Reading Diana Butler Bass’s A People’s History of Christianity compelled me to read more.

For a historian, this is perhaps the highest praise she could receive.  That I want to explore the history that she is writing about.  That I want to integrate that history into my current story the way she does.  That I hope others learn from her.  This is certainly more important than whether or not I liked the book.

And I did.  It is a serious page-turner, but in a different way than I found Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence.  The fast-paced sweep of history and cultural studies made Tickle’s book hard to put down, but Butler Bass’s narrative style brought out the enticing and exciting elements of the church’s story.  Her writing paired the epic and the personal into a story that covers millennia and our own past.

Further codifying the public and the personal dynamic was Butler Bass’s story introductions.  She often introduced a new concept, theme, or historical event by describing an experience from her own past that illustrated what we are about to learn from history, thus reminding us of our personal place in the Church as well as the eternal thematic nature of the faith.

Much can be said about A People’s History of Christianity’s structure, or its purpose, which is clearly to not only expose some voices to a larger audience, but to tell us a few things about our response as the Church to adversity.  This project, that has spanned a large part of the author’s life, is a love letter to the church—one that explains not only why she loves it, but how that love can be difficult, that she loves it despite its idiosyncrasies and strange habits.  But perhaps what is most telling is the timing of the book’s release.  To come now (as opposed to over 10 years ago when she began working on it), on the heels of Tickle’s book and the breakthrough of those parts of the church looking for us to unlock ourselves from the 20^th Century, and explore Patristic, Medieval, and Postmodern elements of our faith, honors and affirms these significant endeavors.

Lastly, her highlighting of how the Church deals with conflict is both a traditional historical approach (like telling the history of the nation as a sequence of wars is quite a common occurrence), but for Butler Bass, this is often shown in the form competing definitions of orthodoxy.  From ethics (including arguments of sex that actually have nothing to do with homosexuality!) to actual acts of violence, Butler Bass takes us on a tour of ideas, their creators, their opponents, and the wars raged within the church over them.  One such example is how she bridges post-reformation theological discord with a recent replica.  Writing from the perspective of her time as a seminary student, Butler Bass tells us:

“By the end of the sixteenth century,” Professor Lovelace told us, “Protestants in both Lutheran and Reformed spheres were referring to the ‘half-reformation,’ which had reformed their doctrines but not their lives.”  The historical stage was set: modern Christianity would struggle between the head and the heart; orthodoxy and piety had been severed.

While he lectured about this tension in the classroom, we witnessed it at the seminary.  In the mid-1980s the school was racked with controversy between those faculty members who insisted upon creedal purity and those committed to spiritual liveliness.  The seminary “scholastics” launched a crusade against colleagues who in their view were guilty of sloppy thinking or questionable orthodoxy—a charge that led to a heresy trial, some firings, and a good many faculty retirements.  For those of us who were students, it was a fearsome object lesson in church history.  Inquisitions are ugly things.  In the battle of orthodoxy versus piety, at that particular seminary, orthodoxy won.  And in the pitch of battle, the love of God vanished from the place.  (204-5)

The story of this theological and ideological war, taking place in a school is terrifying and at the same time, familiar.  A much more subtle battle was taking place at my seminary, two decades later between much the same elements, with new definitions for their positions.  Denominational conflicts, most especially within The Episcopal Church and throughout the Anglican Communion seem to mirror much the same tenor.  In many ways, it is this conflict that may define the relative future of Christianity in the West, and undergirds the tensions Butler Bass discusses throughout the book.

I will admit that I was predisposed to liking this book, and I agree with a lot of her choices, descriptions, and hopes.  But I would certainly recommend the book to anyone, especially those interested in exploring not only what happened, but why.  I’d recommend it to anyone that asks “How did the Church get here?” or is looking to explore more than just the details of particular debates, but their place in history, and how the foundation of that belief was built.  It isn’t a short history of the church, but it is an engaging one.  Butler Bass is asking big things from a faith tradition that promises its people big things.  That seems incredibly reasonable, and the spark for some good discussions.