Christian Community Interactions with Non-Christians

Following along with the weeks topic of "Christian communities" I found a though-provoking article written by Chris Stedman for the Huffington Post. Chris is a homosexual man who details his religious experiences and thoughts since he was a teenager. He talks about adoring his first pastor and participating in church events, and then suddenly not believing in God a few years later. Throughout his life he was trying to "reconcile [his] sexual orientation and [his] conservative religious beliefs". This led to him moving to a more progressive church community. It was here that he met Matthew, who would eventually become a pastor. Interestingly, Stedman talks about how he was accepted to a Lutheran College and wanted to become a pastor as well. This struck because you don't typically think of pastors and homosexuality in the same sentence, unless it's negative. That said, Stedman says that what he "didn't fully understand then was that [his] desire to help others and be in community existed apart from the theological claims of Christianity, which never sat as easily with [him]".

What happens next is what interested me the most though. After he decided to drop his pursuit of becoming a pastor in favor of atheism, he said that he "realized [he] was missing opportunities to learn from and with those who saw the world differently than [he] did". He became a part of the Christian community once more to meet with unlike minds and to learn from them. His overall experience is both inspiring and unconventional. He is still an atheist, but partners with a Christian community to tackle the broader problems throughout the world like hunger and disease.

His overall message is that we should embrace those with different views and put religion aside. While this is certainly going to create a degree of controversy, the idea itself isn't terrible. A world of peace is a world of similarities. He embraced the Christian community without actually being a religious part of it, but a part of it nonetheless.

Link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-stedman/why-this-atheist-still-ne_b_1308171.html

Unifying the Early Christian Community

This week we've been learning about Christian community. In class on Monday, we talked about early Christian communities and what brought them together. Martyrdom and the monastic movement were two ways that early Christians felt connected to their faith. Still, the early church had some significant struggles. First of all, the community had to define what they actually believed, something that was difficult to agree on. In the early church, there were many people who had very different beliefs about what today are some of the most important church doctrines. Perhaps the biggest and most important of these struggles was how to define and describe the divinity of Jesus. This is certainly understandable. The idea of the Trinity, three persons in one God, is hard to wrap the mind around. Even after persecution, the early church community was still establishing its structure and leadership, still figuring out how exactly to include converts of different religious and cultural backgrounds, and even different geographic regions into the Christian community. One problem that arose was that of heresies. Many heresies were discussed in the assigned reading over the Council of Nicaea, but one of the biggest was Arianism. Arianism basically denies that Jesus was fully God, instead saying that He was God's first creation and not equal to God in divinity. Arianism was a big problem for the early church, because in order for Jesus to be the perfect sacrifice to save us from sin he has to be both fully man and fully divine. The Council of Nicaea produced the Nicene Creed, which we still say in mass today. Many of the most important parts of the Nicene Creed are direct responses to Arianism, so one could say that it was necessary that these controversies arose because they forced the early church to define its beliefs. The Council of Nicaea didn't end the problems of the Church, which has struggled with disagreements over teachings throughout its history. However, the council was of major importance in defining the beliefs of Christianity as a religion. These common beliefs, finally defined by authority were something that the early Christian community could unite around.


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/first/diversity.html
This link is to an article about some of the problems the early church had in sending a unified message to a diverse community. The time period it refers to is before the Council of Nicaea, but it makes the point that the early church was not as unified as it is sometimes perceived to have been.

http://carm.org/arianism-and-its-influence-today
This link gives a little bit more information about Arianism. The article says that there are modern day implications of Arianism. It gives some basic information about the beliefs of Arianism as well as some historical background including brief information about the Council of Nicaea.