Diarmaid MacCulloch (Oxford) delivers Annual Prokhorov Lecture HQ

good evening everybody welcome to this year's first poke of Santa global humanities initiative lecture my name's Hank Burke I'm a professor in the school of languages and cultures at the University of Sheffield and one of the two directors together with Afghani the banker of the Prokhorov Center which is responsible for the organization of this lecture I should first of all like to express my gratitude to the Dean of Sheffield Cathedral the very Reverend Peter Bradley for allowing us to hold this lecture in the Cathedral the second I want to do a little bit of self advertisement and mention our next Prokhorov Center lecture which will be delivered by the novelist John Manchester on Thursday the 10th of May on the topic money markets and morals and that lecture will take place in Firth Hall in Perth port third I'd like to draw your attention to the lecture series on religion and ethics called God and good organized by the philosophy department which takes place in the Cathedral and I should also like to draw your attention to the 500 the formations project where colleagues in university collaborate with community organizations and schools to host a number of events talks walks and debates for everyone interested in issues raised by the Reformation and you can more can find more information on these events on the website let me now turn to today's lecture there is a well-known anecdote about the difference between science metaphysics and theology science so the anecdote goes is when it's a pitch dark night and you're trying to find a black Kant metaphysics is when it's a pitch-dark night and you're trying to find a black cat that isn't there theology is when it's a pitch-dark night and you're trying to find a black cat that isn't there and you find the cat anyway indirectly this anecdote points to a deep truth about religion about Christianity namely that God is not an empirically falsifiable entity in philosophical terms God does not have the same ontological status as say the teapot or in less philosophical terms God is not to define equivalent of the Flying Spaghetti Monster the Christian claim is that God exists but not in a manner of a table not as a possible object of scientific inquiry but as the object of human experience in the broadest sense of the term so arguably the best person to speak about God and Christianity is someone who is not only a theologian but also in historian someone who knows about the historical varieties of religious experience I'm glad to say that we have found just such a person down McCulloch his professor of the history of the church at University of Oxford and an historian as well as the theologian he is the author of several best-selling books some of which you can find at the bookstore over there and at the end of this event Verma colorful very kindly agreed to do some book signing if the author of several best-selling books and may has presented several documentaries on BBC television he is here this evening to speak about Christianity the big picture please welcome John McCullough [Applause] Thank You HEC for that generous introduction Christianity the big picture well when I was a boy my parents took me looking at church his church crawling unfortunately they discovered that they had sired a monster because my appetite for looking at churches was insatiable and has remained so it is wonderful to explore churches in their complexity such as this building all those complex churches you could imagine because each church is a facet of that great story the big picture and visiting churches from the age of 2 or whenever has gradually led me to a big picture it's been marvelous fun I hope it goes on being fun but it led me to the question when I was looking at these particular churches what was it all about I have been accused of being cynical or frivolous when I have called Christianity a personality cult well if I was trying to be really clever I just said no it's a three personality cult in one essence but now at the heart of it is the cult of a personality there is no getting away from that a human being called Joshua Yeshua in a particular era who gained a description the Anointed One Messiah or Christos in Greek and Christians built on their encounter with this person the thought that he was also God the Christ who is and was and will be at the heart of Christianity is that person and stories about that person the earliest Christian works of literature are stories of his death passion narratives as they're called technically which you'll find in the New Testament in larger works called Gospels well in the middle of that that the earliest bits are the stories of how he died and rose again whatever that might mean so stories are essentially what Christianity is about it is a story and behind it are more stories Christians tell themselves stories about each other and their past which are part of this stream of stories and stories don't end the accumulation of stories don't end that's one of the most optimistic things you can say about the Christian faith and when I wrote a book about the whole story I called it Christianity the first 3,000 years some of those sort of good ideas that come to you in the bath and you think yes this is the perfect subtitle for a book three thousand years well two thousand is obvious three thousand is reality because Christianity only exists because of its prehistory about a thousand years of prehistory before Yeshua was born probably in Galilee in that particular era of the ongoing story of the human race three thousand years what were the stories behind it the thousand years behind it when in fact two parallel streams of stories of a thousand years beforehand one a Jewish set of stories the other a Greek set of stories Christianity is an amalgam of two different cultures Jewish and Greek and they both have different ideas of God actually completely irreconcilable ideas about God on the one hand you have a Jewish God the God who walked in the Garden of Eden beside Adam and argued with him a God who gets angry who gets moods of mercy and goodness that is the Hebrew God and you see that God is a very personal God the God to whom the Jewish people related particularly and to whom Christians have decided to relate as well but what about the Greek God our Greeks have God's a great pantheon of them they behave in a very human way quarreling rather disagreeably they are not like the Hebrew God who is very much our one God but Greeks gradually decided this was not an adequate picture of God behind these particular gods sales or whoever there must be God and so their philosopher Plato in particular saw that behind these personal refracted images there was God divinity and that God was not personal like his refractions he was perfection so the symbol of that God was being like a sphere in which there are no angles perfection of course has no change and emotions and passions and feelings involve change we've heard our Hebrew God moves from anger to mercy well the Greek supreme divinity does not he is perfection well in the first century of what Christians now call the common year old anno domini that first century was Jesus Yeshua the Anointed One and they came to feel that he was God and that is the most extraordinary claim Christians call it the Incarnation the in Fleshman of God the coming of God in a particular human being well that's an extraordinary audacious thing to claim and it infuriated many Jews who did not see Jesus like that but think about how that relates to the do two different streams of culture in which these first Christians wrestled with that problem they were living to start with in Palestine in a Jewish Melia surrounded by Greek culture not just the Roman Empire which had absorbed it but I think that the basic structure of Greek society so when you said Jesus is God the next question would be which God do you mean the Jewish god that intensely personal God of the Garden of Eden and the prophets and the temple or do you mean Plato's God passionless perfect and if you look at the first four centuries of Christian history you will see that problem went on agitating Christians the first four centuries of Christian history are a story of constant ill-tempered argument about who Jesus was hardly surprisingly when these two cultures were battling it out as to which was the Christian identity because their answer in the end it was both and they made a compromise to which we will return on that particular topic so that's what you learn from the big picture to begin with that it's got basic instability in it Christianity is an inherently unstable religion which is why it has been so successful because one aspect can appeal in one situation another in another and so its success has produced Christianity of the present day after 2,000 years if you look around the world now it's a worldwide religion now about 80% of Christians come from one particular tradition the Western tradition which has given us Catholicism and Protestantism they're both heirs of a single part of Christianity 80 percent of all Christians living at the present time if you lump in the Mormons which I will for the sake of argument well that leaves 20% now who are they 10 percent of the remaining Christians are what are known as Orthodox usually with a particular label in front of it Greek Orthodox Russian Orthodox Romanian Orthodox etcetera etc we could go on being quite contentious about how many etc 'z there are it's about 10% that leaves another 10% who are they they are people struggling in Syria to maintain their existence many of them now in exile in Montreal or Melbourne eking out an existence struggling in Egypt to carry on against grave threats to their existence overall it's difficult to give them a name which will satisfy them and be accurate perhaps one of the the least loaded descriptions its it is going to sound rather technical this is oriental Orthodox these were the people who were once the future of Christianity if you were looking at them in the 5th perhaps through to the 8th century you'd have said these people were the future and instead now they are scattered hanging on to survive one great courage and heroism how did that how did we move from a situation where these people were the future to the present marginal let's face it state stayed among all Christians and instead it's the 80 percent who are majority with Christians of the West once so provincial so unsophisticated are now the center of Christian life Christians who are in these traditions Catholic and Protestants look back to one great Latin speaking theologian his name was Agustin now it's confusing in church history because there are two Agustin's how annoying and inconvenient that is one of them was the the man who came here to introduce Roman Christianity to these islands his name was Augustine to agustina Canterbury forget him we're talking about a different Augustine before him augustine of hippo hippo is a small was a small town in North Africa he was Bishop of Hippo for much of his life Augustine of Hippo now he is the most important theologian for Western Christianity that there is and the mark of that is that in the 16th century when this Christianity split apart and created a thing called Protestantism both halves of it were arguing about the thought of Augustine that's what the Reformation was it was an argument in the mind of Augustine a man who lived in the 4th and 5th centuries of the Common Era now if you look at those other Christians the Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox what do they think about Augustine well the Orthodox had heard of Augusta that they didn't care about him he wrote in Latin and who lists who reads Latin it's an unsophisticated crude language they were Greeks and they didn't need augustin as for the oriental orthodox they just didn't take any notice of him at all because their theology had been formed by the fifth century and it formed in two different ways within their world in relation to a great event in the year 451 see II AED at a place called Cal Seaton which is very near the city of Istanbul Constantinople twisted over the water and in the town of Cal sedum in 451 a great council of the universal Church took place why Cal Seidman some of you may have been there if you've been to Istanbul you look over the great water into Asia to see Cal Seaton it's about 40 minutes on the ferry now probably wasn't much less more than 40 minutes away over the water from the great city why there so that the mob in Constantinople could not get there but imperial troops could get there in 40 minutes or so to make sure that the bishops at this council said the right thing this council had been organized by the Emperor sitting in his palace 40 minutes away over the water in Constantinople the Emperor took a great interest in what the bishops at Cal Seton were doing why well they were arguing about the nature of Christ the nature's of Christ to be more precise the fact that he was a human being and also God how did that work how did that relate to the other persons in the Trinity father and spirit how did this person with two natures relate that's what the bishops were arguing about why were emperors in true why did they keep their troops on the alert in case the wrong decision was made because this was going to split their empire Christianity was now dominating the great power of the ancient world and if the decision went wrong it would split the Empire this Council of Cal Seton is a classic moment in Christian history which in the storytelling of most Christians has been seen as a triumph the end of these arguments for four centuries about the nature of Christ there was a decision at Cal Sweden there's a thing called the Caledonian definition of the nature's of Christ it is a compromise and it is the decision which our Orthodox people and Western Christians all agree on if you consider yourself a Christian in these capacities in this Cathedral you are a Caledonian Christian that's what you've signed up to even if you don't know it that is the package Cal Seton sorted it and in the story of Christian history up to the present day it's always been seen as like the last scene in a air-cool Poirot mystery he gathers them all in the library and the solution is offered and the credits roll well Cal Seton in fact was a disaster a catastrophe because it split the Christian world into three it was the Emperor's decision and because it was the Emperor's decision it was a compromise between the various possible options on the table it was the one down the middle and as a result there were people on either wing who hated it particularly because it was the Emperor's decision and so there were people on that side and people on that side and they would not sign up and at the time they represented a very large chunk indeed of the Christian world and the Christian world has never been reunited after calcium it had fault lines before but this is one of the big ones and if anything in the end destroyed the Eastern Roman Empire it was that fact when Islam came along one of the reasons it was so successful so quickly was that people who hated the decision of kaol Seton were pleased to see these people destroying the imperial power that's why Cal Seton is so important that's part of the big picture the people who did not accept the decision were at the time representative of vast swathe of Eastern Christianity some believed in a one nature solution to the problem crudely speaking of Christ's humanity his divinity one nature and their enemies have condescendingly called those people mourn off his i'ts that's what you'll find in the textbooks on the other side where people who wanted to keep these natures slightly separate rather like having oil and water in the same vessel and they were called to nature people but they were named after someone who had been death defined as an a villain at Cal seen his name with Nestorius and so they have been labeled by their enemies historians both these labels are its boo labels smear labels and I think they should be avoided trouble is what to call them well on one side you call them me a cites instead of monophysites and on the other daya fascitis instead of Nestorians you see it's not much better but at the time they were still the future even when it's LOM came along they were the future for Christianity because Muslims thought that dire physics historians were rather useful here were Christians in the world which they were conquering at the time what is Islam was not a an imperialist faith it did not seek to convert the people it had conquered it's simply what was going to be an elite and it wanted the best knowledge around it wanted Greek philosophy it knew Greek philosophy was very good and the only people who understood this were Christians because they had been arguing with each other in terms of Greek philosophy so the Abbasid dynasty in their new capital Baghdad employed such Christians to be their think-tank to be their experts to translate Greek philosophy into Arabic so that their masters could understand it and so this creates Christianity found its niche it found its place and it's it's great our Bishop Timothy at one stage probably was leader of more Christians than the Bishop of Rome in his time at that moment in the late eighth century Baghdad was the future of Christianity not Rome and so it might go on Christianity might have moved from this encouraging base are encouraged by Muslims eastwards along the trade routes the silk routes into Central Asia to China to Tibet to Japan to Korea and so it did I remember one of the most exciting moments when while I was creating the history of Christianity on television was to stand in the precinct of a monastery in central China which had started its life as a Nestorian adaiah physik monastery in the 8th century and it was still called this place dark sheen which means them from the West people from the West this was the place where they practiced the religion from the West the Roman Empire ultimately but another historical accident intervened the people called the Mongols Mongols great conquerors great invaders and they might have become Christians too because many of them were for a brief moment and it would just take one or two more Mongol princesses to convince their children to go Christian rather than Muslim and the Mongols might have been a great Christian invading force but instead it just tipped the other way and so bishops in Tibet found no successes and monasteries in Mongolia and Korea crumbled into dust and in their place stepped the Bishop of Rome the Pope and this was the beginning of that peculiar skewing of Christian history towards the West once so marginal once so unsophisticated and I actually called that part of my history of Christianity the unpredictable rise of Rome that was not what you'd expect from this Christian past but so it happened in the early church they were not there was not just one great Christian Bishop there were five and one of that five is still called the Pope who is not the Pope in Rome but the Pope in Alexandria Papa the father in Alexandria another Pope to remind us the unpredictable nature of the rise of Rome well why do we need to know all this ancient history because it has shaped us and because the modern world is profoundly alarmingly religious when I was a lad or an undergraduate it seemed that this would not be so and there's an undergraduate in Cambridge and they're the general mood was that the future was secular secularization was a word which even religious people used about the way that the world was going to be and then in 1977 a born-again president was elected to the United States of America Jimmy Carter 1978 a counter-reformation Bishop of Rome appeared John Paul the second 1979 a secular revolution in Iran was taken over by ayatollahs we still hang on to that revolution the world suddenly turned to religion I'm not sure that British universities have entirely caught up with that my generation are still in charge as Vice Chancellors and the like and they don't seem to understand the importance of knowing about religion understanding its past and seeing where it might go next and one of the problems about not knowing about the past is that you create ridiculous mythical versions of it many of those who call themselves traditionalists in in the Christian world don't know enough about the tradition otherwise they wouldn't be traditionalists they think of the past as a simple story rather like my air-cool Poirot version of the Council of Cal Seton and they don't understand the profound changes of structure and understanding and belief that have occurred in these two thousand years the obvious one which is no less true for being obvious is the status of slavery now thought experiment here you are all Christians in 1500 what do you think about slavery well you all think it's part of the fabric of God's creation you you don't necessarily like it much particularly if it involves you or one of your roommates or relations but that doesn't matter slavery is simply part of the way God has created the world and there's nothing you can do about that you can of course emancipate certain slaves but you are not entitled to abolish slavery it's just there why do you think that because your sacred book tells you that the Bible's foundation assumption is that slavery is part of the fabric of God's creation ah you avoid it if you're a Jew for instance but you don't avoid it as a human being that's you as a Christian in 1500 now if I took a straw poll here among those who think of themselves a Christian and say hands up those who think that slavery is an okay thing I don't think I'd get many takers you see the Revolution which has taken part a place in Christian attitudes in these five centuries we