without communion or collegiality, divided by assertions of truth. All that bound the Protestant sects was their rejection of Catholicism and often the doctrine of justification by faith alone, but beyond this they splintered as a ship crashed upon rocks. If one affirms that the Reformation saved the church, he must simultaneously affirm that this salvation fractured the body of Christ, intensifying the tragedy of the Great Western Schism.
In the Reformation the body of Christ suffered from a deeper schism, that between the body and the soul as between works and faith. Justification by faith alone, the doctrinal anchor of the Protestant revolution, announced that what is outward has nothing to do with what is inward, that the works of the body have no relevance for the state of the soul. Faith alone belongs to salvation, and the works of the body, while notable, are qualitatively lesser in importance. But just as one separates the soul of man from his body and the latter dies, with the flesh breaking down into uncountable pieces, so if one separates the faith of Christians from the physical reality of Christ’s body in the Church and its’ good works, then that body also dies, fracturing into bits.
The result of the Reformation consists in no small part in the Wars of Religion, in which Protestants fought Catholics to the death, with each side persecuting the other when it was able. One can recall Mary Tudor, Queen of England, who imposed a series of repressive measures against Protestants in returning England to subservience to the pope. During her reign, open persecution of Protestants became the official policy of the English kingdom, for which she earned the name “Bloody Mary.” France saw various periods of killing, from the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which murdered thousands of Protestants in 1572, to further oppression of Protestants under Cardinal Richelieu in the 1620’s (despite the Edict of Nantes (1598), which allowed for Protestant religion), with Protestantism officially outlawed in 1685 under the Edict of Fontainebleau. Religious war in Germany occurred on multiple occasions, from the War of Schmalkald, fought during the life of Luther, to the 30 Years’ War (1618–1648). The latter, known in Germany as “The War of Total Destruction,” was the bloodiest period in German history prior to the twentieth century. It also involved powers outside of Germany who came to the aid of one side or the other.
How is it that Christians can kill one another, with each side denouncing the other as heretics and spilling blood in the confidence of its righteousness? How do Christian motives (the desire for purity of worship and the glory of God) intertwine with political intrigue and yearnings for freedom, so that the claim of divine authority validates lethal force? The Bible allows no justification for schism and exhorts Christians to love one another! Yet schism broke out with the Reformation, in whose wake those who called themselves Christian hated others who took that name, and in which the confusion and competing claims of righteousness raised such a clamor that men doubted that God deserved recognition in human affairs. It is no wonder that, after the Puritan Revolution in England (1640–49), the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes envisioned a world with God distanced from politics and human nature, and in which men lusted for combat with each other. The house divided becomes a desert indeed.
During the early modern era religious men began to reject the organized church, with notable persons leading the charge. George Fox imagined a church without a liturgical structure, eventually founding the Quaker religion. This version of Christianity does away with all form in worship, believing that the Spirit must flow freely through the individual conscience to contribute to communal life. Here there is no pastor and of course no priest, and freedom reigns supreme. Anne Hutchinson also found herself outside of the organized church of Puritan New England, although not because she rejected that church but because she supposed herself to stand above it. She began to preach beyond her rights according to local authorities, drawing people by her knowledge and asserting that God had spoken to her directly. The Massachusetts colony exiled her but she had made her mark on the American consciousness. Not far from her was Roger Williams, a Baptist whose pursuit of a pure worship of God drove him out the church and toward the Indians before convincing him to take leave of religious society altogether. Such persons serve as the template for the modern disavowal of the church, the body of Christ torn this way and that by those who believe that they can adhere to it according to their own judgment.
Reliance on individual conscience flowered further in the United States following the American Revolution. From the 1790’s to the 1820’s, the period referred to as the Second Great Awakening, a multitude of Christian movements and new denominations exploded onto the American scene, expanding as the population moved West. The Baptists and Methodists were skilled at making converts along the frontier, adding daily to their numbers, gathering the people at camp meetings characterized by emotional preaching and occasionally raucous behavior. The Black church gained a foothold in the United States during this era, breaking away from white society in the North in order to found communities in which race did not entail second-class citizenship.
The age suffered from anxiety regarding religious authority. In this time and land the pope was forgotten and truth was supposed to come from the Bible alone. As each man read the Bible for himself the interpretations proliferated, and with numerous interpretations came conflicts, denomination against denomination and sect against sect, man against man, until the heads of devout believers spun on their shoulders. In such circumstances men went to their private rooms in order to discern truth for themselves, reading the Bible in solitude and without thought for the authority of pastor, priest, or church council. The times provided ample room for men like Alexander Campbell, Barton Stone, and their peers to found new movements. Those originally known as the Christians rose dramatically before eventually settling as the Church of Christ, while Joseph Smith proclaimed revelations from an angel and additions to Scripture as the authority supporting his teaching. Everywhere one looked, one saw that “All Christendom has been decomposed, broken in pieces, and resolved into new combinations and affinities,” while “every theological vagabond and peddler may drive here his bungling trade, without passport or license, and sell his false ware at pleasure.” This assessment comes from Philip Schaff, a nineteenth century historian, who adds that “what is to come of such confusion is not now to be seen.”
But what has come of it is now, in the twenty-first century, very much accomplished: the Christian house has divided and continues to divide, and it has become a desert. The American nation has left God behind in fulfillment of the words of Christ, as the house divided falls upon itself. Although churches still have members, liberal Protestantism has all but died and Evangelicalism senses that it is next, struggling to retain its children. Scholars speak of a post-Christian society, a world in which religious moorings are antiquities, in which men grow distant from one another as they forget God.
I urge you, you devout and God-fearing churchgoers, you men and women who take your faith to heart, to think soberly on the testimony of Scripture against the Western church. Consider the words of Christ and of Paul, consider the design of God to unify men in the Son, and then consider the breakdown of the church in the West, the theological disputes and competition of the Awakenings, the blood and desolation of the Wars of Religion, the exile of the papacy from its home and the sorrow of the Great Western Schism. Think about the modern age in which men have become atomized and self-determining, in which they believe that they can worship Christ and forsake their fellow men. The worship of a bodiless Christ was known as Docetism and castigated as a heresy in the first century; we in the twenty-first century have our own Docetism, the worship of Christ apart from his body the church. Or has the church not died through division? And are we not accomplices in that death so long as we embrace the corpse?8
I exhort you, brethren, to look to the Eastern Church. Although not without its own challenges and practical flaws, Orthodoxy has not endured the division that plagues the West. It has also struggled to maintain the spirit of the ancient councils, of the tradition of meekness and gentleness in mind and heart, of self-control and love of neighbor. It teaches how to practice the presence of God and to strive for union with Christ. I gently encourage you to look to the East, foreign as it is for many Western believers, and to pray upon it as a home for those dismayed by the fate of Western Christendom.
