Hope

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 The Pisces (2018)

  I’d owned enough New Age tchotchkes in my lifetime to know that within a few days of purchase they just seemed like more crap. But as you were shopping, sifting through the stones and their meanings, there was hope that this was a turning point. It was the velocity of buying something that was the high, the potentiality of it. I could capitalist-believe in magic. In the store was hope, and hope was what separated me from the flat expanse of the rest of my life. It was like a line, a gateway that stopped me from being swallowed. I looked at the fliers for all of the different healers. Some did numerology, others Tarot, others Reiki and chakra cleansing. I could have sat there all day and had my fortune told until someone predicted what I wanted to hear—that I was getting back together with Jamie, that he was coming back to me—so I quickly pulled away. I looked at the crystals. I would have loved to buy rose quartz, giant hunks of it, hundreds and hundreds of dollars’ worth. I wanted to make a circle around me; do some ritual shit with rose petals; burn vanilla, gardenia, and strawberry incense to attract love. Instead I bought a sparkly raw chunk of amethyst in the palest purple, which was said to bring peace and stability. There was also a table where magic candles were sold: red for love and passion, green for money. I bypassed the love candle and selected an egg-colored one for clearing and needed change. Maybe I could just burn the past year away. —At home I ate pad thai and drank white wine, fed Dominic, and gave him his medicine. I’d known nothing about dogs before him—how or where to pet them—but he was patient with me, and I’d soon discovered his favorite places to be touched. His entire head was brown with the exception of two white patches: one a white stripe down the center of his forehead, which I stroked gently with one finger and called his angel mark, and the other a diamond shape on the back of his neck, an arrow pointing as if to say, Scratch me here. This was the area that he could not reach with his paws, and, when scratched, would lull him right to sleep. We would play a game where he gazed at me lovingly, trying to keep his brown eyes open, his lids growing heavy, then popping open, then heavier and heavier until they were sealed shut: just two stitches lined with little lashes. When he rolled over onto his back and showed me his white underside, it meant that it was time for a belly rub. Sometimes I would get crazy like I was waxing a car, Dominic pawing joyfully at the air, fur flying, tongue out, and panting. Other times I would gently stroke and kiss the softness there, relishing his scent, which was somehow reminiscent of a warm roast chicken.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  He tells the Philippians, “It has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to everyone else that my imprisonment is for Christ” (1:13). That phrase “imperial guard” is literally “pretorium” and means not the imperial Pretorian Guard in Rome, but the official judgment seat and punishment barracks of any governor. In the present case, therefore, Paul is not imprisoned by some lower official in some minor city, but by the official provincial representative of the Senate and People of Rome at Ephesus in Asia. “By Life or by Death” Throughout Philippians Paul vacillates between life and death, deliverance and execution, but hope always triumphs over despair. Watch that dialectic in these verses, and notice how he talks himself into ultimate confidence: For I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance. It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be put to shame in any way, but that by my speaking with all boldness, Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you. Since I am convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith, so that I may share abundantly in your boasting in Christ Jesus when I come to you again. (1:19–26) A short while later he reverts to the possibility of his execution, but once again he moves from that possibility to speak of imminent deliverance: But even if I am being poured out as a libation over the sacrifice and the offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with all of you—and in the same way you also must be glad and rejoice with me. I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon, so that I may be cheered by news of you…. I hope therefore to send him as soon as I see how things go with me; and I trust in the Lord that I will also come soon. (2:17–19, 23–24) We will see below that Paul’s confident tone may have been more to console the Philippians than to reassure himself and that the terror of that imprisonment was far greater than we glimpse from those letters to either Philemon or the Philippians. One further point. Paul also admits that there was a split among the Ephesian Christians and, although he gave no precise details, it was probably over his program and his imprisonment.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  FIRST QUESTION. How on earth could a fervent Christian Jew like James of Jerusalem, James the Just, James the brother of the Lord Jesus, have ever allowed such a dispensation for pagan converts? First, Jewish tradition had long announced a future day when God would end the evil, injustice, and violence that relentlessly destroyed God’s world and oppressed God’s people. There would then be, here below upon this earth, a magnificently utopian (end-of-this-place) or eschatological (end-of-this-time) world. There would be, they believed and hoped, a restored, transformed, and transfigured world. God would overcome, someday. We have already seen that fervent hope in the preceding chapter. Second, as Paula Fredriksen emphasizes, that sacred tradition imagined two utterly divergent divine solutions concerning the nations, the Gentiles, the great conquering empires who caused so much havoc and destruction. One was extermination, the Great Final War at Mt. Megiddo (Armageddon) when, according to Revelation 14:20, the blood of the slain would be “as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles.” The other was conversion, the Great Final Banquet on Mt. Zion, when, according to Isaiah 25:6–8, The Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth. Nothing is said about male circumcision before that Great Final Banquet; neither is anything said about that banquet’s menu being kosher. Those silences would, of course, allow arguments in either direction. Either those requirements are not mentioned because they are no longer operative, or they are not mentioned because they are always operative and assumed. Remember that point and counterpoint throughout this chapter. Similarly, in the magnificent vision repeated verbatim in Micah 4:1–4 and Isaiah 2:2–4,

