Reviews for A History of the Christian Church - Williston G. Walker - Hardcover

The average rating for A History of the Christian Church - Williston G. Walker - Hardcover based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-06-18 00:00:00 Jean-Francois Navion One of my brothers worked for a "great books" college where no history to speak of is taught. The students work solely with original texts, delving deeply into some seminal issues, but have little sense of how they fit together. Unless they do the contextual study themselves and get a sense of human history and its dynamics, they end up with too much appreciation of the Platonic notion that somehow ideas are superior to and independent of their instantiations, that thinkers are superior to and independent of their material roots, that they are participating in some grand dialog transcending space and time. This criticism can be applied to myself by means of an analogy. Just as it is misleading to think, say, that you can read and understand Plato without knowing the history surrounding the Peloponnesian Wars, so it is naive to believe that you can understand another culture without knowing its language(s). Although I started thinking myself an historian as a high school freshman, I've never been good at the memorization required for learning foreign languages and, so, have never really acquired any except, perhaps, American Sign Language--and that was picked up at home by using it more than by classwork. Viewed from the outside, many of the dogmas and doctrines of the Christian churches seem psychotic, divorced from reality. Viewed contextually in their historical context they begin to make sense. One of my complaints about an otherwise fine school is that Union Theological Seminary did not have us do our three semesters of required Church History courses at the very outset, but allowed me to wait until I was already well into the M.Div. program. A lot of the philosophy/theology coursework would have been easier, would have made more sense, if I had read Walker's History of the Christian Church or Kelly's History of Dogma beforehand or alongside the foundational texts. One of the fun things about general histories, particularly those which treat of matters never studied systematically before, is that you discover so much which is familiar. It's like looking up a word you've seen, even uncertainly employed, over the years and finally discovering its etymology and range of meanings. You have that pleasant "Aha!" experience which encourages the faith that this big wide world of ours actually might make sense given enough effort. It certainly appears richer, pregnant with signification and meaning. David Lotz, teacher of the second of our required Church History courses, the one on the late Middle Ages and the Reformation, was one of the contributors to Walker's amended text. Although neither a colorful individual nor particularly entertaining lecturer, rather a dry expositer of facts and rather exacting examiner, I very much enjoyed his class because the combination of his demands and the great mass of material we were forced to face led to a semester of discovery upon discovery. I still think a lot of religious dogma and doctrine is weird, but Walker and Lotz have greatly contributed to a faith that, with effort, it can all make sense.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-17 00:00:00 Tim Barett This was the text book for a class on Church History while I was in college. Most of my text books I chose to sell back to the school or to other students, but this one I gladly kept. It is a wonderful book written on the history of religion and then men who shaped the religions of the world.