Christianity

The essence and identity of Christianity

          Christianity is the faith tradition that focuses on the figure of Jesus Christ. Faith refers both to the believers' act of trust and to the content of their faith. Tradition, viewed as a system of belief and behavior, leads people to see Christianity as one of the world religions, alongside Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and others.

          Christianity is more than a system of religious belief. It also has generated a culture, a set of ideas and ways of life, practices, and artifacts that have been handed down from generation to generation through the 20 centuries since Jesus first became the object of faith. Christianity is thus both a living tradition of faith and the culture that the faith leaves behind as a kind of deposit. The agent of Christianity is the church, the community of people who make up the body of believers. Christianity may incorporate, along with such believers, their doctrines, customs, and historical episodes.

Christianity “focuses” on Jesus Christ is to say that, whatever else it comprehends; somehow it brings these realities together in reference to an ancient historic figure. Few Christians would be content to keep this reference merely historical. Although their faith tradition is historical—i.e., they believe that transactions with the divine do not occur in the realm of timeless ideas but among ordinary humans through the ages—the vast majority of Christians focus their faith in Jesus Christ as someone who is also a present reality. They may include many other references in their tradition and thus may speak of “God” and “human nature” or of “church” and “world,” but they would not want to be nor would they be called Christian if they did not bring their eyes and attentions first and last to Jesus Christ.

           While there is something simple about this focus on Jesus as the central figure, there is also something very complicated. That complexity is apparent when one tries to envision the more than 22,000 separate churches, sects, and denominations that makes up the Christian faith tradition today. To project these separate bodies against the background of their development in the nations of the world is to suggest the bewildering variety. To picture people expressing their adherence to that tradition in their prayer life and cathedral building, in their quiet worship or their strenuous efforts to change the world, is to suggest even more of the variety.

        It is natural that through the ages both those in the tradition and those surrounding it have made attempts at simplification. Two ways to do this have been to concentrate on the “essence” of the faith, and thus on the ideas that are integral to it, or to be concerned with the “identity” of the tradition, and thus on the boundaries of its historical experience.

           Christianity addresses the historical figure of Jesus Christ against the background of, and while seeking to remain faithful to, the experience of one God. It has consistently rejected polytheism, which allows for many gods, and atheism, which makes Jesus a purely and ordinarily human figure without divine or transcendent reference.

            To monotheism as an element of the faith tradition of Christianity one may add that, with rare exceptions, Christianity refers to a plan of salvation or redemption. That is to say, the believers in the church picture themselves as in a plight from which they need rescue. For whatever reason, they have been distanced from their source in God and need to be saved. Christianity is based on a particular experience or scheme directed to the act of saving—that is, of bringing or “buying back,” which is part of what redemption means, these creatures of God to their source in God. The agent of that redemption is Jesus Christ.

             It is possible that through the centuries the vast majority of believers have not used the term essence to describe the central focus of their faith. The term is itself of Greek origin and thus represents only one part of the tradition, one element in the terms that have gone into making up Christianity.  Essence refers to those qualities that give something its identity and are at the center of what makes that thing different from everything else.  Jesus Christ belongs to the essential character of Christianity and gives it identity in the same way that Buddha does for Buddhism.

         The mass of people, in practice they must come to terms with what the word essence implies. Whether they are engaged in being saved or redeemed on the one hand, or thinking and speaking about that redemption, its agent, and its meaning on the other, they are concentrating on the essence of their experience. Those who have concentrated from within the faith tradition have also helped to give it its identity. It is not possible to speak of the essence of a historical tradition without referring to how its ideal qualities have been discussed through the ages. Yet one can take up the separate subjects of essence and identity in sequence, being always aware of how they interrelate.

Historical views of the essence

         The earliest members of the Christian faith tradition were Jews, as was Jesus himself, and thus they stood in the faith tradition inherited by Hebrew people in Israel. They were monotheists, devoted to the God of Israel. When they made claims that Jesus was divine, it was part of their task to make their witness in ways that would not challenge monotheism.

         They began to separate or be separated from Judaism, which did not accept Jesus as Christ, these earliest Christians not only experienced salvation but also expressed certain ideas about the one on whom their faith focused. As with other religious people, they became involved in a search for truth. God, in the very nature of things, was necessarily the final Truth. The Gospel According to John, finds Jesus referring to himself not only as “the way” and “the life” but also as “the Truth.” Roughly, this meant, “all the reality there is” and was a reference to Jesus' participation in the reality of the one God.

