Tag Archives: Christian history

Easter Meditation: Christians Grounded in Two-Thousand Years of History

 

The course of Christianity has been marked by pulsations of advance, retreat, and advance.

–Kenneth Scott Latourette, Volume I, Christianity in a Revolutionary Age

 

Christianity is a faith that is solidly grounded in history.

–Robert L. Thomas and Stanley N. Gundry, preface to The NIV Harmony of the Gospels

 

That history includes periods we’d like to forget but can’t because of their lingering influence. Reasons for the Crusades of the Middle Ages were as much economic as religious, a desire for new lands and wealth. We inherit fallout from the Crusades to this day in many of the conflicts in the Middle East.

Colonizations in the Americas evidenced the same split personality. Jamestown vied with Plymouth. Our country inherits this conflict, careening back and forth, stressing economics at one time and community in another.

Some Christians lived more closely to what Jesus taught than others. While Crusaders marched, religious orders treated the ill and destitute in Europe. As the industrial age dawned in the 1700’s, with its disregard for the vulnerable, Christians began schools for children of the poor. They fought against slavery and inhumane working conditions and crowded prisons.

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, so the saying goes. Sudden change burst on the world stage—terrorist attacks or revolutions in Arab nations. Others creep in more slowly—social changes due to increased numbers of women in the work force or new methods of birth control. In either case, knowledge of history gives us a better ability to develop reasoned and compassionate  responses to such changes.

How Did Our Exciting Story Become so Irrelevant To So Many?

 

Following is a scene from my novel A Sense of Mission. The scene follows an unsuccessful attempt to find a church home by three Christians:

We headed to a nearby Greek restaurant and took a table in the back to avoid standing out in our good clothes.

“So?” Ethan said, after we had ordered.

Matilda sighed and unfolded her napkin.

I said, “It’s amazing. All these high rises around. Lots more people, probably, than when the church was in the middle of a suburb, but the church seems to be dying.”

Matilda moved to one side to allow the server to fill her water glass. “I guess they’re doing their best to meet the needs of a changing neighborhood. Did you see the signs for two other groups that meet in the church? One Spanish, I think, not sure about the other.”

“Vietnamese,” said Ethan. “But one group seems almost totally absent, even though it’s probably the largest one in the neighborhood.”

“You mean the middle-class professionals enjoying a leisurely Sunday morning in their apartments and condos?” I asked.

“Right. How come Christians can’t seem to reach this group?”

I shrugged. “Look at the building. It fit fine with the architecture of the single-family suburb. Now it reminds me of those European cathedrals—kind of a dinosaur as far as relevance to the way people live today.”

“But why isn’t it relevant anymore?” Ethan asked. “That’s why the people don’t come now—the church doesn’t seem relevant to them. For the most part, they aren’t atheists or hostile to the church. They’re just indifferent to it. How did our exciting story become so irrelevant to so many?”

Eventually, Ethan answers his own question: “Christ isn’t tame, is he? He doesn’t wait in a box for us to open it on Sunday mornings. If you find where that Christ is, let me know. It’ll be scary, but I want that.”

Where does that Christ dwell, personified as Aslan in the Narnia tales as “not a tame lion”? What are the characteristics of a Christian gathering, or a Christian life, with that Christ at its center?

 

 

Waiting for the Alleluias

 

We did not clap during the Good Friday concert at my church last night. It was a somber concert, about grief over the loss of loved ones, but with a tinge of hope that wove a few colors though the black tapestry. We left silently and went home.

Tomorrow morning, God willing, we will enter the sanctuary, black gauze veiling the windows, as quietly as we left it on Good Friday. We will sit as the children gather around the one light in front, and the pastor will begin the story about Jesus and his death. Then suddenly (I never remember quite how), will come the cry, “He is risen!”

 

We will pull the black from the windows, the lights will come on, and the brass instruments and the violins and the organ will blaze the message, “He is risen!” and we will sing our alleluias for the first time in forty days.

