Outline - Review

The Soul of Christianity

Preface

 I feel like a voice crying in the wilderness, the wilderness of secular modernity which religion is unable to pull us out of because it presents our culture with a babble of conflicting voices. And yet a voice that can pull us out of the wilderness is on our very doorstep. That voice is the voice of first-millennium Christianity, the Great Tradition, which all Christians can accept because it is the solid trunk of the tree from which its branches have sprung.

Prologue

There is within us a longing, built into us like a jack-in-the-box that presses for release. The Good News of authentic religion - in this book, Christianity - is that that longing can be fulfilled.

Introduction

We live in an exciting time. We are living through the second of two great revolutions in the human spirit.

The first of these was disastrous for the human spirit, for it pushed it to the margins. The discovery of the controlled experiment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inaugurated the scientific method, and it quickly displaced the traditional worldview (which pivots on God) with the scientific worldview, which has no place for deity and is uncompromisingly secular.

The second revolution - through which we are now living but remains under-noticed - is constructive, for it brings God back into the picture. This book tries to contribute to that correction.  It champions Christianity by telling the Christian story in a way that is more persuasive than secularism's attacks on it.

Part One - The Christian Worldview 

The background of the Christian story is its two-tiered world.  Without an upper story, the ultimacy of an Infinite God-by-whatsoever-name makes no sense any more than do Jesus' true nature, the redemption of a fallen humanity, prayer, salvation, etc.  And come to think of it, science doesn't make sense either.  Frontier scientists are always working on the rim of the infinite.

This part of the book - Part One - blueprints the world's upper story by way of pinpointing its fixed points, numbered in the text below, in the conviction that if they are kept clearly in mind the Christian story will come through to us more sharply.

1. The Christian world is Infinite.  - If you stop with finitude you face a door with only one side, an absurdity.

2. The Infinite includes the finite.  - The point here is God's pervasiveness.

3. The contents of the finite world are hierarchically ordered. - An idea that had been accepted by most educated people throughout the world until modernity mistakenly abandoned it in the late eighteenth century.

4. Causation is from the top down, from Infinite down through the descending degrees of reality. - As suggested in the Introduction the West may now be more open to hearing the Christian story: emerging evidence is forcing scientists to reconsider their "bottom-up" theory of causation, which has challenged the Christian position.

5. In descending to finitude, the singularity of the Infinite splays into multiplicity. - the One becomes the many. The parts of the many are virtues, for they retain in lesser degree the signature of the One's perfection.

6. As we look upward from our position on the causal chain, we find that as the virtues ascend the causal ladder, they expand in the way one's chest does when one takes a deep breath and inhales air, which in this example stands for God.  As virtues expand they begin to overlap; their distinctions fade and they begin to merge.  This requires that the images of ladder and hierarchically ordered chain be replaced with that of a pyramid.  At the top of the pyramid, in God's infinity differences in virtues disappear completely in the divine "simplicity".  To name that point, any virtue will serve as long as the word is capitalized, whereupon the words become synonyms.  God is the conventional English name for the Infinite, but Good, True, Real, Almighty, One, etc., are equally accurate.

7. To go back to the mathematical point, when power and goodness (and the other virtues) converge at the top of the pyramid, the Christian worldview's most staggering claim comes to view: absolute perfection reigns.  This brings us face-to-face with the problem of evil.

God endowed human beings with intelligence and freedom, without which they would be mere puppets. We are mixed bags, capable of great nobility and horrendous evil. Our besetting sin is to put ourselves ahead of others; egotism or self-centeredness is built into us.  We cannot get rid of that handicap, but we can and must work at restraining it.

8. The "great chain of being" with its links of increasing worth needs to be extended by the classical formula "As above so below." In other words, everything that is outside us is also inside us: "The kingdom of God is within you."

