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Fifth Inquiry Dear Inquirer: There are many Christian
denominations and sects. Can they all be right or wrong? Here is a brief story
of how the Christian church developed and split into a number of groups: From the New Testament texts it is
clear the early followers of Jesus had differing beliefs. And there seem to
have been sects which moved to the edge of the Christian movement and beyond.
The first question the church had to confront was the question of how Jewish the
church should be. One or more factions thought that it was and should remain a
party within Judaism Others felt that it had redefined who the people of the
covenant were and thus broke the boundaries of the Judaism from which it
emerged. For the first 300 years more or less,
the church struggled to maintain its identity and to survive in a complex of
cultures which were indifferent or even hostile toward its core message. There
were times of toleration, others of persecution. Sometimes persecution was
quite local. At other times it was wide-spread. The church grew through this
era. It was led by the witness of the martyrs, and taught by remarkable
teachers. We know quite a bit about this period. There is a literature which
survives, even some archeological evidence. The church of the first 3 centuries
was largely an urban phenomenon, mainly a collection of communities of poor
people with some people of means. Expectations of believers were very high.
Becoming a Christian was a protracted process which culminated in baptism. The
new convert was clothed in new clothes after the washing in the baptismal waters
and a new life was expected. We know from the literature which
survives that rudimentary church order developed fairly quickly, albeit not
uniformly. A collection of sacred texts which tell the story of Jesus and
include the letters of the apostles begins although its content remains
flexible on the edges. The texts of Jewish antecedents were also considered
sacred. An ordered pattern of worship develops around the Lord’s supper; and a
set of practices which are definitive takes shape. The infrastructure of the
Roman Empire, its roads, its systems of transport, its commerce, makes it
possible for this far-flung network of communities to stay connected. Stories
of faith which happen in Egypt are told in Spain. The witness of Martyrs in
Rome are known perhaps as far East as parts of India. The local communities were fairly
small through this period. Of all the modern institutions and movements we know
about perhaps it was most like AA. Very little superstructure, a strong sense
of identity, a lore about practicing the faith. Even a Big Book! It was a
people who gathered to remember how bad it was and how good it is. It was a
people who knew their need for new life and had found it as a gift in loyalty to
Jesus and community with his followers. There may have been a few church
buildings, perhaps large houses given to the community, an occasional converted
temple. But the church seems to have owned relatively little real estate. It did develop rather quickly an
elaborate system for mutual aid, administered by Deacons. We have the story of
St. Lawrence, who was martyred after being asked to turn over the church
treasury to Roman authorities. He pointed to the poor and said, “There is the
church treasury.” The conversion of the Emperor,
Constantine, early in the 4th century, ushered in change. At first a
tolerated religion, then a protected religion, Christianity found itself in a
new place. It ceased being like AA in some respects, and became more like a
government agency….although that is a very crude analogy. Suspicions arose
among the people of the way early about the wisdom of accepting a place of
privilege in an imperial society. And so some of them renounced associations
with empire altogether and moved to the dessert to find solitude and form
rudimentary communities of resistance to the dominant culture and its claims.
One of these early hermits complains that there was once a time when one could
go to the dessert and be alone. Now it is littered with hermits, he says.
Ruined the place. Celibacy is chosen by some as a way of renouncing all the
entanglements with property which went with marriage. It was also a way to
differentiate from the sexual manners of the dominant culture, which at times
would make even Hollywood blush. Eventually what we now know as monasticism
emerges and becomes a powerful movement within the community of faith. These years after the Peace of the
Church, after Constantine’s edict of toleration, from 300 until the rise of
Islam about 700 AD were complex and turbulent in some ways. Different parties
vie for power. The imperial court interfered with the affairs of the church,
the church was drawn into squabbles of political factions. But theological
inquiry develops. Monastic movements mature and grow. Major disputes are aired
in the great ecumenical counsels beginning in 325 at Nicea and continuing
periodically for the next 400 years. The church in the east and the church in
the West, speaking different languages, Greek and Latin respectively, drifted
apart. The slow collapse of the empire and its infrastructure made it harder
for these two geographical areas to stay connected. The rise of Islam and its
rapid spread throughout parts of the East isolated parts of the Eastern church
from other parts and from the West. As the empire collapsed, the Western church
especially came to assume more civil functions. It became the glue which held
western society together. Missionary efforts, led mainly by monastic
communities, pressed North and West and evangelized northern Europe and the
British Isles, even though Christianity had been present in parts of Britain
from perhaps the second or third century. And those monastic communities
preserved the literature and the lore of classical culture. There were periods
of reform and renewal, periods of decline. As the first Christian millennium
drew to a close, East and West were different worlds. The Bishop of Rome, the
Pope, gathered increasing power and privilege. The church remained fairly
decentralized. The monastic communities remained important and movements of
reform and renewal come and go in this amazing collection of people who live in
community and in renunciation of the world. The church even remained in some
respects like AA. But increasingly it became the dominant land owner in the
West, and in various ways dominated cultural life, the economy, learning,
politics. In the first part of the second millennium east and west formally and
institutionally became separate and regarded each other with something at times
like mutual contempt. Christianity became less a vibrant faith, more an
accident of birth. Relationship with Islam are stormy.
