2,000 Years of Christ’s Power Vol. 5: The Age of Enlightenment and Awakening

2,000 Years of Christ's Power #5

by Nick R. Needham

In many ways, I confess I do not feel especially at home in the Age of Reason. My personal roots are far more among those of the Early Church. Still, I gladly admit I cannot help feeling my heart kindled as I read about the mighty deeds wrought in and through the Evangelical preachers of that age.   Thoroughly researched with beautifully linked arguments, biographies, context and discussions, Needham provides a riveting balancing fact and understanding in the wisdom of experience. The book offers a wealth of knowledge for pastors, missionaries, students and professors as they pursue their own education into the response of Christians during the 18th century towards these shifts in the tides of the affairs of men.   Covering the period bracketing the Enlightenment Nick Needham’s new volume in the  2000 Years of Christ’s Power  series, covers the social, economic, political and evangelical changes across two continents.

Genres: Church History, History, Christian, Theology, Religion, Nonfiction

664 pages, Hardcover

Published March 14, 2023

About the author

Dr. Nick Needham is senior minister of Inverness Reformed Baptist Church and tutor in church history at Highland Theological College in Dingwall, Scotland.

Dr. Needham is a Londoner by birth and upbringing. He studied theology at New College, Edinburgh University, where he specialized in Church History. He also taught a course at New College on the life and works of the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli, at the same time completing his PhD thesis on the nineteenth-century Scottish theologian Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. He then taught Systematic Theology at the Scottish Baptist College in Glasgow for several years before spending a semester at the Samuel Bill Theological College, where he taught Church History. After a period as assistant pastor in a church in north London, he moved to the Highland Theological College, Dingwall, where he teaches Church History.

Reviews

[Matt Pitts · Rating 5 out of 5]

I continue to be amazed at the quality, breadth, depth, and simplicity of this series. I don’t know of anything else like it. Each volume is readable and engaging so you can recommend it to anyone and yet even those familiar with the sweep of church history will be introduced to new figures and encounter compelling excerpts from primary sources.

The period covered in this volume is one I was already quite familiar with (in particular Whitefield, Wesley, and the Great Awakening) and yet there was much here that was new to me. I particularly appreciated (as I did in volume 2) the inclusion of the Eastern Orthodox world during this period.

These would be great for church book discussions, Bible classes from high school up, book clubs, and anyone interested in church history at any level. Start anywhere in the series, give it 50 pages, and I think you’ll be hooked.

Note: I received a complementary copy of this book but was not required to provide a positive review.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really excellent overview of the period. Given that it is a survey, the specialist will no doubt find a few faults here and there, but the analysis is generally good. I found the chapters on Lutheranism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy to be especially illuminating.

[Luke Schmeltzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first book in Needham’s series, read for a Modern Church history class. He does an amazing job of presenting the history of the church- it’s people, doctrines, and events- in a clear and engaging way. It’s the most intriguing and compelling work of church history I’ve read, and I am glad to have the whole series to reference and lend to people in my church. I do wish there was more footnoting and primary source quotes, but the simplicity is what makes it so readable.

[Daniel Lieber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll keep this short since my review for Part 1 is applicable to the entire series, but I want to state again how fantastic I believe these volumes on church history to be. Needham is a humble historian very mindful of his role in sharing the events and perspectives of other saints. This series has been nothing short of life changing for me. I’ve grown both in the understanding of others and the refinement of my own convictions as I imagined myself in the middle of different eras and events throughout the history of the church. Again, Needham is admirably objective in these books, but I’ve gone on to read some of his writing outside of this book series and I think he is a fantastic theologian in his own right as well. I’ve learned so much from this man’s work and I want to share how incredibly grateful I am for the countless unseen hours he must have devoted to it. Well done dear brother and praise God for His work through you!

[Ronnie Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding

Church History at its finest. Another gem from Nick Needham. I highly recommend all 5 volumes. Easy to read and thoroughly informative.

