Most of us were introduced to Christianity backward.
We learned what Christianity eventually became and then
assumed that this was essentially what Christians had believed from the
beginning. We read the New Testament through doctrines formulated centuries
later, and we often imagine the earliest Christian movement as remarkably
unified: Jesus taught the apostles, the apostles taught the churches, and the
churches faithfully preserved a single body of Christian doctrine.
History is considerably more interesting than that.
During the first and second centuries, followers of Jesus
were wrestling with enormous questions. Who exactly was Jesus? What happened in
the resurrection? What did salvation mean? How should the Hebrew Scriptures be
understood? What was the relationship between Jesus and the God of Israel? What
did Paul mean by Christ living within the believer?
Different Christian communities did not always answer those
questions in the same way.
Paul's letters reveal arguments taking place while
Christianity was still in its infancy. The Gospel of John presents Jesus and
the Logos in language quite different from what we encounter in the Synoptic
Gospels. By the second century, figures such as Marcion, Valentinus, Justin
Martyr, and others were offering dramatically different interpretations of
Christ, scripture, creation, and salvation.
Eventually some interpretations became orthodox and others
became heretical.
But those categories can obscure something important. Before
there was an established orthodoxy capable of defining its boundaries, there
was a remarkably diverse spiritual and intellectual movement attempting to
understand what had happened through Jesus.
That realization does not require us to conclude that
Christianity was invented or that Jesus was insignificant. I have increasingly
come to the opposite conclusion.
Something extraordinary appears to have happened.
The resurrection proclamation emerged very early. People
became convinced that death did not have the final word. Communities spread
throughout the Mediterranean world. Paul described an experience of the risen
Christ powerful enough to redirect his life. John's Gospel eventually expressed
the meaning of Christ through the extraordinary concept of the Logos—the divine
Word or Reason through which creation itself comes into being.
Perhaps the mistake is assuming that the significance of
Jesus must be confined to the theological framework that eventually won the
doctrinal debates.
What if the resurrection points toward something profound
about humanity's eternal nature?
What if Jesus' revelation of God as Father points toward
something equally profound about our identity as children of the Divine?
And what if the Logos is not merely something Christians
must find outside themselves, but a divine reality in which humanity already
participates?
These questions open Christianity in a very different
direction.
The traditional Christian understanding of Jesus as Savior
does not necessarily have to disappear. For millions of people, that language
expresses something deeply meaningful about their relationship with Christ. But
it may not exhaust what the Christ event means.
The Cosmic Christ can be larger than any single theory of
salvation.
Someone does not necessarily have to begin by being told
that they are a sinner separated from God before Jesus can have meaning for
them. The story can also begin with divine participation, awakening,
transformation, resurrection, and the discovery of our relationship with the
Father.
That possibility becomes easier to see when we temporarily
set aside later theological boundaries and enter the strange, creative,
contested world of the first Christians.
That is the world I wanted to explore in Before
Christianity Became Orthodoxy.
The book is not an attempt to replace one rigid orthodoxy
with another. It is an invitation to look again at the evidence, encounter some
of Christianity's forgotten possibilities, and ask a question that has
fascinated me throughout this project:
What might Christianity have become if some of those
early conversations had remained open?
If this exploration interests you, Before Christianity
Became Orthodoxy is available on Gumroad.
