Why is Christianity so complex?
So, to follow the Christian faith I need to pray (using a variety of different methods), study my Bible (with the help of commentaries to explain what can be very difficult to truly understand) take part in the Eucharist, serve, read other spiritual classics. I am expected to believe in a virgin birth, Christ’s atonement, and the resurrection of the dead.
Meanwhile, my Zen Buddhist friend just sits and follows his breath.
Am I missing something, or is Christianity unnecessarily complex?
Meanwhile, my Zen Buddhist friend just sits and follows his breath.
Am I missing something, or is Christianity unnecessarily complex?
Comments
As for being expected to believe in extraordinary events, we are not - but if God is God, we surely wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than the extraordinary.
I also think you may be describing as things you “need” to do activities that really fall in the category of “may be beneficial to do.” I don’t think, for example, that to be a Christian you need to read a variety of spiritual classics.
It doesn’t strike me that Christianity is really any more complex than other major religions. Which isn’t to say that Christians, being human, may not overcomplicate things from time to time.
Probably no more than a Zen Buddhist needs to ponder the significance of a particular koan.
Which of those is commanded in the gospels?
Prayer? Given that Jesus is reported to have said *When you pray...*
Loving others as one loves oneself is the *New Commandment*, of course, but people of other faiths do that as well. @Monty doesn't mention that in their list - I wonder why?
(Mark 10 , Matthew 18, with apologies to shipmates who read and interpret the Bible properly)
This in itself is surely up for debate. There isn't anything about meditating on the Bible in the Nicene Creed. There is quite a bit about the Virgin Birth. I would personally see the latter as more significant and certainly more unique to Christianity. I definitely would not see it as a secondary issue in any way.
That said, it is not necessary for you to make responses to all the complexity of Christianity. Take the virgin birth, for instance. That is a fact, but it doesn't require anything of us who believe it. We are not (for example) required to remain virgins ourselves, or to accomplish our own reproducing in some analogous fashion, or even to put a bumper sticker publicizing the doctrine on our rear car bumers. The fact is there, but our response to it can be minimal or non-existent.
So following Jesus is at least partly an exercise in discernment (or being led, if you prefer). You disentangle the "bits" of Christianity that require an active response from you--for instance, the call to trust and obey Christ, the call to care for our neighbors, etc.--and you maybe contemplate with interest the bits that do not require some immediate action on your part (the Trinity, various models of the atonement, the precise nature of the resurrection body).
Some of the less urgent bits may become urgent at other points of your life. But at any given time, what you have to actively comprehend and respond to is likely to be a pretty small subset of the whole reality. Just as my nursing child only had to engage with my face, my arms, and my breasts--my knees, feet, lungs were distant realities he could safely ignore at that point in his life. Things change as life goes on.
That's very well put.
The Bible says a lot about Meditation. I give you Psalm 1
1 Blessed is the one
who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
or sit in the company of mockers,
2 but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
and who meditates on his law day and night.*
3 That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.
4 Not so the wicked!
They are like chaff
that the wind blows away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
6 For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked leads to destruction..
* law of God= revelation of God
Re: Virgin Birth. Considering only two Gospels mention the virgin birth but Mark and John do not and Paul does not mention it, nor is it mentioned in the other epistles, I am not going to insist that a new Christian has to accept it. While it is mentioned in the creeds of the 600s, people of the 2000s kind of stumble over it.
BTW, you might want to read this article There is Nothing New About Virgin Births (Just Ask Plato).
You may see it as secondary. I really don’t think, though, that Christianity as a whole over the last two millennia has seen it as secondary.
Though, arguably, what one person would consider an agenda or a power play, another person would consider a basic truth.
My dogma vs your heresy😉
Look, the Christian faith stands or falls on the Resurrection, though I have to say it is very hard to explain. That is the primary teaching of the faith. Everything else is secondary. Who would care if Jesus was born of a virgin if it were not for his resurrection?
What creeds were written in the 600s?
I would say not. Christ’s message is simple and the complexities ( as opposed to mysteries of same) appear to be largely accretions over the centuries.
Possibly a detailed understanding Zen Buddhism ?
What bothers me about the complexity of Christianity is how it provides innumerable niches for people who want to evade the loving your neighbour as yourself part, and translating it as nothing less than hate.
Starting with, for example, the likes of Cyril who saw to the killing of Hypatia in a particularly nasty way, right up to the present day when people in pastoral roles can simply make people feel it impossible to be part of worship with them. The whole lot of them feel justified by the way Christianity has become a shelter for them.
And out of that silence comes the questions.
The questions - and the search for answers - that is a lifetimes work.
And that drives me to prayer, study, contemplation. Again and again. I think, sometimes, some people* demand that this is done in the wrong order.
*Including me sometimes.
The posited message of Christ in Himself is certainly simple: God exists. Then it gets complicated. The messenger has to be miraculous for a start, making Him the most complex entity to have walked the Earth. His life reinforces the message as much as it can. His words are ambiguous, paradoxical, contradictory, and how we get from Him to a weekly concert interrupted by a lecture with an occasional ritual of Him as message, is certainly a large accretion. We seem to have lost the lived message of His first post-mortem followers.
