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Christianity
Overview
Christianity is defined by one of its leading
modern interpreters, Friedrich Schleiermacher
(1768-1834), as "a monotheistic faith
. . . essentially distinguished from other
such faiths by the fact that in it everything
is related to the redemption accomplished
by Jesus of Nazareth." While many interpreters
of the meaning of Christianity would dispute
the content that Schleiermacher gave to each
of the crucial terms in that definition,
the definition as such would probably stand.
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The History of Christianity
Christianity is a historical religion. It
locates within the events of human history
both the redemption it promises and the revelation
to which it lays claim: Jesus was born under
Caesar Augustus and "suffered under
Pontius Pilate. In this respect Christianity
shows its continuing affinities with the
Judaism out of which it came. The primal
revelation for Judaism-and for Christianity-is
the divine declaration to Moses, "I
am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."
To this primal revelation Christianity adds
the assertion that the God who in past times
had spoken through the prophets and acted
through the Exodus from Egypt has now spoken
definitively and acted decisively in the
life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, seen
as the "Christ," the anointed and
chosen one of God.
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Early Christianity. It is, then, with Jesus of Nazareth that
the history of Christianity begins. Almost
everything we know of him, however, comes
from those who responded, in loyalty and
obedience, to the events of his life and
the content of his teaching. Therefore the
history of the earliest Christian communities,
to the extent that we are in a position to
reconstruct it, is at the same time the history
of Jesus as they remembered him. His own
immediate followers were all Jews, and it
is within that framework that they interpreted
the significance of what they had received
and perceived: he was the Christ, or Messiah,
who had been promised to the patriarchs of
Israel. As the record of those promises,
the Hebrew scriptures were sacred for early
Christians no less than for Jews, enabling
them to claim a continuity with the history
of the people of God since the creation of
the world. The apostle Paul both summarized
and reinterpreted the message of the first
generation of believers. Together with the
written deposit of their memories of Jesus
in the Gospels, the writings of Paul and
several other documents were circulated widely
in Christian communities throughout the Mediterranean
world, eventually becoming the Christian
addendum (or "New Testament") to
the Hebrew scriptures (or "Old Testament").
Paul was also responsible for the transformation
of Christianity from a Jewish sect to a gentile
movement by the end of the first century
of the common era. The importance of this
change for Christian history is impossible
to exaggerate. Jesus had been born in an
obscure corner of the Roman empire, but now
his followers took upon themselves the assignment
of challenging that empire and eventually
of conquering it in his name. The opposition
between empire and church during the second
and third centuries sometimes took the form
of persecution and martyrdom, but all that
was replaced in the fourth century by the
creation of a Christian Roman empire, when
the emperor Constantine (306-337) first made
the new faith legal, then made it his own,
then made it the official religion of the
realm.
The century that began with Constantine and
ended with Augustine also saw the stabilization
of the internal life and structure of the
Christian movement. One by one, alternative
ways of thought and belief that were adjudged
to be aberrations were sloughed off or excluded
as "heresies" or "schisms."
Some of these (particularly the various species
of apocalyptic or millenarian expectation)
were efforts to perpetuate ways of being
Christian that no longer suited the needs
of the life of the church when the long-expected
second coming of Jesus Christ failed to materialize,
while others (notably the several gnostic
systems) involved the adaptation to the Christian
message of schemes of revelation and salvation
that were also manifesting themselves in
other religions. In opposition to these alternative
ways of thought and belief, Christianity,
since before the days during which the books
of the New Testament were being written,
identified the content of orthodox belief
and fixed its form in a succession of creedal
statements. The earliest of these, including
that eventually formulated as the Apostles'
Creed, are put into the mouth of one or another
or all twelve of the apostles of Jesus, and
the most important creedal statement was
adopted (under Constantine's patronage) at
the Council of Nicaea in 325. During those
same early centuries, Christianity was also
identifying the structures of authority that
were thought to guarantee the preservation,
of "apostolic" faith and order:
the Bible and the bishops. As already noted,
the Bible of the Christians consisted of
two parts (or "testaments"): the
books they had inherited from Judaism, and
the combination into a "New Testament"
of four gospels about the life and teachings
of Jesus, epistles attributed to Paul and
other apostolic figures, the Acts of the
Apostles, and (from among the many extant
apocalyptic writings) the Revelation to John.
