\nThe point is that Christian beliefs about the nature of the teaching of Christ became expressed within Greek cultural and intellectual understanding from a very early date. There is evidence that many of the first Churches in the west were set up within Greek-speaking Jewish communities and, doubtless, within the remnants of the older Greek colonies which either co-existed with the Roman cities or were absorbed by them. Since the educated classes of the Roman world spoke Greek, and were well versed in Greek philosophical ideas, and Roman religion was identified with the Greek myths of the gods, it was unavoidable that the Christian message would encounter the pervasive Greek culture and be, to some extent, formed with reference to it, either in its Greek or its Roman versions. Thus early Christian apologists accepted concepts such as the Natural Law and the notion of fundamental human equality, derived from the Roman Stoic writers, and set them within theological interpretations whose ultimate pedigree was as much Greek as it was Judaic. It is not really possible to evaluate the formulations of doctrine arrived at by the early councils of the Church \u2013 the Nicene Creed, for example \u2013 without recognising how indebted they are to the subtleties and speculative characteristics of the Greek mind. How else could the doctrine of the Trinity have been constructed? There is nothing in Judaism to suggest it: the God who is One and yet is Three \u2013 a thoroughly Greek concept. So, come to that, is the idea of the Incarnation. It was the Greeks whose gods were always visiting the earth in human form, and who, while here, indicated by not always very creditable behaviour that they were really human for the duration of their visitation.
The Early Church decisively rejected pagan practices considered immoral, and pagan symbolism regarded as idolatrous. But the minds of the first Christians, and their immediate successors, were formed within what remained an essentially Greek understanding of the world and of the immanence of divine forces.<\/p>\n
These considerations need to be borne in mind when seeking to assess the world in which the Catholic Church sought its mission. For the first few centuries it was the heir of the Greek world as much as the Byzantine Church of the east came to be. Here was a single religious realm, transmitting the sacred knowledge of the ancient world, transforming it into a Christian culture that was the successor to the Roman empire. The Catholic and Byzantine Churches are the last surviving institutions of Antiquity. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Hmmm…where have I heard that recently?<\/a><\/p>\nIt should come in a couple of days. I’ll let you know what it’s like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Another book to read. Well, not that it will be a time-consuming or difficult read, being an introduction to the subject, but I’m intrigued enough – especially by the fact that it is illustrated, something that few histories of the Church are, and it certainly looks to be an interesting addition to the (currently very…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n
Oh good - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/oh-good.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Oh good - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Another book to read. Well, not that it will be a time-consuming or difficult read, being an introduction to the subject, but I’m intrigued enough – especially by the fact that it is illustrated, something that few histories of the Church are, and it certainly looks to be an interesting addition to the (currently very…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/oh-good.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-03-02T19:16:34+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/amywelborn.typepad.com\/openbook\/images\/history.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Oh good - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/oh-good.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Oh good - Via Media","og_description":"Another book to read. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a> Well, not that it will be a time-consuming or difficult read, being an introduction to the subject, but I’m intrigued enough – especially by the fact that it is illustrated, something that few histories of the Church are, and it certainly looks to be an interesting addition to the (currently very short) suggestion list for when we’re asked, "Can you suggest a good, introductory history of the Church?"<\/p>\n