CHRISTIANITY: TWO THOUSAND YEARS
Eds. Richard Harries & Henry Mayr-Harting
OUP. 279 pages inc. index. £12.99
ISBN 0 19 924485 5
This book originates in a series of lectures given in Oxford by academics who are mainly historians. When I asked OUP for the review copy they told me that the book was designed for the general reader. So this is why this review is not by a professional historian.
In a short review it is not possible to consider all the articles in detail. But this is not a straightforward history of 2,000 years of Christianity. Each author faces in his own way an explanation of what he or she is trying to do. The individual chapter headings should make it clear that the authors are presenting a bird's-eye view. It is plain that to deal with the early Middle Ages, the late Middle Ages, and the Reformation, etc., in a single lecture or a single chapter cannot cover all the ground. So the authors deal with broad sweeps of historical influences. Alexander Murray in his chapter on the later Middle Ages makes it plain when he says, 'In presenting medieval Christianity to you in terms of material changes, of a kind so big as to be visible from space, I may seem guilty of a kind of dialectal materialism, of wishing to reduce religious experience to a function of economics, and to ignore free will, with its inner response to God - which is what Christianity is all about.'
In the first chapter Henry Chadwick says: 'In beginning from the church in ancient society we are looking at the nursery of European civilisation. Into this the early church injected faith in a merciful act of God making himself known to a wretched and rebellious race, and through the central person of Jesus of Nazareth, uniquely chosen to be redeemer, continuing this act through a community to communicate to believers, forgiveness, renewal, and a high moral discipline.' But from then on the authors, by and large, are concerned with major events so that climate, kings, disease and famine and other historical factors play their role in shaping what happens to the church. The writers are successful in presenting this overall view, some more than others.
