CH-402 History of Christianity

How did Christianity shape the civilisations it entered, and how did they shape it? Follow the church through two thousand years, from Rome to the Global South.

This course reads Williston Walker's classic history of the church, first published in 1918, put into plainer English with a new last chapter on the years since 1900. You follow the church from a persecuted minority in Rome, through the Middle Ages, when church and kings ruled together, and the Reformation, to the modern West and the churches of the Global South. Along the way you learn to read a historian: to tell what Walker reports from what he judges, and to weigh his judgements by Scripture and by the evidence.

What you will study

• The church, the Roman government and the early defenders of the faith
• Monks, bishops and Augustine
• The rise of the papacy, from Gregory the Great to Charlemagne
• Popes and emperors in conflict, and the Crusades
• The universities and the Renaissance
• Calvin, the Reformation and its divisions
• Modern science, Methodism and the world wars
• Independent churches and Christianity's shift to the Global South

Course materials

• A History of the Christian Church (Williston Walker), a WWES edition
• The Bible