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| Ok, disclaimer... this is more like recent, protestant, euro-american-centric church history with an eye toward explaining the advent of the emerging and post-emerging church... but that is way too long for a title... |
What we know as church today mostly comes from recent
movements in human intellectual advances. The Enlightenment in the 17th
and 18th centuries and the trajectory since changed how humans saw
the world. Modernity was founded. For the first time, western scholars believed
that everything could be known, medicine could fix all ailments, wars would
cease, peace would prevail with or without divine intervention. The modern
thought process impacted the church in three distinct ways: It created two
strands of church theology, fundamentalism and liberal theology; and it also
created a strong anti-religion movement which has ultimately led to the new
atheists.
Both liberal theology and fundamentalist theology rely on
the modern concept that all things can be known. For the liberal theologian, it
meant exegesis that tore open the biblical texts and searched for empirical
truths by looking at the scriptures through historical and literary lenses.
Myths and miracles could be explained away by understanding the context of the
ancients writing styles and storytelling. Jesus could be better understood by
listening through ears attuned to a cultural context that we attempted to
understand. Most mainline seminaries continue to teach in the liberal
theological tradition.
Meanwhile, the fundamentalists felt this liberal theological
trend was getting away from the fundamentals of Christian faith. Also believing
that all things could be known, the fundamentalists prescribed basic concepts
that they required affirmation of in order for a Christian to truly be Christian.
These included biblical literalism, a direct slap in the face to liberal
theologians exegetical work; biblical inerrancy, which presupposes that God had
a hand in all biblical scholarship; the virgin birth, a story that many liberal
theologians had decided was essentially a “myth” that was meant to explain
deeper truths; the bodily resurrection of Christ; and substitutionary
atonement, the belief that Jesus died for our sins to appease God and the need
for humans to petition Jesus for salvation in order to escape hell in the
afterlife.
The 20th century was a period of separation
between these two theological lines of thought while the growing atheist
movement, which drew plenty of agnostics along with it, went from being a
cultural abnormality to a cultural expectation among intellectual elites. This
new movement would begin the work of intellectually driving a wedge between
science and religion and ultimately create great unease among the Christian
faithful. Where the liberal theologians had little difficulty keeping science
and religion comfortably combined, their fundamentalist brethren had to disavow
much of current scientific thought in order to maintain a hold on their
purported fundamentals.
But in the early 20th century several things
happened that began to bring about the collapse of the modern time period. The
advent of World War I shook even the firmest foundational modernists, a war
that not only unhinged the enlightened belief that peace would prevail but
indeed escalated to include much of the world’s population. Further wars added
to this failure and the Vietnam war of the mid-20th century put the
nail in the proverbial coffin of modernity’s expectation for peace. In science,
Quantum Theory undermined the notion of a predictable universe. If there is the
potential for the quantum, now long since proven, then there is simply no way
that all things could be known. The universe is not deterministic. The 1918 flu
pandemic threw to the wind this idea that all disease could be abolished and a
series of new viruses, including the AIDS virus, would challenge our medical
theories. We were no longer living in a quantifiable, predictable world where
all things could be known. Thus Postmodernity was born.
Postmodernity or no postmodernity, the church has a tendency
to take a little while to catch up to the current intellectual mindset. The
church that most of today’s society is familiar with was birthed from the
modern movement. Our 1950’s white pillared protestant church with its
committees and 10am Sunday morning hymn laden, sermon focused worship services
is a product of the modern response that we can be enlightened and educated
through hymnology and good preaching. This classic traditional worship could
and can still be seen in congregations that value both fundamentalist as well
as liberal theologians. Both were word heavy. Linguistic and musical learners
have always been the mainstay of the modern church, which relies on a passive
congregation receiving edification from the worship leaders.
In the 1970’s the contemporary church sprang up in order to
respond to the growing atheist and unchurched movement. It was no longer
culturally conditioned across America that people attend worship on Sundays or
even go to church at all. Christendom was beginning to die in the western world
and several church leaders responded by trying to “change the package without
changing the message” in order to try to draw the unchurched back into the
fold. Gone were the stain glass windows, the high pulpits (or indeed any
pulpits). Gone were the pews and the visual symbolism. Gone were the hymns and
the organ.
In auditoriums with new technology at their fingertips, the
contemporary church began bringing the sounds of the current culture: rock and
roll, punk, hip hop, rap, and alternative indie rock. A whole new music
industry even developed around this new church movement. Liturgy was replaced
by skits and music sets. The sermon still took center stage, but it would be
accompanied by power point presentations and video clips. Churches grew at
exponential rates as the contemporary church learned how to use modern
marketing practices to bring in the crowds. In order to maintain some personal
connection to individual congregants, small group ministries began to emerge.
Discipleship classes became the mainstay of contemporary pastor types who
promoted new programs. Starbucks and McDonalds could be found in the lobby of
megachurches as they sought to cater to contemporary tastes.
To be continued….
(next month look for the advent of the emerging church and
the continuation of the story…)
