The British newspaper The Independent has an article by Matthew Bell on the Alpha Course, which it describes, interestingly, as “British Christianity’s biggest success story.”

Being the Independent, and standing at the far distant extreme of secularism, there are some inevitable digs. We learn, for instance, that “Twenty years ago, evangelical Christianity [in Britain] was a fringe activity, associated with loony American cults.” Well, no, the country was somewhat better acquainted with evangelical faith long before that, and a boom was certainly in progress from the late 1970s at the latest. The journalist is also deeply unhappy at Alpha’s conservative stance on homosexuality.

Having said that, most of the article is surprisingly positive, about the Alpha Course itself, and the man mainly associated with it, Rev. Nicky Gumbel. “Alpha males (!) … may not all clap happily and speak in tongues, but they are all part of an evangelical tide; a global Anglican phenomenon.” Now practiced in 169 countries, the Alpha Course is in the news because one of its alumni, Justin Welby, was recently consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Most striking perhaps is Gumbel’s own background, which resembles Welby’s in that both came from Jewish backgrounds that they did not fully discover until their adult years. Both also had thriving professional careers that they gave up to enter the priesthood. Gumbel was converted at university in the mid-1970s: “My degree was then in economics, and I really had nothing to do. So I read the New Testament. And I could not believe what I was reading. I was so struck by it, by the story of Jesus. His character, his words, his parables. It just had the ring of truth.”

The article concludes: “With 20 million people around the world now thought to have experienced an Alpha course, it’s hard not to see Gumbel as a crusading evangelist. ‘I hate the word evangelical! If you torture me, I’m Anglican. But it’s not helpful. We label people in order to dismiss them. . . . I personally feel very optimistic about the church, about the new Pope, about the new Archbishop. We are in a new season. There is so much interest. I’ve never experienced so many young people pouring into church’.”

Definitely worth reading.

Cross-post at the Anxious Bench.

Felices Pascuas, Joyeuses Pâques, Buona Pasqua, Glad Påsk… Around the world, Christians use very similar words to wish each other a happy Easter, and with a couple of glaring exceptions, they call the feast by a variant of pascha, Passover. Even Tagalog uses pasko. The odd-tongues-out are of course English itself, and its close ally German, where believers wish Frohe Ostern! That oddity actually says a great deal about the process of inculturation, past and present.

Astonishingly in retrospect, English took the name Easter from a pagan goddess. We know this from the work of Bede, who around 725 wrote his De Temporum Ratione. He records that “Eostre-Month” was named after a goddess named Eostre, in whose honor feasts were celebrated (quondam a Dea illorum quæ Eostre vocabatur, et cui in illo festa celebrabant nomen habuit).

Bede says nothing more about this figure, about whom nothing else is known, but there is not the slightest doubt that his statement is accurate. Bede himself was an utterly scrupulous and cautious historian. He grew up in a family only a generation or two removed from paganism, and the remnants of old pagan shrines would still have littered the Northumbrian landscape. He often talked with older people who would assuredly have known about pagan times. Most tellingly, it is inconceivable that he would have invented such a linkage, which would have seemed blasphemous were it not rooted in sober truth.

The English, then, named the greatest Christian feast after a Spring-goddess, and that was the name they took with them when their missionaries converted Germany shortly after Bede’s time. Although we know nothing of the worship of Eostre, analogies from elsewhere make it unlikely that it would have been chaste enough to win the approval of even the most broad-minded Christian clergy.

By the way, Bede also says that that the English have now renamed that old Eostre-season as Paschal-month, Paschalis mensis. He would be disappointed to see how things turned out.

Throughout history, Christian missions have made accommodations with local pagan cults and observances, but have usually offered at least a thin disguise. In this case, though, it’s almost as if the celebration was named after Artemis or Thor, or that modern churches advertised their Odin-eve services.

This offers a useful precedent when we see modern debates about reconciling Christianity with older primal faiths. In Africa especially, such inculturation has for decades been the subject of ferocious controversy, for fear that it would contaminate the orthodox faith. But look at our English Easter story. At the time, that appropriation might have seemed radical or even syncretistic, but what happened in the long run? Today, what do we know of the older pagan Easter, of the goddess and any of her rituals? Absolutely nothing.

If a faith is confident enough, it can afford to be very tolerant indeed of any potential competitors. To adapt Shelley’s words, Christians should know that in the long run, the One remains; the many change and pass.

Cross-post at the Anxious Bench.

I posted recently about the network of small states that existed between the Roman and Persian empires, the two superpowers of Late Antiquity. Most of these buffer states are of little interest to non-specialists, but two of those middling powers in particular demand our attention for what they suggest about the early history of both Christianity and Islam. Arguably, early Islamic history makes little sense except in the context of these two remarkably influential tribal powers, which together represent a lost Christian realm.

A familiar myth suggests that it was mainly the force of Islam that brought Arab peoples into the traditional heartlands of the civilized Near East, around the 630s. We perhaps visualize this in terms of memories of massed camel charges from Lawrence of Arabia—though camels really had nothing to do with those early Islamic conquests. In reality, Arab tribes and ethnic groups were very powerful indeed long before this, and some formed influential states in the lands that we would today think of as Jordan, Iraq and Syria, territories contested between the two great empires. To the west stood the Ghassanid kingdom, the “Sons of Ghassan,” allied with Rome. In the east were the pro-Persian Lakhmids, with their capital at al-Hira. (The best scholar on this era is Irfan Shahid, author of several key books on the Arabs before Islam).

The Ghassanids arrived in the region as refugees from further south in Arabia, possibly as Christians fleeing persecution by Jewish tribes. From the fifth century they formed a powerful state, which became vastly more powerful in the sixth century as the wars between Rome and Persia escalated. The Byzantine Empire relied heavily on Arab allies (foederati) like king al-Harith (“Arethas”) and his son al-Mundhir. Far from being barbarians, the kingdom was deeply integrated into the Byzantine politics of the day.

Its leaders were also strongly Christian, and were mainstays of the Syriac-speaking Monophysite/Miaphysite churches. The sixth century kings ensured that the Syrian Monophysite church survived and flourished under their protection, creating a powerful Middle East tradition that endured for centuries.  Al-Harith was the patron of Jacobus Baradeus, the church’s wide-ranging evangelist (hence “Jacobites”).  This story by the way exactly fits the pattern I described in earlier posts of religious traditions persecuted in one region being able to flee for safety across a convenient border, of “refugee faith.” Later Ghassanids refused conversion to Islam, and many of their descendants remained Christian until modern times.

Although they served the Persians, the Lakhmids also included a strong and deeply rooted Christian element. Al-Hira was an important bishopric of the Church of the East.

The landscape in which the Ghassanids operated included several cultural and religious centers that would be critical for both Christianity and early Islam. One was Sergiopolis (Resafa) the beloved shrine of the martyr saint Sergius, and effectively the religious capital of a wide region of what is now Syria and Iraq. In the sixth century, it was the seat of a metropolitan, with five suffragan sees. As so often happened in Western Europe, later medieval rulers continued to build in and around such ancient religious shrines, so that Sergiopolis became the palace of the eighth century Caliph Hisham.

Another great Ghassanid city was Bostra, the metropolitan see of Arabia. It also featured extensively in later legend as the place where the prophet Muhammad met the Christian monk Bahira, who acknowledged his prophetic destiny.

By the seventh century, both empires were facing growing difficulties from their client states. The Lakhmids rebelled openly against the Persians, while religious divisions made the Ghassanids ever more discontented with Roman rule. These conflicts formed the background to the new movement of Islam. Reputedly, the Lakhmids helped the Muslims against their former Persian enemies.

But even after Islam had triumphed, the two Arab kingdoms exercised a lasting influence on the new empire, which still based itself in their former territories. I have already suggested how highly the new Muslim rulers valued places like Bostra and Resafa. In the East, al-Hira was supposedly the place where the Arabic alphabet. It is very close to Kufa—hence “Kufic” script. Others attribute it to the Christian Arabs of al-Anbar

Some scholars go much further in proposing Christian influence over the emerging Islam. For one scholar, Christoph Luxenberg, the Qur’an demonstrates a Christian Syriac literary background that could certainly not have arisen in Mecca or nearby parts of Arabia, which had no adequate schools or libraries. Instead, he suggests, the Qur’an originated in a Christian environment in al-Hira or al-Anbar—and so, by implication, did much of the faith of Islam. Although this is highly controversial, there is no doubt that the old  Christian Arab world left a substantial inheritance.

