Theologeezy: The Thorough Theological Thinkers That Thickened Thoughts Through Thorny, Thrilling, Threatening Theories

By Anthony Kottaridis

Theology is perhaps the most serious study in the world. That is, it was. Now I have spoiled everything with this marvelous and unfathomably fantastic little book. In it, you’ll laugh, or at least smirk violently through the crazy history of the Christian way of thinking about things. There are pictures and jokes and awful puns and outrageous facts and truly wonderful things to learn about—things only theology people usually know. But now you can too! Theology has never been so easy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Apr 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512781748

Anthony Kottaridis

Why did I write this book? It has little to do with my education in Theology, which was a cheerless subject and typically carries the same mood wherever it goes. But it was a reason, I suppose. I learned a lot - and I wanted to make the difficult things easier for others. Education in our times is always ineffective unless it entertains. I wished to do something that had not yet been done, perhaps because it is seemingly impossible: to make theology fun. Theology is one of those things everyone engages in - for everyone thinks about God. Why not show these same people that other people have answered their questions centuries ago? Why not do it with illustrations and jokes? Why not? Life is unfunny enough as it is, and laughter is good for you. I noticed the power of comedy as a boy. It astounded me. I was 9 and my siblings and I had to stay at a friend's house while my hospitalized mother gave birth to her fifth child. The people at whose house we were staying went to our church. The father had a glass eye, the mother had big frizzy hair, the elder daughter had dark, dark eyes, the younger daughter had light blue eyes and I was secretly in love with her. There was an elder son, who had 'gone 'bad'. He had been imprisoned before, I heard. Violent temper. Prone to exploding. Well, this angry young man just so happened to stop by on the night of our sojourn in their homestead. He was, naturally, indignant about something. He slammed doors, swore, shouted, and I was terribly afraid. The girl with the blue eyes hid us in her room - but we were found and shouted at as well. Thankfully my father arrived. The shouting stopped. And a movie was put on in the living room. A comedy. A silly little film. A film of no artistic merit, no philosophic worth and no critical esteem. But it was funny. The angry young man peeped in as we sat about tentatively viewing the screen. He sat down and folded his arms and eyed the screen and then! He roared in laughter! He buckled over, slapped his thighs, threw back his head and filled the house with "Ha! Ha! Ha's!" It left me astonished - and not a little relieved. That stupid little movie had conquered a dragon! That was how I saw it. Our lives are infested with dragons and goblins and all sorts of nastiness and misery. And there's always questions gnawing at us. But big books purporting to answer our questions intimidate and repel. I'd like to answer some of the biggest questions - the sort of things people ask and get asked all the time. What I wouldn't like is to answer them in blocks of text in small print in a War and Peace-sized volume. Because no one would read it. I decided it would be best to put small snippets of text between big comical pictures with ridiculously awful jokes and who knows? Maybe theology will not seem so dusty anymore. My name is Anthony Kottaridis. I was born in Sydney, Australia, on December 12, 1989. My father was the youngest of 7 children, born in a town in southern Greece, a country that was devastated by the Germans in WW2. My grandmother would cry every night remembering the horrors she had witnessed against the Greek people, or sub-humans as the Nazis called them. My mother was born into a family of capricious fortune, sometimes rich and poor, with a father of Scottish descent and a mother of Jewish heritage. She was the second of three children and came to Christ at an early age. As a boy I was thin and sickly-pale and bad at sports, but quite adept at drawing and sketching. I preferred to be indoors, as there were less insects. We were never well-off and moved house incessantly. At 15 I read Great Expectations by Dickens and I have been reading hungrily ever since. At 17 I began scribbling verses and stories. At 22 I finished my BTh and at 24 I finished an MTh. I began doing some assistant teaching, student paper marking. Dull and low-paying and depressing. What I truly like to do is write. I hope to do it for a living, for I cannot live without it.

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Copyright © 2017 Anthony Kottaridis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture quotes are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

WestBow Press

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8175-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8176-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8174-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017904966

WestBow Press rev. date: 4/17/2017

Contents

Introduction

To Begin With

Jesus’s Generation

Marvelous Martyrs

Champion Church Fathers

Unhappy Hermits

Awesome Augustine

Murky Middle Ages

Tremendous Thomas Aquinas

Endnotes

Introduction

A lot of people are afraid of theology.

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They may think it’s too tough for them, or too boring, or that they can do very well without it, thank you very much. But in our own little ways, we engage in theology all the time. It’s everywhere. If you’ve ever thought about God, even for just a second or two, you’ve done some theology, because that’s all it is—thinking about God-things.

Now some of us have some pretty odd ideas about God …

As far as Christianity’s concerned, some very, very strange ideas about God have arisen over the years. Some ideas died out after a little while, like a fashion, but some were so strong they’re still around today.

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Now the world was very different a thousand years ago; you were not as free to think about things as you are today. This was especially true in theology. People could come up with ideas that were downright dangerous. Some got away with it and lived happily ever after—but many met with sticky ends.

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The job of this book is to follow the story of Christian theology and make the hard bits easy to understand. Because, let’s face it, theology can be pretty baffling.

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But let’s not waste any more time here in the introduction: sit back, make yourself comfortable, and prepare for a trip through the story of the gory and the glory, of the funny and the bloody, the foolish and the ghoulish world of theology. Ready?

To Begin With

Christian theology begins with the Bible. The Bible is made up of sixty-six books, divided by Christians into two parts.

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The first part is called the Old Testament. It was written in Hebrew (and a little Aramaic) and has books on history, law, prophecy, poetry, and more. The second part is called the New Testament. It was written in Greek and is made up of four gospels, numerous letters, and the famous and mysterious piece of apocalyptic literature, Revelation.

Christians believe that the Bible is the word of God.

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And it’s where all Christian theology is, or should be, based.

Some parts of the Bible are easy to understand, others not so easy. The problem is that so many important passages are of the difficult sort, and people tend to just skip them or simply assume it means this (when it just might mean that). Big mistake!

Once the Bible was written and was circulating all over the ancient world, more and more people started coming up with more and more answers to the difficult bits. They even started looking at the easy parts and finding deeper meanings in them.

People do this all the time, and not just where the Bible’s concerned. Just have a look at any English class. A teacher will flourish a silly syllabus about and say something like, So we see that Shakespeare’s placement of this particular adverb within this alliterative couplet serves to both satirize the social, cultural, economic, and political facets of the early Jacobean middle class and further draws attention to the precarious psychological implications of expressing one’s idiosyncrasies within the confines of institutions. (They seem to forget that Shakespeare wrote plays for people to enjoy, not to dissect like a frog in a laboratory.)

Now there’s nothing wrong with trying to interpret something that isn’t clear. The problem is that whatever solution