BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.2.3.1//EN TZID:America/Chicago X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Chicago BEGIN:VEVENT UID:276@redriveruu.org DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20191124T100000 DTEND;TZID=America/Chicago:20191124T104500 DTSTAMP:20190616T235256Z URL:https://redriveruu.org/events/early-christianity-a-great-courses-serie s-2019-11-24/ SUMMARY:"Early Christianity\," A Great Courses Series DESCRIPTION:After 2\,000 years\, Christianity is the world's largest religi on and continues to prosper and grow. What accounts for its continued popu larity? Simply put\, Christianity is powerful and persuasive as a religion . It offers a convincing personal experience of ultimate\, or "divine\," p ower.\nIn Early Christianity: The Experience of the Divine\, Professor Luk e Timothy Johnson maintains that the most familiar aspects of Christianity —its myths\, institutions\, ideas and morality—are only its outer "hus k." In this two-part course\, he takes you on a journey to find the "kerne l" of Christianity's appeal: religious experience. You travel back to Chri stianity's origins\, its first 300 years\, to identify the elements that f irst made it appealing and which still hold the secret to its ability to a ttract new followers.\nProfessor Johnson is a former Benedictine monk and author of 20 books\, including The Writings of the New Testament: An Inter pretation. At Emory University\, he has twice received the "On Eagle's Win gs Excellence in Teaching" Award.\nIn his presentation\, Professor Johnson employs scholarly techniques that have only recently been applied to reli gion. By combining such disciplines as history\, the social sciences\, and comparative literary analysis\, you look at religious experience and beha vior from a fresh perspective.\nWhat is "Religious Experience"? \nBut if t his course is about the nature and power of religious experience\, what ex actly is that experience?\nYou consider a variety of theories developed by the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Immanuel Kant\, Emil Durkheim \, the founder of sociology\, and Sigmund Freud\, before settling on a def inition that will be used for the remainder of the course.\nTo better unde rstand religious experience in Christianity\, you then study it in the two religions with which early Christianity co-existed: Greco-Roman paganism and Judaism.\nThese lectures assume that patterns of behavior can be used to identify religious experience in antiquity. In this sense\, all of life in the Roman Empire might be said to be a religious experience. Every hum an activity—civic\, military\, domestic\, and personal—fell under the power and protection of gods who needed attention for life to be prosperou s.\nProphecy and the healing of physical and mental disorders were regarde d as revelations of divine power. Participation in mystery cults offered a ccess to deeper realities\, as well as social advancement.\nIn Judaism\, r eligious experience was rooted in the symbolic world of Torah. These scrip tures embodied central Jewish convictions such as belief in one God and a sense of themselves as a Chosen People. Torah also defined the ways in whi ch these convictions were to be expressed\, through such practices as circ umcision and the observance of the Sabbath.\nFor Jews living in Palestine\ , religious life focused on the temple\, the synagogue\, and the family. P alestinian Judaism was also affected by the stress resulting from Greco-Ro man oppression. Some Jews splintered into sects. This was accompanied by t he appearance of new sources of religious experience:\n\n\n Apocalyptic w ritings that offered hopeful visions of God's future\n Intervention of ch arismatic miracle workers and healers\n Prophets such as John the Baptist .\n\nSources of Religious Experience: Healing\, Visions\, and Speaking in Tongues \nIn introducing early Christian religious experience\, Professor Johnson looks at questions that are new and intellectually exciting in the study of religion. Was Christ the founder of Christianity? Was Christiani ty's early growth due to his life and works or to his followers' powerful experience of his death and resurrection\, their sense of having been tran sformed by the Holy Spirit?\nYou see how religious experience in earliest Christianity took on a variety of forms. Fellowship meals celebrated the p resence of the resurrected Lord Jesus. Healing was a sign of God's presenc e in the world and could certify the healer as a saint. Prayer and visions provided access to\, and confirmation of\, divine power.\nMany practices\ , however\, created problems for early Christian leaders. For example\, th ey rejected demands to add circumcision to baptism as an initiation rite i n Christianity. This was due not so much to its use in Judaism as to the f act that it would make Christianity seem similar to pagan religion: a seco nd rite would resemble the multiple initiation rites used by Greco-Roman m ystery cults.\nSimilarly\, many Christians saw glossolalia\, or speaking i n tongues\, as a powerful form of religious experience\, dating from the e xperience of the crowd at Pentecost. However\, a variety of concerns\, inc luding that it could be confused with pagan prophecy or used by women to u ndermine male authority\, quickly led to its marginalization.\nProfessor J ohnson raises important questions. Did institutional development in early Christianity—the creation of its formal structure and creeds—eliminate important sources of religious experience? Or did it minimize certain pra ctices in order to preserve\, for millennia\, other meaningful avenues of religious experience?\nFinding "True" Christianity \nThere has always been a struggle between "official" Christianity—its institutions and politic al roles—and "popular" Christianity\, which most directly connects Chris tians to religious experience. In the last lecture\, Professor Johnson arg ues that official Christianity has been accepted as true Christianity due in large part to the way in which its leaders and reformers have defined i t and the manner in which academic scholars have studied it.\nIn the last 15 years or so\, new analytical methods have begun to be applied to the st udy of Christianity. Among these is the approach taken in this course as w ell as the fresh perspectives offered by women's history and social histor y. With these techniques\, so-called "popular" Christianity may well come to be understood as real Christianity. CATEGORIES:Film LOCATION:Alexander Room\, 515 N. Burnett Ave\, Denison\, TX\, 75020\, Unite d States X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=515 N. Burnett Ave\, Deniso n\, TX\, 75020\, United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=100;X-TITLE=Alexander Room:g eo:0,0 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Chicago X-LIC-LOCATION:America/Chicago BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20191103T010000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0600 TZNAME:CST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR