Tom Holland: belief

Transcript context

…If you look at Jehovah’s Witnesses, who put a lot of stress on Revelation, they seem less classically liberal. The thing about the Book of Revelation is that it was recognized by Christians themselves in antiquity as a highly dangerous book. It wasn’t included in the canon of the New Testament in the Orthodox Church in the realms of the Byzantine Empire until the 10th century. They were nervous of it. Although it was included in the canon of the New Testament in the Latin Church much earlier, again, you look at the Church fathers in the Latin Church, and again, they’re very, very nervous of it. The archetype of the greatest of the Latin Church fathers, St. Augustine, writing in the late 4th and early 5th century — he is very, very anxious that Christians might read the Book of Revelation and interpret it too literally. There’s talk about a thousand years in the Book of Revelation as a key span of time. Augustine is absolutely definite that this is to be seen as a kind of abstraction. When the first millennium arrives, the year 1000, the Church is not encouraging people to feel apocalyptic anxieties, but I think they indisputably do. I think, actually, ironically, the fact that the Church emerges from this millennial period and that Christ hasn’t come or the reign of Antichrist hasn’t come — the horrors of the extraordinary wars and plagues and terrors that were seen by John in the Book of Revelation have not been manifested — it opens up, for reformers in the 11th century, an idea that the Christian people can be cleansed, can be reformed, can be brought closer to God. That precipitates what I think is the first great revolutionary moment in European, and therefore Western, history — what’s called the papal revolution. It’s that revolution, I think, that stands at the fountainhead of the entire revolutionary tradition of which we in the 21st century are still heirs. I think that liberalism and all kinds of things would not have been possible without that revolutionary moment. Perhaps, to that extent, without the Book of Revelation, maybe the papal revolution wouldn’t be launched, and maybe we wouldn’t be where we are today. Which Gospel do you view as most foundational for Western liberalism and why?…

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