Orthodox are the heirs of the Roman Empire, but whereas Western Latin Christians emerged out of the ruins of the western half of that empire, the Greek-speaking Eastern Church was shaped by the continuing rule of the Eastern emperor .For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found space to serve its own theological and social purposes .Even now, by no means all sections of the Christian world have undergone the mutation of believing unequivocally in tolerating or accepting any partnership with other belief systems .Deeply embedded in Christian tradition is a vocabulary of 'repentance' and 'conversion', both words which mean 'turning around' .So this book describes some of the ways in which individuals were turned around by Christianity, but also the ways in which they could turn around what Christianity meant .We will meet Paul of Tarsus, suddenly struck down by what he heard as a universal message for all human beings, who then quarrelled fiercely with other disciples of Jesus who saw their Lord as a Messiah sent only to the Jews .There is Augustine of Hippo, the brilliant teacher whose life was turned around by reading Paul, and who, more than a thousand years later, deeply influenced another troubled, brilliant academic called Martin Luther .There is Constantine, the soldier who hacked his way to total control of the Roman Empire and became convinced that the Christian God had destined him to do so -for Constantine, his side of the bargain was to turn Christians from a harried, suppressed cult, accused of ruining the empire, into the most favoured and privileged of all Roman religions .Ideas, once born, often develop lives of their own within human history, and they need to be understood in their own terms as they interact with societies and structures .Christianity in its first five centuries was in many respects a dialogue between Judaism and Graeco-Roman philosophy, trying to solve such problems as how a human being might also be God, or how one might sensibly describe three manifestations of the one Christian God, which came to be known collectively as the Trinity .After much ill-tempered debate on such matters, the outcome of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 was dictated by political circumstances and did not carry the whole Christian world with it .It is an important book, and highly recommended for the general reader of history as well as the Christian who wonders how the Jesus movement came, by Constantine's time, to be the church we know .
Andreas Raffeiner (Sat,) studied this question.