The Lost History of Christianity is written by Philip Jenkins, offering a new angle to view our world today and outlining an important perspective of the history of Christianity outside the European areas for the first thousand years. Another book is called Transforming Mission by David J. Bosch, giving a comprehensive reflection across Christian traditions and mission history. Although Christianity has been deeply rooted in the West of the grand journey of the history, it did not last until the second half of its history.
When we talk about Christianity, we usually focus on the Western Europe, where Christianity flourished for centuries in the midst of religious wars, social turmoil and Islamic competition for economic and military power (David, 2013). Referring to the subtitle
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The doctrine of the Trinity formulated by the Chalcedonian creed has dominated today’s Christianity, which standardized the doctrine of the Trinity throughout the Roman Empire. “Many Christians today simply assume that once the creed was formulated, every Christian in the world accepted it” (Elton, 2013). By assessing the history, it shows that some of the contradicting voices have spread their own Christology throughout other parts of the world. Plus, when we trace the roots of the churches in India and Ethiopia in the 1st century, you will realize that there is no linkage to the Nicene and Caledonian councils, which mean the councils held thousands of miles away, had almost no effect on them. Eventually, the churches with different theological beliefs outside the empire thoroughly vanished but the church within the Roman Empire survived. So as the dominant theology today, it could have been different which Christianity might even be thought of as an Eastern religion rather than a Western religion (Elton,