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Diarmaid MacCulloch puts the "tour" in the Tour de force (1100+ pages) since he delivers a comprehensive presentation of Christian history. From pre-Christian thought, the life of Christ, the formation of the ancient creeds, medieval religious thought, the Reformation, the RCC's Counterreformation, the council of Trent, the puritans to the sundry expressions of the Faith in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Churches he delivers a fascinating read. This grand volume is interesting and intriguing forasmuch as the author provides extensive details of well-known historical incidents in addition to unfamiliar events and figures in Christian history.

MacCulloch describes the impact of:

- Paul
- Augustine
- Thomas
- Luther
- Popes
- Orthodox patriarchs including Patriarch Bartholomew I
- And numerous additional material.

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A Cautionary Presage: The notes I write below may disappoint, displease, sadden, and upset readers who affirm a non-confessional Christian view and possibly hurt some readers' feelings. Below is potentially alarming strident apologetic truth. If you dislike conservative religious viewpoints and Christian apologetics, you may want to cease from reading. The following is based on my personal research as a conservative Christian theist who disallows Miller's epistemic pre-commitments.

I personally am reluctant to avow the author's critical pre-theoretical grid and underlying axioms applied to his textual scrutiny and historical analysis. As a confessing Christian I prefer the fallible works of Jenkins, R. Brown, Bock, Noll, Schaff, Hart, etc.

So, if you enjoy a lengthy book on history;
If you aim to grow in your critical analysis of Christianity;
If you desire to become conversant at a cocktail party pertaining to Christian history using a non-strict approach in touching orthodoxy;
If you take pleasure in Newsweek Magazine's editorially stance and other media outlets that abhor conservative religious views;

And if your cultural and religious presuppositions concur with Jon Meacham (editor Newsweek) who boldly declared: "I am also a critic of Christianity, if by critic one means an observer who brings historical and literary judgment to bear on the texts and traditions of the church." If you answered yes to three or more aforementioned questions, then "CHRISTIANITY: The First Three Thousand Years" by Diarmaid MacCulloch (professor of the history of the church, Oxford) is a good fit for your rational, spiritual, and social pre-commitments. Additionally anti-conservative Meacham, with profound satisfaction, divulges: "I sense a kind of kinship with Diarmaid MacCulloch," whereas MacCulloch confesses that "I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species." Meachum in absolute conformity adds: "That puzzle confronts anyone who approaches Christianity with a measure of detachment."

Stephen Prothero rightly notes (concerning judges) that when it comes to scholars and their biases, there are "only two types: those who acknowledge their biases and therefore try not to succumb to them, and those who are ignorant of their biases and therefore succumb to them unwittingly" (USA Today, 5-17-10).
Unbeknownst to these two religious non-conservatives is the actuality that their own controlling presuppositions are not truly detached but empowered by a priori biases and engrained assumptions including:

- The biblical text is not inspired scripture revealed in history by a sovereign God who has aseity and as such furnishes unfolding Redemptive Holy Writ while utilizing flawed men to make His word known; they presuppose that a perfect God cannot use imperfect men to communicate His perfect will as He expresses His authority over history.
- An overly critical method concerning religious claims. They affirm this critical scheme as a virtue while putting critical tools aside while they are leaning on a worldview that lacks the ontic foundation that furnishes the necessary a priori conditions for the laws of reason required to analyze textual and historical issues.
- A moderate version of relativism that leads to irrationality and lacks the epistemic credentials to account for the comprehension and promulgation of their own anti-logical rational paradigm.
- A rejection of the universality of humankind's sin, the sinfulness of sin, and the necessary and sufficient solution to sin exclusively found in the atonement through the cross of Jesus Christ as He alone provides complete expiation and imputation.

This work has an alluring writing style encased in a relaxed progressive bias; it's hefty and always remarkable; nonetheless the author may want to be more attentive to the epistemic difficulties and irrationality that his moderate skeptical approach is built upon. His presuppositions do not provide an immutable ground necessary to account for the immutability of the laws of logic (LNC/LI), whereas these invariant laws are necessarily utilized in all external criticism of history or texts. Internal criticism of the author's worldview should precede any external skepticism his autonomous thought deploys forasmuch as his lack of an immutable foundation destroys the epistemic possibility of proving or disproving anything, including his view of history.
[[The Necessary Existence of God: The Proof of Christianity Through Presuppositional Apologetics]]

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"Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years" Overview

The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of The Reformation returns with the definitive history of Christianity for our time

Once in a generation a historian will redefine his field, producing a book that demands to be read-a product of electrifying scholarship conveyed with commanding skill. Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity is such a book. Breathtaking in ambition, it ranges back to the origins of the Hebrew Bible and covers the world, following the three main strands of the Christian faith.

Christianity will teach modern readers things that have been lost in time about how Jesus' message spread and how the New Testament was formed. We follow the Christian story to all corners of the globe, filling in often neglected accounts of conversions and confrontations in Africa and Asia. And we discover the roots of the faith that galvanized America, charting the rise of the evangelical movement from its origins in Germany and England. This book encompasses all of intellectual history-we meet monks and crusaders, heretics and saints, slave traders and abolitionists, and discover Christianity's essential role in driving the enlightenment and the age of exploration, and shaping the course of World War I and World War II.

We are living in a time of tremendous religious awareness, when both believers and non-believers are deeply engaged by questions of religion and tradition, seeking to understand the violence sometimes perpetrated in the name of God. The son of an Anglican clergyman, MacCulloch writes with deep feeling about faith. His last book, The Reformation, was chosen by dozens of publications as Best Book of the Year and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. This awe-inspiring follow-up is a landmark new history of the faith that continues to shape the world.

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