A People's History of Christianity Ancient Modern

● Christian Origins: The Free-Thinking Church of Corinth

● Martyrs or Madmen: Religious fervor and martyrdom as people power

● Light in the Darkness: Popular people's movements beyond the monasteries and crusades

● The Unusual Suspects: The Renaissance, Reformation and battle for divine justice

A People's History of Christianity From Ancient to Modern

Four moments in time

● From the Reformation's birth of Protestantism as a global force

● To the emergence of the Modern Age and the 'progress of man'

● And then the collapse of progress and postmodern Christianity

A People's History of Christianity From Ancient to Modern

Final Session: Into Modernity and out the other end

A People's History of ChristianityAncient Modern

PART ONE:The Rise of the Modern Age

● Industrialization: Mid-18th century to mid-19th century: from hand production methods to machines, chemical manufacturing, iron production, water and steam power and development of machine tools, all fueled by extensive mining of coal

● Urbanization: People's lives changed radically with rising average income and population through emergence of the modern city with its factories, rural immigration and child labor

A People's History of Christianity The Rise of the Modern Age

The Industrialization of Human Relating

Much of this explosive growth was made possible by the parallel growth of the modern imperial age...the world in 1914

A People's History of Christianity The Rise of the Modern Age

The Globalization of Human Relating

● The rise of empire and industrial progress gave modern humanity a confdence in the reach of our own achievements

● Historian Robert Mackenzie, writing in 1880: ‘Human history is a record of progress...The nineteenth-century has witnessed progress rapid beyond all precedent, for it has witnessed the overthrow of the barriers which prevented progress'

● Scientifc advancements such as Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) led to view of being human as a species able to advance on its own merits and not as an outcome of providence

A People's History of Christianity The Rise of the Modern Age

The Supreme Confdence of the Modern Man

● Friedrich Schleiermacher: Father of modern theology: our theological starting point is a feeling of 'absolute dependence' on God rather than a formulaic set of dogmas or beliefs.

● Rudolph Bultmann: concept of demythology: only faith in the kerygma, or proclamation, of the New Testament was necessary for Christian faith, not any particular facts regarding the historical Jesus

A People's History of Christianity The Rise of the Modern Age

The Birth of Liberal Protestantism & Biblical Criticism

A People's History of Christianity The Rise of the Modern Age

Critical Biblical Reading

● Karl Marx: The alienation of man from his labor and from one another in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: the product of work as an object alien and even hostile to us.

● Pope Leo XIII: Rerum Novaruni (1891), directed to ‘The Condition of the Working Classes’, hailed as one of the most important modern pronouncements on social justice.

A People's History of Christianity The Rise of the Modern Age

Cautionary Notes on the Progress of Man

A People's History of ChristianityThe Rise of the Modern Age

The Emergence of Modernity as an Age of the Grand Narratives of Progress

A People's History of ChristianityAncient Modern

REFLECTION:Do you look back on the

last 200 years as two centuries of progress?

A People's History of ChristianityAncient Modern

PART TWO: The 20th Century and Postmodernity's Angst

● World War I: Shell Shock was a term used during the First World War to describe the psychological trauma suffered by men serving on the war's key battlefronts

● In many ways the unprecedented 9 million combatant fatalities left human civilization shell shocked at the destruction it could visit upon itself

A People's History of ChristianityPostdmodernity's Angst

The Great War and the Bubble Bursts

● World War II: Over 70 million fatalities, the deadliest war in human history

● Systematic attempt to annihilate Europe’s Jews, disabled, homosexuals in the Holocaust, or Shoah, meaning 'catastrophe'

● Led Jewish and Christian theologians to declare the 'death of God' – the age-old problem of theodicy

A People's History of ChristianityPostdmodernity's Angst

The Holocaust and the Death of God

A People's History of ChristianityPostdmodernity's Angst

Postmodern Doubt

● Jacque Derrida: Deconstruction: proposed the deconstruction of all texts where binary oppositions are used in the construction of meaning and value

● Michel Foucault: Archeology of Knowledge: drawing from Nietzsche and the relationship between knowledge and power, what can be said about certain categories of things

A People's History of ChristianityPostdmodernity's AngstPostmodern Theology

● John Caputo: The old God-of-power is displaced with the idea of God as an unconditional claim without force. As a claim without force, the God of weak theology does not physically or metaphysically intervene in nature.

● Everyday Theology: Beyond the grand narratives of organized religion, my truth is true to me

A People's History of ChristianityAncient Modern

REFLECTION:How do you think Christianity should relate to the world we live in today?

A People's History of ChristianityAncient Modern

PART THREE: From Angst to Action

● Liberation Theology emerged as a people's movement in Latin America in the face of the 'structural sin' of government oppression

● Biblical Grand Narrative of Exodus, God's intervention in human history for the poor recalled as base communities gathered in cycle of action-refection

A People's History of ChristianityBack to an Ancient Grand Narrative

God's preferential option for the poor

● A movement that returns the word of colonial spread of Christianity

● Interpolating indigenous elements into the Christian theological framework

● Example: South Korean Minjung Theology: Minjung, 'the people' made up of people who are ostracized by the larger community

● Other movements: Disability Hermeneutics, Queer Hermeneutics

A People's History of ChristianityBack to an Ancient Grand Narrative

Postcolonial Christianity

● From Jerry Falwell to Al Sharpton, the voices in contemporary American Christianity have offered a wide diversity of people's narratives

● In an age of institutional decline, the question of what sort of grassroots Christianity will survive the century is an open question

A People's History of ChristianityBack to an Ancient Grand Narrative

The American Context for a People's Christianity

What will characterize that grassroots in our own part of the world?

A People's History of ChristianityBack to an Ancient Grand Narrative

The People's Christianity on our Doorstep

A People's History of ChristianityYour Turn!

What are you going to take

from this series?