The church, from the empty tomb to this morning

The tomb is empty

The church does not begin with an idea. It begins with a report: he was dead, and he is not.

Everything on this page hangs on a weekend outside Jerusalem. Jesus of Nazareth was executed under Pontius Pilate, buried in a borrowed tomb, and three days later the tomb was empty and his followers began saying — under threat, and then under execution — that they had eaten with him.

Within twenty-five years Paul was already quoting a creed older than his own letters: that Christ died for our sins, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared to Peter, to the Twelve, and to more than five hundred at once, most of whom were still alive and could be asked.

“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”

Pentecost — the church is born

A hundred and twenty frightened people go into a room. What comes out preaches in every language in the street.

Fifty days after the resurrection, at the feast of Pentecost, the Spirit falls on the disciples in Jerusalem. Peter — who six weeks earlier had denied knowing Jesus to a servant girl — stands up in front of the same city that killed him and preaches.

Three thousand are baptised that day. From the first hour the church is multilingual, multiethnic and public: the crowd hears the wonders of God in Parthian, Median, Elamite, Arabic. Nothing about it was ever meant to be one nation's religion.

“This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses.”

The Council of Jerusalem

The first council asks the first question: does a Gentile have to become a Jew to belong to Jesus?

The gospel had run out past Israel faster than anyone planned, and men came down from Judea teaching that unless the new Gentile believers were circumcised and kept the law of Moses, they could not be saved. Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to have it out.

The apostles and elders met, argued it in the open, and answered: no. Peter said God had given the Spirit to the Gentiles exactly as he had to them, cleansing their hearts by faith — so why lay on them a yoke neither the fathers nor they could carry? James proposed the terms, and the council wrote to the churches.

“We believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.”

Nero burns Rome and blames the Christians

The first state persecution. Tacitus — no friend of the church — records what was done to them.

Fire took most of Rome in July 64. The rumour was that Nero had set it; to kill the rumour he handed the city a scapegoat. Tacitus, writing fifty years later as a hostile pagan, describes Christians covered in animal skins and torn by dogs, or fixed to crosses and burned as lamps when the daylight failed — and says the cruelty was such that even a crowd that hated them began to pity them.

Tradition places the deaths of both Peter and Paul in this persecution: Peter crucified, Paul beheaded on the road to Ostia. The generation that had seen the risen Christ died refusing to say they hadn't.

Jerusalem falls, the Temple burns

The sacrificial system ends — forty years after a carpenter said it would.

Titus' legions took Jerusalem after a siege of five months and levelled the Temple. The daily sacrifice stopped that year and has never resumed. The Arch of Titus in Rome still shows soldiers carrying the menorah out.

For the church, the effects were immediate. Its mother congregation scattered, its centre of gravity moved out to Antioch, Ephesus, Rome; and it was now unmistakably a separate thing from the synagogue — a faith with no altar, no priesthood and no city, because Hebrews had already said the sacrifice was finished.

Marcion cuts the Bible in half

A wealthy shipowner teaches that the God of Israel is not the Father of Jesus. Rome expels him — and returns his money.

Marcion of Sinope found the Old Testament's God embarrassing: material, angry, tied to one nation. So he proposed two gods — the lesser creator of the Jews, and the previously unknown God of love revealed in Jesus — and published the first fixed canon in history to match: one edited Luke, ten edited letters of Paul, nothing else.

The church in Rome excommunicated him in 144. But he had forced a question nobody had needed to answer in writing before: which books actually are the church's books?

“The church answered with a list, not an argument: the Old Testament and the apostles' writings, held together.”

Irenaeus against the Gnostics

Against the claim that salvation is secret knowledge for insiders, a bishop in Lyon writes the faith down in public.

Gnostic teachers offered a better story for sophisticated people: matter is a mistake, the body is a prison, and a private knowledge — gnosis — releases the spark inside you. It sold well, and it emptied the incarnation of any point.

Irenaeus, who had known Polycarp, who had known John, answered with Against Heresies. His method mattered as much as his argument: the apostles taught publicly, in churches anyone could walk into, and what they taught can be recited — the rule of faith, one God, maker of heaven and earth, and one Lord Jesus Christ, truly incarnate, truly crucified, truly raised.

“He became what we are, that he might bring us to be even what he is himself.”

The Great Persecution

Empire-wide, systematic, and aimed at the books: burn the Scriptures, and the faith goes with them.

Decius required every citizen in 250 to sacrifice and collect a certificate. Diocletian went further in 303: churches demolished, Scriptures surrendered and burned, clergy arrested, and finally sacrifice on pain of death. It was the most thorough attempt any state ever made to end Christianity, and it lasted eight years.

It also broke people. Some handed the books over — traditores, the handers-over — and when the persecution stopped the church had to decide what to do with them, a wound that opened into the Donatist split in North Africa.

The Edict of Milan

Constantine and Licinius make it legal to be a Christian. The persecuted church inherits the empire — and a new set of dangers.

Within two years of the last martyrdoms, Christianity went from capital offence to protected religion; confiscated property was returned, and by the end of the century it was the empire's official faith.

The gains were real: Scriptures copied at scale, the poor fed at public expense, gladiatorial games ended, councils able to meet at all. So were the costs. Bishops acquired courtiers' habits, emperors acquired opinions about doctrine, and within a generation the church would be arguing about Christ with an emperor in the room.

Nicaea: true God from true God

Arius taught that there was a time when the Son was not. Three hundred bishops — some still carrying persecution scars — said no.

Arius, a priest of Alexandria, argued that the Son was the first and highest of God's creatures: glorious, but made. It was tidy, it was popular, and it put a creature where God should be.

The council met at Nicaea in 325 and answered with a word not found in Scripture, to defend what Scripture says everywhere: homoousios — of one substance with the Father. Begotten, not made. Athanasius spent the rest of his life — five exiles — holding that line while the empire changed its mind around him.

“God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.”

Athanasius names the twenty-seven

The first list that matches your New Testament exactly — in a letter about when to keep Easter.

Athanasius' 39th Festal Letter names the twenty-seven books of the New Testament and no others: the canon Christians have used ever since. The councils of Hippo and Carthage said the same in the 390s.

It is worth being precise about what happened. No council invented the canon; the churches had been reading these books in worship for two centuries and arguing at the edges about a handful of others. What the fourth century did was write down what the church had already received.

Constantinople: the Spirit is Lord

Nicaea had settled the Son. A second council settles the Spirit — and gives us the creed we still say.

After 325 a new party, the Pneumatomachi — Spirit-fighters — accepted the Son's deity but treated the Holy Spirit as a created servant. The Cappadocians, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, answered them.

The council of 381 expanded the creed: the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified. The version recited in churches this Sunday is substantially this one.

“We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.”

Grace, against Pelagius

A British monk teaches that we can obey God under our own steam. Carthage condemns it; Augustine explains why it matters.

Pelagius was a moralist appalled by lazy Christianity. His cure was to deny that sin had damaged us at the root: if God commands it, we must be able to do it, unaided. Grace becomes help and example rather than rescue.

Augustine — who had tried to save himself and knew exactly how that ends — answered that the will itself is bound, and that God must give what he commands. Carthage condemned Pelagianism in 418, Ephesus repeated it in 431, and Orange in 529 closed the softer version that had crept back in.

“Give what you command, and command what you will.”

Ephesus: one person, not two

If Mary bore only the man, then the one who died was only a man. The council answers with a title for her that is really a claim about him.

Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, objected to calling Mary Theotokos — God-bearer — and preferred Christotokos. Behind the title lay a way of speaking about Christ that kept his divinity and humanity so separate they looked like two persons sharing a name.

Cyril of Alexandria pressed the point: it is one and the same Son who is eternally begotten of the Father and born of Mary. The council deposed Nestorius and kept Theotokos — a statement about Christ, phrased about his mother.

Chalcedon — and the first lasting schism

Four words fence the mystery: without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. And the first great tear appears in the church.

Chalcedon confessed one person in two natures, truly God and truly man, the natures neither mixed into a third thing nor split into two sons. It remains the definition of orthodoxy for Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants alike.

It was also the first council a large part of the church refused. The churches of Egypt, Syria, Armenia and Ethiopia — today's Oriental Orthodox — held to Cyril's language of one incarnate nature and walked away. They have been separated for fifteen centuries, though modern dialogue has concluded that much of the split was two vocabularies for one faith.

“One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, made known in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”

Benedict writes a rule

Rome is collapsing. A rule for monasteries quietly becomes the institution that copies the Scriptures through the wreckage.

Benedict of Nursia wrote a short, humane rule for communities: prayer at fixed hours, work with the hands, obedience, hospitality to every stranger as to Christ. He called it a little rule for beginners.

For the next six hundred years those communities were Europe's libraries, schools, hospitals and farms. The manuscripts that survived the fall of the western empire survived because monks copied them, page by page, in cold rooms — including the manuscripts of the Bible we read.

“Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ.”

The gospel goes into other people's languages

Augustine lands in Kent; Cyril and Methodius invent an alphabet for the Slavs rather than make them learn Greek.

Gregory the Great sent Augustine of Canterbury to the English in 597. In 863 two brothers from Thessaloniki went north to Moravia and did something more radical: they translated the Scriptures and the liturgy into Slavonic, devising a script to carry it, against clergy who insisted God could only be worshipped in Hebrew, Greek or Latin.

Cyril's answer to them has outlived the argument: does the rain not fall on all equally? The Cyrillic alphabet still carries his name.

Nicaea II and the icons

The last council East and West both accept — and the first one Protestants would reopen.

For a century the empire tore itself apart over images: iconoclasts destroyed them as idolatry, iconodules defended them as the natural consequence of the incarnation — the invisible God has made himself visible, so he can be depicted.

The seventh council restored the icons and drew a distinction it thought decisive: veneration, which may be given to an image, and worship, which belongs to God alone. Much of the Reformation would later judge that the distinction does not survive contact with real congregations.

The Great Schism: East and West

Legates lay a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia. Half the church has not been in communion with the other half since.

Two pressures had been building for centuries. One was doctrinal: the West had added filioque — and the Son — to the creed of 381 without an ecumenical council. The other was jurisdictional: whether the bishop of Rome holds authority over the whole church or is the first among equal patriarchs.

In July 1054 Cardinal Humbert's delegation excommunicated Patriarch Michael Cerularius, who returned the favour. Language, politics and finally the sack of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204 made the break permanent. The mutual anathemas were lifted in 1965; communion has not been restored.

The Crusades

Four centuries after the Islamic conquests took Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Christian North Africa, the East asked the West for soldiers — and the West went.

By 1095 more than half of what had been the Christian world had been under Muslim rule for four centuries: Syria and Palestine from the 630s, Egypt and the North Africa of Cyprian and Augustine by 700, Spain from 711, Sicily in the ninth century — and in 846 a raiding fleet sacked St Peter's outside the walls of Rome. In 1071 the Seljuks destroyed the Byzantine army at Manzikert and took most of Asia Minor; in 1095 the emperor Alexios sent west asking for troops. Urban II preached the First Crusade at Clermont that November: go and help the eastern churches, and open the road to Jerusalem again.

That is a war of defence, and defending people under attack is not merely permissible but right — the church had taught as much since Augustine. Nor was it a colonial venture in its origins: what Urban offered those who went was an indulgence, the remission of the penance owed for sin, for a journey made out of devotion and not for gain, and the charters show families mortgaging estates to go and coming home poorer, when they came home.

Good and right things can be abused, and this one was almost at once. Bands under Count Emicho massacred the Jewish communities of the Rhineland in 1096, while the bishops of Speyer, Worms and Mainz tried to shelter them. Jerusalem's inhabitants were slaughtered when the city fell in 1099. And in 1204 a crusade that never reached the Holy Land sacked Christian Constantinople instead — which Innocent III condemned, and the Greek church has not forgotten.

Aquinas and the schools

The medieval mind at full stretch: every objection stated at its strongest before it is answered.

The universities of Paris, Oxford and Bologna took the recovered works of Aristotle and asked whether Christian faith could survive the best pagan reasoning. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae answered by arguing that grace perfects nature rather than abolishing it — and by the discipline of stating each objection so fairly that opponents complained he improved their arguments.

He stopped writing months before he died, after an experience in the mass, saying that all he had written seemed like straw.

Three popes at once

Rome, Avignon and Pisa each have a pope, each with cardinals, each excommunicating the others. Ordinary Christians cannot tell who is the church.

After seventy years of the papacy at Avignon, a disputed election in 1378 produced two rival popes, and a council called to fix it in 1409 produced a third. Saints lined up on opposite sides. The claim that the visible church could not fail was being tested in front of everyone.

