Obligatory Anti-Christian Post

Note: I realize this post rambles a bit, but I want to get these thoughts down now, and perhaps I can be a little more focused later on when I bring up Christianity again.

I want to offer a brief, unbalanced critique of Christianity from a personal point of view. Some background:

I was a believing Christian off and on for over a decade, and I used to read several intellectually stimulating blogs by Christian believers of various persuasions -- mostly Catholic and Orthodox. Since I took the notion of revelation quite seriously, I attempted to steer a theologically conservative path, and I felt the history of Christianity was both important and valuable. Any revelation of God in which the truth could be distorted or lost for 1,500 years was not an option for me (goodbye Protestantism!). Liberal or progressive Christianity, in which we can change what Christians have "always believed," was certainly no option for me.

Over the years I continually ran up against two sources of cognitive dissonance that made it difficult to be a Christian, but it was the second that eventually made it easier to drop the whole thing.

(1) It's so obviously false. Duh? If you are in an echo chamber with regard to apologetics, or if you concentrate on minutiae, then this blaring fact doesn't jump out at you as a Christian. The evidence for the truth of Christianity is just so poor on every front that it really takes some mental gymnastics to remain a believer.

(2) Here's the kicker, though the issues aren't as cut-and-dry as many would have you believe. In a nutshell, there is no "faith once delivered to the saints."

If you accept that God revealed himself, as I did, then it's hard to believe that he would leave that revelation untended; rather, one thinks he would appoint teachers or some clear mechanism to ensure that his message was undistorted. The answer to this problem in the traditional Christian communions that have origins going back to the earliest centuries of Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Nestorian) was the episcopate, i.e. college of bishops. I could never believe that Protestant solutions to the dilemma were feasible -- too much room for human error!

But once you really dig into the history of Christian doctrines, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain that there is a single Christian belief that has remained qualitatively unchanged for over two thousand years. To take an example that is almost painful to recall, since it's so obvious in retrospect, we go from an adoptionist Christology in the earliest Gospel, that of Mark, to an increasing glorification and deification in Matthew and Luke, finally to arrive at semi-Arian ideas in John. Paul's letters are a mix of adoptionism and nascent Arianism.

During the next two hundred years or so after the books of the New Testament were written, the Ante-Nicene writers of the "orthodox" Christian church as a rule subscribed to subordinationism (the idea that Christ was divine in some way but still under the Father). Arianism is a natural outgrowth of this, though the matter was in general unsettled and many councils were held debating the topic of Christ's role and nature in the Godhead. Yet the question was decided against subordinationism when it was condemned at the First Council of Nicaea, when Christ "became God."

All of what I just wrote about Christology is probably above the pay grade for quite a few readers, who will misread it and think I'm saying that the earliest Christians believed Jesus to be "just a man" until he was turned into a god by the Emperor Constantine. Not at all! There was clearly a tension and ambiguity about Christ's nature, but the general consensus was that Christ was divine in some sense, existing since the beginning of the cosmos, while still being less than (subordinate to) the Father. Then, in the "fullness of time," he became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. Yet all historic Christian communions and denominations that exist to the present day call this heresy!

Who was Jesus the Christ, according to Christians? Well, it depends on whether you asked a Christian in 75 AD, in 175 AD, or in 375 AD. And Arians continued to exist for several hundred years in Germanic territory (outside the Roman Empire) after their condemnation. If their Church had lasted to the present, one might point to them as the "one true faith," but they ceased to exist over 1,200 years ago, and that would mean that the True Faith has been lost since then.

Sorry, not buying it. If Christian doctrine is that changeable (and the examples could be multiplied), then there was no such thing as God's revelation to the world in Christ, because it means that God was unable to secure the and the faith church that he promised he would be with forever.

Of course, Catholics and other Christians have answers to this kind of difficulty. Some even glory in the "development of doctrine." I always found the arguments more than a little tortuous, and finally gave up on the whole business a couple years ago.