Frequently in modern times, as in the more distant past, someone writes a popular book to argue that orthodoxy is merely the position of the strongest party (Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 1934).
The volume might be as sensational as John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East (1970). It might be as erudite as Elaine Pagels’s surprise bestseller The Gnostic Gospels (1979). It might be as recent as whatever book Bart Ehrman published last week.
The basic premise is the same. What has been championed as the one true expression of Christianity is merely what imperial power has declared and imposed. Starting with Constantine’s Council of Nicea (325), the state and the Big Church (East or West) have insisted on one favoured version of the faith, marginalizing and even crushing perfectly legitimate, and even superior, alternatives.
This general point serves the author’s particular purpose of offering a particular kind of religion as having just as good a claim on the title “Christian” as have the mainstream churches. It could be a mushroom cult (Allegro), gnosticism (Pagels), Jewish Cynicism (John Dominic Crossan), or political revolution (take your pick).
Historians of Christianity have introduced to a grateful and fascinated readership lots of churches unknown or long forgotten beyond the regions of their origin. One thinks of W. H. C. Frend, Peter Brown, and the indefatigable Philip Jenkins as chief among them. Egyptian, Armenian, Syrian, Persian, Ethiopian, and Indian traditions, among others—most with roots going back to apostolic times—have slowly taken their rightful place on the syllabi of church history surveys and in global fellowships of churches.
Rarely, however, do knowledgeable people invoke these traditions as evidence of significant differences in pre-Constantinian or pre-Chalcedonian Christianity. That’s because they weren’t, and aren’t, all that different from so-called orthodox churches in both East and West. They certainly aren’t different enough to justify including the likes of Allegro’s or Pagels’s religionists as also Christian.
As far back as the New Testament itself there were varieties of Christianity, most notably Jewish versus Gentile, as discussed at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. Liturgies, languages, and even dietary restrictions varied. Such expressions of cultural difference would diversify increasingly as the gospel spread into new people groups. Yet fellowship based on recognition as brothers and sisters following one Lord, one faith, and one baptism was extended across cultural lines—even to the deeply practical matter of Paul taking up a collection among Gentiles for the Jerusalem church.
Also in the New Testament, however, were alternatives to Christianity being advertised and advanced as authentic. The apostles stayed busy identifying and warning about what they declared were not just different approaches to the common faith but different religions. Not Christianity at all—and sometimes the apostles put the point fiercely. Beware!
That is what the early church properly decided at Nicea, supposedly the first great and baneful instance of imperial orthodoxy. If you prefer to think of Jesus as the greatest of all God’s creations, as did the Arians, then you’re not just singing gospel songs instead of metrical psalms, not even just baptizing believers instead of babies. The whole nature of the religion changes to something else.
Jesus is no longer the divine-human One, both the revelational and the salvific link between God and humanity. He is no longer the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Jesus becomes instead someone to admire, or be grateful toward, or to emulate—like a cult guru, or a cynical sage, or a political leader.
The way back to God is no longer following Jesus and trusting in Jesus. It’s following Jesus’s example and trusting your ability to do so. This isn’t a different Christianity. This isn’t Christianity.
Heresies and schisms and cults have come and gone. Sometimes the church has dealt with them properly. In a few, regrettable instances, the church has dealt with them violently—as with the Albigensians/Cathars in the late middle ages and with various dissenting individuals and groups by the Inquisition, especially in Spain, in the early modern period.
Sometimes the lines were just too narrowly drawn, as with the Coptic Church at Chalcedon (451), or Protestants at the Council of Trent (sixteenth century), or Anabaptists in confessions both Protestant and Catholic (sixteenth through eighteenth centuries). Fellowship was needlessly circumscribed for a long while, although later repaired.
Groups seeking recognition in the universal church can therefore point to some mistakes in the past. But the burden of proof is on them not to show that orthodoxy has sometimes been too narrow but that their particular variety meets the proper test of orthodoxy: consonance with “mere Christianity,” the definable core of Christianity that unites the members and communities of the global church through the ages.
Is there such a definable core? Yes, there is.
Don’t take my word for it. Ask an informed Copt, or Protestant, or Anabaptist what makes their religion truly Christian, genuinely part of “one holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”
Again, don’t take my word for it. Pick up any reputable textbook on world religions and find the section on Christianity. Look up what the author says are the core tenets, rituals, and morals of the Christian religion. It will sound like Nicea and Chalcedon—and like the essential teachings of your favourite local church: Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, Lutheran, or Mennonite.
—Unless it doesn’t. And then you have something else. It will be some version of moralism or mysticism or magic, or some combination of the three, masquerading as just another version of Christianity.
What it won’t be, in fact, is Christianity: the religion that worships the triune God who made and sustains the world, and saves the world through the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Jesus Christ. It won’t be the religion that depends upon the renewing, guiding, empowering, and sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. It won’t be the religion based on the Bible as divine revelation and on traditions that merely clarify and amplify the teaching of that holy book.
I understand impatience with, even despair over, the contemporary church. I’m no defender of the status quo, especially the North American Christianity I call my spiritual home. There is much that is stultifying, repellent, and just plain wrong about so many of our churches.
The solution to what’s wrong, however, isn’t to pick a religion you prefer and try to rebrand it as Christianity. It certainly isn’t ethical to try to pass off your alternative as “another version” of Christianity, let alone as authentic Christianity, in your church or denomination—or seminary.
If you really prefer Hinduism or Buddhism or Daoism or Islam, then own it and convert. If you really prefer the Jesus of Mormonism or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, then you know where to join up. If you’re fundamentally pursuing a political program, then say so and stop sticking other people’s religious labels on it. And if you really want a do-it-yourself religion, then choose your own adventure and good luck to you.
Just don’t call it Christianity. That religion has a definition already. Billions of people recognize it as such, whether they are Christians or not. It isn’t available to reshape as you please. It hasn’t been for two thousand years.