What Church History Does to You

Church History and Faith

I didn’t pick up Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity expecting to feel great about church history and faith. I knew enough before opening the book to know the Church has not always lived out the Gospel that it was founded on. So, this is not a book that celebrates the church. It’s a book that tells the truth about it, which is hard to digest. And yet, useful for pastors and church leaders as they navigate the future of the Church.

For this post, I’d like to narrow in on the six hundred years across ten chapters (14-23); Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the Hesychast mystics all the way through the abolitionists of the nineteenth century. Along the way, MacCulloch keeps returning to the same fault line: institutional power on one side, genuine spiritual conscience on the other. That tension never gets resolved, and it still hasn’t been.

If you lead a church, preach to people, or shepherd anyone, this book will stretch you!

The Pattern Running Through Church History and Faith

MacCulloch shows us that when Christianity moves into a new culture, that culture tends to amplify it. For example, the Byzantine church used an iconostasis with three tiers of saints’ images. When Russia received Orthodox Christianity, they built theirs with five tiers by the fifteenth century, and as many as eight two centuries after that.

It stemmed from the same tradition, but with an increased expression. And these types of amplifications continue to show up; in architecture, in politics, and in who gets to define what faithful Christianity means.

He also gives strong evidence that the Reformation wasn’t a sudden rupture. It was the result of accumulated institutional failure going back at least to the Black Death, when a third of Europe died. The clergy were devastated, and somehow, purgatory became an industry.

Martin Luther, who we assume was the author of the Reformation, didn’t arrive with a new idea. He simply organized a cultural movement within a structural crisis that had been building for 150 years.

What’s sobering is what the reformers did next. The same movement that broke open the medieval church’s stranglehold on conscience turned around and crushed anyone who followed that liberation further than they were comfortable with. For example, the Anabaptists paid for moving reformed thought too far.

Every reform movement, MacCulloch argues, eventually has to decide whether to follow the faith all the way or cut a deal with the authorities or elites who have armies. Sadly, most of them make the deal.

The Story That Hit Me Hardest

Bartolomé de Las Casas is one of the most complicated figures in the book (and Christian history). He was a former plantation owner who heard a Dominican sermon, gave up his land, and got ordained. He then spent the rest of his life arguing that you can’t compel people into the kingdom. MacCulloch gives him real credit for that.

That being said, he doesn’t let him off the hook either. In his effort to protect indigenous Americans from enslavement, Las Casas suggested importing Africans instead! How can the same man have a genuine Spirit-led conviction while being catastrophically blind in another direction?

MacCulloch keeps showing us this same pattern: the closer a figure gets to real spiritual clarity, the more clearly we can also see their blind spots. The flawed structures in them and around them move on, seemingly without their knowledge.

This isn’t a reason to dismiss these people. But it might help us uncover some blind spots in our systems and structures playing out in our leadership. We can’t yet see them, but history will tell our story.

The Question Church History and Faith Can’t Avoid

The hardest section in the book is the slavery material. The Quakers condemned slavery corporately in 1758, a full decade before the major abolitionist campaigns gathered real momentum. MacCulloch’s point is that they didn’t get there through a new reading of the Bible. Something in their gathered conscience simply couldn’t square slavery with the faith they held.

The exegesis came later to catch up with what conscience had already decided. And yet, the same Bible translation, in the same decade, read by equally serious Christians in the American South, was used to defend slavery. The church fractured along sectional lines before the Civil War even began.

During that era, Christians all across America were singing the same hymns with the same language of redemption. And yet, coming to completely different conclusions.

MacCulloch doesn’t resolve this reality or try to put a spiritual spin on it. He lets the reader sit with the hard truth. The question that lingers is one the church still hasn’t fully answered:

If conscience can move before exegesis catches up, how do we know when the Spirit’s leading us forward or when it’s just the culture pulling us along?

Who Should Read This

If you’re a pastor, elder, church planter, or anyone given the privilege to lead people spiritually, you shoudl read this book. Again, not because it’ll make you feel good about church history and faith. Read it because we need more leaders who’ve honestly wrestled with what the church has walked through; the good, the bad and the ugly.

What will stick with me is that the church’s worst moments and its best moments grew out of exactly the same soil. The same tradition that buried reforming texts also produced the abolition movement. The same evangelical energy that mobilized people to fight slavery also mobilized people to defend it.

MacCulloch hasn’t tidied any of that up. And I think that’s the most honest and helpful thing he could have done.

Join the Conversation: Answer This Question

• How do we know when it’s the Spirit leading us forward vs. the culture pulling us along? How do you think about that in your own theological discernment?