Introduction

Welcome to an introduction to the Early Christian Church and the Creeds. I created this project for a class I took about these topics while studying at Gettysburg Seminary. As I worked through the course, I often felt acutely aware of a paradox.

The very early Christian Church would appear alien to almost anyone alive today. Christianity began as Jewish movement that believed Jesus was the Messiah. It was beset by powerful political opposition. Now a dominant global religion, it was at that time in protracted danger of being wiped out by the threat and execution of cultural exclusion and physical torture, sometimes fatal.

However, as I learned about how this burgeoning new religion struggled to define itself, while something very new and exciting was occurring, at the same time, many of the internal issues - the thoughts, beliefs, debates, joys, and problems the early Christians encountered - are very much alive today as they were at the time. Having been raised as a Lutheran but only beginning serious study of the history and theology of Christianity, I kept finding the questions the early Church leaders asked themselves are questions I have asked myself. My own understanding of my religion has grown from this study, and I hope that this summary of it may help you too. I was continually reminded of two Bible verses, one from Ecclesiastes and one from John, regarding eternity:

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
(Ecclesiastes 1:9)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
(John 1:1-2)

With that in mind, some of the history presented in these lessons will be in reverse order. We will learn about the formation of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and then we will take a step before that, to examine the conditions that existed leading up to those events.

This function of this webpage is to act as a synopsis and visual aid intended to accompany an in-person or online videoconference adult Christian education course.