CHRISTIANITY, WHAT WENT WRONG?

Sermon/Essay by JRT

To anyone who has taken the time to objectively view Christianity in the world today, the view is almost uniformly bleak. The fragmentation of the Christian church is a scandal not only to ourselves but to those who view us from the outside. Not only is the Church divided into the broad divisions of Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, but each of those is subdivided into smaller denominations or factions or national churches. And even these smaller divisions have yet smaller divisions within them. How many different kinds of Baptist are there? or of Pentecostal? or of Evangelical? We have not yet even arrived at the fringe groups and cults whose number seems to increase almost on a daily basis. As a matter of fact, a recent estimate puts the count at over 38,400 Christian denominations! Is it any wonder that we are viewed with such a skeptical eye by those outside the Christian church? But wait! It gets worse! Not only are we plagued by this divisiveness but many of us are actively engaged in condemning each other. In attempting to converse with other Christians, I have been called "the spawn of Satan" and even "the antichrist". Some fundamentalist and/or evangelistic groups are especially good at this, and many would not even consider the majority of Christians beyond their own circle to even be Christian.

This rather negative view is made all the worse by our rather naïve misconception that in the beginning all was perfect peace and unity within the Christian church. Not so! Even during his own short ministry, Jesus heard complaints from his disciples that others unknown to themselves were casting out demons in Jesus' name. The epistles of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles refer to a dispute between Paul and the Jerusalem church under James and Peter. It seems that right from the very beginning the apostles and disciples each had their own view of Jesus and this was reflected in their missionary activities. If there ever was perfect unity, it must have been extremely short lived.

A thorough analysis would take years and fill volumes. In fact, it already has! What I most want to do in this short sermon / essay is to just identify and comment briefly on what I feel are some of the more important issues. I will also try to limit myself to those early decades when Christianity was still in it's infancy because I am convinced that many of the present problems in the Christian church have their roots, so to speak, in the cradle.

** My first observation has to do with the extremely short duration of the active ministry of Jesus. The gospels indicate that this ministry could have been as short as a single year and possibly as long as three. Compared to other great religious leaders and thinkers, like the Buddha, or Lao Tse, or Muhammad, all of whom had decades to develop and clarify their thoughts, to gather and teach their disciples, the ministry of Jesus was tragically ended before it had hardly begun. I am personally convinced that even though he had a powerful influence on them, he simply did not have the time to teach his disciples properly. To put things in a nutshell, the disciples "just didn't get it". This confusion is evident in the fact that at least six or seven different branches of Christian thought have been found to have been in existence even before the first canonical gospel (Mark) was written.

The present Christian church, even in it's sadly fragmented state, is the spiritual descendant of just one of these. We could call this the "Pauline" church. The great things about being on the winning side of a competition such as this, is that you get to call the losers heretics, you get to excommunicate them, you get to persecute them and you get to burn their books so that even their thoughts die with them. All of this happened and especially so after the Pauline church allied itself with Roman Imperial power. The persecuted church became the persecuting church and they were very good at it.

** My second point is that we all too easily forget that in it's origins Christianity was little more than a Jewish splinter group. Jesus was born, raised, lived and died a Jew. The first disciples were all Jews. The Jerusalem church, the first Christian congregation, continued in the Jewish tradition of daily temple worship. This Jewish character of the early church was lost within a very few decades and it is only within recent years that we have come to realize the profound implications of this loss.
This loss occurred in two ways. First, the Jews tired of the Christian cult within their own ranks. This was exacerbated by the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem in AD70 when up to as many as 1 400 000 Jews were either killed, starved to death or sold into slavery. This was the beginning of the great Diaspora of the Jews. As with any group whose identity and very survival are at stake, they retreated within themselves, becoming very intolerant of any perceived threat whether from within or without. The end result was that the rabbinical council in Jamniah about AD89 rejected any use of Christian scriptures as readings in synagogue services. This resulted in the final expulsion of the Jewish Christians from within the ranks of Judaism.

On the other hand, the Jewish Christians themselves realized that they were losing the battle for the heart and soul of Judaism. There must have been a certain amount of bitterness in this realization. Following the destruction of the temple, they also recognized that if the message of Jesus were to survive at all, it would have to do so in a Gentile world dominated by Roman Imperial power. These early Christians were also beginning to experience persecution by the Roman authorities. It was a very real embarrassment that Jesus had been executed by these same Romans as a political dissident. It is my personal conviction that the biblical narrative of the trial and execution of Jesus was structured in such a way so as to minimize Roman involvement and to pass the blame on to the Jewish religious authorities and even to the Jewish people themselves. The unintentional side effect of this has been almost 2 000 years of anti-Semitism.

