Welcome to the Speak Life Podcast. Usually the podcast is a discussion between Glenn Scrivener and Paul Feesey about what's new in the world and how the gospel of Jesus makes sense of life. Today we have something special. Glenn is interviewing Tom Holland, author of Dominion, The Making of the Western Mind. It's a fascinating conversation about how the preaching of the cross has shaped the world over the past 2,000 years. If you enjoyed the discussion, don't forget to subscribe and review us to help us get seen by others. For more information about Speak Life, go to speaklife.org.uk. And now here's Glenn Scrivener and Tom Holland.
SPEAKER_03I am with Tom Holland, author of Dominion, The Making of the Western Mind. Thank you so much for making time for us. Pleasure. I uh I first came across you, Tom, and uh an earlier book of yours, uh, in The Shadow of the Sword, kind of uh about Islam and its origins. And I'm gonna run a thesis past you, and then you can shoot it down in flames. Okay. I wonder whether in the Shadow of the Sword is almost the opposite of Dominion, in that in the Shadow of the Sword we look back at Islam, which seems very strange to us, strange to the Western mind today, and yet you show how it very naturally erupted from the forces of late antiquity. On the other hand, Dominion is something that is, you know, Christianity is very natural to us, second nature to us, but we look back to the first century and we see that where does this come from? It's it seems to have this origin that's like an asteroid crashing. Is that something? Is there something to my thesis?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think I think that um uh Christianity is also a very important part of In the Shadow of the Sword, because part of the thesis is that of that book is that that Islam emerges from a kind of confluence of Jewish and Christian, and indeed Roman and Persian and Zoroastrian influences. Um and certainly I wanted to do something similar for this, but the truth is that um it was not initially Christian identity that was my focus. When I wrote In the Shadow of the Sword, I had a lot of Muslim critics who didn't like the way that I was um looking at the kind of the origin myths of Islam and trying to put them under under the microscope. And they said, um, you know, how would you feel about this if your belief if the same thing happened to your beliefs? And to be honest, my my my beliefs were a kind of liberal secular agnosticism. And so I thought that that was a fair point, and it was something that that I'd been pondering for quite a while, chiefly because of the books that I'd written before in The Shadow of the Sword, which which included books on ancient Rome and on ancient Greece. And the experience of writing them, and the Greeks and the Romans had always been my first love. Uh I'd always sided with Pontius Pilate over Jesus, I'd always preferred Athena to the to the Christian god. Um, and so I'd always vaguely assumed that I was, in some sense, a a Greek or a Roman. But I found the experience of writing about those worlds very, very alienating. I found increasingly I found them frightening. Um I realised that I had nothing in common with them at all. And so the question of where my beliefs, my assumptions, my prejudices, the things I took for granted came from was something that um has been shadowing me for as long as I've been writing history. And the process of writing shadows certainly sharpened that. And so when Muslims said, Well, you know, where do your beliefs come from? I thought, well, that's a really good question. And so um, a bit a bit like um uh Theseus tracing his way back through the labyrinth following the thread, that's what I wanted to do. And I realized that essentially everything that I think and take for granted comes from Christianity. Having said that, I mean Christianity I think mediates a lot of other influences from antiquity, obviously the Jewish inheritance, Greek, Persian, Roman, but I think by and large, the way that I have inherited the classical past and the Persian influences and the Jewish influences is through the medium of Christianity. And I think that that is true not just of me, but of pretty much everyone I know and pretty much the whole of the society in which we live. And so that's why I wanted to write it, was I wanted to do, I suppose, to Islam, uh to do to my own beliefs what I had done to Islam.
SPEAKER_03Yes, and your own beliefs turned out to be a lot more Christian than you had thought. Yes, yes, absolutely. And you feel that others should go on that same journey in terms of owning up to a Christian heritage to the views of others.
SPEAKER_02It's not for me to I you know, I'm I I'm not here to make people do anything, but but but if I can write a book that people then, you know, I would very much like them to read the book, obviously. And if it if it um if it prompts people to uh to perhaps to reflect uh in the way that I've reflected, I'd be very happy for the for that to happen.
SPEAKER_03Yes. So when I uh go around university campuses and and and share um the faith I'm a Christian preacher, um quite often when people raise issues about the Bible, I'll I'll have a line and I'll say um uh the Bible is such an immense book that even our problems with the Bible have been given to us by the Bible. Um and it seems to me that Dominion is kind of making a similar argument about Christianity as a whole. Um we might all have problems with Christianity, we certainly all have problems with Christian history and the church and and various things that it's done. Um but it seems like the problems we have with the church have been given to us by the church, the problems we have with Christianity have been given to us by Christians.
