Abstract
Geoffrey Blainey is a well-known historian, principally of Australian economic history, who taught for many years in Melbourne, and also at Harvard. This book was written for a general audience and those specialists in other disciplines (now increasingly numerous) who have only a faint knowledge of Christianity. It is not, and was not intended to be, an encyclopaedia of church history. First published in Australia in 2011, it is now republished in the UK with apparently little revision or updating, apart from the final map on the distribution of the world’s Christians in 2015. As the commendations suggest, it is accessibly written; and the pattern of a scatter of facts illustrated by two or three detailed stories works well.
Nevertheless, upon examination certain biases became apparent. The first millennium occupies some 150 pages out of 550 pages of text, and 50 of those are spent on a retelling of the New Testament period. The history of the eastern Church, whether Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox, receives very little attention. Like many similar texts, the eastward expansion of Christianity to China in its first 600 years is almost totally ignored. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity (2009) was the first major book to rectify that omission, though its text is nearly twice as long. Hence the whole dialogue of Christianity with Islam and religions from further east in Asia is not mentioned either, even though this is a topic which should concern the twenty-first century general reader more than a retelling of the ‘glory days’ of Christendom. More interesting when one examines the sources pages at the back (which substitute for footnotes) is the fact that much of the scholarship on which the book is based is 20–25 years old, and almost necessarily restricted in scope. This perhaps explains statements like ‘On the eve of the Revolution, more Christians lived in France than in any other country’ (p. 380), which ignores much of the work done by French religious sociologists, many of them priests, since 1945. John McManners’s book, from which this seems to be derived, is actually much more nuanced than this, as it had to be to explain the importance of missions by the French religious orders in the early eighteenth century. There is, however, no excuse for such elementary errors as the misdating of Marx’s phrase, ‘religion is the opium of the people’, by nearly two decades (p. 492). Nor is it clear why the RSV is preferred to the NRSV for biblical quotations.
What are the alternatives? Owen Chadwick’s lavishly illustrated A History of Christianity (1995) also omits the Far East, but says as much in slightly less space; MacCulloch’s book, designed to accompany a successful TV series, combines up-to-date scholarship with accessibility. Blainey will not satisfy theological students (or their teachers), but might match some American outline courses, largely abandoned in the UK.