The Church of the East

"This is a wonderful book, and it brings me back to where I started – the Christianities we’ve completely forgotten. These are the Christianities that began by speaking the language of Jesus Christ – he didn’t speak Hebrew, he spoke Aramaic as his first language. They were the churches of Syria, the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, and they spread, not westwards into the Mediterranean, but eastward into what is now Iraq, Iran, then to Central Asia and finally to China, possibly Korea and certainly Japan. They did this by the 7th century. In other words, when Bede was writing in England, there were Christian bishops in the Chinese empire. This historian, Christoph Baumer, has produced a beautiful picture book. He’s travelled as far as China, throughout Central Asia, and to India, taking beautiful colour photos. The book is a pleasure to just flick through – but it’s also a very able history of this virtually lost Christianity. He’s Swiss, so it’s actually a translation from German by Miranda G Henry. It is a Christianity which is, in many ways, closer to the Christianities of the generations after Jesus Christ. Whether that is more authentic is debatable, but it is a Christianity that rejected a lot of what the churches of the Mediterranean said Christianity was. There was a huge council of the Church, within the Empire, at a place called Chalcedon in 451 AD, which established what imperial Christians wanted to say about Jesus Christ. The representatives of the churches in the East either didn’t go to that conference, or they went and said, ‘Well, we don’t agree with you and we’re not going to sign this agreement.’ And that was one of the great turning points for the Church. Those eastern Churches could easily have been the future of the Church, and the centre of Christianity could well have been Baghdad and not Rome – because the bishops of this Church of the East had just as many people under their pastoral care in the 7th and 8th centuries as did the Bishop of Rome. If one of these bishops had converted a Chinese emperor as Constantine the Roman emperor was converted, you could have got a completely different future of Christianity. But the coming of Islam prevented that. It’s a different view of the way in which the human nature of Jesus Christ relates to the divine nature. This Church of the East tried to keep them more separate. They didn’t feel that it was reverent to mix up the idea of God with humanity as much as did the frankly compromising formula of the Council of Chalcedon. One consequence of that is that they had a rather optimistic view of human nature. Because if you say there is a distinct human nature of Jesus Christ, alongside his divine nature, you can say, ‘Well, that human nature is quite like us.’ You can aspire to be like God – and it may put a terrible responsibility on you. Some of the monks of this tradition were austere, savage people who punished themselves to be as pure as possible. They have suffered terrible, terrible disasters in the last 150 years. The Ottoman Empire had tolerated them and given them an honoured place in its setup, but a terrible intolerance set in in the 19th century, I think provoked by anger against the West. These Christians suffered, and they’ve been suffering more and more through the 20th century. Virtually all of them have had to flee Baghdad. And so you end up with many of the leaders in exile, in Australia or Chicago. It is a miserable story of persecution and suffering. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s hugely on the rise. It is the largest world religion, and there is no sign of it decaying. In Europe, it’s becoming a minority practice, but Europe is completely untypical. There are perhaps billions of Christians we don’t even know about in India and China. If you’re interested in numbers, the future is bright for Christianity. It’s all sorts of different forms of Christianity, you really cannot say yet what form is going to dominate. My own selfish hope is that no form dominates. It’s very bad when one identity of a religion becomes the top dog. But my money is on Pentecostalism, and whatever happens next to Pentecostalism (no, not necessarily the jumping-up-and-down, happy-clappy, tambourine-bashing version). Pentecostalism represents a listening to the spirit, not relying on text, on the Bible all the time – and a lot of its success has been to do with getting beyond words, because that can also leap cultures. One reason for its success is that it empowers people, particularly those who don’t feel they have power in any other way. If you look at the enslaved peoples in the southern part of the United States in the 18th century – these are people who had no choice in their lives. One thing that evangelical Christianity offered them was to make a choice: to choose to turn to Jesus. Instantly that gives you back a sense of self-respect. Again and again, in all sorts of different societies, it is that sense, that however unfortunate you are, however powerless in political terms, you’ve got access to a different sort of power. That image of a man who died on the cross, absolutely helpless, and who yet has more power than you could possibly dream of – that’s a constant at the centre of Christianity. When your life is sorted out, that may be a very good reason for not needing it. But that sounds like complacency. I think another factor in Europe is that we experienced the effect of tidy-minded ideologies during the 20th century at first hand. We saw what it was like to offer people a simple way to salvation – and some of those ways were apparently non-religious: Nazism, Stalinism, Communism. Christianity did not come out too well in its encounters with these totalitarian ideologies, and I don’t think Europeans have forgotten that."