When we reverse our gaze and look inward, the spatial imagery does a flip-over and turns upside down. Within us the best lies deepest inside us: it is basic, fundamental, the ground of our being. That which outside ourselves we seek in the highest heavens, inwardly we seek in the depths of our souls. Mind is more important than body, our souls are more important than either of the foregoing, and Spirit is the breath of God which is the foundation of our being.

9. We cannot know the infinite.  The Infinite must take the initiative and show itself to us. If there is to be a love affair between the Infinite and the finite, the Infinite must do the wooing. Hence Revelation, unveiling, the pulling back of the curtain that hides the Infinite from the finite, God from the world.

10. Revelation is multiple in both scope and degree; it has both horizontal breath and vertical depth.

Scope: All revelations are paths to salvation; as people understand only their own language, God sends his messenger with the language of his people, that he might make the message clear to them. Claims to superiority appear in every religion. There is a new mood in Christendom, a recognition that though for Christians God is defined by Jesus, he is not confined to Jesus.

Degree: Theophanies of great magnitude (Moses on Mount Sinai, Jesus emerging from the water of the Jordan, Saul, knocked off his horse and struck blind) endow their recipients with a charisma that rubs off onto their disciples, and this is Revelation's first extension. The records of what came through Moses, Jesus, and Paul, the Gospels and Acts, lack the immediacy of face-to-face contacts and so are a step further removed from the source, and theological reflections yet another step. All are the same Revelation, fading gradually as the distance from the source increases.

11. Reports have to be interpreted - hence the science of exegesis.  This science mounts through four steps of ascending  importance: literal, ethical, allegorical and anagogic.

Literal: What does the text explicitly assert?

Ethical: What does the text tell us we should and should not do?

Allegorical: What are the meanings that Jesus' parables, for example, convey?

Anagogic: What inspiration can we draw from the text? "Inspiration" that with the aid of the Holy Spirit points us to higher realms in an endless attempt to reach perfection.

12. It follows from the above that exegesis that stops with the literal meaning of a text - the lowest of the four steps on the ladder - cannot do that text full justice.  Seeming contradictions can be resolved in a multileveled view of things. It is not possible to read scripture seriously of we stay within the stifling confines of literalism.

13. Continuing with the "ribs" of Christianity's worldview, there are two distinct and complementary ways of knowing, rational and intuitive.  All the wisdom traditions spell this out carefully. Reason can neither grasp nor understand God. In human thought, reason and intuition must work together.

14. Walnuts have shells that house kernels, and religions likewise have outsides and insides: they have outer, exoteric forms that house inner, esoteric cores.  For esoterics God is in focal view, whereas for exoterics his created world is focal and God must be inferred from it. It follows that for exoterics this world is concrete and the celestial world is abstract, whereas for esoterics it is the other way around. Esoterics can understand exoterics and recognize the need for them, but the reverse does not hold. Everywhere in history exoterics far outnumber esoterics, and religious institutions run mostly on the energy they provide.

15. Outside of Revelation's beam, we live in darkness. We are born in ignorance, we live in ignorance, and we die in ignorance. In relation to God we stand as less than a simple protein in a single cell on a human finger. That simple protein could never conceive of the whole of which it is a part. So much infinitely less are we literally, in this mass of the universe, and beyond it the Infinite.

The First part of this book outlines the universal grammar of religion to which (in their various idioms) all "revealed" religions conform.

Two points remain to be made before Part Two opens:

First transitional point: Christianity began with the controversy over whether Jesus was or was not the Messiah, but Christians honor their Jewish heritage. By responding to God's invitation, the Jews had risen to a spiritual level that was head and shoulders above that of their neighbors. However, it was their religion; ethnically grounded in lineage, language, and history, it was not for other people. To this day Jews accept converts but do not seek them.

Second transitional point: Christianity entered history through God's revelation in Christ, but it does not end there. It (God's revelation) moves on, through the New Testament, the church fathers, great theologians and saints; and in fact, it is unending. The Christian story that this book tells, however, deals only with the first millennium, "Classical Christianity", or "The Great Tradition". Subsequent revelations interpret but do not change it.

Part Two - The Christian Story

Of all the great religions, Christianity is the most widespread and has the largest number of adherents. Nearly two thousand years of history have brought an astonishing diversity to this religion. It is our task in Part Two to describe Christianity's Great Tradition, which is to say its first millennium, before it divided into Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. To this will be added, in Part Three, sections on the three major divisions of post-Reformation Christianity: Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism.

I. The Historical Jesus - Christianity is basically an historical religion. That is to say, it is founded not on abstract principles but on concrete events, actual historical happenings. The most important of these is the life of a Jewish carpenter. Who was this man? 

The biographical details of Jesus' life are meager.  Minimally stated he was a charismatic wonder-worker who stood in a tradition that stretched back to the beginning of Hebrew history. The prophets and seers who comprised that tradition mediated between the everyday world, on the one hand, and a Spirit world that enveloped it. From the Spirit world they drew power which they used both to help people and to challenge their ways.

A. How Jesus described Himself

1.The Spirit world, to which Jesus was exceptionally connected and which powered his ministry - "The Spirit of the Lord Is upon Me"

Jesus opened his ministry by quoting this statement from Isaiah. We must attend to this Spirit that Jesus experienced as empowering him, for there can be no understanding of his life and work if it is omitted. Not only was Spirit not spatially removed; though invisible, it could be known. Human beings could take the initiative in contacting it. Fasting and solitude were means for doing so. At his baptism, the Spirit of God descended upon him like a dove. Having descended on him, the Spirit "drove" Jesus into the wilderness, where, during forty days of prayer and fasting he consolidated the Spirit that had entered him and decisively faced down Satan's temptations to use his newly acquired power for his own personal ends.

2. His deployment of his Spirit-derived powers in the alleviation of human suffering - "By the Spirit of God I Cast Out Demons"

Physicists now know that the energy in one cubic centimeter of empty space is greater than the energy of all the matter in the known universe.  It is not going too far to see that ratio as approximating the ratio of Spirit's power to ours, and the Spirit-filled personages in the Bible absorbed that power.  The Gospels attribute such power to Jesus copiously. On historical grounds it is virtually indisputable that Jesus was a miraculous healer and exorcist.

He could have been that - indeed, he could have been the most extraordinary figure in the stream of Jewish charismatic healers - without attracting more than local attention. What made him outlive his time and place was the way he used the Spirit that coursed through him not just to heal individuals but to heal humanity, beginning with his own people.

3. The new social order he felt commissioned to effect - "Thy Kingdom Come, on Earth"

Being holy himself, Yahweh wanted to hallow the world as well, and to accomplish this aim he selected the Jews to plant for him, as it were, a beachhead of holiness in human history. On Mount Sinai he had prescribed a holiness code, faithful observance of which would make of the Hebrews "a nation of priests".

It cannot be said too often that Jesus was deeply Jewish. However, his own encounter with God led him to conclude that, as practiced in his own time, the purity system had created social divisions that compromised God's impartial, all-encompassing love for everyone. God's revelation to the Jews was too important to be confined to a single ethnic group. The mission of Jesus and his followers was to crack the shell of Judaism in which Revelation was encased and release that Revelation to a ready and waiting world.

Putting it this way does not cancel the need for a continuing Jewish presence. Until the world is redeemed, there will always be a need for the witness of a nation of priests.

B. The Christ of Faith - How his disciples described Jesus

1. What he did - "He Went About Doing Good"

a. He healed physical afflictions.

b. There is a universal craving in the human makeup for the knowledge of the right direction, for orientation, how they should live. Jesus gave people that knowledge.

c. He accepted people; he gave them companionship. People felt bonded to Jesus simply by being in his presence.

2. What he said - "Never Spoke Man Thus" 

There has been a great deal of controversy over the originality of Jesus' teachings. Individually they can all be found in the Torah or its commentaries. However, if you take them as a whole, they have an urgency, an ardent, vivid quality, an abandon, and above all a complete absence of second-rate material that makes them refreshingly new.

a. How he taught: If simplicity, concentration, heart-stopping eloquence, and the sense of what is vital are marks of great religious speech and literature, these qualities alone would make Jesus' words immortal.

Further more, his words carry an extravagance of which mere wise men, tuned to the importance of nuances and balanced judgments, are incapable. A second arresting feature of Jesus' language was its invitational style. He invited people to see things differently, confident that if they did so their behavior would change.

b. What he taught: Everything that came from Jesus' lips worked like a magnifying glass to focus human awareness on the two most important facts about life - God's overwhelming love of humanity and the need for people to accept that love and let it flow through them in the way water passes without obstruction through a sea anemone.

3. What he was - "We Have Seen His Glory"  

We have spoken of what Jesus did and what he said, but these implicit and explicit expressions would not have been enough to edge his disciples toward the conclusion that he was divine had it not been for this third factor: "what" not who Jesus was. This concerns his level of being not his personality. Jesus wiped away all smudges of ego to attune his will perfectly to God's will. His love for his Father was so complete that no love remained for him to squander on himself. Thus emptied of self, what remained was a vacuum filled by God.

In one dramatic incident, Peter, John, and James watched Jesus' face change while he was praying, and saw his clothes shine with a dazzling brilliance. They were privileged to see a condensation of the glory that shone through Jesus' entire life.

C. Holy Week - The recorded events of Jesus' human life show he approached his last Passover season with complete knowledge that it would end with his sacrifice by the Pharisees.

1. Palm Sunday - The cheers of hosanna meant "Save now". He did just that but not the way the onlookers were hoping for.

2. Maundy Thursday - At their last meal together Jesus gave his disciples a new commandment, that they love one another - totally, completely, unreservedly.

In breaking the bread, Jesus told them that  it was a portent of the impending breaking of his body, that the wine he blessed was a symbol of the blood he would shedding. He asked them to repeat the meal after he was gone "in remembrance of me".

3. The Night on the Mount of Olives - Knowing what was in store for him, Jesus prayed that, if it was possible, "this cup" might pass from him. Jesus' human nature required that he traverse a great void on the way to his resurrection.

However, it was only God as object (the God he was praying to) not God as subject (the incarnated God that he was) that had deserted him, for to his supplication that the cup be spared him he added, "Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done".

4. The Crucifixion - There is no way to take the Gospel account of the crucifixion at face value without their sounding anti-Semitic.

Condemned, Jesus and two thieves were scourged and nailed to their crosses around noon. Darkness came over the land, and Jesus cried out in agony "Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?" Later he added, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing," and at the end he cried out, "It is finished."

Christians cherish every detail of this scene, which won for them their salvation but the handful of disciples and friends who had remained with Jesus to the end were bewildered and in despair. They had expected a great new day for the people of God, but the miracle they had expected had not yet come.

D. The End and the Beginning - The crucifixion might well have been the end of the story. However, it was just the beginning. Within a short time Jesus' followers were preaching the gospel of their risen Lord. Jesus appears to have resurrected. Not resuscitated for his resurrected body differed importantly from the one that died on the cross. Mysterious differences persuaded the disciples that their Master had entered a new mode of being and thenceforth his people would be Jesus' worldly body, doing what he would do if he still had physical hands and feet.

E. The Ascension and Pentecost - Forty days after he died, Jesus brought his earthly career to a solemn close by ascending into heaven. And forty days after that, God sent the disciples the Comforter Jesus had promised them in an event we now know as Pentecost. At that event "Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit."  They found that they could converse in foreign languages, a portent that Jesus' message, "The Good News" would be carried to the ends of the earth.

F. The Good News - What was this "Good News" that spawned the Christian church and snapped history into B.C. and A.D.?

The good news was about Jesus' resurrection and the status of goodness in the universe. His resurrection offered evidence that goodness has power - indeed, ultimate power. In his resurrection, goodness triumphed over death.

The people who heard Jesus' disciples proclaiming the Good News were as impressed by what they saw as by what they heard. The disciples had two qualities in which their lives abounded - mutual regard and happiness.

These qualities were produced because three intolerable burdens had suddenly and dramatically been lifted from believers' shoulders. The first was fear, including fear of death. Second was release from guilt. Third was release from the cramping confines of the ego.

The only power that can effect transformations of the order described is love, divine love that Christians reflect toward others once they experienced Christ's love for them.

G. The Mystical Body of Christ - The first Christians who spread the Good News throughout the Mediterranean world did not feel they were alone for they believe that Jesus was in their midst as a concrete, energizing power.

Images came to mind to characterize the intense corporate identity they felt. First from Christ himself the metaphor: "I am the vine, you are the branches".

Paul used the human body to symbolize the church. The church was the Mystical Body of Christ. Christ was the head of this body, the Holy Spirit its soul, and individual Christians were its cells. In any given Christian the divine life might be flowing fully, partially, or not at all, according to whether his or her faith was vital, perfunctory, or apostate. Some cells might even turn cancerous and endanger their host.

II. Saul of Tarsus - Christ founded Christianity, Paul founded the Christian church. Its seeds had been sown in the analogies of the vine and its branches and the Mystical body of Christ, but Paul gave those understandings institutional shape, a visible structure. If Jesus had not been followed by Paul, the Sermon on the Mount would have evaporated in a generation or two; but as it is, we still hear and heed it.

Saul was a Jew with a passion to stamp out the Christ-heresy. On the way to Damascus  to lay hold of some Christians he had a conversion experience and later spoke of having been taken to the "third heaven" and shown things he was forbidden to disclose.  He could not say that it was Jesus seated on the throne; but it is reasonable to infer that it was, for nothing short of an overwhelming revelation of this magnitude could account for the instantaneousness of his conversion and the force with which if catapulted him onto the stage of history.

His dedication to elimination social barriers came straight from Jesus. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

Bitter experience convinced him that it was impossible for him to obtain the peace and joy he needed with his own feeble resources - in a word, he could not save himself. Only love that bombards the ego from without can crack its hard shell. The issue came to be encapsulated in a disjunction, faith versus works, with Pauline theology siding with faith.

One thing more, he was a great poet. His discourses exude intelligence and ecstasy combined. Paul's sayings permeate the thoughts of Christians almost as much as the sayings of Jesus.

This section on Paul concludes our account of the Jesus that the New Testament gives us, and we should take note of the fact - so important that it will be repeated a number of times in this book - that truth is the whole. We miss the truth if we content ourselves with fragments.

III. The Mind of the Church - It was not the disciples' mind that were first drawn to Jesus. It was their experience - the experience of living in the presence of someone whose selfless love, crystalline joy, and preternatural power came together in a way his disciples found divinely mysterious. Thinking on these invisible, inspiring things gave rise to symbols. Symbols are ambiguous, however, so eventually the mind introduces thoughts to resolve the ambiguities of symbols and to systematize intuitions. Reading backward we can define theology as the systematization of thoughts about symbols that religious experiences gives rise to. What follows is an account of the foundational points in Christian theology: the incarnation, the atonement, the trinity, life everlasting, the resurrection of the body, hell, and the virgin birth.

A. The Incarnation - Among the revealed religions, Christianity is unique in not being content merely to juxtapose the Absolute and the contingent, the Divine and the human; it conjoins them from the start.

The doctrine of the incarnation affirms that Christ was God-man; simultaneously both fully God and fully man.

B. The Atonement - The centerpiece of Christianity

Its root meaning is reconciliation, the recovery of the wholeness that at-one-ment points toward. Early Christians were convinced that Christ's death had effected an unparalleled rapprochement between God and humanity to counter the tragic estrangement between the two that had occurred - somehow it had put them right with God.

Three points as to how this is to be understood:

1. Because there is no commensurability between the Infinite and the finite, the human mind cannot comprehend exactly what happens in God's dealings with humanity. This precludes our knowing exactly how Christ's death on the cross accomplished the reconciliation between man and God.

2. To try to understand what happened, we need a formula. The formula for atonement is "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself."

3. Formulas need to be interpreted.

Almost every major theologian has tried his or her hand at interpreting reconciliation, and these interpretations resemble angles from which a building can be seen.

One interpretation of the early church is legalistic. By voluntarily disobeying God's order not to eat of the forbidden fruit in Eden, Adam sinned. As his sin was directed against God, it was of infinite proportion. Sins must be compensated for, otherwise, God's justice would be compromised. An infinite sin demands infinite recompense, and this could be effected only by an Infinite Being, God, vicariously assuming our guilt and paying the ultimate penalty it required, namely, death. God made this payment through the person of Christ, and the debt is canceled.

Another interpretation is that every time we abuse the poor, every time we pollute our God-given planet, indeed every time we act selfishly, God dies naked on the cross of our ego.

C. The Trinity - This key doctrine holds that while God is fully one, God is also three. The latter half of this claim leads Jews and Muslims to wonder if Christians are truly monotheists, but Christians are confident that they are.

The idea was anchored in experience . The experiences that prompted it began in the early church. Indeed, those experiences generated the church.

As full-fledged Jews, Jesus' disciples affirmed Yahweh unquestioningly. But they came to see Jesus as Yahweh's assumption of a human form to enter the world corporeally. And then came Pentecost, which brought the Holy Spirit to the disciples' awareness.

This is how the disciples were brought to their understanding of God in three persons; but once that understanding was in place, they projected it back to the beginning of time. If the divine "triangle" has three "sides" now, the reasoned, it must always have had three sides. The Son and the Holy Spirit had proceeded principally from the Father, but not temporally. The three were together from the start; for after the multiplicity of the divine nature was brought home to them, Christians could no longer think of God as complete without it.

The Godhead is a society of three divine persons, knowing and loving each other so entirely that not merely can none exist without the others, but in some mysterious way each is what the others are.

D. Life Everlasting - another doctrine central to Christianity

Modernity assumes that matter is the fundamental reality in the universe and that consciousness is an epiphenomenon. This is a mistake. The truth is that consciousness is the foundation of things. It cannot be annihilated.

This may not come as good news to everybody. Those who have led unhappy lives might rightfully wonder what solace there is in prolonging an unhappy experience forever. The concept of unhappy experiences being prolonged forever raises the question of damnation and hell, to which we will return shortly.

E. The Resurrection of the Body - a doctrine a bit more complex than life everlasting, but not much.

Jesus' resurrected body was not his corpse resuscitated nor is the resurrected body. Eternal life is not simply a prolongation of this life. It is life of a higher order than life on earth in a body of a higher order.

F. Hell - Is the resurrected body in paradise? Not necessarily.

Satan may have seduced a soul into its camp, in which case that soul's resurrected body will find itself in hell, a place that is perhaps a greater mystery to us than heaven. The following questions are commonly asked:

1. What might hell be like? The theological definition of hell is total aloneness - not being connected to anything.

2. Who is responsible for someone's being in hell? The answer is, the individual in question. The reason for a person's being in hell is that he so consistently put himself ahead of others in his life that his capacity for empathy, his bridge to others, broke down. And he himself has caused its breakdown. Being only second in command, Satan has the power to seduce but not to compel. He cannot take away our God-given freedom.

3. Will anyone remain in hell forever? The answer is no, for nothing can deprive us of the image of God that is the foundation of our humanity. It will keep sending us signals. We can let our willfulness suppress them or brush them aside, but for only so long. And when they begin to get through to us, our recovery is on its way. They will build on one another and increase in strength.

