A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The bones were exported all over the Catholic world, a great morale-booster against Protestants in underlining the glorious history of suffering in the Roman Church, and they were joined in their fruitful travels by countless fragments of Ursula’s eleven thousand virgins from Cologne. The Jesuits were chief brokers in this sacred commerce.39

The Jesuits became actors and showmen: their visit must be a heart-stopping special occasion, bringing God’s circus to town. This was carnival, but the carnival employed that ultimate carnivalesque reversal of human hierarchies, in which all humanity is laid low in death, as Jesuit preachers pitilessly reminded their enthralled audiences from pulpit or market cross. The Church offered the remedy: its contact with the divine, summed up in the consecrated Host exhibited amid a blaze of candles, promised hope and salvation.

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.

As Habsburgs, Wittelsbachs and an array of conscientious Counter-Reformation bishops struggled with their own temptations, witches became symbols of the general temptations which Satan used to torment society.

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

Jesuits treated their hunter-gatherer converts almost as children, organizing them into large settlements to protect them against the greed and exploitation of the other colonists, but always in a benevolent European-led dictatorship of estates, the ‘Reductions’.

if a priest heard a penitent’s confession through an interpreter, many felt that it made a mockery of the sacrament.

in India which derived from Syria. The Portuguese contempt for Christians they regarded as schismatics or heretics, and the schisms and disputes which Portuguese interference provoked in these Churches, were not impressive demonstrations of Christian brotherly love, as Catholic Christians burned venerable Christian libraries and occasionally people too for Dyophysite heresy.

and their repression of Japanese Christians was not without some military assistance from the Protestant Dutch, who were doing their best to wreck Portuguese power in eastern Asia, and had few regrets about campaigns against popish Jesuits and friars.

A wooden statue of St Francis was so affected by the humid heat that his face and hands turned black: the Governor announced a miracle, in which the saint had proclaimed himself patron of the local population by identifying with them.

A telling detail of the Jesuits’ ministry was to make sure that their baptismal ceremony included plenty of cool drinkable water; the desperate and grateful slave would be more receptive to the Christian message. In its context, this pastoral work was bravely countercultural, arousing real disapproval among the settler population, but the Jesuits’ efforts to instil first a sense of sin (particularly sexual sin) and then repentance in their wretched penitents now seem oddly placed amid one of the greatest communal sins perpetrated by Western Christian culture.44

Equally surprising is to find St Patrick so prominent in many Vodou shrines (see Plate 61), until one remembers that he too had been a slave who had twice crossed the sea, the second time to freedom, and that he had particular power over snakes, like the loa (Haitian equivalent of orisha) Dambala Wèdo.

it is important to re-emphasize that the vast majority were not separatists but Puritans.

The form assumed by the Church of Massachusetts was therefore the paradox of an established Reformed Church with an all-embracing system of parishes like England, but run by local assemblies of the self-selected godly — a form of Church government which was ‘Congregational’, a Latin-derived word first given currency by John Cotton, one of the Church’s early ministers.

In 1631, the franchise for the colony’s assembly was limited to Church members.

After royal intervention in the 1680s there was the extra annoyance of governors appointed by the Crown who were rarely sympathetic to the Congregationalist ministry, and who even encouraged the indignity of an Anglican church built in the middle of Boston (worse still, in 1714 it acquired that engine of popery, a pipe organ, the first in New England).

Swedish Lutherans settled on the Delaware River, and the Protestant Dutch seized a spectacular natural harbour in the Hudson estuary which they named New Netherland and which quickly emerged as the focus for European shipping along the North American coast.

That included pragmatic Dutch toleration of a wealthy Jewish community, since there were a significant number of Jewish shareholders in the Dutch West India Company, the colony’s proprietor.

They ordered fines and whipping for anyone using the normal religious insults of seventeenth-century England, elaborately specified in a list: ‘heretic, schismatic, idolator, Puritan, Independent, Presbyterian, Popish priest, Jesuit, Jesuited Papist, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist, Brownist, Antinomian, Barrowist, Roundhead, Separatist’.

He also tried to maintain friendly relations with Native Americans. Soon Pennsylvania came to have a rich mix not simply of English Protestants, but also Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Lutherans and the descendants of radical Reformation groups of mainland Europe who were fleeing from Roman Catholic intolerance in central Europe (see p. 647). Among the latter, the Old Order Amish from Switzerland have done their best ever since to freeze their communal way of life as it was when they first arrived in the early eighteenth century.28

Although Adam’s fall had brought about the punishment that humans would have to labour in order to survive, this burden had engendered a natural right in all people to labour and to possess the land for labour. This preceded any authority to govern, which resulted from contracts freely made by humans in order to live more easily with each other.

Locke

was predictable, therefore, that Lutheranism’s greatest musician, Johann Sebastian Bach, experienced a complicated relationship with the Pietist movement which spanned his career. Undoubtedly influenced in his own passionate Christian commitment by Pietist themes and by Pietist books in his own extensive library, Bach was a man whose strenuous temperament was certainly conducive to spiritual struggle.

