Book Review: Church History

Title:  Church History:  A Crash Course for the Curious

Author:  Christopher Catherwood

Publisher:  Crossway, 2007; 224 pp. $12.99

Recommendation (4-star scale):  

I wanted to like this book — I really wanted to like it a lot.

And it has its strengths.  But in the end, its strengths are also its weaknesses.

A book like this has a place in the genre of history books.  The author’s intention is admirable — to provide an overview of all of church history in about 200 pages, and to relate the historical to contemporary movements at the same time.  Frankly, Catherwood (the maternal grandson of the great British preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones) has some lofty goals, but in the end it’s just too much, and neither is successfully accomplished.  (Perhaps if he’d written two books — one a history and one relating history to contemporary movements — the readers would have been better served.)

As an example, the first chapter is a helpful primer on how to read and understand church history — and the importance of reading history to understand how ancient movements influence modern ideas.  It was a fine chapter — except that the title of the chapter is “From Christ to Constantine.”  And while movements within the first three centuries were mentioned, the emphasis was on modern issues and the ancient movements were not logically developed or explained (and to my recollection, which was substantiated by the index, Constantine was not even mentioned in the chapter).

I also understand that the work is not written on a scholarly level, but there are no footnotes and not a single bibliographic entry in the book.  On several occasions he even referred to other works he had written by saying “the author has written elsewhere…” without telling the reader the title of what he’d written in case someone wanted to do some additional reading.  Again, the book is intended for believers with little historical awareness so they might have an overview of church history and is not meant to be a serious research tool — but what better place to offer footnotes, bibliographic references, and study questions to stimulate a desire for further reading?

There is some value in the book — all the major events of the past 200o years in church history are at least mentioned if not explained in brief — but even for an overview this book is too flawed to be a significant help.