EMERGENCE OF A FAITH: THE FIRST 500 YEARS — A GLOBAL HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY: VOL. 1

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. Jesus and the Kingdom of God:

The First Christians were mostly of Jewish heritage who responded to Jesus’ teachings that the Messiah had come and the kingdom of God was near. Later, Gentiles who adopted this emergent faith joined the Jews in their beliefs drawn from oral recollections and subsequent writings that recounted Jesus’ teachings. These distinctly Christian beliefs introduced three persons, Mary, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Bible and Church became mutually reinforcing authorities, complementing each other. The Messiah was God expressed in humanity. James, Peter, and Paul led the Church in Jerusalem, Northern, and Southern Turkey respectively.

2. Politics:

The center of Christianity moved from Jerusalem to Rome after the fall of the Temple in the year AD 70. It moved again to Byzantium as Rome fell in AD 410. Byzantium (Constantinople) became the New or Second Rome. The bishop of Rome came to be known as the pope and he claimed supreme authority over all other bishops based on Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi. But four other bishops resisted this claim and subsequent councils witnessed the battles among them to be the first among equals.The bishoprics of Jerusalem, Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople vied for primacy over the universal church and jostled for privileged political advantages within the Roman Empire.

3. Theology:

The need for consistent doctrines arose to counter inaccurate teachings, requiring reflection upon what was taught by Jesus and the prophets. This gave rise to the work of theology — study of the things of God — the human attempt to describe and explain doctrines (teachings). Disagreements on what it meant to be a Christian often led to charges of heresy. This prompted the Church leaders to examine the Scriptures closely and erect boundaries of orthodoxy. Doctrines were developed to answer questions about the scope and nature of the faith. Theologians emerged to articulate the unutterable majesty of God. The question of the authority to teach came to the fore. Scholarship was inescapably linked to political patronage. The events of the Four Ecumenical Councils showed how major individual and cataclysmic events shaped the political and economic structures of entire nations and vice-versa. Social changes usually followed theological pronouncements. With the establishment of institutionalized Church, there was a need for a central authority. The Emperor needed a spiritual counterpart he could trust. As the council selected its leaders, one rose to prominence — the bishop of Rome. This led to a subsequent tug-of-war between papal and conciliar powers. The councils that gave rise to the papacy found its own authority diminished when it gave the pope the power to call councils into being. The locus of power has swung between popes and councils for two thousand years.

4. Monasticism:

Christian Monasticism has its origins in the Christian East such as Egypt, Syria, and Cappadocia. Monasticism ranges from the life of the hermit, characterized by varying degrees of extreme solitude, to the life of the cenobite living in a community (a “common life”), offering a limited amount of solitude. Monasticism always entails asceticism, or the practice of disciplined self-denial. Many began in imitation of Jesus’ 40 days of physical denial in the Judean desert. Eventually, their significant contributions to education and healthcare earned them respect even among their political enemies. However, during the crusades that began in the 11thcentury, some monks became pilgrims-at-arms.

5. Missions:

The proximity of North Africa, Egypt, and Ethiopia to the Middle East made them the earliest non-European national Churches. There were winners and losers as each community of faith competed for primacy. The ‘losers’ in the theological battles founded the Syrian, Persian and Arabian Churches. They sent out missionaries and found few competitors from the ‘winners’. During the 5th century, monks and missionaries preserved the Bible in literature. In the meantime, the non-European Churches enjoyed a remarkable period of expansion as the Nestorian and Monophysite traditions reached the outer edges of non-Western civilization, to Persia, India and onto Mongolia, Siberia and eventually, China itself. The Middle East, Persia, and Arabia saw a weakening of the Church during the eve of the Islamic invasions in the 7th century.

Conclusion: A New Faith.

INTRODUCTION

In the past 2000 years of Christian history, each 500-year segment was dominated by a motif: (1) The emergence of a new faith, (2) divine authority versus human power, (3) the confluence of merchants, militants, and missionaries, and (4) the dominance of scientific and technological triumphs.