SPEAKER_02Well, what I would say is that by and large, when um Christianity is put in the dock and condemned for being um patriarchal or hegemonic or oppressive or Spanish Inquisition or Crusades or whatever. I mean, I'm sure you will be familiar with the brick bats and get thrown at it, that um the standards by which they uh the church is being judged and found wanting are themselves deeply Christian. And and this, of course, is most famously pointed out by Nietzsche, who is uh a very significant presence in this book, because actually I you know I I read uh an enormous amount of Christian literature for this book, um but almost uh nothing I read made me feel more deeply Christian than Nietzsche because Nietzsche actually hates Christianity for um for the reasons that by and large um you know even even uh uh Dawkins is willing to um admire it. To admire it. I mean, namely, you know, it's it's valorization of the weak and the poor, uh, and and that's what Nietzsche hates. Uh and it looking at it through that prism, then Nietzsche was was was a brilliant classicist, enables you to kind of switch gears and and and re-inhabit a world in which Christianity does not exist and in which the image of the cross as an emblem of of redemption does not exist. Instead, the cross remains what it was to the Romans, an implement of torture. Yes.
SPEAKER_03That is quite a binary way of looking at it. And and that would be kind of my um instinct to read Nietzsche in that way. Um we don't want to follow Nietzsche, therefore it's it's either the abyss or it's Christ and him crucified. But uh what what if someone would say to you, okay, we don't go with Nietzsche, but there's a third option, isn't there? We don't we don't need to go for the pale Galilean either.
SPEAKER_02Well, that that is the course that that by and large the West has taken. I mean, it has taken the course of saying um you know we'll we'll uh take over Christian morals and ethics, thank you very much, but we're not actually going to bother with any of the mumbo jumbo that requires us to go to church. Um the the question that is posed by that, of course, is whether you can continue to have the bloom if the roots have been pulled up, and we don't know the answer to that as a society. Yeah. But we are, I mean, you know, I think the the secular west is very much a via media. Um it is a third way.
SPEAKER_03But reading Nietzsche and thinking to yourself, I don't want to go there, did make the way of the cross more attractive to you. Because that that does seem like quite a binary to me.
SPEAKER_02That does, you know, it's well it's it's it's not Nietzsche that that brought that home to me. It's it's it's thinking about Rome, really. Uh I mean it's it's you know, as a as a child, I idolized Julius Caesar. Um, and one of the reasons I idolised him was that he was not only a great man in almost every way, it's possible to be great, but he was renowned for his clementia, his his qualities of mercy and and and and compassion. And yet when you when you write about him and and you're that much older, uh and you realize that Caesar's renown depends on his feats of conquest in Gaul, where uh it's said by Plutarch, probably with some exaggeration, but not a huge amount, that he he killed a million people and he enslaved another million people. Um, and when he celebrates his triumph, chains of these slaves are being dragged through the streets, and placards are carried boasting how many people he's killed. And you realise this is a profoundly alien world, and the fact that it's founded on the systematic um assumption that um those who are inferior must be downtrodden, and it's right and proper to downtread them, for which the cross is the ultimate emblem, because the the cross is designed not just to torture but to humiliate, and through the process of torture and humiliation to advertise Rome's power, and therefore to um to insinuate into the guts of those who who are um subject to Rome this kind of gnawing worm of dread. And while I was writing this, I went to Iraq and made a film about the Islamic State and specifically what they were doing to the Yizidis. And we went to um a town where lots of Yizidis had lived, um the women had been rounded up and enslaved, and those who were not attractive enough to be enslaved had been shot. And this happened on a kind of open field between Sinjal, the town that had just been liberated, and the Islamic State whose positions were about a mile or so further beyond the town. And the men had been killed, and many of them had been crucified in this town. So I was wandering around a town that had had exactly the kind of fate that the Romans had visited on towns when they conquered, and where people had been crucified, and these people who'd done the crucifixion were you know a mile away within striking distance, and I can tell you that I felt that dread in my guts. Right. Um and it opened a kind of abyss to me, and the abyss was contemplating a world where the cross had not come to take on the significance that it has in the present world, even for those who are not Christian. But you know, you could be an atheist, you could be whatever, but you look at say you know, the Red Cross, and it doesn't say torture, it doesn't say dread, it doesn't say terror, it doesn't say imperial power, it says you know, nice people doing nice things for people. So even in that kind of attenuated level, the cross has become a symbol of hope. But to to imagine a world where ruled by people for whom it did not have that significance, to imagine a world in which the cross existed to torture and intimidate its enemies, I did experience it as a kind of blasphemy. And I did exp, I'm sure that was a kind of religious faith. Because it was it was a response that that came from deep within me.
