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Introduction |
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| I. | Steering through Church History | ||
| The Church as the message about Jesus Christ. | |||
| A. | How is it that we are able to talk about Jesus Christ today? | ||
| 1. | His name has been handed down to us by generations of people who came after him for over twenty centuries. | ||
| 2. | It was not just by a book handed down to us, but by a continuous community of people who heard the word of God proclaimed by Jesus himself. | ||
| 3. | Nor do we meet Jesus by sticking rigidly to a creed that was formulated long ago. | ||
| 4. | We meet him in the very fabric of our daily lives, in the form through which he has been embodied in the everyday living of those who went before us. The happenings and the people, rather than formulas, have carried on the faith. | ||
| B. | The Gospel and Civilizations | ||
| 1. | The Gospel message was proclaimed for the first time in reign of the Emperor Tiberius in Palestine in a remote province of the Roman Empire. Jesus and his disciples lived, worked and spoke against a background of biblical culture. Yet that same message reached the shores of the Mediterranean and then the whole world. | ||
| 2. | When this message has been proclaimed over a long period of time in any particular culture, what is it that the messengers are communicating? Is it the message alone or is it in conjunction with its own cultural background? This Christian civilization has sometimes destroyed or at least pulled apart ancient cultures of the nations it encountered. It is well known that the conquest of America by the Spanish and the preaching of Christianity in the New World coincided with the collapse of the ancient, pre-Columbian civilizations; i.e., Aztecs and the Incas. The rejection of Christianity by Japan and China has been considered to be a deliberate self-defense in the face of a destructive power of their civilizations. | ||
| C. | The Gospel and Institution | ||
| 1. | The difficulties don't end there. Christian life is not limited to the inner-illumination of individuals. Witness comes first, but it necessarily entails education and the organization of an institution in order to be able to receive newcomers and teach them. Now every institution produces power, and all power is similar. The church which exists to hand on Jesus through his Word and Sacrament will always be tempted to organize itself like a political and social organization and take as its model the society which surrounds it. The question must be asked then, "Aren't we a long ways from Jesus and his gospel? Shouldn't the church be purified?" This has been tried sometimes successfully and sometimes not so successfully, resulting in schisms within the church; i.e., Waldo of Lyons, St. Francis of Assisi and Martin Luther. | ||
| D. | Why Study History? | ||
| 1. | History can never be lived over again. An ancient philosopher once said,' One can never bathe twice in the same river.' We shall not find in church history a set of rules that we can apply directly. But church history is to some extent the treasure from which the scribe of the kingdom constantly draws out things old and new. | ||
| See Handout 1 | |||
| See Handout 2 | |||
| 2. | When several people have the same friend in common, each one recognizes something different in him, depending on his or her own experience of that friend. Similarly, over the centuries Christians have experienced Jesus Christ in different ways. Church history makes us share this experience and enlarges our own, which will always be limited. It helps us to discover the successive contributions of different eras to our own, present day form of Christian living. Every heritage merits respect, but at the same time we receive it with certain qualifications. | ||
| II. | The Working Plan of How We are going to do this History Stuff! | ||
| A. | Church History is the History of People | ||
| 1. | We cannot separate church history from the general history of people. We must describe the world in which Christians lived, the political, social and economic forces which influenced the life of the church. We will first of all look at the map of Christ's time. | ||
| B. | Traces of the Past | ||
| 1. | History makes the past come alive through the traces it has left us. As far as the history of religion is concerned, these can be buildings, churches, works of art, statues, frescoes. We will look at past documents, pictures, art and religious sites on this journey through history. | ||
| C. | Written Evidence | ||
| 1. | The historian's foremost tools are still the written sources, the texts. We will look at some of these ancient texts. | ||
| D. | A Part of the Whole | ||
| 1. | A letter or an inscription may be a coherent whole, but more generally, the text will just be part of a larger whole text. The bibliography will give the details on the whole text if you wish to read it for yourself. If it piques your interest, go find it at the state library or at the very least the seminary library at Menlo Park. | ||
| E. | Understanding | ||
| 1. | On a first reading, do your best to understand all of the words of the text. Note the people involved and the places described. | ||
| F. | Translation | ||
| 1. | There is an old saying; 'Translators are traitors'; inevitably they cannot reproduce all of the meaning of the original text. Several translations of the Bible exist and on some of the finer points there can be significant differences between one translator and another. A point to remember: the writer of the text is always the winner of the battle! Losers don't write their history, either because they are dead or in subservient positions. | ||
| G. | Literary Genres | ||
| 1. | It is important to give due consideration to the literary genre of a document. That enables us to understand properly any information it has to give us. A police report is not the same as a sermon, a private letter is not the same as a legal document. | ||
| H. | Incidental Information | ||
| 1. | A text does not only give us information which the author explicitly intends for us to have, but also it can indirectly give us information which is even more valuable and more certain that was not intended. Example, Pliny, in writing to Trajan, was primarily concerned with maintaining law and order and keeping the Emperor's books. But in doing this, he has given us the earliest information we have on the Christian communities in northern Asia Minor. | ||
| I. | Where does the Truth lie? | ||
| 1. | Question! 'Is the author telling us the truth? Is he mistaken? Is he trying to mislead us? There is no good answer to these questions with a definite yes or no. Usually we get our historical information from writers who were not eye witnesses. The persecutors of Christians blackened their enemies names and reputations. In self-defense, Christians would paint an idyllic picture of their own communities. An author of his own autobiography reinterprets his own past. He is selective. He tries to justify himself. A good historian tries his best to sort out the evidence that seems most reliable to him. | ||
| J. | Confronting the Evidence | ||
| 1. | To obtain a balanced view a good historian will read several different documents from differing political views. Unfortunately, sometimes we will only have one document from our ancient past to review and it is up to the historian to decide on whether to trust it or not. That explains a lot of the gaps in our information. Historians will hypothesize to produce harmonization's and make deductions. Sometimes their imagination will work overtime. Therefore, read the documents with a skeptical eye. | ||
| K. | Letting our surroundings be Changed | ||
| 1. | At the end of the day, though, things aren't quite as complicated as they seem to be. The important thing is to allow ourselves to be transported back into the past and its experience. We must not interpret the past by our own standards. Eventually we must ask ourselves how the events of the past affect us today. | ||
| L. | How are we going to proceed? | ||
| 1. | From now until Christmas, hopefully, we will cover narrative events, institutions and documents which are part of that particular story. These documents will consist of maps, charts, and above all texts on the period in question. I will hand out photocopies of particular documents that will help you see for yourself what we are talking about. And so you don't think that I'm making this up as I go along I'll begin by giving you a bibliography of those sources you can go find for yourself and do further reading up on if you so desire. | ||
Handouts |
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| 1. | Hermas, who is writing in the first part of the second century, is preoccupied with the problems of the church of his day, in particular with penitence. In a series of visions, an angel who takes the form of a young shepherd replies to his questions. That the church appears as an old woman primarily signifies its antiquity in the thought of God, but also the weakness and the sins of Christians who have made it lose its strength and its joy. | ||
| See Full Text | |||
| 2. | Eusebius(U-SEE-BEE-US), Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine (born circa 263, died circa 340) is regarded as the 'father of church history'. In his Ecclesiastical History he has handed on to us a wealth of documents from the first centuries which without him would have been lost. Eusebius tells us his aim in writing his work. Would we have the same expectations of a church history today? | ||
| See Full Text | |||
