Chapter 8 — Making a Foundation to Receive the Messiah
The previous chapter closed at Constance in 1415, with the smoke from Jan Hus's pyre over a Christendom that no longer trusted its central institution. The four centuries that follow are, in William Haines's reading, a long argument about what to do with that distrust. The Renaissance recovered the texts; the Reformation broke the unity; the Wars of Religion drained confessional politics; the Enlightenment tried to live without revelation; the industrial and democratic revolutions produced the first societies in which an ordinary person could expect to be heard. Each step was a piece of providential infrastructure, and each a near miss. By 1920 the runway was ready.
The Renaissance and the recovery of synthesis
The Renaissance was not chiefly about painting. It was the re-marriage of the two traditions whose separation had crippled Christendom — Hellenistic and Hebraic — and its precondition was the cracking of papal monopoly. The crack opened in a quarrel between a pope and a king.
Pope Boniface VIII took away all the privileges granted by previous popes to the kings of France. He demanded that Philip, the king of France, come before a council in Rome to answer certain charges he wanted to bring against him. Philip did not like this imperialistic papacy and responded, 'Your venerable conceitedness may know that we are nobody's vassal in temporal matters.' The pope, on the other hand, responded that it is necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff. In other words, unless every person acknowledges and accepts the absolute authority of the pope, they cannot go to heaven.
Philip's reply is the opening line of European modernity. Once a Christian king could answer a pope in those terms, the unitary medieval order was finished in principle; the Avignon papacy, the Great Schism and the conciliar movement are all downstream of his we are nobody's vassal. As papal authority contracted, intellectual room opened in the Italian city-states for the unembarrassed reading of pagan books alongside Christian ones — the recovery, at root, of the Nativity formula: Hebrew tradition in the subject position, Hellenistic in the object. The engine, for William, was never institutional but the persistent operation of conscience inside individuals brave enough to follow it.
If the function of the conscience were absent in fallen people, God's providence or restoration would be impossible. Sometimes people wonder why God doesn't do more or why He didn't send the Messiah earlier, but the reality is that it is not God's fault that the fall took place; it was human beings who must put things right. Therefore, God's providence only advances to the extent that people listen to and follow their conscience, sometimes at great personal risk.
Galileo's case is the textbook illustration. Popular memory tells it as a clash between religion and science; William insisted the actual antagonists were the academic Aristotelians whose careers depended on the geocentric textbook, with the Church dragged in. The chief enemy of providential advance is not unbelief but vested interest.
The Reformation as marriage crisis, succession crisis
If the Renaissance was Italy's contribution, the Reformation was Germany's. William handled Luther briskly; what interested him most was the English Reformation, which did not begin with theology. It began with a marriage that had failed to produce a male heir.
Henry VIII's break with Rome was a dynastic emergency in confessional clothing. He had written against Luther, earning the papal title Defender of the Faith. What he wanted from Rome was an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and what Rome would not give him — Catherine's nephew Charles V had Italian armies in the field — was that annulment. The Church of England was the road around. The result was a settlement no Continental reformer would have recognised as Protestant and no Roman Catholic as Catholic, and the genius was the ambiguity.
If you look at the Church of England, it is Catholic in structure, with archbishops, bishops, and priests, but Protestant in theology. Additionally, priests are allowed to marry, making it a sort of halfway house. The Catholics thought they could accept this because the apostolic succession was maintained. On the other hand, the Protestants believed they could manage the theology. This compromise is often referred to as a 'fudge.' You try to keep as many people happy as possible without being overly logical, accepting various contradictions, and living with them. The only qualification is that you have to enjoy having tea and biscuits afterwards.
William read the fudge as practical wisdom the Continent never managed. By refusing doctrinal precision as the price of membership, the Elizabethan Church gave English political life its preference for muddled co-existence over logical purification — a preference later codified in habeas corpus and the common-law jury.
The road there was not gentle. Under Mary, England briefly reverted to Rome.
