A (0:00)

Well, good evening and welcome. My name is John Rouley, I'm a professor in the Government department and I'm chairing tonight's occasion. This is a talk in a series organised by the LSE Forum on Religion, which was established to provide a space for learning, exchange and discussion on matters related to faith and religion in contemporary society. And I'll say a little bit more about that at the end. We hope to have a podcast of this talk available afterwards later, so that if people wanted to go back and consult that they could. But it's my great pleasure this evening to introduce Dermid McCulloch, who's the professor of History of the Church at Oxford University and a very distinguished historian of religion. Earlier publications include a biography of Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 16th century Church of England, and a book that I can testify myself as to be a quite wonderful book. Reformation Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700, both of which books won major academic and literary awards. He has just published. And I will seek to. How many pounds on the scale?

B (1:28)

£4.

A (1:29)

£4 on the scale, but £30 to you with a signed copy tonight at the end of the occasion. And there are copies to be had. History of Christianity with the intriguing subtitle the First 3000 Years. And as I said, copies of this book are available for inspection and purchase after the talk. The book is linked to a major BBC television series, the first two episodes of which have already been shown, but you can get it on your iplayer. The third will be this Thursday on BBC4 at 9 o'.

B (2:07)

Clock.

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So either be in front of your television set or set it to record the first two episodes. I found really extremely illuminating, particularly the first one, which went east instead of West. But Thomas McCulloch is not talking so much on the history of Christianity today, but on the futures. We've changed the title to pluralise Future on the futures of Christianity. The idea is to speak for something in the region an hour to leave us something like half an hour for discussion and questions. So without further ado, over to you.

B (2:48)

Thank you. Thank you, John, for that generous introduction. Yes, the qualification futures is important. There will be a lot of history in this. I really want to talk about what I was trying to do, both in the book and in the TV series. But that has implications. These futures are not just the futures which may happen next, but they are the lost futures of the Church in the past, as significant as the things which happened. And the fact that they didn't happen has helped to shape futures to come and also may indicate possible futures. So there's a whole sort of multiple dimension in this word futures. And as you'll see, the fact that it's plural is very important because pluralism is an essential feature of Christianity. The book is, in a sense, the culmination of a life's work. I spent my life worrying about Christianity. When I was a little boy, my parents took me out looking at old churches. As I say in episode one of the TV series. They realized soon that they had bred a monster. My appetite for churches was insatiable. No ecclesiastical building was safe from my probings. And that's why I eventually went into therapy for the mania by becoming professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. And it was as part of that therapy that I wrote the the book. And then the BBC contributed further to rehab by the TV series. Six episodes, each an hour long. It has taken two years to get these to your screens. 21 countries involved at the rate of about five minutes on screen for every 12 hours of location shooting. It's a very intensive business filming. And what was it all about? What is this Christianity with which has so many futures, some lost, some to come? It is, in essence, a personality cult. At the center of its message is an individual person. I have been criticized for calling Christianity a personality cult, and that is, I think, because the phrase has been cheapened. Personhood is at the center of this phrase, faith. A person in a theological sense, but also the sort of commonplace sense that you and I use, that word person. A person called Jesus, whom Christians believe is also the Christ, which means Messiah or anointed one. And that Christ is an aspect of the God who was, is, and shall be, yet who at the same time is a human being set in historic time at a particular moment. And the first Christian literature we have was a story or set of stories about the death of that man, Jesus. They're called the Passion narratives. They're embedded in the gospels, four gospels, which in themselves are a set of stories seeking to throw different spotlights on the God who was made man. Christians also believe that they can meet with this human being in as real a fashion as the disciples who walked with him on the shores of Galilee. And they tell stories about themselves on the basis of those stories from the past. It is a constant refraction of stories from the beginning, from before Jesus Christ and to the present day, and projected through hopes into the future. And it's that which I'm trying to capture in this study which is lying in for all its £4 on the table there. And I don't want to make any pronouncement and I don't in this book, and I don't tonight as to whether Christianity or indeed religious belief is true. Because is Shakespeare's Hamlet true? Well, it never happened. Yet it seems to me much more true than the banal reality of the breakfast I