A History of Christianity - S1.E6 ∙ God in the Dock
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00:00I come from three generations of Anglican clergy.
00:12Half a century ago, my father was parish priest here in Suffolk.
00:18He was a good and faithful priest, much loved by his congregation.
00:25My family lived in a huge Georgian rectory just up the hill from here.
00:29When my father retired, the church sold the house,
00:32and now the parson lives in another village,
00:34and there's been a woman priest in charge,
00:36and that would have surprised my father 50 years ago.
00:44His was still the Church of Christendom,
00:47which had endured since the time of the Emperor Constantine the Great.
00:53Even as a boy, I could see that the sort of church and society he served was dying.
01:02Now I describe myself not so much as a Christian,
01:05but as a candid friend of Christianity.
01:09And my own life story makes me a symbol of something distinctive about Western Christianity,
01:14a scepticism, a tendency to doubt,
01:17which has transformed Western culture and transformed Christianity.
01:22Where did that change come from?
01:24In our final programme, we try to understand recent Christian history and where it goes next.
01:40For 2,000 years, the Christian answer to the big questions of existence
01:44was faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
01:49That made sense of life and death.
01:52It taught right from wrong.
01:55But the recent history of Christianity has been described as a sea of faith,
02:00ebbing away before the relentless advance of science, reason and progress.
02:08It's actually a much more surprising story.
02:12The tide of faith perversely flows back in.
02:16But Christianity has a remarkable resilience.
02:20In crisis, it's rediscovered deep and enduring truths about itself.
02:26And that may even be a clue to its future.
02:47I've lived in Oxford since 1995,
02:50fellow of St Cross College and professor in the theology faculty.
02:56Our local pub is The Eagle and Child,
02:59which can actually claim a bit part in Christian history,
03:02and not just because I drink here.
03:08Around the time I was growing up in Suffolk,
03:10this was the regular haunt of Russian pubs.
03:13When I was growing up in Suffolk,
03:15this was the regular haunt of writers C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their friends.
03:22Devout Christians though they were,
03:25these writers were asking questions about their faith.
03:31When C.S. Lewis published a collection of essays on Christian themes,
03:35he gave it the title God in the Dock.
03:39That's a good description of the way in which Western culture
03:42has increasingly put the Christian God on trial.
03:47Of course, doubt is a fundamental part of religion.
03:49The Bible's full of it.
03:51The Old Testament is shot through with doubt,
03:53though in its stories, doubters tend to feel God's wrath,
03:56like Adam and Eve when they doubted that it was a really bad idea
04:00to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
04:05But something odd happened in Western Europe.
04:09Doubt has chipped away at the very fabric of Christianity,
04:13Catholic and Protestant.
04:16At times, threatening to dynamite its foundations.
04:21We can trace this scepticism back to the period known as the Enlightenment,
04:27when Western Europeans began posing questions about the power of monarchs,
04:32the power of clergy,
04:35above all, the power of God.
04:39Conventional wisdom has us believe that the Enlightenment
04:42began with the French philosophers
04:44in the elegant salons of 18th-century Paris.
04:50But I'll show you that it was in Amsterdam, 100 years earlier,
04:53that God was first put in the dock.
05:02In the 17th century, Amsterdam boasted an economic and social tolerance
05:06unequalled in Europe.
05:10This was a proud and cosmopolitan boom town.
05:13A paradise for traders, but also a marketplace for ideas.
05:19A place where people sought refuge from religious and political persecution.
05:26A brilliant young philosopher who lived in the city
05:29was to change the rules of Western religion.
05:33Barak Spinoza belonged to a well-established refugee community here.
05:38They were Sephardic Jews who'd been expelled from Spain and Portugal
05:42after the fall of Muslim Granada in 1492.
05:47This was their synagogue,
05:49once at the heart of a thriving, tolerated Jewish quarter.
05:55Yet a sense of the excitement that this people must have felt,
05:59that suddenly they could build, just like a mainstream community,
06:03here they are, free at last.
06:05Coming from England, this building is pleasingly familiar.
06:08It's just like one of the parish churches
06:10which Sir Christopher Wren was building in London
06:12just at the same time, the 1670s.
06:14You've got all the elements, you've got the galleries,
06:17the dark woodwork, the whitewash.
06:19There's great clear windows with the light streaming in.
06:23And yet, of course, it's also Dutch.
06:26A lovely touch, I think, is on the floor.
06:29Sand to deaden the sound as people shuffle in.
06:36So, for many Jews, coming to Amsterdam
06:39meant rediscovering the riches of their tradition,
06:42building a beautiful synagogue like this.
06:45But other refugees remembered their sufferings.
06:48They remembered the Spanish Inquisition.
06:51For them, all religion became tainted by the same crazy dogmatism
06:55which had fuelled the Inquisition.
06:59Baruch Spinoza felt like that.
07:02And he went so far as to question faith itself.
07:07He did not believe in God as a supernatural divine being.
07:12Nor did he believe in the immortality of the soul
07:15or the existence of miracles.
07:21Yet Spinoza's God hadn't disappeared from the world entirely.
07:25For Spinoza, God and nature were one.
07:33The philosopher was a gentle, courteous, austere figure
07:36who made his living grinding lenses for spectacles.
07:41But to his enemies, he was an evil monster.
07:45In 1656, his relations with the Amsterdam Jewish community
07:49reached breaking point.
07:53He refused an offer of 1,000 florins to keep quiet.
07:57At the age of 24, he was expelled from the Amsterdam synagogue
08:01without possibility of return.
08:03This is actually the order for his expulsion.
08:06Contra Baruch Espinosa.
08:08Against Baruch Spinoza.
08:13At the time, Jews and Christians alike
08:16thought his views blasphemous and heretical.
08:20But that didn't stop him writing,
08:22even though his chances of getting published were slim.
08:25In fact, his most startling work only appeared after his death in 1677.
08:33This book is the first edition in Dutch of the writings of Spinoza.
08:38Very brave Dutch publisher to publish this as early as 1677.
08:43But still not brave enough to put Spinoza's full name on the title page.
08:47It's too controversial, so it's just BDS, Baruch de Spinoza.
08:56I see Baruch Spinoza as the original doubter.
09:00The man who first dared to break with the past
09:03and question whether God was the answer.
09:07This was the beginning of that special phenomenon
09:10of the Western Enlightenment.
09:12An open scepticism as to whether there can be definitive truths
09:17in sacred books.
09:20In his lifetime, Spinoza was treated as a dangerous eccentric.
09:27A contemporary of his in England
09:29also raised fundamental doubts about the nature of God.
09:36But he's celebrated as a national hero.
09:40His inquiries were in a field which they called natural philosophy.
09:45It's what we call science.
09:48Up until the 17th century, if you were really clever,
09:51you'd studied theology.
09:54Now, natural philosophers look to the natural world
09:58for answers to their own questions.
10:01And the answers to their own questions
10:05Now, natural philosophers looked at heaven and earth
10:09and explained them not through the Bible, but through observation.
10:17They set up their own college of research in London,
10:20which became the Royal Society.
10:22And its most illustrious president was Sir Isaac Newton.
10:27There's a famous tale about Newton's breakthrough in physics.
10:31He's said to have been hit on the head by an apple.
10:34And the apple led him to question
10:36the common understanding of God and the universe.
10:40Now, here is the first real biography of Newton,
10:44written by William Stokely.
10:46And there is that splendid story about the apple and gravity.
10:50That's right. There are actually various versions of this story,
10:53one of which involves a leaf falling from a tree.
10:57But I think an apple, because of its biblical associations,
11:01might well have appealed to Newton more as a good story.
11:04I see. So he's moulding scientific discovery
11:08in the pattern of a biblical story.
11:10That's right. And, of course, he's also moulding a Newton mythology.
11:18Newton is celebrated as a hero of science,
11:21but in no way was he an enemy of religion.
11:24Like Spinoza, he radically rethought it.
11:28He took the Bible very seriously, but on his own terms.
11:32He spent as much energy brooding on the prophecies of the last days
11:36in the book of Revelation as he did on the nature of gravity.
11:41And he insisted that the universe was run by laws
11:45laid down by the Creator God,
11:47who had then made the decision to make the universe
11:51Newton's God was becoming different from the God of the Bible.
11:54For one thing, his God was rational, like a natural philosopher,
11:58and perhaps, for the time being,
12:00just as shut away in his study or laboratory
12:03whatever he might do at the end of time.
12:10There were plenty of people,
12:12but not all of them were as rational as Spinoza.
12:16There were plenty of people, including churchmen,
12:19in rational, practical Protestant England,
12:22who thought that what Isaac Newton said made sense.
12:25Perhaps that's because, unlike Spinoza,
12:28he kept some of his wilder ideas to himself.
12:31But in Catholic France, the same thoughts had a very different impact.
12:37Here it wasn't just God who was put in the dock,
12:40it was also the Catholic Church.
12:46BELLS CHIMING
12:52In the coffeehouses of 18th-century Paris,
12:55you could meet a new kind of philosopher.
12:58These were men of the world,
13:01journalists, playwrights and critics,
13:04and they were united in their hatred of the prejudice and fanaticism
13:08which they saw all around them in the sacred monarchy of France.
13:13Their king was an absolute monarch
13:16who insisted that his power came from God
13:19and expected the Church to agree.
13:22Since the reign of Louis XIV,
13:25a particularly intolerant version of Roman Catholicism had triumphed.
13:31With that background, the philosophers emphasised ever more fiercely
13:35the need for religious toleration, freedom of thought and equality.
13:39Take the best-known name of them all, Voltaire,
13:42the pen name of François-Marie Arouet,
13:45a French notary's son who just couldn't stop writing
13:48and told that he came here to Le Procope every day
13:51and drank 40 cups of a coffee and chocolate mixture.
13:55Amazing, he lived to a ripe old age.
14:03When he did die in 1770,
14:07when he did die in 1778, aged 84,
14:11he was denied a Christian burial.
14:16Today, Voltaire's remains are laid to rest here in this mausoleum.
14:28The Panthéon, no better symbol of what the Enlightenment might mean
14:32because this started life as a very expensive church
14:35built by a French king, Louis XV.
14:37Now, God has been banished
14:40and the place is a huge holding pen
14:43for the most illustrious corpses of the French Republic.
14:50Voltaire is one of the most famous of the dead in the Panthéon crypt.
14:56Revered as one of the leading prophets of doubt,
15:01he'd waged war against the Catholic Church
15:04with brilliant wit and savage irony.
15:07He hated what he saw as its authoritarianism,
15:11superstition and dogmatic rigidity.
15:16But beyond that, he also attacked the idea of a just God.
15:22At first, Voltaire subscribed to the idea of a benevolent creator God,
15:27a referee who makes decisions about human morality and justice.
15:31And even in his 70s, he said,
15:34if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
15:39That does suggest that we need God, but it's still pretty cynical.
15:51However, in his own mind, Voltaire had already condemned God.
15:57His sentence provoked by a horrifying natural disaster,
16:02which chose the most incongruous moment to strike.
16:09It happened in Lisbon in 1755.
16:11A massive earthquake caught the whole city in church on a high festival,
16:15candles blazing in every corner.
16:18Churches and people were crushed or burned
16:21and soon the whole city was in ruins and on fire.
16:27When the survivors struggled to safety on the broad waterfront,
16:30they saw a massive tsunami rushing towards them.
16:33Thousands were drowned.
16:37Where was a loving God in this monstrous accident?
16:51Voltaire was appalled by those who believed the earthquake
16:54to be part of God's divine plan in a perfect world.
17:00His response was a scathing satirical novel, Candide.
17:06Candide is an innocent fool, that's what his name means.
17:10His tutor is the pointlessly optimistic Dr Pandlos,
17:15whose catchphrase is,
17:17all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
17:21The story ends with Candide realising just how wrong Pandlos is.
17:35Voltaire is the extreme example of a mood which seems to me
17:39to represent the most special, unusual thing about Enlightenment culture.
17:45It constantly stands back from itself,
17:49scrutinising, comparing,
17:52examining objectively from every angle.
17:55No belief is exempt.
17:57Every assumption carries a health warning.
18:01There are many good things about this.
18:03It can produce a sanity, a healthy scepticism
18:07and it produces a self-confidence which has made Western civilisation
18:11one of the most dynamic in history.
18:20But as Voltaire himself forcefully suggested,
18:24it's never a good idea to be too optimistic about human beings.
18:28His scepticism in the wrong hands was twisted
18:32and used to annihilate God and the whole of Catholic Christianity.
18:43France celebrates the most iconic moment in its history
18:47on the 14th of July.
18:50On that day in 1789, the storming of the Bastille
18:54heralded the beginning of the French Revolution.
18:57All over Europe there was enthusiasm at the news of revolution.
19:02Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
19:05was how William Wordsworth remembered it looking back on his youth.
19:09You could be forgiven in 1789 for thinking that the ideals of the Enlightenment
19:14had been realised.
19:17Liberty, equality and brotherhood were within reach.
19:30But standing in the way were deeply entrenched social and political
19:34privileges embodied in the French monarchy
19:38and those that had supported it for the past 1,500 years.
19:42The aristocracy, of course, but also the Catholic Church.
20:00While the Church had been only an object of ridicule for the philosophers,
20:05revolutionaries now had the power actually to strip the Church of its
20:10At first, many lower clergy who'd been excluded from such wealth and privilege
20:15enthusiastically backed the revolution in reforming a system with obvious faults.
20:20But relations soon soured when the revolutionaries began confiscating
20:24centuries' worth of Church properties and interfering in Church government
20:28far more than the Bourbon monarchy had ever done.
20:32What began as an end to privilege quickly degenerated.
20:40The revolution began to show its dark side.
20:45The snickering scepticism of the French philosophers
20:49was a sign of the end of the monarchy.
20:52It was a sign of the end of the monarchy.
20:55It was a sign of the end of the monarchy.
20:58The snickering scepticism of the French philosophers
21:01was seized upon by the revolutionaries
21:04and radicalised against the Church with a scale and speed which was horrifying.
21:12These are the remains of more than 100 priests
21:14murdered on 2 September 1792.
21:18They were hacked down or shot in the grounds of this Carmelite convent in Paris.
21:24The September Massacres spread
21:26and over the next few years, thousands of Catholics were killed
21:29resisting the revolution in the name of their faith.
21:39The revolution tried to destroy Christianity.
21:44Before 1789, there were no fewer than 40,000 French parishes celebrating the Mass.
