Book Notes

Church history, c. 1914 to now.

As someone who is always on the look-out for suitable introductory texts to support a course I regularly teach on the recent world history of Christianity, I am delighted to have discovered Jeremy Morris' contribution to the I. B. Tauris History of the Christian Church. Morris, an Anglican minister, is the dean of King's College, Cambridge, and an active churchman as well as widely published historian. With The Church in the Modern Age, he brings off the near-impossible task of organizing the incredible welter of world ecclesiastical history over the last century in 15 spare chapters and just over 200 pages of text.

The secret is expert use of a three-fold chronological division: from World War I to the end of World War II ("the crisis of imperialism"); then to the early 1970s ("the end of empire); and finally into the 21st century ("the rise of the global south"). For each section there is an abbreviated summary of main world events followed by succinct accounts of Catholicism, Orthodoxy (both Eastern Orthodoxy and the oriental Orthodox churches), and "worldwide Protestantism." The first chronological period concludes with a chapter on ecumenism featuring the 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference, the second with an account of "independent churches and new religious movements," and the third with "Pentecostalism."

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