The Kingdom of the Heavens > Salvation > Adoption > From Early Christianity to Islam and Back — 1. The Earliest Christianity

From Early Christianity to Islam and Back — 1. The Earliest Christianity

July 13, 2020 6 Comments

A God who Speaks, Adoption, Background Information, Church purpose versus church growth, Complex unity, Conversation with God, Desire to have our own way, Emotions, Eternity Present, Free will, God Acts by Speaking, God Never Stopped Speaking, God Speaks to Us, God was never our enemy, God's Existence and Nature, God's purpose for us, God's rationality, God's sovereignty, God's Voice, His Children, His Friends, Historical Background, Human Rationality, Is forgiveness of sins the focus of salvation?, Jesus the Son, Knowing good and evil, Language and Speech, Logical thinking, Male and female, Other Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Prophecy, Reconciliation, Regeneration, Rejecting God, Restoration of God's Image, Salvation, Sin, Sins versus sin, Son of Man, The Bible, The Invisible God's Self-Existence, Through the church, To be his ambassadors, To be in his image, To live in unity, Trinity, Unity, What is God's Word, What is sin?

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This post is the first in a series of six outlining a broad view of how things in the Church and the world got to be as they are now, including contributions early Christianity and Islam made to each other. This post attempts to outline the basic positions of early Christianity. Comments are invited!

Over the next six days, God willing, I will lay out in very broad outline form, and without many citations to authority, a historiography of the development of Christian teaching and division, how this affected the rise of Islam, and how both Islam and errors made by the dominant Christian organizations before Islam affected the present state of Christianity and the world. I may come back to revise this outline over the next year or so, as I develop each point in detail, with proper citations and argument. I may also come back to revise this outline, and the articles which will follow it, in response to reader comments, which I invite.

In order to keep from posting a single article that is monstrously long, I will post this outline in six segments:

  1. The Presuppositions of the Earliest Christianity (today’s post).
  2. Negative Developments in Christianity Before Muhammad.
  3. Effects of Christian Developments on the Rise and Development of Islam
  4. Effects of Islam on Late Medieval Western Christianity and History.
  5. Effects of these Events on the Reformation and Post-Reformation European and American History.
  6. Effects on the Present State of Christianity and the World,

While this outline is largely centered on developments in the West, with which I am the most familiar, I would hope at some future time to also give some development of events that affected the Eastern and Southern branches of Christianity, and, hence, Asia and Africa.

The Presuppositions of the Earliest Christianity

I would submit that all of the following were presuppositions of the early Church, as found in the New Testament, even though most of them had not yet been precisely formulated:

