FLORES Discussion Post #2-Bede's Unchanging & Brown's Ever-Changing Christendom

[Jasmine]

"Bede went out of his way to create a new unity. He viewed Britian as a whole, much as Gildas (whom he had read with care) had done.... They were a new people, united, if in nothing else, by their common adherence to Catholic Christianity. Bede was the first author to speak of the disparate groups of settlers no longer simply from the outside, as "Saxons". He talked of them from the inside. He used a name which the tribes of Northumbria and others had used for themselves. He treated them as a single gens Anglorum, a single 'nation of the English.' He did this in part because Gregory the Great, who knew no better, has used the same undifferentiated term. But he also used the term because he wished to present the gens Anglorum as a single people, like the People of Israel, newly established in their own Promised Land, the island of Britain. He dates the end of his history by the '285th year after the Coming of the English to Britain,'" (Brown, 351). 

Bede sees the English in Christ as one people although they represent a variety of languages, cultures and histories. He likens them to the nation of Israel. They are faithful for a while and then they go astray. To him, their faithfulness largely depends on the example of their leaders. From account to account, the believers flourish under a believing ruler, but return to their pagan ways under a disobedient one. His narratives are singly focused on seeing the English "get back on track." In other words, returning to tried and true old-fashioned Catholic Christianity and prospering under it. Even believers who deviate from a point on this "track" (such as we witnessed in the Easter date debate) have to be pulled away from their own personal convictions and submit to the ruling authority of the Roman church. The authority of that church is law and the standard by which every believer should conform. I believe that Bede, living in a time when the influence and power of the church in Rome was great and far-reaching, could never envision that church becoming fragmented first through the East-West Schism and then later through the Reformation. The Church was based on a God who never changed like shifting shadows and on a Christ who was the same today, yesterday and forever. Why should the community of believers in England be any different? Just as the Jews look back to one unfolding history and see themselves as one ethnicity - the Chosen people - far above language, country and culture, so does Bede see the English. 

We know, of course, just as Brown does, that Christianity has changed drastically since Bede's time. Practices, perspectives, popular Christian culture and we Protestants no longer resemble Bede's Catholicism. To Brown, looking back at millennia of Christendom, this is an inevitable fact. He states, "In the year A.D. 700, Western Christianity had taken on features which would continue from that time until the present day: a highly individualized notion of the soul and a lively concern for its fate in the afterlife; a linking of the Mass to a notion of the "deliverance" of the soul, which opened the way to the medieval doctrine of Purgatory; a widespread emphasis on confession as a remedy for sin; a landscape dotted with prestigious and well-endowed monasteries. Little of this had been there in around the year 500," (Brown 265). Rather, to Brown, these very different worshiping communities become "micro-Christendoms," (Ch. 16).The "micro-Christendoms" of the nations are still part of a Christian "global village" (Brown 378).