PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
"This will be a history of the high points. These events, from
challenge to challenge, from shocks and tremors to recovery, through
conversion and successive integration, give a kind of rhythm to this
tale where the believer will always be able to distinguish between the
wheat and the chaff and so discover the finger of God writing on the
sands of time."--Guy Bedouelle
Is church history a totally and exclusively historical discipline or is
it a theological one as well? This book contends that it is both, that
the viewpoints of history and theology are not contradictory but are at
once distinct and conjoined: distinct as to approach and method but
conjoined in comprehension.
In line with the general approach of the
AMATECA Handbooks of Catholic Theology, this book offers an overview of
the history of the church from a theological perspective.The first and
last chapters present a theological view of church history drawn from
the work of such thinkers as Jean Danielou, Gaston Fessard, Charles
Journet, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The second chapter is
epistemological and methodological. Chapters 3 to 13 lucidly present the
unfolding history of the church as a series of challenges--of the
Barbarians, of Feudalism, of Lay Thought, of Ideologies and Cultures.
Chapters 14 and 15, in a different key, sketch the variety of Eastern
Churches and the forms of Protestantism.