How should thoughtful Christians—especially historians and missiologists—make sense of global Christianity as an unfolding historical movement? Highlighting both the continuity and the diversity within the Christian movement over the centuries, this comprehensive resource from Scott Sunquist offers a framework for how to read and write church history.

The first comprehensive account to explore the beginnings of early Christian history writing, tracing its origin to the Gospel of Mark and Luke-Acts When the Gospel writings were first produced, Christian thinking was already cognizant of its relationship to ancient memorial cultures and history-writing traditions. Yet, little has been written about exactly what shaped the development of early Christian literary memory. In this eye-opening new study, Eve-Marie Becker explores the diverse ways in which history was written according to the Hellenistic literary tradition, focusing specifically on the time during which the New Testament writings came into being: from the mid-first century until the early second century CE. While acknowledging cases of historical awareness in other New Testament writings, Becker traces the origins of this historiographical approach to the Gospel of Mark and Luke-Acts. Offering a bold new framework, Becker shows how the earliest Christian writings shaped “Christian” thinking and writing about history.

A society with no grasp of its history is like a person without a memory. This is particularly true of the history of ideas. This book is an ideal introduction to the thinkers who have shaped Christian history and the culture of much of the world. Writing in a lively, accessible style, Jonathan Hill takes us on an enlightening journey from the first to the twenty first centuries. He shows us the key Christian thinkers through the ages - ranging from Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine and Aquinas through to Luther, Wesley, Kierkegaard and Barth - placing them in their historical context and assessing their contribution to the development of Christianity.

People and Events Every Christian Should Know In this 12-session DVD-based study, Dr. Timothy Paul Jones takes you through the most important events in Christian history from the time of the apostles to today. He brings to life the fascinating people and events that shaped our world. This isn’t dry names and dates. It’s full of dramatic stories told with a touch of humor. This series, based on Dr. Jones’s popular award-winning book Christian History Made Easy, ties in spiritual lessons believers can glean by looking at the past, and shows how God was still working in his church despite all the ups and downs. You will learn: • The fascinating stories of people such as St. Patrick, Martin Luther, and Augustine. • People who changed history: Constantine, Charlemagne, and Francis of Assisi • How we got the Bible that we read today — John Wycliffe, William Tyndale and others. • The Middle Ages and the Reformation: Kings and Queens, Monks and Reformers • Where church doctrines and practices originated. • How the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches came to be. • Reason and Revival - How modernity and the scientific revolution affected Christianity. • How Christianity has spread around the world You don’t have to be an expert to lead this 12-session study. Perfect for small groups, Bible studies, or personal use. Ages: Young adult to adult. The Sessions The 12 sessions cover major eras and topics with plenty of stories and humor. You’ll cover the early church, monasticism, medieval conflicts, the Protestant Reformation, the Great Awakening, 19th-century missions, modernity, and postmodernism.

In this book Mark Noll makes the compelling case that how Americans have come to practice the Christian faith is just as globally important as what the American church has done in the world. He backs up this substantial claim with the scholarly attentiveness we've come to expect from him.

Thomas C. Oden surveys the decisive role of African Christians and theologians in shaping the doctrines and practices of the church of the first five centuries, and makes an impassioned plea for the rediscovery of that heritage. Christians throughout the world will benefit from this reclaiming of an important heritage.

Christian faith complicates the task of historical writing. It does so because Christianity is at once deeply historical and profoundly transhistorical. Christian historians taking up the challenge of writing about the past have thus struggled to craft a single, identifiable Christian historiography. Overlapping, and even contradictory, Christian models for thinking and writing about the past abound--from accountings empathetic toward past religious expressions, to history imbued with Christian moral concern, to narratives tracing God's movement through the ages. The nature and shape of Christian historiography have been, and remain, hotly contested. Jay Green illuminates five rival versions of Christian historiography. In this volume, Green discusses each of these approaches, identifying both their virtues and challenges. Christian Historiography serves as a basic introduction to the variety of ways contemporary historians have applied their Christian convictions to historical research and reconstruction. Christian teachers and students developing their own sense of the past will benefit from exploring the variety of Christian historiographical approaches described and evaluated in this volume.