Early Christian Communities: Exploring Theological Diversities before Christian Empire

Dear Colleagues,

Early Christianity’s spread into the ancient world was a remarkable transcultural revolution. As the teachings of Jesus moved outside Palestinian lands during the first few centuries, new configurations of the faith often resulted from interactions between pre-existing local ideologies and interpretations of the emerging canon of Christian Scripture shared by loose networks of churches. Once Emperor Constantine sanctioned the Christian movement under the auspices of the Roman Empire, the diversities of those earliest Christian communities were gradually subsumed by the work of the ecumenical councils as essential tenets of Christian Orthodoxy were clarified.

In our time of increasing secularization and the Taylorian ‘supernova’ of belief options churches now encounter around them (at least in the West), an expanded understanding of diversities within early Christianity may helpfully illuminate the church’s past and may be helpfully instructive for the present moment.

This scope of this issue focuses on those pre-Constantinian diversities and how particular Christian communities may have pursued the spiritual life as followers of Jesus. Original research and reviews which address the following topics are of particular interest:

• Historical accounts of pagan epistemologies that have been Christianized;
• Ancient metaphysical frameworks which adopted various early Christian teachings;
• Early Christian rituals which conversed with other local religious customs;
• Early Christian writings which amicably resourced non-Christian philosophies;
• Early Christian interpretations of Scripture which amicably engaged other local religious beliefs;
• Spiritual practices of early Christian communities and their metaphysical foundations;
• Political theologies of pre-Constantinian Christianity.

Dr. Frank Guertin
Guest Editor

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• Christian mystical theology
• early Christian beliefs
• early Christian spirituality
• Christian metaphysics
• pre-Constantinian Christianity
• philosophical theology
• political theology