A History of Christianity Quotes

“Human societies are based on the human tendency to want things, and are geared to satisfying those wants: possessions or facilities to bring ease and personal satisfaction. The results are frequently disappointing, and always terminate in the embarrassing non sequitur of death.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“The writing and telling of history is bedevilled by two human neuroses: horror at the desperate shapelessness and seeming lack of pattern in events, and regret for a lost golden age, a moment of happiness when all was well. Put these together and you have an urge to create elaborate patterns to make sense of things and to create a situation where the golden age is just waiting to spring to life again. This is the impulse which makes King Arthur’s knights sleep under certain mountains, ready to bring deliverance, or creates the fascination with the Knights Templar and occult conspiracy which propelled The Da Vinci Code into best-seller lists.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Fawn M. Brodie, whose classic life of Smith earned her excommunication from the Mormon Church, saw the Book of Mormon as 'one of the earliest examples of frontier fiction, the first long Yankee narrative that owes nothing to English literary fashions'.105 There was quite a genre of 'lost race' novels at the time. A century on, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga formed an English Catholic parallel, conscious or unconscious, to Smith's work.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“The only way in which Darwin's data made sense was to suppose that species battled for survival, and that evolution came when one slight adaptation of a species proved more successful than another in the battle: a process which he named 'natural selection'. There was nothing benevolent about the providence which watched over the process. Reason was served her notice as the handmaid of Christian revelation.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“For many in the nineteenth century, nationalism became an emotional replacement for the Christian religion.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Right down to the seventeenth century, Christian debate about faith and the world involved a debate between two Greek ghosts, Plato and Aristotle, who had never heard the name of Jesus Christ.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Punishment was thus directed to outsiders as well as to sinful Christians. One of the characteristics of Western Christianity between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries is its identification of various groups within the Western world as distinct, marginal and a constant potential threat to good order: principal among such groups were Jews, heretics, lepers and (curiously belatedly) homosexuals.8 In 1321 there was panic all over France, ranging from poor folk to King Philip V himself, that lepers and Jews had combined together with the great external enemy, Islam, to overthrow all good order in Christendom by poisoning wells. Lepers (as if they had not enough misfortune) were victimized, tortured into confessions and burned at the stake, and the pogroms against Jews were no less horrific. Muslims were lucky enough to be out of reach on that occasion.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott, Ein gute Wehr und Waffen’.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“From dispensationalism grew another ‘ism’: ‘Fundamentalism’ was a name derived from twelve volumes of essays issued in the USA by a combination of British and American conservative writers between 1910 and 1915, entitled The Fundamentals. Central to these essays was an emphasis on five main points: the impossibility of the biblical text being mistaken in its literal meaning (‘verbal inerrancy’), the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, the idea that Jesus died on the Cross in the place of sinners (an atonement theory technically known as penal substitution) and the proposition that Christ was physically resurrected to return again in flesh. Fundamentalists created organizations to promote this case: in 1919 the World’s Christian Fundamentals Organization was founded, expanding through its use of mass rallies from a mainly Baptist base to affect most Protestant Churches.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“A better text to hang in the office of any Minister for Religious Affairs would be the words of a brave dissident Polish priest, Fr Jerzy Popielusko, in one of the addresses which led to his death at the hands of Communist Poland’s secret police in 1984: ‘An idea which needs rifles to survive dies of its own accord.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“The writers of Genesis who composed the story of Cain and Abel showed wisdom in recounting the first act of worship of God as immediately followed by the first murder”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“in the perceptive words of one Orthodox priestly theologian born in post-1917 exile, ‘if there is a feature of “Russian” Orthodoxy which can be seen as a contrast to the Byzantine perception of Christianity, it is the nervous concern of the Russians in preserving the very letter of the tradition received “from the Greeks”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“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.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Yet Baptists gave no single opinion on the Revolution, mindful of the angry reaction which they had provoked in that same Continental Congress when they had complained about New England’s compulsory levies for the established Congregational Church. The irony of the revolutionary slogan ‘no taxation without representation’ was not lost on Baptists.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“In counterpoint to the Church’s pronounced drive towards conformity with society’s often perfectly reasonable expectations, which we have noted as such a characteristic feature of the later literature in the New Testament (see pp. 114–18), Christian obedience repeatedly plays a troubling wild card. It is the Apostle Peter’s impudent retort to the angry high priest of the Jerusalem Temple, recorded in Acts 5.29: ‘We must obey God rather than men.’ Not so long after Perpetua brutally confounded her father’s natural expectations and set herself up as the agent of God’s forgiveness, bishops including Peter’s self-styled successor in Rome would come to find themselves cast in the role of the high priest: furious at the disobedience of Christians to their own authority and in the end even condemning Christians to death, as once Peter had been by the Roman authorities.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“When a great deal of later inauthentic imitation has been sifted out, the most compelling of these accounts are more than just edifying guides to do-it-yourself sainthood: they preserve portraits of people in the most extreme of situations, the circumstances of which have released them to behave well beyond convention. Most surprising is the journal of sufferings written in the first decade of the third century by an unusually well-educated, spirited (and Montanist) North African martyr called Perpetua. One of the most remarkable pieces of writing by a woman surviving from the ancient world, its content caused problems to both its editors and to subsequent conventionally minded devotees because it was shot through with her determined individuality and self-assertion. She did not simply defy the authorities but went against the expectations of everyday society (including, of course, Christian everyday society) by disobeying her father, who desperately wanted her to abandon her faith: ‘Father’, I said, ‘for the sake of argument, do you see this vase, or whatever you want to call it, lying here?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I see it’. And I said to him, ‘Can you call it by any other name than what it is?’ And he said ‘No, you can’t’. ‘So’, I said, ‘I cannot call myself anything other than what I am – a Christian’. Merely hearing this word upset my father greatly. He threw himself at me with such violence that it seemed he wanted to tear my eyes out …18 In that charged encounter is a characteristic moment of tension for Christianity: how does one form of authority relate to another, and which is going to prevail? Perpetua was disobedient not just to her father but to the institutional Catholic Church which later enrolled her among its martyrs, because she was a Montanist. Some of the most remarkable passages in her account occur in her description of the second and third dreams or visions that she had in her prison cell.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“He wanted to talk about grace; his opponents wanted to talk about authority. That chasm of purposes explains how an argument about a side alley of medieval soteriology escalated into the division of Europe.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Western Christians would have to decide for themselves which aspect of Augustine’s thought mattered more: his emphasis on obedience to the Catholic Church or the discussion of salvation which lay behind the rebellion by Martin Luther and other theologians in his generation. From one perspective, a century or more of turmoil in the Western Church from 1517 was a debate in the mind of the long-dead Augustine.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“He makes no bones about saying ‘keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us’. So much for Jesus and his wandering Twelve. Paul was on the side of busy people who valued hard work and took a pride in the reward that they got from it: tent-makers of the world, unite.5 Christianity had become a religion for urban commercial centres, for speakers of common Greek who might see the whole Mediterranean as their home and might well have moved around it a good deal”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“The suspicion therefore arises that someone writing a good deal later, rather hazy about the chronology of decades before, has been fairly cavalier with the story of Jesus’s birth, for reasons other than retrieving events as they actually happened. This suspicion grows when one observes how little the birth and infancy narratives have to do with the later story of Jesus’s public ministry, death and resurrection, which occupies all four Gospels; nowhere do these Gospels refer back to the tales of birth and infancy, which suggests that the bulk of their texts were written before these particular stories. We must conclude that beside the likelihood that Christmas did not happen at Christmas, it did not happen in Bethlehem.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“We learn of these events within four books of the Christian ‘New Testament’, credited with authorship by early followers of Jesus called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They shine four different spotlights on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and, as we will see, all four were probably written not less than half a century after his death”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“now they had the catastrophe of the Babylonian captivity to ram home the point that Yahweh wanted obedience to his law and had severely punished the nation for not providing that obedience. Never again should Israel make the same mistake.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Around Abraham’s rackety grandson Jacob are woven several engaging tales of outrageous cheating and deceit, and they culminate in an all-night wrestling match with a mysterious stranger who overcomes Jacob and is able to give him another new name, Israel, meaning ‘He who strives with God’.5 Out of that fight in the darkness, with one who revealed the power of God and was God, began the generations of the Children of Israel. Few peoples united by a religion have proclaimed by their very name that they struggle against the one whom they worship. The relationship of God with Israel is intense, personal, conflicted. Those who follow Israel and the religions which spring from his wrestling match that night are being told that even through their harshest and most wretched experiences of fighting with those they love most deeply, they are being given some glimpse of how they relate to God.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Abundant slave labour, after all, blunted the need for any major advance in technology. Yet in the realm of ideas, philosophy and religious practice, Hellenistic civilization created a meeting place for Greek and oriental culture, which made it easy and natural for Jewish and then non-Jewish followers of Jesus Christ to take what they wanted from the ragbag of Greek thought which any moderately educated inhabitant of the Middle East would encounter in everyday conversation.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Against such an intellectual background, where the everyday world was of little account to the true idealist, curiosity expressed in practical creativity was no longer much valued. There was little follow-up to the remarkable advances seen in Classical Greece in the understanding of technology, medicine and geography. When the steam engine was invented in Alexandria about a hundred years after the birth of Jesus Christ, it remained a toy, and the ancient world failed to make the breakthrough in energy resources which occurred in England seventeen centuries later.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“for two thousand years after his death Aristotle would set the way in which Christians and Muslims alike shaped their thoughts about the best way to organize and think about the physical world, about the arts and the pursuit of virtue. The Christian Church began by being suspicious about Aristotle, preferring the otherworldliness of Plato’s thought, but there was no other scheme for understanding the organization of the world as remotely comprehensive as his. When Christians were faced with making theological comments on natural subjects like biology or the animal kingdom, they turned to Aristotle, just as Christian theologians today may turn to modern science to inform themselves about matters in which they are not technically expert. The result was, for instance, that two millennia after the death of this non-Christian philosopher two monks in a monastery somewhere in northern Europe might consider an argument settled if one of them could assert, ‘Well, Aristotle says …’ Right down to the seventeenth century, Christian debate about faith and the world involved a debate between two Greek ghosts, Plato and Aristotle, who had never heard the name of Jesus Christ. Aristotle fuelled the great renewal of Christian scholarship in the Western Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (see pp. 398–9), and even in the last twenty years the leaders of the Catholic Church in Rome have reaffirmed the synthesis of Christianity and Aristotelian thought which Thomas Aquinas devised at that time.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“For Plato, the character of true deity is not merely goodness, but also oneness. Although Plato nowhere explicitly draws the conclusion from that oneness, it points to the proposition that God also represents perfection. Being perfect, the supreme God is also without passions, since passions involve change from one mood to another, and it is in the nature of perfection that it cannot change. This passionless perfection contrasts with the passion, compassion and constant intervention of Israel’s God, despite the fact that both the Platonic and the Hebrew views of God stress transcendence. There is a difficulty in envisaging how Plato’s God could create the sort of changeable, imperfect, messy world in which we live – indeed, have any meaningful contact with it.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“It was Socrates’s questioning of the half-century-old Athenian democracy which was a major cause of his trial and execution; his trial is the central event around which Plato’s dialogues are focused, making it as much a trial of Athenian society and thought as it was of Socrates. The grotesque absurdity of killing a man who was arguably Athens’s greatest citizen on charges of blasphemy and immorality impelled Plato to see a discussion of politics as one facet of discussions of justice, the nature of morality and divine purpose – in fact to see the two discussions as interchangeable.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Socrates wrote nothing himself and we hear his voice mediated through writings of his pupil and admirer Plato, mostly in dialogue form. While he was teaching in Athens, his was an insistently and infuriatingly questioning voice, embodying the conviction that questions can never cease to be asked if human beings are to battle with any success against the constant affliction of public and private problems.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years