Philip Jenkins > Quotes

“In any theological struggle, the first thousand years are always the bitterest.”
― Philip Jenkins, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years

“Looking at a situation like the Israel-Palestine conflict, Americans are likely to react with puzzlement when they see ever more violent and provocative acts that target innocent civilians. We are tempted to ask: do the terrorists not realize that they will enrage the Israelis, and drive them to new acts of repression? The answer of course is that they know this very well, and this is exactly what they want. From our normal point of view, this seems incomprehensible. If we are doing something wrong, we do not want to invite the police to come in and try and stop us, especially if repression will result in the deaths or imprisonment of many of our followers. In a terrorist war, however, repression is often valuable because it escalates the growing war, and forces people to choose between the government and the terrorists. The terror/repression cycle makes it virtually impossible for anyone to remain a moderate. By increasing polarization within a society, terrorism makes the continuation of the existing order impossible.
Once again, let us take the suicide bombing example. After each new incident, Israeli authorities tightened restrictions on Palestinian communities, arrested new suspects, and undertook retaliatory strikes. As the crisis escalated, they occupied or reoccupied Palestinian cities, destroying Palestinian infrastructure. The result, naturally, was massive Palestinian hostility and anger, which made further attacks more likely in the future. The violence made it more difficult for moderate leaders on both sides to negotiate. In the long term, the continuing confrontation makes it more likely that ever more extreme leaders will be chosen on each side, pledged not to negotiate with the enemy. The process of polarization is all the more probably when terrorists deliberately choose targets that they know will cause outrage and revulsion, such as attacks on cherished national symbols, on civilians, and even children.
We can also think of this in individual terms. Imagine an ordinary Palestinian Arab who has little interest in politics and who disapproves of terrorist violence. However, after a suicide bombing, he finds that he is subject to all kinds of official repression, as the police and army hold him for long periods at security checkpoints, search his home for weapons, and perhaps arrest or interrogate him as a possible suspect. That process has the effect of making him see himself in more nationalistic (or Islamic) terms, stirs his hostility to the Israeli regime, and gives him a new sympathy for the militant or terrorist cause.
The Israeli response to terrorism is also valuable for the terrorists in global publicity terms, since the international media attack Israel for its repression of civilians. Hamas military commander Salah Sh’hadeh, quoted earlier, was killed in an Israeli raid on Gaza in 2002, an act which by any normal standards of warfare would represent a major Israeli victory. In this case though, the killing provoked ferocious criticism of Israel by the U.S. and western Europe, and made Israel’s diplomatic situation much more difficult. In short, a terrorist attack itself may or may not attract widespread publicity, but the official response to it very likely will. In saying this, I am not suggesting that governments should not respond to terrorism, or that retaliation is in any sense morally comparable to the original attacks. Many historical examples show that terrorism can be uprooted and defeated, and military action is often an essential part of the official response. But terrorism operates on a logic quite different from that of most conventional politics and law enforcement, and concepts like defeat and victory must be understood quite differently from in a regular war.”
― Philip Jenkins, Images of Terror: What We Can and Can't Know about Terrorism

“Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta complained that “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes described the papacy as “no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Submission to a “Christian state” can easily turn into a willful refusal to acknowledge the flaws of that regime, and to connive at official corruption and violence.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Andrew Chesnut remarks, “the Catholic Church has chosen the poor, but the poor chose the Pentecostals,”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Although we know in hindsight that Rome would be the great survivor, that fact was certainly not obvious at the time. Roman popes tried to act like emperors, and they inherited many of the attitudes and behaviors that in earlier years might have characterized an emperor rather than an early Christian bishop—but increasingly, they found themselves marginalized. Rome was stranded on an exposed and dangerous corner of the civilized world, cut off from the heart of cultural and intellectual life. Everything popes did in the various councils has to be seen in this context of vulnerability, the desperate need to cling to power and status within church and empire.”
― Philip Jenkins, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years

“Christ’s nature was a cause for which people were prepared to kill and to die, to persecute or to suffer martyrdom”
― Philip Jenkins, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years

“Ironically, the same church gathering that had denounced Paul of Samosata back in 268 had explicitly condemned the term homoousios, which that earlier council had regarded as one of Paul’s heretical innovations. In 268, the church dismissed the word as heretical nonsense; sixty years later, it was the watchword for unifying orthodoxy.”
― Philip Jenkins, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years

“Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity. —Archbishop Desmond Tutu”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“Diyarbakir was once Amida, a thriving monastic center and a patriarchal seat, while nearby Malatya was once the Christian metropolis of Melitene. Northwest of Mosul lies the Tur Abdin Plateau, the Mountain of the Servants of God. In this area we find the cities of Nisibis and Mardin, as well as a group of perhaps a hundred monasteries that have been described as the Mount Athos of the East.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis is commonly regarded as one of the classics of cinema, and at the time it was probably the most expensive film ever made. Only in light of recent restoration work, though, can we see how explicitly it draws on apocalyptic themes in its prophetic depiction of modern society. Partly, Metropolis reflects the ideas of Oswald Spengler, whose sensationally popular book The Decline of the West appeared in 1918. Spengler presented nightmare forecasts of the vast megalopolis, ruled by the superrich, with politics reduced to demagoguery and Caesarism, and religion marked by strange oriental cults. Lang borrowed that model but added explicit references to the Bible, and particularly Revelation. In the future world of Metropolis, the ruling classes dwell in their own Tower of Babel, while the industrial working class is literally enslaved to Moloch.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade – Angels, Apocalypse, and the Spiritual Dimensions of Modern Violence

“the have-nots will be inspired by the scriptures and the language of apocalyptic, rather than by the texts of Marx and Mao. In this vision, the West could be the final Babylon.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“According to the Catholic or Orthodox, who eventually triumphed within the Roman Empire, Christ had two natures, which were conjoined and commingled. Many Easterners followed the Patriarch Nestorius, who accepted the two natures but held that these were not absolutely united in the mystical sense taught by the Orthodox. This”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“In ninth-century Mesopotamia, Muslim exclusivist al-Jahiz denounced the Christians not just for their worldly success, but for their immersion in Arabic culture, even to the point of taking familiar Arabic names: “They are called Hasan and Husain and Abbas and Fadl and Ali, and they take all these as surnames; and there is nothing left but that they should be called Muhammad and be surnamed Abu 'l-Qasim!”15 Such wholesale absorption allowed wealthy and successful minorities to parade their success without any obvious sign of their religious taint, any hint of inferiority, and such overassimilation in all matters except the religious provoked Muslim regimes to enforce the symbolic badges of the Umaric code. But such cultural boundaries did not limit the spread of Arabic, and an Arabic-speaking world had already made a massive leap toward the possible adoption of Islam. As Peter Brown remarks, “[U]ltimately, it was the victory of Arabic which opened the doors to Islamization.”16 The older languages of the subject peoples fell increasingly into disuse, sometimes because Muslim regimes limited their use in the public sphere.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“And so likewise among the Bactrians and Huns and Persians, and the rest of the Indians, Persarmenians, and Medes and Elamites, and throughout the whole land of Persia there is no limit to the number of churches with bishops and very large communities of Christian people, as well as many martyrs, and monks also living as hermits.28”
― John Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“In 591, the Byzantines were puzzled to find that Turkish envoys from Kyrgyzstan had crosses tattooed on their foreheads: “They had been assigned this by their mothers; for when a fierce plague was endemic among them, some Christians advised them that the foreheads of the young be tattooed with that sign.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“Any acquaintance with recent history made nonsense of any claim that God was on the side of Christian states. As one scholar suggests, what turned Christians to Islam was “the common acceptance by Muslim and Christian alike of the error that the favor of God is shown by worldly success.”22 Self-evidently, Islam represented growth, expansion, and success, in contrast to the tattered shreds of Christianity. Any traveler could see the splendid mosques rising amid the landscape of ruined churches and deserted monasteries. The heart-breaking consistency of defeats, generation after generation, carried a deadly message.23”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“Perhaps theological attempts to explain the destruction of churches or of “Christian nations” are asking the wrong question, if they judge success and failure by the standards of the secular world. When, for instance, a Christian community loses political or cultural hegemony, historians might conventionally think of it as having failed, as if the faith must of necessity be allied to political power, and even military victory. Although such a linkage to worldly success was commonplace in earlier times, it has fewer adherents today. Instead of seeking explanations for the loss of divine favor, Christians should rather stress the deep suspicion about the secular order that runs through the New Testament, where the faithful are repeatedly warned that they will live in a hostile world, and a transient one. Nowhere in that scripture are Christians offered any assurance that they will hold political power, or indeed that salvation is promised to descendants or to later members of a particular community. Perhaps the real mystery of Christianity is not in explaining failure or eclipse at particular times, but rather in accounting for the successes elsewhere.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“As emerging Christianity becomes ever stranger to Northern eyes, it will acquire the same kind of bleak stereotypes that were in bygone years applied to Muslims. The Christian faith of the rising states, we will probably hear, is fanatical, superstitious, demagogic: it is politically reactionary and sexually repressive.