Book Review: A History of Christianity, The First Three Thousand Years. Or, An Agnostic's Reason Why He Is Still Fascinated With His Religious Heritage

Blog Song for the Moment

Bach, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, BWV 80: Aria: Komm in mein Herzenshaus, with soprano solo by Joanne Lunn.  From Bach, J.S.: Cantatas, Vol. 20--BWV 5, 48, 56, 79, 80, 90, 192, Conductor John Eliot Gardiner (2000)

I suspect I picked up Diarmaid MacCulloch's History of Christianity not just because it was named one of the 100 notable books of 2010 by the New York Times Book Review, but because of his name.  I pictured a tonsured Scottish monk, sometime in the 9th century, scrawling away in a candle lit cell, one ear listening for marauding Vikings. He's actually a 21st century history professor at Oxford.

While I've read numerous histories of Christianity, particularly its US variant, this is the first one that I know of by an author with whom I share a similar religious biography (most social science and history authors obey the empiricist premise that their biographies are irrelevant to their objective work).  He has the "happiest memories" of growing up in the Anglican Church (his grandfather and father were clergymen), he "was brought up in the presence of the Bible, and [he remembers] with affection what it was like to hold a dogmatic position on the statements of Christian belief." While no longer an orthodox believer, he describes himself as a "candid friend of Christianity" with an "apophatic form of the Christian faith," which, if I understand the term, means he believes in God, but doesn't think any hard and fast claims can be made because God is beyond human ken (p. 11, paperback edition). He doesn't talk about why he is now just a "friend" and not a believer, though in a biography posted elsewhere, he apparently left the Anglican church in 1988 over its hostile position on homosexuality (MacCulloch had been a member of the "Gay Christian Movement" since 1976).

My spiritual life has followed an analogous path.  I treasure my memories of growing up in Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, where I attended kindergarten, took catechism classes and was confirmed.  The good people of Good Shepherd cushioned my adolescent travails, tolerated my foray into fundamentalism and youthful, fiery critique of Lutheranism, welcomed me back as a Sunday School teacher, musician, youth group leader, and assisting minister, and joined in celebrating my marriage.  Good Shepherd fed my love of music, shaped and sharpened my intellectual world with study of the Bible and church teachings that didn't simply fill me with dogma, but, and I'm realizing this now, encouraged me to be a critical reader and thinker.

Jesus People Expo, Dallas, TX, 1972
From http://www.one-way.org/jesusmovement/

That critical faculty, in part, explains why I left the church and my faith, though I'm not going to attribute my apostasy to it alone.  I know lots of critical thinkers who hold onto their faith.  I suppose in my case it was a matter of intellectual choices I made in in my twenties in reaction to a series of crucial experiences.  From around the age of 16 to 20 (1976-80), I was in what I now refer to as my "fundy period."  I imagine I was caught up in the last wake of the "Jesus People" movement--an evangelical Christian riff on the the Sixties' counter-culture movements--part of which would fold into the country's general lurch to the right in the Reagan years (interestingly, in 1980 I didn't vote for Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter, but the environmentalist Barry Commoner, a harbinger of my own impending lurch to the left). A bad experience in a scandal-ridden mega-church led me to doubt all religious authority, to doubt anyone who claimed to know "the Way." A near simultaneous break up with my first serious girlfriend no doubt contributed to my spiritual doubts--I'd thought our relationship was somehow divinely sanctioned.  An important part of a neo-evangelical teaching is learning to hear God's voice (see the anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann's fascinating investigation of this in When God Talks Back).  I thought I'd heard a thumbs-up from God on our relationship.  But I heard lots of messages that turned out to be me just talking to myself--though I'm sure veteran practitioners would say I'd given up too soon and too easily.  So when I realized I had been clueless about God's will for my life, I began to question the whole enterprise of divining providence, especially when others divined it to mean things that ran against my views--still gelling at the time--on social justice, equality, and the environment.  In other words, I was coming to believe that Christianity was too often a convenient rationale for political positions.  It was unfair of me to lump all Christians together in this perspective, and I think now it was my youthfully earnest but simplistic riposte to the equally simplistic critiques coming out of the growing religious right in the early 1980s.  Still, it's interesting that a recent sociological study by David Campbell and Robert Putnam (discussed in an earlier post) found that the number of people not affiliated with a particular church has been climbing in recent decades, and the current young generation--a third of which reported no religious affiliation in 2011--cite conservative politics as the reason for not joining.  Perhaps I was one of many canaries in the coal mine.

San Francisco La Union, Quetzaltenango, a Mayan village

in the Guatemalan western highlands.  My wife, Margo, and

I lived there as Peace Corps volunteers from 1986 to 1988.

Peace Corps sort of sealed the deal.  Three and half years in Guatemala as a volunteer (1984-88) broke the pattern of church-going and the continual contact with a faith community. 'Use it or lose it,' they say, but I should add that I didn't really have the time to miss my life in the church. In that hiatus from my relatively secure, sedate life in the States, I was the "other" for a change, and on top of doing my job as a 4-H club promoter and informal agricultural extensionist, there was a great deal of work--emotional and intellectual--in navigating Guatemala's physical, social, and cultural terrain (and I made many, many wrong turns along the way).  That experience put into relief much of what I had taken for granted as middle class male WASP from the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world (for example, my bloated notions of the virtue of punctuality, or of individualism).  And I guess I took to heart something a Peace Corps trainer said early on, something like, "when facing the differences you will inevitably face, don't think 'how weird!'  Instead, think 'equally logical, just different.'"  That's a pretty relativistic stance to take on the world, but it's one that helped me get through some tough moments when I knew I had absolutely no idea of what was going on around me, or when I felt so misunderstood.  And I saw what happened to some gringos--volunteers, US AID or Embassy staff, and ex-patriots--who could not or would not accommodate the new environment because of their universalist premise--that their world-view and way of life were and should be applicable everywhere, or were superior to those of others.  They were, at best, mystified, but more often than not they were arrogant, condescending, or just bitter.

I cannot say that I consistently avoided displaying similar features during my Peace Corps stint, but,  getting back to the point of this little bio, it was the practice of a relativist approach (hardly absolute, mind you--I'm no nihilist) that replaced my attachment to Christian doctrine, chunks of which I already tossed out by the time I reached Guatemala.  I simply could no longer believe Christianity's claims of exclusivity.  Along with that, my intellectual journey took me in a direction opposite of that I had followed in my fundy period--from looking for a dependable dogma that would clarify the world for me, I shifted to a willingness to live with murky questions and uncertain answers (Okay, another parenthetical aside, sorry. A Barna study on why young adults who were regular church-goers in their teens now no longer attend, captured some of what was going in my youth thirty years ago. Two of its six reasons were that young adults "wrestle with the exclusive nature of Christianity," and "The church seems unfriendly to those who doubt").

So, I no longer am affiliated with the church. I can no longer recite the Apostles' or Nicene Creed with belief, nor identify as a Christian except in the most general way.  It is my unescapable heritage, after all.  But I nodded 'yes' when I read:

I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence, and appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems.  I live with the puzzle of wonderment how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species (p. 11).

This appreciation and wonder are never distant in this 1000 page tome.  MacCulloch begins the story  with the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, a millennium before Jesus, setting up a cultural context for early Christians--an intellectual world in which Jewish idea of an "intensely personal deity [that] was nevertheless the God for all humanity" competed and in some ways blended with a Greek philosophy in which God is "all-perfect, therefore immune to change and devoid of the passion which denotes change" (p. 2, paperback edition).

This is one of the central tenets of this work--the varied roots of a religion that many of its practitioners today do not likely realize.  Thus, the "Bible speaks with many voices" (p. 6). One voice was that of the author of the Gospel of John.  Consider its "great opening hymn" (p. 103).

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God." All things came into being through Him, and apart from him nothing came into being that has come into being.  In Him was life, and the life was the Light of the men.  The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.  (John 1: 1-5 NASB).

In just a few sentences, the author of John collapses all history, turning the story of Jesus into one narrative strand stretching from creation to the crucifixion.  All of the past was prologue for the present.  God created the world, made the Hebrews his "chosen people," whose prophets would predict the coming of a Messiah, who did indeed appear, though not just as a deliverer of the Jewish nation, but as redeemer of the entire sinful world.

It is beautiful poetry, but as MacCulloch notes, the author of John's use of logos (Word), as well as Christos, tells "us what a tangle of Greek and Jewish ideas and memories underlies the construction of Christianity" (p. 19).  And this tangle of origins and factors only gets more dense as we walk through the history, from Christians trying to find a secure place in the Roman Empire, to the institutionalization of Christianity within the Roman Empire, to the spread of Christianity throughout the Near East, Northern Africa, Asia, and Europe, regions which had independent effects on Christianity, or perhaps we could say, Christianities (so telling that my spell-checker insists I've misspelled that).

That's another tenet, the splintering of Christianity along overlapping regional and doctrinal lines.  John's "Word," would be read and spoken in very many different ways in the early centuries of Christianity. There were stormy debates over the how to reconcile Christ's human and divine natures, disagreements over the still nascent trinitarian theology, among many other doctrinal disputes.  And then there were the "heresies," variations on Christianity that challenged different aspects of an orthodoxy that was eventually constructed, from the Gnostic rejection of the idea that the divine Christ was fully human to the Manichaean argument that humans lived within an ongoing, evenly matched battle between good and evil.  There was a "sheer variety of Christianity from its earliest days: a vital lesson to learn for Christians who wish to impose a uniformity on Christian belief and practice which has never in fact existed." (pp. 176-177).

MacCullough dots the book with these little shots over the bows of orthodoxy.  For example, some of the early biblical scholars argued against a literal interpretation.  The 3rd century Origen wrote:

'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?'

"Origen might be saddened," MacCullough writes, "to find that seventeen hundred years later, millions of Christians are that silly" (p. 151).  The Bible, according to this early Church father, is not to be read as accurate history, but as stories with divinely inspired truth.  But that is about as harsh at the author gets in this generally genial account of Christianity.

A dryly witty one at times, too.  He writes that a turning point in Augustine's life was an encounter with ambitious bureaucrat who questioned his ambition after reading about Christian ascetic in the book Life of Antony:

Now Augustine determined on his own abandonment of ambition, leaving his teaching career to follow Antony's example--after a fashion, for his was to be the life of the desert minus the desert and plus a good library (p. 303)

Well, it made me chuckle.

I suppose I have two issues with this history.  As I've noted, he examines the Jewish and Greek roots of Christianity, but talks little about other syncretic origins of today's Christian beliefs and rituals--the blending of Christian practice with preceding "pagan" religions (e.g., Christmas superimposed over the Roman Saturnalia; various saints attached to prior deities, like Mexico's La Virgin de Guadalupe, a Christian reincarnation of the Nahua goddess, Tonantzin), or intriguing similarities between Christian myths and others, such as the story of the flood (think Gilgamesh, or the Native American Indian story about Mt. Jefferson in my beloved state of Oregon), or the widespread version in ancient stories of a virgin woman giving birth to a god, or a god dying and then rising from the dead (as suggested in Joseph Campbell's Power of Myth, or artfully referenced in Neil Gaimon's American Gods).

Another is his contention that gender is at the center of surge of religious fundamentalism, not just in Christianity, but other major faith traditions.

Why? I would hazard that the anger centres on a profound shift in gender roles which have traditionally been given a religious significance and validated by religious traditions. It embodies the hurt of heterosexual men at cultural shifts which have generally threatened to marginalize them and deprive them of dignity, hegemony or even much usefulness--not merely heterosexual men already in positions of leadership, but those who in traditional cultural systems would expect to inherit leadership (p. 990).

No doubt MacCullough's personal struggle with his church over homosexuality is one reason he settled on the gender factor, and he backs his claim with sociological findings that religious fundamentalism has been "especially attractive to 'literate but jobless, unmarried male youths marginalized and disenfranchised by the juggernaut of modernity'" (p. 991).  And for sure the Catholic church and later Protestant denominations have made control of sexual behavior a key component of doctrinal teachings--from Catholic Marian cults and celibacy, to Protestant holiness movements segregating men and women, with strict rules about fraternization between them (I remember the sober instruction during my fundy days that any sexual contact with a woman outside of marriage, including french kissing, was fornication).

But Christian fundamentalism in the US surged and coalesced in the early 1900s, and fundamentalist ire centered on the theory of evolution and literary criticism, both of which challenged a literalist approach to the Bible.  The 1925 Scopes trial--a legal challenge to the prohibition against teaching evolution in a public school--sent fundamentalists into a retreat from politics, but the point here is that gender was at best an indirect factor in this development (the first wave of feminism had won the vote with the 1920 19th Amendment).  Also, there are many, many women who affiliate with fundamentalist churches.  "Modernity" is not just about shifting gender roles, but an array of factors that challenge religious orthodoxy in the US--not just science and its bogeyman, evolution, but growing religious pluralism.

But these are minor quibbles.  I highly recommend the book to anyone looking for a thorough, global survey of the history of Christianity.  It isn't hagiography.  But it's certainly not the opposite.  MacCulluch's passion for the story of Christianity is obvious.  His tone is not one of "Look how awful those Christians have been," though I suppose some could read it to gather ammunition against Christianity.  Rather, it's as if MacCulloch wants us to shake our heads along with him, wondering over the incredible origins and development, and rapid spread and diversification of Christianity.