Lessons from Good and Evil in Church History

Dickson’s website:  https://www.johndickson.org/

Dickson’s podcast:  https://undeceptions.com/

Book by Dickson:  Bullies and Saints:  An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History

Mikel Del Rosario:
Welcome to The Table where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Mikel Del Rosario, the Cultural Engagement Manager here at The Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Teminary, and our topic on The Table podcast today is, Lessons from Good and Evil in Church History. And I'm pleased to have a very special guest with us today coming to us via Zoom all the way from down under. Our guest is John Dickson. John is the founder of Undeceptions. He co-founded The Center for Public Christianity in Australia. He teaches historical Jesus at the University of Sydney. He also teaches classics at the University of Oxford, and he is Distinguished Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Public Christianity at Ridley College in Melbourne. Thanks so much for being on the show, John.

John Dickson:
Thank you.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Always great to chat with you guys.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Yeah, thank you for coming back on the show. You're not a stranger to The Table podcast, and so we're glad to have you back. Well today we're talking about lessons that we can learn from good and evil in church history. And there was a special pack that I got from a book that you had written called, Bullies and Saints, in which you actually tackled this very topic of what we can learn from good and evil in church history. And in that pack, there was a stack of cards, which I thought was pretty cool, and the first card that I just happened to see is this, it says, "Are we better off without religion?" And man, what a great question for just starting a discussion with people. How did that question…? First of all, tell us the driving, like, how did that question drive your study? Because I know that's a big part of why you wrote this book.

John Dickson:
Yeah, well I should say that I had nothing to do with the incredible marketing pack that you got. I'm glad the publisher had all these crazy ideas of all the things to do. But that particular quote, I assume, it comes straight out of the opening section of my book, where I talk about being involved in a debate here in Sydney, some years ago now, that was broadcast on our national broadcast radio. And the topic was: we'd be better off without religion. And I was involved behind the scenes on the side that was opposing the motion. We thought we wouldn't be better off without religion, but we spectacularly lost the debate. The audience, about 2,000 people, voted at the end of the debate, and it was clear that the majority thought we would be better off without religion.

John Dickson:
And Christianity was the main religion under discussion. So it wasn't just saying, 'Islam' or something like this.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Right.

John Dickson:
And I came away from that debate, deflated, but also really feeling I have to confront why it is so many people think that we'd be better off if Christianity were not around. Because to a believing Christian that sounds nuts, but people aren't idiots. So they're bound to have reasons. And I think when you start to scratch–'What are the reasons?'–there's enough evidence in church history to lead to the conclusion that Christianity's done more harm than good if you just go looking for that evidence. You're not interested in sort of a balanced account of things. You just want to find the terrible things, and you can find terrible things that Christians did in the fourth century, fifth century, sixth century, all the way up to today and the child sexual abuse scandals, and their cover ups. And if that's your evidence and that's all you want to look at, well, I think I would join in saying "We'd be better off without that, surely." My point in the book, though, is that's just part of the story.

John Dickson:
There's no denying: Christians have done terrible things. In Jesus name they did them. On the other hand, Christianity has given the West much of what it loves most in terms of its charity and human rights and human dignity and schooling for all, and hospitals and so on. All of these things also came from Christianity.

John Dickson:
So the question has to be not, "Has the church done terrible things?" Yes, is the answer, just like every institution that's ever existed has done terrible things. The real interesting question is, "What's the unique contribution of Christianity to the world?" Because no one could argue war, was the unique contribution. Because the Greeks and Romans, as you well know, were doing really well on the war front before Christians came along. Torture, yep tick. Slavery, tick. So if you ask, "What is the unique contribution?" It isn't violence. It isn't torture and so on. It is these things like human dignity and humility and charity and hospitals. These were not available in Ancient Greece and Rome, so they can only have come from Christianity into our Western culture.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Yeah. It's an interesting thing you do in the book because you don't paper over the evil parts of Christian history saying, "No, there were only good things." And that's not a simplistic kind of look at church history. But neither do you try to justify it by saying, "Well, we've done more good than evil." It's interesting…how did you approach this book in terms of what you wanted Christians, and then people of other religions or no faith, what did you want them to come away with as you surveyed these parts of Christian history?

John Dickson:
It's probably true to say, as I wrote the book, I had my skeptical friends in mind more than Christians. In particular, I had people like Christopher Hitchens, who has now passed away and was a great skeptic and wrote that book, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," so I almost had him looking over my shoulder. So I was sort of writing a book that would be a good history, that even he would go, "Okay, yeah. Okay. You're not too biased." I don't know if I would've got away with it because he was so skeptical. He might not have enjoyed any positivity about Christianity, but I had the skeptic in mind. The times I had Christians in mind were times like where I'd be in the depths of describing some terrible things that say fourth-century Christians did in riots and destroying property in Alexandria at the end of the fourth century.

John Dickson:
I'd be writing about that, and then I'd stop and I'd think, "Ah, I bet my Christian friends are going to think I'm letting the team down now." I was doing such a good job of telling you how awful these Christians were that I had to stop and think, "Ah, look I don't want to unnecessarily upset my Christian friends." And it has really interesting. As the book has been out a few months, the criticism has not come from the skeptics.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Hmm.

John Dickson:
The criticism has come from conservative Christians, of which I regard myself one, right? So it's my own team who think I've let the team down by being so brutally upfront about the terrible things Christians have done in history. But my account is, "Look, Jesus said, 'Take the log out of your own eye. Don't look at the spec in someone else's eye. Take the log or plank out of your eye.'" And the book is an attempt to do that through Christian history.

Mikel Del Rosario:
That's a good point. You think about how very Christian it is, and even Judeo-Christian, for one to be self-corrective and self-introspective. And really, as you said, "Take the plank out of your own eye,'" or you think even of the Jewish prophets who are definitely pro-Israel, no doubt, and yet they spoke out against the evils, the injustices and we're trying, you know, let's start here and let's get it right for us before we can absolutely point other nations even to the God of Israel. Yeah.

John Dickson:
There's something deeply self-critical in the biblical tradition and in the Judeo-Christian tradition and actually history bears that out. And so as bad as things got in the late fourth, early fifth century, this is exactly the period where some of the greatest reformers also rise up and correct the church, preach against what the church is doing and correct everyone. But the same is true in the fifth and the sixth and the seventh and eighth centuries. This notion of departure and renewal is really the story of every century.

Mikel Del Rosario:
So this poses a bit of a problem for those who are sharing their faith, those who are public advocates of Christianity, when something like the Crusades come up, the inquisition comes up. Sometimes people don't even know what those things are. They just say those words and-

John Dickson:
We just know they're bad. Yes, terrible, terrible things. And so I don't need to listen to a gospel presentation because, you know, Crusades. How do you advise a Christian to walk into that space when they're trying to either make the case for Christianity or just talking to their friends about their faith and this kind of thing comes up?

John Dickson:
Well, I spent a lot of time trying to explain how people who've followed the crucified Lord could end up a thousand years later, killing in the name of Jesus and thinking that they're killing brought their own forgiveness, which is really what the crusade theology said.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Dickson:
Right? I think the thing is we can be totally honest about how bad that was and don't get immediately defensive. That seems to me incredibly important because as soon as you start to defend the Crusades, I think people are just going to think that you're crazy, right? But you can concede the terrible things in the Crusades. And frankly, even if you think the first crusade was a just war, as I do tend to think because it was responding to Islamic aggression, the conduct of the first crusade was despicable and made it an unjust war.

