Miss Buddha (108 page)

On the other hand, the papacy could not
afford to let a national church become the puppet of a political
regime.

The Crusades

There is, however, nothing like a common foe
to close ranks, and the Church and State did exactly that when
joining forces during the crusades.

The Muslim conquest of Jerusalem meant that
the holy places associated with the life of Jesus were now under
the control of a non-Christian power; and even though the reports
of interference with Christian pilgrims were often highly
exaggerated, the conviction grew that it was the will of God for
Christian armies to liberate the Holy Land.

As of the First Crusade (1095), the
campaigns of liberation did manage to establish a Latin
patriarchate in Jerusalem; but a century later Jerusalem had
returned to Muslim rule, and within 200 years the last Christian
outpost had fallen.

In this sense the Crusades were a failure,
or even—in the case of the Fourth Crusade of 1202-1204—a disaster.
They did not permanently restore Christian rule to the Holy Land,
and they did not unify the West either ecclesiastically or
politically.

Philosophical Advancements

A more impressive achievement of the
medieval church during the period of the Crusades was the
development of Scholastic philosophy and theology.

Building as always on the
foundations of the musings of Saint Augustine, Latin theologians
turned their attention to the relation between the knowledge of God
attainable by
unaided human reason
and the knowledge communicated by
revelation
.

Saint Anselm took as his motto “I believe in
order that I might understand” and based on that proceeded to
construct a proof for the existence of God based on the structure
of human thought itself—the ontological argument.

At about the same time, Peter Abelard was
examining the contradictions between various strains in the
doctrinal tradition of the church, hoping to develop methods of
harmonization.

These two (major
philosophical) tasks dominated the thinking of the
12
^th
and
13
^th
centuries, until the recovery of the lost works of Aristotle
made available a set of definitions and distinctions that could be
applied to both.

The philosophical theology of Saint Thomas
Aquinas sought to do justice to the natural knowledge of God while
at the same time exalting the revealed knowledge in the gospel, and
so wove the disparate parts of the tradition into a unified whole.
Together with such contemporaries as Saint Bonaventure, Aquinas
represents the intellectual ideal of medieval Christianity.

However, by the time Aquinas died, storms
had already begun to gather over the Western church. In 1309 the
papacy fled Rome to Avignon, where it remained until 1377 during
the so-called Babylonian Captivity of the church. This was followed
by the Great Schism, during which there were two (and sometimes
even three) claimants to the papal throne. That was not resolved
until 1417, but the reunited papacy found it impossible to regain
control or even respect.

Reformation and Counter Reformation

By this time, reformers of many colors
denounced the now quite obvious moral laxity and financial
corruption that had blighted the church “in its members and in its
head” and called for radical change.

Martin Luther was the catalyst that sparked
the new movement.

His personal struggle for religious
certainty led him, actually against his will, to question the
medieval system of salvation and the very authority of the church
itself, and his subsequent excommunication by Pope Leo X was the
step beyond any point of return that eventually lead to the
division of Western Christendom.

This reform movement was
not confined to Luther’s Germany. Native reform movements in
Switzerland found leadership in John Calvin, whose
Institutes of the Christian Religion
became the most influential synopsis of the new
theology.

The soon-to-follow English Reformation,
provoked in part by the troubles of King Henry VIII, was to reflect
the influence of both the Lutheran and the Calvinistic reforms, but
it took its own “middle course,” retaining some Catholic elements
such as the historic episcopate (too wealthy and politically
influential to dismantle, methinks) alongside Protestant elements
such as the sole authority of the Bible.

In his native France, Calvin and his
teachings helped establish the Huguenot party—initially fiercely
opposed by both church and state, but finally recognized with the
Edict of Nantes in 1598 (though ultimately revoked in 1685).

The more radical Reformation groups, notably
the Anabaptists, set themselves against other Protestants as well
as against Rome, rejecting such long-established practices as
infant baptism and sometimes even such dogmas as the Trinity and
denouncing the alliance of church and state.

That alliance of church and state, however,
helped determine the ultimate outcome of the Reformation, which
succeeded where it gained the support of the new national
states.

As a consequence of these ties to a rising
national spirit, the Reformation also helped create the literary
milestones—especially translations of the Bible from its revered
Latin to the vernacular—that were to decisively shape the language
and the spirit of many peoples.

The Reformation also gave fresh stimulus to
biblical preaching and to worship in the vernacular, for which a
new hymnody came into being.

Because of its emphasis on the participation
of all believers in worship and confession, the Reformation also
developed systems for instruction in doctrine and ethics,
especially in the form of catechisms, and an ethic of service in
the world.

However, the Protestant Reformation did not
entirely exhaust the spirit of reform within the Roman Catholic
Church, for in response both to the Protestant challenge and to its
own needs, the church summoned the Council of Trent, which
continued over the years 1545-1563, giving definitive formulation
to doctrines at issue and legislating practical reforms in liturgy,
church administration, and education.

The task of carrying out the decisions of
the council fell on the Society of Jesus, formed by Saint Ignatius
of Loyola. It is also worthy of note that the time coincidence of
the discovery of the New World and the Reformation was seen by the
Roman Catholic Church as a providential opportunity to evangelize
those who had never heard the gospel.

