A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Equally exciting were the possibilities opened up by the increasing attention that Christian scholars paid to Cabbala, the body of Jewish literature which had started out as commentary on the Tanakh, but which by the medieval period had created its own intricate network of theological speculation, drawing on sub-Platonic mysticism like the gnostics or the hermeticists.

Jerome, mistaking particles of Hebrew, had turned this into a description of Moses wearing a pair of horns – and so the Lawgiver is frequently depicted in Christian art, long after humanists had gleefully removed the horns from the text of Exodus. They are sported by Michelangelo’s great sculpted Moses now in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli (‘Saint Peter in Chains’), yet another commission for Pope Julius II. One finds them frequently in the paintings of Moses and Aaron flanking the Commandment boards in English parish churches, dating as late as the nineteenth century.45

In translating the Greek, Jerome had chosen certain Latin words which formed rather shaky foundations for very considerable theological constructions by the later Western Church, like the doctrine of Purgatory, as the prince of humanists Desiderius Erasmus was to demonstrate (see p.

Perhaps 70,000 to 100,000 Jews chose to become refugees abroad rather than abandon their faith, forming a European-wide dispersal which has been called Sephardic Judaism (since the Jews had applied the Hebrew word Sefarad to Spain).

This was the first republic in human history where those in charge narrowly defined the concept of ‘republic’ as necessarily involving rule by the whole people – Savonarola’s Florence has not often been awarded the credit for this innovation. That legacy of a particular and rather frightening Christian vision of reform has become one of the most important political ideas of the modern world.62

The Piagnoni movement was only one symptom of the chronic neurosis and apocalyptic expectations which disturbed the Italian peninsula for decades after Savonarola was ashes. As in Spain, the mood affected high and low, powerful and destitute; female ‘living saints’ got a respectful hearing when they turned up to proclaim their message of imminent judgement in Italian princely courts. Through the sixteenth century and beyond, prophecies, accounts of monstrous births and wondrous signs became sure-fire money-spinners for the printing presses, as so often since in troubled times

One man seemed to offer the possibility of a reasonable, moderate outcome to Europe’s excitements and fears in the early 1500s: Desiderius Erasmus.

Erasmus had begun to discover a problem which became one of the major issues of the Reformation and which faced all those who called for Christianity to go back ‘ad fontes’. Did the Bible contain all sacred truth? Or was there a tradition which the Church guarded, independent of it? The issue of scripture versus tradition became a vital area of debate in the Reformation, which had no straightforward outcome for either side, whatever they might claim.

Erasmus was protesting against the whole perspective on knowledge which sees the only real truth as what is revealed by divine grace, rather than what is available through the reasoning faculties of the human mind and through the acquisition of education. He was expressing his distrust of mysticism, such as that of the Devotio Moderna so strong in his native Netherlands, and he deplored the rejection of the created world which often accompanied it; his detestation of the monastic life was related to this feeling.74 So Augustinian pessimism was not for Erasmus.

Luther needed to reconstruct his own story in the light of later events because the drastic implications of his personal struggle only gradually became clear. They developed into the rediscovery of good news which has come to be called the Protestant Reformation, but which called itself, to begin with, an ‘evangelical’ movement. That remains the official self-description of the Lutheran Churches, in a use of this word which has separate connotations for English-speakers with their own historical references to an anglophone Christian history.

The first of these three drew on the ancient tensions between pope and emperor to proclaim that the pope was the enemy not just of the empire but of all Christendom. As imperialist spokesmen had long maintained (see p. 558), he was Antichrist, but furthermore, so was the whole apparatus of his Church. The Babylonian Captivity addressed itself in Latin to those inside that apparatus, seeking to convince clergy that the sacraments which they administered had been perverted from their biblical forms. Above all, God’s Eucharist had been turned to a Mass which falsely claimed to be a repetition of Christ’s sacrifice once offered on the Cross. Luther performed something of a balancing act when he spoke of the Mass: he kept a passionate sense of the presence of the Lord’s body and blood in the eucharistic bread and wine, but he scorned the scholastic and non-biblical explanation of this miraculous transformation which the Church had provided in the doctrine of transubstantiation. The third book explored the problem of its title: how could utterly fallen humanity, enslaved to sin, claim any liberty? Luther, never afraid of paradox, boldly gave an answer answerless: ‘A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.’13 The paradox was solved by the utterly undeserved death of Christ, which gave back freedom to those whom God had chosen from amid an utterly undeserving humanity.

The Teutonic Order had met increasing reverses in its long struggle with Poland-Lithuania (see pp. 516–17), and demoralized by major defeats in 1519–21, many of the Grand Master’s knights had turned to evangelical religion, quitting the order. To save himself from ruin, he begged another cousin, King Sigismund I of Poland, to remodel the order’s Polish territories in east Prussia into a secular fief of the Polish kingdom, with the Grand Master himself as its first hereditary duke; he did his first act of fealty to a gratified Sigismund in Cracow in April 1525. Naturally such a radical step as secularizing the territory of a religious order needed a formal act of rebellion against the old Church, and Albrecht of newly ‘ducal’ Prussia, who had already sounded

out Luther in a face-to-face meeting in Wittenberg in late 1523, institutionalized this during summer 1525, creating the first evangelical princely Church in Europe.

Before Albrecht of Prussia, the initiatives in backing evangelical religious change had come from the self-confident towns and cities of the Holy Roman Empire, who enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy from emperor or princes. The first in the empire proper had been the Free City of Nuremberg, a great prize becaus...

By the end of the sixteenth century, this Protestantism would be called Reformed, which crudely speaking meant all varieties of consciously non-Lutheran Protestantism. Often Reformed Protestantism has been called ‘Calvinism’, but the very fact that we are beginning to discuss it in relation to an earlier set of Reformers than John Calvin immediately reveals the problems inherent in that label, and suggests that it should be used sparingly.

First, images were systematically removed from churches in June 1524 and then, in April 1525, the traditional form of the Mass itself was banned in the city. Until that latter moment, astonishingly, Zürich still remained in communion with its traditional ally the Pope, who had let politics blind him to the seriousness of what was happening there, and who never made any official condemnation of the man who was steering events in the city.

He was certainly not going to adopt the ‘Zürich’ renumbering: the result, bizarrely, is that the Churches of western Europe still number the Ten Commandments differently, and the split is not between Roman Catholics and Protestants, but between on the one hand Roman Catholics and Lutherans, and on the other all the rest – including the Anglican Communion.

For Zwingli, therefore, the sacraments shifted in meaning from something which God did for humanity, to something which humanity did for God.

In fact from princely support came a new label for the movement, when a group of the princes supporting Luther made a protest against the decisions of the Imperial Diet at Speyer in 1529. They were accordingly nicknamed Protestants, the first time this word had been thus used; the nickname stuck.

Historically, this was correct, but the argument against infant baptism had hardly ever been made before in Christian history, and it came as an unpleasant shock to magisterial Reformers. Because the radicals sought to give a new and genuine baptism to those who had been baptized as infants, their enemies called them in cod-Greek ‘rebaptizers’ or Anabaptists.

Reformed Christianity saved the Reformation from its mid-century phase of hesitation and disappointment. Lutheranism tended to remain frozen in German-speaking and Scandinavian cultures; Reformed Christianity spread through a remarkable variety of language groups and communities, partly because so many of its leading figures had the same experience as Calvin, finding themselves forced to leave their native lands and to proclaim their message in new and alien settings.

To Calvin’s alarm, he found that in the Netherlands, Scotland and France, he had sponsored movements of revolution, people inspired by the thought that they were the elect army of God whose duty was to take on Antichrist.

In Calvin’s lifetime, Reformed Protestants began challenging the French monarchy, and it took fifty years of warfare and royal treachery for the monarchy to bring them to heel. In France they gained the nickname ‘Huguenots’, a name whose origins have defied all efforts at definitive explanation.

When her half-sister Mary’s death in 1558 delivered the realm into Elizabeth’s hands, her new religious settlement of 1559 restored a fossilized version of Edward VI’s half-finished religious revolution as the Church of England. Many of Elizabeth’s activist Reformed Protestant subjects could see no reason why it should remain fossilized or half-finished, and kept up pressure on her for more change. Increasingly those who were prepared to conform to the Queen’s wishes named the discontented, in no friendly spirit, ‘Puritans’.58

These High Churchmen did not exactly despise preaching (indeed, one of their most influential members, Lancelot Andrewes, was a famous preacher), but they emphasized the solemn performance of public liturgy and the offering of beautiful music in settings of restrained beauty as the most fitting approaches to God in worship.

