Century 2: Christianity at the Crossroads

Mortification of Spin

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Religion & Spirituality

4.4 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2018

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The second century of the church hasn’t received much attention from historians, as it lacked what many would call “remarkable developments.” Michael Kruger disagrees. In his recent book, Christianity at the Crossroads, the RTS president fills in the gaps on how the challenges faced, decisions made, and directions taken by second century Christians were essential to the growth and future of the young church of Jesus Christ.Professor Kruger offers examples of the political and intellectual resistance Christians faced at that time, and draws helpful parallels with the present day. Join the crew, as we discover how our faith took root in the second century.Show NotesThe Collection of the Apostolic Fathers, a collection of post-apostolic writings from Ignatius, Polycarp, Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria.The Apology by Tertullian Thanks to our friends from IVP Academics, we are giving away a few copies of Christianity at the Crossroads. Register if you want the opportunity to win one!Social PostsWe think of the church now as so big and established that we forget that there was a time, from a human perspective, when it wasn’t clear if it was going to make it… There were some dark times there. - M. KrugerThe Christians found themselves distinguishing their beliefs from the broader Greco-Roman polytheistic world and a lot of the things that were going on were very similar to the kind of things that are going on in our world. Christians have to say, there is only one God, and you only worship that one God, and He made everything, and his Son is the only way to salvation, and so on… - M. Kruger

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Mortification of Spin, a casual conversation about things that count with Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt, and Amy Bird.
0:25.5	Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.
0:30.6	Let's join this week's conversation.
0:32.9	Thank you. Oh, well, welcome to Mordification of Spin. My name's Kyle Truman. I'm here with my usual co-hosts,
0:49.3	Amy Bird and Todd Pruitt. And today we're interviewing Michael Kruger.
0:56.5	Mike's been on the program before.
0:58.2	He's the president and the Samuel C. Patterson Professor of New Testament and early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte.
1:06.6	But perhaps he's most famous for being the husband of Melissa.
1:11.0	Great to have you with us, Mike.
1:13.3	Thanks, guys.
1:14.2	Great to be back and great to be known again as Melissa's husband.
1:19.9	But we want to talk to you today, Mike, about an excellent new book you've just produced,
1:25.3	Christianity at the Crossroads, which is a study of the second century.
1:28.6	And I have to say, you're a New Testament man looking towards the early church.
1:32.2	I'm a reformationist who has to teach ancient Christianity.
1:36.0	And the second century has always been a difficult century for me to teach, because it's
1:42.2	been very, very hard to find a good accessible book
1:45.4	that lays out the kind of issues that I want the students to wrestle with as they look
1:50.7	at the rise of ancient Christianity. And this book really plugs that whole in the literature.
1:56.8	So first I want to say, thanks very much for writing. And second, to ask you, what is it that interests you particularly in the second century?
2:05.6	It's a slightly unusual century in some ways to study.
2:09.0	The first century, third and fourth, get well covered.
	...

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