Significant things we can learn from Early Christians

                                      History is His Story

Today, many American churches seem to be declining. What if there were no beautiful buildings or polished worship services?  What if there were no Bibles, and clinging to the few Words of God which you knew would put you on a government watch list?  Your children’s ability to get an education is threatened.  Your ability to make a living and join the marketplace is forbidden. Would you still go to church?

            The 1^st century Christians not only held onto belief, but stood proudly proclaiming their faith in the face of sure death.  They witnessed the Gospel far and wide without a written gospel, for those were written 30 years after Jesus was crucified.  Nor did the church advertize itself with a cross.  That didn’t commonly occur until after 250 AD, when Rome stopped the practice.  It is as if the cross were too horrible and vivid, too common a fate to be a brand. So what did the early Christians have that made their churches grow?  First, they had the New Testament, not the books but, “This is the new testament [covenant] in my blood.” Luke 22:20. That was the only time Jesus ever said the words.  But it stuck.  For Luke writes in Acts 2:42 that from Pentecost forth, “They continued with…the breaking of bread.”  And still 2100 years later, churches throughout the world continue communion.  It’s uncanny. We agree on virtually all the Bible’s miracles—Moses parting the Red Sea, Jesus making water into wine, walking on water--yet we are split into factions when Jesus simply said, “This is my blood…This is my body.” For 1500 years no one questioned it was anything other than miraculous. But now we argue. Moreover, the gospel writers no doubt inserted “is”. Jesus either said those words in Aramaic or Hebrew to his disciples.  Neither language has an “is” in usage, rather, it was assumed. (literally “This, my blood.”) But when all 3 gospel writers wrote it down in Greek, they chose “This is…” Greek can either not use an “is” (like caveman talk (“Og dumb”), or put one in for clarity (Og is dumb). There’s no explanation by either Jesus or the writers of this mystery. Just believe the new covenant.  The early Christians weren’t looking to find God, they had found Him, true, mysterious, and a personal Savior.  They belonged to something that doesn’t end but lasts into eternity. Faith was given by the mystery of God who saves us. Before there was a Bible to hold us together, there was the Lord’s Supper.

            But when the faith started to become widespread geographically the temptation among no doubt well-meaning people to teach a few words of their own crept in. The “apostles’ teaching” [doctrine, “didakay”, Greek] was sometimes corrupted into ‘hetero-didiakay’, heterodoxy/heresy.  The apostles then knew they had to write Jesus’ true words down. Formerly, listeners had memorized verbal repetition.  (Even centuries after, Bibles were scarce and memorization was a preferred tool to instill the Word in ones heart.). Men of faith believed the gospel writers were ‘ortho-didakay’ [“straight doctrine”, ‘orthodox’].  Why?  Because the apostles were living by the Spirit and inspired by the Spirit to write and in II Tim. 3:16 Paul claimed it.  That was the third key to why the early church spread.  They lived by the Spirit. The Holy Spirit was there in faith (I Cor. 12:3), prayer (Rom.8:26), supernatural fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5), many special gifts, and the Spirit’s infusion of The Word.  In the Word, believers saw absolute Truth. So what if you don’t understand part of it? So much the better—that’s God!  Modern man demands an explanation and quibbles over the uncertainty of words. Worse, moderns prefer only what they find likely.  But impossibility defines a miracle and requires the Spirit by which we live.

            Fourthly, they were the Body of Christ. Paul’s earliest epistle was Galatians, to dispel the heresy of the Judaizers. But during Missionary Journey 3 he was compelled to stay in Ephesus and saw an explosion of Christian converts.  Without time to return to Corinth where factions had broken out, he wrote instead.  I Corinthians was actually a second letter and he dedicates it to “the body of Christ”.  Moderns have toyed with the Body as just a metaphor. But the early church believed it flat out. The Ascension took Christ to heaven where, in the Godhead, He can exist everywhere. Yet as an undead man, He can also be localized where He choses to be. As such He chose to be in us as His Body on earth--“you are the body of Christ”.  You are then, Jesus with skin on. You’re the only Jesus some will ever see.  And you’re the only words of life some will ever read.  When the Christian ingests Christ’s body and blood in the New Testament communion, there is the stunning guarantee of this.

Thus the early church grew.  Few scriptures, but they had an absolute trust in what they did know and took pains to memorize and etch it in their hearts.  Not relative truths (“well, that’s your interpretation.”), they believed that God imparted real meaning and truth through the words—through His Spirit.  God was no theory, He was ever-present in relationship with them. And He was in their hearts, connecting them to all the world of other believers. If one lives like this, what does it add up to?  It means complete dependence on God, almost like discovering an added dimension that goes beyond space-time. In that dimension, God is remaking the soul and imparting His hunger to bring others who are lost. 

Should the modern church return to its roots?

Hitler's obsession with USA

Hitler’s “Secret Book”(1928-33 journals), published in obscurity after WW II, is telling new things about the diabolical dictator. He was less obsessed about Jews than USA. In his early years, he couldn’t afford a placement in the Vienna School  of Fine Arts, while other richer Jewish kids bought a seat. Hence he became disgusted with Judaism and agnostic.  But in the Secret Book he talked about being in charge of POWs in WW I.  He came off convinced that Germans who had immigrated to America had depleted Germany and enriched USA.  He viewed everything through racial eugenics and Germans were supposedly the Master Race. Eugenics and social Darwinism had been all the rage since 1890 among intellectuals. British were also long-lost Saxons and together with USA, they threatened to dominate the world. 

Meanwhile Germany lagged economically.  USA’s  Great Depression looked like a decent economy to German farmers of the time. Hitler despised the capitalism of USA and UK, so he adopted Mussolini’s socialism. It seemed to him that a Jewish banking culture had ruined Germany when the finance world conspired to cut down the German empire after WW I.

What to do? First Jews and Slavs had infiltrated German stock and he wanted to banish or genocide them.  Historians have mostly focused on this.  But secondly, he wanted an intense effort to raising up a contaminated German people. Central to every aspect of his Third Reich were things like Pure Aryan Art, Hitler Youth, Strength Through Joy athletic events and demands that good Aryan mothers bear as many children as possible. Thirdly there was Lebensraum, “living space”.  The military was rebuilt with clear intent to take over Eastern Europe and Russia as a “frontier” much as USA had taken over native Americans. Hitler had a unique gift to turn rhetoric into hideous reality.  Others decried the Weimar Republic; Hitler destroyed it.  Others castigated Jews for being money obsessed; Hitler planned a Final Solution.  Other politicians wanted a strong Germany; Hitler took over Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

America it seemed to his racial Darwinistic worldview  was economically mighty but culturally degenerate. Jazz, republican democracy, and Wall Street were things he found disgusting.   His hope was to stave off confrontation with America/Britain until 1943, but a miscalculation in starting war in Poland, then Japan’s Hawaii attack in 1941 stopped this delaying plan. Confronted with America’s military, he had no answers.  He distrusted Japan as they did him. As FDR endorsed a “Europe First” strategy and US industry out-produced Germany 5 to 1, the Germanic Darwinian cause was lost.  

Slavery and the church schisms

The War over slavery in USA split almost every church.  Some have suggested that the church splits drove the split in the nation.  Only the Lutherans, Episcopalians and Catholics seemed to have escaped without schism.  How so?

            Enthusiasts on both sides were powered by moral rather than economic or political motives. Southern Presbyterians split away and accused the Northerners of “calculated malice”.  Notherners accused their brethren of “being in league with hell.” Granville Moody, a northern Methodist reveled in being charged with bringing about the conflict, “for it is a wreath of glory round our brow.” (Whoa! The South started the War.)Southern Methodists talked about “making a secessionist state of mind.” Congregationalist theologian Thornton Munger said McClellan’s much-criticized vacillations were “an example of God’s masterful cunning.” Longer war means,“the South will be much more punished in the end.”

            But Catholics swore allegiance to Rome and Episcopalians to Canterbury; it is said—superseding local politics.  Nonetheless, feelings were elevated.  The Episcopal Bishop of New Orleans, Leonidas Polk, joined the Confederate Army as a general. “It is for constitutional liberty, which seems to have fled to us for refuge, for it is our hearthstones and our altars that we fight.” Meanwhile Bishop of Rhode Island, Thomas March, preached to the state’s militia, “It is a holy and righteous cause in which you enlist…God is with us.”

            So what happened with the Lutherans? They were founders of Delaware, a border state full of slaves, and prominent in MO, TX, dominant around the Great Lakes. Lutherans value systematic theology.  Anyone can be led down an odd way of thinking by a verse or two combined with prejudicial assumptions.  That seems to be what split many Calvinists and Arminians.  The greatest schism was among the Baptists who practice “soul liberty’ (each person forms a personal theology—so to speak).  The split between Northern Baptists (American Baptists) and Southern Baptists still lingers over other issues to the present day.  Lutheran systematic theology meant that the whole Bible is examined to promote a case for any generalizations.  Indeed, Jesus did this in arriving at his teaching.  He spoke of Grace as a first principle of God where others had missed it while beset with legalism over parsing the Law.  The “Breath of God” that indwelled people in the Old Testament, meant the Holy Spirit and that God could come to earth. “Each man must pay for his own sins,” ascertains faith as a personal matter, and the reaching out to all nations alluded to by the Prophets, adds up to a Universal Faith (God isn’t limited to Jews and God will judge all people).  Luther and Augustin argued for Two Kingdoms, that we live both in this world’s kingdom and in God’s kingdom.  Thus in order to make a pronouncement about slavery, you would have to fit that into your views of everything else.  And the conclusion was that Faith Matters Most.  If you are part of a slave society and born to a master, then live a life of faith within that system.  Yet God points to an ideal that we are all free and adopted as children of our Heavenly Father.  The theology was not fence-straddling or retreat to theory.  This was not trying to enforce silence on the issue (as Presbyterians tried unsuccessfully to do).  This was an overarching view of life that unified Lutherans.  And it allowed them to join either side while admitting they were probably stirred by their own mortal opinions.  In fact, more Swedes volunteered for the Union than any other minority.  Stunning, since their culture had been pacifist!

            Meanwhile the propaganda wore on.  Both sides claimed vast numbers of ‘conversions’ among their troops and a tremendous increase in church-going and ‘prayerfulness’ as a result of the fighting.  In the South, there were much-quoted texts on negro inferiority, patriarchal and Mosaic acceptance of servitude  and of course St. Paul on obedience to masters.  In the north, Henry Ward Beecher preached that ‘Southern leaders would be hurled aloft and plunged down forever and forever in an endless retribution.’ Sadly, the racial component of Southern religious arguments stuck for a long time after the war.  That racism has been more troublesome for USA than for other parts of the world where Africans were imported as slaves.

Tulsa Race Riot

“Lutheran” is a black church.  More Lutherans worship in Africa on any given Sunday than N. America and Europe combined.  In the mid 90s, we were church youth sponsors and had a joint event with another church in Tulsa which had our same church name.  Their church was overwhelmingly Afro-American. Ours was not.  They took us to see Edna, an elderly woman who had survived the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.  She sat calmly telling about how she was just 12, the gunshots began, and she fled north, eventually hiding in a dog house at a farm.  The family found her the next morning and was kind, protecting her identity when rioters came looting and trying to kill blacks, then helping her find her father.  All in her family were killed but her father.  She eventually became something of a pillar of hope in the Tulsa Greenwood community.  She got a college degree, taught school at the now defunct grade school along Peoria St. in North Tulsa.  Edna began to talk about what a vibrant town there used to be along Greenwood Ave.—2 theatres, 2 newspapers, 13 churches, over 100 small businesses.  I asked why the tremendous animosity developed in whites of that time.  She thought maybe jealousy over successful blacks was a reason. “Many, like me, were mixed race and had aspirations,” she recalled. 

            The May 31 “riot” of 1921 occurred because of a controversial incident in an elevator.  A white girl, Sarah Page, accused a young black man, Dick Rowland of raping her.  He said he stumbled onto the elevator and thence hurt his knee.  The sheriff arrested him and put him in the county jail. The next day Tulsa Tribune printed her story but not his. Two crowds gathered the courthouse that night, one demanding he be lynched, another of mixed races demanding a fair trial.  Oklahoma had a ugly history--38 lynchings, a large KKK, and segregation. Much of the violence centered around Tulsa.  A gunshot rang out and the lynch mob began firing on the others who retreated into the Greenwood area northeast of downtown Detroit Street. The attackers went crazy robbing pawn shops of $43,000 worth of guns and ammo.  Several thousand whites were involved eventually, killing an unknown number of Afro-Americans.  Historians estimate about 300 killed with another 531 seeking medical attention.  It was almost entirely one-sided. All the buildings along Greenwood were burned, 1115 homes burned, over half the 11,000 Afro-Americans left homeless or without businesses.  Survivors camped on a baseball field, in the convention center, and at Golden Gate Park. State Troopers arrived the next day to stop the mobs, but Greenwood was never to return to a healthy community.  White Tulsa had in effect, created a slum.

            But Edna had hopes.  She was mixed race and attended  church with the family who had saved her.  She spoke out fearlessly against the KKK. “Perhaps the most worthless organization ever created.”--Jerry Shaw, Osage leader and fmr. Director of Wichita State University Native American Studies.   So why, in the later 1920s, did Tulsa County have more KKK incidents (74) than the rest of Oklahoma combined?  An OSU historian told me that roughneck Tulseytown (its original name) had too much poverty, gambling, bootleggers, whores and faithless husbands.  It got transferred to blacks and Indians by psychological projection. Since nothing much has been proven sociologically, perhaps this opinion is as good as any.

            The final irony was that Sheriff William McCullough quietly slipped out of Tulsa with Dick Rowland in custody.  Sarah Page refused to witness, and Rowland was exonerated by a grand jury. Some say she and he simply had a lover’s quarrel.

Slavery part II

The Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria was giving a guest lecture at New York’s Howard University. “You African-Americans are the luckiest people on earth.” The audience was taken a bit aback, but he continued, “One million Africans were brought to these shores.  Today, you are 40 million and the richest Africans in the world. 60 million African slaves were sent to the Islamic world and today you hardly see any Africans there.  Why is that?  They were made eunuchs and the women were put in harems—the babies were killed.  Few Africans survived.”

            There were other factors involved but he’s approximately correct. As Africans were captured and sent to N. African ports, they were force-marched through the Sahara. There are still trails marked by piles of human bones of slaves who died.  Women were particularly vulnerable.  Muslim records show that for every slave to reach Cairo, 10 died. (compared to 10% of Atlantic crossing slaves who died en route.) An estimated 50-90% of males died from castration, hence eunuchs brought higher prices than common slaves. [Ottoman Turks had a “tax” on European-conquered peoples that every couple’s first-born son would be taken as a slave, indoctrinated into Islam, and most were made into eunuchs or janusaries/soldiers. Do you wonder why animosity is still high between Bosnian/Albanian Muslims and the Christians in the Balkans?] Marriage for slaves and concubines was forbidden. And Muslim enslavement of Slavic people from Eastern Europe was also common.  The 15^th century Caliph of Baghdad had 7000 African eunuchs and 4000 Caucasian ones. But import of European slaves was severely curtailed when Russia conquered the Caucus area in the 19^th century. East African slaves were marketed in Zanzibar and sent by boat to the Persian Gulf.  President Obama’s Kenyan family was engaged in slave trading via this route. The prime destination of slaves was to the market in Istanbul, capital of the Ottomans.  There, women were paraded, examined, questioned, and bid on in public display often witnessed by horrified foreigners.  The market was officially closed in 1847 but simply went underground. In Saharan Africa, the slave trade still abounds today in Sudan and Mauitania and with groups like Boko Haram.

            Slave owners in the Middle East were sometimes considered milder than the plantation owners in the West.  But the actual evidence is sketchy.  There was no Uncle Tom’s Cabin or an abolition movement. What happened behind Ottoman home walls is little known. Slaves were not allowed to write and Africans were almost completely uneducated, so we don’t know how the slaves felt about being a degraded people in a foreign land, how a eunuch felt about having no possible family, how concubines felt about the genocide of their children, that she might be lent out to other men or sold. What is known is that some who became Muslims were freed but the rate of reproduction was almost nil, a good indicator of how people see their condition. But there are surprises in everything.  The Assyrian church of Iraq has genetic descent from both Africans and Balkans.  Evidently some slaves who got free became believers in Jesus Christ and were adopted into the Assyrian Christians.  Faith, Hope and Love abide.

Slavery part 1

February is black history month. Yet the common topic of slavery is complex.  Slavery is often taught incompletely in school, favoring present-day politics over accuracy.  It was an institution to force labor of the worst jobs, existing before civilization began. Finally, after the British began wide-spread slave trading did it appall the public and bring about abolition in the mid 19^th century.  This was primarily the work of the evangelical Anglican church who then spread their movement.  European slavery had died out in the 13^th century in Europe before revival in the Caribbean.  In the Middle Ages serfs did the menial labor.  Every society has had slavery in some form of coerced labor. 

            Let’s focus on slavery of Africans following Afro-American Thomas Sowell’s prize winning work.  About 12 million Africans were captured and sold as slaves in the Americas.  They outnumbered European settlers—1.2 to 1 in continental British Colonies, but 6:1 in the Caribbean and 8:1 in Brazil. Slavery had been re-established when Spain and Portugal discovered sugar cane culture from Africa and slavery was the system of using conquered peoples for this hard labor.  Conquistadors puzzled over Native Americans dying of Eurasian diseases brought to America.  The population of Mexico-Peru declined from 20 million to 2M in a generation.  Indians were weak, it was mistakenly thought.  African slaves were imported to do the labor. But they never mined—except in Mexico’s silver mines.  Mines were dangerous and a slave was so expensive, yet often poorly motivated, so they weren’t risked.  Normally, free men dreaming riches mined. Plantation (single crop) agriculture used slaves in the West for sugar in the Caribbean, rubber,cocoa and coffee in S. America, cotton in USA.  About 1.4 million, mostly West Africans of Bantu race, were imported to USA.  Hardship reduced their numbers and life spans were less than Europeans.  (40 for Europeans; 35, Amer. slaves; 24, Caribbean slaves). To be sent to the Caribbean was like a death sentence, something threatened by owners of a contrary slave in the South. Hence there was a need in the Caribbean and Brazil for a constant influx of African slaves. That is why Voodoo (African religion) exists there. US slaves were exposed to reading, European culture, economics, and Christianity (think Frederick Douglass). Those were hardly allowed in Latin America.  Hence when Liberia was established almost all freed slaves from USA declined to go back to Africa.  Those who did return were skilled, valued folks and became upper classes of LIberia and Sierra Leone.

