The Story of Christianity, Vol. 2: The Reformation to the Present Day

 

The Story of Christianity, Vol. 2: The Reformation to the Present Day – by Justo Gonzalez

This book is not only excellent in terms of content, but also in its structure.  Telling such a mammoth history in only 500 pages is not an easy task.  Even though author Gonzalez does divide his history over two volumes, one walks away wishing that this was a 10 or a 20 volume set as opposed to only 2.  There’s simply too much, but it’s all captivating reading.  I read volume 1 about three years ago, and I wisely re-read  it before tackling this one.  This was a smart move as it refreshed my brain of many of the details.  So, yes, I recommend reading these two volumes back to back.

Volume 1 was slightly easier to follow since during the time period, there was only one Christian church.  The Protestant Reformation changed all of that, and volume 2 picks up as the reformation gathers steam.  So with so many more Christian religions in so many more corners of the globe, the author has to keep several juggling balls up in the air to tell an engaging story.

What this means is that this book is not linear. It simply can’t be.  There’s too many movements, too many countries, too many world events that are all happening at once.  When the author is detailing a particular movement, quite often the movement lasts well over 100 years and is specific to only one or two geographical areas of the world.  So when he introduces the NEXT main movement of the Christian church, often times we have to go to another part of the world and set the clock back a century or so.  This can get confusing.  Like all history books, this book almost needs to be studied in addition to simply being read.  I’ve made a mental note that the next time I read these two volumes (and there WILL be a next time), I’ll go much slower and take detailed notes.   There’s too many emperors, popes, kings and countries to keep track.  It doesn’t help when there are so many roman numerals after names such as Innocent, Leo, Benedict, Louis, and Pius.  So we’ll read about Leo VII on one page, and on the very next page we move forward 50 years ago and are now reading about Leo IX or Leo X.  Then, two or three CHAPTERS later, we go back to Leo VII or Leo VIII for proper context.  (This is a hypothetical example.  I have no idea nor recollection of all of the actual “Leos”.) The author does include “charts” that are somewhat helpful, but I read the e-versions of these books, and such charts are too hard to navigate to and fro.

Please note I’m not complaining.  Author Gonzalez does a splendid job keeping his narrative as straight as possible with all of the time travel and geographical switching; it’s just that such things can never assimilate in one’s brain unless a journal for note taking is handy.  He does do a wonderful job reminding his readers of this fact as he states things such as “We’ll revisit this fact in more detail in an upcoming chapter”,  or “…as we learned about in detail in Chapter xx…”.

I also enjoyed the fact that the author is neutral towards his subject.  A Christian himself, Gonzalez doesn’t whitewash the history of the faith.  When we read about the ‘leaders’ of the Protestant Reformation such as Luther, Hus, and Wycliffe, he doesn’t brand them as misfits for questioning the mother church.  Instead, he clearly communicates their motives and we see how practices such as simony and indulgences were badly abused, and these men simply couldn’t abide such a perversion of the faith.  Of course, when Protestantism becomes mainstream, what we witness over several hundred years is a far cry from unity and brotherly love amongst the different denominations.  Still, though, the overall theme of the book is one of hope.  He concludes by stating that whereas Christianity has been in a slow decline in spots such as Europe and North America over the past century, the world is seeing a massive uptick of the faithful in places such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

I highly recommend this wonderful book along with its predecessor.  I’m really serious, though, when I suggest that you should read this thing slowly; maybe one or two chapters a week along with a notebook.  This really is a fascinating story.

Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance

 

Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance by Michael R. Beschloss

I came across a book by this same author with a similar context on the relationship between John F. Kennedy (not the ‘Kennedy’ of this book) and Nikita Khrushchev. That book was one of the best historical books I have ever read.  Whenever I come across a book that moves me such as that one did, I feel the urge to read more of the author’s work.  Because I’m somewhat obsessive-compulsive, I like to start at the beginning and read the author’s output chronologically.  This particular book is the author’s first effort.

What I found incredibly interesting is that this book was released in 1980 when the author was 25. This means that he probably started writing the thing when he was 22 or 23.   When **I** was 22 years old, I wasn’t even shaving every day yet.   I mention this because it’s too easy to dismiss this book and come away feeling disappointed after reading later works by the author, but this criticism is unfair.  We shouldn’t expect someone so young to come up with a Pulitzer Prize effort on their first effort.  So although this book was very well written, it simply didn’t captivate me as much as the aforementioned work.

This book deals with the ongoing arduous relationship between Joseph Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. These two men were undoubtedly two of the biggest movers and shakers of the first half of the twentieth century. They both accomplished great things, yet this book shows us that much of what these men did in their careers was more self-centered than it was philanthropic.  These were two men obsessively driven by their egos to get as far up the mountain as they could possibly go. In order to accomplish said goals, these two men badly needed each other.  They didn’t like each other, but they needed each other.   What’s painfully obvious is that whenever we read about these two men and their frequent interactions, it’s VERY obvious that there’s a mutual distaste of the two, yet we see them cautiously dance around their words and actions so they don’t push or offend the other guy too much.  It’s rather uncomfortable, yet I suppose this is somewhat the norm when one harbors such dangerous goals and desires.

This book doesn’t serve as a biography of either man, yet we do get a brief history of their early histories and their rise to notoriety.  Since Roosevelt actually becomes President (with a lot of help from Kennedy), we see that he always has a slight upper hand in the ongoing bickering-filled relationship.  Kennedy is always jockeying for high placement within the Roosevelt administration, yet never really feels like he is appreciated nor utilized as he should be.  We read about some of his appointments during Roosevelt’s 12-year term such as SEC Chairman and Ambassador to Britain, and it always seems as though Kennedy is desperately trying to free himself from Roosevelt’s leash and implement his own policies and procedures.  This is painfully obvious during Kennedy’s ambassadorship to England in 1939 with a world war brewing.  Kennedy seems to think there’s no way that Germany will fail to prevail, so why not cozy up to Hitler and make life easier for himself and the many wealthy Americans akin to his position?

Although this book (in hardback format) is only about 280 pages, the pages are packed and the print is small.  This is a book where your mind can’t wander for a sentence or two, as you’ll miss critical information.  So I guess you could say it’s good that the author kept the length of the book somewhat manageable, but I can’t help wonder if he shouldn’t have added another 100 pages or so and let the material breath a bit more so it could be a bit more digestible.  He also needed to work on educating his readers a bit more when introducing popular policies that were either initiated or in vogue at the time.  For example:  About ¾ through the book, the author mentions and starts pontificating on the “Lend-Lease Program”, yet doesn’t bother stating what it actually was.  Uninformed readers might need enlightenment, and it would have been nice to have a paragraph or two to the give the person a bit of the basics.  This seems especially obvious in hindsight since readers didn’t have a handy tool such as Wikipedia or the internet at their fingertips.

I then have to ask myself if such a book is really necessary.  I can’t honestly say that I learned anything new within these pages.  True, I’ve read extensive bios of both of these figures, and this book WAS written 40 years ago, so it could be that such revelations that the author puts forth might have been more “book worthy” at the time.  Still, though, this is an incredible accomplishment for an author of such a young age.   I still plan on reading much more by this author, and I highly recommend him.