by Harvey Cox
Second, the question of how empires shape the institutions within them is of special concern today. A recent book by Harvard historian Charles S. Maier, Among Empires, provides an excellent example. He observes that empires, whether Roman or Mogul, British or American, use similar methods to control their subjects. That method is a combination of military might, either used or threatened, and cultural domination, through education, religion, language, and—especially in the American case—popular culture. The most telling point in Maier’s analysis, however, is that empires all tend to spread their pyramidal-hierarchical pattern into all the institutions within their orbit. People not only live within empires; the empires live within them. Maier carefully documents how empires by nature tend to transform grassroots institutions into their own top-down image. They “[extend] their gradients of privilege and participation outward through space and downward into society…. They replicate their hierarchical structures and their divisions at all spatial levels, macro and micro—at the level of community and the workplace as well as the continent…. All recapitulate the structure of the whole.”5 This tendency to replicate the structure of empire helps explain why so much of the Christian movement, which began as the persecuted victim of the Roman Empire and provided an alternative to it, then became a obsequious mimic of that empire and finally its compliant acolyte.6
These, then, are the three alterations that inform the way we now see Christian history—its polymorphic variety; its disparate patterns of authority; and the fact that its leaders, if not its ordinary people, first defied but then succumbed to the empire. These insights can widen the options Christianity has as it enters the twenty-first century, an era that in several ways bears a remarkable resemblance to its first centuries. The more accurate account of “how it was then” is a result not only of historical research, but of the biblical studies and theologies of those who have not been as shaped by the Western worldview. Liberation theologies and feminist biblical studies in particular have questioned the assumptions of modern scholarship and drawn a more reliable portrait of Christian origins. We return to this in a later chapter, but before we do, we need to take a more careful look at just how the descent from theological variety to inflexible orthodoxy, from spiritual fellowships to “apostolic” authoritarianism, and from an anti- to a pro-imperial stance took place.
CHAPTER 5
The People of the Way
The Devolution from Faith to Belief
Christianity erupted into history as a movement of the Spirit, animated by faith—by hope and confidence in the dawning of an era of shalom that Jesus had demonstrated and announced. This “Reign of God” would include both Jews and Gentiles. The poor would be vindicated, the outsiders brought within. For nearly three centuries the Age of Faith thrived. Then, however, in a relatively short time, faith in this inclusive new Reign faded, and what had begun as a vigorous popular movement curdled into a top-heavy edifice defined by obligatory beliefs enforced by a hierarchy.
Theologians from a range of different backgrounds have tried for years to explain how and why this degeneration set in and have suggested a number of different diagnoses. Protestant Reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) thought that what he called the “fall of the church” coincided with the rise of the papacy. Other Reformers suspected it had set in much earlier. The sixteenth-century Anabaptists held that Christians had taken a fatal wrong turn when, under Constantine and his successors, they began to become soldiers. Some of the first Quakers thought that the misstep took place when the scriptures were written down, thus stifling the free flow of the Spirit. Greek and Russian Orthodox theologians date the deviation at about 1000 CE, when the Roman Catholic Church accelerated its dismissive attitude toward the Eastern Church, culminating in the pope’s excommunication of the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople in 1054. Catholics of course hold a more benign view of the Age of Belief. They contend that what troubles there were began with the early “heresies,” which persisted throughout the medieval period and culminated in the Reformation. Nearly everyone, however, agrees that at some point something went quite wrong.
The current rediscovery of early Christianity sheds some light on these disputes. The picture that is now emerging indicates that a big change began in small ways within a few decades after the life of Jesus and congealed into a permanent pattern in the late third and early fourth centuries, when Christian leaders began erecting hierarchies and then fabricating creeds and requiring their people to accept them. After that, composing creeds quickly became a habit—some would say an addiction—and has continued ever since, laying the foundation for all later Christian fundamentalisms. Throughout the early medieval period creeds were churned out on a regular basis, as were the bitter feuds they engendered. During the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, church leaders were still formulating conflicting confessions and contradictory statements of belief. As recently as 1950, Pope Pius XII enunciated a dogma, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, which all Catholics were henceforth to hold. Today Protestant fundamentalists still clutch lists of beliefs they insist are nonnegotiable and without which one cannot be a true Christian. In the years of the Age of Belief, the net result of this compulsive creed creating was that the hope for a different world that had enlivened early Christianity faded. Catholic theologians identified the Kingdom of God with their church. Many Protestants pushed it into an afterlife. Meanwhile, mandatory belief systems nearly eclipsed faith and hope.
Some scholars excuse the craze for creed making as a necessary adjustment the expanding Christian movement had to make as it spread through the Roman world. It certainly was an adjustment, but was it a necessary one? Was something essential lost in the process? Without engaging in imaginative how-it-might-have-been-different historical fiction, it is nonetheless important to notice where certain choices were made, mainly to be able to think more clearly about future possibilities.
