A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

By 1800, around a fifth of all American Methodists were enslaved people — and enslaved they were still, despite being Methodists. In this aftermath of the Revolution which had talked much of life, liberty and human happiness, African-Americans whether free or bonded found little welcome in white Churches and at best would be directed to a segregated seat. So they frequently made a further choice — to create their own Churches (see Plate 41). From 1790 there was an African Methodist Episcopal Union; there followed Black Baptist Unions, taking their known origin from a congregation of Baptists no more than eight strong in the 1770s.

Elite education tended to lead these Founding Fathers not to the Awakenings but to the Enlightenment and Deism (see pp. 786–7): cool versions of Christianity, or virtually no Christianity at all. The polymath Benjamin Franklin seldom went to church, and when he did, it was to enjoy the Anglican Book of Common Prayer decorously performed in Christ Church, Philadelphia; he made it a point of principle not to spend energy affirming the divinity of Christ. Thomas Jefferson was rather more concerned than Franklin to be seen at church on key political occasions, but he deplored religious controversy, deeply distrusted organized religion and spoke of the Trinity as ‘abracadabra … hocus-pocus … a deliria of crazy imaginations, as foreign to Christianity as is that of Mahomet’.89 In the face of such low-temperature religion, many on the present-day American religious right, anxious to appropriate the Revolution for their own version of modern American patriotism, have sought comfort in the ultimate Founding Father, George Washington, but here too there is much to doubt. Washington never received Holy Communion, and was inclined in discourse to refer to providence or destiny rather than to God.

Perhaps the most surprising outcrop of Reformed Protestant interest in the esoteric was the phenomenon of Freemasonry. Although this very varied worldwide movement now boasts mythology tracing its origins to antiquity, Masonic practice actually began in late-sixteenth-century Scotland as an outcrop of Reformed Christianity.

Protestant hopes for a coming apocalypse, disappointed in Friedrich’s downfall, persisted. The renowned Reformed Protestant scholar Johann Heinrich Alsted proclaimed calculations of the divinely ordained End Times, eventually choosing 1694 as the crucial date; significantly much of his theorizing was drawn not from the Bible but from hermetic literature.

Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most prominent early members of the Society, illustrates the contemporary blend of fascination with a mysterious past, innovative observation and abstract thinking; he wrote as much about the Book of Revelation as about ‘the Book of Nature’ which revealed the theory of gravity.

Hobbes denied that it was possible for a God to exist without material substance, delicately ridiculed the Trinity out of existence and gave broad hints to his readers that they should take no Christian doctrine on trust.29 When other anti-Trinitarians followed Hobbes, their main weapon against Christian orthodoxy was the biblical text itself, which, as was rapidly becoming apparent, was full of variant readings between manuscripts – by 1707 one distinguished mainstream English biblical scholar, John Mill, reckoned these to be around thirty thousand in number. Some of these variant readings could plausibly be considered as later interpolations in the interests of Trinitarian belief.

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. Now Quakers noted scholars’ increasing rediscovery of manuscripts containing inter-testamental literature or Christian apocrypha, much of which looked remarkably like the Bible. The gifted Hebrew scholar and Quaker Samuel Fisher, who may have used the young Spinoza to translate tracts into Hebrew, and who certainly got to know the Amsterdam synagogues in his 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?30

If Judaism and Reformed Protestantism were one fundamental pairing behind the creation of a new spirit in Christian religion and metaphysics, the other came through those sometimes uncomfortably yoked Protestant states, the Netherlands and England. The chief settings in which the millenarian, messianic or apocalyptic excitements of Reformed Protestantism and Judaism united, they pioneered the future in another and very different respect: towards the end of the seventeenth century, both societies began a long process of moving Christian doctrine and practice from the central place in European everyday life which it had enjoyed for more than a millennium, and placing it among a range of personal choices.

While Western Europe’s spirituality was showing signs of becoming detached from its liturgy, divinity parted company with revelation, and patterns of society were being shaped by other sources besides Christianity’s sacred book, Western discourse on philosophy came to be dominated by a philosopher whose assumptions likewise radically detached the spiritual from the material. René Descartes was a devout French Catholic who from 1628 had found that the Protestant but pluralist northern Netherlands were the refuge best enabling him to express himself without inhibition and to strip away philosophical assumptions which he found constricting.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe produced two apparently contrary but actually deeply entangled movements, both of which were destined to affect a world far beyond their original settings in countries around the North Sea. 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. Yet beside the Enlightenment, the series of Protestant awakenings drew their inspiration from that same Augustine and from his interpretation in the Reformation. 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. It is possible to read the Protestant awakenings as a shocked reaction to the social and intellectual innovations of the early Enlightenment.

