Deviant Christianity

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the concept of "deviant Christianity." This will involve attempts to answer three main questions: What is the mainstream of Christian faith and practice? What deviations from that mainstream have occurred historically? What are the appropriate theological criteria for deciding whether a deviation has gone so far afield that it is no longer a part of the Christian mainstream? These are not easy questions to answer, and they never have been, since there has never been only a single variety of Christianity in existence.

In order for there to be a Christian mainstream, there must first be a Christian community with a self-conscious identity. This came into existence during the period when the New Testament documents were being written. One can usefully dwell on this period, since the seeds of many later developments can be found in the details of how the New Testament documents were written, collected, and canonized.

Among the earliest documents, those that fall before or were contemporary with the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 69, e.g., Paul and Mark, take it for granted that Christians are a special class of Jews -- specifically, Jews who know who the Messiah is -- and their theology would make no sense outside a Jewish context. On this, consider Paul's dense argument in Romans about why Christians, now including Gentile converts, have inherited the benefits of the covenant with Moses.

In contrast, Luke, whom many scholars c

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g Jesus' lifetime, since Christians remained members of synagogues for almost fifty years after his ascension, but somewhere around A.D. 80-85. At this juncture, the Christians, excommunicated by the Sanhedrin, no longer legally Jewish, felt they had been thrown to the wolves. Christianity was now an illegal religion, and the first official persecution of Christians began about the year 90. (The earlier "persecution" under Nero was merely a local lynching that violated Roman law -- something the Emperors often did.) This historic dividing point between the two faith communities was the beginning of the historic animosity between them. Some Christian communities decided to go on a war footing. They abandoned the traditional synagogue structure, in which authority was divided between the Rabbi and the President of the synagogue council, made up of the elder male members of the synagogue, and instead invested all authority in a single person: an overseer, or supervisor, or epi-skopos, from which the term "bishop" has evolved. That is, the first Christian bishops were something like war chiefs, intended to serve only for the duration of the emergency. Those early communities could not have foreseen that the emergency would last

Category: Philosophy - D