The Future of Faith

by Harvey Cox

  Christians developed two different strategies in their contest with these two rivals, the emperor cult and the pagan pantheon, but neither of them impelled Christianity toward formal doctrines and creeds. Regarding worship of the emperor, Christians responded with an unequivocal “no.” They claimed that Jesus Christ was God’s kyrios (“anointed one” in Greek), but since kyrios was one of the titles attributed to Caesar, they refused to participate in the imperial cult. They were willing to pray for the emperor and for his health, but they stubbornly refused to pray to him or offer ritual tribute. They recognized that one could not be a follower of Jesus while also honoring a rival to the loyalty their faith in him and his Kingdom required; therefore, “not even one pinch of incense on the imperial altar.” This defiance of the political religion of the empire, which led their critics to brand them subversive, landed many of them in arenas with salivating lions. In our time, when fusing the cross with the flag has become so popular and religiously saturated nationalisms are on the rise around the world, the early Christian refusal to mix the two is a cautionary reminder.

  Their enemies made a second accusation against the early Christians: They were cannibals who devoured human flesh. This charge obviously grew out of a misunderstanding of the words used in serving the Communion meal, which symbolizes the body and blood of Christ. But the words excited lascivious rumors especially among those who despised the Christians for other reasons. What is noteworthy, however, is that even though the Christians of course denied they were cannibals, they did not elaborate a doctrine of the “real presence” or the “transubstantiation,” which they then expected other Christians to believe. These doctrines came much later and grew out of internal conflicts within the movement, not in response to canards from without.

  The Christian response to classical Greek (by then also Roman) religion and the philosophies that emerged from it was much more nuanced. On the one hand, Christians claimed that Homer, Plato, and Aristotle had prepared the way for Christ. But they also insisted that since Christ had now come, although these great predecessors could still be appreciated, they had also been superseded. They also thought of other ways to include such classical ancestors in the new Christian story. Some taught that since Christ was the eternal logos (word or Spirit) of God, present in all ages, he had already spoken to the ancient sages, inspiring them as they wrote the Symposium or the Nichomachean Ethics. Others claimed that the Greek philosophers, and even Homer, must have been familiar with the Old Testament and that the good things they taught were derived from Moses and the prophets. Christians often disagreed with each other about the fine points of this ambitious ex post facto adoption process. They argued, but they did not force their views on each other. They coped with Greek philosophy, paganism, eastern cults and emperor worship, without resorting to creeds.

  Despite persecution, Christianity thrived. It continued to expand geographically and soon comprised Visigoths, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, and other people of widely disparate cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Now some Christian notables saw a need for creed making due not to threats from without, but to divisions among the growing numbers of different kinds of people within. This and the lure of money and power combined to transform what was essentially a Spirit-guided movement of faith into a “belief-demarcated” confederation.

  In retrospect it is not hard to see how this happened. We have noted that short summaries of basic Christian teachings began to appear here and there in the third century, mainly to instruct new members. But gradually Christian leaders began to stiffen them into obligations. Today historians of the creeds often explain them as fences, boundary markers delineating who was in and who was out. However, a more appropriate metaphor would be “partitions.” A fence is constructed on the outside edges of the property. A partition is something built inside a house, separating those who live in it from each other. There is not a syllable in any of the early creeds about Mithra or Zeus or Caesar. Without exception they are worded not to proscribe outsiders, but to fence out fellow Christians whose theological views were different. These Christians, however, were now partitioned off, or more precisely, shown the door. The era that welcomed what historians call “great differences in theological speculation,” what I have called the Age of Faith, was ending. Further, not only were the creedal barriers directed against brothers and sisters; they were, in retrospect, a painful example of overkill. They pushed out whole clusters of Christians, whole regions, and even eventually whole countries (like Armenia, the first Christian nation), because people differed on one or another point in one of the creeds.

  Nearly everyone now agrees that much of this barricade building was mistaken. But there is a certain poignancy in watching the painful efforts of popes like John Paul II and a host of ecumenical organizations to build bridges to parts of the worldwide Christian family that should never have been fenced off in the first place. The seeds of hierarchy and of creeds as well as the temptation to power and the lure of money had undoubtedly begun to vitiate the Christian movement quite early. But these currents won the day when, in possibly the most fateful event in its entire history, the emperor Constantine embraced Christianity, and his successors later made it the official religion of the empire in the early fourth century. Now the “People of the Way” was becoming an ecclesial imperium, and beliefs were squeezing out faith. Before we can discuss how Constantine’s corporate acquisition brought about this ruinous alternation, we must first step back and trace the tortuous pathway from the Roman cross on Calvary to the one the emperor ordered emblazoned on his soldiers’ shields.

  CHAPTER 6

  “The Bishop Is Your High Priest and Mighty King”

  The Rise of the Clerical Caste

  When the World Council of Churches assembled in Canberra, Australia, in February 1991, few of the four thousand delegates expected the opening ceremony would ignite a tumult. But it did. When a young Korean female theologian entered accompanied by a procession of nineteen dancers with gongs, bells, and clap sticks, led by two Aboriginal dancers in body paint and loincloths, a gasp went up from the crowd. German bishops, American Methodists, and Orthodox prelates were learning, many for the first time, that the era of Euro-American churchly dominance was over. The Christianity of the future would be culturally, racially, and theologically heterogeneous.

