Why Study the Past?: The Quest for the Historical Church

by Rowan Williams

The well-worn saying about being condemned to repeat the history we do not know applies to church history as much as to any other kind. But how are Christians supposed to discern what lessons from history need to be learned?

In this small but thoughtful volume, respected theologian and churchman Rowan Williams opens up a theological approach to history, an approach that is both nonpartisan and relevant to the church's present needs. As he reflects on how we consider the past in general, Williams suggests that how we consider church history in particular remains important not so much for winning arguments as for clarifying who we are as time-bound human beings. Good history is a moral affair, he advises, because it opens up a point of reference that is distinct from us yet not wholly alien. The past can then enable us to think with more varied and resourceful analogies about our identity in the often confusing present.

Genres: History, Theology, Church History, Nonfiction, Christian, Religion, Philosophy

135 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Rowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, is an Anglican bishop, poet, and theologian. He was Archbishop of Canterbury from December 2002-2012, and is now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and Chancellor of the University of South Wales.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a bad book from almost every perspective. First, it is poorly written. Williams’ style is as dry as Death Valley and he goes out of his way to write in the most obscure fashion possible. For example, in addressing the Arian heresy, he writes:
“Arius’ theory is probably the best attempt that could have been made to settle the issue of Jesus’ holiness without some basic revision of the very word ‘God’. It proposed that the eternal word embodied in Jesus was the primary recipient of God’s revelation and God’s glory and power, but also the primary worshipper of God.” (page 43)
He might just as simply have stated that Arius denied the co-eternal nature of Christ.

Worse than the writing, though, is the thought behind it. Williams ostensibly wrote “Why Study the Past” in order to answer the questions “What is the Church? How can we recognize it, and how do we recognize those people of whom the Church is constituted?” These are good questions and worthy of serious thought and discussion. Williams proposes that one place to look for an answer is in the past, hence the book’s title. He looks to the great chroniclers of the Church, Eusebius, Augustine, Bede and others to find clues to the answer.

No sooner does he make this proposal, htough, than he undermines it by calling the reliability of the chroniclers into question. According to Williams, Eusebius’ definition of the Church is frequently based on the evidence of martyrdom. The faith of those who recanted to save their lives is suspect in the eyes of Eusebius and he makes no bones about it. Eusebius also saw the history of the Church in cycles of temptation, fall, discipline in the form of persecution, followed by rest in the form of exaltation. Williams takes issue with the way in which Eusebius interprets the constituents of the Church and its historic cycles and dismisses most of it as biased and incomplete. He does this with nearly all of the historians he mentions; examining their claims, searching for weakness in the form of bias, and dismissing their claims when he finds any. He particularly finds fault when a historian makes a moral judgment of an historical event. Apparently he does not realize that, in doing so, he, as an historian, is making a moral judgment of an historical event.

History, then, is mostly unreliable, so it cannot answer his questions about the identity of the Church. Williams grudgingly concedes that there is some truth to be found, but he provides us no tools to assist us in the task of sifting historical truth from the error of the chroniclers, no rock on which to secure our anchor as we look for answers to the questions he raises. So where can we turn to find answers to his questions? It is at this point that the book begins to fall apart. Williams rambles from topic to topic in a tangential fashion looking for a peg on which to hang his hat but never finding one.

Sadly, Williams does not mention Scripture as a place to go to understand who the Church is and what it should look like. The reason for this may have to do with the fact that he does not take a very high view of the authority or authenticity of Scripture. On page 29, he writes: “we do not know in what sense we can begin to see Abraham as a historical person, we do not know whether we see the shadow of a remote but real patriarch or simply the brilliant but God-directed literary creation of a personality by the storytellers of a later age.” If we cannot view Abraham as historical, how can we view any other individual in Scripture, including Christ, as historical? How can we accept as authoritative anything in Scripture?

Williams cannot bring himself to look to Scripture to resolve any question. With regard to his own identity as a Christian he writes: “Who I am as a Christian is something which, in theological terms, I could only answer fully on the impossible supposition that I could see and grasp how all other Christian lives had shaped mine and, more specifically, shaped it toward the likeness of Christ.” (page 27) When discussing controversies and potential heresies in the modern Church, the best he can come up with is: “confronted with dispute over controversial novelty, the sort of question that the believer needs to consider is how far a particular option in the debate or a particular innovation tends to obscure the transparency of the Church to God’s action.” (page 105) Without the absolute standards provided by the Bible, it is no wonder that the Anglican Church is in such a state of disarray.

The only definitive statement Williams is able to make regarding Church identity is on page 85: “we affirm the crucial element of an authentic identity as Church – that is, the abiding act of God, and the givenness of baptism.” If he would only open his Bible, he might begin to find answers to the questions he raises; answers that would provide form to the admittedly flawed efforts of fallen human beings to chronicle the history of the Bride of Christ. Christ, Himself, says that the world will know Christians by the love they have for one another and the fruit of the Spirit that they bear. That seems like a very good starting point for discovering who and what the Church is, and has been through history.

As an investigation into the identity and history of the Church, “Why Study the Past” is a failure. Anyone interested in a good book on those topics would do well to read any of the following:
1. Church History in Plain Language, by Bruce Shelley
2. Ye are the Body, by Bonnell Spencer
3. The History of the Church, by Eusebius
4. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, by Bede

[Brad East · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. I will very likely assign this book, or at least parts of it (esp the first chapter), in classes I teach for many years to come.

[Asa Brunk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting analysis of the study of history from a distinctly Christian perspective. Defining the church and what it means in regards to history is a tall task, and Williams expertly navigates the concept and creates a valuable portrait of how Christian’s ought to understand themselves, their faith, and history from a perspective of humility.

[Ivy-Mabel Fling]

I don't know who I would recommend this book to - I had nothing against it but I really didn't understand the message at all. It seemed to me to be full of page after page of meaningless sentences. And those who praise it do so in the same incomprehensible language as Mr Williams.

[James Widdicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good ideas, but lack of self assurance that damages CoE.

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite good. Some real gold in here on the question of history in general, and church history and Christian identity in particular.

[Brett Vanderzee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The real question that drives Rowan Williams’ Why Study the Past? is implied by its subtitle: What is the Church? In a brisk hundred fourteen pages, Williams unsettles all of our easy answers, calling us to a broad-minded, open-handed Christianity in pursuit of truth’s fullness. His vehicle for this complicating is a fairly simple thesis: the Church’s unity is “given by God rather than achieved by us . . . binding us in solidarity with a good many people we should not have chosen to be alongside.” To be a Christian is to be united with multitudes who conceived of and lived out their Christianity in vastly different ways—each of us learning, erring, relearning, and misunderstanding the gospel in our own time and place. So studying the past—encountering the sheer strangeness of our forebears—ought to help us see ourselves as strange, as “people whose lives and values and visions are the fruit of change and learning.” History becomes an exercise in self-awareness, an encounter that—as Alan Jacobs has argued recently—increases our “temporal bandwidth” and “personal density.” It’s not a silver bullet for the present or the future; it “will not tell us then what to do, but will at least start us on the road to action . . . that is moral in a way it can’t be if we have no points of reference beyond what we have come to take for granted.” Williams is preaching directly at contemporary debates, and speaks with equal power to both traditionalists and progressives. He writes, “Traditionalists . . . don’t expect to be surprised by the past; progressives . . . don’t expect to be interested in or questioned by it.” Rather, we all organize history in ways that underwrite our present preferences. Williams wants us to encounter history that “makes us think again about the definition of things we thought we understood pretty well,” to encounter the past “expecting to be surprised and questioned.” When we do, we are often confronted with the contingency of the world we know, the ubiquity of narrow-mindedness, and the possibility of faith’s unfolding. “We do not yet know what will be drawn out of us by the pressure of Christ’s reality,” he contends, “what the full shape of a future orthodoxy might be.” We see through a glass darkly, and the way things are is not what they have been or might be. Indeed, “The cultures formed by Christianity came to find slavery intolerable and to affirm the equality of women. Christians slowly came to think of whatever it was that supported slavery and misogyny in their tradition as an alien growth.” The Church’s past, then, cannot teach us our future, but it can teach us humility, and it may perhaps sharpen our questions for the hard conversations that lay ahead. Such conversations will rely on the common language we can only learn in worship. For it is in the Church's worship that we discover “One of the most evident marks of Christian continuity is . . . simply the regular business of literally making our own the rhythms and vocabulary of another age.” The strangeness of these ancient words de-centers “our own scripts and dramas,” agitating our “charismatic memory” and rendering the past a “transforming gift.” In a world that moves as fast as ours, besotted and beset by presentism, these fifteen-year-old lectures from the former Archbishop of Canterbury are already the distant past. But for those with ears to hear, Williams is hymning the future of a Church more understanding, and a gospel more understood.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books or dramas or music that allow us to mature in their company have a particular role for us; because they are not exhausted by one reading or hearing, they tell us that there is more to be found, that we have a future with them which we cannot predict or control in full. What I am trying to articulate here is that sense of coming into a distinctive landscape that is given us by certain imaginative works; we know that they demand time if we are to 'inhabit' them properly. And in the context of the Church, this is what is being claimed about the texts of Scripture above all, but also about those further texts in which Scripture is fleshed out--the words and forms of worship, and that peculiar kind of text which is a Christlike life. These are the concrete form that by God's invitation to grow in his company; they are equally the promise of a future.

While I enjoyed this brief book, I can't say I understood much of it. Rowan Williams lectures on ways to approach historical evaluations of the Church, which I understand his game plan (after all, the title is Why Study the Past?). At times, his observations and points are clear and fascinating; at other times, he has a (very) specific axe to grind. Being clueless about these specific axes, I could not discern whether or not his conclusions are worthy of accolades due to thorough scholarship and ineluctable logic or the muddled murmurings of a scholar getting on in years yet still hashing it out with yesterday's adversaries--or, to put it more kindly, people who disagree with him.

On the whole, I recommend this book only to those interested in the works of Rowan Williams (obviously) or on examining ways to view historical criticism in the light of elucidating the history of the Church.

Good historical writing, I suggest, is writing that constructs that sense of who we are by a real engagement with the strangeness of the past, that establishes my or our identity now as bound up with a whole range of things that are not easy for me or us, not obvious or native to the world we think we inhabit, yet which have to be recognized in their solid reality as both different from us and part of us. The end product is a sense of who we now are that is subtle enough to encompass the things we don't fully understand.

[Peter Webster]

The study of the history of the Church often has both added complexity and urgency for those working within a framework of personal faith or institutional allegiance. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s 2003 Sarum Theological Lectures, subtle studies of the self-awareness of the early church and of the writing of church history during the Reformation period, offer a stimulating series of meditations on the particularities of approach and attitude that might conduce towards a critical yet useful church history.

Williams rightly rejects an uncritical acceptance of past belief or practice as automatically normative for contemporary Christians, or as easy practically to apply. Also rejected is the related of habit of mind that tends to idealise a particular period of time as one of, as it were, pre-lapsarian purity, whether that of the early church, the Reformation period or of an Anglican ‘Golden Age’ in the seventeenth century. The assumption of a past that is simply ‘the present in fancy dress’ leaves us incapable of being challenged or surprised by that past.

Williams however also comes down equally firmly against a glib assertion of unknowability; the sense that the gulf between ourselves and the past, far from being so easy to traverse, must in principle be unbridgeable. Such a counsel of despair leaves us adrift in a perpetual present, unable to engage with the causes of our present condition.

Such a centrist position is of course not new, and arguably reflects the working practice of most historians, whether religious or not. The core of Williams’s argument is however much more than the familiar rehearsal of the epistemological problems of historical knowledge, so often heard in the last ten to fifteen years. Christians must necessarily have both a particular interest in, and a particular approach to, the church’s past.

Williams sees the task of engaging with the past as one not purely of historical empathy for its own sake, but as a form of understanding and engaging with one’s fellow Christians in a way as necessary and as profound as cross-cultural and ecumenical conversation in the present. A robust, if perhaps uncomfortable, theology of the church as the Body of Christ would suggest that there is only the thinnest of veils between our own life as the Body and that of Christians in previous times, and that the church of today is the autonomous author of its own experience in a much more circumscribed way than is often supposed. Ever mindful of a constant and profound tension between the strangeness of the past and its urgency as our ‘family history’, it is the case that ‘our immersion in the ways in which they responded becomes part of the way we actually hear the call ourselves …’ (p.31)

This leads Williams to a brief, yet to this reviewer, profoundly important, consideration of the degree to which the worship and conversation of the churches should embody languages and visible practices that both act as symbols of contemporary unity and enable a continuing ‘conversation’ with Christians of previous generations. This, Williams argues, may be equally if not more important than questions of structural or legislative unity that have tended to be the primary focus of current thinking on unity. By here eschewing direct engagement with the major issues facing the Anglican communion today, Williams offers a general approach with profound implications for them all.

The implications of Williams’ argument so far are equally as significant for the approach of the individual historian, and in places make uncomfortable reading for one drilled in the scrupulous agnosticism of the secular academy. His focus is not so much on the technique of church history or its sources, but on the attitude in which it might be conducted. This provokes, for this reviewer, much thought not only on the role of the ‘specialist’ church historian within the churches, but on the potential fruits of greater engagement of all Christians with their past. The attitude he suggests is one that Williams worked out in greater detail in his Anglican Identities (2004), (an attitude he there described as ‘passionate patience’) in which we find ‘moments of bewilderment and moments of triumphant grasp’. In an attitude of ‘respect and patience’ we ‘acquire not so much a confidence in our solutions as a capacity to continue, a trust in the process.’ (p.90).

The task of engaging with the past as Christians emerges then not so much as a disinterested, ‘scientific’ dissection (a product of modernity par excellence) but as a form of spiritual discipline. If it is to learn from its past, the church must engage in a process of radical ‘de-centering’ and recover a sense of living ‘in the wake’ of divine action. It is only through a voluntary loss of self that the church can hope to recognise and come to grips with the history of divine action, and recognise the otherwise bewildering diversity of the manifestations of that action. Our collective wish to control and then deploy the past uncritically for present aims remains the barrier to a truer apprehension of that past.

In short, Rowan Williams has produced a series of meditations that are challenging and often profound, and may be read with profit by both Christian historians and historians of Christianity of all traditions and working in all periods.

[A review first published at https://peterwebster.me/2012/03/28/a-...

[Jonah Michael Porter · Rating 1 out of 5]

You know, Rowan Williams might have been an OK Archbishop of Canterbury - I don't pay much attention to those kinds of things for the most part - but I'll tell you what, his books are really boring. No way I'd finish this thing if it wasn't for class.

[Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you really want to study church history for meaning, you must start here.

[Jared Greer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just read this for school, and the following is a condensed version of the review I wrote for class.

As others have suggested, Williams’ prose is at times difficult to follow; his sentences can be a bit cumbersome, convoluted, and/or tangential. But he offers helpful and often profound insight for any Christian interested in the historical process. The title is a tad misleading, as Williams seems to be primarily concerned with “how” and not “why” we study the past—although he does still spend some time discussing the utility of our historical engagement.

Williams’ main argument is that the Christian, in order to be properly formed by his/her study of Church history, must concede and hold in tension both the inherent strangeness of the historical Church and our profound connectedness to it as Christians who continue to share in the same body of Christ. The Church is thus tasked with locating its connective tissue; and Williams suggests that we can locate this continuity, unity, and identity in the work of the God who holds it all together in Christ. We must, in other words, locate God’s priority, primacy, and agency throughout the history of the Church. Where is God at work? It is there that we might uncover the true identity of the Church.

To support his thesis, Williams examines both the Church of antiquity and the Church of the Reformation—and asks how these Churches, in their own strange and unique contexts, sought to establish an identity in the agency of God through Christ. The Church is comprised of “resident aliens”—earthly colonizers that belong to a heavenly Kingdom. And in order for such an identity to be corroborated, God must be seen working in and among the Church. To exhibit and thus validify their distinctive identity in Christ, the Church of antiquity upheld moral and doctrinal purity, and celebrated martyrdom. According to Williams, the martyr is “the conduit of divine presence who vindicates the claim to another citizenship” (p. 39). Luther and the Reformers believed God’s work to be evidenced in the grace shown to helpless sinners—thus the dogmatism surrounding grace and justification by faith alone. The Catholic Church believed the work of God to be evidenced in “visible conformity and central control” within the ecclesiastical structure of the Church (p. 80).

Williams, in typical “via media” fashion, suggests a middle ground: the Church might find unity in a “common language,” and that of praise. He appeals to the German Confessing Church who, in the face of the Third Reich, were able to bridge the gulfs of theological dispute through the shared language of praise. Here, we see God at work.

Across history, God extends to His people a gratuitous invitation. He washes us in baptism and continues to work in and among us. We are thus compelled to praise Him. True of both Protestants and Catholics, this “at the very least puts a question mark against all divisions short of those that…appear to remove even the possibility of common language” (p. 86).

Williams concludes by summarizing his thesis and supporting arguments; and it is in this final chapter that he briefly touches on the value and utility of studying Church history. He suggests that through a more nuanced theological and historical hermeneutic, we can become more confident in our Christian identity, unity, and practice; and of course, this hermeneutic must focus on the agency of God in history.

The content here is very much worthwhile. His ecumenical spirit and high regard for Scripture, the Church, and tradition show an admirable balance and pastoral sensitivity. As I mentioned at the beginning, the read can be a bit dense, frustrating, tangential, and convoluted…but if you’re willing to muscle through all of that, I’m sure you will be better for it.

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

In Why We Study the Past Rowan Williams presents a philosophical approach to why and how we should study history. He methodically builds his argument, adding a new layer of complexity in each chapter, until making his thesis point at the end of the book: we must study all Christian history from the vantage point of Jesus as God’s specific action in history, or none of that history will have an understandable context (p 108, paraphrased). The binding of Christian history is how Christians through the ages have applied their interpretation of who Jesus was and what his work accomplished to the problems and questions that present themselves to each generation. But it is each community’s diverse and complex understandings of Jesus and his work that undermines Williams’ thesis of a unified history.

Reading the canonical gospels and epistles we recognize that the writers of each had differing understandings of Jesus, his work, and how we are to apply it to our lives. Then we add to this the non-canonical gospels and epistles; heresies, dogma, and tense agreements to disagree; and multiple hermeneutical approaches employed by modern theologians. Williams’ claim to a single, unified Christian history is tenuous because there is no single, unified picture of Jesus and his work. Yet, Williams continues, stating this approach will

“[establish] once and for all the possibility of a humanity that does not depend for its harmony on any transient human alliances or definitions of common
interest or common purpose” (p 109)

and that will help Christians to “debate across cultures,” defining cultures as “liberal-conservative,” “Western and Eastern churches,” and “churches in the developing world” versus “those of the prosperous global ‘north’” (pp 107,108). These are all internal struggles, so whose Jesus are we basing our discussions on? Which interpretation of Jesus’ work will we use to determine how we ought to live in community now?

For Williams, it seems the answer is the Jesus put forward by the modern Anglican church, as he refers to the “debates about divorce, women’s ministry or homosexual activity” among the cross-cultural arguments to solve (p. 103). This approach silences the voices of Christian women, queer folk, and other minorities in our culture. Instead of incorporating the womanist, Black, queer, trans, or liberational understandings of Jesus and his work, Williams seems to be suggesting that this is part of “shar[ing] the widespread and fashionable illiteracy of this culture,” “chaotic diversity,” and “malign versions of global unity” that his unified Christian history is meant to help modern Christians to debate. These are word choices that should make us nervous.

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been wanting to read this one for a while, so I finally got around to it last month. The chapters are based on a series of talks that Rowan Williams gave at Salisbury Cathedral in 2004. Williams, before he became Archbishop of Canterbury in the 2000s, was (and is) a patristics scholar and theologian, so the topic is, of course, an important one for him. It is an important one for me, given my interest in history and church history in general.

William's starting point is what church history should look like in the 21st century. He notes that much of church history over the generations really is just bad history, written to confirm theological or denominational assumptions, rather than facing the strangeness that is also a characteristic of the past. Yet, he argues, in different places, that church history also has to face up to a moral task as well. He reviews the two great periods of church history- the patristic era and the Reformation- as case studies of the kind of history he means. His approach is an interesting one because he seeks to find the attitudes and thought patterns which are odd to moderns and use them to explain the (odd) behavior of the contemporaries of those period. They are barely sketches, but they are useful sketches.

I'm particular interested by his comments on history as 'spiritual discipline'. What he means by this is that an encounter with the past should force us to confront the actors in the past as strangers and force us to rethink our own assumptions. I'll probably follow this up a bit more in my blog later this weekend or next week.

[Denise Kettering · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides some very helpful ways to understand the project of church history, and particularly how theology and history are tied together in meaningful ways. Williams' writing, often in long sentences with many clauses, will deter some readers as being "too dry," but the heart of Williams' argument is helpful for those folks interested in thinking about ways to understand the challenges that the Christian past. In particular, Williams reminds us that some of us have the tendency to miss the familiarity of the past, while others miss its strangeness, resulting in varying interpretations on both sides. This book is highly recommended for those interested in theological history or church history as a starting point for recognizing one's own mode of interpretation and interpretative blind spots.

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rowan Williams gives Christians a template for evaluating church history, and by extension all history. His nuanced reading of diverse theologians and historians from Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox perspectives strikes me as quintessentially Anglican. He carefully guides us to a middle way between rejecting the past as archaic, primitive, and ignorant on the one hand, and the opposite fallacy of imagining that we can relive or bring back the faith of an earlier era. His way forward preserves a proper respect for those who have come before us, while maintaining their "strangeness", in other words, our inability to fully comprehend how and why they did what they did. In doing so, we can begin to also have proper attitude towards other contemporary Christians who we may disagree with.

[Kendall Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good book on the whole. Williams makes you stop and think about what we're often trying to do when we do history, especially when we try to use history for polemical purposes. I think Williams is quite right when he recognizes that doing history is about answering questions of identity. Thus doing church history as christians, we are asking the question, "What is the church?" whenever we are doing church history. It may seem odd at first, but I think Williams is convincing in his thesis.

Only downsides are that he seems to have a view of scripture that is too low for my liking, but that's what I'd expect from a Church of England guy. His writing is not the most clear and this at times makes the book a bit of slop. But Williams' brilliance more than makes up for all this I think.

[Noah Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Torn between 4 and 5 stars. All of what’s here is excellent; my main complaint is that he barely discusses the medieval period. He makes it clear up front that that is his plan—to discuss the question of the nature of the Church as it appears in the first few centuries and then in the modern period. But why not add just ten or twenty pages to make the story less gappy? It’s a very dense but coherent and thoughtfully constructed narrative otherwise.

That aside, this is great work, especially for a MacIntyre reader who wants to see how one might sketch, at least in outline, of the Christian tradition, highlighting how its core commitments and conflicts emerge together through its history and reflective inquiry.

I left a defensive comment on another (1-star) review, see that for more.

[Bill Hooten · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are times when I realize that I am just not smart enough to read some books, and, likely, this was one of them. My current endeavor is to teach early church history to a class of lay members, and I can't say that this will be all that helpful for that. This read more like a philosophy of the study of church history, and that wasn't exactly what I was looking for. There were pieces, sentences, and sections that were extremely interesting, and some were helpful. I know some would dive right into this, and talk about the depth, and the thought process -- but I am not one of them. If I were to recommend this book, it would be limited to a select few.

[anthony keating · Rating 3 out of 5]

Does history really have to be so complex?

I found this book to be really hard going. It would seem that the author has a need to use obtuse and abstract language. He may have a great point to make but digging it out would take many readings. Saying all this maybe I am just to thick to understand.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a short and concise summary of the evolution of Christian thought and theological development over the past two millenia, without going into much detail about any of it. The author makes a few good points about the benefits of studying Church history, but otherwise this book is a condensed comparison.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Typically dense Williamsian prose — I read many sentences twice, if not three times — but dogged perseverance and submission to his philosophical-theological explorations yields fruitful rewards. Chapter 4 in particular makes the labor wholly worthwhile: “church history as a spiritual discipline.”(is that a spoiler?) I’m sure I will return to this volume time and again.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an erudite, footnoted, interesting and informative elaboration of Eliot 100 years ago:
"Someone said: The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are what we know."
Williams, of course, quotes Eliot. And practically everyone else. This is a useful and mind expanding work.

[Stephen Kramar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to read most sentences in this book at least twice to make sense of them. I think this essay would be more impactful if it were more clearly and concisely communicated.
Overall an interesting treatise on the value of understanding Christian church history (if you have the patience to parse the complicated writing style).

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some wonderful insight on what makes the church uniquely God birthed; great analysis of the early church martyrdom era and reformation era highlighting why the church responds differently or shows itself as a gift of the Spirit in every era.
Some parts were tough reading through.

[Terrance Lively · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good piece on church history methodology but I found it a little cautious and timid at times. He explains the church and overarching themes during periods but I really want an updated version with more developed thoughts. Worth the read and not to be discounted at all.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic little book, more timely now than when it was written. Williams threads the needle between traditionalist (history is over) and progressive (history has yet to begin) history nicely. Highly recommended for church leaders, ordained and lay.

[Nate Duriga · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that argues for the study of church history as an enriching spiritual discipline that shapes our witness in the world...what a pleasant and insightful read!

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a relatively easy read, in which I felt I had entered the mind of a devout but intelligent, humble Anglican wrestling with the many theological issues that present themselves to us within a contemporary setting.

He asks some great questions. How do we define the church? Is it within or without? He argues for the importance of seeing church history in the social, intellectual and cultural context in which it was lived and breathed, rather than seeing and reading it as us merely in fancy dress. We must not be so critical of attempts to study the past realistically that we treat it as a foreign country, speaking a foreign language that we can never come to understand. We must endeavour to be open to strangeness, to be wiiling to see through the eyes of those who have gone before us, yet maintain objectivity and remain aware of bias, including our own.

He makes some great points about how the earliest followers saw themselves as resident aliens, rendering to Ceasar that which was Ceasar's, yet following their King, not of this world, and how that stance inevitably brought them into conflict with the Roman Empire and all it stood for.

Well worth a read.

[Matt Root · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't give out 5 star ratings often but this one is well deserved. This is an intelligent, compelling offering about not only the importance of narrative and the stories we tell ourselves but also fruitful and respectful ways of engaging the past that neither eliminate its otherness nor make it so remote as to make it meaningless to us today. I rarely say things like this, but I honestly think this should be required reading for anyone studying church, theology or religious studies.