GAMECHANGERS
Key Figures in the Christian Church
By Robert Letham
Christian Focus. 195 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 1 781 915 998
Gamechangers? Church history is no kind of game. The 12 ‘key figures’ whose stories are retold here were not playing about.
The first featured, Athanasius, was five times forced into exile during his time as a fourth-century bishop. Nor was it sport for Barth to be dismissed from his teaching post at Bonn in 1935 for refusing to give the Hitler salute at the start of his classes.
Aquinas sound?
The publishers claim that ‘Gamechangers is a must read for any Christian with an interest in learning the way the church has understood the gospel down through the centuries’. Each chapter provides an outline of the subject’s life, his writings and thought, then some evaluation from the author’s Reformed Presbyterian perspective. All such conclusions are personal, but, even granting the caveats of his academic approach, en readers may be surprised to find Letham call the teaching of Aquinas, ‘sound, Christian and biblical’ (p 96).
Who reads church history?
So who is he writing for? I would be happy to hear there are in the UK groups of ‘research chemists and intelligent lay people with a serious interest in theology’ as eager for this book as those who first heard them as lectures in the USA.
I heartily wish there were more pastors urging their members to read church history. They could be helped and informed by these scholarly mini-biographies, as I have been. But I’m not sure there are enough of them to justify publishing this compendium. I’m told even today’s seminary students treat church history as a minority interest. If they were to read this book I’m sorry to say that it is unlikely to light their fires either.
