Christianity

Following my reading of The Story of Christianity, vol. 1, by Justo Gonzalez (San Francisco: Harper, 1984), I feel compelled to make the case briefly that the Christian faith is not a “white man’s religion”, as has often been charged. It was birthed in the Middle East and not in Europe. Before the spread of the Christian faith into the West, its strength of paganism rivaled that in the East.

In many places this paganism survived alongside of or syncretistically with the Christian religion. Yet it seems that one of the peculiar aspects of Christianity in Europe and Asia is the difficulty of naming a truly indigenous church. Surely there must have been regional or tribal aspects of community worship in the early days, but nothing much survived after officialdom but a normed church culture. Worship in many places became a contrivance that carried little relevance in daily life for many.

If I have bashed the councils following Nicea, there is one good thing we may say of it. While the marriage of church and state had a corrupting influence on both, that first council called by Constantine left us a summation of what the churches had always believed up to that point. The council did not create new beliefs; it merely strained out what had been believed for over 300 years. When Paul told Timothy not to forget the traditions he had learned, it seems doubtful that he referred to a set of rituals. Rituals are culture dependent. More likely, Paul referred to the fundamentals of the common faith. I believe the Nicene Creed spelled out these fundamentals and it went something, more or less, like this:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father.
With the Father and the Son
he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. AMEN.

From my point of view, that was the last important thing any council ever did, as later councils engaged in little other than hair-splitting debates over matters that God never invited us to peer into. The Nicene Creed sums up the gospel for all time, albeit in a freeze-dried state. For many, these became memorized words, but as God does now and again, He waters those words so that they come alive to those who seek.

The indigenous churches thereafter were mostly suppressed into a sameness of ritual and custom that served the purposes of the state. Occasionally, God has burst through the cold concrete of the imperial layers to reach His people. I believe He did this in Francis of Assisi and in Bernard of Clairvaux and probably in many others whose names have been lost to us but whose influence remains.

Consider the irony that today there is a push underway to grant Native Americans and other non-European types the freedom to establish their own indigenous churches. I find it ironic, considering that the European diaspora sent missionaries to so many tribal people, yet had no indigenous church of its own. Indeed, it did not know that it was even missing such. The closest we come to a legitimate native European church community is that of the Celtic church in the far West Isles before the influence of Constantine.

For my next grand experiment, I hope to examine ways and means of taking the church back for the people it was intended for. The difficulty is that culture does not stand still and, though I stand perfectly in the way to exhume the Celtic community flavor, I find myself at a loss. I cannot represent the Celtic community as it was, for I am a member of the Celtic diaspora to the New World — not the world that was and having no contact with the lands my people came from. Fortunately, my generation was the last who were taught anything of the stories, song and dance of our people at large and so I bring a vicarious memory that stretches beyond the manufactured culture of the television.

Because my background is blended from having been in the New World long enough to be mingled with people of other lands, my interpretation of the ancient church cannot be a pure product of one heritage. To top it off, I live in a region where my culture has been shaped by the proximity of Mexico and the addition of a Germanic heritage. But, a truly indigenous church should be able to shift with such changes so that the members of its worship community feel at home in their skin while still being able to accommodate those unlike themselves.

While we are on the topic, I thought I would throw in a video I found the other day about the up-and-coming churches of the Native Americans. It has great implications for the rest of us. Here are people who still operate according to the family rather than nationalism. Some of their practices and symbols might shock us, but I realized this may be little different than our Celtic crosses or the Coptic ankhs which were originally pagan symbols. There is nothing inherently “Christian” in concepts of eternity, judgment, righteousness and other universal ideas. The meanings still hold. Please have a look here and enjoy stretching your understanding of how God communicates in and through native thought.

Continuing on with The Story of Christianity, vol. 1, by Justo Gonzalez (San Francisco: Harper, 1984), I open with a quote from a section on Eusebius, the early church historian, to explain the atmosphere of the church that has continued since Constantine down to the present day to impact the culture of worship.

Three examples should suffice to illustrate the manner in which theology was being accommodated to fit the new situation. First of all, it is clear that in the New Testament as well as in the early church, it was affirmed that the Gospel was first of all good news to the poor, and that the rich had particular difficulty in hearing it and receiving it. … But now, beginning with Constantine, riches and pomp came to be seen as signs of divine favor. … But Eusebius — and the thousands of others for whom he probably spoke — does not seem to have been aware of the radical change that was taking place as the persecuted church became the church of the powerful, nor of the dangers involved in that change.

Likewise, Eusebius described with great joy and pride the ornate churches that were being built. But the net result of those buildings, and of the liturgy that evolved to fit them, was the development of a clerical aristocracy, similar to the imperial aristocracy, and often as far from the common people as were the great officers of the Empire. …

Finally, the scheme of history that Eusebius developed led him to set aside a fundamental theme of early Christian preaching: the coming Kingdom of God. … Since the time of Constantine, and due in part to the work of Eusebius … , there was a tendency to set aside or to postpone the hope of the early church, that its Lord would return in the clouds to establish a Kingdom of peace and justice. At later times, many groups that rekindled that hope were branded as heretics and subversives, and condemned as such. [125]

It was during such times that the emissaries to the Western church are thought to have reached the Western Isles, but it was not the Constantinian representatives who arrived first but descendants of the Desert Monks of Egypt. (If truth be told, legends abound that the Apostles or their representatives reached the West in the first century, so it is quite possible that some sort of indigenous church already existed in part of the West by the time the later emissaries traveled from Egypt.) Gonzalez explains the thrust counter to Constantine at this time:

…When the church joins the powers of the world, when luxury and ostentation take hold of Christian altars, when the whole of society is intent on turning the narrow path into a wide avenue, how is one to resist the enormous temptations of the times? …

Many found an answer in the monastic life: to flee from human society, to leave everything behind,to dominate the body and its passions, which give way to temptations. Thus, at the very time when churches in large cities were flooded by thousands demanding baptism, there was a veritable exodus of other thousands who sought beatitude in solitude. [136-137]

Certainly monasticism and the church system traveled together across Europe and eventually met up with the far West, but prior to that were groups of monastics in the Western Isles completely untouched by the changes since Constantine, such that when they met up, they were quite different. Even today’s Coptic Orthodox Church which claims some parenthood to the far Celtic church, bears the stamp of contamination of the times. It surely is not the same as that from which sprang the original apostles to the Isles.

In truth, the approach chosen for converting the barbaric Celts was as ridiculously simple as in the first century. The New Testament indicates that the original disciples did not continue only in pairs just because Jesus sent the first group out in twos. Reading the accounts of the apostles where this and that one consulted each other before going out gives that impression. But other names are also mentioned as being part of an entourage. We know that later groups involving men and women also went all over. And where were the children? There must also have been children. This missionizing would have turned into a family affair at some point. The early British church was begun by monastics, but the monastic life also included children as well as married and celibates and also involved people with many kinds of skills.

Gonzalez says only a scant amount about the Irish church:

Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire, but Christianity had spread to it before the downfall of the Empire. Although this probably took place through several channels, the spread of Christianity to Ireland is usually attributed to St. Patrick. … Since Ireland was bypassed by the wave of invasions that swept Europe, her monasteries became one of the main sources from which the territories within the ancient Roman Empire regained much of what had been lost during the invasions.

The Irish then began sending missionaries to other countries, most notably to Scotland. The most famous of these missionaries was Columba, who settled on the small island of Iona with twelve companions, probably in A.D. 563. …

For reasons that are not altogether clear, there were a number of differences between this Scotch-Irish [American term] Christianity and that which had evolved in the former territories of the Roman Empire. Instead of being ruled by bishops, the Scotch-Irish church was under the leadership of the heads of monastic communities. They also differed on the manner in which a number of rites should be performed, and on the date of Easter. [235-236]

Here I digress for a moment to say that there is much popular association with St. Patrick and all things nationally “Irish” when we speak of the Celtic church. However, I think it a little silly. I once researched my own Scott family surname and discovered that, although the clan is associated with Lowland Scots today, it was precisely the geographical area of Ireland they came from where St. Patrick operated. And it was they who first gave their clan name to Ireland as “Scotia” before moving across to Scotland and giving the same name to that part of Great Britain. So we may as easily say the early church was Scottish as Irish, if you measure by the people and not the land. However, when Columba went to Scotland, he met a different group of people than the ones he left in Ireland as the Scots (or Irish) hadn’t gone to Scotland yet! (Nor had some of the Irish yet become Irish.) The problem with merging ourselves back into history is that lands and peoples change in time, both on our end and on the original Desert Christian end.

Returning to topic again, many have tried in our day to get back to the simplicity of the gospel in various and sundry ways by starting up churches in homes. Most have not crossed over into all-out monastic living, though a few have developed closed communities. From my point of view, the closed communities have largely invited disaster, turning into (in many cases) oppressive cults. And in the cases of the house churches, they often wind up in another hierarchical system or wind up back in the big building because they just can’t leave it alone. The megashift of 325 A.D. is too much a part of them.

A few have gone the “Celtic church” route, but bigger than ever, practically every one has proven itself to be another flash-in-the-pan for the same reasons as above. They just can’t leave Constantine alone. All that is changed is the tone of the liturgy and one wonders why they bothered. Could a true Celtic-style church be revived and could all cultures re-develop indigenous churches? I think it possible, provided they stick to the most organic kinds of relationships and quit officializing and prescribing everything. But I also believe that as soon as we try to develop this or that kind of church, we kill it. It’s not about having a “Celtic” or any other kind of church. It’s about going back to the simplicity of the gospel and doing it in such a way that it feels natural to our culture, that we have a healthy narrative to pass on, and that we forget how we used to do it and get back to normal-sized groups of relationship — say 10-20 persons max.

