Christopher CatherwoodBesprekingen
Auteur van Church History: A Crash Course for the Curious
Besprekingen
His Finest Hour: A Biography of Winston Churchill door Christopher Catherwood
Countries were created by a few jolly good chaps, sitting with a pen, ruler and a map. Decades later, when they erupt into civil war, the argument is that this proves the need for "civilised" rule.
I began this book expecting it to reinforce my prejudices against Churchill but, the truth is that he was little worse than his compatriots. A depressing, yet worthwhile, read.
Moreover, MLJ's difficulties are compounded by Catherwood's insistence that he can maintain objectivity when assessing the impact of the life of his Grandfather. For completely understandable and human reasons, he fails to do so.
Within the book you'll read:
• An exhortation to only use Biblical language rather than systems or labels. Which seems to run a cropper, when one discusses the Trinity!
• A discussion of Lloyd-Jones' views on the Holy Spirit that result in him being neither Pentecostal nor Conservative, nor really definable.
• Commenting on the 1960s liberalisation of society, Catherwood says, "In Britain the laws on issues such as divorce and homosexuality were altered in a humanistic direction." Leading one to believe that criminalising homosexuality, was a more godly mark of society!
• There are constant references to 9Marks/John MacArthur/The Gospel Coalition that feel artificially inserted to boost the sales of the book.
• And so forth.
There are encouraging sections in here, such as the details about Lloyd-Jones' involvement with IFES but sadly they are drowned out by the rest. If this had been a personal, family, memoir of the man then it would have been a much more forgivable book. Owing to the authors insistence that he can be objective about his much-loved grandfather, it must be held to a different standard.
There is a great need for a slim biography of the Doctor that draws lessons for today's society and church from his life. This is not that book.
Let's start with the positive....
Catherwood's handling of religious influence on the founding of America is brilliant. I find many modern voices over-emphasizing the religious influence on America's founding fathers, turning a willfully blind eye towards the Deistic views that informed some Founders' seemingly Christian speech. Many of our founders, based upon their own writings, would fall outside of orthodox Christianity. However, other liberal voices negate any Christian influence on the founding of America. Such a view is also anachronistic and ignorant. Catherwood, as a Brit, speaks in a balanced way when it comes to America's founding. He writes, "So while it is natural for us as evangelicals to emphasize the Puritans - so many of whose views and values we share as deeply as ever today - it is historically quite inaccurate to see the origins of the USA through Puritan spectacles. When we talk - anachronistically it should be said - of reclaiming America, do we mean Puritan New England or Cavalier Virginia? Both, for good or ill, are equally America" (144).
Catherwood also offers the best definition of 20th Century neo-orthodoxy I have ever read. He calls it "a fuzzy, halfway house theology that recognized the failings of Liberalism and yet was unable to make a full return to biblically orthodox theology" (193). I wish my seminary professors had been this clear when describing Karl Barth and his contemporaries!
Church History falls short on several accounts. Most significantly, it gives far too superficial a treatment to most major historical events that shaped Christianity. For example, Luther, who is given a far more generous treatment than others, is covered in 8 pages. Poor Calvin gets three pages. Johnathan Edwards gets only one page. Curious readers should consider instead Christian History Made Easy by Timothy Paul Jones or, for the more ambitious reader, Justo Gonzalez's excellent two volume The Story of Christianity.
Did you know that Catherwood was the maternal grandson of Martyn Lloyd-Jones? If you didn't, you will after you read this book. Catherwood mentions his relationship to Lloyd-Jones on numerous occasions. One can hardly fault Catherwood for his sense of pride being connected to Lloyd-Jones. After all, the Good Doctor may have been THE preeminent preacher of the preceding century. However, the frequency with which Dr. Lloyd-Jones is mentioned and quoted is off-putting. The book could have been titled, Church History: Through the eyes of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones.
In closing, I think this is a nice book written by an author who is vastly more knowledgable and talented than this book demonstrates. I think there are better options for the reader curious in church history.
