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We live in a time of tremendous religious awareness, when both believers and non-believers are deeply engaged by questions of religion and tradition. This ambitious book ranges back to the origins of the Hebrew Bible and covers the world, following the three main strands of the Christian faith, to teach modern readers how Jesus' message spread and how the New Testament was formed. We follow the Christian story to all corners of the globe, filling in often neglected accounts of conversions and confrontations in Africa and Asia. And we discover the roots of the faith that galvanized America, charting the rise of the evangelical movement from its origins in Germany and England. We meet monks and crusaders, heretics and saints, slave traders and abolitionists, and discover Christianity's essential role in driving the Enlightenment and the Age of Exploration, and shaping the course of World Wars I and II.--From publisher description.… (more)
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I don’t exaggerate when I say “human history,” either. One of the things I
MacCulloch starts, counter-intuitively, a thousand years before Christ. This was a wise move. It’s only when you understand the Jewish and Greek cultural background that you are able to situate the birth of Christianity accurately.
During the early years of Christianity, the church broke into three main groups, along language lines. The first group consisted of Semitic language speakers who spread south into Africa and east all the way to China. The rise of Islam effectively squashed this expression of the church. The two more familiar wings are the Greek speaking orthodox church and the Latin-flavoured Roman Catholic church. Of course, the Reformation is dealt with in detail as well. (In 2005, he published The Reformation: A History.)
The history of Christianity is also a history of politics. During the first three hundred years, it was the story of how Christ-followers defied and evaded political power. After Constantine, it was (tragically for me) the story of capitulation and power-mongering.
A book like this makes me wonder what will come next. Unlike more simplistic histories which treat the progression of culture and religion as inevitable, MacCulloch describes the various false starts and cut-off limbs which prove that history is anything but predictable.
This book is dense but readable. As you might expect, I found the subjects I was most knowledgeable about to be the most interesting to read. The areas I was weaker in seemed more difficult to understand. If you have a background in church history or theology, this book is worth the investment of your time.
Put simply, and at only slight risk of hyperbole, MacCulloch’s Christianity is the history of the church incarnate. Covering the global
While holding firm to the narrative form, MacCulloch offers no single “metanarrative.” Rather, the complex history of Christian self-expression is held together in all its actual lived messiness by a heavily cross-referenced series of interwoven “micro-narratives” of limited geographic, cultural, and temporal scope. In this way MacCulloch overcomes the great obstacle to offering a representative history of global Christianity. Gone is the familiar straight line from Bethlehem to Boston.
At first glance a book on the first “three-thousand years” of Christianity seems either prophetic or simply mistaken. Only upon taking up the text does the genius of its title become apparent. By presenting the deep roots of Christianity in both its Hebraic and Hellenic sources in his first major section, MacCulloch makes the early church intelligible as a complex social and theological phenomenon rather than as an institution revealed ex nihilo. The wisdom of this thousand year backstory is as clear as it is rare among histories of the church.
Without the history of the people of Israel (covenant, prophecy, and Torah) the life and message of Jesus are unintelligible. Likewise, without the traditions of Greek thought (religion, philosophy, and letters) the reception of the Rabbi from Nazareth by the larger world is equally mysterious. Since Jesus was a Jew and his gospel was written (and interpreted) in Greek, the necessary pre-history of the faith he inspired includes the prophets of Israel and the philosophers of Greece.
After a second section treating the early church until Chalcedon (461 CE), MacCulloch first follows developments in Asia and Africa for a full thousand years before turning to the “Unpredictable Rise of Rome (300-1300).” Likewise, the distinctive developments of the Orthodox churches (“The Imperial Faith [451-1800]”) is laid out for nearly one-and-a-half millennia before back-tracking in time and shifting in space to address “Western Christianity Dismembered (1300-1800).” The final section, “God in the Dock (1492-present),” presents the reunion of the churches as players on a world stage that made a truly global faith possible.
Each of these major sections stands alone as introductions to the politics, economics, culture, and theology of their respective regions and eras. What makes these parts a whole is the frequent use of cross-references; illustrating the persistent points of contact and mutual influence across the miles and centuries. What emerges is a network of interconnected themes, events, and personalities scattered over time, space, and ideology. All of this supplies a depth that is often lacking in histories of this ambitious scope. Where others give us a map, MacCulloch offers a globe.
