Bumper sticker: The Bible say it. I believe it. That settles it.
"Now I respect the sentiment, because I'm a huge fan of the Bible. I really am. However, knowing what the Bible says is not the end of the question; because once you know what the Bible says, that then begs the question what the Bible means. And the gap between what it is says and what it means is a little thing we call interpretation.
And if you've ever had a discussion with a fellow believer over the interpretation of Scripture, where the two of you are reading the exact same passage but have radically different understandings of what it's supposed to mean, then you know what I'm talking about.
And the history of the Church, which should be no surprise, is the history of people disagreeing over the interpretation of Scripture, and sorting out what the interpretation ought to be."
5:35-6:40
"We are living in a world where there are right answers and there are wrong answers. [...There] is an assumption built in that ... some answers are mutually exclusive, and so, therefore, some of them may be wrong. There is such a thing as a wrong answer. And, the other side of that coin is that there is such a thing as a right answer. Now there may multiple right answer, but the point is that part of the history of the Church is the search for authoritative answers -- in other words -- what are the official answers to some of these questions."
6:41-7:21
"The other thing that the history of the Church is the history of the development of doctrine. And the image I like to use is imagine if you wanted to build a house. [You] got an empty lot, and you decided you were going to build a house on this lot. So you call the Apostolic Construction Company[. The] Apostles pull up to your empty lot with a dump truck full of bricks, [...] pull the lever, dump the bricks onto your empty lot, and then they drive away[.] 'Now it's up to you to build the house.'
And in a way that's kind of what the Apostles did. Because all of the building blocks for doctrine are in the Apostolic documents -- they're in the New Testaments, they're in the writing the Apostles gave us -- but they're a brick here and a brick there. And it was up to the early Church then to put those bricks together[.] In other words, it's in the time of the early Church when doctrine is clarified and developed."
7:25 - 8:35
"And when you put these two concepts together -- that the history of the Church is the history of the interpretation of scripture and [...] the history of the development of doctrine -- [...] and you track it over time, you begin to get a picture of a kind of a pendulum. [...] And this is a bit what you see in the early Church. Because as the early Christians attempted to interpret scripture and clarify doctrine, people proposed answers that many thought were too far afield from what they considered correct. And so some answers represented a kind 'pushing of the envelop' toward one extreme. But eventually, that momentum is overcome and there's a pull back toward the center. But what almost always happens is that, in reacting against one extreme, there are those who ultimately overreact and swing the pendulum to the other extreme. And so you have this back and forth, with the gravity of time always pulling things back to a kind of center."
8:39-10:21
Papandrea's Three Laws of Early Church History, or the Development of Doctrine
1) Heresy forces orthodoxy to define itself. [...]
ortho = "straight, correct", dox = "praise", orthodox = "correct doctrine"
heresy = "going off on a tangent, off on your own way," "deviating from a mainstream within the Church"
"In our world, we're going to give the heretics the benefit of the doubt. We are going to assume that they are well-meaning believers who had an alternative interpretation but that interpretation was determined by a majority within the Church it be incorrect." 12:09-12:25
"What makes them a heretic though is not really so much that they had a difference of opinion. What makes them a heretic is that they continue to teach the interpretation that was considered incorrect even after they were confronted." 12:25-12:40
"[My] first law says that heresy forces orthodoxy to define itself,' and what I mean by that is, not that heresy precedes orthodoxy, but that the orthodox position is often the one that is held by most people, but kind of assumed and perhaps even unclarified, until it's challenged by an alternative interpretation. And so it's the challenge of the alternative interpretations that will force what becomes to be called orthodoxy to define itself, to clarify itself. So the orthodox are those who overtime defined and clarified doctrine in the Church" 12:52-13:42
"Now, it is in part true that these are labels [namely 'orthodox' and 'heretic'] that can only be applied after the argument is over. [...To] a certain extent, you only know who the orthodox are until you know who won the argument. And even then, over time, it is not always clear who won the argument.
On the other hand, it is also true that there is an orthodoxy in every generation. [...] And the orthodoxy of every generation is based on the orthodoxy of previous generations. And [...] many times the heresies in every generation are based on the heresies of the previous generations." 13:43-14:38
2) Orthodoxy is the middle way between the extreme alternatives.
3) Christology (the person, nature, role of Christ) informs soteriology (the doctrine of salvation)
"soter" = "savior"
"And you can see how the concepts of christology and soteriology would have to be interrelated because what you believe about the Savior has to be consistent some way with what you believe about salvation, how salvation works. It works the other way too, because, if you start with the soteriology, you end up being forced to back into the corresponding christology. In other words, if you start with assumptions about how salvation works and what salvation is, then you back into an understanding of how the Savior saves. " 16:03-16:38
10:22-16:44
"[Remember,] this class is about historical Christianity and historical theology; this class is not about what you believe. So, none of your papers are going to be faith statements or your own perspective. You'll have plenty of time for that in other courses, but this course is about understanding the foundation. So you gotta get that first before you go on from there."
25:52-26:14
"The history of early and medieval Church is, at the same time, everyone's and no one's tradition. Here's what I mean by that:
It is everyone's tradition because the early and medieval Church is the trunk of the family tree that we are all apart of, regardless of your denomination. Everything we are going to study in this class is your tradition, because this is the background of your Christianity. This is not just Eastern Christianity or Catholic Christianity, this is Christianity. And so, what we are going to study in this class belongs to you as a descendant, a spiritual descendant of the people you're going to be studying. These people you're going to be reading, they are that great cloud of witnesses that cheers you on in the race of faith.
On the other hand, when I say that the early and medieval Church is no one's tradition, I mean this:
When we read documents, we often try to find ourselves in the document. And that's natural. If I was writing fiction, I would create a protagonist that people could identify with. That's good writing. And so it's natural to look, to try to find yourself in the text. But the problem with that is there's no one like you living at that time. And what I mean by that is that the world was so very different from the world we live in that it's difficult to relate to some of these people on the level of 'oh, this person is like me,' 'I can relate to this person,' 'I can put myself in their shoes.'
One of the aspects of this is the issue of race.
Race in the ancient world is a very different thing than what is it now, because I imagine that immediately when I said the word 'race,' the first thing you thought of was skin color. And there's a very good reason for that because there's a sad history in [the United States] and in other [countries] in the last several hundred years that makes us think that way. But in the ancient world, race had nothing to do with skin color. In the ancient world, race was where you were from. So, my race would be the Italian race [. ...] But skin color wasn't nearly the issue back then that it is now. And in fact, even slavery was different than what you think of when you think about slavery in the history of [the United States], for example.
You will read about slavery. And there were a lot of slaves in the Roman world. But slavery was not justified on the basis of skin color back then; slavery was justified on the basis of the rights of conquest. If my country conquers your country, I can make you slaves; if your country conquers my country, then you can make me a slave -- but it has nothing to do with skin color, and it is nothing to do with assumptions that one group of people is less human than another. In fact, it was widely acknowledged in the Roman world that Greek slaves were good for teaching your children because they were smart. The idea is that you sort of have to put that out of your mind a little bit, as much as you can.
What that means is when we read these documents, we have no way of knowing, in virtually all cases, what these authors or these people looked like. Even when you read that someone is from North Africa, for example. North Africa was a coastal area, kind of the Los Angeles of the ancient world, where most people are from somewhere else. So you can't assume that people looked a certain way based on where you think they were from in the ancient world. [...] [Again,] you just have to sort of go into this knowing that when you read these texts, you can't assume that you know what people looked like or that you can relate to certain people because you think they might have looked like you. [...]"
27:20-33:26
"Now, I'm not saying that they didn't have racism in the ancient world. Because they did. It just wasn't based on skin color. It was based on language. Racism in the ancient world wasn't based on how you looked, it was based on sound you sounded. If you could be speak Greek or Latin, you were civilized; if you could not speak Greek or Latin, then you're a barbarian. That's the racism of the ancient world, at least in simplified form."
33:27-33:58
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