The Ten Most Influential Christians of the Twentieth Century: Introductory Timeline - Visionary Years
It was an ambitious and sometimes tragic century in which Christians lived out the gospel.
editors
January 1, 2000
United States poet laureate Robert Pinsky said in a recent interview, "The history of my century is a history in which the visionary has repeatedly collapsed into nightmare. … Pol Pot was a visionary. And Hitler was a visionary." The century seemed to be one large, visionary experiment in which people desperately sought, as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn put it, "to live without God." Politics was to save us from injustice, science from disease, psychoanalysis from suffering, and literature from despair. When it worked, we benefited (civil rights, a cure for polio), but when it didn't, it turned tragic (the Holocaust, chemical warfare). And all the while, Christians lived out their faith. Some worked alongside the humanitarians, though with a slightly different agenda (e.g., John Mott, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr.), some opposed the utopians (Karl Barth, C. S. Lewis, Solzhenitsyn); some did an end-around, renewing the church (popes John XXIII and John Paul II) or nurturing the spirit (Billy Graham, William Seymour). To be sure, the century produced more tragedy and suffering than all other centuries combined, but as the calendar begins a new millennium, the Christian church, though still under attack in many quarters, is larger and stronger than ever—thanks in part to the ten people profiled in the following pages. —The editors World Politics
1914-1918 The Great War 1917 Russian Revolution 1936 Joseph Stalin begins a bloody purge that would claim millions of lives 1939 Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland sparks World War II 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 1942 Nazi leaders decide on their "Final Solution": to kill all European Jews 1945 United States drops atomic bombs on Japan; the United Nations founded 1949 Communist Mao Tse-tung emerges as the leader of the People's Republic of China; Western powers found NATO 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution commits American troops to Vietnam (they would maintain a presence until 1973) 1989 The destruction of the Berlin Wall signals the end of the Cold War Science/Technology
1905 Albert Einstein publishes his theory of relativity 1908 Ford rolls out the first mass-produced automobile, the Model T 1928 First all-electronic TV patented 1947 Transistor invented at AT&T's Bell Laboratories 1949 U.S.S.R. detonates its first atomic bomb, initiating the Cold War nuclear arms race 1955 Jonas Salk's polio vaccine released for use in the United States 1957 Russians launch Sputnik—and the "space race" 1961 Researchers discover the structure of DNA 1962 Rachel Carson's Silent Spring kicks off environmental movement 1969 The United States lands a man on the moon 1971 Intel introduces the microprocessor 1981 Scientists identify Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS); IBM launches the first personal computer 1997 Chess master Garry Kasparov loses to the computer Deep Blue Society
1900 Sigmund Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams 1919 Prohibition amendment passed 1925 Fundamentalists mocked nationally for the Scopes "Monkey" trial 1954 Segregation outlawed by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 1960 The FDA approves the birth control pill 1963 Feminism is born with the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique 1969 Woodstock celebrates youth counter-culture; California legalizes no-fault divorce 1973 Abortion is declared a woman's "fundamental right" by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade 1981 MTV debuts with "Video Killed the Radio Star" 1993 Internet takes off with the creation of the Mosaic browser Art/Literature
1900 Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared in The Gay Science (1882) that "God is dead," dies 1910 The first abstract painting, "Improvisation XIV," is unveiled by German artist Vasily Kandinsky 1922 Modernism makes a literary statement with the publication of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses; logical positivism finds voice in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1929 A. N. Whitehead expounds process philosophy in Process and Reality 1934 John Dewey advocates anti-supernatural humanism in A Common Faith 1956 French playwright Jean-Paul Sartre sounds existentialism's hopeless note in Being and Nothingness 1961 Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization explores society's power relations 1967 Jacques Derrida introduces deconstructionism in De la grammatologie 1981 Alisdair MacIntyre's After Virtue argues the failure of the Enlightenment's liberal individualism 1987 Allen Bloom criticizes higher education in the U.S. in The Closing of the American Mind Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History magazine.
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