Former PC(USA) moderator and prolific blogger Bruce Reyes-Chow has started a petition drive called “There is more than one version of Christianity!” His point is that there is a great deal of diversity the Christian family. Christians need to be more tolerant of one another and the media and culture need to recognize Christian diversity, too.
Christianity has always struggled with “orthodoxy,” which means, “right belief.” We do claim, after all, to be “saved by grace through faith, and not by works, lest anyone should boast.” The other two great monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam, are “orthopraxic” religions–the emphasis is on “right practice,” such as obedience to the Law in Judaism or The Five Pillars of Islam. (The rise of Fundamentalism in Islam has made “orthodoxy” a matter of life and death, but most Muslims, whether Sunni or Shi’ite, still consider Islam a matter of “right behavior,” not “right belief.”)
But since Christian focus is on belief, we easily get caught up in “I’m right and you’re wrong” arguments.
“I’m right and you’re wrong” arguments have been with Christians from the very beginning. One of the gifts of modern scholarship is that it proves that the Bible itself is a “big tent” that intentionally included a diversity of voices.
Most Christians seem to think the Bible dropped out of the sky somehow. But ours is an “Incarnational” faith, by which we mean that God works through the real processes of history and the limitations of human beings. God didn’t speak it to its authors directly, as Islam believes God spoke to Muhammed. Our Bible came about over a very human process that spanned a thousand years.
And it wasn’t codified as “scripture” all at once either. Though Jews revered the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, for hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, the canon (the officially-recognized orthodox collection of books) was not settled on until about 100 years before Christ. Likewise, the canon of the Christian Bible wasn’t fully settled until the Council of Nicea in 324 AD.
The Torah, traditionally held to be written by Moses, is in reality an amalgam of different documents collected and edited over centuries. Four sources are generally acknowledged. The Yahwist, the earliest source, presents God as more personal and directly engaged in human affairs. God walks in the Garden of Eden and God’s arm closes the door of Noah’s Ark.
The next oldest, the Elohist, represents a later and possibly altogether different tradition about God that was melded with Yahwism. The Elohist considers God more distant; rather than being directly engaged in human affairs, God sends messengers–angels–and speaks through dreams.
These traditions probably both pre-date the founding of the lands of Israel and Judah. The remaining two, the Priestly and the Deuteronomist, post-date the founding of the nation. The Priestly tradition is concerned that holiness codes are observed; so, for instance, whereas the Yahwist says the animals went onto the ark two-by-two, the Priestly author says “clean” animals came on seven-by-seven, to allow for the possibility of sacrifice. This is an obvious anachronism: in the timeline of Scripture, the rules of “clean and unclean” and the traditions of sacrifice do not arise until long after Noah!
The Deuteronomist represents a return to the ‘traditional’ values of the Mosaic covenant during the 7th Century reign of King Josiah of Judah, who wanted to rebuild his nation after their conquest, exile and return during the “Babylonian Captivity.”
Already enshrined in Torah is a broad diversity of views about God and God’s relationship to God’s people. Rather than pin down a particular theological view or practice, the Torah intentionally bundles them all together. This continues in other parts of the OT. The “liberal” prophets, for instance, have a very different perspective about the causes and solutions to the Babylonian exile than do “conservative” Nehemiah and Ezra. But both views are included as scripture. Likewise the simplistic aphorisms of Proverbs; the deeply personal and complex verses of the Psalms; the troubling questions of Job; and the darkly existential, almost atheological musings of Ecclesiastes, are all lumped together as Wisdom literature.
As Christianity was beginning flourish, it faced a crisis in the middle of the Second Century CE that forced a decision about Scripture. A popular evangelist, Marcion, was winning many converts by preaching and teaching dualism, the belief that there are two conflicting gods. Marcion was a gnostic, who believed that all things fleshly and material were bad and only the spiritual, non-material world was good and eternal. Marcion disliked the Hebrew Bible, saying it was the story of the cruel, clumsy creator God who made the material world; whereas Jesus was the “good” God who would free our spirits from their physical, material prison. As Christianity was becoming far more a Gentile than Jewish religion, Marcion also spoke for the anti-Semitism that was common in the Greco-Roman world after the Bar-Kochba rebellion. Gentile Christianity had become strong enough to stand without the Jews; why be associated with a discredited people?
