Enlightenment and Enrichment (Part 1)

Church History — Steve Gregg

Next in this series

Enlightenment and Enrichment (Part 2)

00:00

Enlightenment and Enrichment (Part 1)

Church HistorySteve Gregg

Steve Gregg provides a thought-provoking discussion on the Enlightenment and Enrichment in this historical context of Europe. Focusing on the Anabaptist movement and the rising powers of state and church, he explains how this period marks the birth of the age of science and rationalism, where everything that smacked of God's intervention was simply rejected. Despite the collapse of Deism from its own weight, the Spiritual Guide of Michael Molinas and the Quakers Quietists' belief in inward peace continue to influence Christianity.

Transcript

The subject of our lecture tonight and next week too will be what I've entitled Enlightenment and Enrichment. It's an analysis largely of Christianity in Europe and elsewhere, mostly Europe, between the years 1648 and the year 1776. That will bring us right up to, of course, about the time of the founding of the American nation.

There was, of course, already a church and significant activity in the church in the United States before there was a United States, I should say in North America, before the nation of the United States was formed. But the period that we're looking at is the approximately one century prior to the founding of the United States, and we'll be looking mostly at events in Europe as we have been all along. Some people think that the way we study church history is too provincial, that we look too much at Europe, that we're too ethnocentric because we are Europeans in our roots.

And it is the case that we could look more closely during the same period of what was going in the Greek Orthodox churches or the Egyptian Coptic churches at the same time. In many parts of the world, there were things happening in the church, and I'm certainly not one to proclaim what were the most important things. But what was going on in Europe certainly is most relevant to those of us who have European background and who live in lands where European culture has been predominated by Christianity and by the events and the movements that occurred in Europe during this time.

So while acknowledging that there were interesting, perhaps, and significant, certainly, things happening in the church in other parts of the world, our main focus has been and will continue to be, for the most part, the West in Europe. And frankly, it may be ethnocentrism on my part, or it may just be chauvinism, but in my opinion, the things that were happening in Europe are more interesting than what was going on in parts of Africa and Asia. Interesting to me because that's where the roots of our culture are.

That's where the movements that we are a part of and that we encounter every day in the body of Christ originated. And of course, as I say, partly maybe as a Western chauvinist, I don't know, I think what happened in Europe was more a recovery of true Christianity in some cases than anything that ever happened in the Eastern Orthodox Church or the Coptic churches or some of these other areas. Now that, of course, may reflect my own Western upbringing, but that is nonetheless my reason for focusing as I am on this portion of the world.

Of course, when you study 2,000 years of history, a phenomenon that is a global phenomenon, you must put some limits upon your focus in some place. You can't look at everything that happened in the whole world over a period of 20 centuries. And so this is our focus at this time.

At a later time, we'll be studying the world missionary movements, once again, originating largely in Europe and America, but reaching out to all lands of the world. But that will have to come in a later lecture. In this lecture and in the one next week, we'll be looking at this century sometimes called the period of the Enlightenment.

But of course, what what history, what secular historians call the Enlightenment, we might well call the Endarkenment, because it was really a move away from the light of the gospel and the light of revelation in the Bible into an age of rationalism where human reason was exalted above scriptural authority or church authority or spiritual experience. And this is what the world calls the age of Enlightenment or the age of rationalism or the age of reason. At the same time that this development was happening, there was also some there were some very encouraging revival type movements, some spiritual awakenings going on in Europe at the same time.

And therefore, I also refer to it as an age of enrichment, because prior to this time, for about 30 years prior to this time, there were the 30 Years War in largely in Germany, involving other nations of Europe as well. And before that, there were other religious wars. And there was, of course, the tumult in many countries over the Reformation, where there were wars between Protestants and Catholics and where there were not wars, there were just outright persecutions.

We had the Anabaptists rising up and the powers of the state churches, both Lutheran and and Catholic, trying to pound them back down again and doing a pretty good job of decimating their ranks. It was an ugly scene. There were people being burnt at the stake, Anabaptists being drowned by fellow Protestants.

There were people beheaded for their faith during this time, just like there was during the Dark Ages. But this was the wonderful age of Reformation. But the wonderful age of Reformation was wonderful in one respect, and that is that a certain independence from the tyranny of the Roman Catholic institution was recognized.

People, the original liberators, we might say, some of them were fortunate enough to live out natural lifetimes, but the larger number of them seem to have been killed for their faith. And by the time 1648 ran around and the end of the 30 Years War, Europe, to a large extent, the sentiment in Europe was kind of thinking that, is it really all worth it? Are these doctrinal differences, these theological dogmas that people are killing each other on, burning each other? Is it really all that worth it? And the sentiments of Europe began to move in the direction of saying, it isn't. We're tired of the bloodshed.

We're tired of the hostility. These are allegedly Christians. We're killing other Christians.

Christianity itself came to be questioned as to whether it really makes sense at all. If Christians are killing Christians and everything like that, maybe we shouldn't trust the authority of this Christian institution. Maybe we shouldn't trust the authority of the Bible.

Now, at the same time, the Reformation caused something else to break loose in Europe, and that was the advance of the scientific age. There were scientists of a sort before the Reformation. But during the medieval period, before the Reformation, science was always seen as a servant to Scripture, a servant to divine revelation.

Philosophy, likewise, was a servant wedded to theology. The phenomenon called scholasticism, a system of thinking in Europe during the medieval period, of which Thomas Aquinas would be a notable example, was the wedding together of philosophical discipline and theological discipline. You know, during the medieval times, theology was called the queen of sciences.

Theology, the study of God, was considered the queen of sciences. How different that is in the universities today. But the reason that is different in the universities today has its roots in the period we're looking at.

You see, there may have been some scientists or some philosophers prior to the Reformation who didn't trust the Bible or didn't trust Christianity much, but they had to lay low if they existed because people were burned at the stake as heretics if they challenged the church before that time. And they were during the Reformation. But the Reformation was a time characterized by lots of people breaking loose from the Roman Catholic Church.

And, you know, the Catholic Church was fighting heretics on many fronts. And once everyone was tired of fighting, basically the mentality of Europe several generations from the beginning of the Reformation was essentially that, well, the Catholic Church should live and let live and let people think what they want to think. And so should the Protestant Church.

And there was just a general sentiment of people ought to be free to have their own ideas about things. And this led to a divorce between philosophy, science and theology, that philosophers and natural scientists began to emerge who did not necessarily feel compelled to please the religious hierarchy. And they began to think independently of the theology of their day.

And so the age of science was born and we have Copernicus, of course, before the Reformation and right around the time of the Reformation was the first to really establish the fact that the Earth is not the center of the universe. Medieval astronomy taught that the Earth was the center of the universe and all the stars and all the planets and the sun itself revolved around the Earth. Now, Copernicus made different observations and he concluded that the sun is the center of the universe.

Of course, we don't consider today the sun to be the center of the universe, but he certainly was that was a step in the right direction. The sun is certainly the center of our solar system. Now, the Roman Catholic Church was not so convinced that this was a step in the right direction.

