The topic you have chosen is the history of Christianity, which is quite extensive. How did you decide which specific areas to focus on?
There is a lot to cover. that’s 2,000 years of human history, or, as I put it in a recent book, really 3,000 years, because you can’t really separate Jewish and Greek heritage from religion. Now it also covers the whole world, aside from (officially) Saudi Arabia and North Korea.
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what you can do is separate the different threads of your history. the three obvious ones are Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism. what also fascinated me while writing my book were the parts of christianity that were not covered by those categories: the really ancient christianities of the middle east, which in many ways are more in touch with the early christians. the mainstream gives them dismissive names, such as Monophysites or Nestorians. but if you have a clear idea of these different categories, the big three and also the other parts of Christianity that could have been the future of the church, then it becomes a little easier to understand.
Let’s start with Bede’s ecclesiastical history.
Bede lived in the 7th and 8th centuries of the Christian era. he lived in england, and he is very, very conscious of being what he would call an anglo, or an englishman. he’s writing about 130 years after the english first experienced christianity so one of the reasons for choosing bede is that if you belong to any kind of english speaking tradition his story is the first really important piece of that tradition. . If you’re in the US or Australia, in a sense you’re still the heir to this man’s book.
“If you care about numbers, the future is bright for Christianity.”
another reason it’s important is that when he was writing there was no such thing as england. there were these people, many of whom would be called angli, and he calls his book an ecclesiastical history of the English people, the gens anglorum. he doesn’t use the word ‘england’ because it didn’t exist yet. Bede is actually one of the people who creates this sense of Englishness, and he’s very much associated with the idea of church. his book is a celebration of the english becoming christian and, in the centuries after him, these people, the angli, will think of themselves as one nation, england. it is a very important part of history, the first real and proper history that the English wrote about themselves, and it is one of the first parts of church history.
The third thing is that it is a delight. Christian history had lasted six centuries or so; there were little bits of history in some big books. but bede is really readable. he has wonderful stories, human interest stories, and he talked to people, very old men who remembered things before their time. he was careful about obtaining documents, and there are all sorts of little ways in which he feels a bit like a modern historian. I find that very attractive and exciting: that you can meet someone from this faraway place, from this faraway world, and still feel, ‘yes, I could talk to this person.’
Is it a particularly English or local form of Christianity you speak of?
it’s a very rome-centric story, because the mission that came to england was sent by the pope and that was very unusual; popes weren’t good at starting missions at the time. the English were very, very proud of that fact. they were really attracted to rome and united with rome. So Bede’s story celebrates his people’s association with this far away place, Rome, which was the center of the Roman Empire. The people who also shared their land, the British Isles, the Celts, the Irish, the Welsh, and the Scots, were not as loyal to Rome. he makes a big point about this and makes fun of them.
I’ll read you a bit: ‘the British [in other words, non-Angli people] for the most part have a national hatred of the Angli and defend their own bad ways against the true Easter of the Catholic church.’
That was a big point of conflict, at that time, on what date they celebrated Easter. then you get the sense that for him to be in a relationship with roma is what it is to be true and, oddly enough, also what it is to be local, to be where he is in the north of england.
let’s move on to the decline and fall of edward gibbon’s roman empire and how that fits in with the history of christianity.
gibbon is terribly different from bede. beda is such a devoted and enthusiastic church servant (he is a monk). Edward Gibbon was a self-absorbed eighteenth-century Englishman, and yet also a citizen of the world. he felt that the enlightened and skeptical outlook he had was the way people should be. he left us a wonderful account of his life, a rather solemn and not terribly humorous autobiography, in which you get a picture of a snobbish, rather prissy, conceited man who likes everything. Those people don’t always have a good time with the rest of the human race, and like many people who spend their time writing, he was very selfish: Very few people stood in the way of Edward Gibbon and his building a life for himself. measure. I think he once fell in love, but it didn’t really work out. otherwise he was a single man who devoted his time to writing this immense book. I’m just looking at my own copy, which is a beautiful, well-bound copy from 1813. It’s in 12 volumes, which gives you an idea of the scale I was writing on. It is a formidable task to read, but it is very enjoyable, because although Gibbon had no sense of humor about himself, he has a tremendous sense of humor about the rest of the world. all the while there is a wonderful little edge to what he is writing. it’s a distancing thing, but it also incorporates human sympathy for the past. I think he may have enjoyed the past more than the present.
In terms of your specific argument, that Christianity helped cause the collapse of the Roman Empire by, among other things, preaching “patience and timidity,” has it been confirmed by modern scholarship?
not. For starters, the book is called “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” but it covers 1,500 years, from Augustus to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks. it’s absurd to call that a “decline and fall” story, it’s too long. what modern historians would say is that this is a story of transformations, and one of those transformations was the alliance between the emperors and Christianity, which made the empire very different. Far from the empire falling after Christianity, it lasted another 1,000 years, in the form of Byzantine Christianity in Constantinople. so that idea doesn’t really work. But what you do see in Gibbon is a very encouraging rejection of priestcraft, the church’s claims to absolute authority, and the church’s attempts to boss the people in their lives. It is an attitude that seems very important to me today. i would love to hear gibbon’s comments on fundamentalism in the united states or in saudi arabia and pakistan. he would be scorching in what he said. in his day the great enemy was the roman catholic church, but all the same applied. he was not an atheist, he was not anti-religious, but he was anti-clerical, he distrusted the clergy, and that seems to me to be a very healthy instinct.
So writing about Christianity in the Roman Empire was just an excuse to be rude to the contemporary church?
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oh, no way. he tells us that great story about going to rome and standing in the ruins of the forum while the friars sang in the background. he was trapped by this great civilization that was in ruins in his day. the end of the 12 volumes is a wonderful portrait of a ruined 15th century Rome, and then she moves back to her own time, and she says, ‘Look! this city is small compared to what it used to be’. there’s a real fascination with pre-christian rome and i think it’s because he felt that rome, once allied with christianity, wasn’t even a patch of what it had been.
your next three books are more recent, but considerably less well known than bede and gibbon…
yes. what I have done so far is give you two of the great classics of Christian history. the other books I have chosen are wonderful forays into particular bits of history and illustrate the way history should be written today.
Tell me about the culture of Protestantism in early modern Scotland.
Firstly, I have chosen a book by a modern American academic, Margo Todd. She is writing about the Scottish Reformation, which produced the Presbyterian Church of Scotland (still the Scottish National Church). traditionally, much writing about the Scottish reformation presents a picture of a repressive and enormously bleak society, and there is something to that. but what margo does is present this wonderfully rich and detailed picture of the lives people led.
It was a very disciplined society. For example, Scottish Protestants invented a new church piece of furniture which they called the Repentance Stool. parish sinners sat on it in church until they had been absolved of their sins. and you think, ‘oh my god, that’s so tyrannical!’, but the best thing about the society he describes is that everyone was involved. the whole congregation looked at these people Sunday after Sunday and then, at the end, the whole congregation welcomed them, hugging them and shaking their hands. this was a discipline that grew out of the lives of ordinary people and gave them a sense of power, because it was a society with no police or security forces to speak of. it was a very scary world where anyone could break out in crime, and you can see how attractive this kind of structure would be to people.
she has the most wonderful stories about these disciplines: for example, a sea captain who was visiting from the netherlands and went out on the town one night and had a great time drinking and fornicating and when he got hungover the next day he He felt so guilty that he went to the local church and offered himself as penance before the congregation. you get the feeling of people struggling with their own consciences and trying to fit into this world. and there is another beautiful story about the stool of repentance. It only existed in Scotland, and an Englishman came to visit Edinburgh one day, and he went to church on a Sunday. he was looking for a pew, and the church was full, but he saw an empty pew out front, and he thought, ‘oh, I’ll sit there, I’m a gentleman, I’m important, and that looks like an important seat,’ so he sat in him, and of course it was the stool of repentance and the whole congregation burst out laughing at the sight of this stupid foreigner sitting where one should never sit. and keep it up. it’s a great book.
was there a big change in scotland between pre-reform and post-reform, or was it always quite strict and severe?
