Diarmaid MacCullochReseñas

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/all-things-made-new-by-diarmaid-macculloch/

I hugely enjoyed MacCulloch’s massive History of Christianity when I read it in 2012; this is a shorter collection of essays on different aspects of the Reformation. I found most of it very interesting, though I must admit I had not heard of Richard Hooker and am little the wiser now. But in general, it’s a set of please for English Reformation history to be understood as a specifically English historical experience, but also one that was linked to developments on the European continent and which also had reverberations in America. (I wish there had been more on Scotland and Ireland, or indeed Wales, but this is a collection of pieces mainly published elsewhere so it’s unreasonable to expect global coverage.)

MacCulloch comes back to the question of English religious texts several times, and explains why on the one hand the King James Version (and he unpacks that name) is used for most of the Anglican services, but on the other the Psalms are generally Myles Coverdale’s version. There’s also an interesting short piece on the Bay Psalm Book, the first book in English known to have been published in America (in Boston, in 1640). I like that sort of thing myself, though of course we have to be aware that we tend to focus on the artefacts that survive from history which can lead to a lack of perspective on less tangible things.

Christianity, one of the world's great religions, has had an incalculable impact on human history. This book describes the main ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organisation and spirituality, and how it has changed politics, sex, and human society.

For most of the book, my biggest problem is one that's basically impossible to solve in something with such a sweeping objective - too much stuff passes by in a flurry of names and dates without enough detail to understand it. To be clear he does go into detail on some stuff! But I kept finding myself wanting more. And obviously that's an unreasonable ask in even a big book on the history of 2000 years.

When it gets to modern times it's more things that I have Strong Opinions on and feel a bit hmm about. He talks about the French Revolution for a couple of pages and it's just a depiction of it as a ridiculous, horrific bolt from the blue with no motivation other than murderous terror, leading to him defending the Catholic church and presenting it as the *actual* popular movement. The line "Against a French Revolution which represented more than two decades of male nationalist violence, the Church found itself managing an international uprising of women - what has been termed with a pleasing overturning of modern sociological assumptions 'ultramontane feminism'" made me put the book down - it's an erasure of women's role in the French revolution, an erasure of the entire history of male violence that's been a significant factor in the church, and an erasure of actual feminism in favour of a movement devoted to subjection to a male-only church.

The bigger issue here is that it puts his failures to cast judgement in other areas into a worse light, and the most egregious example is slavery. It becomes more and more obvious that the examples he's using are 95% the positive examples of Christian resistance to slavery while giving very limited space to the dominant Christian slavery defending and racist views. He mentions the way Noah's curse on his grandson in genesis became a tool for biblical justification of racism...but incredibly he focuses on it (apparently) having first been stated by a Jewish scholar and then follows up with reference to "scientific" racism to soften the blow. He emphasises evangelicals' role in the abolition of the slave trade, focusing inevitably on Wilberforce and insisting it was a mostly moral decision, then mentions the colonisation projects of Sierra Leone and Liberia, where a racial hierarchy was created on the basis of which Africans were sufficiently Christian, with no greater judgment that that it later caused "troubles". To a large extent I assume he thinks the bad will speak for itself, but the extent to which he minimises the culpability of Christian institutions or at least hedges it with the language of good intentions is noticeable and pretty bad. The sections on Christianisation of the Americas are also particularly bad on this - emphasising the "good" of syncretism and cooperation of native elites and the examples of those who spoke out against the genocide while barely paying attention to Christianity as justification for said genocide.

A particularly clear example: he dedicates 4 good sized paragraphs to the American Civil War. First he splits Evangelicals 3 ways - abolitionists/slavers/african americans. He describes the defence of slavery as rather bizarrely "sliding" into white supremacy and explicitly makes the point that both abolitionists and slavers were "equally angry". Then he states the outbreak of the civil war, where the "tensions exploded into fighting" and it was "ostensibly not about slavery but about individual states' rights to make decisions on slavery for themselves" without explaining further. And then we get the line "Already the rhetoric of the struggle had been cast in terms of Christian moral crusade, thanks to the barely sane actions of a fervent Calvinist from a family long committed to the abolitionist cause, John Brown."