Theology presumed that the Earth was the center of the universe because it was in the Bible throughout made clear that the Earth is the center of God's activity. Now, the Bible nowhere said that the Earth is the. Astronomical center of the universe, I'm not sure anyone could identify a center of the universe, really, I mean, I'm not sure if there is a middle, I'm not that hip on astronomy to know, but I mean, no one believes the Earth is nobody with sun is.

But the church, in the absence of information to the contrary, found it convenient to believe that the Earth was the astronomical center of the universe because it was very clearly biblically the theological center of the universe. It is the in the Bible, the place that God did all of his interesting and redemptive activity. As a matter of fact, in Genesis chapter one, the Bible indicates that God created the Earth before he created the sun, the moon and even the stars.

Now, if God made the Earth first and later made stars, it seemed possible, maybe even likely that the Earth was the center and all the stars and everything else went around it. Copernicus discovered or established fairly beyond question to thinking and free people that this was not the case. Later on, Galileo also made certain calculations.

Of course, he's famed for development of the technology of the telescope. He was not the first to build a telescope. Another man was, but he was Galileo's usually remembered as the first to use the telescope.

And he established not only the Copernican cosmology, but he also made other advances in science, for example, demonstrating that the rate of falling objects is constant and so forth, or that the increase of the rate is a constant increase. Some of these things represented tremendous advances in knowledge, man's knowledge of the way nature worked. And these are things that these philosophers and scientists were free to establish without worrying too much with the church thought.

Now, Galileo got in trouble with the church, too. In fact, he got himself excommunicated. I think a few years ago, the church repented and apologized to Galileo for that, if I'm not mistaken.

I remember there was some fuss made over it. A few years ago, the Catholic Church decided to apologize to Galileo. But these early astronomers and scientists began to provide a new view of the universe that went against the traditional theological interpretation of the universe.

Now, let me just say this. As a Christian living in the 20th century, it is not necessary at all to see any conflict between what Copernicus and Galileo established and what the Bible says. When you find that scientific discovery conflicts with what you thought the Bible said, don't immediately throw the Bible out.

There's two other possibilities. One is that the so-called scientific discovery is mistaken and will be replaced by further discovery, as in the case, for example, of evolutionary theory, which challenged biblical teaching back in the middle of the 19th century and still did up into our century, but now is being discarded by thinking people all over the world. And even evolutionists among themselves are fighting intramurally between the gradualists like Richard Dawkins and the punctuated equilibrialists like Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould.

I mean, the main thinkers in evolution are shooting each other simultaneously. And I'm fairly sure that thinking people will not accept either view of evolution after they've demolished each other in a very short time. But evolution held sway for over 100 years as the dominant paradigm.

And it clearly is contrary to scripture. But like I say, when discoveries of science conflict with what we believe scripture says, one possibility is that the paradigm that science is giving us is flawed and that further discovery will demonstrate its flaws. This has happened many, many times.

In the 1700s, the French Academy of Sciences published a work citing 51 scientifically proven facts that contradicted the Bible. But further discovery has pulled the rug out from under every one of those 51 facts. No modern scientist believes any of them anymore.

Although in the 1700s, science thought they'd disproven the Bible with these 51 established facts. Those are not facts. Further discovery often vindicates the Bible.

But there's another possibility. And that is that scientific discoveries, when they go against our understanding of the Bible, may show that our understanding of the Bible is flawed. I mean, if there's contradiction between a scientific opinion and an opinion about the Bible, the two cannot both be true.

Either the scientific opinion is flawed, and that sometimes is the case, or else one's opinion about the Bible is flawed. But that's not the same thing as saying the Bible itself is flawed. Christians need to be open-minded about the fact that science discovers things that we didn't know before.

And when this is so, we go back to the Bible and say, well, is this really what the Bible teaches? Now, some have tried to do that with evolution. They've tried to reinterpret the Bible in light of evolution. This is a fool's errand because, first of all, the Bible cannot ever be reinterpreted in view of evolution.

And it's also a fool's errand because evolution is thinking fast. And there's no reason to change our understanding of the Bible in favor of a theory that is flawed to the core. But the fact is, as new scientific discoveries came forward that challenged the traditional Christian understanding of the Bible, as usual, the institution was not quick to move.

They were just quick to silence, if they could, or excommunicate. And so this is what Copernicus and Galileo faced. But as time went on, it became more permissible, as it were, to think heretical thoughts with impunity.

Descartes, who lived from 1596 to 1650, taught that the universe was mathematically ordered and that it was governed by natural law. Prior to this time, it was believed that God made everything happen. God made the sun come up and go down every day.

God caused earthquakes and disasters and so forth. These were acts of God. Descartes indicated that, no, these things happen with a predictable mathematical precision.

There are natural laws that can be discovered, and everything just happens quite naturally. Sir Isaac Newton, usually considered to be one of the greatest scientists of all time, who lived from 1642 to 1727, provided us with the awareness of the laws of gravitation by which the universe is held together. He published a major work that was read throughout Europe and influenced thinking of Europe that indicated that the law of gravitation basically explains most everything about the workings of the universe.

And to this day, he is still considered to be one of the greatest scientists that ever lived. By the way, he believed the Bible. He wrote commentaries on the Bible.

He's a Bible-believing person. Not all scientists who were thinking for themselves were not Christians. Many of them were Christians.

Johannes Kepler, for example, who came up with the theory before Newton's time that the planets continued in their course around the sun because of some magnetic influence of the sun. It was Newton who called it gravitation, I think, but Johannes Kepler came up with some of these ideas on the grand scale before Newton did. Kepler was a born-again Christian, and he loved the Lord and he believed in the Bible.

But the thing is, the advance of science was intoxicating. I mean, knowledge is intoxicating. Learning stuff is really fun.

And Europe began to enter into an age of scientific discovery, an age of affirmation of the human mind and the human ability to reason and think things out and test things and learn things. And this spirit more or less spread throughout Europe and led to what we call the Enlightenment eventually. Prior to the time that we're talking about, there was the rise of rationalism in what is usually called the Renaissance.

The Renaissance literally means the rebirth, and it refers to the rebirth of classical Greek and Latin culture and literature and so forth. Erasmus, who never did become a reformer, but he's considered to be sort of the man who laid the egg that Luther hatched, Erasmus was the first really Enlightenment thinker, probably. He ridiculed some of the views of the church and so forth, but he never really left the Catholic fold.

Luther, of course, did leave the Catholic fold. He took a step further than Erasmus. But the writings of Luther and those of Erasmus give us a pretty good dichotomy, a way of seeing the difference between the Renaissance thinking and the Reformation thinking that were simultaneously happening in Europe.

These were parallel realities in the age of Reformation. Erasmus wrote his diatribe on human free will. Luther wrote a book called The Bondage of the Will.

And these two works make a pretty good sampling of the difference of opinion that led to Renaissance thinking on the one hand and Reformation thinking on the other. The Renaissance began to deify the human mind. Man was considered to not be a sinner, but a reasonable person.

And one could figure things out and figure out morals and figure out the nature of things by himself. Didn't need God. And he was a free moral agent, and therefore he could decide to do good or evil, but he could pretty much find his own way.

