The Story of Christianity

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

though many of the Catholic doctrinal pronouncements of the time were responses to Protestant theological claims, the movement for reform in the Church antedated the schisms of the 16th century, and the advocates of reform within the Church had not disappeared as a result of those schisms.

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

Western society was on the verge of discovering that a radical materialism could breed horrors far greater than even the worst religious fanaticism.

an evangelical form of Christianity – in which the experience of conversion, rather than baptism, came to be regarded as the way in which a person is ‘born again’ in Christ – gradually became one of the dominant forms of American Protestantism.

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 problem with any such movement when it becomes popular is that it can become as much a fashion as a vocation, and attract persons not really suited to the life.

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.

The centre of his thought was ‘divine humanity’, mankind’s original and natural orientation towards divinization, and the ‘God-man’, Christ, who brings this orientation to fruition and so joins all of creation to God. Solovyov is also accounted the father of ‘Sophiology’, a movement concerned with reflection on the Biblical figure of the divine Sop