Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
1182 okur puanı
Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
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Theology comes from two Greek words: theos , meaning God, and logos , meaning word or rational thought. So theology is rational thought about God. It is not identical with religion. Religion is our belief in God and our effort to live by that belief. Theology is the attempt to give a rational explanation of our belief: it is clear thinking about religion.
Reklam
Emperor Decius (249–51) took another important step. Caesar worship was made compulsory for every race and nation within the empire with the single exception of the Jews. On a certain day in the year, every Roman citizen had to come to the Temple of Caesar, burn a pinch of incense there, and say, “Caesar is Lord.” When a person had done that, they were given a certificate documenting that they had done so.
The charge of cannibalism probably started because the Lord’s Supper was practiced in secret. The heathen did not know what happened at these closed meetings, but they heard that somebody was being eaten. Jesus had said at the Last Supper, “This bread is my body. This cup is my blood.” The pagans concluded that the Christians must be eating and drinking human flesh and blood.
Once the Romans discovered what the Christians were up to, they were confronted by the problem of toleration in a more exasperating form than even the Jews had presented. The Jews, after all, were “a sort of closed corporation, a people set apart from others by the mark of circumcision, who lived and worshiped largely by themselves, and did little active proselyting.” The Christians, on the other hand, were always talking about their Jesus. They were out to make Christians of the entire population of the empire, and the rapidity of their spread showed that this was no idle dream.
In his day Julian was finding it more difficult than he had expected to put new life into the traditional Roman religion. He wanted to set aside Christianity and bring back the ancient pagan faith, but he saw clearly the drawing power of Christian love in practice: “Atheism [i.e., Christian faith] has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and through their care for the burial of the dead. It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar, and that the godless Galileans care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them.”
Reklam