The History of Christian Thought: 01.04/ Origen

Origen

• 39: “Origen is, together with Augustine and Luther, one of the most important figures in this book.”
• 39: “One of the greatest minds of his age, he debated with pagan philosophers as their superior.”
• 39: “… the first truly professional theologian,…”

Life

• 40: “… born in about A.D. 185 in Alexandria.”
  “… he received the best education available… “
• 40-42: His father, Leonides, was also a Christian and died as a martyr in about year 202. All his property was confiscated, but Origen was able to support his family through teaching.
• 42: Two influences upon Origen were:
  • Ammonius Saccas, who also taught Plotinus, founder of Neoplatonism;
  • Clement of Alexandria. “Clement believed that the advanced Christian philosophy was publicly available in the Bible. But he argued that only those with great spiritual insight were capable of looking beyond the plain meaning of the words and understanding the deeper meaning of Scripture.”
• 43: “… such was [Origen's] reputation that when a fresh wave of persecution left the catechetical school with no teacher, Bishop Demetrius of Alexander asked the 18-year-old … to take on the job.”
• 43: Origen became convicted about reading anything but Scripture. So he sold his books and began to only read Scripture. He became an ascetic and might have even gone so far as to make himself a eunuch so that he would not sin sexually.
• 44: Origen earned the nickname “Adamantius,” meaning “Unbreakable” or “Iron Man” because of his “bravery and seeming invulnerability to the hostile authorities.”
• 44: “[Origen] undertook one of the most impressive feats of scholarship of ancient times: the Hexapla. This work was a critical collection and comparison of all the versions of the Old Testament on which [he] could lay his hands.]
• 44-45: “[Origen] met a wealthy Alexandrian called Ambrose,…” Ambrose was a gnostic, but converted through Origen’s ministry. He then funded Origen as an author, providing him with a team of professional scribes. But, “[he] seems to have been a reluctant author.”
• 45: “Origen’s works were so ambitious in scope and minute in detail that he often seems to have got tired of them and abandoned them for new, more interesting projects.”
• 45: “Aproximately 800 titles of his books are known, and ancient sources estimate the total number as to 6,000 items, ranging from short letters and pamphlets to weighty commentaries on the Bible and philosophical tomes.”
• 45: One of these works, “On First Principles, was the first work of systematic Christian theology ever written; in it Origen set forth his fundamental ideas about God, Christ, the world and humanity.”
• 45-46: He eventually “left Alexandria to settle in Caesarea, on the coast of Judea.” This ushered in a time of conflict in Origen’s life. When he was later ordained a presbyter by the bishop of Caesaria, Theocristus, his old bishop Demetrius denounced him and his teachings.
• 46: “Demetrius … now began to work against him as an enemy.”
• 46: “… the church in Egypt condemned Origen’s teachings and excommunicated him.”
• 47: But Origen remained in Caesaria and “resumed his work as a teacher. … he now offered an advanced course in Christian philosophy, covering all the secular literature and science taught in normal higher education but with a Christian focus.”
• 47: “… Origen was becoming something of a sage to the worldwide church.”
• 47: “Origen’s formidable debating powers, combined with his zeal for orthodoxy and fair-handedness in dealing with those who disagreed with him, made him a valuable presence at a number of synods.”
• 47-48: However his last years were marked by more controversy over his teachings and persecution from the Roman authorities.
• 48: “[Origen] was arrested, incarcerated and cruelly tortured in an effort to force a recantation. But a lifetime of ascetic training supported his faith,…”
• 48: “Origen was released after a few days, his faith intact, but physically a broken man. Virtually nothing is known of the last years of his life; his literary and ecclesiastical activities were no more. He is thought to have ended his days in obscurity at Tyre in about A.D. 254.”

Condemnation

• 48: “Even in his lifetime, Origen was a controversial figure.”
• 48: “… as the years passed Origen’s name became increasingly associated with unorthodox ideas.”
• 48-49: At the Second Council of Constantinople ( A.D. 553), many doctrines developed by his later followers would be condemned. Along with this, “the order was given for his works to be destroyed.”

Thought

• 49: “Today only a tiny fraction remains of Origen’s original writings. Only one major treatise, Against Celsus, survives in the original Greek.”
• 49: “… however, enough Greek fragments and Latin translations exist to piece together a sizable body of work from which we can reconstruct most of Origen’s thought.”
• Scripture.
  • 49: “Origen’s thought revolves around the Bible. … Every word [he] wrote was based on his conviction that the whole Bible was God’s revelation to humanity.”
  • 49: “Yet Origen was highly aware of the problems posed by the Bible.”
  • 49: “His answer is that these passages—and indeed the entire Bible—have a deeper meaning.”
  • 52: “This deeper meaning can be discovered by the use of allegory.”
  • 52: “… Origen has received much criticism for reading his own ideas into the text. But three points should be made in his defense.”
    • “First, the use of allegory was widespread in antiquity,…”
    • “Second, the method is part and parcel of Origen’s Platonism. …”
    • “Third, Origen’s allegorizing is not quite as arbitrary as it at first appears—at least in theory. … each passage is interpreted by reference to the whole rest of the Bible.”
  • 52: “So Origen … believed that a body of higher, deeper doctrine existed beyond what ordinary Christians knew about. … Origen believed that this higher truth was publicly available in the Bible but concealed from those who lacked the intellectual and spiritual abilities to see and understand it.”
• God.
  • 52-53: “He insists repeatedly that God is incorporeal, which means he not only lacks a body, but exists everywhere. He is a perfect mind.”
  • 53: “It follows that it is my using our mind—through intellectual activity—that we can become most like God. Origen’s spirituality … is extremely intellectualist.”
• The Trinity.
  • 53: “Like Tertullian, Origen firmly upholds a divine Trinity. Each of the three persons is God. But he is quite clear: they are not equal.”
  • 54: “… these ideas would be rejected by later orthodoxy.”
  • 54: “But Origen did introduce one idea that was to become central: eternal generation. …  … the Son and the Spirit always existed. They are generated from the Father eternally.”
  • 54: “This idea, in the hands of Athanasius, would be central to the fight against Arianism in the 4th century and would become a central plank in the doctrine of the Trinity.”
• The cycles of the universe.
  • 54: Origen believed also that “… the universe is eternally created.”
  • 54: “There was a universe  before this one was created, and after the present order of things is wrapped up a new one will be created—and so on and on, through countless eons.”
  • 54-55: “… each world is different from its predecessor.”
• The Fall and human nature.
  • 55: “Origen rejects the idea that humans are intrinsically embodied, physical beings and accepts instead Plato’s belief that the body is simply a temporary container for an eternal, immaterial soul.”
  • 55: In the Fall, our “… pure intellectual nature became sullied” when we fell away from God. He then “… created the physical world to act as a sort of safety net.” The reason for the Fall was “… caused by free will, a central doctrine for Origen.”
• Christ and salvation.
  • 55: “One [soul] alone chose to remain faithful and united to God. From this union it began to take on God’s qualities itself… This soul is of course the human soul of Christ. Origen is unique among the early fathers in his emphasis on Christ’s human soul…”
  • 56: “Although Origen refers to Christ as Savior, he seems to lack a clear doctrine of Christ’s role in salvation.”
  • 56: “Just like Ireneaus, Origen believes that the universe was created as a place in which we could better ourselves. He stresses that God cannot simply restore us to our original perfection by divine decree: that would override free will. We must get there ourselves, by the exercise of the free will that caused us to fall in the first place.”
  • 56: “… the process lasts far longer than any one lifetime. This is why there is a long succession of universes.”
  • 57: Regarding Hell, Origen says “… the punishment [people] receive there is not retribution for their crimes; it is a remedy for their sickness. … What this means is that hell is not eternal. And that means that all creatures will in the end be restored…”
  • 57: “It is a striking fact that, the devil aside, Origen’s belief in universal salvation appears to have excited very little controversy in his lifetime or shortly thereafter.”
• The resurrection.
  • 57-58: “Origen’s teaching here is among the most obscure in all his work.”
  • 58: Many people apparently thought he was denying any kind of resurrection. And this was part of the charge that caused his works to be burned in the 6th century.
• The spiritual life.
  • 58: “The study of Scripture is central to the spiritual life.”
  • 58-59: He bases his ideas about the spiritual life upon three books attributed to Solomon:
    • Proverbs teaches us “how to live correctly.”
    • Ecclesiastes teaches us “about the world around us, both the physical and spiritual realms.”
    • Song of Songs teaches us the love between “God and the soul of the mystic.”
  • 59: “He was the first great Christian mystic, and his account of the mystical progression toward union with God is arguably the most influential part of his whole system.”

Influence

• 59: “… despite his unorthodoxy in many areas and the destruction of his works, the teaching of Origen has continued to exercise enormous influence down to the modern day.”
• 60: “Wherever Christians try to work out the meaning of their faith with intellectual, spiritual and scientific integrity, the influence of Origen may still be detected.”

The History of Christian Thought: 01.03/ Tertullian

Tertullian

• 32: “The first Latin theologian stamped his unique personality into the character of Western Christianity with a force few have equalled.”

Life

The more we are mown down by you, the more numerous we grow; the blood of Christians is seed. (Apology 50)

• 32: “Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus was born in Carthage…”
• 33: In his youth, “… he seems to have indulged happily in worldly pleasures to what he later considered an extravagant degree.”
  “… received a good education,” and probably was a lawyer.
  “… converted to Christianity,” probably by being impressed with the courage of the martyrs.
  “Tertullian dwells on the glories of martyrdom.”
• 33: “After his conversion he threw himself wholeheartedly into his new faith, immersing himself in its Scriptures to a profound degree.”
• 33: “Tertullian was the first important theologian to write in Latin.”
  “… [his] works were short, brutally direct and completely uncompromising.”
  But, “His attacks often seem to go beyond what Christian charity would normally consider appropriate.”
  34: “In opposing what he saw as doctrinal error, he pioneered new avenues for Christian thought. His works against his theological opponents laid down the lines along which later thinking on the Trinity and the person of Christ would run.”
• He eventually joined a sect called the Montanists, an “early-3rd-century charismatic movement.”
  “Most Christians, however, rejected Montanism; and so Tertullian finally turned his pen against the mainstream church he had once defended.”

Thought

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the Church. (Prescription Against the Heretics 7)

• 35: “Tertullian is the first of the church fathers to have left a large body of work… [it reveals] a remarkably systematic pattern of thought for someone professed to hate philosophy.”
• The sources of theology.
  • 35: “He can see no good whatsoever in either philosophy or philosophers themselves…”
  • 36: “Human reason, then, is not the sources of our knowledge of God. But neither is Scripture alone, since the heretics appeal to Scripture as well.”
  • 36: “Tertullian seems to suggest that the ultimate authority in matters of doctrine is tradition.”
• The Trinity.
  

  All of them are One, by unity of substance; while we still keep the mystery of the distribution which spreads the Unity into a Trinity, placing in their order the three Persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But they are three, not in state, but in degree; not in substance, but in form; not in power, but in appearance; yet of one substance, and of one state, and of one power, inasmuch as he is one God, from whom these degrees and forms and appearances are understood, under the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. (Against Praxeas 2)

  • 36: “Tertullian’s greatest contribution to Christian doctrine is undoubtedly his treatment of the Trinity.”
  • 37: “Perhaps most striking is that Tertullian lists some ways in which the three Persons are one and ways in which they are three, recognizing that there is something paradoxical in what he says.”
  • 37: “The very word trinity … is applied to God for the first time.”
  • 37: The word substance can refer to:
    • what something is made from;
    • an essential quality;
    • property.
  • 38: “[Tertullian] thinks of the Father as the origin of the Trinity … the Son and the Spirit are divine because they come from the Father. The Father is identical with the divine substance of the Trinity; he is the reference point of divinity.
    This is known as ’subordinationism,’ since although it recognizes the divinity and unity of all three Persons it regards the Father as the source of the Trinity and therefore as greater than the other two members.”
• Christ.
  • 39: “… where the Trinity is three Persons with one substance, Christ is one person with two substances.”
  • 39: “Tertullian’s christological teaching is not only clearer than that of any of his predecessors but basically identical to what would become Christian orthodoxy at the epochal Council of Chalcedon two and a half centuries later.

The History of Christian Thought: 01.02/ Irenaeus of Lyon

Irenaeus of Lyon

• 23,26: Although Irenaeus was largely unknown in his lifetime, his work is now recognized as being “punctuated by flashes of brilliance and poetry that together form a Christian vision of remarkable profundity.”

Life

• 26: “Little is known about Irenaeus’s life.”
  “… probably from modern Turkey… “
  “… he was brought up within a Christian household… “
  “… later moved to what is now France… “
  “… a ‘presbyter’… ” at one point, but later “… he seems to have acted as bishop after [a time of] persecution, and he is remembered as such.”
• 26: “… Irenaeus wrote several books.”
  “… the only major work to have survived … is On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis, normally referred to as Against Heresies.”
  “… [it] describes the Gnostic systems in detail and argues against them at great length. In the course of his argument he introduces much positive teaching of his own.”
• 26: “Irenaeus was not a major figure in the early church.”

Thought

• 27: “It should be remembered, too, that Irenaeus, like Justin Martyr, did not write a systematic account of his ideas.”

• God
  • 27: “… he emphasizes God’s unity: there is one and only one God, who transcends all ordinary categories.”
  • 27: He emphasizes “the unknowability of God,” but “Despite [this], we can know something of him through the goodness of the created world.”
  • 27: “Only God truly exists; created things exist only in a secondary way because God keeps them in existence.”
  • 27: “One idea unique to Irenaeus is that of God’s containing the whole universe within himself—there is nothing outside of God.”
  • 28: “Irenaeus describes the Son and  Holy Spirit as the ‘hands of God.’”
• Humanity
  • 28: In sum, Irenaeus asserts that Adam & Eve were created as children in the image of God. However, they only gradually attained that image. They were “morally immature” and needed to grow slowly. The first sin was the result of them wanting to grow up too fast and wasn’t a great catastrophe.
  • 28: “It should be clear that this is a quite different view of the Fall from that found in later Western writers such as Augustine. Irenaeus also has no notion of original sin or inherited guilt.”
  • 29: God uses the evils in the world as a tool in the maturing process of his children: “For Irenaeus … evil comes from God: ultimately it serves a good purpose.”
• Christ and Salvation
  • 29-30: “Christ … is central to God’s plan for helping humanity become mature.”
  • 30: In the incarnation, creation has been “infected with God’s nature.”
  • 30: “The end of the reign of death and decay marks the beginning of the new era in human nature. It is the start of our becoming whole and mature. Only God could bring this about, but only as a man could he do it. which is why the incarnation was necessary.”
  • 30: “Irenaeus thus regards the incarnation as beginning the process of divinization, of humanity taking on God’s qualities.”
  • 31: “Irenaeus’s view of the atonement is therefore based on the incarnation. He lays little emphasis on Christ’s death, treating it as part of his life, the whole of which brings about our salvation. Irenaeus is the first of the church fathers to present an account of the atonement like this, and he sets the tone for all the rest. His basic approach was repeated by Athanasius and remains central to Eastern Orthodoxy.”

Reflections

• 31-32: Hill only reflects upon Irenaeus’s views of evil, describing them as unnecessary if God is omnipotent.

The History of Christian Thought: 01.01/ Justin Martyr

Justin Martyr

• 16: “Virtually singlehandedly he kick-started the Christian dialogue with rival philosophers and set the church on the road to an intellectually coherent account of the faith.”

Life

• He was probably well-educated.
• He wanted to be a philosopher and tried out many before settling on Platonism.
• After reading the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, he converted to Christianity.
• 17: “What is important is the fact that he regarded Christianity as a kind of philosophy, just like Stoicism, Platonism and the rest; and that he became a Christian because he was convinced it was the best of these competing options. Almost as important is the fact that, of the other options available to him, Justin thought Platonism the best. As we shall see, his account of Christianity draws heavily on his Platonic past.”
• 17: “He sought to defend Christianity against its many and varied opponents.”
• To do this, he wrote: The First Apology (ca. 155), followed by The Second Apology, and Dialogue with Trypho.
• In Rome he debated with other philosophers.
• After one debate, he was denounced to the Roman authorities, refused to go against the faith, and was martyred by beheading (ca. 165).

Thought

• God and Christ
  • 20: “… Justin stresses the greatness of God and his distance from the world. … he argues that because of the great distance between God and the world, there must be some sort of intermediary entity between them, by which God can act on the world.”
  • He identifies this intermediary as the Logos, a historical person, Jesus Christ.
• Christians and non-Christians
  • Justin explained the similarities between his thought and those of pagan philosophers by saying, one: that they got their ideas from the Bible; and two: they are participating in the Logos and are in fact Christians (although they didn’t know it).
  • 22: “The philosophers had only the ’seed of the Logos,’ whereas Christians have the whole Logos himself.”
  • 22: He even argues that: “If anyone can follow the Logos by living a rational life, then that means it is possible to follow Christ even if one has never heard the Christian message.”

Reflections

• Justin was a trailblazer, but his efforts also created problems for those who came after him.
• His ideas did not handle the Holy Spirit, the precise relationship between God and Christ, or the incarnation well.
  • 22: “Justin’s Christianity seems to feature a duality rather than a trinity… “
  • 23: “Is the Logos really God? Or is it simply the first and greatest of God’s creations? … … the lack of clear definitions was to cause huge problems for the future, as Christians became divided between those who thought the Logos was indeed God and those who regarded him as a creature: a great and powerful one, but not fully divine.”
  • 23: “… we find that he speaks little of Jesus himself [incarnated] compared with the Logos.”
• 23: “When … greater minds arose to reflect on Christian doctrine, they did so according to the preliminary lines laid down by Justin.”

The History of Christian Thought: 01.00/ Preliminary Thoughts

• Rome was beginning its long decline;
• The church was still in a phase of discovering itself.
• 13: “It was a time of intellectual and spiritual discovery, when the lines were yet to be drawn, the precedents yet to be established.”

Greek Philosophy

• After emerging from Judaism (and related issues), the church had to define its relationships to other ways of thinking.
• 14: “Should they bitterly oppose anything non-Christian, or should they try to take over the best ideas of their rivals?”

The Philosophers

• 14: “Philosophy had the sense we still use today when we talk about someone’s personal philosophy, meaning their moral and spiritual outlook on life as a whole. … it was a life of enlightenment and contemplation, of virtue and striving after the divine.”
• Platonism 
  • Developed by the philosopher Plato in various dialogues. It held that physical objects are only copies of eternal ideals called Forms, which are eternal and unchanging.
  • Had the belief in a high God who was above the world and the Forms, as well as in something called a World Soul that was on the same level of the Forms.
• Stoicism 
  • Developed by the philosopher Zeno in Athens.
  • It followed a rigorous ethical system that sought happiness through virtue. A virtuous person, they thought, could never be made unhappy by circumstances.
  • 15: “The truly happy, virtuous life is one ruled by reason, not by emotion or passion; and the Stoics sought to achieve a passionless state of mind.”
  • The only believed in material things, but did have a concept called the “Logos,” which meant “reason,” “word,” or “principle.”

Philosophy and early Christianity

• These ideas of World Soul and Logos affected later parts of the OT (descriptions of God’s Wisdom).
• Also literature between the testaments was affected.
• Christians used these ideas to describe the relationship between Jesus and the Father.

Second Book

I’ve started on a second book – The History of Christian Thought - by Jonathan Hill. It’s organized a little bit differently than Noll’s book, by time period and person. The chapters are really long, so I’ll probably break them up into parts. It’s going to take a while to read through all of it, if I want to do each section justice.

Finished

I’ve just finished reading my first book for Christian history. A few thoughts >> here << in the comments section.

I’m going to try to add a new page for each book I finish with links to its chapter summaries. Then, I’ll hopefully be able to make a some evaluations on that book’s page in the comment section. That’s the plan anyway.

Turning Points: 13/ Further Turning Points of the Twentieth Century

• 296: “In the search for Christian turning points, the soundest strategy is to look for those events and circumstances that led to the deepening of the Christian faith, to the expansion of Christianity, or both.”
• 296-297: Some possible candidates from the twentieth century (one ultimately not recommended) are:
  • establishement of the World Council of Churches in 1948;
  • rise of “Fundamentalism”;
  • the Lausanne Conference on World Evangelization in 1974.
• 297-298: He also lists some of the most important Christian leaders of the twentieth century.
• Ultimately, he chooses the following five things as potentially most significant for the history of Christianity:

The Rise and Spread of Pentecostalism

• 300: “Together, the Pentecostal and charismatic emphasis upon experiencing the grace of God—especially upon sensing God through more intimate, less cognitive forms of worship—have influenced Protestants, Catholics, and even some Orthodox all over the world.
  Also, in the second half of the twentieth century, Pentecostal and charismatic currents have been central in the rapid expansion of Christianity outside the West …”
• 302: “… Pentecostals  and charismatics have placed great stress on the supernatural power of God to defeat disease and to provide other miraculous interventions in ordinary life.”

The Second Vatican Council

• 303: “Compared with the mood of the First Vatican Council, the tone of these documents was much more conciliatory to non-Roman Catholics, especially the Eastern Orthodox Church.”
• 303: “… one of the most enduring features of the Catholic Church since the 1960s has been the intense debate over just what the council really intended.”