Luther, in his Bondage of the Will, took the Augustinian view that man doesn't really have free will, technically, but that the will is in bondage to sin because of original sin. And this original sin guarantees that man will sin if left to himself. And man needs grace.

The Renaissance thinking didn't believe that man needed grace. Renaissance thinkers thought man needs more common sense. But the Reformation emphasized that man is sunk without the grace of God.

Man is corrupt and can't save himself in any way. And these two mentalities were growing together like wheat and tares in the same field throughout Europe during the Reformation time. And this broke forth in the Enlightenment.

Rationalism found its expression in a number of fairly well-known philosophers. Francis Bacon, any relation to David? Are you descended from Francis? Are you? I figured you might be. Not many Bacons around, probably.

Francis Bacon lived from 1561 to 1626. He developed the inductive method of discovery of thinking. It's a reasoning, logical process.

And he figured this is the best basis of knowledge, and he taught that nothing could really be known on the basis of authority alone. You see, for centuries, people accepted the authority of the church or the pope or the bishops. If they said something was true, they said, yes, sir, that's true, that's orthodoxy.

Or the Protestants, who broke free from that authority, they submitted to the final authority of Scripture. But Francis Bacon said, no, the authority of Scripture and the authority of the church alone can't make us sure of anything. Human reasoning, logical deduction, rational use of the inductive method of reasoning, that's the only thing we can really trust to tell us what is true and to really make known things.

So it began to be sort of the first, what was the bumper sticker? Question authority. That was the mentality of the rationalism of the late 16th century and early 17th century. There was the question authority mentality.

And reasoning was more to be relied upon than the authority of Scripture or of the church. Then, about the same time, we have the career of Thomas Hobbes. I always thought some editor ought to put the works of John Calvin and the works of Thomas Hobbes together in one volume and simply call it Calvin and Hobbes.

But he lived from 1588 to 1679. He was a sensationalist, not in the sense that we use the word today, but in the sense that he believed that the senses were the only way to really arrive at the knowledge of reality. He also, of course, did not wish to follow authority, not at least in thinking.

He was a materialist, believing that there was nothing spiritual. All was material. Even God was material, as far as he was concerned, or what he called the first cause of the universe.

We call him God. To Hobbes, the first cause of the universe was a material entity, not the spiritual God that we know in the Bible. And he was a hedonist in terms of ethics and morals, basically the pursuit of pleasure.

He was English, a philosopher and a politician. He was the forerunner of modern materialism. Materialism today is the philosophy that really all that exists is the material universe.

When Carl Sagan said, the cosmos is all that there is, there's nothing else. He was stating the dogma, and that's what it is, a religious doctrine of the materialist. Because materialism simply says, the material world, the physical world, is all that exists.

There's nothing beyond it. The cosmos is physical. And there isn't anything else but that.

Now, of course, how Carl Sagan or any other thinker could tell us that without expecting us to laugh, to profess to know everything that is, and to know that everything that is, is nothing else but the cosmos, the material cosmos, I don't know how anyone who is a logical thinker could ever hope to tell us everything that is, unless he is defining cosmos as just whatever is, in which case we'd have to include God in that. But obviously no one can say with certainty, certainly no one can say reasonably, that nothing exists except the material world, because in order to say that, one would have to know everything that is, and to know that there is nothing there besides. But the fact is that Hobbes was a forerunner of the modern materialist idea, which basically governs mainstream science in the modern world.

He politically believed in absolute and pure monarchy. In his book, Leviathan, which he wrote while he was an exile or a refugee in Paris from England, because he'd been persecuted there, he got in trouble with the Catholic Church in France also because he wrote this book, where he indicated that pure monarchy and absolute power to the monarch is really the best form of government. And of course, one of the corollaries of that is that the monarch has more authority than the church does, and religious matters should be determined by the monarch, by the secular authority.

The Pope and the Roman Catholic officials in France didn't very much appreciate that, and he had to flee back to England from persecution there. He was obviously not a Christian. He maintained that everything is material, nothing is spiritual, even the first cause of the universe, God, as we might use the term, was certainly not the God of the Bible.

Then we have René Descartes, or Descartes. In 1596, he was born. 1650, he died.

He's the one who's famous for having said, I think, therefore I am. Actually, I believe more literally, the quote is, I know, therefore I am, but usually quoted as, I think, therefore I am. I've always been perplexed by the theology of Descartes, and I can't tell you very much about it.

He believed, however, that only the evidence of reason should be allowed to convince one of anything. And so we have in these thinkers, and in many others at the time, pure rationalism, basically moving away from trust in any authority, any belief in anything supernatural, and simply trusting the mind of man to figure things out, and trusting the mind of man to be the ultimate arbiter of reality. Now, out of this rose a religious system that became dominant in Europe throughout this time.

That system is called deism. Deism is the belief that all is controlled by unbreakable natural laws. Of course, that's part of rationalism, and part of the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment.

But that led to the assumption that the universe could and does operate without any direct intervention from God. Now, the deists were not atheists. During this time in Europe, it was not popular to be an atheist.

Everyone believed in God. But no one believed that God had anything to do with history, or anything to do with man. Except that God was like the great watchmaker, who created the universe and rounded it up like a watch, and left it to run down.

If God was a perfect watchmaker, he made a perfect watch that would run perfectly. And therefore, the laws of nature could always be relied on to be consistent. Now, if this is true, of course, there could never be any miracles, because by definition, a miracle intervenes and changes the predictable course of nature, at least briefly.

And everything that smacked of intervention from God was simply rejected. The belief of the deists was that they had the earliest and most primitive form of religion. They believed the earliest man was deist.

And they believed that all religious systems that have come along are simply the product of priests and religious institutions that try to control people with superstition and so forth. And therefore, they rejected anything that suggested that God was speaking to man, or intervening in man's affairs. Deism rejected the inspiration of the Bible, of course, because that's supernatural.

Rejected the incarnation of Christ. They didn't believe that Jesus was God. They didn't, of course, believe in the miracles of Christ, or the resurrection of Christ.

They didn't believe in providence or prayer, because, you know, if you ask God to do something, but he doesn't do anything, what's the point? You know, prayer and all these things were not part of the deist system. Interestingly enough, deism collapsed under its own weight. It just never really, it just never lasted very long.

But it was a dominant religious idea in Europe in the period that we're talking about. When it did collapse, it was not replaced with biblical Christianity as a dominant cultural mentality. But it was replaced by something worse, total secularism.

You see, the deists were just coming out of an age of religious culture. So they still retained the idea of a God. But later generations in the early 18th century, they didn't see any reason even to retain the notion of God.

They didn't know how to do without him. But they speculated that God didn't even need to be brought into the picture. Of course, it was later in the 19th century that people like Charles Darwin gave what seemed to be scientific mechanisms to account for the rise of living things and of the universe itself from mechanistic processes that don't require God.

Darwin himself believed there was a God. He was more of a deist. He actually believed that God was the first cause of the first living thing.

But he believed that God left that first living thing to evolve into everything else and didn't get his hands in the process. Of course, evolutionists since Darwin went further than him and just got God out. If you don't need God in the process, you don't need God in the beginning either.

But the idea here is that God began to be crowded out of the universe, but not all at once. Initially, for about a century, the deists dominated. They believed there was a God.

They believed in creation. But they didn't believe in intervention by any means of God. Therefore, they were not Christians.

And many of them were very hostile to Christianity. One of the early deists was John Locke, sometimes believed to be the founder of the Enlightenment itself. He living from 1632 to 1704, he taught that man, like the universe, was governed by natural laws, that he had natural rights also.

Locke is known for many aspects of his philosophy, but we probably remember him best for the one who was the political theorist whose ideas were embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Which begins with the affirmation that man was given by his creator certain inalienable rights. That was the philosophy of John Locke.

Now, John Locke was a deist. He believed in a creator, but he didn't believe in the God of the Bible or the doctrines of the Bible. He felt like the doctrines of the Bible were not harmful to believe, but he simply didn't believe they were necessary to believe either.

And that the creator created. But when he created, he invested in man natural rights, the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which were simply part of the whole general philosophy of all things are natural. And just as there are natural laws, there are natural rights of man that the creator built in to man, just like he built natural laws in the universe.

Locke's ideas also found their way into the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, as they did into the American Declaration of Independence. Very influential, but we don't have time to talk about all the aspects of him. We want to get into things more encouraging later on here.

Perhaps the most famous deist of the period was Voltaire. John Locke, by the way, was English, but Voltaire was part of a group of philosophers called philosophes in France. It was in about this time, Paris, France began to be the cultural center of Europe and ideas disseminated from Paris throughout all of Europe.

And it was fashionable to pick up France's ideas and so forth. And there was a movement in France of deists who were particularly hostile toward Christianity, of whom Voltaire is probably the best known. And they were called philosophes.

And these were not really so much academic philosophers, as they were more or less analysts of social trends and social theorists and so forth. But they were deists in their beliefs. And Voltaire lived from 1694 to 1778.

He taught that, like nature, also society is governed by natural laws. And just as natural scientists can discover the law of nature and live according to them to man's benefit, that people could also discover the laws of social order. And by living according to these laws, man could bring about a more benevolent and a more fair and a more equitable society.

He believed that there would be some detriments to this progress, though, and not the least of which was the church. The church, as far as he was concerned, was a relic of the past. Voltaire actually predicted that within a hundred years of his day, Christianity would simply disappear from history.

He believed that with the age of reason having come and the general rejection of the church's authority and of the Bible's authority in much of Europe, that Christianity was sinking fast and would be gone within a century of his time. He missed his prediction by at least a century, because it's been 200 years since he died, and actually Christianity is still here. It's one of the little anecdotes of history that Christians like to tell, is that within 50 years after Voltaire's death, his home and the printing press upon which he printed his books and his pamphlets that he filled Europe with, criticizing Christianity, within 50 years of his death, his home was purchased by the Geneva Bible Society, who used it to print Bibles and disseminate them throughout the world.

So from the spot where Voltaire published his prediction that Christianity would disappear within a hundred years, Voltaire disappeared in much less than a hundred years, but Christianity was disseminated even from his own printing presses in his own former dwelling place. But he was very hostile to Christianity, and he was very clever, very witty, and he filled Europe with his pamphlets and his books and his articles. He had a very profound influence in Europe from his venue in France.

There was also at that time a man named David Hume. He lived from 1711 to 1776, which brings him right up to the end of the period we're considering. He was just a Scottish philosopher and a historian.

He wrote skeptical attacks on the belief in miracles and of the supernatural. He believed that miracles were, you know, not real, they were mythical. And his arguments against miracles were very influential in Europe, promoting the materialist idea that there is no intervention from God.

He taught that moral judgments were simply the product of individual persons' passions and reason, that there was no higher authority determining morality, but just what we feel strongly or what we figure out will determine what morality is. Now, these thinkers and others like them are the ones that really define the age called the Enlightenment. Now, from a Christian perspective, that's not much light.

That's more dark. Actually, the Dark Ages were more light than the Enlightenment, because at least in the Dark Ages, they believed in the Bible, they believed in God, and they believed in Jesus. They didn't follow him very faithfully, but they still affirmed a biblical worldview.

But in the Enlightenment, which was really a retreat from the light of Scripture, there was a rejection of all the above, of Christ, of God, and of the inspiration of the Bible and of a biblical worldview. But that's not the only thing that was happening in Europe during these years. Though deism became very dominant in France and in much of Europe, among the intelligentsia of Europe, there were movements, revivals really, taking place in a number of places.

One of them that I haven't mentioned in our notes was called Jansenism, named after a man named Jansen, who was the founder of the movement. He was a Roman Catholic. This movement did not happen within Protestant circles, but in Roman Catholicism.

And Jansenism was a reaction against the carnality and the deadness of the Roman Catholic Church at the time, and basically an attempt to restore the ideas of Augustine. Augustinian views were, of course, dominant in Reformed theology. John Calvin's theology was also returned to Augustine's views.

But Jansen stayed within the Roman Catholic fold and tried to reinstate a confidence in the ideas of divine election, a high view of God's sovereignty, a low view of man, basically a strong view of man's inability to save himself or to help himself. And there was a true return to a more biblical form of Christianity in this small movement. It would have remained very small, probably, if not for it having a notable convert in the person of Blaise Pascal, who was the most prestigious mathematician in France.

And while many of the scientists in France and elsewhere in Europe were embracing deism or worse, the most illustrious mathematician and scientist in France at the time, Blaise Pascal, had a religious experience. He encountered God and he joined himself to the Jansenist movement and wrote profoundly. He died young, suddenly caught sick and died in two months' time when he was 39 years old.

But he had intended, really, to write a complete book of defenses of the Christian religion. But he did leave scattered thoughts in writing. It's now published under the title Pinses, which means, I think it's called Thoughts.

His disciples or his followers basically published them posthumously after he died. But he was a man who was on fire for God and a brilliant mind. And it's encouraging to know that in an age where scientific progress was leading largely to a rejection of Christianity, that it's not a given that where scientific knowledge increases, Christianity's confidence in Christianity will diminish.

Because some of the very finest scientists who ever lived, Johannes Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, in their days they were the best. And in retrospect, scientists still view Pascal as about the greatest scientist France ever produced. And Sir Isaac Newton is one of the greatest scientists who ever lived.

These men had unbounded confidence in the Bible and in Christianity. So it shouldn't be thought that just because scientific discovery was moving rebellious man into the realm of deism and eventually atheism and materialism, that this is the necessary result of scientific discovery. Not at all.

It is entirely possible for scientists of the highest caliber to do their work and make progress, make discoveries fully within a biblical worldview. And men like Pascal and Newton would be example of that. Outside the Roman Catholic Church, there were a number of movements.

We move now to talk about the Enrichment. The Enlightenment was called the Age of Reason. At the same time, there was the Enrichment.

This century was not only an age of reason, but it was an age of faith. And both Catholicism and Protestantism, especially Lutheranism, had become very, very dead. Some of the Protestant cause had begun as something of a revival, had a lot of life in the beginning.

But after the wars, the Thirty Years' War and so forth, everyone was pretty disgusted with the whole thing. And those that were still holding to Roman Catholicism and those that were still holding to Lutheranism largely had lost their zeal. And there was, to a large extent, just an emphasis on holding to the doctrines of your group.

Catholics were Catholics because they held the Catholic dogma. Lutherans were Lutheran because they held the Lutheran dogma. Reformed churches were reformed because they held the Calvinist dogma and so forth.

And the churches became simply dogmatic institutions. And there was very little of real spiritual life in any of them in Europe. And in certain places, there was, as it were, a revolt against this deadness.

Or we could just see it as a sovereign moving of the Holy Spirit in various ways, although some of the movements that arose were somewhat imbalanced, but they were still improvements over the dead orthodoxy of the day. One of those movements was in the realm of what we'd have to call Christian mysticism. And then we're going to have a look at a movement called Pietism, a very important movement.

In my notes, I've accidentally numbered both of those as number one, a result of word processing, adding a few paragraphs to an earlier point without changing the numbering of the part that comes after. But in the realm of Christian mysticism, mysticism within the Christian realm is the belief that God can be known immediately by direct inward communion. In modern times, A. W. Tozer was fond of referring to himself as a Christian mystic.

In fact, I became aware of most Christian mysticism by reading Tozer's works. I'd never heard of earlier mystics, but he often quoted them. There were quite a few different kinds of mystics, but two of the main movements worth mentioning were the Quakers and the Quietists, which are not to be confused with the Pietists.

The Quaker movement arose out of the ministry of one man. He was George Fox. We live in McMinnville.

Down east is Newburgh, and in Newburgh, there is George Fox University, obviously a Quaker institution. Newburgh has quite a lot of Quakers, several big Quaker churches there, probably not as many as you'd find in Pennsylvania. But nonetheless, George Fox was a controversial, and we might even disagree with some of his distinctives.

But he was an English Christian mystic and itinerant preacher, and his ministry lasted for 40 years. He lived from 1624 to 1691. He was trained in a Puritan home, and early in life, he associated somewhat with Anabaptists, Mennonites, and therefore, those influences were in his life.

But he went his own direction. He became disillusioned with all institutional church. Some of this may begin to sound close to home, but he went a little further than maybe some of us are willing to go in that direction.

But he didn't find peace in the institutional church, and he eventually found peace just seeking God on his own, and had an experience with God, a personal inward experience with God. And he began to preach that this is what matters, is having a mystical inward enlightenment from the Holy Spirit, to discover the inner light, as he called it. Unfortunately, that kind of language sounds rather new age today.

And by the way, some modern Quakers are a little bit new age, and so are some people who aren't Quakers in the Christian fold. But the fact is, he was probably using that in a very Christian sense, in the sense of really having the Holy Spirit quicken and enlighten you with eternal life. He was regenerated, I'm sure.

And he began to preach this. He emphasized the immediate personal communion with God, and he believed that teaching to the believer should not come through the church, but by the immediate teaching of the Holy Spirit and discovery of the inner light in the soul. He disparaged formal church and all the sacraments or ordinances.

That is, he did not believe in water baptism. He did not believe in communion. He didn't believe in professional clergy or professional ministry at all.

In this, the Quakers largely have followed him to this day. Quakers still do not believe in baptism or in communion, although there are clergymen, there are pastors in Quaker churches now. There were not originally.

The reason that he opposed these things was because, although they were taught in the Bible, of course, he believed that in the church as he had known it, they had simply led to a formalism, to a trust in sacraments rather than in God Himself. And he may well have been pendulum swinging. I mean, people do that.

They see an abuse and they just swing all the way the other direction, and sometimes not reasonably. But he was a godly and a spiritual man. He taught frequently against things like slavery and taking oaths and participation in military service.

In that respect, he was a lot like the Mennonites. He didn't believe in taking oaths or in military service. He traveled extensively in England and Scotland, had tremendous influence in those lands.

He also visited Holland and America. And he was greatly persecuted, and he and his followers were persecuted for a long time and spent time in prison. Though it is said of him that he endured his persecutions with meekness and non-retaliation, very much like the Mennonites did.

His followers were constituted as a society in the year 1660, and originally they were called the Children of Light or the Friends of Truth. In time, they were later known as Quakers. And this is, I believe, because in their meetings, rather than having a formal service, because it was sort of contrary to his teaching to have a formal meeting, the Quakers or the Children of Light or whatever would get together.

And as I understand it, of course, I don't know that they still do this so much. They probably do to an extent. I feel ashamed that I've never visited a Quaker church.

I would like to do so. I'd like to know whether they still follow the old ways. And some people here probably know better than I, if you've been to one.

But originally, I guess one of the things that was common in their services would be that they'd sit and seek God silently and something would come over them. They believed it was the Holy Spirit and, well, it may have been. But they begin to shake and quake.

In the days of the Apostles, when the Spirit came upon them, the place was shaken. But among the Children of Light, when the Holy Spirit came upon them, the people were shaken. And they were probably dubbed Quakers by those who were mocking them for this practice.

They never really did officially adopt the Quaker for themselves, though we still call them that. What they finally officially accepted as their label is the Society of Friends. So their churches are usually called Friends churches, Friends.

And as I say, they were persecuted greatly, but they found a place of refuge in America. They came to New Jersey first, but they found that New Jersey was not going to be a place where their religious rights were preserved. And William Penn became a Quaker, became a Quaker preacher and a writer of defense of the Quaker beliefs.

And he established in Pennsylvania a refuge for Quakers. And that's still where a great number of them are, though they are here too. And the Quakers I have known have been very godly spiritual people.

Now, I think they differ somewhat from the early Quakers in that they do have clergy. They do have ministers in their churches. Without having been to their churches, I cannot say for sure.

But from looking at their churches, it looks like they have formal meetings. They have scheduled formal meetings. I don't know what the procedures are there.

But the Quakers I have known, especially some of the leaders at George Fox College, have been spirit-filled evangelical brothers, evangelistic in orientation and orthodox in doctrine. I was called once on the radio program by someone who asked me if the Quakers were a cult. And I don't know enough about everything they say.

They certainly are controversial in their rejection of baptism and communion. But in other respects, they are seemingly orthodox. And they were a true move of God in Europe during a time when there was very little of that.

When it was mainly dead formalism, George Fox brought some new life to many people who were seeking God. But it was an emphasis on inward mystical experience that George Fox taught and that the Quakers originally stood for. Another mystical group or movement was called quietism, so-called because they advocated sitting in total resignation to God, quieting the heart, quieting the will, even annihilating the will to the point where you had no preferences, no desires, and you were just resigned to the will of God in all things.

There were some important leaders of this movement, Michael or Miguel Molinas, who lived from 1640 to 1697. He was a French priest, eventually settled in Rome. He published in 1675 a book called Spiritual Guide.

This guide was well received both by Catholics and Protestants. And in the Spiritual Guide, Michael Molinas showed a fourfold way to inward peace. The four aspects of his system were prayer, obedience, frequent communions, and self-mortification.

Now, mortification means killing, sort of killing yourself, but not literally physically, but in the sense of dying to yourself. In this respect, he followed in the teachings very much of earlier Catholic mystics like Thomas Akempis, who wrote of the imitation of Christ. A lot of the same kinds of things there.

Unfortunately for Michael Molinas, his emphasis on these things as the means of spirituality sort of left no room for any significance of the ceremonies of the church. The sacraments and the ceremonies of the church didn't seem to be necessary if you had this inward personal thing going with God. And so, the Catholic church persecuted him and declared his views to be evil.

He survived. He almost was going to be burned at the stake, but he recanted his views and he lived out a natural lifetime. He was not burned at the stake.

He believed that spiritual perfection and spiritual peace are attained by annihilation of the will and passive absorption into contemplation of God until the soul comes to the place of being indifferent to the world, to sense, to desire, even to virtue and morality. This is probably the worst thing about quietism. By the way, some quietist writers have become very popular among evangelicals.

Madame Guéant, for example, and also Feynelon, two quietist writers who came along teaching Molina's ideas. Actually, their views were, in some respects, not very Christian, but they believed, for example, nothing should agitate your spirit. You should be resigned to God in everything.

And even if sin was in your life, you should just resign yourself to it. I mean, everything is of God and shouldn't let sin in your life disturb you at all. And this is where they took this idea of resignation to God, in my mind, a little too far.

But it's not as if they lived in sin. It's not as if they advocated a life of sin. It's just they advocated coming to a place where you didn't really care about righteousness or sin.

You just everything was OK because everything was the will of God. Madame Guéant was a French quietist writer. She has been very popular in some evangelical circles.

A. W. Tozer thought highly of her, apparently. That's where I first heard about her. Her whole name was Jeanne Marie Bouvier Guéant.

She lived from 1648 to 1717. She received her early training in Catholic convents. And in those years, she showed pretty good asceticism and mysticism as a young girl.

At age 16, she was married at her mother's instigation to an invalid who was 22 years older than she. She was never happy in the marriage, though she was loyal to her husband the whole time. She didn't have to stay with him too long because he died 12 years later.

She had three children by that marriage, and so she was a widow left with her three children under 10 years old. And she at that point decided that she would never marry again and that she'd just devote her life to seeking God and serving God in religious pursuits and devotion. She took a vow of celibacy and devotion to God, leading to a series of revelations and visions and spiritual experiences that she had.

During that time, she wrote a commentary on Scripture that got a lot of attention in Europe. A lot of people found it edifying. She wrote other spiritual writings as well, including an autobiography.

Her writings were condemned twice by one of the French bishops, whose name was Basouet, and she went to jail for her beliefs. But she recanted in the first case. First time she went to jail, she recanted those passages in her writings that were controversial, and she was released.

Later, she kept preaching similar things, and her later writings were condemned as well, and she was arrested. And she recanted again and promised to never teach these things anymore. And so they let her go, and she lived with her children, who were by this time adults and married, for the rest of her life and just did acts of mercy and godly things.

But she became, during those final years, a spiritual counselor to many people, including a man named Phenelon, who was the Archbishop of Cambria. And the letters of Phenelon and Madame Galen to each other exist. Phenelon's works, at least one of them is available today in print.

It's called Christian Perfection. Francis Phenelon lived from 1651, which means he was just a few years younger than Madame Galen, about three years younger. And he died about two years before she did also, in 1715.

He was trained from childhood in French Jesuit schools, and he became a preacher, preaching his first sermon when he was 15 years old. Later, he was ordained as a priest in the Catholic Church and rose through the ranks and became Archbishop of Cambria in France. He became the royal tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, who was the grandson of Louis XIV.

So he had some prestige as a religious man and had some status at the Court of France because of that. However, when Madame Galen's writings were condemned by Basuette, Phenelon, who had been enamored with her writings and actually had become a quietist himself, he wrote in her defense. He wrote a book called Christian Perfection, which was defending her ideas.

And this led to his receiving disfavor in the French court, because Basuette had the support of the Roman Catholic Church and of the French government. And so Phenelon became sort of persona non grata in the court, and yet he continued to minister. He carried on a lengthy controversy with Basuette.

I think the letters of Phenelon in this controversy are still available in print somewhere. I've never seen them myself. I've had his book, Christian Perfection, in my hands.

I've owned it. I don't know where it is now. But his letters, I do not think I've ever seen.

But I believe they are available today. It is said that throughout the controversy, he wrote with a Christian and charitable spirit to his adversary. He was permitted to continue his church work, though he was restricted.

He was actually confined to minister only in his diocese, and he was not allowed to travel and minister. And so he lived out a natural lifetime. He was never martyred or anything like that.

But the writings of Phenelon and Madame Gayle are edifying writings, though their actual theological positions were not altogether orthodox in some cases. Now, before we close, I want to talk a little bit about pietism. Pietism is one of the most encouraging movements to arise during the period we're talking about, and it gave rise really to every modern revival.

The ministry of Billy Graham, the ministry of D.L. Moody, the ministry of really all revivalists, Finney, and these people really traced their roots back to the movement called pietism. And today, you know, it's interesting because I was raised, I suppose, in churches that have the roots in pietism. I've always thought Billy Graham and those guys were the greatest.

In recent years, I've read certain works by reformed theologians who have a very low opinion of what they call revivalism, and they certainly have a very low opinion of Finney, who is so anti-Calvinist that they can't, you know, some of them think he was the devil incarnate himself. But true reformed loyalists, as it were, they're even very, they have a lot of bad things to say about the methods of Billy Graham and so forth, because Finney and Billy Graham and people like this basically are products of pietism, which grew up as a sort of a revolt out of dead reformed churches. Reformed theology and Lutheran theology had become very much a dead orthodoxy at this time too, and just as there were the Jansenists who rose in the Roman Catholic Church, and you had the Quakers arising in England, you know, the Anglican Church, and you had in France, also in Catholicism, the Quietus movement.

So also in the Lutheran movement, especially in Germany, the Pietist movement began. Most of the leaders of the Pietist movement that we'll talk about were Germans, and this movement rose up as a reaction to dead Lutheranism in Germany and in Switzerland and Holland. That's the main countries where pietism flourished.

Basically, pietism emphasized the need for personal conversion. Now you might think, duh, you know, like personal conversion, what else? But you have to remember that most of Europe up until this time was either Catholic or Lutheran or reformed, where they baptized infants. They assumed that being born into the church and being baptized as an infant in the church had a lot to do with whether you were considered a Christian or not.

Now some of these groups believed that it was important to have a personal relationship with God, of course, but still the institutions of both Catholic and reformed and Lutheran churches, they drifted into a dead orthodoxy where it was just believe these doctrines and you're a Christian. And pietism arose as an emphasis on the need to not just believe these doctrines, but to actually meet God, really be converted. And the first of the Pietist preachers in Germany was Philipp Jakob Spener.

He lived from 1635 to 1705. He was a German preacher and a pastor. His ministry laid emphasis on the personal spiritual life rather than a mere intellectual acceptance of doctrine.

There were six means of spiritual improvement that he emphasized. One was meeting in groups to study the Bible. He was ministering in Halle in Germany and pastoring there.

And he held home Bible study groups twice a week himself in his home, where he and other people who were interested get together and just discuss the Bible and study it outside the church. Now the movement happened within Lutheranism. They didn't leave the Anglican Church, though he started his own after he died.

His movement became a denomination called Methodism. But in his lifetime, Wesley never left the Anglican Church and the Pietists really didn't leave the Lutheran Church until the time of Zinzendorf, which we'll talk about a little bit here. But Spener within the Lutheran Church started sort of a renewal movement, emphasizing Bible study in small groups in homes.

And so meetings in groups to see the Bible is one of his six means of spiritual improvement. He also emphasized application of the priesthood of all believers by mutual instruction. In other words, not just having a clergyman teach, but everyone could share.

Everyone could teach, could have insights, and could teach others. Thirdly, he emphasized practical application of Christianity in a life of loving service. You might think that's a no brainer, too.

What else is there? But you see, you're a Pietist to some extent. If you grew up assuming that, yeah, that's what Christians are supposed to do is apply their Christianity to daily life and live in loving service to other people. That is an emphasis that rose out of Pietism.

I'm not saying they were the first to ever teach that, because some of the Catholic orders also taught such things. I mean, the Franciscans and people like that, you know, they did some of that, too. But in terms of Protestantism, this was a new emphasis in the period that's under consideration.

Spader also emphasized taking a sympathetic and kindly attitude in religious controversies. After having spent half a century in wars of religion, this was a pretty radical idea. Take a sympathetic and kindly attitude in controversy on religious subjects and don't get ornery.

The fifth emphasis was on formal theological training in universities. And the sixth was a reformation in the style and method of preaching. He believed that preaching in the churches was too complex and not user friendly, essentially.

He believed that preaching should be much more simple and much more spiritual than it was. And so he emphasized these things. Eventually, he took a very strict approach to moral life, denouncing things like dancing and theater going and card playing and the reading of novels.

He denounced elegant and gay clothing. He denounced light conversation. He thought Christian conversation should be weighty and serious.

And he also denounced immoderate eating and drinking. So actually, the things he stood for are the kind of things that we usually have come to think of as puritanical issues. But he was coming from a different stream.

Anyway, he had tremendous influence and birthed the movement that is called Pietism. One of his co-workers and disciples was a man named August Hermann Franke. And Franke lived from 1663 to 1727.

He was also a German pastor. He was also a Hebrew scholar and quite a multi-talented man. He did a great number of things in his life, but he was an admirer of Spanier and also a co-laborer.

He eventually moved to Halle where he pastored a church and he worked in a university that Spanier had established there in Halle. To a large extent, Spanier promoted Franke's ministry, very humbly allowed Franke pretty much to eclipse Spanier as the leader of the movement in that region. By the way, Franke eventually, a century later, was the inspiration for George Muller.

George Muller got the idea of starting orphanages from the example of Franke, who was this pietist leader. He pastored there in Halle where he established many charitable works and schools. He started orphanages.

He started hospitals. He started several kinds of schools, including schools for the poor and schools for the gifted. The guy did all kinds of things.

It's incredible. If you read the list of things he established, it's amazing. He founded homes for widows and homes for single women.

He was just full of social programs, really, in the name of Jesus. And as a pietist, it was very strongly emphasizing the need for personal conversion. It wasn't just a social gospel he preached.

He is an evangelical preacher, preaching the gospel. A very powerful preacher, too. He was scholarly, but his scholarliness didn't take away from his passion.

He was a passionate, influential, powerful preacher and a very practical man in terms of doing social things for all kinds of people that needed help. The last man we'll be able to talk about tonight was also in the stream of pietism. He's the only one of the ones we're considering who actually left the Lutheran Church.

I think he was kind of kicked out of the Lutheran Church, although he had been ordained a Lutheran. But he eventually started another group. His name was Niklaus Ludwig Zinzendorf, sometimes called Count von Zinzendorf.

I've been aware of this man's ministry a lot longer than most of these other people's. He was the founder of the Moravian Brethren movement, which was the first Protestant movement to ever really get zany about world missions. William Carey is usually considered to be the father of the modern world missions movement, but actually the Moravians were the really just saturate the world with missionaries.

That is the first Protestants to do it. The Catholics have been doing that. The Jesuits have been going all over the world.

For instance, the first missionaries in North America and South America were Jesuits, but they were spreading Roman Catholicism. Of course, it was a Jesuit distinctive to say loyalty to the Pope is everything. But among Protestants, the Reformation had mainly been a focus on doctrinal reformation and organizing new denominations and so forth.

But for until the time of Zinzendorf, there really hadn't been much in the way of effort toward world missions among Protestants. Zinzendorf was the founder of the Moravian or sometimes called the Bohemian Brethren. He was born the son of a nobleman who happened to be a friend of Spaner, so a quietist.

His father died when he was young, but he was educated by his mother, no, grandmother, maternal grandmother, who was also a quietist and trained him in quietism from his early youth. He was educated in Halle under Franke, so he had all kinds of quietist influence in his early life. He was raised with deeply artistic convictions and a more than ordinary concern for world missions.

I'm not sure exactly where he picked that up, but I know one thing that really spurred him into world missions later on was he was in Amsterdam once, or no, excuse me, not Amsterdam, he was in Copenhagen once, and he met a black slave from the Danish East Indies who told him that the gospel had never been brought to his people there, and Zinzendorf decided that this could not continue to be the case, and he eventually became responsible for sending missionaries there and many other places. I think, I believe the first missionaries that were sent out from the Moravians were to the Danish East Indies. Some of us have heard the story, and some of us have retold the story about the almost fanatical, in a positive sense, zeal for world missions on the part of these Moravians.

I'll tell you more about how the Moravians got started, but a typical story that is told of them, one of the anecdotes of their passion for world missions, is that they learned of slaves living on islands that were privately owned by rich barons and people who would not allow the gospel to come be preached there, who would not allow missionaries to come and preach to the slaves, and the Moravians decided the only way they'd get the gospel is to sell themselves into slavery to these men. And so, some of the first Moravian missionaries actually, in order to take the gospel to slaves on isolated islands, sold themselves to the owners of the islands as slaves for life, gave up their freedoms for life in order that they could preach to the slaves on those islands. This is the kind of zeal for missions these people are known to have had.

It is said that as these young men boarded ship to be taken away from their family and friends, to go off and never see them again, maybe even be killed. I mean, slave owners could kill their slaves if they resented these people's intrusion onto their islands with the gospel. They might yet be killed.

I'm not sure if anyone knows what happened. Some of them survived, but as the ship was leaving port, as these young men were going off to who knows what, as new slaves, to preach the gospel, it is said that they shouted back to their families and their friends on the dock, may the lamb who is slain receive the reward of his suffering, which became sort of a war cry for modern missions, that for them to lay down their lives and their freedoms forever, for the rest of their lives, in order to take the gospels to people who had never heard it. This was so that the lamb who was slain would receive the reward of his sufferings.