John Dickson:
They slaughtered Jewish communities along the Rhine as practice while they made their way to Jerusalem. When they got to Jerusalem and they stormed the city, they slaughtered men, women, and children, and this breaks every rule of just war principle. So we can be open about that, and once you are open about it and you can see how terrible it is, I think then, you do have a right to sort of explain the Crusades. And that will partly involve talking about responding to Islamic aggression, yes, but it will also partly involve explaining as I try to do it at some length in the book, how Christianity itself was co-opted by, and converted by, pagan warrior culture in both Gaul and really Northern Europe. As Christians in the eighth, ninth, tenth centuries tried to convert the warrior culture, the Germanic-warrior culture, there is no doubt, we've got pretty good evidence of this, that Christians themselves were converted by that culture. So they started to portray Jesus and the apostles as the ultimate Knight with his war band, traveling around, doing good, standing up for people, right? We even have a great poem that describes Jesus in just those terms, in fact, retells the Sermon on the Mount, as an example of Jesus, the ultimate Knight who demanded justice in the world.

John Dickson:
And so clearly, we see at this point, Christians altering their faith to fit in to their pagan host culture. And in doing that, they compromise their faith, and they are converted by their culture. And so this doesn't excuse it, but this explains how people who could follow the cross centuries earlier could now pick up the sword and think that they were earning their forgiveness of sins through killing people. It was part of the warrior ethic of pagan Europe at the time.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, as you were surveying church history, people say, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Was power really the problem?

John Dickson:
I struggle with this. Yes and no. Power is a really good thing when used for the sake of others. One thing I try to make clear in the book is that Constantine, when he became a Christian, I know you Americans say Constantine, but in the British Australian tradition, it's Constantine.

Mikel Del Rosario:
This is an international show now, so…

John Dickson:
So Constantine, who be comes a Christian, he doesn't 'make' the empire Christian. This is a great misunderstanding.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Hmmm.

John Dickson:
He allows Christianity to be legal. He does sponsor churches in the way that philosophical clubs and pagan temples and Jewish synagogues had already been sponsored by the empire, given tax breaks and so on. So he allowed that, and that did cause Christianity to flourish but he did not impose paganism. So here is immense power, but held in a spirit of pluralism because Constantine was adamant that all religions should be able to flourish under his empire, even though he openly admitted that he hopes Christianity wins.

John Dickson:
By the end of the, the fourth century, you've got a very different phenomenon. You've got someone like Ambrose of Milan, who's the bishop but he is the former Senator and governor, Roman governor, who's parachuted into the church to be the Bishop of Milan, and he changes the role of Bishop to be sort of like a city mayor. Now he starts to push his weight around. He starts to insist on the closing of pagan temples, the pulling down of pagan statues, say, the Statue of Victory in the Senate house. He approves the burning down of synagogues which is unthinkable to us. And that's where you can see power being used poorly. And yet, if you asked a poor Milanese family in say 390, "What do you think of Ambrose of Milan, your Bishop?" They would've said, "He is our champion. He is the reason we have charitable projects available for all the poor." See, if you were an elite pagan, you would hate Ambrose as a bully. If you were a poor pagan or Christian in Milan, you would love him as the champion of the poor cause he used his power for both.

John Dickson:
So I don't know if power is the problem because power can be used for bad, it can be used for good. And at the same time, as Ambrose, you've got the Cappadocian fathers who are themselves powerful men, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus. These are powerful men. They are elites for sure. The highest educated people in that part of the world, mostly known for their Trinitarian philosophy and theology. But these are the people who set up the greatest charities throughout Asia Minor. The first public hospital, a massive complex. Basil set this up for the good of the poor.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Hmmm.

John Dickson:
And so, so their power was set to the service of people. So I am all for that kind of power.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Yeah. That's a really interesting nuance. That it's not just black and white in terms of, '"It's either all good or all bad." And that's actually one thing I think the title of the book kind of alludes to, "The Bullies and Saints." Aren't these bifurcated two groups of people? Sometimes you see it in the same period. Sometimes the same person. Yeah?

