The Christian Worldview of Tom Holland’s “Dominion”
Photo by Alem Sánchez from Pexels
By the time many Christians in the West had grown numb in hearing that modern societies were post-Christian and that it was best, even necessary, to keep one’s religious beliefs to one’s self, Tom Holland, a scholar from Cambridge and Oxford, came along and made a mess of the whole thing, of what was supposed to be a neat and tidy arrangement. In his celebrated and engaging book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, this British scholar develops his argument, not in an iconoclastic way, in which the idols of secular humanists and atheists are simply smashed. On the contrary, his approach is far more subtle and much more effective than that. As a gifted writer, who knows his way around the King’s English, Holland has the audacity, the sheer nerve, to point out, in a way that will surely prove to be embarrassing for some, that the very language, ideas, principles, morals and even goals of some of Christianity’s most potent cultural critics are chock full of the presuppositions, assumptions and even the world-view of the Christian faith itself. Now that’s bold.
Readers are rewarded for their efforts in tackling this rather large book with a number of surprises along the way, the principal one being, of course, that Holland’s own faith in God, as he tells us, “faded over the course of my teenage years,” (17). How then could this person, given his own journey, write such an insightful and perceptive book, one that displays the very heart of the Christian faith and ethos and in a way that would rival some of the best attempts by Christianity’s own historians and theologians? Though Holland left his belief in God behind early on, he never “ceased to be Christian” (17). In just what sense, then, this British author remained Christian is very much what this book is all about. Reflecting on his own upbringing in Broad Chalke, not far from Salisbury, Holland observes: “Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilization’s Christian past” (17). In fact, so pervasive were these Christian assumptions on the development of civilization, especially in the West, that they have come to be “hidden from view” (17). That hiddenness, however, makes them all the more powerful: pervasive and yet unrecognized.
The rise of the Christian faith had a broad and lasting effect on how both God and humanity were understood. Earlier in Hesiod’s Theogony (7th-8th century B.C.) the desires of men and women were ascribed to the gods in a projection to the heavens that elevated both human pride and lust. Moreover, the strong syncretistic tendencies of Roman religion, as it appropriated key Greek insights and even whole gods into its own pantheon, fared little better. Whether of Greek or Roman origin, the gods so conceived were simply all too human. In other words, theology devolved, in a real sense, upon anthropology. Accordingly, the Theogony was a testament to how humanity was now being written in capital letters in which very troubled desires and lusts were attributed to the gods and therefore deemed some of the highest values of all. The crucifixion of Christ changed all of this. In fact, it toppled the tables of the projectionist money changers. The power of the cross led to a broad transformation of values in which meekness, lowliness and humility were no longer despised but now celebrated, yes celebrated! Indeed, first century Romans didn’t even have the proper vocabulary, the linguistic wherewithal, to express all that the early church meant by the simple word “humility.”
Holland is, of course, correct in realizing that it took an Apostle Paul to take the transformation of values that had occurred at Golgotha and to develop that shift specifically along the path of a universality that embraced all peoples, that is, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female (Galatians 3:28), some of whom, by the way, had not faired very well in either Greco-Roman or even in Jewish understandings. To his credit Holland also recognizes that the specific Jew/Gentile distinction was at the heart of the problem that Paul in his theology was trying to overcome as is evident in his following observation: “A single deft stroke, and the tension that had always been manifest within Jewish scripture, between the claims of the Jews upon the Lord of all the Earth and those of everyone else, between a God who favored one people and a God who cared for all humanity, between Israel and the world, appeared resolved” (86-87). This resolution on Paul’s part, so evident in Galatians, was a stroke of genius: the universal fall of humanity back in Genesis 3 was now met with the universal love of God for all people—and all meant all. Put another way, with Christ having had a tender conversation with a condemned criminal on the cross as they were both dying, the riffraff could now come in. In fact, they were welcomed.
Holland develops several major threads throughout the book that support, in part, his larger thesis of the ongoing cultural power of Christian concepts and assumptions, and no thread is more prominent than that of slavery. Holland maintains that the Christian faith over the course of centuries helped to weaken and actually undermine this wretched institution. To illustrate, he notes that Gregory of Nyssa (335-395) went far beyond the natural law arguments of Greeks and Romans (both peoples were loath to apply such arguments to slaves) and insisted that “to own slaves was ‘to set one’s own power above God’s’” (143). Even more forcefully in the sixteenth century, Holland notes, Bartolomé de las Casas while working as a missionary in the West Indies came up with a “sudden, heart-stopping insight,” (308) that shook him to the core: “that his enslavement of Indians was a mortal sin” (308). In other words, since Christ died for these folk as well then they too were indeed his brothers and sisters.
