14 June 2023
Yesterday's post served to reassert freshly a fundamental doctrine, but also as a set up for something I've been asked to address: Where did the Orthodox family of churches come from? How did they split from the Roman Church? This is the Great Schism, AKA Catholic versus Orthodox.
You can't get there from here. It's a very long journey.
It's part of a very large body of scholarship called Church History. Just an introductory course in college is overwhelming. The sheer volume of material is massive. It would take weeks just to read the flawed summary from the likes of Wikipedia, and you still would have only scratched the surface. And to really understand it well, you'd have to delve into the history of each of the countries where the various historical figures lived and worked. You can't understand the Great Schism without the historical context.
Because this remains such a contentious issue even now, you will quickly learn how fractured the scholarly opinions are, and how the scholarship tilts in all directions. Some will claim to be objective, but those are the ones who typically miss the point. I won't pretend I can do a better job than the writers who have already written about it. I'm just as opinionated as anyone else. But some of you have asked me to write about it; you seem to want my opinion.
Here we go. It would be very easy to get lost in the details and not see the broader trends. I've already broached an introduction here and there in previous posts. Let's review.
John was the last living of the Twelve, the last apostle who walked with Jesus. I cannot possibly explain what God was thinking, but I can see what happened as a result of losing that strong Hebrew influence. There were plenty of Jewish believers who carried on after John, but Judaism was by no means Hebraic, except superficially. Jesus emphasized the huge difference between Pharisaism (AKA Judaism) and Moses. Somehow that slipped off the radar after John. I'm not saying no one noticed it, but that it simply didn't influence the way churches did things for very long.
A very fundamental difference is that the native Hebrew approach is very pragmatic and functional. That's the nature of mysticism. The Hebrew intellectual assumptions are that we cannot possibly understand spiritual things from our fallen human situation. The truth is ineffable. Your heart knows, but your brain is on a different wavelength (literally and figuratively). So, the best you can hope for is some kind of guidance on how to play out your role. What is required of us? What can we actually do?
This kind of thinking was undermined by the Exile, simply because it exposed the Judean intelligentsia to a mix of cultures that somehow introduced a more materialistic outlook. It's not easy to trace how that happened, but we can see the net result in how the community leaders acted after the Return. The heavy struggle that Ezra and Nehemiah faced, and the messages of the latter prophets, point out that the human factors overwhelmed the scholars, both those still back in Babylon and those who returned to Judea. There is a distinct fundamental shift that left them wide open to something that was intellectually fatal.
Alexander the Great conquered the land. The Judeans didn't resist militarily, but even more importantly, they were conquered by Alexander's Hellenism. I and others have described at length how the influence of Plato and Aristotle completely eclipsed the Hebraic epistemology (assumptions about reality). By the time Jesus comes along 300 years later, while the Pharisees rejected Hellenic culture, they had fully embraced Hellenized thinking. And it gave rise to the "traditions of the elders" that Jesus condemned. Every dispute Jesus had with the Pharisees can be understood only if you keep that in mind.
Paul had the advantage of spending some years with the risen Christ. There are no details; we are just guessing, but Paul mentions an out-of-body experience and gives hints in writing of things he no doubt shared at length orally. His Pharisaical orientation was corrected by his time alone with Christ.
Unfortunately, his efforts to share that with other Jews who followed Jesus didn't seem to stick. We see the same with what Peter must have taught the Jews with whom he shared the gospel as the Apostle to the Jews. We look back at those times from here and see almost no such influence surviving. Instead, we have a record that shows how successful the Judaizers were in the long run, inserting the Pharisaical intellectual approach back into church doctrine. Somehow, that Hellenized Pharisaical outlook survived, and the mystical Hebraic revival of Jesus and His disciples died out. Again, we have no idea why God allowed this to happen, but that Christians today almost universally fail to grasp what the Son of God taught cannot be a good thing.
Back to John: If you read between the lines, his Revelation laments the fading influence of Hebraic Christianity. It's part of the Apocalypse. The whole thing was written from a very Hebraic point of view, and I'm quite sure John knew the mystical meaning of his prophecy would be lost eventually. Somewhere out there, he knew the Lord would bring it back, but not before an awful lot of time with Satan rising in power among humans. John's vision of the Harlot Church predicted how the church leaders would compromise with Roman imperial government.
Thus, Early Church History is a sad tale of how the simple faith in Jesus the Messiah was perverted into a quest for church political unity on a human level.
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