History of Christianity

The history of Judaism begins very near the beginning of recorded history itself, in the period of the earliest states, when culture was dominated by superstition, and religion was made into a justification for state power. In the fact that their culture and religion gave justification for the power of their rulers, the Jews were not different from other ancient peoples, such as the Babylonians and Hittites.

Judaism was unique in giving great emphasis to a written text, the Torah, which contained the core of the people’s laws. It anticipated “social contract” theories by making the laws come from an ancient covenant between the people and God. By giving such divine approval to the laws in the exact written form they were (allegedly) first given, Judaism created a lively interpretive tradition to preserve the meaning of the texts, leading to Pharisaism and eventually to the Talmud.

It is in the context of Pharisaism that Christianity was born. Christ gave new interpretations to the old laws, bringing them more in accordance with reason, though the superstition of the elders would not long endure this. He helped his movement spread by means of apocalyptic fervor: since the Kingdom of Heaven is coming soon, when all earthly kingdoms shall pass away and all men will be judged according to their deeds, special attention to one’s conduct seems to be called for. So it was that Christianity spread widely, but not far beyond the Jews at first.

Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, changed this by spreading the Christian revelation very far into the Gentile peoples. He accomplished this by having such faith in Christ’s reinterpretation of the law that he emphasized that keeping the old, peculiarly Jewish law would not matter to salvation when the Kingdom came. Since the apocalyptic message was maintained, the Gospel maintained its speedy spread, ultimately penetrating into all the peoples of the Empire.

With the Pharisees spurned as an interpretive tradition, Christianity was able to bring the law even further into accordance with reason by means of philosophy, which, by then, had already developed to a great extent. Fathers such as Augustine and Ambrose were able to read the Scriptures in light of advanced philosophical concepts which they had garnered from Plato and from the Stoics.

They were aided in doing this by support from the Roman Church, which was established as the keeper of the peculiarly Christian tradition. Since the philosophical theologians were not condemned by Rome, they could be assumed, even by the more superstitious faithful, to have brought no perversions into the divine law. The Church allowed the Christian revelation to be brought to as great a level of enlightenment as the sensibilities of the time could bear.

The Church, as an organization, was then for centuries a great aid to philosophy, because it existed independently of earthly kingdoms, and could support, with its own means, the development of doctrines which criticized the exercise of power by states. It also made people more concerned with obeying their bishops than their kings, which gave its doctrine great weight. The apocalyptic message was also attenuated by this further philosophical development, with the Kingdom of Heaven now being largely known to be clearly outside history, although this rational interpretation was not dogmatized.

After these centuries of light, however, the superstitious element flared up again. With the publication of original ancient texts of the Old and New Testaments, some persons thought themselves able to discover the true meaning of the laws with the aid, not of reason, but of history. They thought they could discover what the law meant when it was given by the Apostles, and they gave this original meaning greater credence than either philosophy or Church Tradition. So it was that Luther operated, and he enlisted the aid of kings, who were fed up with the Church’s criticism and were eager to support someone who might curb it. Soon he had many followers – and also, due to his abandonment of a ground of unity, many splintered sects.

Luther’s hermeneutical dogmatism, as might be contrasted with the hermeneutical scepticism of the enlightened Catholic centuries, was then a support, not only for extreme heights of statism – as may be seen, for instance, in Luther’s text on peasant mobs – but also for ghastly heights of generalized superstition, as may be seen in the various Calvinist attempts at theocracy. Apocalypticism, too, was sporadically reborn in its full extremity, leading to earnest predictions that “the end is near” every few decades or so.

For a time, the Catholics were embarrassed by the superstitious zeal of the Protestants, leading to a warm renewal of superstition within their own fold. It was in this context that the Church, which had allowed wildly broad speculations in the time of the Scholastics, was at length able to condemn Galileo for his hasty support of geocentrism. Hermeneutical dogmatism was able to have some effect upon Catholic theology and practice, but always tempered by philosophy, which the Church never abandoned.

Within Catholicism, at least, there may still be hope for a full return of reason to religion, and new centuries of enlightened philosophical theologians. Protestantism, on the other hand, depends for its very existence upon the dogmatist superstition, since if history cannot determine the meaning of the texts, then they ought to either accept a living authority or abandon them. Protestantism must remain superstitious until it either dies, collapsing into irreligion, or is reabsorbed into the Catholic fold.