have got from A to B in which we now simply assume that the Christian attitude to slavery is to condemn it well in the 19th century the United States of America split down the middle on this matter and those who fought each other in that extraordinary destructive and bitter civil war in the 1860s were both Protestant evangelical Christians that was the majority on both sides the people who shot each other at Appomattox or any other battle you name they were Protestant evangelical Christians and those on the southern side were perfectly entitled to be bewildered that northern Protestant evangelical Christians thought it was disgraceful that people were enslaved and they were perfectly entitled to look at their sacred book and say look that is not right it is clear that slavery is part of God's creation you see the Revolution which it took to get from a to who'd eat or curiously it was Quakers the Society of friends who when they were set up in the 17th century felt that God came from within them an inner light they did not learn about God from scripture scripture with a help but it's an ancillary thing and therefore they could look at the Bible in a much more independent way than anyone else and so in the late 17th century it was specifically Quakers who decided from their experience from their feelings about the world that slavery was bad in every circumstance and so they insisted on that despite the witness of the Bible they were then followed by some Protestant evangelicals and that took a long time and evangelicals were not Quakers they despised Quakers in fact but that's among the most extraordinary stories in Christian history because now Protestant evangelicals rather pride themselves on opposing slavery and that is very odd because their Bible should tell them the opposite but somehow they came to it too that's what you do when you look at history properly you see how tradition is not what it seems and the trouble about simple stories of the past is that they lead you into tidy mindedness they make you think that the present should be as tidy as your vision of the past that is a very bad idea is not a Christian monopoly all sorts of tidy mindedness in human experience are the same so the French Revolution that anti-christian movement was just as tidy minded worse because it was thinking things out from scratch in a very tidy way there was one writer novelist during the revolution in his name was Nicholas Sebastian all deshaun for a witty and detached man who listened to revolutionary shouting fraternity or death and said well that sounds to me as if you're saying be my brother or I'll kill you he was right of course tidy mindedness is a terrible thing and it has led to appalling ly simple accounts of the presence the worst example which has had a terrible effect in the last 15 years has been a work by an American political scientist called Samuel P Huntington it's called the clash of civilizations and it is influenced various successive American presidents particularly george w bush into thinking the world is exactly that is the clash of civilizations between principally islam and christianity it's curious that huntington could identify i think four different sorts of christianity but only one islam which shows how little he knew about islam and that work has led to various pieces of hubris on the part of american foreign policy tidy minded history it is far better to embrace the complexity of the past however much work it takes intellectually to do it and to realize that difference diversity is what characterizes human beings not uniformity and that diversity difference are virtues and not vices opportunities not threats if only Christians could do that some can and some are getting near it some show no signs of it so traditionalists generally don't know enough about tradition another characteristic of tradition estándar if you spotted this is that they are terribly cross they are very very angry people why are they so angry and it's not just Christians it's conservative Muslims too conservative Buddhists it goes on why so angry because something has happened in the last 150 years or so too particularly Western society but now all Society and that is a different place for women in societies traditionally men have been in charge it is men who are listened to men who organized by a large it looks as it were men who wrote their sacred scriptures of most of the great world religions and of course they wrote it wrote them from male points of view now that is changing women are asserting their position in society they're proving that they can do things compose music for instance just as much as men and that is profoundly unsettling for men it's unsettling for a lot of women too who feel the same anger as their male counterparts it's rather like my experience at school where in my grammar school in the 1960s prefect s-- were allowed not to wear a cap and I thought about that all through my way up school and just before I went in the sixth form became a prefect they abolished that rule and no one wore caps and I was cross I had been deprived of privilege that is the same sort of anger which we now see in society after society and you see where it's landed it's landed on questions of sexuality it's partly about women but particularly and particularly worryingly for men homosexuality and really male homosexuality that's the neurasthenic issue for conservative religion throughout the world and you see a marvelous