[Shane Goodyear · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once again, I find Nick Needham an exceptional historian
Nick, has blessed me with his historical overview church history since I became a Christian 16 years ago.
This is a great overview of the 18th century church, its conflict with the Enlightenment, and how the revival in America and Britain influence the enlightenment and were influenced by the enlightenment
What I love about this series is the authors willingness to look at Christian traditions on its own terms while being honest about his own reformed biases.
Everything from the evangelical revival to Roman Catholicism to eastern orthodoxy, both in Russian in greek form
This is a must to go to theory for a great overview of church history from the early church fathers to the 18 century. Can’t wait till he writes about the Victorian era.

[Devin Geiger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m glad to hear there is another volume in the works! Needham continues to do a great job conveying the complexities of church history in an understandable way.

[Caleb Lofthus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for school. Long, but detailed and very informative. Another solid work by Needham

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on—and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same—like old Mr Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?’
‘I wonder,’ said Frodo. ‘But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.’
‘No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it—and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. … Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?’
‘No, they never end as tales,’ said Frodo. ‘But the people in them come, and go when their part’s ended. Our part will end later—or sooner.”

I remembered this line as I read the fifth and most recent installment of Nick Needham’s 2000 Years of Christ’s Power. How do you do tribute to a book that you have been awaiting for seven years? How do you put into words the weight of the events that it chronicles? I think the only way to do so is to google a good rendition of For All the Saints, and then to remember that it is all true.
If someone asked me for a recommendation of a church history, I suppose I would have to recommend something like Trial and Triumph or Church History in Plain Language because of the length of these books, but I still love them because Needham describes his heroes’ quirks and failures, as well as their triumphs and virtues.

The church fathers were clearly strong, heroic, and devoted, but you also can see the crankiness, the excessive asceticism, and the quarrelsomeness that they sometimes gave in to. The medieval monks often combined astonishing missionary courage with an appalling veneration of Mary. And Protestants, despite our wonderful recovery of the joyful news that we are forgiven, without any qualification, were guilty of much unnecessary vitriol and even persecution of fellow Christians. The most signal instance of that in this book is John Wesley. Not only did he allow for the first women preachers, but he severely neglected his wife, to the point where she walked out on him; he never repented of how he treated her.

And yet, God used Wesley powerfully to take what appears to be a dead, dead, dead Church of England (I didn’t realize how dead until I read this book) and to revitalize it with a remarkably individual-centric form of Christian discipleship, a form which we all aim at today, even if we cannot achieve it.
*
As I was sitting and going back and forth, pouring over the book, I remembered the lines from Sam, and I realized that here we are, in the same story, with the same basic enemies as the men of the Great Awakening. The Roman empire is gone, and Roman Catholicism is so different that it is more dangerous as a form of anemic liberalism than as the God-hating superstition it was in the time of the Reformation.

But the enlightenment continues to fight us, and the intellectual skepticism about the historicity of the Gospels remains orthodoxy within academia. Or as Matthew might have put it, the scholars of higher criticism have been telling the same story to this very day.

Yet, here we are, transgenderism, and abortion, and homosexuality right in our faces, fighting the same battle that men like Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield fought, wishing that God would revive us again and give us men who did not back down when opposed.
*
The coolest thing about being a Christian is that you can look at the darkest events and know that God is still protecting his Church and making sure the Gates of Hades will not prevail against her. When I read volume 1, it really came home to me that there was a large church in North Africa and the Middle East that eventually died.

That is the romance of Church history: the same romance that we find in the Old Testament. Once again God has delivered His people, and once again the same people that He has delivered have sunk back into idolatry—only now it’s worse because it has the name of Jesus over it.
Nothing stinks more than the idolatry of Israel and Judah. Except for the Pharisees and Sadducees. Except for the Popes and Priests. Except for a liberalized Lutheran church. Except for a dead Church of England. Except for a dead Methodist church. Except for a dead Evangelicalism.

