Growing up Christian without knowing the history of Christianity is like reading a novel without knowing the setting or genre. Sure, you can get the main points of the story, but you can’t really understand the significance of the events until you can understand how the world changed the characters and the characters changed the world they lived in. Religion doesn’t live in its own isolated little box. Every religion is shaped by the culture it exists in, and it also shapes the culture around it. Christianity is no exception. One way history shapes a person’s understanding of Christianity is that it destroys the illusion of a black and white Christianity. While growing up, I heard the phrase “that’s not Christian” a lot. Doing drugs wasn’t “Christian”. Going to parties wasn’t “Christian”. Getting bad grades wasn’t “Christian”. However, I assert that there are very few things that are Christian in the universal sense. The church has changed so much since its origins, and it is so varied greatly across different cultures that most of the church’s societal expectations are just that: societal …show more content…
Some of the things we take for granted, or sometimes question, about the Christian faith are the results of councils, writings, and historical events we don’t always get to learn about in church growing up. Like many people in my community, I grew up being taught trinitarianism and my church followed the Alexandrian School when it came to the natures of Christ. I was fed almost copy-and-paste explanations for all my hard questions that I knew weren’t from the Bible but couldn’t find a source for. I never realizing that those explanations came from Augustine. Indeed, I didn’t even know that they were written to counter another school of thought, nor that there were any other schools of thought to begin