Free Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch Page A

present volume, with more emphasis on primary documents, is J. Comby with D. MacCulloch, How to Read Church History (2 vols., London, 1985, 1989), and an incisive and lavishly illustrated survey is O. Chadwick, A History of Christianity (London, 1995). R. Harries and H. Mayr-Harting (eds.), Christianity: Two Thousand Years (Oxford, 2001), is the concise published result of a course of public lectures by Oxford academics celebrating the millennium. More meditative, while providing a brief chronological overview, is E. Cameron, Interpreting Christian History: The Challenge of the Churches' Past (Oxford, 2005), and a magisterial if controversial study from a major twentieth-century combatant in Roman Catholic history is H. Kung, Christianity: Its Essence and History (London, 1995), translated from Kung's Christentum: Wesen und Geschichte (Munich, 1994). Another more reluctant combatant, Primate of All England, compellingly distils an exceptional historical imagination into R. Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (London, 2005). A. F. Walls, The Cross-cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Edinburgh, 2001), provides a refreshing perspective from an expert on the history of Christian mission, with an enviably wide chronological sweep.
    Beyond these, there are multi-volume surveys of the field, notably the Oxford History of the Christian Church : a series of individually authored stand-alone studies of particular periods, still sailing as majestic in their blue livery as a twentieth-century ocean liner, and edited by the brothers O. and H. Chadwick, themselves the embodiment of one era in European church history. Fine multi-authored volumes of the Cambridge History of Christianity cover the whole span in nine volumes, and single-authored volumes in the I. B. Tauris History of the Christian Church provide crisp surveys also aiming to span the history of the Church. I cite particular volumes from all three of these series in section bibliographies below. The same survey task is performed by expert multiple authors in a single volume: A. Hastings (ed.), A World History of Christianity (Grand Rapids, 1999). An astonishing, not to say daunting, multi-volume account of Christian theology by one of the princes of American liberal Protestant theology is J. J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (5 vols., Chicago and London, 1971-89). Even more monumental, from a great Jesuit intellectual historian, is F. Copleston, A History of Philosophy (9 vols., London, 1946-75). Western Christianity is so inextricably tangled with Western culture that it is worth consulting the comfortingly sensible synthesis of J. S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought (London and New York, 1996). The tangle is interestingly interpreted from a classic Jesuit background in J. O'Malley, Four Cultures of the West (Cambridge, MA, 2004). The mystical and spiritual dimension of Christianity is dealt with in L. Bouyer, A History of Christian Spirituality (3 vols., London, 1968-9). The Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality series, with volumes now running into triple figures, is a user-friendly series of translations presenting a rich variety of Western spiritual writers. One tradition within the West can be sampled in G. Rowell, K. Stevenson and R. Williams, Love's Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness (Oxford, 1989).
    Christian history lends itself to particular themes treated over long periods. A model of popular history covering two millennia is E. Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (3rd edn, New Haven and London, 2006), engagingly supplemented by R. Collins, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy (London, 2009), and, on an allied theme, there is wise guidance and exposition from N. P. Tanner, The Councils of the Church: A Short History (New York, 2001). Larded with ecclesiological