Geohistory: The Christian experience is geohistorical.[1] Although most historical accounts of Christianity trace its development from the time of Jesus, no Christian tradition from the apostolic period survived unchanged. The idea of a single authentic Church is illusory. Every Christian denomination of any tradition in existence today evolved over time as fresh insights from increasing knowledge shaped their doctrines and practices.[2] Our location in space is just as important as our position in time. Where we were born and when we came to be set and condition the range of possibilities for our experiences.[3] Hence, the writing of history will never end since the very act of such an enterprise is itself a contributing factor in the making of what becomes written history. Our participation in documenting our history contributes to the documents that make documentary history what it is. For this reason, the selection of topics to cover within the confines of a seminar manual becomes a necessary burden, which demands explanation.

Philosophy: Philosophy shapes all historical analyses. Historians cannot achieve objectivity. My interpretation of historical data is shaped by my philosophical worldview — that the Christian faith is guided by beliefs formed in conjunction with the life of the Church as it engages with the Bible.

Science: The role of science (knowledge) and its offspring, technology (craft), continue to shape the way we think of God. Important archaeological finds have added to our knowledge as well as complicated our previous assessments based on presumptions necessary to write any sort of history.

Technology: In a technologically globalized world where the electronic transmission of data and improved international travel are now possible, our perspective of the human condition has been enlarged. The Church is no longer a western invention and a gift to the east. Its beginnings are in fact, Asian and its expansion was more impressively global than we once believed. The transmission of the Gospel through translation is the signature characteristic of the Christian scriptures and has made its missional encounters so dramatically successful.

Medicine: Modern medicine reminds us of the brain’s frailty as a memory machine. We adopt the authorities of those we trust. It is in the interest of the Church to invest in confessional believers who possess the capabilities and resources to engage the philosophies and sciences that inevitably influence our confessional beliefs to secure a responsible apologetic.

My extensive travels have corrected my views on how and why the message of the Gospel was transmitted. The Word of God is itself a translation from God to humanity. Hence, the Bible must continue to be translated to be understood. From this mandate came the Great Commission, from which the idea of missions arose. Today, with technology shrinking our global village with instantaneous communications, the distinction between evangelism and missions is fast diminishing. But what is the mission of Christian missions in the first place?

The Mission of Missions

The mission mandate is to tell the world that forgiveness and life everlasting is possible. Since the scientific study of life belongs to the field of biochemistry, an interdisciplinary theological anthropology is necessary to discipline our use of jargon. Christian belief in everlasting life demands an investigation into Christian belief about all of reality. This comprehensive nature of the Christian claim lent itself to the missionary effort that defined the authentic Church. It started with the evangelistic work of Jesus, continued by his disciples in a missionary context when they went beyond Palestine, and grew in numbers under the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit.

The signal claim of Jesus is that God gave him the authority to be Lord of all there is. Apart from anything else this statement also means that Jesus claims to be the Lord of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics of the universe. This is why the emerging subfield of science and theology is fertile ground for a truly comprehensive theological account of reality — a truly grand unified theory that surpasses that of physics. Thus we see the importance of missions studies engaging with the natural sciences. Among these sciences is the field of neurobiology, a part of which examines how we think — cognition. This in turn determines what we believe.

Belief, Cognition and Faith

What enables us to believe in God? Why do humans believe? Today, cognitive scientists of religion suspect that the brain is hardwired to believe in a transcendent being (God). The question is whether this was a biologically engineered survival instinct or part of what makes us the imago Dei (image of God), now detected by neuropsychology. What is clear about the human race is our persistence to exist. The universal quest to extend our existential experience into a postmortem consciousness is the genesis of religious awareness. Thus, every religion we know of began as a quest to extend our awareness after death, i.e., the afterlife. We all want to go on living. Indeed, no theological religion (one with faith in a god) teaches that human existence is fixed and unendurable. It would not be appealing at all and will have nothing to add to this universal human quest. Such a scientific approach to religiosity ought not to take away from the mystical reality of human belief. However, the methods of scientific modular reconstruction of theories impose a self-limiting competence to the field of inquiry. This is because the natural sciences are reliant on examining what is measurable with the tools that we currently possess. Since the physical cannot by definition measure the metaphysical, no science can assess the veracity of belief. What it can do, however, is to help us avoid the pitfalls of circular reasoning and disguised irrationality or inconsistent truth claims. Thus if our brains are indeed hardwired to believe in God, it explains our persistence of belief[4] even in this technological age. While science and philosophy can explain our propensity to seek understanding from the metaphysical, it cannot explain away why this is so. Any rational explanation of cognitive belief simply affirms how natural it is to believe in a creator God who redeems.

Is the story of Christianity merely an inclusion of the outsiders of classic orthodoxy? No. Even the history of Christianity in Europe is undergoing reinterpretation with the flow of information hitherto left undiscovered or kept from scholarly access. The Second Vatican Council affected Catholic scholars everywhere, liberating them to research with modern methods of analyses, resulting in a much richer and nuanced understanding. The ecumenical movements within the church as well as Christian-Muslim dialogues opened the way for better collaboration of diverse sources. We now know a lot more about how Islam affected the empires that stood in its way, “the right path”. Thus both the historical and geographical facets of Christianity are being rewritten in our time. What made all this possible? Technology.

Whose Christianity?

The center of Christianity is shifting. In 1900, Christians accounted for 34.5% of the world’s 1.62 billion people, of which 1.5% lived in Africa and 3.7% in Asia. By 2000, while the percentage of Christians decreased to 33% of world population, 5.6% were Africans and 5.1% were Asians. During this 100-year period, the percentage of ‘Western’ Christians dropped from 94.7% to 67.9%. By 2025, less than 60% of Christians will come from the West. The trend is moving towards a truly global Christian Diaspora. However, these geohistorical statistics do not tell the entire story. Greater concentrations of believers do not influence the faith as much as how they are defined. This is because Christianity is more orthodoxic (beliefs) than it is orthopractic (practice). Unlike Judaism and Islam, where rituals are paramount, Christianity has always been a faith of the book. What the bible means matters to the Church much more than sacred writings do to other faiths. The claims of the Christian Bible engage history and science. This makes Christian theology an interdisciplinary confluence of human thought about faith in God. Theological research will be centered in the West for a very long time to come.[5] Finally, different communities come to faith in Christ with different levels of cognitive adoption. Not everyone share a common understanding of what it means to be a Christian — this is the challenge and comfort of Christianity. We are not saved by mere knowledge, yet it is knowledge of God that directs our deeds and worship. In this, the 21st century, Christianity faces the mounting challenge of having to redefine what it believes as a global Church. With the globalization of communications, it is no longer tenable to assume divergent truth claims without the risk of losing credibility, in this, the age of the brain. The neurosciences have claimed the forefront of attention and demands to be understood in the light of Christian theology. This is our history in the making.

The Second 500 Years

The years AD 500–1000 were characterized by the struggle between authority and power. Christianity was premised on the authority given to Jesus, but the church soon came to use power instead. Judaism faced anti-Semitism in the forms of persecutions, pogroms, forced conversions, expulsions, social restrictions and ghettoization, principally by Christians who were taught misinterpretations of the Bible. Unlike ancient attacks on Jews that were largely politically motivated, medieval anti-Semitism was largely theologically motivated, fueled by poor exegesis of the New Testament. The 4th century Synod of Elvira in Spain set out rulings designed to prohibit fraternization between Jews and Christians engaged in agriculture. French councils in the 5th century followed suit. With the fall of the Vandals to Justinian’s army in 533, North African Jews were forced to convert to Byzantine Christianity.[6] This led to the Dispersion of the Jews from the Mediterranean in the 6th century. By the 7th century, many Jews arrived to join existing Jewish settlements in the Arabian Peninsula that date back to the 1st century. From the 8th to the 10th centuries, Turkic Khazars converted to Judaism and Jewish kings ruled the Kingdom of Khazaria, north of the Black Sea, for 400 years. Following Charlemagne’s coronation, pressure from Christian states and the rise of Byzantine power led to the political decline of the Jews in Europe and the isolation of Judaism as a world religion.