The development of this thread, however, gets more complicated (and some would argue more troubled) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the American South where chattel slavery was on the books. Indeed even though William Penn (died 1718) earlier had argued “that all of humanity had been created equally in God’s image; that to argue for a hierarchy of races was an offence against the very fundamentals of Christ’s teaching,” (384) nevertheless he too had succumbed at one point in his own journey to owning slaves (385). The elephant on the couch, then, is surely the question: why hadn’t Penn’s Christian faith prevented this? Holland never answers this question satisfactorily. Moreover, he seems to be singularly uninterested in looking more closely at several Southern authors, who, though aware of the basic Christian teaching that Christ’s love is a universal one, and that the imago Dei is still very much in place, nevertheless, they always found a way to support the institution of slavery in which families would be broken up never to come together again. Why was the genius of the Christian faith perverted to such debased ends? How could this evil happen? What factors led up to this?
In light of this troubled dynamic in which the ethos of the Christian faith was contextualized in all sorts of malign ways, it would have been helpful if Holland had explored the reconfiguration of the Christian message and ethos that was taking place in particular at the hands of some southern authors in the nineteenth century. Frederick Dalcho, for example, in his Practical Considerations Founded on the Scriptures, Relative to the Slave Population of South Carolina, published in 1823, was busy railing against abolitionists while mining arguments supposedly drawn from the Bible in order to support southern white interests which just so happened to coincide with the maintenance of slavery and the oppression of blacks. Or consider Richard Furman, who a decade later in his Exposition of the Views of the Baptists Relative to the Coloured Population in the United States argued much the same. Given the work of these southern authors, a “sacred canopy,” to borrow a phrase from Peter Berger, had been placed atop this horrible institution. Again why? How could this have happened? Holland recovers somewhat when he turns his attention to the twentieth century and considers the influence of the Christian faith on the civil rights movement in America and on the efforts to turn back apartheid in South Africa. To be sure, some of the passages describing the labors of Nelson Mandela in his pursuit of freedom are among the best in the book. Championing the power of forgiveness as the way forward for his people and nation, Mandela took up a rhetoric that had Christian markings all over it.
Exploring some of the modern challenges to the Christian faith in the forms of Darwinism, Marxism and other movements, Holland exercises good judgment in recognizing just what an ethos-gutting challenge the philosophy of Nietzsche posed to the Christian faith and to cultures based upon it. In a real sense, the focus on Nietzsche is emblematic of the argument of the entire book. If God really was dead then there was no longer any basis for the Christian ethic that valued both self-forgetful service to others and humility. If this rejection of theistic values in general and of Christian ones in particular was then coupled with notions of the survival of the fittest or with the ideas of a later social Darwinism then societies could emerge from this potent concoction that were downright cruel. The ongoing permeating effects of the Christian faith were not only badly needed but they had also, in fact, made societies better—much better.
Beyond this, talk of the inherent rights of men and women was likewise pointless according to Nietzsche (though secularists and atheists continued their work unabated), since there was no longer any imago Dei, an image the consideration of which had led to the articulation of such rights in the first place. In Nietzsche’s vision, the Christian worldview and ethic was little more than the attempt of the powerless, riven with envy and hatred, to topple those who had the gifts and talents to exercise real power. In laying out the considerable challenge of this German philosopher, Holland observes: “Yet Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick” (465).
What was the faith-displacing vision of Nietzsche? It was actually drawn from a pre-Christian era, an age of Greek and Roman culture, in which the crude and more vulgar sentiments of Roman society, in particular, would be celebrated as genuine power, the kind that led to artful and distinct personalities. In other words, in rejecting the compassionate ethic of the Christian faith, which took up the cause of the poor, the despised, and the disinherited, Nietzsche in a real sense ended up focusing on the raw, heedless power of a key figure in this earlier Roman setting. What was it? It was the power of the gladiator, doing exactly what he wanted, standing on the neck of the defeated opponent in the arena, leaning on the sword in his victim’s belly with great calm and self-assurance, indifferent to all that was below him, with eyes raised up enjoying the momentary and intoxicating shouts of the crowd. There you have it.
From this vantage point, the Christian faith could only look like weakness. But was it actually weakness or was it something else, something that the German philosopher had regrettably missed? For one thing, Nietzsche chose the wrong perspective from which to look in the first place as is abundantly evident in his writings. He was therefore unable to see what enormous power was actually displayed at Golgotha, in the midst of mocking, agony, shame and very much blood. What was it? It was the power of humble, sacrificial love, a love that nails could not destroy and taunting could not weaken. This holy love, manifested in the form of an energetic compassion that embraces the “other,” “the least of all,” is yet embedded in so many ways in the cultural forms and mores of societies whose leaders publicly reject the Christian witness but who nevertheless are unable to escape its ongoing ineluctable power. Just why this is the case and remains so, despite the feckless clatter to the contrary, is the significant achievement of Holland’s work.
Dr. Kenneth J. Collins is Professor of Historical Theology and Wesley Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary and is a member of Firebrand’s Editorial Board.