The Spread and Splits of Christianity: From Pentecost to Major Denominations, Study notes of World Religions

Download The Spread and Splits of Christianity: From Pentecost to Major Denominations and more Study notes World Religions in PDF only on Docsity! REL 100 Lecture 19 1 Today we’re gonna continue discussing Christianity or in this session we’re gonna continue to discuss Christianity. What we’re gonna look at in this session is a quick history of the Christian movement. Now, what we’re gonna do today, you can take a whole semester course in this here at SMS — I think it’s a 300 level course called Christianity — and you can take 16 weeks to cover this movement that we’re gonna cover here in the next 20 minutes. So you can see how much we’re probably going to leave out of the story, how many details we’re gonna leave out, but I want to sketch this out a bit so you can get an idea about how we came to where we are today with the diversity that we have within Christianity when it started from the life of this one person, the teachings of this one person, that we talked about in our last session — with Jesus. So in the 1st century — during the first part of the 1st century, then, you have the life of Jesus and the teachings of Jesus, and Him teaching His Apostles who He sent out to carry on His teachings. Then He died and was no longer part of that movement here on earth, so then his Apostles carried on that teaching. In the early part of the 1st century, not many weeks after Jesus’s death, there was a big event in Jerusalem during the Jewish celebration that’s called Pentecost, and that is believed to be the origin of really the church, the movement that came out of the life of Jesus. On that day it was reported that over 3,000 people committed themselves, they said they believed in Jesus, as we talked about in our last session as far as what it took to be Christian, what it meant. Over 3,000 people that day, mostly Jews, accepted this message of Jesus, accepted that substitionary sacrifice for their forgiveness, and so REL 100 Lecture 19 2 this Christian movement really took off within not many weeks after Jesus’s death, after Jesus’s time on earth. So you’ve got Pentecost and you’ve got many Christians there in Jerusalem that responded to this teaching, and it begins to move throughout just Jerusalem, in that area. But by the time you get to the end of the 1st century, Christianity has spread throughout much of the known world at that time. Now, predominantly that spread happened through two means. One way that Christianity spread during the later part of the 1st century and into the 2nd century was through missionaries, people that groups of Christians sent out to other places carrying this message about this man, Jesus, and His teachings and His special death. Probably the most famous of those missionaries was Paul, the same man who is attributed to have written much of the second half of the New Testament, from Romans on close to the end. And so through those missionaries this message was carried, just as is still the case today in Christianity. But a second method of spreading this message or a second occurrence that happened was the persecution of Christians. Now, again in the 1st century, you might remember that what you have are the Jews living in Israel or Palestine but they are under Roman rule. They don’t have control of the land. And essentially, the Romans have said to the Jews, “You can stay here in Jerusalem — you can stay here in Israel as long as you all get along. But if there starts being problems, if there starts being a lot of unrest, if you start being difficult to put up with as sort of a state of ours, then you can’t have this anymore. We’re gonna come in and we’re gonna take control of things in a firmer way.” And so that was kind of the setup that there was between the Romans REL 100 Lecture 19 5 worldview of the Roman Empire. So Christianity became the official religion of the empire. If you were going to be a true Roman, you were Christian. If you wanted to get anywhere in the empire, you needed to claim Christianity. And so now wherever Christianity had not been in the empire, it was sinking in to all the crevices and cracks and it was everywhere, became pervasive throughout the empire. To be Roman was to be Christian. And so there was a great spread of it throughout the empire. So Christianity took on a substantial role throughout the empire and then even into the fall of the empire later. But it’s not until you get to the 11th century — we’re going in fast-forward here — when you get to the 11th century that you find the first major split within Christianity, the first place that starts to really bring about officially the distinctions that you find within Christianity as far as denominations. In the 11th century in this split, there were major differences that had come about, that had been kind of festering and rising throughout the previous century in Europe, and it brought about basically a split East and West in Europe. It was largely a geographical split but also within those geographical regions Christianity just had come to look a lot different. There was an Eastern sort of Christianity and a Western flavor of Christianity, and they were different from one another. They had some different interests. They had some different practices, some different doctrines. And politically and economically they had some different interests, too. So there was a split, East and West. And again, to split that significantly, these would be huge differences. These would be multiple differences. For our simplicity, I’ll mention two that were core. One of those was about highest human authority in the REL 100 Lecture 19 6 church. Highest human authority in the church. By this point, you have down in Rome, in western Europe, the highest human authority being centered on one person, the Pope, and a hierarchy that filters down out of Rome from that one person. Well, especially those in the East had a sense of not really being represented as far as their interests, as far as what they had to offer, as far as the beliefs and doctrine that were developing there, because they were so far away from this central location in the hierarchy that filtered down from that location in Rome. So in the East what they believed made a lot more sense was to have a more representative form of government, and so in the East, they had a representative council of bishops, bishops — church representatives from different areas throughout the Eastern part of Europe, who would come together and they would have these councils to determine various policies, various doctrinal statements, even if there was financial issues to be discussed, but they would make the decisions about what the church should be and what should be going on in the church. So they had a big difference over authority. Should it be this council of bishops or should it be this one person here in the West? And that brought about a significant split because the East was not interested and loyalty down here, and the West saw these people as creating schism in the church because they were setting up their own form of government. Another difference was in ritual and doctrine. That’s probably best represented by the sacraments. Both churches in the East and the West observe sacraments and, by and large, the same sacraments. Like Eucharist and baptism and last rites, and so on and so forth. They observe the same sacraments. But you could go down the line REL 100 Lecture 19 7 and with every sacrament there’s disagreement over why it needed to be practiced, what the purpose of the sacrament was, the method by which it should be practiced, and so again there was great difference between the East and the West as far as the doctrine and the ritual of the churches. An example would be with baptism, for instance. By this point in the Western church they are baptizing infants and also by this point in the Western church there are many methods of baptism. Immersion, but what’s more common now is sprinkling or pouring water over people who are to be baptized. In the Eastern church, however, they believe that there should only be adult baptism and that the baptism should only be done by the method of immersion. Well, that changes a little bit about the understanding of the role of baptism and the need for it. It changes the understanding for original sin. You know, if you believe in original sin, then you need to baptize these babies that are born because they have sin. If you don’t, then you wait until they’re adults when they have their own accountability for their own sin. And even as far as the methodology of immersion, the Eastern church didn’t just immerse people but they immersed them three times. Because the New Testament taught that people should be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And so when someone was immersed, they were dunked once in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So just on baptism. And there would be other differences on the baptism issue. But they disagreed over method, they disagreed over what point in life that should REL 100 Lecture 19 10 finances and ways that the church brought about finances. Direct attacks against ways that people are absolved of their sins that the church taught. And so these were seen to be so central that he was eventually ex-communicated from or kicked out of the Roman Catholic Church. Now, in the 95 Theses for Debate, there are 95 — literally a list of 95 things numbered, but most of those center around one issue and that is the forgiveness of sin, the absolution of sin, the release from sin, through indulgences or the selling of indulgences. And basically what that meant was that when people would go to the priest for confession, to be absolved of sin, that the priest would not only tell them what prayer to pray or how many hail Mary’s to pray and absolve them, but would also have them make some sort of a gift to the church, some sort of a financial payment to the church. It’s likely that early on that was a voluntary payment. You know, kind of put your money where your mouth is. If you really want forgiveness, then make a gift to God through the church. But it came to the point where there were very specific, basically costs that were paid for various sins. Some sins cost more than others. And so because of that, Luther came along and he said, “You know, I don’t see that anywhere. It’s not right to ask people to pay money for forgiveness of sin. Forgiveness is freely given.” And so he had great criticism against the amount of money that was being collected from people for forgiveness for their sinfulness, and then that money was turned around and they used that money to build large cathedrals. And in the 95 Theses he was critical of that. That if the Pope wanted a cathedral built, he should use his own money instead of using REL 100 Lecture 19 11 this money from the people who had been forgiven for sin. So he attacked the financial basis of the church. He attacked the authoritative basis of the church by saying that it’s really not up to the Pope to absolve people from sin or it’s not for the priest to absolve people from sin. That forgiveness from sin comes as each person goes directly to God themselves. Later Luther develops this theology called The Priesthood of All Believers, saying that all people, from his understanding of the New Testament, are priests. That we don’t need some special person to mediate between us and God for forgiveness. So he attacks the authority structure. He’s attacked the financial structure. Eventually he talks about even sort of the control of the church. Because one of the controls that the church had in the Middle Ages was that the Bible was not written in the language of the people. If you didn’t know how to read the Bible in the original languages of Greek, Hebrew and Airmeyic, or in its translated version of Latin, then you couldn’t read the Bible for yourself. And that was the case with most of the people in the population. And so the only way to be taught what the Bible said, what God instructed of people, was through the priest and the authority structure of the church. Well, Luther came along and said, “We can put this in people’s language. We can let people read and interpret the Scripture for themselves.” And he put the printing press, a fairly recent invention there in the Middle Ages — I think it had been invented the century before — but hadn’t really been largely used. Luther is one of the most published people in history. He published all kinds of pamphlets, of booklets, of information, plus the first Bible translated into the German language, the Gutenberg REL 100 Lecture 19 12 Bible. That, then, caused people in other countries throughout Europe, some of these other reformers, to also begin translating the Bible. A lot of people were killed through the Inquisitions because of this translation of the Bible into the language of the people. So as Luther did those things, as Luther began to teach those things, of course it didn’t sit well with the church and he’d been kicked out of the church, and a movement formed based on his protest against the authority and the teachings and the practice of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. That movement — they were called protesters of the Roman Catholic Church. So eventually that came to be called the Protestant movement. And so the Protestant reformation which began in the 16th century was a movement that opposed the authority, the teachings, the practices of the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. Protestant reformation was a movement that began in the 16th century that opposed the authority, the teachings, and the practices of the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. And so that’s where you have the Protestant movement today, is out of those early opposers, those early protesters, of what was going on in the church in the Middle Ages. And so today you have three broad branches within Christianity. The Orthodox branches. Most of those branches of Orthodox Christianity are defined by the country out of which they originate or the ethnic group out of which they originate. So you have the Greek Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church. Then you have the Roman Catholic Church which has maintained its own institutional uniformity. Certainly there’s splinter groups within Catholicism. There are people in Catholicism that would