Woah. Hang on. "Barely sane"? After a couple of paragraphs which explicitly did not include any moral condemnation of slavers and muddied the waters instead of preventing the facts which condemn them, suddenly John Brown is brought up just to attack him. The whole paragraph after I'll quote here. I may well be making too much of it! But it bothers me.

Brown came from the same generation as Joseph Smith, and he remains just as controversial a figure, though nature endowed him with more potential than Smith for looking like an Old Testament prophet Proud of a New England Puritan heritage but unusual among abolitionists in embracing violence for the cause amid the rising tide of violence in the Midwest, he reversed the dictum of the High Priest Caiaphas on the death of Jesus, proclaiming that 'it was better that a score of bad men should die than that one man who came here to make Kansas a Free State should be driven out'. Accordingly in 1856 he was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of five pro-slavery activists, but despite that hardly defensible crime, his Northern canonization as an abolitionist martyr came as a result of his seizure of an undefended Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry three years later. When the raid failed to arouse a black insurrection, Brown sat tight in the arsenal and waited to be martyred, which the Commonwealth of Virginia duly did, for the moment casting oblivion over the crazy character of his campaign. A Massachusetts newspaper editorial picked up the mood: 'no event . . . could so deepen the moral hostility of the people of the free states to slavery as this execution'.

The comparison to Smith is bizarre. He completely elides the horrific context of "Bleeding Kansas" to make it seem like Brown's words are just an absurd unprovoked piece of violence. His "campaign" was "crazy" - before this point the term crazy isn't used by him pejoratively and talk of sanity is only used of Ivan the Terrible and John of Leyden (as an aside, John of Leyden is presented as an evil figure in the 1 sentence about him, but it's unsourced and looking it up Wikipedia points out all the sources on him are by his enemies who were massacring Anabaptists. weird pattern, this). By not putting any of this into context he's made John Brown's actions inexplicable and therefore the abolitionist support of him too.

The next paragraph then completely changes tone as we go back to the slavers' perspective. Apparently "the suddenness of the change in Southern society, the freeing of four million human beings, was a deep trauma to add to the sheer destructiveness and death of the war itself," which feels a pretty gross way of talking about it. "Southerners [a term here clearly excluding Black people] took revenge on Black Christians [excluding a lot of Black people!]" "They also viewed their own plight as that of an endangered victim culture. For the prominent Southern Baptist pastor in South Carolina and Alabama E. T. Winkler, that sense justified his defence of the Ku Klux Klan to Northern Baptists in 1872 as an example of necessary 'temporary organizations for the redress of intolerable grievances'. It was unlikely that he would apply the same argument to any temporary organizations which threatened blacks might form... "The scars persist in American society to this day."

None of this is a serious handling of the American Civil War, Reconstruction or slavery in America. By not providing any context to the naive reader, focusing on the "crazy" John Brown and repeating a narrative that slaver sympathisers hold today with only mild implicit criticism - and surely accidentally but dodgily implicitly tying Black personhood to Christianity, readers will come away with a very warped view.

The problem is as I said before it's clear who's getting the benefit of the doubt. The section on Mormons incredibly avoids criticism of the church. Mormon polygamy is mentioned but it's emphasised that Brigham Young, a horrible misogynist racist, implemented polygamy "with as much public decorum as the nineteenth century would wish". The end of it is an "incursion of external liberal values" along with the allowing of Black men into the priesthood - the racist ban is not explained at all. Almost unbelievably he refers to the revoke of the ban as "allowing men of Negro descent" to become priests - I believe this is a quote but it's not in quotes. He says "Wholesome prosperity... has become a worldwide Mormon speciality". It's a bizarre whitewashing.

As it moves through the modern era you get a description of the civil war that presents the Republicans as the aggressors against the Catholic Church and describes their purported crimes against the clergy in lurid detail for several paragraphs while again giving no context of Spain's horrifically unequal society at the time. Then for "balance" he mentions that Franco set up an authoritarian secret police but with no details. The average reader is going to come away thinking the Nationalists were right.

