Derek Cooper (2) (1978–)

Summary: An unvarnished summary of the first five hundred years of church history, looking unflinchingly at the flaws, as well as the favorable qualities of early Christians.

Perhaps the worst thing any institution, and especially the church, can do is to pretend that it is better than it really is. As disheartening as it is to hear of respected leaders guilty of very human failings, it is even more repugnant when those leaders, and sometimes powerful institutions behind them, cover up those failings in images of sweetness and light. In so doing, institutions try to "gin up" their own sham holiness, instead of the genuine holiness God works when meeting people in their brokenness.

Derek Cooper believes that many of our church histories reflect this same pretense in portraying the church and its leading figures. This work, which covers the first five hundred years of church history, and is first of a series, takes a different approach. Cooper writes:

"Unlike countless other church history books that dance around the distasteful details of our Christian past, let's humanize our history. Counterintuitively, perhaps, let's emphasize as much grit as glory, let's feature as much flesh as faith, and let's showcase as many sinners as saints. It's important for you to know at the onset, however, that we are not going to do this because we think mudslinging is a spiritual discipline, but only because we believe truth-telling is. I, personally, have no desire to sully the reputation of saints, nor do I find any pleasure in wallowing in the faults of our most faithful. When I air the dirty laundry of our most hallowed heroes and heroines, I am fully aware of all the clean clothes they have neatly pressed and attractively arrayed in their dresser drawers. Because of the nature of this book, I will not usually refer to that clean laundry; but make no mistake: I know it is there" (p. 11).

The approach of the book is thematic rather than chronological. He surveys these ten themes, and here are some of the highlights and my takeaways:

1. Daily life. Except for the rich it was dirty, toilsome, and short.
2. Leadership. From Paul on Christian leaders "led with a limp" and often fought tenaciously in controversy. Damasus, who commissioned the Vulgate translation, fought a bloody battle for his papacy in which 137 died.
3. Martyrdom. While some martyrs died nobly, martyrdom was often sought in almost suicidal passion by some. Before his martyrdom, in pursuit of holiness, Origin castrated himself.
4. Church faith and practice. In many respects, it would have looked strange to us: dinners in graveyards, holy kissing (and perhaps not-so-holy), and nude baptisms.
5. Apologetics. This arose in response to attack on the church from both Romans and Jews. Able defenders like Justin Martyr and Chrysostom also helped introduce anti-Semitism to Christian rhetoric.
6. The family tree of heresy and orthodoxy. From the beginning, controversy existed between the line of Simon the Magician and Simon Peter when it came to defining Christian orthodoxy. Cooper traces the rise of apostolic succession in the bishop of Rome as the authoritative means of adjudicating doctrinal disputes and defining heresy.
7. Canon and apocrypha. Cooper discusses both the criteria of canonical New Testament books but the contents of the apocryphal ones--everything from apocryphal infancy and childhood narratives to the possibility that Mary Magdalene was Jesus's girlfriend. He also discusses the recently found fragment of The Gospel of Judas.
8. God and money. With the growth and eventually Constantinian patronage of the church, the question became how to interpret (or re-interpret) the radical gospel teaching about money, widening the needle's eye, as it were for the increasingly rich patrons of the church.
9. Sexuality. Cooper traces how the church moved beyond chastity in its response to the promiscuity of the Roman world (where wives were simply for the procreation of legitimate heirs, and husbands sought pleasure elsewhere with both sexes) to the sometimes ambiguous, and sometimes clear privileging of abstinence and celibacy that reflected a view of all sexual intimacy as filthy. In the cases of both Jerome and Augustine, their own sexual histories may well have shaped their subsequent views.
10. Missions: We learn about the spread of Christianity to other parts of the world--Africa, India, and Armenia--which may very well hold the title as the oldest Christian nation on earth.

Cooper writes in an engaging, witty style and definitely achieves his aim of an honest account of the failings and foibles and follies of the early Christians. While almost none of this was new to me, it was helpful to find this material in a work of popular scholarship, not buried in turgid text or footnotes, or hurled at the Christian community without context in an atheist diatribe.

In his introduction, Cooper alludes to the "clean clothes" of these saints, and that he "know[s] it is there." I believe he does, and the text shows some evidence of this. However, I would not commend this as a stand-alone history of this period but as a complement to a standard church history text, particularly in an introductory church history course. Not everyone will know about the "clean laundry." Most good modern church histories are not hagiographies, but this book serves as a good complement in "keeping it real."

Just as it does not do the church well to conceal its flaws, controversies, and most grievous sins, it likewise does not serve well to gloss over these in our histories. An honest rendering, in books like this, reminds us of the challenges the church has always faced, from within as well as from without. It also reminds us of the providence of God-- that through such flawed, broken people the Christian message has spread throughout the world, and with it literacy, universities, hospitals, and the rule of law, as well as unhelpful things like colonialism. Ultimately, the story isn't about how good we are but rather how sovereignly gracious God has been with this motley bunch of sinner-saints.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.… (altro)

My grad school prided itself on its global Christian impact; yet the church history I learned there was a largely Western story. Certainly there was an acknowledgement that Christendom's origins weren't in the West, and the church in Africa and Asia; yet more time and energy was spent unearthing the European story as the dominant narrative running through Christian history. This made a certain amount of sense. It was a school in the West and the West has pride of place in medieval and modern Christianity; however there was a richer story than the one I was, in large part, told.

In Introduction to World Christian History, Derek Cooper explores the global development 'across time and continents.' Cooper is the associate professor of world Christian history at Biblical Theological Seminary in Hatfield, Pennsylvania. As such, he is used to introducing students to the diversity of the world Christian movement. For this book, he utilizes the United Nations Geo-scheme for Nations as a template for exploring Christian history in three periods: the first to the seventh , the eighth to the fourteenth, and the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. These division departs between the seventh and eighth centuries in his periods, de-centers the European story. Traditional church history treats the conversion of Constantine and the first Council (both fourth century) as
a "watershed moment" in the Christian story (16). However Cooper observes these events may be overstated in global importance, particularly when you consider that the church was never coterminous with the Roman empire and the "councils never represented the whole church" (16-17).

In part one, Cooper explores Christianity in the first to seventh centuries. He begins, in chapter one, with Asia as the birthplace and cradle of the Christian faith, describing the growth of the Christian movement in western Asia (i.e. president day Saudi Arabia and Turkey), central Asia (India and China) and Southern Asia (Iran). Chapter two describes the deep roots of the African church (Northern Africa like Alexandria, Algeria and Tunisia, and the Eastern African church of Ethiopia. Chapter three examines the European story (in Eastern, Southern, Northern and Western Europe). In the early part of the Christian story Asian and African Christianity loom large.

Part two examines again the regions of Asia, Africa and Europe, this time from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. While Asian and African Christians were dominant in earlier times, this was a difficult period for both of them (i.e. the spread of Islam and other faiths, the Crusades, isolation of Asian Christian communities). Cooper writes, "Although it is not accurate to state that Christianity died in Asia at this time, it certainly diminished—and fairly rapidly and extensively so" (87). This is true of Africa as well. African Christians suffered severe persecution with the spread of Islam. In some areas the Christian faith was stamped out though a Christian witness remained in both Asia and Africa, though a chastened one. It is in this era the European story becomes the dominant narrative of Christian history (chapter six).

Part three describes Christianity from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries. In this period global diversity explodes in the Christian movement. Cooper lays aside his tripartite division of Asia, Africa and Europe, adding region and scope. He begins with Europe (chapter seven) and traces the growth of global Christianity through evangelization. He devotes a chapter each to Christianity in Latin America, Northern America, Oceania (Australia and New Zealand, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia), Africa and Asia.

This is a short book. about 250 pages for all of Christian history. As the title suggests this is an introduction to World Christian history, not the definitive word. By necessity Cooper gives us a bird's-eye-view of Christianity than a detailed analysis of every region; nevertheless he does give us a more robust sense of the global Christian movement through the ages. Theologians like Thomas Oden and historians like Phillip Jenkins have noted that the center of Christianity has shifted, in recent history, east and south. This is true, and Cooper would concur. However his 'at-a-glance' romp through church history reveals that the global character of Christianity is not a recent phenomenon, but one of its persistent features.

This would be a good supplementary text for a Church history class, though it is an accessible read for anyone interested in Christian history. As a student, I would have used this book as a jumping-off-point for deeper research. Cooper uses contemporary names for regions and countries throughout makes this approachable for the non-scholar and ordinary reader. I give this four stars.

Note I received this book from IVP Academic in exchange for my honest review.… (altro)

Thomas Manton
Derek Cooper
Thomas Manton (1620-77) was an influential Puritan preacher and an important figure in English Society. This book has two aims, to introduce readers in an engaging manner to Manton and, through this pivotal figure, to provide an introduction to the movement known as "Puritanism," concisely addressing its historical, social, and political contexts.
This was a good book about the life of Thomas Manton. While there are many puritans to choose from this one is most interesting because of preaching before the parliament and chaplain to two very different rulers. He was one of the lesser known puritans and yet not without merit on his own. This book was split into 3 parts: different phases of his life through key events, Manton’s best-know work, his commentary on James and a selection of his work intended to showcase noteworthy sermons. This book provides little gems into his life from a previous biography and history of that time. It is worth the time to glean these gems.
I would like to thank Net Galley and P & R Publishing for allowing me to read and review this book in return for a free copy and I was never asked to write a favorable review by anyone.
… (altro)