The Five Deaths of the Faith

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. MATTHEW 16:18

The Everlasting Man ends, before its summary, with a short chapter about the history of the church after the apostles. Chesterton did not attempt to tell that history in detail. He wanted to point out one strange pattern in it, which he thought was itself a kind of evidence for the faith. He called the chapter The Five Deaths of the Faith.

Too old to die, and too young

The religions and philosophies of the ancient world, he observed, had a way of simply lasting. They grew old and sleepy, and went on for centuries side by side, never quite believed and never quite abandoned. Christianity had the opposite fate. Again and again in its history it has seemed to die — to be hollowed out from within by doubt and worldliness, until only an empty shell remained and every clever man expected its end. And again and again it has come back to life, not as an old religion lingering on, but as a new one, with young men and women throwing themselves into it as though it had just been discovered. Chesterton put the pattern into a single sentence: “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.”

I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death. REVELATION 1:18

Five times

He named five occasions on which the faith had seemed finished. The first was the age of Arius in the fourth century, when the church, newly made respectable by the emperors, seemed ready to settle into a reasonable religion with a Christ who was less than God; and then the faith of Nicaea, defended by Athanasius and others, rose up and threw the reasonable religion down. The second was the age of the Albigensians in the Middle Ages, when a gloomy philosophy that despised the body and the material world spread through southern Europe. The third was the scepticism of the Renaissance humanists; the fourth, the mockery of Voltaire and the Enlightenment; the fifth, the confident materialism that followed Darwin in the nineteenth century, which was still in the air when Chesterton wrote. In each case, he said, the faith appeared to be going to the dogs. And in a phrase that has become proverbial: “In each of these five cases it was the dog that died.”

Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die. 1 CORINTHIANS 15:36

Why it rises

Chesterton did not think this pattern was an accident. A religion that was merely a human invention, he argued, would grow old and die like every other human thing. Christianity keeps rising because it is not, at bottom, an idea at all. It is a Person, who has Himself been dead and is alive for evermore. The church is His body, and what happened to Him happens again and again to it: it is betrayed, crucified, buried, and raised.

There is great comfort in this for believers in a season when the faith seems to be dying around them. Chesterton wrote in an age when the clever people were certain that Christianity was finished. A century later it is the faith of far more people, in far more nations, than it was when he wrote, and many of the confident philosophies that were to replace it are themselves forgotten.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever. ISAIAH 40:8

Weighing it

Chesterton’s chapter is a bracing antidote to despair about the church, and its central claim is thoroughly biblical: the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church that Christ builds, because Christ Himself has conquered death.

Evangelical readers will want to add something to his list, and will notice where he draws its lines. For Chesterton, by the time he wrote this book, the faith that kept rising was the faith of the Roman Catholic Church, and the revivals he had chiefly in mind were Catholic revivals. Protestant readers will see other resurrections in the same history that he passes over: the recovery of the gospel of grace at the Reformation, the evangelical awakenings of the eighteenth century under Wesley and Whitefield, the great missionary movement that carried the faith to every continent. They will also observe that the deaths of the faith have often come from within, when a church has kept its forms and lost its gospel. The pattern Chesterton noticed holds; but what rises each time is not an institution as such. It is the Word of God and the Spirit of life, raising up faithful people out of a dead church.

Wilt thou not revive us again: that thy people may rejoice in thee? PSALM 85:6

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Are you discouraged about the state of the church in your country or your town? Read Revelation 1:9–18 and take heart from the risen Christ.

2. Learn the story of one of the revivals of church history — Nicaea, the Reformation, the Evangelical Awakening — and thank God for it.

3. Consider where your own faith has grown cold and formal. Ask God to raise it again.

4. Pray for a revival of true faith in a place you know that seems spiritually dead.

5. Read the chapter of The Everlasting Man called The Five Deaths of the Faith, in the Ochorus library, and The Key Teachings of Athanasius of Alexandria for the story of the first.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, You were dead, and You are alive for evermore, and You hold the keys of death and hell.

Thank You that Your church has died many times in the eyes of the world, and that You have raised it again every time.

Where my faith has grown cold, and where Your church around me has kept its forms and lost its life, revive us again.

Keep me from despair, and make me a part of the next rising, for the glory of Your name. Amen.