           From the beginning there were Christians who may not have seen Jesus as the Truth, or as a unique participant in the reality of God. There have been “humanist” devotees of Jesus, modernist adapters of the truth about the Christ; but even in the act of adapting him to humanist concepts in their day they have contributed to the debate of the essence of Christianity and brought it back to the issues of monotheism and a way of salvation.  

          The best way to preserve the essence of Christianity is to look at the earliest documents—the four Gospels and the letters that make up much of the New Testament—which tell whatever is believed to be known with any kind of assurance about what the earliest Christians remembered, taught, or believed about Jesus Christ. It is presumed that “the simple Jesus” and the “primitive faith” emerge from these documents as the core of the essence.

Other believers and other scholars, however, have disturbed this simple notion of finding the essence by going back to the beginnings. The writings that make up the New Testament themselves reflect Jewish and Greek ways of thinking about Jesus and God. They are seen through the experience of different personalities, such as the Apostle Paul or the nameless composers of documents that came to be edited as the Gospels. Indeed, there are not only diverse ways of worship, of polity or governance of the Christian community, and of behavior pictured or prescribed in the New Testament but also diverse theologies, or interpretations of the heart of the faith. Most believers see these diversities as complementing each other and leave to scholars the argument that the primal documents may compete with and contradict each other. Yet there is a core of ideas that all New Testament scholars and believers would agree are central to ancient Christian beliefs. One British scholar, James G. Dunn, for example, says they would all agree, “The Risen Jesus is the Ascended Lord.” That is to say, there would have been no faith tradition and no scriptures had not the early believers thought that Jesus was “Raised,” raised from the dead, and, as “Ascended,” somehow above the ordinary plane of mortal and temporal experience. From that simple assertion early Christians could begin to complicate the search for essence.

          From the beginning the believers insisted that they were—or were intended to be, or were commanded and were striving to be—united in their devotion to the essence of their faith tradition. There could not have been many final truths and there were not many legitimate ways of salvation. It was of the essence of their tradition to reject other gods and other ways, and most defining of essence and identity occurred as one set of Christians was concerned lest others might deviate from the essential faith and might, for example, be attracted to other gods or other ways.

            While Jesus was among his disciples and those who ignored or rejected him, to make him the focus of faith or denial presented one type of issue. After the “Risen Jesus” had become the “Ascended Lord” and was no longer a visible physical presence, those at the head of the tradition had a different problem. Jesus remained, as was said, a present reality to them, and when they gathered to worship they believed that he was “in the midst of them.” He was present in their minds and hearts, in the spoken word that testified to him, and also present in some form when they had their sacred meal and ingested bread and wine as his “body and blood.” They created a reality around this experience; if once Judaism was that reality, now “Christianism,” or Christianity, resulted.

              The focus on Jesus narrowed to ideas, to “beliefs about” and not only “belief in,” and to doctrines. The essence began to be cognitive, referring to what was known, or substantive. This was most pronounced when people in the idea-centered Greek culture had to grasp through the mind the reality of someone who was not a visible presence.

            Christians did something rare if not unique in the history of religion: they adopted the entire scriptural canon of what they now saw to be another faith, Judaism, and embraced the Hebrew Scriptures as what they called the Old Testament. But while doing so, they also incorporated the insistent monotheism of Judaism as part of the essence of their truth and way of salvation, just as they incorporated the Hebrew Scriptures' story as part of their own identity-giving narrative and experience.

          This narrowing of focus on Jesus Christ as truth meant also a complementary sharpening of focus on the way of salvation. There is no purpose in saving someone who does not need salvation. Christianity therefore began to make, through its councils and creeds, theologians and scholars, some attempts at definitive descriptions of what it is to be human. Later some of these descriptions were called “original sin,” the idea that, inherited from Adam, the first-created human, all mortals carried a condition that made it impossible for them to be perfect or to please a personal God on their own. While Christians never agreed on a specific teaching on original sin, they did describe as the essence of Christianity the fact that something limited humans and led them to need redemption. Yet the concentration always returned to Jesus Christ as belonging more to the essence of Christianity than did any statements about the human condition.

