by Harvey Cox
This is not just a geographical issue. It means that the new homelands of the faith of Jesus of Nazareth are not the inheritors of either Greek philosophy or Roman civilization. They have minimal interest in the metaphysical issues that obsessed such early Christian theologians as Origen and Athanasius. In Asia their cultures have been nurtured not by Homer and Plato, but by the Ramayana, the Sutras, and the Tao Te Ching. In Africa they have been maintained by a congeries of local rituals, customary healing rites, and the veneration of ancestors. Nor is this recent dislocation only cultural or religious. It also has to do with justice. Since the vast majority of people in this “new Christendom” are neither white nor well-off, their theological questions center less on the existence or nonexistence of God or the metaphysical nature of Christ than on why poverty and hunger still stalk God’s world. It is little wonder that liberation theology, the most creative theological movement of the twentieth century, did not originate in Marburg or Yale, but in the tar-paper shacks of Brazil and the slums of South Korea.2
As we explore the similarity between the first Age of Faith and the Age of the Spirit that is just coming to birth, it is important to remember that the first three decades of Christian history were no Garden of Eden. As the New Testament itself makes painfully clear, early Christianity was in no sense free of internal conflict. The letters of Paul to the congregations in Corinth and Galatia bristle with stern advice about coping with their arguments. Still, one congregation rarely intervened in what was going on in another. At first most of them simply accepted the diversity. But as my previous chapters have shown, eventually some parties within the nascent movement strove to impose their way of doing things on the others. One such faction, with a hefty assist from the Roman emperors, ultimately won this battle. Then, by purging its rivals, branding them as heretics, burning their books, banishing their leaders, and rewriting the history, the winners assumed the title of “catholic,” or “official,” Christianity.
Today’s emerging new Christianity also suffers divisions, and the tensions do not follow geographical boundaries. As in the early church we see comparable efforts to enforce creeds, pull people into line, and impose uniform practices. Some of these take surprising turns. Traditionalist Anglican bishops in Africa who oppose the ordination of gays “adopt” wealthy American Episcopal parishes that agree with their unbending beliefs. At the same time conservative North American Pentecostals try without success to discourage the left-leaning social action of their Latin American sisters and brothers. At the heart of these attempts to goad people into line, however, there lurks a contradiction. They are carried out in the name of some version of “official” Christianity—called “authentic” or “traditional” or “classical,” depending on the denomination. Whatever its label, it remains an expression of the passing Age of Belief, which won its first ambiguous victory centuries ago.
But, with our new knowledge of that early period, the dubiousness of the victory becomes clearer every day. What will happen when the cat is completely out of the bag? How will things change when it becomes known in every pew that the “official” version of early Christianity—whether it is deployed by Catholics or Protestants—was a work of fiction and is no longer credible? Clearly the current discussions about what Christianity “really was,” what it “really is,” and what it “should be” in its contemporary global incarnation must now unfold in a different idiom.
A key element in the new idiom is the regaining of the original meaning of “faith.” It has now become evident that the adulteration of Christianity from the way of life of a vigorous but persecuted minority into the ideology of an empire produced many changes. It not only defaced the institutional profile of the church, but disfigured the meaning of its vocabulary. Students of linguistics know how the context in which words are used inevitably alters their meaning, and this was no exception. At its outset “faith” meant a dynamic lifestyle sustained by fellowships that were guided by both men and women and that reflected hope for the coming of the Reign of God. But when Christianity became swollen into an elaborate code of prescribed beliefs and ritual obligations policed by a hierarchy, the meaning of “faith” was warped almost beyond recognition. Initially faith had meant a primary life orientation, but the evolving clerical class now equated “faith” with “belief in” certain specified doctrines and patterns of authority, which, in any case, themselves changed periodically depending on who held the ecclesial scepter. The result was a disaster for dissent and open discussion. Yesterday’s heretic may be tomorrow’s saint, but the heretic is still dead.
The clerical seizure of power in the church not only altered the meaning of words; it tainted the capacity of Christians to know their own history. The revised account of the first several decades that male bishops concocted was especially dismissive of women. Only in recent years have both male and female historians been able to correct this men’s-club version. It now turns out that women played a significantly larger leadership role than had previously been thought. But the power of false history to shape present perception goes even farther. Since the priestly elite insisted that women had always been subservient and marginal, people were unable to see clear evidence to the contrary.
A ninth-century mosaic in the Church of St. Praxedis in Rome provides a poignant example of this myopia. It shows a certain Theodora with the word episcopa (“bishop”) etched above her head. The church is located only a ten-minute stroll from the main train station in Rome, but when I first walked through its doors, I found that I had stepped into one of the hottest skirmishes between current historical research and received practices and traditions. This one concerns the leadership of women during the first few centuries of Christianity. The mosaic is in a side chapel. Theodora is pictured with Mary of Nazareth, St. Pudentia, and St. Praxedis, all women leaders of the early church. The controversy centers on what the word episcopa, or “bishop,” meant in Theodora’s day. Was she the convener or president of a local congregation? Or did she have a wider leadership responsibility? Was she “ordained,” and if so what did ordination mean then? How does this mosaic fit in with pictures of women leading what appear to be eucharistic services, like the Fractio Panis (“Breaking the Bread”) found in Catacombs of Priscilla, which has become one of the most contentious images?
These visual depictions clearly accord with the dozens of written accounts of early Christian women leaders catalogued by Sister Carol Osiek and Kevin Madigan in Ordained Women in the Early Church, 30–600: A Documentary History.3 Some skeptics assert that Theodora’s title of episcopa was merely an honorific one, bestowed on her because she was the mother of Pope Paschal I, whose mosaic portrait, holding the Church of St. Praxedis in his hands, is in the rounded area above the altar called the “apse.” They also contend that the women mentioned in the written texts played only auxiliary roles.
The storm continues to boil over what it means that Theodora was a “bishop.” The evidence is inconclusive, and the jury is still out. But when I first saw the mosaic at St. Praxedis, a question came to mind immediately. Remembering this was a ninth-century work, I wondered why, if a male dominated clergy had tried so hard to erase evidence of women’s leadership, this dramatic refutation of that opinion was still intact. Someone had tried to scratch out the “a” in Theodora. Still, even the most energetic rewriters of history may be a bit reluctant to scrape whole mosaics off church walls. Also, as I learned later, since many of the visual images of women in early Christianity have only minimal textual material attached to them, it is easier to read something entirely different into the picture than what the artist may have originally intended. It also reminded me of the psychological experiments I have read about showing that we often see what we have been prepared to see, not what is really there.
The displacement of faith by belief had even more ruinous consequences. It became so entrenched in theological reflection and church organization that not even the most dedicated reformers could dislodge it. Luther turned E
urope on its head by insisting that salvation was “by grace through faith.” But within a few generations of his death, “Lutheran orthodoxy” had frozen his insight into the notion that one had to believe in the doctrine of justification by faith to assure salvation. A man of robust passions, Luther taught that we all need to put our trust—our faith—in something in order to live. Idolatry was not a matter of bowing down before statues. Luther in fact, unlike Calvin, wanted to keep the statues in the churches. For him, idolatry meant trusting—putting one’s faith—in such “idols” as money, power, and fame.
By the time of the Enlightenment, Christian terminology was impossibly confused. The original meaning of faith had been so thoroughly lost that, when the philosophes attacked religion by equating it with blind belief and superstition, they were merely echoing what the church itself taught. But then these dissenters went on to make the same mistake. They resolved that “reason” should henceforth banish belief, and that now people should place their faith in reason. The French revolutionaries even enthroned a “Goddess of Reason” in Notre Dame Cathedral, unwittingly proving Luther’s point that everyone needs to have faith in something. But their attack only pushed the church into an even more ferocious defense of “belief.”
The rise of natural science initiated the final step in the decline of a Christianity that was a collation of ostensible propositions about the world that one was supposed to accept on the basis of a religious authority. Science gradually evolved a method of testing factual assertions and by so doing discredited one pseudofactual religious claim after another. The trial of Galileo by the Inquisition marked the turning point. He had insisted that the earth moves around the sun, not vice versa, and claimed that what he actually saw through a telescope had to take precedence over what both the ecclesial and the contemporary scientific authorities taught about the motion of the heavenly bodies. He was forced to recant, but walked away murmuring that the earth still moves. Some years ago Pope John Paul II honored Galileo, and rightly so. He and the science he represented actually rendered an invaluable service to Christianity. They dismantled the church’s claims to competence in describing the workings of the natural world, thus helping Christianity to regain its original impetus as a movement of faith.
Today there is no basis for any “warfare between science and religion.” The two have quite different but complementary missions, the first concerning itself with empirical description, the second with meaning and values.4 Unfortunately, however, although the war is over, sporadic skirmishes between die-hards on both sides continue. Biblical literalists, who totally misunderstand the poetry of the book of Genesis, try to reduce it to a treatise in geology and zoology. Their mirror image is found among the atheists and agnostics who mount spurious pseudoscientific arguments to demonstrate that the universe has no meaning or that God does not exist. Both parties are fundamentalists of a sort, deficient in their capacity for metaphor, analogy, and the place of symbol and myth in human life. Sadly, battle lines that were drawn years ago continue to cause confusion today. Otherwise thoughtful people still mistakenly view the world as divided between “believers” and “nonbelievers.” But that era of human consciousness is almost over. We are witnessing the emergence of a different vocabulary, one that is closer to the original sense of the word “faith” before its debasement.
As we look for this new language, it is important to remember that during the fifteen centuries of the Age of Belief not everyone accepted its garbled version of the life and message of Jesus. Recognizing it as a diluted version, colonies of monks, countless nonconformist groups, movements that were branded as “heretical,” and many courageous individuals refused to accept the caricature. Those in charge dealt with them harshly, as documented by the dreary history of inquisitions and burnings. Still, many of these groups survived and even thrived within the boundaries of what had made itself into an imperial church. St. Francis of Assisi retrieved the authentic message of the Nazarene, but had the tactical savvy to seek the pope’s approval for his raggedy flock of spiritual troubadours. St. Teresa of Avila, for whom faith was a personal bond, close to a marriage, with Christ, relied on her wits and her charm to keep one jump ahead of the Holy Inquisition in sixteenth-century Spain. In our own time, the Sant’Egidio community and people like Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and Bishop Oscar Romero, the assassinated champion of liberation theology in El Salvador, have kept embodied faith rather than belief systems central.
It is fortuitous that our recent awareness of early Christianity is coinciding with its explosive growth in the global South, and fortunately my own life trajectory has brought me into close touch with both. I have worked closely with a number of scholars who by patiently brushing away layers of dust and grit are meticulously clarifying our knowledge of Christian origins. Also, I have traveled, taught, and learned in many places in the world, from Brazil to China and from India to Japan. In my teaching at home I have come to know students and visitors from every continent. These two facets of my career flow together when I realize both how hugely kaleidoscopic early Christianity was and that Christians steeped in ancient non-Western cultures do not have to stuff themselves into any preordained pattern.
The prospect of a dappled and motley Christian community sprawled across five continents may be daunting, but the challenge it poses is hardly new. Christianity came to birth in the midst of a cultural change. A Hebrew and Aramaic message in a Greek and Latin world, it was a movement that was born to travel. In fact, it seems designed to travel, and it takes on new life with every succeeding cultural transition. But for this to happen again, some old wineskins must be discarded, and the incubus of a self-serving and discredited picture of Christian origins must be set aside.
We cannot and should not try to reinstall the first Age of Faith. We live in a different world. But Christianity today bears within it both the cherished gems and the worthless debris it has accumulated during the intervening fifteen hundred years of the Age of Belief, which is now expiring. Can we preserve the jewels and get rid of the junk? It was a period rich with memories and lessons, with good examples and bad ones, with treasures and trinkets. Even though we still live with the scars Christianity has inflicted on itself, we cannot dismantle the soaring cathedrals, silence the music, shred the theological texts, or discard the splendid liturgies. They are ours as well as theirs. As we enter this Age of the Spirit, they can still inspire us, and they have much to teach us. But we need to understand our past in a new way, because we still inhabit a world in which that past exercises a heavy hand and will not easily loosen its grip.
CHAPTER 13
Blood on the Altar of Divine Providence
Liberation Theology and the Rebirth of Faith
On March 24, 1980, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador, arrived just after six o’clock in the afternoon at the tiny chapel in the Hospital of Divine Providence in that city to say an evening Mass, as he had done many times before. Hurriedly pulling on his vestments, Romero first led the small congregation through the Liturgy of the Word, which precedes the Eucharist. Then he stood before the altar, ready to elevate the bread and wine, when a shot rang out. The well-aimed bullet, fired by someone closely acquainted with firearms, pierced his heart, and he collapsed immediately, his blood splattering across the altar and onto the elements he was about to consecrate. He died almost at once, but with his last breath whispered to those around him, “May God forgive the assassins.”
Romero’s life story was a parable. Even before his death he had become an incarnation of the emergence of Christianity from its centuries-long Constantinian era and into its new global phase. He personified the dramatic turn away from a religion of creeds and hierarchies toward a newly recovered faith in the divine promise of a reign of justice, as taught and demonstrated by Jesus of Nazareth. Today millions of people all over Latin American venerate him as a saint.
Romero started as a quite ordinary, somewhat colorles
s priest in a church allied for five hundred years with the landowners and the elite. But he died as a spokesman of a church struggling to be born among the powerless people of his ravaged country. He was born in El Salvador in 1917 and began working as a carpenter, but by his early teens had already enrolled in seminary. He took easily to the clerical life and seemed content to live within its securely confining walls. His fellow seminarians found him remote, overly proper, and not very likeable. But his superiors looked upon him with favor and sent him to Rome to study at the Gregorian University, the widely recognized training school for students with both real mental acumen and unquestioning respect for higher authority, qualities that mark them as likely candidates for leadership in the church. Romero received his licentiate in theology and was ordained to the priesthood in Rome during World War II, when travel to other parts of Europe was impossible. His education was Roman to the core, and he returned to El Salvador ready to be a loyal spokesman for what Catholics call Romanität, which means roughly “the way they think and do things in Rome.” He was “Constantinian” through and through.
Back in El Salvador, a country named for the “Savior,” Romero began his career as a priest firmly ensconced in the closed and inflexible hierarchy that had ruled his country’s religious life and shaped its political and cultural history since its conquest in 1524 by Spaniards under the command of Pedro de Alvarado (ca. 1485–1541). His first years afforded him ample opportunity to put his traditionalist views of church, theology, and politics into practice. He became rector of the interdiocesan seminary of El Salvador, where he had the responsibility of shaping the thinking of novice priests from all over his country. Soon, however, he moved into regional administrative duties, becoming executive secretary of the Episcopal (Bishops’) Conference for all of Central America. A bright and energetic man, and also obedient and ambitious, he was clearly on the way up.1