The Grand Coherence, Chapter 16. The Church in History

This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. For all the links in the book, see this introductory post.

The resurrected Jesus didn't stay long on Earth in the flesh. After a few weeks, He went up to Heaven, in an event that Christians celebrate as the Ascension. He left behind one great legacy: the Church. But what is the Church?

I beg the reader's indulgence as I take a rather long way round to get to answering that question. 

There is a delightfully odd expression in English: "the elephant in the room." It means something people don't want to talk about, which, however, is so obviously important that it's on everyone's minds all the time. Christianity has been to Western civilization, for quite a few generations now, a perennial elephant in the room. I can see the pattern as early as the novels of Jane Austen, in which the characters, though some are clergymen or aspire to the clergy, never pray, never have any religious feelings in a church service, never wonder inwardly, or discuss, whether there's a God, never wonder whether their own souls will be saved, and hardly ever have misgivings of conscience from comparing their conduct to the moral teachings in the scriptures. 

Chesterton called this "the atheism of Jane Austen," but it wasn't so much atheism as elephant-in-the-roomism. Jane Austen doesn't deny God, but rather, deftly dances around the great, uncomfortable subject of God. This pattern continues down to modern films, where the characters usually have no religion that we know about, nor even any explicit irreligion. They simply ignore the subject altogether. In romantic comedies, this is surreal, since dating couples usually do get to know about one another's religion. But in films about sports or business, the silence about God is realistic, and the oddity is less in the film than in modern life. We really live that way. All too often, we are careful not to talk about the elephant in the room.

In the classroom, too, and in academic publications, Christianity is often the elephant in the room. We have seen how the natural sciences omit God, and how this can be innocuous, but how it has also given rise to an ideology inimical to Christianity. Economists omit God in their own way, developing models that suppose people are "rational self-interested agents," maximizing a this-worldly sort of happiness based on consumption. Actually, people who only think about making money and buying consumer goods for comfort and pleasure in this earthly life are quite irrational, since most people believe in God and an afterlife or at least entertain the possibility, and eternity is infinitely more important than the transient pleasures of a moment or a few decades. It's only rational, as Jesus said, to lay up treasures in heaven, where moths don't corrupt nor thieves break through and steal (Matthew 6:20). But the etiquette of academic publication avoids mentioning God. Don't talk about the elephant in the room.

This odd silence about religion is part of what we call secularism, and I'm far from thinking it an unmixed evil. Up to a point, I think it's a necessary purgative medicine for the worst mistake the Church ever made, when it betrayed the non-violence of Jesus and began to use force for the faith. Only in my lifetime has Christianity repudiated persecution thoroughly enough for me to state boldly, without much fear of being contradicted now or in future, a truth that should always have been obvious, and that even the worst of the Spanish inquisitors probably knew in their heart of hearts, namely, that God commands religious freedom. Secularism, by distancing the state and its violence from the Church, helps to safeguard its holy vocation from the temptations of worldly power which have been so ruinous for it in the past. For that, I'm grateful. Yet it's gone too far, becoming not just a political arrangement but almost a worldview, and thereby rendering Western thought strangely incoherent. A secularist worldview is like ripping half the pages at random out of a book. The book won't make sense. Christianity has been interwoven in Western thought from the beginning, and the secular elements in Western thought don't come away clean. 

Science is touched by the problem lightly. Science was born in the midst of Christianity, and it's indebted to Christianity for its basic assumption that the world is orderly, rational and intelligible. Christians have long believed that the world is orderly, rational and intelligible because God made it that way, and then made us "in His own image" and so able to understand it. Science inherited this belief that the world is orderly, rational and intelligible, but it doesn't have a reason for thinking so. On the contrary, as we saw in chapter 9, if science oversteps its bounds and becomes the comprehensive ideology of scientific materialism, it becomes incoherent by denying the metaphysical prerequisites of reason. Yet science can largely forget this and carry on its practical business from day to day. 

By contrast, secular liberalism is a hopeless mess. It insists ever more aggressively on "rights," "freedom" and "equality." The meaning of those words keeps evolving, and everyone must submit to the latest definition, on pain of a kind of moral ostracism that sometimes spills over into loss of livelihood. But why do secular liberals believe in those things in the first place? In a rather twisted way, I think they're still faithful to the great source of those beliefs, which is the Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson, writing as a spokesman for the American revolutionaries, proclaimed that "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Secular liberals still hold these truths to be self-evident. They don't need to explain why. You're just supposed to know. Even if the latest evolution, the marriage "equality" of being able to have a same-sex union publicly recognized as a marriage, or the freedom to choose one's "gender," was only dreamed up in the past decade or three, it is held to be self-evident, and any denying or questioning of it provokes a moral horror among the thought-minions of secular liberalism which seems disturbingly genuine, considering that we know perfectly well it is of recent manufacture. 

Thomas Jefferson's liberalism was not like that. It had deeper roots, for one thing, but also, it was not secular, but rather, explicitly theist. We are created equal, says Jefferson; we were endowed by our Creator with rights. It's not his fault if his intellectual descendants engage in an indefensible pretense that these words are mere ornament. The word "Creator," while it can obviously be read as a reference to the Christian God, leaves room to substitute other notions of the creating deity, such as the "watchmaker" God of Enlightenment deism. Jefferson's theology was not very orthodox, in fact. But without a Creator God of some sort, the Declaration of Independence makes no sense. Yet modern liberals esteem Jefferson's principles, while wanting to make God optional. It's one of a thousand instances of incoherence resulting from secularism. Secularism loves missing the point, and not talking about the elephant in the room.

