Event Detail

We are what we believe. For the Christian, this is especially important because we seek to persuade others that our beliefs are reliably true. Our beliefs were handed to us principally by testimonial witnesses of those who came before us. We ‘witness’ in proclamation to the beliefs of the Christian faith and we testify that ‘we belong to an unbroken line of witnesses’ to what we claim others ought to believe. The Christian witness is hence a witness of doctrine. 

Most of us learn of Christian doctrines with terms such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, original sin, atonement, justification, sanctification, etc., but are unaware of the origins of such important teachings of the faith.

This seminar seeks to explain some of the important doctrines (teachings) of the Christian church handed down the ages to us.

The Old Testament ‘books’ were written in Hebrew and Aramaic, and collected between the 6th century and 2nd centuries BC. The New Testament was written during the 1st century AD. Although most of the first Christians were Jews, they lived in a province of the Latin-speaking Roman Empire that borrowed heavily from Greek philosophy. Thus the Semitic people of Jewish ancestry wrote in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek in a land conquered by the Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Medean, Greek and Roman civilizations.

These Scriptures are selections of documents representing earlier oral traditions passed down through the generations. They reflect the cultural, intellectual and linguistic influences that shaped the expressions of the writers. It was the Greek cultural fascination with precision, rationality and love of philosophical questioning which led the Hellenistic Jewish writers to write the New Testament as they did, paving the way for the development of doctrinal teachings.

The theological doctrines derived from the Bible, shaped into confessions and creeds to form summaries of beliefs, began life in the cauldron of Greek philosophy.