The bishops through their uninterrupted succession
were believed to certify the continuity of
the church with its apostolic foundations.
As the church that could claim to have been
shepherded by all twelve apostles, Jerusalem
.held a unique place; but as the church that
Peter had governed and to which Paul had
written (and where both Peter and Paul had
been martyred), and as the congregation at
the capital of the civilized world, Rome
early acquired a special position as "the
apostolic see," which it would consolidate
by the leadership in faith and life that
it exercised during the crises of the fourth
and fifth centuries. Actually, the criterion
of "apostolicity" was a circular
one: apostolic foundation of episcopal sees,
apostolic authorship of biblical books, and
apostolic orthodoxy of creedal belief supported
one another, and no one of them was ever
sufficient of itself-even in the case of
the see of Rome-to serve as such a criterion
in isolation from the others.
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Official Establishment of Christianity. Constantine's acceptance of Christianity
and the eventual establishment of it as the
official faith of the Roman empire is rightly
seen as the most portentous event-for good
or ill or some combination of the two-in
all of Christian history; conversely, "the
end of the Constantinian era," which
is how many thoughtful observers have characterized
the twentieth century, has brought about
the re- shaping and rethinking of all the
structures of faith and life that Christianity
evolved in the aftermath of its new status
from the fourth century on. Both in the Roman
West, where Constantine prevailed in 312
"by the power of the cross," as
he believed, and in the Byzantine East, where
Constantine established the new capital of
the Christian Roman empire two decades later,
Christianity undertook to create a new civilization
that would be a continuation of ancient Greece
and Rome and yet would be a transformation
of those cultures through the infusion of
the spiritual power of Christ as Lord.
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Reformation Christianity. Such reform movements, it seemed, could
always be counted on to rescue the church
in times of crisis until, through Martin
Luther (1483-1546) and the Reformation, a
crisis arose in which the primary impetus
for reform was to express itself not through
monasticism or the papacy, but against both
monasticism and the papacy (although it must
be remembered that Luther, too, was originally
a monk). Already in various late medieval
reformations, such as those of the "Spiritual"
Franciscans and the Hussites, there was the
sense that (to cite the four standard "marks".
of the church enumerated in the Nicene Creed)
Christendom could be neither one nor holy
nor "catholic nor apostolic until it
had replaced the secularized and corrupt
authority of the bishop of Rome with the
authenticity of the word of God, for which
some looked to a church council while others
put their confidence in the recovery of the
message of the Bible. That sense finally
found its voice in the program of the Protestant
reformers. Beginning with the belief that
they were merely the loyal children of Mother
Church recalling her to her genuine self,
they soon found themselves so alienated from
the structures and teachings of the church
of their time that they were obliged to look
for, and if need be to invent, alternative
structures and teachings of their own.
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"Counter-Reformation". The Roman Catholic response to the Protestant
Reformation is sometimes called the "Counter-Reformation,"
although that term has come to be regarded
by many scholars as excessively negative
in its connotations because it seems to ignore
the positive reforms that were not merely
a reaction to Protestantism. "The Roman
Catholic Reformation" is in many ways
a preferable designation. First through a
series of responses to the theology and program
of the reformers, then above all through
the canons and decrees of the Council of
Trent (1545-1563), the Catholic Reformation
took up the issues addressed by Luther and
by his most eminent successor, John Calvin
(1509-1564), both in the area of church life
and morals and in the area of church teaching
and authority. Many of the corruptions that
had acted as tinder for the Reformation received
the careful attention of the council fathers,
with the result that Roman Catholicism and
the papacy emerged from the crisis of the
Reformation diminished in size but chastened
and strengthened in spirit.
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The Pattern of Christian Belief. As a system of faith, Christianity manifests
"faith" in all the various meanings
that this term has acquired in the history
of religion: as loyalty to the divine, based
on the prior loyalty of the divine to the
world and to humanity; as the confidence
that God is trustworthy in truth and love;
as dependence on the Father of Jesus Christ,
who is the source of all good in this life
and in the life to come; as the commitment
to direct thought and action in accordance
with the divine word and will; and as the
affirmation that certain events and declarations,
as given by divine revelation, are a reliable
index to that will and word. It is the last
of those meanings that provides a basis for
describing in an epitome what it is that
Christianity believes, teaches, and confesses.
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The Person of Jesus Christ. Christian belief began with the need to
specify the significance of the person of
Jesus, seen as the "Christ." The
initial stages of that process are visible
already in the pages of the New Testament.
Its titles for him--in addition to Christ,
such titles as Son of man, Son of God, Word
of God (Logos), and Savior--were an effort
to account for that significance, for within
the events of Jesus' human life the God of
Israel and the creator of the world had been
disclosed. Before the theologians had invented
ways of defining the content of these titles
in any satisfying detail, the devotion and
worship of the church were already identifying
Jesus with God.
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The Trinity. The final creedal statement of the relation
between Christ and God was part of a more
complete statement of belief, the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity, which many theological
exponents of Christianity would regard as
the central teaching of the Christian faith.
Its fundamental outline is already given
in the "great commission"-which,
according to the Gospels, Jesus entrusted
to his disciples before withdrawing his visible
presence from them (Mt. 28:19)-to baptize
"in the name of the Father and of the
Son and of the Holy Spirit." Threefold
though that single "name" was,
it was the relation of the Son to the Father
that carried the principal weight in the
clarification of the formula. But before
the fourth century was over, the status of
the Holy Spirit, and thus the complete dogma
of God as Trinity, had achieved the form
it has held in Christian orthodoxy throughout
the history of the church. The dogma presents
itself as strictly monotheistic. The opening
words of the Nicene Creed are "We believe
in one God," and everything that follows
about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is set
into that framework.
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Sin & Grace. The most distinctive and original Western
contributions during the first five centuries
came not in the doctrines of God and Christ
but in the doctrines of sin and grace. With
significant anticipations in various Western
thinkers, it was once again Augustine who
formulated these latter doctrines in the
concepts and terms that were to dominate
most of subsequent Christian teaching in
the West, that of Roman Catholicism but no
less the theology of Protestantism. Augustine
insisted, that every human being did not
face the same choice between good and evil
that Adam and Eve had faced. On the contrary,
humanity had since Adam and Eve been under
a curse of what Augustine called "the
sin of origin" (peccatum originis),
which infected every human being except Jesus
Christ (and perhaps his mother, the Virgin
Mary). Even without committing acts of sin,
therefore. each member of the human race
was corrupted from birth; the traditional
practice of infant baptism was for Augustine
evidence of the universality of this sinful
condition.
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Redemption. Neither the belief in God as Trinity nor
the dogma of Christ as divine and human in
nature nor the doctrine of humanity as created
in the image of God but fallen into sin is,
however, an end in itself for Christian faith.
As a religion of redemption, Christianity
presents itself as the message of how, through
Christ, reconciliation has been achieved
between the holiness of God and the sin of
a fallen humanity. But while the Trinity,
the person of Christ, and (though less universally
or explicitly) the doctrine of original sin
all have been subjects of a public and ecumenical
confession of the church, the manner of this
reconciliation has not received such attention.
It has been left more to hymnody and preaching
than to dogma and metaphysics to supply the
metaphors for describing it. One of the most
widely distributed such metaphors in early
Christian writers, beginning with the sayings
of Jesus himself (Mt. 20:28), is the description
of redemption as "ransom" (which
is, of course, what redemption means): the
death of Christ was paid (to God or to the
devil) as the price for setting humanity
free. The difficulties that such a notion
entailed for the Christian picture of God
made a modification of the ransom theory
seem imperative: the death of Christ took
place in the course of a battle between God-in-Christ
and the devil with his allies, a battle in
which death triumphed initially by the nailing
of Christ to the cross but in which Christ
was victorious in the end through his resurrection.
God became man in Christ, because as man
he would be able, by his death, to produce
the satisfaction demanded by divine justice,
but as God he would render a satisfaction
of infinite worth that could thus be applied
to the entire human race.
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Justification. Classical Protestantism differs from Roman
Catholicism in the interpretation of redemption
not on the way redemption was achieved by
God in Christ, but on the way it is appropriated
by the Christian. Luther's doctrine of justification
by faith--or, more fully and more precisely,
justification by grace through faith-directed
itself against what he perceived to be the
widespread tendency of medieval Christianity
to give human works part of the credit for
restoring the right relation between God
and man. This he attacked as a denial of
the purely gratuitous character of salvation.
The role of the human will in salvation was
purely passive, accepting the forgiveness
of sins as a sheer gift and contributing
nothing of its own goodness to the transaction
with God. Faith, accordingly, was not (or,
at any rate, not primarily) an act of the
intellect accepting as true what God has
revealed but an act of the will entrusting
itself unconditionally to the favor of God
as conferred in Christ. Such unconditional
trust led to the transformation of human
life from the self-centered quest for gratification
to the God-centered service of others. Partly
in response to Luther's doctrine, the Council
of Trent at its sixth session affirmed that
"faith is the beginning of human salvation,
the foundation and the root of all justification,"
but it condemned anyone who "says that
the sinner is justified by faith alone, as
though nothing else were required to cooperate."
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The Community of Christian Worship. As a system of hope, Christianity holds forth
the promise of eternal life through Jesus
Christ. In the words of what has been called
"the gospel in a nutshell" (In.
3:16), "God loved the world so much
that he gave his only Son, that everyone
who has faith in him may not die but have
eternal life." But that promise and
hope of life for those who have faith does
not stand in isolation from the full range
of Christian hope, the expectation of all
the gifts of God for time and for eternity,
and the acceptance of those gifts in thankfulness
and praise. Hope, consequently, expresses
itself chiefly in prayer and worship, both
the personal prayer of the individual Christian
believer and the corporate worship of the
Christian community.
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The holy catholic church. One integral component of Christianity both
as " a pattern of belief" and as
"a community of worship" is expressed
in the words of the Apostles' Creed: "I
believe in the holy catholic church, the
communion of saints." According to the
accounts of the New Testament, it was the
intention of Jesus to found a church (Mt,
16:18): "I will build my church."
Whether one accepts the literal historicity
of those accounts or not, Jesus did, in fact,
gather a community of disciples and establish
a table-fellowship. The earliest Christianity
we are able to uncover is already a churchly
Christianity, to which in fact we owe the
Gospels and all the other books of the New
Testament. For Christians of every persuasion
and denomination, the church is at the same
time the primary context of worship.
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Protestant views of the church. The Protestant rejection of the authority
of the pope is closely joined to a redefinition
of the nature of the church. There had always
been the recognition in the medieval doctrine
of the church, particularly as this had come
down from Augustine, that the organizational,
empirical church was not coextensive with
the church as it exists in the eyes of God:
some who participate in, or even preside
over, the church as an institution today
will ultimately perish, while others who
now persecute the church are destined to
become members of the body of Christ. That
definition of the true church as "the
company of the elect," and hence as
invisible in its membership and in its essence,
appears in one form or another in the thought
of most of the Protestant reformers. With
differing forms of ecclesiastical administration,
the reformers took over or adapted patterns
of organization that would suit the church
for its function as the community of Christian
worship and the center of Christian instruction.
A favorite Protestant term for the church,
therefore, is the phrase in the Apostles'
Creed, "the communion of saints."
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The preaching of the word of God. Although they would agree that the church
is the community of Christian worship, the
several denominations disagree about the
structure of that community-and about the
content of that worship. It is characteristic
of most Protestant groups that in their liturgies
and forms of worship they assign centrality
to communication of the Christian message
through preaching: "Where the word of
God is, there the church is". As the
leader of the worshiping community, the minister
is principally (though never exclusively)
the proclaimer of the word of God, a word
of God that is found in, or identified and
even equated with, the Bible. The emphasis
on biblical preaching has sometimes led to
a didactic understanding of worship, but
this has been counterbalanced in Protestantism
by the literally tens of thou- sands of "psalms
and hymns and spiritual songs" (Col.
3:16) that the Protestant churches have developed
because of their equally great stress on
the participation of the congregation and
of each individual worshiper in the service.
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The Sacraments. It would, however, be a grave distortion
(albeit a distortion to which even sympathetic
interpreters of Protestant Christianity have
sometimes been subject) to interpret Protestantism
as a thorough-going individualism in its
understanding of worship, for the definition
of the church as .'the community of Christian
worship," in Protestantism as well as
in Orthodoxy and in Roman Catholicism, is
embodied above all in the celebration of
the sacraments. Except for certain details
(e.g., whether it is the recitation of the
words of institution or the invocation of
the Holy Spirit in the epiclesis that effects
the transformation of bread and wine into
the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist),
Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism stand
in basic agreement on the nature of sacramental
worship and the meaning of the seven sacraments.
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The Eucharist. The primary sacrament and the center of
Christian worship is, for both the Eastern
and the Western tradition, the Eucharist
or Lord's Supper, which is, in one form or
another, celebrated by all Christian groups.
Although the celebration is also a memorial
and an expression of community, what sets
the Roman Catholic and Orthodox understanding
of the Eucharist apart from that of most
other groups is their definition of this
sacrament as real presence and as sacrifice.
In fulfillment of the words and promise of
Jesus, "This is my body" and "This
is my blood," the bread and wine presented
for the sacrament become the very body and
blood of Christ, identical in their substance
with the body born of Mary, even though the
taste, color, and other attributes or "accidents"
of bread and wine remain. As the real presence
of the body and blood of the one whose death
on the cross and resurrection effected the
redemption of the world, the Eucharist is
as well a sacrifice-not as though the first
sacrifice were inadequate and Christ needed
to be sacrificed over and over, but "in
union with the sacrifice" of Calvary.
The daily offering of that sacrifice for
the living and the dead is at the center
of Roman Catholic worship, devotion, and
doctrine; and although Orthodoxy is, characteristically,
less explicit for some of its detailed formulations
about the metaphysics of the presence and
more content to speak of it as a "mystery,"
its representatives, when pressed, will come
up with language not far removed from that
of the West.
Whatever differences of emphasis there may
be between Roman Catholicism and Eastern
Orthodoxy about the Eucharist, they are much
smaller than the differences among the several
Protestant groups. Luther defended the real
presence of the body and blood of Christ
in the Eucharist against his fellow Protestants.
They in turn laid stress on the "true
presence" of Christ in his spirit and
power rather than on the "real presence"
of the actual body and blood.
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Baptism. The other action of the community of Christian
worship on whose "sacramental"
character all Christians would agree is baptism.
Throughout the Acts of the Apostles, baptism
functions as the means of initiation into
the Christian movement and into the reality
of Christ himself, and in the epistles of
Paul baptism is the way of appropriating
the benefits of the death and resurrection
of Christ. Although all the explicit references
in the New Testament to the practice of baptism
mention only adults as its recipients, and
that generally only after a profession of
their faith, the custom of administering
it also to children began quite early; just
how early is a matter of controversy.
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Other sacraments. Although baptism and the Lord's Supper are
for most Protestants the only two ordinances
that qualify as sacraments, the medieval
development in the West led to a system of
seven sacraments, which Eastern Christianity,
when obliged to become specific, has likewise
affirmed. The sacrament of penance (together
with the reception of absolution) developed
as a way of coping with sins committed after
the reception of forgiveness in baptism.
As the contrition of the heart, the confession
of the mouth, and the satisfaction of a work
restoring what had been taken away by the
sin, penance became, in the Latin Middle
Ages, one of the principal means by which
the imperatives and the promises of the Christian
gospel were applied to individuals and communities.
With the universal acceptance of infant baptism,
the individual's assumption of the responsibilities
of Christian discipleship, originally associated
with adult baptism, came to be the central
content of the sacrament of confirmation.
As infant baptism attended the beginning
of life with sacramental grace, so at death,
or in a crisis or illness that might portend
death, the anointing of the sick (or the
sacrament of "extreme unction")
brought that grace to the end of life as
well. The only one of the seven "sacraments"
to which the name was applied in the New
Testament was marriage; on that authority,
it became part of the sacramental system.
And as the ordinance by which all the other
sacraments were usually made possible, the
ordination of priests itself was defined
to be a sacrament.
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The Christian Way of Life. As a system of love-and love is, in the
formula of Paul, the "greatest"
of the three (1 Cor. 13:13)-Christianity
presented itself to its hearers as a way
of life. In its symbiosis with the societies
and cultures in which it has taken root,
the Christian way of life has been characterized
by even greater heterogeneity than Christian
belief or Christian worship.
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The Imitation of Christ. Ever since the New Testament, the human
life of Jesus Christ has served as an example
set forth for imitation; it has usually been
more than an example. Just what that imitation
implies concretely for the Christian in the
world has been, however, a continuing issue
and problem, for the Christ whom the believer
is invited to imitate was not married, did
not hold public office, and was not supported
chiefly from a trade or profession. The imitation
of his example has come to mean, therefore,
the application to one's own situation of
the love and faithfulness that Christ brought
to his. Repeatedly, when the demands of society
or, for that matter, the requirements of
the church have proved to be too complex
or abstract, "the imitation of Christ"
has become a way of reducing them to their
essence.
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Obedience. The imitation of Christ has also implied
obedience to his will, as this was expressed
both in his own teachings and in the Mosaic
law. In its treatment of that law, the New
Testament manifests an ambivalence: Christ
is seen as "the end of the law"
(Rom. 10:4). The ambivalence manifests itself
likewise in the descriptions of the Christian
way of life as obedience. But both Roman
Catholic and Protestant ethicists and teachers
have also repeatedly defined Christian obedience
as not the strict observance of a legal code,
not even of the legal code in the Ten Commandments,
but as the spontaneity of the Spirit. "Love
God, and do what you will". Augustine
is as well an early source for the adaptation
to Christian purposes of the philosophical
consideration of the nature and the number
of the "virtues": to the classical
(or, as they came to be called in Christian
parlance, "cardinal") virtues of
prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice,
Christian ethical thought added the three
"theological" virtues of faith,
hope, and love. Obedience to the will of
God and the cultivation of these seven virtues
were seen as the content of the Christian
way of life.
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Faith, Hope, and Love. The complex interactions of faith, hope,
and love with one another throughout Christian
history and throughout Christianity as a
system suggest the absence of a set of universal
principles that could, in the fashion of
Euclid's geometry, yield the Christian worldview.
Christianity is, rather, the product of a
continuing and organic history. Its principal
institutional expression has been the church
in its various organizational forms, but
Christianity is more than the church. Although
its chief intellectual product has been a
theological development that spans twenty
centuries, the Christian message is not coextensive
with its theology. Its most telling effect
on history has been in the faith and life
of its celebrated saints and seers, but Christianity
has consistently declared that its power
and spirit can be found as well among the
silent in the land, the meek who shall inherit
the earth.
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Adapted from the Encyclopedia of Religion.
1987. Eliade, M., Ed. MacMillan Publishing
Co., NY.
Christianity is such a large and diverse
religion that I couldn't do it justice with
a few links. Therefore, click here to go to the MSN Christianity Section.
Religion & Christianity Search Engine
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Books
Opposing Views
Atheism
Humanism
Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to
Civilization? by Bertrand Russell
Why I am Atheist by Ram Samudrala
Why I am not a Christian by Bertrand Russell
The Necesity of Atheism by Percy Blysshe Shelley
Internet Infidels
Arguments in Favor of Atheism
The Philosophy of Atheism by Emma Goldman
American Humanist Association
Council for Secular Humanism
Letting Atheists Come Out of the Closet
The Strategies of Christian Fundamentalism
World Union of Deists
The Human Jesus & Christian Deism
Buddhist Critique of Christianity
The Myth of Jesus of Nazareth
Christianity Exposed
Did Jesus Exist? -- An Excellent Resource
The Quest for the Historical Jesus
A Large Collection of Critical Web Sites from Netscape.com
Judaism
Islam
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