Recently, I taught the World’s Shortest Church History Lesson to the kids in my Sunday school. What I tried to accomplish in one hour was to trace the three ways people have tried to established religious authority since the Reformation. That’s a Big Undertaking, I know, and it requires a lot of simplification, but here’s what I came up with:
The three bases for religious authority that people usually appeal to are: 1) Tradition, 2) Scripture, and 3) Nature (or “science”). From three very different foundations, you get three very different kinds of movements: If your primary basis for controlling what you believe and the way you do church is Tradition, what you end up with is Fundamentalism (if it’s good enough for grandpa, it’s good enough for me). If your primary basis for controlling what you believe and the way you do church is Scripture, then what you end up with is Evangelicalism (Evangelical – meaning “gospel based” since the number one thing you can derive from scripture is the gospel – everything else is extra). Interestingly, in Germany, the Lutheran church has always called itself the Evangelical church. Last, if your primary basis for controlling what you believe and how you do church is Nature, or “science,” what you end up with is something you might call “modernism” or “liberalism.”
The odd thing is what happens when you look at how these kinds of ideas have played out in the last 500 years. Continue reading “World’s Shortest Church History Lesson”
neumatikos 