Introduction to the History of Christianity, 3rd ed.
Overview
An Essential Guide to Christian History
Now in its third edition, Tim Dowley’s masterful one-volume survey of church history has an updated design and new content, particularly in the section covering most recent Christian history. The inviting full-color format includes many new images and updated maps, while maintaining many of the features that made the second edition a popular volume for the classroom.
Dowley has assembled a global cast of respected scholars to write the full story of the rise of the Christian faith and to provide a rounded picture of the worldwide development of Christianity. The volume has been praised as accurate, scholarly, and balanced. Its writers are committed to Christianity but also to the unhindered pursuit of truth that does not avoid the darker aspects of the varied story of Christianity.
The accessible text is supported by detailed timelines, maps, profiles of key figures in Christianity, colorful images, and a complete glossary. Each section includes questions for discussion.
- Provides extended reading lists and updated questions for further study
- Contains extra photographs and detailed maps
- Includes updated design and a new epilogue on Christianity in the new millennium
- Part One: Beginnings: AD 1–325
- Part Two: Acceptance And Conquest: AD 325–600
- Part Three: A Christian Society: AD 600–1500
- Part Four: Reform and Renewal: 1500–1650
- Part Five: Reason, Revival, and Revolution: 1650–1789
- Part Six: Cities and Empires: 1789–1914
- Part Seven: A Century of Conflict: 1914–2001
- Part Eight: Epilogue: A New Millennium
Top Highlights
“Several factors encouraged the rapid spread of Christianity in this short period. One was the existence of a unifying language and culture—at least in the cities—from Italy to India.” (Page 26)
“This has meant that Christians have always differed about the arts. Although official church councils in both East and West before the year 1000 proclaimed that Christian image-making was permissible, many Christians have a lingering distrust of such images. They fear that by having an image of the thing before them, vision and devotion might attach themselves to the image, and fail to press on to the thing for which the image stands. This viewpoint was maintained by the image-rejecting ‘iconoclasts’ in the Orthodox Church for hundreds of years, with fluctuating success, and has always been alive in some part of the church. Some Protestant traditions show a similar trend, playing down the visual.” (Page 602)
“A few decades of relative peace and prosperity followed, only to be interrupted in 303 by the most severe persecution the church had yet faced, often known as the ‘Great Persecution’. By this time Christianity had reached as far as the immediate family of the Emperor Diocletian (284–305).” (Page 38)
“The Council of Nicaea set many precedents. The Emperor called it, influenced its decision-making, and used his civil power to give its decrees virtually the status of imperial law. The Council introduced a new kind of orthodoxy, which for the first time gave non-biblical terms critical importance. The Creed’s own form of expression was influenced by the heresy it outlawed. Only in the long term did the whole church recognize that Nicaea had decisively developed its understanding of the divinity of Christ.” (Page 115)
- Title: Introduction to the History of Christianity (Third Edition)
- Author: Tim Dowley
- Edition: Third Edition
- Publisher: Fortress Press
- Print Publication Date: 2018
- Logos Release Date: 2019
- Pages: 620
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Christianity; Church history
- ISBNs: 9781506445960, 9781506446035, 9781451452389, 9781451465426, 1506445969, 1506446035, 1451452381, 1451465424
- Resource ID: LLS:NTRDCTNHSTC3ED
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T01:57:49Z