Grove City College Professor of History Mark Graham’s new book offers up revealing moments from a period of church history that may be unfamiliar to many, but which illuminate the bond shared by Christians that transcends time and place.
Graham’s “30 Key Moments in the History of Christianity: Inspiring True Stories from the Early Church Around the World" tells stories of the first millennium of the Christian era that he describes as “inspirational, challenging, encouraging, convicting, and even rebuking vignettes” that hold lessons for the faithful today.
Beginning with Roman reports from 112 AD of a “contagion” spreading in an area of the empire that is now Turkey and concluding with accounts of end-times anxiety in France and England circa 1000, Graham’s moments take the readers to ancient and medieval empires where early church fathers defined the faith that martyrs died for, kings and slaves alike adopted, and warriors fought for as it spread across the world.
The tales come from an era long before many modern Christians see the church “becoming global” and they challenge popular notions that Christianity has largely been a Western faith across the centuries,” Graham said.
“A popular Protestant vision of the history of Christianity is typically missing at least a thousand years, often more like a millennium and a half predating the Reformation. And while recent scholars of faith – of various communions – have come to insist that the Church of any era is not and never was an exclusively Western institution, Protestant and Catholic rank and file alike continue to assume that the history of Christianity is essentially the history of a Western church, with maybe a few exceptions thrown in here and there,” Graham said.
“Readers will gain a fuller appreciation of how the ‘One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church’ spread, triumphed, and struggled over ten centuries,” he said.
The book’s origin is tied to Sunday school lessons on the history of Christianity that Graham delivered at his church. “I tried to do something a little different and bring together my own scholarship and teaching on Ancient and Early Medieval Empires in particular with illustrative moments in the history of the church around the world. … After a while, my pile of presentations got pretty large, and I thought, ‘This study could grow up and become a book someday,’” he said.
The moments are not “turning points” so much as illustrations that hold some important lessons for the church today, Graham said. Looking back, he noted that many of his selections were guided by a pair of questions: “How have Christians across time and space wrestled with issues of political identity?” and “How have Christians made sense of the end of the world?”
“I think that these two questions are on the minds of many American Christians even today, and that they today can learn an awful lot from Christians through time and around the world,” Graham said.
“I am especially drawn to moments that either are commonly misunderstood or almost completely unknown to modern Christians, especially the American audience,” Graham said. Those tales include the story of how a Persian emperor unwittingly helped build the church in what’s now Iran and the real character of St. Boniface, which doesn’t have much to do with an ax and a pagan oak tree. “Some of the stories here are better known than others, but even with the well-known stories, I would like even familiar readers to learn something new,” he said.
Graham, who has written several scholarly books and articles, said his audience this time is “Christians in pews,” a growing number of whom, he said, “are realizing the extent to which they have allowed their own national, political and cultural identities to overshadow their most basic and foundational –and eternal – identity as Christians.”
“It is a book about ‘our people’ – Christians through time – written for our people today,” he said. “It hopes to challenge Christians of all ages with the idea that they have more fundamentally in common, for example, with Nubian Christians of the seventh century than they do with their agnostic neighbors who fly the same national flag.”
“30 Key Moments in the History of Christianity” will be published on Jan. 27. It includes a forward by Dr. Carl Trueman, professor of Biblical and Theological Studies.
“Not only does it introduce the reader to an era of history that is often neglected in evangelical circles— the first millennium— but it does so in a way that connects the careful and sober approach of a professional historian to the kinds of questions that interest Christian believers,” Trueman writes. “This is that rarest of books—a popular presentation of church history that could only have been written by a scholar.”
Graham serves as chair of the Department of History at Grove City College, where he has taught numerous classes on the premodern world for more than two decades. As an affiliated faculty with Centro di Conservazione Archeologica, Graham has worked on archaeological projects and sites in Sardinia, Corinth, and Rome and helped excavate the Byzantine emperor Justinian's church in Carthage.
“Dr. Graham has proven to be an outstanding member of the faculty,” said Paul Kemeny, dean of the Calderwood School of Arts and Letters. “His commitment to pursuing cutting-edge scholarship not only informs his lectures but makes a valuable contribution to the field of ancient history. While his students have benefited directly from his scholarship, this new book will make his contributions accessible to even more people. The college is fortunate to have a scholar like Dr. Graham committed to producing works that also directly benefit the church.”
To pre-order a copy, visit Baker Publishing Group’s website bakerpublishinggroup.com.