The essence of Christianity eventually included statements about the reality to God. Christians inherited from the Jews a relatively intimate picture of a God who made their young and small universe, with its starry heavens, and then carried on discourse with humans, making covenants with them and rewarding or punishing them. But the Greek part of their tradition contributed the concept of a God who was greater than any ideas of God but who had to be addressed through ideas. Indeed, it was during this time that words such as essence, substance, and being—terms that did not belong to the Old or New Testament traditions—came to be wedded to biblical witness in the creeds. Christians, it might be said, used the vocabulary and repertory of options then available to them in speaking of the all-encompassing and the ineffable and grafted these onto the witness to God that was essential to their faith. Modern Christians, including many who reject the notion of creeds or any non-biblical language, are still left with the problems and intentions of the ancients: how to think of Jesus in such a way that they are devoted to him not in isolation, as an end in himself—for that would be idolatry of a human—but in the context of the total divine reality.

The primitive church

The early church and Judaism

         Christianity began as a movement within Judaism at a period when the Jews had long been under foreign influence and rule and had found in their religion (rather than in their politics or cultural achievements) the linchpin of their community. From 8th century BC onward the religion of Israel was marked by tension between the concept of monotheism, with its universal ideal of salvation (for all nations), and the notion of God's special choice of Israel. In the age after Alexander the Great (i.e., the Hellenistic period, 3rd century BC–3rd century AD), the dispersion of the Jews throughout the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire gave some impetus to the universalistic tendency. But the attempts of foreign rulers, especially the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes (in 168–165 BC), to impose Greek culture and religious syncretism in Palestine provoked zealous resistance on the part of many Jews. In Palestinian Judaism the predominant note was separation and exclusiveness. Jewish missionaries to other areas were strictly expected to impose the distinctive Jewish customs of circumcision, kosher food, and Sabbaths and other festivals.

         The relationship of the earliest Christian Church to Judaism turned principally on two questions: (1) the messianic role of Jesus of Nazareth and (2) the permanent validity of the Mosaic Law for all.

         The Hebrew Scriptures viewed history as the stage of a providential drama eventually ending in a triumph of God over all present sources of frustration (e.g., foreign domination or the sins of Israel). God's rule would be established by an anointed prince (the Messiah) of the line of David, king of Israel in the 10th century BC. The proper course of action leading to the consummation of the drama, however, was the subject of some disagreement. Among the diverse groups were the aristocratic and conservative Sadducees, who accepted only the five books of Moses (the Pentateuch), and the more popular and strict Pharisees. The Pharisees not only accepted biblical books outside the Pentateuch but also embraced doctrines—such as those on resurrection and the existence of angels—of recent acceptance in Judaism, many of which were derived from apocalyptic expectations that the consummation of history would be heralded by God's intervention in the affairs of men in dramatic, cataclysmic terms. The Sanhedrin (central council) at Jerusalem was made up of both Pharisees and Sadducees. The Zealots were aggressive revolutionaries seeking independence from Rome. Other groups were the Herodians, supporters of the client kingdom of the Herods (a dynasty that supported Rome) and abhorrent to the Zealots, and the Essenes, a quasi-monastic dissident group, probably including the sect that preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls. This latter sect did not participate in the Temple worship at Jerusalem and observed another religious calendar; from their desert retreat they awaited divine intervention and searched prophetic writings for signs indicating the consummation.

             What relation the followers of Jesus had to some of these groups is not clear. In the canonical Gospels (those accepted as authentic by the church) the main targets of criticism are the scribes and Pharisees, whose attachment to the tradition of Judaism is presented as legalistic and pettifogging. The Sadducees and Herodians likewise receive an unfriendly portrait. The Essenes are never mentioned. Simon, one of Jesus' 12 disciples, was or had once been a Zealot. Jesus probably stood close to the Pharisees.

           Under the social and political conditions of the time, there could be no long future either for the Sadducees or for the Zealots—whose attempts to make apocalyptic dreams effective led to the destruction of Judaea after the two major Jewish revolts of 66–70 and 132–135 against the Romans. The choice for many Jews thus lay between the Pharisees and Christianity, the former dedicated to the meticulous preservation of the Mosaic Law and the latter to the universal propagation of the biblical faith as a religion for all mankind. Pharisaism as enshrined in the Mishna (Oral Law) and the Talmud (commentary on and addition to the Oral Law) became normative Judaism. By looking to the Gentile (non-Jewish) world and carefully dissociating itself from the Zealot revolutionaries, Christianity made possible its ideal of a world religion, at the price of sacrificing Jewish particularity and exclusiveness. The fact that Christianity has never succeeded in gaining the open allegiance of more than a minority of Jews is more a mystery to theologians than to historians.

