What I’m Reading: Christianity – The First Three Thousand Years

If the Church (in all it’s forms and formulas through the years and around the globe) is the “body of Christ”, after reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s massive Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years I wonder how often Jesus must cry out with the apostle Paul, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

MacCulloch does an admirable job of compressing three millennia of history into a very readable book of just over 1,000 pages.  It’s a large book.  It would have to be to cover so much history.  But as much detail as MacCulloch has included, there was so much more that, because of space limitations, he was compelled to leave out.   The first thousand years of MacCulloch’s history of the Church probes the Greek and Hebrew worlds from which Christianity was born.  And then with a careful attention to detail, but a narrative that never bores (well, almost never) he summarizes the ebb and flow, the rise and fall, the highs and lows of Christianity around the world and through the years.  I really like the attention that he gives to non-western Christian traditions. Christianity wasn’t exclusively European, after all.

But what began to bother me as I read through this history of the Church is that MacCulloch chose to focus on the political aspects of Christian history.  This isn’t a fault.  The book is excellent and MacCulloch covers a huge amount of material with precision.  But what I found myself wanting was less of a book about the political machinations and territorial squabbling and expansion of the Church and more history of the theology and practice of the Church.  Of course infighting over theology and practice has influenced the political machinations of the Church, so MacCulloch does describe them, but only with enough detail to explain why Pope so and so XII did this and why Archbishop what’s-his-name said this that or the other.

As I read I began to wonder if Jesus ever borrows Paul’s words, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?”  The body of Christ has a scandalous record of vicious infighting.  From the Miaphysite / Dyophysite controversy to the Great Schism of 1054 to the violence between Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation to the propensity of Protestant denominations to break into competing denominations and the continued reluctance to embrace any sort of ecumenical cooperation in some contemporary denominations.  The body of Christ seems anything but unified, anything but healthy.

But I know that this must be only part of the story. 

Which is why I’d like to read a history of the Church that focused less on what King so and so did in the year 1540 and more on what Christians in Iraq believed in the 4^th century and the way that they worshipped…

If you want a concise (and yes, even at 1000+ pages it’s still concise) history of the Church – with an emphasis on the political aspects of that history – MacCulloch’s book is a good one.