'A huge, masterly chronicle that invites the Church centre stage'

Cristina Odone enjoys a vigorous and sometimes incendiary chronicle of Christianity that puts faith back centre stage.

In early October, the relics of St Therese de Lisieux drew more than 2000 people to a church in London's posh and leafy Kensington, after touring all over the country.

A few hundred feet from multimillionaire mansions and a Whole Foods gourmet emporium, men and women queued for hours in order to kiss, touch or press their foreheads against the casket containing bones from a 24-year-old nun's thigh and foot.

While atheist commentators despaired at the gullible who venerated such "juju", Christian websites spoke of the consolation that worshipping relics has brought to millions down the ages.

Populist spirituality weaves in and out of Christianity, a flesh-and-blood backdrop to grand intangibles.

Diarmaid MacCulloch makes abundantly clear in A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years that he would not join the queue to press his lips against the "Little Flower's" casket.

Such pious exhibitionism embarrasses him.

What he cherishes in his church is the gentle compromise, the decent and tolerant community that allows for diversity rather than centralised authority.

It is an unthreatening vision of Christianity and an eminently Anglican one.

It may not explain how BMW-driving bankers can drop to their knees on cold flagstones to venerate ancient French bones, but it does show the variety of traditions that make up a religion too long dismissed as monolithic.

This is a crucial contribution to today's religious debate.

Contemporary critics have portrayed the Christian legacy as uniformly anti-rational and antediluvian; the enemy, this way, can be destroyed with a single blow.

MacCulloch instead portrays a multi-dimensional movement, which, through the millennia, has acted as liberator and not just oppressor, intellectual driving force as well as censor.

In a culture shaped more by Dawkins than Deuteronomy, this amounts to an act of iconoclasm.

But for MacCulloch, "science is a very imprecise word", at its core exhibiting "no clash of purpose or intention with religion".

True scientists, he explains, are philosophers bent as much on an examination of God's creation as any theologian.

In today's world, this is an incendiary statement and it makes one long to organise a debate between MacCulloch, professor of church history at Oxford University, and Dawkins, former professor for the understanding of science at the same university.

If MacCulloch believes scientific inquiry examines God's material creation, he sees Christian studies as focusing on the issue of man's divinity: "How can a human being be God?"

He introduces us to a variety of theologians whose wrestlings with this problem chart the evolution of Christian teaching: St Paul, Origen, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Karl Rahner.

MacCulloch considers seriously and at great length the more important heresies and the more interesting splinter groups, from the Cathars to the Ethiopian Church. MacCulloch's idiosyncratic take goes beyond the characters in the Christian story to matters of real substance: the papacy is control freakery; latterday evangelicals are weird; the ancient Greeks influenced the Church almost as much as the Old Testament did.

These personal convictions are often persuasively argued and always heartfelt.

When he writes of the present battle over homosexuality within the Anglican communion, MacCulloch, gay and Anglican, allows his dismay to ring in every word.

His intimate involvement with the subject lends this history an emotional appeal usually absent from a scholarly work.

It also allows for some peculiar foibles, such as the historian's puzzling emphases: why should we read more about the Jesuits than the Virgin Mary, less on Jesus' ministry than on John Wesley's?

The effect risks distorting rather than illuminating aspects of Christianity.

Yet these flaws are easily diluted in more than 1000 pages, spanning 3000 years of global history that include mythological figures, forgotten rows, extravagant characters and splinter sects.

The sheer breadth of MacCulloch's chronicle is almost subversive.

At a time when Christianity, in the public arena, is dismissed as the poor relation to be shunted off to the sidelines, here is a huge, masterly chronicle that invites the Church centre stage and celebrates its global influence and extraordinary vision. - Guardian News and Media

• A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, by Diarmaid MacCulloch (Allen Lane, pp1216).