human ISM between the late dr. Ian Paisley for instance and conservative Roman Catholics like Anna cumin ISM which extends to ayatollahs in Iran and around the world a hatred of fear of same-sex relations how aren't Y fix on that not an issue in Christianity in a lot of its history and you see the way in which it is made many Christians are assemble behind some very dubious political leaders in the United States of America I'm sorry to keep bashing conservative evangelical Protestants but you can hardly avoid it in seeing the way in which they lined up behind Donald Trump in the 1986 elections and in the way that they cannot see what a grotesque incompetent idiotic monster this man is they simply cannot understand it and they find biblical tropes to explain this they point to the truck the trope of the King Cyrus of Persia a man who was not a Jew yet did good things to the Jews Trump is like that Trump is the modern Cyrus but just to show that I'm clinically minded in my condemnation I point you to Russia where the Moscow Patriarchate is now the willing poodle of President Putin this church which has been through so much which suffered so much in the survey in the Soviet years and suffered heroically and gave an example of Christian witness has cravenly taken on the trappings of power offered by Putin and his KGB all Samba it has gay it has been offered wealth and it has taken it it has offered power and it has taken it it is now persecuting other Christians in Russia Baptists Lutheran's roman catholics let alone jehovah's witnesses they are now the subject of persecution with an orthodox agenda always worth considering and your christian life if such you have the temptations of christ in the wilderness christ taken up from the crowd isolated offered temptation after temptation by satan if you do this you shall have power throw yourself off the top topmost pinnacle and you will show your ability to do that and survive christ said no the patriarch of moscow has said yes it's so tempting when you have lost power as the orthodox church did in 1917 as the roman catholic church did in France in 1789 it is so tempting to try and get that power back and that has been story alas of so much Christianity in the last 200 years let's hope it's a passing phase it's not long in the Christian story instead of which we look at the Western Church which is often said to be in steep decline that's really not a good way of putting it it's a declining church going it's a decline in the church's church which I saw when I was a boy my father was a country parson and ladies came to church in hats and the mothers Union were there and there was a choir etc etc this is a church which was still flourishing it's still there the church is still there but it's different and many churches are empty this church looks as if it's weak as if it's lost its message it's uncertain it's often criticized as such but remember the paradox which Martin Luther put so well in his Reformation message that real power is in weakness and in suffering and that's where the Christian experience is at its most precise and deep not in circumstances of power and ease it is the lesson of the cross and not of the world and in such circumstances because the Western Church now both Catholic and Protestant have to argue for itself to think for itself this is the most healthy state a church can be in when it is constantly challenged and it has led the Western Church in - I think profound reconsiderations of what Christianity should be and reminded itself about truth and what truth might be and truth is not an easy thing now I'm a historian I deal with facts you know Battle of Hastings 14 1066 that's our fact it's true but there are other facts like my breakfast this morning I had a breakfast this morning and that's true too but I think it's profoundly unimportant whereas hamlet is a story which never happened and yet it is played again and again and again Shakespeare's Hamlet tells us things about truth which my breakfast does not and even the Battle of Hastings does not though it happened so where's truth in all that I think the thing which didn't happen in crude terms is the most important of those three there's something to think about when thinking about Christianity and its problems and I think also about something which was said to me by a great and wonderful Dominican philosopher he'd spent his life thinking and talking and lecturing about some Thomas Aquinas one of the greatest minds of the Western Church Tom - this was a Dominican friar Thomas's order called Hobart McCabe some of you may have either met him or know his writings a wonderful flawed man like all of us but a wise man and at the end of an evening where we've been talking arguing having a good time Herbert said I don't think God is the answer I think God is the question and it seems to me that a religion which has that at its center will never die because a question is open-minded open a sentence with a full stop at the end of it the answer has finished the question is open and now I think it's time for questions from you thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

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Views: 6,578

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Keywords: Diarmaid MacCulloch, Annual Prokhorov Lecture, Prokhorov, University of Sheffield, Henk de Berg

Id: D3gcFoqCOMc

Length: 47min 33sec (2853 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 28 2018