Wandering through church history

My resolution for Lent this year was to read the New Testament. I was inspired by a Norwegian friend of mine who read the Bible and the Koran some years ago. She is not religious, but she was interested in learning about Christianity and Islam from a historical perspective and decided to go right to the sources. I will read the Old Testament at some point, but decided to start with the New Testament because Christianity as we know and practice it is based on the life and death of Christ. And his life and death are chronicled quite well in the New Testament. 

I grew to enjoy starting each day reading passages from the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It was very interesting to compare their different styles as well as what they focused on and emphasized. Much of what they wrote about was similar, but I found John's gospel to be the most reflective and I preferred it to the others. But all of them present the life of Christ in an affecting way. I found myself marveling at the different miracles he performed; I'd known about them from previous gospel readings during the countless masses I've attended over the years, but I don't think I fully appreciated the extent of his miracles until now. Nor did I fully understand how much he was hated by the authorities and leaders at that time and those places, mostly because they felt threatened by him. Here was this man walking in their midst, preaching about loving God and your neighbor, healing the sick, allowing the blind to see, turning water into wine, walking on water, and taking a small number of loaves of bread and a small number of fish and multiplying them by the thousands in order to feed the crowds that came to listen to him speak. He made the Pharisees look like the hypocrites they were, but he did it without brutally judging them. He challenged them verbally by asking questions as replies to the questions they asked him. He embarrassed them, and that must have been the worst sin of all for him to have committed. After all, many of them considered themselves learned men and protectors of the laws. Christ in their eyes was a transgressor of those laws.  

My favorite book of the New Testament would have to be the Acts of the Apostles (the fifth book of the New Testament), presumably written by Luke (who wrote one of the gospels). If you want to learn about the founding and history of the early Church, the movement away from Judaism (the Jews ultimately rejected the Church) and toward the inclusion of the Gentiles, the spread of Christianity and further development of the Church, if you want to wander with the apostles from town to town and region to region, you can do so by reading the Acts. This book starts with the Ascension of Christ, describes the conversion of St. Paul and his subsequent missionary journeys in detail, and prepares readers for Paul's epistles. 

I enjoyed reading Paul's epistles to the Galatians, Romans, Corinthians, Philippians, and Thessalonians, among others. There are thirteen books in all. Paul was preoccupied with getting everyone on the same page, especially those to whom the job of passing along Christ's teachings had been entrusted. Paul couldn't be everywhere at once, so he relied on his fellow disciples and believers to preach the word of God. But these were men, not gods. They were often weak, proud, competitive, gossipy and backbiting. Conflicts and controversies arose. Paul warned against all those sins. He encouraged the teachers to take the moral high road. He reassured them, offered comfort and support, and chided them for their pettiness and unethical behaviors. But he did so in a loving way and always ended his letters by promising that he would soon visit those to whom he wrote. 

Nowhere in the New Testament did I find any statement that priests could not marry or that women could not become priests. What I did find were statements that advised men who wanted to become priests to have only one wife (not to be divorced) and to otherwise lead moral and upstanding lives. Women would not have been allowed to become priests at that time because society at that time did not allow women to have much power or say over their lives at all. Considered to be the weaker sex, women were mostly encouraged to obey their husbands, to stay in the shadows of their husbands. As the Church grew, it became more practical to encourage unmarried men to become priests and to remain celibate, simply because once they had a wife and children, their focus would be on them and not on their priestly duties. In other words, they would be distracted from their mission. Celibacy was thus encouraged and became the rule over time, but the rule is based on tradition, not dogma. Perhaps the Church should reconsider its position and relax the celibacy rule, allowing men who want to become priests to marry or not marry as they wish. Perhaps it should also reconsider its ban on women becoming priests, especially since there has been a decline in vocations among men. 

I did not like the final book of the New Testament--the book of Revelation. I found it to be quite bizarre and unenlightening. I learned very little from it, except that it contains apocalyptic visions and imagery that I don't want to delve into further in order to learn more about them. I'm not sure why this book was even included in the New Testament, as its style is quite different from all of the other books. 

The Old Testament awaits, and I look forward to starting on a new journey. As Christians, we were taught that the New Testament was more important for our spiritual journey than the Old, but there is a wealth of history in the Old Testament that I look forward to exploring. 

Some reflections on C.S. Lewis

I finished Preparing for Easter by C.S. Lewis shortly after Easter, which is a book of his reflections on Christianity for each day of Lent. Lewis was a prolific writer of both children’s books and books for adults, and I was introduced to his adult books by my father, himself a prolific reader and a great fan of both Lewis and G.K. Chesterton (who wrote The Everlasting Man). Lewis was an atheist for a good portion of his life, but found his way to Christianity by reflection and reason. Or as he might have put it, he was pulled in that direction and at some point stopped resisting.

His writings appeal to me and others who have had questions about their faith, who haven’t accepted all aspects of our faith on ‘blind faith’ alone. Perhaps that makes us doubting Thomas-es, but I for one have a lot of compassion for doubting Thomas, who was a sceptic by nature. Yes, his faith was wanting when push came to shove, but life is often like that. I doubt that God loved him any less in the long run. Even Lewis suffered doubts about God’s existence when he lost his beloved wife Joy to cancer. Some of his best books come from that period and that experience; he wrote about pain, suffering, and grief in ways that you will remember long after you read his books. He never forgot to write about our humanity in our meetings with God. He understood as an academic that it was difficult to accept some of the tenets of Christian faith. So his mission was to write to help us understand them. I must admit that I use quite a bit of time to reflect upon his writings. But as he himself once said, ‘he reasoned his way to faith’. And for an atheist, that is perhaps the only way. When reason overpowers scepticism so totally, then there are no defences left to fight with.