Opening remarks of an abreaction

Note: This was written, originally, the week after my baptism and slowly has become a sort of summation of the month long rabbit hole I fell in after speaking with a family member about my baptism.

It is pure catharsis.

I mention that I don’t mean to jaw on about the differences between denominations, but I do and you know what?

So what?

I was mad, I felt low, and then I did a bunch of research that made me question my own understanding of Christianity. At times it feels like I’m taking shots at everyone and everything. And maybe I am. No spiritual tradition is worth its salt if it cannot withstand scrutiny. That being said, I have spent enough time ruminating, though, and would like to move on to another project, so without further ado, The Star:

“Dear brothers, I could not speak to you as to men of the Spirit. I had to speak to you as to men who are still caught up in their way of physical being and who are not yet of age as regards the way of Christ. Milk I gave you to drink, I could not yet give you solid food; you did not yet have the strength for it. Even now you do not have the strength for it. You are still caught up in what is earthly. For there is even strife and jealousy among you. Does this not show that you are still caught up in earthly things, and are walking on merely human ways?

“When one says: I belong to Paul, and the other: I belong to Apollos, is that not a sign that you remain caught in merely human things? For what is Apollos, what is Paul? They are servants through whom you have come to the faith, and each of them has worked as the Lord gave it to him.

“I planted, Apollos watered what had been planted, but God caused the growth. Whether someone plants or whether he waters is of equal value. Each one will receive his reward according to the work that he has done. We are fellow workers with God; you are the field of God and God’s building.

“Out of the power which the divine grace has given me I first laid the foundation as a wise master-builder should; some one else has built further on it. Now let each one attend to how he also can build further. No other foundation, however, can be laid by anyone, except the one that has already been laid: and that is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:1-11).

I’m in a different headspace today. I was baptized almost a week ago and I have been allowing what that means to incubate within me, let it digest and become a means to look at the world. I see the world through baptism, now. I am in this world through baptism, now. I will live my life through baptism going forward, now. 

After a difficult Lent I made it, alongside every other pilgrim sojourning through the Lenten season, to the Great Vigil of Easter—where I, Pabst Overdrive, was baptized in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I have been received by the Episcopal Church, welcomed into the Body of Christ. 

I took my first communion on April eighth, two-thousand and twenty-three.

It is a precious and life-giving gift given to us by He Who is. In a world of death, He has given us life through His death: the precious and life-giving cross in light of the Resurrection is a taunt against the principalities and powers of this world. It was not always this way.

The Romans perfected the form of capital punishment, and it became a symbol of its authoritative expanse and crushing of dissent. The cross was a sight of agony, longsuffering, and death. It would, in the time of Christ, represent keeping people in their place, keeping them towing the Roman line, keeping them a part of the larger culture. 

If you can imagine seeing a cross on a hill… No matter what reaction it inspires in us now back then it was a sight of absolute misery and oppression. 

But then Christ was crucified. Our Lord, our Savior, our God crucified by His creation, His people—His children. The Resurrection changes the symbol of the cross being death to represent life, of our Savior trampling down death by death, overcoming the powers and principalities of this world. We wear the cross in defiance of the passing authorities of this world and rulers of this earth, seeking refuge in the Church, in the Body of Christ. 

I am a member of the Body of Christ, now.

I am, by partaking in the Eucharist, becoming a mooring rope of the Kingdom alongside my brothers and sisters in Christ. We, by participating in the Eucharist, ingest eternity and become one with it, physically embodying the love of Christ and eternal union between Man and God. 

We, each of us, become a reflection of the Trinity developing our persons in community expressing His will, individually. The Eucharist was celebrated on the Eve of Christ’s Resurrection and then, before dismissal my girlfriend and I took to the altar to confess, before God and others, our intention to marry. 

My new family welcoming my new family.

It was the most important day of my entire life. 

And in light of the Resurrection every second of suffering spent during Lent was worth even a portion of what a blessing it was to be with my family in our Father’s house.  

May the powers and principalities of this life tremble before the life-giving cross. May it symbolize their temporal authority and passing rule. And may God have mercy on those who would use His Name in their pursuit of worldly desires and mundane gain.     

I had a few more things I wanted to talk about regarding this absolutely amazing and life-giving event. But frankly, there are more crucial things to cover, and they come about in light of the baptism. My thoughts on baptism can best be summed up by Vladimir Lossky’s own words in his “Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.” 

