Benedict's Updates

"I'll begin by saying that this is probably one of the most easily readable church history books available. The writing style is straightforward and non-academic. The chapter lengths are perfect for daily reading. For a survey of the last 2000 years, Shelley manages to put in a lot of detail without getting bogged down in it. There's a lot to like about this book.

There are a few things to dislike about this book though. First, it should be called Western Church History with a Calvinist Bias. There are factual errors and conflations of heretical and orthodox teachings. The Eastern church is, by in large, given fair treatment, but the Great Schism between east and west is hardly mentioned, and all of Eastern Christianity simply disappears immediately after, to reappear only in the 20th century—at least the Russian Orthodox church reappears—first as the victims of, and then as shills for the atheistic Soviet government.

Shelley takes great pains to describe the political climate and machinations that contribute to the rise of Christendom and the Roman Catholic church (as if these political events were the underpinning of the entire movement), but he essentially ignores the politics involved in the spread of the Reformation, leaving one to surmise that Protestantism spread solely by its own merit and Divine Will.

The major problems I found are related to Shelley's bias shining through the text at key points throughout the narrative. Some examples follow:

p. 4 �� "[A]n unprejudiced reading of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John reveals Jesus' plans for a company of followers to carry on his work."
This certainly seems to indicate the necessity of Apostolic succession. Shelley makes this bald statement almost as a thesis for the whole work, and then goes on to present a version of history that is highly critical to hierarchical ecclesiology, and which takes for granted the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.

p. 13 �� "Stephen, however, was a special case. He dared to renounce the law of Moses and attack the temple of God, openly and repeatedly. . . . He spoke of Jewish history, but he argued that men might worship God apart from the temple."
The account of Stephen is given in Acts 6 and 7. Acts 6:13��14 specifically indicate that the accusations of Stephen speaking against the temple and the law are false witness. Furthermore, Stephen's quotation of Isiah 66:1��2 is a charge that the Jewish leaders were trying to subjugate God with their temple authority, not a renouncement of temple worship. Early Christians continued to worship in the temple until it became impossible to do so, after which they created new, sacred spaces, often in the homes of wealthy believers.

p. 17 �� "These first Christians came to believe that the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, followed by the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, were divine events. . . . In a similar way, the second ceremony, the Lord's Supper, as it was soon called, looked back to Jesus' betrayal and death and found in the events of Calvary and the empty tomb evidence of the 'new covenant' promised by the prophet Jeremiah. . . . This simple meal renewed their covenant with God and with one another."
I doubt that early Christians would have characterized the Lord's Supper as a "simple meal". As early as 155 A.D. Justin Martyr records that Christians considered the Eucharist to be the flesh and blood of the incarnate Christ. Communion as a simple meal is a modern Protestant characterization.

p. 84 �� "Among the earliest was a young law student from Asia Minor named Gregory, later nicknamed the Wonder-Worker, because of his unusually successful missionary labors among his own people."
"Wonderworker" is not a "nickname"; it is a title bestowed upon St. Gregory by the Church, and not because he was a decent missionary, but because of the many miracles God performed through him! The idea that someone would be referred to as "the Wonderworker" because of his missionary prowess is ridiculous on its face, and seems to indicate a bias toward Dualism.

p. 85 �� "Origen's overriding concern was to allow the whole Bible to speak for itself . . ."
Another ridiculous statement. There was no "Bible" in the time of Origen. To speak of "the whole Bible" as existing at that time is a willful misrepresentation of facts, and only perpetuates the myth that the Bible descended, in bound form, from on high.

p. 102 �� Shelley misquotes the Nicene creed by including the filioque ("and the Son") as part of the original text. This phrase (which has deep theological implications as to the personhood of the Holy Spirit) was added by the Roman church at a later date. It was never accepted by the churches in the East, and was one of the major points of contention that led to the Great Schism between East and West.

p. 106 �� "It is clear that when we think of the Trinity, we should not try to think of three persons in our sense of the term, but three personal disclosures of God that correspond to what he is really like."
Shelley spends an entire page discussing the difficulty the church had in expressing the nature of the Trinity, and then goes on to sum it up in one, trite statement—a statement which is, in fact, an expression of Sebelianism (or modalism), a heresy dealt with in the 3rd century.