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  There is here a first irony. Recall the fierce disagreement between Paul and Peter at Antioch in Galatians 2:11–14 from Chapter 4. They were finally reconciled, at least by later tradition, as martyrs under Nero. Also, recall the disagreement between the weak and the strong from Romans 14 earlier in this chapter. We do not know if Paul’s plea for their unity was successful or not. But, once again, that discord was rendered moot by Nero’s brutality. Peter and Paul, weak Christians and strong Christians, united in martyrdom, were finally able, as Paul prayed in Romans 15:6, “together with one voice to glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” There is also a second irony. Paul did not know that the letter to the Romans would be his last will and testament. He did know that accompanying the collection to Jerusalem was personally very dangerous. But the letter and the collection were both about unity and, eventually, that search for unity would cost him his life. He accepted that possibility. You may disagree with him on pagans and Jews, on Jews and Christians, on Christian Jews and Christian pagans. You may also disagree with him on whether Christ is or is not the answer. But, of course and in any case, Christ is only the answer because he incarnates the nonviolent justice of God in his own life and death. So think not just of Christ, but of life within the transcendental imperative of global distributive justice. Read, then, Paul’s explanation of that great collection for James’s utopian community at Jerusalem in 2 Corinthians 8:13–14: I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. We cite that text as applying not just to the original situation of the great collection, but to the present situation of our modern world. “It is a question of a fair balance.” The ideal of human unity under divine justice grounds Paul’s theology of history in Romans. And, after two thousand years, we know it did not work out as he expected, but we also know that it must work out somehow if the earth is to have any future. What a world under justice looks like is already given in the citation from 2 Corinthians. Is it not clear by now that the safety of the world and the security of the earth demand the unity not of global victory, but of global justice? Otherwise, God will still be God, but only of the insects and the grasses.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  Rome’s global destiny and world dominion came from divine ancestry, heavenly decree, prophetic promise, and, of course, most ancient tradition. As Homer’s Greek Iliad ended with three related women, Hecuba, Andromache, and Helen, mourning for Troy after dead Hector’s fate, so Virgil’s Latin Aeneid began with three related men, Anchises, Aeneas, and Julus, fleeing from Troy after dead Hector’s apparition. In other words, Virgil took Greek paganism’s Old Testament, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and combined them to produce Latin paganism’s New Testament, the Aeneid’s soaring manifesto of Pax Romana and Augustan revolution. All of that glory is long in ruins, so mockery comes easily now. But, in any case, imperial globalization, the conscious claim, the intentional hope, the prophetic promise, and expected destiny of world rule is a heady ideology, no matter what actual limits of time and place may come upon it as history unfolds. First Justice, Then Peace We already saw Paul’s command to obey earthly government in Chapter 7’s comments on Romans 13:1–7 and recognized that it was not a general universal decree, but a specific Roman situation. How could it ever have been an unqualified mandate to human power from a Paul who had just recorded this cosmic indictment in Romans 8:19–23 (italics added)? For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. We talked in connection with Romans 13:1–7 of the hierarchy of the negative in assessing nonviolent resistance and turn now, as promised there, to consider the even more fundamental primacy of the positive. Our proposal is that both Jesus and Paul are not so much trapped in a negation of global imperialism as engaged in establishing its positive alternative here below upon this earth. If you are only against something, you are doomed to negativity, which is why imperial dictators are often replaced by postcolonial ones and foreign thugs are often replaced by local ones. Think, instead, of Jesus’s Kingdom of God or Paul’s Lordship of Christ in terms of these two examples from our contemporary world. One example is Mohandas Gandhi against the authoritarian imperialism of the British Empire in India. The other is Václav Havel against the totalitarian imperialism of the Soviet Empire in eastern Europe. They are not just against something, they are positively for something else.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  At the moment of Paul’s writing that vision of global unity under divine distributive justice was incarnated personally and concentrated symbolically for Paul in two magnificent initiatives (15:23–33). First, since the Jerusalem Conference, as he recalled in Galatians 2:10, Paul had been organizing a financial collection from his pagan converts for the common-life community known as “the poor” and assembled around James, the brother of Jesus, in Jerusalem. Representatives from the various provinces would bring it, and Paul was to accompany them to Jerusalem. That would emphasize and he hoped promote the religio-social unity of pagans and Jews, Jewish Christians and pagan Christians. Second, and thereafter, Paul intended to turn from the eastern to the western Roman Empire, and he planned to visit the Roman assemblies and obtain their assistance on his way to Spain. That would emphasize and he hoped promote the religio-geographical unity of East and West under the justice of God as revealed in Christ. That was the global unity Paul described as a theology, lived as a geography, and served as a ministry. And, as it turned out, he died for it as well. One final point and request. Throughout this book we have cited rather than simply referred to any passage in Paul’s letters under discussion. We do not presume you have a New Testament always at hand. But because of the length and density of Paul’s argument in Romans we have had to impose limitations in this case, so there will be more unquoted references than usual. You will be able to follow the discussion without a copy of Romans beside you, but