GES130 Christianity and Western Culture (better known to Bethel students as CWC, or "C-Dub") is a one-semester study of the complicated interactions between Christianity and Western culture through the ages.

Now well into its third decade, CWC serves as a cornerstone of Bethel's General Education curriculum, giving students a unique foundation on which to build in later courses.

Designed as a distinctively "Bethel" version of the Western Civilization survey, CWC starts with the Classical World of ancient Greece and Rome, and follows the story of "Western Civ" up to the Enlightenment. Besides studying the social, political, and cultural history of the West, students read excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Locke, Wollstonecraft, Jefferson, and other major intellectual figures.

But at the same time CWC tells the continuing story of God's people. As Bethel Bible prof (and course co-founder) Mike Holmes has said, CWC completes the space in the biblical story between the Acts of the Apostles and the end of history prophesied in Revelation. Guided by the scriptural image of being "surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1), students listen to nearly 2000 years' worth of Christian voices speak to the relationship of the individual believer to God, of the individual to the larger church, and of Christians to the cultures around them.