Of history, origins and authenticity

Spent the first hour of a delayed day oeuf watching BBC Four's History of Christianity on iPlayer. Some really interesting stuff, and a really good change to have something about Christian origins with a degree of academic integrity (as opposed to the usual Good Friday documentary exposing Jesus' first followers as charlatans etc).

Certainly some fascinating questions arise out of this. The emphasis on the Eastern element in the early Church is certainly a good balance to the usual Euro-centric histories, and the interface between Christianity and Islam is intriguingly more subtle and complex than our contemporary reading (based on ignorance and Islamophobia - the armies of anarchy are at the gates!).

Interesting also that most if not all styles of Christianity make some claim to being authentic; whether that be the language of the Syrians, the authority of Rome or the anti-institutionalism of the Free Churches. If we are to live truly Incarnate lives then I wonder what is authenticity - surely it has to be maintaining a much deeper DNA of Jesus (the dangerous memory of Christ as +David recently quoted somebody as having written). Thus values such as mission, compassion and living the Gospel (again the famous quote from Newbiggin about the best exposition of the Gospel is a group of people living it out) seem far more important than continuity of succession or style or liturgy (and indeed continuity of having none of these).

Certainly I found MacCulloch's distinction between Eastern and Western traditions as being as much about the embrace in the West of wealth and power as the theology of Nestorius quite fascinating, and the lead on from that with the start of the Monastic tradition; a tradition that the West soon seems to have adopted until, here in the UK, the monasteries were asset stripped by Henry VIII so that today we don't have to speak French or Spanish (or whoever he was fighting at the time), although here in the West the monasteries may have celebrated asceticism within the cloister, but they seem to have held considerable power in the local areas too (as well, I am sure, of doing a great deal of good in terms of education and health care in their time).

Comments

[Caroline Too]

the monasticism angle in England is really interesting. especially if you contrast the 'celtic' model of monasteries with the later enclosed models.

you could argue that England was 'converted' by the monastics of Aidan.. spreading out from Lindisfarne, setting up temporary houses, moving on, a few monks setting up another temporary home before heading back to the mother house for a season...
my knowledge of this is not deep, but it has a very different feel to the big, powerful, land owning trading houses that later monasteries became.