Evangelical/fundamentalist groups love to tell the tale Faith tells at the top of this discussion. They like to think of it as history.
Actually, the story is myth. It follows a classic mythical pattern. The story is a 'Golden Age' myth. Golden Age narratives fall out in a broad three-part form.
A Once upon a time life was great. Peace reigned, milk and honey flowed, and the chiefs were wise.
B Some vile false chiefs came along and corrupted everything. They brought forth The Dark Times: long years when evil reigned and everything sucked.
A' Heroes have recently arisen to bring back the Golden Age. Their invigorating ideas are on the move. Soon the restoration of the Golden Age will be manifest to all.
We see the Golden Age myth repeated in many stories and legends. Academics and scientists have hardly been immune to its charms. The first scientists labeled medieval centuries as 'the dark ages' and labeled their own time as the 'Renaissance (rebirth)' in a now classic example of Golden Age thinking.
Something about the myth holds deep appeal to our species. The structure is pleasing aesthetically. As a narrative it makes one feel one is living in important times. Psychologists see it as projection onto the environment of a pattern we universally experience as individuals: the safety of infancy, the perils of adult life, the longing for safe harbour.
Golden Age myths have their uses. But one of them is not writing history.
The Pietist Golden Age Story
Faith's Golden Age folk tale is one she learned from her teachers. It's the founding myth of her tribe, the just-so story of How Our People Got Here.
A Life in the first century was golden. Believers were close in time to Jesus. They could work miracles. The community was united. Its leaders were literally infallible.
B Nefarious villains brought about the dark age. People lost their salvation because of vile new false doctrines. For centuries Catholicism reigned and life sucked.
A' Heroic individuals started bringing back the Golden Age. True truth is on the move. The restoration of the Golden Age will soon will be manifest to all.
It's a neat story. Alas, real history has a way of resisting organisation into symmetrical storybook forms.
Missing from Faith's narrative are a number of important and very real events. The conversion of Constantine gets short shrift. A giant missing piece is any mention of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. There's a reality that affects millions. Orthodox traditions predate the Reformation by centuries.
The most urgently missing detail in Faith's case is any mention of Pietism. This belongs in the story because Faith's own subset of Christianity is Pietist. For the sake of accuracy she should disclose this.
Pietism was a development in European Protestantism in the late 17th century. It began in Germany and spread to England and other countries. The identifying marks of Pietism may be seen today across the variety of movements known as 'evangelical'.
Faith probably didn't withhold the information on purpose. It's more likely that her teachers failed her. They didn't mention Pietism because they preferred that she go through life ignorant of her own subgroup's historical origins. They preferred that she think of its distinctly Pietist characteristics as simply the way things ought to be, the way all 'true Christians' act. She was never to be told of the long and rich history that preceded the fairly recent arrival of her own subgroup. She was never to learn of the existence of any Christians outside of it.
Faith learned her flawed lessons well. She is here repeating her Pietist pieties and shining her Pietist light--unthinkingly, uncritically, like the good girl her teachers expected her to be.
If you're going to take it on yourself to teach everyone history, you bear the responsibility to know and account for real history. Your tale of Protestant Jedis doing battle with Catholic Siths in a galaxy of non-existent Orthodox might make for an entertaining Sunday School matinee, but as history it's strictly kid stuff.
Faith wants to discuss the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, tracing them all the way back to the early church,
Then I second the motion. It would be interesting to see someone try to trace that.
My bet is that we'll get Golden Age myth rather than history. The early church will be a time when everyone pooped ice cream. Then the bad Catholic-ish guys will take over from the good Protestant-ish guys (while the Eastern Orthodox are ignored) and on we'll go from there.
That's my bet. But I'm always willing to see low expectations exceeded.
Meanwhile there WERE true Christian groups that stayed outside of the Roman institution [after 606...] such as the Waldensians and the Albigensians [....] Nobody says their doctrine was perfect but it WAS Christian
So the Waldensians and Albigensians are 'true Christians', you say, because they stayed independent of the papacy, even though their doctrine was 'not perfect'. OK.
unlike the RCC which is pagan to the core
oh a long long list of completely NONChristian and even Antichristian doctrines could be made.
