History of Christianity (2000) | Full Movie | Dr. Timothy George | Mona Hurlbert Fisher

(uplifting atmosphere music) - The

history

of Christianity is developed and presented by Timothy George. Internationally renowned theologian, author and editor, and dean of Beeson Divinity School. History is a course of study designed to further stimulate your curiosity by giving you glimpses into some of the pivotal events in the spread of Christianity. And sketches of great Christian figures who have significantly influenced Christian

history

, thus shaping the history of the world. But when the

full

ness of time came, God sent his Son. Made of a woman, made under the law to redeem those who were under the law, in the

full

ness of time.

Two words designate time in the New Testament. Chronos, root of English chronicle and chronology, is measured time. Time counted in minutes, months, centuries. The tick tick tick of an alarm clock, of a stopwatch in a race. Time as we live it circumscribes our activities and our lives day after day. Kairos means the right moment, the opportune moment. Time loaded with meaning. The fullness of God's time. The event of Jesus Christ, his life, his death, his resurrection, forever changed the meaning of time and history. In Jesus, chronos became kairos. The counted time and the transcendental event merged, so affecting world history that even the measurement of time was divided into before Christ and after Christ, before Christ and after Christ. (uplifting atmosphere music) - Christianity is not primarily a philosophy of life, nor a code of conduct, nor even a set of rituals.

It is the story of what God himself has said and done, in space and time. In the person of his Son on Earth and the work of his spirit through the centuries. We remember the words of Jesus, on this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. The history of Christianity is to some extent the history of the fulfillment of that prophecy. Christianity began as a small sect within Palestinian Judaism. But by the end of the 1st century it had become a major force within the Roman Empire. When Jesus died, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate demanded that the words This is Jesus, King of the Jews, be written on his cross in three languages: Hebrew, Greek and Latin.

These three languages ​​represented the three worlds to which the early Christians carried their message of a crucified and resurrected redeemer. -Among the disciples of Jesus and the first Christian evangelists, the apostle Paul was the best interpreter of him. Paul was a Jew like Jesus, but unlike many of his other disciples, he was classically educated, a member of the Jewish elite, and free to travel throughout the Roman Empire and among the Gentiles. - One of the most important decisions of the early church was the retention of the Old Testament as Christian scripture. Above all, this meant that the god of creation, the god of the covenant, the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, was none other than the god and father of the Messiah Jesus.

And the world of Greek culture, since the time of Alexander the Great, about 300 years before Christ, the Mediterranean world had been united in a common intellectual and cultural unity that we know as Hellenism. The use of a new form of Greek language, the koine or common language, became widespread. It was in this language that the New Testament was written. And the message of Jesus spread throughout the Roman Empire. Christianity came into contact with Greek philosophical ideas and traditions. Inherited from Plato and Aristotle. An early Christian father from Carthage named Tertullian asked the famous question "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" This tension between faith and reason, between philosophy and theology, will run through the entire Christian movement to this day.

Christianity also made its way into the world of the Roman order. For more than 200 years the world had known a period of relative peace and stability known as the Pax Romana, the Roman peace. It was during this time that the Christian church was born and the story of Jesus spread along the major highways and well-developed shipping routes of the Roman Empire. From the beginning Christianity was a missionary movement with a world vision and a universal message. - Inevitably, Christianity was perceived as a threat to the predominant world system and to Caesar, its considered divine ruler. Religious pluralism was in fashion and a minimal Christian concession could have resolved the conflict if Christians had been willing to worship Jesus and also place a pinch of incense on the altar of the imperial deity.

But when Emperor Domitian delegated the title of Lord and God to himself, the Christians did not relent. Jesus is Lord, they said, not Caesar. And the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church. - Under two previous emperors, Decius and Diocletian, Christians had been savagely repressed. Their churches destroyed, their bibles burned. Many of them were executed for refusing to offer sacrifices to pagan gods. But instead of extinguishing Christianity, these persecutions were a stimulus for its growth and expansion. The joy and equanimity with which so many Christian martyrs faced horrible torture and even death became the means by which others came to faith in Christ.

Like many who had witnessed martyrs die so consistently, they themselves became followers of Jesus. Over time, the story of the martyr's death became a kind of devotional literature. Including the famous story of Perpetua and her servant Felicitas, who were executed locally in 202 in the city of Carthage. - The conversion of Emperor Constantine was an important turning point in the fortunes of Christianity. Constantine, a politically astute soldier with aspirations to be emperor, recognized the religious temperament within the Empire and in its legions. He had initially linked his destiny to the sun god Sol Invictus, a deity who claimed universal dominion over all parts of the Empire.

But in the year 312, while preparing for battle on the Milvian Bridge near Rome, Constantine dreamed that he was to place the sign of Christ, the Chi-Rho, on the shields of his soldiers. In another version, he also saw written in the sky: "In this sign you will conquer." Constantine obeyed. He later won the Battle of Milvian Bridge, became emperor, and switched his allegiance from the sun god to the Son of God. Historians debate the sincerity of Constantine's conversion. Was it the result of divine intervention or an act of political expediency? However, by either interpretation, it was evidence of God's will and had enormous consequences for the church. - In 313, the Edict of Milan recognized Christianity as a legal religion that must be tolerated along with other religions within the Roman Empire.

Over time, Christian symbols began to appear on Roman coins and eventually December 25, the festival celebrating Sol Invictus, became the day when Christians celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ. This Christianization of the Roman Empire brought many wonderful benefits to the Christian church, but it also had its disadvantages. Because over time Christianity became not only tolerated, but even dominant. And some Christians gave in to the use of force, repressing other dissidents who did not follow their particular beliefs. And so a heritage of persecution and coercion became mixed with the gospel of Jesus Christ. The 4th century also marked a milestone in three other ways.

A new sense of history, a new form of spirituality, and the classic statement of Christian theology developed. First story. The early Christians looked forward to the coming of Christ, his return in power and glory. But now, although Christians did not abandon this belief, they began to look not so much forward as backward. Church architecture was born when Christians moved from worship in caves and catacombs to beautiful basilicas and majestic places of worship. Constantine's mother, a very devout woman called Helen, was a great supporter of the development of beautiful churches in the Holy Land, and in the year 333 we read of a group of pilgrims from France who made the great journey to the Holy Land.

With the cessation of persecution, martyrdom was no longer a possibility. It was at this precise moment that a new and distinctive form of Christian spirituality emerged. The white martyrdom of

mona

sticism, as it was called, would leave an indelible mark on the history of the church. The father of

mona

sticism was Saint Anthony, who at the age of 18 entered a church at the same time that the words of Jesus were read. "If you want to be perfect, go and sell everything you have, give it to the poor and come follow me." Antonio immediately obeyed. He secluded himself in the desert of Egypt where he lived in the tombs doing hand in hand.

He fights hand to hand with the devil and the demons of darkness. Finally, thousands of people followed Antony to his monastic retreat. The monks saw themselves as the successors of the martyrs. They were now the frontline fighters in the ongoing fight against the world, the flesh. , and the Devil At the same time, Christianity was developing a new sense of history and a new form of community and spirituality. Classical Christian orthodoxy also developed when Christians definitively defined the doctrines of the Devil for the first time. Holy Trinity and the person and work of Christ From the beginning Christian theology had been concerned with a question that Jesus himself asked during his earthly ministry: Who do you say I am?

The Christian community responded with the apostle Peter, are you the Christ? , the Son of the living God. What we know today as The Apostles' Creed developed from this type of basic confession of faith. - The church developed principles of Christian faith reflected in questions that were asked of each new Christian as a confession of baptismal faith. We hear them echo through the ages, alive and powerful in The Apostles' Creed. "Do you believe in God, Almighty Father, creator of heaven and earth?" The new Christian responded pisteuo. Believe. "Do you believe in Jesus Christ, who was "conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the "Virgin"?

Did Mary suffer under the power of Pontius Pilate?" Pisteuo. "And do you believe in the Holy Spirit, "the Holy Catholic Church, in the resurrection "of the flesh and in eternal life?" Pisteuo. - However, still The fundamental question of how Jesus of Nazareth was related to the eternal God whom he called Father was unresolved. In its most basic form, the Doctrine of the Trinity is the Christian church's effort to reconcile the Old Testament statement: "Hear." "Israel, the Lord our God, is One," with a New Testament confession: "Jesus Christ is Lord." This was not simply a matter of semantics or philosophical wordplay.

It got to the very root of Christian piety and the fact that Jesus was an object of worship. and prayer. The issue came to the fore in the early 4th century in a fierce conflict between Arius and Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria and Egypt. Arius emphasized the uniqueness and transcendence of God. "The essence of God is indivisible," he said, "and therefore cannot be shared" with anyone else, not even with his Son. "And that is why the logos, the Son, must be a creature," said Arius. "It must have had a beginning. "There was when he wasn't there." But against this idea of ​​Christ as a creature, Athanasius proclaimed that the Son of God, the logos, was homoousios, of the same essence as the Father himself. "A mere creature," said Athanasius, "however exalted, could never atone for our sins. "Only God himself could rescue us from sin and death." - In 325, when Constantine called the Council of Nicaea, the church established this view of Christ "We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, "the only Son of God, eternally begotten" of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, "true God from true God, begotten, not made, from a single being." with the Father. "Through Him all things were made. "For us men and for our salvation, "He descended from Heaven." - In the West it was Saint Augustine who summarized this theology in his great treatise on the Trinity.

Emphasizing the unity and equality of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, as well as the personal dynamic of relationship within the divine God that he had. Augustine himself had come to the Christian faith through a tortuous, intellectual and spiritual search. He was born in the year 354 in Tagaste, in what is now the current country of Algeria. His father Patrick was not a Christian, but his mother Monica was a devout believer who had a dominant influence on Augustine's life and thought. Like C.S. Lewis in our century, Augustine tried many different paths before finding the true Christian faith.

For seven years he belonged to the Manichaeans, a dualistic sect that emphasized a radical difference between good and evil, light and darkness. He then became skeptical and doubted that genuine truth and meaning could be discovered. He eventually became a Neoplatonist, a philosophy that offered him a model of transcendence, pointing him beyond the visible world of flux and fluidity. From the temporal to the eternal. - The sermons of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, brought Augustine closer to the Christian faith. Even soHe resisted. One day, sitting alone in the garden, he heard a group of children playing and singing a song.

Tolle lege, tolle lege. Take and read, take and read. He took a copy of the Scriptures and opened with this text in Romans 13: "Not in gluttony and drunkenness, "not in strife and jealousy, "but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires." " For Augustine, this event was as if the light of trust had flooded his heart and all darkness and doubt had been dispelled. It was the turning point in his search for God. - Augustine has been characterized as the first modern man, but we could also call him the first medieval man, because his life and theology would exert a profound influence on the thousand years of Christian history between his death in 430 and the birth of Martin Luther, another Monk.

Augustine, in 1483. Augustine was not only a great theologian, but also an active bishop and pastor of souls, as this 15th century Flemish manuscript shows. His voluminous writings would deal with all forms of the Christian life, the nature of the sacraments, discipline and penance, worship and prayer, how to venerate martyrs and saints, how to study, teach and preach the Bible. . And in his debates with the British monk Pelagius, Augustine expounded a theology of grace and God's salvation that emphasized the helplessness of human beings separated from Grace and emphasized the sovereign love and mercy of God. And later the church would honor him with the title Doctor Grazia, the Master of Grace.

With the death of Saint Augustine in 430, the world of classical antiquity came to an end, ushering in a millennium of turbulence and realignment in Western Christendom. In his abundant life as a religious seeker, bishop, spiritual ascetic, and theologian, St. Augustine summarized the major themes of the early Christian era. His vision of God and his description of the Christian life would form the basis of numerous currents of medieval spirituality. When he was born, the blood of the martyrs was still warm and moist in Christian memory. When he died, the organized church had become strong enough in the world to take the place of the fallen Roman Empire and the formation of a new civilization.

A thousand years later, both Protestants and Catholics would claim that St. Augustine was the forerunner of their own efforts to advance the cause of Christ. Today all Christians look at Saint Augustine and read his wonderful autobiography The Confessions, and we see in him the great teacher of introspective consciousness. The opening words of his confession still speak to us today. "You have made us for yourself, and our heart" he is restless, until he finds his rest in you. "Whoever does not want to fear", let him explore the most intimate part of himself. "Do not touch only the surface. "Go down within yourselves. "It reaches the farthest corner of your heart." Thank you so much for joining us at The Early Church.

The first in a six-part series on the history of Christianity. In the second part we will explore the Middle Ages. The challenging millennium between the fall of Rome in 430 and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. We would love to hear your questions and comments. Thank you so much. (uplifting atmosphere music)