2 of 4

• He traces the three chief sources of authority that developed in reaction to those challenges: Scripture, Bishops, and Creed. And he shows how all three gained their authority and how they came together to create Christianity's binding doctrines in the early ecumenical councils.

There is much more here of a luminous, clarifying nature. For example, Johnson shows how, after Constantine launched the faith from persecuted minority status to culture-shaping power broker, Christianity "expanded to fill the public space" with elaborate architecture, Roman-esque bureaucracy, and stunning art and music. And how, by the same token, Christianity began to take a custodial role in larger society, recognizing certain public responsibilities as it endowed charities and defined the very passage of time through the festivals and saints' days of the liturgical year.

Johnson is also sure-footed near the end of the story, as he takes us through the three events that disestablished Christianity (that is, disengaged it from public power): the French, American, and Russian revolutions, and gives a helpful typology of how the Enlightenment critical tradition—and the "modernity" it created—elicited very different responses from each of the traditional Christian confessions.

All of this he does in much more powerful, direct, concrete language than the abstract shorthand I am using to summarize it.

Conflict trumps coherence
On the negative side: Whether Johnson intended this or not, his course might have a certain appeal to bright outsiders or fringe fellow-travelers struggling with the "big questions" about a fragmented, wheat-and-tares Christianity and its poor record on many fronts. But I am not sure this presentation says enough about the real strengths of Christianity—at least, once this world religion has crossed the Constantinian Rubicon from marginalized sect to culture-shaping power—to be helpful to that audience (or, more seriously, to leave any audience with a balanced, well-rounded sense of the faith).

There is about this course the whiff of the liberal historian of yesteryear who surveyed church history only to show where the church has betrayed the "kernel of the Gospel"—which, upon close examination, turns out to be a flaccid, ill-defined religion of love. A modern example of this tired approach, pioneered by the nineteenth-century historian Adolf Harnack, is Robert Farrar Capon's tellingly titled The Astonished Heart: Reclaiming the Good News from the Lost-And-Found of Church History. This approach is of course (and I am not accusing Johnson of this entirely, just as a tendency) one-sided, as it fails to show that even in the midst of great error and heartbreaking conflict, Jesus has continued to build his church, against which the gates of hell will not stand.

To state this more positively: One does sense that Johnson, as a believer who has taken his dedication to the faith so seriously that he has become a church historian (and perhaps more impressively, in a previous life, a Benedictine monk), trains this harsh light on the faith because he believes the truth of the Gospel and does not wish to see it obscured or diminished by the many errors of the human institutions that have attempted to live that truth in the world. And in the end, this "wounded lover" approach does make this tape series strong broth for strong Christians. But it is not introductory milk for baby Christians, nor (a fortiori) an appropriate introduction for those whose prejudices against the church are already strongly formed in some of the directions Johnson explores.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

July (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48