Second reading even better
One of the main focuses for Catherwood is to show the key doctrines of the faith to which Evangelicals hold. Utilizing several different sources (including the Lausanne Covenant, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students’ statement of faith, and a sample of a British and American church’s respective vision statements) Catherwood paints a broad picture of what it means to be an Evangelical. Evangelicals have always been united around key doctrine, so it is important for someone attempting to understand Evangelicalism to recognize what those doctrines are. In this area The Evangelicals is a very beneficial read. However, one should keep in mind that Catherwood is writing from a Reformed perspective, so while he tries to maintain a balance in presentation, he does represent a particular slice of Evangelicals, not Evangelicalism in its entirety.
Which brings us to the second caveat American readers should keep in mind. Catherwood is writing from England, and therefore reflects certain biases in his presentation despite his best efforts to understand American Evangelicalism. At points he can seem a little anti-American, and he is anti-George W. Bush throughout (I think he’s a little late to that party). For example, Catherwood goes to great lengths to describe how Bush damaged the world’s perception of Evangelicalism, which is certainly true in some sectors of the globe. But he makes very little of the former President’s AIDs relief funding to Africa, something the author clearly supports.
As far as “where Evangelicals are,” Catherwood does a fine job of building off the work of Philip Jenkins and others, showing how the epicenter of Evangelicalism has been moving to the Global South for the past few decades, an often under-appreciated reality for those of us in America (Jenkins’ work, The Next Christendom is required reading for anyone interested in this phenomenon).
Catherwood also includes a chapter on the eschatological (end-times) beliefs of Evangelicals. While it may seem out of place to give so much print space to this topic, it actually fits quite nicely with Catherwood’s theme. Views of the end-times are often one of the most misunderstood facets of Evangelicalism, even by Evangelicals themselves. Catherwood’s presentation of this aspect of theology is, once again, a good overview for someone attempting to become acquainted with Evangelicalism.
Overall, this quick read is a good introduction on Evangelicalism. In places it may lack depth or nuance, something I’m sure the author could have added had he desired. But that weakness is also the book’s biggest strength. The Evangelicals does not get bogged down or overly academic. I highly recommend the work for anyone who is a beginner on the topic, or anyone seeking a quick refresher on one of the dominant strains of religion in the world today.
Nevertheless I cannot give this book quite the glowing review that I would like to. This book was very good and collates a huge amount of information and detail into a small space, making it readable and accessible. The author is up front about being from the reformed wing of evangelicalism, and we know when he is putting his personal view on an issue. The presence of his personal opinions is by no means illegitimate in a book on history.
But even though I too am from the reforemed and evangelical wing of the Church, and have every on of Martyn Lloyd-Jones' books on my bookshelf (and read too!) I felt, reading this book, that it had some issues in terms of time spent on evangelical church history as opposed to the broader sweep of church history.
Some of this is my own bias, but - for instance - some very important people in curch history, such as Theodosius for instance, do not even get named. Many others are little more than footnotes. There is brief mention of early church doctrinal disputes, but the issues are so briefly covered that it is hard to get a feel for how all encompassing they were. Arianism gets reasonable coverage. Gnosticism is hardly mentioned (in fact maybe not at all). Constantine is briefly covered, although his mother is nothing more than a footnote.
This is a crash course though, so maybe I should not expect so much from this work. At least these people are mentioned - but I would have liked perhaps a pointer at least to something like J N D Kelly's excellent "Early Church Doctrines". In mentioning the medieval dispute over the number of angels that dance on a head of a pin, it would have been nice to extend that to another paragraph at least, explaining how the real issue in that dispute was over corporeal/non corporeal forms, and why this was actually considered a valid point of inquiry.
But come the reformation we are then given pen portraits of a selection of important figures in Church history. These have a strong bias to evangelical tradition. All this information is valid and useful, but here is my problem with this approach: It feeds confirmation bias.