John Dickson:
Absolutely and Ambrose is the classic example. I don't know what to do with Ambrose. I don't think I would've liked him or at least I don't think I would've liked to get on his bad side.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Yeah.

John Dickson:
And yet, he wrote beautiful hymns to the divinity of Christ. He established charities. He protected the poor. He gave away a huge amount of his own vast wealth. So he's a mixed character. And you're right. This is true in every century and it's different to different degrees. You know, we could go into the 600s and come across with Bishop Eligius in France. And he seems only like a saint, not a bully. I mean, I'm sure he had his problems and he was a sinner like everyone else, but this is the man who was the greatest jeweler in Europe and very wealthy, but actually convicted by the gospels that he ought to be using his wealth and resources for the good of others.

John Dickson:
And so he would travel around Europe using his jewelry to purchase slaves and free them.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Wow.

John Dickson:
Okay. There's still a big slave trade. It was the leftover of the Roman slave trade, and also the Saxon slave trade was huge. And he, and he would just buy and release, buy and release, buy and release. And he taught all of his disciples to do so, including the Queen who did so. So this is someone in the seventh century who was an abolitionist and fiery evangelist, who I would probably place in the category of saint. I mean, I'm not using it in the biblical use of the word. It's the cliche I'm using it. He was a good guy. He's a guy who sang the beautiful tune of Jesus and did so really well.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Man, the beautiful tune of Jesus. I love how as a musician, you have this lovely musical metaphor. Here's another cool card that I'd like you to elaborate on. 'If someone played Bach terribly, would you dismiss Bach altogether?' This is a wonderful conversation starter. And I love using this. I borrow this from you all the time, in terms of, in my spiritual conversations, in terms of the tune of Jesus and how we play that. Explain your metaphor and how that works.

John Dickson:
Well, we know to judge a composition on the basis of its best performance, not on its poor performance. So we know to distinguish between the composition and the performance. And so if you hear say the cello suites, which you know is that remarkable piece that Bach wrote, played by say me who can't play the cello, you might question Bach's ability. But if you hear it played by Yo-Yo Ma, okay, America's greatest cellist, then you know that you're hearing the real thing and you distinguish. You go, "Aha, that's a beautiful tune." 

John Dickson:
And my point is Christ gave the world a beautiful tune. Not just the ethic of "Love your enemy," but his whole life story was the giving of himself for enemies, his cross. And that is the shape of the Christian life: self-giving for the world. And there are times when people did not look like that. And what I'm saying is, "That's a terrible performance." You can hardly hear the composition in some performances of Christians through history. 

John Dickson:
And yet Bishop Eligius in France, who I just mentioned, Basil of Caesarea from Cappadocia, they are singing the tune beautifully. When you look at their lives, you can actually see that gospel ethic of the love of enemy, of the giving of the self for the other. And my point is, throughout church history, you will find Christians who were out of tune with the original melody. But you will also find many Christians who were in tune. And so the real question that the skeptic has to ask from Christian history isn't, "Did Christians participate in all that is base in human nature?" The answer to that is, "Yes they did." The real question is, "What was the unique contribution of Christianity to the world?" And the answer to that will take you straight to the beautiful tune of Jesus.

Mikel Del Rosario:
That's amazing. Yeah. I love that. I borrow that from you all the time. So the point is really that when Christians do good they're in harmony, to borrow that musical term again, they're in harmony with the teachings of Jesus. And when they're engaged in evil, they're actually rejecting the teachings of the One that they claim as their master. So it's how much do you mirror the teachings of Jesus and how you are playing the tune, so to speak. My son actually played cello and he was a lot younger, and we recorded a song together. And there was a lot of digital massaging that went into that cello track.

John Dickson:
Yeah, trying to bring the performance into line with the composition.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Yeah, yeah. But-

John Dickson:
God willing, that's what the Holy Spirit is doing in a genuine believer. Even though we're all fallen, we are all out of tune often enough, God's Spirit brings us back into tune. And especially if Christians are reading their gospels and staying close to the Lord because the closer you are to your host culture, the more like your culture you will be. The closer you are to the Lord and His gospel, the more shaped you will be by that. That seems to me an important lesson of church history.

