Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (162 page)

Equally difficult for Anglicans was to make progress with the Orthodox. Once more, there was much goodwill. Many uprooted Russian and Serb clergy and students, traumatized by war and revolution, had found a happy refuge with their wartime ally Britain. Representatives of the vacant patriarchate in Constantinople were enthusiastic witnesses of the debates at Lambeth in 1920, which came in the wake of Constantinople's own dramatic appeal for all Christians to cooperate whatever their doctrinal differences (though the delegates were less enthusiastic about most other features of the Church of England which they observed during their visit). Given the dire state of affairs in Soviet Russia, it was natural for Anglicans to look to Constantinople rather than Moscow, but the patriarchate was caught up in Ottoman Turkey's collapse and the devastation of Christianity in Asia Minor. That shrewd diplomat Archbishop Randall Davidson was aware that, as so often in the tangled three-century history of Anglican-Orthodox relations, a major consideration for the Orthodox was to grab any help they could find in a crisis.
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Both rival candidates to fill the patriarchal vacancy in Constantinople now made enthusiastic noises about recognizing the validity of Anglican clerical orders that had been so comprehensively rejected by the Pope in 1896 in
Apostolicae Curae
. Meletios, the successful candidate, eventually sailed into Constantinople in 1922 on a French rather than a British gunboat, but he went ahead with a declaration that he recognized Anglican orders. What seemed for a moment like a major step in reunion soon disappeared into the mire of Orthodox feuds. Meletios infuriated most of the Orthodox world, not merely by consorting with heretical Anglicans, but also because of his efforts to switch Orthodoxy to the use of the Gregorian calendar, that pernicious invention of an equally heretical pope. When the Turks engineered Meletios's dismissal a year later, the British, content with the achievement of having preserved the patriarchate in its historic setting in Constantinople, did not intervene.
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The one great success of the Ecumenical Movement in following up Anglican appeals to pursue corporate unity on the basis of a common episcopate took place where the Movement had begun, back in India. A statesmanlike High Churchman, Edwin Palmer, Bishop of Bombay (the modern Mumbai), won the confidence of non-episcopal Church leaders in south India. He proposed a Church which would possess the historic episcopate in succession from the Apostles, but which would take seriously decision-making by the whole body of the Church in presbyteries or synods and local congregations, and which would recognize the validity of the various ministries which came to it from Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians.
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The scheme which emerged echoed - no doubt largely unconsciously - the broadly based episcopacy which King James VI (see pp. 648-50) had long before with crafty persistence engineered in early-seventeenth-century Scotland. Doctrinaire English Anglo-Catholics hated the plan, and their protests about it diverted a good deal of their attention from the Second World War raging around them. Bishop Palmer marshalled a terse pragmatism in its defence in a letter of 1933 to the London
Times
, using an image that would resonate with the generation who had learned realism in Flanders trenches:

Some obscure persons in South India are making the first attempt to end that division. They are like men asking leave to go over the top. They know that they may die in the attempt and that their attempt will fail if they are not followed. In other words, it is possible that a united church may go wrong after union . . . Who is it who died, deserted by all to save all? Who is it who wants one body to complete His saving work?'
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Eventually in 1955 the Church of England agreed to enter (almost) full communion with the new episcopal Church of South India, which had come to fruition eight years before. It was a hard fight, and England's consent was not repeated in the case of a not dissimilar united Church in North India, which therefore continues to face procedural difficulties if its ordained ministers seek to work in Anglican settings. No other scheme of corporate union has so far sidled its way past the reluctance among opposed Anglican Church parties to surrender their respective understandings of Anglican identity.
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Around the Christian world, it has largely been Protestant Churches of liberal tradition, whose authority is already vested in a corporate decision-making body, Presbyterians and Methodists - more sacrificially, Congregationalists - which have found it possible to overcome their historic divisions.

WORLD CHRISTIANITY REALIGNED: PENTECOSTALS AND NEW CHURCHES

The World Council of Churches has achieved much in creating understanding and communication among Christians. Around 350 Christian Churches are currently either full members in its work or in association with it; the Roman Catholic Church has not become a full member, but has a long-standing commitment to its activity. It has been an agent for channelling resources into a myriad of projects seeking to address social and political problems and redress the balance between Western wealth and the need of the developing world. Yet more than half a century after its foundation, it is clear that it has not (or at least not yet) assumed the central place in Christianity that seemed possible in its first decades. Likewise, the Ecumenical Movement's successes have not been those expected by Oldham and the other founding fathers (fathers indeed, mostly male and mostly clerical): results have been low key, local, pragmatic.

Perhaps the problem lay in the very institutions which Oldham and his colleagues excelled in creating: conferences, committees, movements with secretariats, carefully drafted and redrafted agreed statements. Liberal Protestantism was inclined to find the spontaneity of the Holy Spirit rather unnerving. Not so the mushroom-like new Church bodies which we have already noted in Africa and America at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As so often in the history of Christianity, at first the mainstream Churches scarcely noticed what was happening beyond them, or if they did notice, they hardly took seriously what they saw among what seemed like small groups of eccentrics. It has been argued by one of the most perceptive observers of Pentecostalism that not until the late 1950s was the wider American public made aware of its existence.
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Indeed, it is difficult for outsiders to keep track of movements which have generated a bewildering array of names, acronyms and slogans. All were intended to express their multiform identities and zestful efforts to capture experiences life-transforming but, by their very nature, often difficult to put into words - particularly by those who lacked the benefit of higher education in the style of Oxbridge or Berlin.

Pentecostal disagreements trivial to observers, momentous to participants, threw long shadows over the future. In 1916, for instance, a significant section of American Pentecostalism split in two, in an argument which leapt back to some of the earliest recorded disputes about the Trinity. Evangelicals in the Keswick Conference tradition were inclined to invoke the name of Jesus with a frequency which would have struck a chord with late medieval northern European Catholics or Orthodox exponents of Hesychasm; yet in this case, devotional enthusiasm led to an assertion by the Canadian preacher Robert McAlister that early Christians had baptized not in the name of the Trinity, but in the name of Jesus. Did not Peter say as much in Acts 2.38? From there, McAlister developed the proposition that 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit' were only titles for the God who was named Jesus. This was a new form of that early Christian assertion of oneness in the Godhead, modalist Monarchianism (see p. 146). Since 'baptism' was a word constantly echoing through Pentecostalist conversation, there could hardly have been a more explosive intervention. Schism followed in the only recently formed Assemblies of God, and the 'Oneness' folk went their own way, preserving a commitment to racial inclusiveness which was now notably lacking among the all-white Assemblies. 'Oneness' Pentecostalism still flourishes; it may represent about a quarter of avowedly Pentecostal Churches worldwide.
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And the emphasis on Jesus continues to resound through Pentecostal and Charismatic hymnody generally.

Mainstream Evangelicals who took a poor view of speaking in tongues noticed approvingly that the Assemblies of God had at least kept themselves true to Trinitarianism. That would be a help when later the two parties inched together. That result was not inevitable: there was an interesting problem here. In Pentecostalism's early years, Pentecostals met with extreme detestation and name-calling from more established conservative Evangelicals, perhaps all the more so because Pentecostalism's rhetorical style was unmistakably familiar. Like Evangelicalism, it combined a suspicion of modern city ways with a relish for capturing modernity from Satan. It was a leading Pentecostal Church founder, the swashbuckling Aimee Semple McPherson, who hurled handbills for God from an aeroplane in 1920, and presided over the first-known Church radio station. Taking their cue from (the sometime) Mrs McPherson's genius for showbiz, Pentecostals from Los Angeles to Seoul have subsequently shown a talent for staging worship in ways which would stand creditably beside the great Hollywood musicals of the twentieth century (see Plates 50 and 68).
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Yet while Pentecostalism's roots were Evangelical, there was much in it which was not a natural partner for biblically based Protestantism, particularly for Protestants who looked to the Five 'Fundamentals': verbal inerrancy, Jesus Christ's divinity, the Virgin Birth, penal substitution and the physical resurrection of Christ. Pentecostalism was inclined to look instead for 'new revelation': it was intuitive, spontaneous, whereas conservative Evangelicalism was rationalist, word-based. It was also apt to give scope to female leadership, in a fashion which had always been common in the radical beginnings of nineteenth-century Protestant movements, but which in Pentecostalism showed every sign of growing rather than diminishing.

Another movement within Pentecostalism caused alarm for those Evangelicals who cared: it stood at an absolute polarity to the 'Social Gospel' of contemporary liberal Protestantism. In the American heartland, as years of catastrophic economic depression painfully inched towards recovery at the end of the 1930s, there developed a form of Pentecostalism referring to itself as the 'Word of Faith' movement. Like some earlier American denominations, it stressed the importance of prayer in healing, but there was much more to its vision of Christian success than that, causing detractors to refer to it as the 'health and wealth' movement, or the 'Prosperity Gospel'. One of its earliest exponents, Kenneth E. Hagin, developed his ministry in Texas among the Assemblies of God, taking as a favourite text Christ's promise in Mark 11.23 that those without doubt in their hearts can move mountains. One of his associates, Oral Roberts, who became to television what Aimee Semple McPherson had been to radio, was closely involved in 1951 in a Californian multi-millionaire's foundation of a Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International. This organization still robustly promotes capitalism in the service of Jesus, a 'cargo cult' rebranded for the American Dream. Through Pentecostalism's global reach, many corners of the world would take up this message, so especially appealing to communities whose trajectory from poverty to prosperity seemed to vindicate the prayers they were making. There was a political corollary. Those who had suffered from Communism in a variety of settings, especially in South Korea (see Plate 68), also appreciated the firm message from the 'Word of Faith' that if capitalism represented God's will, Communism was a device of the Devil.
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Despite their differences, Evangelicals and Pentecostals cautiously moved together. In 1943 the (still Trinitarian) Assemblies of God joined a new umbrella organization for American conservative Evangelicalism, the National Association of Evangelicals, whose avowed goal was to fight Protestant liberalism and the Ecumenical Movement. This was a crucial alliance. It meant that Pentecostal theological education, now rapidly developing to keep pace with its proliferation of congregations which needed more pastoral understanding than fiery preaching could provide, was firmly directed into an Evangelical mode. It discouraged Pentecostalism (at least for the time being) from casting its eyes on those parts of Christianity of which conservative Evangelicals disapproved.
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The association was a welcome reinforcement for Evangelical values at an unpromising moment. During the previous decades, conservative Evangelicals' assumption that their cultural outlook was part of the hegemony of Protestantism in mainstream America had received two serious blows, over the issues of evolutionary biology and Prohibition.

It was their hatred of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution that caused the first debacle. In the early 1920s, two states in the Midwest, Oklahoma and Tennessee, passed laws against the teaching of evolution in schools. A test case in 1925 (brought partly to boost the economy of the struggling town of Dayton, Tennessee, with a mite of free publicity) caught the imagination of pressmen across the Union; a young biology teacher, John Scopes, was found guilty, although he was not actually sure that he had got round to teaching evolution in his lessons. Leading the prosecution was the veteran Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan, who, having built his reputation on championing the concerns of ordinary decent folk from the countryside against the sophistication of the cities, was never averse in his long career to spicing his thrilling speeches with a good dose of home-cooked religion. The conviction was overturned on a technicality in the Tennessee Supreme Court, and two more states went on to pass similar laws in the aftermath, but the damage had been done.

Facing Bryan for the defence was Clarence Darrow, a lawyer who had likewise made his name championing the causes of the humble and powerless. Darrow was another masterly performer in a courtroom, unscrupulous in a good cause, and, relevant to the present case, he was that rarity in American public life, an avowed agnostic. He made the grand old man look foolish: he forced Bryan off the sure ground of parental say in children's education towards the dangerous territory of small details in the Old Testament (Darrow had more sense than to be satirical about the Gospels in public). It was all a gift for humorists, and laughter is never good news for those seeking to impose the authority of the Word of God on others. Less comic was the sudden death of Bryan, before he had the chance to leave Dayton.
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