Church history

Review: Reading the Bible with Ten Church Fathers

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Cover image of "Reading the Bible with Ten Church Father" by Gerald Bray

Reading the Bible with Ten Church Father

Reading the Bible with Ten Church Father, Gerald Bray. Baker Books (ISBN: 9781540905147) 2026.

Summary: How the generations after the apostles interpreted and preached the Bible.

One of the things any growing Christian aspires to is to better read and understand the Bible. Gerald Bray believes that is one of the reasons why we should learn how the early church fathers read, understood and preached the Bible. We follow in the footsteps of two millenia of Christians and the ten church fathers profiled here were among the first. Not only that, what they understood and taught played a crucial role in the formation of the church’s understanding of key doctrines. They contributed, even in their disagreements, to clarifying what we believe about the Trinity and the person of Christ. And, yes, they differed. But even their differences helped shape the church’s interpretive practices.

In this readable account, theologian Gerald Bray offers a concise biography of each of the ten fathers, highlighting their works and how they read scripture, and what this means for us. For example:

Justin Martyr was an apologist to the Jews. He argued for the idea that all scripture pointed to Christ but that the Jews had failed to see this. His Dialogue with Trypho and how the two men concluded is a model of respectful dialogue.

Origen was the first to write commentaries and practice careful textual criticism. He set forth principles of interpretation and guarded against excessive spiritualization of the biblical text, yet used the literal sense as a basis for allegorizing scripture.

Gregory of Nyssa came from a family of theologians with older brother Basil and sister Macrina. He stressed God’s initiative through the Incarnate Word, Jesus, and the written word of scripture. He not only contributed to the formulation of God as one in nature and three hypostases. Gregory sets forth Abraham as the archetype of faith.

Ambrosiaster is a kind of “mystery man” among the church fathers. However, he left us with commentaries on Paul’s letters and a discussion of questions of interpretation of the whole Bible.

John Chrysostom was known for his preaching, eventually being elevated to patriarch of Constantinople before become embroiled in controversy and exiled. He sees scripture as God’s accommodation to the limits of human understanding. John described Old Testament prophets as sowers and the New Testament apostles as reapers. He believed salvation to be for all people and modeled diligent exposition of the whole of scripture.

Theodore of Mopsuestia was a friend of John Chrysostom. He was a monastic and scholar, writing commentaries on most of the Bible and rejecting fanciful allegorization for literal reading of the text. He got in trouble after his death for his views of the two hypostases of Christ.

Jerome is best known for his Latin translation of the Bible, known as the Vulgate, based on the Hebrew Masoretic text rather than the Septuagint. He was a model of careful translation that returned to the sources as well as an author of several commentaries.

Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo in north Africa models the work of a theologian grounded in the biblical text, confronting both the Donatist schism and Pelagianism.

Cyril of Alexandria met the challenge of Nestorianism over Christology. He read the Old Testament as history that pointed to Christ, a pioneer of typological reading. Cyril also modeled the theological interpretation of the New Testament, particularly the gospel of John. He was clear in proclaiming Jesus as God incarnate who, divine and human in one person, died for our salvation.

Theoderet of Cyrrhus was a disciple of Theodore of Mopsuestia, but models for us the willingness to be convinced by scripture that the ideas of Christology he received from Theodore were inadequate and that the Chalcedonian account was truer to the text of scripture.

This is a wonderfully concise introduction to the fathers, suitable for a class or personal study. Reflection questions help the reader discern the relevance of each father for today. They also recognize the timeless questions with which both they and we must wrestle. Each chapter also includes texts for further reading on each father.

Bray helps us realize the crucial role these fathers played in clarifying orthodox belief. Not only that, he helps us see how they grounded the defense of the faith in scripture carefully interpreted. Bray encourages us to give thanks for their lives, anticipating the day we will be in eternal communion with them at the table of the Lamb.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Athens and Jerusalem

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Cover image of "Athens & Jerusalem" by Gerald Bray

Athens and Jerusalem, Gerald Bray. Lexham Press (ISBN: 9781683597728) 2025.

Summary: An in-depth survey of the parallel histories of philosophical tradition and Christian theology and their interactions.

I should lead off by saying that this book turned out to be something different than I’d expected. Instead of a critical analysis of the influences of philosophy on Christianity, this turn out to be more of a historical survey of both traditions, their differing perspectives, and interactions. That said, the survey offered by Bray is a highly readable one spanning the time from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle down to the present.

Bray accomplishes that by a chronological history that begins first in Athens and the rise of the Greek philosophers followed by a history of Jerusalem and the Abrahamic faith of the Jews. Then Bray traces the intersection of both Jews and Christians with the Greek philosophers, first in Alexandria, and then with Origin. Following this, Bray describes the period from 313 to late medieval times as Jerusalem triumphant. Theological controversy demanded the systematic rigor of philosophy to clarify matters of doctrine. The high point of harmonizing philosophy and theology came with Thomas Aquinas.

The rediscovery of philosophical works in the Renaissance resulted in the rise of Neoplatonism and an increasing focus on human reason. For Protestants, Hobbes and Locke offered a kind of creed for civil society that opened the way for the secular, separated state. The longest chapter in the work treats the thinkers of the Enlightenment with its focus on rationalism. Often, this resulted in challenging Christian theological conviction. Some of examples of this are found in the works of Rousseau, Voltaire, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin. In addition, philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and john Stuart Mill promoted a pragmatic secularism.

So, we finally arrive at the present. Both biological and cosmological discoveries have led to a renewed openness of some to theism. In addition, Bray notes metaphysical premises that parallel theological convictions including an orderly and rational universe and the human ability to understand it, contingency, and more. However Bray seems more cautious than some when it comes to reconciling the two. He notes a basic difference of perspective. Theology begins with and focuses on God. Philosophy begins with human reason and lacks a fixed point of reference. He’s not without hope however and notes the work of Christians in philosophy.

What Bray offers is a highly readable yet in-depth survey of the history of the interaction of Christianity and philosophy. Summaries at the end of each chapter distill the main points of his survey yet further. We don’t get an in-depth critical analysis of the church councils and how philosophical considerations played into the debates and formulations. Nor do we study the synthesis of philosophy and theology in Aquinas and subsequent Catholic tradition. Some may also object to his summary treatment of philosophers.

What I would suggest is that this is a great first work to read, overviewing the landscape of the history. Of course, the interested student will want to zoom in on particular periods and people. It would have been helpful to have more in-depth bibliographies for each chapter rather than the brief “For Further Reading” at the conclusion. However, any student who has learned basic research methods can figure this out. This also makes a good reference work for pastors who need historical context if discussing a particular philosopher.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Becoming the Pastor’s Wife

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Cover image of "Becoming the Pastor's Wife" by Beth Allison Barr

Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, Beth Allison Barr. Brazos Press (ISBN: 9781587435898) 2025.

Summary: Examines the connection between the decline of female ordination and the rise of the role of pastor’s wife.

Beth Allison Barr is the wife of a minister. She is also a full-time Professor of History at Baylor University. While joining in her church’s ministry, she does not fit the stereotype of “the pastor’s wife.” She does not see “pastor’s wife” as a calling for all women married to ministers. And in this book, she makes a case that the elevation of the role of “pastor’s wife” corresponds to the decline in the ordination of women, particularly in evangelical churches.

She begins by observing what we see in the New Testament accounts. There are women like Phoebe, Prisca, and Junia who engaged in ministry. Junia is “among the apostles.” And then there is Peter’s wife. Barr asks, “where is she?” The silence of scripture suggests that there is no role definition for her, unlike the growing consensus in conservative church circles treating “pastor’s wife” as a calling. (Barr and her researchers even compiled the literature on the subject, which appears as a special bibliography.)

Rather, for the first millennium, Barr shows that there were women who were priests. She describes the Priscilla Catacombs that portray a women leading liturgical prayer. There were the presbytera who served communion and otherwise participated in ministry. And she points to stained glass representations of women with croziers and to the powerful role of Milburga as abbess over a double community of women and men. Such an ordained position was the equivalent of a bishop’s. Likewise, there is the example of Hildegard of Bingen, who preached throughout Europe.

Barr traces the decline of women in such positions to the celibate male priesthood. Female bodies became a problem as the “Geese” of the Cross Bones Graveyard attest. Located near Winchester, it was unconsecrated burial ground for women prostitutes working in brothels under the bishop’s jurisdiction. And when the Reformation came, the priest’s whore became the pastor’ wife.

From here, the book takes a turn to the role of the pastor’s wife in the Southern Baptist Convention and the elimination of ordination as an option for women. Here, Barr brings in her study of books written for pastor’s wives. The picture is one of the church getting “two for the price of one” in addition to being the dutiful homemaker who served all her husband’s needs. She traces the evolution of the Willie Turner Dawson Award, recognizing the best pastor’s wife.

She explores how women were ordained in the Southern Baptist Convention–as missionaries. And prior to 1973, women were ordained to ministry positions. At this point, complementarianism began to be increasingly embraced, and with it, women’s ordination increasingly opposed. And during this time, sexual abuse and misconduct and coverups became part of the Southern Baptist culture. Barr juxtaposes the story of the 2023 vote to disfellowship churches ordaining women with the story of Maria Acacia. An SBC missionary to Toronto, she found herself in an abusive relationship with her husband. Church leadership covered up the abuse. He remained in leadership. She filed for divorce. No one spoke to or for her.

Barr concludes the book proposing the the role of pastor’s wife can be different, pointing to the Church Mother role in Black churches. She contends that women can minister as co-pastors with their husbands. And men and women can team together in ministry.

It was my privilege to work alongside amazingly gifted women in campus ministry, striving together for God honoring excellence. We had clear policies and good training about sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior. So I would applaud Barr’s vision.

I also applaud her calling out the stultifying expectations of the “pastor’s wife” role and the injustice of the “two for one” system that made wives unpaid employees of churches. I’ve seen the oppressiveness of these expectations, the harm to marriages, and the children alienated as a consequence.

The pivot in the second half of the book to a focus on the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) came as a surprise. While this is a significant body that exemplifies beliefs and practices of other evangelicals, Barr’s account seemed ‘inside baseball” to this outsider. It was helpful to bring in examples from the Black church. However, the title and promotional material material about the book didn’t prepare me for the heavy SBC focus of the book. And counter-examples from other church bodies, if such exist might have been helpful.

In sum, Barr’s research on the role of “pastor’s wife.” and the corresponding decline of women’s ordination is an important contribution. It highlights, for me, the constrictions we have placed on the gospel freedom of women and the loss to the whole church that has resulted.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Finally, thanks for visiting Bob on Books.  I appreciate that you spent time here. Feel to “look around” – see the tabs at the top of the website, and the right hand column. And use the buttons below to share this post. Blessings! [Adapted from Enough Light, a blog I follow.]

Review: Turning Points in American Church History

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Cover image of "Turning Points in American Church History" by Elesha J. Coffman

Turning Points in American Church History, Elesha J. Coffman, foreword by Mark A. Noll. Baker Academic (ISBN: 9780801097492) 2024.

Summary: Shows ways the church contributed to American history through 13 key events over four centuries.

If we have taken a history course in college, we may have read a text that tried to cover every significant event and date within its scope. While comprehensive, at least in a superficial sense, it was usually a bore. Elesha J. Coffman, following an example of Mark Noll (who contributes the foreword) takes a different approach to the subject of American church history. Specifically, she chooses thirteen key events that may be considered turning points in American church history. By doing so, she can both zoom in on the real human history, while setting the turning points in a broader context and showing subsequent developments and impacts in American history.

From the table of contents, here are the thirteen events covered:

1. The Old World Order Upended
The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588
2. The Limits of Religious Freedom
Roger Williams Banished from Massachusetts, 1635
3. A Collision of Cultures
King Philip’s War, 1675-76
4. Evangelicalism Sweeps America
George Whitefield Sparks the First Great Awakening, 1740
5. A Faith for Enslaved and Free
First African American Church Founded at Silver Bluff, South Carolina, 1773
6. Far from Rome
John Carroll Elected First Roman Catholic Bishop in the United States, 1789
7. The Benevolent Empire
American Bible Society Founded, 1816
8. Houses Divided
Methodist Church Splits over Slavery, 1844
9. Muscular Missions
Student Volunteer Movement Launched, 1886
10. Los Angeles Fire
Azusa Street Revival Catalyzes Pentecostalism, 1906
11. Science versus Religion?
The Scopes “Monkey” Trial, 1925
12. Civil Rights and Uncivil Religion
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing, Birmingham, 1963
13. Religion Moves Right
Ronald Reagan Elected President, 1980

To illustrate her approach, I will take the chapter on the first African American church. Each chapter opens with a representative piece of hymn or song lyrics. This chapter opens with “There is a Balm in Gilead.” She traces the first church to Silver Bluff, North Carolina, the preaching of white revivalist, Wait Palmer on George Galphin’s estate, although George Liele, from a slave background, had previously preached to the slaves. Liele served as presiding elder after the initial sacraments, administered by Palmer.

Coffman then backs out, discussing the early history of slavery, Richard Allen and the formation of the African Methodist Episcopal churches as well as the informal revivalist experiences, including the unique form of the “ring shout.” She discusses the fears of uprising and how much Christian activity was covert. And she includes a sidebar from Frederick Douglass on false and true Christianity. Each chapter concludes with a prayer, in this case, from a message of the Rev. Absalom Jones. Finally, each chapter also includes a bibliography for further reading.

I personally found several chapters particularly interesting. I had not thought about the significance of the defeat of the Spanish Armada for the English settlement of the colonies. And I appreciated the history of Bishop John Carroll, having lived near the university that bore his name. Growing up in a heavily Catholic neighborhood, I did not always appreciate what it was like for Catholics as a minority in a heavily protestant country. Working in collegiate ministry, I appreciated the inclusion of the chapter on the Student Volunteer Movement, a predecessor to the organization I worked with. And I reflected as I read the final chapter on the rise and decline of evangelicalism, of how I had lived in that history from the “year of the evangelical” as a college student down to the present. Sobering.

The author admits that one weakness is that some important developments get overlooked. In the American context, one element that I wish had been included was the importance of ethnic church communities, including Asian ethnicities, Latino ethnicities, and African churches in our contemporary context. On the other hand, I was impressed with how these thirteen key events covered so much ground. And they were interesting!

This book could serve as a good text, or supplemental text, in American church history. It will also work well for an adult Christian education course. And the breadth of stories helps us realize the amazing mosaic that is the American church.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Missionary Movement from the West

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The Missionary Movement from the West (Studies in the History of Christian Missions), Andrew F. Walls, edited by Brian Stanley, foreword by Gillian Mary Bediako. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2023.

Summary: A history of the last five hundred years of Christian mission efforts from the Europe and North America.

Andrew F. Walls was perhaps the dean of mission scholars until his death in 2021. In this volume, we have his final work, a survey of mission efforts from Europe and North America over the past five hundred years. Missions historian Brian Stanley edited this work drawing upon recordings of Walls lectures, and one has the sense that we are listening to Andrew Walls.

The book is organized on a developmental theme from birth, marking the decline of Christendom, following European migrations to North America, Africa, and the East, to mid-life and the high water mark of the world Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, to old age following the Second World War, the end of colonial empires and the rise of world Christianity. He begins with tracing the transition from crusade to colonization, and with that the missions, both Catholic and Protestant that accompanied commercial efforts and European migrations. Gone was the conversion of whole peoples under Christendom but rather efforts of preaching and evangelization. Walls also sees these migrations as the beginning of an increasingly secularized Europe, signaling the death of “Christendom.”

In succeeding chapters, he covers the early mission efforts of Puritans and Pietists with native peoples in North America, focusing particularly on Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd. He recounts the rise of early missionary societies in England, the Church Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society, and the early efforts of William Carey in India. It was striking that many of the early workers were drawn from working classes, unlike the beginnings in North America in the university student movement that traces from the Haystack Prayer Meeting of 1806 at Williams College. Walls also notes the strong humanitarian impulse connected with Christian missions in this period, particularly the influence of Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect on abolishing slavery and addressing other social reforms.

The second period Walls addresses might be called “early adulthood to midlife.” He looks at nineteenth century Bible reading and growing concerns around end time prophecy and how this mobilized missionary efforts toward world evangelization. He introduces many of us to the work of Rufus Anderson of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. We learn of the early vision from Henry Venn of the idea of the national church and the first expression of the Three Self Principle–that churches be self-governing, self supporting, and self propagating. Missions forced grappling with race, culture, and society, and led to the rise of language and culture studies, particularly in the context of African mission. This was likewise true in early mission efforts in China, where it was recognized that it was not enough for the missionary to get into China. China had to get into the missionary–sometimes to the disapproval of sending boards. Walls profiles Robert Morrison, a Scot who pioneered medical missions.

The third period is the “midlife crisis period. It begins on a triumphal note with the great missionary conference of 1910 at Edinburgh, a thorough-going effort to delineate what was entailed in the “evangelization of the world in our generation.” Access to nearly every country was possible–it was simply a matter of mobilizing a missions movement–still from the West. Then in just four years came the First World War. Nevertheless, many doors were open and medical missions led the way, but became increasingly costly to mission boards with advances in medical care. Walls then features the International Missionary Council in Tambaran, India, and the signs of rising indigenous churches and strainings to shed dependence on the West that would become full-blown following the Second World War.

The final part of the book covers the movement into Old Age, exploring in successive chapters the growth of the church in a time of transition from Western mission efforts in India, China, and Africa. The book concludes with the rise of world Christianity and the movement of Christians to the West, even as the West becomes increasingly secularized.

The narrative Walls provides traces a story arc that ties a number of developments into a fascinating account. Along the way, he introduces us to the contribution of key mission leaders. He offers a thoughtful account that recognizes both the ways the mission movement was implicated at times in colonialism and at times struggled against it in thoughtfully contextualized efforts designed to foster indigeneity.

I was surprised by the absence of treatment of the Lausanne movement which certainly represented a transition from western to global Christianity. Likewise, there was no coverage of efforts centered at Fuller Seminary around missions mobilization and church growth, nor was there coverage of more recent student missions movements continuing the tradition of the Student Volunteer Movement through the series of Urbana Missions Conventions beginning in Toronto in 1946. All of these reflected the changes in understanding of the role of the West in global Christianity–although not into senescence, perhaps, but into a new paradigm of new wineskins.

Nevertheless, this may be forgiven because Walls covers something less familiar to many Western Christians–the rise of Christianity in Latin America, Africa, and both South and East Asia, where he has traced developments throughout. Walls helps us understand the role of the West in reaching our present moment, offering inspiring models and salutary lessons worth heeding by global Christian leadership.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Shape of Christian History

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The Shape of Christian History, Scott W. Sunquist. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2022.

Summary: An exploration of how Christian history is written and read in an era of “Christianities” proposing three framing concepts that give coherence to the whole arc of Christian history while respecting the diversity of its expressions.

In current scholarship, it has become commonplace to speak of the diverse cultural expressions of Christianity as “Christianities.” While this honors the diversity of global Christianity, it also carries the implication that there is not, and may never have been a common thread that can be traced through the two millenia history of the Christian movement. Scott W. Sunquist, a missiologist and church historian questions this trend and sets out in this work to answer this compound question: “What is Christianity as a historical movement, and how can we best understand and explain Christianity as God’s redemptive work in history?” He argues that this is not a mere academic question of how we teach church history but also how we prepare students and pastors to live as missional participants in the global Christian movement.

Before proposing his response to this question, Sunquist offers us a “brief history of history,” exploring the history of accounts of the Christian movement through history. He begins with James Dennis and his Christian Missions and Social Progress and traces these attempts up to Kenneth Scott Latourette’s A History of Christianity. The narratives are ones not only of geographic advance but also social progress, the bringing of what was thought the best of Western culture from hospitals to schools under the mantel of colonialism. In a post-colonial situation, this narrative no longer works and Sunquist believes only the biblical story, the experience of the global church, and Jesus himself offer coherence. He proposes three framing concepts, or three threads that conform to these criteria and serve to connect the history of the global church: time, cross, and glory.

Time: Two crucial events in time inform the direction of Christian history. Creation emphasizes that the story has a clear beginning, and one of beauty, rather than an endless cycle of birth, growth, decline, and death. It speaks of the goodness of the material creation against religion that denies the goodness of the body and material world. Incarnation tells us that something decisive was done in the past that shapes our present reality and gives us a future hope. All of this addresses the religious and secularist systems that fail to offer hope of redemption on one time, or try to realize heaven on earth in over-realized eschatologies that usually end up violent.

Cross: The cross and resurrection are central to the redemptive work of God throughout human history. This is true not only in what was accomplished through suffering and vindicated in the resurrection, but also serves as a pattern for the mission of the church. The church in its mission is to be cruciform, sharing in the sufferings of Christ. Sunquist shares case studies, particularly of the Moravians and how their suffering brought life as well as generations of mission work in China, often with great persecution, only to eventuate in what may be the largest Christian movement in the world today. Sunquist challenges the versions of a Christianity of success and conquest from the Inquisition to “prosperity” Christianity.

Glory: The glory in view here is the splendor of God and the honor due God for who God is. It is what motivates mission, not in a quest for personal glory but a zeal that this be acknowledged to the ends of the earth. Sunquist traces stories of those who suffer unto glory, including that of Julia Mateer and the school she began for Chinese boys. It moves us to hope, humility, and hospitality, the “little glories” that point to the greater glory.

Having discussed the writing of history and laid out his three framing ideas of Christian history, Sunquist concludes with a marvelous chapter on the reading of Christian history and how this may be transformative for students and for the church. He urges that we:

  • Read history looking for little glories.
  • Read history for biographies.
  • Read history for the influence of ideas (theology).
  • Read history for our local churches.
  • Read history to meditate on the ambiguities of history.
  • Read history for our missionary involvement.
  • Read to have a greater awareness of evil.
  • Read history to understand the relationship between the kingdom of God and earthly kingdoms.
  • Read history to learn unity and love.

What a great apologetic for reading Christian history! He particularly encourages the reading the discovers the unsung heroes of the faith. I research and write local history and I can attest that so much of it is about people, people who often have acted with courage, character, compassion, and competence, and whose stories have been lost to their home towns. How much more for the history of the church! I’m also keenly aware as I look at the landscape of the American church that this transformative reading of church history seems greatly lacking. This raises questions for me about what happens in the training of pastors in our seminaries.

More foundationally, Sunquist reminds us of the only threads that can tie together the diverse global movements that identify as Christian: time, cross, and glory. We all believe God has acted in time to create and to incarnate his saving work in his Son, extending that through his people. We all believe in the centrality of the cross and the resurrection, and that these central events ought shape our lives. We all belief that our greatest end is God’s glory. What a fascinating study Christian history can be when given to seeing how this thread plays out, even in the darkest times, when we are at our worst and occasionally, at our best.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: A Survey of the History of Global Christianity, Second Edition

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A Survey of the History of Global Christianity, Second Edition. Mark Nickens. Nashville: B & H Academic, 2020.

Summary: A study of Christianity from its beginnings to the present, tracing its global diffusion, and the resulting diversity within the big “tent” of Christianity.

One of the dangers of our “presentism” and “individualism” is that Christian history often reduces to what is in the Bible and my personal story. Many of us don’t even know the story of our own church body. That being the case, we miss the sense of a vast, 2000 year story in which we are caught up, and one that touches every continent on earth. This text, which may be used for introductory college or seminary courses in global church history, or in an adult study group serves as a good place to start in filling that gap and enlarging our vision of Christianity beyond our own experience and “tribe.”

This survey is organized in five sections:

  1. The Early Church: 30-400
  2. Medieval Christianity: 400-1500 (in two parts from 400 to 1000, and 1000 to 1500)
  3. Pre-Reformers, the Protestant Reformation, and European Christianity (1500-1900)
  4. American Christianity: 1500 to the Present
  5. The Global South

There are several features that make this a readable and easy to follow resource. Each section offers an introduction to the whole and each chapter includes an outline of topics to be covered, helpful if you want to zoom in on a particular topic. Along the way, there are quotes and explanatory sidebars that helpfully illuminate the text. A link is provided for each section offering a supplemental timeline on the author’s website.

I thought the first section quite helpful in covering the rise of the church from a network of local bodies to the institution it became after Constantine. There is good discussion of the canon, doctrinal issues and the early councils and creeds The second section extends this with the seven ecumenical councils, the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, the challenge of Islam, the rise and decline of the papacy, the earlier breakaway of Oriental Orthodoxy, and the later schism between the eastern (Orthodox) and western (Catholic) churches. The section ends with key elements leading to the Reformation: early reformers, the printing press, and the rise of the universities.

The main subject of third section is an account of the different reformation movements and figures in Germany (Luther) and Switzerland (Calvin), the Anabaptists, Mennonites, and Amish, and the persecutions they faced, and the Church of England and other Protestant movements that arose, as well as the Catholic Counter Reformation. I perhaps should mention at this point that it is evident that the history reflects a Protestant point of view, but not tendentiously so, with fair descriptions of Catholic belief and practice.

In the section on American Christianity, I appreciated the focus on colonial and frontier religion, the rise of revival movements, a good amount of material on the black church, as well as the rise of Catholicism with southern and eastern European and Irish immigration and the rise of fundamentalism. The post World War 2 rise of evangelicalism is traced as well as coverage of the rise of pentecostalism, televangelism, and the Christian right, but there is no mention of Reinhold Niebuhr, or the later rise of more progressive forms of neo-evangelicalism. There is very little about the complicity of churches in slavery (apart from divisions in northern and southern denominations) and the only treatment of Native Peoples are the missionary efforts of David Brainerd and Jonathan Edwards

The last section was on the church in the Global South. The author provides a chart showing the number of Christians in each part of the world (leaving out Europe) showing the majority of Christians in the Global South. Yet the coverage of the history of these churches was only 25 percent of the text and confined to a single section. One strength is showing how mission movements transitioned to indigenously-led churches that often became mission movements themselves. A chapter is devoted to the history on each continent, with a fair amount of detail on movements in particular countries (for example, the churches in India tracing their roots to the Apostle Thomas). Good coverage is given to the rise of global Pentecostalism. Apart from some discussion of liberation theology, there is little on the church’s involvements in movements seeking justice. There is nothing on Samuel Escobar and Rene Padilla and other evangelicals who pressed the cause of social justice in Latin America, nor the role of religious leadership in ending apartheid (or the collapse of communism for that matter). Nor was there any coverage of the Lausanne movement, one increasingly shaped by concerns of the Global South, or of Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope.

What is not here suggests an avoidance of controversy and a conservative rendering of recent history. It also suggests a history still dominated by the West, in its focus on mission movements and their indigenous offshoots. There is no acknowledgement of nor engagement with the discussion of post-colonialism in the Global South. While a history cannot engage or critique such movements, their existence is also a part of the fabric of this history. This is regrettable, because the author renders historical accounts well, and a text like this could enjoy broader circulation if it told a broader story. It is especially useful for its concise but detailed history up through the Reformation but I would recommend supplementing it with other texts on American and Global South church history.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: A Multitude of All Peoples

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A Multitude

A Multitude of All Peoples: Engaging Ancient Christianity’s Global Identity, Vince L. Bantu. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020.

Summary: A well-documented study of the global spread of ancient Christianity, controverting the argument of Christianity as White and western, and contending for the contextualizing and de-colonizing of contemporary global Christianity.

Often in Christian witness with people from Western countries, the challenge is whether someone can believe intellectually or volitionally, or dealing with ways they may have been put off by the church. In other parts of the world, or with people from those parts of the world or from minority cultures, the issue is that Christianity is thought of white and Western, and it would be an abandonment of one’s culture to believe. In significant part, this arises from mission efforts that have been both culturally captive to the West, and often been the Trojan horse for colonizing efforts.

This book addresses this challenge in several ways. One is that it traces how the early church in the West diverged from other believers in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The fusion of church and state that began with Constantine marked the beginning of the separation from churches in the East. The framing of orthodox Christian belief at Chalcedon in Hellenistic language distanced believers who spoke of Christian faith in different heart languages.

Then in successive chapters Bantu traces the indigenous Christian movements in Africa, in the Middle East, and along the Silk Road. The exclusion of Miaphysites, those who would say that Christ exists as one person and one human-divine nature, separated the Africans and others from the West. What Bantu shows is the vibrant indigenous churches that developed in each of these parts of the world–the Copts in Egypt, the Ethiopian Church, the Maronites in Lebanon, and the Armenian Church, the early church in India tracing its origins to St. Thomas, and churches along the Silk Road.

The book summarizes the history of each of these indigenous movements that at one time, or even down to the present have been a vibrant Christian presence (consider the 21 Coptic martyrs brutally killed in a videotaped Isis message). The history is accompanied by images of church buildings and artifacts from these churches. The history and archaeological evidence make a strong case for the trans-cultural, global character of early Christianity that existed from the earliest centuries through the first millennium, long before western mission movements.

Likewise, the history of the interaction between the early churches of the West, and sister churches in Africa, the Middle East and Asia offer lessons for today. Chalcedon, from the perspective of these churches, rejected their understanding of Christ and the Christian faith, insisting on a Hellenistic framework for this belief. Bantu shows how indigenous churches responded to the rise of Islam, and sometimes were able to frame Christian faith in ways that were doctrinally sound and yet sidestepped the controversies surrounding God and his Son.

At the beginning of the third millennium of Christianity and the unprecedented global spread of Christianity, the message of this book more important than ever. At times, churches outside the West still struggle under Western theological and cultural domination. In other places, indigenous leadership is framing culturally contextualized yet theologically faithful approaches that advance the gospel. Will Western churches relinquish control in the former instance and affirm and learn from the latter? This book both offers historical evidence that indigenous churches may thrive, and that Christianity from its very beginnings was not exclusively white and Western.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Sinners and Saints

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sinners and saints

Sinners and Saints, Derek Cooper. Grand Rapids, Kregel Academic, 2018.

Summary: An unvarnished summary of the first five hundred years of church history, looking unflinchingly at the flaws, as well as the favorable qualities of early Christians.

Perhaps the worst thing any institution, and especially the church, can do is to pretend that it is better than it really is. As disheartening as it is to hear of respected leaders guilty of very human failings, it is even more repugnant when those leaders, and sometimes powerful institutions behind them, cover up those failings in images of sweetness and light. In so doing, institutions try to “gin up” their own sham holiness, instead of the genuine holiness God works when meeting people in their brokenness.

Derek Cooper believes that many of our church histories reflect this same pretense in portraying the church and its leading figures. This work, which covers the first five hundred years of church history, and is first of a series, takes a different approach. Cooper writes:

“Unlike countless other church history books that dance around the distasteful details of our Christian past, let’s humanize our history. Counterintuitively, perhaps, let’s emphasize as much grit as glory, let’s feature as much flesh as faith, and let’s showcase as many sinners as saints. It’s important for you to know at the onset, however, that we are not going to do this because we think mudslinging is a spiritual discipline, but only because we believe truth-telling is. I, personally, have no desire to sully the reputation of saints, nor do I find any pleasure in wallowing in the faults of our most faithful. When I air the dirty laundry of our most hallowed heroes and heroines, I am fully aware of all the clean clothes they have neatly pressed and attractively arrayed in their dresser drawers. Because of the nature of this book, I will not usually refer to that clean laundry; but make no mistake: I know it is there” (p. 11).

The approach of the book is thematic rather than chronological. He surveys these ten themes, and here are some of the highlights and my takeaways:

  1. Daily life. Except for the rich it was dirty, toilsome, and short.
  2. Leadership. From Paul on Christian leaders “led with a limp” and often fought tenaciously in controversy. Damasus, who commissioned the Vulgate translation, fought a bloody battle for his papacy in which 137 died.
  3. Martyrdom. While some martyrs died nobly, martyrdom was often sought in almost suicidal passion by some. Before his martyrdom, in pursuit of holiness, Origin castrated himself.
  4. Church faith and practice. In many respects, it would have looked strange to us: dinners in graveyards, holy kissing (and perhaps not-so-holy), and nude baptisms.
  5. Apologetics. This arose in response to attack on the church from both Romans and Jews. Able defenders like Justin Martyr and Chrysostom also helped introduce anti-Semitism to Christian rhetoric.
  6. The family tree of heresy and orthodoxy. From the beginning, controversy existed between the line of Simon the Magician and Simon Peter when it came to defining Christian orthodoxy. Cooper traces the rise of apostolic succession in the bishop of Rome as the authoritative means of adjudicating doctrinal disputes and defining heresy.
  7. Canon and apocrypha. Cooper discusses both the criteria of canonical New Testament books but the contents of the apocryphal ones–everything from apocryphal infancy and childhood narratives to the possibility that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s girlfriend. He also discusses the recently found fragment of The Gospel of Judas.
  8. God and money. With the growth and eventually Constantinian patronage of the church, the question became how to interpret (or re-interpret) the radical gospel teaching about money, widening the needle’s eye, as it were for the increasingly rich patrons of the church.
  9. Sexuality. Cooper traces how the church moved beyond chastity in its response to the promiscuity of the Roman world (where wives were simply for the procreation of legitimate heirs, and husbands sought pleasure elsewhere with both sexes) to the sometimes ambiguous, and sometimes clear privileging of abstinence and celibacy that reflected a view of all sexual intimacy as filthy. In the cases of both Jerome and Augustine, their own sexual histories may well have shaped their subsequent views.
  10. Missions: We learn about the spread of Christianity to other parts of the world–Africa, India, and Armenia–which may very well hold the title as the oldest Christian nation on earth.

Cooper writes in an engaging, witty style and definitely achieves his aim of an honest account of the failings and foibles and follies of the early Christians. While almost none of this was new to me, it was helpful to find this material in a work of popular scholarship, not buried in turgid text or footnotes, or hurled at the Christian community without context in an atheist diatribe.

In his introduction, Cooper alludes to the “clean clothes” of these saints, and that he “know[s] it is there.” I believe he does, and the text shows some evidence of this. However, I would not commend this as a stand-alone history of this period but as a complement to a standard church history text, particularly in an introductory church history course. Not everyone will know about the “clean laundry.” Most good modern church histories are not hagiographies, but this book serves as a good complement in “keeping it real.”

Just as it does not do the church well to conceal its flaws, controversies, and most grievous sins, it likewise does not serve well to gloss over these in our histories. An honest rendering, in books like this, reminds us of the challenges the church has always faced, from within as well as from without. It also reminds us of the providence of God– that through such flawed, broken people the Christian message has spread throughout the world, and with it literacy, universities, hospitals, and the rule of law, as well as unhelpful things like colonialism. Ultimately, the story isn’t about how good we are but rather how sovereignly gracious God has been with this motley bunch of sinner-saints.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Christianity in the Twentieth Century

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Christianity in the Twentieth Century

Christianity in the Twentieth Century, Brian Stanley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Summary: A thematic account of the development of global Christianity during the twentieth century.

It is no small challenge to write a one volume history of Christianity in the twentieth century. The Christian faith has truly become a global faith, represented with indigenous churches on every continent, expressed and experienced in as many or more ways than there are countries in the world, and facing varied internal and external pressures leading to adaptation and change.

Brian Stanley has approached this task not by trying to write a series of chapters on regional histories, or denominational histories, or theological history, but by identifying fifteen themes running through Christian experience over the last hundred years. Each chapter develops a particular theme, sketching some of the global developments, and then offers two case studies, usually specific to two different countries or regions. In the course of this study, Stanley not only touches on fifteen critical themes or trends but also shows the development of Christian faith in every part of the world in its multiplex variety.

In brief, here are the themes covered:

  • Responses to World War I
  • Christianity and Nationalism
  • Prophetic movements
  • The Persecuted Church
  • Belonging and believing
  • Ecumenism
  • Christianity, Ethnic Hatred, and Genocide
  • Christianity in Islamic contexts
  • Christian mission in the modern world
  • Theologies of liberation
  • The church addresses human rights, racism, and indigenous peoples
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Pentecostalism
  • Eastern Orthodoxy
  • Migrant Churches

As mentioned above, each theme chapter is illustrated by two case studies. For example, in looking at Christian faith and nationalism, Stanley takes the contrasting cases of Protestant nationalism in Korea, and Catholic nationalism in Poland, developing the role of the church in the movements for national autonomy in each country, as well as the uneasy alliance of Christianity and nationalism more broadly. However, in the chapter on Christian mission, he considers first the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965, and two contrasting gatherings of Protestants at Uppsala in 1968, focused more on the social dimensions of Christian faith, and Lausanne in 1974, focused more on the conversionist aspects of the faith, albeit with a strong witness for justice concerns by Christians from the majority world. I was somewhat surprised that little was said about the subsequent Lausanne movement or the efforts to identify and reach unreached people groups, a missiological development from this movement.

One of the observations I made while reading is that some themes felt like well-known territory, with names, issues and movements I was well familiar with. Other chapters, like the one on Orthodoxy, for example, surprised me as I learned of Orthodox movements in Africa, and how significant diasporas have been for the development of Orthodoxy in western Europe and the United States. I’ve recently become more aware of Ghanaian Pentecostalism in my own city and this book filled in context of the development of Ghanaian Christianity as well as Pentecostalism in other parts of the world. Numerous leaders of significant movements in twentieth century Christianity were mentioned that I had not heard of, conveying what a far-flung, diverse, and global movement Christianity has become.

The author opens and closes the book discussing the renaming of The Christian Oracle as The Christian Century. Was the twentieth century a “Christian century.” A simple answer to that question is not possible in the author’s estimate. In absolute numbers, no century has witness greater growth, and yet the world’s population has grown faster. In Europe, North America, and Australasia, the church has been in retreat, except for the immigrant churches that have come from South and Central America, Asia, and Africa. Secularism and persecution have attempted to undermine the church, have made significant inroads, and yet not succeeded, and sometimes resulted in a resilient and more robust faith. Christians have both played pivotal roles in justice movements, and been inextricably involved in ethnic hatred and genocide. Great progress has occurred in some sectors toward Christian unity, even while indigenous and immigrant churches assert their own autonomy and major bodies are riven over questions about human sexuality.

Rather than offering a triumphalistic account, Stanley offers a cautionary tale inviting the reader to reflection, summarized in his closing question of “whether Christianity has converted indigenous religionists or whether indigenous religious and cultural perspectives–whether these be African, Asian, Latin American, or even white North American–have succeeded in converting Christianity.” In raising this question, I think he has identified one of the critical issues facing Christians in the early twenty first centuries, questions that ought send us to our knees, turn us to our Bibles, and challenge us to listen to the prophetic voices that speak the uncomfortable truths we need to hear.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.