4. THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM

FOUNDING ELEMENTS

Jesus the mystic ... and teacher of life

Christianity as Jesus's ministry ... plus
        adaptations from Western culture

Jesus is one whose life is shrouded in mystery – great mystery – as is befitting one whom millions of people have attested through the ages to be the living Christ, the Son of God. Jesus is a figure that is almost impossible to pin down historically.  It is faith – not facts – that seems to define him as a historical personage.  True, we do have the accounts of his brief (3 year?) ministry contained in the 4 gospels.  But these appear to be more the testimonies of faith about his very nature or being than true "history" as we think of it today.  The apostle Paul, whose Christian writings seem to be the earliest we have on record, was almost totally silent about the actual life of Jesus.  Also, little attention to or understanding of him was made by the larger Roman world until centuries after Jesus had come and gone. We have virtually no "facts" about Jesus that stand apart from the testimonies of his own faithful followers and their disciples.  But certainly something did happen that caused a group of most common folk to become most uncommon in their awesome and fearless support of Jesus's Messianic and Divine claim.  These people were willing to brave cruel rejection, pain, even death so firm was their belief in the truth of their claims about Jesus.  This is faith speaking – not science.  Yet faith comes to truth in its own way and in the end may be the most valid claim for truth of all.

Jesus was a teacher, a mystic in fact, who summed up or "completed" the "Axial Age" of Israel, Greece and Rome ... especially the mystical side of the equation. He was a moralist like Socrates in that he understood that good works were a vital part of a happy or successful life.  But he went beyond that – way beyond that, in fact – in explaining how ordinary people, all of whom struggle with human sin and weakness, can achieve such success.  He saw man as caught up in the middle of a great cosmic battle between good and evil, in which the larger purpose of human life was to join with the forces of good in that cosmic struggle against evil.  But he also understood that the ability to carry out this great moral assignment occurs only with the help of heaven itself ... by us forming some kind of personal union with the very power of heaven – or as most of the Jews of his time understood things, the very power of God himself.  God as Abba  But according to Jesus, this God was not some fearsome cosmic giant who needed to be appeased by sacrifices and self abasement.  This God was to be understood as a great Father, a Father that children would even call "Daddy" – the literal meaning of "Abba" which he used constantly in reference to God – an Abba of passionate love for his children, an Abba willing to bend over backwards to help his children (any and all who would look to him indeed as Abba and thus would qualify as his children or "sons" and "daughters" of God.) Properly religious Jews of Jesus's day were scandalized that he would bring God down from heights of power to place him alongside us as Abba; they also were shocked at the implications of this use of the term "Abba," for this would put us in the position of being sons and daughters of the Most High God.  This was blasphemous to the ears of a "righteous" Jew.   In the end their shock was what enabled them morally to have Jesus put to death on a Roman cross, unwittingly serving as the last grand act of atonement before God – payment for human sin, then, now and forever. Human empowerment with God's own Spirit Jesus preached what was basically a mystical union between man and God in which we brought to the struggles of life our good intentions ... and God delivered to us his very own power (his Spirit ... the "Holy Spirit") to enable us to refine (or even alter drastically) those good intentions (tainted with sinful self promotion) ... so that we should then live only by God's perfect intentions.  As we found "oneness" with him, in and through his power, our lives would move forward victoriously in this cosmic struggle against evil ... evil mostly of our own doing. Our human powers in this struggle were not unimportant.  But they also were not the critical factor in the struggle – because victory in this struggle belonged not to the most powerful of people, but to the ones – whatever their background, accomplishments, their status – willing to bring themselves to full union with God simply through their trust or faith in him as Abba. Children even qualified.  In fact Jesus pointed out that children's very simplicity in the way they approached life better qualified them for entry into Heaven – into the midst of the cosmic company joined with God in the struggle.   Indeed, the rich and the "accomplished" of this world would sadly have the greatest difficulty in finding their way into this cosmic company ... simply because in this struggle they would want to rely on their own achievements or powers rather than on the powers of God – something or someone they could not control and thus were not likely to trust.  And without that faith based trust in God and his fatherly care or provision ("Providence"), they would never see victory.