  1.  There is only one God.
  2. Fundamentally, early Christianity was based on the possibility of having a living, personal relationship with this God through his Son, Jesus Christ.
  3. Only God has existence in himself.  The existence of all other things and persons derives from him, at every moment of their existence. Exodus   Genesis 1:1; Exodus 3:14-15;  John 3:27; Acts 17:24-28; Colossians 1:15-16.
  4. Because God exists at all times simultaneously, and simultaneously throughout his Creation, his being subsumes all of the changes that occur in his Creation without changing him—the changes are found in him from the beginning, and he has provided for them from the beginning. He is the same God yesterday, today and forever. Hebrews 13:8..
  5. For the same reason, however, God’s thoughts, emotions, and manifestations of himself to his changing Creation and to his transient creatures appear to change with time when viewed by beings like us who are bound to time..
  6. God is eternal and omnipresent—that is, he simultaneously exists at all times and places.  To him all times and places are present.
  7. This also implies that God is all around us—in him we live and move and have our being, as Paul said.  He is not limited to an infinitely distant “Heaven” or an eschatological distant future.
  8. God is both “transcendent”–above (in power) and outside his creation (which he pre-existed)—and “immanent” (manifested throughout creation, active in it and accessible from all places within it).  There is no contradiction in this tension.  See, for instance, Acts 17:24-31.
  9. God is a unified One, a complex unity that includes the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, not an ontologically “simple” unity in the sense advocated by Greek (and later) philosophy.
  10. God created the first two humans, each of which was also a complex unity with a body containing many members, a mind, emotions, a moral sense, a language, and free will, in his own image and likeness.
  11. God has made us able, and leaves us free, to make our own decisions, yet he remains in total control of the ultimate outcome of our choices, and retains the authority to control the details of individual events when necessary to perform his ultimate will.  There is no contradiction in this, and both Jesus and the New Testament church sometimes expressed both halves of this tension in the same utterance.  See, e.g., John 19:10-11; Acts 2:27-36; Acts 4:24-30; Acts 5:27-32; Acts 7.
  12. By the most fundamental attribute of his nature, God is love.
  13. God can participate in his Creation, feel emotions as a result of the things that happen in it, and act in response to what we do in it, and not change himself at all, because he is above time.  The whole drama of the Creation which he is perfecting, including us, is simply permanently subsumed within him.  We are the ones who are limited to finite, unidirectional time; he is not.
  14. This also implies that God is not “impassible” (to use the formal, theological term), in the sense this is normally urged—that is, that God is unable to feel any emotion as a result of anything that happens to his creatures or his Creation.  God is frequently described as having emotions, and these descriptions are not mere anthropomorphisms designed to make God’s totally dispassionate sovereign decisions more understandable to humans. See, e.g., Exodus 34:5-7 (“compassionate” part of God’s name); Hebrews 11:5-6 (God pleased); Hebrews 13:15-16 (God pleased); Genesis 6:5-7 (God grieved); Hebrews 3:7-11, 16-17 (God provoked and angry) .   God feels, thinks and acts..
  15. .Indeed, God frequently makes decisions that appear to have been made in time, basing those decisions on actions of humans or other events that occur in time, and executes them in time.  See, e.g, 2 Kings 20:1-6; Ezekiel 18:21-32; Jonah 3:4-4:4.   This implies that he is not “immutable” in one sense often urged—i.e., unable to be changed in any way (even as we see time) by anything we do or by any events that occur.  This observation also undercuts the ordinary insistence that God is “impassible,” as the main supporting argument for it is that he is “immutable.”
  16. God also, in creating the first two humans, created them “male and female,” created with unity between themselves, in his own image and likeness.  Neither was created subservient or inferior; both were equally and together a part of God’s image.
  17. God created the universe by speaking and now maintains it by his Word. Genesis 1:1-3; John 1:1-4; Hebrews 1:1-3.
  18. The things of the Spirit–the things God says–are more real than the things we see.
  19. God has always spoken with humans and has never stopped speaking. John 1:1-18.  Language, the use of words, both spoken and, more recently, written, has always been God’s preferred method of communicating with us.
  20. Jesus, being one with his Father, is entirely like his Father.  John 14:6-9.  God is eternal, above time.  Jesus is, therefore, eternally what he now is—both fully divine and fully human.  Both his divinity and his humanity are eternal and have never been and can never be separated.
  21.  Jesus was born as a human at a fixed time, as we see time.  But God perceives time differently than we do.  Jesus was incarnated visibly into a humanity he has always possessed. He did not become human at that time, any more than he became God at that time.
  22. Jesus revealed his eternal humanity to us when he was conceived in Mary and born into our time. Matthew 1:18-23; Luke 1:26-38; 1 Peter 1:17-25.  At that time, Jesus, as a man, temporarily—again as we see time—took upon himself the temporal and spatial limitations of his human brothers and sisters, died for us—and was raised. Philippians 2:5-11; Hebrews 2:9-18.  So he knows our limitations from his own experience, and understands them.  Hebrews 4:14-16.
  23. Jesus is also the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8)—as God views time—and he has always possessed the life of his resurrection.  Revelation 1:8, 13, 16-18; Matthew 22:31-32.  When he told Martha, a few days before his earthly death and resurrection, “I am the resurrection and the life,”  he did not mean “I will be the resurrection and the life”—he was already the resurrection incarnate when he spoke.  John 11:25.
  24. That God created the first humans in his own image implies that he already contained humanity, what it means to be human.
  25. It has always been God’s intention to bring humans who will trust him, by adoption as his children, into unity with himself, in the same complex unity shared by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
  26. The first human pair failed under temptation, choosing to seek equality with God in the matter of deciding for themselves what was good and evil so that they could have what looked good to them in preference to their friendship with God. This attitude of desiring to take God’s place, to ignore God so that they could have their own way, was “sin.” Genesis 3:1-13, 22-23; Romans 1:21-24; Romans 7:7-14.
