is the tension we must wrestle with in church history and in the story of Western civilisation.17 Christendom, for all the cultivation of Christian virtues, for all the claim of the spirit’s effervescent presence, for all the advances in human liberties from the Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights, was still tainted with the human capacity for evil. It is indubitably true that Christian civilisation was often neither Christian nor civil. At times, it seemed as if the kingdom of heaven was still very much in heaven and not on earth.