ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the concepts discussed in part 1 of this book. The part highlights selected social features of the two millennia of Christianity, beginning with sociological factors that formed its first century, then tracking Christianity's evolution and intersection with classical sociology, and ending with contemporary political expressions of Christianity of interest to sociology. It leads with a literary examination of the various texts that comprise the New Testament, employing textual criticism, source criticism, and redaction criticism. The part explicates Christianity as a world-historic phenomenon and locates it within the civilizational analytic perspective of comparative historical sociology with reference to the Axial Age breakthrough, the religio-political nexus as a societal meta institutional framework, and the rise of modernity. It illuminates how the theological concept of transcendence typifies world religions in the classical sociology of religion, though Durkheim presented a transcendence of the collectivity over the individual.
