Author: Bill Leonard
Title: “Homebrewed Christianity: Church History: Flaming Heretics
and Heavy Drinkers”
Publication: Nashville: Fortress Press, 2017, 238 pages,
paper, 8 chapters, endnotes.
This orange book is one of a series called “Homebrewed Christianity”,
edited by Tripp Fuller.
The basic premise is that Christianity is practice has been
a bottom-up religion, defined by how it is practiced by real people, who are
compared to chess pieces (Bishop, Elder, Deacon, Acolyte). Yet the tone of the book presumes people want to act together and belong, not be so much on their own.
Indeed, the first chapter is called “herding ecclesiastical
cats. As the reality of actually witnessing
a resurrection and ascension, which would have seemed like ultimate truth to those
who happened to live at a time and place where they could see it, receded, and became
a matter for “men of faith”, it became a member of socialization and
organization to figure out who really should be in charge and who should
deliver the messages and how people would follow.
Perhaps that has meaning today as individual speech itself becomes
questionable and we wonder who has the “privilege of being listened to” in a
secular sense.
The church has always had to deal with the paradoxes of
hypocrisy. It doesn’t know who walks
with the Lord. Only people do. The latter part of the book gets into specific episodes,
like the Jim Crow laws and Scopes Trial (movie “Inherit the Wind” and the “old
time religion” scene).
Copies of this book were sold at the First Baptist Church of
the City of Washington DC last spring.
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