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Historical theologyHow did belief develop?

Church history

What is church history?

Church history, also called ecclesiastical history or Kirchengeschichte, is the branch of theology that studies how the Christian church and Christianity have developed in time, using the ordinary methods of historical science. It holds a double citizenship in theology and in history, and overlaps with historical theology and with the history of Christianity, the name many secular universities now prefer.

  • 38Sources
  • 7Traditions
  • 16Dated entries
  • 11Minutes

Study v1.1, 13 October 2026

Church history

At a glance

Why it matters for reading Scripture

Two thousand years of the church's life: people, councils, divisions and renewal. It gives every reading its date and setting.

What the study found

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.

Where 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.

How the traditions compare

  • Catholic

    Holds that the church has a divine element, which does not change and so lies outside history, and a human element, which changes and so has a history.

    The historian may recognize providence while applying full historical method: the Catholic Encyclopedia argues that ruling out divine action in advance is itself an unproven assumption. It emphasizes councils, the papacy, saints, religious orders and the continuity of tradition, and its representative historians include Baronius, Hefele, Hergenröther, Pastor, Jedin, O'Malley and Duffy.

    Sources1–2

  • Orthodox

    Reads church history as the life of one tradition of the Fathers, councils and liturgy, with emphasis on the seven ecumenical councils, Byzantium and the Christian East.

    Its representative historians include Florovsky, Meyendorff, Schmemann, Ware, Louth and McGuckin.

    Sources2

  • Classic Protestant

    Reads the past as the ancient faith preserved, obscured and recovered; the Magdeburg Centuries traced a perpetual agreement of true teaching and the growth of error.

    It emphasizes the Reformation, confessions, awakenings and revivals, and its representative historians include Flacius, Mosheim, Neander and Schaff.

    Sources2–3

  • Evangelical

    Treats historical theology as a friend to exegesis, systematic theology and the church's mission, and emphasizes the primacy of Scripture, revivals and missions.

    Its representative historians include Noll, Marsden, Bebbington and Shelley.

    Sources4

  • Liberal Protestant and critical

    Explains Christianity's rise as a historical process; Baur and the critical school held that history must be read as a human process, and Baur read the church's rise through Hegel's dialectic.

    It emphasizes the development of doctrine and social forces, and its representative historians include Baur, Harnack and Troeltsch.

    Sources5

  • Secular academic

    Studies Christianity as one religion among others and makes no claims about providence, with emphasis on social, cultural, gender and global history.

    Its representative historians include Peter Brown, Averil Cameron, Elizabeth Clark and Le Goff.

    Sources2

  • World Christianity

    Reads Christianity as a polycentric faith in which each culture's reception of the gospel is its own history, with emphasis on translation, mission, the Global South and indigenous churches.

    Its representative historians include Walls, Sanneh, Bediako, Robert, Koschorke and Kalu.

    Sources6

How the field developed

  1. Early church
    2nd and 3rd centuries

    Hegesippus, Julius Africanus and Hippolytus write memoirs and chronicles, the first Christian records and chronologies.1

  2. Early church
    c. 312 to 324

    Eusebius of Caesarea writes the Ecclesiastical History in ten books, founding the genre; it quotes documents at length and preserves sources lost elsewhere. He is called the Father of Church History, though earlier Christians had written history, and the Catholic Encyclopedia, while defending his honesty, accepts that he was not wholly unbiased.1

  3. Late antiquity
    5th and 6th centuries

    Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret continue Eusebius, followed by Evagrius, and continuation becomes a convention. In the West, Rufinus, Orosius and Augustine's City of God, written between 413 and 428, give a theological philosophy of history.1

  4. Late antiquity
    6th to 15th centuries

    Bede, Gregory of Tours and Byzantine and Syriac chroniclers write national and local church histories rather than universal ones.12

  5. Reformation
    1559 to 1574

    The Lutheran Magdeburg Centuries, led by Matthias Flacius, bring a century-by-century structure and the systematic use of primary sources gathered across Europe, for a polemical aim. Thirteen centuries are published, to 1298.3

  6. Reformation
    1588 to 1607

    Caesar Baronius answers for the Catholic side with the Annales Ecclesiastici in twelve volumes, drawing on the Vatican Library and archives; the title runs to 1198, though volume 12 ends in 1193. Because each side had to answer the other's documents, the two histories advanced source criticism.73

  7. Reformation
    From 1643

    The Jesuit Bollandists begin the Acta Sanctorum, the critical study of the lives of the saints, which is still active; Analecta Bollandiana follows from 1882.8

  8. Modern
    1726

    Johann Lorenz von Mosheim writes an Enlightenment pragmatic history of causes in his Institutiones historiae ecclesiasticae; Gibbon used and defended him.910

  9. Modern
    1811

    Schleiermacher's Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, written for the founding of the University of Berlin and revised in 1830, places church history inside historical theology, at the center of theological study.1112

  10. Modern
    1825 to 1852

    August Neander writes the history of Christian life and piety from faith in his General History of the Christian Religion and Church.13

  11. Modern
    1852 to 1863

    F. C. Baur at Tübingen writes the Epochen der kirchlichen Geschichtschreibung, the first history of church historiography, and his Kirchengeschichte, reading the church's rise as a historical process through Hegel's dialectic.5

  12. Modern
    1888

    Philip Schaff founds the American Society of Church History, and the field organizes as a learned profession; the journal Church History follows from 1932.14

  13. Modern
    1930s to 1960s

    Kenneth Scott Latourette and others write of world Christianity, and mission and the churches outside Europe enter the frame.6

  14. Modern
    1974

    W. A. Clebsch's Toward a History of Christianity gives voice to the turn of the 1970s from church history to the history of Christianity, a wider subject under a non-confessional name.1514

  15. Modern
    1982 onwards

    Andrew Walls's center opens at Aberdeen in 1982 and moves to Edinburgh in 1986 or 1987, and the Yale-Edinburgh Group meets from 1992. World Christianity consolidates as a field in the 1990s, and the shift of Christianity's center to the Global South reshapes the story.166

  16. Modern
    21 November 2024

    Pope Francis's Letter on the Renewal of the Study of Church History calls for church history to be taught as living memory, against idealized and ideological readings and a merely chronological approach.171819

How to study church history

The questions it asks

  • What is church history, and how does it differ from historical theology and from the secular history of Christianity?
  • How do historians divide the story into periods, and why are those divisions disputed?
  • May a historian name God's action in events, and if so, how?15
  • How do the Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, evangelical and secular traditions read the same past?
  • Who produced the surviving sources, and how do missionary reports stand against indigenous oral memory?
  • Does the field still frame the global story from the North Atlantic?

Its method

Start

  1. Establish the facts by full knowledge and critical treatment of the sources1.

  2. Classify the sources: remains, which are part of the event itself, and reported sources, which are a witness's account; even council acts are mediated records, so the classification is a starting point rather than a verdict1.

  3. Note whether each source is public or private, by a Christian or a non-Christian author, written or unwritten1.

  4. Read the sources in their languages, Latin, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic and others, with the help of the auxiliary sciences: paleography, diplomatics, chronology, epigraphy, Christian archaeology and art history, numismatics, the study of seals and heraldry, ecclesiastical geography and statistics, and bibliography120.

  5. Explain cause and effect, including the influence of ideas, of individuals and of human freedom1.

  6. Judge impartially, following Cicero: dare to say nothing false and nothing less than the truth1.

  7. Acknowledge presuppositions: no historian works without them, so a demand for presuppositionless history is itself a stance1.

  8. Keep what the sources show apart from theological readings, the university norm, though seminaries and confessional faculties vary15.

  9. Draw where needed on the methods the last century added: social history and the sociology of religion, prosopography, gender history, oral history, material and visual culture, literary theory, textual criticism, and digital and AI-assisted methods.

What to read

Its primary witnesses

  • Remains: liturgies, council acts, papal bulls, church orders, inscriptions, buildings, tombs and art1.
  • Reported sources: acts of the martyrs, lives of saints, the Liber Pontificalis, chronicles, letters and earlier church histories1.
  • Public and private sources: synodal decrees, private letters and biographies1.
  • Writers from outside the church: Roman, Jewish or Muslim writers on Christians1.
  • Unwritten sources: monuments, legends and oral testimony1.
  • Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, which quotes documents at length and preserves sources lost elsewhere1.
  • The Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, running since 1643, the longest-lived example of the critical study of saints' lives8.
  • Missionary reports and indigenous oral memory, now weighed against each other as historians ask who produced the surviving sources.

Standard reference works

  • The Cambridge History of Christianity, nine volumes, chronological and global, its early volumes edited by Mitchell and Young (2006 to 2009)21.
  • The Oxford History of the Christian Church, a series under the general editors Henry and Owen Chadwick, with volumes on periods and regions, including India and Byzantium22.
  • Hubert Jedin (ed.), Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte, seven volumes in ten parts (Herder, 1962 to 1979), the standard Catholic handbook23.
  • Jaroslav Pelikan's The Christian Tradition (five volumes, 1971 to 1989), one of the standard histories of doctrine, with Harnack's24.
  • Philip Schaff's History of the Christian Church (seven volumes, 1858 to 1890, completed by his son), a classic Protestant survey in the public domain25.
  • Kenneth Scott Latourette's A History of the Expansion of Christianity (seven volumes, 1937 to 1945), for mission and world history26.
  • Justo L. González's The Story of Christianity (two volumes), a widely used seminary survey, with his A History of Christian Thought (three volumes)27.
  • Diarmaid MacCulloch's A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009), the leading one-volume academic survey28.
  • Bruce Shelley's Church History in Plain Language (fifth edition), a popular introduction29.
  • The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (first edition 1957), the standard one-volume reference30.
  • Bradley and Muller's Church History: An Introduction to Research Methods and Resources (second edition, 2016), the standard methods handbook in English31.
  • The journals Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, quarterly since 1932, and the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, quarterly since 19503233.

Scholarship referenced in this study

The works below shaped the field and are cited in this study, from the earliest to the most recent. Hover over a book, or select it, to see its author and the sources behind it.

  • c. 312 to 324Ecclesiastical HistoryEusebius of CaesareaEcclesiastical History (c. 312 to 324)Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260 to 339)Sources1
  • 1559 to 1574Magdeburg CenturiesMatthias FlaciusMagdeburg Centuries (1559 to 1574)Matthias Flacius (1520 to 1575)Sources3
  • 1588 to 1607Annales EcclesiasticiCaesar BaroniusAnnales Ecclesiastici (1588 to 1607)Caesar Baronius (1538 to 1607)Sources7
  • 1726Institutiones historiae ecclesiasticaeJohann Lorenz von MosheimInstitutiones historiae ecclesiasticae (1726)Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1693 to 1755)Sources9
  • 1852Epochen der kirchlichen GeschichtschreibungF. C. BaurEpochen der kirchlichen Geschichtschreibung (1852)F. C. Baur (1792 to 1860)Sources5
  • 1858 to 1890History of the Christian ChurchPhilip SchaffHistory of the Christian Church (1858 to 1890)Philip Schaff (1819 to 1893)Sources25
  • 1937 to 1945A History of the Expansion of ChristianityKenneth Scott LatouretteA History of the Expansion of Christianity (1937 to 1945)Kenneth Scott Latourette (1884 to 1968)Sources26
  • 1962 to 1979Handbuch der KirchengeschichteHubert JedinHandbuch der Kirchengeschichte (1962 to 1979)Hubert Jedin (1900 to 1980)Sources23
  • 1963The Orthodox ChurchKallistos WareThe Orthodox Church (1963)Kallistos Ware (1934 to 2022)Sources34
  • 1971 to 1989The Christian TraditionJaroslav PelikanThe Christian Tradition (1971 to 1989)Jaroslav Pelikan (1923 to 2006)Sources24
  • 1996The Missionary Movement in Christian HistoryAndrew WallsThe Missionary Movement in Christian History (1996)Andrew Walls (1928 to 2021)Sources35
  • 2009A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand YearsDiarmaid MacCullochA History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)Diarmaid MacCullochSources28

Listed because this study draws on their published work; no association with or endorsement of Numa Verse is implied. Suggest a correction.

Key terms

The words that carry the most weight in this field, each defined from the sources of this study. Turn a card over to read its definition.

Another name for church history, also called Kirchengeschichte; the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 defines it as the scientific investigation and methodical description of the temporal development of the church21.

The study of how the church read Scripture and developed doctrine; a common summary says church history reviews the theologians and historical theology investigates their ideas436.

The development of doctrine, classically centered on teachings the church came to define, though Harnack and Pelikan range well beyond formal definitions37.

Christianity studied as a religion among others, without confessional claims about the church; the name many universities now prefer2.

The classic division of the field: external history covers expansion and mission, persecution, church and state, and relations with other faiths; internal history covers doctrine, worship, sacred art, government and canon law, religious orders, discipline and popular piety1.

Universal church history tells the whole story across all periods; special church history studies one person, place, institution or theme, such as a diocese, a monastery, the papacy or the councils1.

Bernheim's older classification of sources, Überreste and Tradition: remains are part of the event itself, reported sources a witness's account1.

The disciplines that serve the reading of sources, from the source languages to paleography, diplomatics, chronology and epigraphy; diplomatics was founded by Mabillon's De re diplomatica of 1681, and the term paleography comes from Montfaucon's Palaeographia Graeca of 1708120.

The common seminary division into apostolic and patristic, medieval, Reformation, post-Reformation and modern eras; Catholic and secular histories more often use four3621.

The history of Christianity as a polycentric faith, written from every continent; it consolidated as a field in the 1990s, after Andrew Walls's center opened at Aberdeen in 1982616.

Where it sits

Builds on

Church history

Leads to

From the Journal

A domed Byzantine church and a Romanesque church facing each other across water, joined by a bridgeAI-generated imageChurch history

Why did one word in the Creed divide East and West?

The word is filioque, Latin for "and the Son". The Creed agreed at Constantinople in 381 says the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father; Western churches later added "and the Son". The addition, and the authority to make it, became one of the lasting points of division between Catholic and Orthodox Christians.Numa Verse Editorial · November 2026 · 5 min read

Questions people ask

The fields overlap rather than divide the ground: church history is the widest circle, the whole life of the church, while historical theology traces how the church read Scripture and developed doctrine374. Historical theology is meant to describe rather than prescribe: deciding which era or theologian got things right is a theological judgment, not a historical one36.

It is one of the oldest live questions in the field. The Catholic Encyclopedia argues that ruling out divine action in advance is itself an unproven assumption, so a believing historian may name providence while keeping strict method1. Baur and the critical school held that history must be read as a human process5. The university norm is to keep historical findings apart from theological readings; seminaries and confessional faculties vary, and the boundary is still debated.

Every boundary is a choice: the end of antiquity alone has been placed at points from Chalcedon in 451 to Charlemagne, and treating Luther in 1517 as the hinge into the early modern church is a teaching habit rather than a consensus1. Historians of world Christianity add that the churches of Syria, Persia, India, China, Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia had long histories of their own, which do not divide at 1517 or 16486.

His letter of 21 November 2024 called for the renewal of the study of church history as living memory, against both idealized and ideological readings17. It asks for a history that shows the church's spots and wrinkles and its martyrs alike, and warns against a merely chronological approach that reduces church history to a backdrop for the history of theology173819.

Eusebius's Chronicle set biblical, Greek and Roman dates side by side as one human story, and the Catholic Encyclopedia observed that as Christianity spread, the universal history of the church was becoming a religious history of the world1. Historians trace links with the calendar, learning, law, language, care for the poor, art and science, and with empire, slavery and violence; these are connections, not single causes.

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  1. 1Ecclesiastical History, Catholic Encyclopedia 1910 (New Advent)https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07365a.htm (opens in a new tab)
  2. 2Church history (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_history (opens in a new tab)
  3. 3Magdeburg Centuries (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdeburg_Centuries (opens in a new tab)
  4. 4Review of Historical Theology for the Church (Themelios, The Gospel Coalition)https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/review/historical-theology-for-the-church/ (opens in a new tab)
  5. 5Ferdinand Christian Baur (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Christian_Baur (opens in a new tab)
  6. 6World Christianity (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Christianity (opens in a new tab)
  7. 7Annales Ecclesiastici (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_Ecclesiastici (opens in a new tab)
  8. 8Bollandist (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollandist (opens in a new tab)
  9. 9Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Lorenz_von_Mosheim (opens in a new tab)
  10. 10Vindication, on Mosheim, E. Gibbon (Christian Classics Ethereal Library)https://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/vndctn/mosheim.htm (opens in a new tab)
  11. 11Schleiermacher's Brief Outline, review by B. Cornwall (bobcornwall.com)https://www.bobcornwall.com/2011/06/schleiermachers-brief-outline-of.html (opens in a new tab)
  12. 12Historical theology (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_theology (opens in a new tab)
  13. 13August Neander (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Neander (opens in a new tab)
  14. 14American Society of Church History (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Church_History (opens in a new tab)
  15. 15Toward a History of Christianity, W. A. Clebsch, Church History 43, 1974 (Cambridge Core)https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/church-history/article/abs/toward-a-history-of-christianity/8FF4E864580265D103C3707C8D89F3E4 (opens in a new tab)
  16. 16Andrew F. Walls (1928-2021), obituary (School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh)https://divinity.ed.ac.uk/news-events/obituaries/andrew-f-walls-1928-2021 (opens in a new tab)
  17. 17Letter on the Renewal of the Study of Church History, Pope Francis, 21 November 2024 (EWTN Library)https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/letter-on-the-renewal-of-the-study-of-church-history-27349 (opens in a new tab)
  18. 18Letter on the study of church history, Pope Francis, 21 November 2024 (The Holy See)https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2024/documents/20241121-lettera-storia-chiesa.html (opens in a new tab)
  19. 19Pope Francis calls for study of Church history free from ideologies, 21 November 2024 (CNA, National Catholic Register)https://www.ncregister.com/cna/pope-francis-calls-for-study-of-church-history-free-from-ideologies (opens in a new tab)
  20. 20Jean Mabillon (Encyclopaedia Britannica)https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Mabillon (opens in a new tab)
  21. 21Cambridge History of Christianity, series page (Cambridge University Press)https://www.cambridge.org/core/series/cambridge-history-of-christianity/7B03B6D6CA1680C8B5624BE561EDEBCA (opens in a new tab)
  22. 22Oxford History of the Christian Church, series (Oxford University Press)https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/o/oxford-history-of-the-christian-church-ohcc/ (opens in a new tab)
  23. 23Hubert Jedin (Wikipedia, German)https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Jedin (opens in a new tab)
  24. 24Jaroslav Pelikan (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaroslav_Pelikan (opens in a new tab)
  25. 25Philip Schaff (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Schaff (opens in a new tab)
  26. 26Kenneth Scott Latourette (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Scott_Latourette (opens in a new tab)
  27. 27Justo L. González (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justo_L._Gonz%C3%A1lez (opens in a new tab)
  28. 28Diarmaid MacCulloch (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diarmaid_MacCulloch (opens in a new tab)
  29. 29Church History in Plain Language (Zondervan Academic)https://zondervanacademic.com/products/church-history-in-plain-language-1 (opens in a new tab)
  30. 30F. L. Cross (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._L._Cross (opens in a new tab)
  31. 31Richard Muller (theologian) (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Muller_(theologian) (opens in a new tab)
  32. 32Church History (journal) (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_History_(journal) (opens in a new tab)
  33. 33The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journal_of_Ecclesiastical_History (opens in a new tab)
  34. 34Kallistos Ware (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kallistos_Ware (opens in a new tab)
  35. 35Andrew Walls (Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Walls (opens in a new tab)
  36. 36Historical Theology, essay (The Gospel Coalition)https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/historical-theology/ (opens in a new tab)
  37. 37What Is Historical Theology?, S. Storms (samstorms.org)https://www.samstorms.org/all-articles/post/what-is-historical-theology (opens in a new tab)
  38. 38Editorial on the letter on church history, 21 November 2024 (Vatican News)https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2024-11/editorial-pope-francis-letter-church-history-faith.html (opens in a new tab)

Page record

Reviewed and approved by Duane Herholdt, BA (Theology), Chief Executive Officer, Numa Verse

Study version: v1.1, 13 October 2026 (theology map v1.27)

Last reviewed: 9 November 2026

How these pages are made

  • 9 November 2026: First draft from the approved assessment v1.1.