Dominion

Everybody seems to be reading Dominion, the latest offering from popular historian Tom Holland.  Everybody has the right idea; this is an excellent book.  If you're not already familiar with Holland, he is a) not Spiderman and b) a writer of gripping narrative history.  If you want to get a feel for the collapse of the Roman Republic, a sense of what it was like to live through, you can't do much better than his Rubicon.  If you want to become acquainted with the Caesars and their world, and if you can stand to wade through the inevitable smut which goes with that acquaintance, then Dynasty is fantastic.  And In the Shadow of the Sword tackles the origins of Islam in a way which is both fascinating and - in the way it challenges orthodoxy - brave.  He has also written other things; I have not yet read them.  So many books, so little time.

Dominion is something a bit different.  It is, if you like, a narrative history of the whole of Western culture, in particular of Western Christendom.  How on earth would you write something like that - and keep it to a size which the average mortal would be willing to read?  Holland does it through snippets, visiting a particular incident and exploring its significance before jumping sometimes hundreds of years to the next episode, all grouped together into three broad eras: antiquity, Christendom, modernitas.  The impression is like a vast picture which has been sketched out, with only some details here and there painted on in full colour.  But those individual episodes are enough to give the shape of what is going on more generally on this vast canvas.  To mix metaphors, through these little tasters one gets the genuine flavour of the different moments, and anyway there would be far too much to digest if you ate everything on the table.

The overall picture, beginning in pre-Christian antiquity, is of a world turned upside down.  In a classical world in which power was everything, the news of the crucified God explodes like a bomb.  Values are decisively changed.  The weak are valued; status hierarchies are upended.  And in the ebb and flow of the centuries Holland shows how this revolutionary message lay behind so many of the cultural movements of the West: from the Christianisation of the Empire, right through to the building of new empires.  The revolution often ossifies - the Papacy under Gregory VII sets out to reform the world in the image of the Gospel, but the same institutions, now settled down and entrenched in power, in the next few centuries become the targets of reformers with the same aim.  The revolution creates tensions - it is Christianity which makes European powers feel superior and therefore entitled to enslave others, but it is Christianity which gives Europeans an uneasy conscience about this state of affairs and ultimately leads to abolition.  The revolution can be and has been misunderstood, misappropriated, misdirected.  But it has kept coming back.

Holland's main thesis is this: that we are so steeped in Christian values that we have forgotten they are not universal.  The modern humanist who asserts the worth and dignity of each individual thinks they are stating something self-evident - so did the French revolutionaries.  But in fact these claims have their roots in Christian teaching.  Even such anti-Christian movements as revolutionary Marxism make no sense apart from the revolution of the cross; why care for the poor and downtrodden at all?  The modern 'woke' scene springs from very Christian apprehensions.  The #MeToo movement only makes sense to us because of hundreds of years of sexual ethics which are rooted in the Christian message.

I find all this very persuasive.  One senses behind the narrative the influence of Charles Taylor - but to be honest, this is much more fun to read than Taylor's magnum opus.

Some quibbles - in a book of such vast scope, some detail necessarily gets left behind.  The treatment of the apostle Paul, and the tension between the law written on the heart and Torah, does not, to my mind, get to grips with the complexity of the issue - in particular, why does the apostle continually cite Torah if he is primarily (only?) interested in an internal law written by the Spirit?  I think that's important, because by the time we get to The Beatles we really do need to understand that 'all you need is love' means something very different on their lips than it does coming from, say, St Augustine - and the difference lies in the objective content which the law of love possesses for the apostolic writers and their descendants.  I'm not saying Holland doesn't see this difference - clearly he does - but that the particular contours need to be brought our more clearly.  But then, this is not a work of philosophy or theology, but history, and as such it really works.

