A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Christianity is, at root, a personality cult.

As well as telling stories, my book asks questions. It tries to avoid giving too many answers, since this habit has been one of the great vices of organized religion.

There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.

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.

Western Christians would have to decide for themselves which aspect of Augustine’s thought mattered more: his emphasis on obedience to the Catholic Church or the discussion of salvation which lay behind the rebellion by Martin Luther and other theologians in his generation. From one perspective, a century or more of turmoil in the Western Church from 1517 was a debate in the mind of the long-dead Augustine.

He wanted to talk about grace; his opponents wanted to talk about authority. That chasm of purposes explains how an argument about a side alley of medieval soteriology escalated into the division of Europe.

Referring to Martin Luther

Yet Baptists gave no single opinion on the Revolution, mindful of the angry reaction which they had provoked in that same Continental Congress when they had complained about New England’s compulsory levies for the established Congregational Church. The irony of the revolutionary slogan ‘no taxation without representation’ was not lost on Baptists.

American Roman Catholicism too has largely left the Counter-Reformation behind, and in much of its behaviour and attitudes, it has been enrolled as a subset of the American Protestant religious scene.

For many in the nineteenth century, nationalism became an emotional replacement for the Christian religion.

in the perceptive words of one Orthodox priestly theologian born in post-1917 exile, ‘if there is a feature of “Russian” Orthodoxy which can be seen as a contrast to the Byzantine perception of Christianity, it is the nervous concern of the Russians in preserving the very letter of the tradition received “from the Greeks”