italian state’s “Law of Guaranties” (May 13, 1871). This law gave the papacy certain rights (“immunities and privileges”) and a fixed sum of money per year, but reduced its actual landholdings essentially to Vatican City. For the rest of his pontificate Pius did not leave the confines of the Vatican, viewing himself as a virtual prisoner of the Kingdom of Italy and robbed of his “authority of making laws in regard to the religion and moral order.”

Not until the Lateran Treaties of 1929 did the papacy “consider as finally and irrevocably settled the Roman Question which arose in 1870 by the annexation of Rome to the Kingdom of Italy.”

Paradoxically enough, on the eve of the loss of the Papal States, Pius IX at Vatican I (1869–70) secured an epochal victory for an Ultramontane form of the papacy. The council delivered what appeared to be a knockout blow to long-standing Gallican and conciliarist theories of church governance that gave superior authority collectively to bishops.

Even though the pope condemned the “modern” theology of “liberals,” he was not averse to using “modern” means in defending his traditional rights. He promoted his goals through loyal newspapers and also attempted to use political parties such as the pro-Catholic Center Party in Prussia to back his aims.

Pius had to reckon with severe challenges to his authority as pope. The challenges stemmed from multiple sources and came packaged in different formats.

III. THE PAPACY BUFFETED BY WINDS OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL CHANGE#

After 1848, especially strong winds of cultural and political change blew throughout parts of Europe, sometimes as storms with gale-force strength. They buffeted long-standing institutions from monarchies to prestigious universities to the Christian churches. Within and without the Roman Catholic Church, liberal voices could be heard calling on the papacy to embrace “modern civilization,” to manifest a greater openness to science and biblical criticism, and to demonstrate appreciation for democratic ideals, including the separation of church and state and “freedom of conscience.”

Moreover, many Italian nationalists became more than ever convinced that Risorgimento (“rising up,” or resurgence), the unification of the Italian states, could only be achieved if the Papal States were integrated into a new national entity. Regional north-south loyalties were also hampering the movement toward national unification.

In the late 1840s Pius IX’s liberal reputation disappeared. He would not support efforts to drive the Austrians out of Italy. This signaled to revolutionaries and others that the pope did not fully back their nationalistic ambitions. After his prime minister was assassinated, a harassed Pius IX, disguised as a priest, fled the Papal States to Gaeta, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. For a time, Mazzini’s revolutionaries gained control of Rome, and a Constituent Assembly was instituted. Protestants and Jews were afforded religious liberties (1849). Only with the help of French troops did Pius IX, now noticeably wary of “liberal” causes, return to the Papal States (June 1850).

Thereafter Pius IX encountered additional serious challenges.

• The campaigns of Garibaldi’s redshirt troops

• The efforts of Cavour and Victor Immanuel II and others to bring about the unification of Italy

• The government of Columbia in South America opting for a separation of church and state

• The seizure of Roman Catholic properties

• Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Roman Catholic Church in Prussia

• French Emperor Louis Napoleon III’s unexpected support for Italian nationalism

Pius believed that he had a God-given mission to affirm the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary. He promulgated this in the Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus in 1854. He also thought that it was his duty to warn the Catholic faithful regarding the dangers lurking in contemporary society. He was especially vexed by the teachings of Catholic “liberals.”

In the “Munich Brief” published in 1864, Pius IX condemned the right of the Catholic faithful to uphold any scholarship that contradicted the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Catholic liberals perceived this brief as a rude blow against academic freedom.

A. Pius IX and the Syllabus of Errors#

In 1864 Pope Pius IX also published the encyclical Quanta Cura (“Condemning Current Errors”), accompanied by the Syllabus of Errors. In Quanta Cura he indicated that Christian people were buffeted by a “truly awful storm excited by so many evil opinions.” He was greatly alarmed about the status of Roman Catholicism in Europe and in Latin America.

Cardinal Luigi Bilio largely culled Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors from previous papal condemnations. The pope not only condemned eighty specific errors, but also targeted the “pests” of “socialism, communism, secret societies, biblical societies, clerico-liberal societies.”

• In error 1 he condemned pantheism, naturalism, and absolute rationalism.

• In error 18 he stipulated that it was wrong to believe that “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church.”

• He countered Catholic liberals by proposing that it was an error (80) to believe that the “Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”

Whereas many Ultramontane Catholics applauded the Syllabus of Errors, some Roman Catholics were aghast. They feared that Protestant scholars would gloat that this document revealed clearly the papacy’s alleged hostility toward “modern” scholarship.

The French Bishop Felix-Antoine-Philibert Dupanloup of Orléans attempted to counter negative perceptions of this kind by proposing that a proper understanding of the syllabus rendered it much less offensive. Dupanloup claimed that the pope was describing the principles (theses) for an ideal society, but that in the everyday world it was legitimate for Catholics to follow hypotheses that might vary somewhat from the ideal principles.

B. Vatican Council I: The Infallibility of the Pope#

In 1864 Pius IX announced he planned to hold a general council. In 1869 the theologian-historian Dollinger published anonymous letters (The Pope and the Council by Janus in book form) against the Syllabus of Errors and papal infallibility. He also presumptiously warned that the council would be a “synod of flatterers.”

Approximately 754 prelates attended Vatican I, a council designed to uproot “current errors.” The clergy addressed issues such as rationalism, materialism, atheism, and Christian marriage. But their greatest debates focused on what emerged eventually as the council’s teaching on papal infallibility.

On July 18, 1870, all but two of the 535 members of the council at the decisive session approved the doctrine as defined in Pastor aeternus, the “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ.” Some 20 percent of the prelates — the anti-infallibilists and “inopportunists” — had exited the council earlier so that they would not have to vote. The “inopportunists” did not oppose the doctrine of papal infallibility but thought that it was inopportune to approve the teaching in the present circumstances.

Pius IX’s Ultramontanism that concentrated church and doctrinal authority in the papacy had won a decisive victory over the conciliarist form of church governance that highlighted the superior authority of bishops. Ultimately, most of the prelates accepted the doctrine with only a few refusing to do so. The latter joined the Old Catholic Church, which included some of Dollinger’s followers. In 1871 Dollinger was excommunicated.

The promulgation of papal infallibility represented a signature golden moment in Pius IX’s pontificate. The moment, however, was in one sense quickly tarnished, because the next day the Franco-Prussian War broke out. The proceedings of Vatican I were interrupted.

Until his death in 1878, Pius IX resolutely opposed parliamentary democracies.

• He forbade the participation of Roman Catholics in the political life of the “usurper” Kingdom of Italy.

• He criticized strongly Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against Roman Catholics in Germany.

When Germany and Russia broke off diplomatic relations with the papacy, Pius’s estrangement from European politics became even more painfully clear. News from South America was even less encouraging as President Federico Errázuriz of Chile, like a number of other South American leaders, disputed papal claims in his country.

Pius IX’s adoption of a “siege mentality” hampered his capacity to interact in an accommodating and persuasive way with many academics, clerics, and political leaders who questioned Vatican I’s definition of papal infallibility.

C. Pope Leo XIII: Accommodating “Modern” Culture?#

Not all Roman Catholics shared Pius IX’s rigid hostility toward the Kingdom of Italy and aspects of “modern” scholarship. A good number sought to accommodate their status as citizens of democratic states and their intellectual convictions with what they thought was a faithful acceptance of Roman Catholic doctrine.

The conclave of 1878 elected Leo XIII, age sixty-eight, who sought to make these kinds of rapprochement more feasible. Such was no simple task.

• He was aware of Catholic intellectuals, a number eventually known as “Catholic modernists,” who wanted him to endorse forms of biblical higher criticism and evolutionary theory he deemed incompatible with Catholic doctrine.

• He faced hostile political movements in France, Germany, and elsewhere that propagated virulent anticlericalism.

• He was subject to pressures from Ultramontane conservatives who were suspicious of any form of accommodation with modern culture.

By and large, Leo XIII’s pontificate enhanced the papacy’s reputation for greater openness to modern scholarship and an appreciation of democratic and labor movements. This was quite an accomplishment, given the fact that the pope never forsook his desire to recover the Papal States and in various ways upheld many of the same doctrinal convictions and Marian devotions as his predecessor, Pius IX.

In the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris (“Of the Eternal Father”), Leo XIII urged the renewed teaching of Scholasticism (Thomistic) as the Christian philosophy capable of adequately addressing the “false conclusions concerning divine and human things” that originated from “schools of philosophy” that had “crept into all the Orders of the State” and had been “accepted by the common consent of the masses.” In October 1879 the pope established the Roman Academy of St. Thomas.

Leo XIII often improved diplomatic efforts with European governments. He opened the Vatican archives for historians’ research. He indicated that a democratic form of government is acceptable as long as it does not attempt to subvert the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

In the encyclical Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (“Concerning New Opinions, Virtue, Nature and Grace with regard to Americanism,” 1899), Leo warned the bishops of the United States (through Cardinal James Gibbons) not to countenance “Americanism” — a cluster of beliefs including the freedom of the press and the separation of church and state — due to the risk that American Catholics might practice another form of their faith than that practiced by Roman Catholics worldwide.

D. Leo XIII’s Encyclical Providentissimus Deus#

The encyclical Providentissimus Deus (1893) of Pope Leo XIII served as one of the papacy’s responses to issues evoked by biblical criticism and evolution.

Leo XIII encouraged Catholic scholars to pursue rigorous scholarship and defend the authority of Holy Scripture and Catholic Tradition. While affirming that the Vulgate was the authentic edition of Scripture, he urged Catholic scholars to engage in the “art of true criticism” by seeking to understand Holy Scripture as given in the original biblical languages and through the use of lower textual criticism. Moreover, he warned them about the dangers of higher criticism.

Pope Leo chided historians who were intent on finding errors within Scripture. He was also concerned about critics who were exploiting the physical sciences to throw disrepute on the Bible.

The pope affirmed that “biblical inerrancy” had been the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrine throughout its history. Scripture is true because God is its ultimate author. He praised St. Augustine’s adroitly crafted definition of the Bible’s authority and inerrancy.

E. Catholic Modernism (1890–1910)#

The estimates of the number of “modernist” priests in France ranged widely, from 1,500 (Loisy) to 20,000 (Tyrrel). The papacy also believed that a Roman Catholic seminary in Milan, Italy, along with a number of other educational institutions constituted modernist hotbeds.

In one sense the “Catholic modernist” movement was an extension of the earlier “Catholic liberalism” of Lammenais and “progressive” Catholic thought. Catholic modernists wanted the papacy to demonstrate a greater openness to modern scholarship.

• They called for the right to freedom of inquiry in their “scientific” theological, biblical, or historical research.

• They admired aspects of the scholarship of Protestant liberals such as Adolph von Harnack and Auguste Sabatier, who appeared to enjoy a certain amount of intellectual freedom and supposedly were not fearful of ecclesiastical recriminations.

“Liberal” Catholics often assumed that the adjustment of their religious beliefs to modern scholarship would help project a Catholicism attractive to well-educated members of the Roman Catholic Church who were aware of modern scholarship.

The Catholic modernists’ rationales for their scholarly work did not satisfy the papacy. It accused them of serving “Protestant masters” and promoting rationalistic, historical biblical criticism.

Catholic modernists who denied biblical inerrancy and embraced higher criticism and doctrines of evolution ran the risk of condemnation as heretics.

In 1907 Pius X’s Lamentabili Sane stipulated sixty-five condemnations of alleged errors found in the writings of Loisy and Tyrell, and his Pascendi Dominici Gregis delivered sharp criticisms of the Catholic modernists’ “new Christianity,” calling it in effect agnosticism. The Catholic modernists were suspected of embracing a Kantian immanentist perspective that denied reason could address issues beyond the world of phenomena. Both Loisy and Tyrell were excommunicated.

So concerned was Pius X about Catholic modernism that in 1910 he required all “clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries” to henceforth swear an “Anti-Modernist Oath”.

IV. SPIRITUAL AWAKENING AND CONFESSIONAL RENEWAL IN NORTHERN EUROPE (1780–1850)#

In 1798 King Frederick William III of Prussia envisioned the unification of the Reformed and Lutheran churches on the basis of a shared ritual (per the Agenda, the official Lutheran book of rites and ceremonies). In 1817 he approved the “Evangelical Church of the Union” comprising the two churches. He hoped this union would temper confessional struggles and animosities between Lutherans and Reformed Christians. It would also permit his wife and him to take Communion together.

The measure provoked both enthusiastic approval and stiff criticism. Pastor Clause Harms, an advocate of confessional Lutheranism, viewed the union as an outright capitulation to rationalism and Protestant liberalism. Among other charges, Harms claimed that reason had become “the pope of our time.”

In 1829 the government attempted to enforce obedience to the Agenda. “Old Lutherans” and others refused. Some Lutheran pastors were incarcerated, and some Old Lutherans, seeking religious freedom, immigrated to Australia and the United States. A group of more than six hundred Saxon Lutherans also immigrated (1838–39) and eventually became part of the Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod. A significant division, then, existed among German Lutherans.

Deep into the nineteenth century, many lay members of the Lutheran and Reformed churches, especially in rural areas, rejected Protestant liberalism.

• They preferred old or traditional ways of worship that emphasized historical confessions, hymnbooks, catechisms, and prayer books.

• They revered Luther’s translation of the Bible.

Newly minted pastors who were partisans of Schleiermacher or other Protestant liberals sometimes found that their progressive theological ideas did not sit well with the laity in their parishes.

Large numbers of laypeople became caught up in a Pietist spiritual awakening that spread through Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway (ruled by Sweden from 1814 to 1905), and Finland (ruled by Russia). In time, some of those affected by the evangelical awakening began to view the Lutheran Confessions as pure expressions of the Christian faith.

By the 1840s, a revitalized Lutheran movement had emerged. Its leaders — Pastors Clause Harms, Ludwig Adolph Petri, Johann Konrad Wilhelm Loehe, and Karl Grail —strongly opposed unionism and Protestant liberalism. They identified the Christian faith exclusively with the Lutheran Confessions.

The Pietist awakening had disparate impulses. Influential pastoral theologies had earlier called on ministers to take greater spiritual care of their parishioners, preach the gospel, and urge faithful attendance upon the sacraments. Areas of southern Germany like Württemberg possessed significant Pietist and Moravian populations.

Restrictions on the practice of their faith along with poor economic conditions prompted about 1,600 “radical” or “Separatist” Pietists under the direction of Johann Georg Rapp to immigrate to the United States in 1803–4. Rapp formed the “New Harmony” colony in Pennsylvania and later other colonies.

In 1819 another group of Pietists led by Pastor Gottlieb Wilhelm Hoffmann left Württemberg and formed a community in Korntal.

By the 1830s, Pastor Christian Gottlob Barth helped Württemberg become a center for Pietist publishing with a focus on Bibles, tracts, and devotional and educational literature.

In the 1820s Reformed Pastors G. D. Krummacker and his son, F. W. Krummacker, witnessed large crowds attending church services in parishes of Westphalia and the Lower Rhine. Some of these parishioners passed out Bibles and tracts.

In 1861 Heinrich Heppe, a distinguished Reformed theologian and church historian at the University of Marburg, published Reformed Dogmatics, a book that greatly influenced the thinking of Karl Barth.

Branches of the British and Foreign Bible Society in Germany and Scandinavia provided printed Bibles, books, and tracts that colporteurs and itinerant preachers distributed in the countryside and cities. On occasion, entire Scandinavian households of peasants and craftsmen in rural communities listened appreciatively to itinerant preaching. At the same time, some of the German nobility such as Princess Marianne Hessen-Homburg, who was married to Prince Wilhelm, supported the movement.

In Hamburg, Johann Hinrich Wichern began Inner Mission (1833), a charity whose members sought to care for the spiritual and material needs of impoverished men, orphans, and the infirm. A Danish Inner Mission (1853) was also founded that sought to evangelize Danes. In addition, between 1824 and 1842 a number of foreign mission societies were established.

Missionaries from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden set sail with the goal of preaching the gospel to the “heathen” in the far distant regions of the world.

The Norwegian Marie Monson (1872–1962) made a major contribution to evangelistic outreach in China. Swedish churches sent missionaries to Natal (1876), Lower Congo (1881), and other regions of Africa.

A heated, public clash between Danish theologian Henrik Nicolai Clausen, a partisan of Schleiermacher, and Nikolaj Grundtvig, curate of Copenhagen’s Our Savior’s Church (1822–26), put in bold relief thorny issues separating more liberal-oriented clergy and theological conservatives.

• Clausen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, recommended, among other things, that Christians should use critical tools in interpreting Scripture.

• Grundtvig, a defender of the Apostles’ Creed and the view that the living Christ is the head of the church, sharply criticized Clausen’s theology. He asserted that Clausen “must either make the Christian Church a solemn apology for his unchristian and offensive doctrine, or resign his office and no longer call himself a Christian.”

Clausen successfully sued Grundtvig for libel. An expert in Nordic literature, Grundtvig was forced out of a teaching post and resigned his pastoral position. A poet, popular preacher, and hymn writer (composer of 1,500 hymns such as “God’s Word Is Our Great Heritage”), he called on the Danish people to repent and return to the Christian faith and their national roots. From his point of view, the nation had departed from its Christian Protestant heritage during the Napoleonic era.

The adoption of the Danish Constitution of 1849 afforded Danes the right to belong to a church other than the state Lutheran Church. Until its adoption, Danes had been obliged to belong to the Lutheran Church if they were to enjoy the rights of citizenship. For some Danes, attendance at church had become a civic duty and routinized. Worship services could appear devoid of spiritual vitality.

A. Søren Kierkegaard#

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), a deeply sensitive and perceptive soul, a keen societal observer and anti-Hegelian, feared that the impact of the Christian faith on Danish culture had become perversely worldly or mundane. The writings of the German Johann Georg Hamann contributed significantly to the shaping of his thought. Kierkegaard, a loner prone to melancholia, became convinced that many contemporary Danes assumed they were Christians if they were good citizens and participated in the worship formalities of the Danish state church.

In 1854 Kierkegaard attacked what he thought was the hypocrisy of Christendom. He wanted his contemporaries to abandon Christianity as a cultural religion in exchange for a life of following Christ through costly, personal discipleship.

Kierkegaard experienced the crucibles of depression, grief, and suffering. Despondency overtook him before and after he broke off an engagement with Regine Olsen, the love of his life. He was also deeply troubled by the death of a number of siblings. Several scholars suggest that after his father died, Kierkegaard determined to defend his father’s more theologically conservative views against theological liberals and Hegelians. He believed that a person must die to self and follow Christ, even if “Christian” culture mocks costly discipleship.

In his discourses such as Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Works of Love, and The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard indicated that our sin renders us incapable of winning God’s favor. Rather, in the incarnation, Christ, the revealed Son of God in the flesh, died on the cross for our sins. Kierkegaard affirmed that Christ’s incarnation and resurrection constitute paradoxes. Accepted by faith, these beliefs are not subject to rational demonstration (sin blinds us from understanding their truth).

The impact of Kierkegaard’s “religious existentialism” and “religious subjectivity” (“Truth is subjectivity”) would have significant effect on a wide range of thinkers in the twentieth century, including Karl Barth.

B. Norway, Sweden, and Finland#

In 1814 Norway became independent of Denmark, only to be ceded to Sweden. Due to Norwegian resistance, Sweden invaded Norway. Norway retained its independence, but the Swedish crown ruled both countries until 1905.

The Norwegian peasant Hans Nielsen Hauge, imprisoned for preaching to the laity (in violation of a 1741 law), had promoted the Pietist awakening among farmers and other workers in rural areas. The revival stimulated a greater interest in missions. Between the years 1842 and 1845, non-Lutherans in Norway began to receive the right to worship according to their own consciences.

The Dissenter Law of 1860 gave Swedes the right to take leave of the Swedish state church (the Evangelical Lutheran Church). Karl Olof Rosenius (1816–68), who stayed within the Lutheran Church, participated in a pietistically oriented spiritual awakening. Some of his followers separated from the state church and formed “Free Churches” such as the Swedish Mission Church. These churches consisted of “believers only” and adopted a congregational polity. They emphasized the importance of the Bible’s supreme authority, the experience of a “new birth” through conversion, and the pursuit of godly living in anticipation of Christ’s second coming.

Some “Free Church” Scandinavians immigrated to the United States, where they founded the Swedish Evangelical Free Mission (1884), the Swedish Evangelical Mission Church of America (1885), and Baptist churches. Women sometimes held leadership positions in these churches.

Following the Great Northern War (1700–1721), the province of Vyborg in Finland shifted from Swedish to Russian control. In the wake of the defeat of Sweden/Finland, a number of army officers were imprisoned in Russia. There they were ministered to by German Pietists. Upon their release, they returned to their respective homes and promoted Pietistic teaching.

In 1809 Finland was officially designated a Russian grand duchy. The tsar, the head of the Orthodox Church, also assumed the position of head of the Lutheran state church. Pietistically oriented revivalists such as Henrik Renqvist continued to preach in the countryside. Ministering outside the state church, they were on occasion harassed by state officials. In 1869 an official church act permitted the Finnish people (except for the Orthodox) to choose their own church. Russian Tsar Alexander II allowed Finland a certain measure of political autonomy and permitted its people the right to use the Finnish language (rather than Russian).

C. The Spiritual Awakening and “Awakened” German Academics#

The German/Scandinavian awakening received backing from a number of notable academics. In Berlin, Johann August Neander (1789–1850), a convert from Judaism and an accomplished church historian with broad evangelical convictions, opposed the radical biblical criticism of D. F. Strauss and F. C. Baur. Neander introduced Friedrich August Tholuck (1799–1877), an expert in oriental languages, to members of the Pietistic circle of Baron Kottwitz in Berlin.

Tholuck strongly supported the Prussian Union. In 1826 he began a half century of a popular professorship in theology at the University of Halle. A proponent of a “mediating theology,” he possessed warmhearted Pietist tendencies and emphasized the importance of Christian conversion and discipleship.

• He persuaded many students who had embraced liberal Neologian theology to rethink their positions.

• Tholuck wrote well-respected books such as Hours of Devotion, Commentary on the Gospel of John, and Light from the Cross.

• He criticized what he thought were the excesses of Neologian rationalism and the speculative theology of Schleiermacher and Hegel.

• At the same time, he was wary of aspects of Protestant orthodoxy. He did not affirm the doctrine of the Bible’s infallibility.

Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802–69) took a different theological path than Tholuck. He was likewise impacted by his interaction with the Pietistic circle in Berlin. An able Old Testament scholar and author of The Christology of the Old Testament, he defended the Bible as the infallible Word of God. As editor of the journal Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, he initially supported the Prussian Union. As time went on, however, he promoted more narrowly Lutheran confessional orthodoxy.

D. The Christian Churches and the Birth of “Modern Germany”#

In 1814, at the fall of Napoleon, Germany —like Italy — did not exist as a modern nation. Rather, from 1815 to 1866, “Germany” consisted of a confederation of independent states (.34), free cities (4), and kingdoms (Austria, Bavaria, Württemberg, Prussia). The idea of a national union enthused a number of political liberals. Nonetheless, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 did not eventuate in the successful unification of Germany. Instead, it took Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Prussia to forge the creation of modern Germany.

