The Story of Christianity

Christianity – if you liked the movie, you’ll love the sequel!

Well, up to a point with today’s work, The Story of Christianity – Volume II by Justo L. González. You may recall that we considered the author's Volume I a few months back, and the Curmudgeon was a fan. Volume II is cut from slightly different cloth than its predecessor, largely because its subject demands it. Until the Reformation, the history of Christianity is the history of the Catholic Church, give or take a few heresies; it is inherently linear. But the Reformation is a tale of several stories developing in parallel as the major Protestant denominations arise and the Catholics respond to that challenge. González adjusts his narrative style accordingly: where the earlier volume is clearly a history of theological thought, Volume II is more closely tied to political history.

We open with the inevitable Martin Luther, he of the Ninety-five Theses nailed to a door. Very famous.

Luther nailed his Theses, his points for change in Christian life and worship, to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517. What nobody bothers to tell you is that what he nailed up was old work and he didn’t expect anyone to notice much. Luther had written his manifesto earlier, in Latin and for discussion within his own university. He expected those ideas to be hot stuff, controversial; in fact, he found a number of his colleagues agreed with him. The paper received some minor discussion and then was ignored. Luther repackaged his ideas into the Ninety-five Theses (in the original draft there were ninety-seven, and no, I don’t know which ones he dropped) and nailed them up as a silent protest of the silence response they had received. This time out they were seen by a guy with a printing press – recall that printing was new technology at the time – who translated Luther into German and published the Theses. And it was then that Luther’s ideas set the world on fire, in the vernacular, and in print not manuscript.

Luther’s proposed changes were many, fundamental, and well outside the scope of this review. But part of what he was on about was indulgences…to the point that the full title of his famous work is Ninety-five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences. (A man who can use “efficacy” in a sentence makes the Curmudgeon’s knees weak.) As you probably know, an indulgence is a form of donation, a financial pre-payment today for sins one might commit in the future. What Luther either didn’t know or chose to overlook was just how that money was used and who was raising it. Pope Leo X wanted to fix up Rome; Albert of Brandenburg (he was a Hohenzollern, we’ve run into them before) was already archbishop of two bishoprics and he wanted a third, which the pope could grant. Money talks, and the round of funding that Luther objected to came about when Leo agreed Albert could issue indulgences, the sale of which would provide funds for Albert to buy the third bishopric. Face value of the funding round was 10,000 ducats with Leo and Albert splitting the proceeds 50-50, money Leo would then use for his building projects.

Luther and many others objected to the practice of plurality, as the holding of multiple bishoprics was known…bishoprics came with land and income, and the positions were, after all, supposed to care for their congregations, not allow their inhabitants to amass income-producing portfolios of real estate. What Luther also objected to, and which I was unaware of, was just how aggressively indulgences were sold. Once Leo approved the indulgences, Albert hired a guy named John Tetzel (he was a Dominican friar) to run the sales campaign. “Cleaner than when coming out of baptism,” our author quotes Tetzel as promising, and “the cross of the seller of indulgences has as much power as the cross of Christ.” Luther thought that was over-promising a tad. My own favorite of Tetzel’s is, “as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs!”

By the time you read this missive I may or may not have trademarked that last one.

For English speakers the tale of Henry VIII, his break with Rome, and all those wives looms large, pretty much shorthand for the Protestant Reformation. González’s treatment of the subject is well worth the read. It is he who reminds us (or me, anyway) that Henry’s father had just fought a very bloody civil war to put the Tudors on the throne…his son’s obsessive desire for a male heir was less about male vanity then we imagine, and all about the need to avoid further civil war. And in part, all the wives were a search for a viable Protestant military alliance after Henry broke with the Catholic Church.

Since we’re on the topic of absolute monarchs, how about a quick turn around papal infallibility?

Non-Catholics may be amused to know that the pope wasn’t infallible until 1868. The mid-nineteenth century was a time of tremendous change in Europe, and the pope at the time was Pius IX. The revolution of 1848 kicked him out of Rome, and he stewed in exile until the French restored him. (The French are always involved.) Pius, rather than taking the hint that republican sentiments were carrying the day, decided to rule as absolute monarch of the Papal States, the middle part of Italy. Which of course put him in direct conflict with the rulers and politicians working to unify the Italian nation. In 1870 the nationalists took Rome, depriving Pius of lands and power: he was allowed to retain only the Vatican palaces.

Shorn of temporal power, Pius sought to assert absolute spiritual authority. In 1854 he issued the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. When that was accepted without too much fuss, he moved on to issue a Syllabus of Errors in 1864, which enumerated various ideas the faithful must at all costs avoid. That, too, was accepted, so in 1868 the pope convened the First Vatican Council which then proclaimed papal infallibility. Somewhat limited, in that he’s only infallible when speaking ex cathedra (“from the chair,” for attribution), which I suppose protects against papal muttering.

And here's the kicker: all of us who aren’t popes think infallibility would be cool, but it’s only been used once, in 1950 by Pius XII, when he declared the Assumption of Mary. Since that had to do with the disposition of a body long dead, infallibility seems not to have quite the sizzle one might wish.

Would that González had left the narrative with Pius IX.

No matter what the author’s personal faith, he is a true Trinitarian. Each volume of The Story of Christianity is divided into three parts (we medievalists would expect nothing else), of which the nineteenth century and beyond is the final one. Titled “Beyond Christendom,” this final part takes as its thesis that Christianity had been a state-backed enterprise (the author’s definition of Christendom) from Constantine in the fourth century until the wave of religious freedom at the end of the eighteenth century. Christianity then became something different, he feels, “beyond Christendom.”

This final part is also the point at which the author’s academic approach changes and becomes less rigorous. González begins to assign motive without defending his assessments, which he had not done previously. He repeats several old canards, including the idea that “women’s stories” are somehow “absent from history,” blithely ignoring the cogent case he himself has made for their involvement in both history and theology. Previously in his work, out-of-power groups rebelled, often for logical reasons, and in-power groups put down the rebellions for perfectly logical, if often self-serving, reasons. Starting in the final section, however, González has groups out of favor “struggling” and favored groups “oppressing,” emotional language that robs both groups of the basic logic of their positions. And one is treated to increasing levels of detail, including everything from feminists and Marxists to Evita. (Evita the woman, not Evita the show, mercifully.)

No, gay freedom does not warrant a discussion in the volume. Frankly, I didn’t expect to find Troy Perry and the MCC in a book about Augustine and Luther, but about the time Evita entered the picture, I began to notice the omission.

González is an estimable scholar and a fine writer. The whole of Volume I and the first two parts of Volume II are an outstanding achievement: well argued, very well written, and completely accessible by a gay audience since sexual judgement is omitted. I cannot blame the guy for attempting late in his career to bring a lifetime of thought and research through to “the present.” In my view the result is a bit like a skater trying to end his Olympic career with the first ever quad-something and landing on his butt. It does detract from the overall performance, but there is nobility in the effort. None of us can understand his own times, not even Martin Luther could…he thought his ideas were played out and dead, he nailed them up and walked away.

Writing history of the present is an oxymoron.