Chapter 6: A Not-so-Brief History of Faith Evolution
We speculate about what ancient people believed. We cannot be sure what people were thinking before the gift/curse of imagination, of being able to imagine things never experienced or abstract ideas like spirits or gods or right and wrong or good and evil or group identity. When we see cave paintings by Neanderthal Man, we do not know the thoughts behind those paintings.
The study of cultures with very old roots, mostly hunters and gatherers, possibly the most intelligent people who ever lived, shows a diversity of beliefs from atheism to spirits for everything. Along with that diversity of beliefs, morals, social structures, and values diverge. Some societies are/were matriarchal, some patriarchal, and some that defy description of their social structure.
Atheism persisted from very early through to now as some people refused to believe in anything beyond what they could see and touch. In most societies with strong group or social religions, these people pretended to believe or said as little as possible. However, if they had power, they would say the right cultural things, but act in carefully self-serving ways, and sometimes twist the religious beliefs to their advantage. Looking at history and at churches today, I wonder about the importance of a person's belief and the importance of how well they played the game. I suspect many of them past and present did not believe what they claimed, but were or are very good at playing the game.
Astrology evolved from a useful science to a religious practice. Originally the observation of changes in the stars over the year and monthly observations of the moon guided people in their annual cycles. The time when a particular formation of stars appeared would be when a particular food source became available or it was the time to plant a particular crop or some other important annual event. Not everyone would be interested in studying and memorizing the stars, so this became the task for the few able and willing to use the information from the stars to guide the rest of the community.
Somehow this evolved to modern day astrology which ascribes mysterious powers to the planets and stars in shaping individual human behaviour. This is one of the by-products of ancient observations where individuals receive special status for their claimed ability at interpreting stars, tea leaves and animal entrails among others.
There are a variety of belief systems linking spirits to living and non-living things in the world and the moon and the sun.. While the assumptions of society limited belief in spirits to primitive times, the belief persists in various forms including the angels identified by some Jews and Christians. I will probably explore these in greater depth in a chapter dedicated to angels (messengers).
Agriculture transformed local belief systems into religions. While the stated role of various religions was to gain the support of one or more powerful gods in gaining success in growing food, they justified the developing hierarchies with the rulers as having special relationships with particular gods.
The intermediate stage of development of these religions included the worship described as Baal worship in the Hebrew scriptures. Baal means gods. We might name Baal worship today as animism, a form of religious belief still dominant in several places in the world. The great religions combined service of the divine with service of the ruler(s). Judaism, while rooted in the beliefs of nomadic livestock owners, became clearly linked to empire, either in practice or in exile. Christianity became an imperial religion in the third century CE. Islam was quickly established by Mohammed as an imperial religion. Hinduism is an ancient imperial religion re-emerging under Modi and Hindu nationalism as an imperial religion again. Sikhism came to the fore when they controlled the Punjab. The lack of connection of the Bahai to a state or empire contributes to them being an important and interesting religion, but not a “great religion”.
There are some practices which straddle the space between philosophy and religion, with a religion defined as related to one or more divine beings, or non-belief in divine beings, and philosophy being a belief system without divine beings.
Buddhism, Taoism and others fit in this space, one where the belief system does not have official divine beings but seems to include either worship of a being (the Buddha) or ancestors or ascribe special powers to something such as the I Ching.
Most belief systems end up as blends of older and newer systems that take on particular forms. Some of the inputs are small and some are large. For example, the author of the Gospel of Matthew worked in a small dose of Eastern astrology into the story of Jesus through the magi. In later centuries a large dose of Germanic and Celtic beliefs and practices were integrated into our celebrations of Christmas and Easter.
Some new religions draw on old roots. Scientology draws on Gnosticism and Mormonism in its structure and functioning. Wicca, one of the newest religions, draws on what some moderns believed about ancient practices linked to witchcraft but is about herbalism and relationship to the natural world. New religions tend to be more comfortable as they can fit who we are, what we believe, and what we seek more comfortably than established religions. This is why they can grow quickly for a while.
