Tom Holland and N. T. Wright on "Unbelievable?" discussing "How St Paul Changed the World"
1. Essays & Reflections: “Why I Was Wrong about Christianity”
Back in 2016 classical and medieval historian Tom Holland wrote a short piece about his deep reading in ancient history changed his perspective on Christianity. According to Holland,
The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practiced a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognized as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of the Enlightenment – that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born – increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.
2. Essays and Reflections: “Jamesian Space and Taylorian Spin in the Immanent Frame”
Reading Holland’s story reminded me Charles Taylor’s notion of the Jamesian Space and open or closed spins and takes. The Jamesian space is the open space between belief and unbelief. And as I described it in my dissertation,
entering the Jamesian space is not so much about being able to rationally consider and understand the opposing side as it is an ability to be so vulnerable that a sense of the background framework can be felt.
To actually achieve this sort of a stance in the Jamesian space, then, is a rare and challenging feat. The gap between the two stances of belief and unbelief, openness and closure, is so wide that the ability to stand between the two, to be “supremely vulnerable” and truly feel the force of the opposing position, is very uncommon. Charles Taylor thinks most of us are either at level one, where we are unable to see how the other construal is even conceivable, or at level two, where we can conceive it but still struggle to stand vulnerably and feel the force of the cross-pressured winds.
Holland seems to be one of those rare persons capable of entering the Jamesian Space, and I applaud him for the integrity of his deep reading of history.
3. Essays & Reflections (& Videos): “How St Paul Changed the World”
At the conclusion to his piece above on why he was wrong about Christianity, Tom Holland says in his morals and ethics he is not Greek or Roman but “thoroughly and proudly Christian.” And yet he is nevertheless not (yet) a Christian believer. But as I noted above, I believe he has stood in the Jamesian space and is thus allowing his deep reading of history to steer him. This is also evident in this remarkable discussion between popular historian Tom Holland and New Testament and Pauline scholar N. T. Wright.
Or you can watch a short 4-minute snippet of the exchange, which includes the following from Holland:
I think of Paul as a type of “depth charge” deep beneath the foundations of the classical world. It’s not anything you would particularly notice if you’re in Corinth or Alexandria. And then you start feeling this rippling outwards. By the time you get to the 11th century in Latin Christendom, everything has changed. I think essentially the significance of Paul is that he sets up ripple effects of revolution throughout western history. So the 11th century when the papal revolution essentially established this idea that society has to be reborn, reconfigured; that vested interests have to be torn down. And then what we call the Reformation is a further ripple effect of that, and then the Enlightenment is a further ripple effect of that. And it’s spilled out so much that now in the 21st century, we don’t even realize where these ripple effects are coming from. We just take them for granted.
4. Books: Two Reviews of Tom Holland’s most recent book Dominion
Fr. Stephen de Young describes Dominion as a work of cultural history, not church history. “It is not a book aimed at tracking the development of theology or of particular church institutions in the West. Rather, it traces the interplay of Christian teaching and culture which has resulted, over two millennia, in a profound transformation of culture.”
Read the whole review here.
Matthew Rose offers a similar description:
By going deep into our cultural history, and showing its moral transformation over three millennia, Holland proposes to show that progressives and conservatives are bred from the same moral matrix. They are the children of the most subversive revolution in human history, whose legacy is the ongoing disruption of settled patterns of life. That revolution is Christianity, and in Holland’s graceful telling, the West remains so saturated by Christian values that it still merits the name “Christendom.”
7. Liturgy: Bright Week Prayers
Christ is risen from the dead trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.
They who were with Mary came before the dawn, found the stone rolled away from the sepulcher, and heard the angels say unto them, “Why seek ye Him as man with the dead, who dwells in light eternal? Behold the grave wrappings; make haste and declare to the world that the Lord is risen, and hath caused death to die; for He is the Son of God, the Savior of mankind.
In the grave with the body but in hades with the soul as God; in paradise with the thief, and on the throne with the Father and the Spirit wast Thou, O Christ, filling all things, Thyself uncircumscribed.
Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
As life-bearing, as more splendid than paradise, and more radiant than any royal chamber, O Christ, is shown forth Thy tomb, the fountain of our resurrection.
Rejoice, O thou hallowed, divine abode of the Most High, for through thee, O Theotokos, was joy given to those who cry aloud to thee: Blessed are thou among women. O all-undefiled Lady.
8. Word from the Fathers: “What Is the Pascha?” by St Melito of Sardis
A short sample from today’s reading:
What was marvelously knit together was unraveled, and the beautiful body divided. Humanity was doled out by death, for a strange disaster and captivity surrounded him; he was dragged off a captive under the shadow of death, and the father’s image was left desolate. For this reason in the body of the Lord is the paschal mystery completed.
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