  27. Because they had chosen sin, Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate of the forbidden fruit.  This was the first of many “sins”—concrete actions that arise from the underlying attitude of “sin”—to be committed by the human race.
  28. Adam passed on to all of his human descendants except Jesus the attitude of “sin”—the determination to ignore God and make gods of (or for) ourselves so that we can have our own way.
  29. When Adam chose sin, he separated himself from the source of all life, and died, though his physical body continued to function for many years thereafter.   He also passed this state of spiritual death and inevitable, though delayed, physical death on to his descendants. Romans 5:12-14.
  30. It is “sin,” our determination to live apart from God, that separates us from God—by our own choice—and leads to death.  Individual sinful acts—the instances of “sins”—do not separate us from God, in and of themselves; they only evidence that we have chosen “sin.”
  31. In addition to our tendency to make gods of ourselves, disobey God and hurt others (“sin”), we also inherited from Adam our tendency to deny our sin, to incorrectly attribute our feelings of dread toward God on our individual “sins” (sin guilt) or the way God made us (our weak bodies, our “nakedness”) rather than our underlying “sin,” and to flee from God and other people and hide our sin from exposure.
  32. Under the original New Testament formulation of “sin,” there was a critical distinction made between “sin” (singular), or the “sin nature”, and “sins” (plural), meaning discrete acts that instantiated “sin.”
  33. That said, there has always been a tension in the Christian community and Christian doctrine between faith and works, and a corresponding tension between emphasizing elimination of inward “sin” and emphasizing control of outward “sins.”.
  34. A very early expression of this tension is found in Acts 15, which records what was later named the Council of Jerusalem.  The conflict there temporarily resolved was a conflict between many of the Jews who had formed the original Church and the new Gentile converts.  The faction that remained “zealous for the law” (see, e.g., Acts 21:20) insisted that one must first convert to Judaism—by being circumcised and pledging to observe the Law—before one could come to Christ. .
  35. The resolution reached by the leaders in Jerusalem in Acts 15 was that Gentile believers must only abstain from sexual immorality and from a few other practices associated at that time with pagan idolatry, not be circumcised and keep the whole law. 
  36. But that resolution failed to keep many of the Jewish believers in Jerusalem satisfied even until the end of Paul’s life.  By the time Paul went to Jerusalem in Acts 21, and was arrested there, this large faction had resumed its insistence that Gentile believers must be taught to observe the Law.  Acts 21:20-25.
  37. God’s answer for the separation caused by our individual and collective sin was to come to earth as one of us.
  38. The New Testament Jesus was fully God, but also fully human—like us.  He lived his life as a human on earth by listening to, depending upon and obeying his Father and by living in the power of the Holy Spirit, exactly as we are invited to do.  His temptations were real and were fully like ours, though he did not yield to them.
  39. The answer to our sin guilt, which made us dread God and want to avoid his presence, was the death of Christ, which completely atoned for—i.e., covered—our sins, leaving us no reason to fear coming to God.  This was a covering of our sins with his righteousness, not payment for our individual sins.
  40. The answer to sin living within us was the resurrection of Christ, which came with the invitation and the promise that, if we died  with him to our old life, we could also live with him in his resurrected life, with his Holy Spirit working within us, to overcome the power of the sin nature and learn to let him, rather than sin, live through us.  It promised the power of a real ongoing relationship with the risen Christ.
  41. In the New Testament, the “Word” of God is not just a Book, a collection of written words, but a living Person—Jesus Christ—who was made flesh, lived among us, and now lives within us, making God’s words live within us. John 1:1-3, 14; James 1:22; 1 John 1:1-3.
  42. Jesus said that his sheep listen to his voice and follow him.  This implies that he is speaking to them.  Those who cannot hear him, cannot hear him because they are not his sheep. John 10:25-28. In the New Testament, there is every indication that Jesus spoke regularly with ordinary believers.
  43. It has always been God’s purpose, in both Old Testament and New Testament times, that his people should learn to trust him, hear his voice, and follow him. Compare, Exodus 19:3-6 and John 10:25-28.
  44. The Bible is a story that invites us to ask questions and converse with God about them. It was not written to answer abstract philosophical questions, so that we can know about God without knowing him, or so that we can predict the “rules” under which he operates so permitting us to manipulate him. It is also not a book of clear rules about how to please God without ever hearing from him directly. 
  45. God’s hermeneutic: in practical matters is “ask and you will receive.” Jesus promises us his presence, leading, and voice.  He promises his Spirit within us leading us into all truth.   He makes no promise to answer abstract philosophical questions about himself. But he does say he will show us how he is, what he is like, the image we are to let him develop.
  46. God gave the Children of Israel his Law because they like Adam feared to face him—so they asked for commandments to follow that would please him, if they observed them, instead of having God speak to them directly and continually. Exodus 20:19-22.
  47. The Israelites’ declared fear that God’s voice would kill them was obviously unfounded—God was, in fact, speaking to them at the time they asked him to stop doing so, and none of them had died as a result of it.  Their underlying, but unexpressed, fear was that God would interfere with something they wanted to do, they would then resist God’s voice, and he would kill them for resisting.
  48. Thus, the purpose of the moral and ceremonial aspects of the Law given through Moses was not to regulate all of the details of the Israelites’ lives so that they would not sin, but to show sin to be what it is—the rebellious condition of the heart, not the transgression of rules—and to teach them that they could not please God without his active participation in their lives. Romans 3:19-26; Romans 8:1-4; Galatians 2:15-21 3:21-29.
  49. The purpose of the civil aspects of the Law of Moses—the commands entailing earthly penalties imposed by human judges or a human “avenger of blood”—was also not to regulate all of the details of the Israelites’ lives so that they would not sin, but to preserve order and provide justice for major offenses between people.  This was the same as God’s purpose for ordaining rulers in general.  Compare Romans 13:1-4; 1 Peter 2:13-16.
  50. While the Acts and Epistles contain only limited information on the various ways different local congregations operated during the earliest period of the Church, it is clear that, at that time, God used people exercising various manifestations (or, “gifts”) of the Holy Spirit—including, most prominently in this regard, prophecy, teaching, exhortation, wisdom and knowledge—to speak to gathered congregations.  Some of these people were permanently recognized as given to the Church in these matters, others only spoke occasionally.
  51.  The only direct information on the manner in which the exercise of these gifts in church meetings was to be regulated in the earliest churches is found in 1 Corinthians 12 through 14.  There, it appears that all believers were permitted to speak, subject to the following limitations:  1) the need to limit the number of speakers at any one meeting, 2) meetings must be kept orderly, 3) when interrupted, a speaker should yield, 4) all other believers present were to judge the truth of what was being said, and 5) the gift of “discernment of spirits” was allowed to operate freely.  This last point was the ultimate check on the propagation of error, as long as the congregation was composed predominantly of people who were listening to the Holy Spirit—if an error was stated, another believer known to exercise discernment could interrupt and provide correct teaching.
  52. Relatively early in the history of the Church, the various local church organizations instituted processes of catechesis—periods of observation and mentoring for new converts before they would be fully admitted to the organized church.  In the early period, the various local bodies each had their own processes for this, just as there was a variety of different forms of church organization.
  53. As originally taught by Jesus, the Kingdom of the Heavens is all around us, and a major aspect of Jesus’ message was that, by faith, we can enter it and live in it while still in this physical life on earth.  Like God himself, the Kingdom is not limited to an infinitely distant “Heaven” or an eschatological distant future.
  54. Early Christianity regarded men and women as equal in the church (see my prior post “Humans Male and Female… as Pictures of God’s Unity in Diversity” and the  quotations that deal with the non-distinction between male and female in my post About Racism).  Acts and the Epistles even appear to identify women who were recognized as apostles and prophets.  See, Romans 16:7 (Junia, Apostle); Acts 21:8-9 (daughters of Philip, prophets). The apparent exceptions to this equality in a few Epistles are best understood as responses to particular social circumstances of individual congregations, matters of avoiding offense or confusion, not as indicating inequality.
  55. During its earliest period, the church was mostly taken from the lower classes of society, who became persecuted outcasts upon professing faith in Christ.  This was understood to be the cost of discipleship.  As Paul wrote, even in Corinth, where there were apparently a few more wealthy people than in most congregations, “not many” were considered wise or educated by human standards, and “not many” were of noble social rank.   1 Corinthians 1:26.
  56. It is now generally conceded that, during the New Testament period and for one or two centuries after it, Christianity largely embraced pacifism.
  57. While the New Testament speaks of spiritual warfare and uses some military metaphors to describe it, these descriptions always make clear that we are not fighting against other people, or their political kingdoms, but against a spiritual enemy. “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against… spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.”  Ephesians 6:12 (NASB).
  58. To be sure, nothing in the New Testament expressly prohibits believers from participating in their nation’s military.
  59. When soldiers came to John the Baptizer for the baptism of repentance, and asked him what they must do, he did not tell them to desert.  He told them to stop extorting people, stop accusing people falsely, and be content with their wages.  Luke 3:14.
  60. On the other hand, Jesus ended a dispute among his disciples about which of them was the greatest by denouncing the way of worldly power and recognition:  “And He said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who have authority over them are called ‘Benefactors.’ But it is not this way with you, but the one who is the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like the servant.For who is greater, the one who reclines at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at the table? But I am among you as the one who serves.”  Luke 22:25-27.
  61. Jesus gave a similar explanation of what made the way of the Scribes and Pharisees, who loved having both the power to lay moral burdens on others and public recognition of that power, worthy of the woes he pronounced on them: “Do not be called leaders; for One is your Leader, that is, Christ.But the greatest among you shall be your servant.Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.”  Matthew 23:10-12.
  62. When on trial before Pilate, after telling Pilate that his kingdom was “not of this world” (hence not a direct threat to Caesar), Jesus explained “If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.”  John 18:36. To Pilate, this explanation that Jesus’ followers were not fighting to prevent him from being turned over for trial was sufficient to acquit Jesus of the treason charge the Jewish leaders had brought against him.  John 19:4.
  63. In a number of other places, both Jesus and the writers of the New Testament discussed the various ways in which the Kingdom of God operates on principles that are the exact opposites of the principles of power and subjugation on which earthly kingdoms operate.  See, God is King.
  64. Thus, those early Church Fathers who concluded that Jesus advocated nonviolence (See the Wikipedia article Christian Pacifism)  at least arguably had good scriptural grounds to stand on. 
  65. And, while God appears to anticipate that earthly nations will continue to go to war, see Matthew 24:6-7, and, therefore that nations will still need to defend themselves and Christians may be forced to participate, nothing in the New Testament appears to justify the use of war to promote the Gospel of Peace or the use of violence to reconcile people to God and each other. It is an obvious contradiction..
  66. Scriptures on spiritual warfare, per se, in the New Testament are rare, and its military metaphors are far from being the dominant metaphors of the Christian life.  Much more common are metaphors of trust—like sheep following a good, caring shepherd—or of unity and growth—like the Body of Christ metaphor. 
  67. The Pentecost story in Acts demonstrates that, even at its inception, the Church, though then composed only of Jews, included Diaspora Jews who represented many different linguistic and cultural groups, including Arabs, Medes (Persians), Parthians, Mesopotamians and Egyptians (Copts). Acts 2:7-11.

