Church History

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StartThe first generation: from Jerusalem to RomeStart TimelineFrom Pentecost to today, in events and people

The early church 30–312

  1. The first generation: from Jerusalem to Rome The church that began in Jerusalem at Pentecost around AD 30 reached Samaria, Antioch and Rome within a generation. Through Nero's persecution in 64 and the fall of Jerusalem in 70, a small company of Jewish disciples became a church of Jews and Gentiles together.
  2. Persecution and the martyrs From Nero to the early fourth century Christians were at times arrested and killed for refusing to sacrifice to the gods and the emperor. Through Polycarp of Smyrna around 155, Perpetua and Felicity at Carthage in 203, and the persecutions under Decius in 250 and Diocletian from 303, the church remembered its martyrs as Christ's witnesses, and learned how to receive back those who fell.
  3. Worship and life in the early church Without buildings or the protection of the law, the early church met in homes on the Lord's day to hear the apostles and prophets, to pray and to give thanks over bread and cup, and it baptized those it had taught. The Didache's prayers, the worship Justin set before the emperor around 150–155, and the care of the sick in time of plague show a people for whom worship and love went together.
  4. Canon, creed and bishop With the apostles gone, the second-century church had to ask how to keep the faith it had received from them. Around 110 Ignatius urged the churches to stand together around their bishop; after Marcion broke with the church at Rome in 144, the church said more clearly which books it had been reading; and around 180 Irenaeus defended the apostles' faith from the Scriptures, the rule of faith and the succession of bishops.

The church of the empire 313–590

  1. Constantine: from persecution to toleration Victorious at the Milvian Bridge in 312, Constantine agreed at Milan the next year to give Christians and all others freedom of worship, and in 325 he called the bishops to Nicaea. By 380, when Theodosius made the faith of Nicaea the empire's, the church had been freed from persecution and had begun to pay the price of being bound to power.
  2. The desert and the monastery The monastic life Antony began in the Egyptian desert late in the third century grew through Pachomius' communities and Basil in the East, and took its Western shape with Benedict at Monte Cassino around 529. Monks served the church by prayer and work, by welcoming guests and nursing the sick, by books and by mission; the Reformers asked about vows and merit.
  3. The fall of Rome and Augustine When Alaric's Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, pagans blamed the Christians for abandoning the old gods, and Augustine answered with The City of God. He died in 430 in Hippo, besieged by the Vandals; as the empire fell in the West, bishops cared for their cities and monks kept learning alive.
  4. The church beyond the empire In the fourth and fifth centuries the gospel spread beyond Rome's borders: King Ezana of Aksum and Frumentius around 330, Armenia and Mesrop's alphabet around 405, Nino in Georgia, the persecuted Church of the East in Persia, and Patrick, once a slave in Ireland, going back to its people. And the Bible was translated into the peoples' own tongues.

The early Middle Ages 590–1054

  1. Gregory the Great and the mission to Europe Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome from 590, cared for his city and the church as a shepherd, and the monks he sent reached Kent in 597. Irish and English monks carried the gospel to the continent; then came Charlemagne's coronation in 800 and the forced baptism of the Saxons, and Cluny's reform in 910.
  2. The rise of Islam and the churches of the East In the seventh century Arab armies took Syria and Egypt, and around 638 Jerusalem surrendered: the Christians of those lands came to live as protected people, dhimmi, under Muslim rule. In the same years Alopen of the Church of the East reached the Tang capital, Chang'an, in 635, a story kept on a stone set up in 781.
  3. Icons and the mission to the Slavs When the Byzantine emperors of the eighth century had icons removed, the monks resisted, and in 787 the Second Council of Nicaea distinguished the veneration given to icons from the worship given to God alone. In 863 Cyril and Methodius brought Scripture and worship to the Slavs of Moravia in their own tongue, and in 988 Vladimir of Kyiv and his people were baptized.

The Middle Ages 1054–1500

  1. 1054: East and West divided In July 1054 the pope's legates laid a bull excommunicating the patriarch on the altar of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the patriarch's synod condemned them in turn. It was one scene in an estrangement that grew over centuries; the crusaders' sack of the city in 1204 made the wound deep, and in 1965 the two churches lifted the excommunications.
  2. Popes, emperors and the Crusades In the eleventh century Pope Gregory VII set out to free the church from the power of kings, and in 1077 Henry IV sought his pardon at Canossa. The Crusades, begun at Urban II's call in 1095, brought the slaughter of the Rhineland's Jews in 1096 and of Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem in 1099; in 2000 Pope John Paul II asked forgiveness for such sins of the church's sons and daughters.
  3. The friars Early in the thirteenth century Francis of Assisi and Dominic of Castile gathered brothers who lived in poverty on the road rather than behind a monastery's walls, preaching the gospel, and the popes approved their way of life in 1209 and 1216. These mendicant orders carried the gospel into the towns and universities; in time, inquisitors also came from their ranks.
  4. The Inquisition and heresy In the twelfth-century West the Waldensians preached poverty and the Bible in the people's tongue, and the Cathars taught two principles, good and evil. The church put them down through the decree of Verona in 1184, the Albigensian Crusade of 1209 and Gregory IX's inquisitors from 1233; Protestants burned heretics too, and in 2000 Pope John Paul II asked forgiveness for violence used in the service of truth.
  5. The Black Death, the Great Schism and Hus The Black Death that swept Europe from 1347 took between a third and a half of its people, and in the fear it brought many Jewish communities were massacred. The papacy, split in two in 1378, was made one again at the council of Constance, but the same council burned Jan Hus in 1415, though he had come under a safe-conduct. In 1453 Constantinople fell.

