A Somewhat Slanted Look at the History of the Christian Church – Part II

drhiter-churchseriesLast week we defined our terms and went to work on understanding some of the words that we all use to discuss the goings-on within the Christian Church.

And let’s get it said right here at the outset that there’s only one Christian Church! My authority is the Bible, and in particular, the 16th Chapter of the book of Matthew, along with the first Chapter of the letter to the Colossians.

There are several more references that imply the same thing. Now, yes, we all know that Paul, John, the author of the Book of Hebrews (and others) used the same word to refer to individual congregations. We still do, today. But, that doesn’t mean that all but one of them are somehow wrong. Again, that is a religious issue, best discussed within your own such congregation. For our purposes here, we’re talking about the big use of the word: the whole Church. Christianity. Christendom. The whole body of Christ.

So. Do all the people who call themselves Christians worship the same? Of course not. Even within the Church, there are those who rarely if ever actually worship anything, much less God. Some people worship “science”, or think they do. They often call themselves “atheists”, too, but usually what they’ve done is make an idol of some scientific tradition or other. Science is the study of the physical world, and since Charles Darwin managed to separate “science” from “religion”, some people have thought that they can’t involve themselves in both.

So, some decide to worship “science”. Some have made a religion out of Darwin’s theory of evolution, alone. You run across these people especially in the field of Biology. They’re wrong, of course, but you still find them around.

A minority of people worldwide worship God. Not “a” god, as in Baal or Isis or Shiva, but God, the creator and maintainer of the universe. Among this relatively small group are Christians, Jews, and Moslems. These three share many beliefs, but they practice those beliefs in very different ways. In the United States, and especially in the South, most people think of themselves as Christians.

Christians believe that God became man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth over 2000 years ago, and that he was later crucified in order to save mankind from sin. There is wide discussion about what all that means, and that discussion has resulted in several hundred so-called “denominations” within the Christian Church. Not all “denominations” even accept the title “denomination”.

The problem with studying religion is that the people who promote any given religion tend to be practitioners of that religion. Even within a given sect of any given religion, true believers (and that generally includes the clergy) tend to be pretty dogmatic about how their own branch of it is the only acceptable one.

Over the history of mankind, it is likely that no single question has resulted in the death of so many people as differences over what and how to worship. That is true of Christianity and it is also true of Judaism and Islam and any number of other religions. If you want to know about a given religion, you often have to join it. That in itself can get you killed. Maybe we can avoid that extreme in this series.