Most of the currents of modern Western history can ultimately be traced to the well-meaning decisions of Christian leaders in the early centuries to seek political sponsorship. This led to the inversion of the Gospel message, forced exile of "heretics," the rise of Islam through the influence of exiled "heretics," and most of the subsequent upheavals in the Western world.
The primary thesis of this series is simple: certain errors which were introduced into organized Christianity in its early centuries–in divergent forms in different groups of Christians–as a result of its politicization were then in the Seventh Century CE either absorbed, modified and absolutized by Muhammad or absolutely rejected by him and his companions and early followers. The rejection of certain aspects of Muhammad’s contemporary Arabian Christianity were then made pillars of Islam, as were also some of the ideas ratified and absolutized. Then interaction between Islam and Christianity, much of it violent, caused hardened forms of these same errors–or sometimes, in reaction against Islam, their polar opposites–to grow within organized Christianity. This led to further splintering and extreme dogmatism within organized Christianity. It also led to the Crusades, the Reformation and its wars, the growth of modern political states in Europe and the Americas, and many of the problems of the current world.
These problems were not caused by Jesus, by individuals’ faith in him, by his teachings or by the teachings of his immediate Disciples/Apostles. Rather, they were caused by errors introduced initially with the good intention of making the Gospel (which is always unacceptable) more acceptable to the masses and their leaders—through making itself compatible with human philosophies of the day, through syncretism with other religions and through what Jacques Ellul termed “mass evangelism.” These efforts were successful within the Roman world—they led to the absorption of the Church, as a human organization, by the Roman ruling class, to the end of persecution for Christians as long as they stayed within the “official” organization, to the whole empire becoming nominally “Christian,” and to the conversion of “Christianity” itself into a tool of statecraft.
But this “success” had a high cost. The Gospel is first of all a way of individual salvation into an active friendship with Jesus. It requires only repentance—turning from our own way that once opposed God—and willingness to now live as God’s children and friends through his Son Jesus. Christian belief, as reflected in the New Testament, was focused on the freedom of each believer’s direct relationship with God, as an adopted child, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Instead of a rigid moral code, it taught something much more difficult—living under the direction and power of the Holy Spirit under the law of love. All the good things believers are to do for the benefit of others and the world are not works we are to do for Jesus, in isolation from him, to get on his “good side;” instead, we are already on God’s “good side,” and our works are to be works done by Jesus through us.
Jesus was from the lower classes of Jewish society, though perhaps not as poor as he is often represented (carpenters were skilled craftsmen). A majority of his immediate disciples appear to have been fishermen. For about the first century and a half after Jesus’ resurrection, the Church taught life with and in Christ, something which appealed mostly to “have nots” who could put their hope in nothing else, although favoritism shown toward the few rich members had to be rebuked even in the time of the Apostles. (Compare, for example, Matthew 5:3, Matthew 19:16-26, Luke 6:20-26, 1 Corinthians 1:26-29, James 2:1-7, James 5:1-6). The Holy Spirit and the Church operated largely outside the existing social order, the Church lived as outcasts from it, and none of the distinctions of wealth or social rank were to have any place in it. There was never any thought of the possibility that a community based on individual faith in Christ might someday rule whole communities and nations—indeed, that concept was directly opposed to the individual direct relationship with God that is at the heart of the New Testament.
But once it became established that everyone in a whole community, military regiment (the main setting in which “mass evangelism” started in Imperial Rome), city, province, nation or empire must be recognized as “Christians” by decree and taught to act (yes, play-act, hupokrisis) like it, the idea of individual relationships with God—and everything that goes with it–had to be discarded. Any notion of individual communication with God also became dangerous to those in authority. If any direct relationship with God were to be permitted, it must be strictly limited to the church organization and its politicized leaders—in much the same way direct contact with the gods was limited under the pre-Christian Roman civil religion. And this is exactly the way organized Christianity gradually took, even in groups outside the Roman Empire.
Those who dissented from this marriage between Christianity (or, more precisely, “Christendom”) and its secular rulers, or the suppression of the possibility of a direct relationship with God that it required, were labeled “heretics” and killed or exiled as enemies of both Church and State. Wars were fought, and were thought “just,” to suppress heretics. This pattern was thoroughly established by the time of the death of Emperor Constantine I in 337 CE, and has not fully ended today. Each wave of “heretical” Christians expelled from areas under Roman–or, a little later, Byzantine–control during these early centuries scattered to areas surrounding the Empire in which no branch of “Christianity” was, at least initially, in league with political leaders. In some of these areas, to be sure, “heretical” forms of Christianity did take control of the ruling classes. The most important examples of this are the Axumite Empire of Ethiopia, Armenia, much of Egypt, and the areas under the control of the Germanic fickle foederati of Rome in Dacia in the late 4th Century–the Goths, Vandals and Lombards. However, in other important areas to which the exiled “heretics” fled–Arabia, Mesopotamia, Persia–neither the “orthodox” Christianity of the Empire nor any group of “heretics” ever gained control. In general, though, the non-Christian rulers of these areas were more actively opposed to “orthodox” Christianity (which was believed a tool of the Roman “enemy”) than they were to groups of Christian “heretics” (who Rome/Constantinople had declared to be its “enemies”). The short- and long-term consequences of this early process will be described in the series of posts that flows from this one.
Next in this Series: “Spiritually Traumatized” Areas Hypothesis
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