Anastasis Center Courses

Many are in process of deconstructing their understanding of Christian faith. But what do we reconstruct in its place?

We draw on resources related to the early church, especially the first 400 - 500 years. Our materials either expand on early Christian teaching or activity, or draw upon that well as a resource or inspiration.

Protestants tend to assume that we today have coherent and sophisticated theology, whether conservative, legalistic, propertied, and retributive, or liberal, individualistic, progressive, and postmodern. We tend to assume that the early church was incoherent and unsophisticated. The same bias occurs in anthropology, in what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” Yet anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow give a fabulous one hour lecture, called The Myth of the Stupid Savage, about how earlier human societies were quite relationally sophisticated. Their research was later published in their November 2021 book, published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. See a 15 minute interview of David Wengrow by journalist Anand Giridharadas, Human History Gets A Rewrite, released November 5, 2021. Below, the video lectures of our class, Reconstruction, demonstrate how the earliest Christians were quite theologically, morally, and ethically sophisticated. Under each video, you will find at least one more link to go deeper. These same videos, without additional links for more information, are available on our Reconstruction playlist on our YouTube channel.