I've put up with enough. I got about 90% in so I didn't technically finish but close enough. I'm not reading any more and can't seriously recommend it given his constant willingness to cover for the right wing established order and for Christians in general as against misleading and outright dangerous slavery apologism used to describe the people who tried to change things. Screw this.

Very satisfying out line of Western Church history, not Orthodox, from Greek times on. Done in 1987 when a junior lecturer at Cuddeston. Intro about philosophy and Christian development and last few chapters on church problems recently very insightful. A work of description rather than commitment. Also good stuff about history, strong on philosophy.½

This is based on a 6-hour long series of lectures McCulloch gave. The audiobook is 8 hours, and it isn't read by MacCulloch, which is a shame if you enjoyed his narration of the BBC version of his History of Christianity. In any case, this seems to encompass a lot more than silence and covers much of the same ground as his book version of the History of Christianity. At times it is very interesting, but for some stretches it isn't. The brief sections toward the end about Christian silence about the Holocaust and Slavery were interesting as well as the discussion of child abuse covered up by the church. But as you can see from these examples, the author has strayed a bit far from his original treatment of silence in terms of silent prayer or the silence of monasteries. I don't recommend this unless you are a big fan of MacCulloch or religious history in general. (Although I definitely agree with the other reviewer who said it works better as a book than a lecture.)

McCulloch's video series is a good companion to his book, but leaves you with a different feeling. Perhaps it's the religious people from all over the world he talks with, but what emerges is a more positive view of a living Christianity--especially Protestant--than in the book. Just seeing the faces of worshippers in the world's largest church in Seoul or the commitment of the market ladies in Ghana makes a non-believer such as myself nod my head in grudging respect--not that I'm about to become a believer. But it is easy to see how important religion is for so many people. The six hours here aren't nearly enough to tell the story in the depth that the book does, so it becomes a bit of a travelogue as McCulloch travels all over the world. Much of the video we see consists of him going up steps, gazing out at rivers or other scenes, or drinking beer or coffee while narrating. But somehow it all works. He is a very compelling speaker and in his white hat, which we see him take off again and again as he enters buildings, he is an enviable, relaxed model of stylishness. Not only that, he seems to speak German and French (as well as Latin and probably Hebrew and Greek), and he even plays the organ in Germany. If I had a stylish hat, I would take it off to him.

There's not a lot to fault here. The fascinating story occasionally gets bogged down in religious terminology and you may need a scorecard to keep track of all the various players art some point, but McCulloch's narrative is compelling and fair. This is not a book about the truth of the bible or the integrity of biblical text, although it touches upon those matters. It is more a book about the beginnings of the Christian Church, its success in putting down early heresies, then its later splits into Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant (and all the sub-varieties within at least the last two of these.) Along the way a modern reader should be repulsed by the violence committed in the name of religion--I won't even say in the name of god, although I'm an atheist, since it is so clearly about preserving the hegemony of one church or another. McCulloch tries to point out good things along the way, and a few folks do emerge as principled and thinking. But the church leadership (see The Bad Popes for some good examples) is often out of touch with reality. Infallibility? Give me a break. The last part of the book focuses on the changing nature of Christianity after its separation from government. McCulloch makes some hopeful noises, and yes, despite those of us who just wish it would go away, religion still holds a central part in the lives of people all over the world, including well over two billion Christians. I just have to be honest and admit that they are going to outlast me. But books like this do provide a better understanding of and even some enjoyment in Christianity.½

Hard to rate: extremely well researched and presented but all in all, a bit dry.

This was a rather long and rambling history. To be fair, any history that is trying to cover so much is likely to be so, but I came away feeling that I learned very little because there was no structure to stick the information to. It was just 40 hours (audio version) of fact after fact after fact.

As a casual reader of history, I want my history woven onto some framework. Not forced into it, but given enough consistent presentation that the reader can build a mental model. Of course, the choice of any such framework is going to necessarily mean that some things are left out, but the reader will remember more.

To be more concrete, with respect to this book, MacCulloch tried to cover both Christianity in its context as a mover of European history and many of the theological debates over Christianity's history (as well as much more). If he had just stuck to one -- e.g., the European historical perspective, bringing in the theological debates only when they effect the political situation -- then the book would have been more coherent.

