How our scholars and general readers voted in the Most Influential Christians of the Century survey.
editors | posted 1/01/2000 12:00AM
One year ago, we asked you, our readers, to do two things: list the five most influential Christians of the twentieth century and then note five well-known Christians who were most personally influential. We posed the same two questions to historians who belong to the Conference on Faith and History, a group composed of mostly Christian historians who study Christianity's influence in history. We've ranked each of the four lists by the percentage of votes received for each person. Here's what we discovered.
Surprises
John Calvin (yes, the sixteenth-century reformer) garned two votes among readers as most personally influential. These are hyper-Calvinists, no doubt, who firmly believe in the resurrection.
Radical demythologizer Rudolf Bultmann did make the top 20 list of most influential. It's clear both readers and scholars believe you don't have to admire a person to recognize how much trouble he may have caused the church this century.
The only non-Western Christian to place significantly was China's Watchman Nee.
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