Christianity has been a passionate argument, periodically escalating to bloody conflict, since its inception. There were disputes amongst the disciples even before Jesus died. Then came Paul, who directed his fury at his fellow Christians in Jerusalem. Several of the theologians who came next were first heralded as brilliant, only later to be declared heretics. All in all, the first five centuries, up to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, saw an extraordinary flourishing of theological imagination and religious antagonism. Christians were persecuting each other within two years of the emperor Constantine’s conversion, a fact that is doubly arresting since that was easily within living memory of the period during which Christians suffered their severest persecution under Diocletian.
Work through the centuries since, as Diarmaid MacCulloch does in his new book, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, and it’s clear that few facets of human nature have been left unexplored in this struggle. Equally inventive are the authorities that have attempted to unify their bit of Christianity. That creativity continues to the present day too: the teaching authority, or magisterium, of the contemporary Roman Catholic church is an invention as recent as the 19th century.
I didn’t even know he had a new book. Great news! Thanks.
It’s hard to tell from this review whether it’s the book or the reviewer who presents the skewed and biased history in the article. For instance, this line: “For example, he [MacCulloch] suggests that the energy behind the most vocal forms of Christianity today, those of angry conservatism, might originate with shifting gender roles.” If I had to base my opinion on this review, I wouldn’t bother with the book.
MacCulloch’s history provides a kind of extension of the tenuous, conflicted ecclesiology of the church at Corinth. Division leading to schism is also apparent from the earliest formative years of the ante-Nicene Fathers. See, for example, J. B. Rives’ study of “Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine” (Clarendon, 1995), which, as I recall, is cited by MacCulloch. All this is to suggest that conflict, division, and schism are normative aspects of the church’s history from the beginning.
This untidy history is not what we often find in simpler modern historical narratives which assume a general trend from originative unity toward disunity, escalating after the Reformations of the 16th century, producing such division in Christ’s body that the Holy Spirit has withdrawn from the whole mess. Reading MacCulloch reminds us that the Holy Spirit had every reason to abandon the Church from the get-go.
When you put MacCulloch and Philip Jenkins’ new “LOST HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY” together, it becomes readily apparent that we are NOT living in such exceptional times with our unhappy ecclesiological divisions. Narratives that do not account for this rely on golden age or golden thread arguments that fail to do justice to the abundance of data to the contrary. They are also decidedly Western in slant… which means they haven’t quite comprehended the ecclesial vitality of the Global South.
No. 3: “Narratives that do not account for this rely on golden age or golden thread arguments that fail to do justice to the abundance of data to the contrary.”
Yes, but just to be clear–and to amplify: These golden-age narratives no longer show up in college or university courses (at mainstream institutions) or in scholarly books and articles. We’ve been “teaching the conflicts” for many years. Distorted, simplistic narratives probably do still show up in many Sunday school classes and church pageants, however, even in mainstream churches that should know better.
Btw: “All this is to suggest that conflict, division, and schism are normative aspects of the church’s history from the beginning.” Did you mean ‘normative’ or ‘normal’? The latter would seem to make more sense in your context.
I welcome news of the publication of this latest tome by the award-wionning church historian. As I’m just working my way through his earlier big books, his massive, thorough history of the Reformation, and his likewise detailed biography of Thomas Crnamer, with much profit I’m happy to add, I’ll undoubtedly want to go on when I’m done to read this new book as well.
But since I haven’t gotten my hands on it yet, can anyone clear up the meaning of the subtitle. How is this book a history of Christianity’s “first THREE thousand years??”
David Handy+
As Joseph Ratzinger said in his “Introduction to Christianity”, “… an important law of the history of religion and belief, which always proceeds by linked steps, [means] there is never complete discontinuity.” So, to suggest, as the reviewer does, that the Church’s magisterium was “an invention as recent as the 19th century” is misleading.
When one goes about detailing the diversity of a thing, one must have in mind what that thing is. The fact that schism has been a recurring theme in Christian history speaks to me of the unity of Christian belief rather than its diversity.
Futhermore, the reviewer states that Christianity “privileges the male heterosexual”. I think this evidences a deep misunderstanding of both Christian texts and history. In fact, I would argue just the opposite. An aspect of modernism that gives the Christian pause is not the loss of privilege, but the blurring of the complementary nature of the sexes.
I suspect the reviewer has not done the author any favors.
[i]2. Katherine wrote: “It’s hard to tell from this review whether it’s the book or the reviewer who presents the skewed and biased history in the article.”[/i]
I haven’t read this book, but I have read MacCulloch’s book on the Reformation. Do you think that at Baptism you promised, among other things, to believe the truth as revealed in Scripture, true things about God, Jesus, salvation, etc., along with the rest of the Church? MacCulloch’s editorial slant is that there never has been a truth that all Christians believed together.
All historians probably write witih some subjectivity, but MacCulloch doesn’t conceal his biases very well. And eventually it comes out that his motive, or at least one of his main motives, is to make the case that there never has been a consensus on marriage and sexual purity in the Church.
Pax,
Chuck Bradshaw, Hulls Cove, Maine
I agree with Chuck Bradshaw over against (regretfully) David Handy. I read MacCullough’s book on the Reformation and found it to be full of sneering condescension toward Christianity, particularly on the subject Pastor Bradshaw mentions.
The three thousand years of MacCulloch’s history includes the thousand years before Christ of gestation within Hebrew and Greek cultures.
A review I read in a thinking person’s weekly said that the book was painfully politically correct.
MaCulloch was an Anglican deacon who was not priested because he was active in the British ‘gay Christian’ movement. AFAIK, he doesn’t describe himself as a Christian now but somewhere on the periphery.
RE: “MaCulloch was an Anglican deacon who was not priested because he was active in the British ‘gay Christian’ movement.”
Ah.
All is explained now. Thanks for simply stating that little fact so folks can understand what the inevitable theme of MacCulloch’s work will be.
David Handy is quite correct about the generally high caliber of MacCulloch’s work. His masterful Cranmer biography stands up quite well to peer review in secular academic and more churchly circles. And while his more recent little survey of the Reformations faired less well, this was, I think, more due to the fact that he is less skillful in writing surveys. Similarly, his most recent book on the whole history of Christianity is going to be less satisfying. I find the book uneven in quality– quite competent in bringing in new scholarship and making appropriate adjustments in traditional historiography, but interrupted by unnecessary ‘opinion’ rather than substantiated interpretation. This doesn’t happen enough to dismiss the entire work, however.
Some historians are better left to in-depth archival research on focused subjects, others are more adept at crafting larger narrative interpretations. MacCulloch’s personal struggles with the faith would certainly factor into his interpretation, but I don’t see this as a fatal flaw in his more detailed studies–most especially the Cranmer work. There one finds a genuine fascination with a complex three-dimensional character… and he’s too busy piecing all the bits and pieces together to bother with editorial glossing. It’s just good history.
Thank you, Peter Carrell (#9), for answering my question about where the 3,000 year figure came from.
And thanks for the kind words and clarification, Dr. Phil Harrold (#13).
David Handy+