50 WORLD-CHANGING EVENTS IN
CHRISTIAN HISTORY
By Earl M. Blackburn
Christian Focus. 336 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 1 781 917 497
This delightful and worthy book attempts to encapsulate 2,000 years of church history into 50 key events in a way that is accessible to the general reader. The writer describes it as ‘an entry-level book on church history’.
The writing style is usually clear. It must have been a tough job to select the most helpful and truthful things to say when the scope is so wide and the space so short.
Twenty seven of the key events are pre-Reformation, so there is good coverage of early church history. The Councils and Christological controversies are allocated several chapters and reasons are given why their deliberations are still vital today. So we meet, for example, the Monophysites and the Monothelites. I found some of this was so compressed that it became a little baffling.
The writer also covers events which Protestant evangelicals would count as landmarks: the writing of Calvin’s Institutes, the King James Version, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
It is written from the point of view of the English-speaking world, with a mid-Atlantic centre: there is a chapter on the Azusa Street Revival and the emergence of Liberation Theology, mentioning its effects on the church that Barack Obama was formerly associated with (p.315)
It is a good introductory book and as such has little in the way of references to rigorous sources. Serious students would want to dig deeper. The statements that ‘Mecca, capital of present-day Saudi Arabia’ (p.128) and ‘Russia stretches to the Mediterranean’ (p.145) come as a surprise to me.
