The distinguishing quality of Christians is that they believe in Christ... a point that seems almost too obvious to make. But in fact, having belief as the central and distinguishing feature of a religion is so rare and weird that religious scholars have pushed back against the study of other religions through the lens of faith—to the point of not even wanting to study Christianity through that lens. What gives? In this episode, we walk through the findings of a new study on how exactly faith functioned in the Greco-Roman setting of early Christinaity and why it is rightly the defining feature of Christianity, with implications for the life of the church today.

Notes:

1. The key book we discuss here is Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith

2. Very relevant to the discussion at hand is Dad's Divine Complexity

3. Other episodes related to this one: Justification by Faith, Augustine's City of God

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