The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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History: Inventory of Relics

“It used to be believed by the vulgar,” wrote Evelyn Waugh, “that there were enough pieces of this ‘true cross’ to built a battleship.”  Waugh disagreed: “In the last century a French savant, Charles Rohault de Fleury, went to the great trouble of measuring them all.  He found a total of 4,000,000 cubic millimeters, whereas the cross on which our Lord suffered would probably comprise some 178,000,000.”

He concludes: “As far as volume goes, therefore, there is no strain on the credulity of the faithful.”

History: Taste not, touch not

Assmann again, on “the fantastic but probably not totally inaccurate statements made by Herodotus about the purity commandments observed by the Egyptians in their contact with the Greeks and probably with all foreigners.”

Herodotus reports, “No Egyptian would touch a knife or cooking utensil that had been used by a Greek, nor eat the mean of an animal slaughtered with a Greek knife.  Nor could any Egyptian ever bring himself to kiss a Greek on the mouth.”  Assmann qualifies this by saying that many purity regulations applied only to Egyptian priests, who had “to preserve the sacred rites from profanation, not necessarily by foreigners but by the uninitiated.”

The relevant passage is from Book 2 of The History:

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History: Ritual as Cosmogony

In his The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs, Jan Assmann notes the two purposes of rituals that mimicked “cosmic life and the cyclical recurrence of its natural phenomenon: day and night, summer and winter, the motions of the stars, the inundations of the Nile, sowing and reaping, decay and regeneration.”

The assumption is that the sacred is timelessly unchanging, and that ritual is a prophylactic against change: “The purpose of this ritual mimesis was dual: first, it was designed to incorporate the human world and its routines into the sacred circularity of cosmic life, thus countering decline and decay with a chance of regeneration (which in Egypt meant in the first place ensuring the prospect of new life after death); second, it served to sustain cosmic life in its circularity, not merely to ‘keep’ time by observing calendrical progress but actually to generate it.  The ritual calendar was not just a representation of the cosmos, but a cultural form that stabilized the cosmos it represented.  The motive for repetition was not . . . that the gods are conservative and only want to hear the same formulas repeated in perpetuity, but the conviction that the cyclical stability of the cosmos is constantly in jeopardy and has to be sustained by ritual repetition.  The ritual institutionalization of permanence thus has a cosmic significance: it generates cultural order with a view to sustaining cosmic order; memoria is raised to the rank of cosmogony.  The world is commemorated in order to counterbalance the perpetual drift toward decline, inertia, entropy, chaos.”

History: History and Divination

We all realize that seeing the future requires prophetic inspiration.  But we think that the past will be accessible to us if we can accumulate sufficient evidence.

Some of the ancients knew better.  Josephus wrote that “the prophets alone had this privilege [writing history], obtaining their knowledge of the most remote and ancient history through the inspiration that they owed to God, and committing to writing an account of the events of their own time just as they occurred.”

Any sight beyond the present requires divine inspiration.  Discerning the shape of the past is as much a product of divination as foreseeing the shape of the future.

History: Mystique of California

Jean Baudrillard (America) observed that the mystery of California, its mystique and myth, are rooted in its desert setting:

“The mythical power of California consists in this mixture of extreme disconnection and vertiginous mobility captured in the setting, the hyperreal scenario of deserts, freeways, ocean, and sun. Nowhere else does there exist such a stunning fusion of a radical lack of culture and natural beauty, of the wonder of nature and the absolute simulacrum: just in this mixture of extreme irreferentiality and deconnection overall, but embedded in most primeval and great-featured natural scenery of deserts and ocean and sun — nowhere else is this antagonistic climax to be found.

“Elsewhere, sites of natural beauty are heavy with meaning, with nostalgia, and the culture itself is unbearable in its seriousness. The strong cultures (Mexico, Japan, Islam) reflect back to us the image of our degraded one, and the image of our profound guilt. The surplus of meaning in a strong, ritual, territorial culture turns us into gringos, zombies, tourists kept under house arrest in the country’s natural beauty spots.

“No such thing in California, where there is total rigour, for culture itself is a desert there, and culture has to be a desert so that everything can be equal and shine out in the same supernatural form.”

History: Why Churches Die

One of the themes of Jenkins’s The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died is that Christianization is reversible: Churches die.  How to account for it?

Jenkins He cites on Payne Smith, a Victorian scholar, who wrote in the introduction to the works of John of Ephesus that “the young Mahomet, repelled in his first inquiries by the idolatrous aspect which Christianity outwardly bore, was rising to be the instrument of God’s just anger against the Eastern Church.  For the picture which John has drawn for us . . . of the narrowness and bigotry, the fierce strifes, the want of self-restraint, the injustice and cruelty and utter absence of Christian charity, which characterized all parties in his days alike, make us feel that the times were ripe for punishment.”

