Church History Books - Page 6

A Short World History of Christianity

Robert Bruce Mullin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

An excellent account of Christian history; scholarly and very readable 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.

I've read a few chapters of this book in proof form prior to publication. Mullin's gift is the ability to make history accessible and interesting, while not compromising on scholarly foundations or analytical complexity. His insights into Christian history are new and illuminating, and yet ring with the truth of careful, sound scholarship and analysis. Anyone, be they student, scholar, believer, inquirer or skeptic will find this work challenging, intriguing and very rewarding. Mullin is that rare academic who is brilliant scholar, illuminating teacher, and an excellent writer. This is a great place to begin a study of Christian history or to refresh one's knowledge. This work belongs on the bookshelves of anyone at all interested in the history of Christianity.

Editorial Review:

From the introduction: Fire is a multivalent metaphor. It destroys and refines; its light illuminates while its smoke conceals. . . . In taking fire upon the earth as the guiding metaphor for the story of Christianity in world history, this book attempts to do justice to the images multifaceted implications. Friends, enemies, and neutral observers have judged the story of Christianity to be one of amazing creativity and terrible destruction, of fearless accomplishments and grim failures. . . . Whatever else there is to be said, Christianity has left its mark on the world as surely as any fire. And the story and the mark form the subject of this book. With highly readable narrative, Robert Bruce Mullin surveys the rise and spread of Christianity throughout the world. Global in focus and covering the expanse of Christian history, the book unveils the challenges that Christianity has faced throughout the centuries.

America: The Last Best Hope Volume 2: From a World at War to the Triumph of Freedom

William J Bennett

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Total reviews: 72 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Bennett, a secretary of education under President Reagan and author of The Book of Virtues, offers a new, improved history of America, one, he says, that will respark hope and a "conviction about American greatness and purpose" in readers. He believes current offerings do not "give Americans an opportunity to enjoy the story of their country, to take pleasure and pride in what we have done and become." To this end, Bennett methodically hits the expected patriotic high points (Lewis & Clark, the Gettysburg Address) and even, to its credit, a few low ones (Woodrow Wilson's racism, Teddy Roosevelt's unjust dismissal of black soldiers in the Brownsville judgment). America is best suited for a high school or home-schooled audience searching for a general, conservative-minded textbook. More discerning adult readers will find that the lack of originality and the overreliance on a restricted number of dated sources (Samuel Eliot Morison, Daniel Boorstin, Henry Steele Commager) make the book a retread of previous popular histories (such as Boorstin's The Americans). This is history put to use as inspiration rather than serving to enlighten or explain, but Bennett does succeed in shaping the material into a coherent, readable narrative.

Robert's Rules in Plain English: A Readable, Authoritative, Easy-to-Use Guide to Running Meetings, 2nd Edition

Doris P. Zimmerman

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Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

It's a practical guide to Robert's Rules 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is a nice book for the money. It's easy to read. It has a good layout.

Editorial Review:

A revised edition of the bestselling Robert's Rules in Plain English, which still stands as the most concise, most-user friendly guide to parliamentary procedure on the market today.

If you've ever had to run a meeting according to parliamentary procedures, you know just how difficult it is to keep track of all the rules, much less follow them. Figuring out what to say and how to say it seems an impossible task.

Robert's Rules in Plain English, 2nd edition, is the solution to that problem. Not only does it provide you with the essential, basic rules in simple, straightforward English, it also includes summaries, outlines, charts, and sample dialogues so you can see exactly how these rules work in practice.

With an extended glossary and new chapters on electronic meetings and internet usage, Robert's Rules in Plain English, 2nd edition, is an authoritative, modern guide to running a meeting successfully and keeping it on track.

The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

Bart D. Ehrman

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Total reviews: 105 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The early Christian Church was a chaos of contending beliefs. Some groups of Christians claimed that there was not one God but two or twelve or thirty. Some believed that the world had not been created by God but by a lesser, ignorant deity. Certain sects maintained that Jesus was human but not divine, while others said he was divine but not human.
In Lost Christianities, Bart D. Ehrman offers a fascinating look at these early forms of Christianity and shows how they came to be suppressed, reformed, or forgotten. All of these groups insisted that they upheld the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, and they all possessed writings that bore out their claims, books reputedly produced by Jesus's own followers. Modern archaeological work has recovered a number of key texts, and as Ehrman shows, these spectacular discoveries reveal religious diversity that says much about the ways in which history gets written by the winners. Ehrman's discussion ranges from considerations of various "lost scriptures"--including forged gospels supposedly written by Simon Peter, Jesus's closest disciple, and Judas Thomas, Jesus's alleged twin brother--to the disparate beliefs of such groups as the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, the anti-Jewish Marcionites, and various "Gnostic" sects. Ehrman examines in depth the battles that raged between "proto-orthodox Christians"-- those who eventually compiled the canonical books of the New Testament and standardized Christian belief--and the groups they denounced as heretics and ultimately overcame.
Scrupulously researched and lucidly written, Lost Christianities is an eye-opening account of politics, power, and the clash of ideas among Christians in the decades before one group came to see its views prevail.

Beyond Belief

Elaine Pagels

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Total reviews: 173 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Special edition including the complete text of the Gospel of Thomas

Elaine Pagels, one of the world’s most important writers and thinkers on religion and history, and winner of the National Book Award for her groundbreaking work The Gnostic Gospels, now reflects on what matters most about spiritual and religious exploration in the twenty-first century. This bold new book explores how Christianity began by tracing its earliest texts, including the secret Gospel of Thomas, rediscovered in Egypt in 1945.

When her infant son was diagnosed with fatal pulmonary hypertension, Elaine Pagels’s spiritual and intellectual quest took on a new urgency, leading her to explore historical and archeological sources and to investigate what Jesus and his teachings meant to his followers before the invention of doctrine–and before the invention of Christianity as we know it.

The astonishing discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, along with more than fifty other early Christian texts unknown since antiquity, offers startling clues. Pagels compares such sources as Thomas’s gospel (which claims to give Jesus’ secret teaching, and finds its closest affinities with kabbalah) with the canonic texts to show how Christian leaders chose to include some gospels and exclude others from the collection we have come to know as the New Testament. To stabilize the emerging Christian church in times of devastating persecution, the church fathers constructed the canon, creed, and hierarchy–and, in the process, suppressed many of its spiritual resources.

Drawing on new scholarship–her own, and that of an international group of scholars–that has come to light since the publication in 1979 of The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels shows that what matters about Christianity involves much more than any one set of beliefs. Traditions embodied in Judaism and Christianity can powerfully affect us in heart, mind, and spirit, inspire visions of a new society based on practicing justice and love, even heal and transform us.

Provocative, beautifully written, and moving, Beyond Belief, the most personal of Pagels’s books to date, shows how “the impulse to seek God overflows the narrow banks of a single tradition.” Pagels writes, “What I have come to love in the wealth and diversity of our religious traditions–and the communities that sustain them–is that they offer the testimony of innumerable people to spiritual discovery, encouraging us, in Jesus’ words, to ‘seek, and you shall find.’”

Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity

Nancy Pearcey

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Total reviews: 78 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

“This book continues the Schaeffer-inspired project that Nancy Pearcey and Chuck Colson began in How Now Shall We Live?—awakening evangelical Christians to the need for a Christian ‘worldview,’ which Pearcey defines as ‘a biblically informed perspective on all reality.’ This is the rare long book that leaves one wanting to read more.”
—Publishers Weekly

“On one level, this book is a lucid, easy-to-understand manual for worldview thinking. But it also breaks new ground in worldview analysis.”
—World Magazine

“Pearcey is an outstanding writer with the ability not only to express deep thoughts in a very readable way, but one who also understands a biblically reformed world and life view. If you buy only one book this year, this would be at the top of the list.”
—Equip for Ministry

“Pearcey helps readers see how many modern Christians unwittingly accept a sacred/secular split, which allows them to relegate faith to the private sphere of life. She then clearly puts forth a Scriptural picture of integrating all of life under the liberating Lordship of Christ and shows what that truth means for the areas of public policy, family life, science, business, law, education, and more.”
—Covenant Magazine

“Total Truth questions the modern American cultural attitude of keeping religion a private matter, claiming that Christianity’s truth is best served by being brought into the public sphere to maximize its influence.”
—Midwest Book Review

“Thoroughly researched, well-written and well-argued, Total Truth will prove to be a useful and easily accessible guidebook for many who seek to develop a comprehensive biblical worldview that affects not only beliefs but actions.”
—CaliforniaRepublic.org

How can you liberate Christianity from its cultural captivity? In this superbly crafted cultural analysis, a noted author passionately argues that Christianity is truth about all reality, not just religious truth, and that to keep it privatized is stripping it of the power to challenge and redeem the whole of culture.

Letter and Papers from Prison

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Insightful and moving letters that transcend human created myth. 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters & Papers from Prison was a most edifying read, primarily because it stripped away the mystery and mythical aura that surrounded him, before and after his murder by the Nazis in 1945. The fact that his reputation is so universally well known is greatly due in part to his brother-in-law, the late Eberhard Bethge.

Having been raised in a very German household myself, I would hear occasional stories from my own father, who grew up in Germany at that time, about the German pastor who was a part of the plot to kill Hitler, the one who was the moral conscience who aided the conspirators while they tried to rid Germany of the diabolical dictator and his vile atrocities that were sweeping throughout the land, for nothing was sacrosanct.

Bonhoeffer, known throughout the Christian world for his books, The Cost of Discipleship and Ethics, among other treaties, pamphlets and sermons, was a great example in respects to how a man or woman can truly live an independent Christian life while working in the world and that heroism does not necessarily come from preaching the Gospel, but rather, living it or trying to. It also comes from incorporating nuances of those truths, big or small, into the daily activities of ones life and sharing that Christian goodness (in a healthy and practical manner) with people from all walks of life, irrelevant of class structure, education, ethnic background, et cetera.

In this book, Bonhoeffer's theological musings move from the act of suffering to the meaning of love, whether human, religious or even material, and the insights that he shares with some of his correspondents, especially Eberhard Bethge, is sometimes profoundly compelling, and one can endlessly cite the abundant source material to back that up. But while he was accepting his cross of suffering, knowing in a way that it was a gift, he had an agony for those whom he was separated from, specificially his fiance, Maria von Wedemeyer-Weller.

The overall profile of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as presented in this work, showcases an all too human man, sometimes short-tempered and impatient yet very religious, contemplative, moral, ethical and surprisingly creative. For an example of that, read his short fiction piece entitled: "Lance-Corporal Berg: A narrative" which is almost similarly reminiscent, style-wise, to that of the writer and author Erich Maria Remarque. His poems, however, were not that great, but it made him only more real.

Though I am Catholic and my interpretation of Scripture is slightly different, much of what Bonhoeffer wrote spoke volumes to me, especially in tackling the day-to-day challenges and experiences that life has to offer. I think he speaks to many people, and that is good, for what he has to say, by his life, writings, choices, down to his martyrdom can cross all ecumenical boundaries. And that is indeed a remarkable witness.

Editorial Review:

One of the great classics of prison literature, Letters and Papers from Prison effectively serves as the last will and testament of the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis after incarceration in Tegel Prison. Acute and subtle, warm and perceptive, yet also profoundly moving, the documents collectively tell a very human story of loss, of courage, and of hope. Now reissued with a new Preface, by one of his leading interpreters. Bonhoeffer's story seems as vitally relevant, as politically prophetic, and as theologically significant, as it did yesterday.

The Story of Christianity, Volume 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (Story of Christianity)

Justo L. Gonzalez

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Story of Christianity, Volume 1, is an informative, interesting, and consistently readable narrative history. It brings alive the people, dramatic events, and ideas that shaped the first fifteen centuries of Europe, such as the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the New World. Historian Justo Gonzalez shows how various social, political, and economic movements affected Christianity's internal growth.

Gonzalez skillfully weaves in relevant details from the lives of prominent figures from the apostles to John Wycliffe, tracing out core theological issues and developments as reflected in the lives and struggles of leading thinkers within the various traditions of the church. "The history of the church, while showing all the characteristics fo human history, is much more than the history of an institution or movement," Gonzalez stresses. "It is a history of the deeds of the spirit in and through the men and women who have gone before in the faith." The Story of Christianity demonstrates at each point what new challenges and opportunities faced the church, and how Christians struggled with the various options open to them, thereby shaping the future direction of the church.

The Story of Christianity will serve as a fascinating introduction to the panoramic history of Christianity for students and teachers of church history, for pastors, and for general readers.

The Light and the Glory

Peter Marshall, David Manuel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 41 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Lots of things you were never told. 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I really loved reading this book and had a hard time putting it down. It reads much like the Old Testament except the main characters are our forefathers. There is a lot of information in this book that they never told us in school, but should have. The authors of this book tell where they got the information and did a great job putting this book together. I wish I would have read it years ago. It's one of those books you want to pass on to others after you read it.

An amazingly well-researched book 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book details how to achieve great things by serving God first. It shows us what we must do to get our country back on the track of democracy. Even though it seems like we have completely lost our way, all we have to do is turn whole-heartedly to God and ask for His help. The story of how our forefathers did this is wonderful and inspiring.

A unique perspective on America's spiritual roots. 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This volume of early American history is limited in its scope, covering a period of about 300 years from Columbus through the colonial era, the Revolution, and the Washington presidency. Its purpose, however, is not merely to chronologize these events, but to examine them from a spiritual perspective. Peter Marshall and David Manuel, both Yale alumni, seek to discover our country's earliest spiritual heritage and how it relates to the moral and cultural degeneration they were observing in 1977, and that continues today. While the book is not without its flaws, I think it offers a critically important and often purposefully omitted piece of the historical puzzle regarding the roots of America.

The authors begin with Columbus, whose early missionary ardor to bear the light of Christ to the New World was ultimately corrupted by the powerful lures of wealth, prestige and power. Next come fairly detailed examinations of the colonies at Jamestown, Plymouth, Salem and Boston. Of particular emphasis, again, were the spiritual actors, such as the Franciscans, Jesuits, Pilgrims and Puritans. Throughout, the authors provide a quite unvarnished look at the shortcomings of all of these personalities, but also strip away the false images and caricatures of them that are so prevalent in modern scholarship. In particular, they restore some desperately needed balance to the discussion of the Pilgrims and Puritans.

The thing that gives this book such strong credibility, as with any good history, is the authors' heavy reliance on primary sources, particularly from Columbus, Bradford, the Mathers, Winthrop, Washington, Adams and many others. Their own writings reveal much about the deep Christian faith of our country's founders, much that is never mentioned or even considered a valid topic of discussion in most modern (i.e., revisionistic) history books. Over and over, the hand of God's providence is highlighted, whether in the survival of the early colonies, or the war for independence, or the unlikely success of the Constitutional Convention.

My key criticism of the book, however, is the extent to which the authors presume to tell us what the will of God was or was not in various situations. In so doing, they depart from the demands of the documentary evidence, and thus take what are, in my opinion, speculative leaps that are impermissible for historians. I understand the authors' tendency to surmise such things from surrounding circumstances, but just as I found this kind of speculation to be objectionable in the work of Will Durant, that is equally true here.

Still, this history was written by Christians for Christians, and the authors make no bones about that. As a result, they are prone to occasionally slip into sermonizing as they consider spiritual parallels between conditions in the 17th and 20th centuries. The book also ends with a call to national repentence and a reestablishment of the Covenant Way that marked the lives of the first colonials. As a committed Christian, I am comfortable with this perspective because all knowledge is God's knowledge and may be fairly integrated in this way. Secularists, however, will likely find this aspect of the book distracting. Nevertheless, the value of this book for filling in an important gap in most people's historical knowledge cannot be overstated.

Editorial Review:

A compelling behind-the-scenes look at America's godly beginnings, ably narrated by the authors. 180 minutes on 2 cassettes.

Escape the Coming Night

David Jeremiah, Carole C. Carlson

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Nonacademic, Storytelling Approach to Explain Book of Revelation.... 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Dr. Jeremiah in this book, as in his Turning Point television broadcast, uses anecdoctes in explaining scriptural truth, in this case the book of Revelation. Even though Jeremiah is right on theologically, his story-telling style might be frustrating for readers who want to get straight to the verses, word study, context, and just a more academic approach to understanding Revelation. On the other hand, people who enjoy Bible-based fiction or those who just don't want to strain their brain with study, might appreciate being introduced to Revelation through this book. If you like this book, I'd recommend Jeremiah's HANDWRITING ON THE WALL, which is a similar style commentary on the Old Testament book of Daniel, and which would actually be helpful to read first, since some of Revelation is based on Daniel. For those wanting a more academic approach to Revelation, I recommend Ryrie's more academic REVELATION as accessible to the beginner, and still more detailed would be the commentaries of Walvoord, Robert Thomas, or even Newell. All of these, like Jeremiah, hold to the conservative, evangelical "pre-trib, pre-mil" endtimes view that the rapture will take place before ("pre") a 7-year tribulation before a literal millial (i.e., 1000 years) reign of Messiah on Earth.

Editorial Review:

Escape the Coming Night is a penetrating look at the prophetic time machine that is the Book of Revelation. It is a vivid reminder of how, in the face of the coming darkness, we should live today.