Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  of anger against God. It tells stories which it does not pretend ever happened, in order to express profound truths, such as we read in the books of Jonah and Job. It is also full of criticism of Church tradition, in the class of writings known as prophecy, which spend much of their energy in denouncing the clergy and the clerical teaching of their day. This should provide a healthy warning to all those who aspire to tell other people what to do on the basis of the Bible. From the biblical text, a great variety of Christian and pre-Christian themes re-emerge periodically in new guises. In Ethiopia, Miaphysite Christianity returned to the practices of mainstream Judaism, borrowing features of worship and life-practice (such as circumcision and refraining from eating pork) which shocked sixteenth-century Jesuits coming from Counter-Reformation Europe. One of the most numerically successful movements of modern Christianity, Pentecostalism, has centred its appeal on a particular form of communication with the divine, speaking in tongues, which was severely mistrusted by Paul of Tarsus and which (despite the understandable claims of Pentecostals to the contrary) has very little precedent in Christian practice between the first and the nineteenth centuries CE. A much more frequent recurrence has been that basic theme of the founder so far never fulfilled, the imminence of the Last Days – for some reason, a particularly common theme in Western rather than Eastern Christianity. In the medieval West, it was usually the property of the powerless, but it became mainstream in sixteenth-century Europe’s Reformation, playing a major part in launching warfare and revolution. After the nineteenth-century addition of particular sub-themes, premillennialism and the ‘Rapture’ of the saved, it has come to play an equal part in American conservative evangelical Protestantism, and it has spread throughout Asia, South America and Africa wherever Western Pentecostalism has taken root and become an indigenous religion. It is not surprising that so many have sought the Last Days. The writing and telling of history is bedevilled by two human neuroses: horror at the desperate shapelessness and seeming lack of pattern in events, and regret for a lost golden age, a moment of happiness when all was well. Put these together and you have an urge to create elaborate patterns to make sense of things and to create a situation where the golden age is just waiting to spring to life again. This is the impulse which makes King Arthur’s knights sleep under certain mountains, ready to bring deliverance, or creates the fascination with the Knights Templar and occult conspiracy which propelled The Da Vinci Code into best-seller lists. Repeatedly the Bible has come to mean salvation to a particular people or cultural grouping by saving not merely their souls, but their language, and hence their very identity. So it was, for example, for the people of Wales, through the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  and as the First World War became ever more destructive, his anger had fed his perception of fraudulence in the tradition stemming from Schleiermacher, with its affirmation that reason opened a path to understanding of the divine.55 Barth’s Commentary on Romans, published in 1919, drew out of Paul the theme which had successively transfixed Augustine of Hippo, Luther and Calvin: humanity, its reason utterly fallen, could only reach God through divine grace mediated in Jesus Christ. Unsurprisingly, the veteran liberal scholar Adolf von Harnack was one of Barth’s first opponents, while among those junior clergy seized by Barth’s critique of liberalism was one of Harnack’s own students in Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.56 The Swiss Reformed pastor and the well-connected young Lutheran Bonhoeffer were among a significant number of Reformed and Lutheran Protestants, mostly of the younger generation, who decided in 1931 that they must make an ecumenical stand against the growing nationalism of their society. Spurred by the apparent growth of the German Christians after Hitler’s seizure of power, the dissidents made common cause in 1933–4 to form a ‘Confessing Church’. In May 1934 the Church issued a declaration at a synod in the unglamorous industrial city of Barmen, presenting its Evangelical and Reformed faith against the ‘destructive errors of the German Christians and the present national church government’. Among the array of Bible texts which it mustered, a notable absentee was the call to unequivocal obedience in Romans 13.1 which had so dominated the thought of the magisterial Reformers: ‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God’. Instead, the declaration fixed on obedience under the text ‘Fear God, honour the Emperor’ (I Peter 2.17).57 Despite its apparent loyalism, this command has a rather more ambiguous or double quality than Romans 13.1. The balance to be struck made witnessing to Christian truth in the Confessing Church not merely dangerous, but problematic. The Confessing Church experienced the difficulty of all well-intentioned Christians in a state dominated by an evil whose dimensions were difficult to believe, certainly to anticipate. The Barmen Declaration made no reference to the plight of the Jews (something for which Barth three decades later expressed personal regret). The Confessing Church only took an official stand on the question of racial discrimination via its ecclesiology (that is, its theology of the Church): it refused to accept that the State could determine Church membership by excluding through racist legislation ethnic Jews who had become Christians. Many Confessing Church members felt that such Christians ought to have their own separate parishes.58 Virtually all members also continued to feel it their duty to support the lawfully elected German government. One of the senior

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  mood of American Evangelical Protestantism. The ultimate fruit of this was the large part played by clergy in the reformist upheavals of 1905. It was then that Fr Georgii Gapon, a popular and charismatic (one might say headstrong) young St Petersburg parish priest, led a mass demonstration of unarmed workers in the city, demanding political and social reforms. The reaction of the government was to shoot them down, a piece of brutal stupidity which turned demonstrations into attempted revolution. The outburst of popular fury nearly destroyed the regime twelve years before its eventual fall, and left a lasting legacy of mistrust and contempt for imperial rule. It was remarkable how much support Fr Gapon had received from the Church authorities during his outspoken campaigns, but the bloody end to the events of 1905 left the Church bitterly divided as to how to proceed in an atmosphere of repression and censorship. A radical wing among its clergy, the Renovationists, would continue to seek ways of reconciling Christianity with the increasingly militant stance of angry workers in Russian cities.83 The dynamism and questioning of Russian Orthodoxy were paralleled by those experienced by Churches seeking to escape four centuries of second-class status under Ottoman rule. Serbia and Greece were the first two regions to seize their freedom, and their different trajectories away from Constantinople were to cast long shadows into modern European politics. Serbia had little external help in its successful fight between 1815 and 1817 for independence, which was only acknowledged and given international recognition in 1878. Successive native dynasties were closely associated with the creation of a Serbian Orthodox Church which was autocephalous (independent of the Oecumenical Patriarch). That new establishment followed historic precedents, and so the patriarch could regard it as a restoration of former independence; a deal was carefully negotiated with Constantinople. The Orthodox Church had been vital to the survival of a Serb consciousness over the centuries of occupation. Now it had little hesitation in identifying with an expansionist Serbian nationalism, fuelled by a view of history shot through with consciousness of heroic suffering, and inclined to look for support to Russia, which was formal guarantor of Serbian independence from 1830. By contrast, when an independent state took shape in the Greek peninsula, the fascination of Western Europeans with the Classical past complicated Greece’s assertion of Orthodox values with a strong dose of Western liberalism. Greeks had in any case long enjoyed more commercial and travel contacts with the West than most other Orthodox, and it was noticeable that it was in Greece that Orthodoxy was faced with one of its own who had turned to expounding Enlightenment ideas in his own language. Christodoulos Pamblekis had been

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  93 took place in the year 70 C.E., at the end of the outbreak of a Jewish war in the year 66. When Roman troops marched into Palestine, they quickly conquered the land of Galilee and then moved into Judea in the south, laid siege to Jerusalem, and after three and a half years, conquered the city and burned the Temple. o In Luke 21:20–24, for example, Jesus talks explicitly about Jerusalem being surrounded by its enemies and being trampled by the Gentiles. o In Matthew 22:7, Jesus tells a parable in which a king is upset with people who had been invited to a wedding banquet but refused to come. The king sends out his troops and burns the city. This is a parable about Jesus being rejected. God, the Father, has a wedding banquet for his Son, but the Jews, the called people, refuse to come, so God burns their city. Gospel Sources  Almost certainly, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written from information from the oral tradition. After Jesus died and people came to believe that he had been raised from the dead, stories were told about him. In fact, the only way Christianity could spread was by people telling stories about Jesus.  The religion spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire, with people who were not eyewitnesses converting others by telling stories about Jesus, and those new converts, in turn, passing the stories on.  It’s completely implausible to think that the apostles of Jesus were the only ones telling stories about him or that they were present to guarantee the accuracy of every story that was told throughout the empire. For the most part, the apostles probably stayed in Jerusalem, while the stories about Jesus passed between travelers, neighbors, relatives, and friends.  Of course, there is no way to control what happens to stories in oral circulation, particularly when they are being told for the purposes of 94 Lecture 14: Did the Disciples Write the Gospels? convincing people of a new viewpoint, when they’re being passed among hundreds of people, or when they’re being transmitted from one language to another. The stories change in circulation; some stories may even be entirely invented. This explains why there are so many discrepancies, contradictions, and varying perspectives in the gospels.  The attribution of the gospels to certain disciples and companions of the apostles was meant to give these books authority. Many gospels were circulating, and it would have been dif fi cult to know which ones to trust. Some Christians thought that these particular books were trustworthy, and in order to enhance that sense of reliability, they connected the gospels with the apostles of Jesus. Ehrman, Forged. 1. Why do you suppose the gospel writers chose to remain anonymous? 2. If the apostles really did write the gospels, would that make them historically accurate in your judgment? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Protestant aristocracy with whom to ally, was very different. The British answer, embodied in the Quebec Act of 1774, imitated the success of a small-scale previous experiment in the Catholic Spanish island of Menorca, a British-ruled strategic base in the Mediterranean: it was a pragmatic alliance with the local French elite, and therefore inevitably with the Catholic Church. Protestants in the thirteen colonies were furious at this arbitrary outflanking of their culture and shared British values. A Continental Congress summoned to Philadelphia in 1774, amid statements on many commercial and taxation grievances, recorded its ‘astonishment that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a Religion, that has deluged your island in blood and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world’.83 When anger turned to open war, American Evangelicals were divided. Scotch- Irish clergy, with their own traditions of warfare against Westminster, were influential in articulating opposition to British misgovernment; Princeton University, forcing house for leaders of the Presbyterian Awakening, was a ready source of morale-boosting sermons and literature, and its Scottish President, John Witherspoon, was a leading figure in the Continental Congress through the revolutionary years.84 Yet Baptists gave no single opinion on the Revolution, mindful of the angry reaction which they had provoked in that same Continental Congress when they had complained about New England’s compulsory levies for the established Congregational Church. The irony of the revolutionary slogan ‘no taxation without representation’ was not lost on Baptists.85 Quakers were harassed by the revolutionaries for their pacifism and, in ugly incidents echoed recently amid the American outburst of flag displays after the 9/11 attacks of 2001, they had their houses trashed for not displaying candles after the British defeat in 1783.86 Methodists, taking their cue from John Wesley’s emphatic Tory loyalism, opposed the Revolution; so, unsurprisingly, did many Anglicans. When, in 1775, the Rev. Samuel Andrews of Wallingford, Connecticut, received Congress’s order to lead his Anglican congregation in observing a day of fast, he obeyed it with aggressive wit by choosing his sermon text from Amos 5.21: ‘I hate, I despise your feast days.’87 It was not surprising that Andrews was among those loyalists who could find no place in the new Republic, and who trooped north (often suffering great hardship) to take refuge in the remaining British territories of Canada. Nevertheless, because the revolutionary leadership sprang from the social establishment in several colonies, it included many who were Anglicans by denominational loyalty, no less than two-thirds of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.88 Elite education tended to lead these Founding

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  always problematic. The kings of Kongo were constantly at odds with the Portuguese, who tried to impose Padroado rights in appointing bishops: this inhibited the arrival of non-Portuguese European clergy, severely limited the creation of a native clergy, and drew attention to official Christianity’s entanglement with the slave trade. The Italian Capuchin Franciscan missionaries whom the Kongo monarchy welcomed in during the seventeenth century (at a moment when the Portuguese were distracted by war with the Dutch) did their best in protest; in 1686 they secured from the Roman Inquisition an unprecedented general condemnation of the slave trade, long predating any such Protestant official action or statement.47 Yet despite this striking symbolic pronouncement, the papacy continued to employ slaves in its Mediterranean galleys up to the French Revolution, some of them market-purchased. While Capuchin anger was ignored, the slave trade continued to subvert Central African society. When the Kongo descended into political chaos in the seventeenth century, the official structures of the Catholic Church were also crippled.48 As in Iberian America and China, what Church life survived continued to depend on local catechists, who with their knowledge of Portuguese could communicate with such European clergy as remained, but who could also perpetuate what they knew of Christian belief and practice to their own people, albeit necessarily in a non-sacramental form. This pattern was to flourish once more in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa, and it sustained what remained of Africa’s first indigenous Catholicism, in a variety of creative popular syntheses of Christianity with local religions. Two successive prophetesses arose around 1700, and significantly a major element in their visions was the demand from Heaven that the ruined capital São Salvador should be rebuilt. The second of them, Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, who had taken on herself the character of the Capuchins’ much-loved saint Antony of Padua, was burned at the stake in 1706 by one of the kings of the now-fragmented Kongo, but she had indicated a future strength in African Christianity: independent Churches which would build what they wanted out of European Christian teaching (see pp. 887–8).49 Ethiopia’s ancient Miaphysite Christian culture proved not to be headed by Prester John, Europe’s hoped-for ally against Islam. Events indeed entirely reversed expectations, for in the 1540s a Portuguese expeditionary force at very great cost in lives helped the Ethiopian kingdom defeat an Islamic holy war under the charismatic Muslim emir Ahmed Granj, which had nearly annihilated both it and its Church. Latin Christianity could therefore initially count on Ethiopian goodwill; indeed, one of the first authentic African voices to be heard in Western literature is that of an Ethiopian ambassador to Portugal, whose

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  clergy of his Church, whom he saw as tainted by just such a compromise. The Church had ceased to be other. Amid obsessive diatribes against the criminal respectability of the unfortunate (and fortunately deceased) Bishop Mynster, he declared: Original Christianity relates itself so militantly to this world that its view is: not to want to slip happily and comfortably through this world but to take care to collide in dead earnest with this world … Thus there is a world of difference, a heaven of difference between the Mynsterian life-view (which actually is Epicurean, one of the enjoyment of life, zest for life, belonging to this world) and the Christian view, which is one of suffering, of enthusiasm for death, belonging to another world.42 This torrent of words was a declaration of war on the notion of Christendom, but it was also a declaration of war on all intellectual systems, dogmatic or otherwise: ‘no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning, the task of no later generation is shorter than its predecessor’s’.43 Kierkegaard’s vehemence was mixed with laughter, his destruction of contemporary religion and philosophy based on a mockery of complacency and a constant sly questioning which he had discovered in Socrates. Kierkegaard’s contemporaries did not put him on trial or kill him for his Socratic fun, but they found him baffling, just as Athenians long ago had puzzled over Socrates. How could the bitterness he displayed towards contemporary Christianity emerge from such a playful eccentric? It is not surprising that Kierkegaard did not have a speedy impact in the nineteenth century – particularly since he was writing in one of Europe’s more narrowly distributed languages. Amid the blows which the twentieth century has delivered to humanity’s self-esteem, Kierkegaard’s steady concentration on the sufferings and loneliness of a God-Man on the Cross addresses the perplexities of Western Christianity, while not necessarily providing any answers beyond serene resignation and an appreciation of the laughter which may emerge from pain. Kierkegaard was only too correct that Christendom still dominated the vision of official northern European Protestantism. Both Schleiermacher and Hegel, deeply affected by the memory of French invasion and eventual German victory, enthusiastically identified themselves with the Prussian state’s project of national renewal, and they looked beyond Prussia, not only to the creation of a true German unity but to something more. Hegel’s view of progress encompassed the attainment of world peace, but it entailed the emergence of a superior state which would overcome all others in political organization and cultural dominance as part of its recognition of the God of history. That state might well be planned in the University of Berlin. Kant had also sketched out a

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Maybe she wanted it like this.” I laughed then, and the Colonel said, “What?” “I was just thinking—Why do you run head-on into a cop car with its lights on? and then I thought, Well, she hated authority figures.” The Colonel laughed. “Hey, look at that. Pudge made a funny!” It felt almost normal, and then my distance from the event itself seemed to evaporate and I found myself back in the gym, hearing the news for the first time, the Eagle’s tears dripping onto his pants, and I looked over at the Colonel and thought of all the hours we’d spent on this foam couch in the past two weeks —everything she’d ruined. Too pissed off to cry, I said, “This is only making me hate her. I don’t want to hate her. And what’s the point, if that’s all it’s making me do?” Still refusing to answer how and why questions. Still insisting on an aura of mystery. I leaned forward, head between my knees, and the Colonel placed a hand on my upper back. “The point is that there are always answers, Pudge.” And then he pushed air out between his pursed lips and I could hear the angry quiver in his voice as he repeated, “There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough. The Web says that suicides usually involve carefully thought-out plans. So clearly she did not commit suicide.” I felt embarrassed to be still falling apart two weeks later when the Colonel could take his medicine so stoically, and I sat up. “Okay, fine” I answered. “It wasn’t suicide.” “Although it sure doesn’t make sense as an accident,” the Colonel said. I laughed. “We sure are making progress.” We were interrupted by Holly Moser, the senior I knew primarily from viewing her nude self-portraits over Thanksgiving with Alaska. Holly hung with the Weekday Warriors, which explains why I’d previously said about two words to her in my life, but she just came in without knocking and said that she’d had a mystical indicator of Alaska’s presence. “I was in the Waffle House, and suddenly all the lights went off, except for, like, the light over my booth, which started flashing. It would be like on for a second and then off for a while and then on for a couple of seconds and then off. And I realized, you know, it was Alaska. I think she was trying to talk to me in Morse code. But, like, I don’t know Morse code. She probably didn’t know that.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  between the Habsburgs and Protestants in 1555 established for the first time a reluctant recognition by a Catholic monarch of a legal existence for Protestants. From then on, within the patchwork of jurisdictions which the Holy Roman Empire had become, each ruler could decide on which side of the Reformation divide his territory and subjects were to fall: the principle of cuius regio, eius religio. The arbitrariness of this solution was mitigated by the extreme complication of imperial territorial boundaries, which meant that subjects who disagreed with their ruler might only have to relocate by a mile or two, but there was also a major limitation.The 1555 settlement reflected the realities of the Schmalkaldic Wars: the bulk of Protestants fighting the Catholics had been Lutherans, and the only two permissible religions of the empire were papal Catholicism and Lutheranism. Only four years after Augsburg came a twist of genealogical fate which brought the accession of a serious-minded new monarch in the Palatinate who adhered to neither of these confessions. As the Elector Palatine Friedrich III, he championed a non-Lutheran and increasingly confessionally Reformed Church in the Palatinate (that Church which created the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563: see p. 637). Although Friedrich’s successors wavered between Lutheranism and the Reformed, other German princes followed his example in turning away from increasingly dogmatic Lutheranism towards the creation of Reformed Church polities, reorganized from Lutheran Churches in a ‘Second Reformation’. To their sorrow and puzzlement, these rulers found that their Lutheran subjects were not pleased. When in 1614 the unfortunate Elector Johann Sigismund of Brandenburg tried to defend his Reformed preachers against popular hatred, a cry was heard in the Berlin crowd: ‘You damn black Calvinist, you have stolen our pictures and destroyed our crucifixes; now we will get even with you and your Calvinist priests!’67 The Reformed were confronting Lutheran Churches which, amid an enormous diversity of traditional practice, seemed to have become the shelter for traditional religion as it had been before the Reformation upheavals. The Lutheran Mass (still so called) continued to be conducted partly in Latin, by clergy in vestments, who even elevated the consecrated bread in the service in traditional style. Luther in popular memory had become a saint, his picture capable of saving houses from burning down, if it was fixed to the parlour wall. Right into the nineteenth century, Danish Lutheran visitation teams were alarmed to find rural parishes where the faithful delighted in pilgrimages, holy wells, festivals and intercession to saints from centuries before, and Denmark was not unique around the Baltic.68 By the end of the sixteenth century the Reformed grouping in central Europe could not be ignored, but still they had no place in the 1555 Augsburg agreement, which strictly

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  By contrast with James, his son Charles I, discreetly encouraged by Andrewes (now a powerful bishop), was not noted for judiciousness when he came to the throne in 1625. He was authoritarian by nature, and his reaction to opposition was to become not merely more authoritarian, but distinctly devious in his attempts to get his way. The new king had a soulmate in one particularly busy, conscientious and tidy-minded sacramentalist who was a former Oxford academic, William Laud, to the extent that in 1633 Charles promoted Laud to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Archbishop Laud used his talents to disastrous effect. He vigorously promoted his sympathizers in the Church. Taking a lead from more cautious and tactful moves by the late King James, he increasingly cast himself as a patriarch for an archipelago-wide British Church.74 He made matters worse by genuinely believing that anyone in the Church who disagreed with him was part of a single ‘Puritan’ conspiracy; his high-handed reactions against this imaginary network infuriated enough Protestants in England for the label ‘Puritan’ to be worn for the first time as a badge of pride, rather than an insult to be repudiated with indignation.75 Many of these angry people sailed for the hitherto languishing English colonies in North America, rather than stay in an increasingly tainted English Church, with hugely significant results for the future of Protestant Christianity worldwide (see Chapter 20). Laud’s interference in the affairs of the Church of Ireland, aided by Charles’s high-handed Lord Deputy in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, Lord Strafford, likewise angered the Irish primate, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh. Ussher was a rare figure as a member of an old Irish family which had become firmly Protestant, for the established Church had failed to carry more than a minority of the people of Ireland with it away from Catholicism. He is now unfairly remembered only for the misguided humanist historical precision of his calculation that God created the world on the night preceding 23 October 4004 BCE, but he was a formidable scholar who wanted to defend the independence of his Protestant Church. Ussher knew the Irish Church’s weakness was the result of a badly funded and badly administered Reformation, in a country in which English colonial interference produced a state of permanent crisis, but nevertheless he saw it as a potential vehicle of proper Reformation in Ireland. He was very consciously part of an international Reformed Protestant world, but in his discreet efforts to maintain his position against Archbishop Laud, Ussher might also be seen as the first senior churchman to have a vision of episcopally governed sister Churches which might cooperate in a common identity across national boundaries, without any single leader to tell them what to do. Without knowing the later phrase, he was envisioning the worldwide Anglican Communion.76

