The history of Christianity is part of the history of a great many civilizations. Christianity's influence has been both vast and inextricably intertwined with the histories of the many cultures it has inhabited. It has been a source of social services. It has introduced and furthered literacy and education, created and managed hospitals and hospices, invented and spread technologies and spurred economic development. Christian history includes instances of intolerance and violence that were part of the development of European cultural identity, politics, law, human rights, ideas on separation of church and state, and practices of tolerance and intolerance, activism and emancipation. Christianity has impacted the status of women, children and the poor, race and gender, and issues of justice and injustice. Art and architecture, music and philosophy, family life, marriage, and even views on sex have been affected by it.
"Christian history" redirects here. For the magazine, see Christian History.
The first Christian communities began in Judea, a province of the Roman Empire, in the second quarter of the first century. They swiftly spread into the Jewish diaspora,[7][8] along the trade and travel routes followed by merchants, soldiers, and migrating tribes, moving from fewer than 50,000 adherents to over a million in the hundred years between 150 and 250.[9][10][11] Driven by a universalist logic, Christianity has been, from its beginnings, a missionary faith with global aspirations, leading it to become a part of the history of a great many civilizations.[12][13]
Jewish Christianity was foundational and remained influential in Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor into the second and third centuries.[14][15][note 1] Judaism and Christianity diverged over disagreements about Jewish law, Jewish insurrections against Rome which Christians did not support, and the development of Rabbinic Judaism by the Pharisees, the sect which had rejected Jesus while he was alive.[26] The religious, social, and political climate of the area was diverse and often characterized by turmoil.[17][27] Romans of this era feared civil disorder, giving their highest regard to peace, harmony and order.[28] Piety equalled loyalty to family, class, city and emperor. This was demonstrated through the practices and rituals of the old religious ways.[29]
Christianity was largely tolerated, but some also saw it as a threat to "Romanness" which produced localized persecution by mobs and governors.[30][31] The first reference to persecution by a Roman Emperor is under Nero, probably in 64 AD, in the city of Rome. Scholars conjecture that the Apostles Peter and Paul were killed then.[32]
It is well documented that from 250-311, religious sentiment in the Roman Empire rose.[33] In 250, the emperor Decius made it a capital offence to refuse to make sacrifices to Roman gods, resulting in widespread persecution of Christians.[34][35]Valerian pursued similar policies later that decade. The last and most severe official persecution, the Diocletianic Persecution, took place in 303–311.[36] There was periodic persecution of Christians by Persian Sassanian authorities, and the term "Hellene" became equated with pagan during this period.[33]
Beginning with less than 1000 people, Christianity had grown to around one hundred small household churches consisting of an average of seventy members each, by the year 100.[39] It achieved critical mass in the hundred years between 150 and 250 when it moved from fewer than 50,000 adherents to over a million. This provided enough adopters for its growth rate to be self-sustaining.[10][11]
Early Christianity was in Gaul, North Africa, and the city of Rome.[45][46][47] It spread (in its Arian form) in the Germanic world during the latter part of the third-century, and probably reached Roman Britain by the third-century at the latest.[48][48]
According to the Gospels, Christianity began with the itinerant preaching and teaching of a deeply pious young Jewish man, Jesus of Nazareth.[50] Virtually all scholars of antiquity accept that Jesus was a historical figure.[51][52] His followers came to believe Jesus was the Son of God, the Christ, a title in Greek for the Hebrew term mashiach (Messiah) meaning “the anointed one.” Jesus was crucified c.AD30–33 in Jerusalem, and after his death and burial, his disciples proclaimed they had seen him alive and raised from the dead. Thereafter, he was said to be exalted by God.[17][50] These became founding doctrines of Christianity.[53] From its beginnings, the church has held baptism and the celebration of the eucharist (the Last Supper) as its two primary rituals.[54]
Early Christianity's teachings on morality have been cited as a major factor in its growth. In contrast to traditional Roman social stratification, early Christian communities were highly inclusive being open to men and women, rich and poor, slave and free.[55][56] In groups formed by Paul the Apostle, the role of women was greater than in other religious movements.[57][58]
Intellectual egalitarianism made philosophy and ethics available to ordinary people and even slaves whom Roman culture deemed incapable of ethical reflection.[59][60] Romans saw sexual morality as determined by social and political status, power, and social reproduction. Christianity impacted sexual practices through its teachings on freewill, celibacy, gender based marriage, and the choice it granted to widows not to remarry.[61][62][63][64]
Christians distributed bread to the hungry, nurtured the sick, and showed the poor great generosity.[65][66] Their altruism created a kind of welfare state within an empire which, for the most part, had no such thing.[67][68] Early Christianity redefined family through their approach to death and burial which expanded the audience to include the extended Christian community.[69][70]
Christians had no sacrificial cult, and this set them apart from Judaism and the pagan world.[71] Christianity in its first 300 years was highly exclusive.[72] Believing was the crucial and defining characteristic that set a "high boundary" that strongly excluded non-believers.[72] This has been cited as a crucial factor in maintaining Christian independence in the syncretizing Roman religious culture.[73]
Heresy
The teachers, leaders and philosophers of early Christianity wrote about first-century Judaizers,[74] second century Gnosticism and Marcionism,[75] on into the close of the eighth century using the term "heresy" to define theological error and establish Christian identity.[76][77][note 2]
Church hierarchy
The Church as an institution began its formation quickly and with some flexibility in these early centuries.[80] Christian writings from the first-century mention bishops (or episkopoi), as overseers and presbyters as elders or priests, with deacons as 'servants', sometimes using the terms interchangeably.[81]Gerd Theissen puts forth the view that institutionalization began very early when itinerant preaching first transformed into resident leadership.[82]
First-century Christian writings in Koine Greek, including Gospels containing accounts of Jesus' ministry, letters of Paul, and letters attributed to other early Christian leaders, had considerable authority even in the formative period.[83][84] When discussion began about creating a Biblical canon to separate books seen as authoritative from those that were not, there were disputes over whether or not to include some of them.[85][86] A list of accepted books was established by the Council of Rome in 382, followed by those of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397.[87] For Christians, these became the "New Testament", and the Hebrew Scriptures became the "Old Testament".[88]
Spanning two millennia, the Bible has become one of the most influential works ever written, having contributed to the formation of Western law, art, literature, literacy and education.[89][90]
In Late Antiquity, Christianity turned the existing network of diverse Christian communities into an organization that mirrored the structure of the Roman Empire.[91][92][71] The period from the Council of Nicea (325) to the Council of Chalcedon (451) is often referred to as the "golden age" of patristic Christianity. Many of Christianity's followers transformed its art, culture, and literature, and used its internal and external relationships to define its theology, philosophy and politics.[93]
Art, literature and culture
Classical and Christian culture coexisted into the seventh century, however, over time, Christian imagery gradually replaced classical images.[94] In the fourth century, Constantine's sponsorship produced an exuberant burst of Christian art and architecture, frescoes, mosaics, and hieroglyphic type drawings, though classicism experienced a short revival under Julian the Apostate and in the Theodosian renaissance (circa 400).[95]
Among the many great orators and philosophers of the fourth and fifth centuries, prose was primary. Still, a hybrid form of poetry written in traditional classic forms with Latin style and Christian concepts began to emerge. The Christian innovation of mixing genrés demonstrated the synthesis of Christianity and classic culture that was taking place in the broader culture, while new Christian methods of interpreting and explaining history began.[96][97][98]
In Roman culture, the legal record on marriage and family shows no drive toward Christianization, yet Christianity did present a new voice on divorce, the required remarriage of widows, and the established Roman sexual double-standard.[61]
The codex (the ancestor of modern books) was consistently used by Christians as early as the first century. The church in Egypt had most likely invented the papyrus codex by the second century.[99]
Constantine the Great became emperor in the West, declared himself a Christian, and in 313, just two years after the close of Diocletian's persecution, issued the Edict of Milan expressing tolerance for all religions.[100] The Edict was a pluralist policy, and throughout the Roman Empire of the fourth to sixth centuries, people shifted between a variety of religious groups in a kind of "religious marketplace".[101][102]
Constantine did not make Christianity the official state religion.[103] Law, literature, rituals, and institutions indicate that converting the empire to Christianity was a complex, long-term, slow-paced, and uneven process with no single moment or event to mark when the Roman state might have chosen Christianity as its state religion.[104][105][106][note 3] Before Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (527–565), no Roman "Christian empire" existed.[108]
Even so, Constantine took important steps that supported and protected Christianity.[103] He gave bishops judicial power and established equal footing for Christian clergy by granting them the same immunities polytheistic priests had long enjoyed.[109] By intervening in church disputes, he initiated a precedent for ecclesiastical councils.[110][111] Constantine devoted imperial and public funds to building multiple churches, endowed his churches with wealth and lands, and provided revenue for their clergy and upkeep.[112] By the late fourth-century, there were churches in essentially all Roman cities.[113]
Polytheists
Twenty-first century scholarship has largely turned away from the idea of an epic “conflict between pagans and Christians” in Late Antiquity.[114][115] Traditional cults continued to flourish in some areas, for enough years, that scholars have no agreed upon date, or even decade, to say "when paganism ended".[116][note 4]
Still, Constantine did write laws against sacrifice using language that Peter Brown describes as "uniformly vehement" with "frequently horrifying" penalties, evidencing the intent of "terrorizing" the populace into accepting its removal.[121][note 5] Sacrifice, a central rite of virtually all religious groups in the pre-Christian Mediterranean, largely disappeared before the end of the fourth-century.[125][126][127]
Christians of the fourth-century believed Constantine's conversion was evidence the Christian God had conquered the Hellenist gods in Heaven.[128][129][130] This "triumph of Christianity" became the primary Christian narrative in writings of the late antique age in spite of Christians representing only ten to fifteen percent of the empire's population in 313. As a minority, triumph did not, generally, involve an increase in violence aimed at the polytheistic majority.[131][132]
Constantine's policy toward non-Christians was "toleration with limits", so in general, conflict between these groups was more rhetorical than actual – with a few exceptions.[133][134][135][note 6] Constantine was vigorous in reclaiming church properties that had previously been confiscated by the government, and he used reclamation to justify the destruction of some Greco-Roman temples such as Aphrodite's temple in Jerusalem.[140][141][142] There was no legislation forcing the conversion of pagans until the sixth century during reign of the Eastern Emperor Justinian I.[143][144][145][110]
Jews
Significant Jewish communities existed throughout the Christian Roman empire.[146] Jews and Christians were both religious minorities, claiming the same inheritance, competing in a direct and sometimes violent clash.[146] In the fourth-century, Augustine of Hippo argued against the persecution of the Jewish people, and a relative peace existed between Jews and Christians until the thirteenth-century.[147][148] Although anti-Semitic violence erupted occasionally, attacks on Jews by mobs, local leaders and lower-level clergy were carried out without the support of church leaders who generally accepted Augustine's teachings.[149][150]
Sometime before the fifth-century, the theology of supersessionism emerged, claiming that Christianity had displaced Judaism as God's chosen people.[151] Supersessionism was never official or universally held, but replacement theology has been part of Christian thought through much of history.[152][153] Many attribute the emergence of antisemitism to this doctrine, while others make a distinction between supersessionism and modern anti-Semitism.[154][155]
Heretics
Late Antique Christianity was dominated by its many conflicts defining and dealing with heresy and orthodoxy.[156][157] In the fourth century, the writings of the church fathers and the letters of bishops emerged as sources of authority on orthodoxy and identity, in addition to apostolic authority, and they were often used to identify and condemn heretics in a highly combative manner.[158]
The conversion of Constantine allied a monotheistic religion with a global power, both with ambitions of universality.[33] In the Roman Empire of late antiquity, the state was seen as a religious institution with no separation between "secular" and "religious". Monarchy was thought to be the only viable form of government; therefore the chief duty of all ancient monarchs was to gain heavenly favor.[164] However, after the restrictions on Christianity were removed, emperor and bishop began to share responsibility for maintaining relations with the divine.[165]
Church and State approached this differently: Constantine and his successors, attempted to fit the Church into their political program.[166] In the West, church leaders resisted by making a case for a sphere of religious authority separate from state authority.[167] Their objection forms the first clearly articulated limitation on the scope of a ruler’s power.[167]
The East
The Church of Late Antiquity was seen by its supporters as a universal church.[168][169] However, Patriarchs in the East frequently looked to the bishop of Rome to resolve disagreements for them resulting in an extension of papal power and influence.[93] Yet, the tendency for East and West to grow apart was already becoming evident.[170] The western church used Latin, while Eastern church leaders spoke and wrote in Greek and Syrian and other languages which did not always include Latin. Theological differences were already becoming evident.[171][172][173] The manner in which western and eastern churches related to the State differed. In the Roman west, the church condemned Roman culture as sinful, kept itself as separate as possible, and struggled to resist State control. This is in pointed contrast with Eastern Christianity which acclaimed harmony with Greek culture, and whose emperors and Patriarchs upheld unanimity between church and state.[174][175] One particular bone of contention was Consantinople's claims of equal precedence with Rome.[169]Pentarchy, which shared government of the church between the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and the Pope of Rome, was advocated by the legislation of the emperor Justinian, and was later confirmed by the Council in Trullo (692), but the West opposed it, advocating instead for the papal supremacy of Rome.[176][177]
Ongoing theological controversies led to the Third (431), Fourth (451), Fifth (583) and Sixth ecumenical council's (680–681) efforts to explain Jesus' human and divine natures as either one (or two) separate (or unified) natures.[178] Schisms broke out after the Council of Chalcedon (451) wrote the Chalcedonian Definition that two separate natures of Christ form one ontological entity.[179][180] Disagreement led the Armenian, Assyrian, and Egyptian churches to withdraw from Nicaean-based Catholicism, and instead, combine into what is today known as Oriental Orthodoxy, one of three major branches of Eastern Christianity, along with the Church of the East in Persia and Eastern Orthodoxy in Byzantium.[181][182][183]
Regional developments (300–600)
In Caesarea, monastics developed an unprecedented health care system that allowed the sick to be cared for in a special building at the monastery by those dedicated to their care. This gave the sick benefits which destigmatized illness, transformed health care, and led to the founding of the first public hospital by Basil the Great in Caesarea in 369, which became a model for hospitals thereafter.[184][note 8]
In North Africa during the reign of Constantine, Donatism, a Christian sect, developed. They refused - sometimes violently - to accept back into the Church those Catholics who had recanted their faith under persecution. After many appeals, the empire responded with force, and in 408 in his Letter 93, Augustine defended the government's action.[188][189] Augustine's authority on coercion was undisputed for over a millennium in Western Christianity, and according to Peter Brown, "it provided the theological foundation for the justification of medieval persecution".[190]
Until the time of Justinian, the Byzantine emperors practiced a policy of tolerance toward all religions.[198] Under Justinian, subjects were left without doubt that they lived in a Christian state.[199] Justinian's religious policies reflected his conviction that the unity of the Empire presupposed unity of faith. He persecuted pagans and religious minorities and purged the governmental bureaucracy of those who disagreed with him.[200][199] He regulated everything in religion, and in law, even interfering in papal elections.[201]
Justinian also integrated Christian ideals with Roman law.[202] The Code of Justinian became an essential part of the Corpus Juris Civilis which remains the basis of civil law in many modern states.[203] Justinian made donations to the church, established foundations, and watched over church property. He supported the rights of bishops, priests and abbots, and monastic life. Justinian rebuilt the Hagia Sophia (which cost 20,000 pounds of gold) and Byzantine culture blossomed during his reign.[204]
Asia
There is no consensus on the origins of Christianity beyond Byzantium in Asia or East Africa. Though it is scattered throughout these areas by the fourth-century, there is little documentation and no complete record.[205] Asian and African Christians did not have access to structures of power, and their institutions developed without state support.[206] Practising the Christian faith in these regions sometimes brought opposition and persecution. Asian Christianity never developed the social, intellectual and political power of Byzantium or the Latin West.[9]
In 301, Armenia became the first country to adopt Christianity as its state religion. In an environment where the religious group was without cultural or political power, the merging of church and state is thought to represent ethnic identity.[207] In the fourth century, Asia Minor, and Georgia forged national identities by adopting Christianity as their state religion, as did Ethiopia and Eritrea. In 314, King Urnayr of Albania adopted Christianity as the state religion.[208][209][210][211][43]
The Early Middle Ages were diverse, yet the concept of Christendom was also pervasive and unifying.[212][note 9] Medieval writers and ordinary folk used the term to identify themselves, their religious culture, and even their civilization. Mixed within and at the edges of this largely Christian world, barbarian invasion, deportation, and neglect also produced large “unchurched” populations.[214][215][216] In these areas, Christianity was one religion among many and could mutate with local types of paganism.[217][218] Early medieval religious culture included "worldliness and devotion, prayer and superstition", but its inner dynamic sprang from a commitment to Christendom.[212]
Regional developments (600–1000)
Christianity in the 600s was well established in the western kingdoms of the Franks in Gaul, and the Visigoths in Iberia, along the Rhine river in what would become Germany, out to the edge of Central Asia, as far as Zerang and Qandahar in modern Afghanistan, and into the Sassanian Persian Empire, with Christian churches concentrated in northern Iraq, the foothills of the Zagros, and in the trading posts of the Persian Gulf.[219][220] Ethiopia and Himyar (the Hadramawt in modern Yemen) were long-settled civilizations that were literate and even monotheist, and Christians and Jews competed for their conversion.[221] With the rise of Islam, the Nestorian church moved east to China.[222]
Towards the end of the sixth-century, two main kinds of Christian communities had formed in Syria, Egypt, Persia, and Armenia: urban churches which upheld the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE), and Nestorian churches which came from the desert monasteries.[223] After these regions came under Islamic rule, persecution of non-Muslims was devastating to the Chalcedonian churches in the cities. The monastic background of the Nestorians made their churches more remote, so they often escaped direct attention making them the most able to survive and cultivate new traditions.[224][note 10]
In southeastern Britain and Ireland, Nordic forms of paganism were introduced by Scandinavian settlers causing Christianity to adopt some aspects.[217][218] Suppression of paganism is first recorded in England in the mid 7th century.[233][234][235]
In the 720s, the Byzantine Emperor Leo banned the pictorial representation of Christ, saints, and biblical scenes, destroying much early art history. The West condemned Leo's iconoclasm.[236] By the tenth and early eleventh centuries, Byzantine culture began to recover.[237][238]
Many cultural, geographical, geopolitical, and linguistic differences between East and West existed for centuries. There were disagreements over whether the Eastern Patriarch could claim a universal jurisdiction in the East to match Rome’s jurisdiction in the West. There were differences in ritual such as the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist, and differences in points of doctrine such as the Filioque Clause and Nestorianism. There was a general lack of charity and respect on both sides. Eventually, this produced the East–West Schism, also known as the "Great Schism" of 1054, which separated the Church into Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.[258][259][260] The schism of 1054 signaled the new papal assertiveness taking place in the west.[261]
The Christian church as an institution
Law
Throughout this period, a symbiotic relationship existed between ecclesiastical institutions and civil governments. Churches were dependent upon lay rulers, and it was those rulers - not the Pope - who determined who received what ecclesiastical job on their lands.[173][262][263] Canon law and secular law were connected and often overlapped, but once the church starting gaining permanent property and possessions, it was secular property rights that were sought by the church.[264]
Canon law enabled the church to sustain itself as an institution, and wield social authority with the laity.[265] In the East, Roman law remained the tradition. After Empire fell, the West was a world of relatively weak states, endowed aristocracies and peasant communities which could no longer use law from a "fallen" empire to uphold church hierarchy.[266] Instead, the church adopted a feudalistic oath of loyalty, which became a condition of consecration affecting the hierarchy of church relations at every level.[169]
The church developed an oath of loyalty between men and their king to create a new model of consecrated kingship.[267]Janet Nelson writes that:
This rite has a continuous history in both Anglo-Saxon England and Francia from the eighth century onward, with further refinements in the ninth and tenth. It is, among other things, a remarkable application of law by early medieval churchmen in the West, to which the East offers no parallel.[267]
Canon laws were created by councils, kings and bishops, and by lay assemblies. Law was not state-sponsored, systematized, professionalized, or university-taught in this period.[265]
In 600, there was great diversity in monastic life in both East and West even though the basic characteristics of monastic spirituality - asceticism, the goal of spiritual perfection, a life of wandering or physical toil, radical poverty, preaching, and prayer - had become established. Monasteries became more and more organized from 600 to 1100.[268] The formation of these organized bodies of believers gradually carved out social spaces with authority separate from political and familial authority, thereby revolutionizing social history.[269][note 11] Medical practice was highly important, and medieval monasteries are best known for their contributions to medical care.[282] For the majority of the faithful in the early Middle Ages of both East and West, the saint was first and foremost the monk.[283]
Papal supremacy
Popes led the sixth century response to the invasion of northern Italy by the Lombards (569) producing an increase in papal autonomy and prestige.[284] By the time Pope Gregory I succeeded to the papacy in 590, the claim of Rome's supremacy over the rest of the church as stemming from Peter himself was well established.[285] Gregory held that papal supremacy concerned doctrine and discipline within the church, but large sections of both the Western and Eastern church remained unconvinced they should be submissive to the Roman See.[286][287]
In the century or so after Gregory the Great, the Pope's ability to lay down the law remained limited. Between the eighth and eleventh centuries, this began to change as competition led more and more people to Rome to resolve disagreements.[169] The growing presence and involvement of the aristocracy in the papal bureaucracy, an increase in papal land-holdings from the second half of the sixth into the seventh-century, and changes in their administration that brought an increase in wealth, gradually shifted popes from being beneficiaries of patronage to becoming patrons themselves.[288] The papacy in the eighth and ninth centuries exercised power like that of an aristocrat.[289]
From the ninth to the eleventh-century, western Christendom encompassed a loose federation of churches across the European continent under the spiritual headship of the Pope.[290] However, the Pope had no clearly established authority over those churches, and he gave little general direction.[290][291] Papal supremacy did not imply legal authority.[169]William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, and other powerful lay founders of monasteries, placed their institutions under the protection of the papacy in the tenth-century thereby facilitating another rise in papal power.[292][293][287]
In this era, Christian history is characterized by tremendous religious devotion and reform, as well as its part in technological advancement, the intellectual revolution of High Scholasticism, and the Renaissance of the 12th century.[294][241][295] Following the rise of secular governments and increasing papal power in the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, intolerance also became one of the defining features of these Middle Ages.[296][297]
The Middle Ages held characteristics that led to modern civilization. Bureaucratic clerics, along with Mendicant monks and the elite from the international universities, became central to developing early-modern concepts of power, authority and orthodoxy.[298][299][300] Unlike modernity, the Middle Ages were also dominated by the presuppositions of religion.[301]
The church of 1000 - 1300 became a more imposing institution with a more formal theology.[302][297][227][303][note 12] With Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085), the scope of canon law extended.[261] Spiritual services were increasingly manifested as legal services, and over it all watched an increasingly centralized and proactive church government.[261] Popes from 1159 to 1303 were predominantly lawyers not theologians.[307] Early and Late Antique Christianity had been both inclusive and exclusive with no canon law in its first five centuries; in the Middle Ages, canon law became a large and highly complex system of laws which omitted early principles of inclusivity and tolerance.[202][308]
The educated leaders of the church were advisors and estate managers for the church, kings, and nobles, often acting as judges and negotiating treaties.[309] The clergy, and the laity, became "more literate, more worldly, and more self-assertive" and they did not always agree with the hierarchy.[310] The village parish emerged as one of the fundamental institutions of medieval Europe.[304][311][310]
Throughout this period, the church faced powerful challenges and vigorous political confrontations.[325][294] Between 1300 and 1500, papal power stopped increasing, while kings continued to substantively gain and consolidate power for themselves.[326][327]
Beginning in the twelfth-century, Mendicant orders (Franciscans and Dominicans) presented a significant and impactful change in understanding a monk's calling. Instead of prayer and contemplation, they saw their vocation as a charge to go out and actively reform the world.[331][332]
Scholasticism, Renaissance and modern science
Between 1150 and 1200, intrepid monks travelled to formerly Muslim locations in Sicily and Spain.[333] Fleeing Muslims had abandoned their libraries, and among the treasure trove of books, the searchers found the works of Aristotle, Euclid and more. Reconciling Aristotelian logical reasoning with Christian faith created a revolution in thinking called scholasticism, (a departure from Augustinian thinking which had dominated the church for centuries). This process elevated reason, reconciled it with faith, and formed the first chapter of modern free thought.[334] The writings of Thomas Aquinas contained ideas that provided the foundation of much modern law and politics. Renaissance also included the revival of the scientific study of natural phenomena.[240][241][335][336] Historians of science see this as the beginning of what led to modern science and the scientific revolution in the West.[337][338][339]
Education and universities
A widespread literate religious culture was slow to develop in Medieval Christianity, though vague notions of its mysteries were common.[340] The means and methods of teaching a mostly illiterate populace included mystery plays (which had developed out of the mass), wall paintings, vernacular sermons and treatises, and saints' lives in epic form.[212] Rituals, art, literature, and cosmology were shaped by Christian norms but also contained some pre-Christian elements.[341] Christian motifs could function in non-Christian ways, while practices of non-Christian origin became endowed with Christian meaning.[342]
From the 1100's, western universities, the first institutions of higher education since the sixth-century, were formed into self-governing corporations chartered by popes and kings.[343][344][345] Bologna, Oxford and Paris were among the earliest (c.1150). Divided into faculties which specialized in law, medicine, theology or liberal arts, each held quodlibeta (free-for-all) theological debates amongst faculty and students and awarded degrees.[346][347] With this, both canon and civil law began to be professionalized.[261]
The Church in Confrontation
With the state
The church appointed its bishops and abbots, but it was the nobles who owned the land and had control over who got "invested" into a paying job on their land.[173][262][291] Under Gregory VII, the Roman Catholic Church was determined to end this duality. This produced the Investiture controversy which began in the Holy Roman Empire in 1078.[348] Specifically, the dispute was between the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, and Pope Gregory VII, over who had the right to invest a bishop or abbot, but more generally, it was over control of the church and its revenues.[349][350][351][352][note 15]
In this controversy, papal supremacy took a political turn. Gregory recorded a series of statements asserting that the church must be the higher of the two powers of church and state, and that the church must no longer be treated as a servant to the state.[293][354][355] Disobedience to the Pope became equated with heresy.[356]
The Dictatus Papae of 1075 declared the pope alone could invest bishops.[348] Henry IV rejected the decree. This led to his excommunication, which contributed to a ducal revolt, that led to a civil war: the Great Saxon Revolt. Eventually, Henry received absolution. The conflict of investiture lasted five decades with a disputed outcome.[357][358][359] A similar controversy occurred in England.[360]
When Eastern Emperor Alexius I asked for aid from the western Pope Urban II, Urban responded (1095) with an appeal to European Christians to "go to the aid of their brethren in the Holy Land".[361][362][363] Urban's message had tremendous popular appeal, and there was much enthusiasm supporting it. It was new and novel and tapped into powerful aspects of folk religion. Voluntary poverty and its renunciation of self-will, along with a longing for the genuine "apostolic life," flourished in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries connecting pilgrimage, charity, remission of sins, and a willingness to fight.[364][365][note 16]
Crusading involved the church in certain paradoxes: Gregorian reform was grounded in distancing spirituality from the secular and the political, while crusade made the church dependent upon financing from aristocrats and kings for the most political of all activities: war.[367]
Crusades led to the development of national identities in European nations, increased division with the East, and produced cultural change.[368][note 17] Hotly debated by historians, the single most important contribution of the crusades to Christian history was, possibly, the invention of the indulgence.[370]
In Mesopotamia and Egypt
Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, the Christian churches in Egypt, Syria and Iraq became subject to fervently Muslim militaristic regimes.[379] Christians were dhimma. This cultural status guaranteed Christians rights of protection, but discriminated against them through legal inferiority.[380] Various Christian communities adopted different strategies for preserving their identity while accommodating their rulers.[379] Some withdrew from interaction, others converted, while some sought outside help.[379] By the end of the eleventh-century, Christianity was in full retreat in Mesopotamia and inner Iran. Some Christian communities further to the east continued to exist.[226][381]
Pope Innocent III and the king of France, Philip Augustus, joined in 1209 in a military campaign that was promulgated as necessary for eliminating the Albigensian heresy also known as Catharism.[382][383] Once begun, the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229) quickly took a political turn.[384] The king's army seized and occupied strategic lands of nobles who had not supported the heretics, but had been in the good graces of the Church. Throughout the campaign, Innocent vacillated, sometimes taking the side favouring crusade, then siding against it and calling for its end.[385] It did not end until 1229. The campaign no longer had crusade status. The entire region was brought under the rule of the French king, thereby creating southern France. Catharism continued for another hundred years (until 1350).[386][387]
Through inquisition
Moral misbehavior and heresy, by the folk and clerics, were prosecuted by inquisitorial courts that were composed of both church and civil authorities.[388] The Medieval Inquisition includes the Episcopal Inquisition (1184–1230) and the Papal Inquisition (1230s–1240s), though these courts had no actual joint leadership or organization.[389][390][391] Created as needed, they were not permanent institutions but were limited to specific times and places.[392][393][394] The Medieval Inquisition brought somewhere between 8,000 and 40,000 people to interrogation and sentence.[392] Death sentences were a relatively rare occurrence.[395] The penalty imposed most often by Medieval Inquisitorial courts was an act of penance which could include public confession.[396]
Medieval inquisitors did not possess absolute power, nor were they universally supported.[388][note 18] Riots and public opposition formed as inquisition became stridently contested both in and outside the Church.[392][399][400] The universities of Oxford and Prague produced some of the church's greatest inquisitorial experts as well as some of its most bitter foes.[303]
Between 1478 and 1542, the modern Roman, Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions were created with a much broader reach than previous inquisitions.[401][402][403]
The infamous Spanish Inquisition was responsible to the crown and was used to consolidate state interest.[404] Authorized by the Pope in 1478, it was begun in answer to Ferdinand and Isabella's fears that Jewish converts (known as Conversos or Marranos) were spying and conspiring with Muslims to sabotage the new state.[405][406]
Initially, the Spanish inquisition was so severe that the Pope attempted to shut it down. King Ferdinand is said to have threatened the Pope to prevent that.[407][408][409] Five years later, in October 1483, a papal bull conceded control of the Spanish Inquisition to the Spanish crown.[410][409] It became the first national, unified and centralized institution of the nascent Spanish state.[411][404]
The Portuguese Inquisition was controlled by a state level board of directors sponsored by the king who, during this period, was generally more concerned with ethnic ancestry than religion. According to Giuseppe Marcocci, there is a deep connection between the growth of the inquisition and the statutes of blood purity.[402] Anti-Judaism became part of the Inquisition in Portugal before the end of the fifteenth-century, and forced conversion led many Jewish converts to Portuguese colonies in India where they suffered as targets of the Goa Inquisition.[412]
The Roman Inquisition operated to serve the papacy's long standing political aims in Italy.[413] The Roman Inquisition was bureaucratic, intellectual, and academic.[414] It is probably best known for its condemnation of Galileo.[415]
With pagans
When the Second Crusade was called after Edessa fell, the nobles in Eastern Europe refused to go.[416] The Balts, the last major polytheistic population in Europe, had been raiding surrounding countries for several centuries, and subduing them was what mattered most to the Eastern-European nobles.[417] (These rulers saw crusade as a tool for territorial expansion, alliance building, and the empowerment of their own nascent church and state.[418]) In 1147, Eugenius' Divina dispensatione gave eastern nobility indulgences for the first of the Baltic wars (1147–1316).[416][419][420] The Northern Crusades followed intermittently, with and without papal support, from 1147 to 1316.[421][422][423] Priests and clerics developed a pragmatic acceptance of the forced conversions perpetrated by the nobles, despite the continued theological emphasis on voluntary conversion.[424]
With the East
For most of its existence, the Byzantine Empire was the largest and most prosperous polity of the Christian world.[248] The wealth and safety of its capitol Constantinople, were seen, even by distant outsiders, as resulting directly from the religious devotion of its inhabitants.[238] After suffering many losses to Islam, the eleventh-century began a period of relative peace and prosperity that lasted until April of 1204, when western crusaders in the Fourth Crusade stormed, captured, and looted Constantinople.[425][426][427] It was a severe blow.[428] Byzantine territories were divided among the Crusaders establishing the Latin Empire and the Latin takeover of the Eastern church.[429][430] By 1261, the Byzantines had recaptured a much weakened and poorer Constantinople.[431][432]
With the Jews
A turning point in Jewish-Christian relations took place in June 1239 when the Talmud was put "on trial", by Gregory IX (1237–1241) in a French court, over contents that mocked the central figures of Christianity.[433][434] This resulted in Talmudic Judaism being seen as so different from biblical Judaism that old Augustinian obligations to leave the Jews alone no longer applied.[435] As townfolk gained a measure of political power around 1300, they became one of Jewry's greatest enemies charging Jews with blood libel, deicide, ritual murder, poisoning wells and causing the plague, and various other crimes.[436][437] Although subordinate to religious, economic and social themes, racial concepts also reinforced hostility.[438]
Jews had often acted as financial agents for the lords providing them loans with interest while being exempt from taxes and other financial laws themselves. This attracted jealousy and resentment.[439]Emicho of Leiningen massacred Jews in Germany in search of supplies, loot, and protection money. The York massacre of 1190 also appears to have had its origins in a conspiracy by local leaders to liquidate their debts along with their creditors.[440] In 1283, the Archbishop of Canterbury spearheaded a petition demanding restitution of usury and urging the Jewish expulsion in 1290.[441][442]
The medieval Catholic church never advocated the full expulsion of all the Jews from Christendom, nor did the Church ever repudiate Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness, but new canon law from the Third and Fourth Lateran councils supported discrimination as secular rulers repeatedly confiscated Jewish property and evicted Jews from their lands.[443][444][445][note 19]
Frankfurt's Jews flourished between 1453 and 1613 despite harsh discrimination. They were restricted to one street, subject to strict rules if they wished to leave this territory, and forced to wear a yellow patch as a sign of their identity, but within their community they were allowed to maintain some self-governance. They had their own laws, leaders and a well-known Rabbinical school that also functioned as a religious and cultural centre.[444]
With itself
In 1309, Pope Clement V moved to Avignon in southern France in search of relief from Rome's factional politics. Seven popes resided there in the Avignon Papacy, but the move away from the "seat of Peter" caused great indignation and cost popes prestige and power.[319][450]
For the next thirty years the Church had two popes, then in 1409, the Pisan council called for the resignation of both popes, electing a third to replace them. Both Popes refused to resign, leaving the Church with three popes. Five years later, Sigismund the Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437) pressed Pope John XXIII to call the Council of Constance (1414–1418) and depose all three popes. In 1417, the council elected Pope Martin V in their place.[454][455]
With reform
Attitudes and behaviours against the clergy identify the period from around 1100 to 1349 as an era of “anticlerical revolution".[456][note 20] Multiple strands of criticism of the clergy between 1100 and 1520 were voiced by clerics themselves. Such criticism condemned abuses and sought a more spiritual, less worldly, clergy.[458] However, there is a constancy of complaint in the historical record that indicates most attempts at reform between 1300 and 1500 failed.[459][460]
Catholic monks developed the first forms of Western musical notation leading to the development of classical music and its derivatives, up to and including modern music.[463] Scholars revealed the Donation of Constantine as a forgery.[464]
During the Late Middle Ages, groups of laymen and non-ordained secular clerics sought a more sincere spiritual life.[465] A vernacular religious culture for the laity arose.[365] The new devotion worked toward the ideal of a pious society of ordinary non-ordained people.[466] Inside and outside the church, women were central to these movements.[365]
Byzantium and the Fall of Constantinople
In 1439, a reunion agreement between the Eastern and Western church was made. However, there was popular resistance in the East, so it wasn't until 1452 that the decree of union was officially published in Constantinople. It was overthrown the very next year by the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.[467][468][note 21]
Compulsory resettlement returned many Greek Orthodox to Constantinople.[470] While Islamic law did not recognize the Patriarch as a "juristic person", nor acknowledge the Orthodox Church as an institution, it did identify the Orthodox Church with the Greek community, and concern for stability allowed it to exist.[471][472] The monastery at Mt. Athos prospered from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.[473] Ottomans were largely tolerant, and wealthy Byzantines who entered monastic life there were allowed to keep some control over their property until 1568.[473]
Leaders of the church were recognized by the Islamic state as administrative agents charged with supervising its Christian subjects and collecting their taxes.[474] Compulsory taxes, higher and higher payments to the sultan in hopes of receiving his appointment to the Patriarchate, and other financial gifts, corrupted the process and impoverished Christians.[475][472] Conversion became an attractive solution.[476][note 22]
The conquest of 1453 had effectively destroyed the Orthodox Church as an institution of the Christian empire inaugurated by Constantine, sealing off Greek-speaking Orthodoxy from the West for almost a century and a half.[478][479] However, the spiritual and cultural influence of the Eastern church, Constantinople, and Mount Athos the monastic peninsula continued among Orthodox nations.[479] By the time of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520 – 1566), the patriarchate had become a part of the Ottoman system, and continued to have great influence in the Orthodox world.[477][472]
Russia
From the 950s to the 980s, polytheism among the Kievan Rus declined, while many social and economic changes fostered the spread of the new religious ideology known as Christianity.[255] The event associated with the conversion of the Rus' has traditionally been the baptism of Vladimir of Kiev in 989.[480]
The new Christian religious structure was imposed by the state's rulers.[481] The Rus' dukes maintained control of the church which was financially dependent upon them.[482][note 23] While monasticism was the dominant form of piety, Christianity permeated daily life, for both peasants and elites, who identified themselves as Christian while keeping many pre-Christian practices.[484]
In a defining moment in 1380, a coalition of Russian polities headed by the Grand Prince Dmitrii of Moscow faced the army of the Golden Horde on Kulikovo Field near the Don River, there defeating the Mongols. This began the fusing of state power and religious mission that eventually transformed the Kievan Rus into the Russian state (1547).[485]
Ivan III of Muscovy adopted the style of the ancient Byzantine imperial court a generation after Constantinople fell to the Turks.[486] This gained Ivan support among the late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Rus elite who saw themselves as the New Israel and Moscow as the new Jerusalem.[487]Jeremias II (1536 - 1595) was the first Eastern patriarch to visit north-eastern Europe. Ending his visit in Moscow, he founded the Orthodox patriarchate of Russia.[488][472]
Asia
The sixteenth-century success of Christianity in Japan was followed by one of the greatest persecutions in Christian history. Sixteenth-century missions to China were undertaken primarily by the Jesuits.[227][489]Sheridan Gilley writes that "The cruel martyrdom of Catholics in China, Indochina, Japan and Korea, another heroic missionary country, was connected to local fears of European invasion and conquest, which in some cases were not unjustified."[490]
Scandinavia
Christianization of Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway and Denmark) occurred in two stages.[491] In the first stage, missionaries arrived on their own, without secular support, in the ninth-century.[492] Next, a secular ruler would take charge of Christianization in their territory. This stage ended once a defined and organized ecclesiastical network was established.[493] By 1350, Scandinavia was an integral part of Western Christendom.[494]
Powerful and pervasive ecclesiastical reform developed from medieval critiques of the church, but the institutional unity of the church was shattered.[495] Church critics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had challenged papal authority. Kings and councils asserting their own power had also created challenges to church authority, while vernacular gospels created problems for the church amongst the laity.[298][299]
Though there was no actual schism until 1521, the Protestant Reformation (1517–1648) has been described (since the nineteenth-century) as beginning when Martin Luther, a Catholic monk advocating church reform, nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517.[496]
Luther's theses challenged the church's selling of indulgences, the authority of the Pope, and various teachings of the late medieval Catholic church. This act of defiance and its social, moral, and theological criticisms brought Western Christianity to a new understanding of salvation, tradition, the individual, and personal experience in relationship with God.[497] Edicts handed down by the Diet of Worms condemned Luther and officially banned citizens of the Holy Roman Empire from defending or propagating his ideas.[498][499]
The Roman Catholic Church soon struck back, launching its own Catholic Reformation beginning with Pope Paul III (1534–1549), the first in a series of 10 reforming popes from 1534 to 1605.[503] A list of books detrimental to faith or morals was established, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which included the works of Luther, Calvin and other Protestants along with writings condemned as obscene.[504]
New monastic orders arose including the Jesuits.[505] Resembling a military company in its hierarchy, discipline, and obedience, their vow of loyalty to the Pope set them apart from other monastic orders, leading them to be called "the shock troops of the papacy". Jesuits soon became the Church's chief weapon against Protestantism.[505] The Council of Trent (1545–1563) denied each Protestant claim, and laid the foundation of Roman Catholic policies up to the twenty-first century.[505]
Monastic reform also led to the development of new, yet orthodox forms of spirituality, such as that of the Spanish mystics and the French school of spirituality.[506] The Counter-Reformation also created the Uniate church which used Eastern liturgy but recognized Rome.[507]
Religious War
Reforming zeal and Catholic denial spread through much of Europe and became entangled with local politics. The quarreling royal houses, already involved in dynastic disagreements, became polarized into the two religious camps.[508]
Wars ranging from international wars to internal conflicts, began in the Holy Roman Empire with the minor Knights' War in 1522, then intensified in the First Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547) and the Second Schmalkaldic War (1552–1555).[509][510] In 1562, France became the centre of religious wars.[511] The involvement of foreign powers made the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) the largest and most disastrous.[512]
The causes of these wars were mixed. Many scholars see them as fought to obtain security and freedom for differing religious confessions, however, most have interpreted these wars as struggles for political independence that coincided with the break up of medieval empires into the modern nation states.[513][511][note 24]
Modern concepts of tolerance
Since the 1400's, those who became Protestant had steadfastly sought toleration for heresy, blasphemy, Catholicism, non-Christian religions, and even atheism.[518] Anglicans and other Christian moderates also wrote and argued for toleration.[519] In the 1690s, many humanists were rethinking on a political level all of the State's reasons for persecution. This third group also began advocating for religious toleration.[520][521] Over the next two and a half centuries, many treaties and political declarations of tolerance followed, until concepts of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of thought became established in most western countries.[522][523][524]
Colonialism and missions
Colonialism opened the door for Christian mission in many new regions.[525][526][527] According to Sheridan Gilley "Catholic Christianity became a global religion through the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires in the sixteenth century and French missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth."[526] However, Christian missionaries and colonial empires had separate agendas which were often in direct opposition to each other.[528]
Most missionaries avoided politics, yet they also generally identified themselves with the indigenous people amongst whom they worked and lived.[529] On the one hand, vocal missionaries challenged colonial oppression and defended human rights, even opposing their own governments in matters of social justice for 500 years.[529] On the other hand, there are an equal number of examples of missionaries cooperating with colonial governments.[530]
Until the 1300s, the official position of the Roman Catholic Church was that witches did not exist.[531] While historians have been unable to pinpoint a single cause of what became known as the "witch frenzy", scholars have noted that, without changing church doctrine, a new but common stream of thought developed at every level of society that witches were both real and malevolent.[532] Records show the belief in magic had remained so widespread among the rural people, it has convinced some historians that Christianization had not been as successful as previously supposed.[533] The main pressure to prosecute witches came from the common people, and trials were mostly civil trials.[534][535] There is broad agreement that approximately 100,000 people were prosecuted, of which 80% were women, and that 40,000 to 50,000 people were executed between 1561 and 1670.[536][532]
The Enlightenment
The era of absolutist states followed the breakdown of Christian universalism.[537] Abuses from political absolutism, practiced by kings who were supported by Catholicism, gave rise to a virulent anti-clerical, anti-Catholic, and anti-Christian sentiment that emerged in the 1680s.[538] Critique of Christianity began among the more extreme Protestant reformers who were enraged by fear, tyranny and persecution.[539][540] Thereafter, every level of European society began to embrace secularisation.[541]
The historical watershed of 1760 to 1830 saw the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution and the French Revolution.[542] The American Revolution (1776) and its aftermath included legal assurances of religious freedom and a general turn to religious plurality in the new country.[543] In the decades following the American revolution, France also experienced revolution, and by 1794, radical revolutionaries attempted to violently ‘de-Christianize’ France in what some scholars have termed a "deliberate genocidal policy of extermination" in the Vendée region.[544] When Napoleon came to power, he acknowledged Catholicism as the majority view and tried to make it dependent upon the state.[545] The French Revolution resulted in Eastern Orthodox church leaders rejecting Enlightenment ideas as too dangerous to embrace.[472]
Scholars have identified a positive correlation between the rise of Protestantism and human capital formation,[546] the Protestant work ethic,[547]economic development,[548] and the development of the state system.[549]Max Weber says Protestantism contributed to the development of banking across Northern Europe and gave birth to Capitalism.[550][note 25] However, the urbanisation and industrialisation that was hand in hand with capitalism had created a plethora of new social problems.[552][553] In Europe and North America, both Protestants and Catholics provided massive aid to the poor, supporting family welfare, medicine and education.[554]
In many cases, throughout this period, Christianity was weakened by social and political change.[553] By the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, the influence of anticlerical socialism and communism produced secession and disruption in many locations.[555]
American religious "Awakenings" (1730s–1850s)
Religious revival, known as the First Great Awakening, swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s.[note 26] Verbal battles over the movement and its dramatic style raged at both the congregational and denominational levels causing division into political 'Parties', which eventually led to critical support for the American Revolution.[560]
In places like Connecticut and Massachusetts, where one denomination received state funding, churches now began to lobby local legislatures to end that inequity.[561] In 1791, the United States became the first Christian nation to mandate the separation of church and state. Theological pluralism became the new norm.[562][563]
The Second Great Awakening (1800–1830s) extolled moral reform as the Christian alternative to armed revolution. These reformers established nation-wide societies, separate from any individual church, to begin social movements concerning abolition, women's rights, temperance and literacy.[564] Developing nation-wide organizations was pioneering, and many businesses adopted the practice leading to the consolidations and mergers that reshaped the American economy of the nineteenth-century.[565] The second awakening produced the Latter Day Saint movement, the Restoration Movement and the Holiness movement.[566]
The Third Great Awakening began from 1857 and was most notable for taking awakening throughout the world, especially in English speaking countries.[566]Restorationists were prevalent in America. They have not described themselves as a reform movement but have, instead, described themselves as restoring the Church to its original form as found in the book of Acts. Restorationism gave rise to the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, Adventism, and the Jehovah's Witnesses.[567][568]
Western Slavery
For over 300 years, many Christians in Europe and North America participated in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade which had begun in the sixteenth century.[569] Moral objections had arisen immediately but had small impact.[570] By the eighteenth-century, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), followed by Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists, began to campaign, write, and spread pamphlets against the trade and slavery itself.[571] In the years after the American Revolution, black congregations led by black preachers provided an institutional base for keeping abolitionism alive.[572] By the early nineteenth-century, American Protestants had organized the first anti-slavery societies.[573] Christian reformers in both England and America, African Americans themselves, and the new American republic eventually produced the "gradual but comprehensive abolition of slavery" in the West.[574]
Biblical criticism
After the Scientific revolution (1600–1750), an upsurge in skepticism subjected everything in western culture to systematic doubt including religious beliefs.[575]Biblical criticism emerged (c. 1650 – c. 1800), pioneered by Protestants, using historicism and human reason to make study of the Bible more scholarly, secular, and democratic.[576][577][578] Depending upon how radical the individual scholar was, this produced different and often conflicting views, posing particular problems for a literal Bible interpretation which had emerged in the 1820s. This eventually produced liberalism and fundamentalism.[579][580][581]
Before the Enlightenment of the eighteenth-century, liberalism was synonymous with Christian Idealism in that it imagined a liberal State that embraced political and cultural tolerance and freedom.[580] Later, liberalism embraced seventeenth-century rationalism, which was attempting to 'wean' Christianity from its "irrational cultic" roots.[582] This liberalism lost touch with the fundamental necessity of faith and ritual in maintaining Christianity, which eventually led to its decline and the birth of fundamentalism.[583]
Fundamentalist Christianity arose in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century as a reaction against modernism.[581] In 1925, supporters of a relatively new, loosely organized, and undisciplined fundamentalism participated in the Scopes trial. By 1930, the movement appeared to be dying.[584][585] Later in the 1930s, Neo-orthodoxy, a theology against liberalism with a reevaluation of Reformation teachings, began uniting moderates of both sides.[586] In the 1940s, "new-evangelicalism" established itself as separate from fundamentalism.[587]
The Roman Catholic Church became increasingly centralized, conservative, and focused on loyalty to the Pope.[578] Early in the Twentieth century, the Pope required Catholic Bible scholars who used biblical criticism to take an anti-modernist oath.[578][588]
Protestant Missions (1800s–1945)
Protestant missionaries had a significant role in shaping multiple nations, cultures and societies as well as in making Christianity a global religion.[490][13][589] Women made major contributions.[554] A missionary's first job was to get to know the indigenous people and work with them to translate the Bible into their local language. Approximately 90% were completed. Often, the process also generated a written grammar, a lexicon of native traditions, and a dictionary of the local language. These were used to teach in missionary schools resulting in the spread of literacy.[590][591][592] On the one hand, the political legacies of colonialism include political instability, violence and ethnic exclusion, which is also linked to civil strife and civil war.[593] On the other hand, Lamin Sanneh writes that many native cultures responded to Protestant missions with "movements of indigenization and cultural liberation" that generated many beneficial long-term effects.[594][590][595]
Native American Boarding schools
Preceded by mission schools, the Federal government began a boarding school system in 1819, (before there was a public school system (1869)), for the purposes of education and assimilation of Native Americans. Funded by the federal government, schools were run by Catholics, Quakers, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and by the government itself. The majority of native children did not attend boarding school. Of those that did, many did so in response to requests sent by native families to the Federal government, while many others were forcibly taken from their homes. For indigenous populations in Canada and the US, the history of boarding schools shows a continuum of experiences ranging from happiness and refuge to suffering, forced assimilation, mistreatment and abuse. Over time, missionaries came to respect the virtues of native culture, and spoke against national policies.[596][597][598]
Christianity and Nazism
In the early Twentieth century, European states were advocating the separation of church and state, while also establishing authoritarian governments and state supported churches. Such consanguinity would, after 1945, implicate the church in abuses of power.[599]
Pope Pius XI declared in Mit brennender Sorge (English: "With rising anxiety") that fascist governments had hidden "pagan intentions" and expressed the irreconcilability of the Catholic position with totalitarian fascist state worship which placed the nation above God, fundamental human rights, and dignity.[600]
In Poland, Catholic priests were arrested and Polish priests and nuns were executed en masse.[601]
Most leaders and members of the largest Protestant church in Germany, the German Evangelical Church, which had a long tradition of nationalism and support of the state, supported the Nazis when they came to power.[602] A smaller contingent, about a third of German Protestants, formed the Confessing Church which opposed Nazism.[note 27]
Nazis interfered in The Confessing Church's affairs, harassed its members, executed mass arrests and targeted well known pastors like Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.[604][605][note 28] Bonhoeffer, a pacifist, was arrested, found guilty in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and executed.[607]
The Bolsheviks and other Russian revolutionaries saw the Church, like the tsarist state, as an enemy of the people. Criticism of atheism was strictly forbidden and sometimes led to imprisonment.[611][612] Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals, and execution.[613][614]
Historian Scott Kenworthy describes the persecution of the Russian Orthodox church under communism as "unparalleled by any in Christian history".[615] In the first five years after the October Revolution, one journalist reported that 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were executed.[616] Others report that 8,000 people were killed in 1922.[617] The League of Militant Atheists adopted a five year plan in 1932 "aimed at the total eradication of religion by 1937".[618][note 29]
Despite oppression and martyrdom under hostile rule, the Orthodox churches of the Twentieth-century continued to contribute to theology, spirituality, liturgy, music, and art. Kenworthy adds that "Important movements within the church have been the revival of a Eucharistic ecclesiology, of traditional iconography, of monastic life and spiritual traditions such as Hesychasm, and the rediscovery of the Greek Church Fathers".[622]
In this period, Christianity became a global religion, but it also faced major challenges.[623] Further important aspects of Christian history are seen in the breakdown of denominational boundaries, the impact of war, and particular Christian movements aiding the oppressed.[624] In all these areas, five institutions have been of international significance: the papacy, the Ecumenical movement, the missionary movement, Pentecostalism, and Independency.[625]
A global religion
The world's largest religion has been Christianity since the eighteenth century.[526] After 1945, it grew and expanded in the Third World and in eastern Europe (after the collapse of communism). Its population center shifted to the global east and south, but it remains the world's largest religion into the Twenty-first century with roughly 2.4 billion followers comprising around 31.2% of the world population.[526][562][626]
Before 1945, about a third of the people in the world were Christians with about half of those Roman Catholic.[628] About 80% of all Christians lived in Europe, Russia and the Americas.[628] By 2000, the percentage of Christians in the West dropped to around 40 percent, while the proportion living in Asia and Africa rose to 32 percent.[628]
In the Twenty-first century, the majority of Christians live outside North America and Western Europe. White Christians are a global minority, and slightly over half of worldwide Christians are female.[629][630] In the latter half of the Twentieth century, the church's power was still concentrated in Europe and North America. Global growth has led Western Christians to be more inclusive of non-Western forms of Christianity.[631]
Africa (19th–21st centuries)
In 1900, under colonial rule, there were just under 9 million Christians in Africa. By 1960, and the end of colonialism, there were about 60 million. By 2005, African Christians had increased to 393 million, about half of the continent's total population at that time.[591] Population in Africa has continued to grow with the percentage of Christians remaining at about half in 2022.[627] This expansion has been labeled a "fourth great age of Christian expansion".[632][note 30]
Asia
Christianity is growing rapidly in China, and the rest of Southeast Asia, especially Korea, where it grew faster after colonialism than before it.[637][638][639] A rapid expansion of charismatic Christianity began in the 1980s, leading Asia to rival Latin America in the population of Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians.[640][641] Increasing numbers of young people in China are becoming Christians. Council on Foreign Relations data shows a 10% yearly growth in Chinese Christian populations since 1979.[642][643]
