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LOOKING FOR GOD, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, DECLINE OF RELIGION
Looking for God, Christianity today, decline of religion, does God exist, the Montanist controversy, history of Christianity, Jesus Christ Superstar or ordinary Man.
The results of this new hierarchy was that, for the first time, there were Christians who did not have direct access to the people who had been closest to Jesus. However, all bishops did have to be appointed by the apostles, and after the death of the apostles, new bishops could only be appointed by three existing bishops. In this way, it was hoped to maintain the concept of a traceable link back to Jesus, and thus underpin the authority of bishops and their deacons. This was later to prove a worry to Irenaeus who was concerned that the ancestry of some bishops might not be traceable back to apostolic times.12
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Christianity today.
The rapid growth of the Church in the first and second centuries increased the problems associated with maintaining authority and discipline. In small congregations, such matters could easily be handled, just as they can be in domestic household situations. But as numbers grew, there were inevitably some members who were only loosely attached to the Church and whose commitment was not so great. Wherever there is authority, there are always those who will question that authority, and as Christianity expanded, it took in people who were intellectual, thinking, and questioning. All this was, of course, happening at the same time as what authority there was in the Church was becoming more and more diffused and diverse. Thus began a trend whereby authority and discipline have continued to become increasingly necessary, whilst the Church's basic authority structure of bishop, priest, and deacon has nevertheless remained relatively unchanged.
The effects of this trend can be seen if we compare the diversity of problems faced by the Church today with the first controversies of Christians as embodied in the Council of Jerusalem of AD49. By the time of the Council of Jerusalem, it was clear that whatever was the source of authority within Christianity, it had to set acceptable limits on three issues: what Christians should believe, how they should worship, who should be admitted to the faith. Today, these are still the three key issues, but diversity of choice over belief and worship has increased dramatically due to the increased knowledge of our world which will be considered later.
The Council of Jerusalem met in response to disagreements over who should be admitted to Christianity and to what extent Jewish laws should influence Christianity. Thus it dealt with issues such as whether Christians should adopt the Jewish customs of circumcision and dietary prohibitions, and whether Gentiles should be admitted to the faith. In other words, the authorities of the Church were meeting to decide how the Church should respond to the challenges and problems faced by Christianity at this time. The root of these problems lay in the fact that none of the Church's sacraments was introduced by Jesus, and hence there was no single source of guidance as to their administration. It should be remembered that Jesus was the object of a religion founded after his death, rather than the founder of an established and ordered Church, and so paid no attention to such administrative matters. In the matter of Montanism, for example it would be difficult to gauge what Jesus' reaction would have been.
But at least for the early Christians, Jesus' teaching was immediately compatible with their existing beliefs about, for example, the created world and the coming of a Messiah as prophesied in the Old Testament. Today, however, the whole question of God and creation (the starting point of Christianity) can be called into question. It is this which has caused some of the biggest challenges to the Church's teaching, and thereby its authority, in the past few centuries.
Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, identifies three movements which have transformed the Christian faith in the West since the seventeenth century.13 The most challenging of these movements is the rise of the natural sciences, the origins of which can be found in the Renaissance. Galileo presented the Church with a major problem when he announced that the earth was not in fact at the centre of the universe as had been thought before. Interestingly, however, there was nothing in catholic teaching to say that the earth was central to the universe; it was simply that the Church was defending the ideas of Aristotle whom it had once condemned! Galileo won the argument despite his retraction of his theory, which meant that for the first time the Church was shown to be subject to another authority: the findings of experimental science. It would not have been so bad if the Church had had good cause to reject Galileo's ideas rather than merely the fact that he contradicted Aristotle. The greatest consequence of this dispute was that it set the tone of things to follow: from now on, such questions could not be settled by looking to a recognised authority like the Church, but would have to be resolved by proper experimental testing. Just as the coming to Christianity of more learned men in the early centuries had given rise to heresy and schism, so the rapid and ubiquitous growth in knowledge of this time was posing similar difficulties for Christianity.
Whilst Galileo did little to challenge the Church's teaching, the discoveries of Isaac Newton did, for it was Newton who established the laws of mechanics. In doing so, he introduced the idea that objects obey simple mathematical laws of nature and that their movements can be explained by these laws. The problem for the Church was that if these laws explained all the movements of physical bodies in the world by reference to such small particles as atoms, there seemed to be little room left for God to operate in the world. The problem was that if physics gave explanations to all occurrences in the world, God had no purpose and had not had since creating the world in the first place. Having reached this stage, it would not take much to challenge the idea of God creating the world and mankind at all. And then the whole question of God's existence would be very much in the balance. This inevitable development was begun by Charles Darwin, who shifted the enquiries of science from the sphere of the physical world to that of humanity itself.
It is generally accepted that people conceived the idea of gods and God largely to explain the baffling complexities of the world, all of which seemed to exist by chance. What Darwin did with his theory of evolution was to explain scientifically how all the world's complex life-forms could have come to exist. This represented a major challenge to the Christian belief that God had created Man in his own image, intending him to be just the way he was. For people of this time, discovering that there were in fact descendants of monkeys and not specially created beings raised all sorts of questions about the validity of their religion, as well radically challenging their own perceptions of their place within the created world.
Since this time, Christianity has had to undergo considerable reinterpretation. In answer to the problem of Newtonian science, Ward says that we are still left with the question of how the universe came to be in existence in the first place, and how we can account for the consciousness, imagination and rationality of human beings. Any view (such as Newton's) which does not encompass this is:
"...a profoundly alienating view, leaving human beings as aberrant mistakes in a vast impersonal and purposeless machine." 14
We, as a species, then are an unaccountable anomaly in a mechanical world, if Newton's theories are to be accepted unquestioningly. The result of this, Ward says, is that we have taken on an instrumentalist view of our world, with the consequent belief that we can use the world and its resources for our own purposes. Religion itself, with reference to the creation account in Genesis has often been blamed for this, but Ward counters this by saying that the Biblical story tells of mankind holding the world in trust and being responsible to God. Thus, this new scientific understanding has challenged Christianity in two ways: firstly by devaluing the importance of God in the natural world; and secondly by bringing about a willingness to exploit the environment, the justification for which has been said to be discernible within the Christian account of the origins of the world.
What Ward believes is supported by David Edwards15. He says that unless the findings of science are interpreted in the way they were by materialists in the eighteenth and nineteenth, they cannot destroy belief in God. In fact, many of science's discoveries have strengthened the case for God's existence.16 The concept of the big bang is capable of inspiring great religious awe. The sheer magnitude of our universe, together with the realisation that the volume of what we do not know about must surely outweigh the volume of that which we do know about, means there is still plenty of room for God in our understanding of life. On the whole, then, it appears that science is a challenge not so much to Christianity itself, but to the Church and its authority and right to be dogmatic in its teachings and views.
More recently, the breakdown of strictly mechanical Newtonian physics (thanks to men like Faraday and Einstein) has caused a reappraisal of both science and religion. With most scientists now admit that there is still plenty that is undiscovered and unexplained, science has lost its initial optimism and arrogance. This means that the universe can now be seen in a Darwinian aspect as an evolving mass, where human beings are points of conscious growth within this "organic, value-directed process"17. As a result, the challenge to religion has been lessened, and ideas have evolved to meet these new challenges. The key to the nature of things lies not in the past, but in the future of our emergent universe. Previously, the views of the Church had been given authority by tracing them back to antiquity - to a primeval revelation which had been passed on from generation to generation. This is an example of the way in which the Christian revelation can be said to be eternal and universal whilst at the same time being culturally mediated. It is only by recognising the need for constant change and reinterpretation that institutional Christianity can uphold an authority among its followers.
However, there is another area in which the traditional authority of the Church has been challenged by science, and where the Church has not responded so well: morality. Before Newton's machine model of the earth, morality was simply about obeying the divine commands of God; but with the demise of God, the concept of morality being about obedience to God's imperatives diminished rapidly.
Today, matters are even more complicated by scientific and sociological developments of the last fifty years which mean that it is possible to interfere with and adapt natural processes such as birth and reproduction. The Church has been especially slow to respond to new controversies in sexual ethics. Furthermore, although both Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism rely on the Bible, creeds, and the teachings of the early Fathers and councils to establish their teachings18, the nature of the teachings varies markedly between the two traditions. In the Anglican Church it is difficult to find set teachings on matters such as homosexuality or divorce, whilst in the Catholic Church what teaching there is is dogmatic and uncompromising. This difference exists because the Catholic Church has a system of rules known as canon law. The teachings of the Roman Church on specific matters can always be found in canon law, but in the Anglican Church, there is no equivalent system.
The presence of canon law means that it is easy to find clear-cut definitions of how Catholic people should live and respond to contemporary moral issues. However, the problem is that, by its definition, canon law is highly legalistic. (A similarity exists here with the previously mentioned style of teaching used by the scribes of Jesus' time). It is easy to find examples of how the Catholic authority of canon law has been challenged in modern times. Society has changed dramatically in the last hundred years. Women have shaken off the stereotypes associated with years of subservience, and people have a new awareness of sexual behaviour. Edwards sees the latter as a result of the first. As women have been liberated from a life of simply meeting the physical and emotional needs of men, they have begun to insist that they and not their families should choose their husbands; contraceptives have made it easier for these newly liberated women to have sex outside marriage, and abortion has meant that an unplanned pregnancy will not constrain a woman to an unwanted life of motherhood.19 Yet Christianity responds to these changes with documents such as The Catholic Church's Declaration on Sexual Ethics of 1975 which shows complete indifference to the findings of scientists, psychologists, and sociologists in the field of sexual behaviour. As a result, the Church becomes viewed as a prohibitive and prejudiced body. What it should be doing, according to John Shelby Spong20 is looking at ways in which sexual activity can enhance life in the circumstances of this century seeking to bring together "sexual activity and the fullness of life"21. What he is calling for is continuous reappraisal of ideas of the type referred to in the previous section on the rise of science.
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12 Hall, Stuart Doctrine and Practice in the Early Church SPCK, 1991 pp.59-61
13 Ward, Keith A Vision to Pursue SCM, 1991 pp.134ff
14 A Vision to Pursue, p.137
15 The Reverend David Edwards has held posts as Provost of Southwark, and as editor of the SCM Press. He has contributed on a regular basis to Church Times and has written much on church history.
16 Edwards, David L. The Futures of Christianity Hodder & Stoughton, 1987 pp.337ff
17 A Vision to Pursue, p.147
18 Authority in the Church, p.16
19 The Futures of Christianity, pp.349-350
10 Writing as Episcopal Bishop of Newark
21 Spong, John Shelby Living In Sin? Harper & Row, 1988 p.226
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