the personal journal of Brent Stewart
Christianity, by Roland H. Bainton seems like a big and imposing book, both by it’s presentation and the subject it covers. The book is a large trade paperback, about an inch thick, and it covers two thousand years of history. I found it to be an engaging and educational read.
Bainton sets out to provide a context around Christian history and that is what makes this book so good and so frustrating. My copy is about 400 pages, meaning he’s covering about five years of history per page! There are short little insights that I found to be enormously valuable, like this one on Jewish politics of the first century AD.
Guerillas, who infested the mountain fastnesses and the caves of the desert, emerged as the parties of teh Zealots, who cried “Yahweh alone is king.” Amoung the other parties of Judaism were the Saducees, who fraternized with any rules; the Pharisees, who kept the Law and awaited divine vindication; and even stricter than the Pharisees , the Essenes . . .
This quote also reveals the frustrating part of the book. This is the best encapsulation of the politics of the time that I’ve ever seen, but a paragraph later he’s on to the next topic. There are sections of this book that could easily be lifted out and made into books in their own right. In fairness, Bainton was attempting an overview, and this kind of discipline is necessary for the effort to not grow out of hand. I found multiple points, like the one above, that made me want to dig in and research more in the future.
There are sections of this book that are a little boring, because it moves with such velocity and never really develops a particular thread it can seem like a long-form list. There are also sections that will make a Christian flinch, such as the off-handed comment that the best indictment of the ineffectiveness and political focus of the Catholic church in the 1500s was that it let Martin Luther live (that statement is explored over a hundred years of history and is a fascinating piece of the book).
I recommend the book. I haven’t had a lot of time for straight-through reading and ended up reading in small bites, but the book was accessible and easy to pick back up.