History of Christian theology

[1] The most widely recognized Biblical foundations for the doctrine's formulation are in the Gospel of John,[1] which possess ideas reflected in Platonism and Greek philosophy.

"In both cases the sacrificial blood made possible the continuation or restoration of the relation between God and his people ruptured by sin and/or prevented by human impurity.

[31] Others anticipated the coming of a celestial figure called the Son of Man who would lead armies of angels and inaugurate the reign of God on earth (Daniel 7:13–14).

Cynics "commended and practiced a lifestyle oriented to nature and to reason, which eradicates false passions from the soul (lust, craving, anger) and leads to a simple life without needs.

[note 1] Biblical scholar Peter Stuhlmacher writes, "The men and women surrounding Jesus learned his sayings by heart in accordance with the early Jewish pattern, preserved them in their memory, and passed them on to others.

"[57] According to biblical scholar Anthony Le Donne, early Christian communities preserved memories of Jesus by relating them to familiar stories or types, such as the son of David.

[64] Biblical scholar Dale Allison notes, "our Synoptic [Gospel] writers thought that they were reconfiguring memories of Jesus, not inventing theological tales.

[71] To Jewish audiences, early preaching focused on Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel's messianic hopes (see for example the Apostle Peter's sermon in Acts 2).

New Testament sources suggest that James the Just, brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church still believed the Torah was binding on Jewish Christians.

[87] The collection spans various genres, but the writings share two themes in common: paraenesis (moral teaching) and discussion of Christianity's relationship to Judaism.

According to theologian Geoffrey Hugo Lampe, the Fathers considered baptism to be "the seal with which believers are marked out as God's people, the way of death to sin and demons and of rebirth to resurrection-life, the new white robe which must be preserved undefiled, the shield of Christ's soldier, the sacrament of the reception of the Holy Spirit.

[117] Each phrase in the Nicene Creed, which was hammered out at the Council of Nicaea, addresses some aspect that had been under passionate discussion and closes the books on the argument, with the weight of the agreement of the over 300 bishops in attendance.

In spite of the agreement reached at the council of 325, the Arians who had been defeated dominated most of the church for the greater part of the 4th century, often with the aid of Roman emperors who favored them.

Late antiquity Christianity produced many church fathers who wrote theological texts, including SS;Augustine, Gregory Nazianzus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose of Milan, Jerome, and others.

Orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, held that both the material and spiritual worlds were created by God and were therefore both good, and that this was represented in the unified divine and human natures of Christ.

When the Western Roman Empire fragmented under the impact of various 'barbarian' invasions, the Empire-wide intellectual culture that had underpinned late Patristic theology had its interconnections cut.

Scholasticism proper can be thought of as the kind of theology that emerges when, in the cathedral schools and their successors, the tools of dialectic are pressed into use to comment upon, explain, and develop the gloss and the sentences.

In addition, the century can be seen as a period in which the study of natural philosophy that could anachronistically be called 'science' began once again to flourish in theological soil, in the hands of such men as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon.

Notable authors include: Scholastic theology continued to develop as the 13th century gave way to the fourteenth, becoming ever more complex and subtle in its distinctions and arguments.

Notable authors include: The Renaissance yielded scholars the ability to read the scriptures in their original languages and this in part stimulated the Reformation.

Martin Luther, a Doctor in Bible at the University of Wittenburg,[125] began to teach that salvation is a gift of God's grace, attainable only through faith in Jesus, who in humility paid for sin.

He became convinced that the church was corrupt in its ways and had lost sight of what he saw as several of the central truths of Christianity, the most important of which, for Luther, was the doctrine of justification—God's act of declaring a sinner righteous—by faith alone through God's grace.

Cardinal Albrecht of Hohenzollern, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, with the consent of Pope Leo X, was using part of the indulgence income to pay his bribery debts,[143] and did not reply to Luther's letter; instead, he had the theses checked for heresy and forwarded to Rome.

[146] Luther's writings circulated widely, reaching France, England, and Italy as early as 1519, and students thronged to Wittenberg to hear him speak.

He did not want one of his subjects to be sent to Rome to be judged by the Catholic clergy so he prevailed on the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who needed Frederick's support, to arrange a compromise.

The argument was long but nothing was resolved.On 15 June 1520, the Pope warned Luther with the papal bull (edict) Exsurge Domine that he risked excommunication unless he recanted 41 sentences drawn from his writings, including the 95 Theses, within 60 days.

The conflict would erupt into a religious war after Luther's death, fueled by the political climate of the Holy Roman Empire and strong personalities on both sides.

In the years and decades following Luther's posting of the 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg church, large numbers of Europeans abandoned observance of papal authority, including the majority of German speakers.

They were united, among other things, in the belief that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, that churches celebrate the Lord's Supper on the first day of each week, and that baptism of adult believers, by immersion in water, is a necessary condition for Salvation.

An ecumenical movement begun by John Milbank and others at Cambridge, radical orthodoxy seeks to examine classic Christian writings and related neoplatonic texts in full dialogue with contemporary, philosophical perspectives.