The Story of Christianity Vol. I

There are places historians – an unusually hardy and racy bunch – dare to tread, where mere civilians dare not. And then there are the topics that even for them are too hot to handle, delivery in a brown paper wrapper, banned in Boston.

One such topic may prove to be our current tome, The Story of Christianity, Volume I. Not because its author, Justo L. González, is provocative; his book is anything but sensationalist. However, it is impossible to ignore the strong feelings that a great many people have about religion generally and Christianity specifically. So up front: in this review no disrespect is intended to anyone. Or Anyone, should the faithful prove correct.

I was looking for what for lack of a better term I’d call an objective or political history of the Church, as opposed to a Sunday School profession of faith. The Story of Christianity comes close: by its own description it is a history of Christian theological thought; that is to say, a history of philosophies, not of men, although people certainly do appear. And the book makes a good case for the fact that the political history of the Church actually cannot be separated from the various political histories surrounding it.

González does an excellent job of surveying fifteen hundred years of history, Volume I stopping as it does just short of the Reformation. (There is a Volume II which I intend to read.) But with that much material and very little actual gossip, where does a curmudgeonly reviewer start?

Me, I chose a major heresy first, then sex and money.

The heresy in question is the Arian Heresy, which ran from the third century A.D. until the Council of Florence which wrapped in 1445. A millennium is a pretty good run for a heresy. First of all, it had nothing to do with Hitler: that was Aryan with a “y,” and it was cooked up in the 19th century. The two are unrelated. Our Arian Heresy, with an “i,” came from a guy named Arius, who was wrestling with the nature of the Trinity. He did not, as I understand it, question the divinity of Christ; his argument was that (a) Christians all agree that the spiritual is superior to the mortal, (b) Christ is the only begotten son of God, but did in fact take on an inferior, mortal form; and therefore (c) while a member of the Trinity, the Son is on a different and reduced level than the Father. That idea ran counter to mainstream Christian thought, which held that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three equal manifestations of the same divinity. The whole thing got wrapped up in word-smithing, whether the Holy Spirit flows from the Father and the Son into the world, or whether the Holy Spirit flows from the Father alone.

To me, and possibly to you, that sounds like a nit being picked; and there is a reason for that, as we shall see. But it mattered tremendously to Christians at the time, since it gets to the central weirdness of God taking human form. Emperor Constantine, the guy who formally made Christianity legal in Rome, figured it was easy to solve the matter: he convened the Council of Nicaea, tossed all the bishops into a room, and told them to fight it out and let him know the answer. You gotta love a decisive man. The bishops duly decided against the Arians…all that language in the Nicene Creed about “Light from Light/true God from true God” is really a highly poetic way of saying, “We’re not Arians. No way, not us.”

And there it should have ended, except…

The question and idea of Arianism kept arising, in varied and sometimes subtle forms. The veneration of icons is related in some ways, for example…and for the record, the Eastern Church in Constantinople was in favor of icons and the Roman Church was opposed. As the matter reappears over time, you find yourself saying more and more, “Yes, I know, and I know why it made a difference to them.” That you do so is a testament to González’s ability to sustain a long narrative line, one of the book’s strengths. As to the Arian Heresy itself, the matter was resolved, at least temporarily, in a way both cinematic and bureaucratic. Constantinople was about to fall and there was a desperate need to unite the Roman and Orthodox churches, so Pope Eugene (yes, there was a Pope Eugene…in this case, Eugene IV) convened the Council of Florence to resolve their differences on icons and Arianism, among others. And the great and learned ground on the matter for years and decided…that it didn’t matter. That we all agree the Holy Spirit does good in the world, so why worry just how God sends it out, now would you just stop bickering and move on? And to some extent that decision is why you and I see the thousand-year disagreement as a nit.

Never end a show on a ballad, and never end a review on a negotiated settlement. So let’s take a quick turn around priestly celibacy.

Celibacy always seemed odd to those of us on the outside, especially to those of us who have (in our adult years) had one or more affairs with “celibate” priests. Turns out the whole thing was churned up by the Gnostics, who made out they had a special, inside track on Christianity, secret knowledge that was not shared generally. Which struck mainline Christians as the exact opposite of the Good News proclaimed to all people, pretty much the gold standard in open communication. Things got so bad with the Gnostics (and some other sects claiming secret revelations) that the early Church finally put a stop to priests having families, in an effort to end the idea that there was a priestly lineage with special insight. Plus, it boosted fund raising like crazy: in a world where much of the wealth was held in land, it turned out the way to make sure your annoying neighbor never got his paws on your property was to leave it to the Church, now that the priest didn’t have kids of his own trying to live off your donation. And so celibacy combined a theological point with a strong program of revenue generation, always popular with Church leadership.

One of the great strengths of the book is that González does not take an editorial viewpoint on the theology. He is content to describe various schools of Christian thought without taking sides or asking the reader to do so…which is one mark of a professionally written history. And as a man with thousand-year heresies and such on his hands, González has little time for things as small as individual sin; how sin and redemption were perceived is of interest to him, but the laundry list of sins is not.

Significant to our own interests, at the end of an involving 500 pages whose subject is religion, I still have no idea what the author thinks of homosexuality, or even if he has an opinion on it at all. For a gay scholar, that authorial discipline represents a small, secular gospel all its own.