Christianity spread like wildfire in the first few centuries CE—when it was illegal and punishable by a horrible death. Today, mainline churches are aging, shrinking, and dwindling. What was it that caught on to such a phenomenal degree in the early Roman Empire? What happened to the Christian message today? What is the Christian message?
There is a story in Acts about an Ethiopian eunuch who heard the Christian message from Philip, while riding home in his chariot. They even passed by some water in the desert, and the Ethiopian asked to be baptized in it. What was Philip’s message that so impressed the Ethiopian? All Acts says is that Philip told him the good news about Jesus. The earliest Christian message was, “He is risen!” And I doubt that much Christian doctrine had evolved by the time of Philip’s conversation with the Ethiopian.
We have lots of doctrine now. Swedenborg wrote 30 volumes of doctrine. Then there’s the Church Fathers, the Catholic History of doctrines which they call the Catholic Tradition, Luther’s body of writings, Calvin, Westley, and all sorts of other Christian theologians.
And consider the setting of the Acts story. The conversion of the Ethiopian occurred while they were riding on a chariot in the desert. They weren’t in a magnificent cathedral. They weren’t in a simple chapel. The conversation happened in the midst of their life situation.
Mainline churches and even Jewish synagogues do pretty close to the same thing. There are Bible readings, prayers, and a sermon. People mostly sit there and listen, while the priest, minister, or rabbi preaches to the congregation. It’s all very passive. True, people do sing hymns, and recite psalms. But I wonder if the problem with contemporary Christianity is the form, and not the content. The way church services go, rather than the message of Jesus.
I can’t imagine that people have changed that much since Roman times. I can’t imagine that the message of Jesus isn’t relevant. In ancient Rome, there were temples everywhere, and people even sacrificed to the “spirit” of things like road intersections, rivers and sacred places, woods, and the Roman gods. I heard a scholar say that pretty nearly everywhere in ancient Rome was sacred—woods, temple grounds, rivers, roads, lakes, everything. Were the ancient Romans more tuned to religion than we are now?
Maybe. Science took over in the 19th and 20th centuries, including psychology. Science gives us a world view that doesn’t need God. This would be unthinkable in Roman times. Even merchant ships sacrificed to Poseidon to give them safe travel. Psychology has taken upon itself the task of legislating morality to us. Psychology has taught us to be vulnerable, to be open, to express our anger, to seek self-gratification, self-expression, self-fulfillment, and also to love and work. But psychology’s message doesn’t include God, says nothing about God as the grounding for morality, as a soft science, is not spiritual. Then there is the legacy of the Enlightenment and Immanuel Kant. The upshot of Kant’s philosophy is that we don’t need revealed scripture, or even God, or religions, because reason can lead us into moral behaviors. All these forces have made the message of religion less relevant.
But there is still a large percentage of people today who call themselves spiritual but not religious. Spirituality has not diminished even if religions have. Why are spiritual people saying that they are not religious? Maybe it is because what they think religion means. On the simplest level, maybe religion conjures up images of sitting in a building listening to a preacher talking at you. Then there are some of the doctrines that have evolved over the centuries and millennia. Christians teach that God gets angry at humans, that God punishes, that God calls for genocide, that God murders unbelievers, that God casts the wicked into hell. These are behaviors that we disapprove of in humans—in fact, these are behaviors that Christians teach believers not to do, and yet God does them. If I believed these things, I wouldn’t be religious either. But my God is loving, is all love, can do nothing but love, forgive, and seek to make humans happy. Maybe my beliefs aren’t all that Biblical, but they are Swedenborgian.
The Christian message I hear, and I believe, is the message of love. God loves, Jesus loves, and we are invited to love God and to love one another. That message is in all the Gospels, which were written in the first century CE. It is likely that that message was told to the Ethiopian. This message of love was taught in a time when people were murdered in the Coliseum for entertainment. A time when roads were lined with people being crucified. When gladiators killed to entertain the masses. This society heard the message of love and Christianity flourished as an underground movement. If a society like that of ancient Rome responded to the Christian message of love, would an enlightened society like ours respond less?
I don’t think the message of love falls on deaf ears today. I don’t think that science has rendered us dead to spirituality completely. Though apathy is widespread today, I believe that people still care. I think that the problem with Christianity today is that the original message has gotten buried under human thinking and church traditions. Philip converted the Ethiopian on his chariot. If Christianity can integrate with the workaday world, perhaps it will resurrect. I don’t think the Christian message means sitting facing the altar listening to p preacher hold forth. It can mean that, for those who like it, but doesn’t have to be. Then there are all those messages of hate in the name of the church that turn people off. I think the message of love is still relevant. While churches are dwindling, I’m not sure that the Christian message is.
David Fekete 