St Mary's

Recent discoveries about the first three centuries of Christianity clarify for us today, some seventeen hundred years later, how early Christianity deteriorated from a movement focused on a new age of freedom, healing and compassion into a religious empire focussed on mandatory/ prescribed doctrines/ creeds, strictly monitored by a powerful priestly hierarchy. The Constantinian Roman Empire became “ Christian” and Christianity that had offered an alternative culture, became Roman and imperial.

What had been a loose network of local congregations with varied forms of leadership and ritual, a movement of faith focussed on the Jesus story, which is essentially about a new age of freedom, healing and compassion coagulated into  a rigid structure of beliefs about Jesus.  One historian estimates that in the two and a half centuries after Constantine, Christian imperial authorities put twenty five thousand to death for their lack of creedal consciousness.

An increasingly disenfranchised laity, and women in particular , who played such a vital role in the earliest years of Christianity were pushed to the underside and the edges. Those discoveries suggest that Christianity was not fated to develop as it did – a different historical trajectory was possible. In other words Christianity now has a second chance.

Today a combination of circumstances makes possible a new outlook that might be more like the first three centuries and less like the last fifteen hundred years that Harvey Cox calls the Age of Belief.  Not only do we know more about the actual origins of the Jesus movement than any generation since the first century itself, but – even more important Christianity is no longer a “ western religion”, it has recently exploded into a global one. Its vital centres now lie in Asia,  Africa and Latin America, and this affords unprecedented new opportunities. We are talking about Christianity as a whole – not one particular Christian denomination.

Having said that, there is no road back to the primitive church that some Protestants long for or to the high medieval and glorious church that some Catholics dream of. But there is one thing we can all agree on concerning the future of Christianity, that if there is to be a future, Christianity must return to its roots and focus its energies not on hierarchy, not on creeds, but on what some call the Dream of God – a dream that billions of people on this planet long for everyday – a global community in which all people regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation – in fact all living things, including and especially the planet itself,  are treated with respect, dignity and practical compassion for all those who are most vulnerable – for what we do is surely far more important than what we believe. Otherwise Christianity has become something different from its original vision.  Knowing about the past is vital, not to return to it, but to learn from it- understanding our past can reopen roads that might have been taken but were not. There is within Catholicism an unhealthy emphasis on tradition – a tradition based on the fiction of Apostolic Succession, which locks Catholics into a belief in certain doctrines and moral absolutes that are no longer tenable.

This is why it is so imperative that we have both the most accurate picture of the origins of Christianity possible and the clearest grasp of the sweep and dynamism of the new global Christianity.

Chapter 4 “ The Road Runner and the Gospel of Thomas” of Harvey Cox’s book “The Future of Faith” from which I have taken this homily is available for you to take home – it will help to clarify for “ those with ears to listen”  where this community is presently at and hopefully will continue down that “ road less travelled”  – otherwise in my opinion , we have clearly lost our way.