Church Historia

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On this final episode of the second season, we tell the story of monasticism, which is one of the tension between living a life of authentic dedication and finding out there’s a lot of earthly reward for doing so. There are also many conclusions that can be made from this story when we compare these monks to modern church leaders.

We’re leaving continental Europe to travel to Britain and Ireland. These two islands experienced less interaction with the Roman Empire and so their path to Christianity looks different than places inside the empire’s boundaries. 

We’ll talk about how Christianity became popular in both places, share the stories about their most famous heroes (hint: one of them has one of the most popular saint’s days in the world), and explore the unique parts of their practice and tradition.  And as wandering Irish monks leave Ireland to travel around Europe, we’ll find some threads that bring us back to other episodes this season.

We’ve been in the heat of drama talking about Kngs and the King of Kings on this second season of Church Historia, but today's episode is a re-run from Season 1. In this episode we talk about civil religion and how it expresses itself in the United States. This conversation is important because American civil religion uses a lot of language that sounds similar to Christianity (e.g. God, Almighty, called to a specific purpose), but it is its own thing, with its own stories, symbols, rituals, and heroes. We believe that talking about civil religion and learning how it relates to Christianity and patriotism is important for us to have greater clarity about each of those things and to help us, as individuals, better understand our motivations and beliefs.

While the Roman empire continued on in the East, in the Byzantine empire, Late Antiquity was a time of tremendous change for the western Roman Empire and Europe. Germanic tribes, Roman culture, and Christianity blended, clashed, and intertwined, creating the medieval period and the foundation of the Europe we know today.

In this episode, we’ll use Charlemagne’s story to explore this time of change, reinvention, and creation, where the church and political sphere mutually reinforce each other, while also simultaneously struggling to be the one really in charge.

The path to orthodoxy was never a clear one for Christianity and one of the great debates, especially in the Byzantine Empire, was over the use of icons in worship. Depending on who you talked to and when, icons were either tools for devotion or idols of the most vile kind.

In the 8th and 9th centuries, the Byzantine empire changed its stance on iconography several times, and each time, the new position was declared orthodox by church leadership and the imperial throne.

The story of iconoclasm, and its reversal, makes us ask ourselves how much majority rule plays in establishing the norms of the church. It challenges us to think critically about the “why” behind what we believe and to contemplate the diversity of church and its many threads.

Learn more about this podcast at churchhistoria.com

Among the Christian emperors of Late Antiquity, Justinian stands out along with Constantine as one of the greats. In this episode, we’ll explore the story of Justinian and his wife Theodora and and Divinely Appointed Royalty. Justinian wanted nothing more than to restore the Roman empire to its glory, and creating a unified Christian empire was critical to that vision.

Unfortunately for Justinian, his people were deeply split over their understandings of Christ’s nature and how his God-ness and human-ness related. The division didn’t deter the theologically-inclined emperor, however. In his attempt to restore the glory of his empire and unify it in a single Christian expression, Justinian spent a good amount of his reign navigating this debate both religiously and politically.

This vision of a unified Christian empire, ruled by the divinely blessed royal couple, would live on past Justinian and Theodora and would shape politics in the forthcoming centuries.

Learn more about this podcast at churchhistoria.com

Constantine marks an important turning point for Christianity. Under his reign, Christianity was no longer a small, grass-roots, mystery cult. It moved into the spotlight, and with that, its questions, debates, and internal squabbles became matters of imperial concern.

In this episode we’ll explore Constantine's relationship with Christianity, specifically his involvement in calling the first of seven ecumenical councils that would come to define Christian orthodoxy as we know it today, the Council of Nicea.

In calling this council, Constantine set the precedent that “Christian issues” were issues of the empire, and Christianity itself was important even if you weren’t Christian yourself, and in doing so, set the stage for relationship between the church and emperor for the next several hundred years.

Season 2: Kings and the King of Kings

This is Season 2 of Church Historia! In this season, we’re going to go back in time to the early days of Christianity and look at how Christianity grew into what we recognize today. In particular, we’ll do a deep dive into what happens when Christianity becomes connected with (secular) power. Starting with Constantine and going through the early Medieval period, Steph will share several of the major controversies of early Christianity (Arianism, Monophysitism, and iconoclasm) as well as its spread through Europe. As we look at each area together, we’ll explore how emperors, kings, nobles, popes, and patriarchs shaped the discussions around doctrine and orthodoxy. Along the way we’ll encounter the variety of the older threads of Christianity and be prompted by their stories to look at our own in new ways.

As we recorded Season 1, our conversations took us in many directions and not all of them made sense as part of an episode. Today, we’re excited to bring you one of those “extra” conversations, recorded in the context of our episode about the Mar Thoma church and our conversation with Jissie and Rainu. In this case, our extra conversational meandering was  it’s about food, culture, faith, and finding sacredness in the ordinary.