The Story of Christianity

a capacity to adapt to current conditions is a sign of life – many of the oldest Christian Churches gave plenteous evidence of continued vitality.

The title ‘Theologian’ is a very high honorific in Eastern Christian tradition, indicating a special knowledge of the mysteries of the Holy Spirit, and Symeon is one of only three persons to whom the distinction has been accorded (along with St John the Divine and St Gregory of Nazianzus).

it has been suggested (not altogether implausibly) that one of the reasons that Tibetan monastic ritual differs from that of other forms of Buddhist monasticism – the elaborate robes, incense, holy water and so on – is that the liturgies of the Christians monks of the Church of the East left their mark upon it.

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), the priest and humanist scholar who, as early as 1516, began preaching against clerical abuses, and whose sermons ‘from true, divine scripture’, starting in 1520, inaugurated a popular movement in Switzerland against such practices as priestly celibacy and the keeping of fasts.

the ‘Enlightenment’, the chief tenet of which was that human reason possesses the power not only to penetrate to the natural laws underlying the world, but to determine the nature of a just society, to advance the cause of human freedom, to discover the rational basis of morality and to instill moral behaviour in individuals and nations.

evangelicalism. This was a movement associated with no specific denomination and not bound – after its first few decades, at least – to any standard theology. Its emphasis was upon the personal experience of conversion, repentance, redemption by God’s grace and sanctification. Its typical expression was a certain type of worship marked by palpable

In the Christian understanding of Jesus, after all, exaltation and abasement – the heavenly and the earthly – are inseparable. Inas much as the phrase ‘Son of Man’ can serve to indicate both the humility of Christ in assuming mortal flesh and also the glory of Christ as the divine Lord of history, it elegantly comprises within itself what for Chris

subscribed in 433 to a declaration – intended as a compromise between the Alexandrian and Antiochian positions – that Christ was one Person (that is, the eternal Son of God) possessing two complete natures (divine and human). Not

The generally invertebrate and even subservient response of many of the churches in Germany to the rise of the Nazis, however, was in part the result of centuries of European anti-Semitism, and in even larger part the result of cowardice.

It is not an exaggeration to say that one of the most important events in the early modern history of the Eastern Orthodox Church was the publication in 1782 of a book called the Philokalia, which means ‘the love of beauty’.