Subject Aims (from the Australian College of Theology Undergraduate Manual, 2003)

• to give candidates a survey of major developments in the history of the Christian churches, so that they develop a fuller appreciation of major streams of Christian faith;
• to introduce candidates to selected topics in the life and thought of the christian churches, so that they come to appreciate the problems, opportunities and attitudes of past Christians in their interaction with the societies in which they lived;
• to promote training for candidates in the use of primary documents and begin more specialised study of particular movements, issues and periods.

Subject Content

Section A

Week 1 The Expansion of Christianity to 312AD. An Introduction to Church History; Christianity in the context of the first century Roman Empire; the spread of Christianity within and beyond the Roman Empire to 312AD.

Week 2 Religions and Philosophies. The Challenge of Judaism, Gnosticism, Greco-Roman Philosophies; Christian responses.

Week 3 Caesar: Friend or Foe. The changing nature of church and state relations to 337AD. Decius, Valerian, Diocletian, Constantine.

Week 4 Wrestling with the faith. The first four Ecumenical Councils. Trinitarian debates; Christological debates; Augustine and the Manichaes, the Donatists, & the Pelagians

Week 5 Christianity in the collapsing Western Roman Empire to c.650AD. The Barbarian invasions; Rise of the Papacy; Developments in monasticism; Trends in popular Christianity.

Section B

Week 6 The Conversion of Europe c.550-1100. Mission to the Celts; Mission to the Anglo-Saxons; Mission to the ‘Germans’; The Carolingian Empire and Renaissance; Decay in the Papacy; Monastic Renewal.

Week 7 Developments in Eastern Christianity c.470-c.1291. Ecclesial developments c.470-1054 and the East-West Schism; Missionary activity among the Slavs; interaction with Islam and the rise of the Seljuk Turks; The Crusades to c.1291.

Week 8 Christendom Triumphant. Western Christianity c.1200-1409. Papal power: Innocent III to Boniface VIII; Monastic Reform – Rise of the Mendicant Friars; Scholasticism – A New Theological Method.

Week 9 Christendom in Crisis. Popular Religious Movements and Papal Crisis. Cathars, Waldensians, and other popular religious movements; The Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy; The Great Western Schism; Conciliarism.

Section C

Week 10 Reformation Precusors, The Renaissance and humanism, Exploration and Expansion of Christianity in the New World

Week 11 Reformation in Germany (1517-1555)

Week 12 The Swiss Reformation: Zwingli and Calvin

Week 13 The Radical Reformation: The Gathered Church.

Textbooks to Purchase

Justo L. Gonzales The Story of Christianity (2 vols; Abingdon, 1984)

Reccommended

It will also help your study considerably if you can buy or borrow one or two other books from the bibliography.

Web Resources

Use of on-line resources is also encouraged.

Assessment

There is an essay due by the end of Week 9 (May 2), and you will also do a 2 hour exam. You are also required to send 9 email responses (equivalent to a total of 1000 words) to your lecturer during the semester.

This is the distribution of marks.

9 email responses 10 %

2000/2500 word essay 30 %

2 hour exam 60 %

Bibliography

Please note: this list is a compilation of many of the references cited at the end of each lesson. However, not all books have been included: please refer to the reference lists for books specific to one lesson.

Andrea, A. J. 1997, The Medieval Record. Sources of Medieval History, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

Bainton, R.H. 1978, Here I Stand. A Life of Martin Luther, Festival Books, Abigdon, Nashville.

Baker, J.W. 1966, Justinian and the Later Roman Empire, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin.

Briggs. J. 1990, "God, Time and History", in The History of Christianity. A Lion Handbook. 2^nd edn, ed. T. Dowely. Lion Publishing, Oxford, pp.14-25.

Cairns, Earl E. 1996, Christianity through the centuries: A history of the Christian church. 3^rd edn. rev & exp., Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Cameron, E. 1991, The European Reformation, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Cary, M. & Scullard, H.H. 1975, A History of Rome to the reign of Constantine, Macmillan Press, London, Basingstoke.

Chadwick, H. 1967 (rept. 1982), The Early Church, The Pelican History of the Church, vol. 1, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England.

Chadwick, O. 1968, The Reformation, The Pelican History of the Church, Vol. 3, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England.

Comby, J. 1985, How to read church history. From the beginnings to the fifteenth century, vol. 1, trans. John Bowden & Margaret Lydamore, SCM, London.

Dowley, T. 1977, The History of Christianity. A Lion Handbook, ed. T. Dowely, Anzea Books, Surry Hills, NSW., np.

Ferguson, E. 1993, Backgrounds of Early Christianity, 2^nd edn, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Finn, T.M. 2000, ‘Mission and Expansion’, in The Early Christian World, Vol. 1, ed. Philip F. Esler, Routledge, London & New York.

Foster, J. 1991, The first advance. Church history 1:AD29-500.rev. edn. W.H.C. Frend. TEF Study Guide 5, SPCK, London.

Frank, I. W. 1995, A History of the Medieval Church, trans. J. Bowden, SCM, London.

Frend, W.H.C. 1981 rept, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church. A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus, Barker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Frend, W.H.C. 1991, The Early Church. From the beginnings to 461, 3^rd edn, SCM, London.

Frend, W.H.C. 1984, The Rise of Christianity, Fortress Press, Philadelphia.

Gonzalez, J. 1984, The Story of Christianity. The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation, vol. 1, HarperSanFrancisco, New York.

Gonzalez, J.L. 1984, The Story of Christianity Vol. 2, The Reformation to the Present Day, HarperSanFrancisco, Harper Collins, New York.

Heather, P. 1998, The Goths, paperback edn, The Peoples of Europe, Blackwell, Oxford.

Irvin, D.T. & Sunquist, S.W. 2001, History of the World Christian Movement, vol. 1, Earliest Christianity to 1453, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York.

Keen, M. 1968, The Pelican History of Medieval Europe, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England.

Kelly, J.N.D. 1978, Early Christian Doctrines, revd ed., Harper & Row, New York.

Kelly, J.N.D. 1986, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Lambert, M. 1992, Medieval Heresy. Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 2^nd ed., Blackwell, Oxford, U.K. & Cambridge, USA.

Latourette, K.S. 1964, A history of Christianity. Eyre and Spottiswoode Limited , London.

Leith, J.H. (ed.) 1982, Creeds of the Churches. A Reader in Christian Doctrine for the Bible to the Present, 3^rd ed., John Knox Press, Atlanta.

Logan, F.D. 2002, A History of the Church in the Middle Ages, Routledge, London & New York.

Lynch, J.H. 1992, The Medieval Church: A Brief History, Longman, London & New York.

McGrath, A.E. 1988, Reformation Thought. An Introduction, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

McGrath, A.E. 1993, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, paperback, Baker Bookhouse & Blackwell Publishing, Cambridge Mass. & Oxford, UK.

Neill, S. 1986, A History of Christian Missions, 2^nd edn, Penguin, London.

Noll, M 1997, Turning Points: decisive moments in the history of Christianity, IVP, Leicester

Ozment, S. 1980, The Age of Reform 1250-1550. An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe, Yale University Press, New Haven & London.

Papadakis, A. & Meyendorff, J. 1994, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy. The Church 1071-1453 A.D., The Church in History IV, St Vladimire’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY.

Previte-Orton, C.W. 1971, The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Renwick, A.M. & Harman, A.M. 1985, The Story of the Church, 2^nd edn, IVP, Leicester.

Riley-Smith, J. (ed.) 1995, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. OUP, Oxford.

Rupp, E.G. & Drewery, B. eds, 1970, Martin Luther, Edward Arnold, London.

Russell, D.S. 1963, Between the Testaments, SCM, London.

Selinger, R. 2002, The Mid-Third Century Persecutions of Decius and Valerian, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main.

Shelley, B. Church History in Plain Language

Southern, R.W. 1970, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, The Pelican History of the Church, vol. 2, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England.

Stevenson, J. (ed) 1980, A New Eusebius: Documents illustrative of the history of the Church to A.D. 337, 9^th imp. SPCK, London.

Swanson, R.N. 1995, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.1215-c.1515, Cambridge Medieval Textbooks, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Tierney, B. 1964, The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.

Ullmann, W. 1972, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, Methuen, London.

Waley, D. 1975, Late Medieval Europe. From Saint Louis to Luther, revd ed., Longman, London.

Walton, R.C. 1986, Chronological and Background Charts of Church History, Academie Books, Zondervan, Grand Rapids.

Walker, W., R.A. Norris, D.W. Lotz, & R.T. Handy, A History of the Christian Church, 4^th ed., T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh.

Blackwell, Oxford.Europe, �Wallace-Hadrill, J.M. 1976, The Barbarian West. 400-1000, 3^rd revd ed., Hutchinson University Library, London.

Ware, T. 1993, The Orthodox Church, revised, Penguin, London.