A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

dependence’.

Interesting spin on personal freedom where society stiffles dissent in the guise of liberty

‘What is Enlightenment?’: ‘Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity’.

The awful tidy-mindedness of Enlightenment thought bred an insistence on everyone being liberated in ways defined by Revolutionaries – forcing them to be free, in a ghastly echo of Rousseau.

Manning’s achievement was important in the background to the encyclical of 1891, Rerum novarum, in which Pope Leo XIII restated the Catholic Church’s commitment to social justice for the poor, even to the extent that it would promote trade unions with a Catholic base.

The fault line in French politics between Church and Revolution persisted into the 1960s, anachronistically shaping the structure of political parties, and absorbing political energies which could have been spent on more pressing social and political problems.

1869 around 1 per cent of the working class had attended church in Berlin’s Protestant parishes, and that figure had halved by the outbreak of war in 1914.

England’s tradition of vigorous dissent meant that hostility to the established Church did not turn into general anticlericalism or hostility to Christianity, but was channelled into alternative Christian practice.

Throughout the rest of the 1830s, Keble, Newman and a number of friends mostly associated with Oxford University put forward a new vision of the Church of England in a series of Tracts for the Times (hence the activity they inspired has been called either the Oxford Movement or Tractarianism).

And after initial wide public disapproval – even riots against the ‘Popery’ of Anglo-Catholic liturgy – there came the realization that High Church clergy genuinely did care for the Church’s mission to save souls.

From Bonhoeffer’s time in prison, he left as the end of an industrious production of theological works a series of fragments and letters which contained phrases still echoing round Western Christian ears, as possible clues to future directions for the Church

Liberal Protestantism after 1900 chose a very different path from either the Holiness/Keswick styles of the conservatives, or the proliferation of identities in the new Churches.

He was at home in the Athenaeum, that stately London Clubland headquarters for Englishmen marked out by culture and talent rather than illustrious pedigrees – bishops flitted in and out of the doors of the club, and it served as Oldham’s Vatican.

Anglicans were always fatally divided between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals who could not agree on what was important about being an Anglican, alongside the ‘central’ Anglicans, perpetually irritated at what they regarded as the unhelpful posturing on either flank.

was all a gift for humorists, and laughter is never good news for those seeking to impose the authority of the Word of God on others.

After President Franklin D. Roosevelt presided over the repeal of the Prohibition Amendment in 1933, for half a century conservative Evangelicals were too cowed by the fiasco of Prohibition to try to impose their social values on the rest of the nation by political means.

Nor was the possibility that the Enlightenment would spring any fresh surprises on a liberal Protestantism which had adroitly profited from it, or on a Catholicism which presented a sturdy front against it, protected by a rampart of volumes of Thomas Aquinas.

In King, the Evangelicalism of the South met the writings of one of the greatest exponents of the ‘Social Gospel’ in the USA, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose synthesis of Reformed and Lutheran theology and liberal Protestant analysis of society he much admired.

Bonhoeffer anticipated themes of liberation theology such as the suffering God and the transformed Church, but with a different thrust, in seeing humanity as ‘coming of age’:

In all this, the Reagans were not untypical products of Hollywood, in contrast with the deeply pious Southern Democrat Carter.

With the exception of Lebanon and a remarkable if complex official fostering of religious pluralism in the Syrian Republic, Christian communities are generally in steep decline in numbers through the region, and Israel/Palestine in particular.

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.

Mr Jiang would remember that Sun Yat Sen, the founder of the first Chinese Republic a century before, together with his long-lived and long-revered wife, had been Methodist Christians.

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

Cremation’s earliest champions were in fact Italian liberal nationalists, who were on occasion forbidden burial in graveyards controlled by the Church, and so cremation became an anticlerical gesture in Italy.

It would be very surprising if this religion, so youthful, yet so varied in its historical experience, had now revealed all its secrets.

‘I will make your overseers peace and your taskmasters righteousness.’