It was an absolutely huge change, part of a true reform of customs. the society went from being a society in which church festivals were very important to one in which discipline was valued. Scottish society was still partying, but it had a rather different relationship with the church. the church was generally on the side of buttoning up after the reformation, whereas before it might as well be on the side of unbridled fun.
so it’s not necessarily a change for the better…
depends on where you start. it’s easy for us 21st century liberals to feel that it was terribly repressive, but if society is constantly on the brink of violence, as that society was, I think we would feel something different about the community disapproving of people who they cross the line. we all make deals with the society we live in, and theirs were just a different set of deals. It is not for us to criticize them.
next is the church in africa, by adrian hastings.
This is one volume in a long series called The Oxford History of the Christian Church. I chose it because its author, who has sadly passed away, was not only a great historian but also a participant and observer. he was a roman catholic priest who went to africa and worked particularly in mozambique. he is one of the few people in modern history who can claim to have single-handedly brought down an empire by reporting, in europe, on the massacres that the portuguese army was carrying out against the local population in their attempt to gain their independence . and he really destroyed the credibility of the portuguese, the last people in europe to really defend their colonial empire. he made it very unpopular in certain circles at the time.
The experience that hastings brought to what he did was quite exceptional, and this story is fascinating. it’s beautifully written, it’s beautifully organized, it’s full of wonderful human interest stories and great sympathy for ordinary people, and it sets standards for the way we all write.
Can you tell me a bit about Christianity in Africa? you’re writing about 500 years of history, right?
more than that, because the christian church has been in africa, in egypt, since the first century of the christian era, and it has been in ethiopia since at least the fourth century of the christian era. that’s the story he tells first: he has the most wonderful chapter on ethiopia, which is one of the weirdest christian stories in the world. They more or less remained Christian, without much contact with the outside world, for centuries, becoming quite strange in the process. and he has a lot of sympathy for it. it tells the story of European colonialists in the 15th and 16th centuries, which is a Portuguese/Spanish story, and it tells the story of the English and their mostly evangelical missionary efforts in the 19th century. It then begins by showing the reader how from that initial mission from abroad, the Africans took over and made this religion their own. It is very good portraying that world of African Christianity.
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Is the Christian church an important part, then, of the history of Africa as a whole?
is absolutely central in the last 150 years. Africa has become half a Christian continent and half an Islamic continent. it has made both religions African, and the destiny of South, West and East Africa is now Christian. it is one of the powers of Christianity and has emancipated itself from any colonial stain. When all the African states became independent in the 1960s, all right-thinking liberals all over the world said, “oh, this is the end of Christianity, it’s associated with colonialism.” the churches just grew and flourished. people trusted them more than politicians. so that is the future of Africa now. you see African church leaders engaging in politics in ways that I would normally deeply disapprove of, and which I think are potentially very dangerous to their moral integrity. but they represent much more authentic leadership than some of the terrible and corrupt leaders of the 1960s and 1970s.
His latest book is The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity.
This is a wonderful book and it takes me right back to where I started: the Christianities we have completely forgotten about. these are the christianities that started speaking the language of jesus christ: he didn’t speak hebrew, he spoke aramaic as his first language. they were the churches of syria, the eastern coast of the mediterranean, and they spread, not west into the mediterranean, but east into what is now iraq, iran, then central asia, and finally china, possibly korea and certainly to japan. They did it in the seventh century. In other words, when Bede was writing in England, there were Christian bishops in the Chinese empire. This historian, Christoph Baumer, has produced a beautiful illustrated book. he has traveled to china, central asia and india, taking beautiful color photos. the book is a delight to flip through, but it is also a very capable history of this virtually lost Christianity. he’s swiss, so it’s actually a translation of miranda g henry’s german.
Is this a more authentic Christianity, would you say?
It is a Christianity that is, in many ways, closer to the Christianity of the generations after Jesus Christ. whether that is more authentic is debatable, but it is a Christianity that rejected much of what the Mediterranean churches said Christianity was. There was a great church council, within the empire, at a place called Chalcedon in AD 451, which established what the imperial Christians wanted to say about Jesus Christ. the representatives of the eastern churches either didn’t go to that conference, or they went and said, ‘well, we don’t agree with you and we’re not going to sign this agreement’ and that was one of the big turning points for the church. those eastern churches could easily have been the future of the church, and the center of christianity might as well have been baghdad and not rome, because the bishops of this eastern church had as many people under their pastoral care in the 7th and 8th centuries as they did made the Bishop of Rome. if one of these bishops had converted a chinese emperor like constantine, the roman emperor, he might have had a completely different future of christianity. but the arrival of Islam prevented it.
How is Christianity different?
is a different view of how the human nature of Jesus Christ relates to the divine nature. this eastern church tried to keep them further apart. they did not feel it was reverent to conflate the idea of god with that of humanity as much as the frankly compromising formula of the council of chalcedon did. One consequence of this is that they had a rather optimistic view of human nature.
because if you say there is a different human nature than jesus christ, along with his divine nature, you can say, “well, that human nature is a lot like us.” you can aspire to be like god, and it can put a terrible responsibility on you. some of the monks in this tradition were austere and wild people who punished themselves to be as pure as possible.
and the patriarch of this church now lives in chicago?
have suffered terrible, terrible disasters in the last 150 years. the ottoman empire had tolerated them and given them a place of honor in its organization, but in the 19th century a terrible intolerance set in, I think out of anger against the west. These Christians suffered, and have been suffering more and more during the 20th century. virtually all of them have had to flee baghdad. And so you end up with many of the leaders in exile, in Australia or Chicago. it is a wretched story of persecution and suffering.
You have studied the course of Christianity for the last two thousand years. what is your forecast for the future? is it increasing?
is increasing tremendously. it is the largest religion in the world, and there is no sign of its declining. In Europe, it is becoming a minority practice, but Europe is completely out of the ordinary. maybe there are billions of christians we don’t even know about in india and china. if you care about numbers, the future is bright for Christianity. it’s all kinds of different forms of Christianity, you can’t really say yet which form is going to dominate. my own selfish hope is that no form will dominate. it is very bad when an identity of a religion becomes the main dog. but my money is on Pentecostalism, and whatever happens after Pentecostalism (no, not necessarily the version that jumps up and down, merry, clap, tambourine). Pentecostalism represents listening to the spirit, not trusting the text, the bible all the time, and much of its success has had to do with going beyond words, because that too can cross cultures.
What is it about Christianity that makes it do so well?
One of the reasons for its success is that it empowers people, especially those who don’t feel empowered in any other way. If you look at the enslaved peoples in the southern part of the United States in the 18th century, these are people who had no other choice in their lives. One thing evangelical Christianity offered them was a choice: to choose to turn to Jesus. instantly that gives you back a sense of self-respect. over and over again, in all sorts of different societies, it’s that feeling that however unlucky you are, however powerless you are politically, you have access to a different kind of power. that image of a man who died on the cross, absolutely helpless and yet has more power than you could ever dream of, that is a constant at the core of Christianity.
do you think that’s why it’s becoming less important in europe, because people don’t feel so powerless anymore?
When your life is settled, that can be a very good reason not to need it. but that sounds complacent. I think another factor in Europe is that we experienced first hand the effect of the ordered ideologies during the 20th century. we saw what it was like to offer people a simple path to salvation, and some of those paths were apparently non-religious: Nazism, Stalinism, Communism. Christianity didn’t fare very well in its encounters with these totalitarian ideologies, and I don’t think Europeans have forgotten that.
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