NPR—Pilgrims And Progress: 3,000 Years Of Christianity

Posted by Kendall Harmon

When he was a young boy growing up in a rural rectory in East Anglia, Diarmaid MacCulloch's parents used to drive him around to look at churches. His father, one of a line of Scottish Protestant Anglican ministers, didn't really encourage stops at Catholic churches. But humans are always most interested in what is forbidden, and in the due course of time, MacCulloch grew up to be interested in the multiple ways in which Christianity has morphed, clashed, invented and re-invented itself.

MacCulloch, who teaches the history of the Church at Oxford University, has put his interest into a massive new book called Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.

That subtitle isn't an error. MacCulloch says it was important to look back over the thousand years that preceded Jesus' birth to see how Christianity shaped itself, and at the timelines of the two cultures that influenced what the religion would become.

"It's really two different sets of thousand years, one of them a Jewish thousand years and the other is a Greek thousand years. And both those lie behind Christianity," MacCulloch says. "These two cultures -- Jewish culture, Greek culture -- they've got entirely different views of what God is. And then you get a man coming along who people regard as God: Jesus."

Listen to it all (about 7 1/2 minutes).

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church History • * Culture-Watch • Books

8 Comments
Posted April 25, 2010 at 4:35 pm [Printer Friendly] [Print w/ comments]



1. Brian from T19 wrote:

I ordered this book on Amazon on Friday on the strength of the ABC’s recommendation.  It is currently on sale for $19.79 - a 56% reduction on its $45 price!

April 25, 6:29 pm | [comment link]
2. teatime wrote:

I’m interested in this book, too. It sounds fascinating! Thanks for the tip, Brian!!! smile

April 25, 7:02 pm | [comment link]
3. libraryjim wrote:

There is a video version, too. I saw it at Sam’s Club the other day.

April 25, 8:10 pm | [comment link]
4. Kenneth Semon wrote:

I am 100 pages into it and find it excellent.

April 25, 8:58 pm | [comment link]
5. Pageantmaster [KJS to Coventry] wrote:

Be ever hearing, but never understanding;
be ever seeing, but never perceiving.

Isaiah 6:9-10

April 26, 11:04 am | [comment link]
6. phil swain wrote:

#5, best review yet.

April 26, 2:20 pm | [comment link]
7. Already Gone wrote:

He has an article in the On Faith column of the Washington Post at

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/04/christian_love_and_sex.html#more


An excerpt

“Sex has always been fun: contraception has shown that the fun can be detached from the possibility of having children. The Christian tradition is now faced with the reality that pleasure and procreation are two separate purposes of sexuality, and many parts of the Christian Church, especially the Vatican, are baffled and angry.

How can Christianity cope? A first step would be to recognize that its traditional views on sexual intercourse were filched from non-Christian sources. Christianity is a complex system with two main strands: Jewish and Greek. Of the two, the Greek has made the running for nearly two thousand years. Even though Jesus was a Galilean Jew and probably had little contact with Greeks, the enthusiasts who wrote up his life and discussed his ideas took Christianity far from its Jewish roots. Most of their potential audience had a Greek cultural background, and in trying to make Greeks understand the message, Christianity absorbed the culture which it was trying to capture.”

April 26, 3:09 pm | [comment link]
8. NewTrollObserver wrote:

Another interesting NPR (“On Point”) interview is with Stephen Prothero, talking about how different religions do not lead to the same goal.

April 26, 3:37 pm | [comment link]
Registered members must log in to comment.



Next entry (above): An Editorial from the Tablet: A church in need of scrutiny

Previous entry (below): The Economist on the outlook for the world economy—Curb your enthusiasm

Return to blog homepage

Return to Mobile view (headlines)