The reign of Brazil's military government from 1964 to 1985 split Catholic and evangelical churches along pro- and anti-dictatorship lines.

Now, more than 25 years later, Brazil's newly established Truth Commission is investigating churches that supported the dictatorship for potentially having committed "human rights abuses or supported members of the military responsible for such abuses."

InterVarsity Press (IVP) has pulled a well-acclaimed book on the Reformation from shelves after a review pointed out at least two dozen significant errors in one section.

G. R. Evans’s book The Roots of the Reformation: Tradition, Emergence and Rupture, which was released in March, analyzed the relationship between the Reformation and the medieval church. Evans, a former British Academy Research Reader in Theology, is a noted scholar and a professor of medieval theology and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. Her book received several notable endorsements, including one from J. I. Packer hailing it as “certainly the best of its kind currently available.”

But last month, Carl Trueman, departmental chair of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, published a review at the e-magazine Reformation21 that listed significant errors within Evans' section discussing the Reformation, including inaccurate dates, names, and omissions of key cultural factors that influenced it.

“The Reformation section is unfortunately replete with errors of historical fact, some of which are very serious, even if a few are possibly the result of typos,” Trueman wrote. “The sheer number of these errors renders the book a liability in the classroom and undermines its stated purpose as a textbook.”

In response, IVP said in a statement that though it stood by Evans’s work, it would be taking the book out of print until the publication of a revised second edition, set to be released by the end of August.

“We hope that this underscores the abiding value of Professor Evans' book, one that a number of internationally respected scholars have recommended as a masterful investigation of the Reformation's roots from the early church through the medieval era,” IVP stated.

In 2009, Christianity Today reported on scholarly publisher Wiley-Blackwell’s withdrawal of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization; the editor alleged the publisher was trying to censor the work.

Cross-posted from The Christian History Blog

When theologian George Kalantzis returned to the Wheaton College campus last fall after spending the summer in the Holy Land, he had a very pleasant surprise. While he was out of the country, two donors had approached the college administration about funding a program that would encourage interaction between Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism over their mutual legacy from the early church.

No one at Wheaton knew just how much these donors would fund, but George and his colleagues decided to dream big: they envisioned a Center for the Study of Early Christianity, with a vertically integrated program from undergraduate courses up through master's and doctoral studies.

Their big vision was rewarded.

Philip Jenkins, one of today's authorities on the global church's past and future, has released another highly regarded - if sobering - account of Christianity outside the West. The Lost History of Christianity (Oxford, 2008) tells the winding story of the faith's rise and fall in the Middle East and Central Asia, particularly in Mesopotamia, which became the center of the early church and its wide-reaching cross-cultural missions. The theologies practiced here, those of the Jacobites and Nestorians, were later considered heretical by the Christianized Roman Empire. Yet most of today's dwindling Iraqi Christian population considers one of the strands its "spiritual ancestor," says Jenkins in his most recent CT article, "Recovering Church History."

Jenkins sat down with Beliefnet editor (and CT contributor) Patton Dodd to talk about the book. Here are some of the most provocative excerpts:

On the Eastern church:

[The] Eastern world has a solid claim to be the direct lineal heir of the earliest New Testament Christianity. Throughout their history, the Eastern churches used Syriac, which is close to Jesus's own language of Aramaic, and they followed Yeshua, not Jesus. Everything about these churches runs so contrary to what we think we know. . . .

Just a suggestion. Perhaps we should think of these Eastern communities - the Nestorians and Jacobites - as the real survivors of ancient Christianity. In that case, the great Western churches we know, the Catholic and Orthodox, are the "alternative Christianities."

On early Christianity and Islam:

Christians survive perfectly well for centuries under Muslim regimes, and the relations between the two are often excellent. In fact, Islam borrows massively from those ancient Christian churches. They borrow a lot of the architectural styles of mosques, the worship practices, and customs like Lent, which becomes the Muslim Ramadan. In fact, if a sixth or seventh century Eastern Christian came back today, that person would probably feel more at home in a mosque than a typical Western church service. That comfort level might change once they explored the doctrines being taught, but the general atmosphere would be very similar. The more you look at these Eastern Christianities, the easier it is to understand that Islam and Christianity emerged as sister faiths.

On ?dying' religions:

We really don't know why religions die, and if they do, in what sense they might leave ghosts. One thing that strikes me is how much a dead religion influences its successor - how for instance the old Christianity left its mark on the successor faith of Islam.

Finally, there is a major theological issue that nobody addresses, the theology of extinction. How do Christians explain the death of their religion in a particular time and place? Is that really part of God's plan? Or maybe our time scale is just too short, and one day we will realize why this had to happen. But as I say, nobody is really discussing these questions.

Read the rest of the interview here, and share your reactions here.

The inaugural gathering of The Jesus Project, a group of biblical scholars and academics in related disciplines embarking on a five-year quest to unearth the historical Jesus, took place in Amherst, N.Y. December 5th through 7th. Historian R. Joseph Hoffman, Chair of The Scientific Committee for the Study of Religion (CSER), the Jesus Project's sponsor, describes the group's intent and operating principles on its website.

The Jesus Project, as CSER has named the new effort, is the first methodologically agnostic approach to the question of Jesus' historical existence. But we are not neutral, let alone willfully ambiguous, about the objectives of the project itself. We believe in assessing the quality of the evidence available for looking at this question before seeing what the evidence has to tell us. We do not believe the task is to produce a "plausible" portrait of Jesus prior to considering the motives and goals of the Gospel writers in telling his story. We think the history and culture of the times provide many significant clues about the character of figures similar to Jesus. We believe the mixing of theological motives and historical inquiry is impermissible. We regard previous attempts to rule the question out of court as vestiges of a time when the Church controlled the boundaries of permissible inquiry into its sacred books. More directly, we regard the question of the historical Jesus as a testable hypothesis, and we are committed to no prior conclusions about the outcome of our inquiry. This is a statement of our principles, and we intend to stick to them.

The project was devised more than two years ago, and officially launched at a January 2007 conference, "Scripture and Skepticism," at the University of California at Davis.

CSER's website provides a list of notable attendees at this December's gathering, as well as a schedule of proceedings, and a follow-up report.

Public radio WBFO 88.7 FM in Buffalo interviewed one scholar involved in the project, Robert M. Price, two days before the event. According to his website bio, Price attended a fundamentalist (his word) Baptist church early in life, was involved in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship during his time at Montclair State College, and received an MTS degree in New Testament from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in the late ''70s. Since this time Price has distanced himself from evangelical Christianity, collected two PhDs, moved in and out of various forms of institutionalized liberal religion, and written numerous books. A 2007 release, Jesus is Dead, argues, according to its back cover, that

(1) not only is there no good reason to think that Jesus ever rose from the dead, (2) there is no good reason to think that he ever lived or died at all.

The publisher also notes that readers of the book

will have ammunition with which to counter the arguments of muscular apologists such as Gary Habermas, N.T. Wright, or William Lane Craig.

Price's inclusion in a study group premised on the belief that "the mixing of theological motives and historical inquiry is impermissible" has not been lost on Dan Wallace, professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and Executive Director for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. Blogging at PrimeTimeJesus, Wallace writes:

No one is neutral when it comes to Jesus, and we might as well all admit that fact. It is beyond my comprehension how a man who has explicitly and frequently written that the historical Jesus is a myth could be a part of this project.

The Jesus Project's next conference is tentatively scheduled for May 2009 in Chicago. Papers from the December 2008 conference will be published in 2009 by Prometheus Books under the title Sources of the Jesus Tradition: An Inquiry.

Sunday's Daily Mail and yesterday's Telegraph covered the removal of words associated with Christianity (and therefore, British history), fairy tales, and nature in the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

Words such as disciple, devil, monk, fern, elf, pasture, and willow have been removed from the 10,000-word dictionary and replaced with words such as MP3 player, blog, tolerant, democratic, and biodegradable - all to reflect England's multicultural, technological ethos, says publisher Oxford University Press.

Vineeta Gupta, head of children's dictionaries at Oxford, told the Telegraph, "Nowadays, the environment has changed. We are also much more multicultural. People don't go to Church as often as before. Our understanding of religion is within multiculturalism, which is why some words such as Pentecost or Whitsun would have been in 20 years ago but not now."

(That was probably a good call on Whitsun.)

It's a little unclear why both papers are reporting on the changes now, as the newest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary came out in 2007. Both papers cite an Irish mother of four, Lisa Saunders, who compared six editions of the dictionary from the last 30 years and was "horrified" by the number of words that had been removed.

"The Christian faith still has a strong following," Saunders told the Daily Mail. "To eradicate so many words associated with the Christianity will have a big effect on the numerous primary schools who use it."

The Atlantic's Ross Douthat aptly noted that the removal of animals like gerbil and porcupine from a children's dictionary is particularly perplexing, perhaps more so than the removal of churchy words. Vox Day of World Net Daily, on the other hand, sees the word-swaps as warning signs of the destruction of Western culture due to immigration and pluralism.

Every November America's thoughts turn briefly toward those curious early settlers of New England. While it's the Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation--those Separatists from the Church of England at the center of our much-contested Thanksgiving myth--who normally receive our attention, this year regular NPR contributor Sarah Vowell's bestseller, The Wordy Shipmates, has directed our gaze to their Puritan cousins to the north.

Vowell's breezy style and playful manner may put off those who hold the Puritans in high esteem as models of devotion. And her occasionally freewheeling conjectures will no doubt be deemed incautious by the guild of historians. Nevertheless, those serious about their Christian faith and those serious about history should take heart that she's respectfully mainstreamed both while offering a better-than-cursory treatment. Any book that sparks worthwhile conversation about the Puritans in the national press is a reason to give thanks.

Some of the more notable reviews:

Marc Arkin in The Wall Street Journal

Erika Schickel in the Los Angeles Times

Stephen Prothero in The Washington Post

And a brief interview in The Boston Globe.

An associate professor of church history at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and senior editor of Christian History & Biography, Armstrong chooses his favorite websites about church history.

Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL)
This is the mother lode of church-history-related books by some of the most brilliant and inspiring of our foreparents. In a wide array of digital formats, you'll find G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Augustine's Confessions; volumes of the church fathers; an archive of hymn tunes; and much more.

Christian History & Biography
At this site, you'll find articles from current and past issues of the CT sister publication, a slew of online-only newsletters, and such goodies as This Week in Christian History, Person of the Week, and Quote of the Week. Also, I hear that its editors are working on some major improvements for the site that are coming soon, so stay tuned!

Early Church Online Encyclopedia
Though no longer maintained, ECOLE is a worthy archive. The glossary provides short definitions of early Christian people, groups, events, and ideas from Abelard to Zosimus. The longer articles address such topics as "Sadducees," "Stoicism," and "the Arian Controversy." The accompanying chronology pulls it all together.

Internet Medieval Sourcebook
This chronologically organized trove of primary documents is accompanied by pithy explanations of some of the important interpretive themes and arguments in medieval studies today. Check out, for instance, the material on feudalism: you think you know what this term means, but scholars today are changing their minds about it!

Met Museum: Timeline of Art History
This site links timelines to maps, providing a synoptic view of world art and architecture through history. The resources after A.D. 1, especially in the West, include a rich mine of material related to the history of Christianity. For example, see the essay on "Private Devotion in Medieval Christianity," linked in the timeline at "1400?1500, Europe."

Ar! Shiver me timbers and blow me down. Today be, of course, Talk Like a Pirate Day. Sadly, we have little on our site about pirates. I had high hopes for the recent Christian book Samson and the Pirate Monks: Calling Men to Authentic Brotherhood by Nate Larkin. But beware: the book has nothing in it about pirates.

So I turned instead to Colin Woodard, author of the new and highly acclaimed book that's actually about pirates, The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down.

"The pirates themselves demonstrated little in the way of religion," he told me, unsurprisingly. "But Woodes Rogers [the "Man Who Brought Them Down" of Woodard's title] appears to have been at least partially inspired by his faith, having repeatedly ordered stocks of tracts from the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. Seems he thought part of the way of reforming pirates would be through their spiritual redemption. He arranged for SPCK materials for both an abortive project to reform the pirates of Madagascar and, later, for his mission to the Bahamas."

Woodard talks a bit about this in his book, but that's not what attracted Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler, who recently recommended the book to his blog readers.

"Like the pirates themselves, this book will take your imagination captive," Mohler wrote. "I was taken with the book from its introduction to the end, and I really appreciate Woodard's careful explanation of why the pirates were such important characters on the world scene."

That's about it on Christianity and pirates, at least for this year's TLAPD celebrations. In the meantime, ChristianBook.com sells Pirate Gold Sea Monkeys.

(Oh, and spare me any comments below about I've just spent more time on Talk Like a Pirate Day than on most days of the Christian calendar. I'm well aware of that. Pirates are just much more fun to blog about today than, say, Theodore of Tarsus or Januarius.)

Sticks and carrots:

At the White House this morning, President Bush ran out of patience with the genocidal regime ruling Sudan. He announced a collection of sanctions against the nation-state of Sudan and individuals associated with the sickening killing and rape still going on in the Darfur region at the western border with Chad.

See this video clip:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2007/05/29/VI2007052900512.html

Here's a link to the Washington Post online article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052900462.html

The Save Darfur Coalition includes many evangelical groups that should be encouraged by this move. China especially is likely to resist the imposition of sanctions.

We Christians must understand how the situation in Darfur ripples throughout the region and globally. Until there is real peace in Sudan, this region of Africa will remain violent and unstable.

The carrot and the stick are now on the table, Omar Bashir.

Prayer for the persecuted church in Sudan in the south should just be the beginning of our commitment. I agree with President Bush that we cannot "avert our eyes" from this suffering.

This week I attended the inaugural one-day conference of the Gospel Coalition. This consortium of more than 50 evangelical pastors have united around a common confessional statement and theological vision of ministry. Organizers hope this short conference, hosted by Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and attended by 500+ pastors and other ministry leaders, will propel a long-term effort to renew and reform evangelical thought and practice. D.A. Carson, a New Testament scholar at TEDS, and Tim Keller, senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, organized the group, which has met privately for three years now. Other speakers and workshop presenters included Crawford Loritts, Phil Ryken, Mark Driscoll, and John Piper.

I thought a couple statements stood out in the Gospel Coalition's founding document:

While running my errands this weekend, I listened to the first three disks of the audiobook, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul. The author is Tony Hendra, a great satirist who was a university chum of John Cleese and Graham Chapman and who went on to become the editor-in-chief of Spy.

It is wonderfully comic for a spiritual memoir, but when the author gets serious, he is full of insight. After the stern and aloof husband of the woman he didn't quite seduce dragged the 14-year-old Tony to a monastery to be admonished and shriven, Hendra had a religious experience in which all the mumbo jumbo he'd been taught as a Catholic child suddenly came alive for him--became real! His description of that almost sounds like the classic evangelical conversion story.

But to my point ...