Book Review

Comparative/World

The composition of a history of Christianity presents unusual challenges, for it is a religious movement that spans 2,000 years and all parts of the globe. Recognizing that no one scholar can be expert in all times and places, editor Adrian Hastings has assembled a team of specialists, each authoring a chapter within his or her area of specialization.	1
The resulting volume transcends the typical focus on Western Europe by offering two chapters on the Byzantine Empire and post-Byzantine Eastern Europe and one each on India, Africa, Latin America, the Far East, North America, and Australasia. The chapters on non-European regions span the entire period of Christian presence, while the history of Mediterranean and Western European Christianity is divided chronologically into five chapters interspersed among the others. The placement of the chapters was determined, apparently, by the first appearance of Christianity in that region, even if the bulk of its known history occurred centuries later. Thus geographical coherence is attained at the cost of chronological order.	2
As so often happens in multi-authored volumes, each chapter is structured differently and takes a somewhat different approach to the history of Christianity. The chapters on late antiquity and modern Western Europe, by Hastings and Mary Heimann respectively, focus on intellectual history. Hastings concentrates on the early Christian thinkers whose conceptions laid the groundwork for the official definition of the Christian faith, setting them in their political and intellectual context in an elegant narration. Heimann looks less at Christian theologians per se than at the Christian content of the "great thinkers" of the modern age, making cogent observations along the way concerning modern-day scholars' propensity to accept Enlightenment epistemology uncritically.	3
The other chapters concerning the Western experience pay less attention to intellectual history. Martin Goodman's essay on the beginnings of Christianity focuses on the societal context of the Roman Empire of the first and second centuries. This approach allows him to evade the thorny issue of what, exactly, Jesus and his earliest devotees believed and did. Benedicta Ward and G. R. Evans's chapter on the medieval West, in contrast, examines understandings of the religious life; it is the only chapter to devote substantial attention to lay piety. Andrew Pettegree's chapter on the Reformation places the most emphasis on church-state relations, as does Philip Walters's chapter on the Orthodox East. The latter is stronger on Eastern Europe than on Russia, where the author's interpretation is notably out of date. Political imperatives are also a major theme of Mary B. Cunningham's essay on Byzantine Christianity, especially as they were manifested in theological debates. She is the only author to address the liturgical ramifications of theological and organizational decisions.	4
The chapters on India, Africa, and East Asia (by R. E. Frykenberg, Kevin Ward, and R. G. Tiedmann respectively) all devote considerable attention to Western missionary efforts. The missionaries generally appear as a well-intentioned and culturally sensitive lot, although the authors do not deny excesses of zeal or arrogance in a minority of cases. The essays on India and Africa in particular attempt to give more than customary attention to the development of autonomous indigenous traditions of Christianity. The chapters on North America (Robert Bruce Mullins), Latin America (Hastings), and Australia and New Zealand (David Hilliard) emphasize the adaptation of West European forms of Christianity to local conditions: political culture in North America; the issues of social justice in Latin America; and the scarcity of human resources in Australia and New Zealand.	. . .