"Can you teach yourself Christianity? Yes. Can you teach yourself to be a Christian? Probably not."
This opinion comes from Rev Greg Hoyland, author with Rev Canon John Young of Christianity: A complete introduction (Hodder, £14.99, £9.99 e-book). Now on its sixth edition and largely rewritten, it's part of the Teach Yourself series, so Hoyland might be thought to have an axe to grind – but he's clear that the book is more than just a dry outline of facts. "There are clues to faith in the book," he tells Christian Today. "It isn't just intellectual content."
There is, however, a lot of intellectual content in its more than 300 pages. It's designed for two reader groups, the general public and serious students. Hoyland says: "As I was writing I had in mind both the insiders and the outsiders. For the general public, someone working in healthcare or teaching will encounter Christians and find it useful to understand their beliefs and practices. Undergraduates doing literature, theology or history will find it useful too – you can't assume they know all this."
However, there's another group Hoyland believes might benefit from reading Christianity: A complete introduction – and that's Christians. A lecturer in theology for more than 25 years, he's found that many Christians today, particularly in the new and emerging Church movements, have little sense of their history or how their faith came to be what it was. But rather than rejecting tradition and history, he wants them to understand and own it.
He's now writing about "tradition as a reservoir of memory, rather than a prison cell or a cage". A reservoir, he says, "slows the water down so it can be used for creative purposes", and a richer understanding of the origins and scope of the Christian faith can do the same. He's critical of those who think they can ignore the last 2,000 years and just go back the Bible: "Try to go straight back to the early Church and it's a massive leap – a lot of beliefs were still coalescing."
The book is a fascinating combination of history, biblical studies and cultural references that provides an overview of Christianity, in its theological and global development, from the earliest times to the present day. It isn't quite a complete introduction – Hoyland comes across as a little embarrassed about the title – but it does give an excellent sense of how the faith began, spread and deepened over the centuries.
There are chapters on the life and teaching of Jesus, the Bible and how to read it, Christian belief and practice and how the Church became different Churches. There's also a section on 'The modern world', which deals with secularisation, Church and society, science and cyberspace and the challenge of other faiths.
Each section has quotations from key sources, in-depth introductions to topic, 'spotlight' boxes with illustrations and anecdotes and 'fact-check' multiple choice tests at the end. And while the scholarship is rigorous and detailed enough to satisfy any enquirer, the book's clearly written from a position of faith – though it's a questioning and enquiring faith. So, for instance, when writing about the atonement, the range of views about how the death of Christ has been understood is laid out – challengingly, to Christians who might have taken the idea of substitution as a given. The book challenges the Western-oriented view of Christianity, too – Hoyland says the authors have tried to reflect the fact that it's a global faith.
As part of that they've tried to be "broad and even-handed" in their treatment of different Church streams. "In the West we get Protestantism, Catholicism and evangelicalism and miss out Orthodoxy," Hoyland says. "But Orthodoxy has some very interesting things to say. It's less hell-bent on being relevant to the modern world."
If someone really wants to be a Christian, there's no substitute for meeting with God in the company of believers. But learning about the way he's revealed himself through the Church down the centuries is a good place to start, and this is an accessible, challenging and helpful introduction.
