Christianity: Overview

According to the writers of the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth gathered a small group of disciples and went about for three years in first century Galilee, preaching a message of hope to the poor and healing the sick. John the "Baptist" had gone before him, calling people to repent and be baptized, promising the imminent coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. He recognized in Jesus a far greater preacher than himself, sent from God. Jesus and his disciples eventually set out for Jerusalem. He threw out those who were trading in the temple precincts. He prophesied that the temple would be destroyed. The Jewish leaders pressed for his punishment and the Roman authorities authorized his crucifixion, with a mocking title nailed to the Cross: "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." Three days after Jesus's body was buried it was discovered to be missing from the tomb where it had been laid. Some of the disciples said they had seen and spoken to the Risen Lord and later that they had seen him ascend into heaven. They began to declare him to be the Son of God.

The spread of Christianity toward the West, through the Roman Empire and eventually the whole world, began with the conversion of the Saul of Tarsus, known after his conversion as Paul. He had been determined to eradicate this new sect until he had a vision on the road to Damascus that took him from an energetic Judaism to missionary zeal for Christianity. It was he who persuaded Peter and the other disciples that it was God's will that they should preach the gospel of Jesus to everyone and not just the Jews.

Jesus wrote nothing, and the lack of contemporary accounts of his ministry makes the "historical Jesus" hard to be sure of. The Holy Scriptures of the Christian faith were composed after his death. The four Gospels, accounts of the life of Jesus, the Acts of the Apostles (a history of the early church), a series of pastoral letters to young churches by Paul and others, and an Apocalypse describing the end of all things came to be accepted by the end of the fourth century as a divinely inspired "New Testament" to be added to the Old Testament of the Jewish Scriptures to form the Bible. The Bible has always been used as authority, taken literally by fundamentalists but in most centuries figuratively interpreted as a means of resolving apparent contradictions within it and using it to answer questions it does not directly address.

Christianity and Secular Thought

A series of Christian authors during the first centuries c.e., later known as "the Fathers," defended the faith to contemporary philosophers. Roman imperial religion was syncretistic. Apart from the Christians only the Jews refused to mingle their God with the gods of the pagans. Christians claimed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God and had promised to send the Holy Spirit, or Paraclete, into the world to be "with" his people. Contemporary philosophy described a Trinity in descending order: a Supreme Being, a Logos, a "Soul of the World." Christians insisted that the three "Persons" in one God in their Trinity were equal and coeternal. There were long-running debates about the manner in which God could have "become man." The definitive creed of the council of the whole church held at Nicaea in 325 provided an "official" statement of the approved faith.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, the arena of debate changed. In the Eastern, Greek-speaking half of the old Roman Empire, Christian learning survived in deeply conservative monasteries and focused on a mystical spirituality colored by late Platonism. Christian thought and learning in the West moved into the new Christian monasteries, the cathedral schools, and eventually, from the end of the twelfth century, into the newly created universities. Islamic scholarship had preserved and developed Greek thought and was absorbed in its turn by the Christian scholars of the thirteenth century.

Thinkers of the Middle Ages such as Peter Lombard (c. 1095–1160) and Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–1274) worked out a "systematic theology" covering the existence and nature of God, Unity, and Trinity; the way in which God became man and why; a doctrine of the church and the sacraments; and the relationship of human free will to the foreknowledge and predestination and grace of an omniscient and omnipotent God. For most of fifteen hundred years in the West the church dominated intellectual endeavor to the point where philosophy and science were subsumed in theology.

Division

Christians, despite their schismatic tendencies, always put a premium on unity of faith. Yet the Christological debates of the third to fifth centuries ultimately led to the separation of the Monophysite Churches after the Council of Chalcedon (451). In 1054 the Orthodox Church and the Western Roman Church divided, partly over the Western addition to the creed of the assertion that the Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son.

The Reformation of the sixteenth century in western Europe divided the Roman Catholic Church from the Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, and other "reforming" communities. In dispute at this period were the claims of the institutional church to provide the only route to salvation and the reformers' claim that the individual needed only a justifying faith and the Bible to read, and the grace of the Holy Spirit would do the rest. In the eighteenth century the Methodist Church separated from the Church of England (Anglican) over the validity of its ministry and in due course itself became a worldwide "communion."

Ecumenism

From the second half of the twentieth century there have been serious attempts to restore Christian unity. From 1948, the World Council of Churches, which influenced the whole of the twentieth century with its work on "faith and order" as well as on "peace and justice," excluded the Roman Catholic Church. The Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s put the Roman Catholic Church's stamp of approval on the modern ecumenical movement and allowed it to enter into bilateral and multilateral dialogues with other Christian communities.

