A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

When, with the help of missionaries of the Church Missionary Society, they negotiated a treaty with the British Crown at Waitangi in 1840, the Maori leadership regarded it as a covenant on a biblical model, and, despite many subsequent colonial betrayals of the treaty’s spirit, it endured as the basis of a more just settlement for the Maori people in recent years.

The expelled ministers went on to found a United African Methodist Church whose ‘united’ character, like that of a previous ‘United’ Methodist Church created back in England, consisted in a sturdily united refusal to be bossed around by Wesleyan Methodists.50

Crowther was induced to resign in 1890, and died a couple of years later.

In 2009, as this book goes to press, the Church of England is adorned by an Archbishop of York born and raised in Uganda, John Sentamu.

randomly inserted?

Elsewhere, the inglorious end of Samuel Crowther’s episcopate encouraged the formation of African-initiated Churches; the late nineteenth century saw the rise of leaders asserting their charisma as Old Testament prophets had once done against the Temple priesthood.

The rich variety of Churches he left behind was characterized by local leadership and a propensity for building their own emphases into a distinctive system, beyond anything that Harris recommended. The Twelve Apostles Church in modern Ghana, for instance, has developed predominantly female leadership. Prophetesses preside over ‘gardens’, complexes of open-air church, oratory and hostel rather like a monastery; the prophetess’s most prized ministry is healing, centring on Friday services (for which market women have decreed themselves a day off),

Now that colonial governments were demanding the regular collection of taxes and the filling in of forms, Western-style education was at a premium and only the Churches could offer it. In South Africa, the Xhosa word for Christians became ‘School’.64 Some Churches became alarmingly identified

Then Evangelical pressure in the British Parliament – another campaign led by William Wilberforce, culminating in success in 1813 – gave the Company no choice but to allow missionaries into its territories.

Protestants found that the Indian caste system was a formidable barrier to promoting a religion whose rhetoric emphasized the breakdown of barriers among all those who followed Christ.

elite hostility

Conversely Indian missionary struggles and setbacks bred a new spirit of humility among Christians. 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).

To this day, the official Chinese attitude to Catholicism is that it is different from ‘Christianity’ – that is, Protestantism – since the two religions arrived at different times in Chinese history.

may also have been because radically different approach

China’s huge scale magnified the effects of apocalypticism in the Taiping Rebellion. It took over most of central China, and proved far more traumatic even than India’s Great Rebellion. Taiping means ‘Great Peace’, but this was the most destructive civil war in world history, far outstripping the contemporary American Civil War, and little outdone in mayhem by the Second World War a century later.

When they were not blaming the workings of Satan in Chinese culture, they were prone to deplore the inadequacies of Chinese languages to express subtle abstract concepts, rather than their own inability to do so in Chinese.

Some lay baptizers also became preoccupied with baptizing the babies of non-Christian parents who were expected to die soon:

the parents or the babies?

At the time of the Revolution, despite all the bustle of the Great Awakenings, only around 10 per cent of the American population were formal Church members, and a majority had no significant involvement in Church activities.

Revivalism was firmly in Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian culture already, so not only could they happily accommodate all this, but as ministers grappled to harness their congregations’ startling releases of emotional energy, it was not worth worrying too much about denominational labels.

interesting

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.

who knew?

The boy, both dreamer and likeable extrovert, on the edge of so many cultures – Evangelicalism, self-improvement, popular history and archaeology, Freemasonry – constructed out of them a lost world as wonderful as that future paradise which confronted Hong Xiuquan.103

As one of his less reverential biographers observed, Young’s home in Salt Lake City ‘resembled a New England household on a larger scale. Instead of one superficially forbidding lady in blacks or grays, there were nineteen of them’.

together with a systematic approach to spreading the message which has hardly been equalled in the Christianity which reserves itself the description Evangelical.

White control of the South and the allotting of second-class status to African-Americans were not effectively challenged until the 1950s, and much of the challenge arose from the black Churches, which now remained the only institution through which African-Americans could have any effect on politics.

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.

We can pick out particular moments, like the mixed-race congregation with its opportunities for black and female leadership, meeting in a rented former African Methodist church in Azusa Street in Los Angeles from 1906, which has become something of a founding myth to equal the first Pentecost in much writing of Pentecostal history.

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. The effect was that religious identity transmuted into national identity: Christians became Greeks regardless of what language they then spoke, and Muslims became Turks.

Partition became inevitable,

hmmm

The Pope was an Italian patriot, and besides, the Duce patently wanted a deal to earn himself goodwill from Catholics. So in the Lateran accords of 1929, the Vatican State was born, the world’s smallest sovereign power, the size of an English country-house garden, carrying with it a silver spoon in the form of 1,750 million lire, presented by the Italian government – rather less than had been on offer from the Italian monarchy to Pius IX, but still a very substantial sum.

Rome still saw Communism as a greater representative of evil than Fascism.

Who could have the imagination or the courage to stand up to the insidious mixture of seduction and intimidation?

plenty of ordinary christians

In their pleasure at the Third Reich’s encouragement of family life and campaigns against modern decadence, the German Free Churches failed to notice that they were being used to conciliate hostile opinion in their British and American sister Churches.60

Only slowly did the Catholic hierarchy realize what a terrible mistake it had made;

It will not do to point out the undoubted fact that most Nazis hated Christianity and would have done their best to destroy its institutional power if they had been victorious.68 As the Nazi extermination machine enrolled countless thousands of European Christians as facilitators or uncomplaining bystanders of its industrialized killings of Jews, it could succeed in co-opting them in the work of dehumanizing the victims because the collaborators had absorbed eighteen centuries of Christian negative stereotypes of Judaism – not to mention the tensions visible in the text of the New Testament, which had prompted the urge to create those stereotypes, up to the most mendacious and marginalizing such as the ‘blood libel’

better

In his last years, the ailing Pope presented an increasingly pitiable figure, as he tried ever more frantically to be a universal teacher: Vicar of the Encylopaedia Britannica rather than Vicar of Christ.

ouch

He was at home in the Athenaeum, that stately London Clubland headquarters for Englishmen marked out by culture and talent rather than illustrious pedigrees

One wise observer who knew Africa over more than thirty years, the Swedish Lutheran bishop in Tanzania Bengt Sundkler, observed that whereas in the nineteenth century African Christianity had largely been a youth movement, in the twentieth it was a women’s movement. Healing, that particular concern for women as they cared for their families, has become the great symbol of Christian success alongside education.

Derided and obstructed by their menfolk, many women began developing a spiritual sickness called orpeko, which was caused by an evil spirit. It turned out that the only sure-fire permanent cure for orpeko was Christian baptism. There was not much that men could do in riposte to this: Catholic Christianity had arrived, but it was over-whelmingly female. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most Maasai Christians are inclined to think of the Christian God as a woman, which is not calculated to please the Spiritan Fathers.

religion as engaged with social reality

They have gone on rejecting it, the first time that the Catholic faithful have ever so consistently scorned a major papal pronouncement intended to structure their lives.

hmmm. not sure what the comparison is.

Three years after that, Martin Luther King was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee, the day after a speech in which he had likened himself to Moses, afforded no more than a glimpse of the Promised Land before the entry of Israel.

For at the heart of all these movements was a meditation on the powerlessness of the crucified Christ, and on the paradox that this powerlessness was the basis for resurrection: freedom and transformation.

Throughout all the Anglican Communion’s centuries of involvement with politics and social change, its role in the liberation struggle in South Africa should perhaps give it most pride.

well that i can agree with

These statements of penitence are as resonant as those made by European Churches conscious of their tarnished part in the Nazi crimes of the Second World War. They betoken a new humility in Western Christianity born of experience. Such turnarounds in the Church may encourage wariness in those inclined to make confident dogmatic pronouncements intended to lay down unchangeable truths for the future. But

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.

more progression for state to allow conservative theology

Now American Evangelicals made common cause with the Jewish community in the United States, and they seemed to care little if at all for the opinions or the sufferings of their fellow Christians in the ancient Churches of the Middle East. Israeli politicians were not slow to exploit this political windfall, caring little for the fact that Evangelical apocalypticism expected the conversion of the Jews to Christianity.

which came first the politics or the theology?

Without that visit, the formation of the Solidarity movement and the process which within a decade led to a peaceful establishment of real democracy in Poland, and indeed throughout Eastern Europe, could not have happened.

hmmm

The consequences of this alliance in the wars of the former Yugoslavia are well known, and they are still unravelling. The Serbian Orthodox Church has not yet had the chance or the inclination to stand back and properly consider its part in what happened.89

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.

Southern Baptists and Australian ‘Continuing’ Presbyterians have both experienced determined and largely successful attempts by conservatives to take over institutional control in their Churches’ decision-making bodies. One of the most notorious and

One major powerhouse of this movement is the Australian Anglican Diocese of Sydney, heir to most of the historic endowments from the early days of Australia, when the Church of England seemed set fair for established status in the new land. Two successive (bloodless) coups d’état in the diocese created a stronghold not just of Low Church Anglicanism, but eventually of a particular variety of Reformed Protestant Evangelicalism.

It has lived through its own self-made hells in two world wars, seen the folly of blindly dogmatic belief, and now it has tried to build something less ambitious than paradise on earth, without the aid of sacred stories or absolutist ideologies.

so many hells through history

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 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