The evolution of Christianity begins with Semitic tribes in the Tigris and Euphrates delta area. They seem to have been nomadic herders on the grasslands next to the marshes of the delta. Theological school taught that one explanation for the Abraham story is that several Semitic/Hebraic tribes developed a collective sense of identity with the Abraham and Israel tribes being stronger than the Isaac tribe, leading to Isaac being the least important of the ancestors. Personally, I prefer believing there really was a dynasty of sorts started by Abram's father. While the details of the stories in Genesis are probably partly metaphor and partly the result of two groups, the northern tribes and the southern tribes, drifting apart, then reconverging under Saul and David. A Hebrew scholar put forward the thesis that the Book of J was written by a woman in King David's court. The book of J refers to all the Yahweh stories in Genesis and Exodus.
The southern tribes used Yahweh as the name for God (Jehovah). I have not seen anything about the book of E (God of the heights), but the current book of Genesis, compiled during the exile to Babylon, seems to combine stories from the northern and southern tribes, which explains some of the weird repetitions. Genesis includes many stories which are Semitic twists on older Sumerian and Babylonian stories including Noah's ark. The Tower of Babel story makes fun of the ruins left behind by old empires and explores what God may be like. An interesting aspect is that God is plural in the first creation story and the story of the Tower of Babel. The nature of the shared beliefs of these tribes would have changed as they went from nomads to privileged residents in Egypt to slaves in Egypt to wanderers in the wilderness to invaders in Palestine to empire.
The first four books of the Bible give us hints about those beliefs and their changes. In the beginning, they possessed a matriarchal structure (In Genesis a man is to leave his family and join his wife's family), but they transitioned to a patriarchal society. The conflict between monotheists who believed in only Yahweh/Elohim and the Baalists (believers in many gods/spirits including household gods or spirits) persists for most of their history until the time of exile in Babylon. Daniel Quinn in Ishmael shares the idea that the story of Cain (a farmer) and Abel (a shepherd) is a metaphor about the invasion of the delta area by lighter-skinned farmers from the Anatolian highlands who killed and pushed out the darker-skinned herders. The mark of Cain may be lighter coloured skin. If so, it is interesting that even lighter skinned merchants and armies from Europe came thousands of years later to kill, conquer and push out darker coloured people around the globe.
Modern Judaism was forged in the exile in Babylon. Most of the Hebrew Bible was assembled at this time by scribes and priests using all the print material they could bring from Jerusalem along with their own editorial inputs such as the first creation story. For me, the reference to the Book of Kings leaves me wondering what other information it contained and why no copies of it or several other texts that were probably used in creating the Bible through being woven into several of the books. exist anymore.
While the Hebrew Bible was shaped in part by their experience of being crushed by Babylon and taken into exile, they retained many intriguing parts and a mix of theologies and philosophies. The Song of Solomon, while included as a metaphor about God and the people of Israel, was almost certainly originally composed as love poetry.
The return from exile led to the addition of several books about that return and prophecies that arose in part out of the challenges in that return. The exile established their identity as a people and guidelines for protecting that identity, no matter what. The books that were added reveal the conflicts in that return including the banning of non-Jewish women and their children versus the theme of Ruth which identifies a foreign woman as the great grandmother of King David. The time of struggle to rebuild the nation, now subservient to Persia, and the temple was a golden age compared to what happened when Alexander's army defeated the Persian army.
The Greek overlords of Palestine brutally and arrogantly persecuted the Jewish people and their religious practices. It reached a point where Jewish resentment and other factors combined to result in the Maccabees revolting against the Greeks. The conflict was so terrible, the Jews were left with a quandry. Until then, most Jews did not believe in an afterlife -- when you are dead, you are dead. How could anyone reconcile a just, powerful God with that brutality and no apparent consequences? They borrowed a concept from Zoroastrianism, the concept of an afterlife with a heaven and a hell. The Essenes and the Pharisees accepted this concept. The Sadducees did not. As they did not believe in heaven or hell, the Sadducees were the group most ready to find a way to get along with the Romans who quickly replaced the Greeks and ended the rule of the Maccabees. The period of Greek rule followed by the Maccabees, then Roman rule produced believers in the apocalypse, of a Messiah (anointed one, Christ in Greek) whom God would send to make things right. His coming would bring an end to one age and initiate a new one, a good one. Jesus became part of that story for many Jews and non-Jews. The Jewish people still speak of the coming of the Messiah.
When Jewish rebels, Zealots, over-provoked the Romans, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple. The Jewish religious leaders decided to end sacrifices as they no longer had a temple or ark. Synagogues and homes became the only place for Jewish worship, synagogues for group worship and homes for special celebrations such as Passover. There is much more to the Jewish story readily evident in the proliferation of Jewish sects today. I do not know enough of this history, other than persistent persecution by Christians and others including the Nazis, to try to describe it. And Judaism continues to evolve and diversify.
When the followers of Jesus became annoying to the Jewish leaders, they were banned from the synagogues. This led to the establishment of Christian congregations worshipping in a variety of places until it became safe for them to build churches
During the short time of ministry by Jesus, possibly three years, a community was created. His arrest and execution shook up many in the community who thought he was the Messiah everyone expected, someone God would protect from death and ensure his success in fixing the problems the Jewish people faced. Many left the community, while those who stayed, reflected on their experience and all he taught to make sense of it. I am one of those who believe there was a Pentecost experience that powered the remaining community to a different ministry than what they originally expected, though not necessarily the one described in Acts.
The early community was extremely egalitarian with many women as leaders. This place of equality between men and women started to collapse before the end of the first century. In particular, the Gospel of John does a great deal to decrease the importance of Mary Magdalene, a strong leader in the early community, and lift up Mary, the mother of Jesus, as an example of how women should be subservient, not that she was necessarily subservient. I wonder if John who identified himself as the beloved of Jesus resented the place held by Mary Magdalene in the circle around Jesus.
By the third century, men had succeeded in drastically lowering the place for women in the community.
There were many interpretations of who Jesus was and what his life and death meant. A council of Bishops decided what books to include in the Christian scriptures and what the correct Christian beliefs were, from their point of view. All contrary beliefs were condemned as heresies and resisted as best as they could including Arianism and Manichaeism. The Catholic and Orthodox churches maintained this determination to stamp out all offending beliefs and killed many people who chose those beliefs. This practice intensified after the Reformation and was shared by most of the reformers who also killed people who believed differently than those in power.
Eventually this killing declined dramatically. Baptists, Anabaptists, Congregationalists, Unitarians, and thousands of other sects or denominations arose and continue to arise. At the same time, heresies persecuted by the original churches kept reappearing and are now also common, some being part of the New Age movement.
An important factor paving the way for the Reformation was the development of the printing press. Before that time, most people, including many priests, were illiterate. The printing press made reading material cheaper and more accessible, and made it possible for religious people determined to reclaim faith for ordinary people to produce Bibles written in the languages people used. Before then, all Bibles in the west were only available in Latin. When many people became able to read Bibles in their own language, they came to discover a huge disconnect between the practices of the church and the teachings of Jesus. This produced the restlessness that drove the Reformation.
The Enlightenment marked a major turning point for the Church as many smart, educated people decided that religion was just annoying superstition and poor people felt no sense of place in a church which murdered someone who had what society said was the right belief a decade earlier, but now continued to hang onto a belief that became the wrong belief. In the 1700s many people rejected the church and its teachings. Evangelists like the Wesleys led a great awakening when many people came to see the church as good and important.
A major part of this was the evangelists made the church life and church teachings relevant again. This mostly applied to the Protestant churches. In countries where Catholics were the minority, the amity-enmity complex served to keep the Catholic community unified and resistant to pressure from non-Catholics. In countries where Catholics were the majority, church leaders worked with secular leaders to provide significant social pressure to keep involved in and support the Catholic Church. This collusion lasted in Quebec until about 1960. I believe similar forces guided developments in countries with Orthodox churches. We see this today in the relationship between the Russian Orthodox church and Putin.
At a time when most people again are disinterested in church, history suggests church leaders need to again make church life and teaching relevant for most people.
After the Great Awakening, the churches again became evangelical, sending missionaries all around the world, sometimes to the benefit of locals and usually to the harm of the locals. It is also a time of the emergence of numerous new churches including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses in the nineteenth century.
Critical study of the scriptures which became significant in the 19th century and increases in importance contributed to divergence in theology, in what people believed and in how people understood the Bible.
Beliefs about the Bible range from believing everything in it was dictated by God to the writers of the books in the Bible to believing it is all story with values ranging from worse than useless through interesting to worshipping it as complete truth. Current beliefs range a great deal. For example, some people believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that everything in and on it was meticulously created by God. Followers of Jesus like me believe the earth probably is about 4 to 6 billion years old and the universe is over 13 billion years old with a series of sort of random events within a set of laws and principles resulting in what we are today.
Another movement arose late in the nineteenth century, church union. In small communities and other settings, many church leaders believed churches should be more united in delivering ministry to communities. As rural areas in Canada became settled, church people in some small communities formed Union Churches. These resulted from the union of a combination of congregations, usually Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, or Congregationalist, but occasionally other denominations as well. After over 25 years of negotiation, the Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Union Churches united to form the United Church of Canada in 1925. This was followed by the split of the Presbyterian Church. The Evangelical United Brethren joined about 40 years later. The Uniting Churches of Australia and a united church in India are other examples of this union movement.
At the same time, denominations were splitting and new denominations continue to emerge along with many independent churches.
Continuing divisions contribute to an increasingly large number of denominations and independent churches with decreasing numbers in most denominations and churches closing faster than they are opening.
It is interesting that there are many followers of Jesus who have more common ground with people in other faiths than with many other followers of Jesus. Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu mystics are closer to each other than to others in their own traditions. Conservative Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Moslems share a great deal of common ground.
Just as evolution has led and continues to lead to the development of many millions of species, faith evolution has led to thousands of different Christian faiths and diversity within those faiths. We do not know what faiths will become, but they will change and they will retain some of what we are. And that is okay.
Chapter 7: Angels
Angel means messenger of God (ang = messenger; el = God). (Evangelist = messenger sharing message from God approximately)
Angels in the Hebrew scriptures refers to messengers or agents from God including the ones walking by on their way to Sodom and Gomorrah whom Abram invited in to share a meal and the one who stopped Abraham from killing Isaac. There are numerous angels in the Hebrew scriptures. Luke names Gabriel as the angel who appeared to Mary. Matthew has a nameless angel speak to Joseph in a dream. Matthew, Mark, and Luke have angels taking care of Jesus after his encounter with temptation or Satan.
Milton built on a mix of beliefs and stories about angels and a battle between Satan and his followers with God with Satan being described as the greatest angel. There is very little that is scriptural in Milton’s works but, mixed with Dante’s work, interacted with evolving Christian theology and doctrine.
In folklore, angels partially replaced the myriad of spirits inherited from previous generations in many cultures.
Historically, there are different understandings about angels. Today beliefs about angels range from they are pure superstition through people helping other people (such as snow angels) and connections to our spiritual selves to beings that are active in some way in some, many, most, or all of our lives.
Whatever we believe about angels, there is little solid evidence to validate those beliefs.
Beliefs in them provide many people with comfort and confidence that helps them face challenges in their lives.
For me, the concept of angels as spiritual connectors is helpful. I participated in a weekend workshop with Walter Wink about the use of art in Bible study. It included a couple of sessions on angel journaling, a practice I use at times, mostly at other workshops or courses. The foundational concept is the attachment of a spiritual presence to every individual and organization he called an angel.
The health of this angel depended in part on the practices of the individual or organization so the angel could be robust and loving or crippled or deviant.
As individuals, we can communicate with our angel by deliberately writing to our angel. Write down what we want to say and wait for our hands to write something without thinking about what we want to have written. This spontaneous writing is viewed as a response by the angel. Walter Wink called this angel journaling.
In practice this can help work through many kinds of issues, create affirmation, provide challenges or honest reflection, and so on. It is something I probably should use more.
My interpretation of the attached angels is that they are extensions or connections to the Holy Mystery.
For me, it is also helpful to think of angels as the people who provide help when it is needed.
This would include the people who gave me rides on the highway when my truck was broken down, the people who say important things to me, and those who do the right thing at the right time. For example, when I was about 12, one of the girls in our neighbour group said to me, “James, you are so snobbish.” 62 years later I still remember her comment as a reminder to consider how I am relating to the people around me.
Believe what you want about angels. Before I took that course, I discounted ideas about angels as superstition and of little concern to me. And I still see most of what was or is said about angels as fantasy. But who knows for sure?
We speculate about what ancient people believed. We cannot be sure what people were thinking before the gift/curse of imagination, of being able to imagine things never experienced or abstract ideas like spirits or gods or right and wrong or good and evil or group identity. When we see cave paintings by Neanderthal Man, we do not know the thoughts behind those paintings.
The study of cultures with very old roots, mostly hunters and gatherers, possibly the most intelligent people who ever lived, shows a diversity of beliefs from atheism to spirits for everything. Along with that diversity of beliefs, morals, social structures, and values diverge. Some societies are/were matriarchal, some patriarchal, and some that defy description of their social structure.
Atheism persisted from very early through to now as some people refused to believe in anything beyond what they could see and touch. In most societies with strong group or social religions, these people pretended to believe or said as little as possible. However, if they had power, they would say the right cultural things, but act in carefully self-serving ways, and sometimes twist the religious beliefs to their advantage. Looking at history and at churches today, I wonder about the importance of a person's belief and the importance of how well they played the game. I suspect many of them past and present did not believe what they claimed, but were or are very good at playing the game.
Astrology evolved from a useful science to a religious practice. Originally the observation of changes in the stars over the year and monthly observations of the moon guided people in their annual cycles. The time when a particular formation of stars appeared would be when a particular food source became available or it was the time to plant a particular crop or some other important annual event. Not everyone would be interested in studying and memorizing the stars, so this became the task for the few able and willing to use the information from the stars to guide the rest of the community.
Somehow this evolved to modern day astrology which ascribes mysterious powers to the planets and stars in shaping individual human behaviour. This is one of the by-products of ancient observations where individuals receive special status for their claimed ability at interpreting stars, tea leaves and animal entrails among others.
There are a variety of belief systems linking spirits to living and non-living things in the world and the moon and the sun.. While the assumptions of society limited belief in spirits to primitive times, the belief persists in various forms including the angels identified by some Jews and Christians. I will probably explore these in greater depth in a chapter dedicated to angels (messengers).
Agriculture transformed local belief systems into religions. While the stated role of various religions was to gain the support of one or more powerful gods in gaining success in growing food, they justified the developing hierarchies with the rulers as having special relationships with particular gods.
The intermediate stage of development of these religions included the worship described as Baal worship in the Hebrew scriptures. Baal means gods. We might name Baal worship today as animism, a form of religious belief still dominant in several places in the world. The great religions combined service of the divine with service of the ruler(s). Judaism, while rooted in the beliefs of nomadic livestock owners, became clearly linked to empire, either in practice or in exile. Christianity became an imperial religion in the third century CE. Islam was quickly established by Mohammed as an imperial religion. Hinduism is an ancient imperial religion re-emerging under Modi and Hindu nationalism as an imperial religion again. Sikhism came to the fore when they controlled the Punjab. The lack of connection of the Bahai to a state or empire contributes to them being an important and interesting religion, but not a “great religion”.
There are some practices which straddle the space between philosophy and religion, with a religion defined as related to one or more divine beings, or non-belief in divine beings, and philosophy being a belief system without divine beings.
Buddhism, Taoism and others fit in this space, one where the belief system does not have official divine beings but seems to include either worship of a being (the Buddha) or ancestors or ascribe special powers to something such as the I Ching.
Most belief systems end up as blends of older and newer systems that take on particular forms. Some of the inputs are small and some are large. For example, the author of the Gospel of Matthew worked in a small dose of Eastern astrology into the story of Jesus through the magi. In later centuries a large dose of Germanic and Celtic beliefs and practices were integrated into our celebrations of Christmas and Easter.
Some new religions draw on old roots. Scientology draws on Gnosticism and Mormonism in its structure and functioning. Wicca, one of the newest religions, draws on what some moderns believed about ancient practices linked to witchcraft but is about herbalism and relationship to the natural world. New religions tend to be more comfortable as they can fit who we are, what we believe, and what we seek more comfortably than established religions. This is why they can grow quickly for a while.
The evolution of Christianity begins with Semitic tribes in the Tigris and Euphrates delta area. They seem to have been nomadic herders on the grasslands next to the marshes of the delta. Theological school taught that one explanation for the Abraham story is that several Semitic/Hebraic tribes developed a collective sense of identity with the Abraham and Israel tribes being stronger than the Isaac tribe, leading to Isaac being the least important of the ancestors. Personally, I prefer believing there really was a dynasty of sorts started by Abram's father. While the details of the stories in Genesis are probably partly metaphor and partly the result of two groups, the northern tribes and the southern tribes, drifting apart, then reconverging under Saul and David. A Hebrew scholar put forward the thesis that the Book of J was written by a woman in King David's court. The book of J refers to all the Yahweh stories in Genesis and Exodus.
The southern tribes used Yahweh as the name for God (Jehovah). I have not seen anything about the book of E (God of the heights), but the current book of Genesis, compiled during the exile to Babylon, seems to combine stories from the northern and southern tribes, which explains some of the weird repetitions. Genesis includes many stories which are Semitic twists on older Sumerian and Babylonian stories including Noah's ark. The Tower of Babel story makes fun of the ruins left behind by old empires and explores what God may be like. An interesting aspect is that God is plural in the first creation story and the story of the Tower of Babel. The nature of the shared beliefs of these tribes would have changed as they went from nomads to privileged residents in Egypt to slaves in Egypt to wanderers in the wilderness to invaders in Palestine to empire.
The first four books of the Bible give us hints about those beliefs and their changes. In the beginning, they possessed a matriarchal structure (In Genesis a man is to leave his family and join his wife's family), but they transitioned to a patriarchal society. The conflict between monotheists who believed in only Yahweh/Elohim and the Baalists (believers in many gods/spirits including household gods or spirits) persists for most of their history until the time of exile in Babylon. Daniel Quinn in Ishmael shares the idea that the story of Cain (a farmer) and Abel (a shepherd) is a metaphor about the invasion of the delta area by lighter-skinned farmers from the Anatolian highlands who killed and pushed out the darker-skinned herders. The mark of Cain may be lighter coloured skin. If so, it is interesting that even lighter skinned merchants and armies from Europe came thousands of years later to kill, conquer and push out darker coloured people around the globe.
Modern Judaism was forged in the exile in Babylon. Most of the Hebrew Bible was assembled at this time by scribes and priests using all the print material they could bring from Jerusalem along with their own editorial inputs such as the first creation story. For me, the reference to the Book of Kings leaves me wondering what other information it contained and why no copies of it or several other texts that were probably used in creating the Bible through being woven into several of the books. exist anymore.
While the Hebrew Bible was shaped in part by their experience of being crushed by Babylon and taken into exile, they retained many intriguing parts and a mix of theologies and philosophies. The Song of Solomon, while included as a metaphor about God and the people of Israel, was almost certainly originally composed as love poetry.
The return from exile led to the addition of several books about that return and prophecies that arose in part out of the challenges in that return. The exile established their identity as a people and guidelines for protecting that identity, no matter what. The books that were added reveal the conflicts in that return including the banning of non-Jewish women and their children versus the theme of Ruth which identifies a foreign woman as the great grandmother of King David. The time of struggle to rebuild the nation, now subservient to Persia, and the temple was a golden age compared to what happened when Alexander's army defeated the Persian army.
The Greek overlords of Palestine brutally and arrogantly persecuted the Jewish people and their religious practices. It reached a point where Jewish resentment and other factors combined to result in the Maccabees revolting against the Greeks. The conflict was so terrible, the Jews were left with a quandry. Until then, most Jews did not believe in an afterlife -- when you are dead, you are dead. How could anyone reconcile a just, powerful God with that brutality and no apparent consequences? They borrowed a concept from Zoroastrianism, the concept of an afterlife with a heaven and a hell. The Essenes and the Pharisees accepted this concept. The Sadducees did not. As they did not believe in heaven or hell, the Sadducees were the group most ready to find a way to get along with the Romans who quickly replaced the Greeks and ended the rule of the Maccabees. The period of Greek rule followed by the Maccabees, then Roman rule produced believers in the apocalypse, of a Messiah (anointed one, Christ in Greek) whom God would send to make things right. His coming would bring an end to one age and initiate a new one, a good one. Jesus became part of that story for many Jews and non-Jews. The Jewish people still speak of the coming of the Messiah.
When Jewish rebels, Zealots, over-provoked the Romans, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple. The Jewish religious leaders decided to end sacrifices as they no longer had a temple or ark. Synagogues and homes became the only place for Jewish worship, synagogues for group worship and homes for special celebrations such as Passover. There is much more to the Jewish story readily evident in the proliferation of Jewish sects today. I do not know enough of this history, other than persistent persecution by Christians and others including the Nazis, to try to describe it. And Judaism continues to evolve and diversify.
When the followers of Jesus became annoying to the Jewish leaders, they were banned from the synagogues. This led to the establishment of Christian congregations worshipping in a variety of places until it became safe for them to build churches
During the short time of ministry by Jesus, possibly three years, a community was created. His arrest and execution shook up many in the community who thought he was the Messiah everyone expected, someone God would protect from death and ensure his success in fixing the problems the Jewish people faced. Many left the community, while those who stayed, reflected on their experience and all he taught to make sense of it. I am one of those who believe there was a Pentecost experience that powered the remaining community to a different ministry than what they originally expected, though not necessarily the one described in Acts.
The early community was extremely egalitarian with many women as leaders. This place of equality between men and women started to collapse before the end of the first century. In particular, the Gospel of John does a great deal to decrease the importance of Mary Magdalene, a strong leader in the early community, and lift up Mary, the mother of Jesus, as an example of how women should be subservient, not that she was necessarily subservient. I wonder if John who identified himself as the beloved of Jesus resented the place held by Mary Magdalene in the circle around Jesus.
By the third century, men had succeeded in drastically lowering the place for women in the community.
There were many interpretations of who Jesus was and what his life and death meant. A council of Bishops decided what books to include in the Christian scriptures and what the correct Christian beliefs were, from their point of view. All contrary beliefs were condemned as heresies and resisted as best as they could including Arianism and Manichaeism. The Catholic and Orthodox churches maintained this determination to stamp out all offending beliefs and killed many people who chose those beliefs. This practice intensified after the Reformation and was shared by most of the reformers who also killed people who believed differently than those in power.
Eventually this killing declined dramatically. Baptists, Anabaptists, Congregationalists, Unitarians, and thousands of other sects or denominations arose and continue to arise. At the same time, heresies persecuted by the original churches kept reappearing and are now also common, some being part of the New Age movement.
An important factor paving the way for the Reformation was the development of the printing press. Before that time, most people, including many priests, were illiterate. The printing press made reading material cheaper and more accessible, and made it possible for religious people determined to reclaim faith for ordinary people to produce Bibles written in the languages people used. Before then, all Bibles in the west were only available in Latin. When many people became able to read Bibles in their own language, they came to discover a huge disconnect between the practices of the church and the teachings of Jesus. This produced the restlessness that drove the Reformation.
The Enlightenment marked a major turning point for the Church as many smart, educated people decided that religion was just annoying superstition and poor people felt no sense of place in a church which murdered someone who had what society said was the right belief a decade earlier, but now continued to hang onto a belief that became the wrong belief. In the 1700s many people rejected the church and its teachings. Evangelists like the Wesleys led a great awakening when many people came to see the church as good and important.
A major part of this was the evangelists made the church life and church teachings relevant again. This mostly applied to the Protestant churches. In countries where Catholics were the minority, the amity-enmity complex served to keep the Catholic community unified and resistant to pressure from non-Catholics. In countries where Catholics were the majority, church leaders worked with secular leaders to provide significant social pressure to keep involved in and support the Catholic Church. This collusion lasted in Quebec until about 1960. I believe similar forces guided developments in countries with Orthodox churches. We see this today in the relationship between the Russian Orthodox church and Putin.
At a time when most people again are disinterested in church, history suggests church leaders need to again make church life and teaching relevant for most people.
After the Great Awakening, the churches again became evangelical, sending missionaries all around the world, sometimes to the benefit of locals and usually to the harm of the locals. It is also a time of the emergence of numerous new churches including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses in the nineteenth century.
Critical study of the scriptures which became significant in the 19th century and increases in importance contributed to divergence in theology, in what people believed and in how people understood the Bible.
Beliefs about the Bible range from believing everything in it was dictated by God to the writers of the books in the Bible to believing it is all story with values ranging from worse than useless through interesting to worshipping it as complete truth. Current beliefs range a great deal. For example, some people believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that everything in and on it was meticulously created by God. Followers of Jesus like me believe the earth probably is about 4 to 6 billion years old and the universe is over 13 billion years old with a series of sort of random events within a set of laws and principles resulting in what we are today.
Another movement arose late in the nineteenth century, church union. In small communities and other settings, many church leaders believed churches should be more united in delivering ministry to communities. As rural areas in Canada became settled, church people in some small communities formed Union Churches. These resulted from the union of a combination of congregations, usually Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, or Congregationalist, but occasionally other denominations as well. After over 25 years of negotiation, the Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Union Churches united to form the United Church of Canada in 1925. This was followed by the split of the Presbyterian Church. The Evangelical United Brethren joined about 40 years later. The Uniting Churches of Australia and a united church in India are other examples of this union movement.
At the same time, denominations were splitting and new denominations continue to emerge along with many independent churches.
Continuing divisions contribute to an increasingly large number of denominations and independent churches with decreasing numbers in most denominations and churches closing faster than they are opening.
It is interesting that there are many followers of Jesus who have more common ground with people in other faiths than with many other followers of Jesus. Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu mystics are closer to each other than to others in their own traditions. Conservative Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Moslems share a great deal of common ground.
Just as evolution has led and continues to lead to the development of many millions of species, faith evolution has led to thousands of different Christian faiths and diversity within those faiths. We do not know what faiths will become, but they will change and they will retain some of what we are. And that is okay.
Chapter 7: Angels
Angel means messenger of God (ang = messenger; el = God). (Evangelist = messenger sharing message from God approximately)
Angels in the Hebrew scriptures refers to messengers or agents from God including the ones walking by on their way to Sodom and Gomorrah whom Abram invited in to share a meal and the one who stopped Abraham from killing Isaac. There are numerous angels in the Hebrew scriptures. Luke names Gabriel as the angel who appeared to Mary. Matthew has a nameless angel speak to Joseph in a dream. Matthew, Mark, and Luke have angels taking care of Jesus after his encounter with temptation or Satan.
Milton built on a mix of beliefs and stories about angels and a battle between Satan and his followers with God with Satan being described as the greatest angel. There is very little that is scriptural in Milton’s works but, mixed with Dante’s work, interacted with evolving Christian theology and doctrine.
In folklore, angels partially replaced the myriad of spirits inherited from previous generations in many cultures.
Historically, there are different understandings about angels. Today beliefs about angels range from they are pure superstition through people helping other people (such as snow angels) and connections to our spiritual selves to beings that are active in some way in some, many, most, or all of our lives.
Whatever we believe about angels, there is little solid evidence to validate those beliefs.
Beliefs in them provide many people with comfort and confidence that helps them face challenges in their lives.
For me, the concept of angels as spiritual connectors is helpful. I participated in a weekend workshop with Walter Wink about the use of art in Bible study. It included a couple of sessions on angel journaling, a practice I use at times, mostly at other workshops or courses. The foundational concept is the attachment of a spiritual presence to every individual and organization he called an angel.
The health of this angel depended in part on the practices of the individual or organization so the angel could be robust and loving or crippled or deviant.
As individuals, we can communicate with our angel by deliberately writing to our angel. Write down what we want to say and wait for our hands to write something without thinking about what we want to have written. This spontaneous writing is viewed as a response by the angel. Walter Wink called this angel journaling.
In practice this can help work through many kinds of issues, create affirmation, provide challenges or honest reflection, and so on. It is something I probably should use more.
My interpretation of the attached angels is that they are extensions or connections to the Holy Mystery.
For me, it is also helpful to think of angels as the people who provide help when it is needed.
This would include the people who gave me rides on the highway when my truck was broken down, the people who say important things to me, and those who do the right thing at the right time. For example, when I was about 12, one of the girls in our neighbour group said to me, “James, you are so snobbish.” 62 years later I still remember her comment as a reminder to consider how I am relating to the people around me.
Believe what you want about angels. Before I took that course, I discounted ideas about angels as superstition and of little concern to me. And I still see most of what was or is said about angels as fantasy. But who knows for sure?
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