Brief Christian Histories: Getting a Sense of Our Long Story

Brief Christian Histories

Getting A Sense of Our Long Story

James W. White

Foreword by Brian McLaren

Icons by Melissa White Addington

Brief Christian Histories

Getting A Sense of Our Long Story

Copyright © 2014 James W. White. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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In Loving Memory of

LOREE ELIZABETH WHITE

Disciple of Christ — Woman of Prayer

March 5, 1912 — March 9, 2013

Acknowledgments

Blanche Dubois of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire famously said, I get by on the kindness of strangers. Me, I’ve made it through by the competence of acquaintances—steady friends, thoughtful students, princely scholars, empathetic colleagues, helpful writers, and loving family. These acquaintances generously critiqued the classes I taught, read the trial balloon manuscripts I generated, and suggested better big ideas and little words for this book. I am off-the-charts grateful for their wise words and red ink. By location here are the names of folk I remember contributing to historical-theological-ethical thought in these pages:

In Norman at the University of Oklahoma: Dean Lizsey, John Raines, Leslie Smith, and J. Clayton Feaver

In New Haven at Yale Divinity School: Harry Adams, Sydney Alstrom, Roland Bainton, James Gustafson, Paul Holmer, B. Davie Napier, and H. Richard Niebuhr

In Ft. Collins and at Colorado State University: Louise Cordsen, Bob Essig, Bob Geller, John Hallsten, George Purvis, and Harry Rosenburg

In Berkeley and at the Pacific School of Religion/GTU and the University of California: Robert Bellah, Dale Heckman, John Hsu, Charles McCoy, Wayne Rood, and Nevitt Sanford

In Denver at First Plymouth Congregational Church (UCC) and the University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology: Dick Anderson, Howard Brand, Allen Breck, Theodore Crane, Jim Davis, Linda Glenn (especially), Will Gravely, Dave Harmon, Stuart Haskins, Sally Italiano, Jim Kirk, Alan Pfnister, Sherry Sargent, Jan Skein, Pat Schroeder, Roy Smith, Bob and Bobbye Tucker, Jim Vandermiller, Anita McCullough White, Dana Wilbanks, Ray Zwerin, and many class participants

In Moline: Kate Bastion-Feeney, Beverly Carl, Al McCune, Sunny and Jim Moorhusen, Carol Smith, Bob and Mary Tallitsch, Barb and Eric Trimble, and Jim and Joan Winship

In Edinburgh: Andrew Wall and Lamin Sanneh

In Westfield: Betsy Chance, Nancy Donny, Linda Kreil, Freia Mitarai, Sandra Rooney, Barbara Thompson, and The Thursday Class

In Colorado Springs at First Congregational UCC Church and Colorado College: Hays Alexander, Fawn Bell, Lucy Bell, Jim Bramwell, Kay Branine, Benjamin Broadbent, Janet and Paul Carpenter, Flo Carris, Jim Clamp, Jim Diers, Don Dunn, Kathryn Eastburn, Steve Ferguson, Gail Finlay, David Gardiner, Jerusha Goebel, Steve Handen, Joe Henjum, RoMa Johnson, Virginia Lee, Linda Lemieux, Kathy Lindeman, Sharon Littrell, Carol Malkin, Jim Matson, Carol Neel, Joe Pickle, Howard Ray, Chris Reimer, Eric Ridings, Debbie and John Saxon, Alan Severn, Dave Seyfert, Paul Schwotzer, Robbie Limpert and Sid Shelton, Pam Shockley-Zalabak, Peter Sprunger-Froese, Tom Stella, Anthony Surage, Paul Tatter, Bill Taylor, Jerry Trigg, Jane and Bruce Warren, Sara Weatherman, David Weddell, Cathy and Jerry White, and 101/102 Participants, class-after-class-after-class. (Also in passing-through Colorado Springs, speaking at Colorado College and/or our church’s James W. White Endowed Lectures: Marcus Borg, Gil Bailie, Walter Brueggemann, Joan Chittister, John Dominic Crossan, Amy-Jill Levine, Bernard McGinn, Brian McLaren, Robin Meyers, John Selby Spong, and Susan Thistlethwaite.)

In Decatur at Columbia and Candler Theological Schools: Walter Brueggemann, Roberta and Richard Bondy, Oliver Daley of Jamaica, Mark Douglas, Catherine and Justo González, Jet Harper, Thomas Long, Jaroslav Pelikan, Don Saliers, Stan Saunders, and Jan Vales from the Czech Republic

On El Camino de Santiago de Compostela: Toby and Deanne Eccles of Australia

In Wichita: Leigh and Mike Aaron-Leary, William Browning, Michelle Davidson, Ann Dorrah, and participants in the Sunday Forum

In Seattle: Jane and Mike Emerson, Catherine Foote, Paul Forman, Peter Ilgenfritz, Kathy Kripps, Michelle Kuster, David McCracken, Mark Miller, Kathy and Greg Turner, Gary Waffle, Nancy Wiesner, and participants in the ongoing Jesus Seminar

In Bali: Shirley Cruthers, Emily Evans, Annegret Hoerrmann, Kade Mastra, Susan Setiawan, Tio Sagari, Jeanne Tuttle, and participants in the Vestry Class

In Russia: Bruce Rigdon, Father Vladimir, our Moscow and St. Petersburg guides, and The Twenty-Five Pilgrims

In Eugene: Christian Amondson and Matthew Wimer, editors

From Minneapolis: content editor nonpareil Hermann Weinlick

Exactly when-where-how the above colleagues assisted is suggested in Appendix C of this book, Author’s History with These Histories.

Most especially, from Phoenix, my thanks to Melissa Marie White Addington, iconographer for the chapter sections, from Florida, Brian McLaren, fly-fisherman and author of the fertile Foreword* to this book, AND, on every road and stop of the way: Patti Limpert White, encouraging wife/careful proofreader, and Bruce Kuster, fishing partner/indulgent listener.

And, I know, I’m forgetting . . . many.

That said, the closing lines to The Paradiso in Dante’s The Divine Comedy sum things up well:

Here my powers rest from their high fantasy,

but already I could feel my being turned—

instinct and intellect balanced equally

as in a wheel whose motion nothing jars—

by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.

For that Love, thanks be to God!

*Brian writes so ingeniously, it makes me want to read the book myself.

Foreword

by Brian McLaren

Jim White and I share four passionate commitments, and they serve as helpful introductions to the important book you now hold in your hands.

First, we love fly-fishing. That might be a strange place to begin, since this is a book about Christianity and history. But fly-fishers are students of trout, and trout live in streams, and streams are beautiful, complex, dynamic systems. In any stretch of stream, there is a current, a flow, a direction in which water runs. There are also eddies, places where the current encounters an obstacle that creates an anomaly in the flow—maybe a slow space, a backflow, an upwelling. There are edges, bends, and channels where the currents move at varying rates. There are seams, where different subcurrents meet. To add complexity and dynamism to this already complex and dynamic system, life in the stream adapts to seasons and weather conditions and times of day. 

Now many people wonder—especially the spouses of fly-fishers—what is the difference between (a) fishing and (b) standing on the shore, waving a stick, looking stupid. But for those who have come to appreciate the beauty and complexity of nearly every stretch of nearly every stream, there is a big difference indeed. Jim White is a master angler who has developed a profound sensitivity to beauty, dynamism, and complexity, and that sensitivity has served him well in writing this book.

Like a stream, the Christian faith has a flow to it, and it has encountered any number of obstacles that have created any number of anomalies and eddies. It has edges, bends, and channels aplenty, and is constantly interacting with times, seasons, and changing conditions. People without sensitivity to beautiful, complex, dynamic systems would miss so much of this, but not Jim White.

Along with fly-fishing, Jim and I share a passion for story. We sense that stories are more comprehensive and adaptable than lists of dates and doctrines or organizational charts of hierarchical institutions. So for us, Christian faith is best understood as a story, a story that, like a stream, has a flow or current. And just as a great stream teems with many fish and other forms of life, the Christian story teems with any number of doctrines and personalities and formations, which are interesting and worth studying . . . as part of the larger narrative flow.

Besides trout streams and stories, we also share a great love for teaching. We believe that the best teaching strives to be comprehensive rather than sectarian, irenic rather than polemic, and iterative rather than linear. Each of those characteristics deserves a bit of explanation, because each tells you something about this book and what makes it special.

Comprehensive rather than sectarian: Jim wants to help readers get the largest vision of Christian faith possible, so he presents a comprehensive vision of Christianity that includes many versions, or Christianities, within it.

Irenic rather than polemic: His aim isn’t to argue why one version of Christian faith is better than all others; his goal is to help readers get a sense of how all the versions are interrelated and how all share commonalities that make their differences all the more interesting.

Iterative rather than linear: Imagine walking down a streamside trail and having a naturalist point out the trees around you. Then the next day you walk the same path, learning about the birds in the trees. Then the next day you focus on geology—land features, rocks, and earth processes that shaped that stream valley. Then the next day you learn about the role of that stream and surrounding forest in human history. At the end of those four walks, you’ll know that forest far better than if you had walked it only once and been deluged with all the information at once. As you read this book, you’ll have the sense that you’re being taken on successive guided tours of the same territory, but shown different things on each tour.

Many teachers—especially of religious matters—prefer to teach with sectarian and polemic ends, using strictly linear means, which helps explain, I think, why so many people have been turned off to religion. Jim has an approach that is better suited, I think, both to most of us students and especially to his subject matter.

And that subject matter is the fourth passionate commitment that we share. You sense in Jim’s writing not the detached objectivity of an outsider, but the devoted wisdom of someone who loves the Christian faith, loves its essence, loves its past, and loves its potential.

Once you’ve read this book, you’ll share that love, and you’ll be better equipped to be part of fulfilling our common faith’s potential.

So it’s time for you to wade in. You’ll soon be hooked!

Introduction

And when in time to come your son asks you, What does this mean? You shall say to him, By strength of hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

—Exodus 13:14 (RSV)

In order to be at peace, it is necessary to feel a sense of history—that you are both part of what has come before and part of what is yet to come. Being thus surrounded, you are not alone; and the sense of urgency that pervades the present is put in perspective.

—Elisabeth Kübler Ross

It’s in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.

—Betsey Trotwood, in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield

How to undergird Christian enthusiasm with Christian substance? That is the question. It’s the question the clergyperson, ordained as pastor and teacher, confronts in the call to equip the saints for faithful living. It’s a tough problem. America, according to cultural analyst Stephen Prothero, has become a nation that is at once deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion.¹ Most American adults cannot name one of the four Gospels, and one high school senior wrote, Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife! The average Christian knows even less about post-Bible history—nothing, for example, about gifts to us from Benedict of Nursia or the Anabaptist Conrad Grebel. On a medieval history exam, I’m told, a college student penned, Joan of Ark, wife of Noah, was burnt as a steak!

Lament and humor about our religious illiteracy notwithstanding, thoughtful folk suspect that, beyond sermons and Sunday school as usual, and certainly beyond devotional-rack literature, there is significant faith-enriching grist yet to be ground for our nourishment. We especially need a grasp of our venerable narrative. Laypeople know this but have a hard time gaining a satisfactory feel for the length, width, and depth of historic Christianity.

The book the reader has in hand addresses the problem.

As a pastor, I’ve always wanted people in the congregation to have a feel for the whole Christian story; and, by whole I mean both our biblical and our ecclesial—that is, church—history. So I have taught . . . and so this book.

Here, though, the reader may ask, as have many students. "But, Reverend White, how can what happened before Jesus be Christian history?" The answer is that the Hebrew Bible—which I like to call the Older Testament—is our story just as much as it the story of Jews. Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, for example, is clearly cast in the likeness of Moses; said another way, the Word, Spirit, and Wisdom of God, spoken of so regularly in the Older Testament, are attributes also ascribed to Christ Jesus. For the Christian narrative to be complete, all the dots in our long story need to be connected.

Why? So that all of us might better understand from whence we have come.

Then it is just possible we might go forward, perhaps not making so many mistakes—like believing that a king’s or czar’s or president’s customary way of doing things is actually our Sovereign’s.

