And that’s not all. MacCulloch convincingly argues that the Western Church hierarchy grew out of the Roman Empire’s bureaucracy:

One suspects that capable and energetic men who would previously have entered imperial service . . . now entered the Church as the main career option available to them . . . The Western Church has remained notable for the presence within its clerical ranks of a great many who are interested in clear rules and tidy filing systems . . . Western theology has been characterized by a tidy-mindedness which reflects the bureaucratic precision of the Latin language: not always to the benefit of its spirituality. (p. 320)

MacCulloch uses “men” here purposefully; elsewhere he discusses women religious figures, including witches, beguines and mystics as well as several administrative geniuses who founded convents and other communities for women. And remember, in reading this paragraph, that the Western Church did not seriously embrace celibacy for its clergy who were not monks until around the 12th century.

There are many more examples–descriptions of the minimal religiosity of the American Founding Fathers, the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church in concert with the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, or the heartbreaking description of the centuries of religious tolerance in Poland that was upended in the 19th century, with tragic results in the 20th. MacCulloch points out that there is no ending to his book; I will leave you with one more long quotation:

Throughout the world at the present day, the most easily heard tone in religion (not just Christianity) is of a generally angry conservatism. 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 has been observed by sociologists of religion that the most extreme forms of conservatism to be found in modern world religions . . . are especially attractive to ‘literate but jobless, unmarried male youths marginalized and disenfranchised by the juggernaut of modernity’–in other words, those whom modernity has created, only to fail to offer them any worthwhile purpose. (p. 991)

This is a history for all of us. Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com.

But wait, you say. This is 2011, only 2000 and a few more years into the Common Era (the time that used to be called, in a western-centric way, AD). How does MacCulloch get off using 3000 years in his title? Christianity was deeply rooted in Greek and Jewish philosophy, thought, and liturgy, and MacCulloch spends the first 75 pages of the book tracing those roots, starting at 1000 BCE. He then moves on to the historical Jesus, and the very uncertain beginnings of Christianity. Along the way he describes routes and theologies not taken, like the Nestorian heresy, the Greek roots of words like heresy, and the lengthy efforts to reconcile the divinity and humanity of Christ. (“You’d think they’d have figured that out by now,” my then 10-year-old son commented during a visit to the Vatican a few years ago.) MacCulloch makes the doctrinal, theological, and, critically, political reasons behind why they haven’t very clear.

I’m now almost 300 pages into the book. I’ve just finished MacCulloch’s description of recent archeological discoveries in China that demonstrate how an Eastern version Christianity thrived in China in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, as well as his observations of the peculiar nature of African Christianity, and the impact of the rise of Islam. All this is grouped under a heading “Vanishing Futures: East and South (451-1500). The span of time and space covered in this section is astonishing, and MacCulloch, without any apparent effort, ushers his facts into clarity and order. The book has revelations (though not the religious kind) on every page, and is very fun indeed to read. After all, where else have you seen a description like this:

Hesiod’s Theogony named the first divinity as Chaos; among the divinities who emerged from him, representing the cosmos spawned out of chaos, was Gaia, the Earth. Gaia’s son Ouranos/Uranus (the Sky) incestuously mated with his mother and had twelve children, whom he forced back in Gaia’s womb; Gaia’s youngest son, Kronos/Cronus, castrated his father, Ouranos, before in turn committing incest with his sister and attempting to murder all their children. How unlike the home life of the Christian Trinity.

The BBC ran a TV show exploring MacCullough’s ideas around the time the book was published in the UK. Here’s a link to the trailer.

I admit to reading the book with cell phone at hand, so I can quickly look up various doctrines and events, though the book is generously cross-referenced. Are you reading this book? Finding it fun? Heavy going? A bit of both? What are your favorite lines, descriptions, puns? Discuss in the comments.

Christianity: The First 3000 Years

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Viking Press 2010, 1,161 pages, including notes and index