In 1866, in what has been called the “Seven Weeks War,” Bismarck’s well-trained and disciplined army defeated the Austrian military, thereby reducing Austria’s influence in the confederation. Bismarck formed a North German Confederation to replace the German Confederation (1815–66), but a number of north German states did not join this body. Twenty-eight church federations, some Reformed and the others Lutheran, likewise existed.

Bismarck apparently provoked the French to declare war against Prussia (the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–71). He then persuaded three Roman Catholic German states in the south (Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria) to join with Prussia in the war effort. Bismarck, a Prussian military leader from the Junker Prussian nobility, helped engineer a stunning German victory over the French.

On January 21, 1871, a second German Reich was born with Wilhelm I, the King of Prussia, its emperor or kaiser. The empire’s population included more than 41 million people, of which 63 percent were Protestant, 36 percent Roman Catholic, and 1 percent Jewish.

In 1871 Bismarck became the “Iron Chancellor” of the new German Empire. A Protestant, he melded a form of liberal politics and conservative theology together. He was genuinely offended when he learned about Vatican I’s definition of papal infallibility. He was concerned that the political loyalties of German Roman Catholics could be diverted and directed toward the papacy and not toward the new German state.

Bismarck launched a Kulturkampf, loosely defined as a “struggle of civilizations.” With others, he extolled a triumphalist view of a German Protestant civilization and propagated a negative perception of a Roman Catholic civilization.

In the nineteenth century, anticlericalism could signify:

• hostility toward a clergy’s participation in politics

• harassment or actual physical attacks on representatives of another church

• (in Prussia) the actions and rhetoric of political liberals like Bismarck against Roman Catholics

• In Roman Catholic Bavaria, it could mean the state’s seizure of church property and restrictions placed on the church’s influence over education

After 1850 a growing presence of Roman Catholics in Protestant Prussia became noticeable. The membership of Catholic monastic orders climbed rapidly: 713 monks and nuns in 1857, but 5,877 in 1867 and 8,795 in 1872. Jesuits and Redemptorists (Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer) attempted to evangelize for the Catholic faith in public outdoor meetings. Alarmed by this palpable Roman Catholic advance, some Protestants in Berlin believed, quite uncritically, sensational printed stories and rumors about alleged deviant behavior of monks and nuns in monasteries and convents.

In 1869, attacks by Protestants against a Dominican/Franciscan orphanage in Berlin-Moabit signaled the inception of a larger anti-Catholic campaign. Protestants were often especially feared by Jesuits. In December 1870 the Roman Catholic politicians formed the Center Party (1870–1933) with the hope of protecting their interests and those of their coreligionists. The Protestant League and other such groups opposed the Center Party.

When Bismarck initiated the Kulturkampf, a significant segment of Prussian Protestant public opinion was ready to support him. The state drew up a series of laws directed against the Roman Catholic community, most notably the Falk Laws (May 1873), which allowed the state to determine which candidates for the priesthood were suitable and what kind of education they should receive. In 1872 (until 1917) Jesuits were banned from Prussia.

In 1875 “Old Catholics” who had dissented from the teaching on papal infallibility were granted privileges to use the church facilities of Roman Catholics. The Roman Catholic clergy in Prussia were thrown into disarray. By 1876 the Prussian bishops were imprisoned or had sought exile. A number of dioceses suffered badly from the loss of their priests.

Bismarck began to realize that the Kulturkampf could be counterproductive.

• It seriously complicated his task of nation building—that is, bringing about unity within the German Empire.

• It could only agitate Roman Catholics in the southern German areas.

• It reflected an illiberal spirit by fomenting religious persecution, something Bismarck had accused the papacy of doing.

• It energized the Roman Catholic Center Party.

By 1878 the government evidenced a less severe approach toward Roman Catholics. The “Peace Laws” of 1886–87 brought about a formal end to the Kulturkampf, even though in some towns the Catholics continued to encounter opposition from some Protestants.

E. The Netherlands#

In the nineteenth century the political, social, and religious landscape of the Netherlands, an essentially Protestant state, changed rapidly.

• From 1795 to 1806 the Netherlands was known as the Batavian Republic

• From 1806 to 1810, as the Kingdom of Holland functioning as a puppet state under Louis Napoleon Bonaparte

• From 1810 to 1813, as a territory of Napoleon Bonaparte’s French Empire

• From 1813 to 1815, as the Netherlands

• From 1815 to the present, as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands

During the Revolution of 1830, Belgium, a largely Roman Catholic region in the south of the Netherlands, won its independence. In 1890 the grand duchy of Luxembourg did as well.

In 1816 the Netherlands Reformed Church, which had been disestablished in 1790, was reorganized and placed under the authority of the crown. But after 1848 the church gained a measure of independence from the state. Lutherans, Mennonites, and Remonstrants constituted the principal Protestant minorities. For their part, Jews gained more extensive rights and were incorporated more readily into Dutch society.

In 1853 the Roman Catholic Church (banned since the 1580s) reestablished its hierarchy in the Netherlands. Thereafter, a Roman Catholic parish system was established. Roman Catholic schools, press, and political parties came into existence.

In the wake of the French Revolution, conservative Calvinists were troubled by the widespread influence of liberal theology (especially in Christology) within the Reformed Church.

In 1834 Pastor Hendrik de Cock, a proponent of the “Revival,” led a group of Calvinists, many of whom were from the lower classes, to separate (De Afscheiding, “secession”) from the state church. These Calvinists hoped to reestablish the church on the “Three Forms of Unity” (the Heidelberg Confession, the Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort). From this secession, two churches emerged:

• The Christian Seceded Church

• The Reformed Churches under the Cross

Some of those who separated decided to immigrate to Holland, Michigan.

F. Abraham Kuyper#

Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), a remarkably gifted theologian, politician, journalist, and educator, attended the University of Leiden Divinity School. Upon entering the pastorate, he espoused Protestant liberal theology. A reading of Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redcliffe and the warning of Pietronella Baltus, one of his early parishioners, to the effect that he was preaching false doctrine, prompted Kuyper to renew his study of Scripture and the writings of John Calvin and other Reformers. Kuyper became a confessional Calvinist. As a gifted orator, he committed himself to gospel preaching in ways the laity could understand.

Kuyper combated what he thought was the nefarious influence of the French Revolution’s radical ideologies and non-Christian forms of “Enlightened” thought among his Dutch contemporaries.

In the late 1860s, Kuyper began ministering in Utrecht. He wrote for The Herald (De Heraut) and joined Groen Van Prinsterer’s Anti-revolutionary Party. A critic of popular sovereignty, Kuyper believed that God is the ultimate Sovereign and lawgiver. He emphasized the value of Christian schools. In 1870 he assumed the post of a pastor at the prestigious Reformed Church in Amsterdam. There he urged pastors in the Reformed Church to uphold the Reformed Formula of Subscription.

Opponents successfully resisted Kuyper’s effort to renew the state Reformed Church. Kuyper felt obliged to leave the church, and 200,000 congregants followed suit (1886). Their movement became known as the De Doleantie, or the “Grieving Ones.” In 1892 they joined with those Calvinists who had earlier separated from the state church (1834), and they created the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands.

After his election to Parliament (1874), Kuyper left the pastorate. Despite his political duties, he wrote prolifically and edited two newspapers, The Herald and The Standard. He also founded and taught theology at the Free University of Amsterdam (1880) He intended that the disciplines—whether medicine, literature, science, or theology — be shaped by a “Reformed” worldview.

Through their theological writings, Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), author of Reformed Dogmatics (1895–1901), provided theological guidance to Dutch conservative Calvinists.

Kuyper argued that the experience of spiritual regeneration distinguishes sharply the way Christians think from the way non-Christians do. For instance, he claimed that our views of science are shaped by our religious beliefs. For him, there is no such thing as a “neutral” science. He assumed a largely “presuppositional” approach to doing theology.

In 1905 the Synod of Utrecht attempted to adjudicate a theological dispute between Kuyper and Bavinck. The synod in its “Conclusions” showed due respect for Kuyper’s perspectives, but ruled in favor of Bavinck’s views regarding supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism, justification from eternity, immediate regeneration, and assumed regeneration.

With the support of Roman Catholics, Kuyper’s Anti-Revolutionary Party held political power briefly between the years 1888 and 1891. From 1901 to 1905 Kuyper, a notable advocate of a Reformed worldview perspective, served as the prime minister of the Netherlands.

V. THE FRENCH CHURCHES: PROTESTANT RESTORATION, REVIVAL, AND THEOLOGICAL DISPUTES#

The trauma of the French Revolution’s “movement of dechristianization” (1793–94) seriously weakened French Protestantism. Under the threats of revolutionary governments, the vast majority of the Reformed ministers abdicated their pastoral functions. In 1799 the French Reformed churches began the painful process of reconstituting their pastoral corps. Some ministers were excluded due to suspicions about their revolutionary activities.

According to Napoleon’s Concordat of 1802, Protestant pastors, whether Reformed or Lutheran, were — like the Roman Catholic clergy —to swear an oath of fidelity to the state and receive a salary in consequence.

By 1815 the French Reformed population numbered approximately 500,000 strong, the Lutheran population, some 200,000 principally in Alsace-Lorraine. Between October 1815 and January 1816, the “White Terror” broke out. After Napoleon’s defeat (1814), Royalist troops returned to the area around Nîmes. Along with others, they targeted Reformed Protestants as potential republican rebels not loyal to Louis XVIII, the new king. More than 200 Protestants were killed, over 250 houses destroyed, and many women brutalized. Between the years 1818 and 1840 the French Protestant churches regained a relative sense of stability and respectability in the society at large.

In 1818 a spiritual revival (Réveil) began to spread within the Reformed (Calvinist) churches. Pietistic Swiss Christians in France played a key role in the revival, including Felix Neff and Ami Bost, who challenged the alleged rationalistic tendencies of the Protestant churches. Partisans of the revival often called for a return to the theology of the Reformers and taught the necessity of a spiritual “new birth.”

Between the years 1817 and 1819 Robert Haldane, a Scottish layman evangelist, attempted to win divinity students and professors to embrace revival teaching at the Reformed seminary of Montauban. Also, in 1818 the Protestant Biblical Society was founded in France. Along with other societies, it supported the widespread revival movement with its publications.

Intense debates broke out within the Reformed churches between proponents and critics of the revival. By the late 1840s, orthodox Reformed Protestants engaged in disputes with Protestant liberals regarding whether the Reformed churches to which both parties belonged should have a mandatory confession of faith or, as the liberals urged, permit greater “freedom of examination” in doctrine.

In French-speaking Geneva, Switzerland, analogous conflicts between Protestant liberals and conservatives took place.

The Genevan Venerable Company of Pastors in time disciplined Robert L. Gaussen as a pastor for refusing to use a catechism he believed bore telltale signs of “rationalism.”

• In 1832 Gaussen helped found the Oratoire, a theological school for the training of evangelical students. The Venerable Company of Pastors proceeded to remove his pastoral credentials.

• In 1834 Gaussen assumed the post of professor of dogmatic theology at the Oratoire. He was joined by d’Aubigné as a professor of church history.

• In 1840 Gaussen published Théopneustie (The Plenary Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures), a defense of the plenary inspiration and infallibility of Scripture.

In 1849 d’Aubigné, who wrote a popular thirteen-volume history of the Reformation, left the state Reformed Church. In 1849 he helped form the Evangelical Free Church in Geneva. Similarly, Frédéric Monod took the lead in establishing the Evangelical Free Churches of France (1849).