Wesley’s answer was unconventional for a High Church Anglican: in 1739 he followed his friend and fellow clergyman George Whitefield (at first rather nervously) in preaching in the open air, as revivalist Jesuits did in Catholic Europe.

Methodist hymns were an element in the gradual separation of Wesley’s movement from the Church of England. The irregular and noisy activity of the Methodists deeply worried the Church authorities and infuriated many parish clergy.

Wesley’s distinctive soteriology was to have great long-term resonances.

accepts Grace rejects predestination

The tensions in trying to maintain them against such frightening phenomena as premarital sex

ridiculous

As so often, a new religious movement which had little actually new in its beliefs (Edwards prided himself in his traditional Reformed theology) took a novel face through its use of music.74

Edwards believed that this millennium would take place before the Second Coming of Christ — hence the Second Coming would be ‘post-millennial’.

think his reasonings on America want force’, the mood has never fully left America.

founding of usa as special sign of apprival and holy prosperity

Priorities in worship changed in the Awakenings. Renewal was experienced as renewal of enthusiasm rather than performance of an unchanging liturgy; Protestant Churches which did not adapt, and which based themselves on traditional European models, suffered. The Anglicans, strongly linked to the Church of England, which was struggling at the same time with the Methodist and Evangelical Revivals, were even more resistant than the Congregationalist Churches of New England to the style of the Awakenings.

Coalescing out of the welter of new gatherings came new denominations. In the south, a Church called the Separate Baptists was virtually created by the Awakenings, and the Methodists, after suffering setbacks for their British loyalism during the Revolution, soon took off once more; so two of the most influential strands within American Protestantism owe their prominence to the first Awakenings period.

The sense of common American heritage among different Protestant denominations was much strengthened by this experience. That would have a considerable effect on politics.

Moravians brought song and uninhibited celebration of God’s blood and wounds to people who knew much of both.

By 1800, around a fifth of all American Methodists were enslaved people — and enslaved they were still, despite being Methodists.

So a racial revolution, shaped by Evangelical Christianity, took shape quietly alongside a different revolutionary uprising by whites against whites.

Methodists, taking their cue from John Wesley’s emphatic Tory loyalism, opposed the Revolution; so, unsurprisingly, did many Anglicans.

The motto ‘In God We Trust’ only first appeared on an American coin amid civil war in 1864,

Because Protestant anglophone culture has until the present century remained hegemonic in the USA, the American varieties of British Protestantism are the most characteristic forms of Protestant Christianity today — together with their offshoots, the most dynamic forms of Christianity worldwide. American Roman Catholicism too has largely left the Counter-Reformation behind, and in much of its behaviour and attitudes, it has been enrolled as a subset of the American Protestant religious scene.

The discipline which is the ancestor of modern specializations like astronomy, biology, physics and chemistry was then called natural philosophy. It demarcated itself from theology’s concentration on the world beyond by exploring evidence from nature, the visible created world. We define this exploration as ‘science’, and the story of natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has in the past often been called a ‘Scientific Revolution’. In the modern West, that term has commonly been yoked to the thought that ‘science’ is a rational mode of enquiry, waging an ideological battle with an irrational foe, Christianity. ‘Science’ is a very imprecise word,

In fact, in Newton’s eyes, all his enterprises were part of a common task of Reformation, which in the case of his religious investigations led him to a discreet dismissal of doctrines like the Trinity. Newton’s task was to recover a lost rationality: ‘the first religion was the most rational of all others till the nations corrupted it. For there is no way [‘without revelation’, he inserted in his manuscript in an afterthought] to come to the knowledge of a Deity but by the frame of nature.’9

But a distinctive feature of modern Western culture, and through it any Christianity exposed to the spread of Western culture, has come to be an inclination to doubt any proposition from the religious past, and to reject the assumption that there is a special privilege for one sort of religious truth.

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.

Protestants were nevertheless more seriously affected than Catholics, because of their general rejection of allegory in interpreting the Bible unless absolutely necessary

Sir Isaac Newton was among those who concluded from these various stirrings that all the world’s cultures sprang from a single civilization informed by knowledge of the divine, but scattered in Noah’s Flood.36

Quite apart from their crabwise and often reluctant embrace of religious toleration for a wide variety of religious dissidence, both countries achieved a wider distribution of prosperity than any other part of seventeenth-century Europe.

but listening had always been done in the context of worship. During the seventeenth century, the Dutch developed the concept of the organ recital: a use of church buildings without specific devotional reference which was to spread throughout the Western Christian world.

In 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. Gender roles became more rigidly divided. Most choices still favoured men: so where once women had been regarded as uncontrollable and lustful like fallen Eve, now they were increasingly regarded as naturally frail and passive, in need of male protection.

In the English civil wars of the 1640s, when the coercive structures of the established Church collapsed, membership lists of the growing number of voluntary churches – Independents, Baptists, Quakers and the like – often reveal women outnumbering men by two to one.

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.

It is possible to read the Protestant awakenings as a shocked reaction to the social and intellectual innovations of the early Enlightenment.