Judaism, Greek, and Roman Cultures meet in Christianity In truth, Christianity – the formal religion that became the foundation of Western Civilization – is not just formed from the teachings and behavior of Jesus ... but is a mix of several cultural additives which shaped the way Jesus's teachings and living example became interpreted and understood in the context of the surrounding cultural environment. The Jewish component in Christianity The Christian world view originated from a Jewish world view which was not only theistic, with a single God as creator and mover and judge of the world and all the heavens, but was uniquely theistic in the way God was viewed as loving, forgiving and forever optimistic about man's ability to work with him in shaping the destiny of the world (despite man's tendency to fall into sinful self preoccupation).   The Messiah or Christ.  Originally Christianity was understood to be a part of, or at least an offshoot of, Judaism. The Jews had been promised by their prophets that God would be sending them a liberator, a redeemer, a savior ... an "Anointed One," (Hebrew: "Messiah" / Greek: "Christ").  But Christianity departed from Judaism in the way Christianity interpreted that Messianic mission.  The Jews were looking more for a military messiah, on the order of King David, to overthrow the Roman Empire and establish a Jewish dominion in its place. Jesus, however, came more in the order of one of the prophets – a man wielding truth rather than destruction.  Thus he was too much the teacher or philosopher for most Jewish tastes.  Consequently, most of the Jews rejected him as Messiah.  However, many did accept him ... as he definitely fit the description of Messiah if the term were understood spiritually or mystically rather than materially or militarily.   Ultimately those who did accept Jesus's mission saw in him the very expression of both what Jewish scriptures described as the way the perfect man ought to be (thus Jesus was "Son of Man") and in Jesus what the Jewish understanding of God himself ought properly to be (thus Jesus was "Son of God").   In Jesus, man and God met in a perfect union. The atoning sacrifice for our sins.  And in even in his death, Jesus brought forth a concept key to both Judaism and Christianity:  the idea of the atoning sacrifice.  Jews understood keenly the problem that someone's sin posed, separating a person from God as sin always does.  Sin was a constant human problem because man's selfishness and arrogance were instinctive to his nature and a barrier to the relationship with God that God had the right to expect of his people.  This problem of human sin was long standing, dating back to the very beginning of the Jewish narrative, when Adam and Eve foolishly disobeyed God and brought a permanent stain of sin on all mankind, forever.  The Jews attempted to address this issue with both life lived rigorously under the discipline of the Jewish law – and with their inescapable sins (no matter how minor) being "paid for" through an annual act of atonement ... the spilling of blood (or the transfer of such sin to a scapegoat) to wash clean those sins accumulated by the Jews over the previous year. The Christians made the amazing proposal that in Jesus, who  –  as God incarnate himself  –  had spilled his blood and offered up his death on the Roman cross, that act of blood atonement had been perfected so that it was good for all sins, for all people, and for all times ... provided that a person acknowledged Jesus indeed as his or her personal Savior and his death on the cross as the sufficient atonement for their sins, then and forever. Jews would understand the implications of this claim ... and either accept it or reject it – passionately. The Greek component There was also a strong Greek philosophical component that grew with the subsequent development of Christianity.  Christianity moved easily into the Greek mystical camp. The teachings of Plato (or a derivative version of them we know as "Neo-Platonism") and the general interest in the Greek philosophical world with the higher or perfect realm of the Ideal (or the Logos) from which imperfect worldly things were derived played big in the early development of Christian theology.  The claim that Jesus was himself the Logos, come to earth to show the way to the perfect world of Heaven or God, would be a claim that the Greek world could easily understand ... even if they did not agree with the claim (though many did). The Roman component But there was also a strong Roman element that got absorbed into early Christianity.  At a time (the first few centuries after Christ) when the traditional Roman pagan moral ethical order was sadly crumbling, Christianity was able to offer comfort and strength to the personal moral ethical sense of order that was so dear to the Roman heart. And when the Romans decided to stop trying to destroy the Christian faith as a threat to the old decaying moral order (and indeed it was) and instead to make it the new moral ethical underpinning of the struggling Roman Imperial order, they changed Christianity from being largely personal and local in character to being a massive religious order, under Roman ecclesiastical law and ecclesiastical organization mirroring the administrative structure that underpinned the Empire's political order.   In short, as Christianity became as extensive in its reach as the Roman Empire itself, and thus "Catholic" (meaning "universal"), it also got "Romanized," … becoming very Roman – and thus "Roman Catholic" in the powers of its governing structure (popes, archbishops, bishops and priests). Would Jesus and the early Christians have approved of this development?  Many would eventually (centuries later, in the 1500s and 1600s) protest clearly that the answer would definitely have to be a resounding "no" ... that the faith had wandered far from its spiritual roots … as revealed by a clear reading of the Bible (at that point widely and easily available thanks to the newly invented printing press).  They demanded that the Christian "order" of the day be put under much-needed serious reform, in order to bring it back to its original or Biblical character.  Thus the "Protestant Reformation." Sadly, bloody wars (1500s and 1600s) would break out over this question ... which would end up doing nothing very lifting for the legacy of the Christianity that Jesus himself had originally laid out.

Go on to the next section:  Jesus - The Christ