Christianity

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Christianity is the monotheistic religion built around Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish teacher executed in Roman Judaea around 30 CE, whom his followers came to confess as the Messiah and the incarnate God — and whose death and resurrection they held to have reconciled humanity to its creator. It is today the largest religion in the world, divided into many communions, but the core of the claim has stayed constant: that in this one life God entered history, and that what happened there changed the standing of everyone.

The movement began as a current within Second Temple Judaism and within a generation had carried beyond it. The letters of Paul, written in the 50s CE, are the earliest Christian documents that survive; the four Gospels, composed in the decades after, narrate Jesus’s ministry, teaching, and execution. By the fourth century, after long persecution, the faith had become the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the councils of that era — Nicaea, then Chalcedon — hammered the contested questions of Christ’s divinity and nature into the creeds that most churches still recite. Scholarship treats this doctrinal settlement as a process, gradual and bitterly argued, rather than a thing handed down whole.

What the tradition has always taught is a specific exchange: that humanity is estranged from God by sin, that no human effort closes the gap, and that the gap is closed instead by grace — God’s unearned act in Christ — received through faith. Around that conviction grew an immense apparatus of sacrament, scripture, law, art, and institution. The great divisions trace fault lines within it: the split between the Eastern and Western churches in 1054, and the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, which broke the Latin West over the question of how grace is mediated and where authority finally rests.

Beneath the public architecture of creed and church runs a quieter strand. The contemplative tradition — the desert ascetics, the apophatic theology that reaches God by negation, the medieval mystics who sought union with him directly — turned the faith inward toward an unmediated knowing, sometimes to the unease of the institution. Earlier still, the second-century currents gathered under the name “Gnosticism” read the Christian story as a drama of secret knowledge and a flawed creator-god, and were condemned as heresy for it. Later esoteric movements have repeatedly drawn on Christian symbols while reading them against the grain of orthodoxy.

The site’s interest falls largely on these undercurrents — the mystical, the hidden, the heterodox — and it is worth marking that they are undercurrents: real, persistent, and consequential, but never the whole of a religion whose mainstream has been creedal, communal, and public. The resemblances between Christian union-with-God and the inward turns of other traditions are genuine and worth tracing. They are not evidence that the traditions are saying the same thing.

→ In the library: The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912) · The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899) · Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: Gnostic Christianity (1906)

→ Related: Bible · New Testament · Paul The Apostle · Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Islam