Dominion, How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

There are certain items in the world that hold value primarily due to their scarcity. Take aluminum. Today, aluminum is so plentiful that it is considered disposable. I heated up some leftover pizza for my kids and covered the pan in aluminum foil in order to avoid washing the pan after lunch. Yet when aluminum was first produced in the mid 1800s, it was one of the most valuable substances on earth due to its scarcity. Napoleon displayed his wealth by using aluminum silverware, and the Washington Monument was capped with six pounds of aluminum. While it was rare, it was precious.

Tom Holland's Dominion should be counted as precious due to the uniqueness of the book. There is really no other book to compare to what Holland produced in his one volume church history. Holland, who doesn't count himself as a member of the church today or a believer in Jesus Christ or the teachings of Christianity, has produced a well-researched, reasonable, and fair recording of church history. Holland does not approach church history with an axe to grind against the church or a need to prop the church up by avoiding the worst moments in our history. He presents a well-written and balanced presentation of the church from the perspective of an outsider, and his conclusions should be received with fondness by any Christian.

Tom begins and concludes his work not by looking at the church itself but by looking at the world before the influence of Christianity and after the influence of Christianity. By starting in Athens 480 years before the birth of Christ and traveling all the way to the "Woke" movement of today, Tom Holland shows that our western world possesses unique values as a result of the Christian faith. Our world should not be viewed as post-Christian, because Christianity is still the dominant movement both in the west. This includes societies where Christianity is still the majority faith and those that wholly reject the church today. Christianity has changed everything.

Holland slowly uncovers why our world is not a secular one that has abandoned the church. What we often see as secular in today's world is not post-Christian, but it is the result of living in a society shaped and molded by Christiana. Why do we care for those who suffer in poverty today? Why set up educational programs for children? Why are people consumed with avoiding any hint of racist motives against minorities? The basis for all of these commonplace behaviors stretching from one end of the globe to the other is Christianity. The world knew nothing of humble charity or a love for children or an appreciation for women before the church arrived on the scene.

Dominion supports this conclusion by tracking changes in the world throughout church history. The most profound change may be our current view of slavery. Why is slavery considered an evil? It started because a bunch of Quakers believed slavery was in opposition to the Bible and within 100 years of the start of their movement against slavery, Christian abolitionists were forcing abolition on peoples around the globe to rid their nations of slavery. Rarely is it mentioned how Christians forced the Ottoman Empire to abolish slavery in order to trade with the British Empire. The dominion of Christianity changed the world in countless ways for the better, and we are so ignorant of the world before the founding of the church that even Christians fail to appreciate the changes our faith has brought to the world.

Dominion is a study in church history like nothing I had ever encountered before. Other books on Church history normally track through the major characters and doctrinal movements that guided and shaped the direction of the history of the church. A strong emphasis is placed on church councils, schisms, and the development of key church teachings. History is divided into three or four main categories. The ancient church of Christ's apostles along with the first several generations of followers is set apart as the most important division of the church. Next is the medieval church dominated by popes and attempts at internal reforms in the Catholic church. Finally, there is the modern, possibly the modern and post-modern church, where the Christian church is now broken up into an untold number of denominations and factions.

Simply by looking at the chapter headings, one can see that Dominion is nothing like what came before. Each chapter covers a time period in church history but the titles inform the reader of only the locale and one descriptive word that will be emphasized as the overriding subject of this time period. Examples of chapter titles are Mission: Galatia set in AD 17. Flesh: Milan in 1300. Reformation: Wittenberg in 1520. Love: Abbey Road in 1967. At times I was a little bewildered by Holland's choices of where to place his focus. The life of Christ is barely given any space in this large work. Holland may have spent more time with Angela Merkel than the events of Jesus' own life. I was initially confused by this editorial decision, but this may be a result of Holland's two rather transparent points in the book.

Tom emphasized throughout the book, the church's regular and consistent reformations. In generation after generation, men rose to power and abused the church for their own selfish gains, but the church always kept coming back to her roots of faith in God and love for one another. Leaders in the church did awful things in the name of Christ, and Tom never whitewashed them or ignored them. At the same time, it was clear from his point of view that those actors were not following Christianity and the teachings of Christ and Paul, but they were twisting the Dominion of Christianity for purposes outside of the church. Therefore, there were always reformers trying to bring Christianity back to her original principles. Jesus was not involved in reforms since He established the church, so Jesus did not fit as a major player in the regular reforms of the church.

The second emphasis was how the church has changed the world. Holland writes, "Dignity, which no philosopher had ever taught might be possessed by the stinking, toiling masses, was for all. There was no human existence so wretched, none so despised or vulnerable, that it did not bear witness to the image of God. Divine love for the outcast and derelict demanded that mortals love them too." (page 141) Tom Holland went to great lengths to show how through the abolition of slavery, the view of women, and more, how the church changed the world for the better. Jesus did not change the morality of the world in His lifetime, so Jesus did not fit as a major player in the reforms that the church brought to the world. Christ founded the church, but the impacts of the church did not occur throughout the world at large until He was dead and ascended into glory (This is my view of Jesus ascending into glory and not Tom Holland).