** So Judaism and Christianity parted ways with blame residing on both sides. How did this affect the further development of Christianity and Christian thought? Put very simply it is just this --- the scriptures began to be read with Gentile rather than Jewish eyes. The early interpreters of scripture, and I include the "Church Fathers" in this number, no longer had the ability to understand the Jewish world view, metaphors, images and literary styles inherent in the gospels. They read them as literal history when the plain fact of the matter is that the gospel writers did not intend them as literal and the first readers did not read them as literal. It is only just recently that we have rediscovered this very crucial fact, namely that the gospels were written in the style of Jewish sacred writing known as "haggadic midrashic".

Let me illustrate with just a very brief example. The Jewish scriptures, our Old Testament, were written in a style known as midrashic literature. In this style of writing every effort was made to incorporate and interpret new events in terms of events that were already in scripture. In doing so historical accuracy was not nearly as important as meaning. An example will illustrate this. In Exodus 14 we read that Moses parted the waters of the Reed Sea (yes, I said Reed not Red) to lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt. In Joshua 3, we read that Joshua parted the waters of the Jordan River to lead the Hebrew people into the promised land. Did this event actually happen exactly as described? I suspect not. Certainly the river was crossed but the "parting of the waters" has it's most important meaning as a literary device linking Joshua to Moses. God's plan was being carried forward. This midrash of the parting of waters was used again in the Old Testament in 2 Kings 2 when the waters of the Jordan were parted by both the prophet Elijah and the prophet Elisha.

This midrash is carried forward into the New Testament in Mark 1 when at the baptism of Jesus the heavens were parted to permit the descent of the Holy Spirit and God's words of benediction. The meaning is obvious"¦Jesus becomes the new Moses leading his people from an old life to a new. But Jesus is also portrayed as greater than Moses. For Moses, God only parted waters, but for Jesus, the very heavens were parted. When read for meaning, the historical accuracy of the event assumes little importance. It is when we of the twentieth century read these stories without knowing their literary background, that the mistake is made of assuming that the stories are historically true exactly as written.

There is a further, almost comical, side effect here. Modern fundamentalist Christians, who regard the Bible both literally and inerrantly, are forced into the posture of rejecting the modern scientific theory of evolution while at the same time they search the Bible diligently for verses suggesting that the earth is not really flat. On the one hand they vigorously defend Genesis, while on the other they reject the biblical world view of a flat earth in a three tiered universe! When we lose sight of our origins, when we lose sight of history, we are sometimes forced into ludicrous positions.

** The "Christ story" so beloved to Christians for almost 2000 years is not unique with Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, in pagan mythologies, the same story can be traced back at least 5000 years. It is the age-old story of the tortured (frequently crucified), dying, resurrecting, redeeming savior. There were at least sixteen such saviors before Jesus.

What the very early Christians did was to take this pagan myth of "the Christ", present it in a Jewish context by linking it to Hebrew prophesy, and to then to marry it to the story of a real man --- a very charismatic itinerant rabbi who fell afoul of the Roman authorities and the Jewish high priesthood. Tragically Rabbi Yeshua Bar Miriam was executed. Paul added an element of Greek philosophy to the mix.

Starting in the second century and following, we Christians made a tragic mistake. You see, the pagans knew that their mythology was a mythology. They knew that it was to be understood as allegory and to be interpreted for the message that lay beyond the literal story. What we Christians did was to attach the myth to the person of Jesus and to read the entire story as if it were a literal history. This has led us to assume a position of self-righteous authority and exclusivity and to condemn in a wholesale fashion everyone who thinks differently.

** Another consideration is that very early on the Jesus movement became institutionalized in the form of churches. This was mentioned in an earlier point. These churches organized themselves hierarchically. This form of church government tends to consolidate power at the top of the pyramid and almost inevitably becomes rigid and self serving. It becomes rigid not just in its structure and authority but also in its belief. Generally speaking the development of dogma and creed serve less to enlighten the faithful than to confuse them. It becomes a litmus test to identify the faithful as either one of ours or one of those horrible heretics. Dogma and creed become sacrosanct ---- locked in place and not to be tampered with even when new information or new understandings of old information comes along. Even in the rare event that an enlightened progressive leader takes power, the structure itself ensures that little if any real change takes place.

This then is where our fragmented churches stand. The very worst thing we can do is circle the wagons and in a figurative way say 'We are right and everyone else is wrong and we're not even going to talk about it'. What we do need today is an openness to dialogue and worship together. A willingness to set aside old slights and injustices. A decision to refuse to condemn and exclude. In short, we need to carefully untie the various knots that we have twisted ourselves into. Of course this is very much easier said than done! Prayer, study and compassion would constitute a beginning.

I commend these words to you in the name of Jesus, our brother and our teacher.