What I Believe–stated simply — a restatement of much of this material in a simpler form and in simpler language, in unnumbered prose with subject headings.

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6 Comments

  1. Jonathan Brickman jeb@americabless.org

    Love the above.

    The only questionables I have, have to do with pacifism, and quite how we are to regard the early church.

    It is common for people of the churches to quasi-deify the early church, suggesting that what we know of its obedience was total. But I think it very important, that the God did not, through either John the Baptist or the Lord Himself, tell any soldiers or tax collectors to repent of their commissions, so far as we have it written. Miracles of belief were done with them, without such repentance. I’ll therefore think He intends His church to extend throughout the world, which means everywhere, including among those whom He uses in violence to keep evil at bay.

    And I will think that the Lord intended the earliest church, whose character was such that the Holy Spirit killed people who lied in matters of money, to be only temporary, for the very reason given in its description in Acts: while that situation held, its neighbors were terrified of it and did not approach. Its purpose was momentarily defeated by its own witness. The situation clearly did not last long, as the next reports were very different.

    Reply ↓
    1. Ian Johnson (Post author)

      True–what John the Baptist told soldiers who came to him was to carry out their orders without adding to them for their own profit, and not to use their authority to extort people. He took them where they were. He didn’t tell them to desert. And, yes, Ananias and Sapphira were a one-time event.

      Reply ↓

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