A History of Christianity by Paul Johnson

First published: 1976

Edition(s) used:A History of Christianity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Church history; history

Core issue(s): Catholics and Catholicism; church; evangelization; Jesus Christ; Judaism; Protestants and Protestantism

Christian Themes

In A History of Christianity, Paul Johnson, an English Catholic who has written prolifically on many political and religious subjects, gives his readers a comprehensive and accessible narrative of the Christian religion from its earliest days to the late twentieth century. Published in the mid-1970’s, A History of Christianity was written at a time when Johnson was shifting his political focus from left to right. A political liberal during the 1950’s and 1960’s, he later moved to the right, insisting that the biblical account of nature is literally true. However, in the 1970’s, he wrote an admiring biography of the liberal Pope John XXIII at about the same time as his publication of A History of Christianity.

In his prologue, Johnson acknowledges his religious beliefs but claims that faith is not incompatible with the demand that historians be as objective as possible, and A History of Christianity is not a work of special pleading for the Christian revelation. If it has a bias, it is a concentration on the story of the Roman Catholic Church, at times at the expense of the Protestant tradition, and it particularly ignores the role of Orthodox Christianity. Nevertheless, Johnson handles this long and complex subject brilliantly. Not doubting the divinity of Christ, Johnson discusses the scholarly challenge of accessing the historical Jesus given the paucity of contemporary sources. Arguing that the teachings of Jesus are more glimpses and insights than a code of dogma and doctrine, Johnson places Christ in the context of the imperial Roman world, a divided Jewish community, and a Hellenistic civilization of competing mystery religions.

Like most historians of early Christianity, Johnson sees Paul, whom he describes as the first pure Christian, as the pivotal figure, who made explicit what Jesus had left implicit. Pauline Christianity, however, with its universalist message, might have lost out to Judaic Christianity if it had not been for the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 c.e., after which the center of Christianity shifted to the city of Rome. The author offers an excellent discussion of the numerous Christian sects and heresies that bedeviled Christianity in its early centuries and its eventual triumph in the fourth century under the emperor Constantine. By the end of that century, with Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, the Church in the West had become an appendage of the state—or perhaps the reverse, becoming increasingly institutionalized and regimented.

During the early Middle Ages, it was the Roman Church that preserved civilization in the West, but the claims of the Church, allied with the Frankish monarchs, prohibited compromise with the Byzantine Empire’s Orthodox Christians, a division that became permanent in 1054. In the later Middle Ages, the papacy, with its vast bureaucracy and legal institutions, became the paramount power, reaching its apex under Innocent III’s pontificate (1198-1216). In the early Middle Ages, Johnson argues, the Church represented enlightenment and humane values, but later the papacy came to represent financial extortion and corruption associated with indulgences, simony, and sexual license. Johnson claims that the crusades of the twelfth and thirteen centuries were disastrous for Christianity. Not only was there little attempt to convert the Muslims, but the East’s Orthodox Church also suffered.

By the early sixteenth century, it had become obvious that the medieval goal of an all-encompassing Christian society headed by the papacy was crumbling. Desiderius Erasmus and the New Learning envisioned a return to the early days of Christianity. However, the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther and John Calvin led not only to a new departure but also to the breakup of the medieval paradigm. The author sympathetically admires the Christian humanists such as Erasmus, a third force in the struggle between the Protestant reformers and the Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation.

The Age of Reason, the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries undermined numerous Christian theological beliefs, such as the threat of eternal hell as a punishment or deterrent. Johnson notes that the Enlightenment was the first intellectual movement since the Roman Empire that evolved outside the Christian prototype. Darwinism and the biblical higher criticism of the nineteenth century brought into doubt the literalness of the Bible, which had been the cornerstone of the Protestants in their conflict with the Catholics. That is not to say, however, that secular reason answered all the challenges confronting humanity, as the excesses of the French Revolution illustrated; some fled to the fixed authority of the Roman Church as a refuge from the doubts and uncertainties of the times.

Although A History of Christianity focuses on the history of European Christianity, Johnson makes insightful comments about the attempt to spread the faith elsewhere. He contrasts the liberal universalism of Paul with the rigidity of the institutional churches and their reluctance to incorporate non-Western elements into European-style Christianity when carried to India, China, and elsewhere. He also argues that the American experience was somewhat unique, an Erasmian Christianity, tolerant, antidoctrinal, associating itself with freedom and progress.

If the latter nineteenth century saw a revival of organized Christianity, the author argues that institutional Christianity reached its nadir in the twentieth century. Again, the focus is largely on the Catholic Church, with the antimodernist stance of the papacy, but also on the Church’s responses to the horrors of World War I and the threat of Nazism. The “Great War” was a conundrum for most Christian clergymen, who too often claimed that God was wrapped in a particular national flag. A decade later, in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, both Catholic and Lutheran clerics were seduced into acquiescence or worse, and this complicity was compounded by the papacy’s deafening silence.

By the second half of the twentieth century, the author claims, Christianity was in retreat, with the notable exception of Africa. In Europe, few attended church on a weekly basis. In the United States, where church attendance remained higher than elsewhere in the Western world, Johnson notes that most American Protestants had long ago abandoned actually reading the Bible. The election of John XXIII as pope opened the window of the Catholic Church to change, but the authoritarian structure of the Church outlasted his papacy. However, even if the West has entered into a post-Christian world, Johnson argues, Christianity has never been just about mere numbers in a territorial context; rather, it concerns the moral and theological impact on individual believers. Johnson ends hopefully, noting the growing ecumenicalism at the time he wrote.

Christian Themes

Given its subject, A History of Christianity invariably encompasses most if not all of the themes found in Christianity’s two-millennium history. However, Johnson discusses two themes that have been periodically manifest over the centuries. First, he contrasts the ideas and influences of two of the key figures of the early church, Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. Johnson argues that Paul, in his radical universalism, broke away from the domination of a single community (Judaism or Jewish Christianity) and a rigid code of laws. Conversely, Augustine was the “dark genius” of the church-state alliance that came into existence after Constantine, becoming the architect of medieval Christianity and willing to use the institutional power of the state and the Church to enforce conformity. Where Paul claims that “there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:11), Augustine argues for an exclusive “city of God” superior to the city of man, a total Christian society, based on compulsion, justifying the use of coercion and torture against heretics and nonbelievers.

The other theme that permeates A History of Christianity is the theme of Christianity triumphant. The late medieval Catholic Church was an example, as was Protestant Christianity in the nineteenth century. This triumphalism not only occurred in matters of theology but also encompassed institutional power as well as assumptions of racial and cultural superiority. As Johnson notes, however, actions lead to reactions, as the Protestant Reformation reduced the “catholic” pretensions of the Roman Church, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment brought into doubt the Protestant reliance upon the Bible, and the world wars of the twentieth century ended confidence about the inevitability of worldwide Christian progress.

Sources for Further Study

Frend, W. H. C. “Christians vs. Christians.” New York Review of Books 23 (August 5, 1976). A major review of Johnson’s A History of Christianity, which Frend describes as both ambitious and radical.

Johnson, Paul. The Quest for God. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Revealing for Johnson’s own religious beliefs.

Weisberg, Jacob. “The Courtly Contrarian.” The New York Times, March 15, 1998. An insightful and fascinating interview of Johnson.