An Explanation Of Christianity

Since so much that happens in the world is based on historical religious patterns, even if it is in modern secular form, why don't we review the history of Christianity?

Christianity is based on Jesus being the awaited Messiah. The Jewish scriptures foretold the Messiah and the ones who accept Jesus as that Messiah are known as Christians. All of this is foretold, and told about, in the Bible. The Christian Old Testament is basically the Hebrew Scriptures, written before the time of Jesus but foretelling His Coming. The New Testament was written after Jesus and it describes and interprets His life and teachings.

The reason for Jesus as Messiah is to save people from their sin. Christianity is not people reaching up to God, it is God reaching down to us. No human has ever been free of sin, it entered humanity through Adam's disobedience. 

But if sin can enter through one man then salvation from sin can also enter through one man. God sent Jesus, His only begotten Son, down here to pay the price for our sin. Jesus was without sin so when he was unjustly crucified, really because the religious authorities were resentful of His popularity, he paid the penalty for all who will accept Him as your savior. 

When God judges someone who has accepted Jesus as their saviour, He judges Jesus instead. So instead of seeing that person's sin, which would make it impossible for that person to enter Heaven, He sees Jesus' lack of sin and then the person can enter Heaven.

There was debate in the early church about the exact relationship between Jesus' divine nature and His human nature, since He had to have both. The nature of this relationship is referred to as "Christology". Some defined the relationship as "two natures in one". Others thought that the two natures of Jesus must be completely separate and still others thought that the divine nature absorbs the human nature.

The majority of Christians accepted the first position, that of "two natures in one". The reason that we do not hear much about Christology nowadays is that the three major branches of Christianity, Catholic, Protestant and, Eastern Orthodox all accept this position. This relationship was affirmed at the Council of Chalcedon and so the three main branches of Christianity are sometimes referred to as "Chalcedonian" Christians.

The Coptic Church of Egypt and Orthodox Church of Ethiopia take the position that Jesus' divine nature just absorbs the human nature. The "Church of the East", or Nestorians, believe that Jesus' two natures remain completely separate. These Christians are neither Catholic nor Protestant nor Eastern Orthodox. Note that "The Church of the East" is not the same thing as Eastern Orthodox.

The vast majority of Christians in the beginning were Catholic. There are actually more than twenty Catholic churches, all in communion with the pope but using different rites. About 98% of Catholics belong to one of these, sometimes called the Latin Church. The other Catholic Churches are often denoted by nationality or ethnicity, such as the Greek Catholic Church or the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

The Roman Emperor Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to be a Christian, founded a city in the east that was named for him, Constantinople. This eastern part of the Roman Empire spoke Greek, while the western half spoke Latin. After the fall of the western Roman Empire the eastern half continued for a thousand years as Byzantium, or the Byzantine Empire.

The Catholic Church was led by the pope, based in Rome. The pope claimed to be the successor to St. Peter, who seemed to be the most prominent of the apostles with Jesus. Much of the New Testament was written by St. Paul, who came afterward and never met Jesus on earth. But many Christians questioned why the pope had to have such power, or why they needed to be led by a pope at all. 

In the east many Christians questioned the authority of the pope. The papacy responded by founding the Holy Roman Empire to unite Europe to rein in the Christians of the east. Charlemagne was crowned as it's first emperor. Despite the name the Holy Roman Empire was mostly centered in Germany.

The eastern Christians finally split away, in what is known as the Great Schism of the year 1054. The pope sent representatives to meet with the Patriarch of Constantinople. The meeting didn't go well and the eastern Christians split away to form the Eastern Orthodox Church. 

The eastern church had been using a different rite from the western Catholic Church, the Byzantine instead of the Latin Rite. The eastern church also spoke Greek, rather than Latin. A major boost for this eastern church, before it broke away altogether to form the Eastern Orthodox Church, was the selection by Prince Vladimir of the Byzantine Rite for his kingdom of Kievan Rus. He then returned home to baptize the population of Kyiv.

Vladimir had been baptised in Crimea and this might explain why both Crimea and Kyiv are so important to the Russian Orthodox Church. The modern nations of Russia, Ukraine and, Belarus are all descended from Kievan Rus.

The Eastern Orthodox Church was based in Constantinople which was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453. The logical place to move the focal point of the church would be Kyiv, but it had been so devastated by the Mongols that it would take centuries to regain it's former position. So the focal point became a new major city, known as Moscow. Unlike Constantinople or Kyiv Moscow, as a major city, has never been Catholic.

I see a parallel here with the story of Ireland. First the story of Prince Vladimir quite resembles that of St. Patrick, except that St. Patrick had no royal title. The breakup of the Soviet Union left sites that are so historically important to the Russian Orthodox Church, Crimea and Kyiv, in a foreign country. 2022 is the centennial of the modern nation of Ireland and the drawing of the border with Northern Ireland has left the places most associated with the life of St. Patrick, in County Down and County Armagh, outside of Ireland.

Even with the splitting away of the Eastern Orthodox Church, in 1054, the Catholic Church reached the height of it's power in the Thirteenth Century even though the Crusades, the military missions to take control of the Holy Land, were ultimately unsuccessful. Also the Holy Roman Empire was becoming a rival to the papacy over the Investiture Controversy, the question as to whether the pope had the right to appoint or remove emperors.

There was a split in the Catholic Church that lasted about seventy years when the King of France refused to submit to the pope. A succession of French popes reigned from Avignon, in southern France, rather than Rome. At any given time there might be several claimants to the papacy, before the crisis was resolved.

A century after that was resolved came the second major permanent split in the Catholic Church. In the Fifteenth Century the Catholic Church tried to reform itself. Church offices were being sold for money. Popes were effectively controlled by one or another rival wealthy families. Money donated to the church was going so that cardinals could live in palaces.

If the effort at reform had succeeded the Protestant Reformation might never have happened. The Reformation began in 1517. The name most associated with it is Martin Luther, in what is now eastern Germany. But it was a spontaneous movement that had been brewing for quite some time. The other prominent early Reformation figure is Huldreich Zwingli, in Switzerland.

Essential to the Reformation was the newly-invented printing press. Bibles could now be mass-produced and there was no reason that people couldn't read the Bible for themselves in their own language, instead of listening to mass in Latin. But that was a threat to the authority of the Catholic Church and they put a lot of effort into suppressing it.

Across northern Europe people decided that it was time to separate from the Catholic Church and do things their own way. But the papacy decided to stop them by force, and the result was over a century of warfare.

Reform of the Catholic Church did happen, but it took this second major split in the church to bring it about. Much of what the Catholic Church is today comes not from the original church but from the Counter-Reformation, which the papacy implemented after the Protestants had separated in the Reformation. One new order that was created was the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus, of which the present Pope Francis, who has praised the Reformation, is a member.

The Protestant ideal is freedom. Anyone can study the Bible for themselves and start their own church. People can think for themselves and decide which church to join or how to interpret the Bible. There is no Protestant version of the pope or the Vatican. Let the people be free and think for themselves, instead of being told what to believe. Our modern concept of freedom would not exist without the Reformation.

But some of the new Protestant churches kept much of the Catholic liturgy because people were familiar with it. This included the Lutherans, the church named for Martin Luther even though he only wanted to reform the Catholic Church and didn't intend to start a new church.

Luther and Zwingli were the leaders of the first generation of the Reformation. The next generation brought John Calvin and John Knox. Calvin was puritanical in that he wanted just the Bible, purified of all the man-made sacraments and rules that the Catholic Church had added onto it. John Knox was an outstanding preacher who turned Scotland from a bastion of Catholicism into one of the most Protestant of nations. The Scottish Protestant church that resulted is the Presbyterians.

England joined the Reformation after it was already underway in continental Europe. But Catholicism was still tolerated and the decision was not unanimous, there was a short-lived rebellion in northern England against the Reformation. Queen Elizabeth I created the Anglican Church, or Church of England, as an effort at compromise between Puritans and the remaining Catholics. 

The Anglican Church kept so much of the Catholic liturgy that it is sometimes called "Anglo-Catholicism", although there would be no control or influence from the Vatican. Just as in Catholic days there are two Anglican archbishops in England, at York in the north and Canterbury in the south. Most Protestant church leaders are called "ministers" but Anglican leaders are still called "priests".

Even today the Anglican Church, which is now a family of churches called the Anglican Communion, is said to consist of a "high church", representing the Catholic side, and a "low church", representing the Puritan side. This compromise church didn't please everyone, many Puritans wanted nothing to do with Elizabeth's church. The English Civil War wasn't between Protestants and Catholics but between Anglicans and Puritans. The Puritans won but afterward fell out of favor. Some left for Massachusetts and that is where the Pilgrims and Puritans came from.

But the Anglican Communion is the largest single Protestant denomination today. When America declared independence from Britain the Anglican Church there was separated from the rest and renamed the Episcopal Church, but it has since rejoined the Anglican Communion.

At Oxford University a group felt that the Anglicans should be more active in helping people. From their orderly way of doing things this group became known as "Methodists". The Methodists would grow into a major separate denomination, no longer considered as Anglicans. In efforts to help people the Salvation Army is a Methodist creation.

Central to Protestant belief is the Puritanism, the elimination of man-made additions in favor of just the Bible. The Baptists were one of the early branches of the Reformation. Also important to Protestants is the direct experience of the Holy Spirit, no need to go through popes and archbishops and man-made sacraments. The Pentecostal Church began in the U.S. and the Evangelical movement has spread across the world.

In the late Nineteenth Century the world grew more secular. Can you believe that there were people saying that, since wars tend to be religious in nature the Twentieth Century should be a much more peaceful century. It didn't quite work out that way.

People are designed to believe in something and when they don't believe in God they will just believe in something else. The Nazis took people who, for the most part, no longer believed in God and did an outstanding job of giving them something else to believe in.

The established patterns of religion are the basis of our economic and political systems. The organization of Soviet councils was very similar to the organization of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Nazis' "National Socialism" was between Capitalism and Communism just as Lutherans were Protestants but kept much of the Catholic liturgy. When people fell away from following the pope they just followed dictators instead, and the Twentieth Century was certainly the century of dictatorships. The Protestant principle that anyone can start their own church is reflected in the capitalist principle that anyone can start their own business and the democracy principle that anyone can start their own political party.