I can easily envision separate groups of monastics with ties to one another operating as “the church” in an area. These contrived “teams” that are sent out by institutional churches today are probably a stab at this, though the relationships begin as ordered roles and not as organic realities. I’m quite curious to see a set of organic relationships develop into a team without benefit of top-down ordering. It is from this collegiality that the mature elders will be recognized and supported by the community as they watch for the souls in their charge.

Having finished the book, The Story of Christianity, by Justo Gonzalez (San Francisco: Harper, 1984) — and now going back over the parts of it that I highlighted — I realize one simple fact concerning the reason I even picked it up in the first place. I was trying to see how close the Western fringes of the Celtic church matched the early church in Jerusalem and then in Egypt. But what I find is a continental church history having absolutely nothing to do with that virginal outcrop. Questions of Gnosticism, apostolic succession, hierarchy, and world powers had not seemingly touched the far Western church. It could not seriously be argued that a return to the Orthodox Church or any of the Oriental churches today would return the Western church to its original condition, as these are not what they once were when they sent the first emissaries to the West.

Only a fool would argue that Constantine had no great influence on the church. Of course, it just took a lot longer for that influence to reach the far West — through various stages and kinds of conquest. I probably highlighted a quarter of the earliest chapters in the book. To be sure, the church was completely different in the mainstream than on the fringes after that and had normed everything according to Constantine. For all of that norming, there remains much influence of folk religion in the areas where the church has always been strongest. Folk religion aside, we may deduce that, had Constantine not arrived on the scene, each region would still have marked its worship with its own culture. The Council at Nicea did not create an orthodoxy that did not exist among many church gatherngs already — it just spelled it out officially and enforced it with the backing of the state from then on. Ironically, a new church was created out of this merger with the state that undermined it ever since.

Let us turn to Gonzalez again to note some of these changes (which, as I say, had nothing to do with the far West):

Until Constantine’s time, Christian worship had been relatively simple. At first, Christians gathered to worship in private homes. Then they began to gather in cemeteries, such as the Roman catacombs. By the third century there were structures set aside for worship. The oldest church that archaeologists have discovered is that of Dura-Europos, which dates from about A.D. 250. This is a fairly small room, decorated with very simple murals.

After Constantine’s conversion Christian worship began to be influenced by imperial protocol. Incense, which was used as a sign of respect for the emperor, began appearing in Christian churches. Officiating ministers, who until then had worn everyday clothes, began dressing in more luxurious garments. Likewise, a number of gestures indicating respect, which were normally made before the emperor, now became part of Christian worship. The custom was also introduced of beginning services with a processional. Choirs were developed, partly in order to give body to that procession. Eventually the congregation came to have a less active role in worship.

Already in the second century, it had become customary to commemorate the anniversary of a martyr’s death by celebrating communion where the martyr had been buried. Now churches were built in many of those places. Eventually, some came to think that worship as particularly valid if it was celebrated in one of those holy places, where the relics of a martyr were present … [Gonzalez, 125]

Isn’t it interesting that even Gonzalez begins to use the word “church” in a meaning that begins to shift almost imperceptibly from meaning the “body of believers” to meaning a “building”? He does not offer an explanation of this, perhaps because it was unconscious on his part or perhaps because its usage is so common now that he felt no need to explain.

As to the practice of collecting relics — particularly dead saints’ bones, I suspect this falls under the category of regional custom. I cannot imagine the early Jewish believers doing such a thing. I find its normalization particularly interesting. It may have served a culturally relevant purpose in its point of origin, but it might have been ill received in a place where the inhabitants were not naturally disposed to harboring such relics. Example: in my own culture, we do not maintain such things — not because we are afraid of death as some have charged, but because we consider such relics unclean. I remember how horribly shocked I was the first time I saw pictures of the Sedlec Ossuary in Czechoslovakia. I thought it must be some kind of anti-Christ place filled with fallen priests of the Black Arts. Now I realize that this must be how the culture of that day redeemed a tragedy of slaughter.

I found the origin of the incense quite fascinating. The oldest churches worship with all the senses. I was brought up to worship with none of my senses except common sense, and even that could be debated. My faith was much more interiorized and I felt it a mark of security that if I should ever lose sight, sound, taste, and the rest, I could still find God in my soul. But should I really say I lost all these senses in worship? If so, I was “taught” to do so, but it was not the reality of my daily life. Once more church culture is “churchy” because it is not where we really live.

After reading of the Celtic dislike of structure and love of nature, I realized I had not lost that heritage in my private life, no matter the enforced church culture. The night skies filled with stars were my ceiling. I could imagine Abraham looking at the same stars in the desert. I remembered the smell of freshly plowed dirt and the scent of soon-rain in the air, full of mystery and engagement. To me, this always evoked the Creator –who else would have put it there? Perhaps that was my heaven and my incense all along. My institutional church only fooled themselves into thinking they had snuffed out that nonsense.