Something To Read That Isn't About The Coming Depression

Between hosting a company Christmas party this week, taking my son to the ER because he got a nasty gash from a cinderblock retaining wall - and fell face-first onto a coffee table in the ER waiting room, getting a black eye from it - and getting rid of the family dog because I'm tired of him biting my son with no provocation at all, it's hard to find time to blog.  I'm pretty much just following my son around everywhere he goes, at least until the new year when our cafeteria plan deductions kick in again and we can start drawing on that for our ER copays and coinsurance.

So here's an interesting article you may not have seen yet.  It's about the history of those Christians who spread to the East instead of the West, establishing churches throughout Asia by 800 CE. Even if you don't suscribe to the belief that Jesus spent several years in what is now India studying with and teaching various Buddhists, it's clear that there was quite a bit of not only cordial relationships, but collaboration between Buddhists and Christians.  It's fascinating.

I do have one caveat:  Philip Jenkins is one of many who are apparently under the impression that the Roman Catholic Church created itself ex nihilo a few centuries after Jesus, springing into existence a fully formed, worldwide movement with immense political and economic power.  Otherwise I simply cannot fathom why he would suggest that the Christians who migrated eastward, and the Nestorians in particular, have a better claim upon the original movement centered around Jesus.  This is ridiculous; Paul's letter to the already-established church in Rome predates the earliest Synoptic Gospel, Mark, by around 20 years, which is also the approximate time that had elapsed since the events of Easter.

It's a funny thing upon which to fixate, but reading the present-day Roman Catholic Church back into the first few centuries of the Common Era is not only common, but is also the source of quite a few nonsensical ideas that find their way into books about "suppressed books" of the Bible and grand conspiracies between the early Christians and the Roman government.  Christianity spent a couple centuries not mattering very much except to serve as scapegoats for political problems, and even Constantine's famous meddling wasn't nearly as consequential for either the Church or Rome as the inheritors of the European scholarly tradition would like everyone to think.  It took a while for Christianity to become what we see today - about 2,000 years, I would think.

Comments

[low-tech cyclist]

I've got to admit, I found that guy to be almost nonsensical in his description of the nature of the conflict between Christianity and other faiths.

"Following the ideas of Pope Benedict XVI, though, the church refuses to give up its fundamental belief in the unique role of Christ." That belief is independent of Bennie; that's what Christians believe.

"Over the past 30 years, the Roman Catholic Church has faced repeated battles over this question of Christ's uniqueness, and has cracked down on thinkers who have made daring efforts to accommodate other world religions." Not really. While the RCC will certainly defend Christ's uniqueness if necessary, that's not, by and large, where the battles have been. Rather, the questions concern the degree of truth, validity, and value that other religions have, within a belief system that says that no one comes to the Father but through Christ.

The former Joseph Ratzinger seems to be of the attitude that there is little, if anything, that Christians can learn from practitioners of other faiths, but that is hardly a direct consequence of a belief in the uniqueness of Christ.

"Most Christian churches hold that Jesus alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life." That would be John 14:6, dude.

He's frighteningly ignorant of the basics of Christianity for a tenured university professor who's written a book about a big piece of its history.

[Sir Charles]

I'm more of an expert on the ER visits. My first came when my son was only two weeks old and I was still totally dazed and confused. I didn't realize that part of the gig as the parent of a newborn is that you have to be complicit in whatever torture they are visiting upon your baby -- holding him while they poke, prod, and provoke. Not fun.

Hang in there Stephen. You can always put a football helmet on him and pretend it's a game of some sort.

[Stephen]

I've got to admit, I found that guy to be almost nonsensical in his description of the nature of the conflict between Christianity and other faiths.

Yeah, I should have just said to ignore all that and focus on the actual history part of the article. He clearly wanted a hook for his article, when ISTM it would have been just as interesting without it.

[jacqueline]

stephen

hope your son feels better soon,
and your hearts are filled with christmas spirit.
:-)

[dm]

I've got to admit, I found that guy to be almost nonsensical in his description of the nature of the conflict between Christianity and other faiths.

Don't forget that he's writing to an audience with a fair number of Unitarians, Quakers, and the odd Episcopalian who have gotten out of the habit of stressing that sort of exclusive handle on the Truth. Not to mention those of us at the completely secular end of things.

[low-tech cyclist]

Don't forget that he's writing to an audience with a fair number of Unitarians, Quakers, and the odd Episcopalian who have gotten out of the habit of stressing that sort of exclusive handle on the Truth. Not to mention those of us at the completely secular end of things.

That still doesn't get him out of the obligation of describing things accurately, any more than it's kosher for some neocon speaking to an audience of Americans to give a faulty description of what's happening in Iraq.

[low-tech cyclist]

On a completely different religious matter, I was watching Rick Warren's video on Prop 8 where he said:

"Every culture for 5000 years, and every religion for 5000 years, has said the definition of marriage is between one man and a woman."

The Biblical patriarch Jacob had two wives and two concubines. King David of Israel had a few wives. King Solomon of Israel had 300 wives and 700 concubines. And so forth.

More recently, the 19th-century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints allowed one man to have several wives. Had no idea that happened over 5000 years ago, did you? Me either.

This is an evangelical Christian leader - a guy who doesn't know his own Bible? Not to mention making a hash of American religious history, too. Sheesh.

[Stephen]

This is an evangelical Christian leader - a guy who doesn't know his own Bible? Not to mention making a hash of American religious history, too.

He's a liar.

Though the extent of Christians' ignorance of their own Bible is infinite.

[Matt Weiner]

Warren is an even bigger charlatan than that makes him sound. Just before that he apparently said, "It is the universal, historic definition of marriage, one man and one woman, for life."

[dm]

That still doesn't get him out of the obligation of describing things accurately....

I don't know. While I admit my experience with theology is pretty much limited to a college-age infatuation with Thomas Merton, who late in life discovered similarities between the Eastern and Western mystical traditions in the context of being a Trappist monk in the age of Vatican II. With a background like that, nothing in the article seemed nonsensical to me.

And he's pretty concrete when it comes to talking about the syncretics who worry the Vatican today. Merton probably would have been one of them (though his ecumenical mission to Asia was endorsed by his hierarchy at the time), as are the Sri Lankan and Vietnamese theologians he mentions in the article.

[pluky]

The rise to primacy of the Roman Church in the West was by no means a smooth, inevitable process. Probably the most important enabling event was the destruction of the Jerusalem Church in the overall razing of the city in the last Judean rebellion. The merger of Church and State under Constantine gave the network of Bishops subordinate to Rome authority to suppress those others with competing visions of ecclesia, dogma, and scripta.

All of this has nothing to do with the exile of Nestorian Christians to Sassanid Persia after the Council of Ephesus. The synods establishing Christian orthodoxy were in large part battlegrounds for the Churches of the East (Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch) with little involvement by Rome.

The irony is that having won the battles defining orthodoxy, Constantinople lost the war for catholicism. Centuries of theological dispute left many of Byzantium's subjects amenable to a simpler call risen from the Arabian sands.