From: mls@cbnewsm.cb.att.com (mike.siemon)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: Favorite Bible Verses
Summary: too facile
Date: 11 Sep 92 17:08:10 GMT
Organization: AT&T

In article <25750@castle.ed.ac.uk>, loki@castle.ed.ac.uk (A Kashko) writes:

[re: Constantine and ther imperialization of Christianity]

> 	Hmmm... Spiritually it was probably the death of 
> the original christianity, and therefore a death wound.

That is rather exaggerated.  Think of it rather as an open wound,
which will not heal but continues to bleed the strength from its
ancient body ...

By becoming an arena of activity for *secular* ambitions (those of
the rulers, to manipulate this new vehicle of social control, and
those of the Church who wished -- nakedly or by confusion between
social/political influence and the Kingdom of Heaven -- to pull
the levers of political power), the *visible* and censusable
"body" of Christians became ever more obvious, and what ordinary
usage of "Christian" came to mean, than the Body of Christ informed
by the Spirit.  But the basic problem had existed from the start
-- it is mostly an order of magnitude change after Christianity
became trendy (and then politically necessary.)  One may still find
Christians living in the Spirit in the strangest places -- Pope
John XXIII lived in the Vatican, for example :-).

> 	Politically it was a great help in letting the church 
> become the new empire.

The Church NEVER "became the new empire."  In the East, the Church
was for the most part subservient to the state, with the exception
of a few outbursts (as in anti-iconoclasm, or some late rejections
of political attempts to patch up the schism with the West.)  In
the West, the Church provided ad hoc leadership when there was none
other, and sometimes functioned in place of prior civil services.
By the time of the Ottos, there WAS no civil service of any sort,
and the Saxons enlisted clerics as clerks to a degree that would
have surprised even Charlemagne.  In this alliance, the Church was
reformed by a coalition of prestigious Benedictine monastic houses
and the new Saxon dynasty -- and the reformed Church then was strong
enough to make itself (mostly) independent of that political structure.
From then on, the Roman Church had imperial *pretensions* but it has
never had the reality of empire.  Just as well, I say.

> 	Any connection between today's christianity and what the 
> original founder (Yeshua, not Paul) taught is at best accidental,
> and more likely depsite the wishes of the churches.

This is standard anti-Christian dogma, but it is much too facile and
depends on forcing 1) a massively liberal interpretation of Jesus
against 2) an equally massively reactionary interpretation of Paul.
If one reads Paul with ANY kind of attention to the structure of his
writing, with the emphases HE gives things and the order of presen-
tation, one can only conclude that his over-riding message is either
the SAME as Jesus' (e.g., that the only law binding Christians is to
love one another, as he expounds in Romans) or goes far beyond it in
universalizing, that in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, man
nor woman, slave nor free (in Galations), or again the evaluation of
love in Corinthians.  Paul had, indeed, a rather complex and murky
theology -- of death with Christ in baptism, to rise with new life
no longer under the dominion of sin and law.  Jesus didn't teach theo-
logy, so it is hard to make much comparison there; one thing is clear:
the later Church as it got into the social control business did its
best to deemphasize a radical and revolutionary strain in Paul, by
isolating and exaggerating elements that COULD be "used" against the
socially wayward.  Paul does do some of this.  So did Jesus.   They
are certainly different in many ways (Paul, for example, was not the
Christ :-)) -- but if you are going to look honestly at Christianity
you would do better to look at either a conservative Jesus and conser-
vative Paul, a liberal Jesus and liberal Paul, or better than either
tendentious program, the Jesus and Paul of scholarly literature, who
are both far more complex and human than political platform statements
even hint at.
-- 
Michael L. Siemon		   "Oh, stand, stand at the window,
					As the tears scald and start;
mls@usl.com			   You shall love your crooked neighbor
standard disclaimer			With your crooked heart."