it would be better if you had one available. Augustus and Nero at Rome The Arch of Titus was dedicated, high on its eastern side, to “The divine Titus Vespasian Augustus, son of the divine Vespasian.” The Flavians, Rome’s second imperial dynasty, lasted almost thirty years and had three emperors, but although Vespasian and his elder son, Titus, were officially divinized by the Senate, his younger son, Domitian, was assassinated and officially execrated by that same body. The Julio-Claudians, Rome’s first imperial dynasty had lasted almost one hundred years and had five emperors. But only two, Augustus and Claudius, were senatorially divinized, and the last one, Nero, was finally “pronounced a public enemy by the Senate” and condemned, according to Suetonius’s The Lives of the Caesars: Nero, to being “stripped, fastened by the neck in a fork, and then beaten to death with rods.” He only avoided that fate by suicide, driving “a dagger into his throat, aided by Epaphroditus, his private secretary” (49.2–3). On June 9, 68 C.E., the Julio-Claudian dynasty came to an ignominious end and Rome was plunged once more into civil war.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  in the eucharist. Declaring that the judges had not been able to break down his arguments, Wyclif went on preaching and lecturing at the university. But in the king’s council, to which he made appeal, the duke of Lancaster took sides against him and forbade him to speak any more on the subject at Oxford. This prohibition Wyclif met with a still more positive avowal of his views in his Confession, which closes with the noble words, "I believe that in the end the truth will conquer." The same year, the Peasants’ Revolt broke out, but there is no evidence that Wyclif had any more sympathy with the movement than Luther had with the Peasants’ Rising of 1525. After the revolt was over, he proposed that Church property be given to the upper classes, not to the poor.564 The principles, however, which he enunciated were germs which might easily spring up into open rebellion against oppression. Had he not written, "There is no moral obligation to pay tax or tithe to bad rulers either in Church or state. It is permitted to punish or depose them and to reclaim the wealth which the clergy have diverted from the poor?" One hundred and fifty years after this time, Tyndale said, "They said it in Wyclif’s day, and the hypocrites say now, that God’s Word arouseth insurrection."565 Courtenay’s elevation to the see of Canterbury boded no good to the Reformer. In 1382, he convoked the synod which is known in English history as the Earthquake synod, from the shock felt during its meetings. The primate was supported by 9 bishops, and when the earth began to tremble, he showed admirable courage by interpreting it as a favorable omen. The earth, in trying to rid itself of its winds and humors, was manifesting its sympathy with the body ecclesiastic.566 Wyclif, who was not present, made another use of the occurrence, and declared that the Lord sent the earthquake "because the friars had put heresy upon Christ in the matter of the sacrament, and the earth trembled as it did when Christ was damned to bodily death."567 The council condemned 24 articles, ascribed to the Reformer, 10 of which were pronounced heretical, and the remainder to be against the decisions of the Church.568 The 4 main subjects condemned as heresy were that Christ is not corporally present in the sacrament, that oral confession is not necessary for a soul prepared to die, that after Urban VI.’s death the English Church should acknowledge no pope but, like the Greeks, govern itself, and that it is contrary to Scripture for ecclesiastics to hold temporal possessions. Courtenay followed up the synod’s decisions by summoning Rygge, then chancellor of Oxford, to suppress the heretical teachings and teachers.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  This presented the Church with a unique opportunity to capture society by its roots. It had the chance not merely to establish a stranglehold on education, but to recreate the whole process and content and purpose of education in a Christian setting. In a way, Augustine had foreseen and prepared for this. Lacking Greek, he had sketched the outline of a Latin-Christian system of knowledge in which every aspect of human creativity and intellectual endeavour was related to Christian belief. He produced the matrix which continued to be elaborated throughout the Middle Ages. But how was this knowledge to be transmitted? It is curious that during the fifth century, when Roman institutions were crumbling, no attempt appears to have been made to create Christian schools. The first such suggestion was made in 536, when Cassiodorus, a prominent Catholic layman who was secretary to the Ostrogothic king, Theodoric, asked Pope Agapetus to found a Christian university in Rome: ‘Seeing that the schools were swarming with students with a great longing for secular letters’, he urged the pope ‘to collect subscriptions and to have Christian rather than secular schools in the city of Rome, with professors, just as there had been for so long in Alexandria’. The project was started but collapsed in the Gothic-Byzantine wars, which finally put paid to the state system of education, and indeed to what remained of Roman civilization in Italy. By the time Gregory the Great came to the papal throne, the West had descended to an altogether lower level of culture. Yet something had been saved. Boethius, another sixth-century Catholic layman and minister at the Gothic court, had contrived – before he was executed in a Gothic-Arian persecution – to translate into Latin the complete works of Plato and Aristotle. His manuscripts were copied, and re-copied, and slowly proliferated. Cassiodorus himself, during the darkest days, created a Christian institution at Squillace in Calabria, at which learned laymen or monks copied manuscripts of standard texts. Developing the ideas of Augustine, he prepared an encyclopaedic course of study, both secular and divine, for Christian ascetics. Thus, for the first time, a great portion of available knowledge was assembled for a Christian purpose and in a monastic context. In the next two generations, the Cassiodoran system was taken up in Seville, under Bishop Leander, a friend of Gregory the Great, and his successor, Bishop Isidore. Seville had already become a gathering place for scholarly Christian refugees, and with the conversion of the Arian court it became possible to build up a centre of Christian culture. Over a period of twenty years Isidore and his helpers compiled a vast survey of human knowledge, arranged etymologically and incorporating the works and transmissions of Boethius and Cassiodorus, and much else. His object was partly to assist the Visigothic kings, partly to instruct his own priests and monks. Almost by accident he founded a civilization, or at any rate an educational system.