The Future of Christianity: Can It Survive?

By Arthur J. Bellinzoni, Professor Emeritus of Religion, Wells College

Whatever else they may be, the religions of the world are all human constructs, human creations, the human half of what believers generally consider an encounter with the divine, with God.

Most of the world’s major religions trace their origins to encounters between a “founder,” usually a prophetic figure, or what I prefer to call a mediator between the human and the divine: Lao-tzu in Taoism; Confucius in Confucianism, Buddha in Buddhism, Moses in Judaism, Mohammad in Islam, Jesus in Christianity, and so on.

Men and women who belong to this “prophetic type” are individuals who purportedly speak for a god as if they were under “divine guidance.”  These individuals, these mediators are religious teachers who either claim to be, or who are regarded by their disciples as, speaking under divine inspiration or supernatural direction. They are generally men and women who have experienced the divine in a vision or an audition in such a way that they believe that they have received revelations from the supernatural order.  These prophets listen to, obey, and then speak what they claim is “the word of their god.”

The prophet invariably points to the divine as the source of the authority whose teaching or message the mediator is presumably delivering.  As such, the prophet is under a superhuman constraint and serves simply as the mediator, the channel, the link between the divine and humankind.

There are generally three essential steps in the preservation of the divine word: 
 

1. It is God or a divine messenger, such as an angel, who reveals the message to the prophet;

 
2. The prophet faithfully delivers the divine message to an audience of listeners or followers; and 

 
3. Either the prophet or, more often, a disciple or disciples of the prophet faithfully transcribes the prophet’s words, thereby creating an infallible record of the divine word in what are often considered sacred writings.

At each step in this process, the mechanism of the believing community assures that the written word of the sacred book is essentially identical to the divine word delivered to the prophet.  This claim, this mechanism, guarantees the authority of the sacred writing, but the writing is, of course, in the final analysis nothing more than a human construct, a human claim about the supernatural.

By such a process, Moses delivered the Ten Commandments; Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount; Mohammad delivered the teachings of Allah.  By extension, Jews have the Torah; Christians have the Bible; Muslims have the Koran.  So too, Mormons have the Book of Mormon, Christians Scientists have Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures, and so forth.  All of these writings are, of course, human creations and must be examined and studied as such.

From the perspective of modern scholarship, it is essential to examine each and every religion and each and every body of sacred literature in its own historical, cultural, and religious context if we are to truly understand that religion and its sacred writings.  Historical objectivity insists that contextuality is essential in understanding any natural phenomenon, and whatever else they may be, the religions of the world and their myriad of sacred books are all natural phenomena, creations of humankind in the near or more distant past.

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Christianity had its origins in the first century in Roman Palestine as an insignificant sect within Judaism.  The movement spread quickly into the Greco-Roman world, where it changed substantially.  To understand Christianity’s origins and growth, one must be aware of the historical, the cultural, and the religious contexts in which Jesus of Nazareth lived and into which the nascent religion was born and later spread, the former Jewish, the latter Hellenistic.  One must also be aware of the historical, the cultural, and the religious contexts of each subsequent period in Christianity’s history in order to understand the development of Christianity over its 2,000-year history.

The best scholarly research into the life and ministry of Jesus maintains that Jesus was a first-century Jewish apocalyptic prophet who preached the imminent end of history as we know it and the arrival of a new age, the period of God’s rule that would be ushered in, in the very near future, by a supernatural angelic figure whom Jesus and others of his generation called the Son of Man.

Following Jesus’ death, the earliest Christians believed that when that angelic Son of Man finally arrived, presumably within their lifetimes, he would be none other than Jesus himself, whom they claimed God had raised from the dead and elevated to his right hand to a position of honor and authority.  In his first letter to the emerging Christian community in Thessalonica, probably the earliest writing in our canonical New Testament, Paul makes it eminently clear that he expected Jesus to return very soon.  Paul was wrong.  The second coming did not occur in Paul’s lifetime; neither has it occurred since.

That first generation of Christians, and certainly Paul, effectively changed the religion of Jesus into a religion about Jesus.  Those early Christian communities believed that if an individual simply believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead and that he was Lord and Messiah, he or she could share in Jesus’ resurrection and would, after death, be united with him and the father in glory in heaven.  That belief survives in some form in most Christian communities even today, although individual denominations differ on the timetable for the second coming.

In the earliest centuries of the church’s history, Christians appropriated what they believed was suitable Greek philosophical language to explain what they considered to be a special relationship between Jesus the Messiah and God the Father, and the relationship of the two of them to the Holy Spirit or the spirit of God which, they believed, continued to live with the church and inspire members of the community with supernatural power.

In 325, almost three hundred years after Jesus’ death, 318 fathers of the church — bishops who were considered to be appointed by God as witnesses to the Christian tradition — assembled at Nicaea in modern Turkey in the first ecumenical council, summoned by Emperor Constantine.  An ecumenical council is an assembly of bishops and other ecclesiastical representatives whose decisions on doctrine, cult, discipline, and so forth are considered authoritative and, therefore, binding on all Christians.  Since it was Constantine’s policy to join the Christian Church to the Roman state by the closest possible ties, Constantine was deeply involved with the church’s internal affairs.

An appeal from contending parties led Constantine to assemble the Council of Nicaea to settle the dispute about the Person of Christ and his relationship to the Father.  Constantine presided over the council.  Under his guidance — some would say under his direction — the bishops adopted language that they maintained expressed the correct or orthodox definition of the relationship of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in a formula still recited by most Christians today as the Nicene Creed.  This creed expresses the authoritative understanding of the Trinity, most specifically that the Son is of the same substance as the Father.  The Council of Nicaea was not only an important theological event; it was a major political force in uniting the church.

The fourth ecumenical council was convened in 451 in Chalcedon, also in modern Turkey.  The 500 to 600 “divinely appointed” bishops present adopted a statement of faith called the Chalcedonian Definition, which affirmed the existence in Christ of Two Natures, which are united “unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, and inseparably.” That formula maintains that Jesus Christ is in other words entirely human and entirely divine.

Subscribing to both the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Definition has become throughout the church’s history the principal test of orthodoxy — a Greek word meaning “correct teaching,” as opposed to heresy, a Greek word meaning “choice,” implying a “schism” or a “division” or a “faction” that knowingly and consciously deviates from the “correct teaching” of the universal church. 

Accepting the correct teaching of the universal or “catholic” church was, at least until the time of the Protestant Reformation, the principal measure of determining whether a person was a Christian or not, orthodox or heretical.  In other words, Christianity has generally required first and foremost subscription to correct definitions of the Godhead, on the one hand, and of the dual nature of Jesus Christ, on the other hand.  Christianity has, consequently, been unique among the world’s religions in being first and foremost a belief system, that is a subscription to correct or orthodox theology (that is, teaching about the nature of God) and correct or orthodox Christology (that is, teaching about the dual nature of Jesus Christ).

In the West, the period of the Middle Ages from 476 to the end of the 15th century was the age that approached most nearly the realization of Christendom as a cultural unity, much like what Islam is today in many parts of the world.  This period was characterized by the consolidation of ecclesiastical authority in the bishops of the West and, in particular, in the bishop of Rome as being first among those bishops.  During this period, there was effectively no separation between church and state, as we have come to understand and value that principle in the West in recent centuries.

Much of that relatively monolithic structure began to change with the advent of the Protestant Reformation.  Beginning in the 14th century with attacks by the English reformer John Wycliffe and his followers, the Lollards, and their Czech associates John Huss and the Hussites, an involved series of changes began with assaults on the church’s hierarchical and legalistic structure.  From the outset, the strongest criticism fell upon the papacy.  Consequently, when, in the 16th century, Martin Luther protested against the corruption of Rome and the abuses attending the sale of indulgences, he was breaking no new ground but was, rather, advancing the criticism of his 14th-century forbears.  Likewise, John Calvin in France, Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland, and other reformers challenged the authority of the bishops and, in particular, the pope, and identified authority as being vested, instead, in the 66 books of the Bible.  The reformers understood themselves not as innovators but as returning to an earlier state of primitive excellence.  In due course, Luther’s study of St. Augustine led him to question the emphasis of late medieval theology upon “good works,” while his historical studies raised doubts regarding the validity of papal claims to supremacy.  For the reformers, in what they believed was a return to the theology of Paul, salvation came through faith alone rather than through works of the law in marked contrast to Roman Catholicism.

In affording this very brief and imperfect sketch of a few critical periods in the history of the church, I want to call attention to the fact that Christianity and, in particular, the focus of the church’s teaching and authority have changed or shifted dramatically over time.  Christianity has not been static these 2,000 years.  It has, rather, been dynamic and has shown enormous adaptability in meeting the needs and the challenges of each new age.

