Diarmaid MacCulloch’s splendid account of Christianity’s long, momentous, non-ignorable life among us is in one way or another an account of everything that has gone on during the three millennia in which he sets his story. Three millenniums, not two, inasmuch as Mr. MacCulloch, the noted Oxford University specialist in church history, begins with the Greeks and Romans and their religious urges, carrying readers up to the feverish present. So. Another recycling of the Christian story? Not a recycling at all: Rather, it’s a well-informed and – bless the man – witty narrative guaranteed to please and at the same time displease every single reader, if hardly in identical measure. I guarantee it.
Its sheer length and bulk make “Christianity” as hard to pick up as to put down. The reason for the latter difficulty, if you call it that, is the author’s engaging prose style: fluent, well-judged and wholly free of cant and the kind of stuff in which theological journals immerse you.
Mr. MacCulloch covers the Christian waterfront so thoroughly – we have here accounts of Eastern Orthodoxy that may turn off American evangelicals, and narratives about American Pentecostalism that may inspire the Eastern Orthodox to page-flipping. There’s something here to bore pretty much everybody – but not for long, because Mr. MacCulloch, the author of a major book on the Reformation as well as a biography of Thomas Cranmer, the controversial, conflicted 16th-century archbishop of Canterbury, never dawdles, always moves along with nearest approximation to a sense of economy you can imagine in a book of 1,000-plus pages.
That sounded interesting, so I purchased an electronic copy of the book (downloaded to this computer) within the last ten minutes.