The early church and Jesus

          The prime sources for knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth are the four canonical Gospels in the New Testament. Only a few probably authentic sayings of Jesus became preserved in oral tradition independent of these documents, though many sayings came to be put into his mouth. The Gospel of Thomas, preserved in a Coptic Gnostic library found about 1945 in Egypt, contains several such sayings, besides some independent versions of canonical sayings. At certain points the Gospel tradition finds independent confirmation in the letters of the Apostle Paul. The allusions in non-Christian sources (the Jewish historian Josephus, the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, and Talmudic texts) are almost negligible, except as refuting the unsubstantiated notion that Jesus might never have existed.

         The first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, have a literary relation to one another and are hence called Synoptic. Matthew and Luke probably used Mark. John, differing in both pattern and content, appears richer in theological interpretation but in detail may preserve good historical information. As their titles imply, the Gospels are not detached reports but were written to serve religious needs; they resemble oil paintings rather than photographs. Legendary and apologetic (defensive) motifs, and the various preoccupations of the communities for which they were first produced, can readily be discerned as influences upon their narratives. Historical scholarship at present has insufficient tools to eliminate subjective judgments about the probability of many details (upon which there will always be disagreement), but the most persuasive scholarly consensus accepts the substance of the Gospel tradition as a veracious picture.

          A prominent uncertainty is the matter of chronology. Matthew places the birth of Jesus at least two years before Herod the Great's death late in 5 BC or early in 4 BC. Luke connects Jesus' birth with a Roman census that, according to Josephus, occurred in AD 6–7 and caused a revolt against the governor Quirinius. Luke could be right about the census and wrong about the governor. The crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judaea (AD 26–36), was probably about the year 29–30, but again certainty is impossible.

           Encounter with John the Baptist, the ascetic in the Judaean Desert who preached repentance and baptism in view of God's coming Kingdom, marked a decisive moment for Jesus' career. He recognized in John the forerunner of the kingdom that his own ministry was inaugurating. The first preaching of Jesus, in his home region of Galilee, took the form of vivid parables and was accompanied by miraculous healings. The Synoptic writers give a single climactic visit of Jesus to Jerusalem at the end of his career; but John may be right (implicitly supported by Luke 13:7) in representing his visits as more frequent and the period of ministry as lasting more than a single year. Jesus' attitude to the observance of the law generated conflict with the Pharisees, and, though the people protected him, he also aroused the fear and hostility of the ruling Jewish authorities. A triumphal entry to Jerusalem at Passover time (the period celebrating the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt in the 13th century BC) was the prelude to a final crisis. After a last supper with his disciples he was betrayed by one of them, Judas. Arrest and trial followed, first before the Sanhedrin and then before Pilate, who condemned him to crucifixion. The accusation before Pilate was sedition, in which the Evangelists saw a framed charge. It was universal Christian belief that three days after his death he was raised from the dead by divine power.

         Jesus preached the imminent presence of God's Kingdom, in some texts as future consummation, in others as already present. The words and acts of Jesus were believed to be the inauguration of a process that was to culminate in a final triumph of God. His disciples recognized him as the Messiah, the Anointed One. He is not recorded to have used the word of himself. The titles Prophet and Rabbi also were applied to Jesus. His own enigmatic self-designation was “Son of man,” sometimes in allusion to his suffering, sometimes to his future role as judge. This title is derived from the version of the Book of Daniel (7:13), where “one like a son of man,” contrasted with beast figures, represents the humiliated people of God, ascending to be vindicated by the divine Judge. In the developed Gospel tradition the theme of the transcendent judge seems to be most prominent.

Apocalyptic hope could easily merge into messianic zealotry. Moreover, Jesus' teaching was critical of the established order and encouraged the poor and oppressed, even though it contained an implicit rejection of revolution. Violence was viewed as incompatible with the ethic of the Kingdom of God. Whatever contacts there may have been with the Zealot movement (as the narrative of feeding 5,000 people in the desert may hint), the Gospels assume the widest distance between Jesus' understanding of his role and the Zealot revolution.

        The gospel of repentance presupposes deep defilement in individuals and in society. The sufferings and pains of humanity under the power of evil spirits call out for compassion and an urgent mission. All the acts of a disciple must express love and forgiveness, even to enemies, and also detachment from property and worldly wealth. To Jesus, the outcasts of society (prostitutes, the hated and oppressive tax agents, and others) were objects of special care, and censoriousness was no virtue. Though the state is regarded as a distant entity in certain respects, it yet has the right to require taxes and civic obligations: Caesar has rights that must be respected and are not incompatible with the fulfillment of God's demands.