  Christianity in the first three centuries of its history faced a similar challenge. Like today, it was growing and spreading into a cacophonous range of cultures, each with its own customs, language, and religion. A plethora of different theologies and liturgies were budding, from Syria in the east to Spain in the west to the lands of the Gauls and the Goths in the north. This spectrum of variegation undoubtedly troubled those who prefer their religion tidier and more predictable. The earliest Christians did not handle the dissonance by trying to impose a uniform system of doctrines and rites. Instead, they welcomed a wide array of expressions and trusted that the Spirit, not a hierarchy or a creed, would maintain their unity in love.

  In his authoritative book Paul and His World, New Testament scholar Helmut Koester shows in a chapter entitled “The Authority of the Spirit” that their life in the Spirit was the link that held the early congregations together. He demonstrates that Paul’s letters should not be read as laying down theological formularies, but as ad hoc political and administrative advice to particular local churches. Paul had no interest in nurturing uniformity, but was mainly concerned that Jewish and Gentile followers realize they now all belonged to the same community, one that had come to birth with the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost, described in Acts of the Apostles: “And it shall come to pass, says God, that in the last days I shall pour out my Spirit on all flesh” (2:17).1

  But within a few decades this effervescent diversity began to worry a new generation of Christian leaders. Eager for more standardized product, they began to argue that if this or that practice had not existed from the days of Matthew, Paul, and John, then it must be a deviation and theref
ore illegitimate. The same tactic is employed today by companies that insist you buy only the “original” brand-name commodity and “accept no substitutes.” It is a time-tested technique. Even the Roman Catholic Church, which is accused by its Protestant and Orthodox critics of appending novelties over the centuries, takes pains to argue that at least the seeds of every innovation—from papal infallibility to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary—were already present in principle at the beginning. The same strategy is used by old-school Protestants, whose favorite epithet for those they disagree with is “modernists.”

  The logic seems straightforward: if it is not the original, if it was not there at the beginning, then it is spurious and illegitimate. But what happens when we discover that what those third- and fourth-century Christian purists labeled as innovations were, in fact, “there from the beginning”? James Robinson, one of the most respected scholars of early Christianity, says that in the period he studies the beliefs and practices were “variously understood and translated or transmitted.” As he puts it, “There seems not yet to be a central body of orthodox doctrine distinguished from heretical doctrine…. To this extent the terms heresy and orthodoxy are anachronistic.”2 In short, both “apostolic authority,” which was a self-reinforcing prejudice, and the true-because-original argument turn out to be without basis in actual history. But once established, such fictional inventions harden over time, until people come to believe they are true even when they are not.

  The congealing does not take long. As early as the beginning of the third century, the Christian writer Tertullian (ca. 160–225) based his searing critique of those he called “heretics” (De proscriptione hereticorum) on the claim that what they taught had not been present at the beginning, and this allegation continued to serve as the proof positive others mounted against all “heretics,” ancient or modern: they were “innovators.” But now their case is no longer credible. What they condemned had, in fact, been there from the beginning. Chronologically the Gospel of Thomas is as “original” as Mark’s gospel and may be even more “original” than the Gospel of John.3 This realization is a troubling one for many. Some simply cannot accept the idea that there might be five, not four, “original” gospels. Some are troubled by the mystical theology of Thomas, which seems at odds with the other four. Still others are offended by the low view of women the text takes. Nevertheless, the discovery of Thomas opened the door to a refreshing new understanding of the first centuries of Christian life. What if today’s Protestant fundamentalists and Catholic traditionalists are the real “modernists” and innovators?

  I cannot blame my teachers either for the fact that I occasionally nodded off in a seminary class or that the undiscovered Gospel of Thomas still lay sleeping peacefully in a cool cave in the Egyptian desert. They could not have foreseen the dramatic discoveries that were soon to come. Today, however, we cannot avoid asking what the undercutting of the time-honored heresy/orthodoxy dichotomy means for a mottled and global Christianity and what the drastic transformation of all we know about the early Christians suggests for the future.

  It is easy to see why a previous generation of teachers still talked so confidently about heresy and orthodoxy. But why, in addition to not connecting the dots to biblical studies, did they also so easily accept the now widely dismissed claims for early “apostolic authority”? Unfortunately, they put too much stock in what the ancient Christian writers had said, but that only raises another question. Why had those venerable figures, many of them bishops like Eusebius (275–339), painted this deceptive picture in the first place?

  The reason has to do with the all too human obsession with acquiring and holding on to power. As Paul and Mark and the other original apostles began to die, their prestige and stature increased. Maybe this happened for the same reason that antique shops thrive or that a painter’s canvasses command a higher price the moment after the artist dies. In any case, it did not take long for succeeding generations those guiding in the Christian movement to devise the idea of an inherited “apostolic authority,” even though the apostles themselves had never claimed to hand on any such authority. Nevertheless, these would-be leaders claimed that they themselves were the true successors of these first apostles and therefore should exercise the same authority they declared that those apostles had exercised.

  Next, some of the new generation of leaders began to compose gospels and epistles and to guarantee their authority by attributing them to one of the now deceased apostles. These texts (some of them found in the same cave at Nag Hammadi) were not really written by Barnabas, Philip, Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and Judas, as their title pages claim, but they have become the favorite cover-story features of the drugstore magazines that are always on the lookout for breathtaking new religious gossip. Of course these “lost gospels” are, in a modern sense, forgeries. But forgery was not recognized in those days, and in any case they make fascinating reading. As New Testament scholar Elaine Pagels puts it, maybe they don’t belong in the canon, but they don’t belong in the wastebasket either. They are indispensable in helping us catch a glimpse of the Christian movement a hundred years or more after Christ, namely, when a spurious “apostolic authority” was already being invented and wielded, in some cases quite successfully.

  One example illustrates this tactic well. It seems that across the Adriatic Sea from Rome, in the congregation in Corinth, the one to which Paul had written two of his letters, a youth rebellion had taken place. Some of the younger members had replaced the older ones and assumed leadership. The tiff may or may not have been a significant one in its own right. But when the congregation in Rome heard of it and then tried to do something about it, a letter was produced in about 96 CE, the First Epistle of Clement, that eventually became an important factor in the transition from the original, more egalitarian leadership style to the pattern of domination we have come to call a “hierarchy” (which means “rule by the holy”).

  First Clement urges the congregation in Corinth to reinstall the sacked elders, but the reasons it advances for this action are telling. It takes no position on whatever issue caused the rift. It has nothing to say about heresy, immorality, or false teachings. It never mentions a creed. It is solely concerned, rather, with who is to be in charge and why. Curiously, a mere seventy years after a detachment of Roman legionnaires had executed Jesus, it commends the example of the Roman army for its clear lines of authority and argues that only the displaced leaders in Corinth, who—it asserts—were the authentic successors of the apostles, had the right to rule. The subsequent deployment of this letter in other disagreements makes it a key marker in what was to happen later.

  Naturally, ever since First Clement appeared, anyone who believes in a hierarchically governed church based on “apostolic authority” likes to exhibit it as evidence of how early these institutions began. And those who hold that the word of the bishop of Rome should carry a special kind of weight, even at some distance from the seven hills by the Tiber, like it even more.

  But First Clement can be read in another way. If the Christians in Rome needed to persuade their Corinthian brothers and sisters about the prerogatives of those who considered themselves the successors of the apostles, clearly the Corinthians, at least the younger ones, did not adhere to this concept of authority at the time. As to the prerogatives of the bishop of Rome, the text itself does not indicate an author. It was only a later tradition that ascribed it to a bishop (there may have been more than one) named “Clement” in the Roman congregation. Later still, this same Clement was said to have been the fourth pope, the direct successor of Peter, whom Catholic teaching holds to have been the first bishop of Rome.

  Still, First Clement made an impact, and some even wanted to include it in the New Testament. It eventually was not included, but Hans von Campenhausen, the leading expert on the history of ecclesiastical authority, summarizes its warnings to the Corinthians and its considerable influence as follows:

  [The warnings] are not directed again
st heresy, nor do they have as their content religious or moral instructions…which the elders are to uphold. Instead it is the system of elders as such which is created simply for the sake of order…. The protection of an express apostolic injunction…thus acquires a weight and significance which it has not hitherto possessed.4

  Even though First Clement did not make it into the New Testament, it did mark a turning point, for it signals the emergence of what would later become “canon law,” and it contributes an essential element of what was later to be called the “apostolic succession.” It is also important to underline, however, that what is on the mind of the author(s) of First Clement is neither heresy nor creeds, but simply the question of who is on top. The model of a military command structure is coming to the fore. Already, at the end of the first century, at least in some congregations, the early Christian “fellowship of equals,” which was never fully equal of course, was beginning to evolve into a segmented pyramid. The process was just beginning, but it foreshadowed events to come. Establishing authority always entails establishing jurisdiction, and eventually who is inside and who is outside would be determined by a creed. With First Clement the train of Christianity had left the station and was headed for Constantine’s imperial church and the Age of Belief that eventually produced Christian fundamentalism.

  Still, as the Christian movement entered the second century, it continued to thrive, sometimes in the face of severe persecution, with a polyglot of theologies and numerous different styles of governance. In seminary, when we read the standard histories of that turbulent period, I found many of the early church fathers fascinating, albeit a bit odd. I was intrigued, for example, by Ignatius (d. 110), the bishop of Antioch, who declared that he looked forward eagerly to being a martyr and boasted that, if the wild beasts were not hungry, he would urge them on. He was, in fact, eventually arrested and taken to Rome and martyred, but whether the lions were hungry is not part of the historical record.