The Church's One Foundation, part 3: Torn and Worn; Troubled by Haters and Traitors
In the first two verses of his hymn, Samuel Stone pointed to the divine origin of the church. This is no human idea, no simple gathering of warm bodies who share a common interest. The church was conceived and created by God himself—a new family created from those who would never naturally get along. There is an unseen spiritual reality that links all true Christians together. There is only one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one hope. Sin that remains in believers will continue to cloud their understanding and their functional unity until the influence of sin is completely removed. In the meantime we are to work towards a common understanding of the truth taught in Scripture and to walk in charity toward all true believers.
Sometimes it seems that true unity in the church has not existed since the first chapters of Acts. Those chapters tell us several times that the first 5,000 believers had all things in common and were in one accord. But Acts 6 brings us the complaints of the Greek Jews against the Hebraic Jews. Jump forward a few more chapters and the Paul-Barnabas mission society has fractured. Most of the New Testament churches have frictions or divisions, but Corinth runs away with the prize. Paul writes to the Galatians of false teachers and to the Philippians of envious evangelists. Divisions on the inside, attacks from the outside—this becomes the playlist for the next 2,000 years.
We look at the world around us and the church still looks fractured and far from the glorious bride that Christ is preparing for himself. Stone saw a similar landscape as he looked out his own windows. Verses 3 and 4 of this hymn begin and end with hopeful promises, but the rest of the lines give a realistic view of the woes and discouragements that burden the church today.
Verse 3.
At the beginning of Verse 3, Stone is inspired by the stirring words of Jesus Christ to Peter that he would build his church, and the gates of hell would not prevail against it. "I will do the work," says Jesus, "and it is my church." As messy as these millennia have been, they are what “Christ building his church” looks like. The church will never perish, says Stone, for her precious Lord stands by her side to defend her. From full dissolution into heresy or from extermination by the enemy, Christ will keep his church. And not only will he keep her, he will be with her. Some of his last words to his disciples were that he would remain with them until the end of the age. It is Christ, the head of the body, who guides, sustains, and cherishes her. She, like he, may be despised and rejected by men, but she is precious in his eyes. He gives faithful shepherds to feed her, he commissions his angels to serve her, he sends his Spirit to indwell her.
How much the church needs to know and believe these promises! Martin Luther was not the only one who has known a world “with devils filled” that threatens to undo the church. The church has often known dark and threatening days. We are often of little faith, the little flock who fears and who forgets that it is the Father’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom.
Stone knew the darkness of his day. The theological atmosphere of 19th century England was several generations downstream of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution. The Reformation broke the monopoly that the Roman Catholic church had on biblical interpretation. But before long, the freedom of conscience that was gained by the Reformation was abused by rationalistic thinkers of the Enlightenment to make of the Bible what they would. The Scientific Revolution led to a greater understanding of the natural world, which began to raise doubts in the minds of academics about the supernatural elements and origin of Scripture. A combination of these forces created good soil for the birth and growth of new ways of interpreting the Bible.
By the time that Samuel Stone was a student at Oxford, several decades of these new interpretations had infiltrated the colleges and universities of Europe, England, and North America. In 1859, Darwin published his Origin of Species, and the following year another landmark book came out, entitled Essays and Reviews. This was a collection of seven essays by Anglican clergy (and one educated layman) regarding how they felt that advances of the modern age affected biblical interpretation. The book presented a theological world in which Old Testament prophecies did not foretell the future but looked back on history, where miracles were impossible, and where modern geology forced a re-interpretation of the early parts of Genesis. These concepts were not new to academia—theologians in Germany had promoted them for decades—but the publication of this work by respected Anglican clergy was a major marker of theological drift in the English church. Stone was briefly shaken by the concepts in the essays but—his biographer related—it was not long before he “settled his feet in the old paths.”
John Colenso was not one of the authors of Essays and Reviews, but he shared some of their sentiments. He was a generation older than Stone, and after seven years of ministry in England, went to South Africa as a missionary. He served as bishop in the colony of Natal and worked among the Zulu, for whom he had genuine compassion. In time, he would translate the New Testament into Zulu and become a strong advocate for them against harmful aspects of colonial expansion. Even as a minister in England, Colenso had misgivings about the historicity of parts of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament). When some of his Zulu converts asked him if he believed that the stories of Genesis actually happened, he was forced to wrestle with his lingering doubts. He eventually discarded biblical orthodoxy. During the 1860s he began writing and publishing commentaries on Old Testament books and the book of Romans. These commentaries taught that Moses did not write the Pentateuch and that the flood of Noah’s day and the exodus from Egypt had never happened. In his Romans commentary, he rejected the historic teaching of the church on eternal punishment.
Colenso wrote of the inner turmoil he had felt at his inability to harmonize the traditional interpretations of Scripture with current scholarship. He appears to have had a sincere crisis of faith and was not simply throwing off tradition. But at his ordination he had affirmed his agreement with the doctrinal statement of the Anglican Church (the “Thirty-nine Articles of Religion”). When his views changed he should have resigned his position. He instead used that position to publish and promote books that helped to dismantle biblical orthodoxy. He was brought before a church court, where he was tried and convicted of heresy. The conviction was later overruled on a technicality, and Colenso was enabled to continue his work until his death 20 years later.
The controversy stirred by Colenso in Natal did not not remain on the African continent. In England, articles and essays were written and sermons were preached in condemnation of his views. (Even Charles Spurgeon took note of him, referring to him as the “heathenish bishop.”) And a 27-year-old curate in Windsor had heaviness on his heart as he composed his ninth hymn on the Apostles’ Creed. When Stone talked of Christ’s bride being “rent asunder” by schisms or “by heresies distressed,” he was not speaking in general terms. Years later he recalled, “When I wrote ‘The church’s one foundation,’ the steadfast defence of the Faith made by Bishop Gray of Cape Town against the heresies of Colenso some time before was much on my mind.”
Verse 4.
Colenso died in 1883, and Stone in 1900. But the pressure to conform Scripture to a current cultural framework has continued. By the turn of the 20th century, many (if not most) Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, and Baptist churches had adopted the thinking of Colenso and the essayists. The 1920s and 30s saw the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy and further rejection of core beliefs like the virgin birth of Christ and his bodily resurrection. For most of the 20th century, evangelicals held the line against this “modern theology” in the mainline churches. But today we see fault lines and fracturing even among evangelicals. (Not many years ago I was working with a Bible college graduate when he told me he doubted the historicity of Adam. I felt as though I was watching a modern evangelical fall prey to the errors of the 19th century.)
Is all lost? Will the church ever recover the harmony she knew in Acts 2? This is what Stone asks at the close of Verse 4. The true saints are grieved at what they see. They know they cannot compromise on the truth—cannot simply reinterpret Scripture to fit the changing winds of modern scholarship. They cry out, “How long? How long will this continue? When will peace return? When will the church be free from those who hate her? When will the schisms end?”
“Soon,” says Stone, “soon the night of weeping will be the morn of song.”
It is a righteous thing with God to repay with tribulation those who trouble you, and to give you rest with us when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels. (2 Thessalonians 1:6-7, NKJV)