Crusades are launched, ostensibly to reclaim Christian use of the sacred sites
in the Holy Land. But also to seek a final solution for the infidel. Islam
countered with force and very nearly conquered Europe through Spain.
Constantinople in the East falls and the Church of the Holy Wisdom, perhaps the
most beautiful in all Christendom, is converted to a mosque. Centers of learning emerge in the
west in the monastic and cathedral communities. In time the university
emerges. Great centers of learning are established in Paris, Oxford and
Cambridge, Prague, Seville. In time the new learning sees a rethinking of major
theological questions. Forgotten wisdom from the past is reclaimed, curiously
through Muslim efforts at preservation. Toward the middle of the second
millennium a full-blown renaissance sweeps Europe. It affects art and
architecture, music, government, culture, language. There is new interest in
reading ancient texts in their original languages, including the Bible. There
are the beginnings of Nationalism. The hegemony of the church is challenged
intellectually, politically and culturally. There is an enormous blow out from
all of this. Lutheranism emerges in Germany and Scandinavia and touches
England. Calvinism dominates in parts of Switzerland, parts of Germany, the law
countries, Scotland. An institutional reformation begins in England and becomes
a theological reformation in a generation. More radical reformers emerge, the
mothers of modern day Quakers and Mennonites, and a very radical sect who are
the antecedents of modern-day Unitarians. The Roman Church has its own
counter-reformation. All of this reform brings with it
considerable antagonism and years of war. It is resolved finally by an
agreement (the peace of Westphalia) in which the religion of the prince becomes
automatically the religion of the realm. It was not a perfect solution. But it
was better than constant war. Because of this, some of our immigrant ancestors
from Germany are Lutheran, some Reformed (Calvinist), some a mix of the two,
some Roman Catholic, some Anna-Baptist--the ancestors of modern day Mennonites,
Brethren, and Baptists. Depends on the area from which they immigrated. There are efforts to reform the
reformation. In England the Puritans find Anglicans corrupt and apostate and
propose a more radical reformation. They impose such a thing with the
commonwealth after beheading the King. A generation of joyless zealotry meant a
reform of the reformed reformation. Anglicanism is re-established. Luther nailed up his 95 theses for
debate and disputation in 1517. The fall-out from this event continues to this
day. Once the bonds of unity are broken, however, fissiporation seems to have
its own dynamics. In Europe this is restrained by state churches. The
colonization of the new world, which at first merely replicated the arrangements
of church and state found in Europe, soon opened Pandora's box. In time new
churches were invented at the drop of a hat. Much of Protestant America is
home-grown invention. Some varieties are peculiarly American, like the
Mormons. Others are Americanized versions of European-rooted sects. Often the
connections with European antecedents are barely recognizable. Anglicanism, after surviving a brush
with death visited by the Puritanism, and its own self-destruction in the 18th
century from domination by Aristocratic interests and less than ardent faith,
the challenge of Methodism (in the 18th century) which began as a
movement of reform within the church but soon spilled out of it, came to this
country with colonists as early as the Jamestown settlement. It barely survived
the revolutionary war. Many of its members, especially its clergy, were
loyalists. Some avoided the conflict by moving to Canada. The establishment of
the new nation with its constitutional separation of church from state meant
that Anglicans had to re-invent the church for themselves. And this they did. Using some models
borrowed from the recently created state, and some from the English church, a
non-established church was created. Its first Bishop was ordained in Scotland.
Subsequent Bishops in England. The Episcopate was guaranteed. And with it the
distinctive kind of spirituality, worship and practice inherited from the
English Church. Always a minority, this branch of
Christianity in the United States and in other parts of the world, has survived
and thrived. It claims the loyalties of about 2.5 million people in the United
States. After years of decline it seeks now to double its numbers by the year
2020. Can these bones rise again? Inquirer: Does this give you a sense of the story? What is missing? Where do you fit in to it? It has been claimed that this age is much like the pre-Constantine age. How might that be so? What are the opportunities and challenges of such a situation? |
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