Quinn, David (10 January 2020). "Two liberal humanists battle it out over the Christian legacy". Iona Institute . Retrieved 12 April 2023. See Brad Littlejohn's review here. Here's a taste: "For years, Christian conservatives have been sounding the alarm about the post-Christian world into which the modern West has lurched over the past generation. The acclaimed British historian Tom Holland begs to differ: a truly post-Christian world would be far darker and more terrifying than the twilight zone we currently inhabit. Our current culture wars, he argues, represent the confused shadow-boxing of rival Christian intuitions, with the woke as well as the born-again representing variants of Protestant fundamentalism." Holland liked the review. Whether that deity orchestrated the conquest of Canaan, or whether it was more a case of the scribes recording what they felt they should for the sake of Israel itself, is something Holland discusses in a way that should interest thoughtful Christians faced with this awkward part of the Bible. He is equally thought-provoking in looking at how monotheism brings the problem of evil into acute focus. The twin conviction of the Jews that their God was both omnipotent and all-just was revolutionary: ‘Never before had such incongruities been so momentously combined within a single deity: power and intimacy, menace and compassion, omniscience and solicitude’ (50). Needle-point precision is achieved here in the way that C.S. Lewis managed while starting from a different premise. Lewis’s memorable description of Aslan as good but certainly not a tame lion springs to mind. Perhaps Christians are sometimes rather reluctant to accept an entirely objective picture of the God of the Bible. It is a welcome change to find a writer from outside a strictly Christian worldview who is able both to do justice to texts and be theologically literate. A good, if simple, example of this is where Holland understands that the commandments are not just instructions but an expression of God’s identity, a call to men and women ‘to share in his nature’ (53). That is a useful reminder to us all: whatever we may think of how Christians behave, there has never been a God like this, one who loves jealously and expects the highest possible moral behaviour in return for his protection and guidance. Moreover, for God to enter a covenant with his people rather than just being called as witness to worldly ones was without precedent. If you're interested in how secularism is a necessarily Christian concept and how secularity could arise only in a Christian matrix, read Taylor's 'A Secular Age'. Of course Holland has plenty to say about the Protestant Reformation, its origins and impact. He reminds us that Luther (now so often remembered for his intolerant attitude to peasants in revolt and to the Jews) ‘had opposed the burning of heretics well before self-interest might have prompted him to do so’ (298–9). His fear and dislike of the Jews is not understated but is balanced by the fact that there were some who felt sympathy, even admiration, for this much-abused people. Holland also understands the central Christian conversion experience that Luther underwent. Namely, the fact that despite his helplessness and sinfulness, he was still loved by God: ‘Afire with the intoxicating and joyous improbability of this, [he] loved God in turn’ (302). The reverberations of this fundamental truth ‘detonated’ across Christendom. It did nothing however to prevent the ‘godly vandalism’ of figures such as John Knox; worse still it inflamed those outside the experience till in 1572, thousands of Protestants were slaughtered on the streets of Paris by fellow ‘Christians’. Thus, the city that 400 years before had seen the engagement of brilliant Christian scholars in the translation of Aristotle allowing the rational investigation of the workings of the universe on a free footing had become a place like Lyon in AD177. There, in the arena, thousands of Christians were butchered for the pleasure of the mob and because of the sort of God they believed in. Holland misses, or does not point out, the irony that the Paris massacre took place on the day of St Bartholomew, whose name was shared by the Catholic peacemaker Bartolomé de Las Casas, who wanted to save the Native Americans just because they were humans.

As far as we believe in freedom of choice and universal human rights we are showing that we are still a decidedly Christian culture. having a place in the "General" section of the bibliography. Perhaps this was because Genesis was far more important than the New Testament here; perhaps again a limitation of space. Nevertheless I think this was an unfortunate neglect, as it is one of the most powerful responses to the science and religion conflict thesis. I also was surprised to see no mention of the excommunication of Theodosius I by Ambrose, a powerful foreshadowing of the investiture controversy and humbling of Henry IV. O'Neill, Tim (16 March 2021). "INTERVIEW: TOM HOLLAND ON "DOMINION" ". History for Atheists . Retrieved 12 April 2023. I have spent the better part of the last 6 months discussing this book with a close friend who happens to be a Catholic priest. I think a summary of that discussion and my conclusion is the best review I can provide.a b c d e Thonemann, Peter (1 November 2019). " 'Dominion' Review: The Christian Revolution". Wall Street Journal . Retrieved 12 April 2023. At times Holland comes across a bit like Batman doing one of those ink blob Rorschach tests. While Batman just a sees a load of bats, all Holland seems to see is a sequence of crosses. That is why Dominion will place the story of how we came to be what we are, and how we think the way that we do, in the broadest historical context. Ranging in time from the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC to the on-going migration crisis in Europe today, and from Nebuchadnezzar to the Beatles, it will explore just what it was that made Christianity so revolutionary and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mind-set of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that has become increasingly doubtful of religion's claims, so many of its instincts remain irredeemably Christian. The aim is twofold: to make the reader appreciate just how novel and uncanny were Christian teachings when they first appeared in the world; and to make ourselves, and all that we take for granted, appear similarly strange in consequence. We stand at the end-point of an extraordinary transformation in the understanding of what it is to be human: one that can only be fully appreciated by tracing the arc of its parabola over millennia. a b c d McDonagh, Melanie (12 September 2019). "Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland – review". Evening Standard . Retrieved 12 April 2023. Holland races across the centuries with breathtaking speed. There is no sensational debunking of heroes like Abelard or Francis for the sake of novelty; they are seen as the scholars and heroes they were – suffering loss and injustice like the rest of us, but still giants in whose debt and around whose feet we creep unknowingly today.

Jonathan Sumption, writing for The Spectator, opined the book was "sustained with all the breadth, originality and erudition that we have come to associate with Holland’s writing." [16] Philosopher John Gray, writing for the New Statesman, called Dominion "a masterpiece of scholarship and storytelling". [17] If great books encourage you to look at the world in an entirely new way, then Dominion is a very great book indeed' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times History Book of the Year a b "Briefly Noted "A Game of Birds and Wolves," "Dominion," "Interior Chinatown," and "Stateway's Garden." ". New Yorker. 3 February 2020 . Retrieved 12 April 2023.While this is the central argument of the book - that two thousand years of Christian teaching have so subsumed our thought process that we can no longer easily detect them - the message is delivered via a narrative “History of Western Christianity”. Christianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history. Even the increasing number in the West today who have abandoned the faith of their forebears, and dismiss all religion as pointless superstition, remain recognisably its heirs. Seen close-up, the division between a sceptic and a believer may seem unbridgeable. Widen the focus, though, and Christianity's enduring impact upon the West can be seen in the emergence of much that has traditionally been cast as its nemesis: in science, in secularism, and yes, even in atheism. Many philosophers of the period similarly derived their ethics from first principles. It is true that Godwin was the son of a dissenting Protestant minister and had a Christian upbringing. But it was at the age of 26, when he first read the works of the subversive philosophers d’Holbach and Helvetius, that his entire worldview shifted. He came to believe that society should be formed for human happiness, and to deny the divinity of Christ; he would become an atheist who held that marriage was evil, and the father of anarchism, one of the major political philosophies of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

The inclusion of de Sade somehow points up two extraordinary exclusions from the book which are surely serious omissions. Nowhere to my knowledge, in either the index or the main text, do the names John Wesley and William Wilberforce appear. Which is odd when one considers how much they altered Christian history and contributed to the ‘making of the Western mind’. It would be hard to overestimate the impact of Wesley on the eighteenth century in the UK and eventually worldwide. Several eminent historians noted that not only was he the greatest man of his times but that the fact that England did not suffer the depredations of revolutionary Europe was due to his influence. [3] Wilberforce’s story is currently better known and Archbishop Rowan Williams named him unhesitatingly as the greatest Briton of the last thousand years. Holland remarks that the commitment of the mass of the British public was unprecedented in its desire for the abolition of slavery but does not sufficiently explore where that desire came from: Wesley followed by Wilberforce. Omitting their role is equivalent to leaving out Churchill’s name from Britain’s Second World War effort. The dangers of moral certitude In short, Faith is easy; the Rule is hard. Faith rationalises self-interests; the Rule subverts them. Historically and empirically, there is no relation between Faith and the Rule except as contradictions. Christian values are oxymoronic. Those principles of behaviour which constitute our cultural ethic come from elsewhere than Christian teaching; and they are obscured by that teaching. The impact of Christianity on the way we live, think and speak has been extraordinarily pervasive, and not only in the West, Holland concludes. Whether we like it or not, we live in a ‘society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions’. We could not even rebel against this heritage without resort to Christian vocabulary, Christian ethical tools and Christian notions of rebirth and renewal. It is not for nothing that Nietzsche came up with the notion of the Ubermensch: to unlearn Christianity would take nothing less than a superhuman, quasi-divine effort. a b Strandness, Erik (17 September 2020). "Tom Holland: "I began to realise that actually, in almost every way, I am Christian." ". Patheos . Retrieved 12 April 2023. Filled with vivid portraits, gruesome deaths and moral debates... Holland has all the talents of an accomplished novelist' Terry Eagleton, GuardianI particularly enjoyed the descriptions of various Christian heresies. I really need to read more about the Cathars (they seem nice, I'm sorry they got stamped out). I was highly amused by the image of Dominican monks wandering around Southern France screeching 'DEBATE ME!!!' at heretical peasants just trying to live the good life.