Tom clearly took his time to dive into the source material and really unearth what men and women were saying in their own days and not lazily placing his 21st century views upon the people of the past. A surprising moment for me was when Tom rightly pointed out how the early church fathers had a very earthly view of Christian eschatology. He wrote on how the early church viewed Christ as returning to earth to establish a physical kingdom in their eschatology, but Augustine and others were more influenced by Plato than Scripture. Their unbiblical focus caused them to see an immaterial view of eternity divorced from this physical world. I did not expect Holland to pick up on how the Pre-Millennial view of the earliest church fathers was quickly abandoned, but he saw it and included it in Dominion.

Holland never shied from the darkest moments for the church. He changed my view on what is the worst action in church history. In 1231, pope Gregory IX authorized the physical persecution and torture of heretics for the first time in church history. The church began to forsake preaching against heretics or better yet, evangelizing them to faith Christ, but the church now sought out heretic to imprison and murder them. The beginning of the first inquisition caused the burning of an untold number of heretics in Germany by Conrad the first inquisitor. This was the moment when the church drifted farther than it ever had from the greatest commandments given to the people of God to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.

Tom Holland was willing to record and pass judgment on the past misdeeds of the church, but it never felt like an attack on the people of God. Instead, he reveals why the church is in need of constant reforming. The church is filled not with holy men who will inevitably walk in holiness. The church is filled with sinners saved by grace. The church is those who deserve no dignity, but they have been given dignity by faith in Christ. It is no surprise that such a gathering of people would fall into deep sin at multiple places over a 2,000-year history resulting in the need of regular reforms.

I had one major frustration with the book, and it was one I did not expect going in. I expected to be frustrated by Holland twisting church teaching, but I found him to be surprisingly insightful for an outsider looking in. It's also easy to be charitable to an unbeliever writing on the church's teaching, because we should not expect them to see with clarity. I expected to be angered as the church was presented in the worst light possible to serve as ammunition to attack the church today. Thankfully, neither of those frustrations were realized. The one part of the book that frustrated me was how starting with the chapter entitled Religion and dated in 1825, Tom Holland spent almost all of his time avoiding the major characters of the modern church. Holland writes nothing on the actions and writings of those in the church such as J.N. Darby, C.H. Spurgeon, J. Greshem Machen, Karl Barth, and Billy Graham. Most are not just rarely mentioned, but they do not even occur in the book.

Instead, Holland spends his time talking about those outside of the church and those who are seen as the church's greatest adversaries. Looking back, I think I discovered his goal in shifting the focus of the book at the point of the mid-19th century. Tom Holland was trying to show how the world, and especially those who oppose the church, have been fundamentally influenced by the church. An example from this section: in 1863, barely twenty years after the sultan of Morocco had declared slavery an institution approved since the dawn of time, the mayor of Tunis wrote a letter to the American consul-general, citing justifications drawn from Islamic scripture for the abolition of slavery. Due to the influence of Christians, in 20 years slavery went from an institution seen as vital to the Islamic faith to one cast aside in the desire for international trade. Islam has no part or portion with the church of Jesus Christ. The call of Mohammed is to dominate and rule over us. Yet Christianity changed the fundamental Islamic teaching regarding slavery in Morocco.

Holland spends the last several chapters not looking at the inner workings of the dominion of the church but how Christianity's greatest enemies have been fundamentally led in their worldview to see man, science, religion, politics, and more from a Christian perspective. The dominion of the church stretched beyond the walls of the church cathedral to fundamentally change those who would never enter the doors of a church. Holland has no concern with the issues of what truly makes someone a Christian. He passes no judgment on the protestant or Catholic church as the correct interpreters of the Bible and Jesus' Gospel. This is outside of his work as a secular historian. His goal is to track how the church has changed and reformed itself from generation to generation and then to reveal how the church has changed and reformed the world.

We rarely consider how the atheist movement of the 20th and 21st century was a by-product of the Christian revolution. Christianity was the movement that tore down the polytheistic religions of old driving the godless into a new faith. After Christianity proved the insanity of polytheism where else did pagan society have to turn other than atheism. The science that is touted as the foundation of atheism was not developed by atheists. It was discovered and nurtured by Christians who believed in the wise and orderly designs of the Father of Jesus Christ. As a homeschool father, I have had the joy of teaching my kids how theologians developed the scientific method.

Dominion is a unique and important work – a history of the church that is honest, forthright, and fair, from someone who is not in the church. These don't come along every day, and you should not pass this one up. As a proponent of the Free Grace Gospel, this book has helped to encourage me in my own understanding of the Gospel. Opponents of the Free Grace Gospel attack it as a novel understanding of Christ's teaching not present in all the years of the dominant Roman church for hundreds of years and still absent in the writings of the reformers. Dominion helps our movement to see why an argument based on longevity is no advantage in the church. The church needs to be reformed from generation to generation instead of obsessing over the popularity of the teachings of those in past generations. Godly reforms always came from individuals and groups who return to the original source: the Holy Scripture.