I encounter far too many Christians who are totally unaware of our own history. They might know the history which is found in the bible—namely Acts of the Apostles—but past that, they figure “it’s all Catholic stuff and monks and the Crusades,” and at the end of the Middle Ages there’s Protestantism, Henry VIII of England, Puritans (and for Americans, the Pilgrims), and maybe a little about their own denomination. That’s about it.
Yeah, that’s pathetic. But I’ve been there. I grew up in a church which taught little to nothing about Christian history, and of course my world history class in high school didn’t help any—the textbooks were more interested in secular history, and if an emperor or king happened to show any interest in Christianity, they tended to briefly mention it, then move on, as if the king was a hypocrite and didn’t really mean it. (To be fair, in fact they really didn’t. But sometimes they did.) So in order to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, I went to seminary.
Probably the only quote everyone knows by a philosopher about history is Jorge Santayana’s, “Aquellos que no pueden recordar el pasado están condenados a repetirlo” (“Such people who can’t recall the past are condemned to repeat it”). Christians have especially fulfilled this statement. We’ve dabbled in a lot of the same failed ideas, flawed teachings, and misbehaviors, as have Christians in the past. Had we known our history, we’d have known better. Had we followed some of the great Christians of the past, we’d have grown better. Hence I’ll discuss a bit of useful Christian history.
Today, Christian history in a nutshell. Future articles will zoom in on specifics.
This part you knew from the bible. (I hope.)
Christianity began with the Hebrew religion: The worship of YHVH, the god of Abraham, Isaac, Israel, and Moses, whom we call the LORD. How one worshiped him was spelled out in “the books of Moses,” which we call the Law (Hebrew, Torah). The rest of the Hebrew scriptures, which we call the Old Testament, detail the history of the Hebrews under the Law. But more about how they refused to stay under it, defied it all the time, ignored the many prophets whom the LORD sent to warn them away from disaster, and suffered the consequences. Eventually the LORD’s generosity restored them to their homeland (newly renamed Judea, and themselves Jews). If you have an Orthodox or Catholic bible, you also have the extra books which tell how the Judeans fought off their enemies and established a new monarchy of priest-kings… a dynasty which ended when the homicidal Herod took over the family and killed most of them, and that’s where the New Testament began.
Round the year 1 of the Christian era (but more likely six years before it), the LORD was born a human: Jesus of Nazareth was born to a peasant family which happened to be descended from the original Hebrew kings. His father was a workman, but Jesus became a rabbi, a teacher in the synagogues of the Pharisees, the largest sect of religious Jews. In his third decade, Jesus began proclaiming the Kingdom of God—the original intention he had when he presented the Hebrews with the Law—and it was coming into the world. The gospels describe the Kingdom: How Jesus wants God’s followers to live, both in anticipation of the Kingdom, and in it. The Pharisees understood the Kingdom would be led by an anointed king, a Messiah. That’d be Jesus, whom we Christians call Christ (from the Greek for Messiah).
Judean leadership considered Jesus a threat to political stability. They arrested him on the charge of being Messiah—which was considered treason to their king, the emperor of Rome—found him guilty, and got the Romans to execute him. Days later, Jesus was discovered alive, resurrected far in advance of the End. He commissioned his 11 apostles to continue declaring his Kingdom, and left—for now—to superintend their work from heaven.
Despite further persecution from the Judean leaders, the apostles spread the good news and expanded the Kingdom. A Pharisee convert, Saul Paul of Tarsus, with Joseph Barnabas of Cyprus, helped establish a Christian synagogue in Syria, and from there set out on three missions journeys establishing churches, groups of Christians, throughout the eastern Roman Empire. Paul’s letters, four gospels, and letters of various other apostles, form our New Testament.
The Kingdom takes over Rome. Sorta.
The Roman Empire was tolerant of religion, provided you practiced the state religion of worshiping the emperor’s god. If you were a polytheist this was rarely an issue. The one exception they permitted, grudgingly, were the monotheistic Jews. In the early days of Christianity, we were seen as just another denomination of the Hebrew religion. But after the Jewish War in the year 70, the Romans determined we weren’t, and Christians began to be persecuted for defying the state religion. It was sporadic, but it ensured you didn’t become a Christian lightly.
From within the ranks were heretics, people who wanted to turn Christianity in their own directions. The early Christians wrote plenty of anti-heretic books, and held council after council to nail down just what it is we do believe—which scriptures are valid or not, who’s qualified to run a church or not, who can join the church, and exactly what is Jesus’s relationship to the Father. (Our conclusion: The Trinity. Which is also hard to understand, but it’s the best we could figure.)
The persecution stopped in the 300s when Constantine, the Roman emperor, became Christian and legalized the religion. Problem is, Christianity became prestigious—and people joined the church not because they wanted any relationship with Jesus, but because it gave them back-door access to the emperor and power. This political power corrupted the church (though no, it didn’t invalidate it) till countries finally began separating church from state in the late 1700s. Constantine wanted to use Christianity to unite his empire, and make it become the Kingdom. (As have plenty of politicians since; U.S. politicians likewise want to use Christianity to unite Americans and turn it into the Kingdom. It’s hardly a new idea.) But for the next 11 centuries the Romans remained steadfast cultural Christians—even as the Roman Empire withered away and the Ottoman Turks finally overthrew it in 1453. Even today, Turkey has its Christian strongholds.
The west/east split.
Though part of the same empire, Latin-speaking western Christians and Greek-speaking eastern Christians never really had a lot in common, other than Jesus. Westerners emphasized Augustine of Hippo’s philosophy, and a strong hierarchy with Rome’s pope in charge. Easterners emphasized the Greek-speaking church fathers, and a looser hierarchy with multiple patriarchs. The collapse of the western Roman Empire, resulting in Rome itself leaving the empire, meant these Christians were no longer citizens of the same nation; especially after Pope Leo 3 crowned Charlemagne as “emperor of Rome” in 800. To the westerners, the Romans were “Romanians,” and later historians renamed them “Byzantines.” The westerners, since they had Rome, considered themselves the true successors of the Roman Empire, and encouraged the Frankish and Germanic kings to consider themselves part of the new Holy Roman Empire—which the popes held considerable sway over till the Protestant split.
But the issue which really stuck in everyone’s craw was the way the Latins added filioque to the Creed, one extra word which states the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son. It’s a minor difference, but to the easterners, the pope couldn’t just unilaterally change the Creed: It needed to be decided by all the church leaders, in council. To the westerners, if the pope said it was fine, it was fine. It wasn’t really about the word filioque, but about who really had final say in the church. By the year 1054, the pope had enough of the debate and excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople, and the patriarch excommunicated him right back.
Thus our one church split into two denominations, in what we now call “the Great Schism.” Obviously the patriarchs’ churches became known as Orthodox, and the western church became the Roman Catholic Church. Both groups insist they’re not denominations, but the church—really, the true church, although officially they don’t say that anymore. Just privately.
Yeah, I’ll bring up the crusades: In 1095, on hearing the Sultanate of Rûm had taken Jerusalem from the real Roman Empire, Pope Urban 2 called for people from the Holy Roman Empire to go take it back—and, surprise being on their side, they actually did it. In so doing, many crusaders, figuring they earned themselves a free pass to heaven, committed all sorts of atrocities against Jews, Muslims, and while they were at it, Orthodox Christians. But in 1187, Salah ad-Din’s army took Jerusalem back, and the crusaders never got it again, no matter how many crusades they organized. Presuming God is on your side has never really worked as a military strategy.
Back in Europe, for the next four centuries, the popes ran the Catholic church, and often meddled in the governments of the Holy Roman Empire and other Christian kingdoms—as much as those kings permitted. Some kings tried to run the popes right back: When Clement 5 moved the papal headquarters to Avignon, France, the kings of France took advantage, and the next six popes wound up coming from France. Crying foul, the people of Rome elected their own pope, and so did the people of Pisa. From 1378 to 1418 there were up to three different popes, all claiming to lead the church, till the popes held a council to sort it out, moved the papacy back to Rome, resigned, and elected Martin 5.
Protestantism.
I wrote about the Protestant split before, but briefly: Dr. Martin Luther’s classroom discussion in 1517 turned into a movement to reform the Catholic church, and when the church leadership resisted, the church split. Other split-off groups of Christians formed other churches. These churches are all called Protestant, which originally meant they protested the errors in the Catholic church at the time, but nowadays just means “not Catholic (nor Orthodox).”
Kings who wanted to remove themselves from papal influence, took advantage of the pope’s new political weakness and declared themselves and their nations Protestant. Henry 8 of England is probably the most famous—and unique—example: He didn’t leave Catholicism for any doctrinal disagreements, but only because he wanted to marry his mistress and the pope wouldn’t grant him an annulment. So Henry declared his country Catholic, but not Roman Catholic anymore—and for the next two centuries, England went through several bloody civil wars, trying to sort out exactly how Protestant the new Church of England would be. Some fought because they truly wanted to follow Jesus, but more, of course, sought power.
Protestants nowadays look at this as a trend towards religious freedom, but it’s no such thing: Irreligious kings were trying to get out from under the pope so they could run their countries as they pleased. Their countries became Protestant because it was treason to not follow the king’s “faith”—after all, if the king’s enemies were Catholic, and so were you, it was assumed you sympathized with the king’s enemies. The fights in Northern Ireland today, between “Catholics” and “Protestants,” likewise have nothing to do with Christianity. They’re political movements which borrow religious names. True religious freedom—to be whichever denomination of Christian you felt you should—didn’t really come into being till the United States. Till then, each country had an official church: If your nation was Catholic, so were you. If your province was Lutheran, so were you. If your city was Calvinist, so were you. That, or you went into hiding.
America and disestablishment.
And one of the places you could hide were the British colonies in North America. The colony charters permitted the corporations and individuals who founded colonies to largely govern themselves. William Penn made his colony Quaker—and since Quakers believed in religious tolerance, in Pennsylvania you could be any kind of Christian you chose. (Or none. Or something else. Benjamin Franklin, fr’instance, went with pragmatic deism: He believed in God, ’cause God is a practical idea. And that’s all.)
Puritan separatists founded Plymouth; Catholics founded Maryland; Dutch Reformed founded New York; Baptists founded Rhode Island; Puritan congregationalists founded Massachusetts, though over time many became Unitarian; pagans founded Virginia but emphasized the Church of England. As the colonists interacted with one another, which denomination of Christian you were became less and less of an issue. In Europe, they’d kill one another over it. In America—with some exceptions of course—it was largely live and let live. And because no denomination predominated when the colonies became the United States, the framers of the Constitution decided to keep the government out of it: Religion was disestablished, meaning the U.S. had no official religion. Religious requirements were banned in Article 6, and Congress’s interference in religion was banned in Amendment 1.
This means you could be any religion in the United States, or even found your own. And many did. All sorts of churches and denominations were founded. Including heretic churches. This is not to say there’s no cultural persecution of one church or another, like the way people harassed Catholics or Mormons in the past (and sometimes still do). But none of this behavior is legal in the States.
It took the rest of the west another century to copy the U.S.’s example—and many European countries still haven’t; their established churches are still funded by tax dollars, and are less and less attended all the time. But because the U.S. has a long history of no religious persecution, Christianity doesn’t have the same stigma in the States which it does in other countries. And because the U.S. has a long history of revivals—evangelism efforts to get communities to turn back to God—one generation may slide away from Christianity, but the next generation may slide back.
Global evangelism.
From the United States came the bulk of the missionaries, evangelists who want to preach the gospel where it’s not yet been spread. They’ve been instrumental in encouraging religious freedom and stronger relations between different countries—yeah, with the ultimate goal of spreading the Kingdom. It’s not an ulterior motive: It’s the motive. And other nations have followed suit.
It’s not been any sort of coordinated effort. Just about every denomination sends its own missionaries, which means some nations get blitzed by competing Christians. But in the past 200 years—especially in the past 70, thanks to the increasing ease of global travel and communications, the end of colonization, and the extraordinarily rapid spread of charismatic Christianity—the evangelists have won lots of people to Jesus. And those new Christians become evangelists themselves, and spread the gospel to their fellow citizens.
The Pew Research Center estimates there are 2.18 billion Christians in the world as of 2010; about half Catholic, and about half those Catholics are in the Americas. As it currently stands, roughly a third of humanity is now Christian. (Or at least Christianist.)
And those are the highlights. I’ll get into the details in future posts.