Some of the futurist sayings, if taken by themselves, raise the question whether Jesus intended to found a church. A negative answer emerges only if the authentic Jesus is assumed to have expected an immediate catastrophic intervention by God. There is no doubt that he gathered and intended to gather around him a community of followers. This community continued after his time, regarding itself as the specially called congregation of God's people, possessing as covenant signs the rites of baptism and Eucharist (Lord's Supper) with which Jesus was particularly associated—baptism because of his example, Eucharist because the Last Supper on the night before the crucifixion was marked as an anticipation of the messianic feast of the coming age.

           A closely related question is whether Jesus intended his gospel to be addressed to Jews only or if the Gentiles were also to be included. In the Gospels Gentiles appear as isolated exceptions, and the choice of 12 Apostles has an evident symbolic relation to the 12 tribes of Israel. The fact that the extension of Christian preaching to the Gentiles caused intense debate in the 40s of the 1st century is decisive proof that Jesus had given no unambiguous directive on the matter. The early community has cast Gospel sayings that make the Jews’ refusal to recognize Jesus’ authority, as the ground for extending the Kingdom of God to the Gentiles must, therefore.

        Major religion, stemming from the life, teachings, and death of Jesus of Nazareth (the Christ, or the Anointed One of God) in the 1st century AD. It has become the largest of the world's religions. Geographically the most widely diffused of all faiths, it has a constituency of some 2 billion believers. Its largest groups are the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox churches, and the Protestant churches; in addition to these churches there are several independent churches of Eastern Christianity as well as numerous sects throughout the world.

Medieval Christianity

        No product of medieval Christianity has been more influential in the centuries since the Middle Ages than medieval thought, particularly the philosophy and theology of Scholasticism, whose outstanding exponent was Thomas Aquinas (1224/25-1274). The theology of Scholasticism was an effort to harmonize the doctrinal traditions inherited from the Fathers of the early church and to relate these traditions to the intellectual achievements of classical antiquity. Because many of the early Fathers both in the East and in the West had developed their theologies under the influence of Platonic modes of thought, the reinterpretation of these theologies by Scholasticism required that the doctrinal content of the tradition be disengaged from the metaphysical assumptions of Platonism. For this purpose the recovery of Aristotle-first through the influence of Aristotelian philosophers and theologians among the Muslims, and eventually, with help from Byzantium, through translation and study of the authentic texts of Aristotle himself-seemed providential to the Scholastic theologians. Because it managed to combine a fidelity to Scripture and tradition with a positive, though critical, attitude toward the "natural" mind, Scholasticism is a landmark both in the history of Christianity and in the history of Western culture, as a symbol (depending upon one's own position) either of the Christianization of society and culture or of the betrayal of Christianity to the society and culture of the Middle Ages.

Reformation

            Protestantism differed from the various protest movements during the later Middle Ages by the thoroughness of its polemic against the ecclesiastical, theological, and sacramental developments of Western Catholicism. Initially the Protestant Reformers maintained the hope that they could accomplish the reformation of the doctrine and life of the church from within, but this proved impossible either because of the intransigency of the church, the extremism of the Protestant movements, or the political and cultural situation-or because of all of these factors. The several parties of the Reformation may be conveniently classified according to the radicalism of their protest against medieval theology, piety, and polity. The Anglican Reformers, as well as Martin Luther and his movement, were, in general, the most conservative in their treatment of the Roman Catholic tradition; John Calvin and his followers were less conservative; the Anabaptists and other groups in the left wing of the Reformation were least conservative of all. Despite their deep differences, almost all the various Reformation movements were characterized by an emphasis upon the Bible, as distinguished from the church or its tradition, as the authority in religion; by an insistence upon the sovereignty of free grace in the forgiveness of sins; by a stress upon faith alone, without works, as the preconditions of acceptance with God; and by the demand that the laity assume a more significant place in both the work and the worship of the church.

         The Reformation was launched as a movement within the established Christianity that had prevailed since Constantine. It envisaged neither schism within the church nor the dissolution of the Christian culture that had developed for more than a millennium. But when the Reformation was over, both the church and the culture had been radically transformed. In part this transformation was the effect of the Reformation; in part it was the cause of the Reformation. The voyages of discovery, the beginnings of a capitalist economy, the rise of modern nationalism, the dawn of the scientific age, the culture of the Renaissance-all these factors, and others besides, helped to break up the "medieval synthesis." Among these factors, however, the Reformation was one of the most important and, certainly for the history of Christianity, the most significant. For the consequences of the Reformation, not in intention but in fact, were a divided Christendom and a secularized West. Roman Catholicism, no less than Protestantism, has developed historically in the modern world as an effort to adapt historic forms to the implications of these consequences. Established Christianity, as it had been known in the West since the 4th century, ended after the Reformation, though not everywhere at once.

Modern Christianity

          The end of "established Christianity" in the old sense resulted in the most rapid and most widespread expansion in the history of the church. The Christianization of the Americas and the evangelization of Asia, Africa, and Australia for the first time gave geographic substance to the Christian title "ecumenical." Growth in areas and in numbers, however, need not be equivalent to growth in influence. Despite its continuing strength throughout the modern period, Christianity retreated on many fronts and lost much of its prestige and authority both politically and intellectually.

         During the formative period of modern Western history, roughly from the beginning of the 16th to the middle of the 18th century, Christianity participated in many of the movements of cultural and political expansion. The explorers of the New World were followed closely by missionaries-that is, when the two were not in fact identical. Protestant and Roman Catholic clergymen were prominent in politics, letters, and science. Although the rationalism of the Enlightenment alienated many people from the Christian faith, especially among the intellectuals of the 17th and 18th centuries, those who were alienated often kept a loyalty to the figure of Jesus or to the teachings of the Bible even when they broke with traditional forms of Christian doctrine and life. Citing the theological conflicts of the Reformation and the political conflicts that followed upon these as evidence of the dangers of religious intolerance, representatives of the Enlightenment gradually introduced disestablishment, toleration, and religious liberty into most Western countries; in this movement they have been joined by Christian individuals and groups that advocated religious freedom not out of indifference to dogmatic truth but out of a concern for the free decision of personal faith.

           The state of Christian faith and life within the churches during the 17th and 18th centuries both reflected and resisted the spirit of the time. Even though the Protestant Reformation had absorbed some of the reformatory energy within Roman Catholicism, the theology and morals of the church underwent serious revision in the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation. Fighting off the attempts by various countries to establish national Catholic churches, the papacy sought to learn from the history of the Reformation and to avoid the mistakes that had been made then. Protestantism in turn discovered that separation from Rome did not necessarily inoculate it against many of the trends that it had denounced in Roman Catholicism. The orthodox dogmatic of the 17th century both in Lutheranism and in the Reformed churches displayed many features of medieval Scholasticism, despite the attacks of the Reformers upon the latter. Partly as a compensation for the overemphasis of orthodoxy upon doctrine at the expense of morals, Pietism summoned Protestant believers to greater seriousness of faith and purpose. Valid though its summons was, the subjectivity of Pietism unwittingly played into the hands of its enemies, helping to make it possible for the rationalism of the Enlightenment to undermine traditional Christian belief.

        In alliance with the spirit of the Enlightenment, the revolutions of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries aided this process of undermining Christianity. Roman Catholicism in France, Eastern Orthodoxy in Russia, and Protestantism in former European colonies in Africa and Asia were identified-by their enemies  and were nearly swept away with it. As the discoveries of science proceeded, they clashed with old and cherished notions about the doctrine of creation, many of which were passionately supported by various leaders of organized Christianity. The age of the revolutions-political, economic, technological, intellectual-was an age of crisis for Christianity. It was also an age of opportunity. The critical methods of modern scholarship, despite their frequent attacks upon traditional Christian ideas, helped to produce editions of the chief documents of the Christian faith-the Bible and the writings of the Fathers and Reformers-and to arouse an unprecedented interest in the history of the church. The 19th century has been called the great century in the history of Christian missions, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. By the very force of their attacks upon Christianity, the critics of the church helped to arouse within the church new apologists for the faith, who creatively reinterpreted it in relation to the new philosophy and science of the modern period. The 20th century saw additional challenges to the Christian cause in the form of Communism, of resurgent world religions, and of indifference. Both the relation of church and state and the missionary program of the churches thus demanded reconsideration. But the 20th century also saw renewed efforts to heal the schisms within Christendom. The ecumenical movement began within Protestantism and Anglicanism, eventually included some of the Eastern Orthodox churches, and, especially since the second Vatican Council (1962-65), has engaged the sympathetic attention of Roman Catholicism as well.