Most Protestants in the Church of England resisted this return to papal control. As a result, 283 Protestant leaders, bishops, and archbishops were burned at the stake publicly. This really antagonised people, and some Catholic advisers warned that it was not a good idea, as it would only make people hate her. This is exactly what happened; 800 Protestants who didn't want to be burned at the stake left England and went into exile, many to Holland, but a significant number went to Geneva, where they came under the influence of John Calvin and became Calvinists.
The exiles returned harder than they had left, radicalised by Geneva into a Puritanism the fudge could only just contain. Their grandchildren would sail to Massachusetts, fight at Naseby, and crown a Lord Protector. The seventeenth century is a chain reaction set running by Mary's bonfires. The dissenting English conscience found its voice in the next generation, when Milton wrote in defence of the unlicensed press.
John Milton wrote: 'Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties.' He is not arguing for the freedom to libel or slander people; not at all. He states, 'Thou cannot touch the freedom of my mind.' Even though he was imprisoned several times, he realised that those who put him in prison could not touch the freedom of his mind. He maintained his inner freedom to think, pray, and worship God in the way he chose, and nothing could take that away from him. He would have nothing to do with the cancel culture we see today, where people are offended and opinions are silenced. Killing a good book is akin to killing reason itself, as reason comes from God. Therefore, destroying good literature is tantamount to destroying the image of God in humanity.
The Messiah, William held, cannot be received in a society that has surrendered the right to be wrong out loud — whether to Tertullian's regula fidei or the social-media mob.
The Wars of Religion and the politics of displacement
Luther's revolt set off, on the Continent, a hundred and thirty years of religious war. The first uneasy peace was struck in 1555.
Following the Reformation initiated by Martin Luther in 1517, Europe experienced a series of religious wars. The Reformation first split Germany, where the northern princes supported Luther, rejecting the idea that the Pope had the authority to appoint or dismiss kings. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 allowed princes to choose either Roman Catholicism or Lutheranism for their subjects, recognising the need for compromise in a divided nation. The prince had the authority to decide on religious matters, and if someone did not want to follow the religion of their prince, they were given a certain amount of time to move to a principality that aligned with their preference.
Cuius regio, eius religio — religious freedom for princes only, exile the residual right of conscience — was the first formal European acknowledgement that confessional difference within a polity was permanent. The displacement principle of Augsburg is the embryo of every later liberal accommodation, from the Edict of Nantes to the First Amendment. It worked for sixty years; the Thirty Years' War showed what happens when it stops, and by Westphalia in 1648 the German lands had lost a third of their population and the Continental appetite for religious war was exhausted.
What it left behind in France was a Catholic establishment that had won militarily but lost morally — too entangled with the Bourbon throne to reform itself, and a generation of intellectuals who preferred something else. Voltaire was the heir: écrasez l'infâme. The failure of French Catholicism to reform itself produced the atheism of the eighteenth century, which produced the Jacobin Terror and, by inheritance, the Bolshevik.
Charles I, the Civil War and the Methodist firebreak
The same Continental absolutism arrived in Britain on Stuart shoulders. Charles I had inherited, via Scotland and the French theory of Jean Bodin, the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings — the monarch answerable only to God, above Parliament and above the law. The English tradition, descended from Magna Carta, had never accepted any such thing. Charles's attempt to govern as a French monarch on English soil produced the crisis of the 1620s, civil war, regicide, and finally a restored monarchy bound by parliamentary supremacy. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 made the bond explicit. Divine Right, the French import, was rejected.
A century later the same crisis arrived in France with the opposite outcome. Britain ought, by all measures, to have followed France into revolution in the 1790s. The reason it did not was John Wesley. Methodist preaching from the 1730s gave the new industrial working class a framework in which to organise their dignity without burning down the country. The British labour movement grew out of chapels rather than committees of public safety. The industrial conditions Methodism domesticated were, William believed, the most important material fact in the providential foundation.