MacCulloch’s sensitivity to the modes of thought contributing to Christian self-consciousness also opens up to a more subtle issue. Christianity includes a great deal of (sometimes arcane) theological detail. This is important because, for example, without understanding their theological views one cannot hope to begin to appreciate the forces that separated the Latin, Greek, Southern, and Eastern churches. MacCulloch is fully aware that conflicts really were fueled by matters as seemingly minor as a single letter (i.e., homoiousios, “similar essence,” vs. homoousios, “same essence”).
In an age when even the first-year seminarian cannot be expected to be familiar with the Christian theological tradition, no history of the church can afford to be without a good deal of theology. Ironically, however, the level of theological detail required to make MacCulloch’s historical narratives intelligible can interrupt the flow of that narrative and makes for some relatively difficult reading at times.
Still, Christianity is an excellent first read in church history and will make a convenient reference for scholars as well. The limitations of MacCulloch’s history – and there are gaps here and there – have more to do with the limits of book binding and the vigor of the reader than with any real fault in plan or execution. Despite the enormity of his task, MacCulloch largely succeeds in bringing politics and piety as well as economics and theology together to tell the stories of real people, for whom all were equally important and often inseparable.
Derek Michaud
Boston University
dmichaud@bu.edu
The author covers a topic of great scope both chronologically and geographically in the 1000 pages of text. As I read the book I watched a small religion grow into a church and then many churches that now comprise one of the greatest cultural movements on the planet. Unless you find the topic offensive it is one of the amazing stories of humankind.
The book is written in a very objective tone that shows a great respect for the topic. While the author narrates many of the specific events that gave rise to Christianity I did not detect any bias on the subject of belief. There are hints of Anglo-centrism, I have never heard Tennessee referred to as part of the American Midwest, but the author gives equal coverage to all of the areas of the world where the topic takes him.
I learned a great deal about all of the places and people involved in the history of Christianity. While some sections of the book read like a history of Medieval Europe there are extensive sections on Christianity in the Middle East and the effect of Islam. There is also a substantial section on the growth of Christianity in South Korea. The author describes all of the various types of churches, church organizations and monastic associations that comprise the great mosaic of the different types of institutions that have been created for Christian worship and practice.
The author does an excellent job of telling the different stories of the different people involved in the history of Christianity. The book is full of biographical details that make the people come alive and remind the reader that history is primarily the story of people through time. Any book about religion has to delve into theology and that area was the most difficult for me. I had to do a little research at times to stay up to speed. I do know the difference between Dyophysites, Monophysites and Miaphysites.
I think the author's great talent was taking all of this information and making it into a narrative that was both concise and complete. He obviously came to the project with a great deal of knowledge and did a vast amount of research. He had a story to tell and when he was finished he had told the complete story without any repetition. If I were a theologian I might be able to point out a flaw but I am not and I can only give my impressions of the book.
I could obviously say a great deal more about what was in the book but then I could never stop. I learned a lot about an interesting topic and I had a good time doing it. I have an audio edition of the book and I am sure that I will listen to it often. The narrator is very good and I have much more to learn from this book.
The revelations contained in MacCulloch’s account are too numerous and complex to summarize. Instead, I will just note a few of the author’s more interesting observations.
If Jesus ever wrote anything, it did not survive in the historical record. In fact, there appear to be no contemporaneous written mentions of Jesus. The gospels, both canonical and apocryphal, as the well as two references to him by secular historians, were written at least a generation after his death. The four canonical gospels themselves appear to have been written by early followers who had agendas that differed from one another’s. Much of MacCulloch’s history describes the efforts of various individuals or groups to control the story and the meaning of Christ’s life that would be included in the official canon. (The earliest surviving complete list of books that we would recognize as the New Testament comes as late as 367 C.E.)
The author notes the contradictions in the alternate stories of the birth of Jesus found in Mathew and Luke [Mark and John are silent on that issue]. He summarizes, “We must conclude that beside the likelihood that Christmas did not happen at Christmas, it did not happen in Bethlehem.”
Early Christians (most of whom were converted Jews) did not want to be enemies of the Roman Empire, so they played down the role of Roman authorities in the execution of Jesus, preferring to shift the blame to Jews who did not convert.
