18 April 2023
Review: The ancient Hebrew people assumed there was an Eternal Realm radically different and superior to this realm of existence. They were convinced it was beyond human comprehension. The only discussion of it is in parables and symbolism. The Hebrew language is loaded with figures of speech about the Eternal Realm, but even Jesus did not attempt to describe it in clinical terms. He always used parables to talk about the Kingdom of Heaven.
For the Hebrew who was not self-absorbed, the only real issue in day to day life was how to stay on good terms with Jehovah. And it was personal, not a matter of mere protocol. They thought of Him as their Master and Father. There was a common lore of the revealed Covenant, but they also knew it was a matter of conviction. It was intensely personal; you must stay on friendly terms with God.
They did not suffer any obsession about going to Heaven. For them, it was a matter of staying on good terms with Jehovah while here in this world. This was your only chance to get it right. Live within the boundaries of His Covenant and walk by your convictions and He would take care of the rest. Get your heart right; stay faithfully committed to God, and your eternal destiny would be fine. They would go so far as to say God told them not to worry about Heaven.
In the New Testament, those among the Jews who followed Jesus would have quickly returned to this way of thinking about things. However, the moment they ran into Greek-speaking Gentiles, they were dealing with an entirely different orientation. The Greek language rested on Greek pagan culture, and that culture did not believe in any kind of eternal realm separate from this one. For them, it was all one thing. The gods were typically invisible to human eyes, but were still stuck in this same realm of existence with us. It's not that Aristotle came up with that; rather, it was a common assumption across the entire Greek culture.
It's not that Greeks had never heard of a spirit realm. Eastern religions were rather popular across the Greek Empire, and later the Roman Empire. Most of them promoted the notion of a spiritual realm totally separate from this realm. Thus, the Apostles were able to reference the idea as a way of pointing out that the common Greek pagan assumptions were wrong about this. Still, it wasn't hard to deal with the main question every Greek-speaking pagan had on their minds: How does one please the higher powers, whatever and however many their might be? How do we live this life to be in their favor? Most Greeks were religiously pagan, not Aristotelian.
But because of the assumptions behind the common Greek language, most of the Greek-speaking pagans had a strong confidence that man wasn't totally fallen, just misguided. Thus, Apostolic preaching among the Gentiles was loaded with warnings of our fallen nature. Hebrews knew one could not trust the common man to rule himself sensibly. It required frequently falling on your face before God as your Master, and subjecting yourself to the powers He ordained. Government was accountable directly and personally to God. The common man could only pray to God if government was bad. The Greeks in particular were quite favorable to the idea of a more or less democratic government that was accountable to the people, and only incidentally accountable to any deities.
The early Gentile church scholars who took up the reins from the previous generation of Hebrew leadership lost track of the Hebrew feudal outlook. It was not so much in their writings, but you can sense it in how they approach the various questions of how to walk in faith. They didn't handle government persecution with the level of patience that the Hebrew Christians did. There was no Gentile equivalent of Job. Rather, the Greek-speaking Christians were wide open to the temptation of having their say in government, whether it was pagan or not. This is why, two centuries later, they sucked up to Constantine, the pagan emperor.
Please note that Constantine didn't renounce his worship of Sol until he was on his deathbed. His embrace of Christian religion was sheer political opportunism. We get the impression he didn't believe in the afterlife, but decided to be baptized at the last moment, just in case. Meanwhile, he was personally faithful to his preferred deity in this life.
When the Germanic tribes invaded the fading Roman Empire a century later, the church leadership tried to negotiate a separate peace with the raiders, as if they were a separate kingdom within Rome, and represented the last surviving element of social and political stability. To do this, church leaders cynically made adjustments in the thrust of the gospel as it was at the time, and made it conform to the pagan mythology of the invaders. What little Hebrew character was left in their gospel went out the window.
So it's no surprise when, a couple more centuries later around 600 AD, the first pope (Stephen) arose over a church hierarchy that was somewhat a mixture of Roman and Germanic traditions. It was the basis for western Medieval feudalism, quite different from that of the Ancient Near East, which included the Hebrew people. While this brand of feudalism took government involvement out of the hands of the lowest peasants (no different in practice from the Greeks), the hierarchy still had to deal with lesser nobles until the birth of middle-class merchants. The middle class essentially bought off the royalty to gain their freedoms.
So, the Renaissance and Reformation were both movements of the middle class asserting a renewed interest in church and politics. It was the death of the western feudal government forms, but not the philosophical assumptions inherited from the Greco-Roman Civilization, which was seeing a revival of interest at the time. By this time, the remaining official Church was still Medieval in outlook, and the best way to weaken her power was to translate the Greco-Roman paganism into secularism. But it was still German flavored in many ways. Thus, we come to the Enlightenment.
The resulting Anglo-American culture was a very highly inflected brand of Enlightenment philosophy. There was a proliferation of evangelical Protestant religions because the Enlightenment government leadership were a mixture of Deist and various brands of mostly Protestantism. It was still an elitist government to the core, with plenty of cynical propaganda to address the common folk. This led to the masses believing in variations on democratic government. It never was that, but it gave the appearance of it.
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