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Acts 2
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Birth of the Christian Church and Christianity in Ireland
In this course, Professor Lewis Ayres (Durham University) explores the Birth of the Church and Christianity in Ireland. In the first lecture we examine the early Christian church by looking at the Book of Acts. In the second lecture, we delve further into the early church origins in scripture and look at Paul's writings. In the third lecture, we consider the Apostle’s Creed and its role in Christian tradition. In the fourth and final lecture, we discuss Saint Patrick and the origins of the church in Ireland.
Acts 2
In this lecture, we examine the early Christian church in Acts, focusing on: (i) Pentecost in Acts 2, where the Spirit enables the disciples to speak in diverse languages, highlighting the Spirit's role in guiding the church; (ii) the Spirit’s presence as central to the church's mission, marking a new phase of God’s redemptive plan; (iii) Peter’s sermon, presenting Jesus as fulfilling Israel’s prophecies and initiating evangelism; (iv) the church’s dual focus on preaching and mission to gather new followers; (v) communal living and property-sharing among apostles, showing a commitment to mutual care; (vi) shared resources used to support community needs and the church’s outreach; (vii) the early church’s defining traits of outreach and a supportive, mission-driven internal community.
My name is Lewis Ayres.
00:00:06I'm professor of Catholic and historical theology at the
00:00:07University of Durham.
00:00:10And I'm going to talk to you in this video about the origins
00:00:12and beginnings of the church.
00:00:15I'm going to talk particularly, or begin at least,
00:00:18with what happens in the book of Acts in the second chapter.
00:00:21At the beginning of Acts, Jesus ascends into heaven,
00:00:25and the disciples are left to begin to form their community.
00:00:29In the second chapter of Acts, there's a dramatic event.
00:00:35The disciples are all in the same place,
00:00:39and suddenly, it is as if tongues of fire appear
00:00:42over their heads.
00:00:47And to the people who are with them from different
00:00:49regions of the Mediterranean speaking different languages,
00:00:52it seems as if the disciples are speaking
00:00:55in a multitude of languages.
00:01:00Everyone who is present can understand what they're saying.
00:01:01And, the gospel of Luke, which goes with Acts and Acts itself,
00:01:07is quite, a symbolic text.
00:01:11It's both trying to narrate the history
00:01:14of the church in a way that people a few decades later understood it,
00:01:18but it's also constantly trying to make theological points.
00:01:22And the event of Pentecost as it's given to us
00:01:26is intended to give us a sense of what the church is.
00:01:30One of the most important comments at the beginning of
00:01:35Acts two is that the disciples act in this way
00:01:39through the inspiration of the Spirit.
00:01:43They don't just start to speak in different languages,
00:01:47if that's how we should understand it.
00:01:50What matters is that the spirit speaks in and through them.
00:01:52They speak human words,
00:01:56and the people gathered with them can understand what is
00:01:57said, but the one who has begun this process,
00:02:01who's the author of this, is the Spirit.
00:02:04And one of the things that's important throughout the book
00:02:08of Acts is the appearance of the Spirit as an actor in the
00:02:10new community of the church.
00:02:15The Spirit fills the disciples or a disciple on a number of occasions.
00:02:17The disciples take decisions about what their
00:02:22community should do in the spirit.
00:02:25So the spirit is one of the main actors in Acts,
00:02:30and that tells you a great deal about how the church
00:02:33understands its own origins.
00:02:36It doesn't understand itself as a collection of people who have
00:02:39been abandoned by Jesus because Jesus has popped off on a cloud back to heaven.
00:02:43Rather, the Church in Acts understands itself as the beginning of a
00:02:48new phase in God's redemptive activity.
00:02:53Christ has come, lived among us, died, risen again,
00:02:58shown himself to the disciples, and then,
00:03:02gone away back to heaven.
00:03:06But that going away is itself quite
00:03:09complex because Christ is already
00:03:12present still in his spirit.
00:03:15He is gone and yet he's not gone.
00:03:18He's present in the Eucharist. He's present in the spirit.
00:03:21And what's happened now for Acts is a new phase in
00:03:25God's redemptive activity.
00:03:29The church is formed as a community of people led by the
00:03:31Spirit to preach what Jesus told them
00:03:35and to develop what God wishes for
00:03:39the human race to draw out new complexities
00:03:44on the basis of Christ's speaking.
00:03:48So one of the most important examples of that comes later in
00:03:51the book of Acts where you see the apostles debating how far
00:03:54Jewish food laws are necessary for Christians.
00:03:59And they go, in some sense,
00:04:03beyond what Jesus has said under the inspiration of the
00:04:05Spirit.
