20AR25-30

( - previous issue - / - next issue - )

AR 25:30 - How the Christian revolution remade the world

In this issue:

HISTORY - the global influence of Christian values

Apologia Report 25:30 (1,487)

July 28, 2020

HISTORY

We featured Tom Holland's latest book, Dominion, late last year <www.bit.ly/3eqCqqj> and I've (RP) only just finished reading it - happy with the opportunity to pair my experience with the rave reviews it has received. Spoiler Alert: Dominion turns out to be a historically based cultural apologetic that presents the influence of faith to the glory of faith's Christian objective. It was first published in the UK, where it has the subtitle "The Making of the Western Mind." In the U.S. it's "How the Christian Revolution Remade the World." I found that it covers a riot of diversity.

You may wonder, "We are deep into 2020 and you've only finished Dominion now? What took you so long?" Well, the first time I went through it, I said to myself, "Wow, that motivates me to read something else to refresh my understanding." That was several more books ago. (Many good history books incline those enjoying them to read even more good history books for contextual enhancement.) And now I'm planning to go through Dominion a third time. (If a book was worth reading, C.S. Lewis usually read it twice - and more times, in proportion to the value received.)

In my case, these books interrupted my second pass through Dominion. It began with The Lost History of Christianity <www.bit.ly/32geHqG> by Philip Jenkins. Turns out Lost History could be called Devastation to Holland's Dominion.

Little has been written about first-millennium Christianity in contrast to the history of the second. Jenkins tells of early Christian expansion East, South, and North to the point that, in spite of much of the record being lost in a climate of intense persecution, Beijing appears to have had a Christian presence much longer ago than you might imagine.

Lost Christianity is quite obviously secular in its persuasive intent, yet far from caustic in its attitude toward religious faith - seemingly asking, "Why can't we all just get along?" Dominion is persuasive about Christianity having informed the definition of what "secular" is, and how it has harnessed some core Christian values in the description of its own meaning.

Both books offer numerous examples to support the observation that cultic invention tends to flow where religious freedom fails to stifle its germination. Lost History can be used as a historically based apologetic for the resilience of faith to the glory of God.

Lost History's book jacket includes a good summary: "Jenkins takes a stand against current scholars who assert that variant alternative Christianities disappeared in the fourth and fifth centuries on the heels of a newly formed hierarchy under Constantine, intent on crushing unorthodox views. In reality, Jenkins says, the largest churches in the world were the 'heretics' who lost the orthodoxy battles."

The early part of the book features a lengthy overview of its content. Some highlights:

"As late as the eleventh century, Asia was home to at least a third of the world's Christians." (p4)

"The Christian center of gravity" began and lasted in the East more than twice as long as it lasted in Europe. (p25) And it lasted in Europe two times longer than it did in America before it began shifting to the global South. (p26)

"Nestorians and Jacobites remained very influential for over eight hundred years after the great church councils expelled them...." (p27)

The Nestorians, already in China by 550 (p64) and in India "around 425" (p66), were "the most widespread" segment of Christianity by about 1280. (p67)

Jenkins challenges conservative thinking in different areas such as:

* - The goal of maintaining "New Testament Christianity" or a "return to the basics" is impossible because the reference source used is incomplete and "no later ages could possibly replicate the apostles' world." Other barriers are seen as "the loss of community," and how "Christianity has no historic core," "mainstream" or "historic norm." (p26)

* - "[W]hat we today call mainstream historical orthodoxy looks more like the view that gained power in Europe...." (p27)

* - "Christianity and Islam have far more in common than many rigorous believers of either faith would care to admit." (p38)

There is also significant discussion that finds consensus among evangelicals:

"So extensive, [under Muslim rule] were persecutions and reductions of [non-Muslim] minority groups, from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century, that it is astonishing how little they have registered in popular consciousness, or how readily the myth of Muslim tolerance has been accepted." (p33)

"Karen Armstrong <www.bit.ly/2MriZ7p> regularly contrasts Muslim tolerance with the bigotry so evident in Christian history. ...

"In reality, the story of religious change involves far more active persecution and massacre at the hands of Muslim authorities.... Armstrong's reference to Christians possessing 'full religious liberty' in Muslim Spain or elsewhere beggars belief." (p99)

Islam's goal "was to create a Muslim world that was just as Christian-free as large sections of Europe would be Jew-free after the Second World War [in which] the largest single factor for Christian decline was organized violence." (p141)

Here is just one of many other observations which provide an idea of how much change has taken place between first and second millennium Christianity: "By the fifth century, Christianity had five great patriarchs, and only one, Rome, was to be found in Europe." (p47)

Then there is Jenkins' professional insight as a historian: "The best reason for the serious study of history is that virtually everyone uses the past in everyday discourse. But the historical record on which they draw is abundantly littered with myths, half-truths, and folk history; historians can, or should, provide a corrective for this. This remark applies particularly to the history of Christianity and of the Christian church, which represents a familiar component of popular knowledge, part of 'what everybody knows.'" (p43)

Back to Holland, who has authored eight books on world history and has been a writer/host <www.bit.ly/2OC5wbL> of BBC Four documentaries. With Dominion, Holland explains, "I have sought ... to trace the currents of Christian influence that have spread most widely, and been most enduring into the present day. (p12)

"Christianity may be the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history, but it is also the most challenging for a historian to write about. (p13)

"To look to the supernatural for explanations of what happened in the past is to engage in apologetics.... (p14)

"[U]ntil quite recently" Holland was like many in the West, who were "reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief might be traceable back to Christian origins. (p15)

"That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I ceased to be Christian. ...

"This book explores what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom, and why in a West that is often doubtful of religion's claims, so many of its instincts remain - for good and ill - thoroughly Christian.

"It is - to coin a phrase - the greatest story ever told." (p17)

Dominion begins in the fifth century BC. Along the way to our present century it is loaded with interesting details and insights by someone who thrives at historical epoch summation regarding growth, decline and interconnectivity. It considers worldview development, conflict and uniqueness regarding religious movements, canons, philosophy, attitudes, controversies, aberrations, heresies, theology and apologetics - occasionally sprinkled with lingering uncertainties over divine inspiration and the miraculous which titillate the secular while challenging the spiritual. Holland adds to this the growth, interaction, obstructions and synthesis of culture, learning, behavior, tradition, government, politics and church/state relations. He also weaves in terminology distinctions, word origin, personalities, practices and recurring themes where Holland picks apart knots from the principal sources and global impact of slavery to the spread of Christianity and the secular response to it.

Holland teases out little-known but forgotten details of long-sustained impact while giving judiciously limited attention to the historically more celebrated. For example, Johann Hilten, the German Franciscan who in 1485 gave a prophecy, including the date of 1516, about "a great reformer" who would bring about the ruin of the papacy. (p300 - something not found in the biographical work that I've read of Michael Massing or Yale Luther scholar Roland Bainton).

In 1519, the year Cortez landed in the New World, the emperor of "Mexica" was accustomed to visit the neighboring massive ruins of previous Aztec capitals as a reminder "that the world was endlessly mutable, governed by cycles of greatness and collapse." (p305)

Holland notes: "The genius of the authors of the United States constitution was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that was the prime religious inheritance of their fledgling nation." (p400) He finds: "Christianity spreads ... through secularization" and "the idea that a religion can be separate from the secular is Protestant." (pp419-20)

He records Darwin's fateful response to Christian care for the weak being "highly injurious to the race of man" because it prevented natural de-selection from running its course. Yet, he "remained sufficiently a Christian to define any proposal to abandon the weak and poor to their fate as 'evil.'" Even so, "Christian notions of charity ... were misplaced. Only to continue to give them free rein, and the people who clung to them were bound to degenerate ... to the detriment of the entire human race." (p442)

In Hitler's insane perspective: "Only people infected by the baneful humanism of Christianity - a cult, it went without saying, 'invented by Jews and disseminated by Jews' - could possibly think otherwise" about the need for his Final Solution. (p479)

Holland isn't shy about speaking his mind. Critics will likely react to some findings, e.g., "Christianity's infinite capacity for evolution" (p427) - and some may say he ignores the central doctrine of redemption. Consider the remark: "Christianity, it seemed, had no need of actual Christians for its assumptions to still flourish." (p533) Just remember, Holland's readership has never been the choir.

He concludes: Dominion is "the story of how Christianity transformed the world" - and how its framework of values permeates Western culture by having "sought to evaluate fairly both the achievements and the crimes of Christian civilization" by standing "within them." (p534)

Christianity is "the most influential framework for making sense of human existence that has ever existed" in contrast to its rivals, who often conclude that "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." (p537)

"Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible." (p539)

"If secular humanism derives not from reason or from science, but from the distinctive course of Christianity's evolution - a course that, in the opinion of growing numbers in Europe and America, has left God dead - then how are its values anything more than the shadow of a corpse?" (p540)

"... the image of a god dead on a cross." (p541)

------

( - previous issue - / - next issue - )