Penny, certainly there are the haters who seem to miss the message completely, but then there are also the people like Desmond Tutu.
What you need to believe is a bit more involved, but again it's there because we think it's true not as an exercise in mental gymnastics before breakfast.
I think you might have to explain that @Penny S. I'm possibly a bit thick but my reactions to that statement are 'How?' and 'Why?'
Whereas is profound. I think you're onto something there. Thank you.
It is a statement of the utterly compromised relationship between the church and human sexuality, and is something that needs healing before the church can be a positive factor in life. Until that happens, the church will always be based on a fundamentally paranoid structure - that Jesus's humanity is both complete and completely compromised - and therefore compromised in its ability to connect with people who are very sensitive to this kind of mixed, self-defeating message.
There is a case that the interaction between the story of the Virgin Birth and its uptake by Greek and Roman attitudes to sex and virginity resulted in excluding part of full humanity from Mary.
That said, Peter Brown, the classical historian, after describing one of the more sex-positive church fathers (Clement of Alexandria, IIRC) observed that if Christianity had gone done that particular road not taken it might have ended up like conservative Judaism or Islam. That is, not actually very sex positive for anyone other than married men.
I would say that the Christian faith stands or falls on Christ—his incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension. They are all related. He is the primary teaching (if that’s the right word) of the faith.
And yes, with some others I think @Lamb Chopped has it.
However, that's not easy even if it's not complex.
I suspect - and also can't prove - that the historic emphasis on Mary's virginity while she was pregnant was at least partly to distinguish the Incarnation from the sort of Graeco-Roman myth where a god fathered a child with a mortal woman by having sex with her. But understanding the full significance of that distinction is probably difficult if you don't live in that same Graeco-Roman world.
Baby steps Monty. You don't have to do everything all at once, however tempting it is to try.
My experience of salvific love planted an urge to dedicate the life I'd thrown away to God, who had saved me. I misinterpreted that as a calling to ministry. I did spend heaps of time studying and learning, but it turned out that I was called to work for people with disabilities, and more broadly, to try and be nicer. The studying and learning was part of my recovery from a gambling addiction.
The big thing for me was prayer. For ages I asked everyone I came across what it was. I couldn't get a handle on it. It wasn't till I met people who would just sit and try to clear their minds, or focus on a bit of text, or a biblical image that it came together. My mate is getting into the Hours, but it just doesn't work for me. I'm too chaotic.
I'm trying a bible in the year thing. We'll see how that goes - day 3!!!
- Herod was the "King of the Jews"
- Emperor Caesar was Son of God, Saviour of the World, the one who brings peace on earth, the God of light and reason and imperial order
and the gospel writers who used these terms for Jesus were using them subversively, or at least presenting an alternative understanding for the expected Godly reign.And in a world which did not know about male and female gametes it was not difficult to believe in virgin births or gods siring children with human women. In Genesis 6:4 we find
But before I get at the simple version, two explanations I have been given and politely said nothing about, and one historical one.
A friend who preached in house churches when she felt she was given something to say (she would not give "lip service") believed that human's blood was inherited from the father. Thus if Jesus' blood were to be efficaceous in salvation, it had to be from God, not a human.
The curate who prepared me for confirmation taught that Jesus could not be descended from Joseph, because Joseph was descended from David via a line which had been excluded from the kingship because of something one of his ancestors had done.
Aristotle had something related to the friend's blood idea, that the whole infant was derived from the father as a sort of tiny homunculus which derived nourishment, but none of its nature from the mother. This would have been the general idea at the time, among those who thought about inheritance. This would, though, have meant Jesus was wholly divine.
My feeling about the birth, and extending the idea to the immaculate conception, is that it is saying that the normal means of engendering new people is wrong. I can't think of a better word than that. And a lot of Christianity, and other religions come to that, seem to like this idea.
I've been reading a book on Medieval Women - married couples weren't supposed to see each other naked, especially the men weren't to see their wives. And then an angel visited the man who was to become Saint Illtud and told him he was to be repulsed by the sight of his wife naked, which he was, and wouldn't let her back in bed with him, and later, when he was running Llantwit Major, and she came back to see him, she was struck blind (did get her sight back, though).
Wouldn't it have been nice if God had come into the world through a joyful marriage of two normal human beings?
I grant that the Christian faith can sometimes seem complex, given all the Stuff that's been added since Jesus' time, so perhaps @Monty could let us know what they think could be done to make it less so?
I think Buddhism itself can become complex, and indeed, highly intellectual. However, Zen decided to get to the Ding an Sich* directly, and produced various techniques for doing that. Whether it succeeds is impossible to say.
*the thing itself, as opposed to appearances.
As others have already said, many faiths (whether theistic or not) are complex, or can appear to be so.
Absent a deity (and, some might suggest, ideally absent even a self), a "sitter" ultimatel released from requirements, commandments, rituals, practices, ceremonies, etc. is freed to confront or construct or experience reality.
Nicely put. An old teacher of mine would reply, "contemplate". Or sometimes, "you mean fucker". Highly unorthodox.