00:04:10So at the origins of the church lie the idea of a
00:04:11community now able to act in the Spirit
00:04:15in a new way
00:04:19because Jesus is not bodily among them.
00:04:21And that's the the drama, the structure,
00:04:25the plot of the Book of Acts that's absolutely central.
00:04:28And within that context, you begin to see the characteristics
00:04:32of the earliest church.
00:04:38Let's just talk about two to begin with that you see in that context.
00:04:40So in the second chapter,
00:04:45what you see is the event of Pentecost.
00:04:47Okay? Fifty days after, Pentecost in Greek.
00:04:50At Pentecost, you see the Spirit appear,
00:04:55the apostles speak and teach,
00:04:58and those around them are able to understand
00:05:00whatever language it is that they themselves speak.
00:05:04But then in the very next few verses,
00:05:08Peter stands up and speaks.
00:05:10And it's one of the very first examples
00:05:14of preaching in the early church.
00:05:19Peter tells the assembled multitude what is happening,
00:05:22and he does it by presenting Jesus as the fulfillment of
00:05:26Israel's prophecy,
00:05:31the fulfillment of everything that's spoken about,
00:05:32in the history of Israel.
00:05:35He quotes passages from the Old Testament and says Jesus is the
00:05:37meaning of all of this.
00:05:41So what he does is immediately, under the power of the Spirit,
00:05:43speak to the people around him and try and convert them,
00:05:48to draw them into this new community.
00:05:51And Peter's speech there is the beginning of a movement which
00:05:54is traced through the rest of Acts in which the disciples and
00:05:59eventually Paul who comes to join the church after
00:06:04persecuting it, the disciples, and then Paul
00:06:07go out into the area around them to preach the news that
00:06:11Jesus has risen from the dead and that this new relationship
00:06:15with God is possible.
00:06:20So preaching is rooted immediately
00:06:21in the origins of the church.
00:06:25But at the same time,
00:06:29there's a second mark of the earliest church,
00:06:31and that's a concern for the sharing of property and mutual
00:06:34relationships between the members of the church.
00:06:38So in Acts four, for example,
00:06:41you have the apostles in Jerusalem
00:06:44sharing their property.
00:06:47It's actually not entirely clear what this means.
00:06:49Did it mean that they sold everything they had and it was held in common,
00:06:52or do they mean that they did not make decisions about their
00:06:58own property without consulting the community and were always
00:07:02willing to use their possessions at the service of
00:07:05the community's needs.
00:07:09It probably means something like the second option.
00:07:10But what's given to us is immediately a picture of the
00:07:14apostles through the Spirit able to live a new form of
00:07:18common life.
00:07:23And the most important aspect of that common life is perhaps
00:07:24a common life at the service of others.
00:07:29It's not simply that they shared property among themselves.
00:07:32It's that they shared things among themselves
00:07:36so that they could use their possessions as a means of
00:07:39accomplishing the goals of the community,
00:07:42the preaching and the outreach.
00:07:44And it's no accident that we already hear in Acts of the
00:07:47numbers of people that the earliest Christian community
00:07:50looked after, the poorer members of the community,
00:07:54especially widows within the community,
00:07:57who could be cared for with the community's resources.
00:07:59And so you have already two marks of the earliest church.
00:08:04Preaching as an activity that really marks this church, this community,
00:08:09as a mission that's going out into the world trying to draw in new members,
00:08:13and internally the community in some circumstances putting its
00:08:18property at the service of others.
00:08:23That doesn't mean that all Christians in the first and
00:08:27second centuries shared their property.
00:08:31What we see is a vision of what happens in Jerusalem,
00:08:34and we see in the book of Acts other possibilities
00:08:38in which a figure like Paul is able to both work for
00:08:41himself, making tents, and also drawing on the
00:08:46resources of communities to whom he goes for accommodation and etcetera.
00:08:50So we have a community
00:08:56in a variety of ways trying to
00:08:58share property
00:09:03for the purpose of aiding the community around it.
00:09:05And that relationship between going out to bring people in
00:09:10and offering a model of a community through sharing
00:09:13really identifies two of the most
00:09:17important marks of the earliest Christian community.
00:09:20
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Ayres, L. (2024, November 05). Birth of the Christian Church and Christianity in Ireland - Acts 2 [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/birth-of-the-christian-church-and-christianity-in-ireland
MLA style
Ayres, L. "Birth of the Christian Church and Christianity in Ireland – Acts 2 ." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 05 Nov 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/birth-of-the-christian-church-and-christianity-in-ireland