Module description
Christianity, wrote Herbert Butterfield in Christianity and History (1949), 'has not been exempt from that bias, that curious twist in events, that gravitational pull in human nature, which draws the highest things downwards, mixes them with earth, and taints them with human cupidity.' This course offers an earthy introduction to modern Christianity in the period that stretches roughly from the Protestant Reformation to the present. It asks you to consider why Christianity has been such an extraordinarily successful, pervasive and often malign religion in that time. Leaving the question of its truth to the theologians, it asks: what have been the social, cultural and intellectual bases of its authority? The course takes a broadly historical approach to the question of what Christianity is and has been in the early modern and modern world. The aim is not to attain a single and thus simplistic definition of Christianity but to recognise that this religion has been the site of perpetual conflict both between its members and between its members and its enemies. 'What is Christianity?' is a question that has divided Protestant from Catholic, bigot from freethinker, evangelical from non-evangelical, colonisers from imperial subjects. Therefore it begins by suggesting on the one hand that although Christian religiosity has everywhere shared some key preoccupations - an acceptance of the Bible's authority, the centrality of Christ, a preoccupation with sin and salvation and an insistence on communal worship - this has not prevented radical disagreements on how those preoccupations should be worked out in practice. Christianity has often offered its believers an escape from the terrestrial world, but the next section of the course goes on to explore the ways in which Christianity has not so much escaped from but dynamically interacted with deep-seated patterns of domination and inequality: physical force, sexuality and gender, wealth and poverty. The last section of the course turns to examine how Christianity has coped with increasingly pressing threats to its authority. It will examine the impact of the enlightenment, the challenges posed by the emergence of modern states and nations and finally ends by discussing the phenomenon of secularization.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/trs/modules/level4/4aat1030.aspx
Assessment details
Coursework
one 2,000 word essay (40%) and one 2,500- word essay (60%)
Teaching pattern
Two-hour weekly classes over ten weeks.