Basing itself on the hierarchy of translations back to the time of William Tyndale ninety years before, even taking notice of the Roman Catholic ‘Douai’ version, which had scored some palpable hits against previous Protestant English translations, it has remained vital for anglophone culture worldwide: the ‘King James’ version beloved of conservative Christians professing their faith in Churches of whose nature the original King James would profoundly disapprove.73

Now Carafa could persuade the Pope to set up a Roman Inquisition, modelled on the Spanish Inquisition founded seventy years before, with Carafa himself as one of the Inquisitors-General. One of its functions (a function which remains to the present day in the Roman Inquisition’s rather more bland guise as the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) was to determine what the norm for theology was within the Catholic Church.

Discipline and the urge to order people’s lives were ecumenical qualities.46

The parsonage was a new model for Europe’s family life. It was perhaps not the most comfortable place to live, on a modest income and under constant public gaze, but children grew up there surrounded by books and earnest conversation, inheriting the assumption that life was to be lived strenuously for the benefit of an entire community – not least in telling that community what to do, whether the advice was welcome or not. It was not surprising that clerical and academic dynasties quickly grew up in Protestant Europe, and that thoughtful and often troubled, rather self-conscious parsonage children took their place in a wider service. Such personalities as John and Charles Wesley, Gilbert and William Tennent, a trio of Brontë novelists, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Karl Barth and Martin Luther King Jr took their restlessness and driven sense of duty into very varied rebuildings of Western society and consciousness, not all of which their parents might have applauded.

Maybe forty or fifty thousand people died in Europe and colonial North America on witchcraft charges between 1400 and 1800, most noticeably from around 1560, at just about the time when large-scale execution of heretics was coming to an end.

From 1500 there were Franciscans in America, and within a decade Dominicans had also arrived. Very soon the Dominicans began protesting against the vicious treatment of the natives.

Las Casas insisted that Augustine of Hippo’s gloss on the biblical text ‘Compel them to come in’ (see p. 304) was simply wrong: Jesus had not intended conversion to his ‘joyful tidings’ to be a matter of ‘arms and bombardments’ but of ‘reason and human persuasion’.6 His writings about Spanish barbarity in America were so angry and eloquent that ironically they became part of the general Protestant stereotype of Spaniards as a naturally cruel race. At one stage he suggested a fateful remedy for the exploitation of native labour: African slaves should be imported to replace natives on plantations, radically extending the slave trade which the Portuguese had pioneered in the previous century. Las Casas eventually realized his mistake, but it was too late.7 Here idealism trying to end one injustice blundered unhappily into colluding with a genocidal crime of three centuries’ duration, whose consequences are still built into the politics of both Americas.

No major native American kingdom succumbed to the Spaniards before disease took hold, but once it had, the effect was crippling, and maybe half the population of the Americas died in the first wave of epidemics. That in itself was a powerful argument to bewildered and terrified people that their gods were useless and that the God of the conquerors had won. It has been estimated that by 1550 around ten million people had been baptized as Christians in the Americas. Another informed and sobering estimate is that by 1800 indigenous populations in the western hemisphere were a tenth of what they had been three centuries before.8

When the Jesuits were forcibly expelled from the Americas in 1767, they left their natives without any experience of leadership, and the carefully structured communities in the Reductions quickly collapsed. Only in Bolivia did priests of supposedly pure Spanish blood (Creoles) manage to carry on similar work after the Jesuits had left.21

Presenting the Christian message without military backing posed considerable problems for a missionary priest.

Yet despite this striking symbolic pronouncement, the papacy continued to employ slaves in its Mediterranean galleys up to the French Revolution, some of them market-purchased.

This caused a sharp reaction of protest both in New England and in the home country. Charles II ordered the executions to stop, even though his government had little time for Quakers and was itself imprisoning them; it was ironical that a royal regime so like the one from which the Puritan settlers had fled should now restrain their zeal for persecution. The executions exercised many New Englanders as to whether even the religiously obnoxious ought so to be treated. Pointedly, Rhode Island respected the Quaker commitment to pacifism by exempting them from military service. This unprecedented concession survived even the dire crisis of native all-out war in 1676, while still allowing Quakers a say in the government of the colony, which included decisions about war.16

The great exponent of toleration and liberty John Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government, resoundingly declared to Englishmen that ‘Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man … that ‘tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for ‘t’.

But that is precisely what Locke himself had done when (as one of the first hereditary peers created in English North America) he helped first to draft and then to revise a constitution for a vast new English colony in the south called Carolina, at much the same time in the 1680s as he was writing Two Treatises. Blacks were different.

