I Don’t Believe in Christianity

I recently read in Jaroslav Pelikan’s excellent Jesus Through the Centuries a line from American scholar Arthur O. Lovejoy, who asserted, “The term ‘Christianity’ is not the name for any single unit of the type for which the historian of specific ideas looks.”  Rather, the term describes “a series of facts which, taken as a whole, have almost nothing in common except the name”.  At first I thought his statement was absurd, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was true.  And that I did not believe in Christianity.  Please let me explain.

       The term “Christianity” refers to a religion (like other religions such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism) which includes several large sub-groups, usually labelled as Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism.  The subgroups can be broken down into other smaller subgroups, and some of them have almost nothing in common with each other.  Thus, for example, Lutheranism, the Salvation Army, and the snake-handling cults of the Appalachians are all “Protestant” and therefore a part of “Christianity”, but it is doubtful if they all share anything more than a name.  Luther, for example, who would not even shake Zwingli’s hand at the Marburg Colloquy, would not have recognized the Salvation Army or the snake-handlers as Christian at all.  When we cast the net even wider, the disparity grows even wider along with it.

       Thus, for example, in the early church the groups founded by the Gnostics Valentinus and Basilides had little in common with the group attended by Irenaeus or Justin Martyr.  Later on, the Unitarians, the Quakers, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, and the Mormons also had precious little in common with the older groups such as the Catholics and the Lutherans.  At the end of the day, the term “Christianity”, generously applied, meant no more than that the group looked to Jesus as an important and perhaps central figure and used the New Testament in some way.  All these groups, looking to Jesus and using (or misusing) the New Testament could lay claim to be a part of “Christianity”.

       That is why I said that I don’t believe in Christianity—nor, come to that, did the framers of the Apostles’ Creed (the “Old Roman symbol”) or of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.  The authors of those historic creeds did not say, “We believe in Christianity”, but rather “We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church”.

       Note please that Jesus did not establish a religion.  Rather, by His life, death, and resurrection, He established the Kingdom of God, and left behind a group of people on earth who would proclaim this Kingdom and invite others to join it.  That is, He did not leave a religion, but a group of disciples gathered around a clergy (i.e. the apostles).   

He also did not establish Christianity as a religion different than Judaism, but rather fulfilled the hopes of Israel by inaugurating the Kingdom that Israel was expecting.  Israel was invited to accept this fulfillment and allow themselves to be reconfigured by it.  Israel was now to become not “national Israel” or “racial Israel”, but “Messianic Israel”, defined no longer by Torah, but by Christ.  When many in Israel declined the invitation and instead worked to destroy the Christian movement, the growing differences between Christian Jews and non-Christian Jews could be (unhelpfully) defined as two religions.  But Christ did not come to establish another religion, but to transfigure Israel, the people of God.

       This transfigured part of Israel was called “the Church”.  And when the Church emerged into history (as G.K. Chesterton once wrote, in his The Everlasting Man), “the very first thing that happened to it was that it was caught in a sort of swarm of mystical and metaphysical sects, mostly out of the East; like one lonely golden bee caught in a swarm of wasps.  To the ordinary onlooker, there did not seem to be much difference, or anything beyond a general buzz; indeed in a sense there was not much difference, so far as stinging and being stung were concerned. The difference was that only one golden dot in all that whirring gold-dust had the power of going forth to make hives for all humanity; to give the world honey and wax, or (as was s finely said)…sweetness and light”.

       This would explain the Church and the groups that quickly clustered around it, like the followers of Valentinus and Basilides:  they were wasps around the golden bee.  There would be other wasps in the succeeding centuries—groups like the Unitarians and the Mormons, but these proved to be as powerless to produce eternal sweetness and light as were the Gnostics of yesteryear.  It was the apostolic Church—the one retaining the allegiance of men such as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus—which alone could produce spiritual sweetness and saving illumination.

       If one believed in the religion known as “Christianity” one would therefore be compelled to acknowledge that Christianity was a large tent indeed—one large enough to contain Mormons, Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gnostic Valentinians, snake-handling Pentecostals, Orthodox, Catholics, Lutherans, Quakers, Mennonites, and many more, including such interesting weirdos as the Swedenborgians.  One would have to include within their number conservatives such as John R. Rice and liberals such as John S. Spong.  And at length, one would have to conclude along with Mr. Arthur Lovejoy that the term “Christianity” describes a series of groups which have almost nothing in common except the name. 

One would, of course, be able to pick one’s favourite group from among the many varieties of Christianity.  One could, for example, say that the Appalachian snake-handlers represented Christianity in its purest and truest form, in contrast to the false and benighted Catholics.  Or one could say that the old calendarist Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece were the true Church of Christ on earth, and that all the other Christian groups wandered about in the dark.  But preferences aside, saying that Christ founded Christianity necessarily involves acknowledging all other groups as in some way Christian—doctrinally mistaken naturally (with whatever consequences), but still in some way Christian.

This was not the approach of the Fathers.  For them, Christ fulfilled the promises made to Israel and reconfigured the people of God as His Body.  In other words, He founded the Church.  Later groups might come, cite the Church’s literature, and claim to be the Church Jesus founded (like the Valentinian wasps), but their message and their sacramental separation from the original Church belied their claim.  The Church would wend its way through history, suffering persecution from without and enduring groups breaking away in schism from within, but it would remain what it always was—the little flock established by Christ by the gift of His Spirit and in which He was present in His fullness when they gathered in His name at the Eucharist.

I should add that by mentioning both Mormons and Mennonites in the same paragraph I do not mean to equate them or to suggest that they are all equally heretical or all equally distant in their separation from the original apostolic Church.  If a group loves and worships Jesus as Lord, God, and Saviour, I believe their members can be saved on the Last Day.  But such divine mercy does not mean that the group to which they belong can lay claim to belonging to the Church which Christ established on the Day of Pentecost.  All the groups which have separated from the original Church are equally schismatic, but some groups lay on the outer fringes of the schism, while others are closer to the border, and partake of the divine grace which flows into the Church and seeps out (as it were) through its porous border.  That was why St. Basil could opine that some schismatic groups “still belonged to the Church” (see here for more).

It is this original and apostolic Church in which I believe.  I do not believe in Christianity, that multi-form amalgam of groups sharing a name, a literature, and (sometimes) little else.  I believe in the family Christ founded, with its unchanging Message and the unchanging sacramental Presence of the Lord in its midst.  I freely confess that this Church contains people who do stupid and sinful things and cause great embarrassment.  But for all that, it is still the Church which Christ founded and which claims the loyalty of everyone who belongs to Him.