Mikel Del Rosario:
So how would you unpack the uniqueness of what Christianity has contributed to society in just a short conversation with someone?

John Dickson:
Well, this notion that every human being, regardless of capacity or usefulness is infinitely valuable, cannot have come from Greece and Rome. So what are the other rivers into Western culture? Well, they are the Jewish and Christian, it's Jerusalem is also the great river into our culture. And in the Judeo-Christian vision, every human being, regardless of capacity, regardless of goodness, is made in the image of God. And we can see that, this is not just theology, we can see it empirically being raised as the point of difference in the ancient world. "You, pagans don't believe that humans are equally inestimably valuable. We Christians do. That's why we pick up the infants that you guys have left exposed in the streets to get rid of. We pick them up. We set up leprosaria for the lepers that you won't even go near, right? We set up places for them. You discard your elderly. Well, we set up aged care systems."

John Dickson:
There's no public hospitals. The only hospitals available in the ancient world were for soldiers or for the very elites. And they weren't even really hospitals. They were just sort of doctors who would come and look after you. But Christians said, "No, it should be the great mass of people that get these." And so they have established hospitals in about the year 370 and over the next five centuries, there are literally thousands of hospitals, and they all come from Christians.

John Dickson:
Education. In the eighth century, there was a great renaissance of education. Charlemagne had conquered Europe, but he had a minister of education, Alcuin of York, whom hardly anyone's ever heard of, but he's one of the greatest people in the history of the Western world.

John Dickson:
He was a church deacon. He was absolutely committed to Christ. And part of his commitment to Christ was to make sure Europe was educated. He was the most learned man in Europe. And he established schools in hundreds and hundreds of towns throughout Europe, where boys and girls, rich and poor, could go and get a good liberal arts education. They weren't just studying the Bible. They were studying grammar and rhetoric and poetry and astronomy. And once you've done the seven liberal arts, you could then go on to do theology and so on. And this created a revival. 

John Dickson:
Anyway, all of the things we love in the Western world now: charity, human rights, hospitals, education, they were all given to the Western world by the church. That's an empirically verifiable statement that isn't just nonsense. Now, I'm not saying you need Christianity to keep those things. That's not what I'm saying. But I am saying we got these things that we love today because of Christianity, because there is an intimate connection between Christianity's view of the human being as infinitely valuable, regardless of their capacity or usefulness. And that changes everything about how society works.

Mikel Del Rosario:
And that also prevents Christians today, especially protestant Christians, from rejecting everything in the past and saying, 'Well, all those things were just medieval Catholics. All those things were just… that wasn't us, so don't pin that on me kind of a thing.' Because as far as "secular society" or the world sees it, it's just one entire Christian history. Yeah?

John Dickson:
Yeah. They're not making distinctions between Protestants and Catholics. And yes, it is a very common tactic. I used to do it years ago. Oh, those Crusades and Inquisitions? Yeah it was those Catholics. Yeah, that was all the Catholics, right? And actually that's a very old Protestant line of argument. Even great people like Martin Luther dismissed the darkness of the centuries that preceded him and even used this word of darkness. And that sort of cemented in Protestant in the Reformation and over the next two centuries.

John Dickson:
So in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestants would refer to the period before the reformation as dark, and not just dark theologically, but dark educationally in terms of charity and technology and so on. Now that isn't true. It was a piece of Protestant propaganda designed to take all credit away from the Catholic church on theological level and on charitable level. And as much as I agree with the theology of the Protestants, I think their history and sociology in that period was woeful. It's a slander because these great gifts of Christianity to the world, hospitals, education, and so on, really are Christian gifts, and Protestants inherited them and continued to give them to the world. So they're part of our shared tradition, with Christianity going right back to the apostles.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Yeah. So last card, 'What has the church learned from its history?'

John Dickson:
Hmm,

Mikel Del Rosario:
Not sure if you ever thought these would be used as podcast prompt questions-

John Dickson:
Never.

Mikel Del Rosario:
It's a great thing to… And there's a stack of them but we just chose three for today. What can the church learn from, from taking a look at the history as you've kind of surveyed it in the book?

John Dickson:
Well, I guess there's a general lesson that everyone should learn by studying history, even outside Christians and Christian history, and that is to wonder what our own blind spots are, because when you study enough history, you learn that actually people are a great mix of insightful and beautiful and horrible and cruel. And this is true in just about every era. And you might look at say, tenth century Christians in France, and think, "How could they have done that?" Your real question should be, "I wonder what my blind spot is? I wonder what people 300 years from now will say about me and my Christianity?" And honestly, I sometimes even wonder if tenth-century Christians could look at us, they might wonder if we are Christians. And why do I say that? Because the thing that they had much better than we do is a commitment to looking after the needy and the poor, and that to be rich, while there are people who are poor in your midst, is to be evil. And I find this very confronting in church history.

John Dickson:
We might look back on say, eleventh, twelfth century violence and think, "How could they have done that?" But they'd look at us as I'm sure, 300 years from now, Christians will look back on us 21st century American, Australian, white, evangelical, whatever, they might look on us and say, "Were they really Christians? Because look how they don't really care for the needy. Look at how they can spend $30 on a bottle of wine and not think anything of it. They buy on Amazon just with a click and don't think of doing the same thing to World Vision."

John Dickson:
So you ask, what does the church learn? This is what I learned, "What are my blind spots?" I'm not relativizing the blind spots of the past because they were real blind spots. I'm just saying I'm made of the same stuff and so I've probably got problems. I need to stay close to my gospel. I need to be humble and fear that I'm a bully and a saint in one.

Mikel Del Rosario:
Wow. Darrell Bock is not here to comment on this, but he calls that "owning your own junk."

John Dickson:
Yeah.

Mikel Del Rosario:
We just need to be honest with what we see in ourselves, what we see in the Church. And again, it is a very Christian thing to repent, to ask God to forgive your sins, and to say, "Hey that's why we need forgiveness." It's part of coming to Christ and being humble. 

Mikel Del Rosario:
So I want to thank you so much for joining us today. Our time has gone…

John Dickson:
Always a pleasure.

Mikel Del Rosario:
very quickly, but I do want to mention a couple things. You mentioned the cello piece, the Bach cello suite, No. 1 In G major, by Yo-Yo Ma. There's actually a playlist for those who are listening on Spotify that you can listen to. It's got not only that track, it's got some Gen X favorites, like REM, Coldplay, YouTube, and John Dickson has a couple tracks on there.

John Dickson:
Yeah, indeed.

Mikel Del Rosario:
I've always just wondered how to sneak in some private music that I've written into an academic publication one day and then hey-

John Dickson:
There you go.

Mikel Del Rosario:
… good idea, man. Also, there is an audio book, which I had the pleasure of listening to a little bit of it. You can get that on Audible or on the Google play store. One thing I really liked about that, it that you actually read it.

John Dickson:
Yeah.

Mikel Del Rosario:
I love it when authors read their own books. And plus I'm an auditory learner. So if I hear your voice saying it, it just kind of reminds me where I heard the idea and it helps me make a good connection with the author. So thanks so much again for joining us today, John.

John Dickson:
Absolute pleasure. God bless you, mate.

Mikel Del Rosario:
And we thank you for joining us on The Table podcast today. Please do leave us a review on Apple podcasts or Google or wherever you're listening to this. And go ahead and subscribe to the show if you haven't done so as well and tell your friends about it, because that's how people get to know about the content that we do so that we can share more content with you. I'm Mikel Del Rosario. And we hope that you'll join us again next time on The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture.