Our previous version of this page was titled “Forge of Faith Unleashed.” That is not the name of any book. The book actually being reviewed is The Church of the Revolutionary Age: Christian Brotherhood, Volume 2 by Henri Daniel-Rops, and the old review had its subject wrong as well. We are fixing both here.
What this book is actually about
It is not a book about friendship between men. The “Christian Brotherhood” in the title means something entirely different: it refers to what Catholics call the separated brethren, meaning Christians who follow Jesus but are not in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. The book is a history of Christian division and of the ecumenical movement that tried to heal it.
If you are a Protestant or non-denominational reader, you are one of the separated brethren this book is written about. That is worth knowing before you spend money on it.
Our old review claimed the book teaches iron-sharpens-iron friendship, vulnerability, and accountability, and that it contains study questions for men’s groups. None of that is in the book. That review was written from the word “Brotherhood” in the title and nothing else.
Who wrote it
Henri Daniel-Rops (1901 to 1965) was the pen name of Henri Petiot, a French Catholic historian elected to the Académie française. He wrote around seventy books in thirty years, including Jesus and His Times and the ten-volume History of the Church of Christ. This title is part of the tenth and final installment of that series.
The Catholic frame, stated plainly
Called to Better is not Catholic, and this is a thoroughly Catholic book. Daniel-Rops writes as a member of a church that understands itself as the one from which others separated. He is generally generous toward Protestants and Orthodox Christians, and he is honest about Catholic failures in producing those divisions. But the vantage point is fixed, and a Protestant reader will disagree with the premise on nearly every page.
That does not make it a bad book. Reading a serious historian describe your own tradition from the outside is a genuinely useful exercise, and few Protestants ever do it. Just go in knowing what you are reading rather than expecting a devotional.
Practical notes
This is Volume 2. Starting here means starting partway through an argument. The Cluny Media edition currently listed was issued in 2024; an earlier Cluny printing runs 282 pages. We could not confirm that the Cardinal Mercier line quoted in our old review (“To unite, we must love one another; to love one another, it is necessary to know one another”) appears in this volume. It is a real Mercier quotation, but we cannot verify it is in this book.
Where we land
Serious church history for a reader who wants it, and completely wrong for anyone who came here looking for a book on male friendship. If brotherhood in the ordinary sense is what you want, the related reviews below are the right place to go.
The Church of the Revolutionary Age: Christian Brotherhood, Volume 2 on Amazon