TaxProf Blog: What Tax Profs Are Reading — The Faith: A History of Christianity
Now here is an odd insight into Brian Moynahan’s The Faith, which I am still deeply enjoying.
This 730-page heavily noted one-volume reviews the almost 2,000 year development of the variety of denominations and sects that are bundled under the name “Christian.” Resembling more a college history textbook than a mere beginning-to-end tale, Moynahan’s book was, for me, refreshing and educational. I treated the book as a course text, and let myself absorb one or two chapters a week over a six-month period.
The Faith was refreshing because Moynahan brings his background as a journalist and reporter to his effort. Instead of a partisan apologetic, plenty of which I’ve read while growing up, the account spares no one in its examination of the good and the bad, the brilliant and the stupid, the genuine and the hypocritical. Moynahan digs into sources not typically the cornerstone of Christian histories, such as documents from Arab caliphates and documents in the archives of governments and libraries far and wide. His approach gave me a sense of detached observer, looking at the growth and spread of Christianity as though watching from an orbiting earth observatory rather then as a child of a particular segment of the movement under study…
That’s not to say Moynahan has set out to cast Christianity in a bad light or that his work has that effect. Indeed, he includes the stories that explain how Christianity has endured for so long and has found adherents through conviction, persuasion, and inspiration. The good is no less highlighted than the evil. Unlike the Roman-heavy histories that dominated my childhood education, The Faith gives thorough examination of the Orthodox churches, the Eastern rites, all sorts of Protestant sects, movements that defy categorization, and an array of heresies ancient and new. Moynahan gives as much attention to the 19th and 20th centuries as he does to the first and the sixteenth, suggesting that he considers (understandably) the developments during the past 70 years of Christianity to be as significant as those of the embryonic church and those of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation…
…It should be of interest to Christians and non-Christians alike; for many of the former it is or should be an eye-opener, and for the latter it demonstrates that insiders need not be so biased that they cannot look at themselves objectively. That’s a lesson that the 21st century sorely and surely needs.
I found the key to Moynahan’s own position in his chapter on the Inquisition. He refers to the Grand Inquisitor in Chapter 5 of Fyodor Mikailovich Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment. “But the Inquisitor is a universal figure,” writes Moynahan, “Protestant as much as Catholic. He believes in a ‘weak, eternally depraved and eternally dishonourable human race’ whom he must protect with his strength, as Luther did. As Calvin cursed heretics for obliging him to burn them, so the Inquisitor feels himself among ‘the martyrs who have taken on themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.’ …”
A moving response was made by Sebastian Castellio, himself suspected of heresy by Calvinists and Catholics alike. In his response to Beza — “Whether Heretics Are to be Persecuted?” — he wrote of the necessity for Christians to imitate Christ. “O Christ, creator and king of the world, dost thou see?” he asked. “Art thou become quite other than thyself, so cruel…? When thou didst live upon earth, none was more gentle, more merciful, more patient of wrong. Art thou now so changed? If thou, O Christ, has commanded these executions, these tortures, what hast thou left for the devil to do?” Were not Christ and his apostles killed as heretics? What was heresy, when there were so many Christian doctrines in the world?
“I have carefully examined what the word heretic means,” he wrote, “and I cannot make it seem more than this, a heretic is a man with whom you disagree.” — The Faith pp. 453-454.
The Church believed in “rendition” by the way, handing its heretics over to another authority in order to keep its own hands clean.
Floating Life 