Description
About the Book
This work aims to provide the interested reader with an overview of whence and how Christianity arose, how it then survived over two millennia, and what of it we may still believe and hold as a sensible faith to carry us on into Christianity’s third thousand years, grateful to our Creator that we so can. It aims to be a concise compendium whilst also providing the reader with documented access to both the utilised primary source data—well, as close to primary as one can get to such events—and also occasionally reports the scholarly mental trail the author followed in the task of creating it. That author was academically trained in history, philosophy, theology, natural science, medicine and clinical epidemiology, all to higher degree level.
The manuscript’s first three chapters respectively delineate the needed etymology, report the current scientifically accepted understanding of our Universe’s creation (being careful to include a realistic assessment of the extent of our ability to achieve that task), and then walk through evolution, essentially the how, when and where self-organization within matter led onwards until the tree of life eventually blossomed with humans. The fourth chapter then focusses evolution’s lens onto a deeper study of the source, development, nature and modus operandi of the human body and mind with readers encouraged to make their own decisions as to just what they are, and whence they will go. Eventually in chapter five we focus on Jesus of Nazareth, his historicity, religious heritage, physical derivation, earlier life’s events, ministry years, and his two climaxes: Crucifixion and Resurrection. Chapter six then surveys the first 2,000 years of Christianity, with closer attention to the first five centuries which take us to the Chalcedonian resolution. The next fifteen centuries are examined in the ‘broad sweep’. One hopes to have found enough hooks to support an intelligent assessment of where we are and what Tomorrow might hold for us. That is the essence of chapter seven which attempts to look into God’s Mind and sums up what this writer believes he can carry forward for the few years more he might have on Earth before he is permitted to see Eternity from within.
About the author
Richard Davey was born in 1945 in Victoria, Australia, where he has since been domiciled. At several Australian universities he studied in turn philosophy, history, theology, biological science, medicine and clinical epidemiology, all to post graduate level and has worked for some fifty-five years, the greater part thereof as a physician, specialising finally in Chemical Pathology and working therein at the Royal Melbourne Hospital until 2008’s end when he then refocused in half-time, FIFO, clinical consulting in the NT’s outback, working within Aboriginal health services whilst also contributing to the practice of pathology in that specific remote context; he retired at 2021’s end. Hospital work also led him into the RAAF’s Specialist Reserve as a Medical Officer; he retired in 2010 having reached the rank of Wing Commander. He was ordained priest in the Australian Anglican church by Archbishop Sir Frank Woods on Whitsunday, 1971. Woods supported his clinical redirection and in 1974 he withdrew from the stipendiary ministry and proceeded to study medicine. He remained a non-stipendiary cleric. Philosophy, faith and clinical work have all remained a delightful blend for Richard with research and writing perhaps see-able as culminating in his leading the drafting of the IFCC, the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine’s current Code of Ethics, it approved by the IFCC Executive Board, July 28, 2021, the last year in which he sat as a member of the IFCC’s Ethics Taskforce.
