Christianity 1750-Present

Christianity has gone through many changes specifically from 1750 to the present. Most changes have occurred in North America and in Europe but they have occurred throughout the whole world. The influence of immigration and the changing of society altered America’s Christianity. Christianity dispersed into many different denominations from the influences of different religions and people. This proves the inevitability of a worldview. This shows that religion cannot escape from being affected and altered by many different beliefs and nations.

Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel who saw the world as an experience and not set in rules first challenged the Bible. This idea led Ferdinand Baur to make people forced to see Jesus in a different light. The thought that Jesus might not be what everyone thought He was came into context. ‘All this was a speculative trend, but stimulated much historical inquiry into the actualities of what we could know about Jesus’ (Smart 354).

People began to see the Bible in more terms than belief. The Bible was beginning to be treated historical wise and not authoritatively. This was reinforced by Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, which was published in 1859. Evolution was what Darwin proclaimed. The human species came from the mutation of animals and apes. This challenged the Creation of God, which leads to humans not believing that they were created for a purpose and that they were to serve God so that they could enjoy a life after death in Heaven.

Evolution, away from the Christian aspect, should have been considered a step above and towards the right direction. ‘Evolution is good news: it hints at how we have risen from earlier stalkings and screams in the undergrowth to our present moral stature-above all, so the argument goes, the Christian religion-has played crucial part’ (Smart 356).

The Roman Catholic Church revived religion by reaffirming the authority that it had in the Vatican I in Rome in 1870. The Pope and his doctrine would be held in high regard and people were to listen to the Pope and the authority that he held. Some people rebelled against this to form Christian Socialism and started Methodists and Baptists.

The teaching of Karl Marx and other thinkers such as Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin once again challenged Christianity. Many philosophers had great influence as well. The blending of countries and domination over each other in Europe leads to the work of missionaries. Karl Barth, who wrote Church Dogmatics, challenged the Church by saying that everything that we know about God is through revelation only.