had this morning. And the story of Christianity is also true in the sense that it is part of human history. There's an immense appetite among the readers of novels for mythical and conspiracy minded versions of Christian history. Witness the recent success of Dan Brown. And the trouble about Dan Brown is that in no sense is it true. It is a dubious literary confection without much merit. And it obscures the fact that the truth is much more exciting and satisfying than anything such dubious tale. And this book about Christianity is a story of another book, the Christian Bible, which of course is not a book. It is a library of books. That word in Greek, biblia is in the plural. This is a library. And books are storehouses for human ideas. And the book about a book must be therefore about ideas. It is stuffed with ideas because they are there. They are, they're part of the Christian story and they are independent variables in human society. Ideas, they will shape events rather than just be shaped by them or be some sort of superstructure on social structures. Ideas have an independent life of their own. And a major theme of the book beside that is that these ideas cause the religion to mutate, as do other circumstances. All successful world faiths are are very, very good at mutating. Christians don't like being reminded of this, particularly those who are in charge of the various religious institutions which call themselves churches. But that's the reality, and it has been from the beginning. The conflicts and contrasts within Christianity make a nonsense of Samuel P. Huntington's concept of a clash of civilizations, a pernicious idea which pits, for instance, Christianity against Islam. Such is the diversity between these great world faiths that it makes no sense at all to speak of a single Christian civilization or a single Islamic civilization. And it will be better for the mental health of the followers of the great religions if they come to realize that diversity is a virtue and not a vice, an opportunity and not a threat. Diversity, then, is key to understanding Christianity. And the diverse strands of early Christianity were marginal offshoots of Judaism, whose founder, Jesus. The founder at the heart of this diversity, Jesus left no written works at all. There is only one record of Jesus writing, and it was stirring the sand up with his finger to get himself out of a tricky situation. That's the only record of Jesus writing anything at all. Jesus seems to have maintained in the things he said that the trumpet would sound for the end of time very soon. And in a major break with the culture around him, he told his followers to leave the dead, to bury their dead. Quite a shocking thing to do in the ancient world. But yet his followers ignored that remarkably quickly. They decided that history was not going to end and they would write the stories about Jesus for that reason that they needed to write them down for another generation. Hence the Biblia, the storehouse of books, which has become the center of Christian discourse. They also survived a major crisis of confidence at the end of the first century of the Christian era, when those last days which Jesus expected did not arrive. That was perhaps one of the greatest turning points in Christian history, which shaped it into a very different institution from that which either Jesus or indeed the Apostle Paul expected or shaped. We know very little about that first crisis which must have been in the sort of 80s or 90s of the first Christian century, because Christians have said much less about disappointment in in their sacred books than the Jews did before them. Jews are very good about talking about disappointment in the Tanakh, the Hebrew scripture. Here then is a chameleon like faith. And a basic element in this chameleon like character for Christianity now, then and in the future is an instability which comes from its twofold ancestry. Far from being the pristine, innovative teachings of Jesus Christ, Christianity draws on two much more ancient cultural wellsprings, Greece and Israel. The story I tell to start with is the story of the ancient Greeks, not the Jews. And hence my teasing subtitle Christianity the first 3,000 years. The first of those 3,000 years is the thousand years before Jesus Christ. You can't understand Christianity without that. So two people, Greeks and Jews, and both of these people thought that they had a uniquely privileged place in the plans of the divinity. And if you're a Greek, that's quite understandable. Think of the achievements of Greek culture, art, philosophy, science gives them good reason to think that they are particularly privileged and special. What is much more surprising is that the Jews felt this, given their constant experience of misfortune, destruction and failure. But somehow they hung on to the idea that God particularly favored them. Usually, it must be said, by clobbering them, this all powerful God took it out on them because he loved them so much, passionate in anger as much as love towards them. In other words, the God of the Jews was an intensely Personal deity, a deity of moods, anger, joy, love, and nevertheless also a God for all humanity. They began to discover one or two hints there in the Hebrew scripture, in one of the prophets called Isaiah, for instance, that this God is there for other peoples beside the Jews. But the Jews have a particular role, this personal deity with the Jews as his loved, chosen people. Very different from the supreme deity which the Greeks evolved. And I didn't say whom the Greeks evolved, but which the Greeks evolved. The thought of Plato