The Council of Constance ended it in 1417 by deposing the claimants and electing Martin V. In doing so it also asserted that a council stands above a pope — a claim Rome later rejected, but which had been made out loud.

Wycliffe and Hus: the first reformers

A century before Luther, an Oxford don puts the Bible into English and a Czech preacher is burned for saying Scripture outranks the pope.

John Wycliffe argued that Scripture is the supreme authority and that the church is the company of the elect, not the hierarchy; his followers produced the first complete English Bible. He died in his bed in 1384 — and was condemned posthumously, his bones dug up and burned in 1428.

Jan Hus took up the same arguments in Prague, preaching in Czech, attacking indulgences, insisting that the cup be given to the laity. Summoned to the Council of Constance under an imperial safe conduct, he was tried and burned at the stake in 1415, singing.

“In a hundred years, God will raise up a man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed.”

Gutenberg prints the Bible

For fourteen centuries every copy of Scripture was made by hand. Then it wasn't.

The first substantial book off Gutenberg's press was the Bible. Within fifty years there were presses in more than two hundred cities, and a pamphlet could cross Germany in a fortnight.

Erasmus published a printed Greek New Testament in 1516 — one year before Luther posted his theses — putting the original text into the hands of anyone who could read it, and exposing places where the Latin Vulgate had drifted.

Luther's Ninety-Five Theses

An Augustinian monk posts debate points about indulgences. Within four years he is an outlaw and the Western church is split.

Johann Tetzel was selling indulgences to fund St Peter's. Luther, a lecturer on the Psalms and Romans tormented by his own failure to be righteous, wrote ninety-five theses in Latin against the practice. Printers translated and spread them without asking him.

The real discovery came underneath it: that the righteousness of God in Romans 1:17 is not the standard that condemns us but the gift he gives. At Worms in 1521, ordered to recant, he said his conscience was captive to the word of God.

“Here I stand. My conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and will not recant.”

The Anabaptists, and the free church

In a house in Zurich, adults baptise each other. Both Catholics and Protestants drown them for it.

Conrad Grebel and a small group concluded that Zwingli had stopped halfway: if the church is people who believe, then baptism belongs to believers, and the state has no business in it. They baptised one another in January 1525. Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat two years later — the mock-execution the authorities thought fitting.

Hunted across Europe, the survivors gathered around Menno Simons into congregations that renounced the sword and answered to no magistrate. Their descendants are the Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites — and, at one remove, every church that holds that faith cannot be compelled.

Tyndale burns for an English Bible

He said a ploughboy would know more of Scripture than a priest. He was strangled and burned before he finished the Old Testament.

Refused a licence to translate in England, William Tyndale worked in exile, smuggling printed English New Testaments home in bales of cloth. Bishops bought them to burn them; he used the money to print more.

Betrayed near Brussels, he was executed at Vilvoorde in 1536. Most of the King James Version's New Testament is still his words — let there be light, the powers that be, the salt of the earth, my brother's keeper.

“Lord, open the King of England's eyes.”

Calvin and Geneva

A twenty-six-year-old refugee publishes the Institutes, is press-ganged into pastoring Geneva, and spends his life on the plain sense of the text.

Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion began as a small handbook in 1536 and grew, over four editions, into the most systematic statement Protestantism produced. But his working life was preaching consecutively through books of the Bible and writing commentaries on almost all of them.

Geneva became a refuge for the persecuted from France, Scotland and England, and an exporter: John Knox called it the most perfect school of Christ since the apostles, and took its convictions home. Calvin's Geneva also burned Servetus for denying the Trinity — the Reformation's own borrowing of the state's sword, and its own indictment.

The Council of Trent

Rome's answer: reform the abuses, and anathematise justification by faith alone.

Trent sat, on and off, for eighteen years. It did real housekeeping — it ended the sale of indulgences, required bishops to reside in their dioceses and founded seminaries to train priests — and it produced the Counter-Reformation's energy and its missionaries.

It also drew the doctrinal lines hard: Scripture and tradition together as authority, the Vulgate as the authentic text, seven sacraments, and canons pronouncing anathema on anyone who said justification is by faith alone.

The Synod of Dort

Protestants discover they can divide from each other too — over grace, freedom and who does the choosing.

The followers of Jacobus Arminius had published a Remonstrance in 1610 objecting to the Reformed account of predestination. The Synod of Dort answered with the five canons later abbreviated as TULIP, and the Remonstrant ministers were deposed.

