Cross-posted from The Christian History Blog

When theologian George Kalantzis returned to the Wheaton College campus last fall after spending the summer in the Holy Land, he had a very pleasant surprise. While he was out of the country, two donors had approached the college administration about funding a program that would encourage interaction between Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism over their mutual legacy from the early church.

No one at Wheaton knew just how much these donors would fund, but George and his colleagues decided to dream big: they envisioned a Center for the Study of Early Christianity, with a vertically integrated program from undergraduate courses up through master's and doctoral studies.

Their big vision was rewarded.

Two physicians from San Diego, Frank and Julie Papatheofanis, have now made that dream possible. (Julie Papatheofanis is a Wheaton alum.) You can see the beginnings of this vision at the Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies website.

Evangelical Christian interest in the early church has been growing for about 30 years. Much of the impetus for that interest can be traced to the work of the late Robert Webber, who was teaching at Wheaton in 1978 when he wrote Common Roots about the importance of the early church for evangelical life. "Without the work of Bob Webber, this would not be possible," George told me over coffee in Wheaton's Beamer Student Center. "He plowed the ground," George continued, alluding to 1 Corinthians 3:6.

There seems to be a real hunger for the systematic study of the early church. Wheaton College has not yet begun to advertise this program and already, George says, he has close to 30 students engaged with it. On his desk are about 10 applications for the master's program, a similar number for the undergraduate certificate program, plus a number of students applying for the doctoral program (only one doctoral student can be accepted each year).

A handful of teachers at the conservative Protestant colleges and seminaries have specialized in patristics. Dan Williams at Baylor University is a leading light. Others George mentioned to me include Bradley Nassif at North Park University, Bryan Litfin at Moody Bible Institute, and Jeff Bingham at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Students interested in patristics can take courses here and there, but Wheaton is the first to offer such a concentrated and structured study opportunity.

What does George Kalantzis hope to accomplish? He is very clear that this should not be a nest from which students can swarm to Eastern Orthodoxy. It is not what the donors had in mind (although they are themselves Greek Orthodox). Instead, this program is about seeing the early church tradition as the common roots of evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox.

"By studying the early church," George says, "we are studying about our commonalities much more than our differences.

"Our goal is to understand our common tradition, explore it, live with it, be with it, instead of just going back and plundering it - finding the eight quotes to justify whatever I want to do."

One reason for George's emphasis on the tradition we hold in common is his own biography. He was born in Greece in a Greek evangelical home. As a fourth-generation Greek evangelical, he is unwilling to surrender the Great Tradition to the Orthodox, as if it were their exclusive property.

The Tradition belongs to Protestants as well, he reminds us. Without the story of the early church, the Protestant Reformation would make no sense. The Reformers appealed to the pattern of the early church. We cannot be true Protestants without knowing that history.

A few other facts about George:

• He came to America to study medicine, but after his first year of medical school, he says, God opened his eyes to a different calling, the study of history and theology.

• He chose to do his doctoral work at Northwestern University in order to stay in Chicago and relate to the Greek evangelical community here. While at NU, he wrote his dissertation on Theodore of Mopsuestia's Christology.

• After his doctoral work, he taught at Garrett Evangelical Seminary for 10 years. If you visit ratemyprofessor.com, you'll see what his students thought about him. One student from 2006 wrote: "George is FABULOUS and his lectures are brilliant. He doesn't coddle anyone but has very high expectations."
  

Well, we think Wheaton College and the Doctors Papatheofanis are FABULOUS for opening a new Center for the Study of Early Christianity. And we have very high expectations. Congratulations to all on a ground-breaking move.

* * *

Image credit: Icon of the First Council of Nicaea via Wikimedia Commons.

Posted by David Neff at April 30, 2009 | Comments (8)

Philip Jenkins, one of today's authorities on the global church's past and future, has released another highly regarded - if sobering - account of Christianity outside the West. The Lost History of Christianity (Oxford, 2008) tells the winding story of the faith's rise and fall in the Middle East and Central Asia, particularly in Mesopotamia, which became the center of the early church and its wide-reaching cross-cultural missions. The theologies practiced here, those of the Jacobites and Nestorians, were later considered heretical by the Christianized Roman Empire. Yet most of today's dwindling Iraqi Christian population considers one of the strands its "spiritual ancestor," says Jenkins in his most recent CT article, "Recovering Church History."

Jenkins sat down with Beliefnet editor (and CT contributor) Patton Dodd to talk about the book. Here are some of the most provocative excerpts:

On the Eastern church:

[The] Eastern world has a solid claim to be the direct lineal heir of the earliest New Testament Christianity. Throughout their history, the Eastern churches used Syriac, which is close to Jesus's own language of Aramaic, and they followed Yeshua, not Jesus. Everything about these churches runs so contrary to what we think we know. . . .

Just a suggestion. Perhaps we should think of these Eastern communities - the Nestorians and Jacobites - as the real survivors of ancient Christianity. In that case, the great Western churches we know, the Catholic and Orthodox, are the "alternative Christianities."

On early Christianity and Islam:

Christians survive perfectly well for centuries under Muslim regimes, and the relations between the two are often excellent. In fact, Islam borrows massively from those ancient Christian churches. They borrow a lot of the architectural styles of mosques, the worship practices, and customs like Lent, which becomes the Muslim Ramadan. In fact, if a sixth or seventh century Eastern Christian came back today, that person would probably feel more at home in a mosque than a typical Western church service. That comfort level might change once they explored the doctrines being taught, but the general atmosphere would be very similar. The more you look at these Eastern Christianities, the easier it is to understand that Islam and Christianity emerged as sister faiths.

On ?dying' religions:

We really don't know why religions die, and if they do, in what sense they might leave ghosts. One thing that strikes me is how much a dead religion influences its successor - how for instance the old Christianity left its mark on the successor faith of Islam.

Finally, there is a major theological issue that nobody addresses, the theology of extinction. How do Christians explain the death of their religion in a particular time and place? Is that really part of God's plan? Or maybe our time scale is just too short, and one day we will realize why this had to happen. But as I say, nobody is really discussing these questions.

Read the rest of the interview here, and share your reactions here.

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at January 7, 2009 | Comments (13)

The inaugural gathering of The Jesus Project, a group of biblical scholars and academics in related disciplines embarking on a five-year quest to unearth the historical Jesus, took place in Amherst, N.Y. December 5th through 7th. Historian R. Joseph Hoffman, Chair of The Scientific Committee for the Study of Religion (CSER), the Jesus Project's sponsor, describes the group's intent and operating principles on its website.

The Jesus Project, as CSER has named the new effort, is the first methodologically agnostic approach to the question of Jesus' historical existence. But we are not neutral, let alone willfully ambiguous, about the objectives of the project itself. We believe in assessing the quality of the evidence available for looking at this question before seeing what the evidence has to tell us. We do not believe the task is to produce a "plausible" portrait of Jesus prior to considering the motives and goals of the Gospel writers in telling his story. We think the history and culture of the times provide many significant clues about the character of figures similar to Jesus. We believe the mixing of theological motives and historical inquiry is impermissible. We regard previous attempts to rule the question out of court as vestiges of a time when the Church controlled the boundaries of permissible inquiry into its sacred books. More directly, we regard the question of the historical Jesus as a testable hypothesis, and we are committed to no prior conclusions about the outcome of our inquiry. This is a statement of our principles, and we intend to stick to them.

The project was devised more than two years ago, and officially launched at a January 2007 conference, "Scripture and Skepticism," at the University of California at Davis.

CSER's website provides a list of notable attendees at this December's gathering, as well as a schedule of proceedings, and a follow-up report.

Public radio WBFO 88.7 FM in Buffalo interviewed one scholar involved in the project, Robert M. Price, two days before the event. According to his website bio, Price attended a fundamentalist (his word) Baptist church early in life, was involved in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship during his time at Montclair State College, and received an MTS degree in New Testament from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in the late ''70s. Since this time Price has distanced himself from evangelical Christianity, collected two PhDs, moved in and out of various forms of institutionalized liberal religion, and written numerous books. A 2007 release, Jesus is Dead, argues, according to its back cover, that

(1) not only is there no good reason to think that Jesus ever rose from the dead, (2) there is no good reason to think that he ever lived or died at all.

The publisher also notes that readers of the book

will have ammunition with which to counter the arguments of muscular apologists such as Gary Habermas, N.T. Wright, or William Lane Craig.

Price's inclusion in a study group premised on the belief that "the mixing of theological motives and historical inquiry is impermissible" has not been lost on Dan Wallace, professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and Executive Director for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. Blogging at PrimeTimeJesus, Wallace writes:

No one is neutral when it comes to Jesus, and we might as well all admit that fact. It is beyond my comprehension how a man who has explicitly and frequently written that the historical Jesus is a myth could be a part of this project.

The Jesus Project's next conference is tentatively scheduled for May 2009 in Chicago. Papers from the December 2008 conference will be published in 2009 by Prometheus Books under the title Sources of the Jesus Tradition: An Inquiry.

Posted by Derek Keefe at December 17, 2008 | Comments (9)

Sunday's Daily Mail and yesterday's Telegraph covered the removal of words associated with Christianity (and therefore, British history), fairy tales, and nature in the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

Words such as disciple, devil, monk, fern, elf, pasture, and willow have been removed from the 10,000-word dictionary and replaced with words such as MP3 player, blog, tolerant, democratic, and biodegradable - all to reflect England's multicultural, technological ethos, says publisher Oxford University Press.

Vineeta Gupta, head of children's dictionaries at Oxford, told the Telegraph, "Nowadays, the environment has changed. We are also much more multicultural. People don't go to Church as often as before. Our understanding of religion is within multiculturalism, which is why some words such as Pentecost or Whitsun would have been in 20 years ago but not now."

(That was probably a good call on Whitsun.)

It's a little unclear why both papers are reporting on the changes now, as the newest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary came out in 2007. Both papers cite an Irish mother of four, Lisa Saunders, who compared six editions of the dictionary from the last 30 years and was "horrified" by the number of words that had been removed.

"The Christian faith still has a strong following," Saunders told the Daily Mail. "To eradicate so many words associated with the Christianity will have a big effect on the numerous primary schools who use it."

The Atlantic's Ross Douthat aptly noted that the removal of animals like gerbil and porcupine from a children's dictionary is particularly perplexing, perhaps more so than the removal of churchy words. Vox Day of World Net Daily, on the other hand, sees the word-swaps as warning signs of the destruction of Western culture due to immigration and pluralism.

A sampling of words removed:
Dwarf, elf, goblin, abbey, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar, beaver, cheetah, colt, doe, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, porcupine, porpoise, raven, thrush, weasel, wren, acorn, bacon, buttercup, canary, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, chestnut, county, cowslip, gorse, hazel, hazelnut, heather, holly, horse chestnut, ivy, liquorice, oats, pasture, prune, radish, rhubarb, sycamore, vine, violet, walnut, willow

A sampling of words added:
Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue, celebrity, tolerant, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro, apparatus, food chain, incisor, square number, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, chronological, block graph

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at December 9, 2008 | Comments (4)

Every November America's thoughts turn briefly toward those curious early settlers of New England. While it's the Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation--those Separatists from the Church of England at the center of our much-contested Thanksgiving myth--who normally receive our attention, this year regular NPR contributor Sarah Vowell's bestseller, The Wordy Shipmates, has directed our gaze to their Puritan cousins to the north.

Vowell's breezy style and playful manner may put off those who hold the Puritans in high esteem as models of devotion. And her occasionally freewheeling conjectures will no doubt be deemed incautious by the guild of historians. Nevertheless, those serious about their Christian faith and those serious about history should take heart that she's respectfully mainstreamed both while offering a better-than-cursory treatment. Any book that sparks worthwhile conversation about the Puritans in the national press is a reason to give thanks.

Some of the more notable reviews:

Marc Arkin in The Wall Street Journal

Erika Schickel in the Los Angeles Times

Stephen Prothero in The Washington Post

And a brief interview in The Boston Globe.

Posted by Derek Keefe at November 25, 2008 | Comments (2)

An associate professor of church history at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and senior editor of Christian History & Biography, Armstrong chooses his favorite websites about church history.

Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL)
This is the mother lode of church-history-related books by some of the most brilliant and inspiring of our foreparents. In a wide array of digital formats, you'll find G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Augustine's Confessions; volumes of the church fathers; an archive of hymn tunes; and much more.

Christian History & Biography
At this site, you'll find articles from current and past issues of the CT sister publication, a slew of online-only newsletters, and such goodies as This Week in Christian History, Person of the Week, and Quote of the Week. Also, I hear that its editors are working on some major improvements for the site that are coming soon, so stay tuned!

Early Church Online Encyclopedia
Though no longer maintained, ECOLE is a worthy archive. The glossary provides short definitions of early Christian people, groups, events, and ideas from Abelard to Zosimus. The longer articles address such topics as "Sadducees," "Stoicism," and "the Arian Controversy." The accompanying chronology pulls it all together.

Internet Medieval Sourcebook
This chronologically organized trove of primary documents is accompanied by pithy explanations of some of the important interpretive themes and arguments in medieval studies today. Check out, for instance, the material on feudalism: you think you know what this term means, but scholars today are changing their minds about it!

Met Museum: Timeline of Art History
This site links timelines to maps, providing a synoptic view of world art and architecture through history. The resources after A.D. 1, especially in the West, include a rich mine of material related to the history of Christianity. For example, see the essay on "Private Devotion in Medieval Christianity," linked in the timeline at "1400?1500, Europe."

Posted by Susan Wunderink at August 11, 2008 | Comments (1)

Ar! Shiver me timbers and blow me down. Today be, of course, Talk Like a Pirate Day. Sadly, we have little on our site about pirates. I had high hopes for the recent Christian book Samson and the Pirate Monks: Calling Men to Authentic Brotherhood by Nate Larkin. But beware: the book has nothing in it about pirates.

So I turned instead to Colin Woodard, author of the new and highly acclaimed book that's actually about pirates, The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down.

"The pirates themselves demonstrated little in the way of religion," he told me, unsurprisingly. "But Woodes Rogers [the "Man Who Brought Them Down" of Woodard's title] appears to have been at least partially inspired by his faith, having repeatedly ordered stocks of tracts from the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. Seems he thought part of the way of reforming pirates would be through their spiritual redemption. He arranged for SPCK materials for both an abortive project to reform the pirates of Madagascar and, later, for his mission to the Bahamas."

Woodard talks a bit about this in his book, but that's not what attracted Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler, who recently recommended the book to his blog readers.

"Like the pirates themselves, this book will take your imagination captive," Mohler wrote. "I was taken with the book from its introduction to the end, and I really appreciate Woodard's careful explanation of why the pirates were such important characters on the world scene."

That's about it on Christianity and pirates, at least for this year's TLAPD celebrations. In the meantime, ChristianBook.com sells Pirate Gold Sea Monkeys.

(Oh, and spare me any comments below about I've just spent more time on Talk Like a Pirate Day than on most days of the Christian calendar. I'm well aware of that. Pirates are just much more fun to blog about today than, say, Theodore of Tarsus or Januarius.)

Posted by Ted Olsen at September 19, 2007 | Comments (11)

Sticks and carrots:

At the White House this morning, President Bush ran out of patience with the genocidal regime ruling Sudan. He announced a collection of sanctions against the nation-state of Sudan and individuals associated with the sickening killing and rape still going on in the Darfur region at the western border with Chad.

See this video clip:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2007/05/29/VI2007052900512.html

Here's a link to the Washington Post online article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052900462.html

The Save Darfur Coalition includes many evangelical groups that should be encouraged by this move. China especially is likely to resist the imposition of sanctions.

We Christians must understand how the situation in Darfur ripples throughout the region and globally. Until there is real peace in Sudan, this region of Africa will remain violent and unstable.

The carrot and the stick are now on the table, Omar Bashir.

Prayer for the persecuted church in Sudan in the south should just be the beginning of our commitment. I agree with President Bush that we cannot "avert our eyes" from this suffering.

Posted by Tim Morgan at May 29, 2007 | Comments (4)

This week I attended the inaugural one-day conference of the Gospel Coalition. This consortium of more than 50 evangelical pastors have united around a common confessional statement and theological vision of ministry. Organizers hope this short conference, hosted by Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and attended by 500+ pastors and other ministry leaders, will propel a long-term effort to renew and reform evangelical thought and practice. D.A. Carson, a New Testament scholar at TEDS, and Tim Keller, senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, organized the group, which has met privately for three years now. Other speakers and workshop presenters included Crawford Loritts, Phil Ryken, Mark Driscoll, and John Piper.

I thought a couple statements stood out in the Gospel Coalition's founding document:

From the preamble: "On the one hand, we are troubled by the idolatry of personal consumerism and the politicization of the faith; on the other hand, we are distressed by the unchallenged acceptance of theological and moral relativism."

From the theological vision of ministry: "If we seek service rather than power, we may have significant cultural impact. But if we seek direct power and social control, we will, ironically, be assimilated into the very idolatries of wealth, status, and power we seek to change."

The Gospel Coalition's core group of pastors plans to meet yearly. Leaders have tentatively planned a national conference for April 2009. A website, www.thegospelcoalition.org, will be forthcoming in June with video of all the conference sessions and loads of links to resources that promote the Gospel Coalition vision.

As Carson told me today, this group could not have come together five years ago. Make of that what you will, but something's stirring in the evangelical movement. The Gospel Coalition seeks nothing less than a return to the theological consensus enjoyed in the days of neo-evangelicalism, led by Billy Graham, Carl Henry, Harold John Ockenga, and many others. That might be a goal more difficult to achieve than pioneering evangelicalism in the post-war Protestant scene, split as it was between fundamentalism and liberalism.

Posted by Collin Hansen at May 25, 2007 | Comments (7)

While running my errands this weekend, I listened to the first three disks of the audiobook, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul. The author is Tony Hendra, a great satirist who was a university chum of John Cleese and Graham Chapman and who went on to become the editor-in-chief of Spy.

It is wonderfully comic for a spiritual memoir, but when the author gets serious, he is full of insight. After the stern and aloof husband of the woman he didn't quite seduce dragged the 14-year-old Tony to a monastery to be admonished and shriven, Hendra had a religious experience in which all the mumbo jumbo he'd been taught as a Catholic child suddenly came alive for him--became real! His description of that almost sounds like the classic evangelical conversion story.

But to my point ...

His conversion turned him on to history. Read these few graphs and think of Bob Webber--or even Tom Oden. This is ancient future stuff transplanted into the life of an English Catholic teen.

... [T]his new grasp of the realness of things ... lit up unexpected areas of my life--areas I'd preferred to ignore or endure up till then. History, once my most and then my least favorite subject, resumed center stage. It had become a tedium to study, a forgettable rat's next of dates and places and people, every one of them stone-cold dead and of no relevance to the here and now. Just as Latin was a dead language, history was a dead subject. I asked Mum once why we had to belong to such an incredibly old religion--weren't there any new ones? (She didn't agree or disagree, but she did give me a lurid pamphlet the Jehovah's Witnesses had left behind.)

Now, driven by the need to dig farther and--just as urgently--to experience the actuality of everything I could, history became my new frontier, the past became my future, a vast terra incognita, every discovery of which was another chunk of virgin territory I could claim, bringing with it the glow of ownership, the anticipatory thrill of further exploration.

What if we gave every new convert a subscription to Christian History & Biography? What if we plied them with the great lovers of God--with Pascal and Augustine and Theresa? What if we taught them that they were part of a very, very old religion--taught them to take seriously the communion of the saints?

It seemed to work for the editor of Spy.

Posted by David Neff at May 14, 2007 | Comments (5)