What is the reward of his sufferings but souls. And this is the passion they had for missions. I'll give you some background on how these people got started.

Zinzendorf, as I say, was raised and trained as a pietist, even under Franke in Halle. But he wanted to study theology. That was his passion.

But his parents really wanted him to study law. So he went to law school for three years and got a degree there. And then he took a job or got a post in the government in Saxony, in Dresden.

And he was a wealthy count. He inherited a large estate. He was in his early 20s when this story occurred.

But he became aware that there were religious refugees coming from various parts of Europe because of the Thirty Years' War and other religious wars. And he decided to make his private estate a place where religious refugees could come and settle. And he had some work being done on his buildings by a carpenter from Bohemia.

The man's name was Christian David. And this carpenter was a godly Hussite. You might remember, Chutz was an early martyr before the Reformation, who had really Reformation kinds of ideas, but didn't get very far.

He got burned at the stake. But the Hussites especially had continued in Bohemia and were under great persecution there at this particular time. And one of the Hussite brethren had come to Germany and worked as a carpenter and got a job doing some building on Zinzendorf's estate.

And Zinzendorf learned from this man about the fate of the Hussite brethren in Bohemia and told him he could invite them to come and live on the estate. So Christian David brought 300 Bohemian brethren onto Zinzendorf's estate, and they started a religious community there. Christian David actually started the community.

Zinzendorf was just the host. He was the leader of the group. And they started a community called Herrnhut, which I forget what it means.

What does Herrnhut mean, Dan? Who knows German? Some of you guys know German. Come on, you guys know what it means. The Lord's Watch.

Herrn means the Lord. And I think hut meant watch. I don't know.

The Lord's Watch? Does that sound right? You Germans speaking Mennonites back there? What's the matter with you guys? Okay. Just Mennonites? Don't follow Moravian history. Anyway, Herrnhut was the name of the community.

And Christian David was the leader. But eventually, because of Zinzendorf's tremendous personal piety and godliness and education, he became the de facto leader of the group and eventually founded... He actually was ordained eventually as a Lutheran pastor. He left his post in the government, got ordained in the Lutheran pastorate.

And the group was originally Lutheran, but then their ideas became so distinctive from the Lutheran church that they eventually left the Lutheran church and started their own organization outside the Lutheran church. Zinzendorf eventually became the spiritual leader. He became ordained Lutheran minister.

The group began an organization separate from the Lutheran church in 1732. And the main thing that basically characterized them was the missionary program that they eventually sent missionaries out all over the world. They sent out very many missionaries.

But you know, in the early days of Herrnhut, things were not very rosy. Zinzendorf has left writings about this, which I have read. Originally, there were 300 of these Bohemian Hussites who came to live on his estate.

And when news got around throughout Europe that this was a refuge for religious refugees, other persecuted Christians from other streams came and settled there as well. So the ranks swelled with a variety of, you know, non-Catholics, non-traditionalists from various places who had been persecuted by the state churches. But they didn't all agree with each other.

And there's a tremendous amount of division and squabbling and strife among them. And this really bothered Zinzendorf, who was a mild man, really had a passion for unity among the brethren. And it really bothered him.

And he preached the need for unity and all. And at one of their meetings, which he records, there was a remarkable thing that happened. The Holy Spirit came down on their meeting.

And they just were all broken. And they all were down on their faces praying and repenting. And from that day on, they had remarkable divine unity among themselves.

And it was from this that their missionary movement grew. Also, at that time, they started a prayer meeting that continued around the clock and continued for 100 years. The Moravians are famous in history for having started the only 100-year-long uninterrupted prayer meeting.

So these guys had a remarkable visitation from God and did remarkable work for God. Tremendous missionary movement. Zinzendorf was a wonderful brother coming out of the Pietistic tradition and founding the Moravian Church.

There are still Moravian missionaries. There's still a Moravian Church. You would normally run into them, I think, in Latin America.

I think at least, I mean, maybe they're everywhere, but that's where I have become aware of their presence is in Latin America today. Because of his separation from the Lutheran Church and his radical ideas, Zinzendorf was exiled from Lutheran Saxony in 1736. And he traveled to many countries, largely promoting unity among Protestant congregations.

He had limited success, however. He was actually in America some of that time. And he tried to bring about a higher degree of unity among the Protestant groups in America than existed.

He was somewhat frustrated because they were resistant to it. And he came back and spent his final years, I believe, at Herrnhut with a little bit of disillusion. One of the things that was saddening for him in his later years is that his son, who he hoped would succeed him as the leader of the group, actually died when he himself, when Zinzendorf was about 52 years old, his son died.

I don't know how old his son was, but his son could have been very old at that time, probably under 30. And so that was a blow to him. And then about three years later, his wife died also.

And so he had some sadness in his later life. But he died godly. He died loving the Lord and having launched the first major Protestant missionary program in history.

The same year that he was exiled from Saxony, 1736, a group of Moravians were on a ship to America to be missionaries to America. There was another man on that ship who was to be a missionary in America, and that man was John Wesley. John Wesley was not yet converted, though he was a missionary.

He was an Anglican and a devout one at that, but he had never really experienced the regenerating grace of God in his life. And there was a tremendous storm at sea on this ship. And Wesley, in his later journals, said he was terrified.

The sailors were terrified. The captain of the ship was terrified. The storm was so severe that the mast of the mainsail broke.

The ship was filling with water. Now, the ship may... But one thing that Wesley observed was there was a group of Moravians on the ship, and they were sitting calmly, women and children and all, singing hymns through the storm. And John Wesley asked the Moravian leader, I think Peter Bowler was his name, if I'm not mistaken, or maybe Peter Bowler might not have been on the ship, but he later had dealings with Peter Bowler.

But he asked the Moravians, weren't you afraid? Weren't your women and children afraid that they would die? And the Moravians said, no, we're not afraid to die. Our children aren't afraid to die. And Wesley was so struck by this, he realized that although he was a preacher and a missionary, that he was not prepared to die and meet God.

And it was because of this that he later looked up the Moravians again when he was back in Europe. And through the influence of a Moravian leader named Peter Bowler, Wesley encountered the gospel. And largely through that means and through other influences, actually came to be born again.

And that started something else of great significance that we will study next time. And that is what we now call the Methodist denomination. Whatever you may think about modern Methodists, the origins of the movement was inspiring and remarkable.

And by the way, there are still, if when you think of Methodists, you think of liberal, it's only because you've encountered the United Methodists. The pre-Methodist church today still is very much conservative, very much fairly loyal to John Wesley's work. But we'll talk more about Wesley.

He's an interesting character. He and his brother, Charles, next time we'll talk about the founding of the Methodist movement. Also, we'll talk about the revivalism in America under men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield.

But we'll have to save some of that for next time. I was thinking we might get into some of that this time, but there's just too much to say. And so we'll have one other lecture on this period next time.