CH501 – in six weeks

I’ve got till 3/16 to do 2,000 pages of reading – bad year not to have entered that reading contest some friends put on – write three papers and generally be introduced to the first 1500 years of church history. I think that’s right. But then, next week two other courses start, each with 2,000 pages or so of reading and papers. And all of this really is just a part time gig.

My texts: The Early Church: History and Memory, The Lost History of Christianity, The Apostolic Fathers (in English)(phew), The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation.

There’s a certain intimidation of really looking at, really examining the early church. Perhaps more than any other single course this one seems to me the most important and ergo the most daunting.

It ALL rests on this history. The faith that I hold, that I profess, that I stake my life and my eternity on isn’t some neat little story of inerrancy upon infallibility. The essentials of my faith and my theology didn’t come skipping out of Jerusalem after Pentecost. The history is complicated, the doctrines clash, the accounts of who?, what?, when?, where?, why? slam up into each other. One day’s heresies were another day’s doctrine. I know all this. I’ve known all this in varying degrees. But I haven’t ever really studied it. I’ve not worshipped God with my intellect in these spaces. For all my years of faith there is a shocking amount that I don’t know. I am excited that this journey is beginning.