…when you can’t agree with each other?
The Hoosier Methodism in which I was raised favored sentimental hymns, including this cherished gem written by John Oxenham’s in 1908, “In Christ there is no east or west, in him no south or north, but one great fellowship of love, throughout the whole wide earth.”
Seriously? This is more delusional than the belief in God itself that we also cherished. Christians have loved one another since…never. Hey, I was pastor of two churches, and it didn’t take long to figure out the factions, the parishioners who couldn’t stand each other. Doesn’t this go back to the beginning? In Mark 10 we read that James and John asked Jesus for favored seating in the kingdom of heaven, and “when the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John” (v 41). Maybe this was when the ‘one great fellowship of love’ began to fall apart, and in Paul’s letters we see plenty of evidence of Christian bickering.
All this was but a hint of what was to come. In making the case that Christianity is a sham, it’s tempting to urge folks to read Dawkins, Hitches, Harris and Loftus, but it might be even more helpful to have them to take a glance at church history. Truly, it’s one bloodbath after another, persecutions, wars, inquisitions, tortures, executions—all
because Christians can’t agree on Jesus and God. Never have, never will.
Maybe reading the history of the church sounds too grim—which it is—so let me suggest a painless shortcut: David Eller’s first essay, ”Christianity Evolving; On the Origin of Christian Species,” in
The End of Christianity, John Loftus’ second anthology (2011). Eller points out that the religion of Jesus—whatever that may have been—was lost forever as Christianity has morphed endlessly, changing, adjusting to the cultures it has moved into. At the end of his opening section Eller states, “Christianity will be exposed as a thicket of bickering religions, absorbing local influences and reinventing themselves over and over again—which does undermine any possible claim of uniqueness or truth in Christianity.”