A few weeks ago I was handed a leaflet by a US missionary. It contained a sequence of statements — Man was created; Man sinned; Man died; Man repented; Man entered Eternal Life. Each statement was accompanied by two or three sentences from the Bible as would-be affirmation of their truth, each with chapter and verse duly appended.
This kind of fundamentalist mindlessness was as far removed as it’s possible to be in the Christian context from the sublime sanity, historical breadth and intellectual integrity of Diarmaid MacCulloch in his magnificent History of Christianity, newly out in a massive paperback from Penguin this month. He’s Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford, and his authoritative but eminently readable book stands in the best traditions of that university — non-doctrinal, yet replete with sympathy for its subject while maintaining an objective distance from it.
MacCulloch explains his position in an Introduction, saying it’s something the reader has every right to know. His job as a historian, he says, doesn’t give him any special capacity as an arbiter of the truth or otherwise of a religion, but its history is something that is undoubtedly real. His stance, he says, is that of a candid friend of Christianity. That he was once ordained as a deacon in the Church of England, but then progressed no further, should be added to this piece of self-description.
As for his aims, he states that modern historians have a duty to promote sanity and to curb the rhetoric that breeds fanaticism, because there is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, “which is invariably history oversimplified.”
Many of MacCulloch’s statements in this book support this even-handed approach. He speaks, for example, of “one of Christianity’s most noble and dangerous visions, the Roman papacy.” His entire account is full of skepticism and an awareness of ambiguity or difficulties, pointing out for instance how little of the familiar Christmas story is really authenticated, and how the various books of the Bible exist in variant texts, and were included or excluded from the final collection as the result of discussions (and probably votes) by a sequence of what we would nowadays call committees. This has been understood in enlightened circles for 300 years, and to take such a collection of old texts, however venerable, and then use them as a basis for telling people how to live their lives, and even enshrining their supposed teachings into punitive laws, is indeed a species of fanaticism. “Maybe the Bible can be taken seriously rather than literally,” the author wisely writes.
I consequently wondered what MacCulloch’s attitude would be to Edward Gibbon, the 18th century anti-Christian historian of the Roman Empire. He only refers to him a couple of times, once to quote one of his most celebrated jokes — that during the pontificate of the lecherous John XII his “rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the tomb of St Peter, lest, in the devout act, they should be violated by his successor.” But Gibbon, who he elsewhere describes as “feline,” is clearly too much of a skeptic for MacCulloch’s altogether more pro-Christian sensibilities.
The scope of this book is immense, as is its subject, though even 1,200 pages can’t encompass every detail of the story. Asia, especially China, gets good coverage, though some territories understandably have had to be left unexamined. But a vast range of Christian experience is represented, from Copts to Pentecostalists, Origen to Francis of Assisi.
At one point he remarks that now, all over the world, “the most easily heard tone in religion (not just Christianity) is of a generally angry conservatism.” The reason for this, he suggests, is that the previously powerful heterosexual male today feels under threat. “It has been observed by sociologists of religion that the most extreme forms of conservatism ... are especially attractive to ‘literate but jobless, unmarried male youths marginalized and disenfranchised by the juggernaut of modernity’ — in other words, those whom modernity has created, only to fail to offer them any worthwhile purpose.”
MacCulloch’s overview is that Christianity’s history has been extraordinary and that it is far from over. (The book’s subtitle “The First Three Thousand Years” refers to the author’s belief that for a thousand years before the life of Christ both Greco-Roman and Judaic traditions were spawning ideas that were to find an eventual place in the new religion). It is possible to take another view, however.
This is that what the world is now ready for is a new faith altogether. This will be one that is not based on a world-view rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean of 2,000 years ago, but encompasses the universe as it is now understood, stretching billions of light-years in all directions. Whatever might have been responsible for that is unlikely to have been involved in the sacrifice of a god-man to appease the anger of a jealous celestial father.
It will be something that teaches that what is holy is life itself, in all its forms, and so can appeal to all men everywhere irrespective of their cultural inheritance. It will probably be pacifist and vegetarian, and if it owes anything to presently existing religions will derive more from Buddhism than from Christianity. Miracles and holy books will play no part in it, except in so far as all life will be perceived as miraculous, and deserving of veneration. Most importantly, it will accord with everything that has been discovered by science, because these things are undoubtedly all “true,” so must sit without friction in any overarching description of what is the ultimate truth of the universe. And describing what is the ultimate truth of our world, and of all other worlds is, after all, what all religions are essentially about.
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