created a supreme being so utterly different from any other sort of being that you couldn't really call him being immune to change because he was all perfect. And an unchanging being cannot be a passionate being because passion implies change from joy to anger, to love, whatever. And there you see two visions of supreme God which cannot be fitted together. The passionate Jewish God, passionless Greek God. But the Christians had to try, because they were in origin Jews who lived in a culture of Greek philosophical cliches. That was the language which they had to try and deal with this puzzle of how Jesus the man was also the anointed one, the Messiah. Very difficult. And the results were unstable. They have never been and can never be a stable answer to the unending question of who Jesus Christ was. And so my first job, after talking about the Greeks and the Jews, was to tell something about that foundation struggle. The second was to show the reader fully what it means to say that Christianity is a global religion. Most Christians alive in the day are Catholics or Protestants. At the present day, the world is full of little Catholics or little Protestants. And together, if you add them together, they make up about 80% of all Christians alive in the world today. If you lump in the Mormons anyway, another 10% call themselves orthodox with some other local label attached to that. Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Romanian Orthodox, and so on. Well, that gets you to about 90% or more. And that doesn't leave much over a few percents. But if you look at those few percents, what you realize is that those Christianities and those few percents were the ancient Christianities, the original Christianities, the Christianities of Asia and Africa, flourishing still in Ethiopia and India, finding an uneasy place in national life in Egypt, hanging on for dear life elsewhere in the Middle east, or finding exile in Africa in America or Australasia. Now that's what I mean by lost futures. These were the forms of Christianity which you would expect to be the future, because these were the Christianities closest to the world of Jesus Christ. And so deliberately, I told their story first, before all the Other stories of Christianity. I reversed the normal priorities of Christian historical storytelling. Because most Christians are now Catholics or Protestants, they give priority to their story, which is in fact only the story of the Western Latin speaking Church, once so marginal, so provincial, so unsophisticated in its thinking. And even though that church, this Western Latin Church, split down the middle in the 16th century in what one side called a Reformation, the Reformation split was in fact an argument about the implications of the writings of one man a thousand years before, a North African bishop called Augustine of Hippo. Augustine is a single most important theologian that the Western Church has produced and he dominates the story of the Western Latin Church for good or ill. In a history of Christianity, you'd expect to meet Augustine quite soon. And my American publishers made me try. I resisted them. You do not meet Augustine of Hippo till about page 300, and I'm afraid there's 900 pages to go after that. Now this is not just thoughtlessness or forgetfulness on my part. What I wanted to emphasize was just how unimportant Augustine was to most Christians in the Christian past. For the orthodox, Augustine is irrelevant. For the ancient churches to the east and south of the Orthodox, he is simply unknown. And there's a reason for that. By the time Augustine was a bishop in the Church at the end of the fourth century, going into the fifth, those other churches had decided what they believed about the Christian problem. They did not need Augustine to help them. And soon after Augustine's death, they decided to reject what the Roman emperor told them, what Christianity was. In the year 451, a Roman emperor, or rather his wife Pulcheria, a lady with whom it was unwise to mess, called a council of bishops to a town opposite the city of Constantinople. The reason for that it was within sight of the imperial palace and hence within sight of the imperial guard. They could keep an eye on what these bishops were saying in this little town, which is about 40 minutes on the ferry across the Bosphorus. It's called Chalcedon. Still there. Now, the issue at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 was a complicated argument about the natures of Jesus Christ, the balance between Jesus the man and Christ the divine Son of God. Now, the imperial government was desperately concerned with this problem because the arguments about it threatened to split the empire in two. And so the emperor offered the bishops a deal which was a deliberate compromise, steamrollering a settlement through the middle of the opposing arguments about the natures of Christ. And at the center of this Compromise deal was what has come to be known as the Chalcedonian definition of the natures of Christ. And the Chalcedonian definition is what Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox alike classically believe about this matter, which is, after all, at the heart of Christian belief. So you might think, well, game, set and match. The Orthodox, the Catholics, the Protestants, they must all be right. Chalcedonian definition is where it is. And that is how early Church history has traditionally been told. The Council of Chalcedon is a sort of culmination of the story, a sort of Hercule Poirot denouement in the drawing room, gathering all the bits of the plot together, and then the credits roll. End of story. But this story of triumph is an illusion. Chalcedon was a disaster, a catastrophe. Fully two thirds of the Christian Church at the time refused to sign up to Chalcedon because they didn't trust the Emperor to do theology. For them, it was a compromise. And because it was a compromise, those who rejected it were on either wing of the compromise. And therefore they detested each other just as much as they detested the Chalcedonians in the Middle. And actually, as I discovered in the Middle east, they still do. They've not forgotten 451. These refuseniks went on to found their own churches, led by their own bishops. Their snooty enemies at the imperial court gave them condescending names, Nestorian and Monophysite. And and because those names are condescending, I don't use them in the book. I've tried to find clumsy, equally clumsy labels which those Christians would just about accept for themselves. So Miaphysite for Monophysite and Diaphysite for Nestorian. I admit they don't sound much better, but at least they are not sneering. They do not incorporate sneers. Nor do they say things which are unfair about those Christians, though of course they themselves would not use such labels. And I remember a particularly grumpy growl from the Miaphysite Patriarch of Antioch on this matter. They would call themselves Orthodox. To the people we call Orthodox, they are, and were unorthodox. But once it seemed as if they, and not the Church of the Emperor, would be the future. Instead, the Emperor's Church, the Roman Emperor's Church, descended into Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy. Now, why is that? The reason that most Christians have virtually forgotten the refusenics of Chalcedon is that a huge historical accident caught them up and in the end nearly destroyed them in the 7th and 8th centuries. The entirely unexpected eruption of yet another monotheism from the Middle East, Islam, cousin to Judaism and Christianity. You can't imagine Islam without Judaism and Christianity. But Islam's assumption was that it replaced or fulfilled their partial visions, that it subsumed all that was good in these earlier monotheisms. And over the next few centuries, the rulers of Asia and North Africa were Muslims, who steadily marginalized Christians. And in the end, the great Church of North Africa, the Church of Augustine, was dissolved, vanished, and the Churches of the east, the Diaphysites, the Miaphysites, were left as tiny remnants. At first, it was not. So the Diaphysic Church of the east became a think tank for the great Muslim monarchs who created the city of Baghdad. Because the Church of the east was so used to talking about the natures of Christ, it had Greek philosophy at its fingertips, it was used to translating it into Syriac, its own language. And now it was asked to do that again into Arabic. And that was all the work of the scholars of the Church of the East. Without the Church of the east, we would not have regained our access to much Greek philosophy or learning, or even got to know about what we call Arabic numerals. It was, in fact, a Diaphysite abbot who first described the Arabic numeral in a manuscript surviving today. And this Church of the Middle east became the Church of the Far East. It reached to China. And so outside the imperial capital, now called Xi' an in the middle of China, you can stand in the countryside in the precinct of a Christian monastery from the 7th century, still called by the Chinese, Mandarin Chinese phrase for the Roman Empire, Ta Chin. This was the place of the religion of the Roman Empire, as far as the Chinese went. And it's possible you might be able to have the same experiences in Kyoto in Japan and in Korea. There are sites there which need investigating, which may well be similar. Christian monasteries. But steadily, bit by bit, this future of Christianity was eroded. Plague, massacre, victimization by mad or bad monarchs. Of course, Islam faced all those dangers as well. But it had powerful friends, more powerful friends than the Christians, particularly the Mongols. And so bishops in Tibet found no successors, and monasteries in Mongolia crumbled into dust. And into the vacuum stepped others, in particular the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. I've called the section of the book which eventually does catch up with Augustine of Hippo, the unpredictable rise of Rome. There was nothing inevitable about the modern papacy, and the claims that it makes for its special authority have been only remotely plausible through half the Church's history. For about the last Thousand years or so, the early church did not look to one patriarch, it it looked to five. And there is still another Pope in Alexandria. It's not been good in my opinion, you may disagree. It's not been good for the spiritual health of Christianity to look to a single leader. However much it's helped to pack the pews throughout the world in the last century or so, the reality is that there has never been one single church. Christianity has a neurotic obsession with unity, a unity it has never possessed. Given its global scale and its constant encounter with a vast variety of cultures, it would be better off celebrating diversity. And I want to help it remind it of the ways in which it's changed and accommodated itself to historical circumstances. One very telling example of this is the Christian attitude to slavery. Now slavery is taken for granted in the Christian Bible, even if it's not always considered to be a good thing, particularly for yourself. Slave owners in the deep south of the United States in 19th century America were perfectly entitled to look at their Bibles to justify their slave owning. And they were right to be surprised that other Christians did not agree with them. In fact, it is only in three Christian centuries out of 20 Christian centuries that churches have come round to saying that slavery is bad in all circumstances, full stop. Now Christians take that for granted. They don't seem to realize the huge moral revolution that has taken place to get them to where they are now on this subject and how much effort it took some maverick souls over a century to persuade fellow Christians that this was the only way to think about slavery. Christians need to see that this might be true of other moral issues too. I just drop in the word homosexuality and stand back and look for the result and see what happens. Well, I've not written this big fat book simply out of a sense of mischief, though perhaps some may think so. I began to feel at this stage of my career in Oxford that I'd been given great privileges which now demanded their price. I had the precious opportunity throughout my career of research, teaching, discussion in the sane and serene environment of two world class universities, Cambridge and Oxford, and in the sane and serene environment of Oxford's theology faculty. Now, many may think of such a place as an ivory tower, a retreat from reality. And they will have some justification for that opinion if we in the university do not go out and tell people what we're doing, extend the discussion beyond our walls. That is why I think the present government's word impact is a useful word for the humanities, however much some people may grind their teeth about it. We have to have impact in what we do. This sense of privilege extended, in my experience, to being an historian, to have the immeasurably exciting experience of having trained as an historian. My training is a call to discipline my own strong feelings of anger and affection both towards my own inheritance and the inheritance of others. And that training, I hope, has helped me tell a story which readers can see is intended to be fair and sympathetic, even if they have very different personal positions and if they disagree with some of it. And for that, for me it's meant an effort to get into different worlds, different religious worlds, which frankly, I don't find sympathetic, but to try and find the good in them, seek out the good, as well as pointing clearly to what I think is foolish and dangerous in these worlds. So that was half of my project, to write a very big fat book, and from that grew a second lunatic project to tell the whole Christian story in six hours on television. Inevitably, it's a very different animal from the book, and it involved me in learning an entirely different grammar of exposition. Television, as some of you who worked with it may realize, is the most difficult communication medium that historians can encounter. Radio is a good deal easier because radio so much relies on the imagination. So it's possible for radio listeners to join with three academics talking around their expertise. With Melvin Bragg on In our time at 9 o' clock on a Thursday morning, and over your breakfast, you can enjoy 3/4 of an hour at undergraduate seminar level. That's what radio can do. Radio is as hospitable to the exposition of abstract ideas as the lecture or the seminar. Television is utterly different. It demands pictures, and paradoxically, by adding a visual dimension, it always threatens to flatten subtlety and ignore the history beyond pictures. That's why archaeologists have such an easy time on the television, because their material is inherently visual. And the same, of course, is true of some aspects of history. While we were filming, we didn't find it a problem to talk about the Reformation in the Grossminster in Zurich, the place where Ulrich Zwingli started the Swiss Reformation. We could go to a Mexican village and talk about Counter Reformation missions. We could go to African independent churches, attend a spirit filled healing service in Ghana, and talk about the way Africans have made Christianity African and indigenous. That's all quite easy and obvious, but there is much more in Christianity to make any producer worth her salt. Blanche. After all, Christianity centres on an invisible God, or rather a God whom Christians see as having been made visible in a particular and very complicated fashion. Take that problem we've already visited. In the 5th century, the Christian world was torn into three by a quarrel over an abstract idea, the exact relationship between the humanity and the divinity of Christ. That Council of Chalcedon failed to resolve the problem. In 451, crowds lynched at least one bishop in the name of the one nature of Christ. The Byzantine Emperor lost whole provinces to those who disagreed with Chalcedon. And the spread of Islam was made a great deal easier because so many Christians hated imperial Christianity and thought the Muslims were just as good, and so they let them take over. Yet television, dealing with these extraordinary momentous events, will not take kindly to talk of the Monophysite controversy or Nestorian Christology, because although these are products of a vital moment in the Christian story, it's difficult to find a picture to illustrate Monophysite or Nestorian Christology. In fact, we did. As some of you may have seen, you can do it with a glass of water, a bottle of wine and some olive oil. I did drink the whole of the bottle of wine, but not the olive oil. So in order to do that sort of thing, I drove very hard bargains with producers. You've really got to push them to the limit and find some way of alluding in picture form to problems which go beyond the picture. But in the end, I do think that a lot of it comes down to staring at a camera and saying those dread words, Christology and the like. You may have to apologize for them, but in the end there is nothing else to say. Well, is it worth the effort? Emphatically yes, and all the more emphatically because this series was a history of Christianity. In the last 30 years, religion has thrust itself into the consciousness, even of secular Europe. Now, when I was an undergraduate 40 years ago, the future of religion was commonly yoked to the word secularization. But then in 1977, the USA elected the first born again Christian president. Jimmy Carter in 1978 became a Counter Reformation Pope, John Paul II. And then in 1979, the Ayatollahs seized control of the Iranian Revolution. Well, I could go on extending that chronology, but you can all do it for yourselves. I hope the point is made. Europe, far from setting the pattern for the world in secularization, has proved the exception to the worldwide self assertion of religion once more. Now I neither deplore nor celebrate that development. What I demand is that historians, social scientists, take religion seriously on its own terms and don't think it's some sort of superstructure. One or another form of religion matters desperately to the overwhelming majority of human beings alive today. And if historians and social scientists ignore that plain fact, then they are ignoring reality. We can't leave religion equally to its practitioners. They're likely to make a mess of it, or at very least misunderstand what they worship. As I was making the series, BBC producers and the like often asked me if it would have a thesis. TV executives in particular love a thesis, particularly if it can claim startling novelty for the viewer. Well, I said, does Birmingham have a thesis? It seems to me that some historical subjects are just too big to have a thesis, to have an overwhelming particular theory by which you can understand them. I think there is one overarching idea in the book and in the TV series, and that is that after stating the basic Christian premise, or fantasy, if you prefer, that God was made man in Jesus, there is no overarching idea. None. The fascination of Christianity is the sheer variety of identities which Christians have constructed on that abstract foundation. And we're structuring the TV series thematically, therefore, to emphasize that variety simply because it is there. Non Chalcedonians, Latin Western Christians, Orthodox Western Protestants, post colonial Protestants, Pentecostals on the way. Of course, you can ask individual questions or pose a way of looking at events. So we filmed in Auschwitz to raise the question of how the Holocaust related to the anti Semitism of Christian Europe, to the Christian myths of the Jewish blood libel, Jews as Christ killers. We filmed against the background of a black American gospel church to confront the modern conservative evangelicals with that interesting paradox I've already raised. At the present day, many conservative evangelicals refuse to accept new configurations of human sexuality in the name of faithfulness to the Bible. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a crucial minority of evangelicals successfully campaigned for the abolition of slavery in defiance of that same Bible in which there is a clear and consistent acceptance of the permanent existence of slavery. The same evangelicals who proclaim biblical certainties are proud of an achievement, the abolition of slavery, which defied biblical certainties. Now, the historical parallels may not make evangelicals change their minds about gay sex, but at least it should give them pause. Well, by now you may realize that it seems that my commitment to the public exposition of history is a moral one. I think expounding history is a moral task. I've ceased personally to have any commitment to any particular form of religious dogma, though I do remember with great affection what it was like to have that commitment. When I emphasize the diversity and the unexpected crab wise evolution of Christianity, or indeed of any religion, religious system, it's because I am infuriated and indeed terrified by the awful tidy mindedness of dogmatic belief. One of the most unattractive features of a certain sort of religious outlook is its insistence that it represents the only true or authentic face of the religion of which it is a part. Of course, that's not the exclusive property of religion. It's a human fault. One contemporary observer of the French Revolution sardonically commented on the Jacobin slogan fraternity or death, that it might be more accurately understood as Be my brother or I'll kill you and you can read the history of the world. Indeed, in terms of the awful tidy mindedness after 1800 of the Enlightenment and the things to which that led, this is a human pathology, dogmatism, and it's religious or it's non religious. And it is based on the ultimate human sin, pride. I think that the most plausible doctrine of Christianity is original sin. Now that is Augustine's doctrine. And at the root of all sin is pride and the historian's prophecy. The historian as well as any other academic. The prophecy of us all is against pride. And pride is also the target of the court jester. And I'm not sure that the historian and the court jester are that far apart. But above all, all this has been the most glorious fun. The biggest ecclesiastical historians road movie ever. Crawling the churches of the world at your expense. Dear license