There is nothing more than that I can add at this moment. 

That being said, on the Wednesday following I had two important conversations: one with my Biblical Criticism professor and then with my Grandad, a retired Church of Christ preacher.

My Biblical Criticism course is online, and this was the first time I met with my professor in-person. My work in the class has been really good this term and my professor had nice things to say about it as well as my future going forward in the religious studies program. Seriously, I was proud of my accomplishments doing stand-up, but my work in this course has been much more exciting—maybe it fits better into the grooves of my brain, I don’t know.

I am reminded that I failed out of high school because I was too busy researching the theology and culture of Scientology to be bothered with attending my environmental science class, “Going Clear” by Lawrence Wright and “Inside Scientology” by Janet Reitman being two books that caused me never to walk across the stage. If there was ever one aspect of my backstory that explains who I am it would be this fact.

Later, I spoke with my grandfather, telling him about being baptized into the Episcopal Church and discerning the priesthood. 

He was, in a word, nonplussed by my journey. 

Now, this is not the time for a taxonomic rundown of heretical teachings in the Church of Christ, nor is it appropriate to tell someone exactly why they’re wrong when they share with you an exciting development in their life. So…

Instead of pointing out the hypocrisy involved in “following the traditions of men” as opposed to following traditions interpreted by men whose sola–I mean–sole authority comes from a working knowledge of koine Greek. As if someone graduating from Freed-Hardeman University has more expertise on Scripture than the Church Fathers. 

This is not worth my time nor is it interesting. If the church that you attend focuses on the differences between it and every other church claiming to be Christian, then we have not moved far beyond drinking milk and carnal-minded gossip and obsession. There is no time to chew solid food when our mouths will not stop jawing over this or that, trading one form of legalism for another. If that is how one wants to spend their time then so be it, God bless and Godspeed.

For the rest of us, there is work to do. 

Now, what is interesting to me is how we got here and by that, I mean why the West has such a polarized view of the religious tradition known as Christianity. My interest, perhaps due to my upbringing, is primarily in the Second Great Awakening and frontier revivalism shaping a particularly American version of Western Christianity. The Churches of Christ are a perfect example of such an organization springing up during the 19th Century. The idea behind the Church, based primarily on the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, or the belief that the Bible is the infallible Word of God and sole authority on Christian faith and practice.

This underscores the personal responsibility of the individual to read Scripture and abide by the doctrines therein. It also implies a certain readability of the Bible where anyone can approach it and access what is being said with no obstacles. It took me half a dozen tries to get through “Blood Meridian,” but sure the Bible is pretty elementary compared to the works of Cormac McCarthy. 

The Churches of Christ position the Bible as the sole authority as well as being an association of churches focused on Restorationism, a belief that Christianity has lost its own thread and that the church needs to be restored back to its true apostolic form: the model of the church that was held during the time of the Twelve Apostles’ lives that ended when the last Apostle reposed.

This, having occurred during the first century, makes it difficult to use as a model without using the ecclesiastical structure and liturgical life of the Jewish peoples with St. Paul’s message of Christ being spread through his missionary efforts toward the end of the Apostolic age. Thus, the true Church is… I mean, it’s either found in the proto-orthodox model of Christian ecclesia or it’s a best guess as to what anyone was doing post-Pentecost.  

Now, this is a good pause point to mention that there are Apostolic Fathers, such as the God-bearing Father, St. Ignatius of Antioch who was alive at the end of the first century and said to be a disciple of St. John the Apostle. I mention this because if we really want to, we can trace the lineage of the Church back to the Apostles–the Apostolic age did not cease with the close of the first century but has been passed down through the Church. The Orthodox call it the phronema, the mind, of the Church. It would be more alarming to assume that the tradition of Christianity was lost almost entirely in utero which would make the Christianity of today… Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. 

The true Church, if we are to use the Churches of Christ framework, had a good run of about a hundred years and it did so without the sole authority that right belief and practice are supposed to come from since the canonization of the Bible did not occur until at least the third century, well after the “Apostolic Age” of the first—point in fact, the New Testament was being written during the first century!