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“The key difference making for survival is rather how deep a church planted its roots in a particular community, and how far the religion became part of the air that ordinary people breathed. The Egyptian church succeeded wonderfully in this regard, while the Africans failed to make much impact beyond the towns. While the Egyptians put the Christian faith in the language of the ordinary people, from city dwellers through peasants, the Africans concentrated only on certain categories, certain races. Egyptian Christianity became native; its African counterpart was colonial. This difference became crucial when a faith that was formed in one set of social and political arrangements had to adapt to a new world. When society changed, when cities crumbled, when persecution came, the faith would continue in one region but not another.32”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“Without dioceses, local parishes and village churches could barely continue, even if the villages themselves could have long survived the constant turmoil and bloodshed. And as we have seen, monasteries and shrines could not last for long in an environment of prolonged warfare. The strength of early and medieval Christianity was that it created a sanctified landscape in which Christian institutions were visible everywhere. The weakness of being so heavily invested in real estate was that it left an almost infinite abundance of tempting targets for plunder and destruction, and once these were gone, so were many of the forces that kept believers attached to the faith. The question must arise as to whether some other kind of organization might have offered a better chance of resisting decline. In theory, we can imagine church structures less dependent on monks and clergy, and lacking the tight hierarchy dependent on the empire’s cities. Retroactively, we could even think of a Christianity that looked more Protestant, in the sense of placing more control and initiative in the hands of ordinary believers, whose decentralized church life would depend less on institutions than on direct access to the scriptures. But such an alternative is difficult to conceive realistically, as monasticism and episcopacy were so deeply en-grained in Eastern tradition, while the Protestant idea of access to the Bible assumes forms of printing technology that would not be feasible until centuries afterward. And the annihilation of European heretics like the Cathars suggests that even quite imaginative forms of clandestine organization could not withstand unrelenting persecution.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“The more we study the catastrophes and endings that befell individual churches in particular eras, the better we appreciate the surprising new births that Christianity achieves in these very years, in odd and surprising contexts. Just as Turkish power was reaching its height in the traditional Christian lands of the Middle East and the Balkans, so the seafaring Christian powers were bringing their faith to the New World and the Pacific. And while the 1915–25 period in the Middle East marked the extinction or ruin of ancient Christian communities, this was exactly the era in which the religion began its epochal growth in black Africa, arguably the most important event in Christian history since the Reformation. But the history can be appreciated in its fullness only by acknowledging the defeats and disasters alongside the triumphs and expansions.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“Besides the missionary theology cultivated by many churches, we also need a theology of extinction.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“Far from anti-Christian purges ceasing with the official end of war in 1918, they actually intensified during the ensuing war between Greece and Turkey. In its origins, this war stemmed from aggressive Greek claims to territory in Asia Minor, which at their most extreme amounted to a return to something like the Byzantine Empire. As matters turned out, the Turks turned the conflict into their own war of independence, in which they evicted foreign invaders. In the process, the Turks purged the Greek Christians of Asia Minor, as ethnic cleansing continued through the early 1920s. The campaign reached its horrifying peak in the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, allegedly causing the deaths of a hundred thousand Greek and Armenian Christians in what had been the City of the Giaour. The area around Trebizond was the setting for what Greeks and Armenians today recall as the Pontic Genocide of Christians.36”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“the great political unknown of the coming decades, the most powerful international wild card, will be that mysterious non-Western ideology called Christianity.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity

“For most of its history, Christianity was a tricontinental religion, with powerful representation in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and this was true into the fourteenth century. Christianity became predominantly European not because this continent had any obvious affinity for that faith, but by default: Europe was the continent where it was not destroyed. Matters could easily have developed very differently.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“A religion that dies in one area, in the sense of having no known active followers, may have many covert or clandestine believers, and—rather like the collapse of churches—crypto-Christianity is a thoroughly understudied phenomenon. In theory, true hidden believers should be immune to study, as they never break cover, and the people who can be studied are only the less discreet. But we often do hear of crypto-Christians, and the stories are startling, all the more so for Westerners accustomed to thinking of Christianity as the established faith of states.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

“As Protestant and Pentecostal numbers have soared over the last thirty years, Catholic authorities have become increasingly resentful.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity