A Brief History of Christianity

Introduction

This short composition was extracted from the book “ Speaking of Jesus: The Art of Not-Evangelism” by Carl Medearis published by David C. Cook (June 1, 2011).  This short history was formulated by Carl as a part of the dialog he shares when he speaks at different universities.  One of Carl’s favorite things to do is to ask the students if they think that he can give the history of Christianity in twenty minutes or less.  Invariably, almost everybody thins that he cannot.  So he has somebody start a stopwatch and then he attempts to give the class the whole thing –all two thousand years of it –before the timer buzzes.  Now even Carl admits that his version is very Western and very Protestant in its perspective, so he pleads for others not to be offended if they are Catholic or an Easterner.  He also intentionally highlights the negative aspects of the Christian religion to make a point.

AD 0-33:  

A Palestinian Jew named Jesus of Nazareth lived, taught, and demonstrated the coming of what He called the kingdom of God.  He confronted the establishments, loved the sinners, healed the sick people, and then died as a sacrifice for the sins of all generations.  Then He disappeared into the clouds, much to the disappointment of His followers.

AD 33 ¼:  

The  Holy Spirit came with great power, and the disciples finally realized what the whole promise of eternal life, and truth, and love was all about –just as Jesus had promised.

AD 34-100: 

The original eleven disciples –plus Judas’s replacement –along with about five hundred or so others, had some pretty radical years of fruitful ministry.  They continued to teach what Jesus taught, along with stories of what He’d done.  Mostly they stuck close to Israel, but a new convert named Paul got really involved and they started going to some exotic places: Turkey, Africa, Greece, and even north into Europe.  It was a good-news-and-bad-news time.  Many accepted this teaching of salvation and a new way to live; yet many also faced persecution, torture, and execution.  Most of the followers died in nasty entertainment venues, like arenas where they were eaten by lions or forked by gladiators in front of thousands of cheering fans.

AD 100-313:  

The message of Jesus’ kingdom spread through the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, and Greece.  Basically the whole Roman world.  Followers of Jesus, Jew and Gentile alike, sprouted into communities.  For every believer who was killed, ten more seemingly popped out of the ground to take his or her place.  A few emperors and religious leaders apparently embraced this new concept of living life in relationship with the Creator, but many were repulsed by this growing demographic and its potential threat to the systems they had worked so hard to build.

During this period, people began to wander from the original teaching of Jesus.  Hierarchies began to form.  People gave themselves titles and positions.  Rules and regulations began replacing the living daily relationship with the Spirit of God.  A new religion called “Christianity” was born.

AD 313: 

The Roman emperor Constantine decided to make the religion of the Christians legal, and it later became the official religion of the expanding Western world.  His decision was more political than personal, as Constantine continued to favor Mars and Apollo with his own offerings.  That is until one night in a dream he heard instructions to put the sign of the cross upon his soldiers’ shields.  After a victory, Constantine decided that the credit belonged to the God of the Christians and committed himself –at least in the public view –to the “Christian faith.”

AD 313-1550: 

This new religion, Christianity, which was loosely based on the Bible and had very little to do with what Jesus said or did, expanded everywhere.  Emperors and kings became religious dictators, killing any dissenters, forcing arbitrary conversion on people, and clamping a title on them for the sake of political unity or military conscription.  Somewhere within this time frame, people began to take the Greek word ekklesia and use it as a place-name noun: “the church.” 

Emperor Charlemagne, the founder of the Frankish Empire, invaded, defeated, and “Christianized” the territory he took, forcing Catholicism on the people, slaughtering those who refused.  When he eventually settled down to rule his kingdom, he divided it into 350 countries.  In order to maintain the loyalty of his subjects, he appointed missi dominici, or “emissaries of the Lord” to each of these territories to oversee the “spiritual condition” of the people, meaning of course that those with different viewpoints could be charged with “sin.”  His strategy kept the people in line politically using a supposedly spiritual entity –all in the name of Christ.

During this time, every few years, on radical preacher or another would get a pulpit and use his fifteen minutes of fame to call the people back to the teachings of Jesus.  Usually these figures faced excommunication or death for their pains.  Many who didn’t die moved to the hinterlands to build places of retreat, typically called monasteries.  

The renaissance, which occurred near the end of this period, was similar in its inception to Christianity in that it got some things right.  The thinking of this period arose from appreciating the dignity of humanity, the discoveries of science and nature, and the capacity of the mind and talents God gave humans.  Good stuff.  But generally speaking, people were confused about who was worshipping what.  Some supported the papacy, others the monks, and still others adhered to various strains of deism, agnosticism, and in some cases outright atheism.

Then in 1517, a Catholic priest by the name of Martin Luther entered the scene.  He realized that this thing called Christianity was a big mess and in need of an overhaul.  So he wrote a list of ninety-five things that should be fixed.  Guess what? Nobody appreciated it.  Well almost nobody.  See, in the same way that Jesus didn’t found the religion of Christianity, Luther didn’t found the Protestant faith.   He didn’t want a new religion.  He wanted to see some things changed within the Catholic system so he could conscientiously remain in it.  Luther’s attempt to urge reform never came to a satisfactory conclusion, and the resulting European and even pan-American theater of theology began.  Before you knew it, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and later Knox, were conversing over the precise definitions of words people like you and me can’t even pronounce.

AD 1700:  

The period known as the Enlightenment arrived.  While essentially the natural progression of men looking for more stuff to call their own, in some ways it continued where the Renaissance left off.  People placed humanity at the center of the universe and put renewed emphasis on the power of the mind.  In fact, people liked themselves so much that they practically built whole nations out of ideologies.  The “individual” was supreme –giving rise to the idea of “individual human rights,” a concept never conceived before.  The later developments of representative government, religious freedom, and civil rights resulted from the thinking of the Enlightenment philosophers during this period.

AD 1800:  

The West expanded farther west, deeply south, and even to the Far East, conquering with the assistance of technology produced by the so-called Enlightenment.  God, gold, and glory dominated this period.

From 1550 to 1850, the religion of Christianity divided and split into many different brand names. The original protesters had since dispersed into hundreds of types of Protestants.  In fact, Protestantism seemed to thrive in the newly individualistic Western world.  Building on the themes of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment came naturally for Westerners.  They considered it an obligation to carry the gospel with them to the New World, zealously converting the natives to Christianity.

They were not all greedy and entrepreneurially driven men.  A number of priests and missionaries went attempting to counterbalance these mercenary ventures by legitimately spreading the good news of Jesus among the newly oppressed natives.  It is a mistake to paint these times with a wide brush of doubt.  We can be sure, both through the historical perspectives and firsthand accounts, that men of the cloth did honestly share the truth of Jesus in spite of the invasions they may have been part of, but were never party to.

Of course, in this era as in all the others before, voices in the wilderness called people to turn back.  However, nobody really knew what he or she would be turning back to in the first place.

AD 1850-1900: 

This was the time of the thinkers.  Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Friedrich Nietzsche.  For brilliant, edgy, ahead-of-their-time philosophers.  Each one, in his own way, summarized “religion” as the easy way out for weaklings.  Humankind was the answer.  They asserted that we must be our own saviors, and that the answer is in economics, psychology, science, and philosophy.

This is very difficult for us to accept, but they may have been dead-on regarding the first point.  What if religion really is a crutch? A crock? Something foolish people invent so that they can fell purpose or peace about their own existences?

The Twentieth Century:  

From about 1920 to the present day, the religion of Christianity has experienced a significant awakening.  Fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, evangelicalism, and the various renewal groups have all but redefined what it means to be a “Christian.” These groups tend to be Bible centered and worship oriented.  Some are “Spirit filled.” There’s even been a gradual return to talking directly about Jesus again.  But still, we have some scary questions to ponder.

We need to ask ourselves: What influences have all the different eras, philosophers, governments, and histories had on this thing we call “Christianity?”  Is the modern system really built on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, or is it a complicated conglomeration of ideas and flaws from different centuries and different perspectives?  Where did Jesus go in the bigger picture?

Have our minds taken over where our hearts should be? The kingdom of Jesus has somehow become a religion of the mind rather than a spiritual response of the heart.  We focus on psychological compliance rather than spiritual dependence upon the teachings of Jesus and the guidance of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit. What if we were able to take Jesus at His word –“I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself” (John 12:32 NKJV)? What if our complicated explanations are wrong, not because they are incorrect, but because they do not constitute the person of Jesus?  What if Jesus is the one question that settles all others?