In 1850 Professor Edmond Schérer resigned his teaching position at the Oratoire in Geneva. Schérer indicated he could no longer uphold in good faith the school’s doctrinal commitment to the infallibility and plenary inspiration of Scripture. This resignation stirred considerable controversy in Protestant Reformed circles in both France and Switzerland.

Protestant liberals and orthodox Reformed Protestants such as the brothers Adolphe and Frédéric Monod, leaders of the French revival, debated the nature of the Bible’s authority. Protestant liberals tended to esteem Schleiermacher’s teaching. Some appreciated emerging forms of German biblical higher criticism.

At the end of the nineteenth century Auguste Sabatier, France’s leading Protestant liberal theologian, retrospectively cited the Schérer controversy as a decisive turning point in the history of French/Genevan Protestant liberalism.

A. Roman Catholicism, the State, and Secularism#

In 1814 Louis XVIII became king of a constitutional French monarchy. Numerous Roman Catholic missionaries fanned out through France determined to reinvigorate orthodox Roman Catholic teaching among the populace. Catholic priests were sometimes dismayed by expressions of “popular religion” among peasants. Knowing little of elementary doctrine and enjoying festive celebration, the peasants sometimes embroidered into their Catholic practice a bewildering array of folktales, magic, and superstitions.

During the reign of King Charles X (1824–30) the Roman Catholic Church became once again the established church of France. Under the Villèlle government, “Ultras” (royalist Catholics) took control of French education. Moreover, the government issued the Anti-Sacrilege Act (1825–30), which stipulated a range of punishments for sacrilege.

Following the July Revolution of 1830, the “liberal” regime of King Louis Philippe (1830–48) permitted greater religious liberties. François Guizot (1787–1874), on occasion one of Louis Philippe’s principal ministers, was a Protestant. Felicité Lammenais’s arguments for the compatibility of liberty and religion and the separation of church and state stirred considerable debate among Roman Catholics.

After the Revolution of 1848, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected the president of the French Republic. In the wake of the coup of 1852, he assumed the title of Emperor Napoleon III, and the French Second Empire was born. By the mid-1850s, the emperor, an authoritarian leader, had emerged as a dominant political figure on the European scene. The French economy appeared prosperous.

Napoleon III apparently became overconfident regarding his successes on the home front. He initiated a disastrous foreign policy, which cost him dearly.

• He met with Cavour, the Sardinian nationalist leader, and backed efforts for the unification of Italy.

• This gambit, designed in part to reduce Austrian influence in Italy, naturally angered Pope Pius IX and stirred resentments among Ultramontane Roman Catholics in France.

• Haussmann’s reconstruction efforts were creating large monetary deficits.

By the late 1860s, Napoleon III attempted to assuage the anger of radical critics and calm public unrest. He granted greater liberties to the press. The number of newspapers multiplied significantly.

The French became deeply worried about the possible candidacy of the German Leopold of Hohenzollern to become the king of Spain. As war fever against the Prussians intensified, Napoleon III suspected that France was ill-prepared for any conflict. Napoleon III pulled French troops out of Rome, where they had been defending the papacy of Pius IX.

During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), a string of disastrous defeats befell the French armies.

• At the Battle of Sedan near the Belgium border, Emperor Napoleon III surrendered.

• The Germans began a siege of Paris; they hoped to bomb and starve Parisians into submission.

• On February 28, 1871, after failed attempts to break the Prussian blockade of Paris, the defeated French government signed an armistice with the Germans.

• On March 1, Prussian troops entered Paris briefly but left after word arrived that the National Assembly located in Bordeaux had ratified the armistice.

The newly elected national government of President Louis-Adolphe Thiers set up its headquarters in Versailles.

B. Radical Republicanism, the “Commune,” and Anticlericalism#

On March 28, 1871, the “Commune,” an insurrection, erupted in Paris. Angered by various economic policies of the Thiers government, thousands of Parisians, especially workers, with radical republicans, anarchists, socialists, and communists in their midst, took over the city.

The “Communards” held an election to give legitimacy to their actions. Archly anticlerical, their leaders sought to establish the separation of church and state and implement lay instruction in public schools. They coined their own money. With their red banners unfurled, the Communards controlled the city for about sixty days.

On May 21 the French troops of the Versailles government penetrated the walls of Paris. For a week, many Parisians, both men and women, fought the French army in a bloody, no-holds-barred civil war. Fire raged through portions of Paris, reducing some prominent buildings to rubble. Parts of the city became a huge, ghastly open-air morgue.

On the night of May 27/28, the last Communard holdouts fell. The overall carnage in the city was immense.

• Between 20,000 to 30,000 Parisians — men, women, and boys and girls — had perished in savage street-to-street fighting or were summarily executed.

• Thousands of Communards were deported to New Caledonia in the aftermath.

Anticlericalism directed toward the Roman Catholic Church — including the execution of the archbishop of Paris — stood out as one hallmark of the Commune.

In preceding years, influential non-Christian writers had given anticlericalism a boost. In 1863 Ernest Renan, a former Roman Catholic priest, published La Vie de Jesus (The Life of Jesus), a rapid “bestseller.”

• He claimed it was one of the first biographies of Christ written from “rational principles.”

• Renan, a biblical critic, denied the divinity of Christ, even though he acknowledged that “among the sons of men, there is none born who is greater than Jesus.”

• He discounted the gospel accounts of Christ’s miracles as legends. He boldly denied Christ’s resurrection.

• Renan acknowledged the influence of the radical German biblical critic Strauss on his thought.

For his part, Auguste Comte promoted “positivism” and a “religion of humanity.” He defended the “perfectibility of the human race.” Socialist writers such as Pierre Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx provided a non-Christian analysis of the plight of workers in a capitalistic society.

Emile Durkheim, author of Rules of the Sociological Method (1895), contributed to the acceptance of sociology as a recognized social science in the curricula of French universities. A proponent of a positivist and secular mind-set, Durkheim argued that religious experience and phenomena should be studied “scientifically” and not explained with any reference to potential divine origins.

VI. EXPANDING CHRISTIANITY TO THE FAR CORNERS OF THE EARTH#

A. The Scramble for Colonies and Western Missionaries#

Between the years 1870 and 1914 a new round of feverish European imperialism gripped politicians and businesspeople alike. Many European nations “scrambled” in ruthless competition. Vast swathes of Africa and Asia were colonized in the space of a few decades.

The U.S. government also engaged in expansionist activities. President William McKinley (1897–1901) viewed the acquisition of colonies as potentially fulfilling a Christian “civilizing” mandate. In the wake of the Spanish-American War (1898), the United States gained Cuba, the Philippine Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico from a fading Spanish Empire.

The British government built the Suez Canal (opening in 1869) in Egypt. Egypt was run by a dynasty (1807–82) founded by Muhammed Ali, an Ottoman viceroy, who helped free the country from the domination of the Ottoman Empire. In 1882 Britain invaded the country and basically controlled it until 1914.

Governments often believed that acquisition of colonial possessions overseas was a key to retaining a balance of power in Europe and assuring continued economic growth at home.

• In 1884–85, diplomats at the Berlin Conference attempted to prevent armed conflicts in Africa by assigning “spheres of influence” in which European states might colonize without interference from other nations.

• Earlier, European powers had forced open Chinese ports through gunboat diplomacy and obliged the signing of advantageous treaties.

In the 1880s, needing more outlets for exports in view of the saturation of markets and emerging “protectionist” trade policies of Germany and the United States and also needing coal-fueling stations to keep her ships operational on far-off seas, France acquired a protectorate in Tunis, gained control of Madagascar, and had worked its way deep into the Congo and Niger.

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, French Catholic missionaries constituted two-thirds of Catholic missionaries worldwide. Some were intent on spreading the Roman Catholic faith while simultaneously promoting French colonialism. Such was the case in the region of Annam and Tonkin (Indochina).

In 1867 Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, a distinguished academic and churchman, was transferred to Algeria. There he directed the missionary efforts of the “White Fathers” and “White Sisters,” who evangelized, built hospitals and schools, and worked with Muslims in other ways. The tireless efforts of Lavigerie helped strengthen ties between various African colonies and France.

B. Missions to the Far East: Japan, China, and Korea#

Japan#

By the late 1540s, Portuguese traders and Jesuits had reached Kyushu, Japan. Daimyo Nobunaga, a prominent military leader in Japan, welcomed them and gave them properties in Kyoto. The Jesuits Francis Xavier and Alessandro Valignano helped establish a successful missionary outreach in Japan. Thousands of Japanese converted to the Roman Catholic faith. But Daimyo Hideyoshi, another powerful figure, became convinced the Jesuits and their followers were conspiring to help Western powers subjugate Japan.

In 1597 an angry Hideyoshi unleashed the first of multiple rounds of persecution directed at the Jesuits and their converts. Within a few decades, the Roman Catholic presence in Japan was greatly reduced. Some Christians did apparently attempt to practice their faith in a covert fashion.

China#

In China, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) established a Roman Catholic mission in the late sixteenth century. After the papacy dissolved the Jesuit order in 1773, the Lazarists took their place at the Chinese court. Despite persecution, some 250,000 Roman Catholic laity, 31 missionaries, and about 90 native priests survived in China at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

• In 1811 Emperor Kia-Kin decreed that leaders of European religions in China should be executed.

• In 1815 Jean-Gabriel Dufresse, the Vicar Apostolic for Western China, was beheaded.

• A number of Chinese Roman Catholics were also

The Scot Robert Morrison (1782–1834), from the London Missionary Society, was the first Protestant missionary to reach China. He became a translator for the East India Company. This position allowed him to gain a far better knowledge of Chinese, and it sheltered him from persecution.

In 1814 Morrison baptized Tsae A-ko, the first Chinese Christian convert (Protestant). A year earlier, Morrison finished the translation of the New Testament in Chinese, and eventually he completed a Chinese dictionary. Morrison was joined in his translation efforts by Karl Gutzlaff, a Prussian missionary.

William Milne (1785–1822), another colleague, worked on the translation of the Old Testament into Chinese. To avoid interference from the Chinese government, Milne established a press (1815) and Christian school in Malacca, Malaysia. Milne baptized the first Protestant Chinese pastor, Liang Fa.

In 1844 Emperor Daoguang gave permission to Roman Catholics to build churches and worship freely. He extended those rights to Protestants in 1845.

During the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), the Qing Empire fought the forces of the “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom” led by Hong Xiuquan, who viewed himself as a messiah and a brother of Jesus Christ. At least 20 million people perished in this vicious conflict, one of the greatest human tragedies of the nineteenth century. Many Chinese came to resent Christianity, owing to the fact that Hong Xiuquan, a murderous tyrant, cloaked himself in Christian symbols.

Korean#

In 1784 Yi Sung-hun, a Korean who had been baptized as a Roman Catholic in Beijing, China, returned to his native land, the “Hermit Kingdom.” By the year 1801 there were 10,000 Roman Catholics in Korea. They were persecuted severely.

In 1833 the Society for Foreign Missions of Paris (founded 1658–63) assumed the task of evangelizing Korea. French missionary priests were sometimes martyred. During the Great Persecution of 1866–71, thousands of Korean laity were killed. By 1900, 238 bishops and foreign missionaries ministered in Korea and Japan.

After 1882, Protestant missionaries began to enter Korea. Many were American confessional Presbyterians and Methodists. They upheld a high view of the Bible’s authority and emphasized gospel preaching. A number belonged to the Student Volunteer Movement. Deeply affected by the Great Revival of 1907, 30,000 Koreans were baptized.

C. Western Missions and the Boxer Rebellion in China#

The “Boxer Rebellion” (November 1899 – September 1901) brought renewed bloodshed and agony to China. The ostensible cause of the rebellion was the heightened animosity of many Chinese toward “foreigners.” Beginning in the 1840s, Western powers had used “gunboat diplomacy” to force the Chinese to open select ports to Western trade and accept a series of treaties deemed “unfair” by the Chinese.

Clauses of these treaties that ended the Opium War (1839–42) and Arrow War (1856–60) afforded both Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries greater liberty to travel throughout China. Missionaries from Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission and other mission societies donned Chinese clothes and trekked into the interior of China.

• At great personal sacrifice, they cared for orphans, the sick, and opium addicts.

• They distributed food to the hungry, preached the gospel, and set up churches, Christian schools, and hospitals.

Loyal adherents to ancestor worship, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism included intellectuals, imperial governmental elites, peasants, and shopkeepers who sometimes fiercely opposed these missionary endeavors. They also took particular offense at the extensive property holdings and special privileges some missionaries possessed.

Adding insult to injury, Japan’s military humiliated China’s forces (1894–95), and the Qing Dynasty (1649–1912) lost Korea and Taiwan in consequence. In 1897 the murder of two German missionaries afforded the kaiser an excuse to occupy the province of Shondong. Antiforeign sentiments and mob rule surged in certain regions and segments of Chinese society.

Between 50,000 and 100,000 Boxers—members of a secret society, “the Righteous and Harmonious Fists” — and 70,000 imperial troops of the Qing Dynasty rebelled against people or institutions thought to be agents of foreign powers.

• Initially, the imperial government attempted to subdue the Boxers, but then the Empress Dowager Ci Xi backed them.

• Among other foreigners, the Boxers specifically targeted Western missionaries in their compounds and “stations.”

• In marauding bands, the Boxers unleashed bloodcurdling shouts of “Death to the foreign devils!” and taunted Chinese believers as “secondary devils.”

In the summer of 1900 the Boxers besieged Tianjin and Beijing. Foreigners in Beijing holed up in the diplomatic Legation Quarter of Beijing and desperately fought off attackers for two months.

On August 14, 1900, Western troops finally quashed the siege. The Boxers were ruthlessly hunted down by military expeditions from eight nations. Before their defeat, the Boxers had massacred 48 Catholic missionaries, 182 Protestant missionaries, some 18,000–30,000 Chinese Catholics, 500–2,000 Chinese Protestants, more than 200 Chinese Orthodox, and thousands of other civilians.

Fifty-eight missionaries and twenty-one children from the China Inland Mission perished in the bloodletting. Gruesome accounts of dismemberments and beheading multiplied.

• Other missionaries fled their “stations” and compounds, seeking safety in diplomatic quarters or with allied troops or attempting to make a perilous trip to the coast.

• They worried about the fate of the Chinese believers whom they had left behind and genuinely loved.

• Numerous Chinese believers were by no means “rice Christians” — people who had accepted Christianity only for material benefits their “conversions” might induce.

• Those Chinese Christians who refused to deny Christ were often executed.

In mastering the rebellion, the soldiers of the Allies looted and destroyed sacred Chinese temples and imperial palaces and killed and raped civilians. Moreover, in the “Boxer Protocol,” the Allies imposed humiliating reparations on the Qing Dynasty. These measures stoked long-term resentments against the Western powers.

By contrast, Hudson Taylor, as a sign of the “meekness and gentleness of Christ,” refused to accept any payments for the destruction of property or for the deaths of his fellow China Inland missionaries.

The massacre of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries and Chinese Christians of diverse confessions during the Boxer Rebellion dealt a severe blow to Western missionary efforts in China. It also stimulated greater interest in world missions among certain Christians.

D. French Secular Education and the Dreyfus Affair#

Paradoxically enough, while the French republican governments generally benefitted from the work of Catholic missionaries in projecting and reinforcing French influence, the Republican prime minister Jules Ferry helped pass a law in 1882 that stipulated French students in the mother country should receive a free, secular education in primary public schools. The teachers should be laypeople, not Roman Catholic priests or nuns.

As the nineteenth century waned, the French people’s enthusiasm for republicanism seemed to mount. Royalist pretenders to the French throne had little hope of overthrowing the French Republic.

In 1884 and 1890, Pope Leo XIII encouraged French Catholics to embrace the republic. Festivities celebrating the French Republic flourished. Breaking accepted artistic conventions, Impressionist painters (such as Vincent van Gogh) and writers (such as Arthur Rimbaud) both shocked and tantalized the tastes of the French public.

The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), a cause célèbre of late nineteenth-century France, did, however, sharply divide French public opinion. Alfred Dreyfus, a high-ranking Jewish military officer, was falsely accused of treason, found guilty, and sentenced to Devil’s Island. He had supposedly given the Germans secret intelligence.

• Anti-Dreyfusards included many Roman Catholics, lawyers, doctors, members of the press, and wealthy members of the bourgeoisie among others.

• Pro-Dreyfus partisans included republicans, socialists, members of the Collège de France, and intellectuals such as the sociologist Emile Durkheim and the writer Emile Zola, who signed “J’accuse” (“I accuse”), a provocative piece in Dreyfus’s favor.

Eventually, it was established in many people’s minds that Dreyfus had been framed. His name was cleared, and with honor he reentered French military service. Deep-seated anti-Semitism was not foreign to the Dreyfus Affair.

Republican opponents of anti-Dreyfusard Catholics worked with renewed vigor to bring about the separation of church and state in France. In 1905 the Chamber of Deputies passed a law that brought about this separation. It guaranteed “freedom of conscience.”

• It also stipulated, “The Republic neither recognizes, nor salaries, nor subsidizes any religion.”

• Henceforth all religious buildings were deemed the property of the state and local governmental entities.

• No longer would any member of the clergy be salaried by the state.

E. The Iberian Peninsula: Spain and Portugal#

During the nineteenth century, anticlerical forces in Spain and Portugal contested the premise that the Catholic Church should be the established church in their respective countries.

In a display of non-friendly aggression, Napoleon Bonaparte annexed Spain, removed the Spanish Bourbon monarchy, and imposed his brother Joseph to sit on the Spanish throne.

In 1807 French troops likewise marched into Portugal. Britain, a longtime ally of Portugal, launched a naval rescue operation that aided the escape of Maria I and the Portuguese royal family to Brazil. In 1808 the Duke of Wellington landed in Portugal with British troops. He defeated the French troops, but then actually helped them return to France with their weapons and Portuguese loot in hand. Two more French invasions followed. Both were repulsed with British help and at great cost to the Portuguese people.

During the Peninsular War (1808–14), Spanish fighters who favored the restoration of a Catholic monarchy waged a bitterly executed guerilla war for independence from France. Supported by Portuguese and English forces, they ultimately triumphed and ousted Joseph Bonaparte.

The Spanish victory over the French failed to usher in a much-hoped-for lasting peace on the Iberian Peninsula. Spain repeatedly seethed with religious-political turbulence and civil war.

• Traditionalist-minded Spaniards argued that adherence to the Roman Catholic Church should serve as the cornerstone of Spanish unity.

• Other Spaniards firmly rejected this premise. They were variously called “Moderates,” “Liberals,” “Republicans,” and “Exaltados.” Some were revolutionary, secular, and vehemently anticlerical; others remained Roman Catholic, moderates, and advocates of constitutional as opposed to absolute monarchy.

King Ferdinand VII (1808; 1814–33), a partisan of restoration, entertained close ties with the Roman Catholic Church. He rejected the Spanish Constitution of 1812 as politically liberal.

In 1814 he sent troops to Latin America with the hope of holding onto Spain’s colonies. Simon Bolivar, however, ultimately defeated Spanish armies and thereby won independence for Columbia (1819) and Venezuela (1821). Other Latin American countries gained independence as well. By contrast, Puerto Rico and Cuba remained in Spanish hands until 1898.

Ferdinand also had to contend with political “liberals” who between the years 1820 and 1823 gained control of the government. They closed down many monasteries and ended subsidies for the clergy. In 1823 French troops invaded Spain and helped Ferdinand drive the liberals from power. A return of the monasteries and financing took place.

The reign of Regent Maria Christina, Ferdinand VII’s widow (1833–39), witnessed the government once again challenging the privileges of the Roman Catholic Church. Church properties were seized, monasteries closed, the Inquisition ended, and the clergy’s control of education curtailed. The First Carlist War (1833–40) broke out.

The Count of Molina, Carlos V (often referred to as “Don Carlos”), a pretender to the throne, along with other counterrevolutionary traditionalists (including clerics), urged the return of a Catholic king as absolute monarch. Carlos V, with his Basque and Catalan supporters and other traditionalists—known as Carlists—advocated four essential themes: “God, fatherland, local autonomy, and King.” The Carlists envisioned a Catholic Christian society in which the church worked with but remained independent from the state. The Carlists were defeated in the First Carlist War.

In 1844, during the reign of Queen Isabella II (1840–68), the moderates regained power. A Second Carlist War (1847–49) ensued. The Concordat of 1851 between the papacy and the Spanish government restored the Catholic Church to its former position as Spain’s established church and to the exclusion of other religions. Jesuits and other Catholic clergy worked diligently to extend the church’s influence. But in 1854 another revolution, one possessing an anticlerical thrust, rocked Spain. Thereafter, the secular (noninstitutional and nonmonastic) clergy lost even more of their properties.

With the “Glorious Revolution” of 1868, the reign of Queen Isabella II came to an end. Political and social unrest once again disrupted Spanish life. In 1869 the Cortes (Spanish Parliament) granted religious liberty for non-Catholics, including the small minority of Protestants. A radical republic was established in 1873. Not unsurprisingly, a Third Carlist War (1872–76) erupted.

A social and political respite of sorts emerged under the reigns of the kings Alfonso XII (1874–85) and Alfonso XIII (1888–1931). During the “Restoration” of 1875–1923, both conservative and liberal governments often demonstrated a willingness to recognize the legitimacy of the Catholic Church as playing an essential role in Spanish life.

Many clerics engaged in campaigns to reinvigorate the Catholic faith and counter radical, socialist movements. So-called “Levitical cities,” located in the countryside, lent their steadfast support to these efforts to reinforce traditional Catholic values and practices. “Secular” cities resisted these same campaigns.

Cardinal Miguel Payá of Santiago de Compostela declared that on January 28, 1879, some 300 bone fragments of St. James had been uncovered behind the cathedral’s altar. According to tradition, St. James had evangelized Spain. Quickly, the cult of St. James blossomed as pilgrims and tourists flocked to Santiago de Compostela. Church experts evaluated evidence concerning the bones’ provenance.

In 1884 Pope Leo XIII concluded in Deus Omnipotens that the bones were indeed those of James, thus official relics. Santiago de Compostela became a major pilgrim and tourist site. Many Spanish Roman Catholics were strengthened in their belief that Roman Catholicism constituted the national religion of Spain.

F. Brazil and Portugal#

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, small groups of Brazilians created clandestine networks whose purpose was to gain the independence of Brazil from Portugal. In 1798 Bahia rebels from the lower classes revolted against the monied classes that exploited them and showed little respect for their mixed blood and ethnic background. The rebels were defeated. The conspirators were executed, imprisoned, or exiled.

Other groups more specifically challenged Portuguese economic policies. Eventually, in 1822, Brazil declared its independence from Portugal.

In the nineteenth century Portugal constituted one of the most Catholic countries of western Europe. Its population grew from almost 3 million in 1801 to more than 5 million by 1900. The country witnessed repeated rounds of civil unrest and revolt, the confiscation of church properties, and disputes regarding what constituted the best form of government.

