A new look at Christian history: 6-7-12

I love Christian history so much that a few years ago I audited a two-semester course in it at Central Baptist Theological Seminary here.

So I'm always intrigued when a publisher releases another fat volume that seeks to tell the 2,000-year-old story of the religion. Among the better recent histories are Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, by Diarmaid MacCulloch (he explains the 3,000 vs 2,000), and The Triumph of Christianity, by Rodney Stark.

Now comes a new volume from Concordia Publishing House, the official publisher of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS), which would describe itself than as more theologically conservative than the considerably larger denomination known as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

The Church from Age to Age: A History, with Edward A. Engelbrecht as the general editor, is a revised compilation of a previous series of books, and it has a lot to recommend it.

It covers the fascinating 2,000 years in a pretty comprehensive way, adding such useful extras as a detailed timeline and some helpful maps.

At the same time, it sometimes has difficulty unsticking itself from the LCMS's pretty rigid approach to the faith, though perhaps it's unfair to expect that it would.

And it is afflicted here and there with what borders on unattractive Christian triumphalism, such as the opening sentence of the Foreward by Paul L. Maier: "Christianity is the greatest success story in the history of the world."

That seems like a conclusion readers should be allowed to draw for themselves based on the contents of the book instead of it being a foundational assumption of what's to follow, for now what's to follow will seem necessarily to be buttressing that argument.

The book gets much of early Christian history right. For instance, it correctly notes that the earliest followers of Jesus believed "that they represented authentic Judaism." But then it goes on anachronistically to speak of the Apostle Paul as "a Jewish convert to Christianity," as though there were then a formal religion known as Christianity to which Paul could convert. This is a common error in popular writing but it's an error nonetheless and it leads to a bad misreading of Paul. (The book to read is Reinventing Paul by John G. Gager.)

Not much positive gets said in the book about the academic tools scholars began using in the 1800s to understand the Bible in more depth -- such a form criticism and higher criticism. Certainly these techniques have led to some unanticipated and unfortunate results (such as some members of the Jesus Seminar wanting to throw out essentially the whole of traditional Christianity). But they've also moved us beyond a narrow, literalistic, unquestioning acceptance of the scriptural text, an acceptance that paid scant attention to the reality that the Bible is a library, not a single book, and that it was composed over thousands of years by many writers.

Finally, it was no surprise to find this Lutheran enterprise handling Martin Luther so gently, with hardly a mention of his central role in dragging the old sickness of anti-Judaism, which infected Christianity almost from the start, from Catholicism to Protestantism -- and the use of his vicious anti-Jewish words by Nazis as a warrant for their policies. (For my essay on anti-Judaism in Christian history, look under the "Check this out" headline on the right side of this page.)

This new book, which runs to nearly 1,000 pages, is a reminder that no history is written without something of a point of view. And, in the end, it's good to see Christian history through an LCMS theological lens so it can be compared and contrasted with histories written through other lenses.

We get into trouble when we imagine there is no lens through which we're reading history and when we never hold one view up against another.

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ROMNEY'S MINISTERIAL DRAFT DEFERMENT

Because Mitt Romney now is a presidential candidate, his lack of military service (he was deferred because he was a Mormon missionary in France in the 1970s) is getting more attention. And it should. All candidates' military background should be known and understood (Barack Obama, under different and later circumstances, did not serve, either). Almost certainly, however, giving someone a "minister of religion" deferment for serving as a proselytizer will get reviewed if we ever bring back the draft.

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P.S.: Speaking of books, Life in a Jar, which I reviewed earlier this year here, has won an "IndieReader Discovery Award" in the category of biography. The book is the story of Irena Sendler, who helped to save some 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II, and of the Kansas high school students who wrote a marvelous play about her. Jack Mayer, the author, tells me that 60 percent of the royalties are donated to the Irena Sendler/Life in a Jar Foundation. It's a great read. Get it for your teens as well as for you.

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ANOTHER P.S.: The death of writer Ray Bradbury on Tuesday gives us a chance to think again about how what I like to call moral fiction can move readers to appreciate and even adopt healthy, constructive eternal values. As the piece to which I've linked you notes, Bradbury was all about love and was willing to shine a satirical spotlight on those aspects of life that were in tension with love. His novel Fahrenheight 451 anticipated much that remains distorted about our popular culture, so much of which is in tension with the very eternal values Bradbury promoted. I remember being quite moved by the book. The impulse behind it I found paralleled in work by such other writers as Kurt Vonnegut Jr.