By Stephen Smoot
The most important figure in the history of the globe was Jesus Christ and the most important movement and gathering of people in the history of mankind is the enduring faith and religion of those who worship in the Christian faith. It remains, however, one of the most misunderstood and manipulated sets of ideals, a problem that Christ Himself knew and understood would be the case.
Biblical accounts of Christ’s birth acknowledge the antecedents of the faith. Most recognize that as “King of the Jews,” Christ carries on many of the core ideals of Judaism. Less recognized and well-known are the ideals brought from Zoroastrianism. Magi, another term for the Three Wise Men, was that faith’s word for its priests.
Christianity has two main elements. The first lies in faith, the second in religion. Faith springs from within if one will allow it. Humanity is born with the capacity to place faith in the divine. The philosopher Rene Descartes argued that the notion of perfection in the human mind is a byproduct of the existence of God, since perfection exists nowhere in the physical world.
Faith is personal, but also shareable. Christ stated that anytime two gather in His name, that He is with them whether that be in a church or at family dinner. Faith goes hand in hand with the concept of redemption, the easiest religious concept to understand, but sometimes the most difficult to execute. Redemption in Christianity comes from honest repentance of ones’ sins, no matter how picayune or profound.
Faith, however, can only go so far in marshaling the support of many when the needs of a family or a person become difficult. Churches exist as they do because congregants for millennia usually had no one to rely on but each other. They took care of a broad spectrum of social needs when government and secular organizations could not. Those who volunteered and worked did so for God and their fellow congregants more so than a paycheck. This is not to disparage those who do this work outside of religion today so much as to show how Christian religious institutions of all kinds could do much more with much less until the last century when government and social welfare agencies took up many of those tasks.
Upon the death of Christ, leadership in His church passed to Saint Peter. The recalling of Peter’s prophesied thrice denial of Christ to the Roman soldiers teaches an important lesson. A human led church will be as prone to error as any human, especially when pressured.
By the 300s AD, the Church had established itself in the on-again, off-again persecutions of the Roman Emperors. The Bishop of Rome rose from first among equals into the leader of the Church as a whole, at least for a time. The Roman Empire, however, by then had two imperial capitals with Constantinople emerging under Emperor Constantine as a second imperial center of authority. By the early Middle Ages, the east west political divide also became religious. The Eastern Orthodox Church gradually split from the Church led by the Roman Pope and established a different set of traditions, practices, and leadership.
One key difference lay in the religion’s relationship to secular governments. Eastern Orthodoxy placed leadership in the person of the Patriarch. Patriarchs worked closely in conjunction with, and usually under the thumb of, the Emperor, which created a system known as caesaropapism. This means that the church and state operate in an almost fused role, but different than the Western theory of “divine right of kings.”
Over time Orthodoxy also evolved intricate rituals and services that provided a comforting regimen to those seeking Christ.
In Rome, the Popes expanded their purviews slowly in separation from the office of Emperor. In the 300s AD, Saint Augustine wrote of the City of God and the City of Man, or of the material world. He laid out theological boundaries between the responsibilities of the Church and the responsibilities of state, the origin of the concept placed 14 centuries later in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
As the Roman Empire fell, the Roman Catholic Church emerged as the one force that could unify Western Civilization and defend it from destruction. The early Middle Ages saw a fearsome slate of enemies eyeballing the weakness and wealth of Europe, including the Viking Norsemen. By the 600s AD, Islamic armies had swept out of Arabia. They ruthlessly seized Christian and Romanized areas of the Middle East, killing those who resisted and forcing those left to choose between conversion to the new faith or second-class citizenship. Muslim forces threatened to expand into Italy and occupied Spain for centuries.
The Roman Catholic Church, led by Pope Urban II, pressed by Muslims from the south and pagan Vikings from the north, organized a counterattack against the bigger threat. Crusader armies lunged into the Middle East and captured from Muslim forces the areas now called Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. The established states lurched for about a century and a half between pragmatic positive relations and foolish aggressions, but also showed that Europe could now defend itself.
Numerous cultural exchanges took place between open-minded Muslims and open-minded Christians. These softened the hard edges of both and led to beautifully intelligent expressions of art and philosophy in both realms, but did not create peace between them.
Also early on, the Roman Catholic Church adopted the wise ideal that God could bring His goodness to any other practice. Practical missionaries among the Germanic and other European pagans followed a similar template. Convert the wives of the powerful men, because they sometimes were the only voices that such men would listen to. Next convert the ritual celebrations, festivals, and other trappings of pagan life (such as German winter solstice celebration trees) into celebrations of Christ and the saints. Through aspects of life that the people knew as familiar, the example of Jesus Christ entered their worlds.
With power comes wealth. With wealth comes both comfort and temptations. The Roman Catholic Church had both through the High and Late Middle Ages into the Renaissance. It also faced an occasional rival for leadership in the Holy Roman Emperor. Christ had warned of the frailty of even the most fervently believing humans, but those seeking mere advancement and power were drawn to the Church as iron filings toward a magnet. Church leadership fractured and split in these centuries.
The worst, however, came from the Borgia family. From the bowels of their corruption came the brilliant and evil Pope Alexander VI in the late 1400s. The next two centuries brought challenges to Catholic authority over faith and religion. These challenges forced Church reforms that led it away from the Borgia years and toward its modern roles.
In the early 1500s Martin Luther, the intellectual son of a German coal miner, took a pilgrimage to Rome with the desire to deeply connect with his faith. He saw corruption everywhere and returned to his home discouraged, not with God, but with mankind. When Luther saw a church official in the streets of his hometown selling “indulgences,” (basically sin “get-out-of-jail-free” cards for the living or dead) to raise money to pay the Archbishop’s debt, he grew incensed.
The jingle sung by the official “when another coin in the coffer rings, another soul leaving Hell sings,” probably did not help at all.
Luther nailed 95 questions, concerns, and accusations to the city’s church door. These spawned a revolution that established a new line of churches. John Calvin shortly thereafter did similarly in Switzerland. While Lutheran churches followed immigration to America, those who grew in the traditions of Calvin had more impact there over the centuries. Calvinism spawned the Presbyterian Church, the Puritan and Separatist movements, and more.
The other major branch of the Christian tree came from the international political maneuvering of King Henry VIII of England, based in his fears that a female ruler of his land (which had not occurred for about 1400 years, at least officially) would destabilize a nation recently almost destroyed by civil war. Denied by a Pope (already battling Luther’s revolt) a divorce from a queen whose childbearing years had passed, Henry VIII instead divorced his realm from the Catholic Church and set up his own.
From the Church of England comes many of the denominations seen in America now, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Church of God, and also the Holiness church traditions to name a few. They hived off over the centuries for a variety of reasons, adapting to the special needs and views of congregants.
A major difference between the Catholic and these traditions lies in the importance and the interpretation of the Spirit and the Word.
A Catholic Mass seeks to bring together congregants and the experience of being as close to Christ as is possible. What is said is important, but not so much as the collective feelings created among congregants. Many of these services have small children darting among the pews, going hither and yon within reason. The idea is that even a small child can experience these powerful emotions generated in a Mass service in their own special way. The example of Mary, the Mother of Christ, also cements further the importance of, and respect given, to mothers in traditionally Catholic cultures.
Many Protestant churches have stronger roots in the concept of The Word. Luther and Calvin both emphasized that Scripture represents the only authority on faith and religion, separating out writers and thinkers such as Saint Augustine and the involvement of saints in lives. Protestant churches in the Church of England line struggled and, at times, separated over how much Roman Catholic thought and ritual should remain.
Churches based on The Word also emphasize personal discipline and ethics as vital. Services often separate children for special instruction in the tenets of faith while adults participate by hearing instructive sermons from the pulpit and singing hymns. Methodism adapted that tradition to far-flung communities with many desperate needs and placed increasing value on social work in support of people.
Non Catholic churches will sometimes embrace the Holy Spirit differently too. The Spirit’s ability to move an individual more so than the whole is more important in some Protestant services through such traditions as the altar call.
The Christian Church is as human as those who both worship and preach within it. It falls at times as humans will, but Christianity also both acknowledges that human nature itself is flawed from the beginning and encourages even those who have fallen the farthest away from it that they can still come back to God’s Grace.
But since each human being, each human community, and each human nation and people are so different, the Christian church has adapted in numerous ways. It has done this not to cater to human whims, but to meet the needs of people and communities where they are so that they can both find redemption through Christ and support each other as a group when life gets challenging and even overwhelming.
Soon will come the Christian realm’s celebration of Christ’s sacrifice and Resurrection, a perfect time for the faithful in any of His churches to reflect on Him, His example, and His Grace.