SPEAKER_03Yes. So how how do you explain then erupting into just that kind of classical world, the claim that God endured that kind of shameful, excruciating death? And of all the people to make that claim, the Jews are. It's very strange.
SPEAKER_02It's very strange, and yet clearly it it's drawing on um elements that are deeply infused throughout Jewish scriptures. And the person so far, you know, we we our earliest source is Paul. So you look at Paul really for that answer because we don't have anything earlier. And you get, I mean, there that there are from Paul's letters, you get the sense of two very strange things that that Paul seems to think have happened, and which a historian is not qualified to rule on. But one of those is Paul clearly has no doubt that Jesus has risen from the dead and in some way is a part of the one creator God of Israel, and what's more, everybody else he's writing to seems to accept this for granted as well. I don't need to tell you, Paul is an incredibly argumentative writer, and all his letters are essentially arguments, but he's not he never has to argue about that, he's always taking that for granted. Uh and the second thing is that Paul seems to think that that Jesus, this criminal who suffered the death of a slave who in some way is God, has appeared to him personally and has told him to go and and and and preach this. So that's very mysterious as well. And you get definite whether it happened in a blinding flash on the road to Damascus, as Axe said, Axe is so much later that I don't think we can judge that as history. But based on Paul's letters, you can absolutely something happened to make Paul think this, and it's evident, I think, from everything that Paul writes about in relation to the scriptures in uh in his letters, that after this experience he's gone away and he's meditated and reflected on what it is that he's seen, how it is that this crucified criminal could in some way be God, and he he elaborates his understanding from what is within the scriptures, and he look and and and so it's in that sense that what becomes to be canonized as the Old Testament is an Old Testament, you know, it is a crucial part of what will become the new covenant, the new testament.
SPEAKER_03And what Paul delivered to the Corinthians, he says in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, was of first importance, and we can sort of date that in terms of a sort of a creedal form to perhaps within a few years of the case. Yeah, it's incredibly early.
SPEAKER_02I mean it's incredibly early.
SPEAKER_03And he says it's according to the scriptures, put to death according to the scriptures, raised on the third day according to the scriptures. So he's saying it's in total continuity with the God of Israel, and it still is the same. So it's a rupture.
SPEAKER_02I mean it's a rupture, it's strange, it's it's baffling. Um, you know, Paul initially seems to have been a persecutor, most Jews don't accept it, but there's clearly enough there within the fabric of Jewish scripture for it it to be rooted in that that theological inheritance, that scriptural inheritance.
SPEAKER_03What do you make as as an historian about uh people like Gary Habamas, who you're familiar with him in the in the States? He he kind of makes a minimal facts argument for the resurrection. He says there are there are a number of things that even very sceptical historians might be prepared to admit. Things like the tomb was empty, uh the disciples had experiences of the risen Lord, which they felt to be meeting with Christ. Those went on for 40 days, they seemed to stop. Um, you know, that Jesus died on the cross and then he was gone. And he kind of builds up a case and he says, Okay, well, you know, did he swoon on the cross? Unlikely. Did the disciples steal it and then lie about it? Unlikely. And goes through and kind of comes up with um that the resurrection itself best accounts for the historical facts. What do you make of that kind of idea?
SPEAKER_02Well, it's very similar to the uh question that I had to deal with in um in the Shadow of the Sword, as to uh why it was that which clearly seems to have happened people seem clear clearly to have believed that Muhammad was in some way a prophet of God, and that that in some way what becomes the Quran are authentic revelations from of the divine. So I I I I left that. I mean, I can't answer that, I'm not qualified to answer that. I'm not I that's not the kind of book that I'm writing. Um and likewise with with the question of what might what it was that might have explained why already Paul seems to think that this happened, I I'm not qualified to say, and and I think that as a historian it's not my position really to say. All I can say as a historical fact is that it's clear Paul believes this, and we can tell from the fact that he doesn't feel any need to to to push this as an argument that everyone he's writing to believes this as well. And on the the the later evidence of the gospels as well, which obviously is massively contested territory, um, there's enough continuity between the under the sense that one can get of the passion as recorded in um in Paul's letters and and the gospel accounts to suggest that there's a measure of narrative continuity there. But I wouldn't go beyond that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. That does leave a gap though, in terms of there is this incredible rupture that we're still feeling the effects of. It's like the Big Bang, you know. Yeah. We know what the Big Bang is because we see an expanding universe. We see this expanding thing called Christendom, and there is something. There was there was something. And do you feel comfortable that the letters of Paul you're hanging that something on the letters of Paul? Because it seems to me.
SPEAKER_02But Paul's letters are, if you like, our first reader on the uh, you know, the the seismeter.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_02Uh it's the first great jag that that lets us know that something's but it's not in itself the uh the earthquake or the rupture or the explosion. Yeah, just it's it's you know, it's that I don't know if you saw Chernobyl, the um the well, but you know, yeah, this three-part series, drama series about the uh explosion of the reactor in um the Soviet Union. And when it initially happens, you literally see the air, you know, you see the air being ionized by the leaking of radioactivity, and there's a sense in which Paul's letters are the kind of measuring of the way in which the air is being ionized in the wake of whatever it is that happened.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_02Um but but I think that um I would I would go so far as to say that I I don't think that um anything resembling Christianity would have happened had that first generation not believed that something spectacularly odd had happened. I think that that seems to me an irrefutable historical fact. What that odd thing was, how it's to be explained, you know, not for me to say.
SPEAKER_03But it was cruciform, it was in you know, and the the cross comes through in the in the book so so beautifully as what a remarkable thing that God would show up in the midst of God forsaken agony and shame.
SPEAKER_02Ah, it's it's it's incredibly odd. It's incredibly odd, and obviously it's odd from the Jewish point of view because this isn't what you'd expect at all. Although, you know, say Paul is able to go back through and discover that actually, in his opinion, it was presaged. But it's but it's even odder for the Greeks and the Romans, you know, it's a stumbling block for the Jews, Paul says, but it's folly to everyone else, yeah, and it's folly because you know, it's a it's a world in which um greatness is manifest, and it's also it's a world in which um you know Paul is is is you know he goes goes to Galatia, and Galatia is a place where the um the civic fathers are furiously throwing up temples to a son of a god, the Philius Augustus Caesar, who is the son of adopted son of Julius Caesar, um has established a kingdom of peace, brought order to the world. He's published a gospel about it, and Evangelion. So the good news has been broadcast around the world, um, he's died, he's ascended into heaven, he sits at the right hand of his father, and cults, temples, uh, memorials have been raised to him. So this is what a god looks like, this is what the son of a god looks like. Um, it doesn't look like someone who's been broken and tortured to death on a cross. So it's very odd. Yes. And Christians know that, and Paul you know endlessly returns to this idea, and all the way through the second century, you get Christian writers who are endlessly saying, Yeah, I know this sounds weird, I know this is odd, I mean you know, this is really embarrassing. And one of the measures of I think of how how embarrassing it is for Christians is that although they um you know they write about it, they don't portray it. And it takes a very long time, you know, so you you do famously get um graffiti showing Alex Eminos, yes, kind of it, you know, insulting graffiti, or you get um people who want to use the image of the cross for uh necromantic purposes, but um the the earliest real portrayal of Jesus on the cross by a Christian artist isn't until the end of the fourth century. And then you see him, it's um an ivory that's in the British Museum. There he is in his loincoth, looking like something out of um Love Island. I mean he's incredibly buff.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And uh he he he is an athlete who has won, he's conquered, triumphed. Um, there's no attempt to portray this. As what it was. And that's a tradition that in the long run emerges not in the Orthodox world, the world of the Roman Empire as it survives, but in the West from about the uh from about the millennium onwards. And so over the course of medieval history, uh of medieval Europe, then we do start to see a kind of dwelling on Christ's suffering.
SPEAKER_03And the ethic that comes out of that starts to be an ethic, which is not the strength and honour of the Roman Empire. It is going to the to the garbage dumps and the trash heaps outside of the city gates to pick up the abandoned, exposed infants.
SPEAKER_02Well, you're claiming Macrina, one of the from this extraordinary family in Cappadocia in what's now Turkey, which includes Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory, and between them they they explore the implications of the fact that Christ, who is Lord, comes down not as a king, not as an emperor, not as a conqueror, but to suffer the death of a slave, the worst death imaginable. And they open up the notion that perhaps to be nearest to Christ is to is to be the lowest. In the very weakest, in those who suffer most at the bottom of the pile, in some way they are closest to God. So that's why Macrina goes around the rubbish tips looking for abandoned babies, particularly abandoned girls, because they are the most vulnerable because they will be brought up and probably sold to brothels. So a lifetime of rape ahead of them, and and she rescues them. Basil uh sets up hospitals where he himself personally tends to lepers. These kind of this idea that you risk death to care for other people. And Gregory famously argues against slavery as an institution, which is a um a kind of notion so radical that it doesn't really take off. But it's an implication that is there in the idea that that because Christ has suffered death as a slave, therefore slavery itself is an offence against against God.
SPEAKER_03Which, yeah, and as you say, is not going to occur to the classical mind. So you know, Plato and Aristotle would say that people are living tools and slaves are living tools, and does not nature teach you that this is the way of all things? Yeah. So this theology of the cross, this epic of the cross, kind of starts infecting things, and and tell us some of the other impacts that an understanding of the cross starts to have as as Christendom grows.
SPEAKER_02Well, I think that um I mean I think that there are two great moral teachings that come from it and which basically have lain at the heart of the way of the West's idea of ethics ever since. And one is I mean it's it's implicit in the cross, but I think it ultimately goes back to um to Genesis, which is that man has been created and woman has been created in the image of God. So that uh gives every created human being a dignity. And what the new covenant, the idea that there is no Greek or Jew, the idea that Christ has died for the sins not just of Jews, but for everybody on the earth, does is to focus attention among Christians on the role that the Jewish God plays as creator of all humanity rather than on his role specifically as the God of Israel. And so what becomes Christianity and what becomes rabbinical Judaism are you know it's a forking in the river, really. Um and so that's that that that's that's a kind of fundamental idea, the fact that that all humans are one, yes, and the other one is the idea that um, you know, as you're saying, that um there is a strength in weakness. Um and those are I ideas that kind of bed down over the course of the succeeding centuries and and and emerge as as fundamental to um the way that everyone in the West tends to think. Um, I mean, really, up and you know, no no no government has really considered otherwise until the Nazis, and the Nazis set themselves specifically to eradicate Christianity because it was preventing them from establishing what they saw as being as the right. You know, the Nazis didn't do what they did because they wanted to be evil, right? They didn't stop and think, are we the baddies? They they wanted to do what they wanted to do because they thought that it was it was the best, right? They you know they thought that that absolutely there is there is a Jew and there is a Greek, and unless we get rid of the Jews, then they will come for the Greeks. The Nazis assume that the ancient Greeks and the Romans were they shared the same race and they've been destroyed by the coming of Christianity. So that the paradox is that the Nazis end up committing genocide against the Jews because they are terrified of what Paul had done to the Greeks and the Romans.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02So the Jews are wiped out basically because the Nazis think they're Christian, which is a kind of awful thing, you know, I mean almost the kind of the cruelest paradox in the whole history of Christianity.
SPEAKER_03Yes, doing sort of photonegative Christendom on them. They are the Third Reich, you know, they're trying to establish that. Um so there's a universalism to the ethic that Christians are studying to teach.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and there's a universal so so there is also, of course, a downside to that. Right.
SPEAKER_03I was gonna ask, yes.
SPEAKER_02So um the I mean I suppose there are two downsides really that that that people who are not Christians would would say to this. Yeah. One is okay, so there's no Jew or Greek, but what if you're Jew and you don't want to have your distinctiveness dissolved into a kind of universalist mush? Actually, you know, we want to keep our own covenant, we don't want to be and so that's why Jews have always been um a problem for Christians because they don't buy into the universalist uh rhetoric that um the church has propagated, and this remains uh a problem for the heirs of Christian universalism, it's a huge, obvious, famous, notorious problem for liberals. What do liberals do with people who have illiberal attitudes, for instance, who don't want to sign up to the liberal perspective? Do we tolerate intolerance and all that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02The the the other thing, of course, is that um if you know, as as Jesus instructs his disciples that they should go and spread the gospel to every corner of the earth, um, therefore, the earth, all the peoples of the world will be happier and better if they are brought into the ambit of Christianity. Again, you know, people may not necessarily want to experience that, and that then prompts and has prompted acts of violence that um mean that um if you say, well, Christianity is a you know is a pacific religion, it's Christianity like turning the other cheek, putting up the sword. People can very, very readily point to plenty of examples from Christian history where that hasn't entirely been the case. Absolutely, absolutely.
