Marty on The History of the Christian World

Last year I picked up Martin Marty’s “The Christian World: A Global History.”

Despite the breadth of the title, it’s a wonderful short look at Christianity from the beginning until more or less the present day.  It’s like an outline of everything that has gone on in Christianity. The Crusades get a page and a half of its 236 pages. The Inquisition gets one long paragraph, into which he manages to pack the context of it in both France and Spain.

Marty weaves in lots of delightful little nuggets like this: “One of the strengths in the East was the devotion to icons, representations of Christian saints that in many cases became the subject of what their critics called idolatry. Finally the Emperor Leo III in 726 was moved to attack them, thus becoming known as the “iconoclast,” the image-breaker.” What fun to learn the origin of iconoclast!
He also pulls no punches. Where the philosopher and theologian Keith Ward has argued that the last Christian war was the 30 years War, Marty is clear that World War I was a Christian war, “in that all sides appealed to the Christian God and used their interpretation of Christianity to justify their faith. It is hard to to read accounts of the cruelty, the carnage, and the atrocity of the war in the name of God without seeing it as a contributor to the decline of of Christian humanism and Christian expression in much of Europe, a decline from which it never recovered.”

Even when he shudders, he remains balanced.  Of missionaries, he writes “that their attitudes were often condescending if not racist goes almost without saying, but it is not the only thing to be said about them.” He goes on to detail both their great faith and some of the good they did.
True, nearly every sentence, every clause even, feels like it could be a book, and yet you still get a real feel for the whole glorious mess of Christianity. A tour de force of historical writing.  It would be a treat to find a similar book for Islam and other major religions.