Readers from the reformed and evangelical traditions will enjoy reading about the great evangelical leaders, but there is little here to challenge them to consider the broader sweep of church history. This could be an altogether too comfortable book for evangelicals. On the other hand, anyone reading from another tradition will probably dismiss it as an example of evangelical bias, and again not allow themselves to be challenged by the distinctive evangelical contribution to Christianity. Lloyd-Jones may be family, but for a book on the broad sweep of church history he seems to get mentioned rather often. (On the other hand, Lloyd-Jones' treatment of the history of dispensationalism is fuller than the one on this book, so that is a good place for further reading).
On his brief foray into science, the author misrepresents the "mitochondrial eve" issue, unfortunately. We should be very clear - we all have a common female ancestor - but she was not alone in the world, and indeed when she was alive, all living people then also had a common female "mitochondrial eve". This was not really a church history issue, and was an unfortunate distraction.
I think what I would have preferred was a longer work that considered the issues more thoroughly, and guided interested readers into further reading, and that was more challenging. There were some challenges though - a clear call for Christians to avoid isolationism, and the insight (found elsewhere also) that separation of religion from the state is good for Christianity, and that the state cannot legislate morality. All these are good insights.
Despite those criticisms, this is not a bad book and one I could happily recommend to anyone who has no knowledge at all of church history. I could imagine adapting some of the material for a sunday school lesson plan on the subject.
The book begins with a well-written short history of the region, which includes the following interesting nuggets. The rise of Islam was facilitated by the fatigue and weakness of the Byzantines and the Persians, who had been contesting control of the area between themselves. Iraq did not exist as a country until 1923. The Basra region was the cradle of Shia Islam, which did not become the official religion of Iran for centuries. The Ottoman Turks were the first Caliphs who were neither Arab nor descendants of Mohammed. By the 18th centruy, the border between the Ottomans and Persia was pretty much what it is today. In the 19th century, the British thought of the Ottomans as the principal bulwark against Russian expansion into the Balkans and Caucauses, but when WWI broke out, the British and Russians were on the same side. The Ottomans probably sided with Germany because of their long rivalry with Russia.
When WWI ended, the French and British were greedy for the spoils of the Ottoman Empire. The British wanted what is now Iraq to complete a safe air route from Cairo to India. Surprisingly, Churchill's voluminous correspondence and memos to various government agencies rarely mentions the importance of oil, which was promising but not yet proven. Britain's chief concern in the area was the possible expansion of the new Turkey, which was busily beating the Greeks and ethnically cleansing Anatolia of Christians.
Catherwood dispenses with one of modern Arabs' favorite myths, namely that the British denied the Arabs their rightful prize for their role in beating the Ottomans through the "Arab Revolt." The author says there really was no significant Arab Revolt. Rather, a few thousand tribesmen of questionable military value fought along with Lawrence, but the real fighting was done by British troops undeer Allenby. Most Arabs remained loyal to their coreligionists under the Sultan.
The British were awarded the Mandate of Mesopotamia, but found that the real Arab revolt was against Western rule. After the war, the British were strapped for cash, and quickly wanted to reduce their presence in the Mesopotamia. They were having plenty of trouble in Ireland, India, and Palestine. They thought the cheapest way of controlling the new Iraq would be to install an Arab king who would beholden to them. There were no such Arabs from Mesopotamia available, so they chose one from the Hejaz, Feisel, who had ridden with Lawrence. They appended Kurdistan in the north to the new "Irak" as a way of preventing the Shiites from having too great a majority in the country and to provide a bulwark against Turkish expansion. They thought they could control the unruly tribesmen with the RAF rather than the army. Churchill recommended using poison gas bombs.
The Iraq created was never stable. Feisel and the Hashamids had to be somewhat anti-British to establish any legitimacy among their subjects. The monarchy lasted from 1921 to 1958, during which time there were 58 [sic!] changes of government. Stability was established by the Ba'athists, but only through the well know extensive cruelty practiced by Saddam.
