How Relevant is the Christian Worldview Today?

This essay was published in The Fourth R 28.3 (2015): 17-18.

What is called nascent Christianity emerged in the early first century CE as a tiny Judean religious sect.  Its religious heritage was shaped by the Holy Scriptures of the ancient Israelites, and the temple at Jerusalem.  What little we know about the group derives from the writings of their later descendants, who represented at least a third generation of followers of the faith.

            When Christianity emerged, the city of Rome controlled the Mediterranean basin, and had divided its territories into a number of provinces.  Judea was an imperial province, governed by the emperor of Rome rather than the Roman Senate.  The religion of Rome in general was comprised of the worship of the traditional Greek Gods in Roman garb, plus new religions that the Romans had allowed into the city.

            As a Graeco-Roman religion of salvation, and with the patronage of the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire (Constantine, 325 CE), the new faith rapidly replaced the old religious traditions, which survived only in the countryside (paganus; hence called "pagan").  After 440 CE no pagan names are listed among the elite of the city of Rome.

            Since the fourth century CE, Christianity has been a formidable force in the Western world, but only recently with the rise of modern science and a growing reliance on reason rather than faith has it begun to show signs of irrelevance.  There had been warnings about the demise of the "pagan" worldview before the Christian hegemony.  For example, in the first century CE about the time nascent Christianity emerged, the priest of Apollo, Plutarch, recounted a strange story; he had heard reports of an anonymous voice announcing the death of the Great God Pan, some 300 years before the ancient pagan worldview was replaced by the Christian.

            Similar warnings have been sounded about the Christian worldview, which has now survived some 1700 years.  Toward the end of the 19th century a German philosopher (Friedrich Nietzsche) in The Joyous Science described a madman who ran into a market place seeking God.  "Where is God?" he cried.  "I will tell you," he says.  We have killed him.  He delivered a short speech about the loss of moorings in a world in which God is dead.  He looked around at his small audience, and throwing his lantern to the ground, he lamented, "I come too early; my time is not come yet. This tremendous event is still the way…it has not yet reached the ears of man."  On the same day he entered numerous churches and sang an "eternal requiem to God" saying, "What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God" (96).

            In the 1960s there briefly emerged a group of scholars who wrote about the "death of God" as an event in our time.  One of these scholars (Thomas J. J. Altizer) took the incarnation quite seriously:  "God has negated and transcended himself in the Incarnation, and thereby he has fully and finally ceased to exist in his original or primordial form.  To know that God is Jesus, is to know that God himself has become flesh: no longer does God exist as transcendent Spirit or sovereign Lord, now God is love" (p. 67).  "Once God has ceased to exist in human experience as the omnipotent and numinous Lord, there perishes with him every moral imperative addressed to man from a beyond, and humanity ceases to be imprisoned by an obedience to an external will or authority" (127).

            Altizer's view clearly suggests there are more than a few cracks in the Christian Conglomerate; nevertheless it is evident that fissures, spearheaded by reason and science, have begun to appear in the seemingly impregnable Christian worldview.  The Christian Conglomerate holds that God controls the natural world, but Mr. Darwin's scientific view (evolution) on the origin of our species makes a more convincing case than does the theological answer.  The weather more often than not appears to work against the common good.  In the early 19th century the church was forced to admit in the face of compelling science that the earth was not the center of our solar system, which had been an item of faith for nearly 1700 years.

            The Christian Conglomerate holds that the Bible is a special religious text that puts human beings in touch with the divine will, but over 300 years of scientific study has shown it to be a human collection, and God has been reduced at best to the peripheral role of inspiring some of its ideas.  The idea that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19) is an item of faith that is not demonstrable except to those of like faith.  The Church is not as Paul believed a divinely gathered community of saints of the end-time, but has become a seriously flawed secular human institution.

            Could the church, like ancient paganism, simply fade into oblivion for lack of relevance?  Put differently: how is Christianity relevant in the 21st century?

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966).

Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche. Selected and Translated, with an Introduction. Prefaces, and Notes (New York: the Viking Press, 1954).

Jesus People, Mystery Religions, and Nascent Christianity #3

This is the third essay in a trilogy on the term "mystery" in early Christianity.  My contention is that early followers of Jesus applied the term to aspects of their belief system that they could not understand rationally—i.e., it was something they believed even though it seemed contrary to reason.  Instead of revising their belief to accord with reason, they admitted cognitive dissonance and branded it as a "mystery," which allowed them reasonably to continue affirming a belief they could not understand rationally.  They trusted that these acknowledged disconnects between reason and faith would be worked out in the Divine economy.  In the modern Christian church the term mystery, as far as I know, is not extensively used.  One notable exception is the "mystery of the Mass"—the moment at which the bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Christ.

These several uses of the term mystery, surveyed in the previous two blogs, raise the question whether or not nascent Christianity of the Pauline type should be regarded as a mystery religions cult—not in the sense of dependence on one of the ancient cults of the Greco-Roman world, but in the sense of a parallel development.  In other words, the spirit of the age evoked these religions of personal salvation and also led to the transformation of the early Jesus people into a nascent Christianity of the Pauline type.  At least one highly respected New Testament Scholar thought of the "religious history of the Mediterranean world in the early imperial period as 'the age of mysteries'" (Shirley Jackson Case, The Social Origins of Christianity [1923], 113).

            The mystery religions cults were rather diverse in their public celebrations, sacred objects, and theological content.  So they had a public face as well as a hidden secret side.  Although different, they did have several things in common.  They were all voluntary associations in which people must choose to present themselves as initiates.  At the heart of the cult was a private mystery rite, a secret not to be divulged to anyone.  In the mystery rite the individual was brought into a close personal relationship with the deity.  The myth behind the rite and the rite itself consisted of things said to the individual, or things performed in the presence of the individual, or in things done to the individual.  Since these rites were secret and not divulged, scholars are left to guess from clues here and there as to the content and meaning of the different secret rites.  Participation in the mystery granted individuals redemption from the evils of the earthly life and the assurance of a blessed immortality, i.e., the expectation of eternal life. Usually a sacred meal was celebrated by those initiated into the mystery cults.  The goal of the initiation rite was not to impart a particular body of knowledge, but rather to produce a certain experience in the individual that resulted in a particular state of mind—about the God, life, and the hereafter.  Some scholars describe the rite of initiation as "an extraordinary experience that could be described as death and rebirth" (Marvin Meyer, "Mystery Religions" Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible [1992]).

            Meyer finds several close similarities between the nascent Christianity of the first century and the mystery religions. Like the mystery religions, followers of the Christ voluntarily associated themselves together in the early Pauline communities, which also were communities of redemption and salvation.  In the community they experienced baptism, a ceremonial ritual (Rom 6:1-11), in which the initiate is baptized "into Christ's death" and with Christ experienced death and rebirth.  Another rite was the Eucharist (1 Corinthians 11:17-31), which commemorated the death of Christ.  "By eating of the bread and drinking of the new wine [i. e., his body, his blood] in the Eucharist Christians participated in the death of Christ, and assimilated the saving power of the Cross into their lives" (Meyer gives a number of other parallels).  The "myth" behind both these rituals is, of course, the mystery of Christ (1 Timothy 3:16): that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:17-19, Galatians 6:14). Christ is described by Paul as the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24), and Paul writes: "We proclaim in a mystery a hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification" (1 Corinthians 2:7; cf. Romans 16:25).  It is difficult to make detailed comparisons between nascent Christianity and the Greco-Roman mysteries, however, because there is little extant first-hand information on the mysteries (see Marvin Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries. A Sourcebook [1987]).

            These parallels are well known, but generally scholars exclude Christianity from consideration as a Greco-Roman mystery religion with the argument that the "mystery" in Christianity is an "open" secret—in spite of the fact that nascent Christianity uses similar language, concepts, and rites, and shares similar objectives with the mystery religions.  Nascent Christianity of the Pauline type evolved out of the early Jesus people into a religion of personal salvation, clearly a type of mystery religion.  It managed to survive into modernity by evolving again into an institutional creedal religion, which enjoyed the political patronage of the Roman Emperor, Constantine, in the fourth century.  The institutionalized religion seems a far cry from the earlier Pauline mysteries.  Paul regarded himself and the initiates in his gatherings as "servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God" (1 Corinthians 4:1).

 

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University