Looking into the future to determine whether Christianity can or even should survive, I assume the following:
 

1. The impact of the Enlightenment, which appeared in an especially clear-cut form in the 18th century in Europe, will continue to have an even greater influence on Christianity, and on all of the world’s religions, in the future.  Set within the tendency to Rationalism, the Enlightenment combined opposition to all supernatural religion and belief in the sufficiency of human reason with an ardent desire to promote the happiness of humankind in this life.  Most of its representatives believed in God as the Creator who had set the universe in motion, but they rejected Christian dogma and were hostile to both Roman Catholicism and to Protestant orthodoxy, which they regarded as powers of spiritual darkness that deprive humanity of the use of its rational faculties.  The spirit of the Enlightenment penetrated deeply into German Protestantism, where it disintegrated faith in the infallibility of the Bible and gave birth to biblical criticism, on the one hand, and its antithesis, emotional “Pietism,” on the other hand.  Both of these tendencies survive today in more liberal and more conservative denominations of Christianity.   I submit that increased acceptance of the principles of the Enlightenment in future centuries will mean that the fastest-growing denominations of this generation lack the rational foundation required to survive for another century, no less for another millennium.  To be blunt, pietistic tendencies like Evangelical Christianity and 20th- and now 21st-century American biblical fundamentalism have no long-term future.  These anti-rational tendencies have survived already beyond their time.


Let one thing be perfectly clear: Rationalism and Science cannot prove that God does not exist.  They do, however, render God unnecessary as the indispensable explanation for the physical universe and the emergence of life on our planet, hence the unrelenting determination of fundamentalist creationists to discredit biological evolution and the mechanism of natural selection.
 

2. We live in a world of diversity in which everyone will have increasingly more contact with people who are different — racially, culturally, and religiously.  Christians and others will continue to assimilate ideas from secular movements and from other religious and spiritual traditions, just as they have done previously.  Further assimilation will mean even more significant change in future generations.

 
3. Christianity must evolve in a way that will address the needs of future generations or else disappear because of its irrelevance, as has been the case with countless religions that flourished in the past but that are known now only from archaeological remains or from books.

I am not sure whether the church will follow or lead during these times of significant social change.  It is, however, essential that the church understand when change is required and what kind of change is appropriate.  By their very nature, religions tend to be conservative, but from time to time prophetic voices in every religious tradition challenge the status quo and introduce revolutionary ideas that bring essential transformation, often quickly and quite dramatically.

Let us look together at issues that will be particularly challenging to the future of Christianity.  There are, in my opinion, four such matters that come to mind in this regard, and they constitute the four divisions of my book, The Future of Christianity: Can It Survive?:

(1) Are Christians prepared to understand that God is not an anthropomorphic being, that God may not be a He, or even a She for that matter?  Are Christians prepared to desist from creating God in our image?  Do we understand that the concept of a personal deity is too limiting and too archaic?

I like to believe that Moses got it right more than 3,000 years ago when he told his followers not to make any images of their god.  The problem is that not only carved images, but also conceptual images, are idolatrous.  Unlike Judaism and Islam, in which images of God are strictly forbidden, Christianity has generally ignored Moses’ directive in what was his second commandment.  The history of Christian art and theology is, perhaps fortunately, at least from an aesthetic perspective, replete with representations of God, both physical representations and, more importantly, conceptual representations.

In ancient Chinese religion, most specifically in the teaching of Lao-zu, the 6th century BCE founder of Taoism, it is the cosmos, or the totality of everything that exists, that deserves our devotion.  Unlike their more western counterparts, ancient Chinese thinkers were not content with framing a theory to account for the becoming, the being, and the passing away of individual objects.  They wanted to account for the evident harmony and order that they saw in nature as a whole.  The concept they arrived at by way of an answer to that perceived order in the universe was the Tao.  The harmony and orderliness displayed in heaven and earth were, they said, the result of the cosmic presence of the Tao.

We read in the opening sentence of the Tao Te Ching, a collection of sayings of Lao-zu composed by his disciples following his death: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao.”  The Tao is the ultimate reality on which all else depends for existence, but it is not itself just one more existent thing; it is rather prior to everything.  The Tao is nameless, and to us who are accustomed to thinking only of entities or beings that we meet or understand within the realm of space and time, the Tao is so elusive, so far beyond our power to imagine or conceive, that we westerners are tempted to think it is nothing at all.  In some ways, the Tao might be considered something like “the governing principle of the universe.”

Among some Christian theologians, the idea of “the God beyond God” may be compared to the Chinese Tao.  That idea is found in Dionysius the Areopagite in about 500 CE, and it reappears in the thought of such theologians as Paul Tillich in the 20th century.  It is eminently clear that the Tao is not a person and, therefore, certainly not God, as that word is usually understood in the West.  Somehow concealed in this elusive Ultimate is the power that moves the world.  Beyond the material universe lies this impalpable and indescribable reality, the Tao.

