Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church

 

Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church:  by Michael J. Kruger

I would bet 95% or more of practicing Christians know every little about the history of the faith.  Sure, every authentic believer is familiar with the books of the Bible, but all of those were written no later than 60 or 70 years after Christ.   Most Christians could tell you nothing about figures such as Clement, Iraneus, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Augustine, or Tertullian.   Nor or they familiar with the history of the Gnostics, the Marcionists, Lucian of Samasota, Heracleon,or Celsus.

This is a shame because the history of Christianity is incredibly rich and rewarding.  It wasn’t always pretty in the early days, but author Michael J. Kruger does an outstanding job showing us the many facets, and leaves his reader with a solid understanding and knowledge of how this new faith survived in spite of its animosities and controversies.  We can see just how it prevailed and became what it is today.   Kruger carefully limits his narrative to the second century.  My feeling is that he probably didn’t want to go further in the timeline since that might violate what he deems as “Early” Christianity.  It’s funny when his narrative does slip into, say, the third century as you can almost hear him slapping his own hand for sailing in waters that he considers forbidden.   Let’s just say that I wish he would have kept going into the third or fourth centuries.  I would love it if he pens another volume that only focuses on the third century, then a book on the fourth, and so on.

One of the main highlights of this book is that the author never allows his narrative to go too deep into the weeds.  He is tackling everything here, not just one or two aspects of second century Christianity.  Every chapter is devoted to a different aspect.  We read about the leaders, the more visible heresies of the time, the relationship between the Jews and the Romans, the aspects of a typical worship service, and a lot on the writings that were penned in the first two centuries.  To be brutally honest, he focuses a bit too much the formulation of the Canon, which is one of the last chapters of the book. 

History tells us that the new testament of our Bible wasn’t actually compiled until around 382 A.D. (which if you think about it, really is a LONG time after the second century), yet Krueger spends an awful lot of time convincing his reader that even though Christianity didn’t actually have “The Bible” as early as the second century, the gospels and epistles were widely available (in the context of the second century, that is) and there really wasn’t that much controversy over what writings were “authentic” and what were not as widely accepted.  So he leads us to believe that when the Bible was finally compiled, it was really more of a formality if anything.

Of course this is only the author’s opinion, and he’s very vocal that there are plenty of scholars out there who disagree with him.  He comes across as quite modest and doesn’t try to steamroll his readers into believing that he’s the ultimate authority of events that happened 2000 years ago. He acknowledges that there are relatively few writings to guide us and to give insight into what was really going on at the time.

Overall this was a very easy book to read.  From the bibliography, the author obviously did a lot of homework, yet his style is such that any reader with a high school education can easily read, digest, and assimilate the material.  This was a very rich book that covered a lot of different aspects of the Christian faith without overwhelming the reader.  This book probably could have been about ten times longer than it was.  In fact, there were many times when I did want more, but as I’ve stated, it’s probably best that Kruger keeps his chapters, and the overall book, somewhat brief.  A great primer to early Christianity, and very easy for most to understand.