A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The two cultures remained curiously separate side by side, with the Latin elite excluded from military service, paying tribute to Gothic leaders while preserving some shadowy rights of property as ‘hosts’ to ‘guests’ who never actually got round to leaving.

Equally significant was the treatise which Boethius wrote in prison while awaiting execution, The Consolation of Philosophy.

Many of these Britons would be Christian to some degree: Christianity did not come as a startling novelty to the inhabitants of lowland England in 597.

Byzantines to the south. Matters might have turned out differently, for in the seventh century, after a certain froideur in the era of Gregory the Great, papal contacts with Byzantium could be regarded as consolidating: eleven out of eighteen popes in the period 650–750 had a Greek or Eastern background.

The uniting of England provoked an outburst of pride which might almost be styled nationalist, and which had a distinctive and galvanizing effect on the English Church.

They were so called from the Latin cardo, meaning a wedge rammed between timbers, for ‘cardinals’ were originally exceptionally able or useful priests thrust into a church from outside – their appointment had systematically breached the early Church’s (fairly breachable) convention that clergy should keep in the same place for life.

This ‘elevation of the host’ became a focus for the longing of the Catholic faithful to gaze upon the body of Christ: the dramatic high point of the Western Latin Mass.

For all their founder’s personal friendship with cardinals and even with one pope, Francis’s followers included crowds who were more part of the wild underworld of thirteenth-century religion than of the establishment.

Such liturgical performance of hatred is embarrassing for modern ecumenical discussions among Eastern Christians when it is directed at cherished saints of one of the Churches participating, but it is probably to be preferred to the Western practice of burning heretics.

There was actually a six-year-period when the Emperor Constans II, desperate to defend his western provinces, abandoned Constantinople and took refuge with his Court in Sicily before being murdered in 668

Leo was known as ‘the Isaurian’ from his origins in a frontier province of Asia Minor, and it may be that already here, in close proximity to Islamic territories, he had become impressed with one aspect of Muslim austerity, the consistent rejection of pictorial representations of the divine.

The dates of the original mosaics help to date the alterations to the decades beyond the second quarter of the eighth century – so the changes are contemporary with the iconoclastic campaigns of Leo’s dynasty, but they are to be found beyond the Byzantine frontiers.

Photios’s periods of patriarchal power coincided fruitfully with the coming of a succession of capable emperors who did much to restore the fortunes of the empire after two hundred years of miseries.

By the time of that sixteenth-century explosion of dissent, the Byzantine Empire had perished, partly because of the inept and often malicious intervention of Western Latin Christians, which helped to destroy the institution so notably revived in the time of Photios and the Macedonian emperors.

Nevertheless, Orthodox identity was no longer so closely tied to the survival of a political empire, and it was increasingly a matter for the Church to sustain.

place of the Church’s authority, Wyclif urged people to turn to the Bible, reading and understanding it, for it was the only source of divine truth.

Wyclif’s followers, first Oxford academics, then a wider circle of clergy and laypeople influenced by the first university enthusiasts, were given the contemptuous nickname of ‘Lollards’: that is, mumblers who talked nonsense.

the intervening period, only the most obviously ultra-respectable could get away with open possession of a vernacular Bible, and indeed, their respectability seems itself to have made their copy of the text respectable.

Hus’s movement became an assertion of Czech identity against German-speakers in the Bohemian Church and commonwealth, and unlike Lollardy it remained supported in all sections of society, from the university to the village.

So, between the Utraquist Church and the Unitas Fratrum, Bohemia became the first part of Latin Europe to slip out of its medieval papal obedience.

The vast majority of humanists were patently sincere Christians who wished to apply their enthusiasm to the exploration and proclamation of their faith. They were trying to restore a Christian perfection to humanity.

And crucially for the future of Christianity, a humanist was someone whose cultural roots were in Western Latin culture, and who knew little of the Christianities of either the Chalcedonian or non-Chalcedonian East.

‘The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.’

springs out of the proverb Dulce bellum inexpertis (‘war is sweet to those who have not experienced it’).

The opposition of Law and Gospel, an opposition set up by God himself, remained a fundamental theme of his theology.

two tiny summary sentences in German which have become the most memorable thing Luther never said: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other’.

Reformed Protestantism from the beginning differed from Luther’s Reformation – much to his fury – in several key respects, principally its attitude to images, to law and to the Eucharist.

That struck a strong chord in Switzerland, where regular swearing of oaths was the foundational to a society whose strength came from mutual interdependence and local loyalty.

Until the middle of the century, it looked as if Strassburg would become the centre of the future Reformation,

It is possible that Cranmer’s quiet sense of humour might make him appreciate this strange outcrop of

his attempt to provide England with a decently Reformed vehicle for the worship of God.

Consistently with this, from 1536 Calvin published and repeatedly rewrote a textbook of doctrine, the Institution of the Christian Religion – commonly known as the Institutes.48

In modern societies, these ‘Calvinist’ systems have a dark and oppressive reputation, but we forget that they worked because people wanted them to work.

One small part of Switzerland, the Grisons or Graubünden, quickly took advantage of the freedom bestowed by their Alpine remoteness and poverty: in 1526, as the Reformation began dividing Europe, they came to a deal in their chief town of Ilanz, by which each village could choose to maintain either a Catholic or a Reformed church.

the ‘King James’ version beloved of conservative Christians professing their faith in Churches of whose nature the original King James would profoundly disapprove.

Having defeated the Scots, the regime was not inclined to set up presbyterianism in England, and was content for the English Church to become little more than a nationwide federation of Protestant parishes.

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The Holy Spirit did not oblige, and with Pole’s defeat there died the last chance of a peaceful settlement of religion in Western Christendom of which his hero Erasmus might have approved.

Trent bequeathed the Church a programme which had first been tried out in the kingdom of England in the reign of Queen Mary, after her unexpected accession in 1553

the common stereotype of the witch as a gnarled old woman does not reflect the reality in England that accused were characteristically prosperous or significant figures in their community, though commonly not the most peaceable.

This quotation from Matthew 5.14 has become a famous phrase in American self-identity, but Winthrop did not intend to confer a special destiny on the new colony.

Reformation Europe had known religious toleration; now religious liberty was developing. Toleration is a grudging concession granted by one body from a position of strength; liberty provides a situation in which all religious groups compete on an equal basis.

Altogether, the Non-Jurors were a distinguished and conscientious grouping who were now free to think new thoughts about why they were still Anglicans when not part of an established Church.

Nevertheless, over the next century, Locke’s language of rights and contract fermented in the political arguments of the anglophone world and then spread into Europe generally, decisively undermining the concept of sacred monarchy.

From its earliest days, Pietism was intimately bound up with education.

Franke’s principle was that everyone, whatever their position in life, should come out of childhood education able to read the Bible and to take pride in at least one special skill.

Like the Pietists and Moravians, English Evangelicals sought to create a religion of the heart and of direct personal relationship with Jesus Christ, in consciousness of his suffering on the Cross – his atonement to his Father for human sin.

Moreover, the British army’s and navy’s steady embrace of a non-partisan patriotism chimed well with a general tendency in British Evangelicalism to keep away from politics unless absolutely necessary, while tending to patriotic conservatism.

Those Anglicans who had not fled north to Canada quickly saw sense and formed themselves into an episcopally led denomination suitable for a republic, the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America; but their future was as a relatively small body with a disproportionate number of the wealthy and influential, their restrained and European ethos of devotion rather countercultural amid American Protestantism.

Perhaps the most surprising outcrop of Reformed Protestant interest in the esoteric was the phenomenon of Freemasonry.