20 Centuries in 20 Posts Part I

20 Centuries in 20 Posts Part I: The Genesis of Church History

Church history matters because the Church matters. It was with such a grandiose statement that I launched the ambitious 20 centuries in 20 posts project. History has always played an important role in the Christian story. From the writers of the Gospel narratives and Acts, through Eusebius and Bede down to today, reflecting on and understanding the past has played an important role in Christianity. And this is because of a distinctly Christian understanding of the past. Church history matters because history itself matters. Central to the Christian worldview is not a timeless, sapiential philosophy; what is central is the conviction that God acts and has made himself known in our space/time universe. And God has ultimately does this in Jesus Christ.

The Christian story begins starts with the in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This is where most church histories will start their narrative. Yet there is something wrong about this, both historically and theologically. Jesus did not just walk in out of nowhere and start proclaiming the Kingdom of God (Mark 1.1-15); he had a context, and saw himself as part of the long story of God’s dealings with Israel. I think that liberal theologian Marcus Borg is on to something when he says:

“We commonly think of Jesus as the founder of Christianity. But strictly speaking, this is not historically true. Instead, his concern was the renewal of Israel.” - Marcus Borg, Jesus: A New Vision, p. 125

To do church history well, I suggest that we need to integrate Israel into our narrative, as some historians have started to do. When we do this, it helps us as Christians to read the Old Testament and what the New Testament says about God’s covenant. It helps you understand the first 200 years of Christianity – which was largely a Jewish movement for the first two centuries of its existence – and in particular the context and issues the apostles write about in the New Testament. But most importantly, grounding Christian history in Israel’s history helps we make sense of Jesus, and what he was doing. He saw himself as the climax of a story that involved Adam and Eve, Abraham and the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, David/Solomon and the kings down to Zedekiah, and the aftermath of exile. It’s by understanding God’s history with Israel and by plotting Jesus on the map of his own particular context – Second Temple Judaism – that we can understand how Jesus interpreted his mission. Briefly, this is what his mission looked like:

1. Jesus focused exclusively on Israel: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” Matt 15.24, and “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" Matt 10.5. Except for three exceptions, Jesus ministered only to Israelites, because his mission was to restore the lost in Israel and renew the nation.


2. Jesus announced the nearness of the kingdom: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the gospel!” Mark 1.15. The Kingdom of God is where God's climatic authority is known and done on earth as in heaven (see Isaiah 40).


3. Jesus performed acts of power: "But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you" Matt 12.28. Jesus enforced the Kingdom through his miracles. He taught that the Roman occupiers weren't Israel’s real enemy, but the spiritual forces that had enslaved the nation in darkness and sin (see Mark 3.23-28).


4. Jesus called and sent twelve: “You are those who have stayed with me in my trials, and I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, that we may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel" Luke 22.28-30. Jesus gathers twelve Apostles, a parallel of the twelve tribes of Israel. These twelve are connected to Jesus, and through him the renewal of Israel that they longed for would happen.


5. Jesus ate with sinners and outcasts: "And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, 'Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?' And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.'" (Mark 2.16-17). Jesus welcomed the lost of Israel, those generally despised and referred to as "sinners", whilst exposing the hypocrisy of Israel’s leaders.


6. Jesus announced God's grace (especially for the destitute): “Blessed are we who are poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God." (Luke 6.20).


7. Jesus taught a new way of living as God's people: “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” Luke 6.35-36).
   

Jesus saw himself as the pinnacle of God and Israel’s story. So what he offered, and what he embodied, was a new way forward for Israel; a profound movement of renewal of Israel in the light of the coming climax of God's dealing with his people. We need to understand this to understand Jesus. Without Israel there is no Jesus.


Church history matters only because history matters. At the heart of Christianity is history: that God promised a Middle Eastern shepherd that through him his family and indeed the whole world would be blessed. At the heart of Christianity is an event that is interpreted as fulfilling that promise: that Jesus, the Jewish King, was killed for the sins the people; that he was raised from the dead, and now reigns as the Lord over all, the first-born of the new creation. This is church history; this is the gospel.


For Further Reading:

• Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, 2009. MacCulloch is an eminent church historian, and his epic book/BBC series helpfully locates the church's history in Israel's history.
  
• NT Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 1996. Wright offers rigorous scholarship, reconstructing the worldview of Second Temple Judaism, making sense of Jesus' aims and self-understanding within that world. A great piece of historical scholarship. Simply put, this book changed my life.
  

Why People Leave Church

"If I don't worry about the one that strays and gets lost, even the one that is strong will think it is rather fun to stray and get lost. I do indeed desire outward gains, but I am more afraid of inner losses." - Augustine

Between 1998-2007 two British academics research why people leave church. The surveyed 800 former church goers in Ireland and the United Kingdom, and intensely interviewed around 20 people. The 200 question survey examined the reasons why people leave church. Here's a selection of the results:

Matters of Belief and Unbelief	Percentage
I doubted or questioned my faith	43
I lost my faith	32
Church had lost its meaning for me	49
I felt God had let me down	10
I could not reconcile my own suffering with my belief in God	14
I could not reconcile others' suffering with my belief in God	29
I became aware of alternative ways of thinking or living	53
So many people fight each other in the name of religion	66
I felt nobody in the church would understand my doubts	16
The church did not allow people to discuss or disagree with its views	25
A questioning faith did not seem acceptable to the church	29
I changed - it wasn't the church's fault that I dropped off	64
I got out of the habit of going to church	69
I believed that you did not need to go church to be a Christian	75
I was disillusioned by church-goers' attitudes to women	24
I was disillusioned by church-goers' attitudes to homosexuals	24
I was disillusioned by church-goers' abuse of power	28
The church failed to connect with the rest of my life	46

Although you need to read this within the British and Irish context, the results are still quite interesting. The two academics, Leslie Francis and Philip Richter, published the results in the book Gone for Good? The book includes detailed analysis of the different reasons people had for leaving church. They also offered pastoral advice on how to care for former church goers, and outlined the circumstance under which people would return to church. For many of the people surveyed who indicated that they might return to church would do so if somebody listened to their concerns.

In response to their research, Francis and Richter offer a new church model as the solution. I'm not sure that I understand their multiplex model yet. However, this is still a very helpful book in understand why people leave church and how to practically care for them once they do.

Guest Post: Easter Eggs - Homemade and Fair Trade

A Guest Post by Alison Moffitt. In the spirit of celebrating Easter. Originally posted here.


A few months ago I made the very difficult decision to stop buying chocolate bars and blocks that weren't fairly traded. Now that Easter has rolled around I've found it really hard to find any appropriate Easter eggs! Apparently it's not just me - fair trade eggs are hard to find! I've been thinking outside the box, though, so instead of store bought Cadbury Easter eggs, this year our family are going to receive... home made Cadbury Easter eggs!

Home Made, Fair Trade Easter Eggs: A Tutorial

Materials and Ingredients

• Small or medium egg chocolate moulds I found some at Spotlight for about $3.00 but you can probably also find them at confectioner's stores, some craft stores or online
• A Pyrex or metal mixing bowl
• A small saucepan
• Copious amounts of fair trade chocolate, broken into small pieces - you want about twice as much as your moulds can hold. Australians: try Cadbury Dairy Milk or Green and Black Mayan Gold
• Foil
• Optional: large delicious nuts or Turkish delight (e.g. macadamias, almonds)

Making the Eggs
1. Melting down your chocolate.
Boil a little bit of water in your saucepan and leave it at a rolling boil. Put half your chocolate in the mixing bowl and balance it on the saucepan. Stir until chocolate is melted and smooth.
My friend in the States has something called a "double boiler". I have no idea what it is but apparently it melts chocolate like this without the danger of balancing two bowls of boiling liquid on top of each other. I guess you could use one of those if you have one!



2. Filling the moulds.
Spoon the melted chocolate into your mould. Tap the mould on the bench top to get rid of air bubbles and smooth the back of the chocolate.



3. OPTIONAL STEP!
Put a nut or a piece of Turkish Delight in the middle of the egg so that half of it is sticking out the back. This will help your egg hold together when you make the other half. However it may also compromise the fair-traded-ness of your egg depending on where these ingredients have come from!



4. Waiting.
Transfer your eggs to the fridge and wait for them to solidify.

5. Making the rest of the egg.
Pop the half-eggs out of the mold and then melt down the rest of the your chocolate. Fill the moulds as before. Carefully line up your solidified egg-halves over the melted egg halves in the mould and press down gently to join the two. Rush the filled moulds into the fridge!



