Includes bibliographical references (p. [241]-276) and index.

The unfolding of Christian history : a sketch -- Christianity : a Jewish heresy spreads across the Eastern Empire -- Greek and Latin, east and west -- Persecution, legal establishment, empowerment and retreat -- The Eastern church, the spread of Islam, and expansion northwards -- The Western church of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages -- Disputes over control, and the rise of a continental church -- The high medieval synthesis -- Later Middle Ages : the era of fragmentation -- Challenges and ruptures : Renaissance and Reformation -- The age of competing orthodoxies -- Challenges to orthodoxy : reason, enlightenment and revolution -- The era of Romanticism and its implications -- The multiple crises of the twentieth century -- Reflecting on the process of historical development -- Constantly shifting emphases in Christian history -- Means to Holiness Become Ultimate Goals -- Asceticism : giving things up for God -- Expecting miracles -- Martyrdom -- Sacrament and sacrifice : the Eucharistic church -- The company of heaven : the communion of saints -- Purity of doctrine and instruction : the school of faith -- The Christian community and its membership -- Reflections on shifting priorities -- Church historians' responses to change and diversity -- The early church : Eusebius of Caesarea -- Early medieval church history : Bede -- The high middle ages : a monastic chronicle -- Renaissance historiography : rhetoric and scepticism -- The Reformation and the rise of a sense of history -- The rise of reformed schools of church history -- Confessional histories in the age of orthodoxy -- Writing Christian history in the shadow of the Enlightenment -- Toward "modern" histories of Christianity -- Postmodern and liberation-oriented approaches to Christian history -- Summary and conclusions -- Some theologians reflect on the historical problem -- The historical background to historical-critical theology -- The challenge of Ludwig Feuerbach to modernizing theology -- German liberal Protestant theology of the ineteenth and twentieth centuries -- Responses to liberalism in the 20th century -- Thomism, mysticism and neo-liberalism : some Roman Catholic responses -- Cultural diversity, liberation, postliberalism and postmodernity -- Drawing the threads together.