Creeds are products of their times. They are road markers of key points in Christian history. They provide invaluable indices of how some Christians, though not all, responded to largely internal disputes in the past. But to make “believing” them a permanent feature of Christianity today misunderstands the invaluable function they can serve. The numerous creeds theologians have devised over the centuries enable us to glimpse the historical challenges they faced. But their circumstances and ours are not the same. Only by seeing them for what they are, landmarks along the long path Christianity has trod and not walled barriers, can they help us face current difficulties and opportunities.
The other question about creeds is whether they should be taken literally or understood as poetry. Roman Catholic theologian Stephen C. Rowan in his book on the Nicene Creed holds that only when the creeds are appreciated as metaphor and poetry can they can serve a useful purpose today. Poetry, he says, is not a less exact, but a more exact form of language, and we have to learn to “read symbolic language symbolically.” He admits this is hard to do in what he rightly calls a “prosaic world,” a literalistic culture in which the voice of the poetic muse has almost been tuned out.1 Sadly, Christianity itself has also been afflicted by the tone-deafness of literalism. The main feature of Protestant fundamentalism is its literalism. Thus when the creeds are understood as factual descriptions of God and Christ and people are still supposed to “believe” them, they become obstacles to faith rather than aids. Maybe the only way to preserve the real value of creeds today is to sing them, as was often done in the past, to dance them, or to print them in iambic pentameter. As the apostle Paul writes, “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6).
Taken literally, creeds continue to constitute more of a hindrance than a help to Christian faith. They keep people stalled in the obsolete Age of Belief. But there are signs that they are becoming less important every day. Our “post-Christian” era is becoming more like the first century than like the many centuries of creed-making “Christian civilization” that followed. Rick Warren, the influen
tial evangelical pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, says that what the church needs now is a “second Reformation,” one based on “deeds, not creeds.”2 Poetry, drama, and dance are finding their way back into the sanctuary. This may be why an enlivened liturgy of Holy Communion is returning to many churches.
A few years ago, drawn by curiosity, a totally “unchurched” young woman named Sara Miles wandered into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. She must have arrived late, because just as she stepped in, Communion was being served. She watched for a moment, then on sheer impulse decided to receive the bread and wine. Something she finds impossible to describe in prose happened. Despite the fact that she distinctly disliked the creeds and the “mumbling liturgy,” she felt drawn to return again and again. Soon she began organizing a food pantry for homeless and hungry street people, gathering in the sanctuary and using the altar as the table. Within a short time two hundred fifty people crowded in each time and Sara enlisted first church members, then the street people, to help prepare and serve the meals. Without knowing much about early church history, she was in fact reestablishing a practice in early Christianity in which—as scholars now agree—the poor were also fed at the Lord’s Supper.3 Sara Miles’s experience demonstrates that it is important to remember what the Christian movement was like in those first “precreedal” centuries, to notice how the devolution into what might be called “competitive creedalism” took place, and—most important—to recognize how the earlier precreedal practice is now returning.
During its first years people called the movement that had begun with Jesus and his disciples “the Way.” Jesus himself was addressed as the one who taught “the way of God in truth” (Matt. 22:16). Those who followed him were described as walking the “way of peace” (Luke 1:79) and “the way of truth” (2 Pet. 2:2). When Paul started to Damascus to arrest the Christians there, he was equipped with warrants, “so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem” (Acts 9:2). This was the original usage, but it is significant, because we use the word “way” today when, for example, we speak of a “way of life.” During the first two centuries, a period of unparalleled growth and vigor, the only “creed” Christians had was not an inventory of beliefs. It was a straightforward affirmation: “Jesus Christ is Lord,” which was more like a pledge of allegiance. It meant, “I serve Jesus, not some other sovereign.” This also meant Christians placed loyalty to Jesus above loyalty to Caesar, which eventually stirred up fateful trouble. But the dispute was not about a clash of creeds; it was about a clash of loyalties. It was about two different ways of life.
During the first two and a half centuries of its life, the nascent Christian movement (“the Way”) flourished despite periodic persecutions and did so without relying on theological agreement. What we now call doctrines or dogmas, let alone creeds, were yet to appear. Historians of that period agree that what bound Christians together in their local congregations was their common participation in the life of the Spirit and a way of living that included the sharing of prayer, bread, and wine; a lively hope for the coming of God’s shalom on earth; and putting the example of Jesus into concrete practice, especially his concern for outcasts. With regard to theological questions, opinions differed widely. In other words, in this most vibrant period in Christian history, it was following Jesus that counted; there were no dogmas to which one had to adhere, and a rich variety of theological views thrived. It was the era of a thousand flowers blooming, and the idea of “heresy” had not yet stepped onstage.
The time is ripe to retrieve the term “Way” for Christianity and “followers of the Way” for Christians. It is at once more accurate, more original, and more contemporary than “believers.” It would reassure those people who are discouraged because they mistakenly assume that, whereas other religions are “ways of life,” Christianity is a about dogmas. This is a clear instance in which we can learn something vital from our first-century forebears. We need not assume that creedal Christianity is the only option. But how did the devolution from “the Way” to a system of beliefs take place?
It began during the explosive geographical expansion of the Jesus movement. Born in Palestine, it spread rapidly into the wider Mediterranean reaches of the Roman Empire and even beyond. It encountered a host of new challenges, and the first was a linguistic one. Jesus and his followers spoke in Aramaic and prayed in Hebrew, but now the movement found itself in a world in which Greek was the lingua franca. The message had to be translated. But translation is never simply a matter of making a more or less accurate rendering of what a word means. Different languages incorporate different views of the world, and the worldview of those in the Greek-speaking areas was different in important respects from that of those in Palestine. How soon this jarring change of linguistic gears had to take place becomes evident when we remember that the entire New Testament, much of it written only a few decades after Jesus’s life, is not in Jesus’s native language, but in Greek.
It was not, however, this new environment that lured some Christians into fashioning creeds. There were other challenges the young movement met in its widened scope. Among these was the myriad of “new religions” that, along with Christianity, had swirled into the empire from its eastern frontiers. Mithraism, for example, which originated in Persia, centered its worship on the ritual slaughter of a bull whose warm blood the priests spattered on chanting adepts. It promised its followers an assurance of immortality and was especially popular among soldiers.
A few years ago I visited a Mithraeum (Mithraic worship center) that had recently been discovered during some excavation under the Church of San Clemente in Rome. Later I examined a fresco from another Mithraeum in Marino on which Mithras is depicted in a Phrygian cape, slaying the bull with his bare hands. A dog and a serpent lick the bull’s blood while a scorpion chews on its genitals, evoking—even with its faded colors—a combination of fascination and repugnance two millennia later. The sheer rawness and explicit violence of the picture at first seemed to explain why the priests of Mithra and the military men who worshiped him refused to allow women to join. Of course, depictions of the crucifixion can be almost as grisly, but during these first centuries the main Christian symbols were the fish and the “good shepherd.” Bloody renderings of the crucifixion appeared only after the conversion of Constantine, when Christians, who had refused military service until then, began to enlist as soldiers.
Some historians claim that Mithraism was Christianity’s main rival for over two hundred years. The emperor Julian, who sought to restore the Roman pantheon and whom Christian historians dubbed “the Apostate,” was an initiate into the Mithraic mysteries. But the cults of Isis and Osiris and of the Magna Mater (Great Mother) also flourished, as did other less widely known local shrines and household devotions. The empire was crawling with gods.
In this respect, the world Christians lived in during those first couple centuries, with different religions jostling each other, is noticeably similar to ours. Today, despite all predictions, God does not seem to be dead after all. Instead, we have witnessed, for good and ill, a global resurgence of the gods and goddesses. In America mosques and pagodas spring up next to churches and synagogues. All around the globe we see the revival of religions once considered moribund. Japanese prime ministers ostentatiously worship at Tokyo’s Shinto Shrine. Kremlin rulers pray in restored gold-domed Orthodox churches. Islamic militants fight to replace regimes they detest in Egypt and Saudi Arabia with “Qur’anic” governments. In Myanmar, Buddhist monks in saffron robes lead street demonstrations against military rule. Some West Bank Jewish settlers demand that Israel become a Torah state. The world of the twenty-first century does not appear to be secular at all. In an uncanny way, it looks more like the one the first generations of Christians experienced than like the one ruled by a virtual Christian monopoly, at least in the West, during the intervening centuries.
There can be little doubt
that many people who today feel a strong attachment to the life and message of Jesus become disenchanted, and sometimes even disgusted, with much of what historic Christianity became. Despite many glowing moments, it is often not a pretty picture. But the picture can be clarified when we notice both how much of that historic Christianity is a caricature of its essential core and that some of the liveliest and most promising Christian movements today are casting off this distorting crust.
Early Christianity, however, was not as concerned with the Mithra adepts and the Osiris devotees as it was with two other alternative religions. One was relatively new, the other one quite old. The new one was the recently devised cult of the emperor, in which Caesar was reverenced as a deity. This was what we might today call a “civil religion”; it had its holidays, processions, and holy sites throughout the empire. Adherence to it was required of all of the emperor’s subjects, wherever they lived and whatever other deities they also worshiped. It was the religious and ideological mucilage that held the far-flung empire together.
The second alternative religion was classical “paganism,” the worship of Zeus and Apollo, Juno and Dionysius, and their fellow Olympians, whose endless intrigues, lustful escapades, and blood rivalries so adroitly mirrored human foibles. By the time Christianity began to spread into their territory, many people had already recast the stories of these gods in a metaphorical manner. But the Olympian religion still continued to exert a powerful cultural and moral influence. Its advantage was that it could easily be melded with the emperor cult. If you already worshiped numerous gods, why not one more?