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Luke Timothy Johnson of Emory University has rendered a service to the church with his Teaching Company audio course: "Great World Religions: Christianity." But he has had to be "cruel to be kind."

A master translator
The truly great teachers anticipate the questions of their students. Then they answer them in a way that hits home. That is, they have the knack not only of drawing up answers from their well of specialist knowledge but working that wondrous translation from their guild's specialist language to a public language. And, even more important, not just any public language, but a language that their students understand—intellectually, intuitively, emotionally.

This feat of intellectual, cultural, human translation is sadly beyond many university professors—as any who have sat through certain courses will attest. Thus when we find a master teacher adept at this miraculous feat of translation, we should indeed, as the Teaching Company does, distribute the fruits of their labor widely and preserve them for posterity. This is the vision of the Teaching Company's "Great Courses" series.

Luke Timothy Johnson is, in the sense I've described, a master translator. Though playing "guess what the professor is thinking" is a hazardous sport, I'll take the guess: It seems to me that Johnson, as he prepared and taught "Great World Religions: Christianity," has kept a particular audience in his mind's eye. This audience seems, if I reconstruct the clues correctly, to consist of non-Christians and nominal Christians who just can't get beyond certain ugly facts about Christianity (folks likely to have a bumper sticker that reads: "I'm for the separation of church and hate"). They have grown up in a Western world shaped, yes, by the power of the Gospel, but also and often more visibly by the many cultural, political, and ecclesiastical mistakes of a church that is far from perfect.

Whether this reconstruction of Johnson's intent is true or not, the clues that have led me to guess at it have also shaped this review, as will become evident.

Helpful handles
To begin with the positive—and there is much here to be positive about—Johnson handles well the extreme compression of the format (twelve 30-minute lectures), providing some illuminating typologies and crystalline explanations. A few examples:

• He contextualizes Christianity well with other world religions. For example, he argues persuasively that Christianity, unlike other world religions, is not law-focused. Unlike Judaism earlier and Islam later, this faith was not (or at least, not for more than a few decades) the glue of an ethnically unified society, but rather in its first centuries a marginalized, relatively powerless group inside an empire run by "foreigners." The result of this sociological fact, Johnson argues, is that beyond the obvious moral center (Ten Commandments, Sermon on the Mount), Christianity has struggled to provide clear rules for engagement with culture, and even rules for social morality.
• He lays out five critical transformations the church underwent in its first centuries of expansion: geographical, sociological, linguistic, cultural, and demographic.
• He explains concisely how "dualism" in various forms mounted the biggest and most dangerous challenge in 2nd- and early 3rd-century Christianity, and how the church responded.
• He shows clearly the second challenge of that age: the move to introduce new, subjective sources of authority to supplement the testimony of the apostles.

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July (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48