Marcion was the first Christian to attempt to develop a canon of scripture. He threw out the Old Testament altogether. His canon consisted of redacted versions of the Gospel of Luke and the letters of Paul.
Other church leaders rejected his choices, but it forced them to confront a problem that had bedeviled the church. Christianity had spread throughout the known world, but there was no clear central authority. Written gospel stories abounded and letters from apostles were everywhere; but often the people in one place had no clue that in another community there were other gospel stories or other letters. To top it off, differing sects of Christianity were adopting different texts as the authority for their beliefs, and condemning other points of views as heretical.
The ultimate solution was the Bible you hold in your hand today. That Bible represents a “big tent” that intentionally gathered most, if not all, the conflicting perspectives of Christians under one dust-cover.
No doubt you’ve heard that The Council of Nicea was a political ploy of the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, who thought that he could unite the Empire by uniting all Christians under one doctrine. That’s true, but to say something is political is not always to say it is bad. Christian leaders saw in Constantine’s plan the solution to the problem that had long vexed them. They could define once and for all what beliefs Christians held in common. In the process they could unite the divided body of Christ by validating different theologies.
Luke was already highly popular with Gentile Christians, but the other three gospels represent a conscious acknowledgement of some sect of Fourth Century Christianity whose view was considered heretical by the mainstream. (For a more detailed account, see, e.g., Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities.)
Mark was valued by a sect of gnostics who believed that when Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it meant that the Christ-spirit was abandoning the dying body of the human Jesus, freed at last from its physical prison.
Matthew, in contrast, represented the very worldly view of the Jewish Christians, or Ebionites. Most Ebionites were Adoptionists–they believed that Jesus was “adopted” as Son of God because He lived a life of perfect obedience. Matthew, of course, presents Jesus as the new Moses, giving the new Law in the Sermon on the Mount.
John, the most obviously Gnostic-influenced gospel, was a favorite of the Valentinians, who believed that Jesus was a spirit who did not have a physical body and therefore did not really die. They were partial to John because in it Jesus says on the cross, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit,” and viewed the resurrection stories as spiritual, not physical manifestations.
By gathering these four Gospels–which, as has been noted from time immemorial, often do not agree on key details–the Nicene leaders were actually gathering together the disparate theologies and regions of the Christian world under one scriptural tent. Obviously, they rejected more extreme theologies; but their goal was to minimize difference and to focus on what Christians held in common.
The Nicene Creed represented the same sort of “Big Tent” thinking. While it defines the boundaries of Christian faith, it uses terms and ideas deliberately borrowed from the diverse views they were attempting to corral together. Hypostasis–the Greek term we translate as “substance” in the Creed–was a Valentinian term. Nods were made in the creed to the other Gnostics and to the Ebionites, as well.
These same church leaders decided without question that the Hebrew Bible was essential to the canon, which no doubt disappointed Marcionites; but their consolation prize was the large number of Paul’s letters. This might have irked some Ebionites; but they would have been pleased to note that Paul’s assertion that we are “saved by grace through faith and not by works” was offset by James’s powerful assertion that “faith without works is nothing.” These are obviously competing (though not irreconcilable) positions, between two people who’d actually been at odds in the early church. Both views are included without commentary.
Christian diversity is nothing new. Compared to the theological issues at stake in the Fourth Century, our doctrinal differences seem pretty tame. You see, Nicea worked: most of us aren’t debating whether there is one God, and if that God is good; or whether Jesus was a spirit or a physical being. And while modern scholarship has raised lots of questions about how we define scriptural authority, most Christians agree that it does have authority, regardless of its sources and history.
I remember my first NT class with the great Dr. Paul Achtemeier. He warned us that we would learn many things in his class that would challenge our faith–things about the very human process both of creating scripture and interpreting it. He then observed that Christians believe that, regardless of how Scripture came to us, the Holy Spirit was active in the process. He was gently throwing down the gauntlet: to deny the validity of historical and literary interpretation of Scripture is a lack of faith.
And now, thanks to historical scriptural interpretation, we can see in the formation of the Bible itself the model for how Christians can live together, acknowledging our diversity, but holding fast to what we believe. So I guess the issue is, do we believe the Bible?