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REEDINGS
. . .
Notes on
Books by Gerard Reed
August 2005 Number One Hundred Sixty-four
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RODNEY STARK’S Church History
For
several decades Rodney Stark, currently a sociology professor at Baylor
University, devoted himself to the sociology of religion.
But he was always “a history buff,” and 20 years ago, he read Wayne
Meeks’s The First Urban Christians. Thus
began, somewhat as an avocation, his reading widely in Church history.
With an academic outsider’s perspective, he began asking different
questions and taking different approaches to the subject, leading to the
publication of highly readable and scintillating works such as The Rise of
Christianity: How the Obscure,
Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western
World in a Few Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c. 1996; San
Francisco: Harper San Francisco
reprint, 1997). In general, the
book seeks “to reconstruct the rise of Christianity in order to explain why
it happened” (p. 3).
But
the book is not a sustained chronological narrative.
Rather, each of its10 chapters stands alone–a collection of essays
providing an analysis of something that strikes Stark as significant.
In chapter one he considers “Conversion and Christian Growth,”
seeking to understand how the120 Christians at Pentecost launched a movement
that literally won the world for Christ.
The data indicate the Early Church grew at the rate of “40 percent
per decade” for several centuries (p. 6).
This is virtually the same growth rate enjoyed by the Mormons for the
past century, and at that rate there would have been only 7,530 Christians by
the year 100 A.D., and some 40,000 by 150.
Thereafter, as anyone understanding compound interest understands, the
numbers dramatically increased and the Roman Empire was “Christian”
mid-way through the fourth century.
In chapter two Stark discounts the popular notion that “Christianity
was a movement of the dispossessed.” Friedrich
Engels championed this view, arguing that it was a “‘religion of slaves
and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights’” (p. 29).
Many historians–and the multitudes of scholars influenced by Ernst
Troeltsch–widely embraced such Marxist thinking.
“By the 1930s this view of Christian origins was largely unchallenged”
(p. 29), and legions of professors still repeat the litany.
But, Stark insists, it must be discarded because it’s utterly untrue.
Today “a consensus has developed among New Testament historians that
Christianity was based in the middle and upper classes” (p. 31).
Aristocrats and wealthy believers, scholars and highly educated folks,
were quite prominent in the Early Church.
This squares with current sociological evidence regarding religious
sects and cults, which almost never thrive among the poor and dispossessed.
Movements such as the Mormons and Moonies appeal to the well educated
and prosperous. So, Stark argues,
it makes sense to envision the Early Christians as appealing to the same
social strata.
In the next chapter Stark argues that converted Jews were an enduring
Christian constituency. He thinks
that “not only was it the Jews
of the diaspora who provided the initial basis for church growth during the
first and early second centuries, but that Jews continued as a significant
source of Christian converts until at least as late as the fourth century and
that Jewish Christianity was still significant in the fifth century” (p.
49). There were, of course,
far more Jews of the diaspora than Jews living in Palestine.
Many of these Jews had so lost their Hebrew roots that a Greek
translation of the Scriptures (the Septuagint) had become necessary.
Among these Hellenized Jews the Christians found a fertile field for
the Gospel. “If we examine the
marginality of the Hellenized Jews, torn between two cultures, we may note how
Christianity offered to retain much of the religious content of both cultures
and to resolve the contradictions between them” (p. 59).
Further contributing to Church growth were epidemics, cited by Church
Fathers such as Cyprian and Eusebius as factors in drawing converts to a
community that cared for the sick and dying as well as offered the promise of
resurrection and eternal life. From
165-180 A.D., an epidemic (probably smallpox) decimated the Roman Empire,
reducing the population by at least one-fourth.
In 251 another empire-wide epidemic (probably measles)
raged. Such horrendous crises
precipitate religious questioning–as the
response of American Indians to similar catastrophes document.
Importantly, for the Church in the ancient world, while pagans fled the
scene of suffering Christians came alongside those who were ill, choosing to
risk death rather than desert those in need.
They also cared for the poor, the widows and orphans, demonstrating a
qualitatively different kind of religious faith.
Consequently, multitudes of disillusioned pagans turned to the
Christian way.
