Christianity
Overview
Religion stemming from the teachings of Jesus in the 1st century ad.
Its sacred scripture is the Bible, particularly the New Testament.
Its principal tenets are that Jesus is the Son of God (the second person
of the Holy Trinity), that God’s love for the world is the essential
component of his being, and that Jesus died to redeem humankind.
Christianity was originally a movement of Jews who accepted Jesus as the
messiah, but the movement quickly became predominantly Gentile. The
early church was shaped by St. Paul and other Christian missionaries and
theologians; it was persecuted under the Roman Empire but supported by
Constantine I, the first Christian emperor. In medieval and early modern
Europe, Christian thinkers such as St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and
Martin Luther contributed to the growth of Christian theology, and
beginning in the 15th century missionaries spread the faith throughout
much of the world. The major divisions of Christianity are Roman
Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism. Nearly all Christian
churches have an ordained clergy, members of which are typically though
not universally male. Members of the clergy lead group worship services
and are viewed as intermediaries between the laity and the divine in
some churches. Most Christian churches administer two sacraments,
baptism and the Eucharist. In the early 21st century there were more
than two billion adherents of Christianity throughout the world, found
on all continents.
Main
major religion, stemming from the life, teachings, and death of Jesus of
Nazareth (the Christ, or the Anointed One of God) in the 1st century ad.
It has become the largest of the world’s religions. Geographically the
most widely diffused of all faiths, it has a constituency of more than 2
billion believers. Its largest groups are the Roman Catholic Church, the
Eastern Orthodox churches, and the Protestant churches; in addition to
these churches there are several independent churches of Eastern
Christianity as well as numerous sects throughout the world. See also
Eastern Orthodoxy; Roman Catholicism; and Protestantism.
This article first considers the nature and development of the
Christian religion, its ideas, and its institutions. This is followed by
an examination of several intellectual manifestations of Christianity.
Finally, the position of Christianity in the world, the relations among
its divisions and denominations, its missionary outreach to other
peoples, and its relations with other world religions are discussed. For
supporting material on various topics, see biblical literature; doctrine
and dogma; Jesus Christ; sacred; worship; prayer; creed; sacrament;
religious dress; monasticism; and priesthood.
The church and its history » The essence and identity of Christianity
At the very least, Christianity is the faith tradition that focuses on
the figure of Jesus Christ. In this context, faith refers both to the
believers’ act of trust and to the content of their faith. As a
tradition, Christianity is more than a system of religious belief. It
also has generated a culture, a set of ideas and ways of life,
practices, and artifacts that have been handed down from generation to
generation since Jesus first became the object of faith. Christianity is
thus both a living tradition of faith and the culture that the faith
leaves behind. The agent of Christianity is the church, the community of
people who make up the body of believers.
To say that Christianity “focuses” on Jesus Christ is to say that
somehow it brings together its beliefs and practices and other
traditions in reference to a historic figure. Few Christians, however,
would be content to keep this reference merely historical. Although
their faith tradition is historical—i.e., they believe that transactions
with the divine do not occur in the realm of timeless ideas but among
ordinary humans through the ages—the vast majority of Christians focus
their faith in Jesus Christ as someone who is also a present reality.
They may include many other references in their tradition and thus may
speak of “God” and “human nature” or of “church” and “world,” but they
would not be called Christian if they did not bring their attentions
first and last to Jesus Christ.
While there is something simple about this focus on Jesus as the
central figure, there is also something very complicated. That
complexity is revealed by the thousands of separate churches, sects, and
denominations that make up the modern Christian tradition. To project
these separate bodies against the background of their development in the
nations of the world is to suggest the bewildering variety. To picture
people expressing their adherence to that tradition in their prayer life
and church-building, in their quiet worship or their strenuous efforts
to change the world, is to suggest even more of the variety.
Given such complexity, it is natural that throughout Christian
history both those in the tradition and those surrounding it have made
attempts at simplification. Two ways to do this have been to concentrate
on the “essence” of the faith, and thus on the ideas that are integral
to it, or to be concerned with the “identity” of the tradition, and thus
on the boundaries of its historical experience.
Modern scholars have located the focus of this faith tradition in the
context of monotheistic religions. Christianity addresses the historical
figure of Jesus Christ against the background of, and while seeking to
remain faithful to, the experience of one God. It has consistently
rejected polytheism and atheism.
A second element of the faith tradition of Christianity, with rare
exceptions, is a plan of salvation or redemption. That is to say, the
believers in the church picture themselves as in a plight from which
they need rescue. For whatever reason, they have been distanced from God
and need to be saved. Christianity is based on a particular experience
or scheme directed to the act of saving—that is, of bringing or “buying
back,” which is part of what redemption means, these creatures of God to
their source in God. The agent of that redemption is Jesus Christ.
It is possible that through the centuries the vast majority of
believers have not used the term essence to describe the central focus
of their faith. The term is itself of Greek origin and thus represents
only one part of the tradition, one element in the terms that have gone
into making up Christianity. Essence refers to those qualities that give
something its identity and are at the centre of what makes that thing
different from everything else. To Greek philosophers it meant something
intrinsic to and inherent in a thing or category of things, which gave
it its character and thus separated it from everything of different
character. Thus Jesus Christ belongs to the essential character of
Christianity and gives it identity in the same way that Buddha does for
Buddhism.
If most people are not concerned with defining the essence of
Christianity, in practice they must come to terms with what the word
essence implies. Whether they are engaged in being saved or redeemed on
the one hand, or thinking and speaking about that redemption, its agent,
and its meaning on the other, they are concentrating on the essence of
their experience. Those who have concentrated from within the faith
tradition have also helped to give it its identity. It is not possible
to speak of the essence of a historical tradition without referring to
how its ideal qualities have been discussed through the ages. Yet one
can take up the separate subjects of essence and identity in sequence,
being always aware of how they interrelate.
The church and its history » The essence and identity of Christianity »
Historical views of the essence » Early views
Jesus and the earliest members of the Christian faith tradition were
Jews, and thus they stood in the faith tradition inherited by Hebrew
people in Israel and the lands of the Diaspora. They were monotheists,
devoted to the God of Israel. When they claimed that Jesus was divine,
they had to do so in ways that would not challenge monotheism.
Insofar as they began to separate or be separated from Judaism, which
did not accept Jesus as the Messiah, the earliest Christians expressed
certain ideas about the one on whom their faith focused. As with other
religious people, they became involved in a search for truth. God, in
the very nature of things, was necessarily the final Truth. In a
reference preserved in the Gospel According to John, however, Jesus
refers to himself not only as “the way” and “the life” but also as “the
Truth.” Roughly, this meant “all the reality there is” and was a
reference to Jesus’ participation in the reality of the one God.
From the beginning there were Christians who may not have seen Jesus
as the Truth, or as a unique participant in the reality of God. There
have been “humanist” devotees of Jesus, modernist adapters of the truth
about the Christ; but even in the act of adapting him to humanist
concepts in their day they have contributed to the debate of the essence
of Christianity and brought it back to the issues of monotheism and a
way of salvation.
It has been suggested that the best way to preserve the essence of
Christianity is to look at the earliest documents—the four Gospels and
the letters that make up much of the New Testament—which contain the
best account of what the earliest Christians remembered, taught, or
believed about Jesus Christ. It is presumed that “the simple Jesus” and
the “primitive faith” emerge from these documents as the core of the
essence. This view has been challenged, however, by the view that the
writings that make up the New Testament themselves reflect Jewish and
Greek ways of thinking about Jesus and God. They are seen through the
experience of different personalities, such as the apostle Paul or the
nameless composers—traditionally identified as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John—of documents that came to be edited as the Gospels. Indeed, there
are not only diverse ways of worship, of polity or governance of the
Christian community, and of behaviour pictured or prescribed in the New
Testament but also diverse theologies, or interpretations of the heart
of the faith. Most believers see these diversities as complementing each
other and leave to scholars the argument that the primal documents may
compete with and even contradict each other. Yet there is a core of
ideas that all New Testament scholars and believers would agree are
central to ancient Christian beliefs. One British scholar, James G.
Dunn, for example, says they would all agree that “the Risen Jesus is
the Ascended Lord.” That is to say, there would have been no faith
tradition and no scriptures had not the early believers thought that
Jesus was “Risen,” raised from the dead, and, as “Ascended,” somehow
above the ordinary plane of mortal and temporal experience. From that
simple assertion early Christians could begin to complicate the search
for essence.
An immediate question was how to combine the essential focus on Jesus
with the essential monotheism. At various points in the New Testament
and especially in the works of the Apologists, late 1st- and 2nd-century
writers who sought to defend and explain the faith to members of
Greco-Roman society, Jesus is identified as the “preexistent Logos.”
That is, before there was a historical Jesus born of Mary and accessible
to the sight and touch of Jews and others in his own day, there was a
Logos—a principle of reason, an element of ordering, a “word”—that
participated in the Godhead and thus existed, but which only preexisted
as far as the “incarnate” Logos, the word that took on flesh and
humanity (John 1:1–14), was concerned.
In searching for an essence of truth and the way of salvation, some
primitive Jewish Christian groups, such as the Ebionites, and occasional
theologians in later ages employed a metaphor of adoption. These
theologians used as their source certain biblical passages (e.g., Acts
2:22). Much as an earthly parent might adopt a child, so the divine
parent, the one Jesus called abba (Aramaic: “daddy,” or “father”), had
adopted him and taken him into the heart of the nature of what it is to
be God. There were countless variations of themes such as the
preexistent Logos or the concept of adoption, but they provide some
sense of the ways the early Apologists carried out their task of
contributing to the definition of the essence of their Jesus-focused yet
monotheistic faith.
While it is easier to point to diversity than to simplicity or
clarity among those who early expressed faith, it must also be said that
from the beginning the believers insisted that they were—or were
intended to be, or were commanded and were striving to be—united in
their devotion to the essence of their faith tradition. There could not
have been many final truths, and there were not many legitimate ways of
salvation. It was of the essence of their tradition to reject other gods
and other ways, and most defining of essence and identity occurred as
one set of Christians was concerned lest others might deviate from the
essential faith and might, for example, be attracted to other gods or
other ways.
While Jesus lived among his disciples and those who ignored or
rejected him, to make him the focus of faith or denial presented one
type of issue. After the “Risen Jesus” had become the “Ascended Lord”
and was no longer a visible physical presence, those at the head of the
tradition had a different problem. Jesus remained, a present reality to
them, and when they gathered to worship they believed that he was “in
the midst of them.” He was present in their minds and hearts, in the
spoken word that testified to him, and also present in some form when
they had their sacred meal and ingested bread and wine as his “body and
blood.” They created a reality around this experience; if once Judaism
was that reality, now Christianity resulted.
The search for the essence of Christianity led people in the Greek
world to concentrate on ideas. The focus on Jesus narrowed to ideas, to
“beliefs about” and not only “belief in,” and to doctrines. The essence
began to be cognitive, referring to what was known, or substantive. As
debates over the cognitive or substantive aspects of Jesus’
participation in God became both intense and refined, the pursuit of
essences became almost a matter of competition in the minds of the
Apologists and the formulators of doctrines in the 3rd through the 6th
centuries. During this time Christians met in council to develop
statements of faith, confessions, and creeds. The claimed essence was
used in conflict and rivalry with others. Christian Apologists began to
speak, both to the Jews and to the other members of the Greco-Roman
world, in terms that unfavourably compared their religions to
Christianity. The essence also came to be a way to define who had the
best credentials and was most faithful. The claim that one had discerned
the essence of Christianity could be used to rule out the faithless, the
apostate, or the heretic. The believers in the essential truth and way
of salvation saw themselves as insiders and others as outsiders. This
concept became important after the Christian movement had triumphed in
the Roman Empire, which became officially Christian by the late 4th
century. To fail to grasp or to misconceive what was believed to be the
essence of faith might mean exile, harassment, or even death.
In the early stages of the development of their faith, Christians did
something rare if not unique in the history of religion: they adopted
the entire scriptural canon of what they now saw to be another faith,
Judaism, and embraced the Hebrew Scriptures, which they called the Old
Testament. But while doing so, they also incorporated the insistent
monotheism of Judaism as part of the essence of their truth and way of
salvation, just as they incorporated the Hebrew Scriptures’ story as
part of their own identity-giving narrative and experience.
This narrowing of focus on Jesus Christ as truth meant also a
complementary sharpening of focus on the way of salvation. There is no
purpose in saving someone who does not need salvation. Christianity
therefore began to make, through its councils and creeds, theologians
and scholars, some attempts at definitive descriptions of what it is to
be human. Later some of these descriptions were called “original sin,”
the idea that all humans inherited from Adam, the first-created human, a
condition that made it impossible for them to be perfect or to please a
personal God on their own. While Christians never agreed on a specific
teaching on original sin, they did describe as the essence of
Christianity the fact that something limited humans and led them to need
redemption. Yet the concentration always returned to Jesus Christ as
belonging more to the essence of Christianity than did any statements
about the human condition.
The essence of Christianity eventually included statements about the
reality to God. Christians inherited from the Jews a relatively intimate
picture of a God who made their young and small universe, with its
starry heavens, and then carried on discourse with humans, making
covenants with them and rewarding or punishing them. But the Greek part
of their tradition contributed the concept of a God who was greater than
any ideas of God but who had to be addressed through ideas. Indeed, it
was during this time that words such as essence, substance, and
being—terms that did not belong to the Old or New Testament
traditions—came to be wedded to biblical witness in the creeds.
Christians used the vocabulary and repertory of options then available
to them in speaking of the all-encompassing and the ineffable and
grafted these onto the witness to God that was essential to their faith.
Modern Christians, including many who reject the notion of creeds or any
non-biblical language, are still left with the problems and intentions
of the ancients: how to think of Jesus in such a way that they are
devoted to him not in isolation, as an end in himself—for that would be
idolatry of a human—but in the context of the total divine reality.
It is impossible to chronicle the efforts at expressing essence
without pointing to diversity within the unity. Yet the belief in final
unity belongs to any claims of finding an essence. Thus it was both a
typical and a decisive moment when in the 5th century Vincent of
Lérins’s, a Gallo-Roman theologian, provided a formula according to
which Christianity expressed a faith that “has been believed everywhere,
always, and by all” (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum
est). Even if not all Christians could agree on all formulations, it was
widely held that there was some fundamental “thing” that had thus been
believed.
The church and its history » The essence and identity of Christianity
» Historical views of the essence » Medieval and Reformation views
For a thousand years, a period that began with what some historians
called “Dark Ages” in the Christian West and that endured through both
the Eastern and Western extensions of the Roman Empire, the essence of
Christian faith was guarded differently than it had been in the first
three centuries, before Christianity became official; throughout the
Middle Ages itself the understanding of the essence evolved. In the 4th
and 5th centuries, theologians including Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo,
and Jerome laid the foundations for the development of Christian
thought. By the 5th century, the bishop of Rome, the pope, as a result
of conciliar decisions and unique events in Rome, had become the leading
spokesman for the faith in Latin, or Western, Christendom. This position
would assume greater institutional strength in later periods of the
Middle Ages. In the Eastern churches, despite the claims of the
patriarch of Constantinople, no single pontiff ruled over the bishops,
but they saw themselves just as surely and energetically in command of
the doctrines that made up the essence of Christianity.
The Western drama, especially after the year 1000, was more fateful
for Christianity in the modern world. The pope and the bishops of Latin
Christendom progressively determined the essence through doctrines and
canons that enhanced the ancient grasp of faith. As they came to
dominate in Europe, they sought to suppress contrary understandings of
the essence of the faith. In the 14th and 15th centuries, Jews were
confined to ghettos, segregated and self-segregated enclaves where they
did not and could not share the full prerogatives of Christendom. When
sects were defined as heretical—Waldenses, Cathari, and others—because
of their repudiation of Roman Catholic concepts of Christian essence,
they had to go into hiding or were pushed into enclaves beyond the reach
of the custodians of official teaching. The essence of Christianity had
become a set of doctrines and laws articulated and controlled by a
hierarchy that saw those doctrines as a divine deposit of truth.
Theologians might argue about the articulations with great subtlety and
intensity, but in that millennium few would have chosen to engage in
basic disagreement over the official teachings, all of which were seen
to be corollaries of the basic faith in Jesus Christ as participating in
the truth of God and providing the way of salvation.
Through these centuries there was also increasing differentiation
between the official clergy, which administered the sacraments and
oversaw the body of the faithful, and the laity. Most of what was
debated centuries later about the essence of medieval Christianity came
from the records of these authorities. As more is learned about the
faith of the ordinary believers, it becomes more evident in the records
of social history that people offered countless variations on the
essence of the faith. Many people used the church’s officially
legitimated faith in the power of saints’ relics to develop patterns of
dealing with God that, according to the Protestant Reformers, detracted
from the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the only agent of salvation.
During this thousand years in both Western and Eastern Christianity,
when the faith had a cultural monopoly, there was an outburst of
creativity and a fashioning of a Christian culture that greatly enhanced
and complicated any once-simple notions of an essence. Christianity was
as much a cultural tradition as it was a faith tradition, an assertion
that the leadership of the medieval church would not have regarded as
diminishing or insulting. Christianity as a cultural tradition is
perhaps most vividly revealed in the magnificent cathedrals and churches
that were built in the Middle Ages and in the illuminated manuscripts of
the period.
As Christian culture grew ever more complex, however, there arose a
constant stream of individual reformers who tried to get back to what
they thought was its original essence. Among these was St. Francis of
Assisi, who in his personal style of devotion and simple way of life was
often seen as capturing in his person and teachings more of the original
essence of Jesus’ truth and way of salvation than did the ordained
authorities in the church and empires. Unlike the Waldenses and members
of other dissident groups, Francis accepted the authority of the
ordained clergy and contributed to a reform and revival of the broader
church.
In the late Middle Ages a number of dissenters emerged—such as Jan
Hus in Bohemia, John Wycliffe in England, and Girolamo Savonarola in
Florence—who challenged the teachings of the church in more radical ways
than someone like St. Francis did. For all their differences, they were
united in their critique of what they thought complicated the essence of
Christianity. On biblical prophetic grounds they sought simplicity in
the cognitive, moral, and devotional life of Christianity.
When the Protestant Reformation divided Western Christianity—as
Eastern Christians, already separated since the 11th century, looked
on—the 16th-century European world experienced a foretaste of the
infinite Christian variety to come. The reforms that gave rise to the
many Protestant bodies—Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, Reformed,
Anabaptist, Quaker, and others—were themselves debates over the essence
of Christianity. Taken together, they made it increasingly difficult for
any one to claim a monopoly on the custodianship of that essence, try as
they might. Each new sect offered a partial discernment of a different
essence or way of speaking of it, even if the vast majority of
Protestants agreed that the essence could be retrieved best, or, indeed
uniquely, through recovery of the central message of the Holy
Scriptures.
After the ferment of the Reformation, most of the dissenting groups,
as they established themselves in various nations, found it necessary to
engage in their own narrowing of focus, rendering of precise doctrines,
and understanding of divine truth and the way of salvation. Within a
century theologians at many Protestant universities were adopting
systems that paralleled the old scholasticisms against which some
reformers had railed. Those who had once thought that definition of
doctrine failed to capture the essence of Christianity were now defining
their concept of the essence in doctrinal terms, but were doing so for
Lutherans, Reformed, Presbyterians, and even for more radical dissenters
and resistors of creeds, such as the Anabaptists.
The belief of Vincent of Lérins that there is a faith that has been
held by everyone, always, and everywhere, lived on through the
proliferation of Protestant denominations and Roman Catholic movements
and, in sophisticated ways, has helped animate the modern ecumenical
movement. Thus some have spoken of that movement as a reunion of
churches, an idea that carries an implication that they had once been
“one,” and a further hint that one included an essence on which people
agreed. Reunion, then, would mean a stripping away of accretions, a
reducing of the number of arguments, and a refocusing on essentials.
The church and its history » The essence and identity of Christianity
» Historical views of the essence » Modern views
The modern church and world brought new difficulties to the quest for
defining an essence of Christianity. Both as a result of Renaissance
humanism, which gloried in human achievement and encouraged human
autonomy, and of Reformation ideas that believers were responsible in
conscience and reason for their faith, an autonomy in expressing faith
developed. Some spoke of Protestantism as being devoted to the right of
private judgment. Roman Catholics warned that believers who did not
submit to church authority would issue as many concepts of essence as
there were believers to make the claims.
In the 18th century the Western philosophical movement called the
Enlightenment further obscured searches for the essence of Christianity.
The Enlightenment proclaimed optimistic views of human reach and
perfectibility that challenged formerly essential Christian views of
human limits. The deity became a benevolent if impersonal force, not an
agent that arranged a way of salvation to people in need of rescue. The
Enlightenment also urged a view of human autonomy and of the use of
reason in a search for truth. But, in the view of Enlightenment
thinkers, reason did not need to be responsive to supernatural
revelation, as contained in the Old and New Testaments. Indeed, reason
questioned the integrity of those scriptures themselves through methods
of historical and literary criticism. No longer should one rely on the
word of priests who passed on notions of essential Christianity.
While many Westerners moved out of the orbit of faith as a result of
the Enlightenment and the rise of criticism, many others—in Germany,
France, England, Scotland, and, eventually, the Americas—remained
Christians, people of faith if now of faith differently expressed. Some
Christians, the Unitarians, rejected the ideas of both a preexistent
Logos made incarnate in Christ and a Jesus adopted into godhead. Jesus
was seen as the great teacher or exemplar. They thus also tested the
boundaries of essential teaching about a way of salvation. And at the
heart of Deist Christianity was a view of God that remained “mono-” in
that it was devoted to a single principle, but as “deist” instead of
“theist” it departed from the ancient picture of a personal God engaged
in human affairs. These were blows to the integrity of Vincent of
Lérins’s concept and more reasons for the orthodox to use Vincent’s
concept to exclude Unitarians, Deists, and other innovators from the
circle of Christianity.
In the 19th century philosophical and historical criticism inspired
some Christians to renew the search for essences. For example, in the
wake of the German Idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, Hegelian scholars
tried to rescue Christianity by viewing it as an unfolding of “absolute
spirit.” They followed Christian history through a constant dialectic, a
series of forces and counterforces producing new syntheses. A problem
with the Hegelian approach arose as the historical Jesus came to be seen
merely as one stage in the unfolding of absolute spirit; he was not a
decisive agent of the way of salvation “once for all,” as the biblical
Letter to the Hebrews had claimed him to be. Soon biblical scholars such
as David Friedrich Strauss were speaking of the historical Jesus as a
myth of a certain set of people in one moment of the dialectical
unfolding. The Christian faith itself began to dissolve, and many
Hegelians began to reject the God of the Christian faith along with the
historical Jesus.
Another group of 19th-century theologians took the opposite course.
In the spirit of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant,
these neo-Kantians spoke not of the noumenal world, the unseen realm of
essences beyond visible reality, but of the phenomenal realm, the world
of history in which things happened. Theologians in this school engaged
in a century-long “quest for the historical Jesus,” in which they sought
the simple essence of Christianity. Significantly, the greatest exemplar
of this historical tradition, the German theologian Adolf von Harnack,
wrote one of the best-known modern books on the essence of Christianity,
Das Wesen des Christentums (1900; What Is Christianity?).
The call had come to purge Christianity of what Harnack called traces
of “acute Hellenization,” the Greek ideas of essence, substance, and
being that were introduced into the Christian tradition in its early
history. The focus was shifted to the Fatherhood of God and the
announcement of the Kingdom, as Jesus had proclaimed in the Gospels.
While this approach matched the thirst for simplification in the minds
of many of the Christian faithful, it also diminished the concept of
God. The result was a form of Christian humanism that more traditional
Christians regarded as a departure from the essence of Christianity.
This view claimed to be based on the historical Jesus, but scholars
could not agree on the details.
Throughout the modern period some thinkers took another route toward
expressing the essence of Christianity. The notion that the theologians
would never find the essence of Christianity grew among German Pietists,
among the followers of John Wesley into Methodism, and in any number of
Roman Catholic or Protestant devotional movements. Instead, according to
these groups, the Christian essence was discernible in acts of piety,
closeness to the fatherly heart of God as shown in the life of Jesus,
and intimate communion with God on emotional or affective—not cognitive,
rational, or substantial (i.e., doctrinal)—grounds. Although these
pietisms have been immensely satisfying to millions of modern believers,
they have been handicapped in the intellectual arena when pressed for
the definitions people need in a world of choice.
Some modern Christians have shifted the topic from the essence of
Christianity to its absoluteness among the religions. They have been
moved by what the Germans called Religionswissenschaft, the study of
world religions. In that school, the focus fell on the sacred, what the
German theologian Rudolf Otto called “the idea of the Holy.” On those
terms, as the German scholar Ernst Troeltsch showed, it was more
difficult to speak of the “absoluteness” of Christianity and its truth;
one had to speak of it on comparative terms. Yet some early 20th-century
comparativists, such as the Swedish Lutheran archbishop Nathan
Söderblom, applied their understanding of the study of religion to help
animate the movement for Christian reunion.
The modern ecumenical movement is based upon the belief that the
church has different cultural expressions that must be honoured and
differing confessional or doctrinal traditions designed to express the
essential faith. These traditions demand criticism, comparison, and
perhaps revision, with some possible blending toward greater consensus
in the future. At the same time, supporters of the movement have shown
that, among Christians of good will, elaborations of what constitutes
the essence of Christianity are as confusing as they are inevitable and
necessary.
Despite this confusion, the ecumenical movement was an important
development in the 20th century. It took institutional form in the World
Council of Churches in 1948, which was composed of Protestant and
Eastern Orthodox churches. The World Council emerged out of two
organizations that offered distinct approaches to the essential concepts
of the faith. One approach was devoted first to “Life and Work,” a view
that the essentials of Christianity could be best found and expressed
when people followed the way or did the works of Christ, since this
constituted his essence. The other approach, concerned with “Faith and
Order,” stressed the need for comparative study of doctrine, with
critical devotion to the search for what was central. By no means did
these groups cling any longer to the notion that when they found unity
they would have found a simple essence of Christianity. Yet they
believed that they could find compatible elements that would help to
sustain them on the never-ending search for what was central to the
faith tradition.
Some modern scholars—for example, the British theologian John
Hick—viewing the chaos of languages dealing with the essentials of the
faith and the complex of historical arguments, pose the understanding of
the essence in the future. They speak of “eschatological verification,”
referring to the end, the time beyond history, or the time of
fulfillment. In that future, one might say, it will have become possible
to assess the claims of faith. Theologians of these schools argue that
such futuristic notions motivate Christians and the scholars among them
to clarify their language, refine their historical understandings, and
focus their devotion and spirituality.
The church and its history » The essence and identity of Christianity »
The question of Christian identity
These comments on the search for the essence of Christianity, the task
of defining the core of the faith tradition, demonstrate that the
question of Christian identity is at stake at all times. What the
psychologist Erik Erikson said of the individual—that a sense of
identity meant “the accrued confidence that one’s ability to maintain
inner sameness and continuity . . . is matched by the sameness and
continuity of one’s meaning for others”—can be translated to the
concerns of the group. This means that Christians strive, in the midst
of change, to have some “inner sameness and continuity” through the
focus on Jesus Christ and the way of salvation. At the same time,
Christians posit that this identity will be discoverable by and useful
to those who are not part of the tradition: secularists, Buddhists,
Communists, or other people who parallel or rival Christian claims about
truth and salvation.
On these terms, writers of Christian history normally begin
phenomenologically when discussing Christian identity; that is, they do
not bring norms or standards by which they have determined the truth of
this or that branch of Christianity or even of the faith tradition as a
whole but identify everyone as Christian who call themselves Christian.
Thus, from one point of view, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, or the Mormons as they are commonly called, is, in the view of
scholar Jan Shipps, “a new religious tradition.” The followers of the
Book of Mormon incorporated the Old and New Testaments into their
canon—just as the New Testament Christians incorporated the entire
scripture of a previous tradition—and then supplied reinterpretations.
As a new religious tradition, Mormonism would not be Christian. But
because Mormons use Christian terminology and call themselves Christian,
they might also belong to a discussion of Christianity. They may be
perceived as departing from the essence of Christianity because other
Christians regard their progressive doctrine of God as heretical. Yet
Mormons in turn point to perfectionist views of humanity and progressive
views of God among more conventionally accepted Christian groups. In
areas where the Mormons want to be seen as “latter-day” restorers,
basing their essential faith on scriptures not previously accessible to
Christians, they would be ruled out of conventional Christian discussion
and treatment. Yet they share much of Christian culture, focus their
faith in Jesus, proclaim a way of salvation, and want to be included for
other purposes, and thus fall into the context of a Christian identity
at such times.
This phenomenological approach, one that accents historical and
contemporary description and resists prescription, does not allow the
historian to state the essence of Christianity as a simple guide for all
discussion. It is necessary for the scholar to put his own truth claims
in a kind of suspension and to record faithfully, sorting out large
schools of coherence and pointing to major strains. It is not difficult
to state that something was a majority view if the supporting data are
present. For example, it is not difficult to say what Roman Catholics at
particular times have regarded as the essence of Christianity or what
the various Orthodox and Protestant confessions regard as the true way
of salvation. Someone using the phenomenological method, however, would
stand back and refuse to be the arbiter when these confessional
traditions disagree over truth.
Vincent of Lérins, then, speaks more for the hunger of the Christian
heart or the dream of Christian union than for the researcher, who finds
it more difficult to see a moment when everyone agreed on everything
everywhere. Yet it remains safe to say that Christian identity begins
and ends with a reference to Jesus in relation to God’s truth and a way
of salvation. The rest is a corollary of this central claim, an infinite
set of variations and elaborations that are of great importance to the
separated Christians who hold to them in various times and places.
Martin E. Marty
The church and its history » The history of Christianity » The primitive
church » The relation of the early church to late Judaism
Christianity began as a movement within Judaism at a period when the
Jews had long been dominated culturally and politically by foreign
powers and had found in their religion (rather than in their politics or
cultural achievements) the linchpin of their community. From Amos (8th
century bc) onward the religion of Israel was marked by tension between
the concept of monotheism, with its universal ideal of salvation (for
all nations), and the notion of God’s special choice of Israel. In the
Hellenistic age (323 bc–3rd century ad), the dispersion of the Jews
throughout the kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean and the Roman
Empire reinforced this universalistic tendency. But the attempts of
foreign rulers, especially the Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (in
168–165 bc), to impose Greek culture in Palestine provoked zealous
resistance on the part of many Jews, leading to the revolt of Judas
Maccabeus against Antiochus. In Palestinian Judaism the predominant note
was separation and exclusiveness. Jewish missionaries to other areas
were strictly expected to impose the distinctive Jewish customs of
circumcision, kosher food, and sabbaths and other festivals. Other Jews,
however, were not so exclusive, welcoming Greek culture and accepting
converts without requiring circumcision.
The relationship of the earliest Christian churches to Judaism turned
principally on two questions: (1) the messianic role of Jesus of
Nazareth and (2) the permanent validity of the Mosaic Law for all.
The Hebrew Scriptures viewed history as the stage of a providential
drama eventually ending in a triumph of God over all present sources of
frustration (e.g., foreign domination or the sins of Israel). God’s rule
would be established by an anointed prince (the Messiah) of the line of
David, king of Israel in the 10th century bc. The proper course of
action leading to the consummation of the drama, however, was the
subject of some disagreement. Among the diverse groups were the
aristocratic and conservative Sadducees, who accepted only the five
books of Moses (the Pentateuch) and whose lives and political power were
intimately associated with Temple worship, and the Pharisees, who
accepted the force of oral tradition and were widely respected for their
learning and piety. The Pharisees not only accepted biblical books
outside the Pentateuch but also embraced doctrines—such as those on
resurrection and the existence of angels—of recent acceptance in
Judaism, many of which were derived from apocalyptic expectations that
the consummation of history would be heralded by God’s intervention in
the affairs of men in dramatic, cataclysmic terms. The Sanhedrin
(central council) at Jerusalem was made up of both Pharisees and
Sadducees. The Zealots were aggressive revolutionaries known for their
violent opposition to Rome and its polytheisms. Other groups were the
Herodians, supporters of the client kingdom of the Herods (a dynasty
that supported Rome) and abhorrent to the Zealots, and the Essenes, a
quasi-monastic dissident group, probably including the sect that
preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls. This latter sect did not participate in
the Temple worship at Jerusalem and observed another religious calendar;
from their desert retreat they awaited divine intervention and searched
prophetic writings for signs indicating the consummation.
What relation the followers of Jesus had to some of these groups is
not clear. In the canonical Gospels (those accepted as authentic by the
church) the main targets of criticism are the scribes and Pharisees,
whose attachment to the tradition of Judaism is presented as legalistic
and pettifogging. The Sadducees and Herodians likewise receive an
unfriendly portrait. The Essenes are never mentioned. Simon, one of
Jesus’ 12 disciples, was or had once been a Zealot. Jesus probably stood
close to the Pharisees.
Under the social and political conditions of the time, there could be
no long future either for the Sadducees or for the Zealots: their
attempts to make apocalyptic dreams effective led to the desolation of
Judaea and the destruction of the Temple after the two major Jewish
revolts against the Romans in 66–70 and 132–135. The choice for many
Jews, who were barred from Jerusalem after 135, thus lay between the
Pharisees and the emerging Christian movement. Pharisaism as enshrined
in the Mishna (oral law) and the Talmud (commentary on and addition to
the oral law) became normative Judaism. By looking to the Gentile
(non-Jewish) world and carefully dissociating itself from the Zealot
revolutionaries and the Pharisees, Christianity made possible its ideal
of a world religion, at the price of sacrificing Jewish particularity
and exclusiveness. The fact that Christianity has never succeeded in
gaining the allegiance of more than a small minority of Jews is more a
mystery to theologians than to historians.
The church and its history » The history of Christianity » The
primitive church » The relation of the early church to the career and
intentions of Jesus
The prime sources for knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth are the four
canonical Gospels in the New Testament. There are also a number of
noncanonical sources, notably the apocryphal gospels, which contain
stories about Jesus and sayings attributed to him. The Gospel of Thomas,
preserved in a Coptic Gnostic library found about 1945 in Egypt,
contains several such sayings, besides some independent versions of
canonical sayings. At certain points the Gospel tradition finds
independent confirmation in the letters of the apostle Paul. Although
the allusions in non-Christian sources (the Jewish historian Josephus,
the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, and Talmudic texts) are
almost negligible, they refute the unsubstantiated notion that Jesus
might never have existed.
The first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are closely related
in form, structure, and content. Because they can be studied in parallel
columns called a synopsis, they are known as the Synoptic Gospels. Mark
was probably used by Matthew and Luke, who may also have used the Q
Gospel (so-called from the German Quelle, “source”; Q is the
hypothetical Gospel that is the origin of common material in later
Gospels). John, differing in both pattern and content, appears richer in
theological interpretation but may also preserve good historical
information. The Gospels are not detached reports but were written to
serve the religious needs of the early Christian communities. Legendary
and apologetic (defensive) motifs, and the various preoccupations of the
communities for which they were first produced, can readily be discerned
as influences upon their narratives. Although many details of the
Gospels remain the subject of disagreement and uncertainty, the
scholarly consensus accepts the substance of the Gospel tradition as a
truthful account.
The chronology of the life of Jesus is one of the matters of
uncertainty. Matthew places the birth of Jesus at least two years before
Herod the Great’s death late in 5 bc or early in 4 bc. Luke connects
Jesus’ birth with a Roman census that, according to Josephus, occurred
in ad 6–7 and caused a revolt against the governor Quirinius. Luke could
be right about the census and wrong about the governor. The crucifixion
under Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judaea (ad 26–36), was probably about
the year 29–30, but again certainty is impossible.
Jesus’ encounter with John the Baptist, the ascetic in the Judaean
Desert who preached repentance and baptism in view of God’s coming
Kingdom, marked a decisive moment for his career. He recognized in John
the forerunner of the kingdom that his own ministry proclaimed. The
first preaching of Jesus, in his home region of Galilee, took the form
of vivid parables and was accompanied by miraculous healings. The
Synoptic writers describe a single climactic visit of Jesus to Jerusalem
at the end of his career; but John may be right (implicitly supported by
Luke 13:7) in representing his visits as more frequent and the period of
ministry as lasting more than a single year. Jesus’ attitude to the
observance of the law generated conflict with the Pharisees; he also
aroused the fear and hostility of the ruling Jewish authorities. A
triumphal entry to Jerusalem at Passover time (the period celebrating
the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt in the 13th century bc) was the
prelude to a final crisis. After a last supper with his disciples he was
betrayed by one of them, Judas Iscariot. Arrest and trial followed,
first before the Sanhedrin and then before Pilate, who condemned him to
crucifixion. According to the Evangelists, Pilate condemned Jesus
reluctantly, finding no fault in him. Their version of the condemnation
was an attempt to keep Jesus from appearing guilty in Roman eyes, and it
was a means for the early Christian community to find its way in the
Roman world. In any event, Jesus was executed in a manner reserved for
political or religious agitators. It was a universal Christian belief
that three days after his death he was raised from the dead by divine
power.
Jesus preached the imminent presence of God’s Kingdom, in some texts
as future consummation, in others as already present. The words and acts
of Jesus were believed to be the inauguration of a process that was to
culminate in a final triumph of God. His disciples recognized him as the
Messiah, the Anointed One, though there is no record of him using the
word (except indirectly) in reference to himself. The titles Prophet and
Rabbi also were applied to him. His own enigmatic self-designation was
“Son of man,” sometimes in allusion to his suffering, sometimes to his
future role as judge. This title is derived from the version of the Book
of Daniel (7:13), where “one like a son of man,” contrasted with beast
figures, represents the humiliated people of God, ascending to be
vindicated by the divine Judge. In the developed Gospel tradition the
theme of the transcendent judge seems to be most prominent.
Apocalyptic hope could easily merge into messianic zealotry.
Moreover, Jesus’ teaching was critical of the established order and
encouraged the poor and oppressed, even though it contained an implicit
rejection of revolution. Violence was viewed as incompatible with the
ethic of the Kingdom of God. Whatever contacts there may have been with
the Zealot movement (as the narrative of feeding 5,000 people in the
desert may hint), the Gospels assume the widest distance between Jesus’
understanding of his role and the Zealot revolution.
With this distance from revolutionary idealism goes a sombre estimate
of human perfectibility. The gospel of repentance presupposes deep
defilement in individuals and in society. The sufferings and pains of
humanity under the power of evil spirits calls out for compassion and an
urgent mission. All the acts of a disciple must express love and
forgiveness, even to enemies, and also detachment from property and
worldly wealth. To Jesus, the outcasts of society (prostitutes, the
hated and oppressive tax agents, and others) were objects of special
care, and censoriousness was no virtue. Though the state is regarded as
a distant entity in certain respects, it yet has the right to require
taxes and civic obligations: Caesar has rights that must be respected
and are not incompatible with the fulfillment of God’s demands.
Some of the futurist sayings, if taken by themselves, raise the
question whether Jesus intended to found a church. A negative answer
emerges only if the authentic Jesus is assumed to have expected an
immediate catastrophic intervention by God. There is no doubt that he
gathered and intended to gather around him a community of followers.
This community continued after his time, regarding itself as the
specially called congregation of God’s people, possessing as covenant
signs the rites of baptism and Eucharist (Lord’s Supper) with which
Jesus was particularly associated—baptism because of his example,
Eucharist because the Last Supper on the night before the crucifixion
was marked as an anticipation of the messianic feast of the coming age.
A closely related question is whether Jesus intended his gospel to be
addressed to Jews only or if the Gentiles were also to be included. In
the Gospels Gentiles appear as isolated exceptions, and the choice of 12
Apostles has an evident symbolic relation to the 12 tribes of Israel.
The fact that the extension of Christian preaching to the Gentiles
caused intense debate in the 40s of the 1st century is decisive proof
that Jesus had given no unambiguous directive on the matter. Gospel
sayings that make the Jews’ refusal to recognize Jesus’ authority as the
ground for extending the Kingdom of God to the Gentiles must, therefore,
have been cast by the early community.
The church and its history » The history of Christianity » The
primitive church » The Gentile mission and St. Paul
Saul, or Paul (as he was later called), was a Pharisee who persecuted
the primitive church. Born at Tarsus (Asia Minor), he had come to
Jerusalem as a student of the famous Rabbi Gamaliel and had harried a
Christian group called by Luke the “Hellenists,” who were led by Stephen
(the first Christian martyr) and who regarded Jesus as a spiritual
reformer sent to purge the corrupt worship of Jerusalem. While on a
mission to Damascus to persecute the followers of Jesus, Paul was
suddenly converted to faith in Christ and, simultaneously, to a
conviction that the Gospel must pass to the non-Jewish world under
conditions that dispensed with exclusively and distinctively Jewish
ceremonies. Paul was disapproved by Christian Jews and remained
throughout his career a controversial figure. He gained recognition for
the converts of the Gentile mission by the Christian community in
Jerusalem; but his work was considered an affront to Jewish
traditionalism. He saw clearly that the universal mission of the church
to all humanity, implicit in the coming of the Messiah, or Christ, meant
a radical break with rabbinical traditions.
Owing to the preservation of some weighty letters, Paul is the only
vivid figure of the apostolic age (1st century ad). Like his elder
contemporary Philo of Alexandria, also a Hellenized Jew of the
dispersion, he interpreted the Old Testament allegorically and affirmed
the primacy of spirit over letter in a manner that was in line with
Jesus’ freedom with regard to the sabbath. The crucifixion of Jesus he
viewed as the supreme redemptive act and also as the means of expiation
for the sin of mankind. Salvation is, in Paul’s thought, therefore, not
found by a conscientious moralism but rather is a gift of grace, a
doctrine in which Paul was anticipated by Philo. But Paul linked this
doctrine with his theme that the Gospel represents liberation from the
Mosaic Law. The latter thesis created difficulties at Jerusalem, where
the Christian community was led by James, the brother of Jesus, and the
circle of the intimate disciples of Jesus. James, martyred at Jerusalem
in 62, was the primary authority for the Christian Jews, especially
those made anxious by Paul; the canonical letter ascribed to James
opposes the antinomian (anti-law) interpretations of the doctrine of
justification by faith. A middle position seems to have been occupied by
Peter. All the Gospels record a special commission of Jesus to Peter as
the leader among the 12 Apostles. But Peter’s biography can only be
dimly constructed; he died in Rome (according to early tradition) in
Nero’s persecution (64) about the same time as Paul.
The supremacy of the Gentile mission within the church was ensured by
the effects on Jewish Christianity of the fall of Jerusalem (70) and
Hadrian’s exclusion of all Jews from the city (135). Jewish Christianity
declined and became the faith of a very small group without links to
either synagogue or Gentile church. Some bore the title Ebionites, “the
poor” (compare Matthew 5:3), and did not accept the tradition that Jesus
was born of a virgin.
In Paul’s theology, the human achievement of Jesus was important
because his obedient fidelity to his vocation gave moral and redemptive
value to his self-sacrifice. A different emphasis appears in The Gospel
According to John, written (according to 2nd-century tradition) at
Ephesus. John’s Gospel partly reflects local disputes, not only between
the church and the Hellenized synagogue but also between various
Christian groups, including Gnostic communities in Asia Minor. John’s
special individuality lies in his view of the relation between the
historical events of the tradition and the Christian community’s present
experience of redemption. The history is treated symbolically to provide
a vehicle for faith. Because it is less attached to the contingent
events of a particular man’s life, John’s conception of the preexistent
Logos becoming incarnate (made flesh) in Jesus made intelligible to the
Hellenistic world the universal significance of Jesus. In antiquity,
divine presence had to be understood as either inspiration or
incarnation. If the Synoptic Gospels suggest inspiration, The Gospel
According to John chooses incarnation. The tension between these two
types of Christology (doctrines of Christ) first became acute in the
debate between the schools of Antioch and Alexandria in the late 4th
century.
The church and its history » The history of Christianity » The
primitive church » The contemporary social, religious, and intellectual
world
Many Palestinian Jews appreciated the benefits of Roman rule in
guaranteeing peace and order. The Roman government tolerated regional
and local religious groups and found it convenient to control Palestine
through client kings like the Herods. The demand that divine honours be
paid not only to the traditional Roman or similar gods but also to the
emperors was not extended to Judaea except under the emperor Caligula
(reigned 37–41), whose early death prevented desecration of Jerusalem’s
holy sites and social unrest. It was enough that the Jews dedicated
temple sacrifices and synagogues in the emperor’s honour. The privileges
of Roman citizenship were possessed by some Jewish families, including
that of the apostle Paul.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul affirmed the providential role of
government in restraining evil. Christians did not need to be
disaffected from the empire, though the deification of the emperor was
offensive to them. Moreover, although as an agency of social welfare the
church offered much to the downtrodden elements in society, the
Christians did not at any stage represent a social and political threat.
After the example of their master, the Christians encouraged humility
and patience before wicked men. Even the institution of slavery was not
the subject of fundamental Christian criticism before the 4th century.
The church, however, was not lost in pious mysticism. It provided for
far more than the cultic (liturgical) needs of its members. Inheriting a
Jewish moral ideal, its activities included food for the poor, orphans,
and foundlings; care for prisoners; and a community funeral service.
Christianity also inherited from Judaism a strong sense of being
holy, separate from idolatry and pagan eroticism. As polytheism
permeated ancient society, a moral rigorism severely limited Christian
participation in some trades and professions. At baptism a Christian was
expected to renounce his occupation if that implicated him in public or
private compromise with polytheism, superstition, dishonesty, or vice.
There was disagreement about military service, however. The majority
held that a soldier, if converted and baptized, was not required to
leave the army, but there was hesitation about whether an already
baptized Christian might properly enlist. Strict Christians also thought
poorly of the teaching profession because it involved instructing the
young in literature replete with pagan ideals and what was viewed as
indecency. Acting and dancing were similarly suspect occupations, and
any involvement in magic was completely forbidden.
The Christian ethic therefore demanded some detachment from society,
which in some cases made for economic difficulties. The structure of
ancient society was dominated not by class but by the relationship of
patron and client. A slave or freedman depended for his livelihood and
prospects upon his patron, and a man’s power in society was reflected in
the extent of his dependents and supporters. In antiquity a strong
patron was indispensable if one was negotiating with police or tax
authorities or law courts or if one had ambitions in the imperial
service. The authority of the father of the family was considerable.
Often, Christianity penetrated the social strata first through women and
children, especially in the upper classes. But once the householder was
a Christian, his dependents tended to follow. The Christian community
itself was close-knit. Third-century evidence portrays Christians
banking their money with fellow believers; and widely separated groups
helped one another with trade and mutual assistance.
Women in ancient society—Greek, Roman, or Jewish—had a domestic, not
a public, role; feminine subordination was self-evident. To Paul,
however, Christian faith transcends barriers to make all free and equal
(Galatians 3:28). Of all ancient writers Paul was the most powerful
spokesman for equality. Nevertheless, just as he refused to harbour a
runaway slave, so he opposed any practice that would identify the church
with social radicalism (a principal pagan charge against it). Paul did
not avoid self-contradiction (1 Corinthians 11:5, 14:34–35). His
opposition to a public liturgical role for women decided subsequent
Catholic tradition in the East and West. Yet in the Greek churches
(though not often in the Latin) women were ordained as deacons—in the
4th century by prayer and imposition of hands with the same rite as male
deacons—and had a special responsibility at women’s baptism. Widows and
orphans were the neediest in antiquity, and the church provided them
substantial relief. It also encouraged vows of virginity, and by ad 400
women from wealthy or politically powerful families acquired prominence
as superiors of religious communities. It seemed natural to elect as
abbess a woman whose family connections might bring benefactions.
The religious environment of the Gentile mission was a tolerant,
syncretistic blend of many cults and myths. Paganism was concerned with
success; the gods were believed to give victory in war, good harvests,
success in love and marriage, and sons and daughters. Defeat, famine,
civil disorder, and infertility were recognized as signs of cultic
pollution and disfavour. People looked to religion for help in mastering
the forces of nature rather than to achieve moral improvement.
Individual gods cared either for specific human needs or for specific
places and groups. The transcendent God of biblical religion was,
therefore, very different from the numerous gods of limited power and
local significance. In Asia Minor Paul and his coworker Barnabas were
taken to be gods in mortal form because of their miracles. To offer
sacrifice on an altar seemed a natural expression of gratitude to any
dead, or even living, benefactor. Popular enthusiasm could bestow divine
honours on such heroes as dead pugilists and athletes. In the Roman
Empire it seemed natural to offer sacrifice and burn incense to the
divine emperor as a symbol of loyalty, much like standing for a national
anthem today.
Traditional Roman religion was a public cult, not private mysticism,
and was upheld because it was the received way of keeping heaven
friendly. To refuse participation was thought to be an expression of
disloyalty. The Jews were granted exemption for their refusal because
their monotheism was an ancestral national tradition. The Christians,
however, did everything in their power to dissuade people from following
the customs of their fathers, whether Gentiles or Jews, and thereby
seemed to threaten the cohesion of society and the principle that each
group was entitled to follow its national customs in religion.
If ancient religion was tolerant, the philosophical schools were
seldom so. Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics
tended to be very critical of one another. By the 1st century bc, an
eclecticism emerged; and by the 2nd century ad, there developed a common
stock of philosophy shared by most educated people and by some
professional philosophers, which derived metaphysics involving theories
on the nature of Being from Plato, ethics from the Stoics, and logic
from Aristotle. This eclectic Platonism provided an important background
and springboard for early Christian apologetics. Its main outlines
appear already in Philo of Alexandria, whose thought influenced not only
perhaps the writer of the anonymous letter to the Hebrews, traditionally
held to be Paul, in the New Testament but also the great Christian
thinkers Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Ambrose of Milan. Because of
this widespread philosophical tendency in ancient society, the Christian
could generally assume some belief in Providence and assent to high
moral imperatives among his pagan contemporaries. Platonism in
particular provided a metaphysical framework within which the Christians
could interpret the entire pattern of creation, the Fall of humanity,
the incarnation, redemption, the church, sacraments, and last things.
Aspects of the Christian religion » Christian philosophy
It has been debated whether there is anything that is properly called
Christian philosophy. Christianity is not a system of ideas but a
religion, a way of salvation. But as a religion becomes a
distinguishable strand of human history, it absorbs philosophical
assumptions from its environment and generates new philosophical
constructions and arguments both in the formation of doctrines and in
their defense against philosophical objections. Moreover, philosophical
criticism from both within and without the Christian community has
influenced the development of its beliefs.
Aspects of the Christian religion » Christian philosophy » History of
the interactions of philosophy and theology » Influence of Greek
philosophy
As the Christian movement expanded beyond its original Jewish nucleus
into the Greco-Roman world, it had to understand, explain, and defend
itself in terms that were intelligible in an intellectual milieu largely
structured by Greek philosophical thought. By the 2nd century ad several
competing streams of Greek and Roman philosophy—Middle Platonism,
Neoplatonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism—had merged into a common worldview
that was basically Neoplatonic, though enriched by the ethical outlook
of the Stoics. This constituted the broad intellectual background for
most educated people throughout the Roman Empire, functioning in a way
comparable to the pervasive contemporary Western secular view of the
universe as an autonomous system within which everything can in
principle be understood scientifically.
Neoplatonic themes that provided intellectual material for Christian
and non-Christian thinkers alike in the early centuries of the Common
Era included a hierarchical conception of the universe, with the
spiritual on a higher level than the physical; the eternal reality of
such values as goodness, truth, and beauty and of the various universals
that give specific form to matter; and the tendency of everything to
return to its origin in the divine reality. The Christian Apologists,
Christian writers of the 2nd century who provided a defense of the faith
against prevailing Greco-Roman culture, were at home in this
thought-world, and many of them used its ideas and assumptions both in
propagating the Gospel and in defending it as a coherent and
intellectually tenable system of belief. They accepted the prevailing
Neoplatonic worldview and presented Christianity as its fulfillment,
correcting and completing rather than replacing it. Philosophy, they
thought, was to the Greeks what the Law was to the Jews—a preparation
for the Gospel; and several Apologists agreed with the Jewish writer
Philo that Greek philosophy must have received much of its wisdom from
Moses. Tertullian (c. 155/160–after 220)—who once asked, “What has
Athens to do with Jerusalem?”—and Tatian (c. 120–173), on the other
hand, rejected pagan learning and philosophy as inimical to the Gospel;
and the question has been intermittently discussed by theologians ever
since whether the Gospel completes and fulfills the findings of human
reason or whether reason is itself so distorted by sin as to be
incapable of leading toward the truth.
Greek philosophy, then, provided the organizing principles by which
the central Christian doctrines were formulated. It is possible to
distinguish between, on the one hand, first-order religious expressions,
directly reflecting primary religious experience, and, on the other, the
interpretations of these in philosophically formulated doctrines whose
articulation both contributes to and is reciprocally conditioned by a
comprehensive belief-system. Thus the primitive Christian confession of
faith, “Jesus is Lord,” expressed the Disciples’ perception of Jesus as
the one through whom God was transformingly present to them and to whom
their lives were accordingly oriented in complete trust and commitment.
The interpretive process whereby the original experience developed a
comprehensive doctrinal superstructure began with the application to
Jesus of the two distinctively Jewish concepts of the expected messiah
and the Son of man who was to come on the last day and also of the son
of God metaphor, which was commonly applied in the ancient world to
individuals, whether kings or holy men, who were believed to be close to
God. It continued on a more philosophical level with the use, in The
Gospel According to John, of the idea of the Logos, drawn both from the
Hebraic notions of the Wisdom and the Word of God and from the Greek
notion of the Logos as the universal principle of rationality and
self-expression. As Jesus, son of God, became Christ, God the Son, the
second Person of the Trinity, he was identified with the Logos.
Aspects of the Christian religion » Christian philosophy » History of
the interactions of philosophy and theology » Emergence of official
doctrine
During the first several generations of Christian history there was
great variety and experimentation in Christian thinking. But as the
faith was legally recognized under Constantine in 313 and then became
the sole official religion of the Roman Empire under Theodosius, its
doctrines had to be formalized throughout the church. This pressure for
uniformity provoked intense debates. The orthodox versions of the
doctrine of Christ and the Trinity were finally established at the great
ecumenical councils (principally Nicaea in 325; Constantinople in 381;
and Chalcedon in 451). The key ideas of these Christological and
Trinitarian debates and their conclusions were based upon the Greek
concepts of ousia (nature or essence) and hypostasis (entity, used as
virtually equivalent to prosōpon, person). (In Latin these terms became
substantia and persona.) Christ was said to have two natures, one of
which was of the same nature (homoousios) as the Father, whereas the
other was of the same nature as humanity; and the Trinity was said to
consist of one ousia in three hypostases. The Platonic origin of this
conceptuality is clear in the explanation of the Cappadocian Fathers
that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share the same divine ousia in the
way Peter, James, and John shared the same humanity.
The influence of Neoplatonism on Christian thought also appears in
the response of the greatest of the early Christian thinkers, St.
Augustine (354–430), to the perennially challenging question of how it
is that evil exists in a world created by an all-good and all-powerful
God. Augustine’s answer (which, as refined by later thinkers, remained
the standard Christian answer until modern times) includes both
theological aspects (the ideas of the fall of angels and then of humans,
of the redemption of some by the cross of Christ, and of the ultimate
disposal of souls in eternities of bliss and torment) and philosophical
aspects. The basic philosophical theme, drawn directly from
Neoplatonism, is one that the American philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, in
The Great Chain of Being (1936), called the principle of plenitude. This
is the idea that the best possible universe does not consist only of the
highest kind of creature, the archangels, but contains a maximum
richness of variety of modes of being, thus realizing every possible
kind of existence from the highest to the lowest. The result is a
hierarchy of degrees both of being and of goodness, for the identity of
being and goodness was another fundamental idea Augustine inherited from
Neoplatonism and in particular from Plotinus (205–270). God, as absolute
being and goodness, stands at the summit, with the great chain of being
descending through the many forms of spiritual, animal, and plant life
down to lifeless matter. Each embodies being and is therefore good on
its own level; and together they constitute a universe whose rich
variety is beautiful in the sight of God. Evil occurs only when
creatures at any level forfeit the distinctive goodness with which the
Creator had endowed them. Evil is thus negative or privative, a lack of
proper good rather than anything having substance in its own right.
This, too, was a theme that had been taken over from Neoplatonism by a
number of earlier Christian writers. And if evil is not an entity, or
substance, it follows that it was not a part of God’s original creation.
It consists instead in the going wrong of something that is in itself
good, though also mutable. Augustine locates the origin of this
going-wrong in the sinful misuse of freedom by some of the angels and
then by the first humans. His theodicy is thus a blend of Neoplatonic
and biblical themes and shows clearly the immense influence of
Neoplatonism upon Christian thought during its early formative period.
Augustine and Christian thinkers in general departed from
Neoplatonism at one crucial point. Neoplatonism maintained that the
world was continuous in being with the ultimate divine reality, the One.
The One, in its limitless plenitude of being, overflows into the
surrounding void, and the descending and attenuating degrees of being
constitute the many-leveled universe. In contrast to this emanationist
conception Augustine held that the universe is a created realm, brought
into existence by God out of nothing (ex nihilo). It has no independent
power of being, or aseity, but is contingent, absolutely dependent upon
the creative divine power. Further, Augustine emphasized that God did
not create the universe out of preexistent matter or chaos, but that
“out of nothing” simply means “not out of anything” (De natura boni).
This understanding of creation, entailing the universe’s total emptiness
of independent self-existence and yet its ultimate goodness as the free
expression of God’s creative love, is perhaps the most distinctively
Christian contribution to metaphysical thought. It goes beyond the
earlier Hebraic understanding in making explicit the ex nihilo character
of creation in contrast to the emanationism of the Neoplatonic
thought-world. This basic Christian idea entails the value of creaturely
life and of the material world itself, its dependence upon God, and the
meaningfulness of the whole temporal process as fulfilling an ultimate
divine purpose.
Modern Christian treatments of the idea of creation ex nihilo have
detached it from a literal use of the Genesis creation myth. The idea of
the total dependence of the universe upon God does not preclude the
development of the universe in its present phase from the “big bang”
onward, including the evolution of the forms of life on Earth. Although
creation ex nihilo (a term apparently first introduced into Christian
discourse by Irenaeus in the 2nd century) remains the general Christian
conception of the relation between God and the physical universe, some
20th-century Christian thinkers substituted the view (derived from
Alfred North Whitehead and developed by Charles Hartshorne) that God,
instead of being its transcendent Creator, is an aspect of the universe
itself, being either the inherent creativity in virtue of which it is a
living process or a deity of finite power who seeks to lure the world
into ever more valuable forms.