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  To Ralegh, the true evidence of God was in nature itself which, as he pointed out in his History of the World, spectacularly reinforced the revelation of the scriptures: ‘By his own word, and by this Visible world, is God perceived of men, which is also the understood language of the Almighty, vouchsafed to all his creatures, whose Hieroglyphical Characters are the unnumbered stars, the sun and moon, written on these large volumes of the firmament: written also on the earth and the seas, by the letters of all those living creatures, and plants, which inhabit and reside therein’. This splendid metaphor of the natural world, governed by laws ascertainable to reason, acting as a permanent if silent witness to God’s Christian truth, established itself firmly in the minds of many western intellectuals by the end of the seventeenth century as the basis of a new system of apologetics. In England, such men were often members of the Royal Society. They did not bring their religious debates into science, but they were eager to select from science evidence for religion. Many were in orders, steering a sensible middle road between strict Calvinism and the High Church. In university circles, especially at Cambridge, they were characterized as neo-Platonists; within the Church, as Latitudinarians. Gilbert Burnet, one of them, sums up the Cambridge group thus: ‘They declared against superstition on the one hand and enthusiasm on the other. They loved the constitution of the church and the liturgy, and could live well under them. But they did not think it unlawful to live under another form. They wished that things might have been carried out with more moderation. And they continued to keep a good correspondence with those who had differed from them in opinion, and allowed a great freedom in philosophy and in divinity.’ For these men, educated, urbane, up-to-date, constitutionalists in politics, religion was common sense. The days of persecution were over. All men would come to God in the natural way, if only the shouting and killing stopped, and the voice of reason was heard. Reason reinforced faith. The best ally of theology was natural philosophy. God could be seen in and through his creation. As John Smith put it: ‘God made the universe and all the creatures contained therein as so many glasses wherein he might reflect his own glory... in this outward world we may read the lovely characters of Divine goodness, power and wisdom.’ Joseph Glanvill, Rector of Bath, thought that the power and wisdom and goodness of the Creator is displayed in the admirable order and workmanship of the creation.’ God’s existence could thus be demonstrated; they constructed a reasonable pattern of belief, then showed that scriptural revelation coincided with it – for instance Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, proved that Mosaic history conformed to the canons of reason.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  And he was too much of a historian to suppose that reason alone was likely to prove a reliable guide for mankind – he had no need of Pascal’s admonitions – or that optimism was a sensible posture for a philosopher. What makes Voltaire a really great man, and an important figure in the history of Christianity, is that in this and other respects he swam against the prevailing tide of the Enlightenment. He found both the underlying notions behind Leibniz’s Theodicée (1710), that everything was for the best in this world, and that in any event the Christian should resign himself and submit, quite misguided: the first fallacious, the second morally repugnant. He rejected Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733): Safe in the hand of one disposing power, Or in the natal, or the mortal hour... One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. He thought this was tempting Providence, and was delighted when Providence, tempted, produced the spectacular Lisbon earthquake of 1755. It was as though Voltaire had been waiting for this catastrophe to attack the received wisdom of the age, whether Christian or rationalist: ‘My dear sir, nature is very cruel. One would find it hard to imagine how the laws of movement caused such frightful disasters in the best of possible worlds . . . I flatter myself that at least the reverend fathers Inquisitors have been crushed like the others. That ought to teach men not to persecute each other, for while a few holy scoundrels burn a few fanatics, the earth swallows up one and all.’ Voltaire used the occasion of the earthquake, which aroused a European interest quite disproportionate to its magnitude, to rush out a didactic poem, which went through a score of editions in 1756: Un jour tout sera bien, voilà notre espérance, Tout est bien aujourd’hui, voilà I’illusion ... The poem was a challenge to the European intelligentsia, sceptical or Christian, to explain natural disasters in terms of moral assumptions. Pamphlets poured out by the hundred. Christian theodicy proved particularly feeble. Rousseau, trying to blend rationalism with emotion, was no better: men were responsible, he reasoned, since the casualties would have been less if men did not huddle together unnaturally in cities. Young Emmanuel Kant was another respondent. He was already moving towards a post-rational and romantic solution: insight is really more important than exact scientific knowledge, and moral experience carries us further than the truths revealed by phenomena: ‘I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to leave room for faith.’ The lesson of the earthquake, Kant argued, was that in the world of phenomena man was subject to the necessities of natural law, but in the world of the spirit he is free – nature was subordinate to the realm of ends governed by purpose, and spirit was superior to matter. The process of reasoning thus ended in God.