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  That was for the future. In the short term, Charles and Laud alienated leaders in the three kingdoms to such an extent that rebellions broke out, first in Scotland in 1638 against a typically heavy-handed royal attempt to introduce a version of the English Prayer Book without consultation; then in 1641 in Ireland, where Catholics determined to throw off English rule saw their chance in the Protestant disarray. Finally in 1642 came civil war in England, between forces led by a majority of the English Parliament in Westminster and supporters of the King, who felt that such opposition was a fight against God’s anointed, whatever Charles’s faults. In England the trigger for war was stark disagreement as to whether Charles could be trusted to lead armies against Irish Catholics, after his support for the deeply unpopular ecclesiastical policies of Laud and his friends, and his blatant attempts to double-cross his opponents. Although some Catholics fought for Charles, and the majority of Irish Catholics eventually tactically allied with him against the Westminster Parliament, the wars and civil wars of England and Scotland up to 1660 were overwhelmingly fought by Protestants against Protestants, to decide the future shape of British religion.77 In the course of the war, episcopacy in Scotland and England was abolished, along with the Book of Common Prayer. The question was now whether a strict version of Scottish presbyterianism would be set up in England, or some looser system of Church government. Calvinist theories of resistance to tyranny reached the ultimate conclusion when, after Charles’s defeat by Westminster’s armies, a radical group among the victorious Puritans forced the King’s trial and then his beheading in 1649: this was no arbitrary lynching, but an attempt to punish the King for his crimes against his people, in the name of a Protestant God. In Cromwell’s eyes, Charles deserved the name which the furious prophet Shimei had bestowed on King David at a particularly low moment in that charismatic but murderous and usurping monarch’s career: ‘you man of blood, you worthless fellow’.78 The Old Testament had in that moment revealed its not infrequent low opinion of kings, and English Puritans hearkened: Charles deserved to die. They created an English Republic, or ‘Commonwealth’, though angry Royalists looking back after the Commonwealth’s destruction were inclined among more abusive names to style it the Interregnum, period between two reigns. The Republic’s armies were so successful that, in the decade after 1650, they united the Atlantic archipelago in a single political unit for the first time in its history. Having defeated the Scots, the regime was not inclined to set up presbyterianism in England, and was content for the English Church to become little more than a nationwide federation of Protestant parishes. Nevertheless in the end the victorious Puritans were defeated and thrust aside because they were as tidy-minded as poor Archbishop Laud (executed for his

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  people, Mangena Maake Mokone, infuriated at condescension from his white colleagues, had founded what he called the Ethiopian Church.69 Here was a name for a Church which, unlike any other title – Methodist, Anglican, even Catholic – was actually to be found in the Bible. Mokone was mindful of the psalm-verse (68.31) ‘let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out her hands to God’ – a scriptural fragment which, in conjunction with the story in Acts 8.26–40 of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, was destined to have huge repercussions through the continent over the next century. In a remarkably deft piece of Anglican diplomacy, the nucleus of Mokone’s Ethiopian Church eventually ended up as an ‘Order of Ethiopia’ in union with the mainstream South African Anglican Church, but the impulse to honour the victorious empire spread elsewhere through a great variety of African-initiated Churches. A parallel urge to look for a truly African historic episcopal succession led some African Christians to form congregations under the jurisdiction of the tiny Church presided over by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria; but Ethiopia remained and remains the chief symbolic focus.70 When Fascist Italy sought to avenge the shame of Adwa in its invasion and destructive occupation of Ethiopia in 1935 (including the wrecking of historic church buildings), reaction across Africa was sharp in condemning this outrage. As far away as Nigeria, Christians sneered at the Italian Pope for his lack of condemnation of fellow Italians: ‘It should be remembered that the Pope is after all a human being like the ordinary run of mankind and therefore heir to human weaknesses, in spite of the traditional claim for him by his adherents of infallibility.’71 Equally Ethiopia has inspired many Afro-Caribbeans and African-Americans to express their pride in Africa through their adherence to Rastafari. This syncretistic religious movement takes its title from the pre- coronation name of the last Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, and it meticulously grounds its beliefs in Old and New Testament, in the fashion of Christian Churches through the centuries. INDIA: THE GREAT REBELLION AND THE LIMITS OF COLONIAL MISSION The stories of the great Asian empires suggest that although the relationship between Christian expansion and imperial expansion could be intimate, Christianity was as likely to be disruptive as helpful. From the 1790s most British Protestants did not share the particular preoccupation of the London Missionary Society with the Pacific; they viewed former Mughal India as the

• From Action (2014)

  Should something like this ever happen to you: If you feel endangered, or like what you’re physically comfortable with has been dismissed in favor of the other person’s pleasure, get out of that situation. If you told that person no, in any capacity, about something that they did anyway, you can report them to whatever authorities you can: police; security if you’re in a place that has it; a league of friends-and-family street vigilantes. Some of us don’t feel that they can report sexual assault, and I understand that. The fucked-up thing about reporting sexual assault, violence, or rape is that, in some cases, those responsible for upholding the law will not help you, even if you report what happened “perfectly,” which is a fallacy that means “within a certain time frame, and under certain conditions.” If you can report without feeling dysfunctionally worse, persecuted, and/or scared, it’s still worth doing: If nothing else, it most likely puts the grime-hole who hurt you on official record as having this complaint against them, which will make it less difficult to nail this person if it should ever happen again, to you or someone else. You are not obligated to traumatize yourself in order to “do the right thing” and alert the authorities if someone has done you harm. If you feel you’ll be put at risk, or even just unsettled, if others know what happened, or if you’re worried that, as is bitterly the case for many victims of sexual assault, your assailant’s denial or even social reputation might be the one people are inclined to side with over your real account of what went down: You have the right to remain silent. And I’m sorry, and hope you can confide in someone who loves you, plus a good therapist, if you feel that would be helpful. Someone doesn’t have to hit you in order to make you feel unsafe or otherwise freaked out about sex, of course, and that lack of violence doesn’t correspond to a lack of validity in terms of your gross feelings about what’s happening. I was not made by dominant physical force to have non-consensual sex, the two times that’s happened. (I have been pretty lucky, which is an amazing thing to say about being raped twice. “It was only twice! Gee, that’s almost as good as winning the lottery that many times!”)

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  the wickedness of what he and his fellow colonists were doing. The shock turned him to ordination, and he made it his especial task for half a century from 1514 to defend the natives – he became a Dominican himself in 1522. He won sympathy from the aged Cardinal Ximénes; later his insistence that native Americans were as rational beings as Spaniards, rather than inferior versions of humanity naturally fitted for slavery, sufficiently impressed the Emperor Charles V that debates were staged at the imperial Spanish capital at Valladolid on the morality of colonization (with inconclusive results). Las Casas insisted that Augustine of Hippo’s gloss on the biblical text ‘Compel them to come in’ (see p. 304) was simply wrong: Jesus had not intended conversion to his ‘joyful tidings’ to be a matter of ‘arms and bombardments’ but of ‘reason and human persuasion’.6 His writings about Spanish barbarity in America were so angry and eloquent that ironically they became part of the general Protestant stereotype of Spaniards as a naturally cruel race. At one stage he suggested a fateful remedy for the exploitation of native labour: African slaves should be imported to replace natives on plantations, radically extending the slave trade which the Portuguese had pioneered in the previous century. Las Casas eventually realized his mistake, but it was too late.7 Here idealism trying to end one injustice blundered unhappily into colluding with a genocidal crime of three centuries’ duration, whose consequences are still built into the politics of both Americas. Rather more equivocally expressed, but equally important for Latin Europe’s future relations with other world civilizations, was the work of a Dominican who never saw the ‘New World’. Francisco de Vitoria, for the last two decades of his life highly influential as the leading theologian in Salamanca University, built on earlier Dominican thought to consider what was happening in America in the light of ‘just war’ theory. Conventional Christian legal wisdom saw nothing wrong in enslaving non-Christians captured in a just war, but there seemed to Vitoria little that was just in the idea of a crusade, particularly in its exploitation in America. War was only justified as a response to inflicted wrong, and the various peoples of America had offered no wrong to Spaniards before the Spaniards decided to move in on their territory. The Aztec practice of human sacrifice did offer a different justification for Spanish action in Central America, since it was a clear offence against universal natural law. There were other possible interpretations of wrong: resistance to preaching the Gospel, for instance, once the intention to do so had been proclaimed in the Requirement. Vitoria also considered authority within commonwealths. He discussed it in terms of sovereignty, a ruler’s untrammelled power within the boundaries of a commonwealth or state. Such sovereign commonwealths need not be Christian:

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Netherlands, to take up arms against the Catholic Leviathan. His ancestor Willem ‘the Silent’, eventually murdered by a Catholic fanatic, had done the same a century before, but Prince Willem would more than avenge his fate.Willem made it his life’s work to humble French Catholic power across Europe. His success exacted dynastic revenge not simply for Willem the Silent but for the disaster suffered by his great-uncle by marriage, the Elector Palatine Friedrich, back in 1618–19 (see pp. 646–7). As a by-blow in the course of his relentless campaigns against Louis, Willem gained the three thrones of Britain in 1688 — but what a by-blow this proved! It was the culmination of a decade of political turmoil in the Atlantic Isles, and was provoked by the extraordinary stupidity of King James II, a sincere but inept convert to Roman Catholicism. While James was still Duke of York and heir to the throne, his wily brother King Charles II had saved him between 1679 and 1681 from a real prospect of being excluded from the succession in favour of James’s daughters, Mary and Anne, by his first wife, Anne Hyde; unlike their father, both ladies had remained firm in their loyalty to the Church of England. The King’s strategy to save James from exclusion had been to strangle opposition from the ‘Whig’ group, which was promoting exclusion, through a royal alliance across the whole Atlantic archipelago with a rival political grouping within the Protestant establishment. They were christened ‘Tories’ by the more radical Protestant enemies, an insulting reference to Irish Catholic bandits (similarly the Whigs were nicknamed after Protestant Scots cattle thieves). Tories were Protestants who championed government by bishops in the established Protestant Churches of the three kingdoms, and they trumpeted their belief in the divine right of kings as well as bishops, in return for royal support in oppressing rival Protestants and (in Ireland) riding out resentment from dispossessed Catholics. King Charles died in 1685, leaving his brother in the best possible position, but King James II failed to see that Charles had bought success by becoming prisoner to a political party.33 When James’s antics in promoting the interests of his fellow Catholics made Tories snarl, he promptly abandoned the Tories and tried to outflank them, courting Protestant Dissenters by offering the same emancipation he was promoting for Catholics.34 Dissenters were torn between pleasure at the end of their persecution and a very real fear of international Catholicism. James might have got away with his plans if the succession had remained with his Protestant daughters, but he now had a second wife, the Catholic Italian Mary of Modena. Their fatal mistake was to provide a half-brother for the Princesses Mary and Anne, James Francis: ‘Francis’, with its multiple Catholic resonances, was not a clever name to give a prospective English king. From that moment in 1688,

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  the time of Moses. For the moment, the Deuteronomic reform was no doubt encouraged by the fact that Josiah’s innovations coincided with a decline in Assyrian power: surely a sign of divine favour.31 The angry, precise legislative programme of the Deuteronomic party extended beyond the book itself into a wholesale rewriting of Jewish history. In an operation of remarkable scholarly and literary creativity which probably involved many collaborators working over several decades, older documents were edited and incorporated into a series of books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Jeremiah) which carefully told the story of Israel’s triumphs and tragedies in relation to its faithfulness to Yahweh. The coherence of this literature can be detected not merely in its deployment of that central notion, but even in the language idioms which it uses. This remarkable programme was given practical expression in the gleeful destruction of cultic objects and of any sacred places within Judah which might rival the Jerusalem Temple, but besides a drastic simplification of the Jewish sacred landscape, the reform achieved something unusual in the religions of the time. In much the same era that Homer’s epics began taking on their own particular significance as the central works of literature for all Greeks, the Jews likewise began to focus their religious identity on the contents of a book. Probably to start with, there was only one copy of the Deuteronomic Code for consultation and solemn public recitation, but together with the literature that it inspired, it was an increasingly indispensable point of reference for the religion of Yahweh. That proved to be of huge importance when a new catastrophe befell the Jews. The southern kingdom had managed to withstand assaults from the Assyrians. If this had been more by luck than judgement, that is not how the historians in the Deuteronomic tradition saw matters; it was the result of faithfulness to God’s commands. The luck, however, did not last – or the faithfulness faltered. As Assyrian power collapsed at the end of the seventh century BCE, it was replaced by a new Middle Eastern power, based in Babylon, showing a fierce pride in the previous empire which had ruled from that city long before. The Babylonians, in alliance with other powers, sacked the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, in 612 BCE. It was not many years before Judah found itself overwhelmed by Babylonian armies, and after its last king rebelled against subject status, around 586 BCE the Babylonians sacked the already shattered city, destroyed the Temple and carried off many people from Judah to exile in Babylon. Those exiled are likely to have been community leaders; those left behind were apparently mostly of little account. The exiles were not allowed to return until Babylon itself was conquered by the Persian ruler Cyrus in 539. Not all Jews did go home then, and many formed a community in Babylon which for centuries continued to be one

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  On day seven, Cunningham said to controllers, “I’d just like to go on record here as saying that people that dream up procedures like this after you lift off have somehow or another been dropping the ball for the last three years….It looks kind of Mickey Mouse.” On day eight, Schirra said, “I wish you would find out the idiot’s name who thought up this test….I want to talk to him personally when I get back down.” In Houston, Kraft and Slayton were seething. Not only were Schirra and his crew nearly insubordinate, they were doing it for the public to hear. At a press briefing, a reporter said, “I’ve covered sixteen flights, and I don’t recall ever finding a bunch of people up there growling the way these guys are. Now, you’re either doing a bad job down here, or they’re a bunch of malcontents. Which is it?” Apollo 7 splashed down eleven days after lift-off. Every mission objective had been achieved, and more. The spacecraft had worked beautifully. The SPS engine, so critical to a lunar journey, had performed well. By virtually every measure, the flight had been nearly perfect, and it would open the door to Apollo 8’s flight to the Moon. Many attributed the negative behavior by the crew of Apollo 7 to the constant discomfort from their head colds. Others wondered if Schirra had been terrified by the Apollo 1 fire. The commander of that mission, Gus Grissom, had been Schirra’s next-door neighbor. Schirra had been Grissom’s backup pilot for the flight. Long after the fire, Schirra had told people, “We all spent a year wearing black arm bands for three very good men. I’ll be damned if anybody’s going to spend the next year wearing one for me.” Despite the technical brilliance of the mission, Kraft wouldn’t abide insubordination, even if it was born of legitimate fear; he determined that none of Apollo 7’s crew would ever fly again for NASA. He felt differently about the crew of Apollo 8. Borman, Lovell, and Anders were consummate professionals, as rock steady as they came. He was certainly grateful for Lovell. Kraft had been ringside for Gemini 7, the grueling fourteen-day mission during which Lovell remained unflappable, even during problems that might have threatened the flight’s survival. Equally important, Lovell was as likable and optimistic a fellow as there was in the astronaut corps, and on man’s first journey away from his world, there could never be too much of that. Chapter Seven [image file=Image00007.jpg] JIM LOVELLEvery Saturday when he was five years old, James Arthur Lovell, Jr., went to the movies, always to see a Western. Sometimes he went with his father, but the best times were when he went alone. Walking untethered through Philadelphia as a little boy, he was free to discover new neighborhoods, invent new routes, pass strange faces, navigate a giant world by himself.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  history suddenly found himself confronted with subjects who appealed to a higher principle than his power. The dissidents were of course used to doing so, but the Emperor had not expected such ingratitude after he had ended the Great Persecution. If he knew nothing else about the Christian God, he knew that God was One. Oneness was in any case a convenient emphasis for the emperor who had destroyed Diocletian’s Tetrarchy to replace it with his own single power, but there is more to the annoyance and apprehension apparent in Constantine’s official correspondence than cynical political calculation. Anything which challenged the unity of the Church was likely to offend the supreme One God, and that might end his run of favour to the Emperor. Faced with petitions from the Donatists, in 313 Constantine made a decision of great significance for the future. Rather than make a judgement for the Christians with the help of the traditional imperial legal system, as the non-Christian Emperor Aurelian had once done before him (see p. 175), he would use the expertise of Church leaders, asking them to bring the matter ‘to a fitting conclusion’.53 So he adapted the North African Church’s well-established practice of submitting disputes to councils of bishops, with the difference that now for the first time they were gathered from right across the Mediterranean.Constantine’s first summons of a council was to Rome, in 313. The Donatists ignored the result, since it went against them; so Constantine tried again the following year, this time summoning an even more widely recruited council to the city of Arles in what is now southern France. The bishops, travelling on imperial passes, even included three from the remote province of Britannia, one of the first indications of Christian activity in that island. Once more the council did not succeed in appeasing the Donatists, and in the course of much muddled negotiation with Donatist leaders, the Emperor was provoked into ordering troops to enforce their return to the mainstream Church. The first official persecution of Christians by Christians thus came within a year or two of the Church’s first official recognition, and its results were as divisive as previous persecutions by non-Christian emperors. Most Donatists stayed out and stayed loyal to their own independent hierarchy, nursing new grudges against the North African Church, which remained in communion with the rest of the Christian Mediterranean Churches and which thus arrogated to itself the title of Catholic. The split was never healed, and it remained a source of weakness in North African Christianity for centuries until the Church there faded away (see p. 277). The councils of Rome and Arles were thus not a promising precedent, but over the next century the use of councils to resolve Church disputes became firmly established as a mechanism of Church life. It represented a notable concession by the commander of Rome’s army to the officers of God’s army,

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  through the Reformation into sixteenth-century Protestantism, which centred on the death of Christ and his atoning work for humanity by his suffering. This constant exposition of the Passion had an unfortunate side effect. To dwell on Christ’s sufferings was liable to make worshippers turn their attention to those whom the Bible narrative principally blamed for causing the pain: the Jews. Franciscans were not slow to make the connection explicit, and in doing so, they complicated and darkened the already tense relationships between Jews and Christians. Augustine of Hippo had declared that God had allowed the Jews to survive all the disasters in their history to act as a sign and a warning to Christians. They should therefore be allowed to continue their community life within the Christian world, although without the full privileges of citizenship which Christians enjoyed: God only intended them to be converted en masse when he chose to bring the world to an end. So Jews continued to be the only non-Christian community formally tolerated in the Christian West, but their position was always fragile, and they were excluded from positions of power or mainstream wealth-creating activities. One result was that a significant number turned to moneylending at interest (usury), an activity which, thanks to half- understood prohibitions in the Tanakh, the Church prohibited to Christians. That trade could bring wealth to Jews, but certainly not popularity.36 It is true that the Franciscans had not pioneered or single-handedly invented the link between Jews and the Passion. The Western liturgy of Holy Week had been elaborating and intensifying the drama of Good Friday, the day of Jesus’s death, for at least a century before their first appearance, and others had drawn their conclusions from the emotion of that liturgical experience.37 Yet the tragedy remains: the heirs of the apostle of love, Francis, were among the chief sustainers of the growing hatred of Jews in medieval Western Europe. It was in this atmosphere that England pioneered Western Europe’s first mass expulsion of Jews when, in 1289, Edward I’s Parliament refused to help the King out of his war debts unless he rid the realm of all Jews; other rulers followed suit later. Such anti-Semitic ill-will continued to be balanced, in the untidy fashion of human affairs and with Augustine’s lukewarm encouragement, by perfectly cordial or straightforward relations between Jews and Christians, but the impulse to harass or persecute Jews became a persistent feature of Western Christianity which it has only now properly confronted in the wake of terrible events in the twentieth century.38 Jews were not the only group to be scapegoated: we have already noted (see pp. 400–401) the way that in bad times, lepers and homosexuals could also be seen as conspiring against Christian society. The early fourteenth century added a new set of conspirators: Satan and his agents on earth, witches. Pope John XXII, a man much exercised by enemies and

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  cherished symbol of the ‘Hussite’ movement, which against the general practice of the time, although in harmony with a demand of Jean Gerson and certain other theologians, came to insist on frequent communion for the laity, even for infants. The Hussites’ eucharistic devotion offered a great contrast both to Wyclif’s outlook and to the text-based gatherings of the later Lollards, although the original links between the movements meant that a significant number of English Wyclifite manuscripts have survived into the modern Czech Republic. Yet soon Hus himself was dead, betrayed at the Council of Konstanz in 1415 when the assembled clerics prevailed on the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund to set aside an imperial promise of safe conduct to the Prague Reformer. After being imprisoned in vile conditions, Hus was burned at the stake. It was a powerful symbol that the institutional Church was no longer capable of dealing constructively with a movement of reform. Hus’s death turned him into a Czech martyr: an explosion of fury in Prague established what was in effect a separate royal Bohemian Church, at first supported by the nobility. Pressure from both emperor and pope resulted in the abandonment of much of this experiment, which caused further anger in the city. Once more the Eucharist became a symbol of the revolution: a mob was led by the insurrectionary preacher Jan Želivský bearing the eucharistic monstrance from his parish church to the city hall, where the crowd hurled thirteen Catholic loyalists from an upper window to their deaths, the first ‘Defenestration’ of Prague.34 The following insurrection featured violent destruction of symbols of traditional religion: the first large-scale wrecking of monasteries and church art by Christians in the history of Christian Europe, as thoroughgoing as anything the continent was to see from the 1520s to the 1560s. The period between the first and the second (rather less bloodthirsty) Prague Defenestration a year short of two centuries later (see p. 646) was one of continuous if intermittent religious warfare focused on Bohemia, all springing out of the martyrdom of Hus, although merging with the wider conflict of the Reformation. For four centuries and more, Prague’s half-finished Cathedral of St Vitus, whose rebuilding the Emperor Charles IV had begun in the decades before the Hussite crisis erupted, was a permanent memorial to that troubled time. Its lavish eastern wing was the equal of any earlier French cathedral, but it petered out in the huge empty void windows of its half-built transepts, a bathetically unfinished spire, and an incoherent muddle where the nave should be (see Plate II). But after decades of vicious civil war and the defeat of successive outside attempts to destroy the revolution, an independent Hussite Church structure still survived, grudgingly and incompletely recognized by Rome. After all the destruction of the previous decades, it was a surprisingly traditionalist body, still