Customer Reviews

Christianity - The Second Thousand Years [VHS]

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This film is a sort of a catalog of different Christian churn branches which gives a brief description about how every movement was born and relationships between them and the states. So if you want to know how Orthodox or Methodist Church was started, this is a good source.

They also are trying to give some analysis of the environment, but that part is much worse. The role of church is so complex and attempts to summarize it in a short film are usually arguable and not convincing.

Anyway, it's a lot of interesting information packed into one film, highly recommended!

After an overly long exposition from THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS, this set takes off with wings of brilliance considering how many topics and issues it must cover.

Again, please do not take this set as an encompasing piece of information. Like the preceding series, it completes an INTRODUCTION to Christianity's first two thousand.

Excellent.

After watching the first thousand years of this series I really looked forward for the 2nd thousand years. It is as good as I expected. An excellent account of the history of Christianity begining with the cruzades, the Middle Ages, the Rainessance and the separation of Luther, Calvin and Henry the 8th... and going through the last days of the 20th century. I highly recommend you watch this. (Watch the first part also!)

The series 'Christianity: The Second Thousand Years' is the follow-up to the series 'Christianity: The First Thousand Years.' For DVD fans, these two series are bundled together. From the outset, the narrator states the purpose of this series as not being a look at the Bible or theological and spiritual ideas, but rather a history of the church, of Christendom and the whole institution of Christianity. Because this was done in four, fifty-minute episodes (roughly 250 years per segment), the history has had to be more selective than history ordinarily is. The documentary navigates a good and interesting course between major figures, events and ideas and interesting trivia and elements of the Christian experience.

Given the audio-visual nature of the documentary, there are lots of pictures of artwork, architecture, archaeological/historical sites, and re-creations of events; there is also a good deal of music as a background - in the first thousand years, the primary music of the church was plainsong and chant, so that is most frequently used here (besides the orchestrated theme and background music that turns up regularly). However, as times get more modern, so does the music, through polyphony, baroque, and into more classical and 'regular' hymn music.

One of the limitations of the audio-visual medium of documentaries is that deep theological issues cannot be examined in detail - one hopes that one of the benefits of a series like this is to spur interest in reading the actual works of the people being discussed. For example, a few piece from Calvin and Luther are used to highlight their issues with the church in the Reformation, but there is so much to each of these theologians that it is impossible even in a full documentary focussing exclusively on them to give more than a passing acquaintance with their work to the viewers. This is true for all major theological thinkers, from any era.

Another area of interest is in the historical development of Europe overall, during the first thousand years, and the spread of the church as the Europeans spread throughout the world, during the second thousand years. Again, the purpose of the documentary being to explore the history of the church, one should not expect a full historical development even of the areas directly touched upon - still, this documentary does a good job at setting the overall context in political, social, military, economic and intellectual terms.

This is a history produced in broad strokes - the overall aspects and trends of Christian history come through in good form, even if the details are not as fully developed as an historian might care to have. We have used these videos in church history classes at my seminary as a supplement to the primary texts and history surveys that students read - this really does help bring history to life.

The scholars represented on this video come from a very diverse background - the Roman Catholic and Orthodox members of the scholar team on this documentary may be surprised to find themselves classified and dismissed as 'Jesus Seminar types' (particularly people like Eastern Orthodox Archbishop Kalistos Ware); interestingly, this is not a documentary about the Bible, either what it says or how it was made - in this regard, that might be one of the gaps of this particular documentary series (how the Bible was made gets relatively little space in this video). On the other hand, A&E have another series, 'Who Wrote the Bible', which involves scholars, theologians and religious leaders who were involved in the production (and again, a diverse bunch - Jerry Falwell would not qualify as a 'Jesus Seminar' type either).

This is a very good video series for the novice, the general interest seeker, and for students and pastors who want an introduction or refresher into the overall scope of church history.