SPEAKER_03But they would be judged according to the molten hot centre of Christian history.
SPEAKER_02They would, they would, but there is there is um you know Christianity as it's emerged is is not necessarily uh uh a package with entirely internal logic. Right. There are all kinds of ways in which there are inherent contradictions within it, um and that has historically generated all kinds of tensions. Yes, okay.
SPEAKER_03So as a Christian preacher, um I go around talking to people about Jesus. Some of the things that are often kind of um said to me, especially by by humanist friends, they will they will say um um obviously Christianity has played a part in Western liberal values, um, but uh even without Jesus Christ, we we would have gotten to where we've gotten to.
SPEAKER_02No, I mean I mean and and it's so odd that it tends to be people who who valorise science and Darwin and the theory of evolution. But I mean I'm entirely with Stephen J. Guild on this, who says, who famously said that um if you rewound the clock of Earth's history, you would not get humans. There's nothing inevitable about the way that that evolution has gone. If you know a creature in the Precambrian gets squashed, then potentially the entire course of life has changed. We would have eight fingers. So and and I think the same is true of historical contingency. There's nothing inevitable at all about the emergence of um the qualities or the val the values or um the teachings of Christianity at all.
SPEAKER_03But you can't you can't assemble them from other sources?
SPEAKER_02Well, you know, I mean, if if you want a sense of of um of what the world might have looked like um without Christianity, you could look at India, where you have very rich philosophical traditions, you have very rich traditions of of worshiping gods. Um you you don't have something that emerges and essentially wipes that out. You can absolutely imagine a world where Christianity doesn't emerge, and you know, that 10% of Jews and what Jew what what what the Jewish scriptures offer to Gentiles remains highly appealing. So there's a kind of churn of conversion, but because the difficulty of becoming Jewish is such, it would never rise, you know, we'd never become universalist on the scale that Christianity does. But you could imagine that there are you know people continue to worship the traditional gods and that there are kind of philosophical traditions that go back many, many thousands of years, um, and you know, there's no place there for Christianity in that that that kind of alternative world.
SPEAKER_03And could we though have generated some kind of universal human rights and that that sort of stuff outside materials? Right.
SPEAKER_02Why would you? I mean, the the idea of human rights, I mean the idea that human rights kind of hangs in the ether waiting to be discovered is is as theological as believing that the Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead and sits at the hand of God the Father. Yes. I mean it's it's it's it's it requires a leap of faith. Yes. The difference is that Christians recognise that belief in the divinity of Christ requires belief. Whereas you know, lots of people just assume that human rights are something that exists but they're not. They're they're they're the the the result of specifically legal developments in medieval Christendom. The emergence of of um uh this theory by the canon rights lawyer by by by the canon lawyers in from the 12th century onwards. It it doesn't just spontaneously emerge.
SPEAKER_03Yes. But you hold dear to your heart those liberal values. You personally hold dear to your hearts that the wheat should not be cast off and that there's there's an equality of all the things.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but I recognise now that they're not, you know, that they're Christian values. Yes, yes. And of course the w what it opens up is the is the recognition that that actually without Christian faith, then w ultimately what is the underpinning for that? Yes. And the the the kind of idea of that that humanists propagate that somehow science proves this, I mean it seems to me grotesque. Right. You know, science science is a mirror in which you see what you want to see reflected back. So the Nazis use science to justify racial genocide, and liberals use it to justify uh, you know, let's you know, hug the world. Yes. But both of them reflect the cultural prejudices of the people who are looking in that mirror of science.
SPEAKER_03Therefore, do you worry about Western civilization going forwards if I mean certainly the church is exploding in places like China and in other places in South America and Africa, but here in the West it's on the wane. Do you worry that these people go?
