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Some of my best friends are classicists. Growing weary of the popular assumption that their supposedly tweedy profession involves only an obsessive retreading of the same few ancient texts, they have developed a convenient formula that outlines the modern changes in the discipline: downward, outward, later. As classicists and ancient historians delve deeper in the social strata, exploring the lot of the cast-off and marginalized, they also move toward the fringes of empire, and indeed into the barbarian lands beyond. And they concern themselves not just with golden ages but also with the long-neglected later years of decline and ruin, the years of tarnished silver, if not of pure dross. And in each of these new dimensions, classicists find themselves reinventing their subject, as they realize the paper thin walls that separate the study of Greece and Rome from the disciplines of social and gender history, anthropology and sociology, African and Asian studies.
Without apology, I will here be appropriating that dynamic three-word slogan to describe some important recent directions in the study of Christianity, in which the concerns and interests of the immediate present determine the questions we seek to ask of the past. Particularly over the past quarter century, the history of Christianity has moved enthusiastically downward, to focus on the lived experience of ordinary believers, no less than the great deeds of celebrated leaders. In more senses than one, it has also moved outward, recognizing that the Christian experience cannot be contained within denominations but must be explored to the margins of orthodoxy and beyond. And perhaps most important of all, it has expanded geographically, with a powerful emphasis on the global, non-Euro/American experience. Living in a world in which the most dramatic Christian growth occurs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, how could historians do otherwise? Finally, historians move later, both in the sense of discussing the roots of present-day conditions, but also of tracing the story of churches beyond the glories of their origin and heyday, into their twilight years.
To see contemporary scholarship of Christian history at its best, we need only turn to the new nine-volume Cambridge History of Christianity (chc), of which three are presently available, with the remaining volumes scheduled to appear over the next year or so. The scale of the enterprise inspires awe. Each volume contains about thirty separate essays by an enormous diversity of excellent scholars—in all, call it 270 chapters, making up more than 6,000 pages. This is, in short, a library rather than a mere series. So lengthy is the list of authors that it would be invidious to highlight just a few, but suffice it to say that the editors have chosen well, often very well indeed.1 The fact that so many contributors stem from the British Isles (or Commonwealth nations) does rather enhance the normal academic tendency to left and liberal perspectives, but political biases are generally under control.
The collection stands out from rivals by its sheer scale, which need not in itself be a virtue. Some would rank the 250 idiosyncratic pages of Charles Williams' Descent of the Dove as one of the finest histories of Christianity ever written. Yet the very generous space allotted to the chc does allow its contributors to achieve a breadth of coverage to which I can think of few equals. Based on the volumes available to date, we see that the chc is characterized above all by its quest for a universal vision, its determination not to write the story of Christianity solely as it appears from a European or North American perspective, while at the same time not neglecting those critical regions. Nor, crucially, is the perspective limited by denomination or faith tradition. There is a conspicuous, and highly successful, attempt to provide due attention to all the major traditions, to Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox, not to mention—and this deserves real praise—the array of independent and prophetic churches that have been so important in African and Asian Christianity.
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