He much admired England, where he had spent a couple of years when he needed to escape from French officialdom after two spells of imprisonment in the Bastille. If the philosophy of Locke and the mechanical universe of Newton had banished mystery from human affairs, Voltaire saw Catholicism as a self-interested

Alongside the gleeful and publicity-seeking assaults on the Church and Christianity from philosophes came a more profound challenge from an academic far to the north in the University of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant. He was a total contrast to Rousseau: no whiff of scandal came out of a very private single life, and no open deviation from the Lutheran Pietism of his parents. Yet he shaped the way that the West did its thinking

through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the effect of his work was to reduce still further the place that a historical Christian faith and its institutions might have in the concerns of Western culture. It was he who in a short essay of 1784 gave the most celebrated answer to a question about this new movement posed by one of his Berlin contemporaries, ‘What is Enlightenment?’: ‘Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity’.

Thus there is a God in Kant’s system: the ultimate goal to which (rather than to whom) the individual turns, hoping to meet this goal in an immortality which stretches out beyond our imperfect world. Yet this is a God whose existence cannot be proved; who needs no revelation in Bethlehem or on the Cross, no Bible, but the inner conscience calling us towards a distant image. Kant’s removal of knowledge in the interests of faith is a solvent of Christian dogma, though it would present no problem for many Christian mystics throughout the history of the Church, who have ended up saying much the same thing.

For many in the nineteenth century, nationalism became an emotional replacement for the Christian religion.

Even in pre-industrial France, the main impulse to overthrow the ancien régime had come from groups outside the landed class: lawyers, journalists, businesspeople, urban workers with specialist skills – what is clumsily but unavoidably called the middle class. In the more decorous politics of Britain as much as in mainland Europe, middle-class groups now sought to legislate into being political institutions to give themselves voices in national affairs appropriate to their wealth and talent, at least to share power with the landed aristocracy. They aimed to create structures designed to reward ability and personal achievement rather than birth, and to gain the right to express their political and religious opinions as they wished. This was the politics of liberalism.

People who cared about the restructuring of Europe in the wake of events from 1789 to 1815 respected the rationalism of the Enlightenment less than a new expression of emotion and a search for individual

fulfilment. Romanticism became a major colouring for political movements in Europe, whether looking to the past or to the future. In a chastened age after Napoleon’s fall, it provided multiple opportunities for Europeans to posture. Fraternity, the third element of the revolutionary trinity, became the watchword of groups who envisaged a brotherhood of all oppressed people against both old and new oppression, confronting both Europe’s surviving monarchical pattern and the newly wealthy elites of the industrial revolution. Quite suddenly in the 1830s, radical politics in Britain and France acquired a new word: ‘socialism’.

Yet while Marx prophesied in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, what was distinctive about this new phase of socialism was its commitment to materialism and rejection of religions of revelation.

In the long term, such a shift in clerical leadership, in parallel with the growing professionalization of secular government and bureaucracy in Europe, was going to produce a predisposition to liberalism in Western Christianity,

By the eighteenth century, Freemasonry had become the adopted son of the Enlightenment, just as so many eighteenth-century Protestant Scots had done more generally; long before the French Revolution, Freemasonry’s leading figures came to sound more like Voltaire than John Dury or Johann Heinrich Alsted. Now especially in Catholic countries in southern Europe, Central and South America and the Caribbean, in the absence of any popular Protestant alternative to the Catholic Church, the Masonic Lodge became a rallying point for all who loathed ecclesiastical power. Here Freemasonry often did indeed become the chief force within liberal politics: a rival to that other closed male caste, the Catholic clergy, complete with Masons’ own engrossing (though a good deal less public) ritual life.

At least in its rhetoric, then, the late-nineteenth-century Catholic hierarchy set itself up against liberalism, whatever local accommodations it might make to circumstance. Perhaps that was inevitable when liberalism and nationalism humiliated the pope in his own city.

some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient working-men’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.

More long-lasting, and of genuinely worldwide significance, was another segment of the same enterprise which shared its focus on Palestine: an Evangelical Alliance linking British and German Evangelical Protestants, founded in 1846. One of the Alliance’s concerns was to return Jews to Palestine and convert them there. This was an unprecedentedly practical attempt to hasten on the Last Days, that recurrent Protestant preoccupation. Most supporters of the Jerusalem bishopric project had viewed that enterprise in the same light, much excited by the fact that the first man chosen as bishop, Michael Solomon Alexander, was an English convert from Judaism and former rabbi. Alexander had demonstrated in his own person that the conversion of the Jewish people was imminent – an essential preparation for the End Times. The Evangelical Alliance found many other battles to fight as new threats to the Evangelical world view repeatedly emerged, but its first close association with Jerusalem projects was a precocious sign that international Evangelical Protestantism was going to link itself to the fate of the land of Palestine, even before many Jews began to share that concern

It was with this triumphalist Protestant ideology in the background that the architect of the Second Reich, the Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, launched in 1871 what one of his severest Protestant critics, Rudolf Virchow, Berlin’s independent-minded Professor of Pathology, usefully christened the Kulturkampf – the clash of cultures. What cultures were these? Liberalism and Protestant Germany in alliance against international and conservative Roman Catholicism. Bismarck was hoping to yoke the new power of the Protestant imperial state to the horror of liberals at Pope Pius IX’s various dogmatic statements leading up to the declaration of infallibility – he could also draw on German nationalist contempt for and fear of Polish Catholics, whose dismembered nation lay partly within the Reich.

By then one factor had become clear: a great many working-class people turned away from Protestant churches which had identified themselves with the conservative imperial system, and instead embraced a socialism which had begun providing them with a whole alternative subculture for leisure activities and welfare, paralleling what the Church could provide. The German Social Democratic Party was Europe’s first mass socialist party, and it was as much the subject of government repression as the Catholic Church. German Protestantism was thus caught between Catholics and socialists. In 1869 around 1 per cent of the working class had attended church in Berlin’s Protestant parishes, and that figure had halved by the outbreak of war in 1914.50

British socialism notoriously owes more to Methodism than to Marx – indeed, in the twentieth century it came to owe more to the Mass than to Marx, as newly enfranchised working-class Catholics turned their votes to the Labour Party.52

The first successful suicide bombers in human history were anarchists responsible for the murder of Alexander II in 1881.80

Since Hegel saw the Christian God as an image of Absolute Spirit, the stories about God in the Bible must also be images of greater truths which lay behind them. The biblical narratives could be described as myths, and that put them in the same league as the myths of other world religions.

The historical Christ Schweitzer saw in the Gospels was a man who believed that the end of the world was coming immediately, and had gone on to offer up his life in Jerusalem, to hasten on the time of tribulation. His career had therefore been built round a mistake. If there was a historical Jesus to be found in the Gospels, he was a figure of failure and tragedy who could only speak of failure and tragedy to the modern world.96 Kierkegaard had reached this vision by another route: it was a faith infinitely remote both from the old Christianity of dogmatic systems and from the rationalizing Christianity of the nineteenth-century liberals.

They called themselves ‘agnostics’, yet another of those newly minted words which were signs of nineteenth-century struggles to describe phenomena with no precedent, in this case a coinage of 1869 from Darwin’s extrovert and aggressive friend Thomas Huxley.

Some who felt that science had won the struggle with Christianity were driven to explore the great religions of eastern Asia. A curious construct of religious belief newly named ‘Theosophy’ (from its emphasis on the search for divine wisdom) gained an enthusiastic anglophone middle-class following during the 1890s; it was one of the earliest expressions of that major component of modern Western religion, ‘New Age’ spirituality.

It is no coincidence that several eminent late-nineteenth-century researchers in physics and chemistry were affected by the allied craze for spiritualism.

Their extensive travels had an impact throughout the anglophone world; those involved were much influenced by the growing Evangelical enthusiasm for a ‘dispensationalist’ view of God’s purposes in history (see pp. 911–12). From dispensationalism grew another ‘ism’: ‘Fundamentalism’ was a name derived from twelve volumes of essays issued in the USA by a combination of British and American conservative writers between 1910 and 1915, entitled The Fundamentals. Central to these essays was an emphasis on five main points: the impossibility of the biblical text being mistaken in its literal meaning (‘verbal inerrancy’), the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, the idea that Jesus died on the Cross in the place of sinners (an atonement theory technically known as penal substitution) and the proposition that Christ was physically resurrected to return again in flesh. Fundamentalists created organizations to promote this case: in 1919 the World’s Christian Fundamentals Organization was founded, expanding through its use of mass rallies from a mainly Baptist base to affect most Protestant Churches. Fundamentalism is a distinctively Protestant idea, because it centres on the Reformation

way of reading the Bible. Reformation Protestantism turned its back on most of the ancient symbolic, poetic or allegorical ways of looking at the biblical text, and read it in a literal way. As part of that literal reading, concentrating on a line of thought on salvation pursued by St Paul, came the penal substitution theory, and Fundamentalists rightly concluded that these were the aspects of Christianity most vulnerable to attack from nineteenth-century intellectual developments. Fundamentalists were nevertheless to find in the twentieth century and beyond that many new battles grew out of their five principles.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has described Nietzsche as the central figure in a trilogy of what he usefully terms ‘the masters of suspicion’, the predecessor being Karl Marx and the successor Sigmund Freud: those who gathered together the two previous centuries of questions posed to Christian authority, and persuaded much of the Western world that there was no authority there at all.