It is very interesting to read the correspondence of Churchill and other british officials from 1920-21, because they faced problems almost identical to those now faced by the Americans. Churchill's biggest error was to think nationalism could be as powerful a force in the Middle East as religion. Folly indeed.
(JAB)
This author says some funny things which reveal something insightful about historian practice today, conventions, mores, or taboos within their self-referential and self-congratulatory echo-chamber, and also our own collective blind-spots about what is really going on in our world today.
Like page 144 "...even though Jordan has nowhere near the natural resources of its theoretically wealthier neighbor, Iraq, it has not suffered the years of instability followed by tyranny, genocide, and oppression that the Iraqis have endured. Abdullah may not have gained a throne in Baghdad, but his descendants and their Jordanian subjects have been far luckier."
This is really revealing and really funny. Isn't it well understood by now that precisely because no Brit, American, or Russian Oil Oligarch ever wanted to control non-existent oil or mineral business and wage labor in Jordan, that they have instead enjoyed peace and prosperity? Iraq is not at all "theoretically" wealthier, neither is Iran, the other target of our oil company and banking Plutocrats all these years, nor certainly Afghanistan as last year's "surprise" announcement about minerals there belies. These nations are extremely wealthy, like Africa, or Latin America, and these nations continually suffer from outside induced strife, with Brit and now American business interests the main antagonists. That US taxpayers have paid to build roads and highways cris-crossing Afghanistan these last years also says a lot about somebody's true intentions there. That this somebody can exercise such intentions so freely under these duplicitous guises behind the State Department, CIA, AND Pentagon is a real constitutional crisis for the people of the USA! That we don't realize it yet is a real consciousness crisis! We are surely living with those consequences now.
Here is another one on page 142: "Lawrence added that 'in four of five years, under the influence of a just policy, the opposition to Zionism would have decreased, if it had not entirely disappeared.' Again, the history of the past eighty years reveals the sad folly of such a view."
Can Mr. Catherwood really suggest that a "just" policy has been followed in Palestine over the last eighty years? He suggests that the conflict between Arabs and Israelis is still going on, but he fails to acknowledge anything about the 1988 Declaration of Independence or other Arab League or Saudi proposals acknowledging the State of Israel at 1967 Borders, nor the reported legerdemain of right-wing Israeli (and US since they are irrevocably intertwined and interdependent) interests to fund Hamas and sick them on the Palestinian people in the first place.
There is also an interesting use of the passive voice throughout in discussions of revolts against Ottoman Empire without any mention of the money behind those revolts. He does day "Russian supported insurrections", but never British ones. Nevertheless, these insurrections and revolts were going on all across the Balkans for many years. But, the relationship between Lawrence, the Arabs, and the story sold them for their eventual complicity in bringing down Constantinople gives us a glimpse into how all this really works everywhere to this day. A good read about Francis Bacon working for Elizabeth I reveals the same methods.
Page 50 "Nationalism was in many ways the great explosive force of the 20th Century, causing world wars, colonial rebellions, and much else besides." Was it really nationalism that caused all these things? Or, was nationalism not merely the tool used by the Reactionary Imperialist powers to stir the people up in diversionary plots, and prevent the Royals, their Aristo elites and Bankers from having to institute universalist democracies in Germany, Austria, Russia, or Ottoman Empire wherein lived all these economically vulnerable peoples? Unpacking the history of the declining years of Austro-Hungary and the 1000 year old Hapsburg dynasty reveals all about how nationalism and sectarian religion were used by those rulers to dissuade and disassemble the public from any goals they may have entertained about universalist democracy from 1848 up to and including 1914. "Causing" is an apologist term here. The same kind of nationalism is used in the US today, probably Iran, and other places like Israel for many of the same reasons. Maybe the same should be deduced in Hungary too where these parties are winning there now amidst a highly concentrated wealth situation set up by the rapid engineered World Bank and EBRD privatizations after 1989. Where else are highly concentrated wealth Top 1%'s in need of cover? History should be our guide about how all this works.
