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Christianity is the most populous religion on earth, with two billion believers worldwide -- one-third of the Earth's population. Yet it is also one of the most fiercely disputed religions, with hundreds, perhaps thousands of denominations and splinter sects, and many individual believers who do not associate themselves with any established church. Recent estimates place the Roman Catholic church at about a billion members worldwide (although not all are actively practicing), making it the largest single denomination. But the Mormon and Evangelical churches, who practice active proselytizing and missionary work throughout Russia, Africa, and Latin America, are also high in numbers.
And so Christianity is also the largest of the three monotheistic or "Abrahamic" religions, a term that includes Judaism and Islam, both of which also claim Abraham as their patriarch. Historically, Christianity bears a relationship to Judaism, its parent religion in the Western hemisphere, that resembles the way in which Christianity developed from the Hindu culture of India. That is, it was born in a worldview dominated by Judaism, and shared many of its principles and much of its scripture. But Christianity also established itself almost immediately as a different tradition, and quickly grew apart.
Like the Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth was steeped in the culture and beliefs of his day -- in his case, the Torah and the Hebrew prophets, whom he quoted extensively. But Jesus emphasized the compassion teachings of the Jews above ritual cleanliness and diet, seeking to restore the sense of communal love and support that had been damaged by the Roman occupation. Christians believe that Jesus was more than just a social reformer, however. The defining belief of Christianity is that Jesus is the only begotton Son of God, divinely engendered in his mother, Mary, through the action of the Holy Spirit. He is seen as God incarnate, the Word made flesh, in the language of the Gospel of John.
But other facts about Jesus' life and teachings are disputed by Christians, including many believing Christian biblical scholars, who insist that seeking the historical truth of the Gospel accounts of Jesus is not inconsistent with devout Christian faith.
The evolution of biblical scholarship over the past century or more has been just one of the factors leading to a rift between those Christians who take the words of the Gospel literally -- Gospel truth, so to speak -- and those who accept that most of the Bible is true in spirit if not in every detail. Among the conclusions reached by the vast majority of scholars that differ from received tradition is the fact that none of the four canonically accepted Gospel accounts was actually written by an eyewitness to the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. The search for the historical Jesus, as this scholarship has come to be known, has challenged some of Christianity's most cherished traditions.
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Within the past three decades, Jesus has been cast by various scholars as a social revolutionary, magician, ascetic, apocalyptic prophet, and a disciple of Rabbi Hillel, who also preached compassion. The underlying argument holds that much of the language of the Gospels is the creative invention of their authors and various scribes who later inserted what they thought Jesus ought to have said, rather than the actual words and deeds of Jesus. The early Christian church that took shape after the death of Jesus developed theological agendas of its own that at times went contrary to or were not supported by the existing Gospel texts, this theory goes, so words and deeds were inserted or deleted to fit those agendas. The changes often created other problems of continuity or contradiction, either between different authors or in the same author trying to juggle too many assertions. |
Biblical scholars start with the contradictions and improbabilities and work backward to deduce what the original sources, now missing, may have said concerning Jesus. Their deductions have led them to question the beloved Christmas stories (which appear in only two of the four Gospels, in contradictory accounts) and much of the passion narrative, and in the process to cast doubt on some of the time-honored traditions of Christianity. But for many Christians, such scholarship has little relevance to what they consider to be the true story of Jesus as told by the Gospels.
The Four Gospels differ from each other in some important details, but the basic narrative is familiar by now. During the Roman occupation of Judea, Mary, a virgin betrothed to the carpenter Joseph (both living in Nazareth, a town of about 1,600 in the northern province of Galilee), is pregnant, even though she has not had intercourse with Joseph. Joseph is understandably upset at this, but angels appear separately to Mary and Joseph explaining that the child that has been mysteriously conceived is "of the Holy Spirit," and will "save the people from their sins." Joseph agrees to take Mary into his household and not to sleep with her until the child, to be named Jesus, is born.
She delivers her child in impoverished circumstances in Bethlehem, and by the time he is 12 he is discovered by his parents talking with the learned teachers in the Temple of Jerusalem. When we next encounter Jesus at about age 30, he is being baptized in the River Jordan. John the Baptist belonged to a sect of Morning Bathers, one of several Jewish communities that offered ritual ablution as a form of forgiveness for sins in anticipation of the end of time. "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," John preached, possibly reflecting an Essene influence. He was later executed by Herod Antipas.
The baptism triggers a powerful experience in Jesus, as he sees "the Spirit descending on him like a dove" and hears a heavenly voice proclaiming, "This is my beloved son." Jesus then goes into the desert to fast for 40 days, and is "tempted by the devil." He refuses offers of material gain in exchange for using his newfound spiritual powers for self-aggrandizement. Leaving the wilderness, Jesus returns to Galilee to begin his ministry. Reaching out to people on the lowest rungs of the social order, he calls four local fishermen to join him as he he goes to the town of Capernaum by the Sea of Galilee to heal and teach. He is immediately perceived as someone who speaks from his own spiritual experience, not merely interpreting canon law, and he heals maladies ranging from demonic possession to blindness and paralysis, attracting even more followers. He selects 12 men to be his apostles, although he clearly has a close relationship with Mary Magdalene, and some of his most notable teachings and healings involve women.
 The twelve lambs, six on each side of Christ, represent the 12 apostles. |
As Jesus is reaching out to the common folk, he also attracts the attention of the Jewish scribes, or canon-lawyers, and the Pharisees and Saducees, who accuse him of consorting with "tax-collectors and sinners." For Jesus to teach and eat with the Jewish tax-collectors -- men who collaborate with the Romans and pay a fee for the right to extort as much tax money as they can from fellow Jews -- outrages the religious establishment. But the occupying Romans hold the ultimate power, and they perceive Jesus as an even more dangerous threat to foment rebellion among the peasantry. |
Using parables, metaphorical stories that appeal to the peasants, farmers, and artisans who make up most of his following, Jesus teaches in a way that is both simple and profound. Like Zen stories, his descriptions drawn from daily life are striking and often confound his listeners' expectations, as when he says, "Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well" (Matt. 5:39-40). He emphasizes love and forgiveness in countless sayings, and elevates the lowly over the rich and powerful.
Yet after only three years of public life, Jesus is arrested and handed over to the Roman authorities. After a brief trial, he is sentenced to death by crucifixion, an especially painful and brutal form of Roman execution used against criminals and rebellious Jews. After dying on the cross, his body is taken down and laid in a sepulcher. But when some of his women followers, including his mother and Mary Magdalene, arrive at the tomb to anoint his body, they are informed by a "young man in a white robe" that Jesus has "risen." Known as the Resurrection, this event is the cornerstone of Christian dogma, proving that Jesus was divine. In some gospel accounts, Jesus later appears to his disciples in human form, preaches briefly, and after 40 days on earth ascends bodily into heaven.
The most important text for almost all Christians is the Bible, specifically the New Testament, although the Old Testament, which is essentially the Hebrew Bible, carries equal authority, if less relevance. The word "testament" refers to the covenant between God and the people of Israel, and, in the New Testament, to the new covenant based on Christ's teachings and death on the cross. The Bible is considered by Christians to be the revealed word of God, written down and assembled by various human agents.
Biblical scholars agree that the four canonical Gospels, although attributed to two apostles (Matthew and John) and two followers of apostles (Mark and Luke), known as the four Evangelists, were not actually written people who knew Jesus personally. Composed in Greek from 40 to 70 years after the death of Jesus, they were based in part on an older written Greek source referred to by scholars as Q, from the German Quelle, "source." This source was itself probably based on an earlier Aramaic text, perhaps written by the apostle Matthew, or on collections of sayings, miracles, and passion narratives written down by the year 50. (Even some of the so-called Gnostic Gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 appear to have drawn on the same Gospel Q as the Synoptic Gospels.) Those earlier sources have not been found, and may well have been destroyed in the process of standardizing the surviving gospels. Three of the four gospels are called Synoptic, because their accounts and language are similar, unlike the Gospel of John. Of these three, Mark is believed to be the earliest (c. 70), followed by Matthew (c. 80-90), Luke (c. 85), and John (early 2nd century). The authors of the Synoptic Gospels probably saw different versions of each other's gospels as they went through various stages of revision, accounting for both their similarities and significant differences of emphasis, as each author was writing for a different constituency and had a different agenda. But the fact that the Evangelists did not actually write down the gospels attributed to them does not deny the possibility that those gospels derive from an oral or written tradition originating with the Evangelists. For Christian believers, in any event, the authoritativeness of the gospels as inspired by the Holy Spirit does not rest on the specific identity of their human authors
Scholars have pointed out that the teachings and certain miracles of Christ were threaded into a narrative that may have been fabricated as a teaching device to help early Christians remember the words. Many narrative details no longer hold up to historical scrutiny. According to Luke, for instance, Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem to be registered in a worldwide census under Caesar Augustus, yet historians have shown that there never was a census under Augustus, and that such a census would have required registration in the place where one lived and worked, not the place of one's ancestry. Nor is it likely that the disciples, who fled in fear of their lives when Jesus was arrested and brought to trial, could have retained any detailed knowledge of the events of his passion and death.
As with the Hebrew scriptures, the gospels underwent considerable redaction over the years, and several versions of each probably existed before the versions that we now have, which date no earlier than 200, and as late as 350. And so, the Greek manuscripts on which all our translations are based are more than a century older than the original versions, and none of them was written in the Aramaic of Jesus -- meaning that Christianity does not possess the words of its founder in something approximating his native tongue. But besides the translation issue, how much editing, scribal corruption, or just plain censorship occurred in those hundred years?
The earliest authentic New Testament works that we have are the Epistles of Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, which were written c. 50-55. Although Paul was not an immediate disciple, he claimed to have been spoken to by Jesus in a vision and in trance, and he did have contact with some of the original disciples. The two other major New Testament books are the Acts of the Apostles (c.150), written by Luke and probably intended as the second book of his Gospel, and Revelation, or Apocalypse (c.100), describing a vision of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, written by a churchman named John in exile on the Isle of Patmos. (Sometimes called John the Divine, he should not be confused with the apostle John, whose name is traditionally attached to the last of the four Gospels.)
The Christian Bible existed in Latin, the clerical and liturgical language of the Church, from the early 1st millennium until the mid-16th century, when the Protestant reformers began translating the Bible into vernacular English and German. The commonly accepted English translation, the King James (or Authorized) Version, was prepared in England under James I and published in 1611. It is noted for its literary value, and many of its phrasings have entered the language. A modernized edition called the Revised Standard Version is in common use today. The Douay or Douay-Rheims Bible remains the standard Catholic version, translated into English from the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome by Roman Catholic scholars and published at Rheims, France (New Testament), in 1582 and Douay (Old Testament) in 1610. More scholarly and accurate translations have appeared recently, e.g., The Jerusalem Bible.
S. Pietro. View from the cupola towards the square.
Discovered in Palestine in 1947 by three Bedouin cousins, the Dead Sea Scrolls had been stored in caves near the site of a monastery of an exiled sect of Essenes at Qumran, on the northeast coast of the Dead Sea, since at least 68, when Roman forces sacked and burned it. Beginning in the middle of the 2nd century BCE, Qumran had been occupied by a group of priests who left Jerusalem for the desert led by someone referred to as the Teacher of Righteousness, apparently exiled from the Temple priesthood by one known only as the Wicked Priest. The scrolls themselves included, among other things, the teachings of the Qumran community, and copies of several books of the Hebrew Bible, notably a leather scroll of Isaiah at least a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew manuscript of that book. Their main value, however, is the light they may shed on the origins of Jesus's beliefs and his possible connection with the Essenes. Because access to the scrolls themselves, not all of which have been translated, was restricted until recently to a select group of scholars, they have been surrounded by controversy. Scholars still debate the exact identity of the authors of the scrolls: one authority feels they were not Essenes but Sadducees, another claims they are related to the teachings of James, the brother of Jesus, who led the Jerusalem Jesus Movement. No fully satisfactory answers have yet emerged.
The early Christian movement was marked by internal contention and disputes between the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem, who focused on Temple worship and acted like a Jewish sect that emphasized charity and venerated Jesus as a martyred leader, and the Diaspora Jewish Christians who were wealthier, more cosmopolitan, and Greek-speaking. The Jerusalem Church was scattered with the destruction of Jerusalem in the first and second centuries. Although the earliest followers of Christ, now called the Palestinian Jesus Movement, were from the countryside, they took their message to Mediterranean urban centers like Damascus, where they attracted the attention of Saul of Tarsus. Originally a Pharisaic Jew of the Diaspora, Saul was aghast at the Christian challenge to Judaic teaching, and participated in the persecution of the earliest Christians, even joining in the stoning of St. Stephen, the first martyr. But as he rode to Damascus to search for Christians there, Saul was knocked from his horse in one of the most famous conversion experiences in history, as recounted in Acts 9: ". . . suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?'"
The voice belonged to Jesus, and Saul was temporarily blinded. By the time he recovered his sight, he had embraced Jesus and begun to proclaim him in the synagogues as the Son of God. At some point, he became known as Paul, and had an overwhelming impact on the shaping of Christianity. Paul's conversion was not only sudden but total: a Pharisee who had followed the Law strictly, he became a universalist who sought to do away with the Jewish Law and separative rituals such as circumcision. In this sense, he is often considered (favorably by some, pejoratively by others) the first Christian. Still others believe that Paul had been schooled in Zoroastrianism -- "Pharisee" is linguistically related to Parsi and Farsi, referring to the Zoroastrian people and language -- and that he is responsible for the Zoroastrian influence evident in Christianity, although not in the teachings of Jesus.
Pauline Christianity began in mostly urban households that included family, slaves, freedmen, tenants, and others associated with the head of the family. These household churches, many of which were the homes of women who figured prominently in early Christianity, probably had their inspiration in the Jewish practice of adapting private dwellings into synagogues. The house meetings involved spontaneous prophecy, the reading of letters from Paul or other Christian leaders, and speaking in tongues -- a form of spirit possession in which people speak spontaneously in a language known only to them (still practiced in some Pentecostalist Christian sects.)
Paul discouraged the ecstatic practice of tongues because he found it divisive; he also opposed circumcision (as did Zoroastrians) and other rituals such as sabbath observance and kosher dietary laws that set Jews off from Gentiles. At the Council of Jerusalem in 49, various apostles and elders including Paul and his traveling companion Barnabas, Peter, and James the brother of Jesus met to debate the question of circumcision for Gentile Christians. After much argument, the Council agreed not to enforce circumcision but to demand compliance with certain Jewish laws about diet and sexual conduct. Paul, however, continued to press for a universal religion that would not exclude any potential converts on the basis of either circumcision or diet. The resulting inclusiveness may be one of the main reasons Christianity was able to convert the Roman Empire and Judaism was not. The ethical underpinnings of both religions are essentially similar; even though Jesus shifted the emphasis to a more mystical, present-oriented spirituality with his Kingdom of God, the Pauline church had already somewhat lost touch with that teaching, substituting the belief that Jesus was God incarnate, who died to redeem humanity from its sins. But Judaism was tied to its homeland and Temple, its tribal past of ritual animal sacrifice, dietary restrictions, and circumcision.
By this time, the name Christ was being applied to Jesus, from the Greek word christos, which means "ointment," was the literal translation of the Hebrew word for messiah. Jesus Christ, the Anointed Savior who died for the forgiveness of sins, and who rose from the dead so we all might have eternal life, replaced the teacher of compassion and the inner kingdom of God. English scholar John Bowden expressed it this way: "The center of Jesus' preaching is the kingdom of God; the center of Paul's preaching is Christ crucified and risen. . . . In other words, the Jesus who has the message changes into the Christ who is the message." The early Christians originally saw themselves as Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, but later opposed themselves to all other Jews. Christianity also divided the Deity into a Trinity composed of Three Persons: God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Paul planted communities of Christians all around the Mediterranean area, and his Hellenized and universalized version of Christianity converted Rome and prevailed in the West.
The Baptism of Christ
In the late 1940s, the world of biblical scholarship was handed a stunning surprise. A trove of previously unknown papyrus manuscripts discovered near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, dating back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, contained a number of alternative gospels. Maybe the most surprising was the Gospel of Thomas, written early in the 2nd century in a form similar to the lost "sayings gospel" that the four evangelists drew upon. Some scholars believe that many of the texts may predate the four canonical gospels and express a set of beliefs known as Gnosticism.
Scholars aren't certain whether Gnosticism developed out of Christianity or if the early Christians were reflecting Gnostic beliefs that were already in circulation. Part of the reason for this is that Gnostic teachings were secret and most were never committed to writing; what writings did exist were sought out and destroyed by the branch of the Christian church that became dominant. But the Nag Hammadi texts disclosed a combination of Asian mysticism, magic, astrology, and Jewish Kabbalah in a Christian setting. Gnostics divided the world into opposing forces of good and evil, and they believed they had access to secret wisdom (gnosis is Greek for "knowledge"). Gnostics believed the widespread myth of the Trickster, a human or animal who, like the serpent in Genesis, tricks humanity out of its rightful enjoyment of the world. The Trickster could also be a secondary god who creates the world, identified by some Gnostics with the Old Testament God. He is inferior to the supreme God, but the created world of matter, corrupted by the devil, bears his mark. Because many Gnostics saw matter as evil and spirit as good, they believed that sex and marriage were to be avoided.
Most of what the Gnostics practiced horrified the orthodox elements of the growing Christian church, including Eastern meditation, secret rituals, belief in reincarnation, and equal treatment of women. In the Gospel of Mary (found before Nag Hammadi), Mary Magdalene recounts seeing Jesus in a vision after his death. The disciple, including Peter and Andrew, immediately ridicule her, no doubt indicative of the orthodx position to both Gnostics and women claiming spiritual authority. By the 6th century, Church councils had denounced Gnosticism as heresy, including reincarnation (2nd Council of Constantinople, 553), and most Gnostic writings disappeared until the Nag Hammadi library was discovered in 1945.
All religions borrow from the traditions that came before them, and Christianity is no exception. Since Christianity was based on the teachings of a Jewish healer and its earlest members were primarily Jews, it's no surprise that much of its structure, tradition, and scripture derives from Judaism. The Christian Old Testament is essentially the Hebrew Bible, and even the most influential early translation of that Bible, the Greek Septuagint, was the work of over 70 Jewish scholars translating from the original Hebrew. The Sabbath and feast-days, the singing of Psalms and hymns, choral music, the use of candles and incense, of an altar with a tabernacle and an altar lamp, the "sacrifice" of the mass and the eucharist, are rooted in Judaic practices going back to the Temple days, as are the role of the priest and of special vestments to be worn during services. The structure of Jewish clerical authority with its high-priest became the basis for the Christian hierarchy of priests, bishops, and cardinals, headed by the pope. Even the word "Amen" is Hebrew, usually translated as "so be it," although it actually means "truly."
The other major influence on the developing Christian church was a mystery religion that probably originated in Persia from in much earlier Zoroastrian beliefs. Mithraism takes its name from Mithra, an ancient Iranian god of heavenly light, similar to the Aryan Mitra; when the religion was adopted by the Romans, the name became Mithras. The Greeks called this and similar cults -- like those of Eleusis, Dionysus, and Isis -- mysteria, from a root meaning "to keep one's mouth shut." The "mystery" religions in general demanded absolute secrecy, under pain of death, in exchnage for initiation into rites capable of transforming one spritiually and psychologically. This is one reason we know so little about the Mithraic mysteries, the other reason being that nearly all memory of them was eradicated by the victorious Christians.
Images of Mithras survive, however, in underground temples from England to Asia Minor, showing the deity as a handsome youth kneeling on a bull while stabbing it with his knife. Some scholars associate this figure with the personification of the constellation Perseus, hypothesizing that the cult arose in response to the realization that the reign of Taurus as the constellation of the spring equinox had been replaced by that of Pisces. The Mithraic cult proved especially popular among Roman bureaucrats, legionaires, and slaves, who celebrated it in grottoes and underground chapels. And it appears to have influenced many aspects of Christian belief and practice. According to attacks on Mithraism by Christian authors, its members celebrated sacraments such as baptism and the eucharist, marked their foreheads with a cross, and believed in Mithras as their savior, redeemer, and final judge. Sunday had always been the holy day of the Mithraists, who also celebrated December 25 as the birthday of the sun, in reassurance that the days had begun to grow longer following the winter solstice.
The assertion of the early Christian church that Jesus was the incarnation of God on earth created a theological dilemma. If Jesus was God, could he also be a human being, a man whom other humans could emulate because he had endured human suffering? One solution was to say that Jesus was both true God and true man--that, in fact, God can exist in the persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and still be One. This concept was debated at church councils in Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 381, and Ephesus in 431, and was reasserted at the fourth ecumenical council of Chalcedon in 451. It eventually became known as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
But not all Christians agreed, fearing that it implied a division between the human and divine in Jesus. The split deepened over the next two ecumenical councils, and these "non-Chalcedonian" Christians separated into other churches known as Monophysite for their belief that Christ has only one nature, although they do accept his humanity. The Monophysite churches included the
In addition, between the 8th and 11th centuries, a schism developed between the Roman and Eastern Orthodox branches of the Church, which came to a head, known as the Great Schism, in 1054. The main point of contention was the Roman Church's insistence that the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, proceeds from the Father and the Son, rather than just from the Father.
The Eastern Orthodox branch included the Orthodox Churches of Greece, Serbia, and Russia, with modern branches including the Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Ukrainian, and Carpatho-Russian Orthodox. The Orthodox today profess most of the same beliefs as the Roman Catholic Church, but they reject the leadership and infallibility of the Pope, preferring to follow their own local bishops, called metropolitans. (Senior bishops are patriarchs; monasteries are headed by archimandrites.) Eastern Orthodox priests can marry and have families, but bishops were required to be celibate from about the 7th century, and today they must be monks as well.
Orthodox belief emphasizes the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. Since God is viewed as the Cosmic Creator, His taking on human form is a great inconceivable mystery. And so the Orthodox use of icons -- representations of the Incarnated God, along with Mary and the saints -- is their way of celebrating that mystery and not mere "idol worship" as Western Christians believed. The iconoclastic movement begun by Pope Leo III in 725 was intended to counter the Eastern belief in the legitimacy of icons (and perhaps as a response to the rapid growth of Islam, which forbade all use of images). However, Leo's precepts were eventually rejected by the Church, and now both Roman and Eastern Christians are free to venerate statues, icons, and other images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints.
Eastern Orthodoxy also emphasizes monasticism and the pursuit of mystical union with God much more than either Roman Catholicism or Protestant Christianity. But with about 225 million practitioners worldwide, the Orthodox make up just a little more than ten percent of the world Christian population.
After the Church became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century under Constantine the Great, its spiritual authority merged increasingly with the power of the state. Refusal to believe as the church dictated--heresy--became a crime punishable by imprisonment, torture, and death. Although heresies were often crushed with great violence, they continued to emerge in different parts of the world, usually named for their founders. Major heresies included:
After the death of Christ, Peter, his chief apostle, became the Bishop of Rome and is considered the first pope in a line of succession by which the bishops of Rome became the papal rulers of the Church. The apostles, incidentally, were married, as were many of the early popes. By the end of the first millennium, the Papal Reform Movement, spearheaded by Pope Leo IX (1049-54), sought to reform the priesthood by eliminating marriage for priests. Around the same time, the Crusades began. The Holy Land of Jerusalem, a pilgrimage site for Christians, had been taken over by Muslims in 637, and they eventually restricted access by non-Muslims.
St. Augustine's concept of the "just war" held that war was justifiable if it was waged at the implicit command of God, and subsequent popes developed the notion that death in battle for the sake of the Church would result in heavenly rewards similar to those for martyrdom -- a concept shared by Muslims today. These beliefs created a fertile theological ground for the Crusades. The large armed escorts sent to accompany pilgrims to the Holy Land with Muslims approval often ended up murdering Muslims, Jews, and even other Christians, and engaged in looting and gratuitous destruction. The First Crusade was set in motion by Pope Urban II in 1095; the crusaders set out and took Jerusalem in 1099. The Second Crusade in 1147, led by King Louis VII of France and Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III, was a failure. Forty years later, Saladin took Jerusalem back from the Christians, instigating the Third Crusade by the three principal monarchs of Europe, Including Richard the Lionhearted. They failed to capture Jerusalem, but worked out a truce with Saladin allowing passage to the Holy Land. The Fourth Crusade was carried out not against Muslims but the Eastern Orthodox of Constantinople in 1204. It succeeded in permanently alienating the Greek and other Orthodox from the Roman Church.
These failures led many Christians to think that the Crusaders were not innocent enough. So in 1212, when a French peasant boy preached a Children's Crusade, 50,000 French and German youths set out on one of the great follies of the Middle Ages. Most of them either perished while crossing the Alps or were sold into slavery in Marseilles. There were eight Crusades in all, most of them failures except for the stimulus they provided to European commerce and the arts as a result of extended interaction with the East.
By the beginning of the second millennium, Christianity was so dominant in Europe that non-Christians such as Jews or Muslims had virtually no rights, although they were allowed to live and function within Christian society. Unbelievers or agnostics, considered heretics, were subject to persecution. Christian society was so authoritarian that the process of seeking out infidels and heretics created great abuses. So early in the 13th century, the Church created a permanent tribunal manned by Dominican friars to control abuses of power. But the tribunal, which became known as the Inquisition, only made things worse, allowing church courts to scrap principles of trial law in the endless search for heretics. To be accused of religious wrongdoing amounted to proof of guilt, and the accused could be tortured as part of the process or jailed until either admitting guilt or denouncing others. (This tactic reappeared during the Salem witch trials of the 17th century, and again during the Communist "witch hunt" led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.) Only a small percentage of those tried were actually put to death, ut many were imprisoned and forced to hand over money and possessions to the tribunal, which led to further abuse of the process.
In Spain, Tom6s de Torquemada was named Grand Inquisitor in 1483, and persecution not only increased, but also was aimed at the Jews, who were expelled from Spain in 1492. The Spanish Inquisition continued to operate in one form or another into the 19th century, stopping only after it ran out of money as wealthy targets of confiscation began to dwindle.
As the Christian church grew larger and more powerful with each century, abuses of power inevitably set in. Chief among them were the sale of indulgences and the restriction of the Bible to Greek and Latin that most Christians could not read. Indeed, the whole superstructure of the church, with its hierarchy of popes, cardinals, bishops, and priests required to mediate the faithful's relationship with God had become oppressive. Prior to the 16th century, a number of visionaries attempted to initiate reforms, but without much success. The Italian preacher Savonarola (1452-98) cleansed Florence of some of its worst abuses of church and state power for a time, but he was hanged and burned by the citizens of Florence for his efforts.
Martin Luther (1483-1546) had been an Augustinian monk, an ordained priest, and a doctor of theology at the University of Wittenberg in Germany when a passage in Paul's Epistle to the Romans convinced him that forgiveness of sins could come only from the grace of God, and salvation, or justification, from faith in God rather than from sacramental works or indulgences. This idea of a direct relationship with the Deity became one of the cornerstones of the Protestant Reformation, which he set in motion when he nailed his famous 95 Theses ("On the Power of Indulgences") to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517. Like Luther, Jean Calvin in France developed the concept of justification by faith alone, with no reliance on the church to healp you earn your way to salvation. This belief is still at the core of mainline Protestantism as well as many unaffiliated Evangelical sects.
Luther intended only to open debate on the subject of indulgences, but when the pope summoned him to Rome to defend himself against charges of heresy, he chose to stay in Germany and call for a general reform of the Church. Luther advocated the abolition of priestly celibacy, monastic vows, fasting, masses and religious holidays, and the sale of indulgences. The pope officially excommunicated Luther in 1521, setting in motion a chain of events that led to the rise of Protestant sects.
At the heart of the Protestant reform was a return to the simplicity of the early Christians, following the New Testament rather than the interpretations of those texts by Church Fathers like Augustine and Aquinas, or the popes and their councils.
Lutherans
Luther's vision of Christianity was closely tied to the German state that had served as his protector from the papacy. But he preferred the name Evangelical to Lutheran, believing that he was not founding a new religion but restoring the original church of Christ as contained in the Gospels. Lutherans acknowledge only baptism and communion of the seven sacraments, because only these are mentioned in the Gospels.
Although Luther began by blaming the Church for alienating the Jews, when the Jews didn't jump to convert he became a fierce anti-Semite, calling for the destruction of all Jewish homes and synagogues, the confiscation of their property, and a ban on teaching and traveling. By placing the ultimate power in the hands of the state and demanding absolute obedience to the existing order of society, Luther laid the groundwork for the abuses of Bismarck and Hitler. Hitler often quoted Luther's anti-Semitic rantings, and the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 that began the Holocaust was scheduled by the Nazis to honor Luther's birthday.
Anabaptists
The movement rose in Zurich in the 1520s and spread across German-speaking Europe before splitting into opposing factions. The Anabaptists were persecuted and many thousands slain not only by Rome but also by fellow Protestants who found their radicalism threatening. They believed in voluntary adult baptism by peers, as well as a return to certain basic teachings of Jesus: love, redistribution of wealth, pacifism, and complete separation of church and state.
Calvinists, Reformed, Presbyterians
Jean Calvin's extreme form of predestination held that individuals were destined by God, even before the Creation, to be saved or damned according to His plan. The surest way to determine if you were one of the elect was to be a member of the Calvinist communion, preferably through an individual experience of regeneration, which in modern born-again Christian terminology is equated with "taking Jesus as one's personal savior. In France, Calvin's church amounted to a theocracy, usingexcommunication and execution to silence his opponents. It was known in Continental Europe as Reformed churches and under John Knox in Scotland as Presbyterianism. By stressing that ordinary, everyday work, as opposed to clerical occupations, was a valid way of glorifying God, he laid the groundwork for the Protestant work ethic. Protestants who opposed Calvin and believed in universal salvation are sometimes called Arminians. Reformed churches in France were known as Huguenots; Presbyterians arrived in America in the mid-17th century as the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1972 in Great Britain, Presbyterians joined Congregationalists to form the United Reformed Church, later joined by the Churches of Christ.
Anglicans (Church of England)
As a result of Henry VIII's dispute with Rome over his right to divorce the first of his six wives, he separated from the Roman Catholic Church in 1533 and established the Church of England. Although he abrogated the power of the pope and dismantled monasticism, in his Six Articles, issued in 1539, he also reaffirmed traditional Catholic Christianity. Today, Anglicanism and its American counterpart, Episcopalianism, are the Protestant sects closest in spirit and practice to Roman Catholicism.
Puritans
Residents of Great Britain who thought the English Reformation didn't go far enough, the Puritans wanted to purge many of the ceremonies of the Church that were kept by the Anglicans, such as kneeling at the altar for communion, using the cross in baptism, and clerical vestments. During the pro-Catholic reign of "Bloody" Mary, many Puritans fled to the Continent, and in 1620, a group of 102 Separatists from the Church of England, the Pilgrim Fathers led by John Robinson, left for America to create a New England, and settled in Plymouth.
Mennonites
Menno Simmons (c. 1492-1559) was an itinerant Anabaptist preacher who stressed non-violence during the initial persecution of the sect. He didn't found the Mennonites, but they adopted his less fanatical version of Anabaptism. Because of persecution, the Mennonites migrated from the Netherlands and northern Germany to Russia and the United States. They were pacifists, and protested the use of slaves in America as early as 1688. One of their best known sects is the Amish, who separated from the mainstream in Switzerland around 1690 under Jacob Ammon, who insisted on a stricter observance of rules. The strictest branch of Amish, the Old Order Amish Mennonite Church, insist on plainness of dress, furnishings, and meals.
Baptists
In the early 17th century in England, several movements evolved among the Separatists, insisting on the separate autonomy of each church and the equal voice of each believer. The New Testament was their only guide, and they denounced the practice of infant baptism which had been developed by the Catholic Church. Baptists today continue to deny any human founder or creed. In the U.S., the Baptists' emphasis on autonomy played a role in ensuring religious freedom through separation of church and state in the Constitution and the First Amendment. Today the Baptists make up the largest single Protestant denomination in America (over 35 million adults), second only to Roman Catholics overall. Their largest sub-sect is the Southern Baptists.
Methodists
A movement focusing on personal experience and social consciousness was begun by John Wesley (1703-91) and his brother Charles (1707-88), both Anglican priests. The name came from their methodical observance of fasting and prayer time, although they also spent time visiting the sick, poor, and imprisoned, and doing other charitable work. Charles's hymns -- over 7,000 songs and poems -- had as great an effect as John's preaching. In America, the driving force of the United Methodist Church is the belief that every Christian must take a direct interest in the lives of the less fortunate.
Quakers (also Society of Friends).
Developed from radical English Puritans in the mid 17th century, their name implied trembling with awe before the word of God. Their leader was George Fox (1624-91) who, probably as a result of spending six years in squalid prisons for his opposition to established Christianity, moved the Quakers to pursue social justice causes early on. A mystic, Fox stressed the importance of seeking the "Inner Light" of the living Christ that he said exists in every human being equally. The Quakers were among the first to oppose slavery in America, have always been anti-war, and run some of the most prestigious schools in the country. They reject the sacraments entirely, dress and speak simply, and practice a kind of meditation.
The Brethren.
Trace their roots back to the Brethren of the Common Life, and early German Pietists, who cultivated an inner spiritual life through prayer, Scripture study, and fellowship rather than institutionalized dogma. More radical and less dogmatic than many Protestant sects, they also tended to be separatist, and many of them were forced to migrate to America to avoid persecution. Spinoffs include the Brethren in Christ and the River Brethren (a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania subsect based near the Susquehanna River). The Dunkers, also called Tunkers (from the German tunken, "to immerse"), Taüfers, or Dompelaars, believed in triple immersion, one for each Person of the Trinity. They favored early Christian practices like the agape ("love feast") and refuse to engage in warfare, lawsuits, or oath-taking.
Shakers
An offshoot of the Quakers, they came to America in 1774 by way of England, led by Mother Ann Lee. They live in utopian congregations, practice celibacy even among married couples who join them (there is no marriage for Shakers), abstain from meat, fish, alcohol and tobacco, and live unusually long and healthy lives. They also engaged in communal seances and wildly ecstatic, shaking dances, accompanied by laughing and barking. Their furniture, known for its unadorned esthetic appeal, is still much sought after by collectors. Because of their celibate orientation, based on Mother Lee's belief that God contained male and female principles and sex was always sinful, the sect is slowly dying out.
Adventists
In 1831, a Baptist named William Miller began preaching that Christ would make his return, or Second Advent, in 1844, based on his interpretation of a passage in the prophetic Book of Daniel. Miller's unfulfilled prediction was labeled the "Great Disappointment," and he quit preaching. After Miller withdrew, Ellen G. Wright and others formed a new church from his disappointed followers, called Seventh-day Adventists, based on the practice of observing the Sabbath on Saturday, the seventh day of the biblical week.
Jehovah's Witnesses
This millenarian sect continues to thrive despite the fact that their numerous predictions of the end of the world, which they first prophesied for 1914, then 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, and 1975, never materialized. As conceived under the original name of Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society by a Pittsburgh haberdasher named Charles Taze Russell, its distinctive belief is not merely the destruction of the damned (unbelievers) in Armageddon but also the elevation to heaven of the 144,000 elect as predicted in the Book of Revelation, to rule over the remaining faithful who would live eternally on a perfected Earth. Theologically, the Witnesses do not believe in the Divinity of Christ, or that the soul can live without the body. They have virtually no devotional life, but spend most of their energy in proclaiming their message door to door. Within recent years, the Witnesses have ceased predicting the Second Coming at a specific date.
African-American Churches
African-American churches began as branches of the Baptist church in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The first to refer to their racial origins were the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New York, known nowadays as the A.M.E. and A.M.E. Zion churches, respectively. But the largest black denominations in the country today are the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A. and the National Baptist Convention of America.
Several Christian sects have been founded and based in the United States, including the Church of Latter Day Saints (the name it now prefers to the Mormon Church) and the Church of St. John Coltrane (a branch of St. John's African Orthodox Church devoted to the music of the late, great jazz saxophonist and composer). But only one major religion in the U.S. was founded by a woman and identifies her as its major source of inspiration. The Church of Christ, Scientist, better known as Christian Science, has well under a million members, yet its highly respected media arms (the Christian Science Monitor newspaper and Monitor Radio) and its radical philosophy of healing have kept its name in the public eye.
The church was founded in the 19th century by Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), who rejected the notion of predestination embraced by her staunchly Calvinist New England father, although she remained a member of the Congregational Church until she founded her own. Eddy suffered early on from convulsive fits, which, combined with a series of personal losses (her brother, husband, and mother died and her young son was put into foster care within the same decade), left her almost a total invalid. Suspecting a mental rather than physical element to sickness, she explored alternative healing practices like homeopathy and hypnotic suggestion. A hypnotist and healer from Maine named Phineas Quimby, who believed that the mind could both cause and cure disease, helped to relieve her pain for a time.
But after Quimby died, Eddy became deathly ill following a nasty fall. After reading and meditating on a Bible account of Christ's miraculous healing, Eddy was healed, and "gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon." Over the next several years, Mrs. Eddy wrote her interpretation of the Bible entitled Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875), explaining that Jesus taught "our dominion over matter," and that spirit was the sole reality of existence. She claimed it was directly inspired by God, but reportedly asked a clergyman to help with the grammar. In 1879, she organized the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston; the Mother Church was built there in 1894 and later expanded.
Because Christian Scientists believe that evil and illness exist only in the mind, they rely on specially trained members called practitioners, who help other members heal injuries or disease through prayer, thought, and reading. The prayers are tailored to each situation and are based on the King James Bible, Science and Health, and other writings by Mary Baker Eddy, and the practitioner does not need to deliver them face to face. The practitioner is not believed to have healing powers, but rather to help the patient turn to God as the source of healing. Medical intervention is not necessarily forbidden, but is not encouraged, since it is said to interfere with spiritual healing.
Because of their controversial beliefs about healing, in recent years a number of Christian Scientists have been brought up on criminal charges, and several convicted, when their children died after receiving treatment through prayer rather than through conventional medical care. One Boston couple, for example, was convicted in 1990 of manslaughter in the death of their two-year-old son who became ill in 1986 because of a bowel obstruction and died five days later. However, all guilty verdicts have eventually been overturned on appeal. In another case, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that a Christian Scientist couple had the right to reject chemotherapy to treat cancer in their three-year-old son. Furthermore, spiritual healing is recognized by law. Christian Science practitioners' charges are paid by many large private insurance companies, and some Christian Science sanatoriums are providers of care under Medicare. The fees charged by practitioners, nurses, and sanatoriums are deductible from federal income taxes as medical expenses.
Some Christian theologians contend that Christian Science does not represent orthodox Christianity because it does not teach the divinity of the man Jesus. However, Christian Scientists do understand Jesus Christ to be the Son of God, the Redeemer, and they accept the gospel accounts that he was born of a virgin, was crucified, rose from the grave, and then ascended. In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy writes, "The Divinity of the Christ was made manifest in the humanity of Jesus," implying some separation between the human and divine natures of Jesus Christ, whereas most Christians insist that both natures are united--that Jesus was "true God and true man." Christian Scientists see the Christ as an eternal principle, which sounds a little like the concept of the Indian avatar. At other times Christian Science bears a resemblance to the Eastern philosophy of relative and absolute truth, as when it says that (on the level of absolute truth) there is no reality except Mind or Spirit and everything material--sickness, death, sin--is unreality, and yet that (on a relative level) because humanity has not fully grasped or accepted that God or Mind is All, people do appear to become sick and die, and they rely on marriage, food, money, and other material necessities. But since Christian Scientists believe that Jesus Christ is the Redeemer, that the cross is the central element in human history, and that humanity's spiritual, God-given identity is indestructible and eternal, it would be difficult to exclude them from the Christian tradition.
Christian Scientists accept the word of Mrs. Eddy as final; no new teachings can enter the church. And so, there is no preaching or sermonizing in the traditional sense. Each church has a First and Second Reader elected by the congregation who read selections of Scripture accompanied by selections from Science and Health without commentary or explanation. Members can and do share testimonies of healings that have taken place in their lives, and sing hymns, some of them written by Mrs. Eddy.
With about 11 million members worldwide and over five million in the U.S. alone, Mormons make up one of the larger American denominations, just ahead of Episcopalians and Pentecostals. Based in Utah, the Mormon church, which prefers to be called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or LDS), has used its army of young missionaries to spread its beliefs across the country and around the world. They have also joined with non-Mormon groups to fight against drug use, abortion rights, and equal rights for women and gays and lesbians. Their conservative, "pro-family" beliefs make them close in spirit to fundamentalist and Evangelical Christian groups. And yet many of those same groups repudiate the Mormons as a kind of cult, because LDS teachings about Jesus, and some of their other beliefs, are radically different from mainstream Christian doctrine.
Among other things, Mormons believe that after the first disciples of Jesus died, their followers immediately entered into error, and so God withdrew his Church from the earth. They refer to this as the Apostasy, or general falling away from the truth, and believe that Jesus Christ began to restore His Church to the earth only in 1820, through the Prophet Joseph Smith. For Mormons, the Church of Jesus Christ has now been restored to the earth, and the authority of God exists in the Mormon church today, just as it did in the "original Church." Mormons accept not only the Bible but also the Book of Mormon -- Another Testament of Jesus Christ, as the word of God. But because it was first published in 1830 and has no connection to the original Christian tradition, the Book of Mormon is not considered by most Christians to be revealed truth.
Mormons disagree, and fully believe that their founder, Joseph Smith, received a genuine revelation from both God and Jesus Christ. At the age of 14, while living in Palmyra, New York, Smith received his first vision. God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared before Joseph as separate entities and told him that the Christian denominations already in existence were in error and that he should avoid them. Three years later he began receiving visions of an angel identified as Moroni, son of Mormon, who revealed the location of golden tablets that contained the history of two early American tribes. Following Moroni's directions, Smith said he discovered (along with a breastplate similar to those worn by ancient Israelites) a set of golden plates on which four ancient American authors had written new accounts not contained in the Bible, but in an unfamiliar script, and two "stones in silver bows" called the Urim and Thummim. Referred to in the Hebrew Bible, these were apparently devices that the high priest consulted to discern God's will. Smith claimed that with the stones and God's help he was able to translate the unknown writing on the golden plates into English. He also found a set of brass plates on which another author had recorded certain genealogies.
More visions followed in succeeding years, as Smith proceeded to translate the script he found on the plates. (The nature of the original script and the validity of the translations has never been verified by a third party, as the plates no longer exist.) In 1830 Smith published the Book of Mormon, a Bible-flavored account of God's intervention in the history of America's ancient inhabitants, said to be descended from the Israelites and other Biblical tribes who crossed the sea in barges from the Tower of Babel to become the ancestors of the American Indians. Jesus Christ himself figures in the 500-page text, which so enraged the local Christians that Smith and his followers were forced to flee to Ohio, Missouri, and finally to Illinois, where Smith began a campaign to become president of the United States. In 1844, after Smith and his brother destroyed the presses of a newspaper that had opposed Smith's candidacy, they were lynched by a mob.
Brigham Young succeeded Smith and in 1847 led most of the sect to the Salt Lake basin in Utah, where he found a permanent home for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (so called by Smith because he claimed to be returning Christianity to its original state). Besides their unorthodox beliefs regarding Scripture, the Mormons also infuriated other Christians by their practice of polygamy, or "plural marriage," which they based on the fact that the Hebrew patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Solomon had practiced it. Joseph Smith and his closest associates, including Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball, sanctioned and regulated the practice in the early years. But in 1890, church President Wilford Woodruff "received a revelation that the leaders of the Church should cease teaching the practice of plural marriage." Known as the Great Accommodation, this reversal helped to win statehood for Utah. (In 1985 Michael Quinn, a Yale-educated Mormon scholar, discovered evidence that Mormon leaders continued the practice secretly for another 14 years. The Reorganized Church of Latter-day Saints, a splinter group of Mormons centered around a descendant of Joseph Smith in Independence, Missouri, rejected polygamy early on. They are still active with over a quarter of a million members.)
Mormon Beliefs
Many LDS beliefs are consistent with traditional Christian teachings. Mormons believe, for instance, that God the Father sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to be the savior of humankind. Through Christ's "atonement," humanity can be saved if they obey God's laws and ordinances. Apart from the early practice of plural marriage, Mormons have embraced a moral code similar to the most conservative Christian sects: coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and extra-marital sex are strictly forbidden, and members are expected to tithe, giving one-tenth of their income to support church activities. Yet, as noted earlier, much of their dogma is unique. The LDS church teaches a doctrine of continuous revelation, meaning that the Book of Mormon and two other works, Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price, are considered legitimate additions to the Bible (no other Christian sect recognizes the validity of those works). They also believe that before birth, humans live with the "Heavenly Father as one of His beloved spirit children." Humans do not have a physical body during this pre-birth existence, but incarnate because they need "a chance to gain experience" on their own, "away from His presence, but with the ability to communicate with Him and receive help. So He sent you to Earth, hoping that you would return to Him and receive everything He has to offer you."1 Mormons also believe in a complex level of spiritual worlds in the afterlife. Marriages that are performed in the Church's temples, and have been officially "sealed by priesthood," are said to continue after death, when earthly families are to be reunited in the afterworld. Finally, LDS teaching holds that God and Christ are separate deities of flesh and bone, and although the Holy Spirit has no physical component, the three are one in purpose.
The church expects two years of missionary service from male members when they turn 19. Women are allowed but not encouraged to be missionaries. As in the Roman Catholic church, Mormon women have begun agitating for the right to become bishops--the Mormon equivalent of priests or ministers--an office that is currently closed to them. Paradoxically, a long-established Mormon doctrine holds that the spiritual parents of humanity included a female as well as a male deity, a belief that is emphasized by a still-popular hymn written in 1843 by Eliza Snow, a major church figure who supported equal rights for women. The hymn, "Oh, My Father," includes the lines,
"In the Heavens are parents single?In recent years, amid the growing cry for equal treatment of women within the church, its leaders have severely disciplined or excommunicated several Mormon scholars and feminists. A revelation from God in 1978 ended a policy of exclusion of African Americans, who are now regarded as full members of the LDS and are eligible for consideration for ordination.
No. . . .
Truth eternal
Tells me I've a Mother there."
The LDS church continues to be one of the fastest growing in the world, with several thousand meeting houses and 106 formal temples worldwide. And the Book of Mormon is among the ten most popular books in America.
__________________
1. Taken from the Offcial Website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: http://www.lds.org
Like all the other major traditions, Christianity has a rich history of mysticism and a number of renowned mystics whose teachings are read enthusiastically by followers of other religions. But the Christian churches have tended to downplay the importance of their own mystics. Several of the most renowned Christian mystics, including St. John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart, were openly attacked by the church or threatened with excommunication during their lifetimes. Many leading Christian mystics were also monks who renounced the worldly life to withdraw into study and prayer. This tradition began in the deserts of Egypt and Syria in the 3rd century, with a group of monks known collectively as the Desert Fathers. The prototype was undoubtedly Anthony the Great, a Coptic layman who, around the year 270, followed literally the gospel teaching of Jesus, "Go, sell all you have and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven, and come follow me." Living as an illiterate desert hermit followed by an informal group of disciples, Anthony never washed or changed his clothes, and died at the age of 105.
During the 4th century, from Upper Egypt to Syria, Palestine, and Arabia, various groups of ascetics formed around an abba, or "father" (from which "abbot" derives). In Syria, some monks went naked and in chains, lived on tall pillars (Stylites); nested in the branches of trees (Dendrites), or foraged in the woods like wild animals (Graziers). In Asia Minor, other monks such as St. Basil the Great (c. 330-379) were literate, upper-class theologians who lived under a set of rules; Basil's are the first written rules we have.
But over time a number of great Christian mystics appeared who lived among and preached to the general public.
Johanne Eckhart (1260-1328) A German-born Dominican monk better known as Meister Eckhart used the term "Godhead" to refer to the kind of impersonal, transcendent Absolute the Hindus called Brahman, distinguished from God as the personal creator of the universe. This kind of thinking disturbed the Church, and Eckhart was tried several times for heresy. He was finally found guilty, and a papal bull, or edict, was issued against him, but he was never actually punished since he had died shortly before the bull was published.
Nicholas of Cusa (1400-64) His career of seeking reform within the Church generally met with support, including papal appointments, despite the fact that, like most mystics, he accepted the equal validity of all religions. Nicholas was a gifted mathematician, scientist, and linguist.
St. John of the Cross (1542-91) became a monk in the contemplative order of Carmelites at age 21 in Spain. John was associated with fellow Spaniard Teresa of Avila (1515-82), who founded a reformed order called the Discalced ("barefoot") Carmelites, stressing strict poverty, cloister, and fasting. Their asceticism and independence angered religious authorities to such an extent that John was tortured, found guilty of disobedience, imprisoned, and humiliated. During his imprisonment, he wrote his famous mystical poem, "The Dark Night of the Soul," describing the point at which the soul has begun to break away from the separative ego and its material consolations, but has not yet achieved the higher consolations of mystical union with God.
Julian of Norwich (c.1342-1416) In her great book Revelations of Divine Love, Julian recounts a series of 16 visions she experienced on a single day as she suffered from a near-fatal illness which she had asked God to send her. The book also contains her meditations on these visions over a period of 20 years. Julian was an anchorite, living in almost total isolation in a cell attached to the wall of the Norman church of St. Julian and St. Edward's, although she occasionally served as a spiritual counselor to others.
The universality of mysticism, a phenomenon which the German philosopher Leibnitz called the "perennial philosophy," is sometimes evident in thte language of mystics. Julian, for instance, writes that in one of her mystical visions the Lord showed her "a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball. I looked at it thoughtfully and wondered, 'What is this?' And the answer came, 'It is all that is made.'" This experience of God or creation as being infinitely small (or infinitely large) is also part of Hindu mystical thought, and was succinctly expressed by the visionary poet William Blake in "Auguries of Innocence":
To see the world in a grain of sand,
And heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
The concept of religious fundamentalism originally developed among Christian revival movements in California and New England around the turn of the 20th century. But since 1979, the meaning of the word has expanded to include Muslims and Jews and Sikhs. But before we can understand the implications of world fundamentalism, we need to know what fundamentalism means in its original Christian designation.
To begin with, although most fundamentalists would consider themselves born-again Christians, not all born-agains are fundamentalists. To call oneself a born-again Christian, as do between 30 and 50 million Americans, including former presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, means to have gone through an adult conversion experience that included accepting Jesus Christ as one's personal savior. The experience is often preceded by a period of less than exemplary living, after which the believer is "rescued" by the Lord and is called to regenerate his or her life. But just as Carter and Reagan had very different political viewpoints, many born-again Christians refuse to align themselves with the so-called Christian Right, remaining staunchly liberal on social issues and often preferring to maintain separation of church and state.
How Did Fundamentalism Come To Be?
When empirical philosophy was applied to Biblical criticism during the 19th century, increasing numbers of Christians began to accept the Bible as largely symbolic and metaphorical rather than literally true. Scientific evidence and biblical scholarship were increasingly showing that on a rational level at least, the Bible didn't stand up to scrutiny as either a scientific document or even as the work of many of the men to whom it was credited. Bible scholars, for instance, were able to show based on textual evidence that the first five books of the Bible, known in Hebrew as the Torah, could not have been written by one person, and certainly not Moses. Indeed, they were shown to have been composed after the works of the Prophets, who follow those books in both the Hebrew and Christian Bible. And parts of the creation and flood narratives were found to closely resemble accounts from Sumerian and Babylonian myths that predate the Bible by more than a thousand years.
Those Christians who clung to the old belief that every word of the Bible was literally true -- called biblical inerrancy -- came together and formulated their beliefs at a series of revival meetings and Bible study conferences that took place across North America from Ontario to Southern California between 1875 and 1915. These groups agreed on five "fundamentals" of Christian belief that were enumerated in a series of 12 paperback volumes containing scholarly essays on the Bible that appeared between 1910 and 1915, entitled The Fundamentals. Those fundamentals included:
Fundamentalism, or the adherence to the fundamentals of Christianity, grew at least in part out of a desire by fundamentalists to return to the days of a less ethnically and religiously diverse America, a time that predated not only the empirical approach to biblical criticism but also the influx of large numbers of immigrants from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean rim, mainly Roman Catholics and Jews. They especially sought a return to a world in which moral laws were absolute, men dominated women, and the laws of the Bible were strictly adhered to. Throughout the 20th century, for example, fundamentalist Christians have staunchly opposed equal rights for women and the legalization of homosexuality and abortion. For these reasons, fundamentalist Christians tend to be intolerant of those who practice modernized, liberalized, or less rigorous forms of their religion (something that is true to some extent of all religious fundamentalists, including Muslims, Jews, and Sikhs). They lobby to have their beliefs, including creationism, taught in public schools and, increasingly, they have moved into the political arena by promoting candidates for public office -- from local school boards to the presidency of the United States. The extremist fringe of fundamentalism advocates militant action that may include civil disobedience, violence, and even murder.
Although many of the most vocal fundamentalists are rigidly conservative in their political orientation, national polls have indicated that as few as one-third of Americans who identify themselves as born-again Christians align themselves with the so-called Religious Right, which is dominated by politically active fundamentalists with a socially conservative agenda.
Most born-again Christians are identified as either Evangelical or Pentecostal Christians. The term evangelist originally referred to the disciples who proclaimed of the "good news" of Christ's teaching (the literal meaning of its Greek root). But by the end of the 2nd century the term was applied to the four authors of the gospel (Anglo-Saxon for "good tidings"), and evangelism to any form of conversion-oriented preaching. During the Protestant Reformation, the title Evangelical reflected Luther's emphasis on returning to the gospel message itself, free of church doctrine. Today, the Lutheran Church in Germany and several Lutheran sects in America have the word Evangelical in their names. But its most common usage developed around the turn of this century in America among conservative fundamentalists within the Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, and Presbyterian churches and Pentecostal and Holiness sects, who emphasized preaching the Bible and personal spiritual experience without the mediation of a clerical class.
Evangelicals, as they call themselves, tend to favor warmth and emotionalism over formality. Although they grew out of the fundamentalist movement, strict fundamentalists make up only a minority fringe of Evangelicalism today (specifically Bob Jones University and the American Council of Christian Churches). In a modern context, the term refers to Protestant religions that conform to the earliest teachings of the New Testament, apart from their interpretation by the Church Fathers and popes. Evangelicals do accept historic the belief in the three Persons of the Trinity. At least 14 kinds of Evangelicalism have been identified in the U.S., from Conservative (including perennial evangelist Billy Graham) to Charismatic (typified by Oral Roberts).
Pentecostalists are fundamentalist Protestants who emphasize being born again in the (Holy) Spirit, often accompanied by speaking in tongues, and healing by laying on of hands. The largest Pentecostalist churches are the Assemblies of God, the Church of God, the Church of God in Christ (the largest black Pentecostal sect), and the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, founded by famed faith-healer Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944), who is also considered the first radio evangelist.
Both Evangelical and Pentecostalist prayer meetings are likely to include hand-clapping, spontaneous prayer and testimony, tongues, faith healing, and upraised arms accompanied by shouts of "Praise the Lord!" When Jerry Falwell took control of the PTL (for Praise the Lord) during the much-publicized scandal in which Jim Bakker was convicted of pocketing millions of dollars in contributions, Bakker's followers objected largely becuase Falwell's dour fundamentalist style did not jibe with Bakker's and his congregation's more emotional, Evangelical one. Many fundamentalist Baptists, who don't believe in tongues, are put off by that kind of exuberance.
The wide-spread success of the Pentecostal and Evangelical sects has led Roman Catholic and mainline Protest churches to accept within their own denominations charismatic movements which foster an emotionally charged atmosphere in the context of otherwise orthodox worship services.
Televangelists, who preach over the airwaves or cable and survive on mailed-in contributions, don't belong to a specific sect, but are almost always born-again. Some of them, like Pat Robertson, use their electronic pulpits to attempt to influence political events. Others, like Oral Roberts, merely raise large sums of money and endow colleges and universities named after them. Robert Tilton, whose Dallas-based television ministry has been the subject of television exposes and an IRS investigation for fraud, talks in tongues and practices faith-healing over the tube.
The most successful electronic evangelist in America based on ratings is Robert Schuller, whose "Hour of Power" is ranked first among religious broadcasts by both Nielsen and Arbitron, with about one and a half million viewers and listeners, and 50 nations around the world. Schuller preaches a sunny gospel from his Crystal Cathedral in Southern California, borrowing from Norman Vincent Peale's "Power of Positive Thinking" approach to religion with something he calls "possibility thinking."