Christianity and Modern Thought

The eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment returned to "natural" religion, those "truths" that can be arrived at by rational observation of the "created world." This was a first step in allowing changes of fashion in modern secular philosophy and political assumption to drive new thinking in Christian theology. Theologians were prompted to fresh thinking by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant. Friedrich Schleiermacher continued the challenge into the nineteenth century. Søren Kierkegaard called for a move away from believing "propositions" to living the Christian life. Charles Darwin's work on the Origin of Species forced Christians to think radically about the story of the Creation told in Genesis. Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner are leading theologians of the twentieth century who have attempted modern restatements of the faith that allow for the changed philosophical infrastructure. "Process theology" (Alfred Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne) postulated that God is changeable and challengeable—a process, not a substance. Don Cupitt and others have experimented with the idea of the "death" of God. Postmodernism, a multiple and shapeless movement emerging after World War II, and the "deconstruction" of language and forms (Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) have undermined old certainties.

Christianity and Secular Politics

The Gospels say that Jesus taught his disciples to be compliant citizens, "rendering to Caesar" what the law required. The Roman Empire became officially Christian with the conversion of the emperor Constantine the Great in the early fourth century. Modern manifestations of the resulting long-term tension in relations of church and state include liberation theology in South America in the late twentieth century, which pressed for recognition of the dignity of the poor. Liberal feminism, especially vigorous in the United States in the late twentieth century, called for inclusiveness of language and an end to the assumption that God is a "he." Women are ordained to the Anglican, though not the Roman Catholic or Orthodox, priesthood and episcopate in the early twenty-first century. The old debate about the relationship of science and religion has moved partly into the political arena and is now preoccupied with the ethics of the mapping of the human genome, genetically modified food, and the means now available to achieve live births of human children not conceived by ordinary sexual intercourse.

Mission and Interfaith Relations

The Gospels relate that Jesus charged his disciples with spreading the Gospel, and the first generations took it throughout the Roman Empire. Gregory the Great sent a mission of Augustine of Canterbury to England in 597, and from there Boniface in the eighth century took missions into continental Europe. Christianity was still spreading east and north in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The crusading period from the late eleventh to the thirteenth century brought Christianity into contact with Islam in the Middle East and the first translation of the Koran was made in the West in the mid-twelfth century. With world explorations and discovery of the Americas in the sixteenth century it was carried to the New World. There the Roman Catholic tradition dominated Latin America and the colonies established by the Spanish and French in North America, with the future United States predominantly colonized by Protestant exiles from Northern Europe. The nineteenth century saw a somewhat "imperialist" spreading of the faith into the Far East and Africa and the Pacific. Much of this later missionary endeavor has been "denominational"; American Baptist missionaries entered Orthodox Russia after the fall of communism. Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period the Jews had lived in Europe alongside the Christian communities. During World War II the Roman Catholic Church did not protest about the Holocaust, and Pope John Paul II eventually apologized for the silence of the Church. Interfaith dialogue in the early twenty-first century seeks to establish a basis of mutual respect on which adherents of different faiths may live.

Conclusion

Christianity remains numerically probably the largest world religion, with Islam close behind. About a third of the population of the world was Christian in the 1990s, and the majority of the non-Christian population knew of Christianity or had some opportunity of contact with it. The largest number of Christians resided in Latin America, with Europe second and Africa third, then North America, then South Asia. Postcolonialism and globalization pose major challenges as to how far the faith can absorb local culture without itself being essentially changed. But paradoxically the loss of heritage makes for conservatism. The fastest-growing Christian community is in Africa, where the intellectual history of the patristic and medieval West is often unfamiliar. Conservative fundamentalism is making the ordination of homosexuals as priests and bishops in the West a church-dividing matter in parts of Africa. The altered balance of the Christian populations worldwide has begun to throw into question the continuance of an intellectual tradition now culturally remote from many Christians while it continues to privilege the Bible as the foundation text and ultimate authority.

See also Christianity: Asia ; Free Will, Determinism, and Predestination ; Heaven and Hell ; Heresy and Apostasy ; Philosophy and Religion in Western Thought ; Philosophy of Religion ; Pietism ; Puritanism ; Religion and Science ; Religion and the State ; Ritual: Religion ; Sacred and Profane .

bibliography

Evans, G. R., ed. The Early Christian Theologians. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

——, ed. The Medieval Theologians. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Ford, David, ed. The Modern Theologians. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

Gascoigne, Bamber. A Brief History of Christianity. London: Robinson, 2003.

Lindberg, Carter, ed. The Reformation Theologians. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

McBrien, Richard P. Catholicism. 3rd ed. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994.

Piepkorn, Arthur Carl. Profiles in Belief: The Religious Bodies of the United States and Canada. 4 vols. New York: Harper and Row, 1977–1979. Covers all the main Christian denominations with an account of their differences.

Sanders, E. P. The Historical Figure of Jesus. London: Penguin, 1995.

——. Paul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Ward, Keith. Christianity: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Oneworld, 2000.

Ware, Timothy. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.

G. R. Evans