Christianity Flashcards
The Gospels: the life of Jesus
Known to history as Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus of Galilee, the story of Jesus Christ has altered history. With the name Christ meaning the ‘Messiah’ or ‘the anointed one,’ His followers believe He was sent to Earth to offer salvation for all.
As the New Testament of the Christian Bible recounts, it is believed that Jesus was born to a virgin in the town of Bethlehem. As the Gospels share, He was raised as a Jewish carpenter. However, when He began asserting that he was the Son of God, equal to God, He gained the disfavor of both Jewish and Roman officials.
After performing many miracles, like turning water into wine, and after gaining many disciples, Jesus Christ was betrayed by Judas Iscariot and crucified at Calvary. However, after three days in the grave, He was resurrected from the dead, appearing to many before eventually ascending into heaven.
Seeing His many miracles, and believing him to be the Son of God - equal to God the father in every way - His disciples began spreading the New Testament message that any who believe that Jesus is Lord and that He was raised from the dead will be saved.
The early Christian church
The early Christian church was not a new religion that simply sprung up out of nowhere in the first century Rome. Instead, it was firmly planted with Judaism at its very root structure. The early Christian church was begun and spread by Jews who believed in the message of Jesus Christ.
Furthermore, the early Christian church held the Jewish writings of the Old Testament as sacred. In fact, almost the entire Christian Bible was written by Jewish men. In addition, the early Church held the Jewish God of the Old Testament and their Jesus of the New Testament to be part of the Trinity, which made up one Holy God. Instead of calling the early Christian church a new religion, it might just be a better bet to call it ‘a group of Jewish believers who followed Jesus Christ-another Jewish man-and spread his message of salvation throughout the world.’
Judaism and Christianity in the Roman Empire
In short, Judaism was a religion, but it was also a racial and national identity. This made Judaism an exclusive religion with its own unique ideals and its own language. The Jews did not want to be part of the Roman Empire; they sought to break away from it. The Jews sought to resist the Roman Empire through violence and lost.
The world was largely unaware of the suffering of the Jews as they did not read Hebrew, and they were indifferent to this suffering anyway, since the Jews held themselves aloof. As a result, the Jews were easily labeled as violent, religious extremists to be attacked and dispersed. Anyone who bothered to think on their plight would assume that they had gotten what they deserved.
By contrast, Christianity was not concerned with race or nationality, making it an inclusive religion. It shared many of its ideals and rituals with the people of the time and communicated in a common language. Christians would happily be a part of the Roman Empire; they just wanted it to stop persecuting them. Christians sought to resist the Roman Empire’s persecution through non-violence, and they won.
The world was moved by the steadfastness of their faith in the face of such cruel oppression. Every martyr murdered by the Roman Empire advanced the cause of Christianity. Indeed, over a few centuries, Christians eventually took control of the very empire that had once oppressed them.
The early Christian church
The early Christian church was not a new religion that simply sprung up out of nowhere in the first century Rome. Instead, it was firmly planted with Judaism at its very root structure. The early Christian church was begun and spread by Jews who believed in the message of Jesus Christ.
Furthermore, the early Christian church held the Jewish writings of the Old Testament as sacred. In fact, almost the entire Christian Bible was written by Jewish men. In addition, the early Church held the Jewish God of the Old Testament and their Jesus of the New Testament to be part of the Trinity, which made up one Holy God. Instead of calling the early Christian church a new religion, it might just be a better bet to call it ‘a group of Jewish believers who followed Jesus Christ-another Jewish man-and spread his message of salvation throughout the world.’
Paul and the early church fathers
According to the Gospels, or the first four books of the New Testament Bible, Jesus had 12 original disciples, or followers. These were men from all different walks of life who traveled with Jesus. Some of the most well-known are Peter, John, Thomas, and Judas, the one who would eventually betray Jesus.
After the death and resurrection of Jesus, these men were filled with the Holy Spirit of God on the Day of Pentecost. The book of Acts, which recounts the workings of the disciples following Christ’s death, tell us the remaining disciples fervently preached the word of God. For this, all but John met violent deaths.
Along with the 12 disciples, the Christian Church holds that the Apostle Paul is one of the earliest Church Fathers. As a member of the Pharisees (or a ruling sect of the Jews), Paul, also known as Saul, hated the Christians.
However, after his supernatural meeting with Jesus on the road to Damascus, and then after meeting another guy named Ananias, Paul went on to become a fervent believer in Jesus Christ. With this belief, he founded many churches and wrote nearly half of the New Testament Bible. Although he was executed under the reign of Nero, his teachings and his story continue to impact our modern world.
Early critics of Christ: Sadducees and Pharisees
Being the wealthier, aristocratic Jews of the day, the Sadducees held a majority of the seats in the Sanhedrin, or the Jewish ruling council. They desired a very strict interpretation of the Torah, known in Greek as the Pentateuch. They also worked to maintain peace with the ruling Roman Empire. Due to all this, the Sadducees were not very popular with the common Jews of the day.
Like the Sadducees, the Pharisees were also part of the Sanhedrin. However, they tended to be more of the middle class. Also unlike the Sadducees, they considered their oral traditions to be equal to the words of the Torah.
Recorded in the New Testament Gospels as the two main groups that orchestrated Jesus’s crucifixion on Calvary, the Sadducees and the Pharisees have often been considered His greatest earthly opponents. To them, His claim to be equal to their holy God was in direct contradiction to their ideas of monotheism. So seriously did they take this, that they plotted and carried out His death.
However, also according to the Bible, this plan was rather undone when on the third day after His death, Jesus Christ was resurrected. As the angel proclaimed, ‘He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead, just as He said would happen.’
Stephen and Christian persecution
With the coming of Pentecost, the persecution of the followers of Christ began. The first of these martyrs was Stephen. His death stands to many as the official separation between Judaism and the followers of Christ. With his death, the desire to persecute the early Christian church intensified among the Jewish leaders of the day.
Along with persecution from the Jewish elite, the early church also faced persecution at the hands of the ruling Roman Empire. Disgusted by their commemoration of Jesus’s Last Supper, or the Eucharist, and angered by their unwillingness to worship their gods, Roman officials began torturing Christians. This intensified when men, like Nero, began blaming Christians for the natural disasters that befell the empire. When Emperor Domitian began calling for the adherence to emperor worship, Christians across the Roman Empire were tortured and killed for refusing to comply.
For many years, countless men and women, like Polycarp, Ignatius, and Origen, sacrificed their lives for the cause of Christ. Despite all this death and persecution, the Christian faith thrived and flourished into one of the world’s largest systems of faith.
The conversion of Constantine
The conversion of Constantine is an event that elevated Christianity to political prominence and power. Although it began with a vision, Constantine’s faith permeated his reign. Flying directly in the face of the modern separation of church and state, Constantine integrated the Christian faith into the political arena. Today, this integration is even given the name Constantinism.
Not merely content with his personal conviction, Constantine’s reign saw the legalization of Christianity through the Edict of Milan. It also saw the establishment of Sunday as a Roman holiday and December 25th as the official celebration of Christ’s birth.
Adding to this most impressive list, Constantine also called and presided over the famous council of Nicaea, which officially proclaimed Jesus Christ as divine and led Christian church-goers all over the world quoting the Nicene Creed.
St. Augustine’s City of God
St. Augustine was an educated bishop who wrote during a tumultuous time in the Roman Empire. As Rome was being pillaged by foreign invaders, many were looking for someone to blame. They found their scapegoat in the monotheistic believers of the Christian church. In order to refute such claims, Augustine wrote the City of God.
Although these writings are vast, we can highlight three of their main points. First, the Christians were not to blame for the sacking of Rome. Rome, like everyone else, just had problems. Second, internal peace can be had by those who follow the guidelines set out in scripture. And last, but not least, hell is real and waiting for those who choose the City of the World over the City of God.
Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire and the Divine Right to Rule
Born around the year 742, Charlemagne began as a Frankish King, but rose to the heights of Holy Roman Emperor. He was a man of influence and power, who used military conquest, his divine right to rule, and cultural reform to pull a continent from chaos.
In order to unify Europe under his rule, much of his rule was spent at war, reigning in the scattered lands of Western Europe. Using his position of Holy Roman Emperor, he ruled under the divine right of kings, a political ideology that recognizes a monarch as free from any earthly authority. With such power, Charlemagne not only waged war, he enacted social reform, bringing education and the Carolingian Renaissance to his people and forever changing the face of Europe.
Martin Luther, the 95 theses, and the birth of the Protestant movement
In 1517, Martin Luther published his 95 Theses in an attempt to get the Roman Catholic Church to stop selling indulgences. Luther did not think the Church had the authority to grant such indulgences, especially not for money. Luther believed that salvation could be achieved through faith alone. The Church responded by labeling Luther a heretic, forbidding the reading or publication of his 95 Theses, and threatening Luther with excommunication. Luther refused to recant his beliefs.
The next year, in 1521, Luther was summoned to appear at the Diet of Worms, where the leaders of the Holy Roman Empire would decide his fate. When Luther once again refused to recant his positions, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, ordered his arrest. Luther’s supporters hid Luther in Wartburg castle, where he completed a translation of the Bible into German, as well as, publishing a variety of treatises against the Church. By the time Luther returned from his exile, Germany was in the grip of a Peasant revolt, as peasants burned and destroyed all things Catholic. Luther calmed the revolt in his hometown of Wittenberg and established his own Lutheran Church in 1526.
How Thomas Aquinas saved the faith from reason
Aquinas was a Christian scholar who protected the church from the threat of Aristotelian logic. The church was afraid that scholars would use this logic to disprove Christianity, just as Aristotle had used the same logic to disprove Plato centuries earlier.
This panic was only heightened by the fact that so much Platonic philosophy had found its ways into Christianity. Plato’s lofty idealism, which had provided the church with its philosophical foundation, now proved a liability against the common sense approach of Aristotelian logic.
Aquinas turned this threat on its head. Rather than refuting Aristotelian logic, he used it and even improved upon it. Essentially, Aquinas took the sword of logic from the throat of the church and placed it firmly in her hand.
The Great Schism between the East and western churches
The Great Schism, also known as the ‘East-West Schism,’ was the official split of the Christian Church into Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism. Although 1054 is the official date of this occurrence, tensions between the two parties had been brewing for centuries. Separated by geography, language and culture, the Eastern and Western Roman empires grew more and more distant from one another. Making it even harder to remain unified, the Western Empire was under constant barbaric invasion while the Eastern Empire flourished. This only added to the divide.
When arguments arose over the power of the Papacy, the tenuous relationship between the East and the West could stand no more. In 1054, the office of the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople went head to head, each excommunicating the other and bringing about the Great Schism, forever giving the world two distinct Churches, Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
The Great Crusades
Despite the dazzling success of the First Crusade, the later crusades were marked by incompetence and treachery. The Crusaders were grossly ignorant of the geography, climate and politics of the Middle East. Though at their height, the Crusaders drew several great kings to their cause, a lack of clear leadership and an unwillingness to commit fully doomed each of the Crusades to failure.
Of the eight Crusades that followed the first, only the fourth and sixth met with anything even resembling success, though the fourth was success over the Greek Orthodox Christians, and the sixth was a success of diplomacy rather than warfare. Back at home, popes declared crusades against heretics, and their political enemies. This abuse of crusading at home, combined with the utter failure of crusading abroad, undermined the authority of the pope, and would play a key role in the advent of the Protestant reformation.
The Great Schism between the East and western churches
The Great Schism, also known as the ‘East-West Schism,’ was the official split of the Christian Church into Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism. Although 1054 is the official date of this occurrence, tensions between the two parties had been brewing for centuries. Separated by geography, language and culture, the Eastern and Western Roman empires grew more and more distant from one another. Making it even harder to remain unified, the Western Empire was under constant barbaric invasion while the Eastern Empire flourished. This only added to the divide.
When arguments arose over the power of the Papacy, the tenuous relationship between the East and the West could stand no more. In 1054, the office of the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople went head to head, each excommunicating the other and bringing about the Great Schism, forever giving the world two distinct Churches, Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
