What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (25 page)

And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air;

 

I’ve met Christians over the years that were actually smug about this. They are confident that non-believers will have to face the Tribulation while—
foosh!—
they happily vanish. Hugely successful books and videos, like the depressingly popular
Left Behind
series, traffic in this nonsense. They sift through Scripture and seize upon this one verse as a landmark event of the Last Days to assure themselves that they’ll be spared the horrors of
Revelation
. They’ll simply beam up without warning, which means you never want one of them as your surgeon, your pilot, or your Commander in Chief.

Apocalypse How?

People love talking about the End of the World so much that there’s a special realm of study about it called eschatology. It’s one of those disciplines that attract both top-notch scholars and tinfoil hats. The imagination people apply to working out the details of Doomsday would make Walt Disney envious. It’s a subject of staggering complexity, not because a shred of it is true, but because it’s so much fun coming up with timelines for Judgment Day and then watching people go into a pious panic about it.

One tiny taste of this eschatology business is the loopy concept of Dispensationalism. Around 1819, an Irish minister with entirely too much time on his hands named John Nelson Darby sparked a movement that sees human history as a succession of “ages” in which God dispenses, or reveals, certain rules and expectations for man to meet. Each age has a holy purpose and is a step towards Judgment Day. The movement, in its many forms, has had a major influence on American fundamentalism and, through them, on U.S. foreign policy.

Dispensationalists adhere to three basic points: First, biblical prophecies, even in the Old Testament, should be read literally. (Right away we’re in trouble.) Second, God distinguishes between the “church” and “Israel.” The “church” is everyone who has accepted Jesus since the first Pentecost. “Israel” refers to the seed of Abraham (I think they call them Jews) for whom the covenants of the Old Testament still count. Both groups will be saved, but in distinct ways, and they’ll continue to be distinct throughout eternity. Separate but equal. Third, each dispensation is done for the greater glory of God…and God is
very
into glory.

Usually, these religious futurists break history down into seven dispensations:

     1. Innocence: from the Creation to the Fall of Man

     2. Conscience: from the Fall to Noah’s Flood

     3. Human Government: from the Flood to Abraham

     4. Promise: from Abraham to Moses

     5. Law: from Moses to Jesus

     6. Grace: the Church Age/from Jesus to the present

     7. Kingdom: the Millennium/the thousand-year reign of Christ

In each age, God reveals something new and tests our obedience. For instance, Noah’s dispensation after the Flood was to “be fruitful and multiply” …one of the more delightful dispensations to obey. Of course, our present age is located right on the eve of the Apocalypse. The current Church Age ends with a seven-year Tribulation, when God will pull out his cosmic can of whoop-ass. After this comes the Kingdom—the thousand-year Millennium when Jesus will rule the world and the saved will live happily in a theocratic utopia.

But at what point in this series of events will Jesus appear? At the start of the Millennium or at the end? Whole schools of thought, if you can call any of this thought, are dedicated to such questions, and none of them are easy to pronounce.

Pre-tribulational Premillennialism
—Jesus will return at the
start
of the Tribulation, then comes the Millennium, and then the Last Judgment.

Post-tribulational Premillennialism
—Jesus will return at the
end
of the Tribulation but
before
the Millennium. At the end of the Millennium comes the Last Judgment.

Post-millennialism
—Jesus will return at the
end
of the Millennium at the same time as the Last Judgment.

Amillennialism
—the whole Millennium idea is just symbolic so don’t wait to see it. Jesus won’t return until the Last Judgment.

And on and on and
on
you can go with this stuff until the End of Time…or your patience.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Baptizing the West

Lead me not into temptation. I can find it myself.

—Anonymous

Preaching to the Unconverted

Okay, so we’re back again in the first century. The Christians have their savior, their Gospels, and their prophecies and, any day now, Jesus is coming back. But as the days turn into years, and the years into centuries, living life barefoot, broke, and celibate is not turning out to be the festival of joy many imagined. It’s impractical. On top of this, the years produce numerous new folktales about Jesus, many of which conflict with each other and some of which are truly bizarre. This is a problem. If every home-tooled visionary can have his own take on Jesus regardless of what his fellow Christians think, they won’t have a religion for long. They’ll have the Democratic Party. Christians have got to get organized.

Why a Church?

Well, somebody had to do it. A few guys pass the time hitting balls with a stick and it isn’t long before we’ve got leagues and commissioners and congressional investigations. Same deal with religion. You need an establishment to set the rules.

Left on its own, the Bible is like the salad bar at Sizzler—it offers such a variety of choices that you can tailor it to your liking. You can select a healthy mix of fruits and veggies, or you can lard on the Tater Tots and fried chicken wings and create a heart attack to go. Radically different results can come from the same source. Same with the Bible. Any bozo can assemble his own faith out of hand-picked passages if there is no authority to shape the big picture. Eventually, someone realized that individuals couldn’t be allowed to arbitrarily troll through Scripture and focus only on the self-serving verses they liked. That was a job for a church.

As “the rock” upon which Jesus said he’d build his church, the apostle Peter leads the most prominent of the early churches, in Jerusalem, and he eventually becomes the first Bishop of Rome, an office that will evolve into the papacy. It takes centuries before the Roman Church establishes formal authority over the others and, in the process, not a few bishops tell aspiring pontiffs to take a hike. But gradually, power and money accrue to an office that starts to think of itself as God’s exclusive mouthpiece.

