Christianity’s Enduring Legacy

Tom Holland On Christianity’s Enduring Legacy | History Extra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"‘What do you see as the key influences on Christianity from the ancient world?’

‘Well, the obvious influence, of course, is the inheritance of Hebrew Scripture. There's a temptation to say Judaism, but I think it's a mistake to think that something called Judaism exists in the lifetime of Jesus. What there is, is something that is called in Greek Eudaismos [sp?] i.e. Jewishness, which covers the whole range of Scripture, of practice, of sense of nationhood, of ritual practice. One of the things that is distinctive about this is really that it's probably best to think of it as being points on a spectrum, points on a bandwidth. And the two ends of that bandwidth are defined by the fact that the God of the Jews is very distinctive.

On the one hand, he is the god of Israel, he has a personal covenant with the children of Israel. On the other end of the spectrum, he is the God who has created all the heavens and the earth, and therefore is the fashioner of every human being who lives. So what emphasis do you put on him? Do you put an emphasis on him as as a kind of ethnocentric god, a god who is who is primarily concerned with with the children of Israel? Or do you put an emphasis on him as a kind of universal God who cares for all the peoples of the world.

And in a sense, what emerges as rabbinical Judaism is the form that that emphasizes the status of God as the God of Israel. And what becomes Christianity is the form that emphasizes his role as a universal deity. So that, of course, is the overwhelmingly significant influence, that really is what Christianity emerges from, but it's seasoned with all kinds of other influences.

It’s seasoned by the inheritance of Persian dualism, which it's absorbed through the Jewish inheritance. It's born into a world that is culturally deeply saturated in Greek concepts, Greek language, Greek notions, Greek philosophical notions. So these two are part of what informs it. And then of course, it's born into a self proclaimed universal Empire, the empire of Rome, and the circumstances of its emergence, this proclamation of a son of a God, who has come to rule an entire world. This is clearly influenced by and a reaction against the Roman portrayal of Augustus, who is the son of Julius Caesar, the deified, Julius Caesar, also the son of a god, also with claims to a universal rule, and whose enthusiasts proclaim hew and [sp?] gaily on the good news of the Augustan peace, And so it's possible to see Christianity as well as a kind of parody of the Imperial cult.’

‘What do you think made it so successful in its early days? What enabled it to spread so quickly, in a way that other similarly *something* cults hadn't?’

‘Well, I think I mean, clearly part of it is that it does fuse together so many disparate cultural elements at a time where the Roman Empire is serving as a kind of melting pot, and it does much more successfully than almost any other kind of philosophy or cultic practice. Beyond that, what it offers to non Jews, in a sense is all the riches and the kind of the theological potency of Jewish scripture and Jewish practice, without actually having to go through what for men is the most unsettling demand, which is it circumcision. So that's the huge appeal. But I think that also in a world that is governed by power and by brutal displays of power. And the most terrifying image of that power really is the cross on which people can be nailed at the whim of any provincial governor.

It offers a reassurance that actually those who've always been despised, those have always been at the bottom of the pile, those who've always been liable to the most brutal and sordid executions actually are as close to if not closer, the omnipotent deity who’s fashion the heavens, the earth, and the rich and the powerful. And this is an enormously potent concept. And it's one that clearly people find spiritually satisfying, but also as the church grows, so also that does the church come to provide practical sustenance. It effectively comes to provide a welfare state.

And so the church as it grows, the kind of cuckoo in the Roman nest, ultimately comes to kind of provide a shadowy state within the state because it's bishops, it's our figures of an awesome authority of a kind that that any Roman would respect. But it also provides famine relief, it provides help to those who've been imprisoned, it provides sanctuary for orphans or for widows, or for the old. Essentially, it provides everything that we today would look for in a welfare state. And there is simply nothing comparable to it in the Roman world.

And so you can see why all of these circumstances would combine to make it very, very popular to large classes of people. And then of course, when Constantine converts, and it becomes the official Imperial cult, and of course, it has all that weight behind it as well. And so it's not surprising that its growth accelerates prodigiously.’

‘So how integral is the Roman adoption of Christianity to its long term success?’

‘It's a very good question. It's been an enduring ambivalence in the heart of Christianity, that it rejects Empire, it rejects power, it praises those who are at the bottom of the pile, the first will be last and the last will be first. This is Christ's own message. However, the paradox is that Christianity becomes the Imperial cult. And then over the course of 2000 years, it's spread and grown to become the most hegemonic way of understanding the world that humanity has ever devised. And so its very power, its very spread, its very hegemony, has caused Christians and even more post Christians a great deal of anxiety'...

‘There's a tension at the heart of Christian universalism, and it's there right from the beginning. So Paul, right into the Galatians, preaches this new covenant. The Old Covenant, that Moses brought the children of Israel, no need for it anymore, because there's this new covenant, written in the blood of Christ on the cross. And that means that there is no Jew or Greek, he says. No slave or free, man or woman, because all are one in Christ. Now, that's a model of universalism, a dissolution of difference, that that we today find enormously appealing, and that I think is largely because we remain its heirs.

But if you are a Jew, and you don't want to have your distinctiveness, you don't want to have your personal covenant with God dissolved into this kind of Universalist mush, then what do you do? Well you say, no, I don't want that, I want to stay as I am, please. And that then, of course, generates resentment among those who say, well, you should, you know, forced to become part of our universal brotherhood of man.

And once you get Christians who are armed with swords, or, you know, horses or guns in the case of the Conquistadores, then you can essentially justify conquering people who are not Christian, who reject the gospel as as an expression of God's will, and indeed, can provide a kind of fanaticism, that makes quite effective conquerors of Christians. But at the same time, you have the problem that, first of all, what do you do if people don't want to be part of your universal Christian order? And secondly, if Christ was crucified, suffered death under an oppressive Empire, and you've now become an oppressive Empire, then doesn't that mean that actually it's those who are suffering under the Empire who are closer to Christ. So the very process of Imperial conquest, if you're a Christian, inevitably throws up reactions against it, both among those who are the conquerors, so people like Las Casas in Spain, and then Quakers in New England and North America, and then in due course, among those who have actually been conquered and who absorbed, Western ambivalence is about Empire.

So that is why essentially, the paradox of Christianity is that it simultaneously, it inspires people to aspire to conquer the whole world, bring the whole world to Christ, while also suffering from the anxiety that doing that is somehow to betray the example of the crucifixion. And that's a tension and a paradox that continues to lie at the heart of the West today. I mean, it may be secularized, but it's still absolutely there.’

‘And do you notice differences in the way that Christian countries and empires have behaved over history compared to say, Muslim ones or even say China, things like that? Can you see differences in behavior?’

‘I think there is a much greater ambivalence among Western empires than say, among the caliphate, Muslim empires. I think that the mandate for conquest in Islam is much clearer. Certainly, that's how historically it's been understood. That doesn't mean that Christians haven't been just as brutal and just as concerned to conquer that and they clearly have, but I think the ambivalences have been much greater.’

‘An interesting point you raised in the book is how Christianity has really shaped other religions, and even the concept of them being a religion’...

‘We talked about the saeculum, this eternal flux. Counterpointed against that is the bond that you as an individual Christian can have with God. And bond is in Latin is a religio and a religio in classical Latin meant anything that established a bond with a god, so a festival, a priesthood, a sacrifice, something like that. In the Christian era religio comes to signify those who have a particularly close bond with God, who consecrate themselves to God as a bond. So monks, nuns, hermits, people like that.

With the Reformation, this concept of a personal bond with God becomes democratized. Everybody has it, monasteries get closed down. Every individual Protestant has a religio with God. And so a two fold understanding of what in English comes to be called religion, it gets anglicised as religion. On the one hand, a religion is something that's personal to a believer, it's, you know, what religion do you have? What are your personal beliefs? What is your personal relationship to a deity, that's what a religion is. Simultaneously a religion is something that can be seen as distinct from something called, again, it's been, saeculum is emphasized to the secular.

So religion is something distinct from the secular. And by the 18th century, 19th century, when the British are expanding across the world and taking their language and therefore these concepts with them. The idea that something called religion, the idea that something called the secular exists, is taken absolutely for granted by not just missionaries, but by everybody going out to other civilizations.

So in India, people arrive, British arrive in India, and they start saying, well, what religion do the people of India, who they call the Hindus, you know, what religion do Hindus have? Well, there's the religion of the Muslim Hindus, there’s the religion of the Christian Hindus, and then there's the religion of all the other Hindus. And in time, this religion of all the other Hindus comes to be called Hinduism. And Hindus comes to be acquainted with those who practice the Hindu religion. And the British take for granted that there is something called Hinduism, which exists distinct from everything else in India, all the great swirl of its, the way that people live their lives, cultures, everything.

And in time, this is an idea that Indians themselves come to take on, so that by the time the Raj comes to an end, India proclaims itself to be a Secular Republic, with a notion that there are religions - Hinduism, Islam, whatever, absolutely woven into the fabric of the Indian Constitution. And, as a great Indian scholar has said Christianization proceeds in two ways. It proceeds through conversion, which doesn't happen in India. And it proceeds through secularization, which really has happened.

And I think a large part of what's happening in India at the moment with Modi, and the rise of what is called the Hindu right, is a kind of reaction against that. A kind of recognition that actually, the secular isn't something that is universal, it's not a kind of given, it's not something that's just there, like the oxygen we breathe in. That in fact, it's very, very culturally contingent, and it's a legacy of the British imperial period. And so that's why they want to get rid of it. Difficult to get rid of it, though, because it's become an idea that so embedded in the way that people and not just Christians see the world, but it's almost impossible to kind of imagine a world where that that notion of the secular doesn't exist.

Likewise, with Judaism, and with Islam, much the same process happened, except Jews is kind of fascinating example, because they are actually living within Christendom, within the Christian world. And they had always seen themselves as belonging, not to anything called a religion. I mean, this is an alien, wholly Christian way of conceptualizing things, they see themselves as belong to a people, they are the people of Israel. But what happens in the 19th century, with the French Revolution and the emancipation of Jews, is that they're offered citizenship. But they have to accept that they do not belong to a distinct people, that the laws of Moses are given no status at all, under the constitutions of the emergent European states in the 19th century. And Jews have to accept that they belong to something called a religion, not to a people. And so over the course of the 19th century, you see, Reform Judaism emerged as a kind of almost overtly Protestant attempt to satisfy that.

And much the same thing is happening, again, with Islam. That, again, Muslims don't have an idea of something called Islam as if that's a religion. It's only gradually over the course of the 19th and 20th century that that idea comes to be taken on board by Muslims. And that's why you will often see among Muslims who reject secularism, that they will avoid using the word religion, even if they’re native English speakers. They'll use the word deen, which is conventionally translated as religion but has a very, very different signification. Because again, I think they recognize that, to use these words, and to apply them is inherently to Christian eyes, something that previously had been uninfected, as they would see it by this.’

‘And you even go so far in the book as to say that groups like Islamic State themselves are to some extent heirs of this Christian tradition’

‘Yeah, well, what happens in the Muslim world over the 19th century is that the British, for instance, when they are approached by the Sultan to join Ottoman forces in the Crimean War, one of the conditions is that the Sultan has to crack down on the slave trade. And they're Muslim scholars, this seems bizarre. Why would they want to do that? Slavery is something that every society has practiced. It's sanctioned in the Quran, it's sanctioned by the example of the Prophet, it's sanctioned in the Hadiths. Why would they want to do that? And the British say, you’ve got to do it, because it's the right thing to do. And in saying that, they're trying to disguise the fact that actually they think it's the right thing to do, because a distinctively evangelical brand of Protestantism has convinced the British that it's the right thing to do’

'People take for granted concepts like the secular concept like religion, things like that. So on that level. But I think they're also very engineering on the level of ethical and moral assumptions. So if we look at the concept of the woke, the idea that that you get awakened to a proper understanding of how things should be seen, and invariably, being awakened, becoming woke, seeing the light, enables you to recognize that it's those who are downtrodden, those who are marginalized, who actually have the highest status. And, you know, this is absolutely a very strange way of understanding things. And yet, people who advance that can take it completely for granted that it's the right thing.

And the only reason they can take for granted that it's the right thing is that they live in societies that are so saturated with Christian assumptions, that you don't need to be a Christian, just to take it for granted. The question is how long these assumptions will last without the kind of seedbed of actual Christian faith and practice? And I don't know the answer to that. I mean, it's, you know, it's one of the most interesting questions that we face in the future, is whether assumptions bred of Christianity can survive decline of Christian faith'…

‘Do you think this profound Christian legacy that we have that's been here in the west for, say, 2000 years, has that on balance been a good thing?’

‘That begs an enormous question as to what is good? And essentially, our definition of what is good and bad, remains a Christian one. And if we judge Christianity and say it's been bad, the paradox is that we judge it to have been bad by Christian standards.’

‘It's failed to live up to its own standards.’

‘But without Christianity, we wouldn't have those standards by which to judge it. I think that that's a question for moralists, and theologians’"