Though the scope of this book is wide, it wants to be brief and is so named. In fact, it is four brief histories. The long story of our biblical and ecclesial history comes in concise—roughly fifty-page—iterations. My intention is for the reader to quickly and easily grasp the whole narrative.

These whole-cloth renderings of our history create a unique book, distinct from all the brief Christianity books I know about. To be sure, there are many Intros to Christianity on the market. Their focus is often on how to become a Christian or what Christians believe. Such is not the focus here. My focus is our religion’s long history and how that history is influencing us. In this regard, the available shorter faith-history books in the market are of two types: overviews of the Bible and short church histories. Amazingly enough, no one book joins biblical and church stories in a single volume. This one does.

Of course, Brief Christian Histories cannot cover everything in our faith narrative, but it goes the way of enabling the interested reader to begin to get the big picture. It can happen even in a single evening’s read at the kitchen table! What I commend is quickly going through any one of the four narratives, just to sense what the whole may be. The chapter with which one starts does not matter. Each tells the same basic narrative. If the reader gets lost at some point, he or she may check out the People Timeline located after chapter 1.

This book narrates faith-history by taking a theme and running it through Christianity’s four-thousand-year story. Let me share how I developed the theme approach to doing religious history. While teaching Bible history or church history in the usual church educational setting, I learned that sharing something fully is, at best, difficult. Most educational offerings in the church are hit-and-miss affairs. If you offer a seven-Sundays-in-Lent course on a topic—say, the parables of Jesus—many class members miss some sessions, thus not learning the parables well. If you do a history course, it is more troublesome, for to miss a session creates a continuity gap, and to understand history, one needs the sequences. My solution to the missed-classes problem has been to tell our story complete every session. This way even a one-time attendee gets the big picture, albeit along a narrow track. Persons who attend two, three, or all the sessions have a fuller grasp of the long narrative. Learning our history by taking a manageable-but-important-themes approach is, I am convinced, a good way to get our hoary story communicated. So, this book.

The four themes followed in Brief Christian Histories are as follows:

• People—who has done what in which roles

• Ethics—how we’ve construed the moral life through the centuries

• Practices—what we’ve done to demonstrate loyalty to God and one another

• Cultural Interaction—where our religion engaged . . . and to what effect

My earlier book, Christianity 101: Tracing Basic Beliefs, followed a similar theme approach. That book dealt with (1) the central events that formed us, (2) the history of God, as we’ve appropriated it, (3) Christ before-during-and-after his earthly time, and (4) life in/with the Holy Spirit(uality). Those themes highlighted basic beliefs, that is, what we hold to be true about God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. However, believing, the concern of that book, is only part of Christian faith. Part.

An equal portion of our religion has to do with who we are and how we act in the world. This dimension to Christianity concerns behaving and belonging. Said another way, half of the Ten Commandments have to do with relationship with God, and the other half with life in community. Brief Christian Histories turns to work with themes that trace our history in terms of the Good, more than via the True (beliefs) or the Beautiful (the arts). If my earlier book had to do with interpretation, this one concentrates on implementation of the faith.

This book is going to be most helpful for learners-about-Christianity generally and Christian laypeople in particular. Brief Christian Histories comes as a resource for individual readers, learners in parish study groups, college students in intro-to-religion classes, seminarians, and resource librarians.

Let me say more about the four themes actively traced.

Chapter 1, The People of God—The Main Characters of Our Faith Story and Their Roles, is a broad overview of our biblical and ecclesial past in terms of men and women. We know our story, our play, through the players. Those players gave, used, and altered church roles, many of which are operative today. The role of church musician, for example, has a history from Miriam, the 1250-BCE tambourine-playing prophetess, to Mahalia Jackson, a twentieth-century-CE gospel singer.

Chapter 2 is Christians’ Ethics—Historical Trajectory on Relating to God and Neighbor. Our actions through the years have been guided by (1) command, (2) call, (3) response, and (4) virtue—four major modalities of living morally. These modalities are described by H. Richard Niebuhr and Robin Lovin. We’ll see how and where these various ways of construing the moral life operated in the past—so that we might be guided in the present.

Chapter 3, Practices and Pieties of the Pilgrimage, shows that through the centuries we have nodded to God differently and similarly, and we’ve observed, forgotten, and kept innumerable rituals. We have been ascetic and indulgent, venerated certain objects and eschewed others. Some practices and pieties, the reader will discover, are timeless, others fleeting. This chapter comes with matching quizzes at the end of each section.

Chapter 4 is Christ and Culture Interacting—Societal Settings, Dynamics, and Formations of the Faith. Belief and behavior have consequences. They affect our relations with others. Relationships over the millennia are traced in these pages. Christianity has been shaped by its physical, social, and cultural environments . . . and there have been countershapings of the world by the faith. It is helpful to recall these dynamics, even as we struggle with the culture today, a matter addressed in the chapter’s closing pages.

What each chapter does is give readers a sense of the whole Christian story. Necessarily, there will be repeating of events, incidents, people, things. Repeated, they serve as guideposts for the long journey. Each theme works to overlay, thicken, or, if you will, decoupage the narrative.

Feel for our whole faith history, then, is the goal of this book. To help in that development, each chapter is offered with nine repeated subdivisions or time periods. The nine intervals with their icons—appearing in the chapters—are

In the dating shown above, and throughout the book, I use BCE/Before the Common Era and CE/Common Era.

At the end of each chapter are Questions for Reflection and Discussion, for individual readers and for use in the classroom. Footnotes, intentionally, have been kept to a minimum throughout, only occasionally inserted when better documentation is called for or when a relevant or interesting aside seemed in order. At book’s end is a bibliography, a strong one. Church historian Robert Bruce Mullin says about his A Short World History of Christianity, If readers finish this book hungering for more in-depth knowledge, it will be the author’s dream come true. There are many fine encyclopedic histories they can consult.²

To which dream I add a hearty Amen!

James W. White,

Colorado Springs, Colorado

1. Prothero, Religious Literacy,

1

.

2. Mullin, Short World Christianity, xiii.

Chapter 1

The People of God

The Main Characters of Our Faith Story and Their Roles

Let us now sing the praises of famous men [and women], our ancestors in their generations. The Lord apportioned to them great glory, his majesty from the beginning.

—Sirach 44:1–2

I sing a song of the saints of God / Patient and brave and true,

Who toiled and fought and lived and died / For the Lord they loved and knew.

And one was a doctor, and one was a queen, / And one was a shepherdess on the green:

They were all of them saints of God, and I mean, / God helping, to be one too.

And one was a soldier, and one was a priest, / And one was slain by a fierce wild beast:

And there’s not any reason, no, not the least, / Why I shouldn’t be one too.

—Lesbia Scott, Lyricist

. . . to lose respect for the great lights along with the lesser ones, to forget Elizabeth of Hungary or Thomas More, Catherine of Siena or Martin of Tours, leaves us alone on the edges of life, lacking both models and guides.

—Sister Joan Chittister, In Search of Belief

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—

Christ—For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire

More than most religions, Christianity emphasizes relation to God through people. Ask a gathering of Christians how they came to the faith, and the number one reason will involve people: The influence of my sainted grandmother, Because a neighbor invited me to services, or simply My daughter. Only occasionally in Christian decision is it religious doctrine, ritual, stance on an issue, or program that counts. Mostly it’s people.

When world religions are symbolically depicted, we may see a Star of David for Judaism, a yin and yang circle for Taoism, a crescent for Islam, and so on. A cross usually shows Christianity. Such representation notwithstanding, our main symbol, finally, is not a cross, nor a three-in-one geometric figure, nor a book or place or story or season or attitude. It is a human being, the man Jesus of Nazareth,³ the one we call the Christ. On either side of Jesus-as-the-Christ stand witnesses. In this chapter, I want to remember some of these men and women before and after Jesus, he being for us the fulcrum of history—an understanding suggested by theologian Robert McAfee Brown.⁴ Our faith flows to Jesus and from Jesus with people. The fulcrum can be seen in the following overreaching but illustrative graphic:

The idea here is that, in creation, all people were in close relation to God, called to be part of God’s