Aspects of the Christian religion » Christian philosophy » History of
the interactions of philosophy and theology » Aristotle and Aquinas
Although Neoplatonism was the major philosophical influence on Christian
thought in its early period and has never ceased to be an important
element within it, Aristotelianism also shaped Christian teachings. At
first known for his works on logic, Aristotle gained fuller appreciation
in the 12th and 13th centuries when his works on physics, metaphysics,
and ethics became available in Latin, translated either from the Greek
or from Arabic sources. Aristotle’s thought had a profound impact on
generations of medieval scholars and was crucial for the greatest of the
medieval Christian thinkers, St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74). One of
Aristotle’s ideas that particularly influenced Thomas was that knowledge
is not innate but is gained from the reports of the senses and from
logical inference from self-evident truths. (Thomas, however, in
distinction from Aristotle, added divinely revealed propositions to
self-evident truths in forming his basis for inference.) Thomas also
adopted Aristotle’s conception of metaphysics as the science of being.
His doctrine of analogy, according to which statements about God are
true analogically rather than univocally, was likewise inspired by
Aristotle, as were his distinctions between act and potency, essence and
existence, substance and accidents, and the active and passive intellect
and his view of the soul as the “form” of the body.
Thomas Aquinas’s system, however, was by no means simply Aristotle
Christianized. He did not hesitate to differ from “the Philosopher,” as
he called him, when the Christian tradition required this; for whereas
Aristotle had been concerned to understand how the world functions,
Thomas was also concerned, more fundamentally, to explain why it exists.
With the gradual breakdown of the medieval worldview, the nature of
the philosophical enterprise began to change. The French thinker René
Descartes (1596–1650) is generally regarded as the father of modern
philosophy, and in the new movements of thought that began with him
philosophy became less a matter of building and defending comprehensive
metaphysical systems, or imagined pictures of the universe, and more a
critical probing of presuppositions, categories of thought, and modes of
reasoning, as well as an inquiry into what it is to know, how knowledge
and belief are arrived at in different areas of life, how well various
kinds of beliefs are grounded, and how thought is related to language.
There has long ceased to be a generally accepted philosophical
framework, comparable with Neoplatonism, in terms of which Christianity
can appropriately be expressed and defended. There is instead a
plurality of philosophical perspectives and methods—analytic,
phenomenological, idealist, pragmatist, and existentialist. Thus modern
Christianity, having inherited a body of doctrines developed in the
framework of ancient worldviews that are now virtually defunct, lacks
any philosophy of comparable status in terms of which to rethink its
beliefs.
In this situation some theologians turned to existentialism, which is
not so much a philosophical system as a hard-to-define point of view and
style of thinking. Indeed, the earlier existentialists, such as the
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), vehemently rejected the
idea of a metaphysical system—in particular, for 19th-century
existentialists, the Hegelian system—though some later ones, such as the
German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), developed their own
systems. Existentialists are identified by the appearance in their
writings of one or more of a number of loosely related themes. These
include the significance of the concrete individual in contrast to
abstractions and general principles; a stress upon human freedom and
choice and the centrality of decision, and hence a view of religion as
ultimate commitment; a preference for paradox rather than rational
explanation; and the highlighting of certain special modes of experience
that cut across ordinary consciousness, particularly a generalized
anxiety or dread and the haunting awareness of mortality.
Existentialists have been both atheists (e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche and
Jean-Paul Sartre) and Christians (e.g., Kierkegaard, the Protestant
Rudolf Bultmann, and the Roman Catholic Gabriel Marcel). It would be
difficult to identify any doctrines that are common to all these
thinkers. Existentialist themes have also been incorporated into
systematic Christian theologies (e.g., by John Macquarrie).
Aspects of the Christian religion » Christian philosophy » History of
the interactions of philosophy and theology » Other influences
Others have sought to construct theologies in the mold of 19th-century
German idealism (e.g., Paul Tillich); some, as process theologians, in
that of the early 20th-century British mathematician and metaphysician
Alfred North Whitehead (e.g., Charles Hartshorne on the doctrine of God,
John Cobb on Christology); some, the liberation theologians, in highly
pragmatic and political terms (e.g., Juan Luis Segundo, Gustavo
Gutiérrez); and some, as feminist theologians, in terms of the
self-consciousness of women and the awareness of a distorting
patriarchal influence on all past forms of Christian thought (e.g.,
Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth Fiorenza). Most theologians, however, have
continued to accept the traditional structure of Christian beliefs. The
more liberal among them have sought to detach these from the older
traditions and reformulate them so as to connect with modern
consciousness (e.g., Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf
von Harnack, Karl Rahner, Gordon Kaufman); while the more conservative
have sought to defend the traditional formulations within an
increasingly alien intellectual environment (e.g., B.B. Warfield,
Charles Hodge, Karl Barth, Cornelis Berkouwer).
Of the factors forming the intellectual environment of Christian
thought in the modern period, perhaps the most powerful have been the
physical and human sciences. The former have compelled the rethinking of
certain Christian doctrines, as astronomy undermined the assumption of
the centrality of the Earth in the universe, as geologic evidence
concerning its age rendered implausible the biblical chronology, and as
biology located humanity within the larger evolution of the forms of
life on Earth. The human sciences of anthropology, psychology,
sociology, and history have suggested possible naturalistic explanations
of religion itself based, for example, upon the projection of desire for
a cosmic father figure, the need for socially cohesive symbols, or the
power of royal and priestly classes. Such naturalistic interpretations
of religion, together with the ever-widening scientific understanding of
the physical universe, have prompted some Christian philosophers to
think of the religious ambiguity of the universe as a totality that can,
from the human standpoint within it, be interpreted in both naturalistic
and religious ways, thus providing scope for the exercise of faith as a
free response to the mystery of existence.
Aspects of the Christian religion » Christian philosophy » Faith and
reason
Different conceptions of faith cohere with different views of its
relation to reason or rationality. The classic medieval understanding of
faith, set forth by Thomas Aquinas, saw it as the belief in revealed
truths on the authority of God as their ultimate source and guarantor.
Thus, though the ultimate object of faith is God, its immediate object
is the body of propositions articulating the basic Christian dogmas.
Such faith is to be distinguished from knowledge. Whereas the
propositions that are the objects of scientia, or knowledge, compel
belief by their self-evidence or their demonstrability from self-evident
premises, the propositions accepted by faith do not thus compel assent
but require a voluntary act of trusting acceptance. As unforced belief,
faith is “an act of the intellect assenting to the truth at the command
of the will” (Summa theologiae, II/II, Q. 4, art. 5); and it is because
this is a free and responsible act that faith is one of the virtues. It
follows that one cannot have knowledge and faith at the same time in
relation to the same proposition; faith can only arise in the absence of
knowledge. Faith also differs from mere opinion, which is inherently
changeable. Opinions are not matters of absolute commitment but allow in
principle for the possibility of doubt and change. Faith, as the
wholehearted acceptance of revealed truth, excludes doubt.
In the wider context of his philosophy, Aquinas held that human
reason, without supernatural aid, can establish the existence of God and
the immortality of the soul; for those who cannot or do not engage in
such strenuous intellectual activity, however, these matters are also
revealed and can be known by faith. Faith, though, extends beyond the
findings of reason in accepting further truths such as the triune nature
of God and the divinity of Christ. Aquinas thus supported the general
(though not universal) Christian view that revelation supplements,
rather than cancels or replaces, the findings of sound philosophy.
From a skeptical point of view, which does not acknowledge divine
revelation, this Thomist conception amounts to faith—belief that is
without evidence or that is stronger than the evidence warrants, the gap
being filled by the believer’s own will to believe. As such it attracts
the charge that belief upon insufficient evidence is always irrational.
In response to this kind of attack the French philosopher Blaise
Pascal (1623–62) proposed a voluntarist defense of faith as a rational
wager. Pascal assumed, in disagreement with Thomas Aquinas but in
agreement with much modern thinking, that divine existence can neither
be proved nor disproved. He reasoned, therefore, that if one decides to
believe in God and to act on this basis, one gains eternal life if right
but loses little if wrong, whereas if one decides not to believe, one
gains little if right but may lose eternal life if wrong, concluding
that the rational course is to believe. The argument has been criticized
theologically for presupposing an unacceptable image of God as rewarding
such calculating worship and also on the philosophical ground that it is
too permissive in that it could justify belief in the claims, however
fantastic, of any person or group who threatened nonbelievers with
damnation or other dangerous consequences.
The American philosopher William James (1842–1910) refined this
approach by limiting it, among matters that cannot be proved, to
belief-options that one has some real inclination or desire to accept,
carry momentous implications, and are such that a failure to choose
constitutes a negative choice. Theistic belief is for many people such
an option, and James claimed that they have the right to make the
positive decision to believe and to proceed in their lives on that
basis. Either choice involves unavoidable risks: on the one hand the
risk of being importantly deluded and on the other the risk of missing a
limitlessly valuable truth. In this situation each individual is
entitled to decide which risk to run. This argument has also been
criticized as being too permissive and as constituting in effect a
license for wishful believing, but its basic principle can perhaps be
validly used in the context of basing beliefs upon one’s religious
experience.
The element of risk in faith as a free cognitive choice was
emphasized, to the exclusion of all else, by Kierkegaard in his idea of
the leap of faith. He believed that without risk there is no faith, and
that the greater the risk the greater the faith. Faith is thus a
passionate commitment, not based upon reason but inwardly necessitated,
to that which can be grasped in no other way.
The epistemological character of faith as assent to propositions,
basic to the Thomist account, is less pronounced in the conceptions of
Pascal and James in that these accept not a system of doctrines but only
the thought of God as existing, which itself has conceptual and
implicitly propositional content. Kierkegaard’s self-constituting leap
of faith likewise only implicitly involves conceptual and propositional
thought, as does the account of faith based upon Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
concept of seeing-as (Philosophical Investigations, 1953). Wittgenstein
pointed to the epistemological significance of puzzle pictures, such as
the ambiguous “duck-rabbit” that can be seen either as a duck’s head
facing one way or a rabbit’s head facing another way. The enlarged
concept of experiencing-as (developed by the British philosopher John
Hick) refers to the way in which an object, event, or situation is
experienced as having a particular character or meaning such that to
experience it in this manner involves being in a dispositional state to
behave in relation to the object or event, or within the situation, in
ways that are appropriate to its having that particular character. All
conscious experience is in this sense experiencing-as. The application
of this idea to religion suggests that the total environment is
religiously ambiguous, capable of being experienced in both religious
and naturalistic ways. Religious faith is the element of uncompelled
interpretation within the distinctively religious ways of
experiencing—for theism, experiencing the world or events in history or
in one’s own life as mediating the presence and activity of God. In
ancient Hebrew history, for example, events that are described by
secular historians as the effects of political and economic forces were
experienced by the prophets as occasions in which God was saving or
punishing, rewarding or testing, the Israelites. In such cases,
religious experiencing-as does not replace secular experiencing-as but
supervenes upon it, revealing a further order of meaning in the events
of the world. And the often unconscious cognitive choice whereby someone
experiences religiously constitutes, on this view, faith in its most
epistemologically basic sense.
For these voluntarist, existentialist, and experiential conceptions
of faith the place of reason in religion, although important, is
secondary. Reason cannot directly establish the truth of religious
propositions, but it can defend the propriety of trusting one’s deeper
intuitions or one’s religious experience and basing one’s beliefs and
life upon them. These schools of thought assume that the philosophical
arguments for and against the existence of God are inconclusive, and
that the universe is capable of being consistently thought of and
experienced in both religious and naturalistic ways. This assumption,
however, runs counter to the long tradition of natural theology.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Historical views
From the perspectives of history and sociology, the Christian community
has been related to the world in diverse and even paradoxical ways. This
is reflected not only in changes in this relationship over time but also
in simultaneously expressed alternatives ranging from withdrawal from
and rejection of the world to theocratic triumphalism. For example,
early Christians so consistently rejected imperial deities that they
were known as atheists, while later Christians so embraced European
monarchies that they were known as reactionary theists. Franciscans,
especially the Spiritual Franciscans, proclaimed that true Christians
should divest themselves of money at the same time that the Catholic
church erected magnificent churches and the clergy dressed in elaborate
finery. Another classic example of this paradoxical relationship is
provided by the monks, who withdrew from the world but also preserved
and transmitted classical culture and learning to medieval Europe. In
the modern period some Christian communities regard secularization as a
fall from true Christianity; others view it as a legitimate consequence
of a desacralization of the world initiated by Christ.
The Christian community has always been part of the world in which it
exists. It has served the typical religious function of legitimating
social systems and values and of creating structures of meaning,
plausibility, and compensation for society as it faces loss and death.
The Christian community has sometimes exercised this religious function
in collusion with tribalistic nationalisms (e.g., the “German
Christians” and Nazism) by disregarding traditional church tenets. When
the Christian community has held to its teachings, however, it has
opposed such social systems and values. Given the inherent fragility of
human culture and society, religion in general and the Christian
community in particular frequently are conservative forces.
However, the Christian community has not always been a conservative
force. Twentieth-century black theology and Latin American liberation
theology shared the conviction that God takes the side of the oppressed
against the world’s injustices. From the perspective of theology or
faith, the criticism of the world of which the Christian community
itself is a part is the exercise of its commitment to Jesus Christ. For
the Christian community, the death and Resurrection of Jesus call into
question all structures, systems, and values of the world that claim
ultimacy.
The relationship of the Christian community to the world may be seen
differently depending upon one’s historical, sociological, and
theological perspectives because the Christian community is both a
creation in the world and an influence upon it. This complexity led the
American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr to comment in Christ and Culture
(1956) that “the many-sided debate about the relations of Christianity
and civilization…is as confused as it is many-sided.”
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church, sect, and mystical movement
The German scholar Ernst Troeltsch sought to impose a meaningful pattern
on this confusion by organizing the complex relationships of the
Christian community to the world into three types of religious social
organization: church, sect, and mystical movement. He described the
church as a conservative institution that affirms the world and mediates
salvation through clergy and sacraments. It is also characterized by
inclusivity and continuity, signified by its adherence to infant baptism
and historical creeds, doctrines, liturgies, and forms of organization.
The objective-institutional character of the church increases as it
relinquishes its commitment to eschatological perfection in order to
create the corpus Christianum, the Christian commonwealth or society.
This development stimulates opposition from those who understand the
Gospel in terms of personal commitment and detachment from the world.
The opposition develops into sects, which are comparatively small groups
that strive for unmediated salvation and that are related indifferently
or antagonistically to the world. The exclusivity and historical
discontinuity of the sect is signified by its adherence to believers’
baptism and efforts to imitate what it believes is the New Testament
community. Mystical movements are the expression of a radical religious
individualism that strives to interiorize and live out the personal
example of Jesus. They are not interested in creating a community but
strive toward universal tolerance, a fellowship of spiritual religion
beyond creeds and dogmas. The Methodist Church exemplifies the dynamic
of these types. The Methodist movement began as a sectarian protest
against the worldliness of the Church of England; its success stimulated
it to become a church, which in turn spawned various sectarian protests,
including charismatic communities.
Niebuhr further developed Troeltsch’s efforts by distinguishing five
repetitive types of the Christian community’s relations to the world.
Niebuhr’s types are: Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ
above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ the transformer
of culture. The first two are expressions of opposition to and
endorsement of the world, while the last three share a concern to
mediate in distinctive ways the opposition between the first two.
Opposition to the world is exemplified by Tertullian’s question,
“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” This sharp opposition to the
world was expressed in the biblical disjunction between the children of
God and the children of the world and between “the light” and “the
darkness” (1 John 2:15, 4:4–5; Revelation); and it has continued to find
personal exponents, such as Leo Tolstoy, and communal expressions, such
as the Hutterites.
Endorsement of the world emerged in the 4th century with the imperial
legal recognition of Christianity by the Roman emperor Constantine.
Although frequently associated with the medieval efforts to construct a
Christian commonwealth, this type is present wherever national, social,
political, and economic programs are “baptized” as Christian. Thus, its
historical expressions may be as diverse as the Jeffersonian United
States and Hitlerian Germany.
The other three types that Niebuhr proposed are variations on the
theme of mediation between rejection and uncritical endorsement of the
world. The “Christ above culture” type recognizes continuity between the
world and faith. This was probably best expressed by Thomas Aquinas’s
conviction that grace or the supernatural does not destroy nature but
completes it. The “Christ and culture in paradox” type views the
Christian community’s relationship to the world in terms of a permanent
and dynamic tension in which the Kingdom of God is not of this world and
yet is to be proclaimed in it. A well-known expression of this position
is Martin Luther’s law–gospel dialectic, distinguishing how the
Christian community is to live in the world as both sinful and righteous
at the same time. The conviction that the world may be transformed and
regenerated by Christianity (“Christ the transformer of culture”) has
been attributed to expressions that have theocratic tendencies, such as
those of Augustine and John Calvin.
Efforts by scholars such as Troeltsch and Niebuhr to provide typical
patterns of Christian relations to the world enable appreciation of the
multiformity of these relationships without being overwhelmed by
historical data. These models relieve the illusion that the Christian
community has ever been monolithic, homogeneous, or static. This
“many-sidedness” may be seen in the Christian community’s relationships
to the state, society, education, the arts, social welfare, and family
and personal life.
Carter H. Lindberg
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and state
The relationship of Christians and Christian institutions to forms of
the political order has shown an extraordinary diversity throughout
church history. There have been, for example, theocratically founded
monarchies, democracies, and communist communities. In various periods,
however, political revolution, based on theological foundations, has
also belonged to this diversity.
In certain eras of church history the desire to establish the Kingdom
of God stimulated political and social strivings. The political power of
the Christian proclamation of the coming sovereignty of God resided in
its promise of both the establishment of a kingdom of peace and the
execution of judgment.
The church, like the state, has been exposed to the temptation of
power, which resulted in the transformation of the church into an
ecclesiastical state. This took place in the development of the Papal
States and, to a lesser degree, in several theocratic churches, as well
as in Calvin’s ecclesiastical state in Geneva in the 16th century. At
times, too, the secular state declared itself Christian and the executor
of the spiritual, political, and social commission of the church; it
understood itself to be the representative of the Kingdom of God. This
development took place in both the Byzantine and the Carolingian empires
as well as in the medieval Holy Roman Empire.
The struggle between the church, understanding itself as state, and
the state, understanding itself as representative of the church, not
only dominated the Middle Ages but also continued into the Reformation
period. The wars of religion in the era of the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation discredited in the eyes of many the theological and
metaphysical rationales for a Christian state. The Anabaptists in the
16th century and some Puritans in the 17th century contributed to this
skepticism by advocating religious liberty and rejecting the involvement
of the state in religious matters. The Enlightenment idea of grounding
the relationship between church and state on natural law, as advanced by
Friedrich Schleiermacher among others, led to the advocacy of the legal
separation of church and state.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and state » The history of church and state » The
church and the Roman Empire
The attitude of the first generations of Christians toward the existing
political order was determined by the imminent expectation of the
Kingdom of God, whose miraculous power had begun to be visibly realized
in the figure of Jesus Christ. The importance of the political order
was, thus, negligible, as Jesus himself asserted when he said, “My
kingship is not of this world.” Orientation toward the coming kingdom of
peace placed Christians in tension with the state, which made demands
upon them that were in direct conflict with their faith.