There is thus a deep contradiction in the period. The nineteenth century has usually been seen as principally the time of these ‘masters of suspicion’ in Europe: a century of disenchantment with Christianity and the supernatural in an age of science, a period of ebbing of European faith. Yet it was crowded with visionaries both Catholic and Protestant, full of excitement about the End Times, noisy with the sound of building for new churches and monasteries and the voices of furious quarrels about the best way forward for Christian renewal.

In that hour when John Newton ‘first believ’d’, he saw no incongruity between his newly awakened faith and his trade of shipping fellow human beings from West Africa to America. In fact he saw the slave trade as having helped him reshape his life after a chaotic youth, and in his autobiography, written in mid-life, he observed with no condemnation of his former career that he had been ‘upon the whole, satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me’.2

In 1798–9 the French revolutionaries’ imprisonment of the Pope and his death in exile were icing on the apocalyptic cake.

The Bible speaks without reserve about witches and at one point it suggests that they should not be allowed to live.42 African societies knew witches well, and many allotted power to witch-finders. Europeans did not want to encourage these rivals in charisma, particularly when the witch-finders encouraged the killing of witches, but if Europeans expressed scepticism, indigenous Christians might ignore them and take matters into their own hands. In the twentieth century, the results grew increasingly fatal in certain parts of rural Africa, where witch-killings marched in step

In arid zones, missionaries were repeatedly expected to bring rain where there was no rain. They were after all travelling men preaching biblical power, and they ought to be able to do better than traditional rainmakers, who were often also charismatic wanderers, and as much their competitors as the witch-finders.

Rainmaking (or rather the lack of it) ended the personal missionary career of the great Scottish missionary publicist and explorer David Livingstone.

Here yet again was an issue of biblical interpretation. Polygamous African Christian men were perfectly capable of reading their Bibles and finding their ancient marital customs confirmed in the private life of the patriarchs in the Old Testament; usually in vain did Europeans redirect them to a contrary message in the Pauline sections of the New Testament.

Amid the general European ascendancy, two ancient Christian Churches stood out as not having first arrived in Africa with the slave traders. Both were Miaphysite: the Copts of Egypt and the Ethiopians.

It was among Protestants in India that the impulse first arose to forget old historic differences between denominations which meant little in new settings and to seek a new unity. This was the chief origin of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement (see pp. 953–8).

One of those who gave an answer emphatically in the affirmative, William Miller, was himself a one-man exemplar of Protestant America’s spiritual trajectory: rejecting his Baptist upbringing for the reasonable faith of deism in Vermont’s remote

New England farming country, moving into revivalism via his anxious search for evidence of the Last Days in his King James Bible (noting Archbishop Ussher’s dates in its margins), ordained by the Baptists, preaching his startling message through the nation that the Advent of Christ was due in 1843 – much excitement – then 1844 – even more excitement – and then followed the Great Disappointment. For true apocalypticists there is no giving up hope, although Miller, now scorned by the Baptists, retired to Vermont to contain his chagrin with a handful of followers.

Cut-price printing presses aided Mrs White’s urgent campaign to share roughly two thousand of her visions with the public, not to mention her decided opinions about sensible diet. What now became known as Seventh-Day Adventism flourished once more; like the Seventh-Day Baptists before it, it observed as its holy day of rest not Sunday but Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Modern vegetarianism, a cause earlier championed by radical English Evangelicals, now found its master salesman in Mrs White’s Adventist benefactor and collaborator, Dr John H. Kellogg, whose breakfast cereals and benevolence brought lasting and worldwide prosperity to the Adventist Church.100 Miller’s prophecies have continued to fertilize the imaginations of drifting but compelling personalities like himself. One Millerite schism produced the Jehovah’s Witnesses: millenarian, pacifist and with strong views against blood transfusions. Another recent prophet, Vernon Howell, was driven to rename himself David Koresh (that is the Persian King Cyrus, liberator of the Jews from Babylon), and he brought his own terrible Last Days on those who believed in him at Waco in Texas in 1993.

Timothy McVeigh’s equally ghastly act of revenge for Koresh two years later in the Oklahoma City bombing: a grim legacy for Miller alongside the corn flakes.101

Deeply interested in this dispensationalist scheme was a former Irish Anglican priest, John Nelson Darby, who left his Church for a loose grouping called the Brethren, among whom he became the most prominent leader.