So Catholic Christians are 'pagan to the core', you say, even though they worship Jesus, because their doctrines are just too imperfect. Among the inexcusably imperfect doctrines you name are celibacy and the wearing of unattractive hats. OK.
The Eastern Orthodox Church was the eastern wing of the church, centered in Byzantium (Constantinople), until they refused to obey the demand from Rome that they submit to the Roman Pope, which led them to split into the Eastern Orthodox church, which is the state church of Russia among other things. They are basically quite similar to the Roman Church [...]
So even though Eastern Orthodox believers remained independent of the Rome just as the Waldensians and the Albigensians did, and even though they do not require celibacy of their clergy, they get no credit for being 'true Christians' because their funny hats and imperfect doctrines make them 'quite similar to the Roman Church' regardless. OK.
[Jesuits] are dedicated to power, not religion
Voltaire mentioned that in his time there had already been --I think he actually said -- thousands of books denouncing them.
So if people in post-Revolutionary France say bad things about a person, that person must be bad. And taking a vow renouncing the pursuit of powerful stations (as Jesuits do) means you are 'dedicated to power.' OK.
___
Well, Faith. your summary of early Christian history certainly presents us with a lot to, um, digest. Please answer a few questions that remain open despite your enlightening narrative.
1. Define 'true Christian'.
2. Describe the difference between an excusable 'imperfect doctrine' and an inexcusable imperfect doctrine.
3. Describe the process by which you personally arrived at perfect doctrine.
4. Explain why the Waldensians and Albigensians get points for remaining independent of Rome but Orthodox Christians don't.
5. Describe how we may distinguish between people who pray to Jesus and are 'true Christians' from people who pray to Jesus and are 'pagan to the core'.
6. Explain what makes the Russian Orthodox Church the 'state church of Russia' when Russia has no state church.
7. Explain how the people in the early church were able to be 'true Christians' when the epistles describe them as altering the Eucharist beyond recognition, requiring the observance of Jewish customs, disagreeing about holy days, marrying multiple spouses, eating 'meat sacrificed to idols', conducting chaotic meetings, doubting some of their teachers could be true apostles, quoting apocryphal literature as authoritative, holding mystic ideas that denied Yeshua a bodily resurrection or even a body at all, and saying things like 'faith without works is dead'?
8. Please explain why celibacy makes one 'pagan to the core' if Yeshua himself was celibate, and Paul of Tarsus not only lived a celibate lifestyle but recommended it to anyone who took their beliefs seriously.
9. Please explain why Jesuits are evil for (as you describe it) persecuting 'pagan to the core' popes, but Martin Luther remains a 'true Christian' despite his desire to persecute Jews.
10. Explain what Waldensians and the Albigensians have to do with Protestantism when Protestantism did not exist at the time and their doctrines did not align with a Protestant understanding of doctrine.
I didn't say they were sex crazed fiends, that's the popes down through history, and the priests in general, not particularly the Jesuits if at all. They are power crazed not sex crazed.
Same sparkling sense of humour as always. Did you like the song?
Faith: The "not perfect" is an objection to the idea of a "Golden Age" which is some kind of ridiculous idea of your own. [Waldensians and Albigensians] were basically Bible believers who knew Rome was on the wrong track.
Ridiculous as you find it, you just validated it.
You told us the early church was composed of 'true Christians'. You told us the Catholics who came along later were 'pagan to the core.' You told us the Protestant reformers were 'true Christians'.
As 'Christian' means good in your vocabulary and 'pagan' means bad, the matter is settled. Your narrative is a Golden Age myth.
A Times were good.
B Times were bad.
A' Good times are being restored.
Voil. Thank you for playing.
I tipped off everyone beforehand that your story was going to follow this pattern. Wary, you tried to camouflage things with a few cosmetic touches. You allowed some doctrinal beliefs in your Golden Age of 'true believers' to be less than 'perfect'. The idea was to give your story a realistic feel.
But you balked at the observation that some early Christians advocated some very imperfect doctrines indeed. Some were so imperfect by your professed standards as to make their adherents 'pagans to the core'. Though all of this is sourced in your purportedly infallible canon, you dismissed it undiscussed. You can admit a few pockmarks on the ingots, but your Golden Age must remain Golden.
You put your finger on the scale again with your cursory and uninformed treatment of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Logically you can accept these people as 'true Christians' just as you did the Waldensians and Albigensians. They fall on the same side of issues you deem important. Their differences with Rome are legendary. But you refused to cut the Orthodox the same slack.
Why? Because your myth needs a Dark Age. If in that part of your story you allow generations of 'true Christians' to walk all over the known world unpersecuted in plain sight of everybody, you don't have a story. So you call the Orthodox 'basically the same' as those 'pagan' papists. It's unjust, but it keeps your Dark Age intact.
Which brings us to the present. You belong to a sect. People in Sunday School ask leaders of the sect how it got here. The leaders could tell them the sect represents another stage in the ongoing evolution of Christian belief. This would be accurate but it would lack romance. The leaders want the sect to have an aura of epic history, heroic mission, and manifest destiny. To evoke feelings like that they need a more appealing story. A story with a certain ring to it.
Faith: What an amazing mythmaker you are indeed. Turning simple reality into a myth.
If you believe the reality of human history across centuries is simple, you already believe a myth.
It's pointless to take out your embarrassment on me. I was merely standing here when you began your ritual chant of your tribe's origin myth as told to you by its shamans. I'd seen the ritual before so I gave everyone a synopsis.
that crazy list of accusations of the early church was... incomprehensible and unrecognizable.
No accusations. I was observing. It's remarkable that someone who claims the Bible as 'the infallible standard' would not recognise a bundle of references to it.
All those epistles in the New Testament canon: on nearly every page we find a writer correcting an addressed community of Christians on their errors in belief and practice.
Did you never truly notice what some of those beliefs and practices were?
Read your Bible. You'll find quite a variety. The early church was a dynamic jumble of competing beliefs and cultures. Protestant fundies like to think the early Christians were just Protestant fundies wearing bathrobes and sandals. Not so. They were far more interesting than that.
And when you finally do read your Bible, Faith, you will discover too that, even though the writers expressed their disapproval in often strong terms, they acknowledged that wide variety of people and ideas as belonging to their Christian community. There's valuable information in that for you, Faith, the day you are willing to learn.
Faith: This entire section of this thread initiated by Archer has been nothing but an extended accusation that I'm lying about what I've written here. That's what "myth" means, it's a lie, it's made up, it's not true history.
It's not an accusation. It's a genre observation.
Myth is a genre. As is history. Myth expresses itself primarily in symbols, history in facts.
A history makes a thorough investigation of facts, then attempts to understand those facts. In a myth, symbols drive the story. Facts, if they appear at all, serve the symbols.
Your so-called 'true history' of Christianity is thus myth. You tell us of archetypal heroes and villains, Protestant Jedis and Catholic Siths. You gloss over important aspects of Christian history (the conversion of Constantine, the existence of millions of Eastern Orthodox Christians), you utter fatuous falsehoods ('the state church of Russia'), and you play up trivia (the pope's funny hat). Facts are not the star in your narrative. Crafting symbols is all. This is not history. This is myth.
Human beings are storytelling creatures. Our brains have two hemispheres. We process both symbolic and literal modes of expression. Both myths and histories can be useful to us.
Great mischief ensues, though, when people naively confuse genres. It doesn't do to ask symbols to do the work of facts, or vice versa.
Your attempt to pass off your tribe's Golden Age myth as 'true history' is just such a naive exercise.
Explain how the people in the early church were 'true Christians' as you say, when many of them--as described in the epistles--altered the Eucharist beyond recognition, required the observance of Jewish customs, married multiple spouses, ate 'meat sacrificed to idols', conducted chaotic meetings, debated which of their teachers were true apostles and which were not, quoted apocryphal literature as authoritative, and said things like 'faith without works is dead'. Would you accept such deviations from the norm in your own church? How about a Catholic church?
Faith responded:
No way I can discuss such a dense list of unidentifiable accusations.
And again:
that crazy list of accusations of the early church was[...] what I said it was: incomprehensible and unrecognizable.
Here's the list again with references.
Some Christians in the early church...
...altered the Eucharist beyond recognition 1 Corinthians 11.20-33
For one thing the word Eucharist means nothing to me, I have to think twice to even know you could possibly be referring to something in scripture.
Wikipedia:
quote:The Eucharist /ˈjuːkərɪst/, also called Holy Communion, the Lord's Supper, and other names, is a sacrament accepted by almost all Christians. It is reenacted in accordance with Jesus' instruction at the Last Supper, as recorded in several books of the New Testament, that his followers do in remembrance of him as when he gave his disciples bread, saying, "This is my body", and gave them wine saying, "This is my blood."[2][3]
The Greek word εὐχαριστία (eucharistia), meaning 'thanksgiving' or 'gratitude', is the noun form of a verb found in New Testament accounts of the Last Supper. The earliest account:
quote:For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ - 1 Corinthians 11.23-24 NRSV
According to Wikipedia, 'Eucharist' (Thanksgiving) was a term in use among Christians by the late first or early second century. Didache, Ignatius of Antioch, and Justin Martyr all described the rite this way. Today the term remains in common use among Christians, especially those in older traditions: Copts, Greek Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Anglo-Catholics, Lutherans and Presbyterians. Protestant denominations of more recent origin more often refer to the rite as 'Communion', 'Lord's Supper', or 'Breaking Bread'.
--
It's telling that a word that has done such long and distinguished service 'means nothing' to a person who presumes to tell others about Christian history.
No need to explain, Faith. We get the picture. You are not interested in history, or much else. You are here to recite the myths, dogmas and prejudices of your little tribe. 'Eucharist' is not a term your shamans use, so you don't recognise it. You are too lazy to use a search engine. You are proud of this.
Congratulations. You've won the triple crown of illiteracy: science, history and now your own professed 'faith'.
I've quoted the last two paragraphs of your post in their entirety (emphases mine).
Hopefully a little clarity has helped illustrate that the "Golden Age" of Christianity was not really a golden age in the sense that everything was perfect. However it was a Golden Age in that originally, with the establishing of Churches by Paul and many of Apostles, The church was much more about unity, love, community, and encouragement than it has been over the centuries. While the doctrine of the early church was also much more representative of the teachings and revelations of Jesus given to the apostles, as new believers joined the church we can begin to already see deviations as close as 60 years after the death of Christ (the teaching that Christ did not actually come in a physical body, Docetism).
There has never been a "Golden Age," only broken humans, messing up, all the while still being loved by Christ.
I don't have the motivation to try to answer every weird accusation thrown at me.... But since it's become an excuse to have me denounced to the Inquisition...
We have now reached the finale of The Faith Martyrdom Show, folks, in which our heroine--having gathered her own firewood, lashed herself to her own post, and torched the lot with her own match--blames the audience for her suffering.
Enjoy the marshmallows, Questarians, and don't forget to pick up your free T-shirt on the way out.
True Christianity is messy and broken. There is an ideal, there is a goal in thought and theology, but we're broken. mankind has not lived up to the ideal, and yet "true christianity" is when the church relied more upon Christ than buildings, rules, sacraments, and politics.
[Emphasis in the original.]
I see. You'll smear a little mud on the face of your Golden Age to camouflage the glow, but your Dark Age must remain dark.
---
People in Raph's Golden Age make a hash of the Eucharist/Communion to the point that the meal isn't even Christian--and Raph says they're OK, just 'messy'.
People in Raph's Dark Age keep the Christian symbolism intact--and Raph says they're heretics because they built a cathedral around the dinner table.
Here's an idea, Raph. How would it be if the acceptance you show to ancient Corinthians and modern members of your own tribe were extended to everybody?
No neat sectarian myths. Just messy, fallible human beings all around, doing the best that they can. Every day, every century.
Would it upset your Jesus so very much if you tried it?
™ Version 4.2
