Now in its fourth edition, this bestselling textbook (over 125,000 copies sold) isolates key events that provide a framework for understanding the history of Christianity. The book presents Christianity as a worldwide phenomenon rather than just a Western experience. This popular textbook is organized around 14 key moments in church history, providing contemporary Christians with a fuller understanding of God as he has revealed his purpose through the centuries. The new edition includes a new preface, updates throughout the book, revised "further readings" for each chapter, new sidebar content, and study questions. It also more thoroughly highlights the importance of women in Christian history and the impact of world Christianity. Turning Points is well suited to introductory courses on the history of Christianity as well as study groups in churches. Additional resources for instructors are available through Textbook eSources.

"The scandal of the evangelical mind, " says historian Mark Noll, "is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." This critical yet constructive book explains the decline of evangelical thought in North America and seeks to find, within evangelicalism itself, resources for turning the situation around. According to Noll, evangelical Protestants make up the largest single group of religious Americans; they also enjoy increasing wealth, status political influence, and educational achievement. Yet, despite its size and considerable intellectual potential, evangelical Protestantism makes only a slight contribution to first-order public discourse in North America: it neither sponsors a single research university, nor supports a single periodical devoted to in-depth interaction with modern culture, nor cultivates attitudes that treat the worlds of science, the arts, politics, and social analysis with the seriousness that God intends. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind explains how this situation developed by tracing the history of evangelical thinking in America. Noll's analysis shows how Protestants successfully aligned themselves with national ideals and with the particular expressions of an American Enlightenment in the decades before the Civil War; explains how fundamentalists at the start of the twentieth century preserved essential elements of the faith, but only by grievously damaging the life of the mind; gives specific attention to evangelical thought on politics and science; and discusses what some have called an "evangelical intellectual renaissance" in recent decades and shows why it is more apparent than real. Written to encourage reform as well as to inform, this book endswith an outline of some preliminary steps by which evangelicals might yet come to love the Lord more thoroughly with the mind.

During the anxiety-laden period from the Great Depression through World War II to the Cold War, Americans found a welcome escape in the new medium of radio. Throughout radio's "Golden Age," religious broadcasting in particular contributed significantly to American culture. Yet its historic role often has been overlooked. In Ministers of a New Medium, Kirk D. Farney explores the work of two groundbreaking leaders in religious broadcasting: Fulton J. Sheen and Walter A. Maier. These clergymen and professors-one a Catholic priest, the other a Lutheran minister-each led the way in combining substantive theology and emerging technology to spread the gospel over the airwaves. Through weekly nationwide broadcasts, Maier's The Lutheran Hour and Sheen's Catholic Hour attracted listeners across a spectrum of denominational and religious affiliations, establishing their hosts-and Christian radio itself-as cultural and religious forces to be reckoned with. Farney examines how Sheen and Maier used their exceptional erudition, their sensitivity to the times, their powerful communication skills, and their unwavering Christian conviction, all for the purpose of calling the souls of listeners and the soul of a nation to repentance and godliness. Their combination of talents also brought their respective denominations, Roman Catholicism and Missouri Synod Lutheranism, from the periphery of the American religious landscape to a much greater level of recognition and acceptance. With careful attention to both the theological content and the cultural influence of these masters of a new medium, Farney's study sheds new light on the history of media and Christianity in the United States.

America's Book shows how the Bible decisively shaped American national history even as that history influenced the use of Scripture. It explores the rise of a strongly Protestant Bible civilization in the early United States that was then fractured by debates over slavery, contested by growing numbers of non-Protestant Americans (Catholics, Jews, agnostics), and torn apart by the Civil War. This first comprehensive history of the Bible in America explains why Tom Paine's anti-biblical tract The Age of Reason (1794) precipitated such dramatic effects, how innovations in printing by the American Bible Society created the nation's publishing industry, why Nat Turner's slave rebellion of 1831 and the bitter election of 1844 marked turning points in the nation's engagement with Scripture, and why Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were so eager to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. Noll's magisterial work highlights not only the centrality of the Bible for the nation's most influential religious figures (Methodist Francis Asbury, Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Catholic Bishop Francis Kenrick, Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter, agnostic Robert Ingersoll), but also why it was important for presidents like Abraham Lincoln; notable American women like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frances Willard; dedicated campaigners for civil rights like Frederick Douglass and Francis Grimke; lesser-known figures like Black authors Maria Stewart and Harriet Jacobs; and a host of others of high estate and low. The book also illustrates how the more religiously plural period from Reconstruction to the early twentieth century saw Scripture become a much more fragmented, though still significant, force in American culture, particularly as a source of hope and moral authority for Americans on both sides of the battle over white supremacy-both for those hoping to fight it, and for others seeking to justify it.

Who were Jupiter Hammon, Lemuel Haynes and Daniel Alexander Payne? And what do they have in common with Martin Luther King Jr., Howard Thurman and James Cone? All of these were African American Christian theologians, yet their theologies are, in many ways, worlds apart. In this book, Thabiti Anyabwile offers a challenging and provocative assessment of the history of African American Christian theology, from its earliest beginnings to the present. He argues trenchantly that the modern fruit of African American theology has fallen far from the tree of its early predecessors. In doing so, Anyabwile closely examines the theological commitments of prominent African American theologians throughout American history. Chapter by chapter, he traces what he sees as the theological decline of African American theology from one generation to the next, concluding with an unflinching examination of several contemporary figures. Replete with primary texts and illustrations, this book is a gold mine for any reader interested in the history of African American Christianity. With a foreword by Mark Noll.

2010 Christianity Today Book Award winner With characteristic rigor and insight, in this book Mark Noll revisits the history of the American church in the context of world events. He makes the compelling case that how Americans have come to practice the Christian faith is just as globally important as what the American church has done in the world. Noll backs up this substantial claim with the scholarly attentiveness we've come to expect from him, lucidly explaining the relationship between the development of Christianity in North America and the development of Christianity in the rest of the world, with attention to recent transfigurations in world Christianity. Here is a book that will challenge your assumptions about the nature of the relationship between the American church and the global church in the past and predict what world Christianity may look like.

In this popular introduction to church history, now in its third edition, Mark Noll isolates key events that provide a framework for understanding the history of Christianity. The book presents Christianity as a worldwide phenomenon rather than just a Western experience.
Now organized around fourteen key moments in church history, this well-received text provides contemporary Christians with a fuller understanding of God as he has revealed his purpose through the centuries. This new edition includes a new preface; updates throughout the book; revised "further readings" for each chapter; and two new chapters, including one spotlighting Vatican II and Lausanne as turning points of the recent past.
Students in academic settings and church adult education contexts will benefit from this one-semester survey of Christian history.

In seventeen inspiring narratives Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom introduce a new and robust company of saints that has left a lasting imprint on the new Christian heartlands of Africa and Asia. Spanning a century, from the 1880s to the 1980s, their stories demonstrate the vitality of the Christian faith in a diversity of contexts.

Historian Mark Noll traces evangelicalism from its nineteenth-century roots. He applies lessons learned in the milieu of Great Britain and North America to answer the question: Have evangelicals grown to mature confidence in their views of God and Scripture so they may stand-alone if they must-between faith and higher critical skepticism? "This is nuts-and-bolts history at its best." - Douglas Jacobsen, Fides et Historia "This is not only an outstanding study of evangelical biblical scholarship, it is the best survey of the twentieth-century evangelical thought that we have." - George Marsden "This book will be of immense value to all who want to know what the background to current evangelical biblical scholarship is, and who want to explore the likely developments in the future." - Gerald Bray, The Churchman " Noll] has enriched our knowledge of this history through his mastery of its substance and has come to grips with its findings." - Todd Nichol, Word and World Mark A. Noll, the McManis Professor of Christian Thought and professor of church history at Wheaton College, has written more than ten books, including Religion, Faith and American Politics, and Christian Faith and Practice in the Modern World. He edited Confessions and Catechisms of the Reformation. His PhD degree is from Vanderbilt University.

Religion has been a powerful political force throughout American history. When race enters the mix the results have been some of our greatest triumphs as a nation--and some of our most shameful failures. In this important book, Mark Noll, one of the most influential historians of American religion writing today, traces the explosive political effects of the religious intermingling with race.

Noll demonstrates how supporters and opponents of slavery and segregation drew equally on the Bible to justify the morality of their positions. He shows how a common evangelical heritage supported Jim Crow discrimination and contributed powerfully to the black theology of liberation preached by Martin Luther King Jr. In probing such connections, Noll takes readers from the 1830 slave revolt of Nat Turner through Reconstruction and the long Jim Crow era, from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to "values" voting in recent presidential elections. He argues that the greatest transformations in American political history, from the Civil War through the civil rights revolution and beyond, constitute an interconnected narrative in which opposing appeals to Biblical truth gave rise to often-contradictory religious and moral complexities. And he shows how this heritage remains alive today in controversies surrounding stem-cell research and abortion as well as civil rights reform.

"God and Race in American Politics" is a panoramic history that reveals the profound role of religion in American political history and in American discourse on race and social justice.

Narrates the drama of a famous preacher's entire career in his historical context. George Whitefield (1714-1770) is remembered as a spirited revivalist, a catalyst for the Great Awakening, and a founder of the evangelical movement in America. But Whitefield was also a citizen of the British Empire who used his political savvy and theological creativity to champion the cause of imperial expansion. In this religious biography of "the Grand Itinerant," Peter Choi reexamines the Great Awakening and its relationship to a fast-growing British Empire in the context of a dramatic human story. Choi shows that as the British Empire and the Great Awakening evolved, so did Whitefield and his influence. Rather than focusing on his early preaching career, as many books do, Choi follows the trajectory of Whitefield's whole life, including his relation-ships to Britain, the American colonies, slavery, war, and higher education. George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire tells the fascinating, multifaceted life story of Whitefield both as revivalist preacher and subject of the British Empire.

This book explores the life of Abraham Lincoln on the eve of his bicentennial. To fully understand and appreciate Abraham Lincoln's legacy, it is important to examine the society that influenced the life, character, and leadership of the man who would become the Great Emancipator. Editors Joseph R. Fornieri and Sara Vaughn Gabbard have done just that in ""Lincoln's America: 1809-1865"", a collection of new and original essays by ten eminent historians that place Lincoln within his nineteenth-century cultural context.Among the topics explored in ""Lincoln's America"" are religion, education, middle-class family life, the antislavery movement, politics, and law. Of particular interest are the transition of American intellectual and philosophical thought from the Enlightenment to Romanticism and the influence of this evolution on Lincoln's own ideas.By examining aspects of Lincoln's life - his personal piety in comparison with the beliefs of his contemporaries, his success in self-schooling when frontier youths had limited opportunities for a formal education, his marriage and home life in Springfield, and his legal career - in light of broader cultural contexts such as the development of democracy, the growth of visual arts, the question of slaves as property, and French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on America, the contributors delve into the mythical Lincoln of folklore and discover a developing political mind and a changing nation. As ""Lincoln's America"" shows, the sociopolitical culture of nineteenth-century America was instrumental in shaping Lincoln's character and leadership. The essays in this volume paint a vivid picture of a young nation and its sixteenth president, arguably its greatest leader.

Johann Sebastian Bach was a Lutheran and much of his music was for Lutheran liturgical worship. As these insightful essays in the twelfth volume of Bach Perspectives demonstrate, he was also influenced by--and in turn influenced--different expressions of religious belief. The vocal music, especially the Christmas Oratorio, owes much to medieval Catholic mysticism, and the evolution of the B minor Mass has strong Catholic connections. In Leipzig, Catholic and Lutheran congregations sang many of the same vernacular hymns. Internal squabbles were rarely missing within Lutheranism, for example Pietists' dislike of concerted church music, especially if it employed specific dance forms. Also investigated here are broader issues such as the close affinity between Bach's cantata libretti and the hymns of Charles Wesley; and Bach's music in the context of the Jewish Enlightenment as shaped by Protestant Rationalism in Berlin. Contributors: Rebecca Cypess, Joyce L. Irwin, Robin A. Leaver, Mark Noll, Markus Rathey, Derek Stauff, and Janice B. Stockigt.