A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Premillennialism stressed division and separation within society, to gather in the elect, and its frostiness to Enlightenment projects of social reform contributed to that peculiar process by which ‘liberal’ has become a word of abuse in the United States, in sharp contrast to its esteem in European society.

Eventually Pentecostalism affected the older Churches too, as some of those drawn to the movement did not leave their existing Churches and formed ‘charismatic’ groups within them. ‘Charisma’ means a gift of grace – in this case, a gift of the Holy Spirit. The distinctive feature of Pentecostalism is its emphasis on the Holy Spirit. Historically the Spirit has been the Cinderella of

the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity: bone of contention between Orthodox and Latin West, and frequently representing unpredictability and ecstasy within Christianity. So often the institutional Church has sought to domesticate the Holy Spirit and make it intelligible: the Spirit frees the emotions, goes beyond words. Pentecostalism sets the Spirit free – often with disastrous results, as fallible human beings decide for themselves that they best speak for the Spirit, or fall in love with the power of the Spirit and apply it to their own purposes. But the rise of Pentecostalism and its Charismatic offshoots was one of the greatest surprises of twentieth-century Christianity – in a century when most of the other surprises turned out to be unpleasant.

In summer 1914 the Second Socialist International tried in vain to summon up a cross-border solidarity of workers against the growing crisis; it found that far more were swayed by the rhetoric of nationalism backed up by the institutions of Christianity, which caused a continent-wide outpouring of popular enthusiasm for war. All sides excitedly coupled the theme of Christian faith with national unity as they launched their armies, none more so than the government of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was also supreme Bishop of the Prussian Evangelical Church

The four years of slaughter revealed where the power lay between nationalism and religion.

Besides this catastrophe was that of the Dyophysites in Mesopotamia and the mountains of eastern Turkey who, since the mid-nineteenth century, had exploited the findings of Western archaeology in the Middle East and rebranded themselves as ‘Assyrian Christians’. While general war raged, they sought to carve out a national homeland to embody their new identity, in the face of massacres by Turks and Kurds. They were fortified by military victories against the Turks led by the brilliant Assyrian military leader Agha Petros, but after the war the British reneged on previous promises. Instead Assyrians found themselves part of a newly constructed multi-ethnic British puppet kingdom, Iraq, dominated by Muslims, where they fared increasingly badly at the hands of the Hashemite monarchy and its Republican successors.

In the flames perished Asia Minor’s nineteen centuries of Christian culture, and ten earlier centuries of Greek civilization. A Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 overturned the agreements of Sèvres, and the flood of refugees in both directions across the Aegean Sea was formalized into population exchanges on the basis of religion, not language.

This near-death of Orthodox Christianity in the Second Rome is a direct result of the First World War, just as was the martyrdom of the Third Rome.20

Ian Paisley, founder of a self-styled Free Presbyterian Church, reminisced that Nicholson prayed that Paisley might be given a tongue as sharp as a cow’s in the service of the Gospel. Paisley if not God hearkened to that prayer, and despite the remarkable turnaround which crowned and then swiftly ended his political career in old age, he can shoulder much of the responsibility for the immobilisme of Ulster politics through three decades of violence at the end of the twentieth century.24

Arranging Franco’s crucial flight to take command in Morocco, and providing an alibi for the British-hired plane’s true purpose, was a John Buchanesque British MI6 officer, Major Hugh Pollard, undertaking this as a freelance operation because he was a devout Catholic (as well as an enthusiastic admirer of Nazism and Italian Fascism). Pollard, who subsequently publicly and indignantly defended the Nazi obliteration bombing of the Basque capital Guernica, was proud of having fulfilled ‘the duty of a good Catholic to help fellow Catholics in trouble’. He was duly decorated by a grateful Franco when the Nationalists had rolled back the defenders of the Republic with Hitler’s and Mussolini’s military assistance.

This intellectual background gave a superficial plausibility to the setting up of a Protestant body calling itself the German Christians, a movement supporting the aim of the Nazis to eliminate Jewish influence from the Church, and seeking to become the voice of German Protestantism.

In order to account for the Saviour’s origins in Galilee, German Christians suggested that the area had been an enclave of Aryan ethnic identity.

And so as Europe fell into general war in 1939, very many Christians both Protestant and Catholic found it all too easy to fall into complicity with Nazism.

When Hitler destroyed Czechoslovakia, the Slovakian puppet regime he installed was led between 1939 and 1945 by Monsignor Jozef Tiso, who continued to act as a Catholic parish priest during his presidency, and was responsible for implementing deportations of Jews and Roma (gypsies) at Nazi bidding. In Croatia, Ante Pavelić ran a self-consciously Catholic regime, devoted to ridding a multi-ethnic state of Jews, Roma and Orthodox Serbs (though, curiously, not of Protestants or Muslims). His sadistic methods shocked even the Nazis. Nor did the Catholic Church condemn the forced conversions of the Orthodox which were part of Pavelić’s programme. A Franciscan friar, Sidonje Scholz, visited concentration camps, offering Serbs conversion or death. When he was killed by Serb resisters, the newspaper sponsored by Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb described Friar Scholz as a ‘new martyr who died in the name

of religion and for Catholic Croatia’.