Jenkins observes, “Obviously, such opinions carry little weight for most mainstream Christians today.”  Call me “a modern reader of literal inclinations” or a non-mainstream Christian, but I fail to see why Jenkins is so skeptical.  Suppose we just lopped off the divine dimension of Smith’s explanation: Would internecine conflict among Christians, bigotry, injustice and cruelty be a sufficient explanation for the failure of these churches?  Or: Would it be a sufficient explanation if we noted that the churches of John’s day failed entirely to live up to the demands of their professed Lord, that they were hypocritical, that their actions belied their proclamation that Jesus had come to renew human life?  Why does adding the theological dimension make this explanation less weighty?

Jenkins characterizes this style of explanation as an “Old Testament perspective.”  He should read Revelation 2-3 again.

History: Wars to End Wars

Friedman notes that the end of major wars frequently evokes an unwarranted euphoria.  Every war is considered not only a war to end wars, but a war that has ended war: After every major war – what we might call systemic war in which the entire international system convulsed – there was a belief that in the future war could be contained.  After the Napoleonic Wars, there was the Congress of Vienna.  After World War I, there was the League of Nations.  After World War II, there was the United Nations.  After the Cold War, there was the New World Order.”

When the Soviet bloc fell, US policymakers tended to follow some version of Fukuyama’s thesis about the end of history.  From here on out, the US’s role would be to facilitate global trade. A few rogue states remained, but they were nuisances rather than strategically important players on the global stage.  Even when al Qaeda successfully attacked the US, the attack was seen as the work of irrational fanatics, rather than a deliberate, well-planned, and brilliant strategic chess move against the US’s global position.

The US was completely unprepared for an enemy like al Qaeda: “Everything that has happened after [9/11] was a series of hastily sketched improvisations. . . . Apart from killing thousands of Americans, [the attacks] left the U.S. defense and intelligence establishment at an utter loss as to how to respond.  There was no man for defeating Al Qaeda.  Everything that followed, most especially the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was a consequence of this fundamental fact.”

History: America’s Secret War

A lot has happened since George Friedman published his America’s Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies in 2003 (with a paperback edition in 2005).  Still, Friedman’s book is the most satisfying treatment of recent American history that I’ve found.  Founder and director of the private intelligence organization, Stratfor, Friedman speaks with authority, clarity, and balance.

The early chapters of his book examine the rise of al Qaeda and the strategy behind 9/11.  Though he disputes the claim that the US created al Qaeda, he argues convincingly that the US created the conditions in which al Qaeda would be created.  Simplified, the story is this:

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History: Right Reformation

Many of the debates in the Reformed world these days have a sizable church-historical, historical-theological component.  What was the Reformation about?  How much was it in continuity with the patristic and medieval past?  To what extent did Protestant Orthodoxy or American revivalism mislead the original Reformation vision?  Some position themselves as defenders of the Reformation against dangerous deviations, but for all the respect offered to the Reformation among contemporary Reformed theologians, many function with a strangely ahistorical conception of the Reformation.  It’s as if the Reformation Confessions dropped from heaven, written immutably on golden tablets.  As James Payton says at the beginning of his Getting the Reformation Wrong: Correcting Some Misunderstandings, “one way in which some people get the Reformation wrong is by overlooking or neglecting its historical rootedness.”

Payton’s book is a superb antidote to this error, and also offers a neat summary of some of the main historical issues surrounding the Reformation.  He reviews the clamor for “reform in head and body” in the late medieval world and the complex relations between “Ren” and “Ref,” in the process making a fine case for seeing the Ren as a fundamentally Christian movement.  He shows how much the Reformation moved forward by misunderstandings, and reminds us of the painful conflicts among the Reformers themselves.  He devotes balanced chapters to sola fide (justified by faith alone, never by a faith that is alone) and sola Scriptura (always combined with respect for the church fathers and the best of the medieval tradition).  In short, this is a sold, thorough, fairly brief, very readable introduction to the Reformation and Reformation studies that never loses sight of the contemporary relevant of church history.

In two areas, Payton’s book will be controversial.  In both cases, Payton’s on the side of the angels.

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History: War

In his best-selling WAR, Vanity Fair‘s Sebastian Junger explains how war envelops the soldiers who make it.  Some representative quotations:

“Almost none of the things that make life feel worth living back home are present at Restrepo, so the entire range of a young man’s self-worth has to be found within the ragged choreography of a firefight.  The men talk about it and dream about it and rehearse for it and analyze it afterward. . . . It’s the ultimate test, and some of the men worry they’ll never again be satisfied with a ‘normal life’ . . . after the amount of combat they’ve been in.  They worry they may have been ruined for anything else.”

