What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (30 page)

Thomas Aquinas thought he could logically prove the existence of God, and he wrote five clever arguments to make that point. He employed Greek intellectual tools like the syllogism—the kind of three-step pocket logic you probably last used on an SAT test. Example: “Virtue deserves respect. Honesty is a virtue. Therefore, honesty deserves respect.” Or perhaps less abstract: “Disco sucked. The Village People recorded disco. Therefore, the Village People sucked.” Actually, this one works on several levels.

Aquinas painted Christian theology with a fresh coat of logic and lured thinkers away from Tertullian’s ravings about “I believe it because it sounds nuts.” Aquinas didn’t think there were serious conflicts between rational thought and divine revelation—which is why he could logically prove the existence of God.

Except he couldn’t. His five famous arguments are flawed and they’ve been refuted many times. Furthermore, his intellectual revolution would eventually hoist the Church by its own petard, and the Church had a big damned petard. If
anything
you could prove logically was true, what happens if you proved something that didn’t jibe with Scripture?

This is exactly what those ancient Greek manuscripts did on more than one occasion. Yet here was Aquinas giving permission to believe in them. Add to this one final ingredient: Gutenberg’s printing press, in 1439, which allowed copies of these ancient documents to spread all over Europe. The seeds of pagan knowledge were planted in the rationalist soil tilled by Aquinas, and they gradually brought forth a bumper crop of curiosity and skepticism. Logic based on nature rather than on Scripture became the new avenue to truth. People asked questions, found answers and, before you know it, they had a Renaissance on their hands.

Church fathers, however, feared that all this new thinking was playing with fire. One bishop had Aquinas excommunicated shortly after his death. It took another fifty years before they got around to making him a saint. For the religious gatekeepers, the “faith-before-reason” school of Augustine was still in session. They worried that Thomas had made room for heretical thought—which he had. But it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle.

Rebirth

The word Renaissance means “rebirth,” as in the rebirth of interest in the human mind and in worldly knowledge. The change that began in Italy in the early 1400s inaugurated the modern West—humanist, analytical, and ever-changing. At first, artists and writers had to be cagey about how they revived ancient Greek ideas. Sculptors carved pagan nudes, but gussied them up as biblical characters: Michelangelo’s
David
, or Mary and Jesus in his
Pieta
. Greek plays were reworked into Christian-themed dramas. Stargazers harmonized new observations with theology. It seemed to work at first.

The Church, however, saw trouble coming. Inevitably, somebody was going to cross the line and say something stupid or, more to the point, blasphemous. To head this off, the Church tried to regulate the flow of information. They esteemed intellectual ambition, but only within the bounds of religious belief. Initially, only the clergy were allowed to own Bibles. Later, heretical books were banned or burned, sometimes alongside their authors. But this could only go on for so long.

After awhile, it seemed like the Church was more concerned with its authority than with the facts. It had become enormously powerful, corrupt in some quarters, and kind of greedy. One famous method of raising cash was the selling of Indulgences—basically a get-out-of-jail-free card for a sin you hadn’t yet committed. It sounds like a good deal to me but, for serious Christians, it defeated the point. Repenting a sin meant vowing to never do it again. It was hard to make that case when you were buying a permission slip in advance for one more stab at debauchery.

Reformation—Like that was gonna help

The Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany was a prime example of where the Church seemed to have lost its way. It housed a huge trove of religious art and paraphernalia that was periodically put on display—a kind of Smithsonian for religious tourists. Among the 10,000-plus holy relics were, allegedly, straw from Christ’s manger and milk from the Virgin Mary herself. No joke. And get this: Each donation you made bought you one hundred fewer days in Purgatory
for every relic
in the church’s collection. Donate enough, help them buy enough items, and you could shave millennia off your time in the escrow of the afterlife once you died. A transparent sham.

Well, in 1517, ninety-five reasons for telling the Church where to stick its authority were nailed up at the Castle Church doorway. The guy who did it was a moody German monk named Martin Luther, who understandably thought that the marketing of forgiveness was a tad cynical. God’s grace was supposed to be free. You were supposed to deserve it, not afford it. The Church had made it a commodity for purchase.

In challenging all this, Luther launched what became the Protestant Reformation—the notion that the Church was no longer one-stop-shopping for everything you wanted to know about Jesus but feared hellfire to ask. You could be Christian without being a Catholic. It was a concept with legs. Luther, never one for diplomacy, went on to demonize the papacy itself and to equate it with the Beast of
Revelation
. He also rejected the celibate priesthood (at last) and he married a former nun. Luther had issues.

Of course, by breaking with the pope, Luther opened up a massive can of theological worms. It didn’t take long for this movement to proliferate a staggering number of revisions, spinoffs and sects with a baffling assortment of claims and beliefs. Was Scripture to be taken literally or was there wiggle room? Was salvation predestined or was it up to you? Are you justified by faith alone or did good works also count? Must rituals of worship be biblically prescribed or can you make up new routines?

This denominational diversification, if you will, would only get worse until it led to the present-day potpourri that includes Lutherans, Calvinists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Southern Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Quakers, Unitarians, Pentecostals, Puritans, Apostolics, Evangelicals, Charismatics, Mennonites, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, and hundreds of variations on each. To this you can add the Eastern and Oriental Churches, Anglicans, and thousands of modern concoctions tailored to every region, ethnicity, and political view. The result: Anyone wanting to get right with Jesus might as well throw a dart at a Bible and build a faith on whichever passage he hit. It’s what everyone else apparently did.

Not surprisingly, none of this went down well in Rome. Here was a hand basket and the world was officially going to hell in it.