Denominations

           By the late 20th century Christianity had become the most widely disseminated faith on Earth. Virtually no nation has remained unaffected by the activities of Christian missionaries, although in many countries Christians are only a small fraction of the total population. Most of the countries of Asia and of Africa have Christian minorities, some of which, as in India and even in China, number several million members. The concentration of Christians, however, remains in the domain of Western culture. Each major division of Christianity-Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism-is treated in a separate article where its history, tenets, and practices receive a fuller exposition than this article can give them and where a bibliography on the denominations of the division is supplied. The purpose here is to provide an overview of the principal divisions and thus to set the articles about the individual traditions into their proper context.

Orthodox Church

             Eastern Orthodoxy is the large body of Christians who follow the faith and practices that were defined by the first seven ecumenical councils. The word orthodox (“right believing”) has traditionally been used, in the Greek-speaking Christian world, to designate communities, or individuals, who preserved the true faith (as defined by those councils), as opposed to those who were declared heretical.  It should also be noted that there are Monotheistic churches (holding that after Incarnation Jesus had only a divine, and not a human and divine, nature) that have adopted the term orthodox as part of their names.

The cultural context

         The schism between the churches of the East and the West (1054) was the culmination of a gradual process of estrangement that began in the first centuries of the Christian era and continued through the middle Ages. Linguistic and cultural differences, as well as political events, contributed to the estrangement. From the 4th to the 11th century, Constantinople, the center of Eastern Christianity, was also the capital of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, while Rome, after the barbarian invasions, fell under the influence of the Holy Roman Empire of the West, a political rival. In the West theology remained under the influence of St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), while in the East the Greek Fathers shaped doctrinal thought. Theological differences could have been settled if the two areas had not simultaneously developed different concepts of church authority. The growth of Roman primacy, based on the concept of the apostolic origin of the Church of Rome, was incompatible with the Eastern idea that the importance of certain local churches—Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and later, Constantinople— could be determined only by their numerical and political significance. For the East, the highest authority in settling doctrinal disputes was the ecumenical council.

            At the time of the Schism of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople, the membership of the Eastern Orthodox Church was spread throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and Russia, with its center in Constantinople, which was also called “New Rome.”  Missionary expansion toward Asia and emigration toward the West, however, have helped to maintain the importance of Orthodoxy worldwide.

         In the year 1054 a major split occurred in Christianity. The churches in Western Europe, under the authority of the pope at Rome, separated from the churches in the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire, under the authority of the patriarch (bishop) of Constantinople. The churches of the Eastern Empire have come to be known by the collective term Eastern Orthodoxy. The word orthodoxy simply means "correct teaching," or "right belief." The official designation is actually Orthodox Cathelic Church to set it off from the Roman Catholic church.

               Eastern Orthodoxy is a fellowship of autonomous, or independent self-governing, churches, each of which is under the rule of a bishop. The patriarch of Constantinople (now Istanbul) is considered the first among equals, but he has no authority comparable to that of the Roman pope.

          The number of independent churches has varied throughout history. Today there are the Church of Constantinople, the Church of Alexandria (Egypt), the Church of Antioch (headquartered at Damascus, Syria), the Malankara Orthodox Church, the Church of Jerusalem, the Russian Orthodox church, the Church of Georgia, the Church of Serbia, the Church of Romania, the Church of Bulgaria, the Church of Cyprus, the Church of Greece, the Church of Albania, the Polish Orthodox church, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and the churches of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. There are also smaller autonomous churches in Finland, Crete, and Japan and many in the United States. Many of the churches existed in hostile surroundings. The Russian Orthodox Church suffered severe persecution in the past. It was forced to cooperate with the authorities of the Soviet Union in order to function until the restructuring of Communism allowed open worship after 1990. The church in Albania has been outlawed altogether. The members of the churches in Turkey, Egypt, and the Middle East live as minorities amid large Muslim majorities. Almost every national Orthodox body represents eastern Orthodoxy in the United States.

          The Orthodox understanding of the church is based on the principle that each local community of Christians, gathered around its bishop and celebrating the Lord's Supper, or Eucharist, is a local realization of the whole church on Earth. This concept of wholeness is called catholicity. This may seem an abstract concept, but what it means essentially is that everything necessary to be a church is found in the local congregation. The idea of catholicity may be compared to a loaf of bread. Each single slice is not the whole loaf, but each slice has all the ingredients necessary to be bread. Hence, wherever a bishop and congregation are gathered together, there is the church.

         This continuity of the church is demonstrated by the fact that the consecration of a bishop requires the presence of several other bishops. This testifies to the continuity of the whole church in the present and to its unbroken heritage from the time of the Apostles.

         Besides bishops, there are two other orders of clergy-priests and deacons. These may be married men, though bishops are always chosen from among unmarried or widowed clergy.

         Eastern Orthodoxy also has a strong tradition of monasticism, dating back to the 3rd and 4th centuries. It has been primarily a contemplative movement, seeking to experience God through a life of prayer. There has not been the development of religious orders with missionary or educational goals as in Western Christianity.

Belief and Worship

        Eastern Orthodoxy considers itself the bearer of an unbroken living tradition of Christian faith and worship inherited from the earliest believers. Its beliefs are based on consistency with the Bible and tradition as expressed in the ancient councils-the seven ecumenical church councils that took place between 325 and 787. The churches also accept the decrees of some later council as reflecting the same faith.

        The churches accept seven sacraments: baptism, chrismation, the Holy Mass, ordination, penance, anointing of the sick, and marriage. This number of sacraments was never defined in the early church. It was only in response to the Protestant Reformers of the 16th century, who accepted only two sacraments, that the number seven was determined.

        The sacrament of chrismation is peculiar to the Eastern churches. In it newly baptized infants are anointed with oil and immediately admitted to the Holy Qurbana. In Western churches children must wait until they are older before receiving their first communion. In admitting infants the Orthodox churches maintain that baptism is the beginning of a new life that must be sustained by the Eucharist. When given communion, the bread is dipped in the wine,and administered to, or placed on the tongue of, the recipient.

Liturgies.

       Forms of worship are called liturgies. The two chief Eucharistic liturgies in the Orthodox churches are those of St. John Chrysostom and of St. Basil the Great. Both acquired their present form in the 9th century. There is also other liturgies like  St. James, St. Peeter, Isac, Mar Abraham, Mar Mathai, Mar Osthathios, Mar Eulios, Mar Ivanios, Saints etc..,are  often used. All of the liturgies are elaborate, festive occasions.

           The liturgies are divided into three segments. The first is a rite of preparation, during which the priest puts on a plate particles of bread symbolizing the gathering of the saints, both living and dead, around the living Christ. This is followed by the liturgy of the catechumens, or learners. This segment includes the reading of the lessons and the sermon. Finally comes the liturgy of the faithful, or baptized Christians, which includes the recitation of the creed and the administering of communion.

              The Orthodox churches follow the traditional church calendar. The greatest festival is Easter. The date of Easter normally varies from its celebration in the West because the Eastern churches still use the Julian calendar to compute the date.

        The Orthodox churches have a rich tradition of musical composition for hymns and liturgies.

Architecture.

Christians of the Orthodox tradition have built some of the most beautiful and highly decorated church buildings in the world. The first major house of worship, and still one of the great buildings of the world, was built during the reign of Emperor Justinian I in the 6th century at Constantinople. It is the Hagia Sophia, or Holy Wisdom. It consists of a huge round dome set atop a classical basilica-style building. Most Orthodox churches today have one or more domes. The Ottoman Turks turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, and later it became a museum.

      The interior of an Orthodox church is somewhat different from other churches. In most Western churches the altar is readily visible from the entryway. But in Orthodox churches there is a screen, or wall, called an iconostasis, with one or more doors in it, largely concealing the altar area from the worshipers. It is called an iconostasis because it is richly decorated with icons in the form of pictures of Christ and the saints. Orthodox churches have no statues or other three-dimensional images. The purpose of the iconostasis is to suggest a contrast between the visible manifestation of God in Christ as a man and his more perfect and invisible presence in the communion.

       It is largely because of its emphasis on the gathered community in worship that the Orthodox churches have survived in often-hostile surroundings. For this reason it is impossible to overestimate the significance of the liturgy in the life of the Eastern churches.

      There are several Eastern rite churches, most of whose members live in the Middle East, North Africa, or Eastern Europe. They are also called Eastern Catholics because they are part of the Roman Catholic Church under the authority of the pope. These churches trace their origins to various ancient national or ethnic Christian groups, some of which have a history dating back to the 1st century AD. Some of the groups, in fact, claim as founders one or more apostles of Jesus.

       The historical origin of the relationship with the Church of Rome dates from the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1439, which failed to unite the Christians of the East and West. Those in the East were mostly Eastern Orthodox and remain so today. The Eastern rite churches, however, chose to affiliate with Rome, and they did so, singly, over a period of centuries.