Between them, there remained a great spectrum of Evangelical Protestant belief, much of which, in reaction to the liberals, increasingly took to itself the label ‘conservative’.

Despite their differences, Evangelicals and Pentecostals cautiously moved together. In 1943 the (still Trinitarian) Assemblies of God joined a new umbrella organization for American conservative Evangelicalism, the National Association of Evangelicals, whose avowed goal was to fight Protestant liberalism and the Ecumenical Movement. This was a crucial alliance. It meant that Pentecostal theological education, now rapidly developing to keep pace with its proliferation of congregations which needed more pastoral understanding than fiery preaching could provide, was firmly directed into an Evangelical mode. It discouraged Pentecostalism (at least for the time being) from casting its eyes on those parts of Christianity of which conservative Evangelicals disapproved.

It was not easy for the Church hierarchy in Latin America to move beyond both a long alliance with elite Creole Catholic culture and a political outlook still generally conservative and authoritarian, but there were enough clerics capable of making a new assessment of the significance of lay militancy in earlier popular Catholicism among the Cristeros and analogous lay movements throughout the continent.

What liberal English Christians were seeking to do was actively to separate the law of the land from Christian moral prescriptions. Many, especially clergy of Anglo-Catholic sympathies, had been disgusted by the debacle caused

by the Church’s established status in its attempted Prayer Book revision of 1927–8, and wanted to liberate the Church in its divine mission by disentangling it from official power structures.44 They were acknowledging, even furthering and celebrating, the death of Christendom, with a conviction that beyond it there lay better prospects for Christianity.

Throughout the world at the present day, the most easily heard tone in religion (not just Christianity) is of a generally angry conservatism. Why? I would hazard that the anger centres on a profound shift in gender roles which have traditionally been given a religious significance and validated by religious traditions. It embodies the hurt of heterosexual men at cultural shifts which have generally threatened to marginalize them and deprive them of dignity, hegemony or even much usefulness – not merely heterosexual men already in positions of leadership, but those who in traditional cultural systems would expect to inherit leadership. It has been observed by sociologists of religion that the most extreme forms of conservatism to be found in modern world religions, conservatisms which in a borrowing from Christianity have been termed ‘fundamentalism’, are especially attractive to ‘literate but jobless, unmarried male youths marginalized and disenfranchised by the juggernaut of modernity’ – in other words, those whom modernity has created, only to fail to offer them any worthwhile purpose.

At that stage, of course, American politicians were not generally keeping a worried eye on Evangelical political opinion. When in the 1980s they did, they discovered a large constituency emphatically in favour of Israel, for reasons related to the apocalypse. It was the same longing to bring on the Last Days which back in the 1840s had enthused the newly founded Evangelical Alliance and the promoters of the Jerusalem Bishopric (see pp. 836–7), and which derived its particular premillennialist roots from the Millerites and the dispensationalism of John Nelson Darby.

American foreign policy has for decades seemed locked into hardly questioning its support for the State of Israel, even though the consequences for its relations with the Arab and Muslim world, and with others, are almost entirely negative.55 They have been particularly dire for the traditional Christianities of the Middle East.

It has been common for those expecting the imminent Last Days to deny the reality of global climate change or its connection with human agency. In any case, given the imminent reign of Christ, attempts to fortify humanity against such signs of the times would be pointless, not to say disrespectful to God (as well as unhelpful to some of the financial backers of the Republican Party in industry).

Küng’s former university colleague Josef Ratzinger, his own explorations of such views long behind him, arrived in the Vatican in 1981 as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – a title which was a further creative rebranding of the Roman Inquisition.

John Paul’s consistency (for good or ill) in all this nevertheless fatally deserted the Vatican over one of the most painful issues in sexuality, the sexual abuse of children and young people by clergy. For the world to discover how widespread this had been over the span of living memory was bad enough; what was much worse was the exposure of the Church’s history of cover-up and callous treatment of those who complained, and the fact that this attitude was not effectively reversed during the 1990s. The problem sprang not simply from the defensiveness which is common to all monumental institutions. It was an inheritance

from centuries of building an image of priesthood in which the priest by virtue of ordination became an objectively different being from other humans. It was easy to slide from that into an attitude which suggested that different moral rules applied to such a separate being.71

At last the Vatican was taking seriously the scale of what was going on, which John Paul, with his own austere sexual integrity, seemed incapable of imaginatively appreciating. It was too late to prevent the decimation of congregations throughout the anglophone world and in Europe: an unprecedented blow to the authority of the Church in which ridicule, exemplified in the deceptively farcical Irish-made television sitcom Father Ted, was mixed with real fury. Whether the effects will spread into the rest of the Catholic world remains to be seen.73

It has been remarked that as the Soviet Union finally disintegrated in 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church was left as ‘arguably the most “Soviet” of all institutions’ remaining in Russia.78 One symbol of this is the remarkable circumstance that the FSB, the Russian intelligence service which has rather seamlessly succeeded the Soviet KGB, has lovingly restored a Moscow parish church for itself.

