Readings in the History of Christian Theology: From the Reformation to the Present (Readings in the History of Christian Theology Vol. II)

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Summary: More of their own words...
Review: William Placher teaches religion and philosophy at a university nearby to my schools and residence; I've had the opportunity to hear him speak several times. During his time as a teacher, he has written books on religious studies, theology and history for use in classroom settings, and this two-volume set of readings is one such useful product of Placher's.

Originally intended to be reader companions to his earlier work, 'A History of Christian Theology: An Introduction' (1983), Placher discovered to his surprise and delight that these books are able to stand alone without the earlier volume as a useful narrative of the development of Christian ideas.

The second volume deals with Christianity from the time of the Reformation to (almost) the present day. The first chapter begins with the Reformation in earnest, looking at writings of key reformers -- Martin Luther, Menno Simons, Ulrich Zwingli, Thomas Muntzer, as well as some of the formative documents of the time. It is amazing the profound impact these ideas have had on Christianity Protestant and Catholic, and how relatively unknown these writings (and sometimes, the people themselves) are.

The next chapter looks at the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Response to the Reformation. Documents include pieces from the Council of Trent, writing of Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, and Pascal (better known perhaps as a philosopher).

The English Reformation is the topic of the next chapter, including writings from John Calvin, John Knox, Richard Hooker, George Fox and others -- the English version of the Reformation took a diverse form, with Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Quaker, and other free-church traditions beginning in uneasy community on the island of Great Britain.

Placher's fourth chapter here looks at theology and philosophy, particularly the period of the Enlightenment. This was a period of time when Christian ideas began to be influenced by and take account of outside disciplines in earnest. Writers not traditionally classified as theologians or religious are included here -- David Hume, Immanuel Kant, John Locke -- as well as names such as John Wesley.

The fifth chapter looks specifically at the early American expeirence of theology and Christian ideas, including religious leaders such as Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards, Mary Baker Eddy and Joseph Smith, aas well as prophetic voices such as Sarah Grimke and Ralph Waldo Emerson, all of whom show a great spectrum of Christian expression as America grew as a nation.

The sixth and seventh chapters look at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; if not the most profound in Christian history, certainly the most prolific and productive in terms of texts and thinkers. The nineteenth century theological enterprise was a largely northern European affair, with a dominance of Germanic scholars (Schleiermacher, Harnack, Feuerbach, Troeltsch, Kierkegaard, Schweitzer); this was also the period of the first Vatican Council, The twentieth century also saw a good deal of Germanic theological work (Barth, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Tillich, Rahner), but this began to give way to an English dominance (Whitehead, Niebuhr, Martin Luther King).

This leads into the final chapter, on new voices in theology, including people such as James Cone (Black theology), Gustavo Gutierrez (Latino/Hispanic, liberation theology), John Mbiti (African theology), and Rosemary Radford Ruether (feminist theology). Any selection of texts in this category is bound to be controversial; output is so frequent in some of these topics (and others not addressed here) that only the briefest exposure can be given to give the reader a sense of the divergent directions of theology, while keeping the text to a manageable size.

The books in this set are ecumenical in nature; it is generally Western in its bias, tending toward the northern-European and American development; of course, this is audience to whom Placher writes. This is not an institutional history, but rather a history of ideas. Placher has introductions to the chapters and again to each of the primary texts, but these are minimal percentage-wise of the overall text. Placher made the conscious effort to include the most common and familiar of the passages from history, making the persuasive argument that, for students, often the passages seemingly over-used by teachers and ministers, are in fact new.

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Summary: No Better Way to Read Church History
Review: William Placher writes a history of the Reformed church which is accessible to an Adult sunday school class as well as graduate level students. Always careful to include general movements in history as well as the church's specific crises, Placher offers the reader a full contact history - one unabashedly profound history text!