06_person_1208_church_state

Sometimes when studying church history, we need to be clear about what we're looking for. When studying scripture, we analyze what the early church thought about its interpretation. But when studying Christology, we're interested in the main storyline of that era. This is important to consider when asking for the history of the church or theology during a specific time period, as the theological and geopolitical stories are closely intertwined. The major theological issues of the time also had significant impact on the state. Sometimes when we split church history, we're projecting into a certain time really our request for information on what they thought during that time. So like, for scripture, you're basically studying for the early church, you're trying to study what do they think about the interpretation of scripture, there are a lot of different ideas, and so you have to synthesize based on reading through their stuff what they thought about it. But for Christology, when we're asking what happened, we're really asking for the main storyline of that era. You kind of don't even have this in a specific request, you just say, well, why is the history of the early church? And you're going to get Christology. Sometimes this happens, and so the cool thing is, you know, this has happened in this class quite a bit, because we're just trying to cover the highlights. And often, you know, like next week we're going to cover the Holy Spirit, it's the theological story for that time. So your query would have to be modified to say, give me the history of the church or of theology during this time period. And you know, you're going to get something about the Holy Spirit when you talk about the early 1900s. In this case, the query would just be, what is the history during this time period, you know, from the 300s to the 500s, not just theological, but geopolitical as well. Because the church and state were so tightly mixed, the main theological story was also the main geopolitical story at the time as well. So the major theological issues became state issues.