Westerners find this language difficult to comprehend, elusive, even uncomfortable.  I submit, however, that something like the Tao will, within this millennium be closer to the Christian understanding of ultimate reality than the personal God in whom Christians currently believe.  I submit to you that our “personal” God is too small.

Borrowing, additionally in my book, from Moses, Thomas Jefferson, and American Negro spirituals, I propose that the concept of God might be better served by focusing on the contemporary concept of human freedom.  And with a nod to Hollywood’s George Lucas, I suggest that using a term like “The Force” might actually deliver us from the anthropomorphic limitations generally associated with the word “god.”

(2) What about our understanding of the Bible, the canon of sacred scripture?  What does it mean to call these 66 books “authoritative,” especially when biblical scholars have shown conclusively that these books are human compositions that reflect not only timeless values, but also short-lived values of the time in which each book was written?

We are surrounded by biblical fundamentalists, especially in the South and in the form of TV evangelists, what I call The Electronic Church.  Fundamentalism is a movement in various Protestant bodies, which developed after World War I, especially in the United States.  It rigidly upholds what it believes are ancient and traditional Christian doctrines, most especially the inerrancy of scripture.  It attracted widespread attention in 1925, when William Jennings Bryan assisted in the prosecution of John Scopes, a Tennessee schoolteacher who was convicted on the charge of violating state law by teaching biological evolution, a story made famous by Hollywood in the film Inherit the Wind.

In a wider sense, the term Fundamentalism is applied to all profession of strict adherence to orthodoxy in the matter of biblical interpretation.  Evidence of the strength of the movement is manifest in ongoing efforts to remove from school curricula the requirement to teach evolution and the big bang theory of the origin of the universe, or to add to school curricula the alternative of so-called Intelligent Design.  Even President George Bush supports this effort and maintains that he does not believe in evolution, but our courts have consistently and happily overturned efforts to introduce these religious fundamentalisms into our nations’ public school classrooms.  Nonetheless, as we all know, religious fundamentalism remains strong in the United States.

Will future generations of Christians be more open to understanding what the Bible is and what it is not?  We know that Genesis is not a science manual in spite of those who persist in treating it as such.  It is interesting to speculate about how Christians will understand their scriptures in the future, but I promise you that it will be quite different from the way in which many currently understand the Bible.  Christians must learn to distinguish in the Bible the timeless from the not-so-timeless.

(3) And what about Jesus?  Who was he? What kind of man was he?  Are we prepared to reexamine the question of Jesus’ divinity and deal with him exclusively in his humanity?  Can we understand that phrases like “Son of God” might have poetic and symbolic meaning beyond trying unsuccessfully to establish Jesus’ genealogical relationship to God?

I mentioned earlier that the doctrine of the Trinity is a human concept, carved out of 4th-century theological disputes within the Church and that, in formulating the church’s creeds, Christian theologians borrowed and adopted philosophical language current in the Greco-Roman world.  The final form of the Nicene Creed was as much the result of a political decision of Emperor Constantine as it was the victory of the followers of Bishop Athanasius over the followers of Arius.  Nicaea has been characterized as an argument over a single iota, the Greek letter i.  Are the Father and the Son of the same substance (Greek homoousia) or are they of similar substance (Greek homoiousia)?  The “same substance” theologians prevailed at Nicaea, with considerable “encouragement” from Constantine.  I contend that that vote will ultimately not stand the test of time.

(4) What about Christianity’s mythical view of the world and its mythological understanding of salvation and redemption?  More than 60 years ago, German New Testament scholar and theologian Rudolf Bultmann, an ordained Lutheran minister, recognized that the cosmology of the New Testament is mythical.  The world of the Bible is a three-storied structure, with the earth in the center, heaven above, and the underworld beneath.  Heaven is the abode of God and the angels; the underworld is hell, the abode of Satan and the place of torment and punishment.  Even the earth is not simply the scene of everyday natural events.  It is rather the scene of the supernatural struggle between God and his angels on the one hand, and Satan and his demons on the other hand, both competing in a cosmic conflict for our allegiance.

The New Testament presupposes this mythological view of the world in its preaching, and I quote: “In the fullness of time God sent forth his Son, a pre-existent divine Being, who appeared on earth as a man.  He died the death of a sinner on the cross and made atonement for the sins of humankind.  His resurrection marked the beginning of the cosmic catastrophe.  Death, the consequence of Adam’s sin was abolished, and the demonic forces were deprived of their power.  The risen Christ was exalted to the right hand of God in heaven and made “Lord” and “King.”  He will come again on the clouds of heaven to complete the work of redemption; the resurrection and judgment of everyone will follow.  Sin, suffering, and death will then be finally abolished.  All this is to happen very soon; indeed, St. Paul thinks he himself will live to see it.  All those who belong to Christ’s Church and are joined to the Lord by Baptism and the Eucharist are certain of resurrection to salvation,” and so forth, and so on.

This all sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?  It is at the heart of the church’s creeds.  Reflect on the “movement” among the three mythological spheres in this biblical confession of faith.  Bultmann indicated that this is the language of ancient mythology and that the origin of most Christian themes can be traced to 1st-century Jewish and Hellenistic mythology.  To this extent, Bultmann maintained, the Church’s preaching is currently incredible to our modern generation because the mythical cosmology or worldview that the church’s preaching presumes is obsolete.  It was Bultmann’s view that there is, in fact, nothing specifically Christian in this mythical worldview.  It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age, nothing more, nothing less.

Bultmann made the critical observation that the purpose of myth is not to present an objective picture of our physical universe, but rather to express an understanding of our place in the world.  The subject of the New Testament, he maintained, is actually not God at all, but humankind, or even better an understanding of the nature of humankind and the meaning of human existence.  Accordingly, the importance of New Testament mythology lies not in its imagery, but rather in the understanding of the meaning of human existence that Christian mythology enshrines.

According to Bultmann, the question of God and the question of myself are identical, and Christians must focus in future generations on the Bible’s understanding of the meaning of human existence and interpret Biblical mythology not cosmologically (as we have usually done), but rather anthropologically, or better yet existentially.  Are we prepared to accept such a major shift and say that the subject matter of Christianity is actually humankind, and not God? 

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I’ve already spoken too long and prefer to refrain from predicting what Christianity will look like a hundred or a thousand years from now, if, indeed, it is still around.  I frankly do not have a crystal ball.  No one does.  But I promise you that Christianity will be substantially different from what you and I were taught in Sunday school.  There is no turning back the clock, and there is no way to avoid the insights and the truths that conflict with what many Christians mistakenly think is the essence of Christianity.

Christianity must henceforth focus its efforts on humankind.  It is in that context alone that it is possible to discuss the question of God.  Using the best that science and human reason have to offer, it is time to reach behind or through Christian mythology to undercover its enduring relevance. 

Once the power of myth has been unleashed and its meaning unlocked, we can then look at the myths of Genesis and the mythology of the New Testament and focus on the existential content and timeless truths that are enshrined in Jesus’ teaching and in the books of the Bible and then dispense with what is not timeless.  Suffice it to say, Christianity will have to reinterpret ancient mythology to address the issues of God, the Bible, and Jesus.  That is the focus of my book.

It is no longer clear that God exists, at least not in the way in which Christians have traditionally believed.  Our popular view of God is laden with ancient mythologies, and we should probably understand that God cannot and should not be understood apart from the human experience of what it means to be human and how we humans should relate to our experience of the universe and our encounter with all life on this tiny planet.

It is essential to address the question of what role the Bible will play in this exercise.  It can no longer serve as the single authoritative record of the human encounter with the divine.  No book can.  And the written scriptures of the world’s religions are simply not what they claim to be, whatever anyone from any religion may tell you.  We need to open ourselves to “inspired” writings wherever we find them -- in other religions, in poetry, in literature, and yes even in film.

And finally, Jesus’ total humanity is uncompromisable.  Christians must ask themselves, accordingly, whether there is anything unique in the person of Jesus or in his teachings.  Is Jesus qualitatively different from other great prophetic figures?  Does his message represent a better way than what we find in the teachings of Moses, Buddha, Mohammad, or Lao-zu?

The stakes are exceedingly high, and the challenge is enormous, but to survive, Christians must speak openly, honestly, and courageously to these and other issues.  It is essential to keep one’s eyes focused on the future and to look to the past only for an occasional point of reference as to where we have already been.

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The focus of my book The Future of Christianity: Can It Survive? is that if it is to survive, Christianity must do two things:
 

1. Christianity must look to the future and to what it must mean a millennium from now for Christianity to be a truly universal religion; and 

 
2. Christianity must reclaim the agenda from Christian extremists, who will, otherwise, I promise you, most assuredly guarantee the demise of Christianity due to obsolescence.

I urge all of you, whatever your personal religious belief, Christians or not, to prepare for the challenge, not by entrenching yourselves more deeply in traditions of the past and in obsolete religious fundamentalisms, but rather by opening yourselves to the future and to new truths wherever you may find them and however disconcerting and disturbing they may appear to be. 

Delivered June 1, 2006 at Wells College.