Just a thought about what Christians should and shouldn't do with this book.  Firstly, what not to do: don't make out of the narrative a theology of glory.  'Aha!  Everything good in Western culture comes from Christianity!  Behold, the clear and straightforward link between Christian belief and goodness!'  That wouldn't do justice to the nuanced picture that Holland paints, in which Christian belief has often led to oppression and war; nor would it suit the gospel itself, which as Holland shows is about the triumph of weakness, a victory through obscurity and suffering, not through just being the best.  Then again, we also need to avoid overstating the conclusion.  Holland does argue that many contemporary movements only make sense because of our Christian past; it would be incorrect to infer that they are therefore Christian.  We cannot, in a straightforward way, claim #MeToo or Extinction Rebellion or whatever as Christian movements.

The use we should make of this work is much more limited.  It is helpful to be able to show that the values which many of us take for granted are not, in fact, universally obvious.  The world order which has been shaped by the influence of the West bears the hallmarks of the Christian past.  As Holland argues, even the universal claims of these value systems derive from the universal claims of the gospel.  Perhaps, then, those of us who are Christian apologists might be able to use this work to show that in fact the influence of Christian belief on the world has not been as negative as many of our contemporaries assume - precisely because many of the good things about Western culture which they and we take for granted actually stem from Christianity.

"All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution which has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross."

Theoretically...

Following on from a thought last week, I noticed as I was reading the introduction to Peter Wilson's book on the Holy Roman Empire one more source of conspiracy theory-type thinking: the prevalence of theory over actuality.  Wilson bemoans the way in which historiography of the Holy Roman Empire has run into various dead ends over the years just because the Empire didn't fit in with the prevalent theories.  In the twentieth century especially, post-colonial theory has made the very name of 'Empire' a nasty word, and introduced a whole lot of assumptions about what empires are really like - and never mind that very few of them really match up with the reality of the Holy Roman Empire.  The theory tells us that empires in general behave in this way, so this empire in particular must have behaved in this way - and if it doesn't look like it did, then it must have just been doing it behind the scenes.

In short, a preference for abstraction over detail, and generalisation over the particular, can lead us to keep on making flawed assumptions about what is really going on in any given instance.

(Super)historical Jesus

One of the great things about the annual remembrance of the Passion is that it forces us to recall that Christianity is about events.  That is to say, what we remember is an occurrence, a thing that happened.  The Gospel is not a message based on someone's enlightened thoughts about God; it is not even a message sent straight from heaven.  It is a message about things that took place, in real space and real time.  The Paschal celebration helps us to remember that.  There is time before it, leading up to it, and there is time afterwards, leading away.  We celebrate in a particular place, with particular people - a space that is next to other particular places, inhabited by other particular people.

This is a long-winded way of saying that Christianity is historical.  When Jesus died and rose, he did so in reality, in a moment contiguous with other moments and forming part of a series that includes this moment now, in a space located within that same space in which we live.  The Gospel is a report of that occurrence, coupled to an explanation of its significance.  It is about history.  That is why the only worthwhile apologetic for the Christian is a historical one.  Did this happen, or did it not?  It is this sort of apologetic which is used by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, and before Agrippa.  This stuff happened.  (If it did not, then Christians are pitiful, pathetic creatures).

Having said that, how do we avoid Lessing's ditch?  Lessing's problem was that as a good child of the Enlightenment he felt a universal could not be proved by a particular; specifically, reports of particular miracles, which reach me by perfectly ordinary and non-miraculous testimony, cannot establish the truth of the Gospel.  If all that matters is history, how can I get over the intervening centuries and believe in a report of a thing the like of which I have never witnessed?  If the Gospel is a report of a historical occurrence, why should I believe it when it resembles nothing else in history?

I think part of the answer is to recognise that when the apostolic testimony asserts that these things happened, it does not mean to maintain that they happened in just the same way as all other things.  Perhaps a useful way to put it would be this: the events reported in the Gospel happened within history, but they are not themselves historical events; that is to say, they are not events which stand in an ordinary relation to the other things happening around them.  They are not explicable by reference to their setting, or to the other events occurring at the time.  In fact, whilst at one level the resurrection of Jesus is something that happens in history, at another level it is a thing that happens to history.  This one point in space and time brackets and encompasses all the other points, including this one now.  If there is an epistemological ditch, there is no ontological one.  A historical apologetic can get us to the point of saying: there is a hole here - a thing that does not fit into history.  We cannot explain what came before and after in terms of the ordinary historical sequence.  And at that point, a lot will depend on whether we are willing to consider that history is neither so impregnable nor so linear as we thought.

Historicist

To continue my rambling about my personal political views, let me chip in a very brief post about historicism.  Historicism is the belief that the actual history of a particular person, group of people, or situation really matters.  Unlike more philosophical theories, historicism does not see particulars as reducible (even in principle) to general rules.  There is no overall scheme of things into which particulars must fit.  One cannot, therefore, bring Marxist philosophy (for example) to a situation and seek to present solutions on the basis of that philosophy; one must look at the particular circumstances.  In particular, one ought not to attempt an atemporal analysis, as if this situation had sprung from nowhere - as if it were a generic situation which could have a generic solution.

A grumble: history teaching in the UK is dreadful.  No offence at all is intended to the teachers, who do a grand job with a shoddy teaching philosophy.  When people in politics start to ramble on about British values, and other such twaddle which we supposedly share as a nation, it makes me want to scream.  What we share is history, except we don't know it because we've never been taught it in a coherent way.  And that leads to all sorts of silliness, like British leaders appearing to claim that what really unites us is a sense of fair play (apparently shared with no-one else in the world beyond this blessed isle), or the SNP talking as if Scotland had been somehow conquered and oppressed by England.  All this is due to not knowing the basic story of how we got here.  (Yes, I am suggesting we teach narrative history.  In order.)

Anyway, the point is this: attempting to move forward without looking backward is never going to work.  Being up to date, in and of itself, is of no use.  Being rooted matters.

Revelation and History

Another question which needs to be tackled in constructing a doctrine of revelation is the relationship between God's revelation and history. Here are a few thoughts I've had so far...

1. We must affirm that revelation occurs within history. That is essentially to say that the historical man Jesus Christ is the revelation of God, and therefore (note the logical order, which differs from the temporal) the OT history is the revelation of God. Secondarily, this means that the Scriptural accounts which purport to be historical refer to actual events - they are not myth, or edifying stories designed to convey religious truth. They record events which occurred in the usual way, in connection with other events, through the agency of people (including God) in the space-time universe in which we live.

2. We must deny that history is revelation. Although all the events of history are connected to the events of God's revelation, they are not all revelation themselves. We cannot therefore seek revelation in the history of religions, for example, or - as the older liberals sought to do - in the history of culture more generally. At the micro level, we cannot seek revelation in our own personal history either. This is, I think, what lies behind Barth's much maligned distinction between 'history' and 'sacred history'. The latter occurs within the former, and could be described as its inner logic and justification - but the two are not identical.

3. We need to think carefully about exegesis of Scripture. We can helpfully use information from general history to illuminate our understanding of the Bible, but I think we should be wary of allowing general history to become controlling. The Reformation assertion that Scripture interprets Scripture is to be maintained, albeit in a nuanced way.

4. We must avoid allowing history to judge revelation. Basically, I mean that the events of revelation, which take place within history, cannot be considered purely from a historical point of view. The rules of general history do not take account of the fact that God acts, and perhaps they ought not to. But given revelation, we have to acknowledge that here, in this series of events and supremely in this person, God has acted, and his actions cannot be explained within a general historical framework.

5. We should take care about using arguments from general history in apologetics. I say we should take care; I think we should use historical arguments. But perhaps the only way a historical argument will work is to point out that there is something here that cannot be explained within the framework of general history. In other words, we cannot act as if general history could provide or justify revelation. But we might be able to argue that general history reveals at its centre a hole - and into that hole we can present the gospel, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

Is there anything I haven't thought of?