The Story of Christianity

Alexei Khomyakov (1804–60), a poet, philosopher, political theorist and theologian, who was the first to expound the ‘Slavic Christian’ ideal of Sobornost – which might be translated as ‘concordance’, ‘integralism’ or ‘harmony’ – as both a spiritual and a political principle. Khomyakov was equally contemptuous of capitalism and socialism, which he

The first true university in Western Europe, though, was probably that of Bologna in northern Italy, founded late in the 11th century. And the first major universities in the West were the late 12th-century universities of Paris and Oxford.

St Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Jesuits, who went so far as to proclaim that he would have counted it a cause for pride had he been of Jewish extraction.

It is not in the power of humans to bring about the Kingdom of God, according to this theology; but one cannot serve Christ unless one seeks to live towards the Kingdom, which inevitably must involve the attempt to create conditions that manifest in concrete social, political and economic forms the justice of God’s reign. The

The name commonly applied to the majority of ‘radical’ or ‘free’ Protestant reformers was ‘Anabaptists’, which means ‘Rebaptizers’. The name derives from the fact that these reformers taught that baptism – being the emblem of a sincere conversion of the heart to faith in Christ – could be undertaken only by adults;

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 ‘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.

impotent to reveal his divinity. Obviously, if one followed the logic of orthodox Christology, one had to believe that the human substance of Christ was also truly divine. Moreover, iconodule theology stressed that, in any icon, it is the ‘hypostasis’ – that is, the person – of the subject that is being revealed, and it is that person to whom the v

special evolution entirely inoffensive. One of Darwin’s earliest and most vigorous champions, the extremely accomplished American botanist Asa Gray (1810–88), was a devout Christian who saw such evolution as a manifestation of God’s creative power in the fabric of nature.

Most importantly, the council rejected Luther’s teachings on justification, asserting the reality of human freedom in the work of redemption, the indispensability of good works and the need for the co-operation of the will set free by grace. Moreover, it did this with so thorough and plenteous an exposition from scripture that no Protestant theolog