The Portuguese Constitution of 1822 was remarkably democratic and declared that “sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation.” It eliminated the Inquisition and church courts. In 1834 a wave of anticlericalism struck:

• Male religious orders were shut down

• Colleges, convents, and monasteries were auctioned off

• Church properties were seized

Nonetheless, even radical leaders regarded Portugal as a Catholic state. The Portuguese Catholic hierarchy worked with various governments and made concordats with the papacy.

In an 1851 coup, Duke João Carlos Saldanha, a hard-bitten soldier, took control of the Portuguese state and thereby ended the period of revolutionary turmoil (forty governments in thirty-one years). Royalists formed a democratic government with a two-party system. A “party of regeneration” led by Fontes Pereira de Melo, a statesman and engineer, tried to modernize the Portuguese economy.

Portugal had only limited success in the European scramble for empire. Its aspirations for imperial greatness were thwarted by the claim of Leopold II (1835–1909), the King of the Belgians, to the Congo Zaire (a region colonized for centuries by the Portuguese) and by the claim of the English financier and politician Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) to the Zambezi basin. By 1900 Portugal retained only five colonies, including Indonesia, Mozambique, Angola, and two in China.

In 1910 an anticlerical republican government triumphed. Its leaders instituted the separation of church and state. Roman Catholicism lost its privileged status as the country’s national religion.

VII. CENTRAL EUROPE#

In the mid-nineteenth century the Hapsburg monarchy remained a dominant force in central Europe. Its history stretched back to 1526 when the Hapsburgs brought together into a union the Austrian, Slavonian, and Hungarian provinces. It consisted of multiple ethnic and religious groups (Roman Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Muslim) joined in tenuous unity by the Hapsburg emperor, whose principal residence was in Vienna.

The Hapsburg Monarchy’s lands included Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, a portion of Silesia, Galicia (located in southern Poland), Hungary (further subdivided into “Hungary,” Transylvania, Croatia-Slavonia, and Vojvodina), and Bukovina. Austria and Galicia were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, whereas Hungary had a large Protestant minority.

During the Hungarian Revolution (1848–49), the Magyar Lajos Kossuth, a skilled journalist and political reformer, called for Hungarian independence from Austria. In the summer of 1849, Russian armies helped the Hapsburg emperor Franz Joseph I suppress the revolution. Thereafter Franz Joseph I ruled with an iron hand. One of the emperor’s primary goals was to keep the empire from disintegrating. In 1853 a Hungarian assassin nearly succeeded in killing the emperor.

In 1866 Bismarck’s Prussian armies defeated the Austrians in the “Seven Weeks War.” Franz Joseph I lost his capacity to influence the politics of German lands. Moreover, he became more amenable to making concessions to restless ethnic groups, especially Magyar Hungarians. Earlier, in 1861, the Austrian state had allowed Protestants the freedom to worship. Austrian conservative Catholics excoriated “liberal” concessions of this kind as serving Jewish interests.

During the 1860s and 1870s anti-Semitism sometimes poisoned Austrian political debate. Theodore Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist and author, launched a political Zionist initiative to create a Jewish national state in Palestine, a safe haven for Jews. In 1897 the First Zionist Congress, chaired by Herzl, met in Basel, Switzerland.

The Compromise of 1867 (Ausgleich) transformed the Hapsburg Empire into a dual monarchy (Austria and Hungary) with the Emperor Franz Joseph also serving as the King of Hungary. The compromise put the Catholic Church of Hungary under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Religion and Public Education.

Magyar Protestant elites gained political and cultural autonomy. Some of them tried to impose their culture on minorities. They stipulated that Hungarian should be the language of the government and of the universities. Their efforts at establishing cultural hegemony engendered deep animosities among ethnic minorities such as Croats, Slovaks, Romanians, and Serbs.

By the turn of the twentieth century, seething ethnic and religious divisions had greatly weakened the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

A. The “Polish Question”#

The dismemberment of Poland as a national entity continued in the nineteenth century.

In 1863–64 the Russians crushed the Polish “January Insurrection.” Polish revolutionaries had attempted to end the partition of Poland and gain independence from Russia. As retribution for the revolt, the Russians put to death thousands of Poles and sent other thousands to Siberia.

Poland-Lithuania no longer existed as a nation. Both the Germans under Bismarck and the Russians under Tsar Alexander II respectively consolidated their authority over the regions of partitioned Poland under their control.

• Some regions with large Polish populations became integral parts of Prussia with German laid down as the obligatory administrative language.

• In Russian Poland, the Polish language was forbidden in the schools and replaced by Russian.

Because some members of the Roman Catholic clergy had lent their support to the Polish insurrection, the Russians deposed suspect bishops and closed numerous monasteries. By contrast, Poles in Galicia (part of the Hapsburg Empire), after a state of siege, were given significant liberty to direct their own affairs. In 1873 Galicia became an autonomous province. Krakow flourished as a haven for the preservation of Polish culture and the Roman Catholic faith.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Polish nationalists attempted to keep the “Polish Question” before the “Christian” Western powers: Would the Polish nation ever be reconstituted and given the rights of self-determination?

A good number of Polish revolutionaries fought for radical causes, some participating in the Commune in Paris.

B. The Decline of the Ottoman Empire#

The defeat of the Ottoman Turks at the walls of Vienna in 1683 spelled the end of their much-feared advance into central Europe. In the wake of the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) that marked the end of the Austro-Ottoman war (1683–97), the great powers began to carve up the Ottoman Empire, an operation that proceeded in fits and starts for more than two centuries, or until the Treaty of Lausanne (1923).

The Ottomans, despite efforts by reformers such as Sultan Abdulhamid I (1725–89), often did not keep pace sufficiently well in economics or in weaponry and military strategies with the West. Nor did they do so in education. Only 3 percent of Ottomans could read in 1800, only 15 percent in 1900.

Ottoman Turks also faced the emergence of serious opposition from Wahhabi Suni Muslims. Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92), a so-called “puritan” reformer of Muslim thought, believed that many Sufi and Shia Muslims had compromised the purity of the faith.

• These “heretics” made pilgrimages to the tombs of saints (the cult of saints) and worshiped material objects.

• By contrast, Wahhab argued that no intermediaries exist between God and man and God alone should be worshiped.

• He emphasized Tahwid (the oneness of God).

• He urged discipline on his followers and set standards for clothing and diet.

• Women were to enjoy few rights.

Wahhab expounded some of his views in the text Kitab at Tawid. He urged the Wahhabi “army of God” to pursue jihad — a holy war against unbelievers. The Sa’ud family — the ruling royal family of Arabia — adopted Wahhab’s basic teachings.

The Wahhabi (sometimes known as the Salefis) came to believe that Turks were infidels and fought against them. In 1818 Ottoman and Egyptian armies destroyed the Wahhabi capital. Despite other defeats, the Wahhabi regrouped.

The Sa’ud king engaged in warfare with Britain against the Turks during World War I. After the war the Sa’ud Wahhabi king threatened war against European “occupiers” of Muslim lands in the Middle East. In 1927 the British signed an agreement with the Sa’ud family that led to the creation of Saudi Arabia.

The Ottoman Empire faced other problems as well. It incurred huge debts to the Western powers and became increasingly vulnerable to territorial encroachments by both the Western powers and Russia. Western diplomats worried about the “Eastern Question”: the apparent inability of the Ottomans to thwart the ambitions of Russia’s tsars

• To gain trade-route access through the Dardanelles Straits to the Mediterranean

• To block the considerable influence of the Russians among peoples in the Balkans and Greece who sought independence

The “Christian” Western powers such as England, France, and Germany not only competed with each other to acquire land and trade benefits from Turkey, the “Sick Man of Europe,” but on occasion used or threatened military force in attempts to halt Russian westward expansion.

In 1838 their forces (this time with the Russians as allies) intervened to save the Ottomans from Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Egyptian who sought to create an independent state. His armies had conquered sizeable portions of the Ottoman Empire. The Western allies defeated Muhammad Ali, but he continued to rule Egypt.

Earlier, in the eighteenth century, the Hapsburgs had taken Hungary from the Ottomans, and Russia added a segment of territory to the Ukraine (which in 1654 had been incorporated into Muscovy).

The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji (1774) afforded the Russians lands north of the Black Sea and established them as the protectors of Orthodox Christians in Turkey, among other privileges. Some Russians hoped for the day when their troops might capture Constantinople, liberate the patriarch of Constantinople, and bring an end to Ottoman rule. They also propagated the idea that it was their responsibility to protect Christians living under Ottoman domination in the Balkans and in Greece.

VIII. THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE AND THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH#

In 1723 Patriarch Jeremias of Constantinople recognized the founding of the Russian Holy Synod. The patriarch’s approval masked sharp differences between the model of church governance Peter the Great had imposed on the Russian Orthodox Church and the form of governance sustaining the authority of the patriarchs in Constantinople and the Eastern Orthodox patriarchs.

Peter the Great eliminated the Russian patriarchate for twenty-one years (1700–1721). Emulating a German Lutheran ecclesiastical model, he then established a layperson (Oberprokuror) as the head of the Holy and Governing Synod. The procurator was a civil servant, not a cleric, and reported directly to Peter the Great. During the “Synodal” period of Russian Orthodox Church history (1700–1917), metropolitans replaced patriarchs as the principal clerical rulers of the church.

Between 1800 and 1880 the tsars added vast swathes of new territories to the Russian Empire’s already huge geographical landmass.

• In 1809 Finland came under Russian jurisdiction.

• After 1815, Congress Poland (a kingdom in Poland) was forced to participate in a “union” with the Russians.

• From 1834 to 1859 the Chechens attempted to fend off Russian domination.

• The Russians repeatedly fought the Turks through most of the century.

A significant factor in this territorial expansion was the Pan-Slav movement that developed in the 1840s. Stimulated by similar earlier manifestations of the concept by various scholars, the movement sought to bring unity and shared identity (and freedom from tyranny) among the various Slavic peoples and other ethnic groups spread through parts of central Europe, the Balkan peninsula, and Russia.

The Western powers, despite their joint effort with the Russians to win Greek independence (1832) from the Turks, cast a wary eye at the Russian tsars’ impressive sphere of influence in the Balkans and Greece.

• England, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia fought the Crimean War (1853–56) against Russia, in part to block Russian expansionary encroachments toward the west and southwest.

• During the Russian-Turkish War (1877–78), Russian troops reached the gates of Constantinople.

Deeply concerned western European diplomats pushed through the Treaty of Berlin in an effort to stop the further advance of the Russians into Ottoman lands.

Some of the populace in the Balkans feared that they might be liberated from Ottoman rule only to fall under the heavy-handed governance of the Russians. The Russians also fixed their sights on gaining the principalities of Moldavia and Walachia (eventually known as Romania).

For a time the Russian Empire stretched across seemingly endless tracts of land from Congress Poland to Alaska in North America. Its peoples included Russians, Ukrainians, Belo-Russians, Poles, and various ethnic tribes.

In 1741 the Dane Vitus Bering, a member of the Russian navy, began a mission to discover if Asia was linked to North America. The explorers celebrated the first Orthodox liturgy in America aboard a ship in Sitka Bay, Alaska. Monks from the monastery of Valaam, founded in 1794, spread the Orthodox faith among the natives of Alaska.

On March 30, 1867, however, the Russian government sold Alaska to the United States for $7,200,000. American critics lampooned the purchase of Alaska as “Seward’s Folly” — a reference to Secretary of State William H. Seward, who had championed the purchase. Over time, the transaction turned out not to be foolish. The Americans bought Alaska for about 2.2 cents per acre. Subsequently, the first Orthodox Russian church in North America was built in California.

In the nineteenth century, powerful tsars ruled the vast Russian Empire.

• Tsar Nicholas I (1825–55) prosecuted ruthless policies to control his state. He viewed the Russian Orthodox Church as a pillar buttressing his authoritarian regime.

• The 1855 coronation of Tsar Alexander II unfolded with magnificent pomp and rich ceremonies followed by a Greek Orthodox mass.

The tsar did in fact rule over the largest contiguous empire of nineteenth-century Europe. Yet the striking defeat of Russian forces in the Crimean War by the combined armies of England, France, and Turkey revealed a worrisome military vulnerability.

Tsar Alexander II could act as both a cruel autocrat and a daring reformer.

• He oversaw the crushing defeat of the nationalistic aspirations of the Poles in the “January Insurrection.”

• By contrast, he allowed greater political liberties to the Finnish and encouraged the use of Finnish as the national language.

• He also took certain dramatic steps to reform and modernize Russian life.

In 1858 nineteen million peasants labored on state lands, whereas twenty-two million serfs worked on private lands.

• In 1861, two years before Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous Emancipation Proclamation that liberated slaves, the tsar promulgated the Edict of Emancipation that liberated serfs.

• The tsar even contemplated instituting a representative government with consultative powers.

The tsar eluded a series of assassination attempts. But in 1881 the “People’s Will” set off two bombs, one of which badly wounded him. Tsar Alexander II died soon after, deprived of the chance to implement further reforms.

Tsar Alexander III proceeded to undo many of his father’s reform measures. Anti-Semitism raised its ugly head during his reign. The rumors circulated that “the Jews” had been involved in planning the assassination of Alexander II. Rumors helped spark the tragic years of 1881–84, when many Jewish communities in Russian cities and towns became targets of violent anti-Jewish riots, or pogroms. Large numbers of Jews were killed and their properties seized or destroyed.

The government made the situation even worse by promulgating anti-Jewish legislation (“Temporary Regulations,” 1882). In time, cities like Moscow were purged of Jews. The tsar justified his actions by blaming the Jews for Christ’s crucifixion.

Little wonder some Jews became more attracted to Zionism and the idea of emigration. From 1880 to 1920 as many as two million Jews sought havens of safety in more hospitable lands. They came in droves to the United States (about 1,750,000) — especially, New York City. A smaller contingent (45,000) immigrated to Palestine.

A. Reassessing Russian Church Life (1800–1917)#

Russian Orthodox church life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at one level was none too vibrant. After all, repressive tsarist regimes often did stifle personal religious and intellectual freedoms through censorship, forced exiles, the threat of imprisonment, the use of torture, and the meting out of death sentences

More than 90 percent of Russian Orthodox bishops between 1721 and 1917 came from a privileged clerical class, and their autocratic control of the church governance and positions and their intrusive policies rankled those priests who felt blocked from advancement in the church’s hierarchy.

The centralization of the Russian Orthodox Church’s administration directed by its procurator could hamper initiatives by individual churches (which numbered 94,629 churches in 1914). The tsarist police so restricted the intellectual freedoms of philosophers in the period 1825–60 that it is properly called “the Philosophical Dark Age” in Russian philosophy.

The nineteenth century also witnessed promising developments within the church. Education for the clergy improved. Philaret, the learned Metropolitan of Moscow, helped established seminaries for priests in sixty-seven dioceses. Four theological academies were founded—in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kiev, and Kazan—between 1769 and 1842.

The monastic movement also expanded significantly. In 1812 there were 452 monasteries; by 1914 there were 1,045 monasteries with 21,000 monks and 73,000 nuns. Earlier, in the eighteenth century, monks at Mount Athos such as Paisi Velichkovsky had launched a movement of spiritual renewal based on the ancient Hesychast tradition and the collected prayers found in the book Philokalia.

Influential startsi (elders or spiritual directors) in the Hesychast tradition provided examples of holy, ascetic, and joyful living. They gave wise, spiritual counsel to individual disciples as well as to large numbers of common people.

The Academy of Kazan helped prepare natives for missionary work. St. Innocent (1797–1879), as the Bishop of Alaska, displayed love and concern for native peoples. Other missionaries spread the Orthodox faith among tribes in Siberia and among Muslims.

In the 1860s various attempts to reform church life took place. They included the distribution of monies in the poorer parishes. The respected, learned theologian and orator Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow and the Pan-Slav lay theologians Alexis Khomiakov and Ivan Kireyevsky engaged in efforts to renew Orthodox theology. During the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, F. Golubinsky helped create the Moscow School of Theistic Philosophy.

B. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy: Perceptive Analysts of the Human Condition#

In the second half of the nineteenth century, two Russian writers began to gain a certain following in the European world of letters. They were

• Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), author of works such as Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov

• Leo Tolstoy (1828–1920), author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

As great writers are inclined to do, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy probed deeply, without shrinking back, some of the most profound if not painful problems we humans face

• The origins of evil

• Disease and suffering

• Intense feelings of remorse and guilt

• The inevitability of death

• The pain of broken relationships, and much more.

After 1869 Tolstoy was himself particularly haunted by fear of death and a recognition of his own mortality. In 1877 he made one of two trips to the Russian Orthodox Optina-Pustyn monastery in a quest to find spiritual solace. This did not occur. He thought about taking his own life.

In 1879 Tolstoy experienced a conversion to “the religion of Christ, but divested of faith and mysteries, a practical religion, not promising eternal bliss but providing bliss here on earth.” He rejected the deity of Christ.

Upon reading the Gospels, Tolstoy developed what some deemed a radical, anarchic social ethic based on Jesus’ teaching: “Resist not evil.” He devoted a portion of his wealth and worked diligently to ameliorate the lives of the downtrodden. By the turn of the twentieth century, Tolstoy had become one of the most celebrated figures in the world. In 1901 the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him.

As a Pan-Slav, Dostoevsky did appreciate Russia’s inward-looking cultural ambit.

• He had a deep love for Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church.

• He wrestled with the perplexing issue of how Russia could preserve the traditions of the Orthodox faith while adjusting to new challenges served up by rapid urbanization and industrialization, scientific positivism, radical unbelief, societal unrest, and subversive revolutionary ideologies, whether Western democratic or Marxist.

Dostoevsky’s genuine concern for Russia’s welfare was especially laudatory because the tsarist police had treated him very poorly. Falsely accused of being a socialist revolutionary, Dostoevsky—at the time a Utopian—was sentenced to death before a firing squad. His life was spared at the last minute due to a reprieve. He was obliged to do forced labor during a ten-year prison sentence at the Omsk Fortress, Siberia. He lived under horrendous conditions.

C. Religion in the Twilight of the Tsarist Romanov Dynasty#

At the dawn of the twentieth century, many Russian people, despite economic distress, strikes by workers, and unrest among peasants, did not have a premonition that they were living in the twilight years of the Romanov Dynasty.

• They viewed suffering, poverty, and injustice as inescapable conditions of any age.

• They had just experienced a decade of severe famines.

Certainly, a number of non – Russian Orthodox and unconventional religious groups existed, but most did not appear politically subversive.

• “God-seeking” intellectuals, writers, and artists searched for encounters with the divine through the paths of theosophy, spiritualism, kabbalistic studies, and Eastern mysticism.

• Some members of Russia’s educated classes participated in Masonic lodges and dabbled in occult practices (possibly even Satanism).

• Russian peasants evidenced a fascination for “supernatural” phenomena.

Protestant missionaries reported an openness for their evangelistic efforts among the Russian nobility. In the 1870s the Englishman Granville A. W. Waldegrave, Lord Radstock, was invited to lead Bible studies with prominent Russian military figures and nobles in Saint Petersburg. Colonel Vasilii A. Pashkov and Count Korff were converted to Christ and helped organize evangelical meetings.

The government’s expulsion of Lord Radstock from Russia in 1878 did not thwart the evangelical advance. Sharing Radstock’s Plymouth Brethren convictions, the German educator Frederick Baedeker (1823–1906) continued the work. Baedeker not only ministered in the palatial homes of Russian nobles such as Princess Nathalie Lieven, but gained permission to distribute Russian Bibles at prisons in Saint Petersburg and far-off Siberia.

In 1884 Colonel Pashkov organized a meeting attended by Shtundists, Baptists, Mennonites, and Pashkovites. Police broke up the meeting and arrested the Russians present. Colonel Pashkov was ordered to leave Russia. As a result, John Kargel, a friend of Colonel Pashkov and a minister at the German Baptist congregation in Saint Petersburg, decided to leave Russia. In 1884 he founded a Baptist church in Ruse, Bulgaria, only to return to Russia to work with Pashkovites.

“Shtundists” — from the German Stunde, meaning “an hour” — were Orthodox believers influenced by revivalist German Pietists. They regularly studied the Bible for hours, as their name implied.

In 1894 specific anti-Shtundist laws were drawn up. The government suspected peasant Shtundists of involvement in the so-called “Chigirin populist conspiracy.”

In 1914 an estimated 100,000 Mennonites lived in Russia (as well as Swiss Amish and Hutterites). During the reign of Catherine the Great, German Mennonites, who often originated from Anabaptist communities in the United Provinces, had immigrated to Russia from Prussia, Switzerland, and other countries. The Mennonites considered leaving Prussia because its government demanded they partake in military service. In 1789 and 1803, groups of Mennonites decided to take advantage of the Russian state’s offer of free land, especially in southern Russia.

Various Mennonite groups in Russia such as the Mennonite Brethren, the Kleine Gemeide, the Kirchliche Mennoniten, and the Krimmer Brethren formed autonomous, agrarian colonies.

• They maintained their own schools and churches with a congregational polity and governing administrations.

• They continued to speak German dialects, preserved traditional Mennonite beliefs and customs, and as pacifists remained exempt from military service.

In the 1870s, however, fearing that the Russian government would soon take away their special exemptions, a number of Mennonites opted to immigrate to Canada (Manitoba) and to the United States (Kansas).

In 1882 disparate Russian Mennonite groups came together to form the General Conference of Mennonite Congregations. They adopted as their principle, “Unity in essentials, tolerance in non-essentials, moderation in all things.”

D. The Russian Revolution of 1905–7#

For many Russians, “Bloody Sunday” — January 22, 1905 — shattered any illusions they had retained of living in a politically and socially stable society. In all likelihood, at least one thousand were killed, including women and children.

Across the empire, strikes broke out in Saint Petersburg, Kiev, Varsovie, Bakou, Lodz, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Odessa, Riga, and elsewhere. Peasants torched chateaus in Georgia and the Volga area. “Soviets” (counsels) made their appearance in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

Nihilists, anarchists, and Marxists stirred hot fires of rebellion. In 1898 Vladimir Ilyich Oulianov (better known as Lenin), who in 1895 had been arrested, imprisoned, and exiled in Siberia, organized the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In 1899 he wrote that the final end of the class struggle was “the seizure of political power by the proletariat and the organization of a socialist society.”

By contrast, Father George Gapon, the Russian Orthodox priest who organized the demonstration of January 22, 1905, was neither a revolutionary provocateur nor a hireling for the tsarist secret police. Like a number of other priests, he wanted to improve the lot of oppressed workers in Saint Petersburg. The government had been informed of the marchers’ intention to present a petition of economic and political demands, thinking that the tsar, like a father, would hear them out. Members of the processions that converged on the tsar’s Winter Palace (though he was not present) little expected that volleys of deadly bullets would cut them down.

Father Gapon had previously served as a missionary for the Society of Moral-Religious Enlightenment, a group that attempted to ameliorate the cultural life of workers. Then he organized the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers to function as a labor union. He hoped to negotiate better working conditions for its members, because he felt obliged to engage in social action.

The events of Bloody Sunday and the ensuing chaos and insurrections deeply troubled Tsar Nicholas II. He resorted to force to suppress dissenters, but in time, he did offer new rights to the Russian people.

