The Great Courses Early Christianity: The Experience of the Divine PT 2
Type
Audio/Visual
Authors
Category
DVD
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Publication Year
2002
Publisher
Volume
2 DVDs; 1 Book
Series Name
Description
In introducing early Christian religious experience, Professor Johnson looks at questions that are new and intellectually exciting in the study of religion. Was Christ the founder of Christianity? Was Christianity's early growth due to his life and works or to his followers' powerful experience of his death and resurrection, their sense of having been transformed by the Holy Spirit?
You see how religious experience in earliest Christianity took on a variety of forms. Fellowship meals celebrated the presence of the resurrected Lord Jesus. Healing was a sign of God's presence in the world and could certify the healer as a saint. Prayer and visions provided access to, and confirmation of, divine power.
Many practices, however, created problems for early Christian leaders. For example, they rejected demands to add circumcision to baptism as an initiation rite in Christianity. This was due not so much to its use in Judaism as to the fact that it would make Christianity seem similar to pagan religion: a second rite would resemble the multiple initiation rites used by Greco-Roman mystery cults.
Similarly, many Christians saw glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, as a powerful form of religious experience, dating from the experience of the crowd at Pentecost. However, a variety of concerns, including that it could be confused with pagan prophecy or used by women to undermine male authority, quickly led to its marginalization.
Professor Johnson raises important questions. Did institutional development in early Christianity—the creation of its formal structure and creeds—eliminate important sources of religious experience? Or did it minimize certain practices in order to preserve, for millennia, other meaningful avenues of religious experience?
You see how religious experience in earliest Christianity took on a variety of forms. Fellowship meals celebrated the presence of the resurrected Lord Jesus. Healing was a sign of God's presence in the world and could certify the healer as a saint. Prayer and visions provided access to, and confirmation of, divine power.
Many practices, however, created problems for early Christian leaders. For example, they rejected demands to add circumcision to baptism as an initiation rite in Christianity. This was due not so much to its use in Judaism as to the fact that it would make Christianity seem similar to pagan religion: a second rite would resemble the multiple initiation rites used by Greco-Roman mystery cults.
Similarly, many Christians saw glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, as a powerful form of religious experience, dating from the experience of the crowd at Pentecost. However, a variety of concerns, including that it could be confused with pagan prophecy or used by women to undermine male authority, quickly led to its marginalization.
Professor Johnson raises important questions. Did institutional development in early Christianity—the creation of its formal structure and creeds—eliminate important sources of religious experience? Or did it minimize certain practices in order to preserve, for millennia, other meaningful avenues of religious experience?
Number of Copies
1