Hinduism refers to the religions of the Hindus, a term used to describe non-Muslim Indians during the Mongolian-Islamic Mughal empire of India. Buddhism had already expanded out of India to most of Asia and into China. There it confronted the Persian Christianity of the Nestorians, and struggled to lay claim on the Middle Kingdom (China). It was during this period that Buddhism was also introduced to Japan and Chan Buddhism of China evolved to become Zen Buddhism of Japan. Islam was the fastest growing faith in the world as it spread all the way to Morocco in the west and India to the east within the century that Muhammad died — the 7th. The early split within Islam led to the different dynasties across the Islamic world. Wide and swift expansion tempered the civil war by drawing attention to new frontiers to conquer and bring to submission before Allah.

In the meantime, Christianity underwent a massive change within Europe. This was the beginning of the Medieval Age. Medieval thought is often equated with Scholasticism, the educational tradition of the Medieval Schools. This approach combines philosophical and theological speculation to attain a deeper understanding of Christian Doctrine. Its foundations may be traced back to Augustine and Boethius. In the 5th century, Augustine rejected the kind of piety that divorces faith from reason, because in every other avenue of life, we rely upon our God-given powers of reason to make decisions. To know God, as with anything else, we need to know God’s nature. Thought ought to precede belief, says Augustine, even if belief itself is nothing but to think with assent. “For it is not everyone who thinks that believes, since many think in order that they may not believe; but everyone who believes, thinks — both think in believing and believes in thinking.”[7] In the 11th century, Anselm restated Augustine’s position in his formula ‘I believe in order that I may understand’.

Boethius and his successors developed the notion of the Seven Liberal Arts as the basis for learning. It was divided into the Trivium(grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and Quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy). Later scholasticism asserted the right and duty to inquire into divine revealed truths. Reason and philosophy do not provide independent fonts of truth, but should be used as tools to understand God’s communication to us. This is part of glorifying God.

An important feature of scholasticism was the technique of the Questio (question), examining a question from different angles in the light of various authorities, analyzing it and answering the question after philosophical reflection on the revealed truths of the faith. This method also required objections to be stated and answered. The early centers of education were the monastic and cathedral schools.[8] The 9th and 10th centuries saw Europe continue to recover from the blow to civilization resulting from the Gothic and Slavic invasions. China meanwhile, celebrated with the achievements of the T’ang dynasty. However, by around the year 1000, medieval Europe produced remarkable accomplishments in architecture, literature, law and philosophy (which in those days, always included theology). The challenge to the church was the construction of a theology that was at once precise and complete, where once, simplicity and clarity was required.

Classical philosophy also influenced Jewish and Islamic thought. As the spread of Islam conquered Hellenistic lands, their interest in medical writings prompted them to translate many ancient Greek writings into Arabic (through ancient Asian Persian-Christian scholarship), among which were the works of Aristotle. The most important medieval Islamic philosophers were Ibn Sina (aka Avicenna, 980–1037) and Ibn Rushd the Commentator (aka Averroes, 1126–1198). They followed in the footsteps of the founder of Islamic philosophy, al-Farabi (870–950). Aristotelian philosophy guided Islamic thought to posit Allah as the necessary being but Neoplatonic thought offered a variety of emanations from God, which included ‘active intellect’ (an entity in the world of ideas) and ‘passive intellect’ (the individual human mind). At the University of Paris, Islamic scholars dominated the study of Aristotelian philosophy. Indeed, Averroes attracted the attention of the Dominican, Albertus Magus (1193–1280), the greatest German Medieval theologian who applied Aristotle’s work to Christian theology. Magus was also Thomas Aquinas’ teacher.