This contrast was developed most pointedly in the rejection of the
emperor cult and of certain state offices—above all, that of judge—to
which the power over life and death was professionally entrusted.
Although opposition to fundamental orderings of the ruling state was not
based upon any conscious revolutionary program, contemporaries blamed
the expansion of the Christian church in the Roman Empire for an
internal weakening of the empire on the basis of this conscious
avoidance of many aspects of public life, including military service.
Despite the early Christian longing for the coming Kingdom of God,
even the Christians of the early generations acknowledged the pagan
state as the bearer of order in the world. Two contrary views thus faced
one another within the Christian communities. On the one hand, under the
influence of Pauline missions, was the idea that the “ruling body”—i.e.,
the existing political order of the Roman Empire—was “from God…for your
good” (Romans 13:1–4) and that Christians should be “subject to the
governing authorities.” Another similar idea held by Paul (in 2
Thessalonians) was that the Roman state, through its legal order,
“restrains” the downfall of the world that the Antichrist is attempting
to bring about. On the other hand, and existing at the same time, was
the apocalyptic identification of the imperial city of Rome with the
great whore of Babylon (Revelation 17:3–7). The first attitude,
formulated by Paul, was decisive in the development of a Christian
political consciousness. The second was noticeable especially in the
history of radical Christianity and in radical Christian pacifism, which
rejects cooperation as much in military service as in public judgeship.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and state » The history of church and state » The
church and the Byzantine, or Eastern, Empire
In the 4th century, the emperor Constantine granted himself, as “bishop
of foreign affairs,” certain rights to church leadership. These rights
concerned not only the “outward” activity of the church but also
encroached upon the inner life of the church—as was shown by the role of
the emperor in summoning and leading imperial councils to formulate
fundamental Christian doctrine and to ratify their decisions.
In the Byzantine Empire, the secular ruler was called “priest and
emperor” and exercised authority as head of the church. Although never
ordained, the emperor held jurisdiction over ecclesiastical affairs. The
belief that his authority came directly from God was symbolically
expressed in the ceremony of both crowning and anointing him. This
tradition was continued in the Russian realms, where the tsardom claimed
a growing authority for itself even in the area of the church.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and state » The history of church and state » The
church and Western states
In the political vacuum that arose in the West because of the invasion
by the German tribes, the Roman church was the single institution that
preserved in its episcopal dioceses the Roman provincial arrangement. In
its administration of justice the church largely depended upon the old
imperial law and—in a period of legal and administrative chaos—was
viewed as the only guarantor of order. The Roman popes, most notably
Gregory I the Great (reigned 590–604), assumed many of the duties of the
decadent imperial bureaucracy. Gregory negotiated with the Lombard kings
of Italy, oversaw public welfare, and was the soldiers’ paymaster. His
administrative skill helped lay the foundation for the Papal States,
which emerged in the 8th century. Supporting papal claims and
responsibilities was the so-called Petrine theory—the idea that the pope
was the representative of Christ and the successor of Peter.
Although he considered himself part of a Christian commonwealth
headed by the emperor in Constantinople, Gregory sought to improve the
religious life of the peoples of the West. Under him the church in
Spain, Gaul, and northern Italy was strengthened, and England was
converted to Roman Christianity. Later popes forged an alliance with the
rulers of the Frankish (Germanic) kingdom in the 8th century and
succeeded in winning them as protectors of the Papal States when the
Byzantine emperor was no longer able to protect Rome. The relationship
created a new area of tension, as religious and secular leaders sought
to define the exact nature of the relationship between them. From at
least the time of Pope Gelasius I (reigned 492–496), two powers, or
swords, were recognized as having been established by God to rule.
Carolingian rulers maintained that, as holders of one of the swords,
they had special rights and duties to protect the church. Indeed, the
emperor Charlemagne claimed for himself the right to appoint the bishops
of his empire, who were thus increasingly involved in political affairs.
Emperors in the 10th century, building on Carolingian precedent,
continued to involve themselves in church affairs. As a result, bishops
in the empire were sometimes also the reigning princes of their
dioceses, and they were occasionally guilty of being more interested in
the political than in the spiritual affairs of their dominions.
These conflicting perspectives were the cause of a series of
struggles between popes and secular rulers that began in the 11th
century, when lay and religious leaders sought to reform society and the
church. Already in the 10th century, monastic reform movements centred
at Cluny, Gorze, and elsewhere had attempted to improve the religious
life of the monks and establish a new understanding of ecclesiastical
liberty. In the 11th century, reformers such as Peter Damian and Humbert
of Silva Candida provided new definitions of the sins of clerical
marriage and simony. These intellectual developments, along with new
decrees governing papal elections, led to the virtual elimination of
secular interference in episcopal and papal succession. The staunchest
supporter of these reforms, Pope Gregory VII, ultimately banned the
practice of the lay investiture of bishops and challenged the traditions
of sacral kingship. Gregory’s assertion of papal authority, however, was
opposed by the German ruler Henry IV. Their conflict eventually burst
into the great Investiture Controversy, which became a struggle for
supremacy between the church and the monarchy. The resolution of the
controversy left the emperor in a weakened state and increased the
influence of the secular and ecclesiastical princes.
Although the empire was reconstituted in the 12th century on the
basis of Roman law and the understanding of the empire as a distinct
sacred institution (sacrum imperium), it broke down during the 13th
century as the result of a new struggle between the emperors and several
successive popes. The church, however, faced a new challenge in the rise
of the European nation-states. Papal ideology had been shaped by the
struggle with the emperors and thus was not suited to deal effectively
with kings of nation-states. This first became clearly evident in the
conflict between Pope Boniface VIII and King Philip IV of France over
matters of ecclesiastical independence and royal authority. In 1296
Boniface issued a bull denying the king’s right to tax the clergy, which
he withdrew because Philip forbade the clergy to send money to Rome and
the pope needed the revenue. In 1301, Philip violated long-standing
tradition by trying the bishop of Pamiers in a royal court. Boniface
responded in 1302 with the bull Unam Sanctam (“One Holy Church”), the
most extreme assertion by any pope of the supremacy of spiritual over
secular authority. Revealing how much had changed since the time of
Gregory VII, Philip rallied public opinion against the pope, calling the
Estates General to session to accuse Boniface of heresy, witchcraft,
sodomy, and other crimes. Philip’s adviser, Guillaume de Nogaret, seized
Boniface at Anagni, a town near Rome. Although the pope was rescued by
local inhabitants, he died from the shock of the capture, and Philip
emerged triumphant. Papal fortunes declined even further during the
subsequent Babylonian Captivity of the church, when the papacy resided
in Avignon (1309–77) and was perceived as being dominated by the French
monarchy.
Secular control of the church increased during the Great Schism
(1378–1417), and in some parts of Europe it continued even after the
schism ended. The schism was partly the result of growing demands for
the papacy’s return to Rome. Pope Urban VI settled in Rome and alienated
a number of cardinals, who returned to Avignon and elected a rival pope,
Clement VII. Popes and antipopes reigning simultaneously excommunicated
each other, thus demeaning the papacy. The schism spread great
uncertainty throughout Europe about the validity of the consecration of
bishops and the sacraments as administered by the priests they ordained.
It was perpetuated in part by European politics, as rival rulers
supported either the pope in Rome or the pope in Avignon to assert ever
greater authority over the church in their realms. The schism
contributed to the rise of the 15th-century conciliar movement, which
posited the supreme authority of ecumenical councils in the church.
Although the relationship between the temporal and spiritual powers
continued to be a matter of concern in the 16th and 17th centuries, the
changes brought by the Reformation and the growth of state power recast
the nature of the debate. Under King Henry VIII of England a
revolutionary dissociation of the English church from papal supremacy
took place. In the German territories the reigning princes became, in
effect, the legal guardians of the Protestant churches—a movement
already in the process of consolidation in the late Middle Ages. The
development in the Catholic nation-states, such as Spain, Portugal, and
France, occurred in a similar way.
The ideas of the freedom and equality of Christians and their
representation in a communion of saints by virtue of voluntary
membership had been disseminated in various medieval sects such as the
Cathari, Waldenses, Hussites, and the Bohemian Brethren and were
reinforced during the Reformation by groups such as the Hutterites,
Mennonites, and Schwenckfelders. These groups also renounced involvement
with the state in certain respects, such as through military service and
the holding of state offices; some of these groups attempted to
structure their own form of common life in Christian, communist
communities. Many of their political ideas—at first bloodily suppressed
by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation states and churches—were
later prominent in the Dutch wars of independence and in the English
Revolution.
In the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) confessional antitheses were
intermingled with politics, and the credibility of the feuding
ecclesiastical parties was thereby called into question. Subsequently,
from the 17th century on, the tendency toward a new, natural-law
conception of the relationship between state and church began to
develop. Henceforth, in the Protestant countries, state sovereignty was
increasingly emphasized vis-à-vis the churches. The state established
the right to regulate educational and marriage concerns as well as all
administrative affairs of the church. A similar development also
occurred in Roman Catholic areas. In the second half of the 18th century
Febronianism demanded a replacement of papal centralism with a national
church episcopal system; in Austria a state-church concept was
established under Josephinism (after Joseph II [reigned 1765–90])
through the dismantling of numerous ecclesiastical privileges. The
Eastern Orthodox Church also was drawn into this development under Peter
the Great.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and state » The history of church and state »
Separation of church and state
The separation of church and state was one of the legacies of the
American and French revolutions at the end of the 18th century. It was
achieved as a result of ideas arising from opposition to the English
episcopal system and the English throne as well as from the ideals of
the Enlightenment. It was implemented in France because of the
social-revolutionary criticism of the wealthy ecclesiastical hierarchy
but also because of the desire to guarantee the freedom of the church.
The French state took over education and other functions of a civic
nature that had been traditionally exercised by the church.
Beginning in the late 18th century, two fundamental attitudes
developed in matters related to the separation of church and state. The
first, as implied in the Constitution of the United States, was
supported by a tendency to leave to the church, set free from state
supervision, a maximum freedom in the realization of its spiritual,
moral, and educational tasks. In the United States, for example, a
comprehensive church school and educational system has been created by
the churches on the basis of this freedom, and numerous colleges and
universities have been founded by churches. The separation of church and
state by the French Revolution and later in the Soviet Union and the
countries under the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence was based upon an
opposite tendency. The attempt was not only to restrict the public role
of the church but also to work toward its gradual disappearance. The
church was to be replaced with a secular ideology.
In contrast to this, the attitude of National Socialism in Germany
under Hitler was contradictory. On the one hand, Nazi ideology allowed
no public role for the church and its teaching. On the other hand,
Hitler was concerned not to trigger an outright confrontation with the
church. The concordat concluded in 1933 between Germany and the Roman
Catholic Church illustrates this policy of official neutrality.
In Germany state-church traditions had been largely eliminated in
1918 with the establishment of the Weimar Republic; the abolition of the
monarchical system of government also deprived the territorial churches
of their supreme Protestant episcopal heads. The Weimar Constitution
sanctioned the separation of church and state. State-church traditions
were maintained in various forms in Germany, not only during the Weimar
Republic but also during the Hitler regime and afterward in the Federal
Republic of Germany. Thus, through state agreements, definite special
rights, primarily in the areas of taxes and education, were granted to
both the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelical (Lutheran-Reformed)
churches of the individual states.
Even in the United States, however, the old state-church system,
overcome during the American Revolution, still produces aftereffects in
the form of tax privileges of the church (exemption from most taxation),
the exemption of the clergy from military service, and the financial
furtherance of confessional school and educational systems through the
state. These privileges have been questioned and even attacked by
certain segments of the American public.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and state » Church and state in Eastern and
Western theology
The two main forms of the relationship between church and state that
have been predominant and decisive through the centuries and in which
the structural difference between the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern
Orthodoxy becomes most evident can best be explained by comparing the
views of two great theologians: Eusebius of Caesarea and Augustine.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and state » Church and state in Eastern and
Western theology » The views of Eusebius of Caesarea
Eusebius (c. 260–339), the bishop of Caesarea, was a historian and
exegete who formed the Orthodox understanding of the relationship
between church and state. He saw the empire and the imperial church as
sharing a close bond with each other; in the centre of the Christian
empire stood the figure of the Christian emperor rather than that of the
spiritual head of the church.
In Eusebian political theology, the Christian emperor appears as
God’s representative on Earth in whom God himself “lets shine forth the
image of his absolute power.” He is the “Godloved, three times blessed”
servant of the highest ruler, who, “armed with divine armor cleans the
world from the horde of the godless, the strong-voiced heralds of
undeceiving fear of God,” the rays of which “penetrate the world.”
Through the possession of these characteristics the Christian emperor is
the archetype not only of justice but also of the love of humankind.
When it is said about Constantine, “God himself has chosen him to be the
lord and leader so that no man can praise himself to have raised him
up,” the rule of the Orthodox emperor has been based on the immediate
grace of God.
To a certain extent this understanding of the emperor was the
Christian reinterpretation of the ancient Roman view of the emperor as
the representative of god or the gods. Some of Eusebius’s remarks echo
the cult of the Unconquered Sun, Sol Invictus, who was represented by
the emperor according to pagan understanding. The emperor—in this
respect he also played the role of the pontifex maximus (high priest) in
the state cult—took the central position within the church as well. He
summoned the synods of bishops, “as though he had been appointed bishop
by God,” presided over the synods, and granted judicial power for the
empire to their decisions. He was the protector of the church who stood
up for the preservation of unity and truth of the Christian faith and
who fought not only as a warrior but also as an intercessor, as a second
Moses during the battle against God’s enemies, “holy and purely praying
to God, sending his prayers up to him.” The Christian emperor entered
not only the political but also the sacred succession of the divinely
appointed Roman emperor. Next to such a figure, an independent
leadership of the church could hardly develop.
Orthodox theologians have understood the coexistence of the Christian
emperor and the head of the Christian church as symphōnia, or “harmony.”
The church recognized the powers of the emperor as protector of the
church and preserver of the unity of the faith and asserted its own
authority over the spiritual domain of preserving Orthodox doctrine and
order in the church. The emperor, on the other hand, was subject to the
church’s spiritual leadership as far as he was a son of the church.
The special position of the emperor and the function of the Byzantine
patriarch as the spiritual head of the church were defined in the 9th
century in the Epanagoge, the judicial ruling establishing this
relationship of church and state. The church-judicial affirmation of
this relationship in the 6th and 7th centuries made the development of a
judicial independence of the Byzantine patriarch in the style of the
Roman papacy impossible from the beginning.
The Epanagoge, however, did not completely subject the patriarch to
the supervision of the emperor but rather directed him expressly “to
support the truth and to undertake the defense of the holy teachings
without fear of the emperor.” Therefore, the tension between the
imperial reign that misused its absolutism against the spiritual freedom
of the church and a church that claimed its spiritual freedom against an
absolutist emperor or tsar was characteristic of Byzantine and Slavic
political history but not the same as the political tension between the
imperial power and the papacy that occurred in the West, especially
during the period from 1050 to 1300.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and state » Church and state in Eastern and
Western theology » The views of Augustine
Augustine’s City of God attempted to answer questions arising from the
most painful event of his day: the sack of the city of Rome by the
Visigoths in 410. Augustine responded to the shock and dismay his
contemporaries experienced with the collapse of their world by
delivering a literary demolition of paganism. From Augustine’s
perspective the “splendid vices” of the pagans had led inexorably to the
fall of an idolatrous world. In sharp contrast to this “earthly city,”
epitomized by Rome but everywhere energized by the same human desires
for praise and glory, Augustine projected the “most glorious city” of
praise and thanks to God, the heavenly Jerusalem. However, Augustine did
not simply identify the state with the earthly city and the church with
the city of God. He perceived that the state existed not simply in
opposition to God but as a divine instrument for the welfare of
humankind. The civitas dei (“city of God”) and the civitas terrena
(“earthly city”) finally correspond neither to church and state nor to
heaven and earth. They are rather two opposed societies with
antagonistic orders of value that intersect both state and church and in
each case show the radical incompatibility of the love of God with the
values of worldly society.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and state » Church and state in Eastern and
Western theology » Later developments
The historical development of the church in the Latin West took a
different course from that of the Byzantine imperial church. In the West
a new power gradually emerged—the Roman church, the church of the bishop
of Rome. This church assumed many of the administrative, political, and
social-welfare functions of the ancient Roman state in the West
following the invasion of the Germans.
It was in this context that the judicial pretense of the “Gift of the
emperor Constantine”—the Donation of Constantine—became possible, to
which the later development of the papacy was connected. The Donation is
the account of Constantine’s purported conferring upon Pope Sylvester I
(reigned 314–335) of the primacy of the West, including the imperial
symbols of rulership. The pope returned the crown to Constantine, who in
gratitude moved the capital to Byzantium (Constantinople). The Donation
thereby explained and legitimated a number of important political
developments and papal claims, including the transfer of the capital to
Byzantium, the displacement of old Rome by the new Rome of the church,
papal secular authority, and the papacy’s separation from allegiance to
the Byzantine empire and association with the rising power of the Latin
West. The Donation, which was based on traditions dating to the 5th
century, was compiled in the mid-8th century and is associated with the
political transformation that took place in Italy at that time.
This was the point from which the developments in the East and in the
West led in two different directions. The growing independence of the
West was markedly illustrated by the Donation of Pippin (Pippin, father
of Charlemagne, was anointed king of the Franks by Pope Stephen III in
754), which laid the foundation of the Papal States as independent of
any temporal power and gave the pope the Byzantine exarchate of Ravenna.
The idea of the church as a state also appeared in a democratic form
and in strict contrast to its absolutist Roman model in some Reformation
church and sect developments and in Free churches of the
post-Reformation period. The sects of the Reformation period renewed the
old idea of the Christian congregation as God’s people, wandering on
this Earth—a people connected with God, like Israel, through a special
covenant. This idea of God’s people and the special covenant of God with
a certain chosen group caused the influx of theocratic ideas, which were
expressed in forms of theocratic communities similar to states and led
to formations similar to an ecclesiastical state. Such tendencies were
exhibited among various Reformation groups (e.g., the Münster prophets),
Puritans in Massachusetts, and groups of the American Western frontier.
One of the rare exceptions to early modern theocratic theology was
Luther’s sharp distinction of political and ecclesial responsibilities
by his dialectic of law and gospel. He commented that it is not
necessary that an emperor be a Christian to rule, only that he possess
reason.
The most recent attempt to form a church-state by a sect that
understood itself as the chosen people distinguished by God through a
special new revelation was undertaken by the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints, or Mormons as they are commonly known. Based on the
prophetic direction of their leaders, they attempted to found the state
Deseret, after their entrance into the desert around the Great Salt Lake
in Utah. The borders of the state were expected to include the largest
part of the area of the present states of Utah, California, Arizona,
Nevada, and Colorado. The Mormons, however, eventually had to recognize
the fact that the comparatively small centre state, Utah, of the
originally intended larger Mormon territory, could not exist as a
theocracy (though structured as other secular models) under a government
of Mormon Church leaders. Reports (some apparently spurious) by federal
agents hostile to the church and widespread revulsion toward the Mormon
practice of polygyny mitigated against federal sanction of the church
leadership as the governmental heads of the proposed state. Utah
eventually became a federal state of the United States.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and society
The development of Christianity’s influence on the character of society
since the Reformation has been twofold. In the realm of state churches
and territorial churches, Christianity contributed to the preservation
of the status quo of society. In England, the Anglican Church remained
an ally of the throne, as did the Protestant churches of the German
states. In Russia the Orthodox Church continued to support a social
order founded upon the monarchy, and even the monarch carried out a
leading function within the church as protector.
Though the impulses for transformation of the social order according
to the spirit of the Christian ethic came more strongly from the Free
churches and state and territorial churches made positive contributions
in improving the status quo. In 17th- and 18th-century Germany, Lutheran
clergy, such as August Francke (1663–1727), were active in establishing
poorhouses, orphanages, schools, and hospitals. In England, Anglican
clerics, such as Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley in the
19th century, began a Christian social movement during the Industrial
Revolution that brought Christian influence to the conditions of life
and work in industry. Johann Hinrich Wichern proclaimed, “There is a
Christian Socialism,” at the Kirchentag Church Convention in Wittenberg
[Germany] in 1848, the year of the publication of the Communist
Manifesto and a wave of revolutions across Europe, and created the
“Inner Mission” in order to address “works of saving love” to all
suffering spiritual and physical distress. The diaconal movements of the
Inner Mission were concerned with social issues, prison reform, and care
of the mentally ill.
The Anglo-Saxon Free churches made great efforts to bring the social
atmosphere and living conditions into line with a Christian
understanding of human life. Methodists and Baptists addressed their
message mainly to those segments of society that were neglected by the
established church. They recognized that the distress of the newly
formed working class, a consequence of industrialization, could not be
removed by the traditional charitable means used by the state churches.
In Germany, in particular, the spiritual leaders of the so-called
revival movement, such as Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher (1796–1868),
denied the right of self-organization to the workers by claiming that
all earthly social injustices would receive compensation in heaven
caused Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to separate themselves completely
from the church and its purely charitable attempts at a settlement of
social conflicts and to declare religion with its promise of a better
beyond as the “opiate of the people.” This reproach, however, was as
little in keeping with the social-ethical activities of the Inner
Mission and of Methodists and Baptists as it was with the selfless
courage of the Quakers, who fought against social demoralization,
against the catastrophic situation in the prisons, against war, and,
most of all, against slavery.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and society » The problem of slavery and
persecution
Christian approaches to slavery have passed through many controversial
phases. Paul recommended to Philemon that he accept back his runaway
slave Onesimus “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved
brother…both in the flesh and in the Lord” (verse 16); the passage does
not reject slavery but stresses that masters must treat their slaves
humanely. Although the biblical writings made no direct attack upon the
ancient world’s institution of slavery, its proleptic abolition in
community with Christ—“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither
slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in
Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28)—has been a judgment upon the world’s and
the Christian community’s failure to overcome slavery and all forms of
oppression. Most scholars assume that the eschatological assumptions of
the apostolic community—that the return of Jesus and thus the end of
time were imminent—rendered social issues secondary. As it became
evident that Jesus’ return was not imminent and as the early church made
its place in the world, the Church Fathers began to address social
issues, and they identified slavery as the just punishment for sin.
However, they also emphasized the need to treat slaves justly and
maintained that Christians could not be enslaved. Medieval society made
slow progress in the abolition of slavery, but by the year 1000 slavery
had essentially disappeared in much of Western Europe, and by about 1100
it had been replaced by serfdom. One of the special tasks of the orders
of knighthood was the liberation of Christian slaves who had fallen
captive to the Muslims; and special knightly orders were even founded
for the ransom of Christian slaves.
With the discovery of the New World, the institution of slavery grew
to proportions greater than had been previously conceived. The
widespread conviction of the Spanish conquerors of the New World that
its inhabitants were not fully human, and therefore could be enslaved,
added to the problem. The importation of African slaves to North America
was supported by various Christian churches, including the Anglican,
which predominated in Virginia and other British colonies. Into the 18th
century, African slaves were described as bearing the mark of Cain, and
other scriptural passages were used to support slavery. When some
churches began to champion abolition in the 19th century, churches in
the American South continued to find support for the institution in the
Bible.
The attempt of missionaries, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas in
16th-century Mexico, to counter the inhuman system of slavery in the
colonial economic systems finally introduced the great basic debate
concerning the question of human rights. A decisive part in the
elaboration of the general principles of human rights was taken by the
Spanish and Portuguese theologians of the 16th and 17th centuries,
especially Francisco de Vitoria. In the 18th century Puritan leaders
continued the struggle against slavery as an institution. In German
Pietism, Nikolaus Ludwig, Graf von Zinzendorf, who became acquainted
with slavery on the island of Saint Croix in the Virgin Islands, used
his influence on the king of Denmark for the human rights of the slaves.
The Methodist and Baptist churches advocated abolition of slavery in the
United States in the decisive years preceding the foundation of the New
England Anti-Slavery Society in Boston in 1832 by William Lloyd
Garrison. In England and in The Netherlands, the Free churches were very
active in the struggle against slavery, which was directed mainly
against the participation of Christian trade and shipping companies in
the profitable slave trade. The abolition of slavery did not end racial
discrimination, of course. Martin Luther King, Jr., Baptist pastor and
Nobel laureate, led the struggle for civil rights in the United States
until his assassination in 1968.
Christian churches have engaged in similar struggles on behalf of
other exploited or persecuted groups. In Germany in the 1930s some
Christians fought against the Nazis’ violent anti-Semitism and their
attempts to euthanize the mentally ill and others they considered “unfit
to live.” For his leadership in the struggle against apartheid in South
Africa, the Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Peace in 1984. He later served as head of the Truth and
Reconciliation Committee, which investigated allegations of human rights
abuses during the apartheid era. And Pope John Paul II used his enormous
influence among Catholics and throughout the world to promote respect
for human dignity and to deter the use of violence.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and society » Theological and humanitarian
motivations
Decisive impulses for achieving social change based on Christian ethics
have been and are initiated by men and women in the grasp of a deep
personal Christian experience of faith, for whom the message of the
coming Kingdom of God forms the foundation for faithful affirmation of
social responsibility in the present world. Revival movements have
viewed the Christian message as the call to work for the reorganization
of society in the sense of a Kingdom of God ethic. Under the leadership
of an American Baptist theologian, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), the
Social Gospel movement spread in the United States. A corresponding
movement was started with the Christian social conferences by German
Protestant theologians, such as Paul Martin Rade (1857–1940) of Marburg.
The basic idea of the Social Gospel—i.e., the emphasis on the
social-ethical tasks of the church—gained widespread influence within
the ecumenical movement and especially affected Christian world
missions. In many respects modern economic and other forms of aid to
developing countries—including significant ecumenical contributions from
the World Council of Churches, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches,
the Lutheran World Federation, and the Roman Catholic Church—replaced
the Social Gospel.
Christians have sometimes argued that these developments reduce the
Christian message to a purely secular social program that is absorbed by
political programs. Other Christians, however, have maintained that
faithful responsibility in and to the world requires political,
economic, and social assistance to oppressed peoples with the goal of
their liberation to a full human life.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and education » Intellectualism versus
anti-intellectualism
In contrast to Tertullian’s anti-intellectual attitude, a positive
approach to intellectual activities has also made itself heard from the
beginning of the Christian church; it was perhaps best expressed in the
11th century by Anselm of Canterbury in the formula fides quaerens
intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”). But well before Anselm,
Christians maintained that because people have been endowed with reason,
they have an urge to express their experience of faith intellectually,
to translate the contents of faith into concepts, and to formulate
beliefs in a systematic understanding of the correlation between God,
humankind, and creation. This desire was exemplified by Justin Martyr, a
professional philosopher and Christian apologist of the 2nd century who
saw Christian revelation as the fulfillment, not the elimination, of
philosophical understanding. Even before Justin Martyr, the author of
The Gospel According to John set the point of departure for the
intellectual history of salvation with his use of the term Logos to open
the first chapter of the Gospel. The light of the Logos (the Greek word
means “word” or “reason,” in the sense of divine or universal reason
permeating the intelligible world) had made itself manifest in a number
of sparks and seeds in human history even before its incarnation in the
person of Jesus Christ.
These contrasting opinions have stood in permanent tension with one
another. In medieval thought the elevation of Christian belief to the
status of scientific universal knowledge was dominant. Theology, the
queen of the sciences, became the instructor of the different
disciplines, organized according to the traditional classification of
trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and quadrivium (music,
arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy) and incorporated into the system of
education as “servants of theology.” This system of education became
part of the structure of the universities that were founded in the 13th
century.
With the Reformation there was widespread concern for education
because the Reformers desired everyone to be able to read the Bible.
Luther also argued that it was necessary for society that its youth be
educated. He held that it was the duty of civil authorities to compel
their subjects to keep their children in school so “that there will
always be preachers, jurists, pastors, writers, physicians,
schoolmasters, and the like, for we cannot do without them.” This stress
on education was made evident by the founding of many colleges in North
America in the 17th and 18th centuries by Protestants and by members the
Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, a Roman Catholic missionary and
educational order.
Open conflict between science and theology occurred only when the
traditional biblical view of the world was seriously questioned, as in
the case of the Italian astronomer Galileo (1633). The principles of
Galileo’s scientific research, however, were themselves the result of a
Christian idea of science and truth. The biblical faith in God as
Creator and incarnate Redeemer is an explicit affirmation of the
goodness, reality, and contingency of the created world—assumptions
underlying scientific work. Positive tendencies concerning education and
science have always been dominant in the history of Christianity, even
though the opposite attitude arose occasionally during certain periods.
Thus the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) spoke of
celebrating God in science. In the 20th century, Pope John Paul II
maintained that he saw no contradiction between the findings of modern
science and biblical accounts of the Creation; he also declared the
condemnation of Galileo to be an error and encouraged the scientific
search for truth.
The attitude that had been hostile toward intellectual endeavours was
heard less frequently after the Christian church had become the church
of the Roman Empire. But the relationship between science and theology
was attacked when the understanding of truth that had been developed
within theology was turned critically against the dogma of the church
itself. This occurred, for instance, after the natural sciences and
theology had turned away from total dependence upon tradition and
directed their attention toward experience—observation and experiment. A
number of fundamental dogmatic principles and concepts were thus
questioned and eventually abandoned. The struggle concerning the theory
of evolution has been a conspicuous modern symptom of this trend.
The estrangement of theology and natural science in the modern period
was a complex development related to confessional controversies and wars
in the 16th and 17th centuries and philosophical perspectives in the
18th and 19th centuries. The epistemological foundation of faith was
radically challenged by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Building
upon Hume’s work, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant advocated freedom
from any heteronomous authority, such as the church and dogmas, that
could not be established by reason alone. Scholars withdrew from the
decisions of church authorities and were willing to subject themselves
only to critical reason and experience. The rationalism of the
Enlightenment appeared to be the answer of science to the claim of true
faith that had been made by the churches.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and education » Forms of Christian education
The Christian church created the bases of the Western system of
education. From its beginning the Christian community faced external and
internal challenges to its faith, which it met by developing and
utilizing intellectual and educational resources. The response to the
external challenge of rival religions and philosophical perspectives is
termed apologetics—i.e., the intellectual defense of the faith.
Apologetic theologians from Justin Martyr in the 2nd century to Paul
Tillich in the 20th have promoted critical dialogue between the
Christian community, the educated world, and other religions. This
exchange was further encouraged by the Second Vatican Council, Pope John
Paul II, and the ecumenical movement. The internal challenges to the
Christian community were met not only by formulating the faith in creeds
and dogmas but also by passing this faith on to the next generations
through education.
By the 8th and 9th centuries, cathedral schools were established to
provide basic education in Latin grammar and Christian doctrine to the
clergy, and by the 11th century these schools emerged as centres of
higher learning. The school at the court of Charlemagne (which was
conducted by clergy), the medieval schools of the religious orders,
cathedrals, monasteries, convents, and churches, the flourishing schools
of the Brethren of the Common Life, and the Roman Catholic school
systems that came into existence during the Counter-Reformation under
the leadership of the Jesuits and other new teaching orders contributed
much to the civilization of the West. Equally important were the schools
started by the German Reformers Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, Johann
Bugenhagen, John and August Hermann Francke, and the Moravian reformers
John Amos Comenius and the graf von Zinzendorf. The church was
responsible for overseeing schools even after the Reformation. Only in
the 18th century did the school system start to separate itself from its
Christian roots and fall more and more under state control.
With the separation of church and state, both institutions have
entered into tensely manifold relationships. In some countries the state
has taken over the school system and does not allow private church
schools except in a few special cases. Other countries (e.g., France)
maintain school systems basically free of religion and leave the
religious instruction to the private undertakings of the different
churches. In the American Revolution the concept of the separation of
state and church was intended to free the church from all patronization
by the state and to make possible a maximum of free activity,
particularly in the area of education. The Soviet Union used its schools
particularly for an anti-religious education based upon the state
philosophy of dialectical materialism, practicing the constitutionally
guaranteed freedom of anti-religious propaganda in schools, though the
churches were forbidden to give any education outside their worship
services.
A second issue that results from the separation of church and state
is the question of state subsidies to private church schools. These are
claimed in those countries in which the church schools in many places
take over part of the functions of the state schools (e.g., in the
United States). After the ideological positivism and the materialism of
the 19th century faded away in many areas, it was realized that
religious life had an important role in the cultural development of the
West and the New World and that the exclusion of religious instruction
from the curricula of the schools indicated a lack of balance in
education. In the 20th century religion was adopted as a subject among
the humanities. State universities in the United States, Canada, and
Australia, which did not have theological faculties because of the
separation of church and state, founded departments of religion of an
interdenominational nature and included non-Christians as academic
teachers of religion.
Another development in the history of Christian education was the
founding of universities. The origins of the university can be traced to
the 12th century, and by the 13th century the medieval university had
reached its mature form. Universities were founded during the rest of
the Middle Ages throughout Europe and spread from there to other
continents after the 16th century. The earliest universities emerged as
associations of masters or students (the Latin universitas means guild
or union) that were dedicated to the pursuit of higher learning. The
universities, which superseded the cathedral schools as centres of
advanced study, came to have a number of shared traits: the teaching
methods of lecture and disputation, the extended communal living in
colleges, the periodically changing leadership of an elected dean, the
inner structure according to faculties or “nations,” and the European
recognition of academic degrees. Universities provided instruction in
the liberal arts and advanced study in the disciplines of law, medicine,
and, most importantly, theology. Many of the great theologians of the
era, notably, Thomas Aquinas, were associated with the universities.
The advent of humanism and the Reformation, as well as the reforms
initiated by some university faculty, created a new situation for all
systems of education, especially the universities. Humanists demanded
plans to provide designated places for free research in academies that
were princely or private institutions and, as such, not controlled by
the church. On the other hand, Protestant states and principalities
founded new universities, such as Marburg in 1527, Königsberg in 1544,
and Jena in 1558. As a counteraction, the Jesuits took over the
leadership in the older universities that had remained Roman Catholic or
else founded new ones in Europe and overseas.
In areas of missionary work, Christian education has had a twofold
task. First, its function was to lay an educational foundation for
evangelization of non-Christian peoples by forming a system of education
for all levels from grammar school to university. Second, its function
was to take care of the education of European settlers. To a large
extent the European colonial powers had left the formation of an
educational system in their colonies or dominions to the churches. In
the Spanish colonial regions in America, Roman Catholic universities
were founded very early (e.g., Santo Domingo in 1538, Mexico and Lima in
1551, Guatemala in 1562, and Bogotá in 1573). In China, Jesuit
missionaries acted mainly as agents of European education and culture
(e.g., astronomy, mathematics, and technology) in their positions as
civil servants of the court.
Since the 18th century, the activities of competing Christian
denominations in mission areas has led to an intensification of the
Christian system of education in Asia and Africa. Even where the African
and Asian states have their own system of schools and universities,
Christian educational institutions have performed a significant function
(St. Xavier University in Bombay and Sophia University in Tokyo are
Jesuit foundations; Dōshisha University in Kyōto is a Japanese
Presbyterian foundation).
In North America, Christian education took a different course. From
the beginning, the churches took over the creation of general
educational institutions, and various denominations did pioneer work in
the field of education. In the English colonies, later the United
States, the denominations founded theological colleges for the purpose
of educating their ministers and established universities dealing with
all major disciplines, including theology, often emphasizing a
denominational slant. Harvard University was founded in 1636 and Yale
University in 1701 as Congregational establishments, and the College of
William and Mary was established in 1693 as an Anglican institution.
They were followed during the 19th century by other Protestant
universities (e.g., Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas) and
colleges (e.g., Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois) and by Roman
Catholic universities (e.g., the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame,
Indiana) and colleges (e.g., Boston College, Chestnut Hill,
Massachusetts). In addition, many private universities were based upon a
Christian idea of education according to the wishes of their founders.
Christian education has been undertaken in a variety of forms. The
system of Sunday schools is nearly universal in all denominations.
Confirmation instruction is more specialized, serving different tasks,
such as preparation of the children for confirmation, their conscious
acknowledgment of the Christian ethic, of the Christian confessions, of
the meaning of the sacraments, and of the special forms of
congregational life.
Ernst Wilhelm Benz
Carter H. Lindberg
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and minorities
The tendency to develop an identifiable Christian culture is apparent
even when Christians live in an environment that has been shaped and is
characterized by a non-Christian religion. This is the case with most
Christian churches in Asia and Africa.
In some countries Christian minorities have had to struggle for their
existence and recognition, at times in the face of persecution. In some
cases, however, the situation of Christian minorities is ideally suited
to demonstrate to outsiders the peculiar style of life of a Christian
culture. This is particularly advantageous for the church within a caste
state, in which the church itself has developed into a caste, with
special extrinsic characteristics in clothing and customs (e.g., the Mar
Thoma Church of South India).
A special problem presents itself through the coexistence of racially
different Christian cultures in racially mixed states. The influence of
the Christian black churches, especially of Baptist denominations, has
been thoroughly imprinted upon the culture of North American blacks. The
churches themselves were founded through the missionary work of white
Baptist churches but became independent or were established as
autonomous churches within the framework of the Baptist denomination. A
similar situation exists in South Africa, where white congregations and
separate black congregations were established within the white mission
churches.
The Christian church has always urged the overcoming of racism, even
though it has generally compromised with prevailing societal values. In
the early church, racism was unknown; the Jewish synagogues allowed
black proselytes. The first Jewish proselyte mentioned in the Acts of
the Apostles was a governmental administrator from Ethiopia, who was
baptized by the apostle Philip. Likewise, the early congregations in
Alexandria included many black Africans. Among the evangelizing
churches, the Portuguese Catholic mission in principle did not recognize
differences between races—whoever was baptized became a “human being”
and became a member not only of the Christian congregation but also of
the Christian society and was allowed to marry another Christian of any
race. In contrast to this practice, the Catholic mission of the
Spaniards introduced the separation of races under the term casticismo
(purity of the Castilian heritage) in the American mission regions and
sometimes restricted marriage between Castilian Spanish immigrants and
native Christians. Like the Portuguese in Africa and Brazil, the French
Catholic mission in Canada and in the regions around the Great Lakes in
North America did not prohibit marriage of whites with Indians but
tolerated and even encouraged it during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Consequently, the Christian churches both led and thwarted endeavours
for racial integration. An ideologically and politically founded racial
theory was introduced into black churches in the United States in the
second half of the 20th century. The demand for a black theology with a
black Christ in its centre has been made and, just as much as a
theologically and ideologically founded racial theory on the part of
whites, aggravated the specifically Christian task of racial integration
within the church.
The promise of late 20th-century liberation theologies such as black
theology and feminist theology is that of expanding awareness of the
history and praxis of Christianity beyond the history of doctrines, the
ideas of the elite, and the institutions that convey these ideas. Such
reflection—which arises out of lived situations—reveals roles of the
poor, the oppressed, and women that have too often been ignored and
suppressed. These new orientations serve the church and the world not
only by recalling hitherto unnoticed aspects of the past but also by
strengthening peoples’ awareness of their own causes.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and family
The Christian understanding of sexuality, marriage, and family has been
strongly influenced by the Old Testament view of marriage as an
institution primarily concerned with the establishment of a family,
rather than sustaining the individual happiness of the marriage
partners. In spite of this, a transformation occurred from the early
days of Christianity. This transformation is evident in the New
Testament departure from the Hellenistic understanding of love. The
classical understanding of love, expressed in the Platonic concept of
eros, was opposed in the Christian community by the biblical
understanding of love, agape. Although erotic love has frequently been
understood primarily as sexual desire and passion, its classical
religious and philosophical meaning was the idealistic desire to acquire
the highest spiritual and intellectual good. The early Christian
perception of eros as the most sublime form of egocentricity and
self-assertion, the drive to acquire the divine itself, is reflected in
the fact that the Greek New Testament does not use the word erōs but
rather the relatively rare word agapē. Agapē was translated into Latin
as caritas and thus appears in English as “charity” and “love.” The
Christian concept of love understood human mutuality and reciprocity
within the context of God’s self-giving love, which creates value in the
person loved. “We love, because he first loved us. If any one says, ‘I
love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love
his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And
this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his
brother also” (1 John 4:19–21). Love is presented as the greatest of the
virtues (1 Corinthians 13:13) as well as a commandment. The Christian
community understood faith active in love primarily in terms of
voluntary obedience rather than emotion and applied this understanding
to every aspect of life, including sexuality, marriage, and family.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and family » The tendency to spiritualize and
individualize marriage
Christianity has contributed to a spiritualization of marriage and
family life, to a deepening of the relations between marriage partners
and between parents and children. During the first decades of the
church, congregational meetings took place in the homes of Christian
families. The family, indeed, became the archetype of the church. Paul
called the members of his congregation in Ephesus “members of the
household of God” (Ephesians 2:19). In the early church, children were
included in this fellowship. They were baptized when their parents were
baptized, took part in the worship life of the congregation, and
received Holy Communion with their parents. The Eastern Orthodox Church
still practices as part of the eucharistic rite Jesus’ teaching, “Let
the children come to me, and do not hinder them.”
In the early church the Christian foundation of marriage—in the
participation of Christians in the body of Christ—postulated a generous
interpretation of the fellowship between a Christian and a pagan
marriage partner: the pagan one is saved with the Christian one “for the
unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife, and the unbelieving
wife is consecrated through her husband”; even the children from such a
marriage in which at least one partner belongs to the body of Christ
“are holy” (1 Corinthians 7:14). If the pagan partner, however, does not
want to sustain the marriage relationship with a Christian partner under
any circumstances, the Christian partner should grant the spouse a
divorce.
Jesus himself based his parables of the Kingdom of God on the idea of
love between a bride and groom and frequently used parables that
describe the messianic meal as a wedding feast. In Revelation the
glorious finale of salvation history is depicted as the wedding of the
Lamb with the bride, as the beginning of the meal of the chosen ones
with the Messiah–Son of Man (Revelation 19:9: “Blessed are those who are
invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb”). The wedding character of
the eucharistic meal is also expressed in the liturgy of the early
church. It is deepened through the specifically Christian belief that
understands the word of the creation story in Genesis “and they become
one flesh” as indicative of the oneness of Christ, the head, with the
congregation as his body. With this in mind the Christian demand of
monogamy becomes understandable.
Christianity did not bring revolutionary social change to the
position of women, but it made possible a new position in the family and
congregation. In the ancient Mediterranean world, women were often held
in low esteem, and this was the basis for divorce practices that put
women practically at men’s complete disposal. By preaching to women and
prohibiting divorce, Jesus himself did away with this low estimation of
women. The decisive turning point came in connection with the
understanding of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. In fulfillment of the
prophecy in Joel 2:28—according to Peter in his sermon on Pentecost
(Acts 2:17)—the Holy Spirit was poured out over the female disciples of
Jesus, as well.
This created a complete change in the position of women in the
congregation: in the synagogue the women were inactive participants in
the worship service and sat veiled on the women’s side, usually
separated from the rest by an opaque lattice. In the Christian
congregation, however, women appeared as members with full rights, who
used their charismatic gifts within the congregation. In the letters of
Paul, women are mentioned as Christians of full value. Paul addresses
Prisca (Priscilla) in Romans 16:3 as his fellow worker. The four
daughters of Philip were active as prophets in the congregation. Pagan
critics of the church, such as Porphyry (c. 234–c. 305), maintained that
the church was ruled by women. During the periods of Christian
persecution, women as well as men showed great courage in their
suffering. The fact that they were honoured as martyrs demonstrates
their well-known active roles in the congregations.
The attitude toward women in the early church, however, was
ambivalent at best. Paul, on the one hand, included women in his
instruction, “Do not quench the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19), but, on
the other hand, carried over the rule of the synagogue into the
Christian congregation that “women should keep silence in the churches”
(1 Corinthians 14:34). Although women were respected for their piety and
could hold the office of deaconess, they were excluded from the
priesthood. In the early 21st century the Roman Catholic Church still
refused to ordain women as priests.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and family » The tendency toward asceticism
The proponents of an ascetic theology demanded exclusiveness of devotion
by faithful Christians to Christ and deduced from it the demand of
celibacy. This is found in arguments for the monastic life and in the
Roman Catholic view of the priesthood. The radical-ascetic
interpretation stands in constant tension with the positive
understanding of Christian marriage. This tension has led to seemingly
unsolvable conflicts and to numerous compromises in the history of
Christianity.
In the light of the beginning Kingdom of God, marriage was understood
as an order of the passing eon, which would not exist in the approaching
new age. The risen ones will “neither marry nor are given in marriage,
but are like angels in heaven” (Mark 12:25). Similarly, Paul understood
marriage in the light of the coming Kingdom of God: “The appointed time
has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as
though they had none…for the form of this world is passing away” (1
Corinthians 7:29–31). In view of the proximity of the Kingdom of God, it
was considered not worthwhile to marry; and marriage was seen to involve
unnecessary troubles: “I want you to be free from anxieties” (1
Corinthians 7:32). Therefore, the unmarried, the widowers, and widows
“do better” if they do not marry, if they remain single. But according
to this point of view marriage was recommended to those who “cannot
exercise self-control…for it is better to marry than to be aflame with
passion” (1 Corinthians 7:9). With the waning of the eschatological
expectation that formed the original context for the Pauline views on
marriage, his writings were interpreted ascetically. While these texts
have been used alone in the course of church history, however, they do
not stand alone in the New Testament, which also portrays marriage
feasts as joyous occasions and sexual intercourse between spouses as
good and holy (Ephesians 5:25–33).
By the 3rd century various Gnostic groups and the Manichaeans
(members of an Iranian dualistic religion) had come to reject sex. At
the council of Elvira, in 300–303 or 309, the first decrees establishing
clerical celibacy were pronounced, and in the 3rd and 4th centuries
prominent Christians such as Anthony, Ambrose, and Jerome adopted
chastity. The celibate lifestyle came to be regarded as a purer and more
spiritual way of life. Gradually, celibacy came to be expected not only
of ascetics and monks but also for all members of the clergy, as a
function of their office.
The Reformation rejected clerical celibacy because it contravened the
divine order of marriage and the family, and denied the goodness of
sexuality. Luther viewed marriage as not merely the legitimation of
sexual fulfillment but as above all the context for creating a new
awareness of human community through the mutuality and companionship of
spouses and family. The demand that priests observe celibacy was not
fully accepted in the East. The early church, and following it the
Eastern Orthodox Church, decided on a compromise at the Council of
Nicaea (325): the lower clergy, including the archimandrite, would be
allowed to enter matrimony before receiving the higher degrees of
ordination; of the higher clergy—i.e., bishops—celibacy would be
demanded. This solution has saved the Eastern Orthodox from a permanent
fight for the demand of celibacy for all clergymen, but it has resulted
in a grave separation of the clergy into a white (celibate) and a black
(married) clergy, which led to severe disagreements in times of crisis
within Orthodoxy.
The early Christian community’s attitude to birth control was formed
partly in reaction against sexual exploitation and infanticide and
partly against the Gnostic denigration of the material world and
consequent hostility to procreation. In upholding its faith in the
goodness of creation, sexuality, marriage, and family, the early church
was also influenced by the prevalent Stoic philosophy, which emphasized
procreation as the rational purpose in marriage.
In the 20th century the question of birth control entered a new phase
with the invention and mass distribution of mechanical contraceptive
devices on the one hand and through the appearance of a new attitude
toward sexual questions on the other. The various Christian churches
responded to this development in different ways: with a few
exceptions—e.g., the Mormons—the Protestant churches accepted birth
control in terms of a Christian social ethic. In contrast, the Roman
Catholic Church, in the encyclical of Pius XI Casti Connubii (1930; “On
Christian Marriage”) and in the encyclical of Paul VI Humanae Vitae
(1968; “On Human Life”), completely rejected any kind of contraception,
a position confirmed by Paul’s successors as pope in the late 20th and
early 21st centuries. Modern economic and population concerns in
connection with improved medical care and social and technological
progress have once again confronted the Christian community with the
issue of contraception.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and the individual » Love as the basis for
Christian ethics
The main commandment of the Christian ethic was derived from the Old
Testament: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus
19:18), but Jesus filled this commandment with a new, twofold meaning.
First, he closely connected the commandment “love your neighbour” with
the commandment to love God. In the dispute with the scribes described
in Matthew, chapter 22, he quoted Deuteronomy 6:5, “You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all
your might.” He spoke of the commandment of love for neighbour, however,
as being equal to it. With that he lifted it to the same level as the
highest and greatest commandment, the commandment to love God. In The
Gospel According to Luke, both commandments have grown together into one
single pronouncement with the addition: “Do this, and you will live.”
Second, the commandment received a new content in view of God and in
view of the neighbour through the relationship of the believer with
Christ. Love of God and love of the neighbour is possible because the
Son proclaims the Gospel of the Father and brings to it reality and
credibility through his life, death, and Resurrection. Based on this
connection of the Christian commandment of love with the understanding
of Christ’s person and work, the demand of love for the neighbour
appears as a new commandment: “A new commandment I give to you, that you
love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one
another” (John 13:34). The love for each other is supposed to
characterize the disciples: “By this all men will know that you are my
disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
This is based on an understanding and treatment of human beings as
created in the image of God. Furthermore, the ethic does not deal with
humanity in an abstract sense but with the actual neighbour. The
Christian ethic understands the individual always as a neighbour in
Christ.
The new element of the Christian ethic is the founding of the
individual ethic in a corporate ethic, in the understanding of the
fellowship of Christians as the body of Christ. The individual believer
is not understood as a separate individual who has found a new spiritual
and moral relationship with God but as a “living stone” (1 Peter 2:4),
as a living cell in the body of Christ in which the powers of the
Kingdom of God are already working.
Christian love leads to the peculiar exchange of gifts and suffering,
of exaltation and humiliations, of defeat and victory; the individual is
able through personal sacrifice and suffering to contribute to the
development of the whole. All forms of ecclesiastical, political, and
social communities of Christianity are founded on this basic idea of the
fellowship of believers as the body of Christ. It also has influenced
numerous secularized forms of Christian society, even among those that
have forgotten or denied their Christian origins.
From the beginning, the commandment contains a certain tension
concerning the answer to the question: Does it refer only to fellow
Christians or to “all”? The practice of love of neighbour within the
inner circle of the disciples was a conspicuous characteristic of the
young church. In Christian congregations and, above all, in small
fellowships and sects throughout the centuries, love of the neighbour
was highly developed in terms of personal pastoral care, social welfare,
and help in all situations of life.
The Christian commandment of love, however, has never been limited to
fellow Christians. On the contrary, the Christian ethic crossed all
social and religious barriers and saw a neighbour in every suffering
human being. Characteristically, Jesus himself explicated his
understanding of the commandment of love in the parable of the Good
Samaritan, who followed the commandment of love and helped a person in
need whom a priest and a Levite had chosen to ignore (Luke 10:29–37). A
demand in the Letter of James, that the “royal law” of neighbourly love
has to be fulfilled without “partiality” (James 2:9), points to its
universal validity.
The universalism of the Christian command to love is most strongly
expressed in its demand to love one’s enemies. Jesus himself emphasized
this with these words: “Love your enemies and pray for those who
persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven;
for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on
the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:44–45). According to this
understanding, love of the enemy is the immediate emission of God’s
love, which includes God’s friends and God’s enemies.
The Christian community and the world » The relationships of
Christianity » Church and the individual » Freedom and responsibility
The Reformation revitalized a personal sense of Christian responsibility
by anchoring it in the free forgiveness of sins. Luther summarized this
in “The Freedom of a Christian Man” (1520): “A Christian is a perfectly
free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful
servant of all, subject to all.” The second sentence expressed the theme
of Christian vocation developed by Luther and Calvin, which they applied
to all Christians and to everyday responsibility for the neighbour and
for the world. The Reformers emphasized that Christian service is not
limited to a narrow religious sphere of life but extends to the everyday
relationships of family, marriage, work, and politics.
Later Protestantism under the influence of Pietism and Romanticism
restricted the social and communal orientation of the Reformers to a
more individualistic orientation. This met, however, with an energetic
counterattack from the circles of the Free churches (e.g., Baptists and
Methodists) who supported the social task of Christian ethic (mainly
through the Social Gospel of the American theologian Walter
Rauschenbusch, who attempted to change social institutions and bring
about a Kingdom of God), which spread through the whole church,
penetrating the area of Christian mission. Love rooted in faith played
an important role in the 20th century in the struggle between
Christianity and ideologies such as Fascism, Communism, and jingoistic
nationalisms.
Ernst Wilhelm Benz
Carter H. Lindberg
The Christian community and the world » Christian missions
In the early 21st century, about one-third of the world’s people claimed
the Christian faith. Christians thus constituted the world’s largest
religious community and embraced remarkable diversity, with churches in
every nation. Christianity’s demographic and dynamic centre had shifted
from its Western base to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific
region, where more than half the world’s Christians lived. This trend
steadily accelerated as the church declined in Europe. The global extent
of Christianity represented a new phenomenon in the history of
religions. This was the fruit of mission.
The Christian community and the world » Christian missions » Biblical
foundations
The word mission (Latin: missio), as a translation of the Greek
apostolē, “a sending,” appears only once in the English New Testament
(Galatians 2:8). An apostle (apostolos) is one commissioned and sent to
fulfill a special purpose. The roots of mission, Christians have
believed, lie in God’s active outreach to humanity in history—as a call
to those able to fulfill the divine purpose, among them Abraham, Moses,
Jonah, and Paul. The New Testament designated Jesus as God’s apostle
(Hebrews 3:1). Jesus’ prayer in The Gospel According to John includes
the words “As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them
into the world.… [I pray also] for those who believe in me through their
word, that they may all be one…so that the world may believe that thou
hast sent me” (John 17:18, 20–21). Moreover, the “Great Commission” of
Jesus declares: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo,
I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matthew 28:19–20;
compare Mark 16:15, Luke 24:47, John 20:21–22, and Acts 1:8).
The Christian community and the world » Ecumenism » The history of
ecumenism
While unity is given in Christ, two diametric forces appear in the
history of the church. One is the tendency toward sectarianism and
division; the other is the conviction toward catholicity and unity.
Ecumenism represents the struggle between them. Some of the schisms were
theological conflicts foreshadowed in the apostolic church; others were
internal quarrels related to liturgical differences, power politics
between different patriarchates or church centres, problems of
discipline and piety, or social and cultural conflicts. Nevertheless,
according to the American historian John T. McNeill, “the history of the
Christian Church from the first century to the 20th might be written in
terms of its struggle to realize ecumenical unity.”
The Christian community and the world » Ecumenism » The history of
ecumenism » Early controversies
A long and continuing trail of broken relations among Christians began
in the 2nd century when the Gnostics presented a serious doctrinal error
and broke fellowship. Quartodecimanism, a dispute over the date of
Easter, pitted Christians from Asia Minor against those from Rome.
Montanism—which taught a radical enthusiasm, the imminent Second Coming
of Christ, and a severe perfection, including abstinence from
marriage—split the church. The Novatians broke fellowship with
Christians who offered sacrifices to pagan gods during the persecutions
of the Roman emperor Decius in ad 250. In the early 4th century the
Donatists, Christians in North Africa who prided themselves as the
church of the martyrs, refused to share communion with those who had
lapsed (i.e., who had denied the faith under threat of death during the
great persecutions of Diocletian and Galerius). They remained a powerful
force in Africa into the 5th century and survived into the 7th despite
opposition from church and state. This schism—like many since—reflected
regional, national, cultural, and economic differences between the poor,
rural North African Christians and the sophisticated, urban Romans.
In each century leaders and churches sought to reconcile these
divisions and to manifest the visible unity of Christ’s church. But in
the 5th century a severe break in the unity of the church took place.
The public issues were doctrinal consensus and heresy, yet in the midst
of doctrinal controversy alienation was prompted by political, cultural,
philosophical, and linguistic differences. Tensions increased as the
church began to define the relationship between God the Father and God
the Son and later the relation between the divine and human elements in
the nature and person of Jesus Christ. The first four ecumenical
councils—at Nicaea (ad 325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), and
Chalcedon (451)—defined the consensus to be taught and believed,
articulating this faith in the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian
Definition, which stated that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God,
true man, and true God, one person in “two natures without confusion,
without change, without division, without separation.” Two groups
deviated doctrinally from the consensus developed in the councils. The
Nestorians taught that there are two distinct persons in the incarnate
Christ and two natures conjoined as one; Monophysites taught that there
is one single nature, primarily divine. Several churches refused to
accept the doctrinal and disciplinary decisions of Ephesus and Chalcedon
and formed their own communities. These churches, called
pre-Chalcedonian or Oriental Orthodox, became great missionary churches
and spread to Armenia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, Persia, and the Malabar
coast of India in isolation from other churches.
The Christian community and the world » Ecumenism » The history of
ecumenism » The schism of 1054
The greatest schism in church history occurred between the church of
Constantinople and the church of Rome. While 1054 is the symbolic date
of the separation, the agonizing division was six centuries in the
making and the result of several different issues. The Eastern Church
sharply disagreed when the Western Church introduced into the Nicene
Creed the doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds not from the Father
alone—as earlier Church Fathers taught—but from the Father and the Son
(Latin: Filioque). When the Roman Empire was divided into two zones,
Latin-speaking Rome began to claim superiority over Greek-speaking
Constantinople; disputes arose over church boundaries and control (for
example, in Illyricum and Bulgaria). Rivalry developed in Slavic regions
between Latin missionaries from the West and Byzantine missionaries from
the East, who considered this territory to be Orthodox. Disputes over
authority became even more heated in the 11th century as Rome asserted
its primacy over all churches. Lesser matters related to worship and
church discipline—for example, married clergy (Orthodox) versus celibacy
(Roman Catholic) and rules of fasting and tonsure—strained ecclesial
relations. The tensions became a schism in 1054, when the uncompromising
patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, and the uncompromising
envoys of Pope Leo IX excommunicated each other. No act of separation
was at this time considered final by either side. Total alienation came
a century and a half later, as a result of the Crusades, when Christian
knights made military campaigns to save Jerusalem and the Holy Land from
the Muslims. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade was diverted to attack and
capture Constantinople brutally. Thousands of Orthodox Christians were
murdered; churches and icons were desecrated and undying hostility
developed between East and West.