As for the Resurrection, the central event of Christianity, MacCulloch calls it “not a matter which historians can authenticate; it is a different sort of truth, or statement about truth. It is the most troubling, difficult affirmation in Christianity….”
The problem of biblical interpretation is a theme that runs through the entire history of Christianity. Origen, an early Christian theologian, asks, “who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life, of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?” MacCulloch writes, “Origen might be saddened to find that seventeen hundred years later, millions of Christians are that silly.”
MacCulloch treats Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism equally and dispassionately. He seldom loses sight of his role as historian rather than apologist or debunker. Occasionally, however, his sense of irony cannot be contained, as when he describes the appearances of the Blessed Virgin at Lourdes shortly after Pope Pius IX had used his infallible authority to define and promulgate the doctrine that Mary had been conceived without original sin. Noting that the many appearances of Mary in the nineteenth century were surrounded by fierce controversies, he observed:
"Our Lady showed her approval of the Pope’s action by appearing at Lourdes in the French Pyrenees only four years after the Definition, announcing…with a fine disregard for logical categories, ‘I am the Immaculate Conception….’”
Over the next few months, it was said that those who questioned Our Lady “found themselves troubled by poltergeist-like phenomena and specifically directed storms….[or] acute diarrhoea. These aspects…zestfully narrated by locals at the time, have subsequently been edited out of the shrine’s official narratives; Our Lady has become a much better behaved Virgin.”
The role of the mother of Jesus has been a source of contention between the various strands of Christianity. Without explicitly taking sides, the Protestant MacCulloch notes that a proclamation of Mary’s perpetual virginity has caused devout Catholic commentators to appear clumsy in handling “clear references in the biblical text to Jesus’s brothers and sisters, who were certainly not conceived by the Holy Spirit.”
MacCulloch writes cogently and non-judgmentally about the millennium-long struggle for pre-eminence between pope and emperor for control of the Church.
MacCulloch’s devotes only two pages to the role of religion in the founding of the American Republic, but those pages should be required reading for candidates for national office. He notes that at the time of the American Revolution, only around 10% of the American population were formal Church members. Many of America’s founding fathers were deists, creatures of the Enlightenment rather than practicing Christians. Thomas Jefferson “deeply distrusted organized religion and spoke of the Trinity as ‘abracadabra…hocus-pocus…a deliria of crazy imaginations, as foreign to Christianity as is that of Mahomet.’” Washington never received Holy Communion, and was inclined in discourse to refer to providence or destiny rather than to God.
MacCulloch summarized the influence of religion among the founding fathers as follows:
"What this revolutionary elite achieved amid a sea of competing Christianities, many of which were highly uncongenial to them, was to make religion a private affair in the eyes of the new American federal government. The constitution which they created made no mention of God or Christianity (apart from the date by ‘the Year of our Lord’). That was without precedent in Christian polities of that time, and with equal disregard for tradition…the Great seal of the United States of America bore no Christian symbol but rather the Eye of Providence, which if it recalled anything recalled Freemasonry….The motto ‘In God We Trust’ only first appeared on an American coin amid civil war in 1864, a very different era, and it was 1957 before it featured on any paper currency….Famously, Thomas Jefferson wrote as president…that the First Amendment…had created a ‘wall of separation between Church and State.’”
Evaluation: This book is truly comprehensive in scope. Any review simply cannot touch upon all the issues covered in the book without being absurdly long. MacCulloch is meticulous in referring to, analyzing, and putting into historical perspective just about every known variety of Christianity: Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Mormons, several varieties of Orthodox practice, Coptics, Arians, Pentecostals, and a host of lesser known offshoots and heresies. All get their due. Even if you don’t (yet) know the difference between a Miaphysite and a Chalcedonian Christian, this book contains a great deal to learn and ponder.
Note: Maps and pictures are included with the text.
(JAB)
His approach is to Christianity is sympathetic yet intellectually honest. This is what real history looks like.
What I struggled with was the thematic (vs. chronological) approach to the history. Each of the sections stands alone in telling the story of the politics, economics, culture, and theology of their respective regions and/or time period. To hold them together, though, the author makes excessive use of cross-references – sending the reader backwards and forwards in the text far too much. So, depth of treatment resulted in a somewhat chunky reading experience.
There are excellent books available for all kinds of angles on this story, but a single-volume history of the whole lot seems crazily ambitious. I think MacCulloch has done a beautiful job, and let’s note the fact that anything which is acclaimed by both Christopher Hitchens and the Archbishop of Canterbury as being the definitive work of its kind must be doing something right. What makes it particularly impressive is that it combines a clear explanation of the usual theological debates of the early Church with a very wide-ranging, internationalist scope that also has perceptive things to say about Christianity’s survival and development in Ethiopia, or why it succeeded in Korea but failed in Japan.
Though MacCulloch is too even-handed to build a cumulative argument out of this story, the theme that emerges for me is the constant interplay between Christianity’s interior, metaphorical truths, and the factual historicity of the information by which such truths have been communicated. This is related to a crucial duality present from the very start.
Jewish and Christian traditions want to say at the same time that God has a personal relationship with individual human beings and that he is also beyond all meaning, all characterization.
In part this comes from the dual heritage of Christianity, which is well encapsulated by this book’s provocative subtitle, ‘The First Three Thousand Years’. The first 70 pages trace the Greek philosophical traditions of thinking about divinity – the Platonic idea of a remote, unknowable God – which became fused with Judaic tradition in an uneasy but dynamic relationship that is unique to Christianity.
One result of this, after the Enlightenment, has been a hyper-literalist defence of religion which in modern times can be seen, especially in the US, in the uneducated flourishing of ‘Creationism’. MacCulloch, who demonstrates well that ‘there is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history’, gives such concepts short shrift.
The modern conservative Christian (and Islamic) fashion of Creationism is no more than a set of circular logical arguments, and Creationist ‘science’ has been unique among modern aspirations to scientific systems in producing no original discoveries at all.
Quite; and yet, despite referring to modern ‘fashion’, one thing this narrative shows is that polarities of literalism and metaphoricity have always been there. In the second century, Marcion of Sinope was already writing commentaries on Biblical scriptures which denied any but the most literal interpretations; while his contemporary Origen could write such opposite things as this:
Who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life, of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?
MacCulloch notes drily: ‘Origen might be saddened to find that seventeen hundred years later, millions of Christians are that silly.’ And yet neither of these theologians really won out: both saw their writings declared heretical, and the ‘official’ Churches have maintained an uneasy balance between the two ever since. Reading this, it’s impossible to escape a sense of arbitrariness about such decisions among early religious authorities.
This is particularly true when it comes to the bewildering array of theological debates over what exactly was meant by such counter-intuitive doctrines as the Trinity, or Christ’s divinity. It’s instructive to consider how little modern Christians think about such things, given their central importance to early thinkers. Were the three persons of the Trinity separate substances, or one substance manifested in three different essences? The difference was almost wholly semantic, and yet people fought and died over it. Did Christ have two distinct natures, fully human and fully divine, or did he have one composite nature which blended human with divine? The question was fought over with a violence and vehemence that now seems incredible. Those involved would be amazed to know that many modern Christians are probably not sure of the ‘right’ answers to these questions.
While MacCulloch is bracingly clear on the arbitrary nature of many of these doctrines, he is also often critical of modern revisionism – he offers a reminder, for instance, that Gnosticism, far from being a kind of early New-Age mysticism, was generally much more ascetic and authoritarian than mainstream Christianity was. Similarly, a text like 1 Timothy 2:12, often pounced on by the anti-religious because its patriarchal ideas seem so opposed to modern values, is here given a far more interesting and nuanced reading:
One has always to remember that throughout the New Testament we are hearing one side of an argument. When the writer to Timothy inisists with irritating fussiness that ‘I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent’, we can be sure that there were women doing precisely the opposite, who were probably not slow in asserting their own point of view. But their voices are lost […].
One thing that this book creates is a deep awareness of just how different things might easily have been, had a few decisions gone the other way. It is fascinating to realise, for example, that if Islam had not suddenly exploded across the Middle East, the centre of Christendom in the Middle Ages would almost certainly have moved east to the region of Iraq, rather than west to Rome. MacCulloch is especially good on the interplay between these two faiths, offering such titbits as the fact that Islamic minarets may well have come about in imitation of Christian stylites – the early Orthodox monks who lived their lives on top of pillars. Such fascinating windows on history and belief are thrown open right the way through to the modern day, revealing such unexpected delights as the fact that most Christians among the Maasai in southern Africa think of God as a woman.
It’s hard to find much fault with this book, although there will always be sections where the narrative flags a little, depending on where your interests lie. I thought the tone was exemplary – in the words of Rowan Williams, who reviewed it for the Guardian, it is ‘neither uncritical nor hostile’, which is no small achievement in itself. In one of his most felicitous phrases, MacCulloch describes Christianity at one point as ‘a marginal branch of Judaism whose founder left no known written works’. Such a faith is always going to be a struggle between different interpretations, leading to a term – ‘Christianity’ – which can embrace the incense swung around an Orthodox icon, the speaking in tongues of a Pentecostalist, the resonant stone slabs which call faithful Ethiopians to prayer, and indeed the breezy indifference of Homer Simpson. If any book can give you a sense of how such diversity developed, and what it can possibly have in common – it’s this one.
The title seems a bit odd at first, considering Christianity is only two
One of the more interesting assertions is how Christianity spread into the Middle East and North Africa, in a different form than either Orthodox or Catholic Christianity. Of course, this changed rapidly after the meteoric rise of Islam. The predominance of Roman Catholicism in the West was by no means assured in the earlier period.
And it splinters and splits and feuds. Dozens of sects and wars. It's humbling and rather sad. So many heresies and papal bulls it's -almost- hard to keep track. Killing in the name of peace. Yet the author somehow makes it easy. His tone is distantly affectionate, yet skeptical.
Another interesting analysis is how Christianity spread in the modern world. For example: a form of Presbyterianism became an essential part of Korean national identity, as a means of rebelling from Chinese influence. As a result, South Korea is one of the most Christian nations in Asia, second only to the Philippines.
There is also the issue of how Christianity has reacted and counterreacted against movements of social reform, humanism, and the later 20th century, somehow surviving them all. Of course, some aspects of conduct were less than exemplary (ex: The Catholic Church not allowing the use of condoms, even against STDs, and their snubbing liberation theology) and some were rather progressive (ex: The same Catholic Church broadening 'pro-life' to be 'anti-war' as well as a position on reproductive rights).
Of course, because it is so huge and divergent, that is precisely why it is impossible to characterize the whole 'Christian' population. Of course there are some aspects which could use further exploration. But there is still so much here, that this will be a solid reference for any interested scholar, skeptic or true believer.
What I want to know is how MacCulloch manages to tell a linear story in a way that doesn't pervert the thematic content... or maybe he's written a thematically arranged book which doesn't pervert the temporal changes? In either case, a great relief from most long histories which are full either of repetition or of anachronies. Finally, I would guess that this is the only perspective from which such a book could be written: son of a clergyman, friend of but not believer in the religion, who obviously nonetheless cares greatly not only about its history, but also about its survival.
Avoid, of course, if you want a biased, slanted interpretation of any given point.
The bad: His pedantic and almost
The good: His historical research is brilliant! He covers all sorts of little tidbits than many have overlooked plus he gives mad props to John Wesley.
I would have given the book a five, but his comments on Paul seemed to be written by Ferris Bueller.
The manner in which he has laid out the chapters is marvelous, and I think that he has, by and large, managed to keep a rather neutral tone through the book. This is really good, and is not easy to do.
The amount of material that he covers, and the amount of material that the reader has to cover is tremendous. While I read the book rather slowly, the sheer amount of material, and the complexity of the movement of Christianity did sometimes leave me a bit bemused as to what was happening. However, this is a really good read. I was not aware of the strong Greek influence on early Christianity, and this came as a surprise. Hence, the first 3,000 years.
There is a decline in church going in Europe, and I wonder what he feels about the future of the Church. This has not been covered and could be the subject of a next book.
This is a one volume history of Christianity. That’s not an easy task, even in a volume with 1184 pages. The author succeeds in it, beginning with the origins of christian faith (greek and judaic thought) and examining the constitution and development of the Christian
is an enlightening work, specially for the students of Christian Church and beliefs.
The weakest part of the book is clearly the last that extends into modern history where it becomes wrapped up in the politics of near history and doesn't have the page count and depth left to substantiate much of what it claims. But it is easily forgivable given the very readable and comprehensive history that precedes it.