In the Context of Eternity: A Short History of the Christian Church

In the Context of Eternity is a lively and readable one-volume history of the Christian Church, which challenges the view that ancient history came to an end in the fifth century and that nothing of significance then happened until the Renaissance. It explains how an extraordinary intermingling of the Roman Empire, Christianity, and Barbarism produced the most dynamic society the world has ever known, and how the modern world emerged from the interaction of Christianity and Barbarism on the ruins of Rome. There is a prologue explaining the background to the world out of which Christianity developed and an epilogue commenting on the state of the Christian Church at the beginning of the third millennium. The period of two thousand years in between is divided into six sections, each of which is given the same number of pages and each of which is divided into three chapters. Thus, the period from the 330s to the 660s, on Christendom and the Roman Empire, is given the same attention as the period on The Era of Reform, from the 1330s to the 1660s. Chapter 18 is an account of the development of Christianity in the United States of America.