            There were degrees of slavery.  If a female African had a mixed race child, she was often freed or made a house servant (getting more cross-cultural exposure) and her child given education.  Hence Blanche Bruce, the first Negro Senator during Reconstruction, had been tutored alongside his master’s children. Mixed race slaves were given greater opportunity and status. Stories show a variety of masters.  Some were horrid and did all the evil that Hollywood depicts. Some were swayed by Christian appeal, and often by other Christian slaves.  “Free persons of color” (FPOC) were usually mulatto and often integrated into society. Hence Pres. Warren G. Harding was secretly octoon (1/8 black) and should be considered our first Black President.  But between the two groups were “nominal slaves.” Getting papers to prove free status was expensive so some masters kept nominal slaves who were free to go about their lives as if free.  Quakers opposed slavery. Many ‘owned’ nominal slaves. About 5% of US slaves purchased their own freedom.  37% of free Negros were upscale mulatto, and it explains why my friend Xavier LeMond, Conoco Vice Pres., bragged about how his sister “could almost pass” a huge social benefit even if you didn’t pass.  Xavier was from New Orleans which was unique in its Caribbean roots. Many FPOC’s in the Caribbean owned slaves.  Kamala Harris’s ancestors were FPOC plantation owners. Haiti, once the Jewel of France because it raised sugar (considered more valuable than the Louisiana Purchase!), had half its plantation owned by FPOCs.

            16th century British pirates harassed Spain and captured Islands—Bahamas, Jamaica and Barbados.  Barbados was flat and arable, and immediately crowded with plantation owners who feuded.  In order to relieve the fights, Britain established the two Carolina colonies and repatriated many to SC to raise rice, then cotton.  Cotton was a perfect slave-labor crop requiring hand-picking. Thus the Palmetto state virtually spawned chattel slavery in US colonies after Virginia had concluded that it was cheaper to import Irish to pick tobacco.  Slaves were kept in all the colonies.  That’s how most poor whites got here.  Fare was paid by a colonial who wrote a contract to keep a slave for 7 or 10 years. It also explains how various grades of slavery came to exist with “field slaves” at the bottom of the pecking order and nominal slaves atop.

            Despite importing so many more Africans, racial tension is relaxed in Brazil and the Caribbean today. That is because Africans were always lowest of society before legal abolition and never threatened Brazil’s Europeans and Indians.  USA’s transformation ending the Civil War, however, found Southerners threatened by educated blacks. Rules and anti-racial policies multiplied.  Unfortunately, Pres. Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the military during WWI.  Military experience is a good platform for minorities to learn more of the world (as with Oklahoma’s Indian population). During the 60s when I was a teen we all swore we wouldn’t be racially prejudiced like our dad’s generation. (Ahem. Every generation has sworn anti-parent stuff!) Recent studies by over a dozen universities have found the number of true racists in US society has declined to about ½% to 3% of Caucasians.  But the label is still thrown around as an insult. Mixed marriages are changing attitudes.  In 1950, 1% of Af-Ams married outside race.  Today it is 20%.Modern lore has grown about how Thomas Jefferson sired kids of his personal assistant, Sally Hemmings.  But Sowell is skeptical. Jefferson’s scoundrel nephew, Ray, ran the farm while Thomas was in office and she turned up pregnant.

I haven't published for 8 months but plan to restart again with more posts.

Democrats make fun of Christian Evangelicals supporting Trump.  

Supposedly, the Ds thought Trump’s behavior should have surely impeached him.  But that mocks the important concept of Christianity—that all are sinful and equally in need of God’s forgiveness through the salvation of His Son. Sure, Trump tweets like a WWE guy at times.  But the alternative Democrat universe is where caterers are forced to be part of a gay wedding, any statement of political impact from a church will negate tax-free status, and no nativity scenes need apply for public space at Christmas time. This utter violation of Liberty (called “religious liberty” today), violates the Founding Principle of the United States.  “Give me Liberty or give me death!” Moreover, with Democrats, having many pro-lifers, now demand abortion right up until birth, even championing infanticide, many Christians ask if this is not the chief moral issue of our time. It sure makes slavery look minor in comparison.  Then there is Dem socialism, with its chief doctrine that society, not God, determines your worth and all else of worth.  It is a frontal assault on the faith—indeed it even challenges thinking atheism.  With all that at stake in this election, I wonder why only 88% of evangelicals vote for the Republican nominee.  Why isn’t it 100% of all Christians and Jews? Would a person sell their precious birthright for food stamps and handouts?