21:51By 1794, only 150 were left.
21:57The French army seized Rome and imprisoned the Pope, Pius VI.
22:07The revolutionaries even came up with a substitute ideal,
22:11one they hoped would inspire people to die for the revolution
22:15in the way that those priests had died for Christ.
22:20This new cause was liberty, equality and fraternity
22:23and it made up its own new religion,
22:25a pick and mix from ancient Greece and Rome.
22:28On a stage in Notre Dame, an actress posed as the goddess of reason.
22:33She didn't last long, so much for the victory of rationality.
22:42The French revolution just could not wipe out
22:45the hold which Christianity had over people.
22:54In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte took over the French Republic in a coup d'état
23:00and at the centre of his blueprint for the future
23:03was a fresh deal with Catholicism.
23:07Napoleon had grasped a truth about the Church
23:10which had escaped the revolutionaries.
23:12It was not just a plaything for cynical kings and noblemen.
23:16It gave meaning to the lives of the poor and helpless.
23:20For the Catholic Church, the 19th century
23:23became a great age of devotional intensity, even expansion.
23:45This cathedral in Boulogne was totally destroyed in the revolution.
23:49Now they slowly rebuilt it in the Baroque style
23:52and they intended its dome to be the tallest in the world
23:55after St Peter's in Rome.
24:05And while Church domes got higher, so did the claims of the papacy.
24:11In 1814, the Pope had been swept back in triumph to Rome.
24:16The great powers of Europe had seen that Catholicism
24:19revealed a power greater than theirs.
24:31In spite of the Enlightenment and revolution,
24:34the Catholic Church had re-emerged stronger than ever.
24:39These are the Benedictine monks of Saint Vendrille in Normandy.
24:43Late in the 19th century, they came back home to their monastery,
24:47desecrated during the revolution, the Church destroyed.
24:53But here they are, living the same life as medieval monks before them.
25:00Except now they worship in a converted barn.
25:03Do you feel this is a victory over the French Revolution?
25:06I don't know if we should be talking about victories
25:09over the French Revolution.
25:11I think it's that we've sort of managed to get over a trauma
25:20that affected the Church as much as the state.
25:24And modern France is internally divided
25:28and I think every Frenchman in a way is internally divided,
25:32even though they don't all realise it.
25:35And what we've managed to get is a way of living with our past.
25:42So a happy ending?
25:44Almost. Almost.
25:46Because, of course, there's never a really definitive happy ending
25:51in this life.
26:05That surprising revival of monastic life
26:09showed that Catholicism wasn't just about power and wealth.
26:14It was also about spiritual growth through humility and prayer.
26:22Perhaps easy for monks and nuns in their stillness to see this.
26:27But there was still a danger that the Christian Church
26:30might accept its new triumph too easily.
26:33Because the questions which Spinoza, Newton and Voltaire had raised
26:38had not gone away.
26:40Catholics and Protestants alike could not avoid hearing
26:44the insistent voices of puzzlement and conscientious doubt.
26:49But these now focused more and more
26:52on the very basis of Christian faith, the Bible.
27:04This is the little medieval town of Tübingen in Germany.
27:10Theologians at the famous Protestant seminary here
27:13set out to show the enlightened world that Christianity was true.
27:20They were analytical.
27:22They were sceptical.
27:24And in 1835, the work of one young man in particular,
27:28David Friedrich Strauss,
27:30turned the eyes of all Europe to Tübingen.
27:37Here, in what was once the university library,
27:40Strauss wrote an audacious book,
27:43a biography entitled The Life of Jesus Critically Examined.
27:50What he wanted to do was to prove that Jesus really had lived and preached.
27:54But his Jesus was not the only begotten Son of God.
27:57Jesus was not the only begotten Son of God.
28:00He was not more than a man.
28:05And the Bible became a human creation, like the plays of Shakespeare.
28:09Its truths were the truths of Hamlet or King Lear.
28:14Now, that is truth, but it is not historical truth.
28:18Strauss robbed Jesus of his divinity
28:22and denied the Bible its authority.
28:25It was a book among many books.
28:29And the New Testament narratives
28:31were essentially works of theological symbolism.
28:36Without intending to, Strauss had struck at the heart of Christianity.
28:41Strauss's ideas wrecked the world.
28:45Strauss's ideas wrecked his career.
28:47He was sacked from his lectureship here in Tübingen
28:50just a few weeks after his book was published.
28:53And when he was proposed as Professor of Theology in the University of Zurich,
28:57there were riots in the streets and they couldn't appoint him.
29:01We shouldn't feel too sorry for him
29:03because he did get his professorial salary for life.
29:06But by the end, he'd lost any sense of the truth of Christianity
29:10and he found the idea of an afterlife meaningless.
29:16I find Strauss one of the most compelling voices
29:19among those who question traditional Christianity.
29:22Because I, too, am a professor
29:25and I deal with hundreds of books every year.
29:28If the truth of God is based on a book
29:31and you start viewing that book like any other,
29:34then truth is in trouble.
29:38I, too, need to be persuaded that the Bible is different.
29:42And that's the main reason
29:44why I can only be a candid friend of Christianity.
29:57In less than two centuries,
29:59the truths of the Western Christian church had been put on trial.
30:03Newton challenged the idea of a God who intervenes in the world.
30:08Voltaire, the idea of a just God.
30:12Revolutionaries questioned the authority of the Catholic church.
30:16Strauss, that of the Bible.
30:20Later, Charles Darwin found evidence in the fossil record
30:24to confirm those doubts.
30:27And yet, Christianity didn't crumple.
30:31The ideals of the Enlightenment had gradually become the creed
30:35of respectable, top-hatted historians, scientists and politicians,
30:39even bishops.
30:41Part of a cheerful Victorian belief in the steady march of progress.
30:47And the church still seemed to occupy the moral high ground.
30:51It could still lay claim to one truth.
30:54Knowing right from wrong.
30:58Mind you, in one half of the Western church,
31:01there was a last-ditch effort
31:03to resist the questions of the Enlightenment.
31:08The Catholic church felt threatened by academic challenges
31:12to the authority of the Bible.
31:16And its reaction was judgmental.
31:19In 1907, Pope Pius X denounced what he saw as a conspiracy
31:24to overthrow church teaching.
31:28And he branded it modernism.
31:32Catholics, unfortunate enough to be seen as a modernist,
31:35found themselves treated as enemies of the faith.
31:40And so, in 1905, Pope Pius X,
31:44The viciousness of the official campaign against modernism
31:47cast a long shadow across much Catholic assessment
31:50of new directions in doctrine.
31:52The Catholic church felt embattled.
31:54And the 20th century gave it plenty more reasons for that.
31:58For Pius X had missed the real, far more terrifying modernism.
32:03The modernist church.
32:05And the modernist church.
32:07And the modernist church.
32:09And the modernist church.
32:11Far more terrifying modernism.
32:13The modernism of war.
32:16HE WHISTLES
32:38The events of the 20th century upstaged the French Revolution
32:42and the unforeseen horrors unfolded
32:45which would transform society, politics and Christianity itself.
32:55The murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on a Sarajevo street
32:59in June 1914
33:01dragged the empires of Europe into the first true world war.
33:13The visceral experience of the Great War
33:16began to undercut the one remaining unquestioned truth of Christianity.
33:21Its claim to moral integrity.
33:31Men who'd been here had seen horrors
33:34that their families back home simply couldn't imagine.
33:43EXPLOSIONS
33:54It's green and quiet now.
33:56So much is missing.
33:58There's mud, rats.
34:00The noise, the booming.
34:02But all the human fear and the sense of futility
34:05at going again and again over this ground.
34:08That's all gone.
34:13This little book is called Going to the Front,
34:16a soldier's daily remembrancer.
34:18And it was issued by the Open Air Mission of London to all soldiers.
34:22And what it does is to try and associate Christianity, Jesus,
34:28with the English cause.
34:30For instance, why about this for a hymn?
34:33Yield not to temptation, for yielding is sin.
34:37Each victory will help you some other to win.
34:40Fight manfully onward, dark passions subdue.
34:43Look ever to Jesus, he'll carry you through.
34:51It makes for chilling reading,
34:54particularly here,
34:56in a place where Christians were urged on to kill other Christians,
35:00equally reassured that God was on their side.
35:03It was hardly the first time
35:06that God had been used as a divine recruiting officer.
35:09But it was the first global slaughter in his name.
35:13Ten million dead in five years.
35:21We've come here to Étaples
35:23because this is the biggest British Empire war cemetery in France.
35:26You've got people from India, Australia, Canada, Africa here.
35:30There are also some Germans,
35:32and I notice that they're relegated to the edge of the cemetery,
35:35along with the native troops of the British Empire.
35:39This is a world war, and it's death on an industrial scale,
35:43and not just death in the trenches,
35:45because most people buried here actually died in hospital,
35:48slowly, from their wounds.
35:51This is a wayside crucifix, very near the front line.
35:54All crucifixes show the wounds of Christ on the cross,
35:57but this has extra wounds.
35:59Bullet holes, great gashes in Christ's body.
36:02In the First World War,
36:04damaged Christ's body was buried here.
36:07This is a crucifix.
36:09This is a crucifix.
36:11This is a crucifix.
36:13This is a crucifix.
36:15This is a crucifix.
36:17The First World War damaged Christ's body in a wider sense.
36:22Colonial troops were brought into a European bloodbath
36:25which had no concern for them,
36:27and for many, the moral credibility of Western Christianity
36:30was gone forever.
36:32And in Europe, a generation lost its ideals,
36:36lost its optimism.
36:39But Christianity was now confronted by a terrible challenge,
36:43which, like the French Revolution,
36:45threatened to destroy it entirely.
36:48It also blinded many Christians to even worse moral temptation.
37:03The threat came from a place
37:06The threat came from another child of the Enlightenment,
37:10scientific socialism.
37:13In their communist manifesto,
37:15Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that freedom was only possible
37:20if religion was abolished.
37:22It was in 1917 that scientific socialism was put into action.
37:31When the Bolsheviks seized control of the Russian Revolution,
37:34and bent it to their will,
37:36they came to see the Church as the enemy,
37:38just as the French revolutionaries had once done.
37:41And Russian Communism had far more time to behave bestially to Christians
37:46than the brief decade of the 1790s in France.
37:51And so, in those years between the wars,
37:53many Christians who feared the spread of Communism
37:55were inclined to look sympathetically on any anti-Communist group.
37:59European Christianity was drawn into a fatal alignment
38:02with forces which had little time for the God of Love.
38:10First came the Papacy's deal with Benito Mussolini,
38:14finding a place for the Church in his fascist Italy.
38:22Then, with Spain's brutal nationalist leader, General Franco,
38:26who could present himself as the champion of the Catholic Church,
38:29as his Republican enemies burned churches and murdered priests.
38:37But neither of these links with right-wing power
38:40was as damaging as Christianity's entanglement
38:43with Adolf Hitler's gospel of hatred.
38:46His project for an Aryan future, National Socialism,
38:50it became the defining evil of the time.
38:56It was the 20th century.
39:03The Martin Luther Memorial Church in a quiet Berlin suburb
39:07has an uncomfortable history.
39:11It was planned in the 1920s by conservative German nationalists
39:15to celebrate the German identity, the legacy of Luther.
39:20But by the time it was actually built in the 1930s,
39:23it had been hijacked by the Nazis for their own propaganda purposes.
39:26So the organ was first played at a Nuremberg rally.
39:35To begin with, Hitler wanted to bring together
39:38the Protestant state churches, nearly all Lutheran,
39:41into a single national church based on Nazi principles.
39:45To get his way, he appointed Ludwig Müller as the Reich's bishop.
39:53Müller was the leader of a small group
39:55who called themselves the German Christians.
39:57They purged Christianity of its Jewish roots more radically
40:00than any other Christian group in history.
40:02They said that Jesus Christ could not have been a Jew.
40:05Few versions of Christianity have openly scorned virtues
40:09like compassion or humility, but they did.
40:13They actually called themselves the Stormtroopers of Jesus Christ.
40:18All the swastikas which decorated the church are gone,
40:22chiselled out of the stone carving and whitewashed off the ceiling.
40:26Yet there's enough left to act as a reproach
40:30to Christian collaboration with Nazism.
40:37But we should never forget that there was Christian resistance.
40:41And for one fleeting, heartening moment,
40:44it came from the papacy itself.
40:49A pastoral letter by Pope Pius XI
40:52read from thousands of pulpits on Palm Sunday, 1937.
40:56It denounced Hitler for betraying his assurances to the church
41:01and condemned the idea of a Christianity
41:04that tore up its Jewish roots.
41:08But there was little else.
41:10And it was largely left to individual Christians in Germany
41:14to stand up against the Nazi regime.
41:18I went to meet a pastor who joined the new confessing church
41:22set up to oppose the Nazis.
41:26He reminded me how difficult it was to stand up to the regime.
41:32Contentious objections was not possible.
41:36We had one man refuse military service and got executed.
41:43So I tried to preserve a pastoral existence as a soldier.
41:50So what made you able to see through this nonsense
41:53when so many others could not see through it?
41:56Hitler was betraying people in speaking in a pious way.
42:03He said, the providence has given me the task to liberate you.
42:11And many who called themselves Christians
42:15were also politically at least Nazis.
42:20They were just drunk by their ideology,
42:24by the personality of Hitler.
42:26It was a secular worship.
42:28And this was really difficult to undermine.
42:38But it must have been obvious how dangerous it was
42:41right from the start to be a member of the confessing church.
42:44No, you mustn't read the history from the end.
42:49We did not imagine what would be in store.
42:56I see your flicker by me.
43:02My limits come.
43:06It's just nonsense again.
43:10I see your flicker by me.
43:14My limits come.
43:18It's just nonsense again.
43:22I see your flicker by me.
43:27It's just nonsense again.
43:31And so we're trying to force you here
43:35and see you standing in our sight again.
43:48While the world ripped itself apart,
43:51it would not be dealt with ruthless efficiency across Europe.
43:55It would leave the moral authority of the Christian church
43:58yet further compromised
44:01and expose a deep flaw in Christianity's historic relationship with the Jews.
44:10This is Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland,
44:14the largest of Hitler's extermination camps.
44:20A cemetery of 1.5 million people without graves.
44:25Poles, Romanies, homosexuals, disabled,
44:30but overwhelmingly Jews.
44:34Seven out of every ten Jews in Europe perished in camps like this.
