Customer Reviews

The Church of Our Fathers

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Roland Bainton is an excellent historian who has a deep understanding of Church history. In this short book he presents the highlights so that any reader can get a nice overview of the Church. It is quite a task to explain 2000 years of history in a little over 200 pages, but Bainton is one of the few who can pull off this task with great success.

For those who find history boring, this book will be a nice surprise. It is well packaged. I particularly like this book because it blends the simple facts with personal accounts, poems, songs, and even some art. I highly recommend it for anyone hoping to get a solid primer about the Church's history. For those who want more depth (to include source material references, etc.) this is not the right book, although it would still be an enjoyable read.

If you want the overview of the history of the Christian Church by a writer of great skill and sincerity, this is the right book for you. No footnotes. Not a lot of scholarly depth. But what it does have is a lively prose style and a very good selection of events to tell the story of the Church. Christians should know at least something of the history of the Church. Bainton's book will serve as an excellent starting place.

I suspect this book was originally intended for a high school or even junior high readership--I met it myself in sixth and eighth grades. Forty years later it still has an honored place on my shelves because of its graceful, if straightforward, writing and its lucid presentation of complex issues from many points of view. It covers doctrinal disputes more in sorrow than in anger, never suggesting that one side or the other was acting faithlessly or, for that matter, had sole possession of the truth. Its inclusion of examples of music, art, and literature that were created to celebrate Christ and His Church (in all its many denominations) adds greatly to its appeal. As an introduction to the history of Christianity up to the mid-twentieth century I doubt it can be surpassed.