Long story short—the Church responded to Luther with the counterreformation, a wave of Catholic revivalism that ignited civil wars across Europe and produced a more centralized organization, along with some of the most gaudy, overwrought religious artwork ever created. It was a melodramatic style called Baroque—the aggressively ornate art that gluts the Vatican. Imagine if your great aunt went shopping for ceramic dolls and doilies with the budget of the Pentagon.

Wars over who loved Jesus best raged between Catholics and Protestants for the next couple of centuries, the whole idea of doing what he said apparently having been lost.

In England, Henry VIII broke from Rome and, in 1533, founded what became the Church of England on the pretext that the stuffy old pope wouldn’t grant him a divorce. This launched a century of political intrigues, persecutions, and flat out murder fests before the country finally settled on Protestantism. You know you’ve arrived in this world when you can start your own church over a marital dispute and everyone has to take you seriously. In fact, if you
didn’t
take Henry seriously, you could be accused of treason, which would get you hanged, drawn and quartered. If you committed heresy against his church, you were burned. Like I said, people took him seriously.

Later, in 1584, a Catholic radical named Balthazar Gerard assassinated a Protestant royal named Prince William the Silent—which he certainly was after Gerard got through with him. In revenge, Gerard’s body was gouged with quill pens, and salt and vinegar were poured into the wounds. He was then stretched on the rack, his hands were cut off, and the bloody stumps were seared with hot irons. Then he was torn apart by horses.

In France, a Catholic country, Henry IV issued an edict of toleration for Protestants in 1610 to end a
thirty year
religious civil war. For his trouble he was assassinated by a Catholic. The assassin was subsequently tortured, his legs broken, his hand cut off, and hot oil poured into the wound. He was also torn apart by horses. These were all fights over who best understood Jesus, mind you.

Over in Spain, Philip II called for Catholics to assassinate heretical kings. Meanwhile, the religious infighting in Germany took out one third of the population—the same percentage as the Bubonic Plague.

Trying hard to sit on the sidelines of this madness was a growing subculture of scientific noodlers like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Half of them spent as much time on alchemy as they did on science. But they took the trouble to observe how nature operated instead of taking the Scripture’s word for it, and they described what they saw with geometry and math—two disciplines every bit as boring as religion but a lot harder to argue with.

Various churches tried to shut these guys up. Gradually, however, the so-called scientific revolution swept the West in the 17
^th
and 18
^th
centuries. Political leaders gradually lowered the volume on spiritual issues, realizing that science and engineering could increase efficiency, create new products, expand trade, and generate more cash. That sure beat shaking down the peasants with threats of hellfire. Technology and commerce boomed. Secular life flourished. Public officials paid less attention to bishops and more attention to merchants. The town center moved from the cathedral to the city hall. The modern world had arrived.

The intellectual movement that started with the discovery of those Greek documents in Arabic mosques reached its climax in the 18
^th
century—the Enlightenment—the era when the cult of Reason reached its zenith. The science and art of the ancients were studied, and then surpassed. Their playwrights and philosophers spurred revolutionary new ideas, and some of those spilled over into politics.

It was around this time that thirteen colonies of businessmen and farmers in North America broke away from mother England and set up shop on their own. Once they were independent, the colonists were faced with the question of what kind of government they wanted. They had lots of choices. Should it be a traditional Christian monarchy as in the countries of Europe? Or a theocracy as in ancient Israel? Or an empire such as Rome?

They scanned the millennia and reviewed all the major governments throughout history. For a time, they tried the loose structure of the Articles of Confederation. But that didn’t work out. They needed something stronger.

Then someone looked back to the same ancient Greeks who had given the West the Golden Age of Pericles and the Renaissance, and to a little experiment they had tried a long time ago in Athens. After 2,300 years, godless popular government was about to make a comeback.

CHAPTER EIGHT

America’s Pagan Values

There’s a phrase we live by in America:
“In God We Trust.”
It’s right there where Jesus would want it—on our money.

—Stephen Colbert

God’s Country?

“America is founded upon Christian Family Values.” How many times have we heard this mantra? It’s one of those nice, flexible statements that can mean anything you want because “Christian Family Values” can mean anything you want. Choose any side of any issue, find a Bible verse that seems to back you up, and suddenly your opinion is endorsed by Jesus Christ and should rightly become the law of the land.

So what’s wrong with that? How can you argue that America is anything but a Christian-based country? The Pilgrims were diehard Christians who sought religious freedom, right? The Founding Fathers were Christians who prayed for God’s help to win their revolution. The Declaration of Independence says men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” We say “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and “In God We Trust” is engraved on our currency. Millions of Americans think God’s judgment will arrive before their next Society Security check. Hell, we invented pickup gun racks and the dashboard Jesus. How much more Christian can you get?

Well, most Americans certainly call themselves Christians, and you can dig up plenty of quotes by America’s founders that appeal to God or, as they put it, “divine providence.” There’s no doubt they believed in God, and did so sincerely. But just because they prayed for guidance back in 1787 while hammering out the Constitution doesn’t mean Jesus gets the credit for it. Christians pray at the craps table, too. It doesn’t mean that if you roll a lucky seven, the Son of God was responsible.

Rejecting Traditional Values

The truth is, there is nothing remotely Christian about the American Constitution. It is not a product of Christian philosophy; it is in large part a rejection of it. You can’t argue that America is based on biblical principles just because the founders believed God was on their side.
Everyone
believes God is on their side: the colonists and King George III; the Union and the Confederacy; Germany and the Allies, Jews and Palestinians, terrorists and troops, and both teams at the Homecoming game. They all cite chapter and verse to prove they got the thumbs-up from heaven. No matter who wins, God gets the credit.