Under the spell of nineteenth-century Romanticism, Christian thought experienced a seismic change. In the words of the Oxford theologian A. M. Fairbairn, “The old theology came to history through doctrine, but the new comes to doctrine through history; to the one all historical questions were really dogmatic, but to the other all dogmatic questions are formally historical.” Historical studies came to dominate the field, and Clio was queen of both the theology department and the seminary. From the magisterial works of August Neander and Adolf Harnack to the pathbreaking studies of David Strauss and Albert Schweitzer, serious thinkers sought to understand—and potentially to recover—the Christian message by studying how it unfolded through time.

Diarmaid MacCulloch’s ambitious single-volume history of Christianity stands in that great tradition and, at the same time, is a self-conscious effort to bring it forward to the modern age and to make it accessible to the ordinary reader. An Oxford professor and a distinguished historian of the Reformation, MacCulloch brings to bear on his subject a vast store of knowledge—philological, theological, and historical—all the armaments of modern historiography, and, on occasion, a tonic dose of skepticism as well as a feline wit—which, it must be said, wears a bit thin by the last hundred pages or so. He candidly admits that, unlike the church historians of the Golden Age, he approaches the field not from a position of faith but, rather, from the perspective of a cordial outsider (albeit one who was raised in the