Book Reviews / CHRC .- () –
Robert Bruce Mullin, A Short World History of Christianity.West- minster John Knox Press, Louisville/London , xiii + pp. ISBN . ..
Writing a short history of anything is a daunting, and potentially thankless, task. Authors must respect the word-limits set by publishers that make such books financially viable enterprises even as they endeavor to treat their topics with the seriousness that they deserve. In this instance Robert Bruce Mullin addresses the history of Christianity as a global phenomenon, and attempts to do so in less than three hundred pages of text. Since there is a great deal that will have to go unsaid, there will have to be some driving principle that sets this book apart from the countless histories produced over the last fifty years. It seems to me that there are at least three ways in which such a book can ultimately prove successful. One option is to adopt a specific lens through which the whole subject will be viewed—post-colonial for instance—so that the reader is presented with a very different take on the material than one encounters in the standard histories. Thus, even as the subject matter maybe commonplace (e.g. crusades, heresies etc.) the narrative will not fit the standard pattern. Some will agree with such a reading and others will not, but if done well it will at least stimulate meaningful discussion. Another option is to take a more straight-forward approach, but make it a point to draw on the most recent scholarship in the field and then highlight the shifts in approach to this material that have occurred over the decades. Hence the reader would benefit not only from a survey of the most up-to-date scholarship, but would also receive a valuable historiographical analysis. That would require a great deal of work on the part of the author—locating and digesting the latest monographs and articles—but it would be a boon for the reader. And finally, one might write a history devoted to the many people and events which are passed over in other general histories. This approach need not be driven by a specific ideology, although it could be. Such a book might simply be a breath of fresh air for its western Anglophone audience—telling them about all sorts of things they will not find in comparable books. Unfortunately, Mullin’s A Short World History of Christianity adopts none of these possible avenues. What we are left with for the most part is a potted history, the great bulk of which could just as easily have been written in as in . Mullin argues that for the first , years of its history Christianity was a multifarious entity in which diverse regions expressed their own distinctive versions of the faith. But the next nine-hundred years witnessed the dominance of Western Christianity, the “Latin era” as he calls it. In just the
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, DOI: 10.1163/187124109X463536 Book Reviews / CHRC .- () – last fifty years, however, the rest of the world—most notably the global south— has re-asserted itself and brought the Latin era to a close (pp. xii–xiii). This schema provides Mullin with the rationale for devoting most of his book to the Western Church. As for his treatment of the first millennium, that material is no different than what one encounters in all histories of Christianity: Irenaeus, Athanasius, Cappadocian Fathers, and the like. With the shift into the second millennium, Mullin bids farewell to the East, but he proceeds to tell a very familiar tale. Now it should be said that Mullin clearly grasps the material that he covers; there are no errors. He writes in a clear and lively style. Yet we have heard so much of this before; as the same cast of characters is trotted out (Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Wesley etc.) one wonders why we need to hear it all again. What is this book’s raison d’être? Mullin promises a “new narrative,” but he never really delivers on this. He seeks to justify all the attention given to the Latin Church on account of “western dominance” during the second millennium. But even if this were true politically and militarily, given the weakened state of the Byzantine Empire, the story of Christianity outside the European continent need not be treated as an appendix to what is clearly regarded as the more important western history. After all, ‘Christian history’ did not come to a stop in the rest of the world. There are a few exceptions to this western orientation and one wishes that Mullin had made them the principal focus of his book. There is, for instance, a very interesting section on Christianity among the Mongols of the thirteenth century (pp. –). Generally, though, many of the people that Mullin wants “to bring back into the narrative” (p. xiii) receive very short shrift: the post-Chalcedonian Nestorians and Monophysites for example. And if one wants to make room for alternative western voices surely the Cathars, Waldensians, and Lollards might have found more space. Indeed, a thoughtful discussion of the idea of heresy in the Middle Ages would have furthered Mullin’s larger goal of presenting a more inclusive Christian history. Of course, it can be protested that there is so much material and so little space. That is inevitably the case, but then why take up that precious space with John Calvin? To leave him out might be reckoned a glaring omission, but little good is likely to come from just two pages on “Calvin and the Reformed Vision.” The problem with attempting to pack so much material into solittle space is that, unless the recounting is uniquely insightful, the reader is left adrift amidst a sea of names and facts. Much of the material that would have made this book especially interesting—and that would have set it apart from other short histories—is crowded out by stock accounts of Western Christianity.