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Review of Gonzalez, Story of Christianity, Volume 2

March 20, 2017 by Brian

s-l1000-1Gonzalez, Justo L. The Story of Christianity: The Reformation to the Present Day. Revised edition. New York: HarperOne, 2010.

The coverage of the Reformation in this volume is good, but many other areas suffer from serious defects. For instances, the coverage of Protestant Orthodoxy still follows the older neo-orthodox historiography and fails to reckon with the scholarship of Richard Muller and others. The coverage of fundamentalism does not take into account the work of George Marsden. With regard to recent church history, evangelical history is given minimal attention while a great deal of attention is given to the ecumenism and liberation theology. I found the coverage of Vatican II and the World Council of Churches helpful, but as the book moves toward the end Gonzalez’s own theological predilections become clearer in ways not entirely fitting for a broad-scale historical survey of church history.

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Filed Under: Book Recs, Church History

Comments

  1. Wesley Barley says

    March 20, 2017 at 3:29 pm

    Can you suggest a Church history book to balance Gonzalez? He’s really useful down here because he’s in spanish.

  2. Brian says

    March 21, 2017 at 11:01 am

    Not offhand–esp. in Spanish. As the teacher I would familiarize myself with Marsden on fundamentalism and with Muller etc. on the post-reformation era and then make the needed corrective observations in class. With regard to the latter Willem J. van Asselt, ed. Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism published by Reformation Heritage Books is a good basic intro., esp. chs. 1-2. What they say about Reformed scholasticism would generally be true of Lutheran scholasticism as well.