Christian History: An Introductiom to the Western Tradition

By Diarmaid MacCulloch

First published in 1987, this book has been a primer for theological college students, undergraduates, lay readers and all interested in the history and development of Christianity. Now published in a new and attractive edition with an updated bibliography, Diarmaid MacCulloch still manages to argue his case convincingly that history need not be bo

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Jan 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9780334048831

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Christian History:

an Introduction to the Western Tradition

© Diarmaid MacCulloch 2006, 2012

Published in 2012 by SCM Press

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Previously published in 1987 and 2006 by

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978-0-334-04606-6

Kindle 978-0-334-04607-3

eISBN 978-0-334-04607-3

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Contents

Preface

1 Introduction: What is Christian History?

Part 1: The Building of a Culture

2 The Greek and Roman Roots

3 The Jews and the Gentile Mission (to AD 100)

4 Folly to the Greeks? (AD 50 to 200)

5 Talking about God (second and third centuries AD)

6 Prisoner of the Roman World (first to third centuries)

7 The Christian State (306 to 451)

8 The Parting of the Ways (350 to 1000)

Part II: Through Two Western Reformations 1000–1700

9 The First Reformation (1000 to 1300)

10 The Failure of Centralization (1300 to 1500)

11 The Second Reformation (1500 to 1600)

12 The Expansion of Europe (1500 to 1700)

13 Wars and the Future of Protestantism (1550 to 1700)

Part III: New Worlds

14 Science and Sin (1600 to 1800)

15 Two Secular Revolutions (1700 to 1900)

16 Revolutions of the Mind (1800 to 1900)

17 Constantine’s Church Crumbles (twentieth century)

18 Conclusion

For further reading

Index

Preface

So many debts lie behind the writing of this book that I will only single out a few for particular mention. I am indebted to the late Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton for giving me my training in historical research, to the Editorial Committee of Epworth Press for stimulating me to write this book, to Mr Sean Gill for reading and commenting on part of the text, to the late Mrs Ann Warden for constant secretarial help, and now to Dr Natalie Watson for her expert assistance in renewing this text. As with every teacher who turns to writing, I am chiefly grateful to all those whom I have taught: who with their questions, with their enthusiasm and their boredom have taught me to look at problems afresh, and to look beyond my own priorities and interests.

Chapter One

Introduction: What is Christian History?

History is one of those unfortunate subjects which suffers from the way in which it is taught at school. This is probably less true today than it was a few generations back, but however well schools deal with history there will always be a problem. Like mathematics, it is a subject which demands a large amount of factual input before it begins to make any sense or before it can begin to be used in an exciting way: if maths is built on ‘times tables’, history also has basic building blocks like the dates of the Kings and Queens of England. This book contains some of these building blocks – dates and a narrative of events – yet it also tries to set in motion the questions which historians ask of these events: not just when and how something happened, but why it happened, and what its consequences were. It is when we ask these questions that history can cease to be a dull grind of facts, and become something to enjoy and explore. The ancient Greeks created a goddess called Clio to look after historians, who ought to remember that she started her career as a goddess of song. Woe betide them if they forget that they are supposed to entertain and delight as well as to instruct.

Is history any use? What is the point of spending time reading a book like this? Putting it crudely, it is to stop you going mad. Those who have no history are always on the verge of insanity. When individual people lose their memory, they find it a very distressing experience; history is like a collective memory, the recollections of a nation, of a culture, or of the entire world. When a nation forgets its history, or worse still, invents a history to take the place of the facts, the consequences are tragic. The proof of that can be seen by looking at what happened in Nazi Germany half a century ago; there Hitler began rebuilding a whole society on lies about the past, filling the past with demons, of which the worst were the Jews. Under the influence of these lies, ordinary, decent human beings became accomplices in some of the most horrific crimes which humanity has ever committed. There are plenty of other examples, perhaps the most chilling coming from the world of fiction. In the novel 1984, George Orwell created a world where those in power could never be defeated or removed because they were always right; they were always right because they constantly rewrote the past to show that they were always right. They removed the possibility of change from the world by removing the consciousness from people’s minds that change could take place.