Cross-post at Anxious Bench.

This year more than most, March 21 is a date of multiple significance in the Church of England. You might justly ask whether the English church still matters much on the world stage, but the wider Anglican Communion assuredly does: by the middle of this century, there could well be 150 million Anglicans worldwide.

Historically, March 21 commemorates the burning of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer by Mary Tudor’s Catholic regime, in 1556. Cranmer has a fair claim to rank as the founder of the Anglican tradition and the creator of its liturgy and Book of Common Prayer. He is also a complex figure who had gone far towards compromising with the regime in an attempt to save his life. Ultimately, though, he died as a martyr.

That contorted story explains his appeal for modern writers and biographers. Charles Williams wrote a wonderful play about Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury (1936), which bears comparison with that other great religious play of the British 1930s, Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.

This year, though, Anglican identity is even more centrally in the news on March 21 because of the enthronement of Justin Welby as the 105^th Archbishop of Canterbury, in a line dating back to St. Augustine in 597. As the media have reported extensively, the new Archbishop faces an extremely difficult political situation in that church, which is deeply split over issues of homosexuality, and the election of women bishops.

Welby himself, though, has a fascinating background, which might allow him to meet some of these challenges. His earlier career in the oil business gave him extensive contacts in Africa and particularly Nigeria, and that might give him a foundation on which to engage with some of the global Church’s most conservative leaders.

Moreover, his spiritual background is in tune with many Global South figures. The Anglican tradition has long been divided between Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals/charismatics (high and crazy versus low and lazy, in popular terminology).  In recent years, as overall attendance has declined steadily in England itself, charismatic churches have emerged as centers of striking growth and fervor. Most notable perhaps is the parish of Holy Trinity Brompton, which has much in common with a US megachurch. Among other highlights, it is the source of the famous Alpha Course.

Welby himself is an alumnus of Holy Trinity, which he and his family began attending after the catastrophic loss of an infant daughter.Following that event, “the couple accompanied the Rt Revd Sandy Millar, then Vicar of Holy Trinity, Brompton, on a trip to California, where they met the Revd John Wimber, one of the founders of the Vineyard movement. During the trip, Bob and Penny Fulton, who helped to found the Vineyard movement, prayed with the Welbys in their hotel room.”

In 1987, he was profoundly affected by hearing an American speaker, almost certainly John Wimber. This encounter launched Welby on the road to ordination, and to forsaking his lucrative corporate career – as one British cartoon wryly noted, he is a “lapsed capitalist.”

Even in the most optimistic scenarios, Archbishop Welby will face a difficult road ahead. He will need all his undoubted talents and experience.

By the way, as we are speaking of new leadership, I just published a piece at chronicle.com on the new Pope Francis, and another on the same subject at Realclearreligion. Had it not been for the arrival of Pope Francis, the media would no doubt be paying way more attention to the new Archbishop Welby!

 Cross-post at Anxious Bench.

This weekend, many millions of people around the world will commemorate St. Patrick as a symbol of Irish national pride. I intend no slight whatever to that national consciousness, nor do I criticize the general partying that claims it as an excuse. What is sad, though, is that portraying Patrick as a generic medieval saint with a powerful fondness for the color green prevents us seeing a real and genuinely heroic individual. He is moreover a person we can know much more thoroughly than the vast majority of his Christian contemporaries in Late Antiquity.

Virtually everything that his modern adherents know about Patrick is factually wrong, and that statement does not just apply to the expulsion of the snakes. He did not bring Christianity to Ireland. However we date Patrick’s life—and exact chronology is notoriously difficult—his mission began after the arrival of one Palladius, who in 431 was “consecrated by Pope Celestine and sent to the Scots [Irish] believing in Christ, as their first bishop.” First there were sporadic Christian communities, then there was Palladius, then there was Patrick—and possibly a great many more of their kind. And far from achieving an overnight conversion, the process took at least a century or two.

Oh, and Patrick wasn’t Irish: he was British. Deal with it.

(more…)

Some years ago, I published The Lost History of Christianity, which traced the early expansion of Christianity into Asia and Africa, as well as Europe. For perhaps a thousand years, Christianity flourished at least as well in Asia as in Europe, and that when we focus wholly on the Western side, we are missing a very great deal of the Christian story.

Much of my story concerned the Silk Route, which ran from Syria into China through Central Asia. This was in its day the central artery of transcontinental commerce, which allowed the phenomenal development of cities like Merv, in present day Turkmenistan – at the time, one of the largest urban settlements on the planet.

Besides its economic importance, the Silk Route was also a highway of ideas and faiths, which was used extensively by Muslims, Buddhists, Manichaeans, and of course Christians. From the fifth century through the thirteenth, this was the great missionary road used by the legendary Church of the East, the so-called Nestorians, from their base in Mesopotamia. The Church operated major centers at Merv, Kashgar, Samarkand and Herat (Afghanistan).

Although it is only one Christian site among hundreds that would once have existed, we get some sense of this lost world from the amazing oasis of Turfan, in what is now far north-western China. Its transcontinental connections made Turfan a natural hub for religious groups, who built settlements in the area. Even better, the dry climate allowed the survival of manuscripts that would assuredly have perished in other settings. Modern scholars have been amazed and delighted to uncover whole libraries in the region, including some of the richest surviving evidence for the Manichaean faith. (more…)

March 1 is the feast of David, the early medieval bishop and missionary who became patron saint of Wales. We actually know strikingly little of David apart from that date, of March 1, but I’m going to suggest that represents a good deal in its own right.

Through the Middle Ages, Christians cultivated particular saints, treating them almost as modern sports lovers follow football teams. They collected memorabilia and souvenirs, they traveled to great ritual occasions celebrating the saints, they wore symbols boasting their loyalty. Devotees of St. Audrey bought souvenirs so memorably tacky as to give us our word “tawdry”! Often, these cults became so florid as to overwhelm the real achievements of the saints themselves.

David himself belonged to Wales’s remarkable age of saints from the fifth through the seventh centuries, when a band of heroic leaders maintained and expanded a rich Christian culture despite the catastrophes of social collapse and barbarian invasion. For centuries, David was only one great saint among many in Wales, whose reputation competed with other mighty leaders – Beuno, Illtyd, Cadoc, Dyfrig, and others. Over time, though, the churches that followed his name gained enough wealth and power to achieve superiority, and to write the Lives that would secure David’s primacy among the group.

His cathedral at St. David’s, formerly Menevia, is a gem of church architecture, with its gorgeously colored stone. I should warn you that few photos ever catch its shifting colors, which vary so much at different times of day and seasons of the year—you just have to go there to see it yourself.

Ultimately, David became the national saint, and the symbol of patriotism. As early as 930, patriotic poets were talking of raising David’s pure banner against the English. When the Kings of England started naming their eldest sons Prince of Wales, David’s Day became part of British royal symbolism and celebration.

As I say, we really know very little about David that is historically solid and can only guess at his dates, or his main areas of activity. A death about 590 is a reasonable guess, but we could easily slip fifty years either way. Oddly though, we can be sure that he died on March 1, whether in (say) 532 or 632 AD. Through the Middle Ages, hagiography was a vast area of cultural effort, when almost any outrageous achievements could be credited to a saint. (No, David did not really make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he was ordained by the Patriarch). The one thing that we know these writers did keep faithfully was the death day – the date not the year – because that marked the hero’s ascension to glory, the promotion to heaven. In a particular church or community, those days were critical, as marking the annual celebration of the beloved local saint.

Argue as much as you like, then, about precise years, achievements, martyrdoms and areas of activity, about the number of lepers cured and tyrants opposed – but don’t quarrel with death days.

Death days.

It’s an interesting term. I know my birthday. I also know that at some future point I will die, and that that will befall on a particular date. Let me be optimistic and assume that it will be a distant event, say on July 23, 2049. Each year, then, I pass through July 23 happily unaware that I am marking my Death Day, surely as significant a milestone as my birthday, but not one I can ever know with certainty until it occurs. Nor is it something we really ever contemplate, as we all know, in our hearts, that we are immortal.

I suppose though that it is something we can learn from those medieval monks, that the Death Day is not just a key event in anyone’s life, but literally the only one we can take with absolute confidence.

[Cross posted from the Anxious Bench.]