100 books like A.D. 381

In Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, James Carroll, a former Catholic priest turned journalist and novelist, delivers a powerful indictment of the politicized religion that from the time of Constantine the Great persecuted heretics, non-Romans, and, most of all, Jews. Carroll’s historical account is colorful and accurate, but what this book mostly does is exorcise a demon that plagued the author personally for years: his shared responsibility as a Catholic believer and official for an anti-Semitic tradition that helped generate the Holocaust. This is a stirring job of writing that looks forward to Carroll’s later work as a novelist, including his lovely take on the story of  Abelard and Heloise, The Cloister (Anchor, 2019).     

The historian Peter Brown is the great expert on the late Roman/early Christian era, and he writes like a scholarly poet. I don’t think anyone has done a better job of putting the lives and thoughts of Christian intellectuals and laypeople in the context of a Roman society experiencing convulsive, transformative change. This book will change your views of both Roman and Christian cultures. If you’re like me, it will lead you to read Brown’s other works, such as his epic 2012 study, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.

In this lively and knowledgeable history of Christian controversies of the fifth century CE, Philip Jenkins produces a valuable and colorful sequel to the story told in When Jesus Became God. This book reveals what happened after the Council of Constantinople adopted a Trinitarian view of Jesus and Roman power shifted to the Byzantine East. The council “settled” the Arian controversy for the time being but generated an even more ferocious series of battles over Jesus’ divine/human nature and the relationship of Christianity to Greek thought. As the book’s subtitle suggests, Jenkins has a fine time showing how an admixture of imperial politics, Church politics, and theological ideas created “orthodox” Christian thought and practice. 

Sir Anthony Buzzard, the leader of a self-described “Biblical Unitarian” church, and co-author Charles F. Hunting have written a learned, strongly argued polemic against the Trinitarian doctrine that is still accepted by most believing Christians.  As a non-Christian, I do not take sides in the continuing debate over the relationship of the Son to the Father, but the debate does continue, and Sir Anthony’s book is a must for those interested in it.  It can be read usefully in conjunction with his later study, Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian (Restoration Fellowship, 2007).       

Scholarly works that deal with the subject of near-death experiences in the history of religions are very rare.

This one also happens to be well-written, in a clear and accessible style. It contains a wealth of information about ideas of the afterlife in Late Antiquity that will be unfamiliar to even the most dedicated readers on the subject.

It’s also another great example of a rigorous, knowledgeable scholar concluding that visionary experiences such as NDEs contribute to the formation of afterlife beliefs.

By setting the context with chapters on “Journeys to paradise in the Jewish Apocalyptic tradition” and “Otherworld journeys in the Greco-Roman traditions,” Potthoff reminds us that Christianity did not develop in isolation but was one of various interlinked Mediterranean religions.

It also shows further how these kinds of beliefs and experiences are found around the world and throughout history. 

This book explores post-Reformation attitudes to the medieval past, which was continuously debated and rewritten according to the shifting religious landscape of the sixteenth century and beyond.

Helen Parish’s work helped me to see the merits and benefits of crossing the rather arbitrary divide between the medieval and early modern periods, since it so deftly places medieval and Reformation sources in dialogue.

Her book also makes fascinating reading for anyone wanting to better understand reformed Protestantism as a culture of adaptation and accommodation, as much as of destruction and the outright rejection of the Catholic past. 

A prejudice people have about medieval philosophy is that it is all about theology, and theology isn’t philosophy (or isn’t philosophically interesting). There are two answers to be given here: first, medieval philosophers thought about lots of things apart from theology, like logic, physics, ethics, and so on. But also, when they did theology the results could be philosophically fascinating! In this case, discussions of the Trinity turn out to involve explorations of such topics as the nature of relations and the philosophy of mind (because one idea was to understand the Trinity as being akin to interrelations between aspects of human psychology). Other topics worth looking at to show how philosophically rewarding theology could be would be the eucharist and angels.

So many Christian churches struggle over who ought to lead. Do female priests/pastors fulfill or discount God’s intentions? How does one know? Scripture? Tradition?

Macy digs into the long-term history and finds that women were clearly ordained in the early church, but evidence of that ordination has been erased or explained away. Women used to perform many duties that we associate with religious leadership today, including some sacraments.

Furthermore, some were ordained, receiving vestments, staffs, and mitres. Their gradual exclusion from their traditional roles happened over centuries and was virtually complete by the 13th century, as the Church redefined ordination in ways that excluded women and their ministries.

Then we rewrote the history to make it appear women had never been ordained. Again, no agenda here—just the history.

This is a wonderfully mind-expanding book which gently takes the history of philosophy that you think you know and turns it on its head. Most of the great critics of Christianity – Spinoza, Voltaire, Tom Paine, they’re all here – were not really, it turns out, atheists trying to tear it all up: they were idealistic, reforming believers who weren’t satisfied with churchy orthodoxies and wanted to purify religions that they thought had become corrupted. That made them maybe even fiercer in their criticisms, and it certainly meant they had unleashed forces they couldn’t control. But it means the moral force that drove anti-religious criticism during the Enlightenment was the desire, not to destroy religion, but to perfect it.

Some of the big topics within Bible prophecy are the Great Tribulation Period with the Antichrist at the helm, and whether Bible believers will be raptured before or after this period of distress. The authors tackle this tough question with sound biblical evidence to support their claims.

Unfortunately, their findings go against many popular opinions of the modern Church and there is great debate amongst believers about the Rapture. This is why their book is very important to provide much needed information for those who hold differing views.