Women too were drawn to the Early Church, where they were more highly
revered than in the Greco-Roman world. This
has long been recognized, but Stark seeks “to link the increased power and
privileged of Christian women to a very major shift in sex ratios. I demonstrate that an initial shift in sex ratios resulted
from Christian doctrines prohibiting infanticide and abortion; I then show how
the initial shift would have been amplified by a subsequent tendency to over
recruit women” (p. 95). Due to
the exposure of female babies–in many families only one baby girl was
allowed to live–there were significantly more men than women in the first
and second centuries. This meant,
of course, a dramatic depopulation trend!
Christians, conversely, with their high view of marriage and fidelity,
considered children a blessing and encouraged large families as well as
opposed abortion (thus saving the lives of many women who would have died as a
result of this dangerous procedure). Contrary
to some feminist readings of the documents, Stark insists that women were
drawn to the Church not because it offered them places of political status and
power but because Christians insisted that marriage is sacred, life is sacred,
and children are to be treasured.
Finally, Stark proposes a thesis in his final chapter that explains why
women and others were drawn to the Church: “Central doctrines of
Christianity prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective
social relations and organizations” (p. 211).
Love and mercy, rooted in the Christian understanding of God as
revealed in Jesus Christ, were not celebrated by pagans, but they formed the
foundations for Christianity. Nor
did pagans endorse the sanctity of life.
But “above all else, Christianity brought a new conception of
humanity to a world saturated with capricious cruelty and the vicarious love
of death” (p. 214).
*
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, c. 2001), Stark pursues the thesis that monotheism
is the most important “innovation” in history.
He makes a clear distinction between “godless religions,” such as
Buddhism and Taoism, and “godly religions” such as Judaism and
Christianity. “Godless
religions” may assume a distant, unknowable deity of some sort, but they
appeal to an intellectual elite of monks and philosophers.
“I am comfortable,” he says, “with the claim that Taoism, for
example, is a religion, but it seems unwise to identify the Tao as a God.
Indeed, for centuries sophisticated devotees of Buddhism, Taoism, and
Confucianism have claimed that theirs are Godless religions.
I agree” (p. 10). Remarkably
different, however, are the “godly religions,” that proclaim the reality
of the “one true God” who has revealed Himself and has a clear plan for
mankind, and they have proved historically momentous.
Primitive cultures–as ably documented by Andrew Lang, Paul Radin and
Wilhelm Schmidt–often believed in “High Gods” remarkably akin to
monotheism, but only Judaism, Christianity, and Islam embraced a coherent
vision of God’s nature and of His will for the “chosen” people.
Monotheists call for conversion, and “to convert is to newly form an
exclusive commitment to a God” (p. 50). Monotheists, uniquely, were missionaries.
Though no longer so, Judaism, in the Ancient World, was known as a “missionizing
faith” (p. 52), a fact noted by Max Weber, who credited the success of
Jewish proselytism to “‘the purity of the ethic and the power of the
conception of God’” (p. 59). In
turn, Christians so successfully spread their faith that within 300 years “more
than half of the population of the empire (perhaps as many as thirty-three
million people) had become Christians. More recently, of course, missionaries have taken the Gospel
almost literally to the uttermost parts of the earth.
By
definition missionaries are true believers!
Clergy in established churches easily lose their evangelistic zeal, and
broad-minded “liberals” during the past century (with their focus on
tolerance and pluralism) quickly abandoned evangelism of any sort.
Indeed, “churchmen who no longer believed in One True God” lost any
reason “for attempting to convert non-Christians” (p. 99).
Skeptical churchmen, who no longer believed “in anything more Godly
than an essence, began to express doubts as to whether there was any
theological or moral basis for attempting to convert non-Christians” (p.
99). Following WWI, American liberals rejected the notion of God
“as an aware, conscious, concerned, active being” and anticipated Paul
Tillich’s hypothetical “God as a psychological construct, the ‘ground of
our being’” (p. 100). Rather
that seeking “converts,” liberal Christians engaged in various forms of
humanitarian “service,” endeavors which enlist few life-long vocations and
attract few converts.
True believers seeking converts cannot but engage in religious
conflicts, because “particularism, the belief that a given religion is the
is the only true religion is inherent in monotheism” (p. 116), and Stark
details some of the darker moments of monotheism–persecution of the Jews by
both Muslims and Christians at various times, the Crusades, the 30 Years War.
This same particularism also explains the powerful persistence of the
monotheistic religions. Amazingly,
however, as the last chapter–“God’s Grace: Pluralism and Civility”–shows,
believers have lately learned to peacefully co-exist. “Adam Smith’s great insight about social life is that
cooperative and socially beneficial outcomes can result from each individual
human’s acting to maximize his or her selfish interests” (p. 221). Such seems true in today’s religious world.
Catholics and Protestants, Christians and Jews, have found “that
people can both make common cause within the conventions of religious civility
and retain full commitment to a particularistic umbrella” (p. 248).
Ironically, persecution and intolerance now distinguish secularists
rather than religionists! Deistic
clergy fulminate against despised “fundamentalists,” and “a new study
has demonstrated that the only significant form of religious prejudice in
America is ‘Anti-Fundamentalism,’ and it is concentrated among highly
educated people without an active religious affiliation” (p. 256).
*
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In
a companion volume to One True God, Rodney Stark has written For the Gloryof
God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of
Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c. 2003). Four lengthy chapters (each nearly 100 pp. long) focus on the
four topics listed in the book’s subtitle.
And in each one Stark tries to rectify the historical record, duly
crediting Christians for their contributions to Western Civilization.
Though he acknowledges his debt to historians’ researches, he admits
to being disillusioned by their biases. He
was startled by many of their anti-Christian and (especially) anti-Catholic
comments. “Far more pernicious,
however,” he says, “are the many silences and omissions that distort
scholarly comprehension of important matters” (p. 13).
To shed light on what really happened motivates this study.
For 2000 years the Christian Church has been renewed by continuous
reformations, though Stark focuses almost singularly upon the 15th
and 16th centuries. Many of these movements were “sectarian” in
nature and, like the early Christians, led by “privileged” rebels such as
Peter Waldo, John Wyclif, Jan Hus, and Martin Luther.
Almost never were they the “revolts of the poor” so lionized by
Marxist propagandists. Reformers
sincerely sought “God’s Truth.” Theology,
not economics, motivated them, though the success of their movements was
powerfully shaped by various cultural factors.
Those that truly mattered, Stark says, were three: 1) Catholic
weaknesses in lands that turned Protestant; 2) government response–autocratic
regimes sustained Catholicism in countries like Spain; (3 monarchs’ “self-interest,”
obviously determinative in Luther’s Saxony and Henry VIII’s England, but
crucial wherever Protestantism prevailed.
Stark begins his second chapter, “God’s Handiwork: The Religious
Origins of Science,” with a long quotation from Andrew Dickson White’s
two-volume A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,
the popular source of much misinformation such as the “fact” that Columbus
“discovered” that the earth is spherical.
White, as well as fellow atheists such as Carl Sagan and Richard
Dawkins, simply falsify the historical record so as to advance their
philosophical agenda. In fact,
Stark argues “not only that there is no inherent conflict between religion
and science, but that Christian theology was essential for the rise of science”
(p. 123). This is not “news”
to those acquainted with the work of Stanley Jaki and Alfred North Whitehead
(who in 1925 stated that science developed in tandem with Medieval theology),
but it certainly challenges conventional textbook presentations.
It cannot be too strongly stated that Christianity uniquely nourished
science, whereas neither the Greeks nor the Chinese, neither the Maya nor the
Muslims encouraged scientific development.
And many scientists today are strong Christians!
Indeed, “professional scientist have remained about as religious as
most everyone else, and far more religious than their academic colleagues in
the arts and social sciences” (p. 124).
Stark illustrates his case with an impressive list of great Christian
scientists, past and present.
Still more: neither the
“Dark Ages” nor the “Scientific Revolution” is a historically accurate
label, for the latter was very much a continuation of the former.
Significant scholarly, and scientific, work took place during the
Medieval era, a time of “‘precise definition and meticulous reasoning,
that is to say, clarity’” as Alfred Crosby insisted (p. 135).
“Christianity depicted God as a rational, responsive, dependable, and
omnipotent being and the universe as his personal creation, thus having a
rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting human comprehension” (p. 147).
Thus St. Albert the Great was a great scientist in the 13th
century–and probably a much better thinker than was Nicholas Copernicus in
the 16th! The greatest
scientist of the 18th century, Isaac Newton, devoted inordinate
time (and a million written words) to biblical study and speculation.
His private letters “ridiculed the idea that the world could be
explained in impersonal, mechanical terms” (p. 168).
According to John Maynard Keynes, who purchased a collection of his
manuscripts, Newton “‘regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the
Almighty’” (p. 172).
Newton’s approach to the universe, however, was scuttled by Charles
Darwin and his epigones. In Stark’s
judgment, “the battle over evolution is not an example of how ‘heroic’
scientists have withstood the relentless persecuting of religious ‘fanatics.’ Rather, from the very start it has primarily been an attack
on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science
in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a Creator–an effort
that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticism of Darwin’s
work” (p. 176). The theory of
evolution through natural selection has not really explained the origin of
species, though a great deal of rhetorical disingenuity disguises that fact.
For example: millions of
fossils have been unearthed during the past century, “but the facts are
unchanged. The links are still missing; species appear suddenly and then
remain relatively unchanged” (p. 180).
Thus great thinkers, such as Karl Popper, have “suggested that the
standard version of evolution even falls short of being a scientific theory”
(p. 191)
Yet the Darwinian faithful retained their fervor and Popper was
assailed for his obtuseness! What
Stark labels “the Darwinian Crusade” has been propelled by “activists on
behalf of socialism and atheism” (p. 185).
Alfred Russel Wallace shared Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis and
declared that it unveiled “the coming of that biological paragon of
selflessness, ‘socialist man’” (p,. 186).
In Darwin’s library one finds “a first edition of Das Kapital,
inscribed to ‘Mr. Charles Darwin. On
the part of his sincere admirer, Karl Marx, London 16 June 1873).’
More than a decade before, when he read The Origin, Marx wrote to
Engels that Darwin had provided the necessary biological basis for socialism”
(p. 186). Thomas Henry Huxley’s
passionate commitment to Darwinian evolution was deeply rooted in his
anti-Christian hostility. Ideology
and emotion, not objectivity, dominates Darwinism!
Stark’s third chapter is entitled:
“God’s Enemies: Explaining the European Witch-Hunts.”
Careful calculations, he insists, indicate that during the
witch-hunting era (1450-1750), “in the whole of Europe it is very unlikely
that more than 100,000 people died as ‘witches’” (p. 203).
Though radical feminists and anti-Christian historians often toss
around numbers in the millions, they are simply venting their feelings and
prejudices rather than dealing with the evidence.
Stark suggests that the confluence of satanism, magic, and political
developments in the Protestant Reformation best explain the outbreak of
witch-hunts. They rarely occurred
in Catholic lands, and they abruptly ended in the 18th century. Stark’s meticulous research, and his country-by-country
tabulations, persuasively discount many of the irresponsible textbook
generalizations without defending the irrational frenzy underlying the
killing.
“God’s Justice: The Sin of Slavery,” the book’s last chapter,
argues that Christians, virtually alone among earth’s peoples, have
condemned and eliminated a universal practice (evident in American Indian and
African tribal societies as well as Greece and Rome, endorsed by Mohammed as
well as Aristotle). Apart from
the Christian world, slavery has been taken for granted, much like the stars’
placement in the heavens. But,
Stark says, “Just as science arose only once, so, too, did effective moral
opposition to slavery. Christian
theology was essential to both” (p. 291).
Certainly early Christians, such as St. Paul, “condoned slavery,”
but “only in Christianity did the idea develop that slavery was sinful and
must be abolished” (p. 291). Rather
than being abruptly abolished, however, it simply faded away, so that in the
Medieval World it had disappeared and Thomas Aquinas branded it sinful in the
13th century.
The conquest and colonization of the New World, of course, revived the
institution of chattel slavery. But
in Catholic lands it was mitigated somewhat by theological constraints, as is
evident in the career of Bartholomew de Las Casas.
And in Protestant lands, by the 18th century, abolitionists
began to question its legitimacy. Revivalists
such as John Wesley in the 18th and Charles G. Finney in the 19th
century (not “Enlightenment” philosophers such as John Locke and Voltaire)
opposed it. And
ultimately, as “Robert William Fogel put it so well, the death of slavery
was ‘a political execution of an immoral system at its peak of economic
success, incited by [people] ablaze with moral fervor.’” (p. 365)
“ Precisely!” Stark says, in his final sentence.
“ Moral fervor is the fundamental topic of this entire book: the
potent capacity of monotheism, and especially Christianity, to activate
extraordinary episodes of faith that have shaped Western civilization” (p.
365).
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