The Catholic Historical Review

This book originated in a series of public lectures given in Oxford over the academic year 1999-2000. The lecturers look back at the past two thousand years in order to provide some perspective as the new millennium approached. The lecturers were drawn from various English universities including Oxford and Cambridge.

The book follows the standard division of church history with chapters on the Early Church, Late Antiquity, Early Middle Ages, Later Middle Ages, Refor-mation, etc. They are well written, as one would expect from English dons, often [End Page 726] breezy in style, and often magisterial. The interaction of Church and secular culture is especially well done.

Here are some of the insights I found tantalizing.

In his chapter on the Early Church Henry Chadwick believes the concern about correct and precise formulations of true doctrine left a legacy that would lead medieval schoolmen to excess.

Averil Cameron holds there was no "triumph of Christianity" in the fourth century. If there was, it was bought at the cost of authoritarianism and persecution.

Henry Mayr-Harting explains how the new Christian ethic began to pervade the Germanic political world. In the case of Charlemagne it led to the totally novel concept that a ruler should behave with humility. Which meant he should listen to the Church. Which helped to foster a vital notion in European history—that political power and authority should be limited.

Diarmaid MacCulloch's chapter on the Reformation is a masterpiece of condensation that manages to connect all the dots. He endorses the view of the revisionists such as Eamon Duffy that the pre-Reformation Church satisfied the spiritual needs of late medieval people. But he argues that this only adds luster to the achievement of the Reformers in overcoming the power and success of the old church structure.

In the final chapter Adrian Hasting claims that the struggle with modernity in the twentieth century produced a period of theological creativity equal to the three other peak periods, the later fourth and early fifth, the thirteenth, and the sixteenth. He cites as the most influential Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, the Niebuhrs, Maritain, Teilhard de Chardin, Rahner, Congar, von Balthasar, and Pannenburg. He also notes the emergence into full vitality of churches in the southern continents of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The future third millennium of Christianity, in fact, he believes, may depend on them just as at the start of the second millennium Christianity had come to depend on the young churches of northwest Europe. At the same time European theologians, no longer in thrall to the nationalism and imperialism of the great European powers, have developed a richer theology, more faithful to the tradition than was available at the start of the twentieth century. Certainly this theology is a valuable source for the more dynamic, but also more simplistic churches of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. If so used, it would reflect a law within Christianity's long history that the increase of the new is dependent on the decrease of the old.