Lessons from History that that Can Help Us Understand the Chaos in America in 2020
WCIU Journal: Social Justice Topic
June 2, 2020
by Ralph D. Winter
Excerpts from Winter’s Lectures for the course, Foundations of the World Christian Movement.
History: Ethnic Peoples Caught Up in a Lengthy Unfolding Drama
As I have studied the development of Western civilization, I have noticed through the centuries that if you utilize a grid of five 400-year periods—0 CE to 400, to 800, to 1200, to 1600, to 2000—you will find that five flourishings, or renaissances, fall in the latter part of each period:
1. 300–400, The Classical Renaissance
2. 700–800, The Carolingian Renaissance
3. 1100–1200, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance
4. 1500–1600, THE Renaissance
5. 1700–2000, The Evangelical Renaissance
Each of these epochs is described in some detail in my article, “The Kingdom Strikes Back” (pp. 7-24 in the Foundations Reader).
Many of these periods begin in chaos or persecution. Roman government crackdowns in the first 400 years, Gothic and Saxon invasions in the second 400 years, Viking invasions in the third 400 years, for example.
In southern England, after a relatively calm three centuries of literacy under occupation by Roman legions, in about 440 CE they lost their protection, and England immediately sagged back into chaos and bloodshed, with invading Anglo-Saxons, and all that.
The relative peace and quiet and composure of Ireland, Scotland, England, and middle Europe was exploded, ravaged again and again …
The Evangelical Renaissance created a significantly different form of Christianity. The Reformation had stressed doctrine as the key “verification” of Christianity. The Evangelical Awakening came along and added an emotional dimension. The “Evangelical experience” was now necessary. Additionally, a third dimension of “verification” of faith was the matter of “by their fruits you should know them.”
Profound social changes that stemmed from Evangelical Christianity. The Bible caused a vast array of societal changes, mostly peaceful, but not always. England experienced a relatively mild revolution a hundred years before France, but nevertheless ended up cutting off the head of Charles the First. Then, Cromwell’s army was energized again to cross the Irish Sea and slaughter a hundred thousand Catholics.
In the 18th century, John Wesley took the Pietism from Germany, which was mainly otherworldly, and he grafted into it all kinds of secular concerns. They reformed the courts, the prisons, the insane asylums, the schools—it was an immense transformation of society in England in the eighteenth century.
It would be hard to believe that the Declaration of Independence would even have been signed had it not been for the English Evangelical Awakening flowing over to the American colonies and into the “Great Awakening of the Middle Colonies.” In 1789, when the U.S. Constitution was drafted, only one block away there was a similar group redrafting the new Presbyterian constitution, and many of the same men went back and forth. The Revolutionary War itself would not have succeeded had the Presbyterian denomination not avidly and explicitly preached the war in a way that today would cost them their tax exemption.
And then, what some people call the “Second Awakening,” the surge of faith in the middle of the next [19th] century, had an equivalent causal effect on the Civil War, which to a great extent was fueled by the consciences being aroused in the minds and the hearts of millions of people.
The Lord’s Prayer and Social Action
A book by Timothy Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, shows how revivalism directly led to social reform. Revivalism and social reform were the same thing in the 1850s, and there were incredible numbers of societies for the improvement of morals and societies for literacy, society for women’s education, societies for abolition of slavery. All this social activity was very evangelical.
Jesus taught in terms of changing society to the will of God. If everything that happened on earth was God’s will already, why pray the Lord’s Prayer?—“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” If it were already true, we wouldn’t be told to pray that prayer. Evangelicals, though most of them don’t remember it today, have this history that involved drastic and extensive social action.
But that was before Moody came along. Historically the reason evangelicals rejected the social gospel was because Moody brought millions of lower class people into the church, and they had no stake in running the governments or social change. The people who were talking about governmental level decisions were wealthy college people—the old style evangelicals. So there was a social polarization there, the rejection wasn’t purely theological.
The evangelicals at the Moody Bible Institute began to think about eschatology. For about 35 years, practically everything they taught and wrote about was what was going to happen at the end of time, any moment it’s going to happen. In other words, no use building a bridge because Christ may come before you finish the bridge— that type of thinking.
Well, Wesley didn’t think that way, he wanted to reform England anyway. And I think we need to align ourselves with the Lord’s Prayer whether we’re going to do all of that before Christ returns or not. We need to be lined up with God against darkness and evil.
It is easily possible to imagine that the force of the Lord’s Prayer “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” would require us to do everything we possibly can, not just to exhibit fantastic personal sacrifice, but to mobilize as much of the Christian world and the non-Christian world as possible. To quote 1 John 3:8, “The Son of God appeared for this purpose, that He might destroy the works of the devil.” This verse points out how very central war against evil, war against Satan, actually is. If this is the central purpose, or one of the central purposes of the Son of God (who made it plain that, “as my Father has sent me, even so send I you”), then His commission is our commission and our commission is today widely underestimated and misunderstood.
If Satan is able to dull people’s senses and to divert their gaze, that would certainly explain the extent to which, as John Eldredge puts it in his book, The Epic, “I am staggered by the level of naivete that most people live with regarding evil.”
Indeed, for the Kingdom of God to come on earth and His will to be elaborated in opposition to our great enemy, radically new awareness is necessary. There is not space or time here, to go further in elaboration of what it would take to disassociate God from evil events, or the disciplined group efforts necessary for that purpose. But at least we can sense, with what has been said, the larger dimensions of the Christian mission, and the contrast with what is now being accomplished.
Evangelicals are now going into mainstream public life, and all of a sudden facing questions they never had to decide before. They are gaining a social conscience. They are now members of Congress. They are having to make decisions, which way to vote and how to run the government. They never used to do that, and now they’re developing what is called a public theology. This is the simple reason why I think the face of Evangelicalism is changing today.
Total war will require thousands of Evangelicals to move to the cutting edge of microbiology and of political life, to work for the transformation of ethical standards throughout the commercial world and a new sense of the need of group discipline to do those things. All this and more is necessary if we are to “seize the future.”