New Visibility of Women

• 304-305: “… the more encompassing reality of the twentieth century is the fresh awareness of how important women have been throughout the entire history of Christianity.”
  • integral work of women in missions;
  • critical place of women in theology.
• 306: “Studies from almost every era of the church’s past and from many regions have offered similar findings, namely, women have made up a larger proportion than men among church attenders, those practicing Christian devotion, and those maintaining orthodox beliefs. … Where the business of the church can be counted, women normally show up more often than men.”

Bible Translation

• 310: “More—far more!—individual language groups … have received the Scriptures during the twentieth century than in the preceding 1,900 years of the church’s history.”

Survival Under Communism

• 312: “Proper qualifications having been made, … the twentieth-century assault of state-Communist regimes on Christianity still represents one of the most intense, one of the most purposeful, and one of the most thoroughly systematized periods of [persecution of the church] in all of history.”
• 313: “When it is written as fully as possible, the story of Christian survival under Communist regimes will be an incredible story.”

Turning Points: 12/ A Faith for All the World: The Edinburgh Missionary Conference (1910)

• 271: “The missionary conference in Edinburgh was … the beginning of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement.”
• 272-273: “Edinburgh marked a turning point because it represented just about the last moment when ‘worldwide Christianity’ could in any meaningful sense be equated with the Christianity of Europe and North America.”

A Revival of Mission Activity

• 274-283: Most of this first section is just a long list of names and their accomplishments in missionary efforts.
• 283: “When the expanding Protestant concern for mission was added to the revival of missionary interest among Catholics and the Orthodox, the result was that the nineteenth century witnessed a broader and more diffuse expansion of Christianity than had happened since the very first centuries of the church’s existence.”

Counting the Cost

• 283-284: This time also saw a vast number of Christian martyrs.
• 284: “The personal dramas—whether heroic, pathetic, tragic, ennobling, or all at once—that lurk behind such numbers constitute an open invitation to the serious research they have not yet received.”

Local Indigenization

• 285: “Missionary outreach from the West, which from the early nineteenth century has played such a large role in the world history of Christianity, became permanently significant, however, only when it lead to the appropriation of Christianity by non-Western peoples. That appropriation, along with the expansion of the faith in numbers and cultural impact, represents the truly momentous development in Christian history of the past two centuries.”
• 288: “The contribution of the early Pentecostal, or Pentecostal-leaning, missionaries was critical in providing Western forms of the faith that bridged the gap to the world of African primal religions.”

The Meaning of Mission for the History of Christianity

• 292: “The Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 represents a great turning point in the history of Christianity … for symbolizing a dawning consciousness concerning the worldwide extension of the faith.”
• 293: “… a process of local appropriation has been underway in many parts of the world at the same time [and] the implications for the history of Christianity are immense.”

Turning Points: 11/ Discontents of the Modern West: The French Revolution (1789)

• 251: “The turning point in the history of Christianity represented by the dechristianizing effort of the French Revolution was the end—or at least the beginning of the end—of European Christendom as the dominant expression of Christianity in the world.”
• 252: However, at the same time: “… the nineteenth century was experiencing the greatest increase ever recorded in the number of Christian believers and a greater proportional increase than at any time since the fifth century.”

The Demise of Christendom

• 254: “Over the course of the nineteenth century, a new post-Christian Europe began everywhere to be visible.”
• 254: “Increasingly, the production of wealth, the uses of wealth, the disparities in the possession of wealth, and the application of wealth to social problems assumed a life of their own beyond the watch or guidance of the church.”
• 255-258: The chapter begins to go through various people from this time and summarize their contributions. These include those who somehow helped to hasten the demise of Christendom and those who fought against this direction.

Christian Responses to the “Modern” Age

Intellectual, Evangelistic, Social

• 258-261: This part of the chapter continues the listing and descriptions of various people.

Conceptual and Institutional

• 261-267: Again, a listing and describing of various people.
• 265: “In sum, liberal, sectarian, and traditionalist responses to the weakening of European Christendom all had considerable vigor, though of markedly different kinds. Yet despite much laudable faith and much effective practice, the juggernaut of secularism rolled on.”
• 265: “As before, when disruption of the Christian homeland in the eastern Mediterranean coincided with the planting of Christianity in Europe, so now the disruption of the Christian homeland in Europe coincided with the blossoming of Christianity well beyond Europe.”