Challenges
In the U.S., Pew has reported that, "As recently as the early 1990s, about 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians. But today, about two-thirds of adults are Christians".[644][645] Hugh McLeod writes that,
The most powerful and effective criticism of Christianity in the Twentieth century has been the charge that it has been too closely identified with the rich and powerful, and too ready to legitimate the status quo. These political criticisms have had a far wider impact than those deriving from scientific or philosophical objections to religion.[646]
Highly authoritarian and totalitarian governments have brought about crises and decline in churches in many areas.[647][528][648] From 1945 into the 1980's, the world's first Marxist super-power, along with the many other communist governments, pursued anti-religious policies that were often violent.[599] In 2013, 17 Muslim majority states reported 28 of the 29 types of religious discrimination against 45 of the 47 religious minorities in their countries, including Christianity.[649] Anti-Christian persecution has become a consistent human rights concern.[650]
Independency and Pentecostalism
The challenges of secularism, and the changing moral climate of the 1960's and 1970's, caused controversy within the churches concerning sexual ethics, gender, and exclusivity.[651] A growing demand for greater individual freedom led to new forms of religion which embrace the sacred as a deeper understanding of the self.[652] This spirituality is private and individualistic, and differs radically from Christian tradition, dogma and ritual.[653][654]
The Prosperity gospel formed as an adaptation of Pentecostalism and has moved away from the Reformation view of biblical authority to the authority of personal charisma.[655] Begun in the Twentieth century's last decades, it has become a trans-national movement.[656][note 31] In 2000, approximately one quarter of all Christians worldwide were part of Pentecostalism and its associated movements.[658] By 2025, Pentecostals are expected to constitute one-third of the nearly three billion Christians worldwide making it the largest branch of Protestantism and the fastest growing religious movement in global Christianity.[659][660]
Diversity and commonality
The common threat of secularisation and a recognition of the destructive potential of religious hatred has encouraged co-operation between churches.[661] Collaboration between Protestants and Catholics made little progress until 11 October 1962, when Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council, the 21st ecumenical council of the Catholic Church.[662][663] On 21 November 1964, the Second Vatican Council published Unitatis Redintegratio, stating that Roman Catholic ecumenical goals are to establish full communion amongst all the various Christian churches including Protestants.[664][665] Amongst Evangelicals, there is no agreed upon definition, strategy or goal for ecumenism.[666] Different theologies on the nature of the Church have produced some hostility toward it instead.[667][668]
While sentiment is widespread that ecumenism at the upper levels of leadership has stalled, the trend at the local level has been toward discussion and prayer meetings, pulpit exchanges, shared social action and an increase in inter-marriage.[669][663] Almost 40% of couples married since 2010, compared to 19% before 1960, have married someone outside of their faith, according to Pew Research Center.[670]
Christianity is still diverse, and Christians still disagree, but the grounds have changed to topics that engage the deepest and most controversial issues of the Twenty-first century - "race, gender, colonialism, and liberation" - bringing these to the forefront of the larger more traditional Christian agenda.[671][672] In Hugh MacLeod's view, "A liberal Catholic is likely to have a lot in common with a liberal Methodist", and this commonality is only likely to increase with the influence of the internet.[672]
War
Twentieth-century history with its multiple wars have brought questions of theodicy to the forefront.[673] Wars have had contradictory effects on the church, sometimes producing a loss of faith in human solutions to human suffering, an upsurge in religiosity and patriotism, or an alienation from Christianity.[673] For the first time since the pre-Constantian era, Christian pacifism became an advocated Christian option.[646]
By the Twentieth-century, the nineteenth-century revolutions that established the Serbian, Greek, Romanian, and Bulgarian nations had changed Orthodoxy from a universal church into a series of national churches that became subordinate to nationalism and the state.[472]
Originating in America in 1966, Black theology developed a combined social gospel and liberation theology that mixes Christianity with questions of civil rights, aspects of the Black Power movement, and responses to black Muslims claiming Christianity was a "White man's" religion.[678] Spreading to the United Kingdom, then parts of Africa, confronting apartheid in South Africa, Black theology explains Christianity as liberation for this life not just the next.[678][679][note 32]
The feminist movement of the mid to late Twentieth century began with an anti-Christian ethos, but soon developed a significant and influential Feminist theology dedicated to transforming the churches and society.[682][683] In the last years of the Twentieth century, the re-examination of old religious texts through diversity, otherness, and difference developed womanist theology of African-American women, the "mujerista" theology of Hispanic women, and insights from Asian feminist theology.[684]
Missions
After World War II, Christian missionaries played a transformative role for many colonial societies, moving them toward independence through decolonization.[685][686] In the mid to late 1990s, postcolonial theology emerged globally from multiple sources.[687] It analyzes structures of power and ideology in order to recover what colonialism erased or suppressed in indigenous cultures.[688]
According to historian Lammin Sanneh, Protestant missionaries began the "largest, most diverse and most vigorous movement of cultural renewal in [the] history" of Africa.[689][690][528]
The missionary movement of the twenty-first century has transformed into a multi-cultural, multi-faceted global network of NGO's, short term amateur volunteers, and traditional long-term bi-lingual, bi-cultural professionals who focus on evangelism and local development and not on 'civilizing' native people.[691][692]
It was amongst a small group of Second Temple Jews, looking for an "anointed" leader (messiah or king) from the ancestral line of King David, that Christianity first formed in relative obscurity.[16][17]Peter became the leader of the twelve disciples that Jesus had trained.[18] Tradition, and some evidence, supports Peter as the organizer and founder of the Church in Rome which already existed by 57 AD when Paul arrived there.[19] Paul was a persecutor of the church who later became a follower.[20] The Jerusalem church, led by James the Just, brother of Jesus, described themselves as "disciples of the Lord" and followers "of the Way".[21][22] According to Acts 9[23] and 11,[24] the disciples at Antioch were the first to be called "Christians".[25]
Walter Bauer has put forth a thesis that heretical forms of Christianity were brought into line by a powerful, united, Roman church forcing its will on others. However, William Vinzent has written that unity and universal power did not yet exist in the church in the city of Rome in these early centuries.[78][79]
Substantial growth in the third and fourth centuries made Christianity the Empire's majority religion by the mid-fourth-century. All Roman emperors after Constantine, except Julian, were Christian. Christian emperors wanted the empire to become a Christian empire, and they used empirical law to make it easier to be Christian and harder to be pagan.[107] Many previous scholars have seen such laws as implying the establishment of Christianity as the state religion forcing the conversion of non-believers. However, twenty-first century scholarship has brought this older view into question.[92]
Much of the decline of paganism in the late empire can be tied to economics.[117] The economic crisis of the third century produced a decline of urbanism and prosperity. Further economic disruption in the fourth and fifth centuries occurred when various Germanic peoples sacked Rome, invaded Britain, Gaul, and Iberia, and seized land.[118] Such disruption made fewer public funds and private donations available to support expensive pagan festivals and temples.[119][120]
While Eusebius also credited Constantine with temple destruction, as well as ending sacrifice, sources conflict. The ancient chronicler Malalas claimed Constantine destroyed all the temples; then he said Theodisius destroyed them all; then he said Constantine converted them all to churches.[122][123] Temple destruction is attested to in 43 written sources, but only 4 are confirmed by archaeology.[124]
Emperor Theodosius' prefect Maternus Cynegius is believed to have commissioned the destruction of temples in the territory around Constantinople.[136] According to Peter Brown, this inspired Theophilus of Alexandria to stage a procession in 392 ridiculing statues of pagan gods, which turned into a riot which destroyed the Serapium in Alexandria, Egypt. Twentieth century scholars have traditionally seen this as evidence of a tide of violent Christian iconoclasm that continued throughout the 390s and into the 400s.[137] However, twenty-first century archaeological evidence for the violent destruction of temples in the fourth to the sixth centuries is limited to a handful of sites.[123] The Serapeum was the only Graeco-Roman temple destroyed by violence in this period leaving Roman temples in Egypt "among the best preserved in the ancient world".[138][139]
Manichaeism rose in southern Mesopotamia in the third century and expanded as a form of Christianity from the fourth to sixth centuries in almost all parts of the Roman empire, especially Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa and Italy.[163]Leo the Great (440–61) was the only pope to openly oppose the sect, but the severe persecution instigated by emperor Justinian I marked their end.[157]
Christian monasticism had emerged in the third-century, and by the fifth-century, it had become a dominant force in all areas of late antique culture. During the sixth century, it flourished nearly everywhere Christianity existed.[185][186][187]
Membership in Christendom began with baptism at birth. Members were required to have a rudimentary knowledge of the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer. From peasant to pope, all were required to rest on Sunday and feast days, attend mass, fast at specified times, take communion at Easter, pay various fees, tithes and alms for the needy, and receive last rites at death.[213]
