Enlightenment, Awakenings and Missions

1650–190039 eventsShow on the timeline

Toleration and revolution change the place of the churches in society. Pietism, Methodism and the awakenings renew them, and missions carry Christianity to every continent.

States slowly cease to enforce one confession. Revival movements stress personal faith and holy living, and voluntary societies send missionaries and print Bibles on a new scale. Christians take leading parts on both sides of the debates over slavery, science and the authority of the pope.

Events of this era

1652, firm date
George Fox and the Quakers
In 1652 George Fox preaches across the north of England that Christ has come to teach his people himself, without priest, tithe or consecrated building. Margaret Fell’s house at Swarthmoor becomes the meeting place of the people their opponents call Quakers.
1652 to 1667, firm date
Nikon’s Reforms and the Old Believer Schism
Patriarch Nikon of Moscow brings Russian service books and rites into line with Greek usage. The archpriest Avvakum and others refuse the changes as a break with the faith of their fathers, a council of 1667 anathematises those who resist, and the Russian church divides.
1653 to 1713, firm date
Jansenism and the Bull Unigenitus
In 1653 Rome condemns five propositions on grace. The defenders of Cornelius Jansen condemn them too but deny that they are in his book; Rome defines that they are, and in 1713 the bull Unigenitus condemns 101 propositions from Quesnel’s New Testament.
16 March 1672, firm date
The Synod of Jerusalem and the Confession of Dositheus
Gathered for the dedication of the rebuilt church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, a synod under Patriarch Dositheus of Jerusalem rejects a confession with Reformed teaching printed under the name of Cyril Lucaris and sets out Orthodox doctrine in eighteen decrees.
1675, firm date
Spener’s Pia Desideria and the Rise of Pietism
In 1675 the Frankfurt pastor Philipp Jakob Spener publishes six proposals for mending the Lutheran church, from Bible reading in small meetings to the training of pastors. From 1695 August Hermann Francke founds a school and an orphan house at Halle.
October 1685, firm date
Louis XIV Revokes the Edict of Nantes
By an edict given at Fontainebleau in October 1685, Louis XIV revokes the Edict of Nantes, orders the Reformed churches of France demolished, bans Reformed worship and forbids his Protestant subjects to leave. The Elector of Brandenburg offers those who flee a refuge.
24 May 1689, firm date
The Toleration Act and Locke’s Letter
In May 1689 the English Parliament exempts Protestant dissenters who take the oaths from the penalties of the laws on worship, but not Catholics or those who deny the Trinity. In the same year John Locke’s Letter argues that the care of souls is no business of the magistrate.
1704 to 1742, firm date
The Chinese Rites Controversy
Jesuit missionaries let Chinese converts honour Confucius and their ancestors as civil customs; others call the rites superstitious. Rome forbids them in 1704, 1715 and 1742, the Kangxi emperor says Westerners should no longer preach, and in 1939 Rome allows them as civil acts.
9 July 1706, firm date
The Tranquebar Mission
Two German Lutherans trained at Halle, sent under the protection of the king of Denmark, land at Tranquebar in South India in July 1706. They learn Tamil and Portuguese, baptize converts, build a church, open schools and begin to translate and print the New Testament in Tamil.
25 January 1721 (Old Style), firm date
Peter the Great Replaces the Patriarch with the Holy Synod
In January 1721 (Old Style) Tsar Peter I puts the Russian church under a board of clergy sworn to him as its supreme judge. It takes the patriarch’s place and the name of Most Holy Synod, and in 1723 the patriarch of Constantinople recognises it.
13 August 1727, firm date
The Moravians at Herrnhut
Emigrants from Moravia settle on Count Zinzendorf’s estate at Herrnhut. In 1727 they pledge themselves to common statutes, and their church dates its renewal from a communion service on 13 August of that year. In 1732 Herrnhut sends two men to the slaves of St Thomas.
1734 to 1743, firm date
The Great Awakening
A revival in Jonathan Edwards’s congregation at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734 and 1735 becomes known through his printed account. In 1740 George Whitefield preaches to great crowds in New England, and Charles Chauncy of Boston answers that much of the stir is disorder.