6. Finishing.
Once the second halves are solid your eggs are ready to wrap. Gently shake the eggs free from the mould. Wrap them in foil. If you are so inclined, decorate your eggs with ribbon.



Ta Da! These chocolate eggs will charm your loved ones with their homemade quirkiness and are more ethical than the ones for sale in the supermarket. Double win!

Dedicated to my friend Bron: it is impossible to be friends with her without trying to consume food more ethically!

Celebrating Easter

So how can we learn to live as wide-awake people, as Easter people? ...I have come to believe that many churches simply throw Easter away year by year; and I want to plead that we rethink how we do it so as to help each other, as a church and as individuals, to live what we profess...

But my biggest problem starts on Easter Monday. I regard it as absurd and unjustifiable that we should spend forty days keeping Lent, pondering what it means, preaching about self-denial, being at least a little gloomy, and then bringing it all to a peak with Holy Week, which in turn climaxes in Maundy Thursday and Good Friday . . . and then, after a rather odd Holy Saturday, we have a single day of celebration.

All right, the Sundays after Easter still lie within the Easter season. We still have Easter readings and hymns during them. But Easter week itself ought not to be the time when all the clergy sigh with relief and go on holiday. It ought to be an eight-day festival, with champagne served after morning prayer or even before., with lots of alleluias and extra hymns and spectacular anthems. Is it any wonder people find it hard to believe in the resurrection of Jesus if we don’t throw our hats in the air? Is it any wonder we find it hard to live the resurrection if we don’t do it exuberantly in our liturgies? Is it any wonder the world doesn’t take much notice if Easter is celebrated as simply the one-day happy ending tacked on to forty days of fasting and gloom? It’s long overdue that we took a hard look at how we keep Easter in church, at home, in our personal lives, right through the system. And if it means rethinking some cherished habits, well, maybe it’s time to wake up. That always comes as a surprise.

And while we’re about it, we might write some more good Easter hymns and take care to choose the many good ones already written that celebrate what Easter really is rather than treating it as simply our ticket to a blissful life hereafter. Interestingly, most of the good Easter hymns turn out to be from the early church and most of the bad ones form the nineteenth century. But we should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts, anything that comes to mind. This is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity; as Paul says, you are still in your sins. We shouldn’t allow the secular world, with its schedules and habits and parareligious events, its cute Easter bunnies, to blow us off course. This is our greatest day. We should put the flags out.

In particular, if Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Champagne for breakfast again—well, of course. Christian holiness was never meant to be merely negative. Of course you have to weed the garden from time to time; sometimes the ground ivy may need serious digging before you can get it out. That’s Lent for you. But you don’t want simply to turn the garden back into a neat bed of blank earth. Easter is the time to sow new seeds and to plant out a few cuttings. If Calvary means putting to death things in your life that need killing off if you are to flourish as a Christian and as a truly human being, then Easter should mean planting, watering, and training up things in your life (personal and corporate) that ought to be blossoming , filling the garden with color and perfume, and in due course bearing fruit. The forty days of the Easter season, until the ascension, ought to be a time to balance out Lent by taking something up , some new task or venture, something wholesome and fruitful and outgoing and self-giving. You may be able to do it only for six weeks, just as you may be able to go without beer or tobacco only for the six weeks of Lent. But if you really make a start on it, it might give you a sniff of new possibilities, new hopes, new ventures you never dreamed of. It might bring something of Easter into your innermost life. It might help you wake up in a whole new way. And that’s what Easter is all about. - NT Wright

Jesus Stands Over the Church

“There is at Easter no Christ who simply seals our righteousness and innocence, no guarantor of our status, and so no ideological cross. Jesus is alive, he is there to be encountered again, and so his personal identity remains; which means that his cross is his, not ours, part of the history of a person who obstinately stands over against us and will not be painlessly assimilated into our own memories.” – Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, pp. 71-72.

Again, h/t Michael

New Series: 20 Centuries in 20 Posts

An Introduction
We are on the cusp of three third millennia since Jesus Christ walked the face of this earth. Time has marched on, and what once was has been separated from us by the years and centuries that have past.

Yet the past continues to beckon us. The Christian claim is that in this particular person the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. We believe that through his life, death and resurrection we can know God. Although separated by time and space, the past calls us because to this one man every tongue will confess that he is Lord.

We also believe that God is at work now in the community that arose in response to him. We believe that the church is the new humanity in embryo, the people of the ascended and reigning Christ Jesus.

A central part of the Christian confession has been the “catholic and apostolic church.” Yet from my own experience we struggle with the church. For many in the Western tradition, the church is a tool, a resource. Rather than being the body of Christ, the bulwark of truth, the family of faith, the church is like a loose collection of Jesus’ Facebook friends. So it comes as no surprise that within my own context that we also struggle in being able to tell the story of the church. A large number of Church history books are published every year – most of them focused on retelling particular segments from the church’s life. But I suggest that we find it difficult in being able to coherently (and interestingly) tell the 20 centuries of church history.

Church history matters because the church matters. So in the coming weeks hebel will attempt to grasp the bull by the horns and tell 20 centuries of church history in 20 posts. Church history is far more diverse and complex than what I’ll be able to do. 20 Centuries in 20 Posts is not an attempt to be the definitive guide to church history; instead I intend it as a means to provoke further study and reflection.

What I aim to do in 20 Centuries in 20 Posts is to tell the narrative of the church’s life in a way that takes seriously our belief in the “catholic and apostolic church”. So much church history that is published is western in focus; it assumes the move from Palestine to the Vatican and St Paul’s was a natural historical progression. 20 Centuries in 20 Posts will attempt to tell the church’s story giving due regards to the major branches of the church: Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant/Reformed. I want to tell history that is coherent as well as accessible and interesting. I will assume no prior knowledge, but I will leave you to do further research for yourself. And I want to be generous and gracious in my interactions with the past, knowing that it’s not historical facts and figures I’m dealing with but brothers and sisters in the Lord.

According to Rowan Williams the purpose of historical study is to question and also be questioned by the past.

“A central aspect of where the Christian begins, the sense of identity that is there at the start of any storytelling enterprise, is the belief that the modern believer is involved with and in a community of believers extended in time and space, whose relation to each other is significantly more than just one of vague geographical connection and temporal succession. In theological shorthand, the modern believer sees herself of himself as a member of the Body of Christ.” - Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past?

As we shall see, the Christian past belongs to the Christian present.

Resurrection and Renewal

“In proclaiming the resurrection of Christ, the apostles proclaimed also the resurrection of mankind in Christ; and in proclaiming the resurrection of mankind, they proclaimed the renewal of all creation with him. The resurrection of Christ in isolation from mankind would not be a gospel message. The resurrection of mankind apart from creation would be a gospel of a sort, but of a purely Gnostic and world denying sort which is far from the gospel that the apostles actually preached” - O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 31

h/t Michael

Distorted

"Cauvin is known not only for the doctrine of predestination but also the doctrine of 'total depravity,' a phrase so forbidding one hesitates to ponder it. In Genevan French dépraver is clearly still near its Latin root, which means 'to warp' or 'to distort'. The word does not have the lurid overtones it has for us. Jérôme Bolsec was banished for, among other things, having déprave plusieurs passages de l'Éscriture pour sosutenir ceste faulse et perverse doctrine - the doctrine that predestination would make God a tyrant like Jupiter. This is Cauvin's characteristic use of the word, to refer to distortion of the meaning of a text. Corruption, in the French of the period, can mean 'exhaustion' or 'brokenness', or it can be used just as we use it now when we speak of the corruption of a text. In Cauvin's mind, the mirror is by far the dominant metaphor for perception and also for Creation, do distortion would be a natural extension of the metaphor..." - Marilynne Robinson , The Death of Adam

Living Without Answers

This is from Hannah's Child by Stanley Hauerwas. He's reflecting on the course of his life, and here in particular his first wife's mental illness, and the expectation that as a theologian he'd be able to explain it.

"I have learned over the years as a Christian theologian that none of us should try to answer such questions. Our humanity demands that we ask them, but if we are wise we should then remain silent. ..When Christianity is assumed to be an "answer" that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way they have to be.

Such answers cannot help but turn Christianity into an explanation. For me, learning to be a Christian has meant learning to live without answers. Indeed, to learn to live in this way is what makes being a Christian so wonderful. Faith is but a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers. That is to put the matter too simply, but at least such a claim might suggest why I find that being a Christian makes life so damned interesting" Hannah's Child, pp. 207-8.