Includes bibliographical references (pages 522-531) and indexes.

The age of Jesus and the apostles, 6 BC-AD 70. Away with the King : the Jesus movement ; Wineskins : old and new : the gospel to the Gentiles -- The age of catholic Christianity, 70-312. Only worthless people : Catholic Christianity ; If the Tiber floods : the persecution of Christians ; Arguing about the event : the rise of orthodoxy ; The rule of books : the formation of the Bible ; The school for sinners : the power of bishops ; Apostles to intellectuals : the Alexandrians -- The age of the Christian Roman empire, 312-590. Laying her sceptre down : the conversion of the empire ; Splitting important hairs : the doctrine of the Trinity ; Emmanuel! : Christ in the creeds ; Exiles from life : the beginnings of monasticism ; The sage of the ages : Augustine ; Peter as 'pontifex maximus' : the beginnings of the papacy ; Somewhere between heaven and earth : Eastern Orthodoxy ; Bending the necks of victors : mission to the barbarians -- The Christian Middle Ages, 590-1517. God's consul : Gregory the Great ; The search for unity : Charlemagne and Christendom ; Lifted in a mystic manner : the papacy and the crusader ; The nectar of learning : scholasticism ; A song to Lady Poverty : the apostolic life-style ; Sleeping men and the law of necessity : the decline of the papacy ; Judgment in the process of time : Wyclif and Hus -- The age of Reformation, 1517-1648. A wild boar in the vineyard : Martin Luther and Protestantism ; Radical discipleship : the Anabaptists ; Thrust into the game : John Calvin ; The curse upon the crown : the Church of England ; 'Another man' at Manresa : the Catholic Reformation ; Opening the rock : America and Asia ; The rule of the saints : Puritanism ; Unwilling to die for an old idea : denominations -- The age of reason and revival, 1648-1789. Aiming at the foundations : the cult of reason ; The heart and its reasons : Pascal and the Pietists ; A brand from the burning : Wesley and Methodism ; A new order of the ages : the Great Awakening -- The age of progress, 1789-1914. The restoration of fortresses : Catholicism in the age of progress ; A new social frontier : nineteenth-century England ; To earth's remotest people : Protestant missions ; The destiny of a nation : a Christian America ; A bridge for intelligent moderns : Protestant liberalism ; Nothing to lose but chains : the social crisis -- The age of ideologies, 1914-1989. Graffiti on a wall of shame : twentieth-century ideologies ; Rootless immigrants in a sick society : American Evangelicals ; New creeds for breakfast : the ecumenical movement ; The medicine of mercy : Roman Catholicism : Vatican II -- The age of global expansion and relocation, 1900- . Christianity in the West : decline and reconstruction ; Shift to the global south : what is the "New Christianity"? ; Windows to the Christian world : places and persons of faith.