44:40It was a crime the Christian churches failed to resist.
44:46Average life expectancy in the camp for men was about five, six months.
44:51For women, about three, four months.
44:58Well, it's a grim place.
45:01Tell me, how many people would be in here?
45:04Well, the SS planned that about 700 prisoners will stay in one barrack like this.
45:16If there were too many for the bunks, the prisoners simply stayed on the floor.
45:37This place is an offence against the Christian gospel.
45:40I mean, it's an offence at an obvious level.
45:42It offends against mercy, pity, truth, love.
45:45But at a more profound Christian level,
45:47it offends against the fact that Christianity is a story about a person.
45:52A person who is both human and divine.
45:54This place was designed to rob human beings of their personality,
45:58to make them less than human.
46:01It will not do to say that the Nazis were anti-Christian.
46:05It won't even do to say that Jews died for racial reasons,
46:08not because of their religion.
46:10The Nazis were able to do their evil, destructive work
46:14because they were so good at playing on myths,
46:16the myths which lurk in people's minds.
46:18And this myth was that the Jews were the killers of Christ,
46:21the enemies of Christian civilisation.
46:24In that sense, Christianity is implicated fatally in the murder of the Jews.
46:31It's hard for me,
46:33as heir to a thoughtful, tolerant Christianity in England,
46:37to face up to this.
46:39I know that many Christians will disagree with me
46:42and find this conclusion offensive.
46:45But here I stand.
46:47I can do no other.
46:50In the years after the war, I was a little boy growing up in Suffolk.
46:54I knew little of the challenges facing Christianity.
47:00In the 1950s, church attendance actually increased.
47:03The number of people attending the church was increasing.
47:06The number of people who attended the church was increasing.
47:09The number of people who attended the church was increasing.
47:12The number of people who attended the church was increasing.
47:16In the 1950s, church attendance actually increased
47:19in a chastened, frightened Europe.
47:25But that mood passed.
47:31The horrors of the first half of the 20th century
47:34had raised the old question Voltaire had posed
47:37in response to the Lisbon earthquake.
47:40In Auschwitz, where was a loving God?
47:45Europe was sickened by any system which made absolute claims to truth.
47:51Communism, fascism, Christianity.
47:56So it was hardly surprising that in the second half of the century,
48:00an unprecedented, almost frivolous mood
48:03confronted European Christianity.
48:08Religious indifference, apathy.
48:11Social changes brought about a more relaxed attitude
48:14to sex and marriage,
48:16movement between social classes
48:19and more individual choice.
48:23In the face of that, fewer people chose to spend Sunday in church.
48:30So what sort of Christianity
48:32could survive such an ebbing away of Christendom?
48:36On the edge of Trafalgar Square stands an Anglican parish church.
48:40It tells me a lot about what's happened to Christianity
48:43in the last few decades.
48:47On the face of it, St Martin-in-the-Fields
48:50is a church of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
48:53It's the oldest church in the world,
48:55the oldest church in the world,
48:57the oldest church in the world,
48:59the oldest church in the world,
49:01On the face of it, St Martin-in-the-Fields
49:04is a church of the establishment,
49:06the parish church for the royal family,
49:08the Admiralty and 10 Downing Street.
49:11But that's not why it's internationally renowned.
49:15St Martin's has broken new ground
49:17in exploring what it might mean to be a church
49:20in a secular, sceptical age.
49:22Historically, it's never shied away from controversy.
49:25So, between the two world wars, it was pacifism.
49:28Amnesty International was thought up in one of these pews.
49:35Since the war, St Martin's has run its own social care unit
49:39for the homeless, and Shelter, the charity for the homeless,
49:42was founded from its basement.
49:46It is, in fact, a church which has taken its own lead
49:49on the moral questions which shaped the last half century.
49:53There's no question we're part of the British establishment
49:57and actually we're quite good at being subversive
50:00and undermining it too.
50:02We're next door to South Africa House
50:04and from the late 1950s onwards,
50:06the anti-apartheid vigil outside South Africa House
50:09was supported from here
50:11and it's difficult to remember how controversial that used to be.
50:16But if we think back to Mrs Thatcher
50:18talking of Nelson Mandela as a terrorist,
50:21even in the 1980s, we begin to get the feel for that.
50:25What we hope is that we have the courage to break new ground
50:29and that what mistakes we make are made in the right direction.
50:35I think the biggest test facing the church in the last half century
50:39has been the revolution in understanding gender, sex and sexuality.
50:44It's the issue which really has crystallised
50:47the three centuries of debate since Spinoza.
50:50How do we humans make moral decisions?
50:53Where do we find the authority to make them?
50:57It's something which I've thought about a good deal,
51:00being a gay man in the middle of the church's struggles about sex.
51:04What is it about gender and sexuality?
51:06What is it about this issue which has created so much anger and conflict?
51:10I think you'd have to say that this is something being worked out
51:13not just in the church.