Century One

For the first 100 years of the Christian era, The Way is an unwieldy movement, with splinter groups and homespun cults. Meetings are held in private homes, sometimes in secret. Over time, a hierarchy emerges with a bishop heading up each church. Heroes of the faith became saints, complete with biographies so sanitized the subjects practically pee perfume. Unfounded legends are invented, like the story of Peter being crucified and buried in Rome. The event is not in the Bible and there’s no evidence it happened, but it’s a handy rationale for moving the religion’s home base from the outback of Jerusalem to the Empire’s capital city. One version of the tale says Peter was crucified upside-down because he didn’t feel worthy to die as Christ did. Interesting that he had a choice in the matter.

The early Church adopts the no-frills aesthetics of Roman Stoics and some Greek philosophers. Christians are to exercise self-discipline, prayer, generosity, and fasting. They develop a legal system based on the Roman one, and they begin to standardize their rituals, prayers, and holidays. Towards the end of the century they also retarget their recruitment drive from Jews to Gentiles.

To spread the word, the Church promotes stories, poems, letters, and lectures in schools, libraries, temples and debating societies. In some homes the domestic slave, attracted to the underdog religion, will pass it on to the kids, and it filters up to the lady of the house, who breaks the news to dad one day that the family is now Christian. Yeah whatever, honey. Is dinner ready?

Not everyone is favorably impressed by the new faith, however. Guys like Tacitus who, as we saw, was one of the first outside the Bible to mention Christians, regards them as superstitious fanatics with “shameful and degraded practices.”

Century Two

As Christianity grows from a dozen wandering sages to a loosely-defined subculture, it becomes more complicated and less, well, Christian. Feuding bishops engage in professional rivalries, political intrigues, cultural schisms, and even civil wars over who knows Jesus best. It’s not quite Shiites vs. Sunnis but it’s the same idea. Each bishop claims exclusive authority over his church and over interpretation of the Gospels.

There are many upstart cults, but they break down into two broad categories: the Mythicists—those who read the Gospels as moral folktales, and the Literalists—those who read the Scripture like it was the morning news. For the latter group, virgin birth is a reality and the Eucharist actually transubstantiates into the flesh of Christ. Maybe they invented dental floss. Nobody wants Jesus stuck in his teeth.

Despite their savior’s nickname, the “Prince of Peace,” early Christians spend a lot of time fighting over the endless interpretations of their diamond-in-the-rough religion. Just about everything we know about early Christianity comes through the filter of these characters, and some of them loaded on some major baggage.

Ignatius of Antioch
(ca. 50–110) was a bishop, and supposedly a student of the apostle John. That made him one of the few Church fathers who knew someone who knew Jesus. He was among the first to quote the Gospels. Early in the second century, he was condemned to die in the Colosseum and, en route to his demise, he wrote seven letters that influenced early Christian theology.

He advocated loyalty to your bishop, changing the Sabbath (Saturday) to the Lord’s Day (Sunday), and he was the first on record to use “Catholic” (meaning “universal”) in referring to his church. A fanatic about martyrdom, he famously said, “Allow me to be eaten by the beasts, which are my way of reaching to God. I am God’s wheat…so that I may become the pure bread of Christ.” Unfortunately, once he reached the Colosseum, he was toast.

Polycarp
(ca. 69–155) was another Church bishop who reportedly knew the apostle John. He preached against many rival sects that cropped up in the second century, he renounced financial dishonesty in the Church, and he died as a martyr for the faith in mid-century after almost being burned at the stake, and then stabbed. Tough crowd.

Justin Martyr
(ca. 100–165) argued for the faith against Roman skeptics in the mid-second century. While big on philosophy, he could be confusing and inconsistent, especially when it came to understanding the Old Testament. He claimed God wanted the Jews to be circumcised to identify them as Christ-killers. Apparently this was important to him.

Tatian
(110–180) was a protégé of Justin. In A.D. 144, he tried harmonizing the four Gospels to eliminate the contradictions. Didn’t really work. But his Gospels were used in some regions of the ancient world for several hundred years.

Tertullian
(ca. 160–220) was an important Church father from North Africa who said of biblical miracles, “
Credo quia incredibilis est.”
(I believe it because it is incredible.) Today he’d be in Vegas selling the picture of Jesus he found in his grilled cheese sandwich.

Marcion
(ca. 110–160) established a brand of the faith that, according to
The Catholic Encyclopedia
, became the greatest threat to Christianity in its history. For him, the vengeful warrior god of the Old Testament was not the true God, but an inferior deity. The
real
Almighty was revealed by Jesus, you see. To make his point, Marcion wrote
The Antitheses
, a manuscript that highlighted the contradictions between the Old and New Testaments. (Don’t you love books like that?)

Marcion set up an alternative hierarchy to the Roman Church, made himself a bishop, and developed a theology that seriously rivaled Catholicism. He believed Jesus’ appearance on earth was an illusion for our benefit, which made events like the virgin birth or the resurrection kind of meaningless. The Catholic Church got seriously fed up with this character, dubbed him a heretic, and excommunicated him. But, for a while, he really put the fear of God in the clergy.

Clement of Alexandria
(ca. 150–216) was a Church father who Christianized concepts borrowed from Plato and other philosophers—ideas like the
logos
(the belief in a rational universe) and
gnosis
(knowledge). Plato taught that philosophy strove to attain perfection through union with a higher Truth—which Clement saw as the Christian god. Clement taught that faith was the foundation of knowledge and that knowledge enriched and perfected faith.