In Judaism, the two major trends of philosophical scholarship were the ‘Kabbalah’ (tradition) and the adaptation of Judaism to Greek philosophy. Kabbalah was a form of Jewish mysticism with roots in Persian thought, Neoplatonism, Neopythogoreanism, Gnosticism, Christianity and Islam. God is essentially unknowable and Jewish piety is combined with speculation (as opposed to dogmatic theology). One of its most important texts is The Book of the Pious (Sefer Hasidim), from where the contemporary term Hasidic Jew comes from. The Jewish medieval assimilation of Greek philosophy took place chiefly in Spain under Arab rule. Their most famous scholar was Moses ben Maimon, born in Cordoba, Spain. He is better known as Maimonides or Rambam (1135–1204). This same Maimonides served as physician to Sultan Saladin who sent him to treat Richard the Lion Heart after he fell deathly ill following a battle during the Third Crusade.

This age of power saw the extent to which the battle of doctrines determined the outcome of religious devotion. The rise of the institutionalized Church represented by the emergence of episcopacy and papacy set the direction for the demise of divine authority in tandem with the emergence of secular power. During this period of Christian history, the shift from moral authority to the immorality of power that led to the power of immorality, i.e., when the sacred moral authority derived from belief in God was assigned to a secular political purpose, the boundaries of right and wrong began to shift. This in turn led to the power of what was once considered immoral. An example of this was the value of life and dignity of fellow humans. The earliest Christian theology identified humanity as made and loved by God, endowed with God’s own image and destined for fellowship with the creator. With the fusion of sacred authority (Church) and secular power (State), the common purpose became nationalism (identified with racial, linguistic and socio-cultural norms). This tribal nationalization of the human race eventually justified the ill treatment of ‘others’ in the name of God. What was once condemned as evil came to be justified as spiritually necessary to maintain privileges for ‘us’.

[1] I coined this term to reflect the combined effects of geography and history.

[2] The several Jewish traditions that gave rise to the Jesus movement developed as separate congregations from the start. James, Peter and Paul had different opinions from the very start about what it meant to be the Church that Jesus founded. In essence, there never was a single unified and homogenous Christian congregation. The new movement that emerged from the trauma of the AD 70 fall of Jerusalem and dispersal of the Jews led to different Christian histories in Palestine, Syria, Roman Asia and other parts of the Roman Empire. It was only in AD 325 that some semblance of unification began to take place. Today, all four major traditions, the Eastern Orthodox, the Church of the East (Assyrian/Nestorian), the Roman Catholic, the Protestant (Evangelical) denominations, the Mar Thoma (Syrian Orthodox), Ethiopian Orthodox, Coptic, various Monophysite, and other traditions all suppose that they represent the authentic Church.

[3] If I were born and died before 1268 when spectacles were invented, my poor eyesight would have disadvantaged me significantly. However, computer screens and electric light bulbs permit me to read in less than optimum conditions. My personal geohistory conditions (even if it does not determine) my worldline, i.e., how my life maps out from birth to death in spacetime. Thus although how my life turns out may be influenced by where and when I was born, I can still make decisions that change the course of my life differently from say, a twin brother.

[4] Sociologists and anthropologists have long noted the enduring and universal religiosity of human communities.

[5] This is because you do not build the academic resources of a Union, Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge or Edinburgh simply by having a concentration of Christians. The dominance of English as the language of theology also privileges the UK and US as the geographical centers of theological scholarship.

[6] Shmuel, Ahituv, Ed. Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, (New York: Continuum, 2003), 126ff.

[7] On the Predestination of the Saints 5 (A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 5:499).

[8] By the 12th century, they had influenced the rise of universities, first in Italy, then France and later England and Scotland. The queen of the sciences (scientia means knowledge) then was theology. Philosophy was the preparation for the study of theology. With the creation of universities came the unconscious step of separating faith and knowledge. As modern schools became more secularized, faith came to be seen as the province of the Church, and knowledge as the province of the university.