The bottom line here is that the Council of
Trent on the Roman Catholic side and the many confessions of faith
on the Protestant side had the effect of making the division
between the two Christian Churches permanent.

The Modern Period

Already apparent during the
Renaissance and Reformation, and even more so during the
17
^th
and
18
^th
centuries, it grew increasingly clear that Christianity would
have to define (and defend) itself in response to the rise of
modern science and philosophy.

The condemnation of Galileo Galilei by the
Inquisition on suspicion of heresy was eventually to find its
Protestant counterpart in the controversies that arose over the
impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution on the biblical account of
creation, which begged to differ.

While theory of evolution was a major bone
of contention between Christianity and Science, it was not an
isolated conflict but just one of the modern movements that put
Christianity on the defensive.

One such was the
17
^th
-century critical-historical method of studying the Bible,
which threatened the authority of Scripture and which eventually
led to the condemnation of Enlightenment rationalism as a, what the
Church called, “a source of religious indifference and
anticlericalism.”

Even democracy, due to its emphasis on the
human capacity to determine human destiny, would soon also be
denounced by the Church.

And it grew worse. The
increasing secularization of society gradually removed the Church’s
control from other areas of civic life, especially
education,
which it had once wholly
controlled.

Church versus State

This eventually led to a fundamental
redefinition of the relation between Christianity and the civil
order: the granting of religious toleration to minority faiths and
an ongoing separation of church and state was a deep and radical
departure for a system that had held sway over much of the Western
world since the conversion of Constantine the Great and is, one
must conclude, the most far-reaching change in the modern history
of Christianity.

New ecumenical movements have since tried to
bring together, or at least bring toward a better
understanding—though sometimes even toward reunion—various
Christian denominations that separated long ago. It is, after all,
supposed to be the same religion.

Important steps in this direction were taken
at the Second Vatican Council, where the Roman Catholic Church
moved toward reconciliation both with the East and with
Protestantism.

That same council also expressed, and for
the first time in an official forum, a positive appreciation of the
genuine spiritual power present in the world religions.

The relation between
Christianity and its parent, Judaism, has always been that between
a father and a problem child, but after many centuries of hostility
and even persecution, the two faiths have now moved toward a closer
degree of mutual understanding than at any time since the
1
^st
century.

The reactions of the churches to their
changed situation in the modern world have also led to increased
theological interest.

Reformation

Such Protestant theologians as Jonathan
Edwards and Friedrich Schleiermacher and such Roman Catholic
thinkers as Blaise Pascal and John Henry Newman launched a
reorientation of the traditional apologias for their respective
faiths, this time drawing upon religious experience (rather than
pure scriptural survey) as a validation of the reality of the
divine.

Thus, the
19
^th
century proved to be a preeminent time of historical research
into the development of Christian ideas and institutions, which
research not only indicated to many that no particular form of
doctrine or church structure could claim to be absolute and final
(most, if not all of it, being hearsay in the first place), but it
also provided other theologians with new resources for
reinterpreting the Christian message.

Subsequent literary investigation of the
biblical books—although viewed with suspicion by many
conservatives—led to new insights about how the Bible had been
composed and assembled; and the study of liturgy, combined with the
understanding that ancient forms did not always make sense to the
modern era, also brought reform to the worship.

Church versus Modern State

The ambivalent relation of the Christian
faith to modern culture, seen in all these trends, is also evident
in the role it has played in social and political history.

You would find Christians
on both sides of the 19
^th
-century debates over
slavery—
both
(naturally)
using biblical
arguments
, while much inspiration feeding
revolution, from the French to the Russian, was explicitly
anti-Christian.

The
20
^th
-century Marxist regimes, in particular, actually oppressed
the Christians for their faith, and their traditional beliefs were
denounced (politically speaking) as reactionary. Nevertheless, the
revolutionary faith has frequently drawn from Christian
sources.

Mohandas K. Gandhi always maintained that he
was acting in the spirit of Jesus Christ, and Martin Luther King,
Jr. was, in fact, a Protestant preacher who strove to base his
political program on the message of the Sermon on the Mount.

By the last quarter of the
20
^th
century, the missionary movements of the various strands of
the Church had carried the Christian faith to every corner of the
world.

One characteristic of modern times, however,
saw a radical change of leadership in the far-away mission
churches. In fact, since World War II leadership in such daughter
churches have increasingly been assumed by local or national
clergymen from the previously prevalent Western leadership of Roman
Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant churches in the Third World.

Spreading the faith world-wide has, however,
not been frictionless, and adaptations or assimilation of native
customs have often posed problems of both theology and tradition,
as, for example, when African polygamists attempt to live Christian
family lives.

Among Protestants,
evangelicalism saw a resurgence of strength during the late
20
^th
and
early 21
^st
centuries, and many, including Pentecostals and
Fundamentalists, again emphasized the authority of the Bible,
personal commitment to Jesus, and salvation through
faith.

On the family and on other
social issues, this resurgence tended to take a conservative
stance. Some leaders questioned the teaching of evolution in
schools, while many American Catholics regretted what they saw as
their church’s failure to remain relevant in the late
20
^th
and
early 21
^st
centuries.