Overall, I've gotten much more pleasure out of the more narrow histories I have read, such as Karen Armstrong's [b:The Bible A Biography|520771|The Bible A Biography|Karen Armstrong|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1328774634s/520771.jpg|1980253]. They don't cover nearly so much, but they are actually memorable.

This book is a dense tome of christian history and as comprehensive and extensive as it is, you'll probably need to re-read it. There are just too many strands of history and theology interwoven to have it all stick on one read through. The book should be read side by side with a history of Europe, since the evolution of christianity is so closely linked to the historical political changes, however MacCulloch doesn't make the mistake of seeing everything through the "politics through other means" lens (until, arguably, the end of the book). Theological changes are allowed to be the origin of political change and movements, rather than the reverse.

The weakest part of the book is clearly the last that extends into modern history where it becomes wrapped up in the politics of near history and doesn't have the page count and depth left to substantiate much of what it claims. But it is easily forgivable given the very readable and comprehensive history that precedes it.

I first read this book when it was published. It is so full of insight that I am rereading it (actually listening to Audible version because of sight problems). MacCulloch’s book is excellent. If it has one fault, it is the level of detail and his organization that attempts to relate events, movements, and agents across Europe in more or less real historical time. This results in a back and forth between countries and regions that can become mind-boggling as the people being discussed are constantly changing. I don’t fault the organization per se, but I simply don’t have enough familiarity with the various actors in this drama: many are obscure though the author generally explains how they fit into the Reformation or Counter-Reformation. What I guess I will have to find is another book that supplements this one. I am not criticizing Macculloch. His work is magisterial. Rather my own ignorance of so much of this history is the bigger problem.

Dairmaid MacCulloch has written the most complete and comprehensive history of Christianity I have ever seen. Unlike so many authors who follow the trail of their own particular expression of Christianity MacCulloch follows every trail including the ones that dead ended and those that left just small isolated unique communities. I thought I had a sound handle on Christian history but I learned more than a few things from this book. I particularly learned more about those expressions that the dominate elements labeled heresy. This author does not pass judgement on which expressions of Christianity are right or wrong and I appreciated that. The book drags in places and some passages are quite dry, it took me a long time to finish, but I was worth the work. I am sorry this book was not available when I was a seminarian.

I've only read about a quarter of this (about up to the Council of Trent), but it is a fabulous book that I recommend at every possible opportunity. The author is Anglican, which gives him a reasonable claim to be in the /via media/ between Catholic and Protestant, and what I most appreciated about his perspective is that he gives the benefit of the doubt to all participants. He assumes that both sides were by and large acting in good faith -- an assumption which neither side made about the other at the time!

He also pauses periodically to wonder, "If something at this point had happened differently -- if a key player had chosen a different action -- might the schism of the Reformation have been avoided?" Which is a terrific question, because it's not like there weren't any disputes over doctrine or authority in the previous 1500 years of the Western church, so why did this one end up so differently?

A particular treat is the first chapter of the book, in which he gives a flavor of the late medieval Catholic church: basically the "Before" picture of the Reformation.

I read this for two courses in Christian History. It is an impressive tome chock full of information; a valuable resource. One warning, MacCulloch's biases sometimes get in the way of providing full information and there are plenty of times that an editor could have made the book much better by removing unnecessary snarkiness.