Page 52 "The Russians became more interested in getting rid of their own despotic ruler the Tsar." This is an interesting remark too that they "became" interested all by themselves, given what he reveals in the book about the rivalry between the Tsar and the what must have been the Rockefellers and Kochs for Persia and Azerbaijan's oil. The Brits didn't have their own oil company quite yet. Standard Oil of Ohio eventually sold itself in a stock swap to that Anglo-Persian Oil, which puts Rockefeller interests squarely in the capital structure of what became BP! That Amoco and Atlantic Richfield got added in further enhances that stockholding.
Catherwood reveals that the Brit military was dependent on the US for oil at that time for its imperial military clearly pointing to JD Rockefeller and his Standard Oil trust or siblings' interests in the region. They clearly both had a reason to get rid of this Tsar and his armies. The dismantled Ottoman Empire they initiated by paying for the Arabs' guns would leave a power vacuum they would have to rush in to fill. Reporting elsewhere about Rockefeller money behind Trotsky's return to Russia and later the Koch Industries dynasty being born building pipelines for the Bolsheviks really completes this story. And the story we are all very much still living in. That the young Joe Stalin eventually took over the independent soviets in his totalitarian putsch to start the very uncommunist USSR military industrial complex, the "arms race", so profitable at taxpayer expense on this side of the Atlantic, and the seedings of a peer Plutocracy is also a great follow-on story here. These connections also bring to a new light the basic fact that Rockefeller's National City Bank of New York opened its Moscow office in 1917, just in time for the Revolution. Just to whom were they loaning money?
Page 59 "Yugoslavia had only a brief period as a democracy before the different national component parts 'started to fall out with each other' - Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Macedonians, Albanians, and so on." Catherwood leaves out the well understood facts by Belgrade residents of Milosevic's use of the newspapers and media to call the young male Serb Orthodox Christians to arms against Bosnian Muslims literally overnight as if on cue. He also leaves out Milosovic's Serb minority control over assets in that country as if it has nothing to do with Milosevic's use of the media in that way. The book does illustrate so well how useful these sectarian religions can be for aspiring new rulers in social and economic collapse conditions. It can also shed light on why the Sunni Bathists had to do what they did in their last gasps in Iraq against the Shia majority.
The device citing Karsh and Karsh as the story unfolds and their assertion that "Hashemite intrigues" rather than British perfidy are the root cause of the troubles starting in the years during and after the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire for purely British interests is also an interesting one. "What Karsh and Karsh are saying is that the Arab Revolt was not just Western Imperialism at work, but also the imperial ambitions of the Hashemite family." But, isn't that the point of creating a power vacuum in the first place? To set up the struggle for power amongst the vassals? Vassals the Brits were paying with GBP100K civil list payments every year. This is Brzezinski 101. This keeps your military industrial shareholders and their treasury bill issuing and day-trading bankers in the chips. This is what the Geneva Conventions obligating occupying forces to guarantee civil safety for occupied territories are all about preventing. That the Brits left that vacuum they created themselves by dismantling the Ottoman Empire, which had provided peaceful civil society for 1000+ years, reveals a great deal about what Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration did in Iraq after the invasion. Despite the Joint Chiefs now well understood budget request to maintain Geneva Conventions they cut the troop count in half. That move speaks volumes about the true intent of these Administrations in these lands.
It seems a blind spot for Karsh and Karsh that the entire setting up of one monarch against another for territorial struggle is the very gambit that always served Brit and now American interest everywhere. Catherwood describes Karsh and Karsh as aligned with Israeli interests. Perhaps it is a hard pill to swallow that the Israelis were also set up to be part of this eternal gamesmanship which destabilizes even their own State, absorbing it as the situation does into permanent vassal status dependent on the US and serving its oil shareholder interests, surrounded by threats of perpetual outbreaks of violence.
Catherwood also takes no notice to the conditions the Brits left on the ground after they precipitated Ottoman collapse of a 1000+ year peace in that region. For the very same reasons of "saving money" like Rumsfeld, the Brits seemed very happy for Hashimites, Sauds, Turks, Greeks and Armenians to slug it out on the ground while the Brits dithered over what land they wanted and what they didn't. It looks like even though Churchill was against it, official Brit policy was to back the Greeks in a further dismantling of Turkish rule of Anatolia. Why not pit them in a losing battle? How convenient to be able to play that disagreement for the history books. Despite knowing and acknowledging the conditions on the ground that would lead to future troubles, like the Kurdish State question, they nevertheless went ahead and created their unitary Iraqi state, setting up the Kurds for permanent minority hot potato status, perfect conditions to pilfer for oil and keep the King like Arachne at the end of Minerva's thread. Always good to have an oppressed minority in place to ply with guns and nationalist hopes should you ever need them to cut that thread. This game seems to play out right now in Libya.
That leads me to my final observations about this book. Throughout the early chapters where Catherwood describes the Brit, Russian, and Austrian efforts to pilfer away at the European edges of Ottoman Empire, he uses passive voice language like "rebellions happened". Good for the Greeks to get that chance, but many of them got slaughtered in the worst humanitarian disaster along with the Armenians. That the Armenian genocide escaped scrutiny by professional historians' conventions is the main reason often cited from documents for the NAZIs assumptions they could get away with same thing in their plot using European Jewry as the hot potato scapegoat this time. We know from the biography of Aristotle Onasis however that plenty of Brit, American, and French smugglers and gun runners made plenty of money in those harsh social conditions, while Greek families got slaughtered after 3000 years of residency in Smyrna, and more Armenians %-wise than Jews in WWII got slaughtered. Catherwood doesn't go into the details about the funds transfers through banking houses that paid for those guns to back those Greeks and Armenians in their futile struggle against Turks by the way. But, that information is available to historians who know to look and will one day be an essential convention for historians reporting on times like these.
The remark about German "unhappiness" with the Versailles Treaty is also an interesting choice of words. The terms of the Treaty made not only "happiness", but outright sustainable economics and stable social conditions in the Weimar Republic wholly impossible. Like today all across the Arab world where the outcomes of this kind of buying off Dictators instead of Kings so well prototyped by the British and revealed by this book, was not about mere "happiness". It is about food and basic living standards plummeting after years of propped up Plutocracy pilfering the national wealth and restraining labor to support themselves. It was about the ability of the people to support themselves in a concentrated capital plutocracy set up and serving first the British or French businesses in this region, and now the American oil, bank, and military contractor shareholders, too. The same conditions are increasingly true in Britain today with Cameron doing the dirty deeds against the people for his own well concealed concentrated wealth plutocracy sponsors in what is now known to have been a totally constructed and wholly avoidable faux debt crisis. The same is true in the US where new and deep seated social inequalities in plutocracy will have the same kinds of outcomes as history predicts.
Speaking of history predicting, the discussion of Lawrence getting his book out there early without most of the facts, and outright fiction, seems very much like the Tenet, Rumsfeld, numerous Woodward books, and finally Bush's own memoirs so full of facts missing. It is perfect to see how the rush to get these books out can serve so well for 100 years to obscure the trail for hapless historians chosen to be groomed and taught their half-measure methods in PHD programs.
"Facts are often disputable, their interpretation open to influence of passionately held views." Especially when you can leave entire tracts of facts out is it dead easy to get away with holding passionate and misinformed views. You can even perpetrate and perpetuate them in others. This book is a gem to reveal why things are the way they are, and also how come they stay that way!
This book is a great read to learn to read between the lines about what is really going on out there today. We should have a right as citizens to know about these gambits these types set up, since we and our grandchildren have to pay for them with our money, or even our lives. That will be the next round of constitutional reforms when the dust finally settles in the US once we get through the oncoming troubles set up by these same types in their bids to first make and then keep their hands on the money. This book can give us some good fodder about methods and human error we have to finally curtail constitutionally for those important discussions we are going to have!
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