Today we’ll look at the major times of widespread persecutions of Christians by the Roman State, together with some of the long-term effects it had upon the Church. Then we will move forward to look at the process whereby the Empire itself became Christian.

This reading topic gives you a chance to look at how the Early Church worked, in terms of its core activities of worship, prayer and ministry. Patterns familiar in our day were in their earliest stages of development.

The purpose of this session is to give you a taste as to how the first generation of Christian 'theologians' tackled the issues of their day, arising from the existence and mission of the Church. You will be reading these writers in other modules, but this session is to introduce them and give you an idea of their overall context and thought.

The early church and its shaping theologians.

This session tracks the early developments in Christian, and not-so-Christian, thought. It looks at the emergence of 'heresy', the emergence of the concept of 'Catholicity' and 'orthodoxy', and the reaction to the increasingly structured nature of the Church.

The death of the apostles; an increasingly delayed parousia; a growing Church; state-sponsored persecution and the rise of convincing, but 'false' teaching — all in the midst of a world which had very different ideas to those of the Bible and a culture which was deeply suspicious of monotheism and its implied challenge to the political and social ways of doing things. This was the entry moment for Christianity onto the wider world scene.

Introduction to the New Testament.

Project Gutenberg’s 'The Confessions of Saint Augustine', translated by E.B.Pusey and produced by Robert S. Munday