Podcasts and audio courses

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From Galilee To The Ends Of the Earth (2025)

Anders offers an overview of the fascinating first six centuries of Christian history and extraordinary expansion, in a series of six talks.

The subject for this first session is the extraordinary expansion of the Christian movement in the first six centuries of the church’s life. We are brought up to think of this as mainly an expansion into the Mediterranean world and into Europe, but in fact the new faith travelled south and north and east, as well as west, and there is a whole mostly untold story of early Christian mission into East Africa, and the Middle East, and even India and China.

In this second session, Anders looks at the making of a Christian Bible. We tend to take the Bible for granted, but it has a fascinating history. After all, Jesus and his disciples didn’t have a New Testament – so when and how did that come into existence? And why are there two forms of the Old Testament in use among Christians – one among Roman Catholics and Orthodox, and the other among Protestants? This and much else is explored.

In the third session, Anders asks the question, ‘How did the church end up with clergy?’ More specifically, how did the ‘threefold order’ of bishops, priests, and deacons come to be the normal way of organizing things? And how did some bishops (notably the Bishop of Rome) come to be more important than other bishops? And who looked after the money?

Anders continues in this fourth session to explore how Christians started (from very early on) to try to understand the relation of Jesus to his heavenly Father, and to articulate how Jesus might be said to be completely human and at the same time completely God. This led to much stormy debate in the first Christian centuries, a debate which has left us some of the great classical statements of Christian belief, such as the Nicene Creed (still recited in the eucharist week by week) and the Chalcedonian Definition.

This fifth talk explores the relationship between early Christian churches and the wider society and religious culture that surrounded them. Although often presented as a journey from persecution (before Constantine) to privileged ‘establishment’ (after Constantine), the reality is very different, more complicated, and much more interesting.

Anders concludes the series in this final session, when he investigates the way in which early Christian communities arranged their worship. The eucharist underwent a huge development, from being an evening rite that concluded an evening meal, to being a morning service which quickly came to be constructed in different ways in different parts of the Christian world. Baptism, marriage, and structured forms of prayer during the day are also explored.

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How Can We read The Bible (Lent Course 2025)

Gary presents a 5 part course of talks covering ways the Bible has been and can be read. In this first session we discuss some introductory questions and then explore allegorical reading which was prevalent in the early Church through to late Medieval times:

In the second session of our Lent Course in 2025, we begin to look at some ways of reading scripture which can be described as historical-critical, looking at the Biblical text and its underlying sources.

In the third session of our Lent Course in 2025 we look at “redaction criticism” or how the bible was shaped by its final editors. This is of particular interest in understanding the theology of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke).

In the fourth session of our Lent Course, we look at “canonical criticism”. We consider how the canon of sacred scripture came to be recognised and how we can read scripture as a unified whole with an overall message.

The fifth and final session of our Lent Course of 2025, in which we discuss the riches and challenges of feminist biblical criticism as a way of reading the Bible.

St Paul And The Troublesome Corinthians

In this six session course, Revd Dr Anders Bergquist teaches about St Paul and the Troublesome Christians of Corinth.