p. 129 �� Shelley's discussion of the heresy of Pelagianism is too broad. Not all of what Pelagius taught was condemned, and not all of what Augustine taught was accepted by the whole church, especially in the East. Augustine would remove Man's free will, a will that the early fathers explicitly taught as necessary to understanding salvation. The conflation of Pelagian heresy with standard Christian doctrine of the time reads as a setup for the doctrine of Calvinism some thousand years later.

p. 138 �� "The sole and independent leadership of the Eastern church by the patriarch of Constantinople was confirmed."
Shelley would have the Ecumenical Patriarch as some sort of Eastern Pope. This has never been the case. Eastern Church leadership (and until the Great Schism, this included Rome) has always been conciliar, with one patriarch enjoying primacy, but not authority, over the others.

p. 144 �� "In the Church of the Twelve Apostles, which he had built, Constantine prepared in the midst of the twelve symbolic tombs of the apostles a thirteenth, for himself. . . . This thirteenth tomb gave rise to the emperor's title as 'equal to the apostles.'"
St. Constantine, Equal to the Apostles is called such because he was instrumental in the spread of Christianity, not because he built himself a tomb. Again, Shelley is attempting to discount, or at least temper, the piety of the Medieval Church.

p. 145 �� "Constantine discovered, however, that Christianity itself was divided and torn over differences in traditions of doctrine and practice. He was superstitiously anxious that God would hold him personally responsible for these divisions and quarrels among the Christians."
Is fear of the Lord superstition? Constantine decreed Christianity as the faith his empire. Why would he not be anxious that God would hold him responsible for its practice?

p. 147 �� "The state itself was conceived to be the only community established by God, and it embraced the whole life of man. The visible representative of God within it, who performed his will and dispensed his blessings, was the emperor."
This sounds a lot like the Evangelical view of the United States. (Not a criticism, just an observation.)

p. 241 �� "Thus, Luther brushed aside the traditional view of the church as a sacred hierarchy headed by the pope and returned to the early Christian view of a community of Christian believers in which all believers are priests called to offer spiritual sacrifices to God."
This is a particularly rosy (and modern) interpretation of how the early Church was organized.

In the first half of the book, discussing the rise of Christendom and the church of Rome, Shelley is careful to point out the political climate and machianations that surround these events, almost as if they are the primary cause. In his discussion of the rise of Protestantism, he makes no attempt to ascribe any political motives to the spread of these new doctrines, assuming they are spread solely by Divine Will and their own merit.

In all the talk of the spread of Christianity, there is no discussion of the Christianization of Kievan Rus in 980, which brought Christianity to almost half the world (geographically). He also fails to mention that the Portugese merchants who brought their faith to India encountered Christianity already established there by Thomas the Apostle over 1,000 years prior. This demonstrates the pervasiveness of of Shelley's Western-centric view of Christianity.

p. 256 �� Calvin steps in, right in the middle of the narrative, as the hero of the story. Shelley's enthusiasm for Calvin is palpable.

p. 281 �� "During the Middle Ages, however, an important attitude developed among European Christians. The rise of Islam in the seventh century drove a wedge between Christians in Europe and their fellow believers in Asia and Africa. Only a few outposts of Christianity survived in the Islamic countries of North Africa and the Near East. Christianity was confined almost exclusively to Europe."
If anything, the wedge that was driven was because the Western church began to borrow ideas from Islam (strict adherence to a text being one of them). The Eastern church may not have flourished under Islamic rule, but it did survive, and in many cases, coexisted peacefully.

p. 371 �� "Early Christians believed that, amid his encircling gloom, the Lord Jesus himself prayed for his disciples: 'Father, . . . My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world' (John 17:15��19, NIV)."
Do later Christians believe something different? I'm not sure what this statement is supposed to mean.

It is clear that Shelley's purpose of writing this book was its second half, the rise and spread of Protestantism, and specifically the history of the denominations in America. It's clear because his level of enthusiasm increases as he draws closer to the present. Shelley does an excellent job of documenting the people and processes that got us from Luther to this point, and anyone looking to quickly increase their knowledge of Church history would do well to read this book, keeping in mind the bias mentioned above."