By Tom Holland
Tom Holland is a British historian with significant credentials. This is a large book that provides a sweeping history of how Christianity has affected the world. The book is a tour de force with impressive scholarship.
Here’s the basic point of the book: Christianity has had enormous influence in shaping the world. He does not attempt a year-by-year or even century-by-century approach to this subject. Rather, he chooses 21 examples, beginning with Athens in 479 B.C. and ending with Rostock, Germany in 2015. He builds his case on these 21 examples of the influence of Christianity. Each chapter is filled with fascinating anecdotes.
Here are a few key excerpts.
“How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world? To attempt an answer to this question, as I do in this book, is not to write a history of Christianity. Rather than provide a panoramic survey of its evolution, I have sought instead to trace the currents of Christian influence that have spread most widely, and been most enduring into the present day” (p. 12).
“There are those who will rejoice at this proposition; and there are those who will be appalled by it. Christianity may be the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history, but it is also the most challenging for a historian to write about” (p. 13).
“So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.
“The ambition of Dominion is to trace the course of what one Christian, writing in the third century AD, termed ‘the flood-tide of Christ’: how the belief that the Son of the one God of the Jews had been tortured to death on a cross came to be so enduringly and widely held that today most of us in the West are dulled to just how scandalous it originally was. This book explores what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that is often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain – for good and ill – thoroughly Christian.
“It is – to coin a phrase – the greatest story ever told” (p. 17).
“To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it – the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe – that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of missions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross” (pp. 540-541).
One interesting point: Holland begins this book as an unbeliever. He clearly moved towards the gospel by the end of the book. Perhaps he has embraced the gospel by now.
Do I recommend this book? It is good, not great. Someone needs to have a serious interest in history before tackling it.