The Reformation 1500–1650

  1. Wittenberg, 1517 On 31 October 1517 Martin Luther of Wittenberg sent out ninety-five theses for a debate on indulgences, and the press carried them across Germany; at Worms in 1521 he answered that his conscience was captive to the word of God. His story holds the light of the German Bible and the shadows of the Peasants' War and his writings against the Jews.
  2. Zurich, Geneva and Scotland In 1523 Zwingli began, with Zurich's city council, to rebuild the church on Scripture, and in 1525 his young companions baptized those who confessed their faith and were persecuted by the same city. Calvin, back in Geneva in 1541, ordered the church in a city of refugees, and in 1560 Scotland confessed the Reformed faith with John Knox.
  3. Catholic reform and world mission In the sixteenth century the Catholic Church renewed itself from within through the Jesuits, approved in 1540, and the Council of Trent, opened in 1545, and its missionaries carried the gospel to Japan and China. In the Americas conquest crushed the native peoples, and friars protested on their behalf.
  4. Wars of religion and toleration For a century after the Reformation, Christians in Europe killed one another in the name of faith. Through the Paris massacre of 1572 and the Thirty Years' War of 1618–1648, alongside imperfect peaces such as the Edict of Nantes and the Peace of Westphalia, voices grew that asked for freedom of conscience.

The modern era 1650–1900

  1. Puritans and Pietists In seventeenth-century England and New England the Puritans sought a church and a life reformed by the word, and in 1662 some two thousand ministers left their pulpits for conscience' sake. In Germany Spener's Pia Desideria of 1675 awakened Bible reading, small groups and a living faith, and the Moravians of Herrnhut sent missionaries to distant lands.
  2. The Great Awakening and the Methodists John Wesley, who wrote that his heart was strangely warmed in Aldersgate Street, London, on 24 May 1738, preached in the fields with George Whitefield and gathered converts into classes. Around 1740 the Great Awakening came to the American colonies through Edwards's Northampton and Whitefield's tours, and churches grew among enslaved Africans too.
  3. The century of modern missions William Carey's pamphlet of 1792 and his sailing for India the next year opened a century of Protestant missions. Missionaries went to China, Burma and Africa, learned the peoples' languages and translated the Bible, and the richest fruit was churches led by their own people. Yet the journey often went with the ships and treaties of empire.
  4. Abolition and social reform For centuries Christian nations bought and sold Africans, and many churches defended it from Scripture. Quakers and evangelicals who read the same Bible, and the enslaved themselves, opposed it; Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833, and the United States, after a civil war, ended slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
  5. The Korean Catholic Church: beginnings and persecution In the late eighteenth century young scholars of Joseon came to faith by reading Chinese books from Beijing, and in 1784 Yi Seung-hun came home baptized: a church of lay people began. Through persecutions from 1791 to 1866 it gave a great many martyrs, and in 1984 one hundred and three of them were declared saints.
  6. Protestant missions and the beginnings of the Korean church Before missionaries settled in Korea, Gützlaff left Bibles on its west coast in 1832, Thomas died on the Taedong River in 1866, and in Manchuria Korean translators worked with John Ross on the New Testament. The doctor Horace Allen came in 1884, Underwood and Appenzeller at Easter 1885, and in 1887 the Saemunan and Chungdong churches were founded in Seoul.

The twentieth century and today 1900–

  1. The Pyongyang revival of 1907 and Japanese rule In January 1907, at the winter Bible class of the Jangdaehyeon church in Pyongyang, people confessed their sins openly and were reconciled to one another. Under Japanese rule Christians stood in the March First movement of 1919, and when the Presbyterian assembly approved shrine worship under pressure in 1938, many refused, were imprisoned, and some died.
  2. The church in two world wars In 1914 the churches of Europe each blessed their own nation's war, and in 1915 the Armenian Christians of the Ottoman Empire were driven to their deaths. In Nazi Germany the Confessing Church confessed Christ alone as Lord at Barmen, but church leaders hardly spoke for the Jews; after the war the churches confessed their guilt and in 1948 gathered as the World Council of Churches.
  3. War, division and growth Liberation in 1945 soon became division, and many Christians of the North came south. In the war of 1950–1953 the pastor Son Yang-won lived out the command to love one's enemies; afterwards the Korean church divided and yet grew greatly and sent missionaries across the world, and its growth brought the temptations of size, money and division with it.
  4. The world church today Most of the mission delegates who met at Edinburgh in 1910 came from Europe and North America; a century later, historians say, the weight of the world church had moved to Africa, Latin America and Asia. Today, as churches of every tribe and tongue run the race together through persecution, migration and meeting, this course closes the church's history as a story of God's faithfulness and our repentance.