World history of Christianity.

A World History of Christianity 

Ed. Adrian Hastings Eerdmans 594 pages hardcover, $71.99 ISBN 0 8028 2442 0

A World History of Christianity tries to redress what its editor perceives as the eurocentric bias found in many histories. This is more a textbook than popular history, though it is certainly accessible to the average reader.

It tries to portray the global dimension of Christianity over 2,000 years, recognizing the difficulty of doing so in a single volume by acknowledging that "important countries, whole areas, have been almost left Out." Reflecting the geographic diversity of the Christian story, there are extensive chapters on North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, India, China and its neighbours, Australia and the Pacific.

Each chapter focuses on what mattered most for the specific times and places covered, placing Christianity in the context of social, historical, theological and cultural themes. The less pleasant aspects of Christian history are covered in a balanced way, as are the triumphs.

Unlike many books where Canada is lumped in with the rest of North America, our Christian history is shown as distinctive from that of the U.S. There is a good section dealing with the formation of the United Church of Canada bringing together Methodists, some Presbyterians, and Congregationalists in 1925.

Footnotes are placed at the end of each chapter. There is a 35-page bibliography offering related reading under each chapter heading.

While each chapter makes a helpful contribution in itself, the book seems to lack overall cohesion. A final essay to pull everything together would have helped. There was the germ of one in the chapter on Western Europe, where many of the comments could have had a wider application, especially this: "faith, never universal, has been known to survive in even less promising conditions than those of the present."