The True Story of Christianity

Attempting to understand the complexity of Christianity is a little like trying to reconstruct a large jigsaw puzzle after the dog knocked it onto the floor and chewed on the pieces right before mom vacuumed. We're pretty sure were missing a lot of pieces and what remains is damaged but we're hoping the reconstruction will be sufficient to figure out what the picture is revealing.

For the evangelical Christian this entire effort is pointless. We'll take a winding path through history, and politics, textural criticism, logical reasoning, and a lot of needless facts and statistics, only to arrive at the point where the Christian already stands. Years of study and numerous university degrees are no match for the lonely Christian with his Gospel.

In reality, this is a simplistic and naive take on both Christians and Christianity. It is not a lone Christian with his Gospel, and politics, textural criticisms, logical reasoning, and facts do not necessarily refute the Christian view of the world. As viewed in the light shined most favorably by Christian theologists, this evidence supports the Christian world view. Accordingly, the challenges from outsiders and critics are seen as either misconceptions or simple biases toward the least Christian view of the evidence.

The best example of this is the assumption that there is a long gap between the life of Jesus and the written records of his life, filled in by decades of oral tradition and mythology. The best atheist/agnostic scholars take this on its face and then develop their critique after this a priori assumption. As will be seen, the evidence is not so conveniently clear and requires some examination before anyone jumps off the cliff.

Another example is the H.L. Mencken effect. Writing during the 1925 Scopes Trial, the journalist, Mencken traveled to Dayton, Tennessee with the preconceived view that the Fundamentalist Christians (the heart of Christianity, in Mencken's view), were backwoods yokels; unsophisticated, undereducated, and generally ignorant. That William Jennings Bryan answered Clarence Darrow's questions during the trial about Biblical literacy with a lot of "it doesn't bother me" and "I don't think about those questions" only reinforced the view that Christians hadn't thought much about their theology.

Today this view gets reinforced because fundamentalists tend to have the least sophisticated views but the biggest microphones. The reality of Christianity is far more diverse and their theological defenses are far more sophisticated and complex than critics, atheist or otherwise, want to believe. Christians have had 2000 years to work out their belief system and to think that it can be debunked by identifying a few seemingly obvious contradictions is naive.

Understanding Christianity requires a lot of detective work, supposition, guess work and imagination. This will be neither a complete nor even partial examination. We are simply wandering around the forest taking peeks under the rocks in order to find out what is revealed underneath. In the process we hope to explore the story of Christianity.

To begin we will follow three separate paths to the same ending and in the process start to get a handle on the birth and expansion of Christianity. This will form the base with which we can explore many of the facets that make up the different components of Christian theology and religious belief.