Christopher Catherwood's Church History: A Crash Course for the Curious is a mixed bag of tricks. While there were flashes of brilliance, the book only superficially dealt with history of the church and left me (and lots of other readers, I would assume) still curious.

Let's start with the positive....

Catherwood's handling of religious influence on the founding of America is brilliant. I find many modern voices over-emphasizing the religious influence on America's founding fathers, turning a willfully blind eye towards the Deistic views that informed some Founders' seemingly Christian speech. Many of our founders, based upon their own writings, would fall outside of orthodox Christianity. However, other liberal voices negate any Christian influence on the founding of America. Such a view is also anachronistic and ignorant. Catherwood, as a Brit, speaks in a balanced way when it comes to America's founding. He writes, "So while it is natural for us as evangelicals to emphasize the Puritans - so many of whose views and values we share as deeply as ever today - it is historically quite inaccurate to see the origins of the USA through Puritan spectacles. When we talk - anachronistically it should be said - of reclaiming America, do we mean Puritan New England or Cavalier Virginia? Both, for good or ill, are equally America" (144).

Catherwood also offers the best definition of 20th Century neo-orthodoxy I have ever read. He calls it "a fuzzy, halfway house theology that recognized the failings of Liberalism and yet was unable to make a full return to biblically orthodox theology" (193). I wish my seminary professors had been this clear when describing Karl Barth and his contemporaries!

Church History falls short on several accounts. Most significantly, it gives far too superficial a treatment to most major historical events that shaped Christianity. For example, Luther, who is given a far more generous treatment than others, is covered in 8 pages. Poor Calvin gets three pages. Johnathan Edwards gets only one page. Curious readers should consider instead Christian History Made Easy by Timothy Paul Jones or, for the more ambitious reader, Justo Gonzalez's excellent two volume The Story of Christianity.

Did you know that Catherwood was the maternal grandson of Martyn Lloyd-Jones? If you didn't, you will after you read this book. Catherwood mentions his relationship to Lloyd-Jones on numerous occasions. One can hardly fault Catherwood for his sense of pride being connected to Lloyd-Jones. After all, the Good Doctor may have been THE preeminent preacher of the preceding century. However, the frequency with which Dr. Lloyd-Jones is mentioned and quoted is off-putting. The book could have been titled, Church History: Through the eyes of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

In closing, I think this is a nice book written by an author who is vastly more knowledgable and talented than this book demonstrates. I think there are better options for the reader curious in church history. ( )

The title says it all. A crash course on church history! It's just that; a whistlestop tour through 20 centuries of church history - all in 188 pages. It can only whet the appetite to want to find out more - and it certainly does that!
Second reading even better ( )

This book is exactly what it says on the cover: a crash course in Church history. The author is the grandson of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and from the reformed wing of evangelical Christianity. He is sound and writes with a personal tone, and many people will love this book. He wrote another book that I liked very much - his family portrait of Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

Nevertheless I cannot give this book quite the glowing review that I would like to. This book was very good and collates a huge amount of information and detail into a small space, making it readable and accessible. The author is up front about being from the reformed wing of evangelicalism, and we know when he is putting his personal view on an issue. The presence of his personal opinions is by no means illegitimate in a book on history.

But even though I too am from the reforemed and evangelical wing of the Church, and have every on of Martyn Lloyd-Jones' books on my bookshelf (and read too!) I felt, reading this book, that it had some issues in terms of time spent on evangelical church history as opposed to the broader sweep of church history.

Some of this is my own bias, but - for instance - some very important people in curch history, such as Theodosius for instance, do not even get named. Many others are little more than footnotes. There is brief mention of early church doctrinal disputes, but the issues are so briefly covered that it is hard to get a feel for how all encompassing they were. Arianism gets reasonable coverage. Gnosticism is hardly mentioned (in fact maybe not at all). Constantine is briefly covered, although his mother is nothing more than a footnote.

This is a crash course though, so maybe I should not expect so much from this work. At least these people are mentioned - but I would have liked perhaps a pointer at least to something like J N D Kelly's excellent "Early Church Doctrines". In mentioning the medieval dispute over the number of angels that dance on a head of a pin, it would have been nice to extend that to another paragraph at least, explaining how the real issue in that dispute was over corporeal/non corporeal forms, and why this was actually considered a valid point of inquiry.

But come the reformation we are then given pen portraits of a selection of important figures in Church history. These have a strong bias to evangelical tradition. All this information is valid and useful, but here is my problem with this approach: It feeds confirmation bias.

Readers from the reformed and evangelical traditions will enjoy reading about the great evangelical leaders, but there is little here to challenge them to consider the broader sweep of church history. This could be an altogether too comfortable book for evangelicals. On the other hand, anyone reading from another tradition will probably dismiss it as an example of evangelical bias, and again not allow themselves to be challenged by the distinctive evangelical contribution to Christianity. Lloyd-Jones may be family, but for a book on the broad sweep of church history he seems to get mentioned rather often. (On the other hand, Lloyd-Jones' treatment of the history of dispensationalism is fuller than the one on this book, so that is a good place for further reading).

On his brief foray into science, the author misrepresents the "mitochondrial eve" issue, unfortunately. We should be very clear - we all have a common female ancestor - but she was not alone in the world, and indeed when she was alive, all living people then also had a common female "mitochondrial eve". This was not really a church history issue, and was an unfortunate distraction.

I think what I would have preferred was a longer work that considered the issues more thoroughly, and guided interested readers into further reading, and that was more challenging. There were some challenges though - a clear call for Christians to avoid isolationism, and the insight (found elsewhere also) that separation of religion from the state is good for Christianity, and that the state cannot legislate morality. All these are good insights.

Despite those criticisms, this is not a bad book and one I could happily recommend to anyone who has no knowledge at all of church history. I could imagine adapting some of the material for a sunday school lesson plan on the subject. ( )