Both sides confessed the Trinity, the incarnation, Scripture's authority and salvation by grace. They disagreed about how grace meets the will — and four centuries later Calvinist and Arminian Christians are still in the same church catholic, still arguing.

The Great Awakening

Edwards preaches in Northampton, Whitefield in open fields, Wesley on horseback — and formal religion turns into conversion.

Jonathan Edwards' Northampton revival began in 1734; Whitefield, barred from pulpits, preached to tens of thousands in fields on both sides of the Atlantic; John Wesley, after his heart was strangely warmed at Aldersgate in 1738, rode a quarter of a million miles organising converts into societies.

The revival crossed lines nothing else did. It reached the enslaved and the poor, produced the first significant Black churches in America, and Wesley's last letter was written to encourage Wilberforce against the slave trade.

Carey sails for India

A cobbler with a homemade map of the world argues that the Great Commission still applies. Then he goes.

Told by an older minister that God would convert the heathen without his help, William Carey wrote An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians in 1792 and sailed the next year. At Serampore he and his colleagues translated Scripture into dozens of Indian languages, started schools and a college, and campaigned until widow-burning was outlawed.

Judson followed to Burma, Morrison to China, Moffat and Livingstone to Africa, Hudson Taylor inland — and thousands of women who outnumbered the men on most fields and are named in far fewer books.

“Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.”

The slave trade abolished

Twenty years of parliamentary defeat, driven by converted men and women — and by a church that had defended slavery for centuries.

John Newton, a slave-ship captain turned pastor who wrote Amazing Grace, published his account of the trade; Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped as a child, wrote the bestselling narrative that made it impossible to claim ignorance; Wilberforce and the Clapham circle brought the bill year after year until it passed in 1807. Slavery itself was abolished across the empire in 1833, three days before Wilberforce died.

The other half of the truth: Christians owned slaves, preached submission to them, and split whole denominations rather than give them up. The abolitionists were arguing against their own churches as much as against the traders.

Azusa Street

In a disused livery stable in Los Angeles, a Black preacher with one eye leads a revival that reshapes world Christianity.

William J. Seymour, the son of former slaves, was made to listen to lectures from the hallway because of his colour. The meetings he led on Azusa Street from 1906 ran day and night for three years, and Black, white, Latino and Asian worshippers prayed together in a segregated city — one observer wrote that the colour line was washed away in the blood.

Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity has grown from that room to hundreds of millions of believers, most of them in Africa, Latin America and Asia. It is the fastest-growing movement in Christian history.

Barmen, and the Confessing Church

When most German churches saluted, a minority wrote one sentence that could not be reconciled with the regime.

The German Christians movement wanted a church aligned with the new order — Aryan clergy, a de-Judaised Bible. In May 1934 the Barmen Declaration, drafted largely by Karl Barth, answered that Jesus Christ is the one Word of God whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death, and rejected any other event, power or figure as a source of revelation.

Martin Niemöller went to the camps. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had written that when Christ calls a man he bids him come and die, joined the conspiracy against Hitler and was hanged at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945, three weeks before the surrender.

“Jesus Christ is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”

The Second Vatican Council

Rome opens the windows: the mass in the people's language, the Bible into their hands, Protestants called separated brethren rather than heretics.

Over four sessions, twenty-five hundred bishops reworked how the Catholic Church spoke to the modern world: vernacular liturgy, the laity urged to read Scripture, religious liberty affirmed, and the language of anathema replaced by the language of dialogue.

The doctrinal differences Trent defined were not withdrawn, and Catholics themselves still argue hard about what the council meant. But the mutual anathemas of 1054 were lifted the same decade, and Christians who had not spoken for four centuries began to.

The church the world didn't expect

Missionaries were expelled, churches were closed, and the faith grew fastest exactly where that happened.

When foreign missionaries were forced out of China in the early 1950s, the consensus was that Chinese Christianity would not survive without them. It multiplied in house churches instead. In 1900 Africa had fewer than ten million Christians; today it has more than six hundred million, and the typical Christian alive right now is a young woman in Nigeria, Brazil or the Philippines.

More Christians are also under pressure than at any point since Rome — in Nigeria, North Korea, Iran, Eritrea, China. Two thousand years on, the pattern of the first three centuries is the pattern of the present one.