From Persecution to State Church
Reading Topic: Christian Faith: Worship, Prayer and Church Order in the Early Centuries
Key early thinkers
The Early Church
Chapter 4: Justin and Irenaeus
JUSTIN MARTYR
The Gnostic heretics had appealed to the principles of Platonism to provide a philosophical justification for their doctrine that the elect soul must be liberated from the evil inherent in the material realm to escape to its true home and to enjoy the beatific vision. Their deep pessimism about this created order was not quite fairly deduced from the text of Plato, but there was a sufficient plausibility about the argument to make it look impressive. The Gnostic appeal to pagan philosophy did not tend to encourage the study of philosophy among those who feared Gnosticism as a corrupter of the truth. Philosophy came to seem like the mother of heresy. To Irenaeus of Lyons Gnosticism was a ragbag of heathen speculations with bits taken from different philosophers to dress out a bogus, anti-rational mythology. His successor as an anti-heretical writer, Hippolytus, whose mind was a curious mixture of scholarship and foolishness, wrote a lengthy refutation of the sects based on the presupposition that each sect had corrupted the authentic gospel by principles drawn from a pagan philosopher; he incidentally preserved thereby many fragments of classical philosophers like Heraclitus which would otherwise have been lost. Tertullian scornfully mocked those who 'advocate a Stoic or a Platonic or an Aristotelian Christianity'. It was a Gnostic thesis that faith needs supplementation by philosophical inquiries. 'What has Athens in common with Jerusalem?'
Early Heresies and Movements
After the Apostles
TMM1011: Introduction to New Testament 2021-22
Welcome to Introduction to the New Testament!
This module will give you a detailed introduction to the New Testament (NT), surveying some of its main features and major contributors.
The NT can seem at the same time sprawling and diverse but also repetitive and confusing. It is one of the key goals of this module that we ‘tune in’ to the different voices of the NT writers, whether Matthew, Paul or John, for example, and get to know them as individual writers with their own themes and emphases, and sometimes what we can surmise as their (or their audience’s) situation. Our learning will therefore be a mixture of history and theology, as we learn more about the worlds the NT came from and the worlds it creates for us.