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.