pay. Now, the drawback, of course, is that we had to get up very early to do what we did. But as a result, we got some of the most memorable places in the world entirely to ourselves. Think of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, or the Forest of Stele in Zi', an, entirely free of tourists. I never want to go on holiday again. It just wouldn't be worth it. The Holy Sepulcher, I think, was one of my favorite in Jerusalem. It's occupied by half a dozen dates, different Christian churches who have divided it up over the centuries. And it's therefore a menagerie of Christian pettiness. And at six in the morning it offered particular entertainment when two rival Eucharists started up either side of the tomb of our Lord Himself in the center of the church, the empty tomb. One of these Eucharists was Roman Catholic, with 60 devout young Hispanic Americans and full organ. The other was Coptic Egyptian, with just six of the faithful. And I have to say that the Copts put up the better performance, chanting with ancient vigor and particularly at any solemn or hushed moments in the Roman Mass. I think their finest hour was when their theurifer, their censer bearer, swept round the empty tomb vigorously shaking miaphysite incense into the middle of the heretics. Mass. Great stuff. But we were not mere witnesses of trouble. We provoked a riot in central China at that monastery site, as some of you might, may have seen on the television. We were attempting to film some putative 8th century Christian sculptures in the inaccessible upper stories of the magnificent pagoda which is on the site. And the Chinese government very excited by our presence. They're very keen on religion these days, apart from the Falun Gong. They'd actually gone to the extent of erecting scaffolding so we could get up to see these sculptures, film the rarities. But they'd not reckoned with the local Buddhist villagers who've used this site as a Buddhist temple for the last 500 years or so. And they're locked in a bitter dispute with the authorities about it. So the day before our arrival, the old ladies of the village got up a working party and spent a happy afternoon sabotaging the scaffolding with wire cutters. And as we drove in, we met a large stroppy crowd, complete with Buddhist temple, hastily constructed and out of a tent, broadcasting aggressive Buddhist music over loudspeakers to disrupt our filming. And although we filmed on the hillside above, we never got to see the sculptures. The fearsome old grannies of the village threatened us with tent poles and vile Buddhist abuse and in the end we had to drive off. But what was fascinating about this encounter, which my sympathies were entirely with the grannies, I have to say, was that the party officials with us were entirely helpless and embarrassed by this. They just could not know what to do with this. It's one of those great moments in history where you see a tyranny beginning to crumble. The great moment in Lampedusa's great novel about Italy, the Leopard, in which the same thing happens to the Bourbon monarchy. A moment at which it turned. And it was a great privilege to be at that moment in one village in central China. So ranting. Old persons of the world unite, I say. But apart from foul mouthed elderly female agriculturalists of the Middle Kingdom, it was remarkable how well we were received as we went around the world. The names of both the BBC and Oxford University repeatedly won local goodwill smiles of recognition. People would come up to us in the street and say, who are you filming for? And we'd say, the BBC. Oh, BBC. And I think we need to hear this. I don't Tell this simply as an anecdote to you. We need to recognize that the BBC is the one institution of this country which has worldwide recognition and respect. And we should all be supporting and defending the BBC against ill natured attacks which are likely to come at it over the next few years. And the camera work of the series which they created is absolutely stunning. And what I was left with at the end of all that was a sense of the futures of Christianity. The futures which we saw in the largest Christian congregation in the world, which is in Seoul, in South Korea, Pentecostal congregation, The futures of a back street in Accra in Ghana, where the ladies of the market had decreed themselves a Friday off, as they always do, leaving the men folk to get on with the work, and held a healing service which week by week encouraged the suffering out of their suffering, which helped people into a sense of identity and respect and pride. The future of American black congregations, celebrating the one choice which their ancestors had in slavery, the choice to embrace Jesus Christ and the human dignity of which that still gives such congregations. Such futures were everywhere and they were all different futures. This religion, which had started as a sect of Judaism in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire, was now there, at the center of soul, vigorously contested. But there and those futures are the things which stayed with me the first 3,000 years, yes, have gone. But there is no doubt whatsoever that this world faith, now the largest world faith of all, has many futures to come. It should not be shy of its futures and it should have self confidence rather than arrogance because of the confidence which such futures give it. And so in the end, I felt that this experience, although it didn't reunite me with my dogmatic propositions, at least reminded me why they were there and why other people held theirs. And that was a precious gift for me. Thank you very much.