Engaging overview of Christianity leaves reader hungry for more

"The Christian World: A Global History" is an engaging, amazingly brief overview of Christianity through time, cultures and ideas by the Rev. Martin Marty, the leading voice among American Protestant historians. It is also a great contribution for the general reader and a fine resource for those whose historical interest focuses on one corner of the Christian experience.

The author's winsome style makes this daunting task appear to be a facile journey through a most engaging story. However, Rev. Marty's competence and erudition make his selection of episodes, illustrations and sectors of the globe both fascinating and deeply instructive even in its brevity.

The book is an attempt to see the forest of Christian history, without losing sight of the trees that give it life and particularity. This will be useful reading for both the committed Christian, to see beyond his or her own section of the world, as well as for the non-Christian or the uninformed, as an introduction to this great heritage.

The author chooses to arrange his story in episodes, beginning with the Jewish beginnings. Throughout he shows his immersion in the interreligious dialogues by giving a fair and balanced treatment of Christian interaction with its Jewish sibling in the Abrahamic heritage, and the later interactions with Islam. Likewise, his careful ecumenical balance gives Orthodoxy a place often missing from standard Western treatments, both Catholic and Protestant.

There are two Asian, African and European episodes, giving attention to Christian origins, Christian intellectual life and debates, divisions and the missionary movements that brought a second wave of history to the Asian and African contexts, those continents which were the nest in which Jesus and his first disciples were originally born and the message first spread. His work highlights the necessity of Christian history taking a much wider lens if it is going to be adequate to the global realities of the present, and the much more expansive look at the past than was traditional before the modern ecumenical movement.

Of course, it is still a very ecumenically informed, but Western and Protestant, developmental approach. For example, there is as much space allotted to the English-speaking minority in the Western Hemisphere as to the Spanish-speaking majority, as one might expect from the dean of U.S. church historians. On the other hand, the comprehensiveness in brevity demonstrates the importance of this type of volume to inform the serious but casual reader and to give a synthetic and engaging read to the Christian whose view has emerged in narrow, national and confessional perspectives.

The volume ends with a perceptive and challenging epilogue, appropriately titled "Unfinished Episodes," leaving the reader hungry to continue the quest for listening more carefully to those Christian traditions and developments other than his or her own. The book is enhanced by simple, clear maps, a chronology, a glossary and a fascinating opening methodological chapter, which sets the stage for the episodes as they are unfolded.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops