Get Hold Of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years Conceived By Diarmaid MacCulloch Presented As Booklet

I'm currently reading this, and probably will be for some time, This is my goto book at bedtime, It's rich with explanations of periods and time that my education skipped overoh, let's be frank, my education didn't even go faintly near, periods like the entire history of the Eastern Christian Church and the millenium of Byzantine history.


Where I come from, the midwest of the's, it just didn't happen, right

Trying to make up for that now, I'm discovering whole worlds of thought and dispute among Christians that really lightens the heart during these times of absolute rockbottom handcuffing of American politics to some kind of thirdgrade version of Christian thinking.


Such a rich tradition, full of hope and possibility abused by certain people towards exclusion and division, Well, it's time I caught up with the resilience, variety and depth of the Christian tradition, After reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's brilliant "Reformation" or his equally remarkable "Thomas Cranmer" this book was quite a come down, It offers an acceptable history of Christianity for someone new to the subject but precious little to anyone who has already done some reading in the area.


MacCulloch is a specialist on the birth of the Church of England, He is able to explain how at the time of the conflict between Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism the Church of England took the best of all three and created the greatest of all Christian Churches.
I am a practicing Roman Catholic who does not agree with this point of view but I do admire how brilliantly MacCulloch is able to make his case.


Outside of his main area of interest MacCulloch is a very average synthesist, His perfunctory treatment of Orthodox Christianity was in my view a major shortcoming of this book, His treatment of American protestant churches such as the Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist and Mormon churches also lacks substance,

This is an adequate introductory history of Christianity but it falls far short of what MacCulloch can do when he is in his comfort zone.
to readpages of christianity's history is to readpages of world history since christianity has been a prime mover of human history, every continent and every religion has found a place of clarity in this book, it does not disappoint. whereas it is true that to coveryears of human and religious history, the writer must default to an inch and a half below the surface and some readers may be disappointed in that factor, i decidedly was not.
the sheer breadth of the work, by default, wove together so many disparate parts that i can not help but appreciate the effort, we know most of the information therein, . . but in pieces. seemingly without effort, macculloch weaves the ideas together, making connections, showing cause and effect, and more often than not doing so seamlessly, but getting through this book without becoming dizzy means the reader must pace herself, i took thedays of lent started a week before ended a week early to tackle the job, it was worth the effort, and some of his almost casually thrown off conclusions were just plain insightful, i'm rather pleased with myself for getting through this religious history and am very sure that i will be referencing it regularly, i also have the bbc dvds of the series made from this book, looking forward to watching it and hope not too much has been left out, after reading the entire book, i cannot help but think that every detail matters, that's how well macculloch presented the material, This book should have been called Christianity: A Speculative History from a Somewhat Antagonistic Viewpoint, I only read the firstpages, plenty far enough to understand how MacCulloch feels about Christianity, Most of the book is, by nature, extrapolation based on a very fragmented set of documents and conflicting histories, but MacCulloch is always overanxious to undermine Christianity by taking huge leaps of speculation and is never, at least that I saw in the firstpages, willing to remain neutral or actually go the other direction.


I found his writing style to be good and the idea for the book is fantastic, I'm fully prepared to deal with problems in history and with the faults of Christians throughout history, but I'm not willing to read a book by an author I feel I can't trust or have to constantly second guess.
Because of that, the bits of information I gleaned are all mentally footnoted as being something to go back and verify from a less biased source.


Here are a few examples:

"Yet at the heart of the Egypt and Exodus story is something which no subsequent Israelite fantasist would have wished to make up, because it is an embarrassment: the hero and leader of the Exodus, the man presented as writing the Pentateuch itself, has a name which is not only nonJewish but actually Egyptian: Moses.
" My response is that if the Israelites lived in Egypt foryears is it so surprising and embarrassing that they'd eventually adopt Egyptian names If the implication is that Moses was actually Egyptian, why doesn't MacCulloch just say that.
It wouldn't be the longest logical jump he makes in the book,

Later, this is what MacCulloch concludes about the Beatitudes, "There is nothing gentle, meek or mild about the driving force behind these stabbing inversions of normal expectations, They form a code of life which is a chorus of love directed to the loveless or unlovable, of painful honesty expressing itself with embarrassing directness, of joyful rejection of any counsel suggesting careful selfregard or prudence.
That, apparently, is what the Kingdom of God is like, " Really Only the most literalistic reading of such a poetic passage could lead to such an imbecilic interpretation, MacCulloch makes similar mistakes of interpretation of various other passages in the New Testament, notably in the Lord's Prayer and the command to "leave the dead to bury their dead.
"

When writing about the resurrected Christ note, resurrected he says, "He repeatedly appeared to those who had known him, in ways which confused and contradicted the laws of physics.
" Again, we are talking about a ressurected being, Why is physics even relevant

When he refers to Paul and his desire to teach of salvation through Christ alone, MacCulloch phrases it this way: "Paul managed to find a proper in the Tanakh to sum up what he wanted to say:.
. " This comes across as incredibly condescending, to take for granted that Paul was just manipulating the Tanakh to justify his message, If MacCulloch had left out "managed to find" and replaced it with "found" it would have made all the difference, It is maybe a small infraction on its own, but it was, for me, the last straw,

In a way, I'm really disappointed to stop reading this, The parts of the book that talk about the origins of the Old Testament and the influence of Socrates and Aristotle on Christianity are great.
The discussion of differing ideas of Satan, comparisons of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, ideas on prophecy and life after death in the Old Testament and the obsession with the virginity of Mary are all fascinating.
For now though, I'm done, I don't have time to verify every reference and I don't trust MacCulloch to give it to me straight, Sem dúvida, o livro mais bem pesquisado que li na vida, O historiador inglês Diarmaid é minucioso, detalhista ao contar sobre a história do cristianismo, indo da igreja no ocidente para a igreja no oriente, sem esquecer a igreja africana.
São mais depáginas de pesquisa exaustiva sobre fatos pouco retratados em outros livros de história eclesiástica, Para quem é estudante da história da igreja, uma obra recomendadíssima, A massive bookoverpages. It was not easy to finish just because of the size of the book, though the style was very readable and engaging, I didn't get bored throughout quite the oppositeI was eager to read and learn more, This history helped connect lots of other historical events and developments for me, as if the religious aspect provided a key element to understanding the past two millennia of Western history, an aspect that has been neglected in other histories.


Other than providing me with the religious background that illuminated the rest of history, the great lesson that I gleaned was the immense diversity of the Christian family, over time and space.
There are many, many ways that the Christian message has been taught, lived, and understood,

I would also recommend this book to

any skeptic who thinks Christianity is personified by the modern evangelical or fundamentalist movement, This is a recent innovation of Christianity, and far removed from most of Christian history, Christianity is complex. After having had read this book two years earlier, I had to reread this book in order to understand why I didn't understand it the first time I read it.
The first time I had read this book I was trying to make sense of the Trinity and how it developed and caused differentiation between sects of the Christian faith.
I realize now that was a mistake, Whether it be one person, one nature, and one will or two people, one nature, and one will or, doesn't make sense and never will and trying to understand that is a wasted effort and anyone who doesn't believe in my narrow interpretation is deserving of death j/k, but historically that is what happened.


Once I got past trying to make sense of the religion qua religion, I got to concentrate on the history qua history and found the story worth understanding.
The author excelled at telling the story from the reformation onward, and there is no easy way to tell the early church story in an easy to digest format without leaving out major parts in a one volume work such as this one.


The book does not really dwell on the theological thought and always tries to focus on the history, Therefore, sometimes the relevance of some of the characters are not fully understandable from this book alone, The significance of Pelagius in relation to Augustine and the importance of 'free will' and our reliance on Grace may be lost on the reader of the history alone and how this will lead to St.
Thomas Aquinas' rational argument for a 'necessary' universe until reinstated by Martin Luther with his absolute certainty of a contingent universe similar to William of Ockhem, who would say that God is all powerful so nothing is necessary to an all powerful being.
The author will mention Pelagius, for example, but all the relationships and the importance of what he means gets lost with the history story telling.
That's okay, because after all this is a history book most of all, .