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Nick Needham, Shapers of Christianity, Brief Sketches of Twelve Outstanding Christians from across the Ages, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth,  2025.

ISBN 978 1 80040 523 3

History is His Story, but God chooses and uses His people to make it. In the making of it, some rise to great heights like eagles. Dr Nick Needham, Professor of Church History at Highland and Islands University in Scotland, has selected twelve of them who through the centuries God has mightily used in the making, remaking and sustaining of His church.

            These twelve are: Irenaeus of Lyon, Gregory of Nazianzus, Anselm of Canterbury, Theophylact of Ochrid, John Wycliffe, Peter Martyr, Francis Turretin, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, Tikhon of Zadonsk, Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield and J. Gresham Machen.

            By John Knox’s reckoning these twelve worthies would all have a rightful place in the apostolic succession, not in the mechanical sense of the laying on of hands from generation to generation, but in the sense that they upheld the Apostles’ doctrine, especially in the crucial area of the Person and Work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

     We might wonder why some of these were chosen and why others were not. There’s no easy answer to the second question, but the answer to the first appears to be that, despite each one’s particular place in their day and generation, there is a common thread of attachment to the orthodox doctrine outlined in the Nicene Creed.

     Dr Needham’s hope in writing this book is that ‘these sketches will help to kindle a spiritual interest in God’s people and God’s work across the ages’ — a hope that is well and truly realised.

     In his clear, crisp and precise way, Dr Needham gets to the heart of his reason for choosing each one, providing a quote from each of them, brief biographical details and justification for his choice of them as he distils each one’s contribution.

     My one disappointment with the book is the brevity of the chapter on Machen, whose monumental rescue of Christianity from the clutches of the dead hand of what is falsely called ‘liberalism’ or ‘modernism’ has ‘strengthened the hand’ and more particularly the faith of true believers. The antidote to this unbelief is to reread Machen’s Christianity And Liberalism.

     This is a book which leaves the reader crying out for more to which, happily, there is a solution: ‘Take and read’ Dr Needham’s recently published five-volume Church History Two Thousand Years of Christ’s Power.

— Bob Thomas