A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

In 1656, aged twenty-three, Spinoza was sensationally expelled from the Amsterdam Portuguese synagogue, accompanied by public curses. To incur such an extreme penalty, it is likely that he had already questioned some of the basic principles of all the great Semitic religions: the prospect of immortality

Soon Spinoza was regarded as the standard-bearer for unbelief, even though pervading his carefully worded writings there is a clear notion of a divine spirit inhabiting the world, and a profound sense of wonder and reverence for mystery.

So around Spinoza other voices began to be raised also challenging the ancient wisdom of religion and suggesting that the Bible was not quite what it seemed: a point which Erasmus had made much more discreetly in the previous century.

Already Martin Luther had moved the boundaries of the biblical texts by creating the category of Apocrypha, which he had cordoned off from the Old Testament, even though Jews and the pre-Reformation Christian Church had made no such distinction.

efforts to convert Dutch Jews, gleefully pointed out in 1660 that Paul’s Epistle to the Laodiceans (which Paul had demanded be read in community worship, and so should be considered canonical), appeared to have gone missing altogether – or rather did exist, in a text extant but not acknowledged by the Church. He also drew attention to Jesus Christ’s supposed correspondence with King Abgar of Edessa (see pp. 180–81) – why were these texts outside the Bible, when a trivial letter of Paul’s to Philemon was in?

Isaac La Peyrère, a French Huguenot but with a name which reveals underneath its French guise a further descendant of the Iberian diaspora. His publication in Amsterdam and elsewhere of Prae-Adamitae (‘Men before Adam’) was one of the publishing sensations of 1655: reputedly it even became light reading for the Pope and his cardinals. La Peyrère was one of the most fervent apocalypticists of his day, and he urged Jews and Christians to reunite to bring on the Last Days, but his book, as its title indicated, threw the Creation story into the melting pot by arguing that there had been races of humans earlier than Adam and Eve, who were the ancestors of the Jews only. La Peyrère’s argument in fact gave a particular privilege to the Jewish race, but it also wiped out the Western Christian doctrine of original sin:

Behind the stories of doubters from Spinoza and La Peyrère to Bayle and the Treatise of the three impostors were two imperilled and highly articulate communities, producing radical spirits who contributed to the reassessment of religion: Jews and Huguenots.

ancient Benedictine commitment to scholarship in a specialized direction: Church history. Generally they eschewed the delicate business of scrutinizing the Bible itself, but they established, on a scale so comprehensive as to be impossible to ignore, the requirement to scrutinize historical texts without sentiment or regard for their sacred character. All texts were there as part of the range of historical evidence, not simply the familiar material of narrative historical sources such as chronicles, but official and legal documents.

by 1700. Islam seemed much less threatening politically as the Ottoman, Iranian and Mughal empires fell into decay.

concept of a God who had certainly created the world and set up its laws in structures understandable by human reason, but who after that allowed it to go its own way, precisely because reason was one of his chief gifts to humanity, and order a gift to his creation. This was the approach to divinity known as deism.

We cannot understand the rise of Evangelicalism without seeing it against the background of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Christian and post-Christian rationalism – but also in the context of other profound changes in European society of which the Evangelicals were uncomfortably aware.

Ordinary people in these late-seventeenth-century societies revelled in the unfamiliar sensation of possessing more and more objects which they did not strictly need, and just as much, they enjoyed access to a degree of leisure, now that the provision of food was not a constant anxiety.

major Dutch parish churches had magnificent pipe organs of which their clergy disapproved, but which were protected from clerical wrath and maintained by the civic authorities – organs were in fact one of the symptoms of the Dutch regents’ consistent aim to keep the clergy from tyrannizing them

This was an unmistakable transition of sacred music from worship to leisure, and it began a process by which the performance of or experience of music became for many Europeans the basis of an alternative spirituality to the text-based propositions of their Christian faith. There are other hints

that most personal of realms, human sexuality, the late seventeenth century witnessed great shifts in the way in which masculinity and femininity were understood, and much remains mysterious about the reasons for this change.

Christianity was becoming an activity in which more women than men participated.

church attendance was becoming skewed, and congregations were beginning to contain more women than men.

It is likely that a disproportionate number of women joined the English voluntary congregations because they had more room to assert themselves than in the established Church.

in the 1650s, Quaker women could enjoy prophetic roles reminiscent of those in the early days of some radical groups in the 1520s and 1530s, and just as in sixteenth-century radicalism, the male leadership of the Quakers over subsequent decades steadily moved to restrict women’s activism.

The English clergyman and ethical writer Richard Allestree and the leading Massachusetts minister Cotton Mather agreed in finding women more spiritual than men,

the ancient Christian stereotype of women as naturally more disordered than men and more open to Satan’s temptations began to look steadily less convincing.

Evangelical Protestantism was ultimately not able to set boundaries to the feminism of Western culture, as will become apparent.

The Enlightenment bred an open scepticism as to whether there can be definitive truths in specially privileged writings exempt from detached analysis, or whether any one religion has the last word against any other; in its optimism, commitment to progress and steadily more material, secularizing character, it represented a revulsion against Augustine of Hippo’s proclamation of original sin.

The mainstream Reformers had not merely proclaimed original sin as the key problem for humanity, capable of being solved only by a gracious God, but in their proclamation, they affirmed the authority and transcendence of the biblical text and jettisoned a whole raft of creative allegorical ways in which its meaning might be extended.

Indeed, the Enlightenment in northern Europe was generally led not by those who hated Christianity but by Christians troubled by the formulations of traditional Christianity.

the Enlightenment was a project for the reconstruction of the Christian religion, and it was in dialogue with the

By the mid-eighteenth century the Jesuits were running the largest single directed system of education that the world had ever known,

It was the Catholic world rather than the Protestant which produced a form of Enlightenment consciously setting itself against Christianity, proclaiming itself the enemy of mystery and the emancipator of humankind from the chains of revealed religion.

The struggle between Jansenist supporters of Port-Royal and the Jesuits became entangled with the politics of the French Court,

was that in Western Churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, a large proportion of the clerical leadership had always been drawn from the able rather than the well born, unusually among the institutions of traditional society. Now that prince-bishops, abbacies and cathedral chapters stuffed with aristocratic dimwits had been swept away from the Catholic Church in the former Holy Roman Empire, this became even more obviously the case.

Against a French Revolution which represented more than two decades of male nationalist violence, the Church found itself managing an international uprising of women – what has been termed with a pleasing overturning of modern sociological assumptions ‘ultramontane feminism’.

Everywhere, a maelstrom of nuns descended on the Church.

contemplatives could be distinctively active when it suited them. The world-denying and savagely self-punishing teenager Thérèse Martin of Lisieux in Normandy, overexcited by her pilgrimage to Rome in 1887, seized on a routine papal audience to beg no less a figure than Pope Leo XIII for permission for immediate entrance to the Carmelite Order despite her age. The hapless pontiff was understandably alarmed, particularly when she clung to his knees and had to be removed by ecclesiastical bouncers.

The most assertive woman of all was the Mother of God.

the Masonic Lodge became a rallying point for all who loathed ecclesiastical power.

In time-honoured folkloric fashion, Our Lady was not above giving salutary frights to local sceptics – such as the state officials who unsympathetically interrogated Bernadette, and then found themselves troubled by poltergeist-like phenomena and specifically directed storms, or the drunkard who had defecated in the Grotto and was then terrified by a night of acute diarrhoea.

Now, with careful limitations, agreed after much charged episcopal debate in bad Latin in the echoing acoustic of St Peter’s Basilica, the pope had been declared ‘possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith and morals’.

True to the scholastic Thomism which was now the approved theological style of the Church, there was a pervasive medievalism in Leo’s encyclical.

Likewise, Christian feminism became as vital a feature of Protestantism worldwide as in Catholicism.

founding nunneries which exalted episcopal authority while defying actual bishops, persisting with charitable work or the contemplative life in the face of all discouragement.

Of greater long-term significance were the experiences of two charismatic Scottish sisters from Clydeside, Isabella and Mary Campbell.

The Campbells and their impact on Irving had unknowingly provided the first glimmers of the modern Pentecostal movement

women were perfectly capable of forming a Church and calling a (male) minister.

In 1853 a Congregational Church in South Butler, New York, extended the same logic in ordaining Antoinette Brown as minister, the first woman outside the countercultural Quakers to hold such an office in modern Christianity.

So humans should not merely perceive what must be done in some abstract form, but should make a conscious effort of will to seek the source of all that was holy and dependable: a loving God.

Kierkegaard.

dialectic path to the Absolute as a betrayal of the individual. Sin was not an aspect of some impersonal Hegelian process; it was a dark half of human existence, a stark alternative to a road which led to the broken, powerless Christ. Faced with such a choice, there could be no middle ground – so Kierkegaard offensively expressed loathing and contempt for the most respected clergy of his Church, whom he saw as tainted by just such a compromise.

This was an unprecedentedly practical attempt to hasten on the Last Days, that recurrent Protestant preoccupation.