For two thousand years, men and women and children have celebrated this event. It is for us, as Cardinal Donald Wuerl said yesterday on the Morning Joe television program, based on fact, the fact of redemption and sacrifice and the conquest of death and our own propensity to sin and harm our fellows.

We need Easter this year, in the midst of hate and doubt and secular power. But then, we have always needed it.

Cultural Competition

Ethnic, political, and religious differences divide much of the world today, including the United States.  Global travel and instant communication force local lifestyles and centuries-old beliefs to compete with other lifestyles and beliefs.

Travelers before the modern era took months to travel from one area to another. Most people did not travel at all or know anyone except from their local villages and most could not read. When Americans began trekking across their continent, they traveled for weeks and sometimes months. First trains and then paved roads cut the time to days. Then planes shortened trips to hours.

Today, electronic communication means that Americans can instantly touch base with others all over the world. What happens in Mumbai, India, is available immediately on a computer or a cell phone in Chicago.

We are bombarded with other cultures and belief systems. Our own local group no longer shields us. The Iron Curtain, barricading the Soviet world from the West, fell with the advent of modern communication. Radio signals could penetrate it. Now the Internet, despite the efforts of some governments to block it, reaches savvy young people in most countries of the world.

American Christians no longer inhabit a culture influenced mostly by Christian beliefs. We share space with Hinduism, Islam, atheism, and a host of other world views. How do we react to this new world where we must again compete, as the early Christians did in the days of the Roman Empire?

How did those Christians operate? They traveled the Roman world from Arabia to the British Isles, but they did not force their views. They debated in the marketplaces, and they lived as examples that drew others to their faith.

 

Remnant Religion

Christian history fascinates: all the advances and retreats, deaths and resurrections of the church over the centuries. Such understanding allows perspective in these times of waning Christian influence in the old countries of “Christendom.”

The early Jewish church became the Gentile church (championed by the missionary, Paul). Following barbarian invasions and Muslim conquests, the church split into Byzantine and Roman. The Byzantine (eastern) church at first flourished while the Roman (western) church languished in the backwaters of a primitive Europe. The Turkish Ottoman Empire eclipsed Byzantium, then came close to conquering Europe following the disastrous Crusades.

Europe and the church survived, but movements like the Renaissance stirred new thinking and brought on the Reformation. Wars for power, sometimes cloaked in religious garb, led to pietists and puritans and to the English church’s break with Rome. The resulting Christian communities fought slavery and poverty and spawned the modern missionary movement, leading to growth in non-Christendom countries of Asia and the southern hemisphere.

Today few barriers prevent anyone in this country who desires it from becoming a church member, yet many churches are dying. As happens over and over, Christians become a remnant, even as the church grows in poorer countries and in nations where Christian commitment can be dangerous.

No Religious Preference

The fastest growing religious preference today is “no preference.” Those opting out of organized religion are not necessarily antagonistic atheists. They simply view the church as irrelevant.

In some ways the church is a victim of its own success.

During Europe’s Middle Ages, alleviation of human suffering and ignorance was the responsibility of the Church. No one else was concerned with the vast majority of human society: the poor (most of the population), the sick, the abused. Kings and nobles concerned themselves with land and power. When high church officials became like their secular counterparts, monastic and other movements called a remnant back to the path of service.

Gradually, as modern states arose, the Christian conscience infiltrated the greater society. Great Britain abolished the slave trade. Governments set up schools, hospitals, orphanages, and insane asylums. Religious groups still carry on this work in less developed countries, but secular organizations, like Doctors Without Borders, have joined them.

Today, birth, marriage, and death registration are performed by the state. Only the very devout mark the births of their children in religious ceremonies. Fewer and fewer couples bother to marry, even when they have children.

Yet the needs remain, the needs that spawned the growth of Christianity centuries ago. In a rootless, alienated, angst-ridden society, Christians offer the antidotes of commitment, community, and hope. The ancient agape love of the early Christians is as much an answer to postmodern society as it was to that of the Roman Empire.

Christianity cannot be sustained by laws. It never could, and Christians put their faith in peril whenever they ally with Caesar.

Christians now must practice religion the old-fashioned way: through intentional communities of faith to carry out callings of love, discipleship, and ministry.

How Much Do We Believe In Democracy?

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton recently traveled to Paris to discuss with allies how to boost democracy in newly-liberated Libya.

The United States successfully championed democracy in Europe following World War II and in eastern Europe following the Soviet collapse of the 1990’s. Less so in Iraq and Afghanistan.

How are Christians to view democracy? Do we encourage our fellow Christians in the Middle East to support democratic movements, perhaps at cost to themselves?

Democracy is a relatively new issue. Christianity was born in a theocracy within an imperial empire, both at times hostile to the new religion. It endured barbarian invasions, feudalism, the rise of a cultural Christianity within that feudalism, and the rise of the modern European states.

In the late 1700’s, a secular state arose without a state religion, the new United States. However, most of the people within that state were at least nominal Christians, and Christians exercised great influence.

Christians came to think of the United States as a “Christian” nation. Nevertheless, it was a republic, with freedom of religion and  democratic institutions. What happens if a clear majority of Americans no longer follow Christian teachings?

Does the Christian minority have a right to try to impose their beliefs by law? If so, how are Christians different from other groups who want to impose beliefs through the state? Some Shia Muslims or Indian Hindus, for example—or Islamists in Libya?

Our kingdom is not of this world. Else, Jesus said, his followers would fight as the world’s kingdoms fight. But the first followers didn’t. Christianity advanced in those first centuries through witness, preaching, and above all forming communities of love and purpose.

Christianity’s Success: A Problem?

C.S. Lewis mentioned in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy, how his early life at a “vile” boarding school prepared him for real life. It taught him, he said, to live by hope. At school, hope of the holidays sustained him. During holidays, however, the knowledge that even the best of vacations must end, prepared him for not accepting present situations, even favorable ones, at face value.

Dark times can include seeds of victory and success may hint of struggles to come.

When Christianity at first was rejected by religious leaders and persecuted by secular ones, it grew mightily. When finally it found success and even power as it joined with worldly governments, it suffered from schisms and disharmony. Then Muslims conquered much of the lands that had spawned Christianity. Turks overthrew the last of the Byzantine Empire, and a reduced Christianity was left to the backwaters of a primitive Europe.

Christian leaders developed, and the new printing press spread their ideas. Christianity prospered, increasing the faith of many and bringing deeper understanding. Then adherents of various religious movements tied it to political alliances. Their actions contributed to a lessening of Christian influence and to the rationalism of the eighteenth century in the Western world.

Christianity revived in the nineteenth century and became even more influential, leading directly or indirectly to the abolishment of slavery, the improvement of women’s status, and various programs to alleviate the sufferings of the poor.

It was popular to be a Christian, and Christianity was carried to vast reaches of the world as Europe and America, the “West,” became dominant.

Now we are inheritors of that time and are surprised to find that Christianity has lost its primary position in the West. In truth, Christianity is always carried out by a remnant living within the world. When the influence of that remnant is great, Christian principles weave into our laws and our ways of life. Success, however, brings the temptation to ally with Caesar and Mammon— power and wealth. That alliance may injure us. We must again earn the right to be taken seriously.

 

Abide or Dominate?

When we Christians tie ourselves to any other than Jesus, the church suffers. When we tie ourselves, like so much of the world, to power and wealth and domination, Christianity suffers. Some force— the barbarian invasions of late antiquity, Muslims, Turks, the Enlightenment, and now, the “new atheism”—arises to contend with us and turn us into a remnant.

Jesus didn’t play power politics. He accepted death rather than raise an army and become another Caesar. When he made that final decision to die rather than do so, he told his disciples, “Abide in me.”
Christianity over the centuries has waxed and waned according to how seriously his followers have done that.