CH302 - Christianity in History from 1550

  • 0 Standard Tuition Fee
  • 4
    Credit Points
  • 0.125 EFT 
  • 5
    AQF level
  • church historyUnit Discipline

Learning outcomes

On successful completion of this unit, students will

A. Know and understand

  1. The major phases and developments in the history of Christianity identified in the unit content
  2. The life and thought of selected key figures in the history of Christianity

B. Be able to

  1. Discuss the impact of the social, political and cultural context on Christian beliefs, practices and movements
  2. Evaluate historical evidence using primary and secondary sources
  3. Present an Analytical evidence-based argument or narrative

C. Be in a position to

  1. Inform their theological studies with perspectives from this period of Christian history
  2. Apply perspectives from this period to current issues in ministry and the contemporary world.

Content

  1. Reformation: England and/or Scotland (1533-1588)
    Thomas Cranmer OR Mary Queen of Scots & John Knox
  2. Puritanism in England and/or America (1563-1662)
    Oliver Cromwell OR Richard Baxter OR John
    Winthrop OR Roger Williams
  1. Revolutionary Learning & Radical Politics
    • Deism and the Enlightenment
    • Jansenism
    • The Church in the French Revolution
      John Locke OR Blaise Pascal
  • Lecturers must focus on at least 1 of the topics

Section B: Change & Renewal

  1. Renewal:
    • Pietism,
    • the Evangelical Revival in Britain
    • the Great Awakening in America
    • The Oxford Movement
      John Wesley OR George Whitefield OR Jonathan Edwards OR John Henry Newman
  • Lecturers must focus on at least 2 of the topics
  1. Responding to the changing Social Order:
    • Frontier Religion in America
    • The abolition of slavery
    • Christian Socialism
    • Salvation Army
    • Women in the Church
      FrancisAsbury OR William Wilberforce OR F.D. Maurice OR William & Catherine Booth OR
  • Lecturers must focus on at least 2 of the topics
  1. Responding to challenges to Faith
    • The Rise of Biblical Criticism
    • Science and Religion
    • The First Vatican Council
    • Fundamentalism
      Friedrich Schleiermacher OR Charles Darwin OR Pius IX OR John Gresham Machen
  • Lecturers must focus on at least 2 of the topics

Section C: The Church Universal

  1. The church in a global context:
    • The birth of modern missions,
    • Christian missions in India OR China OR the Pacific OR Africa (nineteenth century)
    • Christian missions & the rise of nationalism (twentieth century)
    • Ecumenical movements
    • Vatican II
    • The History of Pentecostalism
      William Carey OR David Livingstone OR Hudson Taylor OR J. R. Mott OR John XXIII
    • Christians in a Totalitarian State: the church in Germany (1931-1950) OR The Soviet Union (1917-1990)
      Dietrich Bonhoeffer OR Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  • Lecturers must focus on at least 3 of the topics
  1. A history of the church in Australia:
    • Building a Christian Country 1788-1901
    • The Church in Secular Australia 1901 to the present
    • Ministry to Indigenous communities
  • Lecturers must focus on at least 1 of the topics

Notes:

  1. Students are expected to cover all nine areas covered in the syllabus outline. But there are considerable options within all sections, and lecturers should take full advantage of this flexibility to design a coherent program which best addresses the needs of students and the philosophy of the college offering the unit.
  2. Students taking this unit at will be expected to engage seriously with primary sources. The names of prominent figures in Christian history, named above in italics, are to encourage lecturers to set documents for study written by or about those people. Lecturers should feel free to substitute a major figure in the place of those named. The study of primary source documents need not be a requirement for diploma (CH 202) students.  Lecturers should feel free to exchange with lecturers from other colleges advice on documents which have worked well for them.
  3. Assessment will include written work deemed to be the equivalent of  at least 2000 words and may or may not include an exam. While the ACT’s policy is to count each hour of a written exam as the equivalent to 1,500 words, it is not a requirement that words written under examination conditions should attract the same weighting as words written under essay conditions.
  4. If an examination is set, it is recommended that students be required to answer only 3 questions in a two-hour examination, one question from each of the three sections of the paper.
  5. Examiners should feel free to set selections from documents for comment in examinations if they consider it appropriate.
  6. Lecturers may choose to assess parts of the syllabus by instruments other than examination.
  7. Lecturers may assess reports on documents separately from examinations or essays. For example, three assessment instruments may be used: examination (50%), essay (40%), document report (10%).
  8. Examination is no longer compulsory for this unit.

  9. It should be noted that this is a survey unit. Students are required to study the whole syllabus, which includes selected key people for more focussed study (listed in italics in the Unit Outlines). Assessment procedures will allow for a certain amount of specialisation, so that candidates are not expected to study each general topic in detail.

Set Readings

As well as the works listed in General Recommended Readings, the following provide more detailed treatments of sections of this unit.

Reform and Revolution

Brown, J., The English Puritans (Fearn: Christian Heritage, 1998).

Dickens, A. G., The English Reformation (2nd ed.; University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1989).

Kellar, C., Scotland, England & the Reformation 1534-61 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003).

Pearse, M., The Great Restoration: the Religious Radicals of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998).

 

Change and Renewal

Askew, T. A. and R. V. Pierard, The American Church Experience: A Concise History (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004).

Harding, A., The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion: a Sect in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: OUP, 2003).

Heitzenrater, R. P., Wesley and the People Called Methodists (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995).

Herring, G., What Was the Oxford Movement? (London: Continuum, 2002)

Kent, J., Wesley and the Wesleyans: Religion in Eighteenth Century Britain (Cambridge: CUP, 2002).

Knight, F., The Church in the Nineteenth Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008).

Noll, M. A., America’s God: from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford/NY: OUP, 2002).

Noll, M. A., The Old Religion in the New World: the History of North American Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).

Numbers, R. L., Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew (NY: OUP, 2007).

Pearse, M., The Age of Reason: From the Wars of Religion to the French Revolution, 1670-1789   Oxford: Monarch, 2007).

Rosnan, D., The Evolution of the English Churches, 1500-2000 (Cambridge: CUP, 2003).

 

The Church Universal

Bellito, C. M., Renewing Christianity: A History of Church Reform from Day One to Vatican II (New York: Paulist, 2001).

Bergen, D. L., Twisted Cross: the German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1996).

Breward, I., A History of the Churches in Australasia (Oxford: OUP, 2001).

Briggs, J., Mercy Amba Oduyoye & Georges Tsetsis (eds), History of the Ecumenical Movement Vol III: 1968-2000 (Geneva: WCC, 2004).

Gilley, S. and B. Stanley (eds), World Christianities, c1815-1914 (Cambridge/NY: CUP, 2006).

Holmes, D. J. And B. W. Bickers, A Short History of the Catholic Church (3rd ed.; London: Burns & Oates, 2002).

Kung, H., The Catholic Church (London: Orion, 2002).

Moffett, S. H., A History of Christianity in Asia (Vol. I, 2nd Rev. ed.; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998).

O’Malley, J. W., Trent and all that: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2000).