11.20
A close friend gave me this book for Christmas last year and I have to say that I highly recommend it. It’s a survey of literature throughout church history that are either purely Christian or have in some way or another had a direct influence on the church. It’s edited by Alister McGrath, who is Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University.
His method is to introduce each literary work with a brief background about it’s author. You can tell pretty quickly that his understanding of church history is very robust and he comes at it from a highly orthodox view. This lends him a theological credibility that assures me that he is letting the author be who he was, rather than trying to “interperet” them into a modern form as is so often the case these days.
The book is divided into five epochs as follows:
- The Patristic Period: Clement(96) – Fortunatus(530)
- English and Irish Sources: Caedmon’s Hymn(670) – Wulfstan(1023)
- The Middle Ages: Anselm(1033) – William Dunbar(1460)
- Renaissance and Reformation: Erasmus(1469) – Book of Common Prayer(1662)
- The Modern Period: Daniel Defoe(1660) – Garrison Keillor(-)
This is one of those rare gems that should be in every Christian’s library. Most of us can’t afford to have a book for each one of these works in our library and even if we did we probably wouldn’t have time to read them. Yet we should all have a decent grasp of the major Christian writers in church history. This book is the answer to that dillema. Here is the link to it on Amazon. It makes a great Christmas gift.
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