SPEAKER_02I think I mean I've been thinking a lot about this. I think what's happened is I mean Chris Christianity was as vibrant as it has ever been, deeply held in the years of the First World War. It did not precipitate a collapse in faith. If anything, it it consolidated it. And in the years that followed the Second World War, again, there was very, very high uh religious commitment, and then in the 60s it dropped off a cliff. And so the question is what you know what happened. I think one of the things that happened was that um we emerged from the the experience of the war, and as people began to realize what had happened, particularly with the Holocaust, um there was there was a kind of recalibration of our sense of of what evil is. Um and so we no longer needed the devil because we had Hitler, we no longer needed hell because we had Auschwitz. And so ever since ever since the um ever since the war, when most people in the West want to know what is right, what is good, they look at the Nazis and they do whatever the the opposite to what the Nazis did. Right. So it's a bit like um it's a cross between um you know Plato's parable of the people in the cave looking at the shadows, and and Nietzsche's parable of the death of God, but his corpse remains in the in the um in the cave casting shadows. What we're seeing is the shadow of Christianity. We look at Nazism, and the shadow that Nazism casts tells us what what Christian values and ethics are. So enshrined at the heart of every Western society in the wake of the war is the utter conviction that racism is the ultimate evil and that the weak should be careful, so there should be welfare states. And these have become the the um absolute foundations of the way that governments function and universities function and opinion formants function, and the the worst insult that you can give anyone is to say they're a racist or a Nazi. The risk with that, which I think we're slightly seeing now, is that what do you do when people turn around and say, Yeah, okay, I'm a racist, or yeah, I'm a Nazi, or I don't want to let refugees in, or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. What resources then do you have to make this case beyond kind of screaming racist?
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02And that I think is when you start to realise just how rooted in deeply Christian assumptions these arguments actually are, yeah. And how denuded the attempt to try and make these arguments is if you don't have this mythic resonance that Christianity brings them. And I don't use mythic in it as an insult, I mean mythic in the sense that this is a kind of deep, rich it it transcends ideology, it transcends commandments, it it you know, it transcends drama that we live in, and yeah, it's it's it's it's it's a it's yeah, it's drama.
SPEAKER_03It's a strange new world of the Bible that we've got to inhabit. But without that, yeah, it it's like castles in the air to start talking about.
SPEAKER_02I think well it's like castles in the air, or it's it's a it's a very attenuated version, it's thin gruel, right, right. It's it's inherently mildly boring, and that's the notorious thing about liberals, they're mildly boring. Centrist dads. Yeah, yeah. They're a bit b they're a bit boring.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. So would you hope that the church was stronger in the West? Would you would you hope that Christian preachers are not sure?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think I think that um I mean I think that the that that this kind of liberal consensus is uh it's been the centre of gravity for so long that essentially it's it it sucked everything in. So it sucked academics and it sucked politicians and it's sucked um pretty much everyone. And I think it sucked the church in. And I think that the church no longer in the West no longer kind of determines what people think. I think I think that that that it's the it's the kind of the the the liberal um kind of gravitational centre that determines what what most Christians think actually. Right, right. Um so I think that that just as humanism is a is a kind of a Christian heresy humanism has become so hegemonic and normative that it's made Christianity into a kind of humanist sub-branch.
SPEAKER_03So you would you would like to see Christians uh preach what? Well what would you like to see Christians preach?
SPEAKER_02Well, I I think I I see no point in in bishops or preachers or Christian evangelists just recycling the kind of stuff that you can get from any kind of soft left liberal. Yes. Because that's everyone is giving that. You know, if I want that, I'll I'll I'll I'll hear it, I mean, I'll get it from a Liberal Democrat counsellor. Yes. If if you're a Christian, you think that the the entire fabric of the cosmos was ruptured when by this strange singularity where someone who is a god and a man sets everything on its head.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02And the s you know, there is a the to say it's supernatural is is to downplay it. I mean, this is this is a massive singularity at the very heart of things. And if you don't believe that, it seems to me you're not really a confessional Christian. You may be a cultural Christian, but you're not a confessional Christian. Yes. So if you believe that, then it should also be possible to dwell on all the other weird stuff that um that comes as part of traditionally come as part of the Christian package. Yeah. So I I I think that um it seems to me, purely, largely from a kind of cursory listening with thought for the day, that there's there's a deep anxiety about that, a deep almost a sense of embarrassment. Yes. That um, you know, ooh, you know, Jesus is really just a nice guy. Right. Um, it's weird, yes. Weirder than that. And to be honest, the whole kind of panoply of angels and the supernatural panoply that that you know, as I was saying, I think has been destroyed by uh by the the way that the Nazis have kind of re replaced that demonology and then get angelology and everything. I I I think without that, yeah, um and it doesn't need to be a kind of you know an a literalist, reductive. I mean of course, you know, there are all kinds of different dimensions, but the the wealth of of of Christian reflection on this is more than adequate to that.