• In a manifesto in October 1905 he acknowledged that the revolution threatened the stability of his regime, but also showcased the ways he sought “the improvement of order in the state.”

• He permitted participation in the Duma (state government) for “those classes of the population which are at present deprived of voting powers” and granted “fundamental civil freedoms,” including “real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association.”

The manifesto satisfied the demands of some revolutionaries, who desisted from any further rebellious activity, but the government arrested Father Gapon. The Russian Orthodox Church later defrocked him. In 1906 he was found hung.

After 1905, several Protestant groups benefitted from the new religious liberties. The number of Baptists and other evangelicals grew rapidly, to the discomfort of Russian Orthodox clergy. Most sadly, the Jews were once again targets of a devastating pogrom (1903–6).

Nicholas II did not sufficiently address the economic and social grievances that had helped precipitate the 1905 revolution, and resentments against the tsarist Romanov family simmered. During the First World War, the Germans helped Lenin, who had been in exile, to return to Russia.

Lenin, a skilled organizer, knew how to exploit grievances and social injustices. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, he and his Bolshevik colleagues seized power. Nicholas II abdicated his throne, and members of the royal family were incarcerated. In the early morning of July 17, 1918, the tsar was told that he and his family were going to be moved to a place of safekeeping. They were led into a basement by twelve men, who then shot them to death: Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria), their son, four daughters, and a number of servants and a physician. Some other family members were also stabbed. The victims’ bodies were hauled away to a secluded woods, where they were soaked in benzine and sulpheric acid and burned — a vain effort to cover up the hideous crime. The twilight years of the Romanov Dynasty had come to a dramatic and tragic end.

The Russian Orthodox Church had backed “White Russian” (Belorussian) soldiers. These forces were defeated by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in a civil war. The Bolsheviks took over power in October 1917. As victors, Lenin and his colleagues proceeded to deal a severe blow to the church, stipulating that it would no longer be the official state church of Russia.

E. Eastern Orthodox Christian Churches and Ottoman Rule#

Besides the Russian Orthodox Church, other members of the Orthodox family of churches included the Oriental Orthodox, whose long history stretched back into a distant, late patristic past. They belonged to the Assyrian, Nestorian, and Chaldean churches and to the non-Chalcedonian churches in Antioch and India, the Coptic Church in Egypt, the Armenian Church, and the Ethiopian Church.

Toward the mid-nineteenth century, Eastern Orthodox patriarchs, even if subjected to Ottoman rule, viewed themselves as members of the same “Orthodox Church.” They were united in disputing the right of the pope in Rome to dictate their beliefs and practices.

In 1848 the Eastern Orthodox patriarchs of Constantinople (the ecumenical patriarch), Alexandria (Egypt), Antioch (Anatolia), and Jerusalem (Palestine) issued a joint encyclical in which they thanked God for their “Apostolic Baptism,” the “Orthodox Faith,” and Christ’s “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.”

• This encyclical rebuked the papacy of Pius IX for having not “ceased to annoy the peaceful Church of God,” by sending “everywhere so-called missionaries, men of reprobate minds” to win the Orthodox to the Roman Catholic faith.

• They claimed that the pope had engaged in “despotism” by attempting to assert his authority over them.

• Moreover, they accused him of purveying the “new doctrine” that “the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and the Son” among other false doctrines. For the Orthodox, the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father.

Whereas officials of the Roman Catholic Church accused the Orthodox of destroying church unity, Eastern apologists riposted that it was the Catholic Church that had subverted church unity by attempting to force false doctrine on Eastern Christians.

Eastern Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants under Ottoman rule lived in a world where they rubbed shoulders with peoples of mixed ethnic and religious backgrounds. They sometimes lived in the same neighborhoods as Muslims, filed lawsuits in Muslim court systems, and generally had friendly relations their Muslim neighbors.

Europeans and Americans in Ottoman lands pursued varying goals and occupations.

• Some worked in business, trade, and diplomacy or for the military.

• Others served as educators, missionaries, and pastors or priests, or lived as members of monastic orders.

European Protestant missionaries held out the hope that the ancient Eastern Orthodox churches under Ottoman control might be “reformed.”

A number of Western missionaries ministered directly to Muslims. They founded well-respected Christian schools that Muslim students attended.

Some Americans and Europeans were also enticed by exotic travel accounts to visit Ottoman lands as tourists. Their romantic reveries of the Middle East were sometimes dashed by what they actually saw during their touring junkets. Although impressed by the ancient monuments of Egypt, Melville was rudely disappointed by his visit to Palestine. He lamented, “No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine.”

A number of American, French, British, and German scholars were fascinated by the Middle East. After all, it included Palestine, the “Holy Land,” brimming with biblical sites just waiting to be explored.

• In 1841 the American Edward Robinson, Professor of Bible at Union Theological Seminary, New York, published a seminal work in three volumes, Biblical Researches in Palestine, the Sinai, Petraea and Adjacent Regions.

• In 1842 Paul-Emile Botta began digs at the ancient Assyrian capitals of Ninevah and Khorsabad.

• In 1858 Carl Keil defined the exciting new discipline of “biblical archaeology”

• The Egyptologist Flinders Petrie (1853–1943) developed stratigraphical guidelines (analysis of deposited layers) that permitted more accurate historical readings of excavations.

• In 1894 George Adam Smith published the influential Historical Geography of the Holy Land.

To fund archaeological explorations, respected societies were created: the Palestine Exploration Fund (1865), the Deutscher Palätina-Verein (1877), the École Biblique (1890), and the American School of Oriental Research (1900).

Some Ottomans on occasion did demonstrate unbounded hostility toward Christians residing in lands under their control. The Armenians, in particular, suffered profoundly due to horrific massacres and deportations: the Hamidian Massacre, 1894–96; the Adana Massacre, 1909; and — worst of all — the Armenian Genocide (a term the Republic of Turkey repudiates), 1915–17.

F. The Creation of Independent, Nationalistic Orthodox Churches#

The Eastern Orthodox not only at times suffered persecution from Ottomans, but also experienced conflicts among themselves. Orthodox Christians often had differing views on what should be normative in their church governance. They wanted to hold onto their own languages, cultures, education, and forms of worship.

By contrast, highly educated Phanariot Greeks, whether members of the clergy or merchant classes, often insisted that the Greek language and Hellenic culture in general should prevail in Orthodox lands. The Phanariots, who served as agents of the sultans, worked closely with the patriarch of Constantinople. Sometimes they governed other Orthodox Christians in the millet system.

The patriarch of Constantinople frequently chose Greek bishops with a Phanariot background to direct church life in Balkan states under Ottoman control. Orthodox Christians in these lands sometimes strongly resented what they perceived to be strong-armed attempts of the Phanariots to impose Hellenic culture on them.

A deep-seated desire to preserve local languages, customs, beliefs, and practices could incite some Orthodox Christians to revolt against the Phanariots and the Ottomans. They sought to throw off the yoke of the Ottomans, establish autocephalous (self-governing) Orthodox churches, and if possible, reach some form of understanding with the patriarch of Constantinople. Sometimes they looked to the Russians for military assistance in their quest to gain liberation from the Ottomans.

In 1821 the Greek War for Independence broke out. Germanos, the Metropolitan of Old Patras, called for Greeks to revolt against the Turks.

• In the ensuing struggle, Greek revolutionaries massacred Turks, and Turks massacred Greeks.

• By 1832, with the help of European powers, the Greeks had won their independence from the Ottomans.

• In 1833 Greek bishops founded an autocephalous church. The power of the Phanariots was largely checked.

• In 1850 the patriarchate in Constantinople recognized the Orthodox Church in Greece.

In 1804 a Serbian revolution broke out. Eventually, in 1879, the Serbian kingdom won its independence from the Turks and established Serbian bishops as leaders of its church.

Under the leadership of Vassil Levski, hailed as an “Apostle of Freedom,” a movement for Bulgarian independence from the Ottoman Turks gained momentum. In 1870 the Ottoman Turks recognized the independent status of the Bulgarian church. Then in May 1876 the Ottoman Turks harshly suppressed a Bulgarian insurrection, and many Bulgarians were massacred in cold blood.

In 1877–78 the Russians helped the Bulgarians win freedom from the Turks. In 1884 John Kargel founded a Baptist church in Ruse. Despite much opposition, a second Baptist church was formed in Lorn and later a third in Sofia.

A 1900 census indicated there were 3,744,223 Bulgarians, of whom 80.6 percent (over 3 million) were Greek Orthodox; 17.4 percent were Muslims; 0.7 percent were Catholics of the Latin Rite and Uniate Greeks; and 0.12 percent (just over 4,500) were Protestants.

Romania was made up of Wallachia and Moldavia. These states were ruled by the Ottoman Turks until the Turks were defeated in the Russian-Turkish War of 1828–29, after which they became essentially Russian protectorates. But then the Russians were defeated in the Crimean War, and the Congress of Paris placed the protectorates under Turkish control.

• In 1872 the Orthodox churches came together and formed an autocephalous Romanian Orthodox Church.

• In 1883 the patriarchate of Constantinople recognized this church.

• In 1883 the Romanian Catholic Church of the Latin Rite was established with its center in Bucharest.

• In 1856 Germans founded the first Baptist church in Romania.

By 1919 there were 600 Baptist churches in Romania with 19,000 in attendance.

The creation of nationalistic, independent Orthodox churches with their own ethnic identities dramatically reduced the number of faithful who accepted the ecclesiastical authority of the patriarchate of Constantinople.

IX. CONCLUSION#

The fall of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789, signaled the collapse of western Europe’s “Old Order.” The French Revolution and Napoleonic era contributed further to the dissembling of the Ancien régime. After 1814, some Europeans attempted to restore European institutions to a pre-1789 status. They had only limited success in their campaign.

A number focused their efforts on strengthening the Christian churches in the face of countervailing, hostile secular forces. The papacy’s influence on European culture increased. Revivals of the Christian faith in Europe and significant missionary expansion overseas did take place. At the end of the nineteenth century, many Europeans still believed they lived in “Christian” countries.

On June 28, 1914, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, helped precipitate the collapse of “liberal democratic Christian” Europe. This assassination served as a trip wire setting off what became known as World War I or “the Great War.”

Ominous war reports from Europe greatly distressed Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States and a man of strong Christian convictions.

The horrific sounds of destruction and death generally rendered the western front in Europe anything but “quiet.”

• Combatants settled into the murderous savagery of trench warfare.

• Trenches were dug for hundreds of miles from Switzerland to the North Sea.

• A heavily barb-wired “no-man’s-land” of scarred and scorched earth and deadly land mines separated the antagonists.

• The introduction of gas warfare made the fighting particularly lethal.

• The fusillades of tanks and strafing planes added to the maiming and killing.

• The trenches were often flooded with water.

• The number of casualties on both sides escalated.

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1914, at the beginning of the war, something surprising happened. An unofficial truce spread after the Germans and the English sang Christmas songs within hearing distance of each other’s trenches. One soldier recounted his amazement that the Germans and the English enjoyed singing the same Christmas carols together.

Sensing a Christmas spirit of goodwill, a number of the soldiers climbed out of their trenches and walked into no-man’s-land without their weapons. There they exchanged pleasantries, cigarettes, and small items with enemy soldiers who had likewise climbed out of their trenches. There was even a pickup game of soccer between some of the Germans and the English.

Commanding officers later chided their soldiers for having fraternized with the enemy. The deadly trench warfare lasted for three years.

It is noteworthy that the Germans and the English were fighting for nations that had lingering “Christian” cultures. The soldiers had been raised with some kind of contact with the Christian faith, if only learning the lyrics of traditional Christmas carols. But now their “Christian nations” were at war.