The Eighteenth Century

During the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, the First Great Awakening, revolutions in both America and in Europe, missionary expansion, and musical development all left their mark on the church. The principles and ideals forged in the furnace of the religious and societal upheaval brought about by the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the colonization of the New World during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued to reverberate. Many significant events and people reshaped the church, with effects lasting to the present day.

The Enlightenment—which would span the revolutionary and turbulent period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century in Europe and America—represented a philosophical, intellectual, and religious shift away from traditional understandings of faith and reason. Proponents of Enlightenment ideals pitted science against religion and argued for the primacy of human reason, the inevitability of human progress, and the separation of church and state. They sought freedom from what they saw as the trappings of traditional social ethics, art, music, learning, and religion, advocating a worldview that saw all things existing and prospering apart from God and His special revelation in the Bible. Man, not God, was embraced as the measure of all things.

Many Enlightenment thinkers wanted to jettison the role of religion completely, but others proposed new syncretistic alternatives that sought to make some elements of traditional theism compatible with Enlightenment thought. These alternatives included deism and theological liberalism. Deism viewed God as the One who created all things but who then chose not to intervene in the world again, making Him essentially a divine “clockmaker” who wound up creation—along with all its laws of nature—only to let it run its own course while He remains disconnected from the events of everyday life. As a rationalistic theology, deism rejected the supernatural worldview of the Bible and emphasized rationalism and observation of the natural world as the basis for all true knowledge about God and other subjects. Thomas Jefferson’s revision of the Bible (1820), for example, removed references to the supernatural, to the miraculous, and to Jesus’ divinity, keeping only what Jefferson saw as the sound principles of morality that were also attainable by reason alone. Many of the founding fathers of the United States were deists or influenced by deism and retained a belief in God and a desire for some religious expression in public life without favoring one religion over another. Other eighteenth-century revolutions, such as the French Revolution, would reject theism altogether.

Pietism arose in the Lutheran churches of Germany during the two centuries before under the influence pastors like Johann Arndt (1553–1621) and Philip Jacob Spener (1635–1705), but the movement developed and expanded greatly during the eighteenth century. Pietists promoted an active ministry among the laity, emphasized Christian love over theological knowledge, preferred small groups to public Word and sacrament ministry, and elevated spiritual formation and ethics patterned after the life of Christ. August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), a notable Pietist, established the well-known orphanage at Halle and the University of Halle, both of which would inspire a revival in the Moravian Church in 1727 under the influence of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760) and his founding of the Pietist settlement at Herrnhut. Although largely rejected by the Reformed churches at first, Pietism would eventually have an impact even on the Reformed tradition.

At the University of Oxford in England, Anglican students John Wesley (1703–91) and his brother, Charles Wesley (1707–88), formed what was later derisively called the “Holy Club.” This gathering emphasized prayer, Bible study, the practice of other spiritual disciplines, and the cultivating of a holy life. Later, the Methodist Church would trace its origins back to this Holy Club. Another member of this club, George Whitefield (1714–10), also had a profound influence on the church in both Great Britain and North America.

In 1740, Whitefield traveled to America, where his preaching sparked a revival, the First Great Awakening, that influenced several denominations and was foundational for the modern evangelical movement. Another key leader of the movement in North America, Congregationalist theologian and pastor Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), articulated the difference between true and false religion in his various writings, such as Religious Affections, The Freedom of the Will, and Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God. One of Edwards’ close friends and early American missionaries to the Native Americans, David Brainerd (1718–47), left a lasting legacy of piety and devotion through his journal, which was edited and published by Edwards after Brainerd’s death.

Protestant zeal for foreign missions bore significant fruit during the eighteenth century. Various missionary societies were founded, including the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge and the London Baptist Missionary Society. The latter group sent William Carey (1761–1834) to India to do evangelism and establish churches. Carey’s influence earned him the designation “father of modern missions.” These missionary societies and others laid the groundwork for the missionary boom of the nineteenth century, often referred to as the “Great Century” in foreign missions. Roman Catholicism continued its worldwide spread during the eighteenth century, particularly through the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas, the Philippines, and portions of Africa.

Christianity was also a shaping influence on music during the eighteenth century. Protestant composers Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), George Frederick Handel (1685–1759), Isaac Watts (1674–1748), and John and Charles Wesley wrote Christian hymns that the church sings to this day and also wrote some of the most beloved works of classical music. Roman Catholic composers Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) also made significant musical contributions.

By the end of the eighteenth century, every major Christian tradition had solidified a theological identity and had produced concrete church polities. Debates within these traditions and conflicts with the world, as well as the continued geographic expansion of the church, would contribute to many of the challenges witnessed during the nineteenth century, including the Second Great Awakening, the rise of theological liberalism, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and the founding of various cultic offshoots of Christianity including Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses.