Ebook
This volume, condensed from Dr. Justo González’s popular three-volume history, is revised and updated.
While retaining the essential elements of the earlier three volumes, this book describes the central figures and debates leading to the Councils of Nicea and Chalcedon. Then it moves to Augustine and shows how Christianity evolved and was understood in the Latin West and Byzantine East during the Middle Ages.
Finally, the book introduces the towering theological leaders of the Reformation and continues to trance the development of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christianities through modernity in the twentieth century to post-modernity in the twenty-first.
Outlines history of Christian thought from the birth of Christ, to the Apostles, to the early church, to the flowering of Christianity across the world. Introduces key leaders, theologians, and major debates in Christian thinking. Narrates the cross-cultural, cross-confessional, and cross-religious dynamics that characterize the spread of Christianity.
Readers will understand the basics of the history and changes in Christian thought throughout history. Readers will learn key people, doctrines, and constructs of Christianity as they have been variously understood. Readers will appreciate the variegated forms of Christian thought. Readers will understand the basics of the history and changes in Christian thought throughout history. Readers will learn key people, doctrines, and constructs of Christianity as they have been variously understood. Readers will appreciate the variegated forms of Christian thought.
“The doctrine of the Trinity was the other focus of the controversy between Callistus and Hippolytus” (source)
“they disappeared soon after the destruction of the Temple,” (source)
“Clement’s second exegetical principle is that each text must be interpreted in the light of the rest of Scripture” (source)
“These new conditions also had their negative consequences. In the first place, there soon began mass conversion that inevitably detracted from the depth of conviction and the moral life of the church. Secondly, the imperial protection made it easier for the powerful to join the church and to seek to retain and exert their power within the community of faith. Finally, the same protection, which gave Christians the possibility of developing their theology to an extent that was previously impossible, also implied the possibility of imperial condemnation or favor to one theological position or another, and this in turn gave theological controversies a political dimension that they had not previously had. This is what happened in the Arian controversy.” (source)
“The ‘person’ is one who has a certain ‘substance.’ It is possible for several persons to share one substance, or for one person to have more than one substance—and this is the core of Tertullian’s doctrine regarding not only the Trinity, but also the person of Christ.” (source)