Unity and Utopia in Early Christianity

FAIN: FA-11190-75

Wayne Meeks
Yale University (New Haven, CT 06510-1703)

To investigate the history of the notion of the unity of mankind in Christianity in the first four centuries. Both positive assertions of such unity and its rejection are to be included, with special attention to the social functions which symbolic presentations of human unity or disunity took on in the early Christian groups. The project is conceived as a social history of early Christianity rather than a theological one.