When his St Matthew Passion was performed for the first time, influential members of the congregation became steadily more bewildered by the way that the music branched out from the chorales that they knew, and one elderly widow cried, ‘God help us! ‘tis surely an opera-comedy!’47 In one sense, she was right: Bach had poured his choral creativity into his cantatas and, mysteriously, was the only major composer of his time never to write an opera.

Like the Pietists and Moravians, English Evangelicals sought to create a religion of the heart and of direct personal relationship with Jesus Christ, in consciousness of his suffering on the Cross — his atonement to his Father for human sin. Once more, it was the message of Augustine, filtered through Luther. The impulse in part found a home in the Church of England, but it also revitalized existing English Dissenting denominations from the mid-seventeenth century, and it produced a new religious body which by accident rather than design found itself outside the established Church: Methodism.

Hard work was allied with strict morality; if ever there was anything resembling the ‘Protestant work ethic’, it came out of Methodism and the Evangelical Revival rather than the sixteenth-century Reformation.

American Evangelicalism had its own preoccupations, which from the early eighteenth century produced its distinctive style of Protestant revival, soon christened ‘Great Awakenings’.

A short-lived and belated repetition of Protestant English paranoia about witches led to around 150 prosecutions and nineteen executions, and then in short order to the discrediting of the old ethos. A similar witchcraft case in Connecticut in the same year was dropped after widespread and powerfully expressed disquiet from clergy and laity alike, and indeed one of the judges in the Salem trials, Samuel Sewall, subsequently repented and five years later publicly asked fellow members of his Boston congregation for forgiveness for what he had done.

Before Wesley’s movement reached across the Atlantic, the Awakenings in the northern colonies were more purely Reformed, associated with Churches which sprang from Scottish or Dutch roots rather than from those of English origin. Scots had begun emigrating from their kingdom in the early seventeenth century, though their first destination had been not America but Ireland. King James VI and I, after succeeding to the English throne, encouraged them to settle there in order to counter Catholic militancy, sending them to the most troublesome part of Gaelic Ireland, Ulster. Those immigrants may not have been especially convinced Protestants to begin with, but they had every incentive to discover their Protestantism in the face of a resentful Catholic population whom they were seeking to supplant. Anxious, rootless, looking for identity in a strange land, they turned with fervour not so much to the feeble existing Protestant parish system of the Church of Ireland but to ministers of their own, who brought with them the vigorously developing popular life of the Scottish Kirk, centred on massive open-air occasional celebrations of the Eucharist, preceded by long periods of catechism and sermonizing. So large were the gatherings that often no church building could hold them and they turned into open-air ‘Holy Fairs’,

In particular, Ulstermen who cherished their Presbyterianism were discontented at the increasingly unchallengeable established status of the episcopally governed Church of Ireland (they were also fairly accomplished at quarrelling with each other), and the discontented looked across the Atlantic. Scots also emigrated to North America, in default of their own colonies: the English had played a part in helping to stifle an ill-conceived independent Scots colonial enterprise in Central America. There these immigrants from Ulster and Scotland set up their own Presbyterian Churches, and the ‘Holy Fairs’ proved no less appropriate to the American frontier than they had been to the frontiers of Ulster. By the 1720s their network of Churches (‘Scotch-Irish’ in American usage) was flourishing, especially in the Middle Colonies, where religious patterns were so much more open than further south or north. They came into increasing conflict with the older English established Churches. The tensions of a new element in the American religious mix were about to burst into creative energy.

In the northern colonies, Awakenings were led in the Congregational Church by Jonathan Edwards. Edwards combined an academic rigour which came from his deep interest in philosophy with an uncompromising attachment to Calvinism, reinforced by an experience of conversion in 1727.

An important consequence of Edwards’s teaching was that his great intellectual reputation lent respectability to a seductive conception of the Last Days, known in the jargon of theologians as ‘post-millennialism’. This proposition was a development of that traditionally exciting idea, dating right back to Justin Martyr and Irenaeus in the second century CE, that human history would culminate in a thousand-year rule of the saints. Edwards believed that this millennium would take place before the Second Coming of Christ — hence the Second Coming would be ‘post-millennial’.

The Great Awakenings thus shaped the future of American religion. They destroyed the territorial communality which was still the assumption of most religious practice back in Europe. Religious practice,

There were thrones for the downtrodden people at the end of time. In other words, there was justice. It was irrelevant that many of these themes had inspired the English to cross the Atlantic a century before, only to become the colonial people who oppressed the African-American; this was a discovery anew, forged painfully out of the acquisition of literacy by a minority of privileged or freed people. How could they not accept such a vulnerable, all-powerful Saviour?