But I introduced the old elephant in the room metaphor in order to take certain liberties with it, and end by making a somewhat different point.

So follow me as we imagine that you're at a party, with a lot of pleasant company, sipping wine and munching refreshments and chatting lightly, when you notice something odd about the decor in the room. One part of the wall bulges out and is very oddly shaped. Some sort of net has been draped over the top of the bulge to provide a place to hang paintings and whatnot, so as to give that part of the wall a touch of normalcy, but the fact is that it isn't a wall at all, but a great heap of wrinkly gray skin, mounted on some sort of pillars which turn out, on closer examination, to be legs. There's a part of it that dangles and twitches: a tail. And the rest of it isn't quite stationary either: it moves slightly as the beast breathes. In fact, the whole thing is nothing more or less than the posterior half of an elephant. It seems to be standing in a curtained doorway, so that its head is not visible. And it's behaving itself surprisingly well under the circumstances. But the awkward fact is that there's half of an elephant in the room.

You start to try to alert people to the situation. It has, after all, some possible danger, as well as a great deal of interest. So you push past some initial indifference and incredulity and manage to get everyone's attention. The challenge you run into is that no one in the room seems to know what an elephant is. Some act as if they've never heard of it, though you get the sense that this is sometimes an affectation. Perhaps it's not very fashionable in this set to know about elephants. Others have quite wrong ideas. "It's a mythical beast," says one, and a few other heads nod complacently. "It's a vague term for any large mammal," says another, to murmurs of approval. 

You sense rising irritation as you insist that an elephant is a very specific kind of real animal, but as you describe its enormous size and its wrinkly gray skin, you at least have the advantage of being able to point to these features of the beast whose backside is bulging into the room. But then you commit a terrible faux pas. As you start to explain that an elephant has ears like huge pancakes the shape of Africa, an angry incredulity settles over the crowd. And as you begin to talk about how an elephant's nose is like a long bendy snake, with a sort of hand at the end that can pick things up, and can suck up water and spray it, and is so strong that it can tear trees up by the roots, the guests become so outraged by what they take to be preposterous fictions that you fear you've provoked a riot against you. Instead, they all storm out, and you are soon talking to an empty room.

That's a little like the position I'm in as an apologist talking about the Church. The Church is to history as the elephant is to that room. It can be seen only in part. In part, the Church is an institution operating in the world, and it bears some resemblances to other institutions, such as republics, companies, armies, clubs, and so forth. In part, the Church is an ideology, a system of shared beliefs that help to unite and mobilize a community. But it has another part, the most important part, which doesn't belong to this fallen, transient world at all, but is resident in eternity. The church is temporal and eternal, worldly and other-worldly, and yet it is a coherent whole. It might have been more diplomatic and tactful for the elephant explainer in the cocktail party to have remained silent about the elephant's trunk, except that an elephant with no trunk makes no sense. It couldn't feed itself. Likewise, the Church could not be what it has been in history if it were not what it is in eternity. In fact, it couldn't feed itself. It would lack the source of its strength and resilience.

It's time to recall that question to which I promised to circle back. What is the Church? The outrageous traditional Christian answer is that the Church is the Body of Christ. But what could that even mean?

A part of the meaning may be understood by analogy to an expression like "the regiment of soldiers marched across the field as one body." That means that their movements were highly coordinated in a manner indicating a shared purpose. The regiment is like a body, whose members are distinct yet unified, with different functions but one purpose, so that they cohere into one. Likewise, the Church consists of many members who are distinct yet unified, with different functions but one purpose. And with that, the strange, formidable expression seems to be settling down into an innocuous metaphor.

But wait! Not so fast! Christians don't think "the Body of Christ" is a mere metaphor. It is a vividly physical fact. When Christians come to church on Sunday, a ritual is performed which transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, which Christians eat. Yes, Christians eat the body and blood of Christ. That's how they become members of His body, by physically eating His flesh and blood. The Church, the mystical Body of Christ, is unified and healed, like ordinary human bodies, by the circulation of the Blood. 

This is the point at which I expect many readers to drop the book in disgust. How can I ask people to believe such things? It's the sheerest magic!

Secular history prefers not to deal in such mysteries as the Church being the Body of Christ. But it must account for the Church somehow. So it tries to fit the Church into the categories of ordinary secular history, calling it an institution, for example, or treating it as an ideology. And the Church is a little like those things: a little like, and very different. It is more organic than institutions are, and has at once more unity in belief and more diversity in social class and political outlook than ideologies have. But above all, it is by far more long-lived, durable, resilient, and immune to the usual effects of time than any institution or ideology. Secular history can't explain this strange timelessness of the Church. But Christians can. They say that it's because the Church is the Body of Christ. A body heals its wounds, and assimilates food, and remains itself. And as the elephant could not feed itself without a trunk, the Church could not have lasted this long, in supernatural superiority to all laws of history, if it were merely a human institution or ideology, and were not feeding all the time on the flesh and blood of Christ.

To vary the metaphor, and to borrow an idea from CS Lewis, the Church amidst history is like a straight road running through various landscapes, cutting through the hills and rising above the fens. A road can look beautiful amidst a landscape, a narrow, purposeful line amidst rolling slopes or feathery vegetation, and in that sense it can fit in, and look at home, but it is still clearly a thing apart. In that sense, the road passing through shifting landscapes is like a body passing through various places and shifting seasons: it stays the same, amidst change. That is why the secular history of the Church, with deliberations of Church councils and successions of Church hierarchs and gradual development of Church ritual, is rather boring. It is boring because it is superficial and inessential. The Church is not a product of its history, as a body is not, and as a road is not a product of the landscapes through which it runs.

As a road goes on, unchanging, as it was designed by the engineer; as a body carries its form within it and maintains that form, healing wounds and assimilating food; so the Church goes on, essentially unchanged down the generations, here strewn with leaves as it passes through an autumn forest, there a little sandy as it passes through a windy desert, always adding a few saints to its hagiographic corpus along the way, here picking up a custom like Christmas trees, there a book or a song to recommend, but always quite recognizable as itself, the same Church that it always was. Meeting the Church in history is fun in the same way as it's fun to meet a hometown acquaintance in a foreign city. The familiarity is incongruous, because other things change and grow unfamiliar. The Church remains the same because it is alive with a supernatural life, having one foot in eternity. It is the Body of the risen Christ, and it is immune to death. 

Jesus said: "Heaven and Earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away" (Matthew 24:35). That prophecy has yet to be fully proved, but it's already had a good run. The Church has already outlived almost every ordinary product of human history. It has outlived nations and civilizations and empires, philosophies and ideologies and theories and schools of thought, languages and cultures and social classes. And it is still going strong, spreading and growing, winning new victories. It beat communism. We may live to see it beat the Sexual Revolution.

People live their lives amidst a human superstructure of things that seem permanent, but aren't. They accept things that are passed on down the generations, and get comfort from feeling that their children's life cycles will resemble their own, but often they don't. People hope the same songs and stories and customs, the same holidays and rites of passage, the same words and phrases, will fill their children's and grandchildren's lives, and make the generations rhyme, so to speak, like a poem. But such hopes are often disappointed, and people often outlive things they felt to be permanent, or perceive them changing and fading. In the long run, the secular historian might almost glimpse the pattern which has been revealed to the Christian: that nothing human lasts, except the Church, and that which it chooses to sanctify.  

Jesus had relatively little to say about the Church, as far as we know. He mentions it twice, once as a last tribunal to judge and reconcile quarreling Christians (Matthew 18:15-18), and the other to say that it would be founded upon the "rock" of Peter's declaration that "You are the Christ (Messiah), the Son of the Living God" (Matthew 16:15-19). Perhaps He said other things that weren't written down. Jesus had much more to say of the kingdom of heaven. And many of the parables by which Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven are very lucid as descriptions of Church history. For example, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to yeast that a woman kneads into a lump of dough, causing the whole loaf to rise (Matthew 13:13). This is a very good metaphor for the way Christianity spreads, converting people through personal contacts, then getting mixed around by the normal flux and trauma of human affairs, and then gradually, almost imperceptibly, transforming human cultures from within, and uplifting them. 

The Church has always served as a witness to the resurrection of Jesus, invited men to believe in Him, and served as the community of those who do, so much can be understood about it from considering, down the ages, why some have believed while others have not. This is the theme we took up in chapter 2, that people agree about so many things but disagree about religion and the resurrection of Jesus, which has held true, I think, throughout Christian history, though it has often been masked by an official ascendancy of Christianity that made people keep quiet about their doubts.

Many of the same reasons for faith have persisted down the centuries. Christians have believed based on eyewitness testimony of the Resurrection. Christians have believed because of miracles. Christians have sometimes believed simply because the truth of Christianity was, or seemed to be, in their time and place, a societal consensus. Christians have believed because they have seen the sincere and disinterested piety of others, which is indicative of particularly strong belief. Agreement and peace among Christians had sometimes strengthened the case for faith. There have been martyrs, whose willing and even joyful deaths, show the strength of their convictions in a way that gives others a powerful reason to believe. Ascetics and monastics, who choose to live exceptionally abstemious lives and practice lifelong chastity in order to worship God more fully, give evidence of the sincerity of their convictions, the supreme value to them of what the faith has to offer, and therefore the truth of the faith. Christian teachers and apologists sometimes aid faith by their persuasive writings. Sometimes secular science and learning yield conclusions that affirm Christian doctrines. Sometimes, the faith gets what we might call a “Cassandra” advantage from having warned society against a fashion that turns out to be a terrible mistake. Sometimes Christians behave well, and their virtuous conduct favors the truth of the faith that inculcated such good habits. Sometimes Christian societies are well-governed, prosperous, and powerful, and that may help to convince people to embrace the faith, though sometimes for the wrong reason. Lastly, many have regarded the fulfillment of prophecies as evidence of the truth of Christianity. 

Clearly, all these reasons are not equally persuasive in all ages, and usually some of them go the other way. Sometimes the prophecies don't seem to be fulfilled, Christians don't seem to behave well, miracles don't seem to be observed, secular science and learning don't support Christian doctrines, and so on. And again, the striking pattern that I see as I look back on Christian history is that as all these reasons for faith wax and wane over time, the balance of evidence seems to stay roughly the same, leaving honest seekers on a knife edge of uncertainty. Unbelief is always plausible, but it can never settle into an honest complacency. There's always enough evidence to disrupt confident unbelief for anyone who's really interested in the truth. The public evidence, once it is seriously attended to, is enough to lead people to the very doorstep of faith, but it takes private evidence to open the door and let them in. That's just an impression, but I'll try to show you what I mean.

I'll start by dividing Christian history into the following periods: (a) the apostolic age, when eyewitnesses of the Resurrection were still living, (b) the age of martyrs, when the pagan Roman empire was persecuting the early Christian Church, (c) the age of Christian empire and of monks, from the conversion of Constantine until the fall of the empire, which took place a thousand years later in the East than in the West, (d) the Dark Ages, (e) the High Middle Ages, (f) the Renaissance and Reformation period, (g) the Enlightenment, (h) the 19th century, (i) the early 20th century with its revolutions, totalitarianism, and world wars, and (j) the late 20th century and post-Cold War era, down to the present time. Then I'll try to imagine what the evidence for and against Christianity would have looked like from the perspective of someone in a social position corresponding to the likely readers of this book, that is, middle class and well educated.

Imagine you lived in the apostolic age, Christians were a tiny minority, a few thousands or tens of thousands amidst an empire of 50 to 100 million, vastly outnumbered not only by the pagans but by non-Christian Jews. They had no temples, no traditions, and no scriptures except what they shared with the Jews. How could Christianity be taken seriously when Christians were so few and unbelievers so many? Yet the Christians saw the whole Jewish tradition as supportive of their cause, for Jesus was the long-prophesied Messiah. At the same time, Greek philosophy had long tended to favor some sort of monotheism, against the polytheism of Greek religion. Even before Christianity, some Gentiles had become the "God fearers," believing in the Jewish God and adopting some Jewish rites without fully accepting the Law and becoming Jews. For many Jews and God-fearing Gentiles, the good news of the Gospel came as a reconciliation and a fulfillment. If you were an educated Greek or Roman in the apostolic age, you probably either wouldn't have heard of Christianity, or you would have heard only panicky rumors about their vices and cannibalism and treasonable refusal to worship the emperor. But if you had a real encounter with the Church, you might have met a personal eyewitness of the Resurrection. And Christianity would present itself as an audacious answer to questions that haunted your whole life. You might have witnessed miracles, of which many reported in the New Testament, or known others who had. You might have hastily dismissed the crazy, unintelligible ravings of a tiny minority of madmen, or you might have explored this unlikely source of answers to old, haunting questions, and gotten drawn in. 

Now imagine that you lived the age of martyrs. The apostles are gone, and the pagan Roman Empire is still intact. The Church is still small, but steadily growing, in spite of violent persecution by the generally tolerant empire, because Christians alone among the imperial subjects refuse to burn incense to Caesar, the emperor, as to a god, which served as a kind of civic pledge of allegiance. It didn't need to be sincere worship, and the Romans themselves don't seem to have taken it very seriously. But they were savage against the baffling stubbornness of Christians refusing to go along with a ritual so obviously innocuous. In the hagiographies that come down to us from that time, Roman officials don't scruple to inflict multiple tortures for disobedience, while at the same time offering glittering rewards for submission. If you were an educated Greek or Roman in the second or third century A.D., you would likely have known about the Christians largely in their role as victims of spectacular persecution. You might have seen some die in the Colosseum, slain by wild beasts for the entertainment of the populace. You would have heard some propaganda against the Christians, yet you might also have known that they led exceptionally virtuous lives, on average, caring for the poor and refraining from prostitution and other vices. It would have been hard to get a clear explanation of their doctrines. The writings that we now call the New Testament were in circulation, but hadn't been compiled into a book, and other Christian writings were scarce. Christians were, moreover, rather secretive. The likelihood of dying in the arena would be a major deterrent to conversion to Christianity, yet the dazzling courage of the martyrs, their willingness to die for their faith, could not but impress you, and give you a reason to believe that the faith which could inspire such courage and sacrifice must be worth much. And so people kept joining, and the Church kept growing. 

If you had lived in the age of Christian Empire, which lasted until 476 AD in the west, and 1453 AD in the east, you would have had new reasons to believe, but also new reasons for doubt. From the conversion of Constantine onwards, it became, more often than not, advantageous, in a worldly sense, to be Christian. For the first time, there was much temptation to be an insincere Christian. Meanwhile, the great disappointment for those who had kept the faith in the face of persecutions must have been that the conversion to Christianity did so little to improve the conduct of the imperial regime, its ruling class, and the citizenry in general. It would be reasonable to expect that Christians would always behave better than unbelievers, since the Church teaches such a sublime ethics and promises eternal rewards to the good. It's only rational for Christian true believers to behave very well indeed. And it seems that in the age of martyrs, Christians were distinguished by outstanding virtue. Yet when the empire converted to Christianity, the ruling class largely retained the characteristic sins of a ruling class, the luxury and avarice and pride and ambition and propensity for deceitful intrigues and cruelty. At the same time, one gets the sense that the average level of piety in every parish fell, leaving those who wanted to live a life of prayer, and avoid the company of wicked worldlings, feeling frustrated and longing for something different. They found it in the desert. We don't know when monasticism began, but it thrived and became important in the age of Christian empire. It was not ordered by the Church. It was a spontaneous, bottom-up affair. Spiritual heroes like Saint Anthony and Saint Pachomius abandoned civilization and sought a pure life of prayer in the desert, where they lived in amazingly abstemious circumstances. Eventually, others followed, wanting to be near them and imitate them. Sometimes these became organized into communities, with more or less rigid rules of life to keep the peace, foster continuous spiritual exercise, and keep temptation at bay. When the great patriarch Saint Athanasius, champion of orthodoxy, was being hunted by pagan or heretical emperors who wanted to kill him, he took refuge among the monks of Egypt, where the empire's writ did not run. This was also the age of the greatest Church Fathers, holy men and great writers and intellectuals, who explained and defended Christian teachings far better than had ever been done before. In the 4th and 5th centuries, as never before, there were resources available for forming an intellectual conviction in the truth of Christianity.

As an educated Greek or Roman in the age of Christian empire, you might well have converted to Christianity, as so many others were doing. But would you really have believed? Or would you have been merely conforming to fashion, or worse, pandering to the new power elite? Or perhaps, like Julian the apostate, you would have been enthralled by the romantic glamor of the past and become a conscientious pagan. Paganism was fading, and if not exactly persecuted, it was having its public presence curtailed. Many pagan temples were destroyed. But it had a wealth of beautiful, imaginative stories, and had a long run of glorious achievements behind it. Christianity had nothing to offer to rival its literature for martial thrill and aesthetic ecstasy. One emperor, Julian "the Apostate," was raised Christian but, upon attaining the throne, cast it off and dedicated his reign to a romantic infatuation with paganism. Doubtless there were many others, of a lower profile, who rejected the rather sordid Christian present in favor of the glorious pagan past. Yet even as he embraced paganism, Julian urged pagan priests to behave like Christian priests in some ways, for example in practicing charity towards the poor. It was too undeniable that Christians had gotten many things right. And paganism couldn't be forged into a coherent worldview. Perhaps you would have found a return to paganism appealing, yet also found that reason barred the way. If you became, in this age, not just a skin-deep, conformist Christian, but a real Christian true believer, I think the likeliest reasons would be the compelling arguments of the Church Fathers and/or the puzzling but inspiring examples of the monks, who took the place of the martyrs as the exemplars of heroic self-sacrifice for the faith. 

If you had lived in the Dark Ages, Christianity would present itself almost as the only option, yet there would be plenty of reasons for disillusionment. Rodney Stark argues that the early medieval centuries were not dark, but rather, were technologically creative, saw the near disappearance of slavery in Western Europe under the influence of the Church, and were really a time of improvement in the human condition. But there was much chaos and bloodshed, and education and writing became much scarcer. Paganism had faded, and the Church enjoyed a kind of near-universal support among the Romanized peoples of the former empire. It converted the barbarian conquerors too, and even spread beyond the old Roman frontiers into Ireland, and Germany, and Scandinavia. That favored faith. There were monks, and there were miracles. If you had lived in the Dark Ages, you must have been impressed by the way the Church alone carried the torch of civilization through a sea of barbarism and chaos. Every monastery was a school. But the conduct of many Christians was appalling. Even in Constantinople, where Christianity had the deepest roots, murderous intrigue for the throne was routine. In the West, the papacy in Rome had to begun to play kingmaker and patronize wars in a way that was not quite seemly. The present must have seemed a bleak contrast to the classical past, and it must have been disillusioning that a Christianized civilization had been so unable to preserve and build on the ancient pagan heritage. And then there burst forth from the East a new rival, Islam, stoutly monotheistic and vigorously martial, conquering the cradle of civilization with a swiftness that seemed miraculous. Lost to Christianity were Egypt and Carthage and Spain and most of Asia Minor. Was God on their side? Stay-at-homes in Constantinople or Italy or France might hardly have had the option of converting, but they must have doubted.

If you had lived in the High Middle Ages, notably the 12th and the 13th centuries, a time of great progress, creativity, and cultural splendor, you could begin to be impressed by what Christianity had achieved as a cultivator of secular civilization. While both the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment have tried hard to maintain a pose of scornful superiority to the High Middle Ages, it continues to fascinate, with its knights and tournaments and crusades and castles and chivalrous courts, its Franciscan friars and Gothic cathedrals, the poetry of Dante and the legends of Robin Hood, the first universities and the scholastic philosophers, the Magna Carta and the birth of parliaments, and the beginnings of the great European nations. Christian faith in the High Middle Ages was supported by profound societal consensus, learned writings, much theological unity, and the prayers and ascetical exploits of monks and nuns, while for the first time, a civilization with Christian foundations was emerging, and it already showed the signs of genius and dynamism. Against this, there was a rupture between east and west, with the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople mutually excommunicating one another. The revival of secular learning in the medieval universities gave rise to new challenges to faith, such as Aristotle's doctrine that the universe had always existed, contrary to the Christian doctrine of creation. Perhaps there were grounds for disappointment, too, with the failure of Christians' conduct in general to improve more, after centuries of Christian faith. 

