Good choice for an American audience; not so good if your student body is international. Still hoping a comprehensive Church history in English will be written that does not go Jerusalem-Rome-UK-USA and then out to the remainder of the world.

I find myself enjoying the earliest history more. This was still well-researched and written, I just had less of an interest in this period.

The structure of Woodbridge's book was very helpful in following the flow of key transitions with Church History. Often when I read books on church history, I would get lost in the progression of different areas of Christian thought. I love his approach and I have gain a deeper understanding of the progression of Christian thought among different Christian denominations. I highly recommend this book to help people grasp the history of Christian thoughts and traditions.

So, 850 pages of Church History might probably sound a little dry and not like something you would read for fun, right? But I enjoyed reading this book very much and yes, I read all 850 pages. And probably other resources really are dry and boring... but Woodbrigde and James made it easier and even more fun to read than I expected.

The authors provide an excellent overview over the most important events in ca. the last 700 years of church history. They give information on shifts in theology, the history of the different denominations and they do not only look at what happened in Europe and the United States, but they also take a look at global Christianity and very recent developments. Since it is only an overview, it does not always go into detail, but the reader gets a good idea of what happened in that period, learns about the most influential persons and the religious ideas that emerged in these different periods. The book is organized in a chronological order, but the chapters are for example focused on regions (for example France or the UK) or theological topics and therefore there's sometimes a bit of an overlap in time, but I didn't mind. It might even be better that way because the reader can search for specific topics and only read the relevant chapters.

This book is meant as an introductory textbook for theology students, I think, but I think it's very helpful for anyone interested in theology and church history because it is easy to understand without much previous knowledge, too. I could also use what I learned through this book for my bachelor thesis (which was about worship songs from a linguistic perspective). It is also great to look up things from time to time.

So I would recommend this book for anyone that might be interested in church history. It is a comprehensive and comprehensible resource that I really enjoy having on my (virtual) book shelf.

A decent survey of modern Christian history. The book seems to be written for undergraduate survey classes, but the average reader can get some good information as well.

Sorry I couldn't review as I only have Kindle capabilities

Would buy a physical copy if I ever came across it.

I've known the basics of this part of church history, but never the in-depth details. It's fascinating to learn about, and the book is a well-organized, well-written tool to learn from.

I got this book (along with volume 1) when I started church history classes at the seminary. It was very useful for me as I reviewed the sujects the teacher talked about later every day, and got more information about them.
In my opinion, this edition has a good amount of contents and a good balance of details. In general, if someone needs more details about an event, it is better to read a specific book instead of a general one.
For me, this book fulfills its premise, which is to be a general history book, that provides the reader with information about the main events in the church history.
I also must highlight the illustrations. Every topic has pictures and images relevant to it, which enriches the reading/studying experience.
I also enjoyed reading about recent events. The best christian history books I know usually end by the 19th century or the beginning of 20th century, and this one has a lot of excellent topics covering the 21st century. This alone makes this book such a relevant resource for the christian student.

This volume is a continuation of volume one (review here) but by two different authors. This means that the writing style is somewhat different (personally, I preferred the first volume), but the way they present the history is largely similar. This volume is from pre-reformation (1300s) to the present day.

Like in the previous volume, I appreciated the mini-explanations of the theology involved and the biographies of key figures. I also liked the fact that the book also looks at the political, societal and economic of the time (especially political), since Christianity was very closely tied to politics.

Bits of information that surprised me include:

- Martin Luther's marriage to Katie. It started out as a loveless marriage, but Luther fell in love with his wife and the fact that such a key figure in the reformation had such an unusual marriage shaped attitudes towards marriage in society.

- I didn't know that predestination "was not the wellspring of Calvin's theology", because that is what I remember most clearly (and struggle with, for that matter).

But while the book is easy to read, it does try to cram about 700+ years of history into 800 ish pages, which means some extreme simplifications are made. For example, the book says that "Catherine [Catherine the Great] did little to improve the plight of serfs during her reign".

Since I just finished a biography about her, I found this simplification a little insulting because she had a plan to free the serfs, but eventually abandoned it for practical reasons. The book also made no mention of her Nakaz, which I thought was a pity since she did consult many people about it and their reactions would have been helpful to explaining attitudes in Russia.

More importantly, I thought that this volume was too focused on Europe, specifically the British Isles and France, and later on America. Russia was given several sections, but not whole chapters, while Asia, Africa and the Middle East were largely left out (they did appear in the last one third, but I thought their presence was far too little). The persecution in Japan was almost entirely left out, and a lot of the history in India and China greatly summarised.

It is a pity, because there is a history, and in the case of Africa, the book even admits that "it [Christianity] has a continuous history on the continent of Africa of nearly two thousand years." So even if there weren't many theological debates going on, I think the development of Christianity in those regions should have been given more space.

Thankfully, things did get more globalised towards the end, and I found the discussion on the new centres of global Christianity and the modern theological trajectories to be fascinating (especially the contextual theologies, since I haven't heard of most of them). It's an area that I'd like to read more about so hopefully I can find more recommendations some day.

If you've read volume one, you'll want to read volume two. The style of the book is largely the same, and it's a good way to get an overview of the history of the Church (even if it is very European-centric). And to end, a quote I liked:

"The ultimate value of history lies not in its predictive ability or even its capacity for elucidation, but in its aptitude to teach humility."

Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a free and honest review.