Confronted with the challenge of writing about an era too well-known, Lytton Strachey advised how the explorer of the past would proceed: “He will row out over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from the far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.” This magisterial history of the Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch is a prolonged exercise in doing just that.
This is a subject I know a thing or two about, yet his text is liberally sprinkled with facts, insights and interpretations new to me, all of it told in an off-hand style that makes it seem as if he’s just sitting and chatting with you in a diffident way. Yet never did I feel that his examples were mere curiosities; invariably they illuminated the topic under discussion.
The section of New Possibilities: Paper and Printing (70–76) is a case in point. Many have made the connection between the invention of movable type and the rapid spread of the ideas of Luther and other Reformers. But MacCulloch thinks further. The rapid proliferation of (affordable) books made it worthwhile to learn to read—this, before 1516. In turn, the proliferation of profitable printers created an opportunity for new texts. The modern concept of “author” had its birth then. And it surely wasn’t accidental that it was only then that the Index was created: an attempt to control which of the new flood of books should not be read.
I also found enlightening his assertion that the Reformation can be seen as a conflict within the legacy of Augustine, with Luther emphasizing the inability of a human to work toward his or her own salvation, making him or her utterly dependent on God’s grace, while his opponents oriented themselves on Augustine’s stress on the need for obedience to the church to attain salvation.
The author shows throughout how much can be gained by considering how social, economic and political aspects of life then factored into the Reformation yet at the same time maintains the centrality of theology. People then were in dead earnest about matters of belief.
One feature of the book is its continent-wide scale. Too often, an emphasis on German-speaking Europe obscures the interesting developments to the east. Another is that after 500 pages of roughly chronological treatment, the author adds a section entitled Patterns of Life dealing with a variety of topics such as the use of images, the frenzy with regard to witches, and matters related to family and sexuality, focusing both on aspects that remained the same despite the split in Western Christianity, as well as what changed.
This is a thick book: my paperback copy has 700 pages of text set in small type, supplemented by suggestions for further reading, notes and an index. It may be more than the casual reader cares to digest. But with the 500th anniversary of the outbreak of the Reformation rapidly approaching, I say with confidence that if you read only one book on the topic, this would be an excellent choice.

After Wolf Hall, I was thirsty to learn more about the era. This was a great next step. Thorough, well-told, balanced in its judgments.

Almost five hundred pages into this tome, and we have barely crossed into the second millennium! This is a detailed, unhurried sort of account of the 2000 odd years of Christianity (3000 if one co-opts the previous, Hebrew age of the Old Testament), encompassing a truly astounding time span and geographical spread. For a reader like me who was not born in the community, nor grew into the faith, this account does not serve to enlist one's sympathy or understanding. The main response is one of surprise, that a religion which was supposed to be based on compassion and forgiveness, has given rise to so much sheer violence and brutality. Much of that was apparently directed at fellow-religionists who happened to favor a slightly different cosmic outlook. It passes all comprehension how grown men could be ready to break bones and strip off flesh to impose their own version of such abstruse ideas as the nature of god and the soul. The author affords one explanation, almost in passing: when the Roman Empire (the original, before the Holy one) was broken up by the northern tribesmen a few centuries after Christ, the deposed Roman gentry needed some alternative structure to find a political role for themselves... and what better than an organized religion to do so! So the Christian church developed into a fighting, and conquering, force, rather than a motley crowd of fearful vegetarians like some others.

A line about the style: it is clear and direct, making it easy to read. On the minus side, however, is its immense length, over a thousand pages of close spaced and small type (in the edition I have). This demands the investment of a sizable chunk of one's life, in an enterprise that finally yields little instruction or enlightenment, and strains one's sense of optimism about human civilization. This makes it a less than ideal means of understanding the Christian faith and its history.

24. Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch
reader: David Rintoul
published: 2018
format: 26:38 audible audio (728 pages in hardcover)
acquired: April 28
listened: Apr 28 – Jun 11
rating: 4½
locations: mostly 1520-1540 London
about the author: Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford, born in Kent, 1951

I don‘t think it gets much more thorough than this biography. I listened while reading Mantel‘s [The Mirror and the Light]. Working through these at the same time was really interesting and helpful, and a little confusing when things didn't quite align. Thomas Cromwell had a whirlwind sort of reign as Henry VIII‘s primary and closest and most powerful advisor. So much happened. Most is actually in Mantel. MacCulloch offers sources, thorough documentation, endless details and some variations in personalities and themes. He very closely reflects Mantel's end of her trilogy, and many of the key things he quotes or sites here are in Mantel, and, I guess, it's a little surprising some are factual.

The first thing I noticed, when listening, was the amount of detail and the endless introduction of new names...something which never seems to slow down till the book ends. David Rintoul reads it all relentlessly, not catching his own breath, and it felt to me like that is the correct way to read it.