I hope that I can rest my case! However, we might go on to ask if there is any use in making a particular exploration of Christian history. After all, there are some ways in which a historian can never be of any use to religious faith. Jacob Neusner, a historian of Judaism and early Christianity, recently asked ‘what critical historical facts can ever testify to the truth or falsity of salvation, holiness, joy and love?’ There is no answer to that; but there are ways in which history can play a vital role for the Christian faith. I hope that it does not sound too flippant if I describe Christianity as a personality cult: for at the heart of the Christian message is an individual person, an aspect of the God who was, is, and ever shall be, yet who is at the same time a human being set in historic time. The Christian faith necessarily involves a meeting with this person, although Christians have talked about this meeting in a huge variety of ways. All such meetings, the earliest of which are recorded in the canon of the Christian scripture, represent single fragments of the experience of a whole community with a memory over time: the church. The church symbolizes this ever-repeated meeting in its central act: the Lord’s Supper.

Christian faith is thus a great series of ever-changing meetings with an unchanging personality: a series which collectively forms the tradition of the church which in turn regulates its faith. The tradition has a past and a future. In the most solemn statement of this tradition prepared after three and a half centuries’ reflection, the Nicene Creed, there is embedded a historical statement, placed there with what can only be termed calculated effrontery: ‘He suffered under Pontius Pilate.’ Amid statements of eternal truth, we are pulled rudely into the human world: not in the time of any provincial governor, but under Pontius Pilate, at a given moment in the sequence of time.

So Christian faith is profoundly historic, in a way that is not found in great world religions outside the family of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Christian faith therefore has a special relationship with historians, but what is the relationship to be? In the experience of the West, four main attitudes to the writing of history have been common, and I will consider each of them in turn. I will term them the ‘imperialistic Christian’ view, the ‘sectarian Christian’ view, the ‘Liberal Western’ tradition, and the Marxist interpretation.

Imperialistic Christian history

On this view, which has been the most common during the church’s existence, history explicitly reveals God’s purpose, which is working towards his ultimate triumph. The Christian historian’s job is to witness to the unfolding of this purpose in history and to relate it to the community of the faithful. The world is the property of the church – hence my terming the attitude ‘imperialistic’. This approach was inherited by Christianity from ancient Israel, whose sacred books consist of an account of world history uniquely centred on the experience of an insignificant semitic people who played very little part in the calculations of the important states in the ancient world. Great kingdoms which were neighbours of this people but nevertheless did little for good or evil in the career of Israel were liable to be virtually ignored; thus it took the efforts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeologists to discover that the Hittites, far from being an insignificant neighbour of the Israelites, worthy of a casual mention in a list of lesser breeds, had in fact been the masters of one of the greatest empires in the ancient world.

The early Christians found this way of looking at history congenial, particularly as their expectations of an imminent end to the world faded and their interest in worldly affairs grew correspondingly greater. If this world did concern Christians after all, it was up to the church to assess the world’s history as the people of the old dispensation had done. Here was to be found the revelation of God. This impulse was much strengthened by the wholly unexpected change in the church’s fortunes which resulted from the Emperor Constantine’s alliance with Christianity in the fourth century. For Christian historians, Constantine’s action was clearly a direct sign from God of the working out of his purpose, a moment to which all previous history had been moving, and it should influence the way in which history should be narrated. The Roman Empire was now the positive instrument of God, not merely his passive instrument for disciplining the wicked.

However, this view was to be cruelly disappointed by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire during the fifth century. This disaster, and in particular the sack of the ancient Imperial capital by barbarians in 410, prompted Augustine of Hippo, one of the greatest minds of the ancient world and a bishop of the Christian church, to write a weighty book called The City of God which is an extended meditation on the purposes of God in history. I deal with Augustine’s career and this book in Chapter Eight, but we need to note now that this was the most subtle exposition of the imperialistic Christian method which the early church produced; its influence was immense. By dividing the whole of human history into a cosmic struggle between the earthly city (under the control of selfishness and Satan) and the city of God, Augustine was subordinating history to theology; the pursuit of historic facts was subjected to the purposes of the church, which was increasingly claiming the dominant role in Western culture. During the Middle Ages, this ecclesiastical imperialism affected the whole historical process, to the extent that the English monk, Bede, greatest of all medieval historians, popularized a way of organizing chronology which we now take for granted: the dating of events by the birth of Christ, the Year of Our Lord (Anno Domini).

In their intoxication at the central place of the church in European affairs, medieval churchmen forgot the caution and subtlety of Augustine’s historical outlook in The City of God: they constructed schemes which would explain all history. Most influential was that of Joachim of Fiore (see Chapter Nine below), who divided world history into three ages, and predicted that the year 1260 would be a great turning-point. The passing of the year 1260 without notable incident did not dampen people’s enthusiasm for Joachim-like schemes of history; indeed, one of the most potent sources of self-confidence for English Protestantism in its earliest generations after the sixteenth-century Reformation was a similar scheme mapped out by John Foxe in his Acts and Monuments (‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’). His scheme, neatly divided up into units of three hundred years, set out the decline of Western Christianity into popish blindness and its triumphant resurrection in his own time, a new age of victory for Protestantism conveniently opening up on the death of the Catholic Queen Mary of England, and the accession of Queen Elizabeth. It was naturally a popular scheme with Elizabeth’s government, and it gave Englishmen a good sense of their own importance in God’s plans! Although Western history-writing began to take a different direction at this time, similar schemes to that of Foxe, with similar purposes, emerged in nineteenth-century America, organizing history into a series of ‘dispensations’ which were about to be completed by the Second Coming of Christ.

‘Sectarian Christian’ history

An important strain in Christianity, influenced by the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato and the Christian deviations known as Gnosticism, rejects the world and its works, and hence takes little interest in its history; what point is there in learning about the affairs of the world when it is a worthless place? On this view, history is reduced to an exposition of how the Christian community came into being, and how it remained faithful (or not, as the case may be) to its doctrinal standards. This is the sectarian view of history; in contrast to the post-Constantine Christian view of history that seeks to absorb the world into the affairs and concerns of the church, it tries to exclude worldly influences from an understanding of the church’s development.

A trace of this attitude remained in the curriculum of the theological college which appointed me a tutor some years ago. The job advertisement was for a Tutor in Church History; almost from the moment of my appointment, I began biting the hand which was about to feed me by emphasizing that I did not believe in Church History. My colleagues were not appointed to teach Church Philosophy or Church Sociology or Church Psychology of Education; I did not see it as my role to provide instruction solely in the development of solafidianism or in the evolution of liturgical colours. Such instruction would ignore the fact that the church, particularly the Western church, is inextricably bound up from the beginning with the development of the secular culture round it. I hope that this will become obvious as you read this book. It is worth my stating from the outset that I see the most important dates in the history of the church (apart from the coming in flesh of God in Christ) as events outside ‘church history’. They are not the Council of Chalcedon in 451 or the sixteenth-century Reformation, but successively the establishment of democracy in classical Athens (fifth century BC), the various political struggles involving Constantine in the 310s AD, the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, and the French Revolution of 1789. I would be interested to see whether you agree with me after reading Groundwork of Christian History! However, if I reject both imperialistic and sectarian Christian history as models for historical writing, what is left?

Liberal Western history

The tradition of historical enquiry which has become general in the non-Marxist West is not that of imperialistic Christian writing. It lacks a sense of ultimate direction; it has no dogmatic scheme; it is concerned not to illustrate divine purpose, but to provide explanation, to comfort humankind in its perplexities by exploring the causes of the apparently baffling events which surround us. Its origins were with the ancient Greeks, and with two great historians, Herodotos and Thucydides, whose work is described in Chapter Two. Their tradition was replaced by the concerns of Christian history already described, after the Roman Empire was Christianized; however, the revival of classical learning with the last great Renaissance (see Chapter Ten below) brought a revival of interest in the writing of history on these classical lines, a history which could regard itself as ‘scientific’ in the increasingly restricted meaning of the word. No longer were theological considerations to dominate historical enquiry.

In the eighteenth century, the church lost its place at the centre of intellectual life, both in the Catholic and the Protestant world. It was not surprising that the ‘imperialistic’ Christian view of history should give ground to this scientific approach, although it did bequeath to it an idea of direction in history. This was an optimistic society, and it transformed the idea of a guiding hand of God into the notion of a ‘progress’ continually at work improving the lives of human beings. Even for historians who retained a religious faith, this picture of human events stripped of the sacred was very attractive. The concern now became to get behind the web of legend to find out what had actually happened, by the intense study of every available document from the past. The political upheavals caused by the 1789 French Revolution and its consequences suddenly made available vast quantities of documents previously jealously guarded by governments and great families, so historians now had the opportunity to put their plans into action.

The achievements of nineteenth-century historians with this sort of aim were colossal. The greatest of them, the Prussian Leopold von Ranke, produced works which run to fifty-four volumes in the collected edition. For Ranke, this immense labour had a definite purpose, which became clearer as his beloved Germany came out of its early nineteenth-century political confusion and united into an Empire in 1871. The actions of individuals and institutions throughout history had all been directed towards the formation of nation-states like post-1871 Germany; in particular, the history of Europe was now moving steadily to a point where a Protestant Germany would lead its destiny. In Britain, the Cambridge historian Sir John Seeley held a similar view of the British Empire as the focus for his researches. The whole tendency of nineteenth-century historical research in this country has been characterized by the great historian Sir Herbert Butterfield as ‘Whig’ (the name of the dominant political party in eighteenth-century England): in other words, the story of British history was seen as a matter of explaining this country’s inevitable progress to liberal parliamentary government, with all that stood in the way of this aim being a turning from the right road.

So liberal historical writing, under the influence of a secularized version of Christian imperialistic history, gained a sense of purpose and direction in the nineteenth century. However, this sense of purpose was frequently not explicit. So often the sheer burden of detailed and accurate research in the pre-xerox world prevented liberal historians from raising their sights beyond their own research area. In the twentieth century, this often became an escape from the problem of finding a convincing goal for the historical process. The political disasters of the twentieth century, the destruction of Germany, the failure of parliamentary government through much of Europe, the disintegration of the British Empire, all provided good reasons for abandoning the search for a unifying theme in the movement of history. Westerners had been rudely reminded of the brutality of many civilized people in times of stress. The typical attitude of the liberal historian came to be a guarded secular agnosticism, expressed in the rather battered optimism of Dr E.H.Carr in the last words of his book What is History?: ‘I shall look out on a world in tumult and a world in travail, and shall answer in the well-worn words of a great scientist: And yet – it moves.’

Marxist history

During the nineteenth century another development of the Judaeo-Christian imperialist tradition was produced, in direct opposition to the liberal tradition: the Marxist view of history. Although Karl Marx lost any notion of religious faith, his deep grounding in both Jewish and Christian culture made him produce a schematic view of history. Like many of the variants of Christianity, Marxism sees all historical process converging on a foretold end: the classless society in this case. It divides history into a series of periods; yet all this is constructed on a strictly materialist basis, with class interest, economic motivation and control of the means of production as motors of historical change rather than the Trinity or the will of God.

Marxist historical writing has been of great benefit to historians. It has drawn their attention to the importance of economic and social structures in human life, and thus it throws fresh light on the institutions which human society has constructed. No historian of the past can afford to ignore such insights in looking at the past, and the way in which the narrative of this book has been shaped owes much to the legacy of Marxism. Yet Marx was a man of his time, a nineteenth-century figure believing in the inevitability of progress and seeing the passage of history as rather like the scheme of evolution which Charles Darwin had systematized in biology; it is significant that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin (the offer was refused). Marx took his understanding of English history, drawn from his friend Friedrich Engels, as the basis for a scheme which made predictions about the future. Few of these predictions have been fulfilled. The rigidity of the strict Marxist picture of history will no doubt in time make it look as dated as the theories of Joachim of Fiore.

Which method?

It will probably be obvious that of the four methods described so far, I am trying to adopt the liberal Western approach to history in writing this book. The ideal lying behind the method is a commitment to teasing out facts and retelling them in a coherent and neutral way. It has to be said at the outset that this worthy aim is impossible to achieve, for two main reasons: no one is objective, and it is never completely certain what a ‘fact’ is in history.

First, objectivity. As a member of the Christian community, I can never claim complete freedom from bias when I look at its past. Within the Christian community, I have allegiances to particular sorts of Christianity which have been particularly precious to me. With a training as a historian, I can use my professional skills to tell the story as I would like it to be heard. This is not so much a matter of lying, inventing false facts in the manner of Hitler’s Germany or of the State in Orwell’s 1984; it is much more a business of selecting, quietly ignoring some facts and putting the spotlight on others. Every historian, however conscientious, will end up doing this, for a whole variety of reasons of which religious commitment is only one possibility. That is why to assess what a historical event was really like, you must read as many different acounts of it as possible, so that you can raise objections to one version of the story. The historian’s motto should be ‘Yes, but ...’; historians should always be ready to qualify and alter what they are saying. This often makes for a dull and complex story rather than one which is exciting and straightforward, but the complex story may also have its own beauty because it is more like the truth.

But how like the truth can it be? The basic problem with any piece of historical writing is in deciding what a historical fact is, and on what evidence it can be based. Over the last three hundred years or so, we have come to accept that the most authentic facts are those which can be proved by experimental demonstration: an attitude already displayed by the Apostle Thomas when he was first told of the resurrection of Christ. ‘Facts are facts’. However, as soon as we begin looking at history, it becomes evident that there are many degrees of fact, dependent on the amount of evidence available to prove them, the degree of bias which is built into the evidence in the first place, and the possibility or impossibility of there being any evidence at all. For instance, the most pure and trustworthy sort of historical fact is represented by the statement that ‘the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066’. There is plenty of evidence to support this statement; all sorts of events which can be dated interlock with the date of the battle and fix it with a reasonable degree of certainty. More importantly, it is unlikely to be to anyone’s advantage to falsify the date of the Battle of Hastings. Whatever one thinks of the causes or of the outcome of the battle, the date is going to be fairly uncontroversial.

However, let us take another historical statement and see whether we can treat it in the same way: suppose that I, as a professional historian, say that ‘the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century were the scum of the earth’. There are certainly historical statements embedded inside this: there is a date, and a reference to a group of people who with a fair degree of certainty are known to have existed. It might even be possible to bring a fair amount of evidence to justify the rest of the statement: a disagreeable character here, a shabby action there. But even so, I think that anyone hearing the remark might be forgiven for thinking that there was a fair degree of bias involved in the way it was constructed; and they might also think it worthwhile gathering evidence which contradicted it. They might also feel inclined to cast doubt on the value of any other historical statement which I made!

Here, therefore, we have two quite distinct points on the spectrum of historical truth; although these instances may look quite straightforward, there are many more examples which may be less easy to assess. Moreover, there are statements which look like historical facts which can never be such because they are incapable of proof; they are beyond evidence. The Christian doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus (to be more accurate, the virgin conception) is one of these; it is more or less impossible in the twentieth century to observe every stage of the biological processes which lie behind the phenomenon of conception, and at the beginning of the Christian era it would have been out of the question to do so. The raising of Christ from the dead is another such instance. Here the historian can never be of use; with regard to the resurrection, all a historian can do is to point to the effect that it had on other people. So the statement in the Nicene Creed that ‘on the third day he rose from the dead’ is not at all the same sort of historical statement as ‘he suffered under Pontius Pilate’, even though the two clauses look much the same.

In effect, the liberal Western approach to history presents an impossible dream when it tries to give a complete picture of events in history without bias or distortion. If there are ultimate patterns in history, the limits of our minds and perceptions mean that we can never make out their shapes. However, there is no more reason for the historian to give up the struggle to see the patterns than there is for the Christian to give up faith. To write history is an act of faith, and it is an act which can never see complete results; so it can never end.

There are particular limitations on this book which must be realized from the outset. It is a history of Western Christianity: the tradition which stemmed from the church of the Roman Empire to drift apart from the Eastern Orthodox world in the early Middle Ages, the church of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. In doing so, it says nothing about Orthodoxy, and the ancient Churches of the East and Africa beyond Orthodoxy, and if the reader wants to gain a full picture of the riches of Christian experience, the Eastern Christian experience demands to be explored. I make no further apology for this yawning gap in the story, nor for a further feature of the book which may strike home after a few chapters. Once during my time teaching in Wesley College, after four terms taking a particular class through the history of the church in the ancient world and the Middle Ages, one of my students asked in despair ‘But where is the good news in all this?’ It was a fair question, to which I could best reply that all the story was good news. The history of Christianity is frequently sordid and depressing, and very frequently, apparently sacred events turn out to have very secular causes. Christians will remain beginners in their faith if they do not face up to this. The miracle of the church’s story is that after all its mistakes, bewildering transformations and entanglements in human bitterness, it is still there.

How to use this book

One or two technical pieces of advice may help the reader. To give you some shape to the narrative at each point, and to keep as many dates as possible out of the text, each chapter is preceded by a table of dates relevant to its narrative. There is a full index of names and events, and also in an effort to keep dates out of the text, it is in the index that you will find the dates of birth and of death of the various personalities mentioned.

Finally, this book will have failed in its purpose if it is the last work of history that you read. After the Conclusion you will find some suggestions for further reading.

Part I

The Building of a Culture

Chronology for Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The Greek and Roman Roots

It may seem strange to begin a survey of Christian history not in the lands of the Bible, but in a world which knew little and cared less about the Jews: the world of ancient Greece. However, there is good reason for this. Although the life of Jesus Christ seems to have been lived in an entirely Jewish setting, his followers were immediately faced with an ancient and sophisticated culture which filled the minds of anyone who was anyone from Boulogne to Beirut, which had lapped the Himalayas and which would soon spread as far as the remote and backward British Isles: a culture spearheaded by Roman armies, but shaped amid the mountains and islands of Greece. As the church developed, it could not help but be shaped by Greek thought, in the way it organized itself, in the way it talked about moral problems, even in the way in which it tried to form ideas about the man Jesus who was also God.

The attitudes and the thought of the Greeks survived the collapse of the Roman Empire which carried them through Europe, and they did so because the Christian church used them in its own battle for survival. The combination of Greek, Roman and Jewish ideas which lies at the heart of Western European civilization has been one of the most successful cultures in human history; no part of the world today remains unaffected by it, even in settings which have vigorously rejected the West and everything that it stands for. And it is always worth remembering that only where Western civilization has been able to wipe out its rivals has Christianity known massive success. Christian culture and the Graeco-Roman values which it adopted conquered the Americas, smashed the empires of the Aztecs and the Incas and made sure that the New World would be a Christian world, but in the Old World, Christianity has made little impact on Islam, on Hinduism or Buddhism, or on the immensely old and self-confident culture centred on China. Perhaps this lack of success is because Christians still express their faith in thought-forms which were bequeathed them by the Greeks and the Romans, and which do not address the ways of thought and the main interests of the world’s other great faiths. So ancient Greece matters to us.

Early Greece (c. 2200 BC to c. 800 BC)

People speaking an early form of Greek drifted into the Greek peninsula before the beginning of the second millennium BC. By 1400 BC, these peoples had developed their own highly complex and wealthy culture centred on cities and palace-fortresses like Mycenae: hence the name of the Mycenean culture. It was short-lived: in only a couple of centuries, archaeology shows us that its settlements were quite suddenly destroyed. A Dark Age followed, but not an age of complete stagnation. It was during this period that the Greeks started using iron, when previously their technology had been based on the use of bronze; and it was also at this time that the great foundation documents of Greek culture, the Iliad and the Odyssey, came into being.

These two works of literature were as central to the Greek’s image of himself as the Hebrew scripture is to a Jew. Like the earlier part of the Bible, they were composed in a society which knew nothing of the use of writing, and they represent only a fragment of a