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_02Um I mean I I um I I found of all the writers I I Christian writers I read, it was um Oregon or Origin, what do we say? Let's say Gun. Let's let's have a Origin because Origin then it becomes you have a brilliant Darwin. Oregon has this um amazing uh image that he says was taught him by a Jew, his Jewish teacher, where he says that scripture is like a a great house with many rooms, but the keys to these rooms have lie scattered all around the house, and we're difficult to find them. And that's what you need philosophy for, is to help you find the keys. It's kind of amazing, Borgesian image. Um and I think that that's the kind of the the poetry, the the strangeness, the sense of myth that that that should be brought to this. I think that that ultimately if it if if if if it's to be preached as something true, the strangeness of it, the way that it can't be framed by what seems to be mere reality has to be fundamental to it. Right, right. I don't want to hear what bishops think about Brexit. Yes, you know, I know what they think about Brexit, and it's not particularly interesting. Yeah, yeah, but if they've got views on original sin, I'd be very interested to hear that. Okay. Because since original sin is a kind of perfect example, it's the kind of thing that if you're a woke liberal and I speak from experience, that you think how awful. I mean, what a terrible thing. I mean, what you know, I'm so on the side of Plagius, August did what a terrible guy. But watching um the kind of the shrillness of people convinced of their own virtues. Howling down sinners, dragging them down, you realise that actually the concept of original sin that we're all sinners is it keeps us all honest. Through democratizing. Incredibly democratizing. And that without it, you get a horrible hierarchy of virtue. Yes. You get exactly actually what atheists tend to condemn Christianity for. But because you know Christians always have a sense of their own sin.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And it keeps them honest. Yeah. Well, especially if Jesus comes and says, I'm the doctor for the sick, then actually it enfranchises the world. Because, well, you're born with it. But when's the last time I ever heard anyone talk about original sin? Oh really? Okay. I'll give you I'll give you my book 321.
SPEAKER_02321. I was feeding you that one.
SPEAKER_03Have you heard any preaching that you respond to? Have you because you you've tried out churches in the recent past.
SPEAKER_02Yes, I have. I went to uh the church in the village where I grew up, um, where my mother still worships, and uh I went with her um and it was must have been eight o'clock service or nine o'clock service on Sundays, it was very early, and we got there and there were about ten people, I should think. I was by far the youngest, all huddled in the choir stalls, and I thought it was really depressing. And there was um a woman um conducting the service, um, and she looked like a stereotype of of a female vicar um right the way down to the socks and the sandals. And I thought, oh, this is gonna be terrible. And she gave this sermon that was the most amazing sermon I've heard. It was moving and learned, and and and it was all about um uh the baptism of Jesus, and um and it was about uh the idea of of oil and blood mimicking the um uh childbirth. So it was about it was it was a fantastic and like and the fact that it was happening and there were only about ten of us listening, it was like a kind of glow of uh glow of the spirit, it was it was amazing, and then um I went back again uh and about I think it must have been just after Easter, and she she again was was preaching, and this time the church was full because obviously the word got out that she was worth listening to, and she gave them again. Did you tweet it? Disrespect but it it was yeah, uh it was it was it was amazing. So uh yes, I have, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Amazing. Final question. Uh on Twitter, we you're you're very larger than life on Twitter, and um you you use the the platform really well. Um on one of the threads, uh, we were talking about Pauline theology, and and um uh somebody said um uh there are a lot of Christians who are praying for you, Tom, that you not just expound Pauline theology, but you believe it. And you responded to the toy and you said, I hope the prayers are answered.
SPEAKER_02Yes, I I mean I would I would love to be able to believe.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um and there are times where I feel I do. So like I did in Sinjar. As I said, I think I think that was you know, as a stirring, and I I you know but um I also have the dinosaurs, which is always from the age of childhood always been a slight problem. And it's it's it's not because they contradict Genesis or anything like that, it's just the the idea of them being obliterated, what role do they have? What role do all the other cre species in this planet have? You know, why they they they come and they go and they vanish, and and how is that to be integrated into the idea that that we humans have a particular dignity? So essentially that's the kind of thing that I wrestle with. Um but um I you know, I mean who knows?
SPEAKER_03Yes, yes, so keep the prayers coming. Keep the prayers coming. Okay, word word to everybody, keep the prayers coming, put on hold. And um uh thank you so much uh for writing this book. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I I think it'll help me as a Christian and a preacher. Um and uh I I I tweeted out about this book, and a fellow clergyman in Eastbourne said, uh, should we start a clergy book club about uh Dominion? And before I had the chance to respond, you came in and said, Oh, absolutely. Yes, you know. Shameless. Shameless. Uh but shamelessly you should walk, not run, uh rather run not walk, and get Tom Holland's uh Dominion. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much.