It's a good way to see what they know, and, more importantly, what they think they know. The great example here is the so-called "Middle" Ages. Bill Russell, for instance, played for the Boston Celtics beginning in 1956, bringing eleven championships to the franchise in his thirteen-year career. The younger crowd largely heralded LeBron, while the ’80s and ’90s kids didn’t appreciate the premature disrespect of Kobe. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age skewers the notion that secularism is the result of a straight-shot progression from religious superstition to objective rational belief in science. As early as the reign of Ard-Ri Cormac the First—the first years of the third century—the Christian faith had penetrated into Ireland. They want it to be free of denominationalism and separation. Or his letter to the Galatians and their problems with legalism. The winnowing fork is separating the wheat from the chaff before our eyes (Matt. This doesn’t make the church any less “spiritual”; rather, it accounts for the intentional shift from the Apostolic foundation-laying stage to the more permanent ordinary age. Paul Westermeyer. 4. Christianity - Christianity - The Middle Ages: Christian myth and legend were adapted to new traditions as the faith expanded beyond its original cultural milieu of the Mediterranean into northern Europe. If you didn’t live in North America or Europe, you might well be open to seeing this as one of the Church’s great Golden Ages. There was no “Golden Age.” Or maybe we’d be better off saying that every age is a Golden Age; that is, a time when God is still faithfully working through his people to spread his gospel and display his glory throughout this broken and fallen world. Constantine, Divine Emperor of the Christian Golden Age offers a radical reassessment of Constantine as an emperor, a pagan, and a Christian. 1702 Isaac Watts, “the liberator of the English hymn,” becomes Minister of Mark Lane Church in … At the beginning of the 1980s, two NCAA championship rivals—Magic Johnson and Larry Bird—began their almost two-decade-long NBA rivalry. The one blinds us to the possibility of the other. Chronicling the NBA in terms of its greatest players also misses the point that each era has its drawbacks. In this video, the Rev. It is true that Christ’s bride doesn’t look like she should, but it’s equally true that she will look exactly the way she should at the wedding of the Lamb. Evidence of a Golden Age If we are to define a Golden Age of Jewish-Christian interaction as a period of amicable rela- tions, prosperity and mutual creativity, then there is certainly enough evidence to support its application to medieval Spain during the high and late Middle Ages. If this is the Golden Age of Christianity, we’re setting the bar kind of low. "Constantine was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. But each generation has its own voice, and we silence those voices to our own detriment. Don’t get me wrong. Comparing the modern church against the early church is like comparing Bill Russell with Michael Jordan. Only then will she exchange her rags for the unblemished wedding dress her Husband has prepared for her (Rev. And in each, the gospel was proclaimed. But we all struggle with that. Even the great Reformers of the 16th century struggled with infighting, jealousy, arrogance, and even outright persecution and violence. We must correct our drifting and return to the values and practices of the early church, the argument goes. During these periods, you still have the faithful minority, the Christians who reflect the values of the Golden Age and somehow manage to eke out a faithful existence among the depraved majority. 1:6). THE "GOLDEN AGE" OF PRE-CHRISTIAN ERINN. It is believed that we have in these verses a very ancient oracle, first delivered by the earlier prophet Joel (see Joel 3:10), and from him repeated by Isaiah and Micah (Micah 4:1-4). The time is prophesied about, written about, sung about and dreamed about for aeons of time. Even Peter, rock of the church that he was, exhibited his share of brokenness. 2:1–7). the Editors. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age skewers the notion that secularism is the result of a straight-shot progression from religious superstition to objective rational belief in science. But to identify the early church (or any other age) as the golden era and to yearn for its exact replication is misguided and dangerous for a number of reasons. People romanticize a particular era. Trevin Wax | October 27, 2014. 3. “Jenkins is one of America ’s top religious scholars.” —Forbes. The visible church has always been a mix of true and false believers. 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