Intense missionary activity between the fifth and eighth centuries led to eastern Iran, Arabia, central Asia, China, and the coasts of India and Indonesia adopting Nestorian Christianity. Syrian Nestorians had settled in the Persian Empire which spread over modern Iraq, Iran, and parts of Central Asia.[225][226] A vibrant Asian Christianity with nineteen metropolitans (and eighty-five bishops), centred on Seleucia (just south of Baghdad), flourished in the eighth century.[227][228] The rural areas of Upper Egypt were all Nestorian. Coptic missionaries spread the faith up the Nile to Nubia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.[229] From the early 600s, a series of Arab military campaigns conquered Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia.[230][231] By 635, upper-class Christian refugees had moved further east to China at Hsian-fu.[232]
Medieval monasteries provided orphanages, hostels (inns) for travelers, distributed food during famine, and regularly provided food to the poor.[270][271][272] They supported literacy, ran schools, and copied and preserved ancient texts in their scriptoria and libraries. They practiced classical craft and artistic skills, while maintaining an intellectual and spiritual culture that developed and taught new skills and technologies.[273][274][275][276][277][278] In the early sixth century, Benedict of Nursia wrote the Rule of Saint Benedict which would become the most common monastic rule, the starting point for others, and would impact politics and law throughout the Middle Ages.[279][280][281]
Many Roman Catholic fundamentals - "the meaning of the sacraments, the just price and reward for labour, the terms of Christian marriage, the nature of clerical celibacy and the appropriate lifestyle for priests" - were conceived in the twelfth century.[304]Purgatory became an official doctrine, and in 1215, confession became required for all.[305][306]
Some claimed the clergy did little to help the suffering, although the high mortality rate amongst clerics indicates many continued to care for the sick.[316] Other medieval folk claimed it was the "corrupted" and "vice-ridden" clergy that had caused the many calamities that people believed were punishments from God.[316]
John Wycliffe (1320–1384), an English scholastic philosopher and theologian, attended the Council of Constance and urged the Church to give up its property (which produced much of the Church's wealth), and to once again embrace poverty and simplicity, to stop being subservient to the state and its politics, and to deny papal authority.[320][321] He was accused of heresy, convicted and sentenced to death, but died before implementation. The Lollards followed his teachings, played a role in the English Reformation, and were persecuted for heresy after Wycliffe's death.[321][322]Jan Hus (1369–1415), a Czech based in Prague, was influenced by Wycliffe and spoke out against the abuses and corruption he saw in the Catholic Church there.[323] He was also accused of heresy and condemned to death.[322][323][321] After his death, Hus became a powerful symbol of Czech nationalism and the impetus for the Bohemian (aka the Czech) Reformation.[324][323][321]
Bishoprics were lifetime appointments, so a king could better control their powers and revenues than those of hereditary noblemen. Even better, he could leave the post vacant and collect the revenues himself, theoretically in trust for the new bishop, or give a bishopric to compensate a helpful noble. For the church, ending this would better separate church from state, help with reform, and provide better pastoral care, but ending lay investiture would also reduce the power of the Holy Roman Emperor and the European nobility.[353]
Crusading gave ordinary Christians a tangible means of expressing brotherhood with the East and promoted the sense of a "joined-up Christendom". It had spiritual merit for those who went as a direct result of the "dangers, the time, the cost, and the sheer physical and mental effort" that crusading took. Being a part of crusading also carried a sense of historical responsibility.[366]
Modern style preaching began through the call for crusade.[369]Affective piety emerged, (empathy with the human Christ and his suffering), producing compassion toward others. The opening of the Holy Land helped spread veneration of the Virgin Mary.[370][371][372]Christian mysticism increased and spread.[373] New monastic military orders such as the Military Order of the Teutonic Knights developed.[374] The cult of chivalry evolved between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries and became a true cultural force that influenced art, literature and philosophy.[375][376]
In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council allowed inquisitors to search out moral and religious "crimes" even when there was no accuser, and in theory, this granted them extraordinary powers.[397] In practice, without local secular support, their task became so overwhelmingly difficult that inquisitors themselves became endangered. In the worst cases, some inquisitors were murdered.[398]
In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council, met and accepted 70 canon-laws.[446] The last three canons required Jews to distinguish themselves from Christians in their dress, prohibited them from holding public office, and prohibited Jewish converts from continuing to practice Jewish rituals.[447] Of those condemned by the Inquisition of Valencia before 1530, ninety-two percent were Jews.[448]
Scholars have generally referred to "anticlericalism" even though the term is considered biased, and there is a lack of consensus on its elements and form in pre-Reformation Europe.[457]
The flight of Eastern Christians from Constantinople, and the manuscripts they carried with them, were important factors in generating literary renaissance in the West.[469]
The oldest Ottoman document lists 57 bishoprics in Constantinople of 1483. By 1525, bishoprics had decreased to fifty, and only forty are recorded from 1641–1651.[477][472]
The prince appointed the clergy to positions in government service, satisfied their material needs, determined who would fill the higher ecclesiastical positions, and directed the synods of bishops in the Kievan metropolitanate.[483]
Theorists such as John Kelsay and James Turner Johnson argue that these religious wars were varieties of the Just war tradition for liberty and freedom.[514]William T. Cavanaugh points out that many historians argue these ‘‘wars of religion’’ were not primarily religious, but were more about state-building, nationalism, and economics.[515] If they had been motivated most deeply by religion, Catholics and Protestants would fight each other, whereas Catholics often formed alliances with Protestants to fight other Catholics and vice versa. Historian Barbara Diefendorf argues that religious motives were always mixed with other motives, but the simple fact of Catholics fighting Catholics and Protestants fighting Protestants is not sufficient to prove the absence of religious motives.[516] According to Marxist theorist Henry Heller, there was "a rising tide of commoner hostility to noble oppression and growing perception of collusion between Protestant and Catholic nobles".[517]
In opposition to Weber, historians such as Fernand Braudel and Hugh Trevor-Roper assert that capitalism developed in pre-Reformation Catholic communities. Joseph Schumpeter, an economist of the Twentieth century, has referred to the Scholastics as "they who come nearer than does any other group to having been the 'founders' of scientific economics".[551]
In a study of sermon content, William Skiles says "Confessing Church pastors opposed the Nazi regime on three fronts... first, they expressed harsh criticism of Nazi persecution of Christians and the German churches; second, they condemned National Socialism as a false ideology that worships false gods; and third, they challenged Nazi anti-Semitic ideology by supporting Jews as the chosen people of God and Judaism as a historic foundation of Christianity".[603]
By October 1944, 45% of all pastors and 98% of non-ordained vicars and candidates had been drafted into military service; 117 German pastors of Jewish descent served at this time, and yet at least 43% fled Nazi Germany because it became impossible for them to continue in their ministries.[606]
Soviet authorities used "persecution, arrests and trials, imprisonment in psychiatric hospitals, house raids and searches, confiscations of Bibles and New Testaments and other Christian literature, disruption of worship services by the militia and KGB, slander campaigns against Christians in magazines and newspapers, on TV and radio" to eradicate religion.[619] The Russian Orthodox Church suffered unprecedented persecution.[620] From 1927 on, the League of Militant Atheists published anti-religious literature in large quantities. During the 1930s, violence was used. Bishops, priests, and lay believers were arrested, shot and sent to labour camps. Churches were closed, destroyed, converted to other uses.[621]
Examples include Simon Kimbangu's movement, the Kimbanguist church, which had a radical reputation in its early days in the Congo, was suppressed for forty years, and has now become the largest independent church in Africa with upwards of 3 million members.[633] In 2019, 65% of Melillans in Northern Africa across from Spain identified themselves as Roman Catholic.[634] In the early twenty-first century, Kenya has the largest yearly meeting of Quakers outside the United States. In Uganda, more Anglicans attend church than do so in England. Ahafo, Ghana is recognized as more vigorously Christian than any place in the United Kingdom.[635] There is revival in East Africa, and vigorous women's movements called Rukwadzano in Zimbabwe and Manyano in South Africa. The Apostles of John Maranke, which began in Rhodesia, now have branches in seven countries.[636]
Prosperity ideas have diffused in countries such as Brazil and other parts of South America, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana and other parts of West Africa, China, India, South Korea, and the Philippines.[657] It has suffered from accusations of financial fraud and sex scandals around the world, but it is most heavily challenged by Christian evangelicals who question its theology.[655]
Historian of race and religion, Paul Harvey, says that, in 1960s America, "The religious power of the civil rights movement transformed the American conception of race."[680] Then the social power of the religious right responded in the 1970s by recasting evangelical concepts in political terms that included racial separation.[680] In the twenty-first century, the Prosperity Gospel promotes racial reconciliation and has become a powerful force in American religious life.[681]
Cameron 2006b, p.545: "In one of the most momentous precedents of his reign, during Constantine’s Twentieth anniversary celebrations in 325, some 250 bishops assembled at Nicaea in the emperor’s presence and at his order to settle difficult issues of contention across the empire about the date of Easter, episcopal succession and Christology. Constantine made a point of deferring to the bishops. He did not preside himself and only took his seat when they did, but it was the emperor who had summoned the council, and the sanctions that followed for the small number of dissenters including Arius were also imposed by him."
Den Heijer 2011, p.65: "Many of the medieval universities in Western Europe were born under the aegis of the Catholic Church, usually as cathedral schools or by papal bull as Studia Generali"
America magazine 2018: "A study of the religious lives of university students in Beijing published in a mainland Chinese academic journal Science and Atheism in 2013 showed Christianity to be the religion that interested students most and was the most active on campuses."
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The following links provide quantitative data related to Christianity and other major religions, including rates of adherence at different points in time: