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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780342323043 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Franklin Classics |
| Publication date: | 10/11/2018 |
| Pages: | 662 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.33(d) |
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Chapter 1
The General Situation
At the birth of christ, the lands which surrounded the Mediterranean Sea were under the political control of Rome, whose empire embraced not only the coastal territories but their hinterlands as well. Bounded by the ocean and by the Rhine and Danube rivers to the north of the Mediterranean, it encompassed North Africa and Egypt and stretched in the East to the borders of Armenia and of the Persian Empire.
In the century and a half before the appearance of Christianity, the sway of the Senate and People of Rome was extended from Italy to include not merely Gaul, Spain, and North Africa in the West, but also, in the East, the Hellenistic monarchies which had succeeded to the empire of Alexander the Great. This time of expansion coincided with an era of growing conflict and instability in the social and political life of the Roman republic. The assassination (44 B.C.) of Julius Caesar, carried out by a party which feared his subversion of traditional republican institutions, was followed by civil wars which affected all parts of the territories ruled by Rome. It was generally with relief and hope, therefore, that people greeted the final triumph of Octavian, Caesar's nephew and adopted son, whose task it became to reconstitute the Roman state and to reform the administration of its provinces. Preserving the form of republican institutions, Augustus (as Octavian was officially and reverently named in 27 B.C. by the Senate) eventually concentrated all effective power (imperium) in his own hands, receiving lifetime status as tribune of the people and then as consul, with the title "leading citizen"(princeps). Acting with this authority, he brought order to the government of the provinces and relative peace to the whole of the Mediterranean world.
The imperial system which Augustus thus established embraced peoples of many languages and cultures. In most regions of the empire, the basic political and social unit was -- or came to be -- the polis, a term commonly but inadequately translated into English as "city." This was a corporation of citizens tending the affairs of a modest territory whose heart was an urban center of greater or smaller size. Under Roman aegis, such civic corporations -- which were ruled oligarchically for the most part -- were responsible for their own local affairs as well as for the taxes which supported the imperial establishment and its armies. Each city thus provided for the worship of the god or gods who were its patrons, for the administration of justice, and for the welfare of its citizens and other residents. Each was a focus of local pride, with its economic roots in the surrounding countryside.
Put together as it was out of a multitude of ethnic, cultural, and religious groupings, the empire was held together by a common political allegiance, by economic and commercial interdependence, and by a shared higher culture. Politically, everything depended upon Rome, its emperor, and its armies, both for the maintenance of internal order and for the protection of the outer frontiers of Mediterranean civilization, where most of the legions were stationed. Within the empire, the principal source of wealth was the land and its products, and agriculture was the chief industry. Communities distant from the Mediterranean and its tributary rivers lived for the most part on local produce, but the cities of the seacoast -- and especially great cosmopolitan centers like Rome -- were dependent on a lively trade in the staples of life: grain, wine, and olives. North African grain fed the population of Rome as, at a later period, Egyptian grain transported from the seaport of Alexandria sustained the inhabitants of Constantinople. Italy itself was a center of viniculture, and its wines were exported extensively. The Mediterranean cities, then, which were the core of the empire, were increasingly bound together in a nexus of commercial relationships.
The unity and cohesion of the empire, however, depended also upon the existence of a common higher culture -- the "Hellenistic" culture which grew up in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.), as Greek language, education, and civic institutions were diffused through the eastern Mediterranean world. Even Rome, in the century and a half before the birth of Christ, became a cultural and intellectual tributary of the Greek tradition. As Greek became the daily speech of city-dwellers in the East, it also became a normal second language for educated persons in the West, where Latin was the common tongue. Other languages -- Aramaic, Coptic, Punic -- by no means disappeared, but they tended more and more to become languages of the uneducated and of the rural population. In this way, Greek science, Greek religious philosophy, and Greek art and literature enriched and were enriched by other traditions and created the possibility of a shared world of cultural and religious values for the urban civilization of the Mediterranean area.
In this complex, variegated, and remarkably sophisticated world, religious concerns, beliefs, and practices were central in the lives both of individuals and of communities. At the same time, however, the religious currents of the time were diverse. To speak in general terms, one can distinguish three broad categories of religious belief and observance. First, there was the traditional religion of the family and community gods -- what one might call the "civic religion" of the Roman-Hellenistic world. Second, there were the so-called "mystery cults." These were for the most part oriental cults which had their mythic roots in local fertility rites, but which, in the cosmopolitan world of the Greek-speaking empire, underwent a transformation and became voluntary brotherhoods which offered their initiates salvation from the trammels of Fate and Fortune. Finally, there was the way of life which sought human fulfillment and blessedness through the pursuit and practice of philosophical wisdom: a wisdom founded upon criticism of the traditional gods of the Greek pantheon, but capable, as time went on, of offering a "demythologized" version of traditional religion. In practice, these different styles of religion coexisted peacefully, and some individuals were, to one degree or another, involved in all three of them. They responded, however, to different needs, and to some extent they presupposed differing perceptions of the human situation.
On one matter, however, the various types of religion were at one. People in the Roman world were acquiring -- had, indeed, for the most part already acquired -- a new picture of the cosmos. Gone was the flat earth and overarching heaven of ancient myth. Educated and half-educated persons alike now saw the earth as a sphere set motionless at the center of things. Around it in their orbits moved the seven planetary spheres, and around this whole system moved "the heaven," the realm of the fixed stars. To the ancients, however, this cosmos was no mere machine. They perceived it rather as an ensouled -- that is, a living -- thing, in which orderly change and motion were maintained by divine Mind. The world was pervaded by life, and the gods who inhabited the heaven and the planetary spheres were the manifestations or representatives of the ultimate divine Power which extended to all things, even to affairs in that sector of the cosmos -- earth -- which was farthest removed from the divine realm.
Traditional religion in the Roman-Hellenistic world was a public and social affair, an affair of family and community. Since human well-being depended at every moment on the good will of the gods, the cosmic powers, religion sought their help for the common concerns of life: the growing of crops, the conduct of business, the difficult enterprises of war and diplomacy. Its rites were age-old and traditional,
Table of Contents
PREFACEPeriod I
FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO THE GNOSTIC CRISIS
1 The General Situation
2 The Jewish Background
3 Jesus and the Disciples
4 The Early Christian Community
5 Paul and Gentile Christianity
6 The Close of the Apostolic Age
7 The Interpretation of Jesus
8 Gentile Christianity of the Second Century
9 Christian Organization
10 Christianity and the Roman Government
11 The Apologists
Period II
FROM THE GNOSTIC CRISIS TO CONSTANTINE
1 Gnosticism
2 Marcion
3 Montanism
4 The Catholic Church
5 The Growing Importance of the Roman Church
6 lrenaeus of Lyon
7 Tertullian and Cyprian
8 The Logos Theology and Monarchianism
9 The Alexandrian School
10 Church and Roman Society from 180 to 260
11 The Constitutional Development of the Church
12 Public Worship and Sacred Time
13 Baptism
14 The Eucharist
15 Forgiveness of Sins
16 Patterns of Christian Life
17 Rest and Growth
18 Rival Religious Forces
19 The Final Struggle
Period III
THE IMPERIAL STATE CHURCH
1 The Changed Situation
2 The Arian Controversy to the Death of Constantine
3 Controversy under Constantine's Sons
4 The Later Nicene Struggle
5 The Germanic Invasions
6 The Growth of the Papacy
7 Monasticism
8 Ambrose and Chrysostom
9 The Christological Controversies
10 The East Divided
11 Controversy and Catastrophe in the East
12 The Constitutional Development o! the Church
13 Worship and Piety
14 The Latin Christian Tradition
15 Jerome
16 Augustine of Hippo
17 The Pelagian Controversy
18 Semi-Pelagianism
19 Gregory the Great
Period IV
THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE CLOSE OF THE INVESTITURECONTROVERSY
1 Missions in the British Isles
2 Christianity and the Frankish Kingdom
S East and West in the Iconoclastic Controversy
4 The Franks and the Papacy
5 Charles the Great
6 European Christianity in the Ninth Century
7 The Papacy and the Ottonian Empire
8 The Greek Church after the Iconoclastic Controversy
9 Christian Expansion in the Early Middle Ages
10 The Reforming Papacy
11 From Reform to Revolution
12 Hildebrand and Henry IV
13 The End of the Investiture Struggle
Period V
THE LATER MIDDLE AGES
1 The Crusades
2 New Religious Movements
3 Medieval Heresy -- The Cathars and Waldenses; the Inquisition
4 The Dominicans, Franciscans, and Other Mendicant Orders
5 Early Scholasticism; Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard
6 The Rediscovery of Aristotle; the Rise of the Universities
7 High Scholasticism and Its Theology; Thomas Aquinas
8 Late Scholasticism; Duns Scotus and William of Ockham
9 Mysticism, the Modern Devotion, and Heresy
10 Missions and Defeats
11 The Papacy at Its Height and Its Decline
12 The Avignon Papacy; Papal Critics and Defenders; the Great Schism
13 Wyclif and Hus
14 The Reforming Councils
15 The Italian Renaissance and Its Popes; Popular Religious Leaders
16 The New National Powers
17 Humanism North of the Alps; Piety on the Eve of the Reformation
Period VI
THE REFORMATION
1 Luther's Development and the Beginnings of the Reformation
2 Separations and Divisions
3 Ulrich Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation
4 The Anabaptists
5 German Protestantism Established
6 The Scandinavian Lands
7 The Reformation in French Switzerland and Geneva before Calvin
8 John Calvin
9 The English Reformation
10 The Scottish Reformation
11 The Catholic Reformation and Counter-Reformation
12 Confessional Strife in France, the Netherlands, and England
13 German Religious Controversies and the Thirty Years' War
14 Socinianism
15 Arminianism
16 Anglicanism, Puritanism, and the Free Churches in England, Episcopacy and Presbyterianism in Scotland
17 The Quakers
Period VII
MODERN CHRISTIANITY
1 The Beginnings of Modern Science and Philosophy
2 The Transplantation of Christianity to the Americas
3 Deism and Its Opponents; Skepticism
4 Unitarianism in England and America
5 Pietism in Germany
6 Zinzendorf and Moravianism
7 The Evangelical Revival in Great Britain; Wesley and Methodism
8 The Great Awakening
9 The Impact of the Evangelical Revival; the Rise of Modern Missions
10 The Revolutionary Epoch in the United States
11 The German Enlightenment (Aufklärung)
12 Trends in Nineteenth-Century Protestant Thought in Germany
13 British Protestantism in the Nineteenth Century
14 Continental Protestantism in the Nineteenth Century
15 American Protestantism in the Nineteenth Century
16 Roman Catholicism in the Modern World
17 The Eastern Churches in Modern Times
18 The Growth of the Ecumenical Movement
19 The Church in the World
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUGGESTIONS
INDEX
Maps and Charts
The Roman Empire around the Time of Hadrian
Europe at the End o! the Fifth Century
The Empire of Charles the Great
The Byzantine Empire and the Crusader States (First Crusade)
Europe about 1500
Religious Divisions in Europe about 1600
Approximate Distribution of Churches in Colonial America, 1775-1776
Spread of Church Colleges in America up to 1860
Major Ecumenical Gatherings