How we talk about human life matters.
In western post-Christian society, humans are thought of less like precious image bearers and more like commodities. The canary in the coal mine of this ideological shift is often women and children, which manifests itself in the seemingly built-in disdain towards motherhood and children for their lack of production of economically valuable goods. However, the risk of this utilitarian approach to human life is not just outside the church, but within those spaces as well. Indeed, the commodification of human life within the contemporary body politic is so deeply embedded within the systems, even the church has lost touch with some of the ways it inherently devalues the lives of women and children.
Classics scholar Nadya Williams draws from voices both ancient and modern to illuminate how Christians can value human life amidst an empire that seeks to dehumanize that which is most precious. Bringing insights from the beliefs and practices of the early church in Greco-Roman context about motherhood, raising children, and human life, Williams suggests there is a way to recapture a vision that affirms the imago Dei in each person over and above our economic contribution to society.
These audio lectures are a unique learning experience. Unlike a traditional audiobook's direct narration of a book's text, Cultural Christians in the Early Church Audio Lectures includes high quality live-recordings of college-level lectures that cover the important points from each subject as well as relevant material from other sources.
In the middle of the third century CE, one North African bishop wrote a treatise for the women of his church, exhorting them to resist such culturally normalized yet immodest behaviors in their cosmopolitan Roman city as mixed public bathing in the nude, and wearing excessive amounts of jewelry and makeup. Stories like this one challenge the general assumption that the earliest Christians were zealous converts who were much more counterculturally devoted to their faith than typical church-goers today. Too often Christians today think of cultural Christianity as a modern concept, and one most likely to occur in areas where Christianity is the majority culture, such as the American 'Bible Belt.'
Cultural Christians in the Early Church: Audio Lectures, which aims to be both historical and practical, argues that cultural Christians were the rule, rather than the exception, in the early church. Using different categories of sins as its organizing principle, lessons consider the challenge of culture to the earliest converts to Christianity as they struggled to live on mission in the Greco-Roman cultural milieu of the Roman Empire. Their stories provide a fresh perspective for considering the difficult timeless questions that stubbornly persist in our own world and churches: Are women inherently more sinful than men? Why is Christian nationalism a problem and, at times, a sin? Ultimately, recognizing that cultural sins were always a part of the story of the church and its people is a message that is both a source of comfort and a call to action in our pursuit of sanctification today.
In the middle of the third century CE, one North African bishop wrote a treatise for the women of his church, exhorting them to resist such culturally normalized yet immodest behaviors in their cosmopolitan Roman city as mixed public bathing in the nude, and wearing excessive amounts of jewelry and makeup. The treatise appears even more striking, once we realize that the scandalous virgins to whom it was addressed were single women who had dedicated their virginity to Christ.
Stories like this one challenge the general assumption among Christians today that the earliest Christians were zealous converts who were much more counterculturally devoted to their faith than typical church-goers today. Too often Christians today think of cultural Christianity as a modern concept, and one most likely to occur in areas where Christianity is the majority culture, such as the American 'Bible Belt.' The story that this book presents, refutes both of these assumptions.
Cultural Christians in the Early Church, which aims to be both historical and practical, argues that cultural Christians were the rule, rather than the exception, in the early church. Using different categories of sins as its organizing principle, the book considers the challenge of culture to the earliest converts to Christianity, as they struggled to live on mission in the Greco-Roman cultural milieu of the Roman Empire. These believers blurred and pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be a saint or sinner from the first to the fifth centuries CE, and their stories provide the opportunity to get to know the regular people in the early churches. At the same time, their stories provide a fresh perspective for considering the difficult timeless questions that stubbornly persist in our own world and churches: when is it a sin to eat or not eat a particular food? Are women inherently more sinful than men? And why is Christian nationalism a problem and, at times, a sin? Ultimately, recognizing that cultural sins were always a part of the story of the church and its people is a message that is both a source of comfort and a call to action in our pursuit of sanctification today.
