Despair over Europe
No apologies for such a long quote from Philip Jenkins and the future of European Christianity. It’s just too good to edit. Read it carefully, especially the last two paragraphs. Jenkins understands the vital role that movements play in the renew and expansion of the Christian faith.
The recent despair over the fate of God’s continent finds a good many historical precedents. Viewed over the centuries, perhaps the best indicators that Christianity is about to expand or revived is a widespread conviction that the religion is doomed or in its closing days.“God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis” (Philip Jenkins), 288-89.Arguably the worst single moment in the history of west European Christianity occurred around 1798, with the Catholic church under severe persecution in much of Europe, and skeptical, deist, and unitarian movements in the ascendant across the Atlantic world.
Among other horrors, that was the year that French revolutionary armies seized Pope Pius VI and carried him into exile, an event that many took to mark the end of the papacy, and (yet again) the terminal crisis of the Catholic church.
That particular trough in Christian affairs turned in to an excellent foundation, from which various groups built the great missionary movement of the nineteenth century, the second evangelical revival, and the Catholic devotional revolution.
Nothing drives activists and reformers more powerfully than the sense that their faith is about to perish in their homelands and that they urgently need to make up for these losses farther afield, whether overseas or among the previously neglected lost sheep at losses farther afield, whether overseas or among the previously neglected lost sheep at home.
Quite possibly, the current sense of doom surrounding European Christianity will drive a comparable movement in the near future. Death and resurrection are not just fundamental doctrines of Christianity; they represent a historical model of the religion’s structure and development.
