Saturday, November 11, 2017

“The Faith: A History of Christianity”, by Brian Moynahan


816 pages, Doubleday, ISBN-13: 978-0385491143

“Who do men say that I am?” Jesus asked his disciples (Book of Mark, 8:28). This may be the most contentious question in Western history, but Brian Moynahan in his work The Faith: A History of Christianity does not speculate as he tells the Gospel story straight: Jesus was a prophet, but more than a prophet; a Jew who came to fulfill and transcend Judaism, the “son of God”, a phrase with many and very different meanings, then as now. There are a plethora of one-volume histories of Christianity to choose from, and this one is not likely to rattle the competition. Oh, it does its job well enough, telling the tale of how this upstart Mediterranean religious sect developed from a band of ragged disciples with no place to call home into a gaggle of martyrs and emperors, conquerors and crusaders, inquisitors and witch-finders, popes and mendicants, monks and missionaries, slavers and colonizers, reformers and counter-reformers, who spread their faith throughout the world. As this list demonstrates, while Moynahan flings his net as wide as possible, his view is incoherent and he has a tabloid journalist’s preference for the sensational; indeed the quasi-pornographic: he rarely if ever averts his gaze from the tortures, burnings and massacres that disfigure Christian history, while sex, politics and greed draw a great deal of his attention.

Other aspects of his subject are less fervently treated either, for while he discusses the usual cast of characters from Jesus and Paul to Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Wesley and Pope John Paul II, we learn little about the character or beliefs’ of these men, much less about any theologies they may have championed, while showing precious little empathy with religious thinking or spiritual practice. But most frustratingly, for someone offering a history of Christianity, he has no sense of the network of relationships that constitute a meaningful history; instead, he simply presents one blessed thing after another. Moynahan hopes “to have caught something of the essence of the faith” on his vast canvas, but it is never clear exactly what that essence might be. Besides all that The Faith suffers from a lack of balance as Moynahan lavishes attention on Christianity from its beginnings up through the Reformation for the first two-thirds of the book, but then hurries through the establishment of Christianity in America and the development of Christianity in the present day. Even more perplexing is the absence of any examination of Eastern Christianity from its beginnings to the iconoclast crises in the 8th and 9th Centuries. Readers in search of a historical understanding of the Faith have many better places to look than The Faith.

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