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History: Gnostic “religion”

As William Cavanaugh details (The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict), the concept of religion is an invention of the late medieval and early modern West.  In the theory of religion as developed by Deists and Freethinkers, there was an original, generic, universal religion distinct from the dogmatic and liturgical particulars of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.  Particular dogmas and liturgical forms, concocted by priests, corrupted the original purity of religion and produced what Kant called “ecclesiastical faiths” instead.

Cavanaugh’s formulation of this theory highlights its assumptions: “Any particular doctrines and rites that arise in positive religions are a dilution of the original purity of the natural instinct as it becomes weighed down by the body and the material world.”

Which is to say: Religion is pure until it is touched by time and matter.  ”Gnostic” is not here a particular type of religion; rather, the very idea of “religion” is gnostic.

History: Middle East Christians

As Jenkins recounts it, some Christians in the Islamic Middle East chose a path of separation, the “creation of a protected Christian reservation.”  that was tried with the creation of Lebanon after World War I, but that experiment ended in civil war and a greatly reduced Christian population.

Others became activists and entered Muslim public life with the aim of creating “a progressive and nonsectarian Middle East in which Christians and other minorities would be able to survive in any nation.”  Christians were thus “influential in  Communist parties, while others founded influential Pan-Arab movements.”  It was Michel Aflaq, from a Greek Orthodox background, who in 1947 founded the Baath party that ruled in Iraq and still rules in Syria.  Christians were also active in the formation of Palestinian resistance movements against Israel: “Much of the sensational Palestinian terrorism across the globe in the 1970s was planned and orchestrated by Christian commanders like George Sabash, Wadih Haddad, and Nayef Hawatmeh, who often operated in alliance with the Baathist regimes.”

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History: Interfaith

Jenkins again: “in 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in the Chinese imperial capital of Chang’an, but was unable to translate the Sanskrit sutras he had brought with him into either Chinese or any other familiar tongue. . . . He duly consulted the bishop named Adam . . . . Adam had already translated parts of the Bible into Chinese, and the two probably shared a knowledge of Persian.  Together, Budhist and Nestorian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes of Buddhist wisdom. . . . Scholars still speculated whether Adam infiltrated Christian concepts into the translated sutras, consciously or otherwise.”

Adam’s work had a significant impact on Japanese Buddhism.  Japanese monks took these translations back home with them and “these works became the founding texts of the two great Buddhist schools – respectively, Shingon and Tendai; and all the famous Buddhist movements of later Japanese history, including Zen and Pure Land, can be traced to one of these two schools.”

History: Thou Hast Triumphed

Islam took over areas once Christian, but Christianity left its mark on the conquerors.  Jenkins writes:

“No worthwhile history of Islam could omit the history of the Sufi orders, whose practices often recall the bygone world of the Christian monks.  It was the Christian monastics who had sought ecstasy and unity with the divine by the ceaseless repetition of prayers, a practice that would become central to the Sufi tradition.  Once dead, Sufi adepts continued to attract devotees to their tombs, so that venerated sheikhs fulfilled exactly the same role of Muslims that the Christian saints had in their day.”  Elsewhere he notes that Muslims learned the practice of liturgical prostrations from Christians, and suggests that Ramadan was built on the earlier practice of Lent.

History: Dechristianization

Philip Jenkins writes, “we need to realize that such incidents of decline and disappearance [like the decline of Christianity he recounts in his book] are quite frequent, however little they are studied or discussed.  Dechristianization is one of the least studied aspects of Christian history.”  In a footnote, he notes that there have been studies of the erasure of Christianity in Japan (given fictional form in Endo’s Silence), but finds only a few, dated studies of the decline of Christianity in  other areas.

Among other things, research into the history of Dechristianization could give some insight into the challenges facing the churches of the dechristianized West.  It would give historical models to churches that once possessed but have now lost cultural hegemony.

History: Christian and Western

Philip Jenkin’s earlier books turn the world upside down – south is up, north is down.  His recent The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died does the same for eastern ad western Christianity.  As the subtitle indicates, the book is about the rise and suppression of Christianity in the lands east of Byzantium, in Syria, modern day Iraq and Iran, China and India, and south into Africa.  Jenkins shows that these Christian communities were stronger, more vital, and lasted much longer than popularly thought.

These churches were denounced as Nestorian and Monophysite, but when one of their patriarchs showed up in the West (as an emissary of the Mongol ruler seeking a Mongol-Christian alliance against Islam!), the Western Christian found him thoroughly orthodox.

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History: Indian crossroads

William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India explores the clash between modernization and tradition in contemporary India.  Early on, he illustrates with several anecdotes from his travels:

“Outside Jodhpur, I visited a shrine and pilgrimage centre that has formed around an Enfield Bullet motorbike.  Initially erected as a memorial to its own, after the latter suffered a fatal crash, the bike has now become a centre of pilgrimage, attracting pilgrims – especially devout truck drivers – from across Rajasthan in search of the miracles of fertility it was said to effect. . . . In  Kannur in northern Kerala, I met Hari Das, a well-builder and parttime prison warden for ten months of the year. . . . But during the theyyam dancing season, between January and March, Hari has a rather different job.  Though he comes from an untouchable Dalit background, he nevertheless is transformed into an omnipotent deity for three months a year, and as such is worshipped as a god.  Then, at the end of March, he goes back to the prison.”

History: Jews and Arians

Did Alexandrian Jews support the Arians?  Athanasius charged as much, and his assessment has been found convincing to more than one modern historian.

Victor Tcherikover wrote, “Jews became openly hostile to the new rulers” after Constantine’s conversion, “and proffered assistance to any group of persons or to any social or religious movement in opposition to the official Church.  Thus they certainly supported the Arians, and the Fathers of the Church classed Jews and Arians together as the fiercest enemies of orthodoxy.  The Jewry of the Roman empire, though dispersed and lacking a national center in a state of its own, was nevertheless a considerable force, not to be over-looked by the Christian church.”

Robert Louis Wilken writes: “During the episcopate of Athanasius, Jews and Christians clashed over the appointment of bishops to the see of Alexandria.  The Arian bishop Gregory was appointed to take Athanasius’ place.  When the time came for his entrance into Alexandria, Catholics tried to prevent him from being consecrated, but Philagrius, the prefect of Alexandria, was an Arian supporter.  According to Athanasius this prefect gathered together a large mob of heathens and Jews and set them against the Catholics with swords and clubs.  They broke into the churches and desecrated holy objects, seized the virgins and monks, and burned the Scriptures.”  He credits the report of Theodoret, who claimed that after the consecration of Peter as bishop of Alexandria, “the governor ‘assembled a mob of Greeks and Jews, surrounded the walls of the church, and bade Peter come forth, threatening him with exile if he refused.’”

History: Alexandrian Judaism

Jews settled in Alexandria as soon as it was Alexandria, that is, in 332 BC.  In the first century AD, they were a powerful and sizable minority of the city.  Between 66 and 117 AD, however, they suffered a massive reversal.  Robert Louis Wilken (Judaism and the Early Christian Mind: A Study of Cyril of Alexandria’s Exegesis and Theology) writes:

“many Jews were cruelly murdered, their homes destroyed, synagogues demolished, and their leaders tortured.  During this period the extent and influence of Judaism rapidly diminished. . . . The fact that so few literary sources remain from this period is itself a testimony to the devastation of Jewish life.  Apparently the great synagogue of Alexandria was also destroyed and the activity of the Jewish court in Alexandria suspended.”

This reversal was caused by wars between Jews and Greeks (and Romans) in Alexandria.

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History: Doxa to Orthodoxy

Pierre Bourdieu defined “doxa” (originally, “opinion” or in the NT, “glory”) in a variety of ways, but a couple are illuminating.  Doxa is “the world of tradition experienced as a ‘natural world’ and taken for granted,” the set of practices and beliefs that “goes without saying because it comes without saying,” and, more formally, “a particular point of view, the point of view of the dominant, which presents and imposes itself as a universal point of view – the point of view of those who dominate by dominating the state and who have constituted their point of view as universal by constituting the state.”

Heresy, by contrast, is what challenges doxa and thus provokes an “epistemological rupture”: “The dominated classes have an interest in pushing back the limits of doxa and exposing the arbitrariness of the taken for granted; the dominant classes have an interest in defending the integrity of doxa or, short of this, of establishing in its place the necessarily imperfect substitute, orthodoxy.”

Leaving aside the overly simplistic dominant/dominated framework, this gives some illumination into the history of Christian heresy.  Early heresies did not oppose articulated creeds, because there were none (or at least no universal, thoroughly elaborated creeds).  They challenges “the taken for granted,” which is why the orthodox who battled heresy so often appeal to liturgical forms, words, rites.  We all baptized in the Name of Father, Son, and Spirit; Arius says the Son is not eternal God; he is subverting a rite that we have all accepted as going without saying.

But this also means that orthodoxy is not simply a restoration of doxa, but doxa forced by heresy into conscious reflection and ultimately into creedal speech.  Glossing Athanasius: The history of redemption is that the Word became flesh; the history of heresy is that unquestioned doxa becomes Word.

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