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Throughout, authors do far more than simply write chronological sketches of their regions and periods, to write for instance about "Christianity in Germany 1815-1914." Each volume divides its materials into three broad sections, which provide an effective structure. The 19th-century volume, for instance, includes three sections: "Christianity and Modernity," "The Churches and National Identities," and "The Expansion of Christianity." Under "Christianity and Modernity," we find sections on themes such as science, literature, culture and the arts, not to mention theology, devotional styles, and popular religion. The "National Identities" section allows authors to address the relationship between church, politics and culture more closely, in chapters such as "Catholicism, Ireland, and the Irish diaspora" (Sheridan Gilley), "Christianity and the Creation of Germany" (Anthony J. Steinhoff) and "Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, and the Religious Identities of the United Kingdom" (John Wolffe). Throughout the chc, the identification and development of themes is thoroughly successful.
Given my own interests, I naturally turned with greatest interest to the non-Western sections of the volumes, which are in every case deeply impressive. I have already stressed the "outward" character of the chc, which avowedly concerns itself with World Christianities. Every volume allots generous space to Christian history beyond Europe, and also to the Christian encounter with non-Christian religions. The global approach is evident in the regional analysis of Christian emergence in the first volume, Origins to Constantine, with the abundant materials on North Africa and Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia.
In the 19th-century volume, similarly, non-Western themes take up close to 200 pages, and could easily constitute a volume in their own right. (A modest proposal: who will dare publish the first History of Christianity that either omits Europe altogether, or reduces it to a footnote, as due revenge for generations of texts that were equally dismissive of the extra-European experience?) We have chapters on missions and the anti-slavery movement (Brian Stanley), on movements in East and Southeast Asia, in Oceania and the Middle East. And while much of the emphasis is naturally on Euro/American missions, the authors are keenly aware of the role of local peoples as co-creators of the new churches rather than mere recipients of European wisdom. By the end of the volume, with this truly global perspective, we are ready to read Brian Stanley's vision of the Christian world as it stood in 1914, and in retrospect, we can see how and why Christianity was going to grow and develop as it actually did, rather than as elite observers in Boston, Paris, or Berlin thought it should.
For all its breadth, the non-Western sections in the 1815-1914 volume are clearly an addition to a text that focuses chiefly on Europe. This is no longer true in the volume on the past century, in which the affairs of Africa and Asia are thoroughly and successfully integrated into the narrative. Instead of "Oh yes, and then there was Africa," global South conditions, achievements, and challenges are incorporated in each of this volume's three sections, on "Institutions and Movements," "Narratives of Change," and "Social and Cultural Impact." I am incidentally bemused that with this passionate interest in global affairs, Hugh McLeod can declare in his introduction that "the present volume is devoted entirely to Western Christianity, and to newer movements that grew out of Western Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." I suppose African, Indian, or Chinese Christianities can be seen in this way, in the sense that their roots tend to be Protestant or Catholic rather than Orthodox, but this comment seems perverse. Fortunately, this "Western" classification does not detract from the subsequent chapters.
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