Sunday Morning Classes
Starting November 2nd, we will have two adult classes offered on Sunday morning. One will be a short-term class on the Psalms led by David Scott (see below for more about the Psalms study) and another will be a long-term class on Early Christianity led by Nick Strobel.
Early Christianity: The Experience of the Divine
Class meets in The Gathering Place at 9 AM for 24 weeks (with breaks for holidays).
After 2,000 years, Christianity is the world's largest religion and continues to prosper and grow. What accounts for its continued popularity?
Simply put, Christianity is powerful and persuasive as a religion. It offers a convincing personal experience of ultimate, or "divine," power.
In Early Christianity: The Experience of the Divine, Professor Luke Timothy Johnson maintains that the most familiar aspects of Christianity—its myths, institutions, ideas and morality—are only its outer "husk." In this two-part course, he takes you on a journey to find the "kernel" of Christianity's appeal: religious experience. You travel back to Christianity's origins, its first 300 years, to identify the elements that first made it appealing and which still hold the secret to its ability to attract new followers.
Professor Johnson is a former Benedictine monk and author of 20 books, including The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation. At Emory University, he has twice received the "On Eagle's Wings Excellence in Teaching" Award.
In his presentation, Professor Johnson employs scholarly techniques that have only recently been applied to religion. By combining such disciplines as history, the social sciences, and comparative literary analysis, you look at religious experience and behavior from a fresh perspective.
What is "Religious Experience"?
But if this course is about the nature and power of religious experience, what exactly is that experience?
You consider a variety of theories developed by the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Immanuel Kant, Emil Durkheim, the founder of sociology, and Sigmund Freud, before settling on a definition that will be used for the remainder of the course.
To better understand religious experience in Christianity, you then study it in the two religions with which early Christianity co-existed: Greco-Roman paganism and Judaism.
These lessons assume that patterns of behavior can be used to identify religious experience in antiquity. In this sense, all of life in the Roman Empire might be said to be a religious experience. Every human activity—civic, military, domestic, and personal—fell under the power and protection of gods who needed attention for life to be prosperous.
Prophecy and the healing of physical and mental disorders were regarded as revelations of divine power. Participation in mystery cults offered access to deeper realities, as well as social advancement.
In Judaism, religious experience was rooted in the symbolic world of Torah. These scriptures embodied central Jewish convictions such as belief in one God and a sense of themselves as a Chosen People. Torah also defined the ways in which these convictions were to be expressed, through such practices as circumcision and the observance of the Sabbath.
For Jews living in Palestine, religious life focused on the temple, the synagogue, and the family. Palestinian Judaism was also affected by the stress resulting from Greco-Roman oppression. Some Jews splintered into sects. This was accompanied by the appearance of new sources of religious experience:
- Apocalyptic writings that offered hopeful visions of God's future
- Intervention of charismatic miracle workers and healers
- Prophets such as John the Baptist.
Sources of Religious Experience: Healing, Visions, and Speaking in Tongues
In introducing early Christian religious experience, Professor Johnson looks at questions that are new and intellectually exciting in the study of religion. Was Christ the founder of Christianity? Was Christianity's early growth due to his life and works or to his followers' powerful experience of his death and resurrection, their sense of having been transformed by the Holy Spirit?
You see how religious experience in earliest Christianity took on a variety of forms. Fellowship meals celebrated the presence of the resurrected Lord Jesus. Healing was a sign of God's presence in the world and could certify the healer as a saint. Prayer and visions provided access to, and confirmation of, divine power.
Many practices, however, created problems for early Christian leaders. For example, they rejected demands to add circumcision to baptism as an initiation rite in Christianity. This was due not so much to its use in Judaism as to the fact that it would make Christianity seem similar to pagan religion: a second rite would resemble the multiple initiation rites used by Greco-Roman mystery cults.
Similarly, many Christians saw glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, as a powerful form of religious experience, dating from the experience of the crowd at Pentecost. However, a variety of concerns, including that it could be confused with pagan prophecy or used by women to undermine male authority, quickly led to its marginalization.
Professor Johnson raises important questions. Did institutional development in early Christianity—the creation of its formal structure and creeds—eliminate important sources of religious experience? Or did it minimize certain practices in order to preserve, for millennia, other meaningful avenues of religious experience?
Finding "True" Christianity
There has always been a struggle between "official" Christianity—its institutions and political roles—and "popular" Christianity, which most directly connects Christians to religious experience. In the last lesson, Professor Johnson argues that official Christianity has been accepted as true Christianity due in large part to the way in which its leaders and reformers have defined it and the manner in which academic scholars have studied it.
In the last 15 years or so, new analytical methods have begun to be applied to the study of Christianity. Among these is the approach taken in this course as well as the fresh perspectives offered by women's history and social history. With these techniques, so-called "popular" Christianity may well come to be understood as real Christianity.
Lesson Titles
1. Christianity as a Religion
2. What Is a Religion?
3. The Role of Religious Experience
4. Sourcing Christianity
5. The Imperial Context
6. Greco-Roman Polytheism
7. Greco-Roman Religious Experience
8. The Symbolic World of Torah
9. Palestinian Judaism in the Greco-Roman World
10. Judaism in the Hellenistic Diaspora
11. Jesus and the Gospels
12. The Resurrection Experience
13. Movement Meets World—Five Key Transitions
14. Ritual Imprinting and Politics of Perfection
15. Glossolalia and the Embarrassments of Experience
16. Meals Are Where the Magic Is
17. Healing and Salvation
18. Access to Power—Visions and Prayer
19. The Holy Community
20. The Community’s Worship
21. The Transforming Word of Scripture
22. Teachers and Creeds
23. The Power of the Saints
24. Christianities Popular and Real
Study Guides and Class Materials for Past Classes
Select the "Past Classes" link above to go to materials created for some of our classes in the past---a lot of really good material in there! They include study guides for Marcus Borg's "The Heart of Christianity" and Huston Smith's "The Soul of Christianity", links to the Five Practices study and materials for our "Methodism 101" series.
Invitation to Psalms Study
The Disciple Psalms Study will meet at three different times in the week: Wednesday morning led by Anne Scott, Wednesday evening led by David Scott and Sunday morning led by David Scott. The study groups will meet in the Lounge of the Education Building (north side closest to Oswell St). The class has 10 sessions.'
Meeting Times + Location: Wednesdays at 9:30 AM and 6 PM and Sundays at 9 AM in the Lounge of the Education Building.
Make a deeper connection to the world of the Psalms so that these well known scriptures can help you give voice to all aspects of our human experience---joy, faith, uncertainty and sorrow.
During two weekly video segments, experience a varied presentation of individual psalm texts, including dramatic reading, music, dance, and images. Listen to insights into specific psalms presented by one of two biblical scholars through an informal, roundtable conversation format.
Ideal experience for adults who are interested in the practice of prayer and worship and would like to connect prayer practice with Scripture. The study is accessible for adults with little prior Bible experience.
Sessions:
- Word of God, Words of Prayer
- The Prayer Book of God’s People
- Praying the Psalms
- The Language of the Heart
- A Geography of the Imagination
- A Theology of the Imagination
- Lament and Praise
- Grace and Repentance
- Love and Wrath
- Hallelujah and Amen
Living the Questions
<< postponed to January 2009>>
People will be meeting for seven weeks on Friday evenings starting November 14th at the parsonage to view and discuss the "Living the Questions" series. The group led by Pastor Pam will gather at 6 PM and be done between 7:30 to 8 PM. The group will be viewing/discussing the second part of the three-part series for seven weeks (with breaks for holidays)---the "Reclaiming the World" set of videos (videos 8-14 of the entire series).
Living the Questions is a DVD-based study with presentations by pre-eminent scholars and theologians followed by plenty of time for all members of the group to discuss what was presented. The sessions are stand-alone so you can join for any particular one or ones you want.
People know that at its core, Christianity has something good to offer humanity. At the same time, many have a sense that they are alone in being a "thinking" Christian and that "salvaging" Christianity is a hopeless task. What is needed is a safe environment where people have permission to ask the questions they've always wanted to ask but have been afraid to voice for fear of being thought a heretic.
Here are the themes for the entire series. The sessions that start November 14th will be discussing the "Reclaiming the World" set of videos (sessions 8-14 of the entire series).
Invitation to Journey
1. An Invitation to Journey
2. Taking the Bible Seriously
3. Thinking Theologically
4. Stories of Creation
5. Lives of Jesus
6. A Passion for Christ: Paul
7. Out into the World: Challenges Facing
Progressive Christians
Reclaiming the World
8. Restoring Relationships
9. The Prophetic Jesus
10. Evil, Suffering & A God of Love
11. The Myth of Redemptive Violence
12. Practicing Resurrection
13. Debunking the Rapture
14. Reclaiming the World
Call to Covenant
15. A Kingdom without Walls
16. Social Justice: Realizing God’s Vision
17. Incarnation: Divinely Human
18. Prayer: Intimacy with God
19. Compassion: The Heart of Jesus’ Ministry
20. Creative Transformation
21. Embracing Mystery
Walk To Emmaus
The Walk to Emmaus is a spiritual renewal program intended to strengthen the local church through the development of Christian disciples and leaders. The program's approach seriously considers the model of Christ's servanthood and encourages Christ's disciples to act in ways appropriate to being "a servant of all." Beginning with a 3-day retreat and following up with regular small group meetings, Emmaus participants seek to Christianize their environments of family, job, and community through the ministry of their congregations. For information about Walks in our area see the Southern San Joaquin Emmaus contact page (but note the displayed email addresses have been modified to foil the spam robots trolling for email addresses) or any one of the several people in our congregation who have been on Walks.
