CHRISTIANITY
For many Christians the photo to the left, taken inside the church in Jerusalem that marks where Jesus legendarily was buried would show much of what they love about their religion. With its rich imagery they see it as representing a world beyond our senses in which Jesus, risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, awaits a return at the end of time. For some other Christians, a church such as this with its ornate decoration and the elaborate ceremonies of the priests who maintain it, is seens as an unwelcome movement away from the perceived simplicity of the Gospels.
Instead, their
preference is for something more austere where there is no altar at all
and certainly no priests and no droning liturgy. Instead
attention is meant to be concentrated on the pulpit from which a
minister will read and explain the Bible.There is a parallel here between what we saw in Buddhism when early reformers demanded a return to the simplicity of its monastic beginnings while other Buddhists continued to develop ever more elaborate teachings and practices. With the Reformation of the sixteenth century Western Christianity saw a split into the two main traditions of Roman Catholicism and the various Protestant denominations. Like the Theravadin Buddhists, leading Reformers demanded a return to what they saw as the original intent of their founder. Instead of a hierarchy reaching to a final arbiter in Rome, they insisted that ordinary Christians, now more able to access the Bible on their own because of the new technology of printing, should have a relationship with God that did not need to be mediated by a specialized priesthood. There was still a role for the clergy, but the sacramental patterns of Catholicism were no longer necessary.
Eastern Christianity, however, was not affected by this, and even as Roman Catholics have attempted to modernize by abandoning Latin as a liturgical language Eastern Christians (for example, the Greek Orthodox) continue to maintain patterns of worship reaching back through the centuries.
To add to the complexity of this, in the United States Christianity in the nineteenth century exploded still further with new movements, some of which we will look at in the final section of the course.
One thing common to all Christian traditions, in contrast to what we have seen in Asia and in Judaism, is an emphasis on specific beliefs. The Reformation in no way ended intense theological disputes, many of which centered on the issue of how to reconcile the idea of God's absolute freedom with human choices (the question someone might ask about whether God already selects some souls for salvation and others for damnation so that their own actions would not matter). However, sorting out the doctrinal differences in any detail--how Lutherans might differ from Baptists or Episcopalians from Congregationalists--is certainly more than we could hope to accomplish in a survey course such as this. What you should understand are certain key beliefs that are part of the heritage of almost all Christian denominations (above all the idea of the Trinity and the notion of Jesus as both God and man). Some other teachings more limited to particular denominations (such as the idea of the Immaculate Conception for Catholics) will appear as well but not have the same emphasis.
Those of you following the headlines are likely to be aware of two competing tendencies within the Christian community. One is the attempt to reach out to other religious groups, Christian and non-Christian, in an ecumenical effort (seen best perhaps in the work of the World Council of Churches). The other is the struggle between those who call for a liberalization of old patterns and those who insist on maintaing tradition. We see this in effort of some Catholics to end celibacy as a requirement for ordination (note that Greek Orthodox priests who are not monks are expected to be married when they are ordained, although they may not marry again afterward) as well as a call for women to be ordained, while in several Protestant communities a dividing issue is the acceptance of homosexual clergy as well as gay marriage.