51:15This is an issue for the world, isn't it?
51:17And the length of debate that that's taken
51:20has been the decriminalising of homosexuality,
51:23the equalising of the age of consent.
51:25I mean, there's been a process
51:27which actually the church has not been comfortable with.
51:30And the difficulty for us is, I think,
51:34the scriptures don't say anything
51:37about faithful same-sex relationships
51:41and, therefore, what's condemned in scripture
51:44isn't what we're dealing with now.
51:46You're actually saying something quite shocking.
51:49Does the Bible have an answer to a major question?
51:52Oh, I think the Bible does have an answer.
51:54That's not the same thing at all.
51:56I think the Bible's answer is that what matters between human beings
52:01is loving, faithful, honest relationships.
52:13St Martin-in-the-Fields is just one example
52:16of how many Christians in the West
52:18have tried to rebuild Christian morality with realism and humility.
52:23Of course, theirs is not the only answer.
52:26Other churches in central London are packed out
52:29because they proclaim an evangelical version of Protestant faith,
52:33affirming old truths.
52:36And then there is the other half of the Western Church,
52:39the Church of the Pope in Rome.
52:47MUSIC PLAYS
52:57The big Catholic event of the 20th century
53:00was the Second Vatican Council,
53:02which Pope John XXIII summoned to Rome quite unexpectedly in 1962.
53:09Vatican II turned worship from Latin into the languages of the people.
53:13It reached out to Protestant and Orthodox fellow Christians,
53:16but it also apologised to Jews
53:18for nearly two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism.
53:24And in a break from the past, Vatican II suggested
53:27that the Church might not have all the answers after all.
53:3530 years ago, it seemed to set the future for Roman Catholicism,
53:39a spiral of change, an experiment in faith.
53:47But in 1978, a Polish bishop became Pope John Paul II.
53:52At Vatican II, he had consistently voted against all the major decisions.
54:02Ever since, there's been a struggle going on
54:04for the soul of the Catholic Church.
54:07The aim of the papacy has been to issue commands from the top
54:10to reaffirm old certainties in a changing world.
54:13Catholics, as much as Protestants,
54:15are divided about the questions
54:17which Spinoza first asked three centuries ago.
54:33In this series, I've chronicled the history of a faith
54:36which began with a little-known Jewish sect
54:39and exploded into the biggest religion in the world.
54:46The history of Christianity has been the never-ending rebirth
54:49of a meeting with Jesus Christ, the resurrected Son of God.
54:58For some, like the Oriental and Orthodox churches,
55:01the meeting's been through ritual, tradition
55:04or the inner life of the mystic.
55:08The Western Catholics, through obedience to the Church.
55:13The Protestant churches, through the Bible.
55:18And it's the variety which is so remarkable in Christianity's journey.
55:23It's reached into every continent and adapted to new cultures.
55:28That's the hallmark of a world religion.
55:35So, where is Christianity going in the 21st century?
55:38What's its future?
55:40Well, it depends where you look.
55:46In my journeys around Asia, Africa and Latin America,
55:50I've been struck by the sheer exuberance of Christian life.
55:56The Pentecostals, in particular, I think may surprise us.
56:00And, in fact, they may surprise themselves
56:03by what they find in their own Christian adventure.
56:10Outside Europe, numbers of Christians are rising at a phenomenal pace.
56:15But in the West, they are falling.
56:24So, what of the church here in the Christian continent
56:27which first discovered doubt?
56:29Has the church served its purpose here at the River Thames?
56:33Well, when I was young, the Thames in London was a dead river.
56:37No fish, the docks closed and mouldering.
56:40No life.
56:42And look at it now.
56:46If the history of the church teaches us anything,
56:49it's that it has an exceptional knack
56:51for reinventing itself in the face of fresh dangers.
56:56The modern world has plenty to throw at the church.
57:00Scepticism, freedom, choice.
57:03But modernity can't escape the oldest questions
57:07at the heart of the messy business of being human.
57:10Questions of right and wrong.
57:13Purpose and meaning.
57:17A wise old Dominican friar once reminded me
57:20of the words of St Thomas Aquinas,
57:22that God is not the answer, He is the question.
57:26And as long as the church goes on trying to ask the question,
57:30it will never die.
57:41Remember that Christianity is a very young religion.
57:44It spans a mere 2,000 years
57:47out of 150,000 years of human history.
57:50It would be very surprising if it had already revealed all its secrets.
57:54We'll wait and see.
57:56And that's just what Christians have been doing
57:58ever since they gathered as the sky turned black in Jerusalem
58:02at the foot of the cross on Golgotha.
58:06Why not take part in the Open University's online survey,
58:10What Does It Mean To Be A Christian Today?
58:13at bbc.co.uk
58:16slash history of Christianity
58:18and follow the links.
58:36And that was the final part of A History Of Christianity.
58:39Next tonight, stay with us as we get deeper
58:42into Michael Palin's New Europe.