Global Christianity

Readings: 

  • Tertullian

    • Flesh and soul are unified, and can’t exist without the other. Flesh important because of Jesus’ sacrifice.

    • “That which is the means and agent of your enjoyment must needs be also the partaker and sharer of your enjoyment” (Tertullian, Chapter VII).

    •  “The flesh, indeed, is washed, in order that the soul may be cleansed; the flesh is anointed, that the soul may be consecrated; the flesh is signed (with the cross), that the soul too may be fortified; the flesh is shadowed with the imposition of hands, that the soul also maybe illuminated by the Spirit; the flesh feeds on the body and blood of Christ, that the soul likewise may fatten on its God” (Tertullian, Chapter VIII). 

    • “Come, tell me what is your opinion of the flesh, when it has to contend for the name of Christ, dragged out to public view, and exposed to the hatred of all men; when it pines in prisons under the cruellest privation of light, in banishment from the world, amidst squalor, filth, and noisome food, without freedom even in sleep, for it is bound on its very pallet and mangled in its bed of straw; when at length before the public view it is racked by every kind of torture that can be devised, and when finally it is spent beneath its agonies, struggling to render its last turn for Christ by dying for him – upon His own cross many times…. Most blessed, truly, and most glorious, must be the flesh which can repay its master Christ so vast a debt” (Tertullian, Chapter VIII).

  • 95 Thesis - Martin Luther

    • Focus on faith, don’t need material things to earn grace, only scripture. 

    • “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.” To which realm does this apply, the spiritual or material? `

    • “A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” To which realm does this apply, the spiritual or material?

    • Thesis 5: “The pope neither desires nor is able to remit any penalties except those imposed by his own authority or that of the canons.”

    • Thesis 20: “Therefore, the pope, when he uses the words ‘plenary [full] remission of all penalties,’ does not actually mean ‘all penalties’ but only those imposed by himself.”

    • Thesis 91: “If, therefore, indulgences were preached according to the spirit and intention of the pope, all these doubts would be readily resolved. Indeed, they would not exist.”

  • 12 articles of the peasants - 

    • “Until now, it has been the custom for us to be regarded as a lord’s personal property, which is deplorable since Christ redeemed us all with the shedding of his precious blood—the shepherd as well as the most highly placed without exception” (Article 3, 234).

    • “Until now it has been the custom that no poor man has been allowed the right to hunt game or fowl or to catch fish in flowing water. We think that this is completely improper and unbrotherly; rather it is selfish and not compatible with the word of God,” (Article 4, 235).

  • Confessions - Augustine

    • In response to the temptation of dualistic thinking, Augustine argued that no human was unpolluted by sin. 

    • No social institutions created by humans--including the Church--could achieve perfection.

    • Social institutions were needed to provide order to such unruly humans, first through reason, but, if necessary, they could also use force. 

    • Pessimistic view with long-term implications. 

    • Jesus’s life and death had demonstrated that humans needed God’s grace; they could not avoid sin alone. 

    • "Take it up and read it"

    • “The new will, that had started to exist in me, for worshipping you for no material reward, and wanting to enjoy you, God, the only pleasure, wasn’t yet adequate for overcoming my earlier will, which was reinforced by my long-standing way of life. Thus, my two wills, one old and one new, one of the body and the other of the spirit, clashed with each other and in their combat were devastating my soul” (Augustine, 215-216).

    • “It did me no good to be delighted with your law, according to the person I was within, when in my own body a different law was at war with my spirit’s law and led me off as a captive under the law of sin–the one in my body. The law of sin is the lawless force of habit, by which even the unwilling mind is dragged away and confined–and this is justified in that the mind willingly fell into habit” (Augustine, 217-218). 

    • “But the journey there couldn’t be by ships or chariots or on foot–yet the journey wasn’t even as far as I had come from the house to this spot where we were sitting. The act not only of making my way onward, but of commuting clear to the end, consisted of nothing but to want to make my way–but that meant wanting powerfully and soundly, instead of rolling to this side and that side and throwing to the floor a will that was half-impaired, with part of it rising and part of it toppling as it wrestled against me” (Augustine, 226). 

    • In the depths of despair, he heard a child’s voice saying “Pick it up! Read it! Pick it up! Read it!” (Augustine, 236)

    • “‘You won’t be able to do what all these mere males–and females!--have done? Do you really think they achieved it through themselves, and not through God, their Master? Their Master and God gave me to them. Why are you trying to stand on your own–so that you fail to stand? Throw yourself forward onto him! Don’t be afraid. He won’t back away and let you fall. Fling yourself forward and don’t worry about it! He’ll catch you, he’ll take you under his care and heal you’” (Augustine, 234).

    • “I myself, when I was weighing whether to serve God my Master (as I had decided to do long before), I was the person who wanted that and the person who didn’t want that: it was simply me. I didn’t fully want it or fully not want it. Thus I was inwardly at war and being laid waste by myself; yet this devastation was happening against my will. Nevertheless, this didn’t characterize a mind as a thing apart; rather it showed the punishment of my own mind. That meant that it was no longer myself producing that punishment: the sin living in me did that. And this punishment was for a sin committed by a freer choice, as I was a son of Adam” (Augustine, 229). 

  • Pope alexander

    • “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever…[and] to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.”

  • Fredrick Douglas

    • Slaveholder religion, christians with slaves are not true christians. 

    • “I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, – a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, – a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, – and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection…. What I have said respecting religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference” (Frederick Douglass 1845, 103 and 106). 

  • St. Caesarius of Arles

    • Important terms capitalized, how Christians can offer salvation in the face of orthodoxy. He saw humanity as guilty of original sin and needed grace. Grace can be received through baptism which gives them the capacity to be good. People must work faithfully to be good, which can let them be saved. Salvation economy. 

    • “‘O Lord, you are just and true; in your goodness you made man, just as you created me a good angel, not bad. Both to man and to me you gave the faculty of a free will…. I destroyed myself through voluntary malice, then I advised man to do evil…. I encouraged but did not compel him, because I could not force one who possessed freedom of his own will’”

    • “‘By your judgment we received sentences deserved by our merits: I, an eternal curse; man, death and terrible punishment with me. Man united himself to me by his own will; he estranged himself from you with the same will, not unwillingly. He is mine. Because of sin we were destined alike for punishment; if he is torn away from me it is not justice, but violence. It is not a favor, but an injury; not mercy, but robbery. If man was unwilling to live when he could, why should he be brought back to life unwillingly?’” (St. Caesarius of Arles, 63)

    • His sacrificial death—a sinner’s death on the cross for a sinless person—makes the devil guilty by “inflicting the cross upon the just One” (65)

    • “‘You have no excuses, Enemy. The first Adam sinned, but I, the new Adam, did not receive the stain of sin. The very flesh which you had made subject to sin through your seduction has now conquered you by My justice. Let My justice benefit the sinner, let the death unduly imposed upon Me profit the debtor. You can no longer keep man in eternal death, for through Me he has conquered, overcome, and broken you. Truly, you have not been conquered by power but by justice; not by domination, but rather, by equity’” (St. Caesarius of Arles, 66).

    • “He fulfilled the mystery of the cross, the reason for His coming into the world. By this means the handwriting of sin was removed, and the power of the Enemy, as if allured by the hook of the cross was seized” (Caesarius of Arles, 65).

  • Letter from a Bermingham jail - MLK Jr. 

    • Uses first person “I/we” generally a respectful tone. Evil in the world must be immediately addressed and humans need to enact God’s will here and now 

    • “Christian perfectly free lord of all subject to none and a perfectly dutiful servant”. A Christian is spiritually free but doesn't need to be materially free. Should stay in their own social positions. 

    • “expressed regret at a ‘tragic misconception of time among whites. They seem to cherish a strange, irrational notion that something in the very flow of time will cure all ills…. I wonder at men who dare to feel that they have some paternalistic right to set the timetable for another man’s liberation.’”

    • “When you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’…when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”

    • “Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries, our forebears labored in this country without wags; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation—and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”

  • St John Chistonson

    • Celebrated as a saint, likes using rhyming rhythms and repetitions. Very powerful terms, use of term “slaughter” not an actual call for violence

    • Tried to draw boundaries between Christian and non christian that identified good vs evil. Claimed that only Christians understood and were the rightful owners of Jewish texts. Lots of anti-Jewish rhetoric and a lot of the violent metaphors were not necessarily meant to be a call for action.


  • Lots of antisemitism  


Themes


Random useful readings: ‘We are as a city upon a hill, in open view of all the earth, they eyes of the world are upon us, because we profess ourselves to be a people in covenant with God, and therefore not only the Lord our God, with whom we have made covenant, but heaven and earth, angels and men, that are witness to our profession, will cry shame upon us if we walk contrary to the covenant which we have professed and promised to walk in’ - Jon Winstrop


Key Terms


Presence: the possibilities and challenges that arise as Christians think through the implications of Jesus’s historical presence on earth. By the 4th century, orthodox Christian thinking agreed that Jesus was fully human and fully God. They understood him to have been the Word of God made flesh. The idea of God taking on flesh (Greek: sarx; Hebrew: basar) was unique in the Mediterranean World of Late Antiquity. It is a historical fact made all the more poignant by Jesus’s ongoing absence. Christians have explored the possibilities and challenges of presence through practices of mediation that variously address bodies, objects, images, and words. 


Proximity: the theme of proximity points to the struggles Christians encounter when things, ideas, or practices appear to impede their access to God’s grace. Christians often express this concern through a distinction between the material and the spiritual. Some Christians desire a sense of immediacy, others are more comfortable with God existing at a distance. If there appear to be too many impediments to God’s grace, however, Christians may reject old practices, or attempt to realign their practices more perfectly with those inherited from the past.  


Mission: a call to convert all people to Christianity. It is generally (but unequally) accompanied by the idea of exclusivity. Two major concerns haunt missionaries: how does one know if conversion has been complete? What is the line between “indigenization” and non-exclusive religious practice? Two major critiques of Christianity have been offered by those who have been missionized,  particularly under conditions of colonialism and enslavement. First, they may make space for both Christianity and other practices. Second, they may refuse the Christianity they have received and create more authentic Christian forms. 


Transcendence: points to the existence of a radically different realm, far more perfect than our world. Christians debate how bridgeable the distance between these two realms is. For some, human actions can tap into the transcendent; for others the gap is just too large. Economic metaphors demonstrate how Christians rely on very earthly frameworks for understanding the transcendent. These metaphors then result in accessing the transcendent through practices of exchange. How the infinite moves into the finite is an ongoing source of debate. 


Immanence: this term points to the complexities of imagining and creating Christians in this world. While, ideally, Christianity serves as a source of unity, the problem of human sin, and the ways that humans carry the traces of the social worlds in which they are embedded tends to serve as sources of disunity in Christian communities. Determining the extent to which Christian norms should shape the broader community has also served as a key source of debate among Christians. 


Church Terminoloy

  • Aesthetic impact

  • Symbolic resonance

    • High (sacramental), Medium (engengelical), Low

  • Spatial Dynanics

  • Centering Focus


Sacramental: Super fancy, super big, separation between church and altar, forward movement. 

Evangelical: Focus on the speaker, simple symbolic resonance

Modern Communal: Simple room, forward facing but