The Story of Christianity

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

by the end of the 20th century, wars had been waged on a scale never before imagined, and a number of Utopian, strictly secularist ideologies – each in its own way the inheritor both of the Enlightenment project to remake society on a more rational model and of the late 19th-century project to ‘correct’ human nature through the mechanisms of a prov

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.

If Christianity today is the religion growing most rapidly and most widely throughout the world, it is also – not coincidentally – the most persecuted religion in the world.

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

Pavel Florensky

the embarrassment created for the Catholic Church by Urban’s outraged pride has never entirely faded.

For Freud, the self is – rather than a soul with an eternal nature – a complex amalgam of biological and social impulses, many of them quite ‘Darwinian’ in their primal mechanisms, and the conscious mind is only the surface of the ‘unconscious’, where hidden, largely irrational impulses, repressed desires,

sixth-century Christian scientist John Philoponus, who speculated that heavenly bodies are in fact mutable, that above the atmosphere there was perhaps a vacuum, that the stars were not (as pagan scientists believed) spiritual intelligences, but merely masses of fire, and that the planets might move by an ‘impressed’ impetus.