The largest theme here is one Mantel first seems to quietly not acknowledge, then later brings in but down plays. Thomas Cromwell was a religious man and a devout Evangelical reformer. This meant he had some specific and heretical ideas about the mass and a few other details, and also that he felt strongly the bible should be translated into English. (He supported William Tyndale, the executed provocative translator who's work makes up about 90% of the King James bible) When he came into political life, switching from his business life, Cromwell wasn't just hired as a lawyer. He had a mission. When his employer and protector, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, once a potential pope, came down, Cromwell stuck with Wolsey to the end of his fall, but miraculously wasn't destroyed. Instead he caught the attention of Henry VIII. He began to gain favor personally with the king. He would eventually become the dominant force in Henry's reign until the capricious king was convinced to turn on him - and did in a manner consistent to how Henry handled his wives. Cromwell is kind of another divorce. But before this fall Cromwell pushed throughout England, Wales and even Ireland his own Evangelical agenda - and he did right in the open, under the kings nose, and yet without the king fully realizing what was happening. Cromwell kept is name out of all this activity, but remained the force, the mover and shaker of English Christian reform.

But it was an odd thing where it everyone except the king seemed to know Cromwell was driving this reform, and there was a lot of fall out. While it's hinted at in Mantels novel, the Pilgrimage of Grace uprising was specifically targeted at Thomas Cromwell and his closing of monasteries (allowing the king and nobles to usurp the wealthy productive church lands); and the intellectual drive of this uprising was a conservative religious movement that ran counter to Cromwell's ideas. (Both evangelical and the religious conservatives of this era supported King Henry VIII fully as both king and head of the church. If they didn't see Henry at head of the church, they were considered papist, closer to today's Catholic). The rebellion wanted Cromwell destroyed. He survived this uprising still in Henry's good graces, but with significantly less power. He would get his revenge (as Mantel covers). Cromwell was eventually undermined by religious conservatives.

Other extra details here were how Cromwell's brewer/blacksmith father was actually respected enough that people spoke well of him, nothing really hinting at Mantel's monster. And the exploration of Cromwell's true character seems to come out a little contrary to Mantel's version. Instead of a cerebral, problem solver, the historical Cromwell seems to have been an obsessive control freak with an uncontainable anger. He badgered everyone verbally and harshly and with an almost angry gusto. Those attacked included very powerful people with whom he need to stay on his good side.

The most moving is Cromwell's fall. His arrest is a dramatic display of anger and physical violence and insulting. Eventually he was physically overpowered and arrested. His letters to the king from his prison in the Tower of London are preserved, including his endnote where he wrote, "Most gracious Prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!" Cromwell had taken a lot people down, including orchestrating Anne Boleyn's fall, and beheading, along with the execution of her brother and several political enemies of his, all accused of liaisons with the supposedly sex-crazed queen. And he took down, or compromised many of most powerful noble families, and left the others in fear of him, and therefore either active in his fall, or uninterested in assisting him after. Actually Cromwell is essentially abandoned by everyone after his fall, except the archbishop he had worked with so closely, Thomas Cranmer, who wrote Henry a moving plea for Cromwell that avoided exposing himself to danger. Ultimately Cranmer would vote for his conviction, but he had no choice. Those closest to Cromwell could not support him without endangering themselves, including his own son. It's a little tricky to know which of his supporters mainly protected themselves, and which simply were not terribly upset at his fall, but the general silence is notable. Cromwell would make a graceful death, giving important speeches within the tight limits that would not endanger his family, but also gave no ground and ultimately challenged his religious opponents, albeit gently.

Anyway, I've gotten lost here. Tons of overwhelming detail within, and also a lot of fascinating stuff.

2021
https://www.librarything.com/topic/330945#7529156½

This kind of book is exactly why the adjective "magisterial" was invented. It's so learned, engaging, and comprehensive that by the time you finish it your mind feels full. It's nothing less than an attempt at a truly "ecumenical" (pun intended) history of Christianity, covering not only its temporal history, which as you can tell by the subtitle goes back much farther than the BC-AD line, but also all of the different denominations, their doctrinal disputes, the major figures, philosophical lineages, and how the various Christian faiths changed and were changed by the countries they touched. If that sounds just a little too ambitious to be doable, let me say that MacCullouch pulls it off magnificently. He seems equally comfortable recounting the most well-known events in Christianity, like the Council of Nicaea and the Reformation, as he does delving into the most obscure sects and controversies, and he is admirably even-handed when he gets into the weeds of the many, many schisms and splits Christianity has undergone since before the ink was dry on the very first epistle.

I think I found the controversies most interesting: Miaphysitism vs. Diaphysitism, Monophysitism vs. Nestorianism, Arianism vs. Trinitarianism, transubstantiation vs. consubstantiation, iconophilia vs. iconoclasm, faith vs. works, making the sign of the cross with three fingers vs. making it with two, and more, in an unbelievable, one might say miraculous profusion. I enjoyed reading about them not because I'm a smug atheist (although I am), but because even though these violent, frequently lethal disputes seem maddeningly pointless all these years later, they bring home how nobody is exempt from the unquenchable human need to split hairs and make mountains out of molehills. Someday many of the issues I care about will be totally irrelevant, and even though I can claim that at least I'm not wasting my time arguing over just how many loaves and fishes got multiplied or the proverbial angels dancing on a pin, it's humbling to see all these obviously smart people like Aquinas and Augustine spend their time on Earth wrestling with Big Questions through the medium of theology. Who can say what will seem ridiculous thousands of years in the future, and aren't we still dealing with many of the same questions of meaning and purpose that troubled these ancient people? It really helps put your own concerns in perspective, although quite frankly it's tough not to feel smug when you're reading about the sacred towel Mandylion, or some of the weirder cults like the Skoptsis, who had mandatory castration for initiates (!!!).

Where MacCullouch's curating and narrative genius really shines through is in knotting together all these narrative threads across millennia and continents into the full story of one of the most influential ideas in world history. Time and time again a group of people will try to freeze their belief system into an orthodoxy, and then it will fracture under the weight of numbers, or through contact with another group, or from some lone individual convinced they've gotten a True Revelation. Then to these spiritual arguments you add the political dimension - the Byzantine Empire in particular was frequently crippled by religious arguments, but the lesson about the perils of entangling spiritual and political power is universally applicable. I finished this book on Easter Sunday, interestingly enough, and although I'll still never be able to understand how people can believe that someone magically came back from the dead, I think I have a greater appreciation for how this need for mystery and worship has endured over time.

A rigorously fair, well-written account of the Reformation - starting well before Luther and ending well after him. It put me in the minds of the people of the time; taking their ideologies and arguments seriously and avoiding patronizing answers that might overly rely on sociology or psychology.

I'm planning to read his "All Things Made New" next.

I had to a set a no-Wikipedia rule in order to actually get through the book - it was full of fascinating topics that set the stage for more reading. But some themes came through clearly -- the diversity of belief across time and geography and the universality of violence across the same.

An interesting collection of essays on the Reformation, with a primary focus on England. They vary widely in length, focus, and tone. I found it fascinating to see what a top-notch historian thinks of the debates that shaped and continue to shape our prayer and worship.

started off really interesting and well written but seemed to turn into a long list of names of different saints, martyrs, bishops, philosophers etc with not enough words in between.

A thorough and readable history of the Protestant Reformation, both of the events and people but also, crucially, of the ideas. One will come out of this book knowing not just who Martin Luther and John Calvin were and what they did, but what beliefs animated them and fueled the tumultuous two centuries of conflict where men burned other men over disagreements about the manner in which bread was turned into wine during the Holy Eucharist. A long read, but accessible.

Christian Faith and Change
This is a one volume history of Christianity. That’s not an easy task, even in a volume with 1184 pages. The author succeeds in it, beginning with the origins of christian faith (greek and judaic thought) and examining the constitution and development of the Christian Church in the West and in the East. Diarmaid MacCulloch argues that the longevity and success of the Christian Faith is derived in great measure to its capacity to accommodate change. Dogmatism and fanaticism, history shows, didn’t always prevails. The book emphasizes the main facts in christian’s history and explains the history’s backgrounds of their development. This
is an enlightening work, specially for the students of Christian Church and beliefs.