24 May 1738, firm date
John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism
On 24 May 1738, at a meeting in Aldersgate Street in London, the clergyman John Wesley feels his heart “strangely warmed”. The next year he begins to preach in the open air at Bristol, and the societies he and his brother Charles organise come to be called Methodist.
21 July 1773, firm date
The Suppression of the Jesuits
By the brief Dominus ac Redemptor of 21 July 1773 Pope Clement XIV abolishes the Society of Jesus, which the Catholic kings of France, Spain, Portugal and the Two Sicilies had already expelled. In 1814 Pius VII restores it in all countries.
1782, firm date
The Philokalia Is Published
A Greek anthology of writers on watchfulness and the prayer of the heart, gathered from the libraries of Mount Athos, is printed at Venice in 1782. Its preface offers the prayer to laypeople as well as monks. A Slavonic version follows at Moscow in 1793.
1784, firm date
Korean Scholars Found a Church
Korean scholars who had read Christian books from Beijing send one of their own with an embassy; Yi Seung-hun is baptized there in 1784, returns to Seoul and baptizes his friends. A church grows with no priest in the country, and meets persecution.
1786 to 1791, firm date
Religious Freedom in the United States
In January 1786 Virginia enacts Jefferson’s statute that no one shall be compelled to support any worship or suffer for his religious opinions. The federal Constitution bars religious tests, and the First Amendment, ratified in 1791, forbids Congress to establish a religion.
1787 to 1816, estimated date
Richard Allen and the African Methodist Episcopal Church
Black Methodists pulled from their knees at prayer in St George’s Church, Philadelphia, walk out with Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. Allen opens Bethel church in 1794, and in 1816 Black congregations unite as the African Methodist Episcopal Church with Allen as bishop.
1790 to 1801, firm date
The French Revolution and the Church
The National Assembly takes the church’s lands and in 1790 remakes the French church by law, demanding an oath that Pius VI condemns. Priests who refuse it are killed in Paris in 1792 and outlawed in 1793. In 1801 Bonaparte and Pius VII restore Catholic worship by a concordat.
2 October 1792, firm date
William Carey and the Modern Missionary Movement
The English Baptist minister William Carey argues in 1792 that Christ’s command to teach all nations still binds the churches. A missionary society is formed at Kettering that October, and in 1793 Carey sails for India. In 1805 the Serampore mission sets down its principles.
24 September 1794, firm date
Orthodox Monks Reach Alaska
Ten missionaries, most of them monks of Valaam, cross Siberia and reach Kodiak Island in September 1794. Their letters report thousands of baptisms. The monk Herman stays for life, and the priest John Veniaminov, later Bishop Innocent, writes for the Aleuts in their own language.
1799, firm date
Schleiermacher and Modern Theology
In 1799 Friedrich Schleiermacher, a hospital preacher in Berlin, publishes Speeches on Religion for its cultured despisers: religion is neither knowledge nor morals but feeling, a sense and taste for the Infinite. His later dogmatics builds Christian doctrine on that ground.
August 1801, firm date
The Second Great Awakening
In August 1801 a great crowd camps for a week of preaching at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, the church of the Presbyterian minister Barton Stone, and carries the revival home. In the 1830s Charles Finney teaches that a revival is the result of the right use of means.
7 March 1804, firm date
The British and Foreign Bible Society
Moved by the want of Bibles in Wales, Christians of several denominations meet in London on 7 March 1804 and found a society with one object, the wider circulation of the Scriptures without note or comment, at home and abroad.
25 March 1807, firm date
Christians and the Abolition of the Slave Trade
After twenty years of campaigning by Quakers, Anglicans and a formerly enslaved writer, Parliament makes the British slave trade unlawful. Other Christians had defended the trade from the Bible, and a missionary society held slaves of its own.
6 April 1830, firm date
Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints
On 6 April 1830, the year the Book of Mormon is printed, Joseph Smith and five others organize a church in western New York. Its leaders declare it to be Christ’s church restored. The Catholic Church and some other churches do not accept its baptism.
14 July 1833, firm date
The Oxford Movement
John Keble’s sermon on national apostasy and the Tracts for the Times call the Church of England back to its claim to be a catholic church with bishops in succession from the apostles. After Tract 90 is censured, Newman becomes a Roman Catholic.
1844 to 1859, firm date
Tischendorf and the Codex Sinaiticus
On three visits to St Catherine’s Monastery the German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf finds a Greek Bible of the fourth century and takes it away, first in part and then on loan. He and the monastery tell the story differently.
22 October 1844, firm date
The Millerites and the Great Disappointment
William Miller reckons from the book of Daniel that Christ will return about 1843, and by his own estimate some fifty thousand people come to expect it. On 22 October 1844 the last date set passes. Seventh-day Adventists, who give the date another meaning, organize in 1863.
1851 to 1864, firm date
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom
Hong Xiuquan, a village teacher who read Christian tracts in the light of his own visions, is proclaimed ruler of a new dynasty in 1851 and holds Nanjing from 1853. The missionary who once taught him later denounces his religion; Qing armies take the city in 1864.
8 December 1854, firm date
The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception
On 8 December 1854 Pius IX defines that Mary was preserved from all stain of original sin from the first instant of her conception, a point long disputed among Latin theologians. Orthodox and Old Catholic statements reject the definition, and Anglicans record difficulty with it.
29 June 1864, firm date
Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the First African Anglican Bishop
Samuel Ajayi Crowther, enslaved as a boy and freed at Sierra Leone, is consecrated at Canterbury as bishop for the Niger, to lead a mission planned as purely African. By the mission society’s own account, English missionaries sent in 1890 override him; he dies the next year.
25 June 1865, firm date
Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission
Hudson Taylor, a missionary invalided home from China, resolves on Brighton beach to lead a new mission to the inland provinces. The China Inland Mission accepts workers without restriction as to denomination, guarantees no income and makes no personal appeals for money.
17 March 1865, firm date
The Hidden Christians of Japan Come Forward
On 17 March 1865 villagers from Urakami tell the French missionary Bernard Petitjean, in his new church at Nagasaki, that their hearts are the same as his. They had kept baptism in secret under the ban. Deported from 1868, the survivors come home in 1873.
July 1865, firm date
William and Catherine Booth Found the Salvation Army
William Booth, a former Methodist minister, begins preaching in a tent in the East End of London in 1865. The mission he and his wife Catherine build takes the name Salvation Army in 1878 and adds to its preaching a scheme of work, food and shelter for the destitute.
1869 to 1870, firm date
The First Vatican Council
A council of Catholic bishops at Rome defines that the pope has full jurisdiction over the whole church and is infallible when he defines a doctrine of faith or morals ex cathedra. A minority of bishops stays away from the final vote, and other churches reject the definition.
1885 to 1886, firm date
The Martyrs of Uganda
In 1885 and 1886 King Mwanga of Buganda has Christian converts killed, Anglicans and Catholics alike, many of them burned together in 1886, and an Anglican bishop put to death. Both churches honour them as martyrs.
July 1888, firm date
The Lambeth Quadrilateral
The Anglican bishops meeting at Lambeth in 1888 name four things as a basis for reunion with other churches (the Scriptures, the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the two sacraments and the historic episcopate), taking them from a declaration of the American bishops in 1886.
15 May 1891, firm date
Rerum Novarum and Christian Social Teaching
Pope Leo XIII addresses the condition of industrial workers. His encyclical rejects socialism and class war, defends private property, and teaches that workers are owed a living wage, limits on their hours, the protection of the law and the right to form unions.