Church History

A Crash Course for the Curious

Christopher Catherwood

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781581348415
• eBook ISBN: 9781433519352
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

In this concise, accessible guide, author Christopher Catherwood takes his readers through the history of the faith, educating them about the uniqueness of Christianity from its birth to the diverse, global Evangelical Church we know today. Church History is the perfect place to start for anyone who wants to know where to begin this quest for knowledge.

Enjoy discovering more about the lives of men and women from various times and places, not only to better understand the church, but also to know how to live wisely in this age. These are some of the many reasons why history is so important.

From those who desire to learn more about their fellow followers of Jesus Christ throughout history to those who want to learn more about church for themselves, this book will test you to dig deeper in your faith.

From Christ to Constantine

Christianity is a faith named after its founder. We are above all as Christians believers in a person—Jesus Christ. Muslims get angry when they are called Mohammedans since the name of their faith is Islam, which means “submission” in Arabic. Muhammad (or Mohammed) may be that religion’s founder, but he was emphatic in saying that he was not divine. Hinduism is the religion of an ethnic group—the Indians of South Asia. Judaism is also today an ethnic faith, although in times past proselytes, outsiders like Naaman the Syrian, occasionally joined.

Christianity is unique, worshiping a divine founder as God, God the Son, Jesus Christ. We are saved not by good works, as is the norm in man-made faiths, but through the fully accomplished salvation we have in Jesus Christ through His atonement on the cross. Ours is a very personal faith.

So the beginning of Christianity is centered around an individual, Jesus of Nazareth, who we Christians know is God incarnate, come down to live among sinners like us to reconcile us with God.

While there are many precepts, moral codes, teachings, and so on in Christianity, our faith is above all a redeemed relationship. Not only that, but it is God coming down to us rather than humans trying to reach up to God.

As Paul reminds us, if Christ is not risen, our hope is in vain. Ours is also a historic religion, and here it again differs from others, which evolved over the course of time, such as the varying branches of Buddhism and Hinduism. We believe in both a person and in facts connected to that person, things that really happened in what Francis Schaeffer liked to call space and time.

Not only that, but the church itself consists of people. We are not simply an institution, but countless individuals all uniquely related to each other through the special individual relationship we each have with God through Christ. Do remember, when looking at church history, that in Scripture the church is seen as a person, the Bride of Christ, and not as an institution. That is not to deny institutional aspects of God’s church here on earth. But what we are looking at is the unfolding story of people and what happened to them throughout history.

Christianity also arose in the context of a specific historical background, the multinational, multiethnic, and multireligious Roman Empire. To us as Christians this ought to be no coincidence—it was all planned that way by God Himself. The events that led to the large-scale Roman Empire, which stretched from the Atlantic coast of Spain in the west to the borders of present-day Iraq in the east, all having their origins hundreds of years before Christ came to earth, God planned centuries in advance.

Providential History

Are things in our own lives (the small scale) or in history (the large scale) ever purely random events? To use Einstein’s famous phrase in another context, does God play dice? Surely for us as Christians, with a knowledge through the Bible of how God acts, the answer to that must be no. God not only knows what is going to happen but also arranges things so that His will takes place.

On an individual level this is a profoundly comforting doctrine. However odd things may sometimes seem to us, we can have complete faith that our lives are not arbitrary and that God knows what He is doing and is seeking to accomplish.

But while many Christians gain comfort from this at the micro-level, we all too often forget that this is true of the big picture as well, of history itself.

I call this providential history because all that happens, whether simply to us as individuals or on the global scale, to rulers and nations, is equally in the all-loving, omniscient hands of God.

We see this clearly laid out in Scripture because the narrator tells us that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart and put it into the mind of Cyrus to let the children of Israel return home. But as we shall see throughout this book, it is evident that God continues to arrange historical events, so that His purposes can be worked out.

So I do not think it presumptuous to say that this is the case for the historical and cultural circumstances into which Christ came and in which early Christianity was able to grow so rapidly over such an enormous geographical area.

The first of these providential circumstances is probably one we know from childhood Bible stories. The Roman Empire is the background to the New Testament. We are aware that God had predicted it many centuries earlier in the visions He gave to Daniel, when Rome was no more than a blip on a very distant horizon, a small and insignificant city-state in a peninsula with little world importance. By Christ’s time it ruled a vast empire from Spain to Iraq, including therefore not only Palestine but also all the other regions around the Mediterranean.

This meant political stability, which enormously helped the spread of the gospel since it was not necessary to cross over unfriendly borders to bring the message to a wide region. It was possible, for example, to go from the Scottish border in northern Europe to the frontiers of Sudan in Africa in the south, all within the safe confines of Roman rule. Never before had one such gigantic political unit existed, and after Christianity had spread throughout it, the Roman Empire split, never again to be reunited on such a scale.

But since the Romans were some of the best road builders the world has ever seen, it also meant that the logistics of travel became much easier. Roman roads were immensely efficient and, thanks to firm political control, also safe.

The other massive help was linguistic/cultural. This is not so evident to us now when reading the Bible. But it is to those who read it in its original language—Greek, or in particular, koine or popular Greek.

Here we can say that God had paved the way over three hundred years earlier through the megalomania of the great Macedonian—and Greek-speaking—conqueror Alexander the Great. He created within a few years an enormous empire stretching from Greece in the west, Egypt in the south, and Bactria in present-day Afghanistan, on the borders of the Hindu Kush in the east. (During the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan we probably all read articles about fair-haired Afghans, descendants over two millennia later of the original invading Greek armies.)

The actual empire did not survive Alexander. But the successor states, including those that ruled over Egypt (the Ptolemies, including Cleopatra) and Iran (the Seleucids), remained culturally and linguistically Greek for centuries—look at the references in the New Testament to Greek speakers and Greek cities such as the Decapolis. In Egypt a large Greek population remained down to the twentieth century. In fact the Egyptian city Alexandria was named directly after Alexander himself.

This meant that from Greece to the Indian border there were people who either were Greeks, thought along Greek lines (the Hellenizers of the New Testament), or spoke Greek as a second language. Already, long before Christ, the Old Testament had been translated into Greek—the Septuagint. So when Christ came, the simplest and most widespread common language into which to write the good news, our New Testament, was therefore Greek, not Latin. And all this was because of the mania for conquest of a pagan ruler living three hundred years before the birth of Christ.

This, therefore, is the political and cultural background to the extraordinarily rapid and wide spread of the Christian message in the first century. It reached from Spain in the west to Syria in the east, Macedonia in the north and Ethiopia in the south, all by the end of the book of Acts.

To secular historians, all this is helpful coincidence, as will be the case with many other events in Christian history, such as the Reformation, as we will see. But I do not think we can see it like that. Surely these two extraordinary conjunctions—the size and stability of the Roman Empire and the multinational and equally geographically large use of Greek as a second language—cannot just be accidents. So helpful were they to the easy spreading of the gospel and making Christianity a global faith so early on that they must be seen as part of the providence of God.

As Edith Schaeffer reminds us in her book Christianity Is Jewish, the Jewish background to the origins of Christianity is vital to remember. Jesus Himself was Jewish, as were all His early disciples. Much of the book of Acts is taken up with Jewish-related themes, with Peter realizing that the Old Testament dietary laws no longer applied, and Paul using Jewish synagogues as jumping-off points in his early missionary journeys.

In the entire ancient world the Jews were unique. As I show in my secular history book A Brief History of the Middle East, they alone were monotheists. Nowadays, with the two major global monotheistic faiths—Islam and Christianity—being both monotheistic and multicultural, we forget how extraordinarily unusual this was in ancient times. All the other major religions were polytheistic, believing in vast pantheons of gods and goddesses, as Hinduism does today, or in numerous manifestations of deity, as is the case with Buddhism. Even if your own religion had few gods, people believed that gods related to a particular ethnic group—Jupiter and Neptune for the Romans, for example—and that no one group’s deities were unique. It was the Jews, and the Jews alone, who believed that not merely was their God the God of Israel, but that no other gods existed at all. Furthermore, God related to His people and could be known. Nor was He capricious, like so many of the pagan deities, but profoundly moral. The Jews therefore, to use the phrase of a British writer, Paul Johnson, believed in ethical monotheism.

The Roman emperors basically could not care less what local deities their subject peoples worshiped, since the idea of exclusivity in religion was entirely alien to pagan peoples. However, they did insist on what one might call political religion—you could worship whomsoever you wished so long as you recognized the Roman emperor as being divine. This was essentially not a religious requirement but a political one, a way of ensuring that the vast Roman domains had the glue of common worship of the head of the Empire, the emperor.

Just one group was exempt from this—the Jews. Only they were permitted to worship their own God and no other, and they were not obliged to make religious sacrifices to the emperor.

By the first century Jews were spread all over the Empire and beyond. They could be found in the Persian Empire and as far afield as India. Wherever the Jews went, there were also synagogues where the faithful gathered. These were the Jews of the Diaspora, the beginnings of the spread of the Jewish people all over the world, in our own time in the United States and western Europe as well.

Since the earliest leaders of the infant Christian faith were also Jewish, it was only natural that they would begin by visiting the synagogues to proclaim Jesus as the true Jewish Messiah that He was. But as we see in the book of Acts other Jews rejected the claim, and the early church was persecuted.

Here, as I show in Divided by God, there is already a critical difference between the origin of Christianity and that of Islam, the other major transnational faith. As we shall see in the relevant chapter, Islam began as a religion of political and military power. Islam has always been linked to a state, preferably one under its own rule, the Realm or Dar al-Islam. Christianity, the Jewish writer Bernard Lewis has shown in his many books, is entirely different. For its first three centuries the Christians were viciously persecuted. This was done first by those Jews who rejected the messiahship of Jesus and, secondly, when the Romans, observing this, realized that Judaism and Christianity were actually two quite separate religions.

This Roman realization is important because in discovering the difference between the two faiths, the Romans decided that Christians were not protected by the Jewish exemption to worship the Roman emperor as divine. Christians, from early on, were subject to the full rigors of the Roman state and, refusing to worship Caesar as god, were persecuted most savagely for the next three centuries.

Persecution

Christians have been persecuted from the very beginning. One only has to read the book of Acts, several epistles—which reveal the fact that Paul was writing them from jail—and advice on how to deal with persecution in Peter’s writing to see that being a Christian and being persecuted for that fact often went together in those days.

In other words, if Christians are being persecuted now, which they still are in many parts of the world, this is nothing at all new.

In fact Jesus Himself told His disciples to expect it, and throughout the history of the church in many parts of the world it has been the norm rather than the exception.

However, this has usually increased the church rather than diminished it, thereby doing the exact opposite of what the persecutors wanted to happen. As early church historian Tertullian declared, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” Throughout the period examined in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 From Christ to Constantine
• 2 Creeds, Councils, and Conversions
• 3 Medieval Christianity
• 4 The Reformation—Martin Luther
• 5 The Reformation—Succeeding Reformers
• 6 The Age of Expansion and Revival
• 7 Awakening and Evangelicals
• 8 The Dawn of Global Mission and Social Responsibility
• 9 The Great Century: Christianity Becomes Global
• Conclusion: Where Next?