Even so, certain leaders and theologians on both sides tried to heal
the breach and reunite East and West. In 1274, at the second Council of
Lyon, agreement was reached between the two churches over several key
issues—Orthodox acceptance of papal primacy and the acceptance of the
Nicene Creed with the Filioque clause. But the agreements were only a
rushed action conditioned by political intrigue. As a result, reunion on
these terms was fiercely rejected by the clergy and laity in
Constantinople and other Orthodox provinces. A second attempt at reunion
came at the Council of Ferrara-Florence that met in Italy in 1438 and
1439. A formula of union was approved by both delegations, but later it
was rejected by rank-and-file Orthodox Christians.
The Christian community and the world » Ecumenism » The history of
ecumenism » The Reformation
The next dramatic church division took place during the Reformation in
the West in the 16th century. Like other schisms, this one does not
yield to simple analysis or explanation. The Reformation was a mixture
of theology, ecclesiology, politics, and nationalism, all of which led
to breaks in fellowship and created institutional alienation between
Christians throughout Western Christendom. In one sense it was a
separation, especially a reaction against the rigid juridical structures
of medieval Roman Catholicism and its claim to universal truth and
jurisdiction. In another sense, however, the Reformation was an
evangelical and ecumenical renewal of the church as the Body of Christ,
an attempt to return to the apostolic and patristic sources in order,
according to Calvin, “to recover the face of the ancient Catholic
Church.” All the continental Reformers sought to preserve and reclaim
the unity of the church.
Once the separation between the Roman Catholic and new Protestant
churches was complete, people on both sides tried to restore unity.
Roman Catholics such as Georg Witzel and George Cassander developed
proposals for unity, which all parties rejected. Martin Bucer,
celebrated promoter of church unity among the 16th-century leaders,
brought Martin Luther and his colleague Philipp Melanchthon into
dialogue with the Swiss Reformer Huldrych Zwingli at Marburg, Germany,
in 1529. In 1541 John Calvin (who never ceased to view the church in its
catholicity), Bucer, and Melanchthon met with Cardinal Gasparo Contarini
and other Roman Catholics at Ratisbon (now Regensburg, Germany) to
reconcile their differences on justification by faith, the Lord’s
Supper, and the papacy. Another attempt was made in 1559, when
Melanchthon and Patriarch Joasaph II of Constantinople corresponded,
with the intention of using the Augsburg Confession as the basis of
dialogue between Lutheran and Orthodox Christians. On the eve of the
French wars of religions (1561), Roman Catholics and Protestants
conferred without success in the Colloquy of Poissy. It would seem that
the ecumenical projects of theologians and princes in 16th-century
Europe failed unequivocally, but they kept alive the vision and the
hope.
The Christian community and the world » Ecumenism » The history of
ecumenism » Ecumenism in the 17th and 18th centuries
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries storms of contention and division
continued to plague the churches of Europe. During these two centuries
there was an eclipse of official, church-to-church attempts at unity.
Instead, ecumenical witness was made by individuals who courageously
spoke and acted against all odds to propose Christian unity.
In England, John Dury, a Scots Presbyterian and (later) an Anglican
minister, “a peacemaker without partiality,” traveled more extensively
than any other ecumenist before the 19th century. He negotiated for
church unity in his own country and in Sweden, Holland, France,
Switzerland, and Germany. Richard Baxter, a Presbyterian Puritan,
developed proposals for union, including his Worcestershire Association,
a local ecumenical venture uniting Presbyterians, Congregationalists,
and Anglicans.
Efforts were undertaken in Germany and Central Europe as well. The
German Lutheran George Calixtus called for a united church between
Lutherans and Reformed based on the “simplified dogmas,” such as the
Apostles’ Creed and the agreements of the church in the first five
centuries. Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf applied his Moravian piety to
the practical ways that unity might come to Christians of all
persuasions. The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz worked tirelessly
for union between Protestants and Roman Catholics, writing an apologia
interpreting Roman Catholic doctrines for Protestants. John Amos
Comenius, a Czech Brethren educator and advocate of union, produced a
plan of union for Protestants based upon the adoption of a scriptural
basis for all doctrine and polity and the integration of all human
culture.
Orthodox Christians also participated in the search for union.
Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow and the Russian Orthodox theologian
Aleksey S. Khomyakov expressed enthusiasm for ecumenism. Cyrillus
Lukaris, Orthodox patriarch of Alexandria and later of Constantinople,
took initiatives to reconcile a divided Christendom. People throughout
Europe held tenaciously to the dream of ecumenism, although no attempt
at union was successful.
The Christian community and the world » Ecumenism » The history of
ecumenism » 19th-century efforts
A worldwide movement of evangelical fervour and renewal, noted for its
emphasis on personal conversion and missionary expansion, stirred new
impulses for Christian unity in the 19th century. The rise of missionary
societies and volunteer movements in Germany, Great Britain, The
Netherlands, and the United States expressed a zeal that fed the need
for church unity. Enduring the harmful results of Christian divisions in
different countries, Protestant missionaries in India, Japan, China,
Africa, Latin America, and the United States began to cooperate.
In 1804 the British and Foreign Bible Society, an interdenominational
Protestant organization, came into existence to translate the Scriptures
into the world’s vernaculars and distribute the translations throughout
the world. This was followed, 40 years later, by the founding of two
important Christian organizations in England: the Young Men’s Christian
Association (1844) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (1855).
Their international bodies, the World Alliance of YMCAs and the World
YWCA, were established in 1855 and 1894, respectively. The Evangelical
Alliance, possibly the most significant agent of Christian unity in the
19th century, held a unique place among the volunteer associations of
the age. Founded in London in 1846 (the American section was established
in 1867), the alliance sought to draw individual Christians into
fellowship and cooperation in prayer for unity, Christian education, the
struggle for human rights, and mission.
Also pivotal in the 19th century were advocates for the visible unity
of the church. In the United States, where the most articulate
19th-century unity movements were heard, the witness to the unity and
union was led by three traditions. The Lutherans Samuel Simon Schmucker
and Philip Schaff pleaded for “catholic union on apostolic principles.”
Among Episcopalians, the visionaries for unity included Thomas Hubbard
Vail, William Augustus Muhlenberg, and William Reed Huntington, who
proposed the historic “Quadrilateral” of the Scriptures, the creeds, the
sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and episcopacy as the
keystone of unity. Thomas Campbell and his son, Alexander, and Barton
Warren Stone, members of the church of the Disciples of Christ, taught
that “the Church of Christ on earth is essentially, intentionally and
constitutionally one.” Ecumenism was enflamed in the hearts of
19th-century Christians and in the next century shaped the churches as
never before.
The Christian community and the world » Ecumenism » The history of
ecumenism » Ecumenism since the start of the 20th century
The 20th century experienced a flowering of ecumenism. Four different
strands—the international Christian movement, cooperation in world
mission, Life and Work, and Faith and Order—developed in the early
decades and, though distinctive in their emphases, later converged to
form one ecumenical movement.
The modern ecumenical era began with a worldwide movement of
Christian students, who formed national movements in Great Britain, the
United States, Germany, Scandinavia, and Asia. In 1895 the World Student
Christian Federation, the vision of American Methodist John R. Mott, was
established “to lead students to accept the Christian faith” and to
pioneer in Christian unity. The World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh
(1910) inaugurated another aspect of ecumenism by dramatizing the
necessity of unity and international cooperation in fulfilling the world
mission of the church. In 1921 the International Missionary Council
(IMC) emerged, bringing together missionary agencies of the West and of
the new Christian councils in Asia, Africa, and Latin America for joint
consultation, planning, and theological reflection. The Life and Work
movement was pledged to practical Christianity and common action by
focusing the Christian conscience on international relations and social,
industrial, and economic problems. Nathan Söderblom, Lutheran archbishop
of Uppsala, inspired world conferences on Life and Work at Stockholm
(1925) and Oxford (1937). The Faith and Order movement, which originated
in the United States, confronted the doctrinal divisions and sought to
overcome them. Charles H. Brent, an Episcopal missionary bishop in the
Philippines, was chiefly responsible for this movement, although Peter
Ainslie, of the Disciples of Christ, shared the same vision and gave
significant leadership. World conferences on Faith and Order at Lausanne
(Switzerland; 1925), Edinburgh (1937), Lund (Sweden; 1952), and Montreal
(1963) guided the process of theological consensus building among
Protestants, Orthodox, and Roman Catholics, which led to approval by the
Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches of the
historic convergence text Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (1982).
The World Council of Churches (WCC) is a privileged instrument of the
ecumenical movement. Constituted at Amsterdam in 1948, the conciliar
body includes more than 300 churches—Protestant, Anglican, and
Orthodox—which “confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour
according to the Scriptures and therefore seek to fulfill together their
common calling to the glory of the one God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit.” Its general secretaries have been among the architects of
modern ecumenism: Willem Adolph Visser ’t Hooft (The Netherlands),
Eugene Carson Blake (United States), Philip Potter (Dominica), Emilio
Castro (Uruguay), Konrad Raiser (Germany), and Samuel Kobia (Kenya). The
witness and programs of the WCC include faith and order, mission and
evangelism, refugee and relief work, interfaith dialogue, justice and
peace, theological education, and solidarity with women and the poor.
What distinguishes the WCC constituency is the forceful involvement of
Orthodox churches and churches from the developing world. Through their
active presence the WCC, and the wider ecumenical movement, has become a
genuinely international community.
Roman Catholic ecumenism received definitions and momentum at the
Second Vatican Council (Vatican II; 1962–65), under the ministries of
Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, and through the ecumenical diplomacy of
Augustin Cardinal Bea, the first president of the Secretariat for
Promoting Christian Unity. The church gave the ecumenical movement new
hope and language in the “Decree on Ecumenism” (1964), one of the
classic ecumenical teaching documents. Another result of Vatican II was
the establishment of a wide variety of international theological
dialogues, commonly known as bilateral conversations. These included
Roman Catholic bilaterals with Lutherans (1965), Orthodox (1967),
Anglicans (1967), Methodists (1967), Reformed (1970), and the Disciples
of Christ (1977). Topics identified for reconciling discussions include
baptism, the Eucharist, episcopacy and papacy, authority in the church,
and mixed marriage.
Critical to modern ecumenism is the birth of united churches, which
have reconciled formerly divided churches in a given place. In Asia and
Africa the first united churches were organized in China (1927),
Thailand (1934), Japan (1941), and the Philippines (1944). The most
heralded examples of this ecumenism are the United Church of Canada
(1925), the Church of South India (1947), and the Church of North India
(1970). Statistics of other united churches are revealing. Between 1948
and 1965, 23 churches were formed. In the period from 1965 to 1970,
unions involving two or more churches occurred in the West Indies (in
Jamaica and Grand Cayman), Ecuador, Zambia, Zaire (now the Democratic
Republic of the Congo), Pakistan, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, the
Solomon Islands, and Belgium. Strategic union conversations were
undertaken in the United States by the nine-church Consultation on
Church Union (1960) and by such uniting churches as the United Church of
Christ (1957), the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (1983), and the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (1988).
Spiritual disciplines play a key role in ecumenism, a movement
steeped in prayer for unity. During the Week of Prayer for Christian
Unity, celebrated every year (January 18–25), Christians from many
traditions engage in prayer, Bible study, worship, and fellowship in
anticipation of the unity that Christ wills.
Paul A. Crow, Jr.
The Christian community and the world » Christianity and world religions
The global spread of Christianity through the activity of European and
American churches in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries has brought it
into contact with all other existing religions. Meanwhile, since the
beginning of the 19th century, the close connection between Christian
world missions and political, economic, technical, and cultural
expansion has, at the same time, been loosened.
After World War II, the former mission churches were transformed into
independent churches in the newly autonomous Asian and African states.
The concern for a responsible cooperation of the members of Christian
minority churches and its non-Christian fellow citizens became the more
urgent with a renaissance of the Asian higher religions in numerous
Asian states.
Missionaries of Asian world religions have moved into Europe, the
Americas, and Australia. Numerous Vedanta centres have been established
to introduce Hindu teachings within the framework of the Ramakrishna and
Vivekananda missions. In 1965, the Hare Krishna movement was founded in
the United States, attracting followers to its version of Vaishnava
Hinduism. South Asian Theravada (Way of the Elders) Buddhism and the
Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) Buddhism of Japan (mainly Zen Buddhism, an
intuitive-meditative sect) began world missionary activities under the
influence of a Buddhist renaissance. This influence has penetrated
Europe and North America not so much in the form of a directly organized
mission as in the form of a spontaneously received flow of religious
ideas and methods of meditation through literature, philosophy,
psychology, and psychotherapy. As a result, Christianity in the latter
part of the 20th century found itself forced to enter into a factual
discussion with non-Christian religions.
There has also been a general transformation of religious
consciousness in the West since the middle of the 19th century. Until
about 1900, knowledge of non-Christian world religions was still the
privilege of a few specialists. During the 20th century, however, a wide
range of people studied translations of source materials from the
non-Christian religions. The dissemination of the religious art of India
and East Asia through touring exhibitions and the prominence of the
Dalai Lama as a political and religious figure have created a new
attitude toward the other religions in the broad public of Europe and
North America. In recognition of this fact, numerous Christian
institutions for the study of non-Christian religions have been founded:
e.g., in Bangalore, India; in Rangoon, Burma; in Bangkok, Thailand; in
Kyōto, Japan; and in Hong Kong, China.
The readiness of encounter or even cooperation of Christianity with
non-Christian religions is a phenomenon of modern times. Until the 18th
century, Christians showed little inclination to engage in a serious
study of other religions. Even though contacts with Islam had existed
since its founding, the first translation of the Qurʾan (the Islamic
scriptures) was issued only in 1141 in Toledo by Peter the Venerable,
abbot of Cluny. Four hundred years later, in 1542/43, Theodor
Bibliander, a theologian and successor of the Swiss Reformer Zwingli,
edited the translation of the Qurʾan by Peter the Venerable. He was
subsequently arrested, and he and his publisher could be freed only
through the intervention of Luther.
Christian exposure to Asian religions also was delayed. Although the
name Buddha is mentioned for the first time in Christian literature—and
there only once—by Clement of Alexandria about ad 200, it did not appear
again for some 1,300 years. Pali, the language of the Buddhist canon,
remained unknown in the West until the early 19th century, when the
modern Western study of Buddhism began.
The reasons for such reticence toward contact with foreign religions
were twofold: (1) The ancient church was significantly influenced by the
Jewish attitude toward contemporary pagan religions. Like Judaism, it
viewed the pagan gods as “nothings” next to the true God; they were
offsprings of human error that were considered to be identical with the
wooden, stone, or bronze images that were made by humans. (2) Besides
this, there was the tendency to identify the pagan gods as evil demonic
forces engaged in combat with the true God. The conclusion of the
history of salvation, according to the Christian understanding, was to
be a final struggle between Christ and his church on one side and
Antichrist and his minions on the other, culminating with the victory of
Christ.
The Christian community and the world » Christianity and world religions
» Conflicting Christian attitudes
The history of religion, however, continued even after Christ. During
the 3rd and 4th centuries, a new world religion appeared in the form of
Manichaeanism, which asserted itself as a superior form of Christianity
with a new universal claim of validity. The Christian Church never
acknowledged the claims of Manichaeanism but considered the religion a
Christian heresy and opposed it as such.
Christianity faced greater challenges when it encountered Islam and
the religions of East Asia. When Islam was founded in the 7th century,
it considered the revelations of the Prophet Muhammad to be superior to
those of the Old and New Testaments. Christianity also fought Islam as a
Christian heresy and saw it as the fulfillment of the eschatological
prophecies of the Apocalypse concerning the coming of the “false
prophet” (Revelation to John). The religious and political competition
between Christianity and Islam led to the Crusades, which influenced the
self-consciousness of Western Christianity in the Middle Ages and later
centuries. In China and Japan, however, missionaries saw themselves
forced into an argument with indigenous religions that could be carried
on only with intellectual weapons. The old Logos theory prevailed in a
new form founded on natural law, particularly among the Jesuit
theologians who worked at the Chinese emperor’s court in Peking (now
Beijing). The Jesuits also sought to adapt indigenous religious
traditions to Christian rituals but were forbidden from doing so by the
pope during the Chinese Rites Controversy.
Philosophical and cultural developments during the Enlightenment
brought changes in the understanding of Christianity and other world
religions. During the Enlightenment, the existence of the plurality of
world religions was recognized by the educated in Europe, partly—as in
the case of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—in
immediate connection with the theories of natural law of the Jesuit
missionaries in China. Only in the philosophy of the Enlightenment was
the demand of tolerance, which thus far in Christian Europe had been
applied solely to the followers of another Christian denomination,
extended to include the followers of different religions.
Some missionaries of the late 18th and the 19th centuries, however,
ignored this knowledge or consciously fought against it. Simple lay
Christianity of revivalist congregations demanded that a missionary
denounce all pagan “idolatry.” The spiritual and intellectual argument
with non-Christian world religions simply did not exist for this
simplified theology, and in this view a real encounter of Christianity
with world religions did not, on the whole, occur in the 18th and 19th
centuries.
Ernst Wilhelm Benz
John Hick
The Christian community and the world » Christianity and world religions
» Modern views
The 20th century experienced an explosion of publicly available
information concerning the wider religious life of humanity, as a result
of which the older Western assumption of the manifest superiority of
Christianity ceased to be plausible for many Christians. Early
20th-century thinkers such as Rudolf Otto, who saw religion throughout
the world as a response to the Holy, and Ernst Troeltsch, who showed
that, socioculturally, Christianity is one of a number of comparable
traditions, opened up new ways of regarding the other major religions.
During the 20th century, most Christians adopted one of three main
points of view. According to exclusivism, there is salvation only for
Christians. This theology underlay much of the history outlined above,
expressed both in the Roman Catholic dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus
(“outside the church no salvation”) and in the assumption of the 18th-
and 19th-century Protestant missionary movements. The exclusivist
outlook was eroded within advanced Roman Catholic thinking in the
decades leading up to the Second Vatican Council and was finally
abandoned in the council’s pronouncements. Pope John Paul II’s outreach
to the world’s religions may be seen as the practical application of the
decisions of Vatican II. Within Protestant Christianity there is no
comparable central authority, but most Protestant theologians, except
within the extreme Fundamentalist constituencies, have also moved away
from the exclusivist position.
In the 20th century many Roman Catholics and Protestants moved toward
inclusivism, the view that, although salvation is by definition
Christian, brought about by the atoning work of Christ, it is
nevertheless available in principle to all human beings, whether
Christian or not. The Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner expressed
the inclusivist view by saying that good and devout people of other
faiths may, even without knowing it, be regarded as “anonymous
Christians.” Others have expressed in different ways the thought that
non-Christians also are included within the universal scope of Christ’s
salvific work and their religions fulfilled in Christianity.
The third position, which appealed to a number of individual
theologians, was pluralism. According to this view, the great world
faiths, including Christianity, are valid spheres of a salvation that
takes characteristically different forms within each—though consisting
in each case in the transformation of human existence from
self-centredness to a new orientation toward the Divine Reality. The
other religions are not secondary contexts of Christian redemption but
independent paths of salvation. The pluralist position is controversial
in Christian theology, because it affects the ways in which the
doctrines of the person of Christ, atonement, and the Trinity are
formulated.
Christians engage in dialogue with the other major religions through
the World Council of Churches’ organization on Dialogue with People of
Living Faiths and Ideologies and through the Vatican’s Secretariat for
Non-Christians, as well as through a variety of extra-ecclesiastical
associations, such as the World Congress of Faiths. A multitude of
interreligious encounters have taken place throughout the world, many
initiated by Christian and others by non-Christian individuals and
groups.
John Hick