From the 1970s, both Mount Athos and the Coptic monasteries of Egypt have seen a sudden and unexpected revival, bringing new recruits and new hope, albeit sometimes accompanied by an ultra-traditional attitude to the modern world.

The stories of contemporary Russia and Serbia suggest some initial misjudgements. Some may find it depressing that after seeing the collapse of traditional European Christendom, so many Christianities are still entwined with the politics of the powerful, but it is surely inevitable that any potential source of power will fascinate fallen humanity, and that religion is as likely to bring a sword as peace. The writers of Genesis who composed the story of Cain and Abel showed wisdom in recounting the first act of worship of God as immediately followed by the first murder. While no state liberated from Soviet control decided fully to re-establish a Christian Church, the Christian Right in the United States continues to play a part in American politics which is an unmistakable bid for Christian hegemony in the nation, and there are signs of a possible new Constantinian era elsewhere.

‘An idea which needs rifles to survive dies of its own accord.’

Behind the passing conflicts of the moment lies a debate throughout Christianity about whether the Bible and Christian tradition can be wrong and can be changed. It is also a debate about whether God’s plan for the world centres on the supremacy of heterosexual men. ‘Male headship’ is one of the overriding concerns of the Sydney variant on Anglicanism, and worldwide, those Anglicans opposed to any change on attitudes to same-sex relationships overlap fairly snugly with those opposed to the ordination of women to the priesthood or consecration to the episcopate, who use the same sort of arguments. Because of the fundamental nature of this debate, conservative Christians who look coldly on the style of ecumenism parented by twentieth-century liberal Protestantism, and who are frequently deeply suspicious of the World Council of Churches, will make some religious alliances which a century ago would have been unthinkable. So Moscow and Rome are at one in their attitudes to such questions as homosexuality and the ordination of women. Equally, when conservative Episcopalians met in a Dallas hotel conference centre to discuss their future after the Robinson consecration in 2003, these members of a heretical Protestant sect, the

Episcopal Church, were electrified to receive a message of encouragement from no less a figure than the head of the (renamed) Roman Inquisition, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger. It assured them of his ‘heartfelt prayers for all those taking part in this convocation. The significance of your meeting is sensed far beyond [Dallas] and even in this city, from which St Augustine of Canterbury was sent to confirm and strengthen the preaching of Christ’s Gospel in England.’103 A year later, a survey on approval ratings among American Evangelicals showed that Pope John Paul II, who would have represented Antichrist to an earlier Evangelical generation, outpolled assorted spokesmen of the Religious Right such as Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson.

The alliance of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, which was extremely shaky from the first days of Pentecostalism until the 1940s (see pp. 960–61), may not be a permanent one. There is no special reason why a form of Christianity which emphasizes the renewal brought by the gifts of the Spirit should be allied to Evangelical Fundamentalism, which demands adherence to a particular set of intellectual or doctrinal propositions or a particular way of understanding texts from the past. There has indeed been a considerable ‘Charismatic’ movement within a very different variety of Western Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church. Pentecostalism might grow into an alliance with other forms of Christianity which have seen the Bible in more flexible and arguably more creative ways – as stories whose truth is not that of the Highway Code or a car maintenance guide.

In 2000 cremations formed more than 70 per cent of British funerals and 25 per cent of those in the United States, starting from a basis of nil in the Christian world in the 1860s. The arguments are not so much theological as practical considerations for public health and space – particularly in crowded societies like Britain. Yet the liturgical transformation involved is huge, not least the removal of a corpse’s final parting from the church, which is a community place of worship, a setting for all aspects of Christian life, to the crematorium, a specialized and often rather depressingly clinical office room for dealing with death. There are indeed signs that the disposal of ashes is creating a variety of inventive new personalized ritual, including the use of Roman candles to send the ashes of one Florida fireworks enthusiast into the heavens, and an unmanned satellite to speed various others still further from the earth. The theological implications are also profound. Death is not so much distanced as sanitized or domesticated, made part of the spectrum of consumer choice in a consumer society. The Church is robbed of what was once one of its strongest cards, its power to pronounce and give public liturgical shape to loss and bewilderment at the apparent lack of pattern in the brief span of human life.110

How does tourism relate to pilgrimage, and can the Church help tourists to become pilgrims?

‘Nothing has ever borne fruit in the Church without emerging from the darkness of a long period of loneliness into the light of the community.’115

At least Christian history offers plenty of sobering messages for overconfidence. The more interesting conundrum for Christianity is a society in which polite indifference has replaced the battles of the twentieth century: Europe, which is not so much a continent as a state of mind, to be found equally in Canada, Australasia and a significant part of the United States. Can there be a new Christian message of tragedy and triumph, suffering and forgiveness to Europeans and those who think like them? Does secularism have to be an enemy of Christian faith, as Nazism and Soviet Communism were enemies, or does it offer a chance to remould Christianity, as it has been remoulded so often before?

One great encouragement to sin is an absence of wonder. Even those who see the Christian story as just that – a series of stories – may find sanity in the experience of wonder: the ability to listen and contemplate.