Digital Logos Edition
Church History offers a unique contextual view of how the Christian church spread and developed. It did so not in a vacuum, but in a setting of times, cultures, and events that both influenced and were influenced by the church. Church History looks closely at the integral link between the history of the world and that of the church. Volume one explores the development of the church from the days of Jesus to the years prior to the Reformation.
Filled with maps, charts, and illustrations, it offers overviews of the Roman, Greek, and Jewish worlds; insights into the church’s relationship to the Roman Empire, with glimpses into pagan attitudes toward Christians; the place of art and architecture, literature, and philosophy, both sacred and secular; and much more, spanning the time from the first through the thirteenth centuries.
“Paul was spiritually a Jew, legally a Roman, and intellectually a Greek—three trump cards for a missionary in the first century.” (Pages 36–37)
“Broadly speaking, we may identify three groups in the Jerusalem church: the followers of Jesus from his Galilaean ministry, led by Peter and the Twelve; Judaean converts, who came to look for leadership to James, brother of Jesus and also known as ‘James the Just’; and those from the Greek Diaspora and others in Jerusalem sympathetic to them, of whom Stephen became the spokesman.” (Page 34)
“Not until the Council of Nicaea in 325 did creeds expand their function as confessions of faith to become tests of fellowship.” (Page 111)
“The reign of Decius marked the turning point from local, sporadic persecution to an empire-wide assault on Christianity.” (Page 161)
“As Christian theology developed from the affirmations of the gospel and the early moral and doctrinal instruction, Greek philosophy provided the vocabulary, ethical assumptions, thought world, and intellectual options with which Christian thinkers worked.” (Page 29)
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Dale Dowling
5/27/2021
Floyd Johnson
9/16/2015
Anthony Sims
7/29/2015
L. Gabriel Narváez
1/27/2015
David
3/30/2014