The Industrial Revolution is arguably the most important event in the history of humanity since the domestication of animals and plants. It marked the first time in history that the living standards of ordinary people began to undergo sustained growth. For ten thousand years, the global population remained relatively stable until the Industrial Revolution, which was preceded in England by the Agricultural Revolution. This period allowed for the production of more food and goods, enabling a rise in living standards for ordinary people, rather than just the elite. Everything we enjoy today is a result of that Industrial Revolution.
Before it, no society had produced sustained per-capita growth. After it, the question of welfare ceased to be how to divide a fixed cake and became how to enlarge it. The arguments William had been tracing cleared the cultural space — free markets, free press, secure property, sober workers — and the change supplied the material conditions under which a global mission could be financed.
The Enlightenment, rationalism and the Continental disaster
The Enlightenment was not one phenomenon but two. The British and Scottish — Locke, Hume, Smith, Reid — was empirical, sceptical of grand schemes. The Continental — Descartes, Spinoza, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel — was rationalist, willing to deduce whole societies from first principles, and contemptuous of the Christian inheritance from which its ethical assumptions were borrowed. Hegel's left-wing disciples — Feuerbach, Marx, Engels — inverted dialectical idealism into dialectical materialism; Nietzsche declared God dead; the line from Kant through Hegel transitioned easily into communism. William named the consequence without flinching.
The foundation to receive the Messiah should have been established in all Christian countries. However, the invasion of Judeo-Christian foundations by Satan in France, Germany, and Russia led to the rise of dictatorship, fascism, and communism. The horrors of the Great Terror in France and the death camps in Germany and the Soviet Union were direct results of these failures. The establishment of Satan's sovereignty in Europe through totalitarianism necessitated wars to restore freedom and break this hold. The high price of these ideas and their consequences is evident in the millions who suffered in concentration camps. The seriousness of the Enlightenment's impact on society cannot be overstated.
Three Christian civilisations failed to make the foundation; three twentieth-century pathologies filled the vacancies. France produced Jacobinism. Germany produced National Socialism — and a deformation of Christianity itself that has to be named to be believed.
In the German church, there was a movement to present Jesus as not being a Jew. This is one of the reasons why the Gospel of Mark was proclaimed by German biblical scholars as the first and earliest Gospel, as it presents the least Jewish portrayal of Jesus. This movement within German biblical studies aimed to depict Jesus as a Galilean rather than a Jew. It is fascinating how this ideology affected all of academia, including the Martin Luther Church in Berlin, where there was an effort to replace traditional iconography. Instead of saints, one would find German stormtroopers depicted in stained glass windows, and the lectern where sermons were given featured carvings of German stormtroopers surrounding Jesus.
The de-Judaising of Christ was the theological prerequisite for the death camps. Once Jesus had been turned into a Galilean Aryan, the Jewish people he came from could be murdered without contradicting Sunday observance. The German Protestant academy, with a few honourable exceptions, did the work.
Russia, the third civilisation, produced the longest of the totalitarian experiments. Yet before the catastrophe it had produced a supreme cultural achievement — Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Repin — a Golden Age built on the synthesis of imported Western forms with Orthodox spirituality. The synthesis broke in 1917, and what followed was not the abolition of Russia's older pathology but its continuation by other means. The Possessor-Non-Possessor argument settled brutally in the sixteenth century was reopened by Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov — the thread on which the peaceful end of the Cold War would hang.
The rise of democracy, science, and the providential preparation of America and Britain
Against the Continental disasters, the Anglo-American tradition kept going — Pelagian anthropology, common law, parliamentary sovereignty, Methodist sobriety rather than Voltairean contempt. By the late nineteenth century it had produced industrial societies in which religious dissent was lawful, the press free, and a foreigner with an unfamiliar message could expect, in principle, to be heard rather than silenced.
America was the limit case. Its mythology had been written by Marian-exile grandchildren, Quakers, Methodists, Baptists and Jews; its founders were determined to prevent any of them establishing themselves over the others. The result was a polity unusually hospitable to religious novelty — and William attached incalculable weight to this, because the Korean teacher whose movement he had joined could not have done his work anywhere else. That gratitude did not produce a sentimental account of Korea.
Liberal democratic traditions would have made everything so different in Korea compared to what it was in Father's life. Instead of living in hell, he would have been able to do something meaningful with his life, far more than he was able to do. I read that passage about how frustrated Father was that he couldn't marry into that tradition and inherit that foundation through marriage. He was deeply frustrated by how things turned out. However, he dealt with the hand he was given and accepted the reality of the situation. Father said, 'This is the way things are; where do we go from here?' Even though he mentioned how things could have been different, he didn't dwell on that. He focused on the present and the future, which is a key point in his teachings.
It is one of the most striking confessions in the series. The foundation the Anglo-American Enlightenment had built was the foundation a Messiah needed, and Korea had not built it in time. What followed in Father's life — Hungnam, the long emigration — was lived in the gap. America's role was, more than anything else, to provide retroactively what Korea had not.
The run-up to 1920
By 1920 the foundation was ready. The slaughter of 1914–18 had ended the European old order. The Russian Revolution had given the totalitarian alternative its laboratory. The British Empire was beginning the retreat that would hand the lead of the English-speaking world to Washington. The United States had emerged from the war as the only major industrial economy intact and growing, and was about to enter the strange decade — Prohibition, jazz, the Scopes trial, the first great wave of evangelical revival — that would be the cultural matrix into which a Korean Messianic mission could arrive.
The decisive event came twenty-five years later, when Stalin's armies refused to leave the half of Europe they had liberated. Churchill saw earlier than anyone what the price had been.
Politically, it was impossible for America and Britain to suddenly change and declare war on the Soviet Union if Stalin refused to retreat. There would have been no electoral support for that. If Churchill had said, 'Okay, now we're going to have an election in 1944, and now we're going to go to war with the Soviet Union,' he would have lost. So, from Churchill's point of view, he understood Stalin and realised that communism wanted to expand and occupy the whole of Europe. He thought, 'Let's see if we can try to keep American military forces in Europe so we can at least defend half of Europe against the Soviet Union.' It was a question of half of Europe or the whole of Europe. Churchill figured it was better to lose half of Europe than the whole of it.
Half was lost, half preserved, and the preserved half — through NATO, the Marshall Plan and the long German-American friendship — became the ground on which the peaceful end of the Cold War could be transacted. It was peaceful because both sides at the decisive moment were ruled by men — Reagan and Gorbachev — who shared, however incompletely, a Judeo-Christian moral framework. The same cannot be assumed of the Far Eastern impasse to come; Korean reunification, when it arrives, will lack that shared moral grammar.
The chapter ends where William ended his series — with the rubble of the European catastrophe, and the prayer found at one of the camps.
It is one thing to dislike a group, but another to seek their extermination. Hitler's letter from Auschwitz: 'Oh Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will but also those of evil will. But do not remember all the suffering they've inflicted upon us. Remember the fruits we bore thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this. When they come to the judgment, let all the fruits that we bore be their forgiveness.' It's astonishing when you read about the attitude of many Jewish people when they went into the gas chambers; quite often they went in singing, praising God, and praying, knowing where they were going and what their fate was going to be, trying to be like a perfect offering.
That prayer was conscience under the most extreme circumstances it has ever been asked to bear — producing, out of the worst Europe could do, the offering that gave Europe its only honest claim to redemption. The foundation to receive the Messiah was built by people like that, across the four centuries this chapter has summarised. Whether the Messiah, when he came in 1920, was correctly received is the question of the chapters to follow.
A note on omitted material: this chapter draws on twelve of the sixteen passages supplied. Omitted, for reasons of pacing rather than significance, were the two Day 6 passages on the Russian Orthodox loyalty test and the Russo-Japanese War (both summarised in the editorial bridge on Russian Christianity), the Day 5 passage tracing Hegel's heirs from Feuerbach through Marx to Nietzsche (absorbed into the editorial introduction to the satanic-invasion quotation), and the Day 4 passage on Charles I and the Divine Right of Kings (paraphrased in the bridge into the Methodism section). The omissions thin the documentation; they do not alter the case.