Description
Did you ever think that Christianity is one of the few, if not only, religions in which the content of faith is critical?
This seminar has been exploring how the early Christian Church developed its understanding of who Jesus is and its self-identity as Church during the first couple of centuries. In more recent sessions, we have been considering more recent Church history, as in from the protestant reformation onwards.
The format of our group involves our watching DVD lectures followed by discussion.
For the Spring Semester, we are continuing with a Teaching Company course on the history of the Catholic Church by Professor William Cook.
Whatever you think of Catholic theology and history (and the latter has, at times, been pretty ugly), there seems to be a sense in which the Church stands as a beacon against the moral and theological relativism of the mainline protestant denominations in the US. Even as confessing groups of US mainlines emerge from the fractured communions in the US and elsewhere, you may have noted that last November, Rome held out an invitation to anglicans with the setting up of a new ordinariate. It is still too early to say how many Anglicans will avail themselves of the invitation to rejoin the Catholic Church (there will probably be a good number of conservative high-church ELCA Lutherans as well in the light of ELCA's normalizing of gay ordination last summer), but nevertheless we live in interesting times with the reshuffling of the eccesiastical deck.
Does this affect us as latter-day Foursquare's? Not yet. But the issues that these groups are wrestling with and the availability of a traditional, liturgical, sacramental alternative is a trend to be reckoned with (IMHO). Even though the fashion of Christian expression continues towards the megachurch model, that does not suit the sensibilities of many more traditional American Christians, so it seems to me that it is time to re-evaluate our attitutes towards "the Church that Jesus Christ founded" (as our Catholic brethren are fond of reminding us (as opposed to the church that Sister Aimee founded, for example).
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