G. The Virgin Birth - This tenet, in a surprising way, brings Christian theology full circle. The virgin birth begins Christian theology and the resurrection of the body closes it, but they are both concerned with the body.

Again, we cannot know what actually happens on the transcendental plane; we can only get a handle via formulas. Its metaphorical meaning is purity. The doctrine of the virgin birth proclaims that God entered life uncontaminated.

IV. Apocalypse: The Revelation to John - In a throne mysticism experience similar to the revelation received by Paul on the road to Damascus, John received seven reports on the activities of seven churches in Asia and preview of God's closing down of world history.

Common themes run through all of the messages: God is aware of the churches' patience and perseverance, but also of their lapses - that they have let their mutual love decline, and so forth.

But the heart of Johns reports to the churches is the storyline of impending disasters followed by final salvation. The descriptions are alarming. Their object is God's attempt to knock some sense into the peoples of the world and bring them to repent of their ways. The hope is not fulfilled, so God closes history down. His historical experiment is a failure, we might say - but when we step back a pace and see the larger canvas, we see that it is not.

The last book of the New Testament closes with a triumphal vision: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first earth had passed away....And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming out of heaven from God.... And I heard a great voice from the throne saying: Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, for the former things have passed away."

V. Conclusion - The Christian story is the story of how "God became man so man might become God".

This "becoming God" happens individually and communally, as directions rather than destinations, through sanctity in the case if individuals and in the case of the church the degree to which, congregation by congregation it brings the Mystical Body of Christ to life in its midst.

This "becoming God" happens cosmically, and is categorical (absolute, positive) and assured from the start, for we belong to God and nothing can overpower the Almighty to which we belong. If we try to mastermind specifics we are out of our depth from the start, but the consensus of centuries of theological ponderings seems to be that it will occur at the end of history when time closes down and God draws his creation back into himself. He will not withdraw it into his singularity. Rather, its manifold nature will be retained with its dross transmuted into gold.

This final redemption of history is prefigured within history. It is beyond our understanding how but an analogy with the sky and rain clouds may help. The sky reaches out peaceful and beautiful into infinity but it can be obscured from our view by rain clouds which reach out only for a distance measured in miles or feet.

This part of this book, Part 2 - The Christian Story, is ended with a benediction from St. Paul:

I bow my knees onto the Father...that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that you being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ, which surpassed knowledge, that you may be filled with the fullness of God.

 

Part Three - The Three Main Branches of Christianity Today 

What has gone before is an interpretation of the points that, substantially at least, Christians hold in common. For roughly half its history the church remained substantially one institution. Starting in 1054, however, great divisions began to occur. Our concern now is to try to understand the central perspectives of Christendom's three great branches.

I. Roman Catholicism

A. Authority

God, of course is the ultimate "Authority", for only God is the "author," the source and origin of all that is.

Mary, because of her "yes" to God's invitation that she become the mother of his Son is the first and greatest disciple, with an authority transcending all other authority in the Church.

The Church is a family - a new family - and there is authority within the family. Peter, who was publicly selected by Jesus to be chief shepherd of the flock, was the first "Papa" - Pope. The mantle which fell upon Peter has been passed on to his successors for two millennia.

However, the authority of the "petrine" office of the Pope is not tied to the actual building of the Vatican City. The living center of the Church is found in every tabernacle of the world where, in the sacrament of the Eucharist, Christians encounter Christ's "Real Presence"

B. The Sacraments  ( "An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace" - Johnson)

1. Baptism - In baptism, as in confession and later in anointing the body as it approaches death, the Church extends Jesus' mission of forgiving sins through the ages.

2. Eucharist - In the Eucharist, communion is established between God and man. This "communion" is at the very heart of the Church.

The Eucharist is a "standing miracle" effected at every Mass celebrated in the world, for in it, Catholics believe, the bread and wine are actually transformed into the very "body, blood, soul, and divinity" of Jesus Christ, the living link between heaven and earth.

3. Confession

4. Anointing the body as it approaches death

5. Holy Orders - The Eucharist (and all other of the sacraments?) can be celebrated only by a successor of the apostles or his ordained representative. Even though the entire Catholic Church is a "nation of priests", a "priestly people", there are men chosen from the community to live the hierarchical priesthood for the community. They are elevated to this by the sacrament of Holy Orders.

6. Confirmation - Recalling the Holy Spirit sent upon the early Church at Pentecost, the anointing of confirmation introduces a youth into the ongoing priesthood of the faithful.

7. Marriage - The sacrament of marriage offers the promise that human desire can phase into the love of God. This most natural and human of institutions shares in the very life of Heaven and reveals something of the perfect and fruitful love of Heaven to earth.

II. Eastern Orthodoxy

Generalizing on the differences, we can say that the Latin Church stresses the development of Christian doctrine, whereas the Greek Church stresses its continuity.

A. The Corporate View of the Church - All Christians accept the doctrine that they are "members of one another". But it could be argued that the Eastern Church has taken this notion more seriously than either Roman Catholicism or Protestantism.

"One can be damned alone, but saved only with others" is a familiar adage in the Russian Church. The Holy Spirit enters every individual soul as a cell in in the Mystical Body of Christ. But individual cells cannot survive without other cells to work with.

B. Mystical Emphasis - Mysticism figures more prominently in the East than in the West. The Roman Church neither urges nor discourages its cultivation.

The Eastern Church, on the other hand, actively encourages the mystical life. Because the supernatural world intersects and impregnates the world of sense throughout, it should be a part of Christian life in general to develop the capacity to experience the glories of God's presence.

III. Protestantism

It is more Christian than Protestant. The bulk of its faith and practice it shares with Catholicism and Orthodoxy. However, it has two enduring themes:

A. Justification by Faith - Faith, in the Protestant conception, is not simply a matter of belief, an acceptance of knowledge held with certainty yet not on evidence.

To be truly faith it must include a movement of the affections in love and trust, and a movement of the will in desire to be an instrument of God's redeeming love. It is participating in God's infinite love for people.

B. The Protestant Principle - Stated philosophically, it warns against making absolute the relative. Stated theologically, it warns against idolatry.

God transcends all the limitations and distortions of finite existence, therefore. every human claim to absolute truth or finality must be rejected.

The chief Protestant idolatry has been bibliolatry. In a sense the Bible is, for Protestants, ultimate. In its account of God's working through Israel, through Christ, and through the early church, we find the clearest picture of God's great goodness and see how human beings may find new life in fellowship with the Divine. It is ultimate in the sense that when human beings read this record of God's grace with true openness and longing for God, God stands at the supreme intersection between the Divine and the human. There, more than anywhere else in the world of time and space, people have the prospect of catching, not with their minds alone but with their whole beings, the truth about God and the relation in which God stands in their lives.

However, the word of God must speak to each individual soul directly. No derivative interpretation by councils, peoples, or theologians can replace or equal this. It is this that accounts for the Protestant emphasis on the Bible as the living word of God.

It follows that each individual's vision of God must at least be limited and possibly be quite erroneous. How much better then, to recognize it and open the door to corrections of the Holy Spirit working through other minds than to saddle Christendom with what is in fact limited truth masquerading as finality.

As Jesus himself says, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth."

One very important reason for restricting loyalty to nothing but the never-fully-comprehensible transcendent God is to keep the future open.

Coda 

One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat to one side and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful. I experienced that excitement often in writing this book.  I turned to my computer each morning, wondering what excitement was going to fall into my lap that day.  More days than not something did, and it would feel as if it had dropped into my lap from heaven.

Not many Christians today have been blessed by being as indelibly imprinted by Christianity as I have, and it prepared me to tell the Christian story from the inside.

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