Above all, in the West, the horrible and deeply disillusioning surprise was that the Church itself became for the first time a source of violence, in perfect contradiction to the Gospels. In the past, Christians had often behaved violently and unjustly, but the Church itself hadn't instigated violence or organized wars. In the High Middle Ages, the Church began to organize crusades, not only against Muslims but against fellow Christians, and it had its bloody vendettas, and its torturers. By the late Middle Ages, the Church in the West had taken on some of the characteristics of a totalitarian regime, indoctrinating the population in propaganda, imposing censorship, and threatening dissenters with torture and death. If you were a conscientious seeker after truth in the high or late Middle Ages, you must have shared in the widespread repugnance at what the Church had become, and in the aspirations to reform. Yet you probably wouldn't have sought a way out of Christianity, because there were no alternatives on offer. Islam had proved to be a school of tyrants, and morally inferior, practicing slavery on a large scale, for example, after it had largely disappeared from Europe. Muslims were still polygamous, while Christians had adorned monogamous marriage with the art of romantic love. Some began to seek refuge in the Greco-Roman past, and a long love affair with pagan literature began, which would continue for centuries. But paganism clearly didn't make much sense or have evidence to support it. As clearly in the 14th century as in the 4th, Christianity offered the most coherent worldview and the sublimest ethical teachings. Europe was probably becoming more Christian at the grassroots, more pious, more informed about scripture, more eager for salvation, but that only made them more aware of how stark was the contrast between the teachings of Christ and the conduct of "Christian" kings and popes. The challenge was to find a way to be more Christian than the Church.

In the period that we remember as the Renaissance, which began in Italy in the 14th century and spread to the rest of Europe in the 16th, and the Reformation, which began in the 16th century and overlapped the later Renaissance, some of these dreams were fulfilled, and Europe saw both a revival of ancient patterns of intellectual vitality and political freedom, and Christianity freed from the yoke of a Church that was in many ways worldly and tyrannical, freed to try to restore the pristine Christianity of the early Church. The very name of the Renaissance, meaning "rebirth," can suggest a turning away from Christianity, since what was supposed to be being reborn except the Greco-Roman, pagan past? Painters begin to draw the Greek gods with great enthusiasm. And yet the Renaissance played out entirely within the framework of Christianity, never really challenging it at all. And the Italian city-states of the 13th through 16th centuries were quite successful in emulating the civic self-government, political freedom, intellectual exploration and artistic brilliance of the city-states of ancient Greece, while all the while remaining Christian. As for the Reformation, opinions will differ about how successful it was and whether the price was worth paying, but clearly it failed in half of Europe, and left Christendom more divided than ever before. Worse, in precipitated terrible wars among Christians that were in part religiously motivated: men killing for the sake of God.

If you were an educated European in 1500 or 1600, you would have been raised a Christian, and you would be aware of no articulate alternatives except paganism, Judaism and Islam. That would make it hard to opt out, which in any case probably wouldn't be safe, since most European polities at that time enforced some degree of religious conformity. Moreover, it was increasingly clear that Europe had produced a civilization dazzlingly superior to its contemporaries, and superior to the ancients too. Europe alone had circumnavigated the globe, conquered the Americas with ease, and found many easy conquests in Africa and Asia as well. Europeans were more knowledgeable, braver, better able to cooperate, more effective than others, and it seemed a great credit to Christianity that it had laid the foundations of the civilization that produced such men. And yet the conduct of that great civilization was totally different from the ethics of the Gospels. And the agony of disillusionment that many thoughtful people seem to have felt in the intolerant Church of the Middle Ages gave way, not to reform and freedom, but to division and bitterness and war, was intense. Descartes, who fought in the bloody Thirty Years War in which religion, Catholic versus Protestant, was an important casus belli, can be thought of as a tragic case, driven to doubt everything because the existential clash of religious authorities left him with no one he could trust. There was no articulate, plausible alternative to Christianity, but many minds were beginning to grope for one.

As we move forward into the Enlightenment, we enter familiar ground. Earlier chapters have described how natural science gradually became the centerpiece of the first worldview in a millennium to present itself as a coherent, comprehensive, rational alternative to Christianity. That worldview was not really completed until Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. But this glance backward over Christian history has added a piece of the puzzle, for it shows why European intellectuals were so eager for there to be a coherent alternative to Christianity. In the time of the French Revolution there wasn't, and the grotesque attempts of the French revolutionaries to make a substitute for Christianity, instituting the Worship of Reason in 1793, then the Cult of the Supreme Being in 1794, serve to underscore the pathos of those who had long longed to believe in something other than Christianity, but couldn't find anything plausible. Well, now we have a better idea why they wanted a way out. The long, long shadow of the crimes of the medieval Church, much mitigated by the 18th century but still quite unrepented, made an agony of cynicism and disillusionment in conscientious minds. They sought to escape from the intolerable paradox of crusaders and inquisitors killing men in the name of the Prince of Peace.

