Historical theology
How did belief develop?
- 4Fields
- 421Sources
- 44Key works
- 40Key terms
Reading order
Where to begin in this branch
Start with the fields the others build on.
Step 1: Church historyTwo thousand years of the church's life: people, councils, divisions and renewal. It gives every reading its date and setting.
Step 2: The churches and denominationsThe churches and church families, and which readings each holds. It shows which tradition stands behind each view.
Step 3: History of doctrine, with creeds and confessionsHow each doctrine developed, through the creeds and confessions that fixed it.
Step 4: Patristics, including Syriac and Eastern witnessesThe early church writers, East and West, including the Syriac witnesses often left out. They are the first readers of the New Testament after its writers.
Fields
The fields in this branch
Church history studies the church's development in time with historical methods, belonging both to theology and to history, and its centre has shifted to Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Read the field: Church historyWhere traditions divide
Catholic historians may name providence within historical method, while the critical school reads history as a human process; Orthodox, Protestant and world Christianity readings ask different questions.
About a dozen church families hold almost all of the world's 2.3 to 2.7 billion Christians, and Sub-Saharan Africa now holds the largest regional share, ahead of Europe.
Where traditions divide
Christians divide into Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Protestant, Pentecostal, Independent and Restorationist families, and the historic Western communions are divided internally over authority and sexuality.
Builds onChurch historyRead the field: The churches and denominationsMost churches confess the faith of Nicaea but receive two, three, seven or twenty-one councils, and fix their teaching in different texts: creeds, definitions, confessions, catechisms or statements of belief.
Where traditions divide
They divide on Chalcedon and the Filioque, on whether councils or Scripture alone bind, on how doctrine develops, and on whether a church should confess creeds at all.
Builds onChurch historyRead the field: History of doctrine, with creeds and confessionsNearly every tradition cites the Fathers, who wrote in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Ge'ez, Armenian and Georgian from the first to the eighth century, but each draws a different list and boundary.
Read the field: Patristics, including Syriac and Eastern witnessesWhere traditions divide
They divide on which writers count (Origen, Theodore, Nestorius, Dioscorus, Leo), on where the age ends, and on whether Fathers are authorities, witnesses beneath Scripture, or evidence of apostasy.
The theology map