It seems that no matter what institution you build, at some point our sins drive out the Spirit and the music dies. This would be cause for sorrow, and it is sad to me when I see a Jerry Falwell Jr. or Tullian Tchividjian flame out; their fathers made conquest of the land, and they just live off the fat.
But the good news of the Gospel is not that God has promised to be in any particular institution or even in any particular geographical region: that never mattered. They were simply the places where holy men and women walked. If the Gospel dies, God forbid, in America, and millions more in China, India, and Africa believe because of what we and our fathers did, then that is fine. This world is Jesus’s anyway. He can come back and retake the Middle East when the time is right.
*
One of the most shocking moments in this book is Needham’s brief chapter on how the gospel was lost in the Church of England. It got to be so bad that Europeans visiting England would note how impious Englishmen were. A land that had boasted the great Puritans, now reduced to a lifeless nominalism.

Obviously, there is a lot of exaggeration, but I do think that you can tell the difference between times of great spiritual hunger and times of spiritual famine. Douglas Wilson recently said this, “I remember that during that era, we used to hold noon Bible studies on the University of Idaho campus, every day, and they were “standing room only” sorts of events—with 40, 50, or 60 people in attendance. The spiritual hunger of that time was ravenous.”

That is not our time. Oh sure, loads of Christians are joining the church and getting saved. The Holy Spirit has not left us. But people are not coming to Jesus in my town right now. Many of the boomers and Xers I know came to faith anywhere from the 50s to the 80s; most millennials and zoomers that I know who are Christians were just raised that way, and the battle often feels hard won.

The interesting thing is that Needham says that one of the causes was an apathy about orthodoxy—about being faithful to the historic teaching of the church rather than merely to the Bible. This is a challenge for me, since my temperament is to be apathetic about whether our teaching matches up with that of what theologians have said in the past, but maybe there is a use for reclaiming a generous orthodoxy after all.

The other ingredient that Needham notes in his chapters on the Moravians is that there was a reaction among them to the dead or militant creedalism of the Lutheran and Calvinist Churches. I grew up pretty much knowing in my bones that the 1700s and 1800s were when we got all those dreadful, subjective hymns, big on emotion, low on taste.

Coming back to this book, it is striking how much the Wesleys and many, many more men in the church of England wanted assurance. They were men who intellectually accepted the Gospel, but for some reason thought they could never go to heaven and that they needed assurance. This brings up so many issues that have been a live issue for me in my own life. You could say that FV is simply a reaction to the conversionism of the great awakenings.

But it is so clear from reading this book that people were, if not getting saved, at least finding a great deal of assurance and seeking to serve God and love their neighbors.

At the same time, you cannot ignore the fact that an unhealthy subjectivism entered the church. The worst thing about the Wesleys was that they not only went after Calvinism in what appears to me to be a mean and undignified way, but they also allowed women pastors. C.R. Wiley said he was always skeptical of the Methodist tradition because of this. I think he is onto something. Unless Christians are committed, not just to a recovery of the emotions, but also to a recovery of what the Bible says and to a recovery of Christian duty and orthodoxy, then we will fizzle out.

Probably the worst thing that the revival movement did was begin the path away from Psalm-singing towards almost exclusive hymnody. The loss of that to the Church is reflected in the effeminacy of our day.
*
Moreso than the Reformation, I feel like the world we live in is the world made by the Evangelicals. I love Luther and Calvin and even the Puritans, but I feel like the discomfort with dead nominalism and the desire for revival are more central to the Christianity I know than the interesting civic Christianity of the Reformers which sometimes erupted in persecution. By the time of the 1700s, a new ethos had set in, an ethos that did not so easily set brother against brother, and that cared more about saving souls than about public churches. I like the post-Awakening Church a bit more.

Activist it may be, emotional it may be, but it is still basically right that what you need is Jesus.
Dark clouds still hover over our heads, and the devil certainly still seems to be at work, but as Sam said, we are still in the same story. We still have the same Spirit. And there are many more kids being born who will be saved and be like the Wesleys, Whitefield, and Edwards.

The cloud of witnesses is still above us. The Spirit is moving above the face of the waters again.