Persistently down the centuries, in the time of Robespierre as much as in the time of Luther, Christian ethics, in many aspects and guises, compelled men to reject medieval legacies that were all tangled up with the authority of the Church. But what standing had they to defy the Church? Where would they get the authority to do so? Some wrought reformations of Christianity from within. The English evangelicals who spearheaded the abolition of slavery didn't much bother with the Church's historical baggage: they were born again in Christ, and sought to live by his teachings, and that meant freeing the slaves. Such historically innocent Christianities could spring up and join the stream somehow, and Christianity persisted down the generations, waxing and waning a little, often unfashionable in the best society, yet somehow, quietly, becoming pervasive enough to keep setting the tone for a country or generation. The 19th century, for example, despite everything, was a golden age for Christianity. Never before had Christian family values been so normal, or Christian missionary efforts so far-reaching. At the same time, the scientific materialist challenge to Christianity was being fitted out. But the eagerness of so many to embrace it owed much to a great incoherence within a Christianity that seems to need to encompass both the perfect ethics and meek suffering of Jesus and the totalitarian thought control and torture techniques of the Inquisition, both the heroic non-violence of the martyrs and the sordid, bloodthirsty tragedy of the Crusades. 

Before 1914, there were a few decades during which the intelligentsia was developing and refining and being converted to various, overlapping post-Christian belief systems, even as an established order steeped in Christianity, and to some extent even still rooted in the Middle Ages, persisted and supplied a helpful stability. Elites were proud of and enjoyed the civilization they knew, and wanted it to last, and were somewhat soft on, or protective of, silly old Christianity, because it seemed likely to be contributing to the maintenance of that civilization's institutions and culture. For some, Christianity almost seems to have taken on the character of a noble lie. It was said of a Voltaire that he didn't want his guests to speculate about the non-existence of God in the servants' hearing, lest, being relieved of the fear of hell, they should steal his spoons. But after World War I shattered the old order, the elite would rebuild on the basis of ideas that they believed in more than Christianity. It is sometimes said that the three great modern thinkers were Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Marx looked forward to a "dictatorship of the proletariat." Lenin instituted it. Darwin saw a world that was gradually improved through the survival of the fittest. Hitler sought to make a better world by conquering it and allowing only the fittest to survive. Freud analyzed the human mind and reduced it to a bundle of instincts and irrational inhibitions. The Sexual Revolution set out to overrule the inhibitions by reason, and exploit the instincts for pleasure.

Christianity, which was against all these disastrous errors from the beginning, has won many converts from among modernity's disillusioned. Horror at the French Revolution did much to fuel the strong Christianity of the 19th century, and the strong Christianity of the mid-20th century was in part a reaction against the horrors of Nazism and communism. And many of those you will meet in any church service on a Sunday morning today turn out, if you probe their stories, to be refugees from the Sexual Revolution, from divorce and broken homes and dreary, exploitative spells of cohabitation fraught with deceit and dishonesty, perhaps even from abortion, or simply from the loneliness that is so pervasive in a culture where wholesome family life has come to seem hardly possible. The old Cassandra argument for Christianity has persuaded many, and ought to persuade more, though unfortunately, many are still under the spell of the Sexual Revolution, and haven't seen through it yet.

But we've come to the present, so let's see where the public evidence stands now. Eyewitness testimony of the Resurrection is remote, but recent biblical scholarship has made it more credible. Miracles are unfashionable, though often reported, but are best treated as private evidence for purposes of this argument. While Christianity is not a societal consensus, there is much societal consensus about many values and principles that have no real source other than Christianity. There's plenty of fervent Christian piety about, though you have to know where to look for it, and some people may not find much in their circle of acquaintance. I hope that I've persuaded you that modern natural science is consistent with and even provides some striking support for key Christian doctrines, but I don't think this is widely recognized, and an old-fashioned, 19th-century-flavored notion of a war between religion and science still lingers in many people's minds. I've heard rumors of a revival of monasticism but I can't find much evidence that it's substantial.

The conduct of Christians leaves much to be desired, as usual, yet in one respect, I think there has been a very important breakthrough which deserves to absolutely steamroller much of the mental resistance to the faith in so many minds. That is that the violent intolerance which stained the Christian churches for centuries has been utterly purged. It should always have been obvious that God utterly forbids any man to compel another man to worship Christ, but now it is obvious, and it would be hard to find a hundred Christians on the face of the Earth who would dare to be so impious as to defend the Inquisition. If the Inquisition could be revived today, it would accomplish nothing but to make a million martyrs to the truth that God commands religious freedom. Christianity has been cleansed of the worst sin that ever marred it. There is also no longer any religious violence among Christians. In a very few places, such as Northern Ireland, religious identities still serve as ethnic markers that correlate with the sides taken in a war, but having Christian religious leaders urge their flocks to go fight against other Christians to expunge heresy is a thing of the past, and will never be seen again.

I look for one important kind of evidence for Christianity to grow in the years to come. Over the past millennium, Christianity in most of Europe, most of the time, and in North America nearly all the time, has long been deprived by its safety of one of the most powerful forms of evidence in its favor: the witness of the martyrs. The United States of America has almost no martyrs. And it still seems unlikely that anyone will actually have to die for their Christian faith at the hands of the government in the foreseeable future. Yet many are beginning to face a different kind of martyrdom. 

Christians know that there is no such thing as gay marriage and that gender is a biological endowment. It is dishonest to introduce one man as the husband of another man, or to refer to a (biological) woman as "he" or a man as "she." But in many arenas of life, especially universities and many educated professions, it's no longer safe to refrain from such dishonesty. It won't get you killed, but it may get you fired. And is it even honest to accept such jobs in the first place, if you foresee that conscience forbids you to meet the expectations of the role? 

And so it seems to be dawning on many Christians that their Christian integrity may demand that they forego elite institutions and educated professions, and that working with their hands among the humble, at the cost of leaving much of their intellectual potential frustrated, may be the only way to live in truth. Let them remember the words of Christ. "Truly I tell you… no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for Me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life" (Mark 10:29-30). Rewards unlooked for come to those who seek first the kingdom of heaven. 

The word "martyr" has come to be reserved mostly for those who have died for the faith, for there are so many of those in history that Christians lack time or memory to honor them all, and to add those who merely suffered downward social mobility for the faith would make the list even more unwieldy. Yet the principle of martyrdom, of witness leading to sacrifice and sacrifice serving as witness, is broader than that. Those who sacrifice brilliant prospects as judges, politicians, corporate leaders, professors, actors, or writers, or for that matter workaday jobs as bakers, florists, and photographers, for the sake of their Christian integrity, may sometimes do as much to prove the sincerity of their convictions and inspire faith in others as the ancient martyrs whose blood was the proverbial seed of the Church.

Let us Christians not take offense at the slanders of the world, but profit by them instead. Let them teach us humility, and goad us on to amendment of life. One is not a "hater" for denying gay marriage, yet if we are called "haters," is there no justice in the charge? Do we never, like the priest and the Levite and the parable, walk to the other side of the road to avoid seeing the suffering, when we ought to help? Do none of our fellow men stand in the position of Lazarus, suffering in poverty at our gates as we feast? Let us not be righteous in our own eyes, lest we be self-righteous in the eyes of others. The more we proclaim our unworthiness, the less our faults and sins will discredit the Gospel and alienate our erring brothers and sisters from their only hope of salvation, instead of merely discrediting ourselves. Whenever the world slaps us on one cheek by insulting us, let us learn to turn the other cheek by insulting ourselves even more.

By this time, I hope I've managed to convey how little reason there is to think that now in particular Christianity is incredible. It's always been quite reasonable to regard it as incredible that Jesus rose from the dead, or even more, that sinful human souls can be redeemed and made fit to live with God in bliss for eternity. But the public evidence is, on balance, as favorable now as it has ever been. On the other hand, couldn't God make the evidence stronger? For the resurrection of Jesus, it seems to me that He clearly could. There could have been thousands or millions of witnesses instead of hundreds. There could have been fifty eyewitness accounts written down, instead of just three or four. (Was Mark an eyewitness? Never mind.) Why didn't God make the evidence as strong as possible?

Here I'm speculating a bit, but it seems to me that God didn't want the evidence to be really compelling, because he wants faith to be free. He doesn't want people to believe in the resurrection, for whom the resurrection wouldn't be good news. The mere fact of the resurrection of Jesus isn't enough. If it were a single, solitary event, with no larger ramifications, it wouldn't be worth knowing about. It's precisely when someone has glimpsed, or probably meditated on and agonized over, the pre-Christian wisdom that I described in Chapter 14, the wonder and tragedy of Creation and Fall, to the point where the world has become a riddle to which they desperately seek an answer, when people really hunger and thirst after righteousness, when people long for Redemption with their whole being, that the news the resurrection of Jesus can be appreciated, properly received, not as an anomaly but as the last secret, the beginning of the answer to all questions. And so God keeps providing, down the ages, just enough evidence to tip into faith those who are led to the brink of it by hope, and to disturb, a little, the complacency of unbelief. But He will not compel, not by instruments of torture as every sane and genuine Christian has always known from the beginning, but also not by evidence that's too overwhelming. 

Of course, to believe in the resurrected Jesus as the savior of the world is only the entry ticket, so to speak, to the Church. The Church isn't just the set of such people but the community, or rather, to speak more truly, the Body into which they are sacramentally Incorporated. Jesus Himself, as I said above, refers to the Church in the Gospels only twice, but He has much more to say about the kingdom of heaven, of which the Church is the representative or embassy on Earth. Jesus compared to the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed, the smallest of seeds, which yet grows into a great tree so that the birds can nest in its branches, and we see the truth of this in the incredible growth of the Church from a handful of believers at the Ascension to two billion Christians today, with countless kings and sages and nobles having nested in its branches. Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to yeast kneaded into a lump of dough and making it rise, and the truth of this can be seen both in the way Christian faith gradually works its way into and transforms individual souls, and in the way Christianity spreads through populations and transforms cultures. Jesus compares the kingdom to a dragnet that pulls up things of every kind, then sorts them, keeping the good and discarding the bad, and we can see the truth of this in the way Christianity drags things up within individual minds to judge and to sanctify or condemn, and in the way Christianity sifts and judges cultures from within. So it will do at Judgment Day, for the whole of the human race and all of human history. Jesus compares himself to a Vine and believers to the branches that bear fruit, and to see how many believers have felt as at home in Christ as a branch in a vine, and how much fruit of peace and justice and mercy and heroism they have borne! He compares himself to a shepherd and believers to a flock of sheep who rejoice at His voice and follow Him to pasture, and see how many have left behind slavery to their own self-will and wholeheartedly and humbly follow Jesus, and to what pastures of inner peace, and often of worldly happiness also, He has led them!

In Jesus and the Church, we have our proposed agent of Redemption. I set up the problem of Creation and Fall with all the pathos of which I was capable in Chapter 14. It is in Jesus and the Church that I hope to persuade you there is a solution. To the nature of that solution, we turn next.