Tag Archives: writer: diarmaid macculloch

Silence: A Christian History, by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Posted on by
Reply

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Yet just as the books of the Tanakh reveal the process of creative responses to disappointment when they refocus prophecy, rethink the afterlife and steadily enrich their meditation on God’s purposes, there is much to recover from the history of second-century Christianity. It is a period in which Christian communities recovered from their trauma and reshaped themselves for new circumstances. We can gather enough fragments of evidence to show how radically diffetent from the first-century Christian groups the later Christian Church came to look: it created a canon of Scripture, credal statements and an institutional clerical ministry for its community life. The closing of the canon involved the exclusion of much of the apocalyptic literature which had formed the matrix of Judaism in the time of Jesus and his first followers; but the process was slow, and Christians never quite forgot this body of texts, or the climate of thought that it had created.

I enjoyed two previous books by Diarmaid MacCulloch, his magisterial History of Christianity and his collection of essays on the Reformation, All Things Made New. I’m sorry to say that this left me rather cold and I abandoned it after fifty pages. The problem is that the Bible itself is not about silence as such, and delving for what is said and meant about silence seems to me to be looking for something that isn’t really there; still more so when we get to the early Christian church and many patristic and earlier writings that I am unfamiliar with. MacCulloch is entitled to write the book that he wants to write and that his core readership wants to read. You can get Silence: A Christian History here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, by Storm Constantine.

All Things Made New, by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter (“The Virgin Mary and Protestant Reformers”):

The scandal of Cranmer on the Lady altar tells us a good deal about the ambiguous feelings of the Reformers for Our Lady. On the one hand they saw it as a major work of piety to demolish and demystify the cultic and devotional world of which she was the centrepiece. On the other, they needed her as a bastion to defend the Catholic faith against the more militant forces which the Reformation had unleashed. They wished her to play her part in the biblical narrative which they were proclaiming to the world, and which they felt was threatened from the two opposed forces of papistry and radicalism. But in the ambiguity of their feelings towards Mary, they were being true to what they found in the biblical text: here was a story of Mary which not only was restricted in scope but also contained elements of both praise and reserve. The Reformers’ task was one of restoration as much as destruction.

I hugely enjoyed MacCulloch’s massive History of Christianity when I read it in 2012; this is a shorter collection of essays on different aspects of the Reformation. I found most of it very interesting, though I must admit I had not heard of Richard Hooker and am little the wiser now. But in general, it’s a set of pleas for English Reformation history to be understood as a specifically English historical experience, but also one that was linked to developments on the European continent and which also had reverberations in America. (I wish there had been more on Scotland and Ireland, or indeed Wales, but this is a collection of pieces mainly published elsewhere so it’s unreasonable to expect global coverage.)

MacCulloch comes back to the question of English religious texts several times, and explains why on the one hand the King James Version (and he unpacks that name) is used for most of the Anglican services, but on the other the Psalms are generally Myles Coverdale’s version. There’s also an interesting short piece on the Bay Psalm Book, the first book in English known to have been published in America (in Boston, in 1640). I like that sort of thing myself, though of course we have to be aware that we tend to focus on the artefacts that survive from history which can lead to a lack of perspective on less tangible things.

Anyway, apart from Hooker I enjoyed this and learned from it, and you can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries, ed. Joan Russell Noble.

November Books 6) A History of Christianity, by Diarmaid MacCullough

Posted on by

Having been reading various books by Karen Armstrong over the last couple of years, I feel like I have finally found the real thing. This magisterial and thorough book goes through Chrstianity’s roots in Judaism and Greek philosophy, the life of Jesus and the immediate aftermath, and then the historical development of the movement that his followers became. I learned a lot; MacCullough’s broad historical focus took us to places I had not really thought of before, like the early history of Christianity in Asia (including China), and explained to me stuff I thought I already knew about, like the Polish-Lithuania commonwealth (where MacCullough’s account is much more lucid than Norman Davies’). He is lucid and non-judgmental, and usually manages to avoid taking sides (though this slip occasionally during the later discussions of Anglicanism). The triumph of the book is that he does avoid the Whiggishness of some approaches which take it for granted that two thousand years of history were somehow destined to bring us to the Anglican Communion (or Pope Benedict XVI, or whatever the author may support), and by putting the problems of the various churches today in the historical perspective of the viciousness of past debates, the entire situation becomes more comprehensible. It’s very long but well worth it.

We have the DVDs of the TV series associated with the book as well, and I will try and make a point of watching them now.

Top unread non-fiction:
Peleponnesian War | Innocents Abroad | Terre des Hommes | The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Race of a Lifetime / Game Change | Proust and the Squid | The Tipping Point | Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl | Elementary Forms of Religious Life | Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man | History of Christianity | History of the World in 100 Objects | A Room of One’s Own | Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? | The Last Mughal | Reading the Oxford English Dictionary | Jane Austen | Homage to Catalonia | The Road to Middle Earth | Essence of Christianity | The Strangest Man