God is infinite or omnipresent. The State is truly everywhere. At my birth, the State was there to legitimize my birth with the issuance of a birth certificate. Throughout my infancy and my time as a toddler, the State was there to ensure I remained “healthy” through necessary vaccinations. During my formative elementary years, the State was there to enforce my compulsory education. As I grew into a teen, the State was there to license me to drive. Upon my graduation, the State was there to assure me that my post-secondary education was accredited and met its rigid standards. When I fell in love, the State was there, permitting me to marry my bride with a marriage license. When my children were born, the State, ever-vigilant, was there to legitimize their births. And when I grow old and feeble, the State will be there providing me with security, social security, as I attempt to provide for my comforts.

–Matt, The Bound Dragon

I think it’s also fair to note that the church, for it’s part is trying to mimic the state in this endeavor. The church wants to get into every aspect of people’s lives – offering programs and activities that could fill up a person’s entire week. I was eating dinner with a friend the other night and we were talking about this very thing. The church is too visible. Historically, the Christianity has been most vulnerable when it’s the most visible. With mega-churches sprawled out all over the country and multi-million dollar parachurch ministries all over, it’s hard to say that the church is in any way hidden today. You might think that’s a good thing. I think it’s not. Whenever the church pushes into the public square in a big way, it always seems to end up bad.

The flip-side to what I’m talking about is the church as a hidden, personal body. A body committed to ministry and personal relationships. I don’t think that you can say in any way that being more public and visible changes more hearts. As a matter of fact, whenever the church has been the most hidden and the most persecuted is when it has flourished. Just look at the Chinese church today. It’s solid and growing in the midst of fierce persecution. By contrast, the American church is wobbly and stagnant.

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:

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.