The Hebrew Bible was not even codified by the Apostolic Age of the first century with evidence pointing to the books of the Hebrew Bible becoming fixed by as late as the Second Century, with others arguing its final canonization coming about as early as 140 BCE. 

This canonization occurring in the third century is, to me, where things get very interesting.

Before we continue, it is worth noting that I in no way advocate for Jesus mythicism: the belief that Christ was an invention or rather than a historical figure—a claim that has been debunked by academics (leaving the more legendary aspects of the Jesus figure’s biography record in the Gospels is up for debate) having physical records of a man named Jesus who was, unanimously accepted by scholars, both baptized and crucified under Pontius Pilate.

Right, Jesus was real—even a demythologized Christ—and He was baptized by St. John the Forerunner and Baptist and He was crucified. 

We will return to the above, but these two points are academically identified as the most historically accurately accounts of a Jesus of Nazareth existing.

Side note: an ahistorical Jesus, or the construction myth of Christ, goes back to the Age of Enlightenment which was foundational to not only Western Christian thought but the psyche of America. 

The Church in the West is a symbol of dominance and power—a will to power and control the means of producing wealth and more power. And I do not mean the Roman Catholic Church, exclusively. The Protestant distrust and suspicion of the Catholic Church mingled with its own Calvinistic thought seem to be the catalyst for an Americanized Christianity. The Churches of Christ are emphatically anti-Calvin (and anti-Lutheran) due to their stripped-down understanding of the Gospel—it is a one based on strict obedience to the law given by Christ through the Gospels instead of a grace-inspired conversion. This is due to a couple of different things, and we will address them later. 

When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity in the third century there was a great burden placed on the Church to canonize the New Testament, consolidate Christian teachings, and in every capacity unify the Church under the Roman banner. Not exactly a Saul of Tarsus conversion moment for the nation, this adoption by the Roman government was used to unify and preserve a nation that was becoming too large to manage in an administrative sense, so with the implementation of Christianity Rome could better govern its Empire through the Church. 

In effect, this would make Christianity a missionary religion—a fulfillment of the Scripture and a continuation of the work already done by the Apostles and St. Paul. Due to the Roman Empire, the Apostolic Age would be given new life under the eyes of the eagle. Furthermore, this would utilize the Christian religion as a tool of imperialism. That being said, Christianity is much more than a wing of the Roman Empire and its ability to travel shows its basis as a religion of commerce. 

Christ, our God, has qualities of a storyteller giving Him the qualities attributed to trickster deities of antiquity, most notably Hermes, herald of the gods, who also would have been associated with roads, travel, and the land of the dead as a psychopomp. The Hellenistic society became a great place for travel and trade. Christianity, being a perfected spiritual tradition, was (and is) a great product that would have been exchanged on the Hellenistic interstate.

While these notable qualities are shared amongst trickster gods this does not mean Christ is an amalgamation such as Hermes Trismegistus, because Christ—not only supported by historical evidence He existed—was not simply speaking as a representative of the gods a la Thoth and Mercury, He was God. 

He is God. 

Now, Christianity in the Western tradition is a missionary religion, founded in a Hellenistic society and compiled by the Church within the Roman Empire seeking union for its expanding nation. The same cannot be said for Christianity’s purpose. Christ is a psychopomp in that he leads the souls of the dead to their eternal rest, but He is not leading the souls of the reposed to eternal death rather He leads the reposed to eternal life with the Father. He leads us out of the land of the dead. 

Speaking of leaving the land of the dead, it was around this time that the Desert Fathers began their own sacred institution of austerity, poverty, and prayer in the deserts outside of Roman Egypt. The persecution of the Christians under the oppressive Roman regime had come to an end to a finalized adoption of the religion they spent almost four centuries… crucifying.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers moved from this state-sanctioned, mainstream belief system and followed the Way set forth by Christ. To them, this adoption constituted a capitulation of Christ’s teachings, creating followers who would pay their taxes as their Lord instructed them, a gross interpretation of Scripture made by men, for men. 

The intent of this series is to look at how this tradition of men began and why our Desert Fathers and Mothers were right to leave behind the aesthetically safe, spiritually sanitized, walls of a Christian Rome. It goes without saying that, while the aim may seem similar it is not the goal of this project to support (the 19th century belief of) Restorationism, but to present a perspective based in scripture and historical veracity. Selah.

Si comprehendis, non est Deus