Rowan Williams on three millennia of Christianity

Diarmaid MacCulloch wrote a brilliant history of the Reformation and now he has turned his attention to 3000 years of Christianity.Rowan Williams reviewed the book in the Guardian:

The sections on Christianity's expansion eastwards and the tragic history of the churches of central Asia, still a little-known and under-researched subject, are among the very best in the book. Also outstanding are his treatments of the achievements and limitations of European Christian mission (he describes India as the "greatest failure" of Protestant mission effort, given the political advantage with which it worked), of the intimidatingly complex stories of Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox in the borderlands of the Russian empire, from the 17th to the 20th centuries, and of the distinctive legacy of Calvin, whom he rightly sees as setting out not just to carry through piecemeal reforms of an existing institution but to reimagine the Catholic religion itself on the basis of the same biblical and traditional material that others used to defend the papal church.