The Church in the Age of Revolutions: Confronting Modernity (CH3001Z)

Content

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”

William Butler Yeats wrote those words following the failed Irish Rising of 1916, at the end of the First World War, in the midst of the Influenza Pandemic (1918-1919), and with the details of revolutions and crisis filtering through to him from Berlin and St Petersburg. But it may be taken more generally as an apt metaphor for much of modern church history.

The modern era has seen the systematic re-imagining of social relations. Driven by political, social, economic, and religious revolutions, the Church (wherever it may be) has had to confront challenges that make the schisms of the reformation seem only a small fraternal squabble. This unit will journey from the barricades of Paris to the cotton mills of Lancashire, from the overseas empires of Europe to missionary outposts in far-east Asia and the Pacific. The Reformation may have made Christianity a world religion, but it is the modern era that brought its structures to the brink of collapse. Churches have been confronted with world wars, forced famines, death marches, genocides, and have had to wrestle with ethical questions of immediate impact on the human condition, like slavery, abolitionism, totalitarianism, democracy, civil rights, and human rights.

Learning outcomes

Pedagogy

Direct instruction and self-directed learning approach to learning discipline-specific skills (demonstrating an understanding of concepts in history, reading primary and secondary historical documents, writing an argumentative essay, and classroom dialogues) through lectures, tutorials with targeted learning activities, and formative and summative assessment tasks.

Indicative Bibliography

• Balmer, Randall Herbert. The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics, and Beyond. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010. ISBN: 1602582432
• Kaye, Bruce Norman, T. R Frame, Colin Holden, and Geoffrey R Treloar. Anglicanism in Australia: A History. Carlton South, Vic., Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0522850030
• Palmer, R. R. The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800. Princeton Classics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. ISBN: 9780691161280
• Pattel-Gray, Anne. The Great White Flood: Racism in Australia; Critically Appraised from an Aboriginal Historico-Theological Viewpoint. American Academy of Religion Cultural Criticism Series, No. 2. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1998. ISBN: 078850133X
• Tejirian, Eleanor Harvey, and Reeva S. Simon. Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion: Two Thousand Years of Christian Missions in the Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. ISBN: 0231138644
• Thompson, Willie. Ideologies in the Age of Extremes: Liberalism, Conservatism, Communism, Fascism 1914-91. London: Pluto Press, 2011. ISBN: 0745327117

Assessment