[Daniel Hatfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nick Needham’s fifth volume of his colossal “2000 years of Christ Power covers the enlightenment period and the rise of Protestant evangelicalism. Throughout this series, Needham has been thorough and well researched. Zooming in on specific theologically turbulent events and expounding on it and this volume was no exception. This book shines in its exploration of the beginnings of evangelicalism, as he explores the lives of George Whitefield, John and Charles Wesley and others in their establishment of Methodism and Congregationalism in England as well as the New World. Needham covers a good amount of the happenings across Christendom during the time period. From Anglicanism and the beginnings of evangelicalism to Lutheranism Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, much is covered.
But this book devotes an inordinate amount of time to the establishment of evangelicalism. The authors bias is clearly seen and his Baptist heritage is easily spotted as he spends the first HALF of the book going into in-depth detail about the events happening in England, Scotland and the New World. While I found this fascinating and well written it came at the expense of everything else happening across Christendom at the time. Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy— both of whom contain a rich history deserving of exposition— were only briefly touched on. Not only that but the church in Ethiopia and India who both boast a history dating back to the apostles was completely shafted.
This was less a history of the church at the time of the enlightenment and more a history evangelicalism with a few stories across the rest of the western church.

[Blake · Rating 3 out of 5]

This fifth volume of this series by Nick R. Needham, offers the reader fascinating historical coverage of numerous eras: The Enlightenment; The Evangelical Revival in England and Wales; Scotland in the time of the Evangelical Revival; the Great Awakening in America; German and Lutheran Faith; Roman Catholicism in the 18th Century; and The Eastern Orthodox World. In the journey through the book the reader will find himself exposed to key figures in each highlighted segment: Kant and the subsequent view of Scripture, Faith, Reason, and the French Revolution; Calvinsim, Arminianism, Hymns, the Wesley brothers, the rise of Methodism; The Jacobite Risings and how the highlands became Protestant and Presbyterian; George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and other powerful voices in the Great Awakening; Luther's impact in Germany, the rise of Lutheranism; and key figures; Key figures in Roman Catholicism in the 1700-1800's, the Catholic Church in relation to the French Revolution; and The role that Eastern Orthodoxy had in the world, noting key figures and key theological documents of that religion.

As a whole, it was an interesting read, although it was my least favorite out of the five volumes. It still is a worthwhile read for anyone who loves church history or who wants to learn more about church history. Needham has done a wonderful job in covering this era.

[Nathan Hunter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nick Needham's fifth volume on church history rises to the level of his third volume concerning the Reformation and his first volume concerning the Apostolic age. The sections are organized in a more mature faction with multiple sub-chapters in each overarching section.

This volume covers the concept of the Enlightenment and traces it's impact on Reformed, Lutheran, Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, and Eastern/Russian Orthodox groups. Similar to previous volumes, Nick Needham's focus on Eastern Orthodox is certainly welcomed since there is often a high level of ignorance toward this perspective in the Reformed community.

Beyond simply the Enlightenment, the author explores the two Great Awakenings and the French Revolution in their immediate and historic impacts on the world. Although Needham mainly focuses on the church history implications, he touches on both historical and scientific impacts of these events.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoughtful resource that includes large portions of source material. It isn't a dry read. The author seems to be aware of the potential for bias on the part of himself and the intended audience and takes effort to balance this. The 5th volume is formatted with reference to 1-4 but does not require you to have read them for the most part.

[Leol Fetahanegest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great part of series

There is so much good information here about the 18th century. For me it especially was the Evangelical revival and the Great Awakening in America that really grabbed my attention and interest. Christ has truly been building his Church since the day of Pentecost, which clearly emphasized throughout the whole series.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is the sheer beadth and catholicity that Needham brings to his survey of Church history that makes them so enjoyable, edifying, and balanced. This volume is no different, and my only complaint is that we are now down to 100 years per volume.

Loved it.

[Ty Brunet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction to the 18th century church with an expansive overview of denominations: Reformed, Methodist, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox Christianity.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Volume 5 of Nick Needham’s excellent history of the church series 2000 Years Of Christ’s Power. Highly recommended for Christians looking to deepen their knowledge of church history.

[Josiah Ball · Rating 5 out of 5]

This whole series is INCREDIBLE. I have loved each volume and re-read some of them. Best accessible place to start for Church history.

[Cameron Borders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thorough yet readable. Very fine! Good section on the French Revolution.