The Basics of Christian History. Death and Resurrection of Jesus. Harvard Divinity School. Life and Teachings of Jesus. Legitimization Under Constantine. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Generally described as taking place from the 14th century to the 17th century, the Renaissance promoted the rediscovery of classical philosophy, The Protestant Reformation was the 16th-century religious, political, intellectual and cultural upheaval that splintered Catholic Europe, setting in place the structures and beliefs that would define the continent in the modern era.
In northern and central Europe, reformers Luther spent his early years in relative anonymity as a monk and scholar. The Bible is the holy scripture of the Christian religion, purporting to tell the history of the Earth from its earliest creation to the spread of Christianity in the first century A.
Both the Old Testament and the New Testament have undergone changes over the centuries, Followers of Judaism believe in one God who revealed himself through ancient prophets. The history of Judaism is essential to understanding the Jewish faith, which has a rich heritage of law, Islam is the second largest religion in the world after Christianity, with about 1. Although its roots go back further, scholars typically date the creation of Islam to the 7th century, making it the youngest of the major world religions.
Easter is a Christian holiday that celebrates the belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the New Testament of the Bible, the event is said to have occurred three days after Jesus was crucified by the Romans and died in roughly 30 A. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Christianity Beliefs Some basic Christian concepts include: Christians are monotheistic, i. The essence of Christianity revolves around the life, death and Christian beliefs on the resurrection of Jesus.
Christians believe God sent his son Jesus, the messiah, to save the world. They believe Jesus was crucified on a cross to offer the forgiveness of sins and was resurrected three days after his death before ascending to heaven. The cross is a symbol of Christianity. The most important Christian holidays are Christmas which celebrates the birth of Jesus and Easter which commemorates the resurrection of Jesus. Some old ones, such as the exquisite twin churches of Ramapuram, which are and years old respectively, cling precariously to life.
The local parish maintains that they are dangerously unsound and should be demolished, while a group of parishioners has received heritage status for the buildings and secured a court ruling that the churches are safe to use. A gathering of Kerala bishops dressed in the rainbow-hued grandeur of the Eastern Church, holding regal symbols of heavenly and earthly authority and seated on ornate thrones, brings a medieval court to mind.
In some sects, the patriarch is buried while seated on his throne, attired in the dazzling glitter of episcopal robes. For Kerala Christians, the church remains at the heart of their gregarious lifestyle, a place to recall the spirit in the hurly-burly of life.
It is also an intensely experienced way of life for many. Determined not to miss the a. Mass, they set out from their homes at some vague hour after midnight. When they find the church door closed, they fall asleep waiting.
For my aunt Annamma, who devoted one decade of the rosary every day for my becoming a good Christian, the church was like home. In her last days—she died at 87 recently—she would finish at the confessional, then turn around to ask her son in a loud whisper if she had missed any sin, much to the amusement of others, for her memory remained perfect.
The priest would smile and reply that her confession would more than do. He would often add that she might save some for the next one! Annual parish festivals still draw big crowds, many Christians abroad catching a flight back home to attend. Few are memorable or enriching, however, unless you like milling crowds and scary fireworks. Gone are the days of my childhood when we boys hefted a statue of St. Sebastian onto our shoulders and carried it along the maze of village footpaths at twilight.
At each house we visited, the priest intoned the prayers in a quiet voice, the sacristan ringing his little bell at intervals. The smoke from the swinging incense burner wafted in the breeze.
The Hindu homes welcomed us with lighted candles at their gates. Sebastian, shot through with arrows and pinned to a tree stump, showered his blessings on all as he chased away disease and sickness. Faith, in this sense, encompasses more than mere religious belief. It also entails a negative belief about other kinds of belief, a peculiar kind of exclusivity found only in true monotheism. We might call that exclusive sort of belief the tradition of faith. Admittedly, all kinds of religion rely on tradition.
Imagine for a moment that we could wave a magic wand and make everyone on the planet forget everything they know about religion. At the same time, we can erase every word of religious scripture, along with all religious representations in art and literature.
If we wiped all religion away, anthropology suggests, it would rapidly reappear in new yet familiar forms—but probably without monotheism, assuming that history is any guide. Religion in the broad sense clearly represents a human instinct, since we find it in all human societies.
If you worship that sort of God, you share in that single, though by now hardly unitary, tradition. The monotheistic tradition of faith seems to focus and amplify the mental faculty of faith, concentrating the idea of the divine into a single, exclusive deity. Who else but the Jews, those famous monotheists from way back?
This essentially polytheistic outlook accords with the frequent mention of other gods in the Hebrew Bible Old Testament , for example. El was the Canaanite high god, but under him served other gods such as the fertility god Baal and the water god Yam. Perhaps Abraham and his kin adopted El as their own, accepting him as the same god who had urged Abraham to leave Ur and seek out the land of milk and honey in the first place.
Nor, like El before him, does Yahweh appear at first to have been thought of by the Hebrews as a divine creator, at least not according to the picture we get from the last century or so of biblical scholarship. Scholars believe that not until the eighth century bc was the first biblical account of creation composed starting at Genesis , and that only a couple of centuries later did an anonymous priestly author write down the full-blown version we get starting at Genesis 1.
By that time, the Jews were rejoicing in their return to Palestine after the Babylonian Captivity c. Enjoying a sense of revival and optimism, the Jews built the Second Temple in Jerusalem; Jewish priests acted as ambassadors to their Persian rulers.
Jewish life comes down to earth at this point. The days of the prophets are fading. From here on in, the Jews will be concerned less with further prophecies than with the proper interpretation of past ones. In the coming centuries, the Jews did indeed take the final steps down the long road to true monotheism. Neither they nor their new conception of faith evolved in a vacuum.
Right around the same time that the Jews were celebrating their release from the Babylonian Captivity, the ancient Greeks freed themselves from a very different sort of captivity. The crucial first step was a fully alphabetic writing system, which the Greeks invented and began using around bc. Earlier alphabets had been missing vowels. The Greeks took one of them, the Phoenician alphabet, and added new letters for vowel sounds, making the whole thing a much more flexible and precise instrument.
Here begins, if not the march, then at least the toddle toward string theory and space telescopes. For writing and thinking go together, and the dawn of this new literary age was simultaneously the dawn of reason. Within a mere couple of hundred years or so, we see a Greek thinker named Thales of Miletus taking the novel step of trying to explain the material world in secular, naturalistic terms, and of publicizing his ideas so that others could critique them.
This is not to say that no one had ever thought rationally before, of course. All humans have the capacity for rational thought; clearly there exists something we might, for consistency, call the mental faculty of reason. It comprises an innate ability for symbolic logic, which we humans use in something akin to the way dolphins use sonar.
Thales and his immediate successors came from Ionia, the coast of what is now Turkey, where the mainland cities of Greece proper had established a number of prosperous colonies of which Miletus was the acknowledged leader.
But their explanations always came back to religious mythology. Thales and his successors struck off in a fundamentally new direction, that of secular explanation. Within a generation or two, they established free rational inquiry as a recognizable movement, a culturally coherent literary and intellectual tradition, in which ideas and concerns were passed from identifiable individuals in one generation to identifiable individuals in another, with each generation building on the work of those who came before.
And as any student of ancient philosophy can tell you, we see the first appearance of a unitary God not in Jewish scripture, but in the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote in the early fourth century bc. Moreover, its origins go back to none other than Thales, who had proposed that nature can be explained by reference to a single unitary principle that pervades everything.
Thales thought everything boiled down, so to speak, to Water, which he seems to have seen as an inherently divine material substance with no agency in nature; his immediate successors posited their own monist principles, including Air, Fire, and the Infinite. Divine but not divine agents, these ideas straddled the line between religious and secular. Adding limited agency to this tradition, Plato in his dialogue Timaeus described what he called the Demiurge, a divine Craftsman who shapes the material world after ideal Forms that exist on a perfect immaterial plane.
Centuries would pass before the Jews assimilated Greek thought, and scholars suspect that it was Hellenized Jewish philosophers such as Philo of Alexandria who imported the Greek idea of a single unitary God into the Jewish tradition. So one indisputable thing the last century or so of scholarly work has uncovered about faith and reason is that they are hardly the rigidly separate traditions we commonly take them for. Even more surprising, perhaps, is how quickly monotheistic faith followed, starting with its first glimmering in the thought of Thales himself.
As we perceive order in nature, it seems, we also gravitate to the One. This extraordinarily powerful idea was, in fact, entirely unprecedented. For thousands of years before Thales, humanity encountered only one undifferentiated world, a world still inhabited today by some, it is true, though their numbers are dwindling. In this holistic world, matter and spirit are the same: people, places, objects, and events merge and mingle with the gods, goddesses, spirits, and demons who animate them.
We saw a vivid example of this outlook during the solar eclipse over Asia in July , when some local authorities closed schools and urged pregnant women to stay indoors to avoid ill effects as the evil spirit swallowed the Sun god.
The epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey , reflect the oral traditions of this sort of world. These poems established the classical Greek religious pantheon, in which the gods gleam brightly in the sunlight and the sea, rumble through the land as earthquakes, and darken the sky with clouds or eclipses.
With the help of his ally Athena, goddess of wisdom, Odysseus gathers his wits enough to swim along the shore, desperately looking for a place to land. Like the Olympians, the little river is amoral and not much interested in the human world, but it is susceptible to a properly formulated plea for sanctuary Greek custom held that sanctuary had to be granted to a self-declared suppliant. River and deity are one and the same. Putting up that boundary was the most significant act in the history of human thought.
There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and. The new conception here involved is that of reality. It soon gave rise to many branches of learning that are still with us, including literary theory, rhetoric, political science, history, ethnology, medicine, botany, biology, and not least logic itself—the rules of naturalistic thinking.
Where physical sciences attempt to explain raw material reality in naturalistic terms, these disciplines sought to explain various other aspects of reality human social realities, for example, or realities of the plant or animal kingdoms in the same way.
He also made it psychologically necessary for someone to invent faith as well. We can draw a direct line from Thales through Plato, whose Demiurge shapes the seen in the image of the unseen, to St.
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