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The idea seems to have been to create a liberal corridor running through central Europe, from England through Holland, Germany, Austria to Venice, which would cut the Counter-Reformation extremists in two, and ultimately with the help of France impose an eirenic religious settlement on Europe. The marriage between Elizabeth and Frederick was part of this plan, and it was to be followed by Frederick’s establishment as the king of Bohemia and ultimately as emperor of a reunified, liberal Germany. These hopes were reflected in the publication of a number of Hermetic or Rosicrucian manifestos. Their theme was as follows: The Protestant Reformation has lost its strength, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation is driving in the wrong direction. A new reformation of the whole world is called for, and this third reformation will find its strength in Christian evangelism, with its emphasis on brotherly love, in the Hermetic and cabalist traditions, and in a turning towards the works of God in nature in a scientific spirit of exploration. To the third force in England, the heroine, of course, was their princess, Elizabeth, who was seen as both an ecumenical talisman and a patroness of the sciences. Wotton wrote a poem to her, On his Mistress the Queen of Bohemia, and John Donne addressed her prophetically: Be thou a new star that to us portends Ends of great wonder; and be thou those ends. Donne, Dean of St Paul’s, was in many ways the outstanding figure of the English third force during this brief, illusory period. He had changed from Catholicism to Anglicanism without acquiring enmity to his old faith. Writing to his Catholic friend, Toby Matthew, he admitted men could go to heaven by different routes: ‘Men go to China both by the Straits and by the Cape.’ His library included many works of Catholic theology, most of them printed in Spain, and he made no bones about his ecumenicalism: ‘I never fettered nor imprisoned the word Religion, not... immuring it in a Rome, or a Wittenberg or a Geneva; they are all virtual beams of one sun.... They are not so contrary as the North and South poles.’ In 1619, when hopes were still high, James I sent Lord Doncaster on a peace-mission to the Palatinate and Bohemia, and Donne was senior member of the suite. At Heidelberg he preached a sermon to the Elector and the Princess Elizabeth, soon to be the ‘Winter Queen’ of Bohemia. The text has not survived; but we can imagine it, probably with truth, as an eloquent manifesto of the third force. The ecumenical dream collapsed with the great Catholic victory at the White Mountain; Frederick was driven from Bohemia and his Palatinate, and his fine library was carted off to Rome; his princess spent a long exile in Holland, where scholarly remnants of the third force gathered round her. Among her later admirers, by an astonishing irony, was Descartes.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In 1529, the reforming princes delivered their ‘protest’ against the Catholic powers at the Diet of Speier; two years later the Protestant movement was placed on a military footing by the formation of the Schmalkaldic League, extended in 1539 to include a vast area of Germany. From this point, there was no real chance that the Lutheran movement would be exterminated; the papacy and its secular allies were faced with the choice of compromise or permanent schism.1 The overwhelming consensus among secular statesmen was that a compromise, and reconciliation, was possible; and that a universal council should be summoned to bring it about. From the start of the controversy this remained the Emperor Charles v’s policy. His salient object was the reunification of Germany, and he saw this could only be realized by the restoration of religious unity. For the French crown, however, the salient object was the continued division of Germany, and France’s influence was consistently deployed to make a satisfactory council impossible. Clement VII and his successor Paul III were similarly determined to avoid a council which they realized must end in the destruction of papal power; and their procrastinations were successful. By 1539, Luther and his Church were secure, and he had lost interest in compromise; or, rather, he did not believe that the papacy could be brought to entertain one in any circumstances. The principals, as it were, had opted out of the dialogue. But there were many on both sides who still believed the gap could be bridged. In some ways Luther, as they appreciated, was more Catholic than many of his Roman Catholic opponents. At the beginning of the controversy, Johan Eck had chosen deliberately to argue with him on the issue of papal authority rather than on grace, the sacraments and the nature of the Church. Some pious laymen, such as his patron Frederick the Wise, said they could not see where he had been refuted on the basis of scripture. It was the same with Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith. Quite independently of Luther, Cardinal Contarini had reached the same conclusions as early as 1511. There were other instances of Catholic theologians adopting this position as a result of reconsidering St Paul. One example was Cardinal Pole, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in the attempt by Queen Mary Tudor to restore Catholicism in England in the 1550s. Other eirenicists on the Catholic side included Pierre Favre of Savoy, the first Jesuit to go to Germany and one of Ignatius Loyola’s earliest companions. He advocated a policy of love and friendship to heretics and the search of doctrinal harmony. On the Protestant side, Melanchthon and Bucer consistently looked for intermediary positions.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “Rubbish,” she said. “How else do you think you are going to get over him? You think you are going to just heal? Nobody heals. You need to replace! That’ll be the thing that makes him come back in the end, but by then you won’t want him. Men can smell it when we’ve moved on. Especially to a bigger cock. Bald Brad texted me.” “Don’t text him back!” “Oh, I won’t,” she said. “I have no need.” “Well, that’s interesting,” I said. “I’m glad you found a way to balance it all and not get attached.” “For women like us? I’m convinced this is the only way. The only way you’re going to get over him is by having a lot of sex and seeing what else is out there. You might even surprise yourself. You might see that you can do it, you can just fuck and not get attached. I guarantee I will not be getting attached to Trent.” “Ponytail man?” “Yes.” She laughed. “Also, you need to see how hot you are. To feel it.” “I am so not hot,” I laughed. “I’m gross.” “Oh, bugger off. You have the disheveled waif ingénue thing going. Like that bitch from Les Misérables.” She looked at her watch. “Fuck, I have to go pick up my kids. Never have children. They’ll ruin your life.” “Not planning on it,” I said. “You should just try Tinder,” she said. “Just try it.” 11.That night I thought about going to the rocks to see if Theo the swimmer was there again. It made me feel stupid. What was I doing chasing down some boy? Instead I made a fake Facebook profile (I’d shut mine down since I saw Jamie and Rochelle toasting over flan) and created a Tinder account, using old photos: some from five or ten years ago. I was not consciously thinking I will kill the old me and in her place will grow an electronic me, but that is what I was doing. I wanted to negate myself somehow, as if you could just sign up to vanish. As if you could sign up to really be alive, but as someone else. Well, I was going to be somebody who didn’t care. I was going to be free about sex, my body. I wanted to be the one to no longer give a fuck. Could you sculpt yourself into one who does not give a fuck? Could I remove the giving a fuck from the time in my life before I met Jamie, where I had sex with a lot of people, but always seemed to care whether they loved me after? I had to go into it with a professed mission of not giving a fuck. So I wrote my bio: Let’s make out in a dark alley.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  He disliked the Protestant militants almost as much as the fanatics of the Catholic League, and tended to be sceptical of the merits of organized religion. His follower, Montaigne, argued on the same lines in elegant essays. How could Catholics and Protestants be so sure they had the truth? Their arrogance was ‘the nurse of false opinion’. We should admit our ‘uncertainty, weakness and ignorance’. As for persecuting other people’s views, no two opinions were exactly alike, ‘any more than two faces’. Montaigne was a Catholic, but thought that both sides twisted religion cynically to suit their cause. ‘There is no hostility that excels Christian hostility. How wonderful is our zeal when it is aiding our tendency to hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, lying, rebellion.... Our religion is made to extirpate vices: in fact, it protects them, fosters them, incites them.’ The coronation of Henri IV persuaded many that a new age of Christian peace was dawning – it was the chief reason why Bruno thought it was at last safe to return to Italy. Henri did indeed impose religious toleration in France, but it was a long time before he could establish his authority effectively, and only towards the end of his life was he able to work towards a general European settlement. His minister, Sully, spoke of Henri’s ‘great design’ for a peace treaty, and his earliest biographer, Perefixe, wrote that he was working towards a Christian commonwealth of Europe in his last years, to be based on the reconciliation of sensible, liberal Protestants and Catholics in France and elsewhere, and a resumption of the colloquies. His international coalition of states would almost certainly have been mainly Protestant in composition, and would have taken the form of an anti-Habsburg alliance; but this was inevitable, since it was the Habsburg-Papal-Jesuit axis which kept the Counter-Revolution going, with the object of a total extirpation of heresy, and so made peaceful coexistence impossible. Hence Henri, though a Catholic, was seen as Antichrist in Rome, and his assassination in 1610 as a divine deliverance. After the death of Henri, the third force tended to look towards the young Elector Palatine, Frederick V, the chief of the lay electors of the empire, as the ecumenical champion. He married Elizabeth, daughter of James I, and this was appropriate, since James saw himself as an ecumenical figure. In 1604 he told Parliament: ‘I could wish from my heart that it would please God to make me one of the members of such a general Christian union in religion, as laying wilfulness aside on both hands, we might meet in the midst, which is the centre and perfection of all things.’ The proposal was transmitted through the Venetian ambassador, Carlo Scaramelli, to the Papal legate in Paris, and so to Pope Clement VIII. The Pope’s cynical response, scrawled on the back of the legate’s letter, was: ‘These are things which make me doubt that he believes anything.’ The official reply was no more encouraging.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  Christianity is, therefore, and only at its theoretical and practical best, but one manifestation of that far more fundamental grounding of the world in that which we ignore at our peril. Paul described that world grounding as the justice and righteousness of God offered to us as a free gift. He, like Jesus before him, had a divinely mandated program that secondarily and negatively resisted imperial Rome, but that primarily and positively incarnated global justice on the local, ordinary, and everyday level. Here and now. We can read Havel now to understand both Jesus and Paul then. Epitaph for an Apostle Rome was not the evil empire of its ancient time. Rome was not the axis of evil in its Mediterranean place. Rome was not the worst thing that had ever happened to its preindustrial world. Rome was simply the normalcy of civilization within first-century options and the inevitability of globalization within first-century limits. Rome was maybe even the cutting-edge of civilization, although hear in the background snickers from the Han Chinese at the other end of the Silk Road. But this is the crucial point for this book. Who they were there and then, we are here and now. We are, at the start of the twenty-first century, what the Roman Empire was at the start of the first century. Put succinctly: Rome and the East there, America and the West here. Put more succinctly: they then, we now. Put most succinctly: SPQR is SPQA.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  In Chapter 4 we saw the agreement that was forged at Jerusalem between Peter’s mission to Christian Judaism and Paul’s mission to Christian paganism. We suggest that James led an assembly in Jerusalem that practiced community life with regard to their possessions, just as Acts says. In 2:44–45 they had “all things in common,” and in 4:32–5:11 “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.” They were known, therefore, as the Poor Ones, just as Jesus had said, “Blessed are the poor.” That program would be similar to the lifestyle of the Qumran Essenes, that is, a divine share-life in opposition to the normalcy of human greed-life. The Jerusalem agreement of Galatians 2:10 was for donations from Christian paganism for the specific support of that ideal, utopian, eschatological model community in Jerusalem. This is also the second major case in this book when it is absolutely necessary to combine Paul’s letters and Luke’s Acts, and the reason is the same. Our first chapter on the God-worshipers showed how Paul never mentions them, but Luke does so repeatedly. In this present chapter on the collection, we have the reverse, Acts never mentions that collection, but Paul does so repeatedly. Still, in both cases, each has material that only makes sense by adding in the other’s data. That correlation on the collection is as follows: (1) Agreement:Galatians 2:10(2) Program:1 Corinthians 16:1–4;2 Corinthians 8–9Acts 11:27–30(3) Delivery:Romans 15:25–31Acts 20:4(4) Condition:Acts 21:17–26(5) Disaster:Acts 21:27–36In other words, we know, from Paul, about gathering the collection, but only from Acts about its delivery. Paul collected the money from his four provinces, Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia, and Asia but, for obvious reasons of propriety, had representatives take each province’s own contribution. Here in the letter to the Romans is his final recorded statement on the collection as the great symbolic act of unity between Christian Judaism and Christian paganism: At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem in a ministry to the saints; for Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to share their resources with the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. They were pleased to do this, and indeed they owe it to them; for if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material things. So, when I have completed this, and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will set out by way of you to Spain; and I know that when I come to you, I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ. I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in earnest prayer to God on my behalf, that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my ministry to Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints. (15:25–31)

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.’ And Americans, he added, held religion ‘to be indispensible to the maintenance of republican institutions’. Some of them saw it as much more than this. In the period 1750–1820, Presbyterianism and Congregationalism, the two formative sects of American Protestantism, ceased to be dominant, and, in numbers at any rate, the Baptists and Wesleyans took over. In New England, as indeed in England itself, many well-educated Presbyterians, under the impact of the Enlightenment, became Unitarians; and it was the New England Unitarians who created the so-called American Renaissance, centred round the North American Review (1815) and the Christian Examiner (1824), papers whose editors included William Emerson, the father of the poet, Edward Everett, George Ticknor, Jared Sparks, Richard Henry Dana, Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell and Edward Everett Hale. Harvard, whose staff included John Quincy Adams, Longfellow, Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, was largely Unitarian. Unitarianism was, to a great extent, the religion of the élite – critics joked that its preaching was limited to ‘the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the neighbourhood of Boston’. In fact it had its ultimate roots in Arminianism and the third force, and could trace its pedigree not so much to the Founding Fathers as to Erasmus himself, who saw true Christianity in full alliance with the Renaissance. One could even push it back further, for the idea of human rebirth, the ‘new man’ was the central point of St Paul’s moral theology. ‘Christianity’, wrote William Ellery Channing, ‘. . . should come forth from the darkness and corruption of the past in its own celestial splendour and in its divine simplicity. It should be comprehended as having but one purpose, the perfection of human nature, the elevation of men into nobler beings.’ The declaration of the American Unitarian Association (1853) spoke of God ‘forever sweeping the nations with regenerating gales from heaven, and visiting the hearts of men with celestial solicitations’. The prime instrument in this progressive process was the American Republic itself. Jonathan Edwards had predicted in 1740: ‘It is not unlikely that this work of God’s spirit, that is so extraordinary and wonderful, is the dawning, or at least the prelude, of that glorious work of God so often foretold in scripture, which in the progress and issue of it shall renew the world of mankind. . . . And there are many things that make it probable that this work will begin in America.’ To the Unitarian élite, the work had already, manifestly, begun. The old Calvinist theory of the Elect Nation infused nineteenth-century American patriotism. Thus Longfellow: Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all its hopes for future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Christian assumption that the world was about 5,000 years old (Archbishop Ussher of Armagh, in his Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, 1650–4, calculated that the date of Creation was 4004 BC , and this was widely accepted, especially in the Protestant world) was belied by Chinese chronology. If the Chinese were right on this point, might they not be right on others? To what extent could their burial customs or prayers, so crucial in almost every religion, be reconciled to Christian theory and practice? The Chinese were clearly not prepared to abandon what Europeans crudely termed ‘ancestor worship’, but which might be reinterpreted and adjusted to the doctrine of the resurrection and the first and second coming. An elementary system on these lines was worked out by Ricci and his successors. They incorporated Chinese nuances in references to God, and used the same Chinese word for mass as was customarily used for ancestor-ceremonies. The compromise was secretly noted by Franciscans and Dominicans in 1631, and a triumphant complaint made to Rome. The subsequent controversy over Asian rites was gradually broadened to include a number of other variations and translations, and became an explosive issue, as indeed it deserved to be. Was Christianity to throw off its European chrysalis and become at last the world religion, united in its central truth, infinitely varied in its presentation, which Christ implicitly and Paul explicitly had always intended? There was a time when the papacy seemed to be ready to grasp the opportunity. In 1615 Paul V had authorized a Chinese liturgy, and translations were made. In 1622 Gregory XV created a new Vatican Department of Propaganda, with the object of universalizing the missionary movement and freeing it from the narrow national horizons of Spain and Portugal. Francesco Ingoli, the first Secretary of Propaganda until his death in 1649, had a personal vision of global, post-European Christianity, and his philosophy was still reflected in instructions on propaganda sent out a decade after his death: ‘Do not regard it as your task, and do not bring any pressure to bear on the peoples, to change their manners, customs and uses, unless they are evidently contrary to religion and sound morals. What could be more absurd than to transplant France, Spain, Italy or some other European country to China? Do not introduce all that to them but only the faith, which does not despise or destroy the manners and customs of any people, always supposing that they are not evil, but rather wishes to see them preserved unharmed. . . . It is the nature of men to love and treasure above everything else their own country and that which belongs to it. . . . Do not draw invidious contrasts between the customs of the peoples and those of Europe; do your utmost to adapt yourselves to them.’ The intention of this document was wise, indeed admirable; but of course the qualifying phrases laid it open to argument.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Maybe I could have two lives. Maybe I could be with Theo and also go to group. I had been avoiding them, thinking that the two could not coexist. But what if they could? Why couldn’t I, then, stay in Los Angeles? I could get a job at a library or something. I could live somewhere on the beach in a little bungalow, if cheap bungalows still existed. I could be a woman who didn’t kill herself over her problems, but triumphed. I would be balanced, a measured human being. There wouldn’t have to be any more sadness. I would have love and sanity. Or, like Claire, would I just keep getting worse? It was so hard to reconcile fantasy with reality. It was hard to believe that something as beautiful as the way Theo made me feel could put me in the hospital or kill me. Did chasing the light inevitably lead us here? If we didn’t chase the light, did people like us just end up here anyway? If Claire had never left her marriage, where would she be now? She said that she was depressed during her marriage and ended up here once before. And that was before she began her odyssey of love and sex. If you were just going to end up here, regardless of what you did, it seemed worth it to really push things like she did. The nothingness was going to eat you alive anyway. It was going to be mashed potatoes at the end no matter what. So why not just grab for whatever you could get? —“Well, I’ve really mucked it up this time,” said Claire. “I’m back in group therapy now, only here with a pack of sad arses who are completely catatonic—which is maybe actually better.” She laughed. It was good to see her sense of humor back. Her hair was still greasy, piled on top of her head, but the circles under her eyes had diminished and there was a glint in her eyes again. “You seem better,” I said. “Like you’re not just staring at the wall.” “Yes, with my last suicide attempt I woke up completely miffed that I was still alive. But this one was oddly refreshing. Maybe I just needed some sort of sorbet—a life palate cleanser.” My God, I loved her. “I get it,” I said. “I mean, not really, because mine wasn’t really a consciously active attempt.” “No, yours was more of a gesture.” “Exactly, a gesture. I’m not the suicide pro that you are. But I think I understand.” “Love, if I were a pro I wouldn’t be here.” “Right,” I said. “But I mean I’m not as, like, experienced with suicide or whatever. Like it’s not as much a part of my oeuvre. I’m more—I don’t know what I am actually. But I know what you mean by a palate cleanser. Sometimes everything is just so bleh that you need to fucking cut it with a knife.”

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Of all the Christian sects, the Quakers were the first to adopt the view that slavery was intrinsically wrong in all circumstances. Indeed in 1780 they forced the Pennsylvania legislature to make slavery illegal in the state. It had already been declared illegal in England in 1772, when Lord Mansfield ruled against it not on religious but on Common Law grounds. Thereafter the change of Christian opinion in England was steadily brought about, as all the Christian groups were forced to declare themselves. The movement coincided with the first full-blossoming of upper-class evangelicalism, and William Wilberforce became its leader and made ending the slave-trade the principal object of its enthusiasm. Without this conjunction, slavery would undoubtedly have persisted for much longer. As it was, Britain made the trade illegal in 1807, and in 1824 it was legally ranked with piracy, and punishable by death; nine years later slavery was outlawed in all British territories. The preoccupation with slavery and the slave-trade explains why British upper-class Christians were slow to engage in the missionary venture. But of course the two were closely related, above all in Africa. So long as slaving continued, it was very difficult in practice for missionaries to get into the African interior. But once it was illegal, and the British Navy, consuls, and other agents and agencies instructed to enforce the law, the missionaries found themselves propelled powerfully forward on a ubiquitous secular force. For the first time, in effect, the British empire was giving practical, even if indirect, support to missionary endeavour. This big change coincided with the development of missionary societies not only as a huge middle-class movement but as a global Protestant phenomenon. The Anglican Church Missionary Society was formed in 1799, the British and Foreign Bible Society (Anglican and Free Church) in 1804, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (mainly Congregational) in 1810, the American Baptist Missionary Board in 1814, the Berlin Society in 1824, the Basle Mission in 1815, and mission-boards in Denmark (1821), France (1822), Sweden (1835), and Norway (1842). These societies were the first evangelical wave, to be followed by a second, much bigger one, which in the 1850s came from across the Atlantic. The United States began to take the lead in missionary enthusiasm, especially in the Far East. For the first time, women were dispatched as missionaries, eventually coming to outnumber the men; and for the first time, too, missions began regularly to operate medical as well as educational services, and so to become associated with the developing secular idea that the white man held colonies in a form of trusteeship. Inevitably, then, large-scale missionary effort became involved with colonialism and commerce. In Asian and African eyes it was inextricably involved. As the century progressed, Indian intellectuals, for instance, came to see Christianity as nothing more than an epiphenomenon of western political and commercial expansion. Westerners put it a different way.