As strange as it may seem to some of us, a great deal of secular research has been done on the subject of religion, including the Christian religion.
Scholars like Joseph Campbell have written and taught for years concerning the differences within the general field. The problem is that these writings are rarely easily available to the general public.
Few of us want to take a seminary course in comparative religion just to get an answer to why our neighbor believes what he or she does. Neither do we want to open ourselves up to evangelization by some other body, in order to find out what they believe. What we need is a source that can put together scholarly as well as popular information and present it to us in a simple and easily readable format.
That, then, is the goal of this series of columns. Many will be offended at some point or other, and some will no doubt fear for the soul of the writer. That’s good. The point, though, is to transmit information without proselytizing. Christian denominations will often be treated equally with pagan myths and evolutionists. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about all religions, so there’s adequate opportunity for us all to learn something. Please enjoy.
As a final introductory comment, let it be said there never was what we so often hear about, an “undivided Church”. A whole mythology has grown up that holds that there was, somewhere, somehow, between the Resurrection and Reformation, an “undivided”, thinking alike, agreeable to one another, Christian Church. There was not. Look at the Book of Acts. On the very first day of the Church’s existence, that is to say, the Day of Pentecost, 29 AD (or so), people were converted “from every nation”.
Dear readers, those people went home within a day or so. They went home to a dozen or more countries, speaking a dozen or more languages. There was never an undivided Church. Even if the Apostles taught an undivided Gospel (and there is some doubt about that), they taught it to people in vastly different geopolitical, sociological and linguistic settings.
Learning to deal with differences is something the Church has had to deal with ever since the first minutes of its existence. Luckily, much of this was written down, and surprisingly, a good deal of it survives, today.
Perhaps not too surprisingly, the main document that it was written down in is called, by almost everybody, The Bible. “the bible” means simply “the book”. The Old Testament consists of several books of History, Literature, Prophecy and Religion (we’ll discuss the exact number in future columns) from the time before Jesus Christ lived in the Middle East, and the New Testament, which contains the record of His life there and the writings of his earliest followers, as they tried to deal with His death, resurrection and Ascension.
The number of such books is less variable than those of the Old Testament, but even there, there is some discussion. Bound together, these all become “The Bible”. It is a unique document among world religions, and we shall refer to it often.