Is the Church Even Remotely "Christian"?

Bell correctly notes (many times) that God is love. He also observes that Jesus is Jewish, the resurrection is important, and the phrase “personal relationship with God” is not in the Bible. He usually makes his argument by referencing Scripture. He is easy to read and obviously feels very deeply for those who have been wronged or seem to be on the outside looking in.

Pastor Kevin DeYoung
from his blog post: A Review of "Love Wins"

I read an interview with a scholar recently in which he talked about the patronizing concept of the Jewishness of Jesus. I’m not precisely sure what he had in mind as the interview did not get specific enough on this point and I have not read enough of this scholar’s work to be sure what opinions he holds. I do know one complaint he had: people who say their historical presentation of Jesus is a Jewish Jesus and then proceed to explain how Jesus is radically different from their notion of the Judaism of his time.

Derek Leman
from his blog post: Jewish Jesus.

A few days ago, I posted an article on this blog called Who Gets to Define Christianity?. It was my "rant" about how the argument over Rob Bell's new book Love Wins seems to have given Evangelical Christian pastors a license to define the particulars of the Christian faith for the rest of us, including those of us who aren't specifically attached to evangelicalism. Among other things this morning, I read Derek Leman's blog (one of them anyway...he has many) and started wondering if the actual, lived person we call "Jesus" would recognize anything about how we express our worship of him today?

That question may come as a shock to some of you, while others may just assume that the church today bears little resemblance to what the Jewish Messiah taught his disciples in the ancient Middle East 20 centuries ago.

What is Christianity? That may seem like a question with a simple answer, but it's not really. To answer the question, we have to take what the Jewish Messiah established as an expression of the living essence of God and the Torah, and then filter it through all of the defining acts and events that have occurred since the birth, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Once Jesus handed off the torch to his Jewish disciples, who then brought in just a boatload of non-Jewish disciples, who then established "the church", what has changed?

Not being a historian, I can't answer that question with any sense of authority, but I do know that we don't have an unadulterated and unchanged way of understanding and responding to Jesus from the time of the original Apostles. I know there are movements, such as the Eastern Orthodox Christian church, who believe they represent an unbroken chain of understanding and faith from the days of Peter and Paul, but I don't believe this is true.

If it were true, then Christian worship and belief as expressed in those churches, would look remarkably "Jewish"...and it doesn't.

There's no indication in the Bible (here's where I'm going to get into trouble) that there was a specific understanding of God as a "Trinity", yet the Eastern Orthodox church holds such a doctrine. There is also significant use made of iconic images and objects which, based on the commandment, You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. (Exodus 20:4), would have made all of the original Jewish Apostles bristle. I really think Paul would have told all of the non-Jewish disciples to ditch the statues.

I don't want to hammer the Eastern Orthodox church or any other faith group, but I do want to illustrate that I don't believe any modern church institution can trace their worship and doctrine directly back to Jesus with absolutely no change in form or substance. In fact, I think there have been just a ton of changes.

Without going into a lot of detail, it seems that several centuries after Peter, Paul, and the rest of the Jewish Apostles had shuffled off this mortal coil, a bunch of non-Jewish guys got together and made some rather defining decisions about what Christianity was and wasn't. As early as about 150 C.E., a group of men we call "the church fathers" (Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and so on) generated various teachings and writings designed to "defend the faith" as it were.

Of course, the "biggie" as far as defining Christianity in the early centuries of the Post-Jesus era, are a number of "councils" instituted by the Emperor Constantine, most notably the Council of Nicea, which created the concrete "creeds" of the church. These are the "what we believe" parts of Christianity, much of which we still practice today. In 380 C.E., Emperor Theodosius, by law, made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, pretty much sealing the deal, since the Empire (and a bunch of subsequent Empires) and the Holy Roman Catholic church would meld conquest, colonization, and evangelizing into one package and export it to the rest of the world.

OK, I know what you're thinking. What about the Protestant Reformation? True. Much of what we understand Christianity to be today was put into place by Martin Luther in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Like I said. I'm no historian and I don't want to try and list all of the details these various individuals and groups instituted over the long stretch of time, but I do want to make a simple point.

The vast, vast majority of changes made to the original practices and understandings of who God is and who we are as disciples of the Jewish Messiah were made a long time (on the order of centuries) after Jesus ascended to sit at the right hand of the Father. The vast, vast majority of these decisions were made by guys who weren't Jewish and who, given the schism that occurred between Gentile Christianity and Judaism, probably didn't even like Jews (Martin Luther for instance, was a rabid anti-semite). Taking all that into consideration, what makes you think that what we have today as Christian worship, theology, and doctrine, even remotely resembles the original intent of the Jewish Messiah for his Jewish and Gentile disciples?

I know this isn't exactly the first time this question has been asked, but given recent developments in modern, American Christianity as far as defending their position and their teachings in relation to, for instance, Rob Bell's book, I think it's a point that needs to be stated again (and again and again).

I don't think we're "getting it".

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.