Read this e book’s title, and also you would possibly guess that David Hempton – maybe the world’s best historian of Methodism – has written a textbook: a survey of Christianity throughout the previous 5 centuries. Learn it once more, and you may think this e book is a thematic historical past of Christianity’s symbiosis with print and different media throughout that interval. It’s neither of these issues. Right here we’ve got a set of lectures Hempton delivered in Edinburgh in 2021, which didn’t retell or reinterpret that 500-year historical past, however set out a framework for enthusiastic about Christianity’s historical past as a narrative of ‘networks, nodes and nuclei’.
Hempton’s level is that almost all conventional narrative Church historical past takes its form from formal hierarchies of energy, hierarchies which have tended not solely to put in writing the primary drafts of their very own histories however to curate the archives which set the phrases for everybody else. However, Hempton argues, precise non secular lives – and the dynamic processes of spiritual change – are extra networked than hierarchical. Folks bypass chains of command and bundle rituals and beliefs along with cultural and financial alternate. Non secular change occurs out of sight, like a mycorrhizal fungus’ community. Hierarchies and establishments make that change seen, however they’re no extra the entire story than a short-lived mushroom is the entire organism.
A lot of the e book consists of the retelling of acquainted tales from this unfamiliar angle. How do, say, histories of the Jesuit order, or of Pentecostalism, or of Catholic feminism look once we inform them as networked tales? It isn’t straightforward to do. The entire level of networks is that they’re non-linear, and might re-route via a number of crossing-points. Written histories encompass linear prose, and human beings are story-telling animals. Narrating a community is tough. Even when you discover a significant line via it, the complexity is the purpose.
Hempton is massively discovered and a really assured author, and in locations he rises to this problem brilliantly. For instance, he makes use of this method to put naked the pervasive significance of girls’s networks in trendy Christianity, whether or not they operate inside, alongside, towards, or completely separate from male-dominated buildings of energy. His account of the networks behind the Sierra Leone Colony, which brings collectively Christians from revolutionary America, Canada, Britain, and a number of areas of Africa, is a virtuoso piece of plate-spinning: learn it, and for a number of moments you’ll really really feel that you simply perceive the dizzying complexity of this story.
Maybe extra importantly, cautious consideration to networks helps to offer due prominence to themes which can be clearly central to spiritual life however with which hierarchical narratives wrestle. Music, for instance: from Luther or Wesley’s hymns to trendy evangelical worship, the casual, person-to-person unfold of non secular earworms is frustratingly unattainable for the historian to doc, however is undeniably important to how non secular cultures propagate. Equally, Hempton cites the Watergate precept: ‘Comply with the cash.’ Economics is profoundly networked. Hierarchies attempt to management cash, however it has a manner of seeping via their partitions. From the debt-fuelled growth of Jesuit universities to the speculative bubble on which Pietist networks have been constructed, Hempton reveals how networks of commerce and tribute could be a revealing information to the precise processes of spiritual change.
Insights like this could possibly be utilized to an excellent many topics, however Hempton makes a powerful case for his or her particular significance for contemporary Christianity, particularly Protestantism. Martin Luther’s profoundly levelling precept of the priesthood of all believers was, he argues, basically a networked idea – a lot in order that Protestant hierarchies spent centuries making an attempt to comprise it. But its potential stored resurfacing, and by no means extra so than within the digital period, when the stability of energy between hierarchies and networks has tipped decisively. (Terminally, even?)
And but, I’m left a bit of uncertain as to what we are able to actually do with all this. Not many historians are as adroit as Hempton, and even in his fingers a few of these accounts merely really feel like masterful retellings of tales we all know, serving extra to show the networking idea than so as to add notably very important new insights. I additionally fear that we’re simply swapping one metaphor for one more. In opposition to older photos of church buildings, kingdoms, or societies as single organisms, we now have photos of them drawn from ecology or from electronics. People are additionally metaphor-making animals, so maybe the extra we’ve got the higher, since it’s going to cut back the chance of believing in them. However to be clear: ‘networks’ on this sense will not be actual. Non secular beliefs and practices will not be packets of DNA or electrons. They don’t propagate themselves. Each ‘node’ in these ‘networks’ is a human being, that’s, essentially the most irreducibly advanced phenomenon in existence. Writing historical past of any variety – in reality, enthusiastic about human beings in any respect – requires a heroic, insolent diploma of oversimplification. Which is ok: so long as we do not forget that that’s what we’re doing and don’t get entranced by the metaphors with which we do it.
And there’s a extra particularly non secular drawback (which, after all, Hempton recognises). Historians’ conceit is that non secular change is explicable via the connections between human beings (networked, hierarchical, or a little bit of each). However for a lot of – most? – of these human beings, that’s lower than half the story. For it denies any company to God, the saints, or certainly to the satan. Historians can after all say nothing about these brokers, since they haven’t left us any archives. But it’s price remembering that believers attribute their reformations, revivals, and waves of renewal to God, to not networked complexity. Since even to speak meaningfully about that complexity would appear to require a positively godlike omniscience, maybe they’ve a degree.
-
Christianity on the Crossroads: The World Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Period
David N. Hempton
Cambridge College Press, 270pp, £30
Purchase from bookshop.org (affiliate hyperlink)
Alec Ryrie is Professor of the Historical past of Christianity at Durham College.
