Meaning Lost: 5 Boring Christianity

Our last article on context touched upon how Christian teaching tends to shape the translation of Jesus’s words. Christian teaching changes over time. The ideas in the fourth century when the Vulgate was translated were different than those in the seventeenth century when the KJV was translated. Both are different than what is preached today, which is the force behind most newer Gospel versions. As discussed in a very early article, Jesus’s words are the only standard measure we have for evaluating all such teachings, which is why accurate translation is so important.

Why Christianity Became Boring

The reason is simple. The seventeenth century traditions are shopworn and outdated, more suited to burning witches than leading productive lives. People no longer fear hell because a loving God would not create hell. These outdated ideas are easily attacked by atheists and socialists. But hell and sin are deeply baked into our translations of the text because they were the fashion when the King James Version was made. Unfortunately, nothing is going to make these ideas interesting again today.

The conflating of Christianity with modern culture is also boring. The Divine has been conflated with “love.” We should be good, nice, and fair to each other. This is agreed upon in almost all religions. No one needs to hear what we all agree upon.

Neither of these are “good news.” They are “old news.”

Early Christianity was a hotbed of debate about “truth.” Jesus’ sayings are more appropriate for contemplation, confusion, and debate than a catechism that gives all the answers. Historically, the answers came much later as Christianity adapted to what was relevant at the time. This was not necessarily what people need, but what the religion needed.

The Early Church

The only time we had a clear, short summary of Christian beliefs was when the early church evolved. The earliest version of the Apostle's Creed, the basis of the later Nicene Creed, dates back to Irenaeus in about 200 AD. All the early creeds, including the Nicene, were written in Greek. Irenaeus described these beliefs as receive from the apostles. Here is one translation of :

[The Church believes] in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, and the advents, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and His [future] manifestation from heaven in the glory of the Father [...] and that He should execute just judgment towards all; [...] but may, in the exercise of His grace, confer immortality on the righteous.

Looking at this, everything in it connects to statements made by Jesus except his being born of a virgin. The Constantinople version of the Nicene Creed from 381 AD, added baptism, the forgiveness of sins, and that God was a Trinity, a big issue of debate at the time. Jesus never taught these ideas, but they were derived from what he had said and done.

The Seventeen Century

By the time the King James Version was written, Christianity no longer had a simple statement of belief. Instead we had a Catholic catechism and later Protestant ones. These catechisms were longer and provided a more complete explanation of life. Much of Christian focus then was on sin, the devil, hell, eternal damnation, purgatory, and an eternal reward. While Jesus certainly taught about rewards after death, the meaning of a number of Greek words had to be stretched and bent to create Jesus’s support for most of these ideas. (See these articles on the devil, evil, sin, hell, forgiveness of sin, and eternal.) Jesus’s concern was more on leading a valuable life rather than a worthless one. This emphasis on sin may have emerged in the fourteenth century during the Black Plague to explain why such a death was visited on Christian people. However, more recent plagues today have done nothing to revive it.

But thinking about this focus strategically, emphasizing sin and forgiveness was a great way to increase the church’s power at the time. This was so successful that the Church took it too far: to the selling of indulgences. This led to the Protestant Revolution, causing people to rethink their beliefs about the role of religion.

While we cannot discuss all the different doctrines that came out of Protestantism, there were two central ideas that united most Protestants against Catholics. One was the supremacy of the Bible over the dogma of religion, a view that generated the research at ChristsWords.com and these articles. The other was that salvation came from faith alone, not good works. Jesus’s words support both faith (trust), and good works. Living a productive life as opposed to a worthless one requires both.

Modern Christianity

Starting in the twentieth century, the reputation of Christianity began to sink in the minds of average people after the intelligentsia had been tearing it down for over a hundred years. In the minds of the young, traditional Christianity was focused on controlling people’s behavior, limiting their freedom. Many saw it controlling sexual freedom. In truth, Jesus said little about sex, but he taught that truth made us free and lies imprisoned us. His teaching about sex focuses on what is the truth about sex and what is a lie. Is fixing the relationship a better choice than ending it?

Out of the idea that religion was against freedom, a new form of Christianity evolved, emphasizing “love.” Jesus support of the importance of “love” is certain, but his “love” did not equate to our modern concept. He talked about two different kinds of love (see this article): the obligations we have to care for some, and the enjoyment we have in the company of some. We want both in our lives, but this caring and liking was never extended the the whole world. Our caring is for those nearby, those we can affect with our own actions. Our enjoyment of others is not an obligation but a gift. This was perverted into the idea that we should care for the whole world and enjoy every behavior. This became the basis for many forms of socialism where the state, not the Divine, was supreme.

Out of these modern views, a new form of belief, based on Christianity. evolved and, interestingly enough, it was largely shared by young people of all religious faiths. In the 2005 book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, the sociologist Christian Smith and Melinda Denton surveyed a vast swath of American youth. The teenagers included Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist, Hindu, Buddhist, and so on. They found their religious beliefs were surprisingly similar. They named this belief moralistic therapeutic deism. It sees the Divine as the source of morals as natural law and our need for a more personal therapeutic Divine when we are in trouble.

This view only had five simple beliefs: