Christianity

← Encyclopedia

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, with some 2.3 billion adherents, almost three in ten of all living people, 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 fuller account of the central figure belongs to Jesus Christ; this entry traces the religion that grew from him.

From a Jewish current to a world faith

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 — older than any Gospel — and they already presuppose a worshipped Christ, a community of Jew and Gentile, and a gospel of crucifixion and rising. The four Gospels, composed in the decades after, narrate Jesus’s ministry, teaching, and execution; together with the Acts, the epistles, and the Revelation they form the New Testament, which Christians read bound together with the Jewish scriptures as the Old Testament — the two halves of a single Bible whose first half is also the Torah and the Prophets of Israel. The reckoning of the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost as the founding moment of the church, the spread of the apostolic mission across the Mediterranean, the entry through baptism and the meal of bread and wine — these are the load-bearing acts of the first century, and they were carried out in cities of the Roman Empire under a state that for nearly three centuries regarded the new cult with suspicion and intermittent violence.

Then the relation inverted. The Edict of Milan in 313 ended the persecutions; the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, under Theodosius I, made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the empire. What had been a hunted sect became the custodian of imperial culture, and the institution that would carry the classical inheritance through the collapse of the western empire and into the Middle Ages.

The making of doctrine: creeds and councils

The confession that Jesus is God did not arrive as a finished formula; it was hammered out over four centuries of argument so fierce that emperors convened councils to end it. The contested question was how a strict monotheism could also worship a crucified man as divine, and how the one God could be Father, Son, and Spirit without dissolving into three gods or collapsing into one masked actor. The doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the person of Christ are the twin settlements of this labor.

The First Council of Nicaea (325) faced the teaching of the Alexandrian presbyter Arius, who held the Son to be the first and highest of creatures but a creature still; against him the council declared the Son of one substance (homoousios) with the Father. The First Council of Constantinople (381) extended the same divinity to the Holy Spirit and gave the church the creed it still recites at the liturgy. The Council of Ephesus (431) affirmed Mary as Theotokos, God-bearer, against Nestorius, who was read as dividing Christ into two persons. The Council of Chalcedon (451) produced the classic formula of the incarnation: one person in two natures, fully God and fully human, united without confusion, change, division, or separation. Two further councils at Constantinople (553, 680–681) and the Second Council of Nicaea (787), which vindicated the veneration of icons, complete the seven ecumenical councils that Catholic and Orthodox churches hold in common. Augustine of Hippo in the Latin West and the Greek fathers in the East gave these settlements their depth; the Neochalcedonian theologians of the sixth century refined the union of natures still further. Scholarship treats this whole doctrinal development as a process — gradual, political, and bitterly argued — rather than a thing handed down whole, and the councils themselves left casualties: the Church of the East declined to follow Ephesus, and the Oriental Orthodox churches — Coptic, Armenian, Syriac — declined to follow Chalcedon, becoming permanent communions in their own right.

The exchange at the center

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, liturgy, scripture, law, art, and institution. The Logos theology of the prologue of John, which names Christ the eternal Word through whom all things were made, gave the philosophers of the church a bridge to Greek thought; the Mass and the daily round of prayer gave ordinary believers a way to live inside the mystery. The same exchange, read with different emphases, produced the great schools of monasticism that organized the religious life of the Christian centuries — the desert ascetics of Egypt and Syria, the eastern and western communities, the orders of the medieval West.

The great divisions

The most consequential fault lines run through the institution. The first was geographic and ancient before it was formal: the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West drifted apart over language, ritual, the authority of the bishop of Rome, and the wording of the creed (the Western addition of the filioque clause), until the mutual excommunications of 1054 fixed the rupture into the long division between the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Latin West. The Crusades, launched from the West across the following centuries, hardened the breach rather than healing it.

The second great division broke the Latin West itself. The Reformation of the sixteenth century — opened conventionally by Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses against indulgences in 1517 and carried further by John Calvin and the reformers of Geneva, Zurich, and beyond — split Western Christianity over the question of how grace is mediated and where authority finally rests: in the church and its tradition, or in scripture alone, read by faith alone, justified by grace alone. From that break descends the whole Protestant family, from the magisterial Lutheran and Reformed churches to the later radical and free traditions, the Quakers among them.

The three great branches that resulted — the Catholic Church (some 1.3 billion), the Protestant churches (around 800 million), and Eastern Orthodoxy (roughly 300 million), alongside the Oriental Orthodox and the Church of the East — together carried the faith outward in the age of European expansion, until Christianity became genuinely global and its demographic center began to shift toward Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Distinctive local syntheses formed along the way, such as the Kongolese Catholicism of sixteenth-century Central Africa.

The contemplative undercurrent

Beneath the public architecture of creed and church runs a quieter strand. The contemplative tradition turned the faith inward, toward an unmediated knowing of God, sometimes to the unease of the institution. Its sources lie in the desert, in the Greek fathers, and above all in the writings circulated under the name of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, whose apophatic theology — reaching God by the negation of every name — became the charter of Christian mysticism East and West. From this root grew the whole of Christian mysticism: the hesychasm of the Orthodox East, with its discipline of inner prayer and its doctrine of deification; the Rhineland mystics of the medieval West; the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing; and the Carmelite ascent of John of the Cross. The site hosts several of the founding texts of this strand, including the Underhill rendering of the Cloud of Unknowing and Parker’s translation of the Dionysian corpus.

This is also where Christianity meets the wider concern of this archive most directly, through its lineage of Christian Neoplatonism. The fusion of biblical revelation with the philosophy of Plotinus and Proclus — worked by Augustine, by the Greek fathers, by Pseudo-Dionysius, by Origen and Clement of Alexandria, and by the scholastic synthesis of Thomas Aquinas — is the Christian Neoplatonism that supplied the intellectual frame for almost all of Christian theology’s account of the soul’s return to God.

The heterodox and the esoteric

Earlier and more radically, the second-century currents gathered under the name Gnosticism read the Christian story as a drama of secret gnosis — saving knowledge of one’s divine origin — and of a flawed creator-god distinct from the true Father above. They were condemned as heresy, and the boundaries of orthodoxy were drawn in part against them; figures such as Marcion of Sinope, who rejected the Hebrew scriptures and their God, and the dualist current that flowered later as Catharism, mark the recurring temptation to read the faith as a war of light against a malign matter — a reading that connects to the great dualist religion of Manichaeism.

The most distinctive of the esoteric Christian currents drew not on dualism but on the recovery of Jewish and Hermetic learning in the Renaissance. The Christian Kabbalah founded by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johann Reuchlin between the 1480s and 1517 read the sefirot, the divine names, and the letter-mysticism of the Jewish Kabbalah as a hidden confirmation of Christian doctrine — Pico’s notorious claim that no science certifies the divinity of Christ better than magic and Kabbalah, and Reuchlin’s argument that the unutterable Name of God, with one letter added, spells the name of Jesus. Modern scholarship has shown that the Jewish material reaching these Christians was itself partly reshaped in translation toward the Christological readings they wanted to find. Around the same humanist project ran the dream of a prisca theologia — an ancient wisdom transmitted through Hermes Trismegistus and the Corpus Hermeticum in parallel with Moses — that briefly made a Hermetic Christianity intellectually respectable, until the Hermetic texts were re-dated to the Christian era. The historian Frances Yates made this episode central to the modern study of Renaissance esotericism.

A later Protestant lineage runs from the Görlitz shoemaker Jacob Boehme, whose visionary cosmogony of the divine Ungrund, the seven source-spirits, and the figure of Sophia founded the current of Boehmean Christian theosophy — carried by John Pordage and Jane Lead’s Philadelphian Society, by William Law, and into German idealist philosophy and Russian Sophiology. Beside it stand the Rosicrucian manifestos and their legendary founder Christian Rosenkreutz, the Martinist theurgy of the French illuminist tradition, and the later occult systems of the hermetic Qabalah. These movements have repeatedly drawn on Christian symbols while reading them against the grain of orthodoxy, and several — Boehme’s theosophy above all — became channels by which a recognizably Christian vocabulary entered the modern Western esoteric stream.

Scholarship and the textual record

The modern study of Christianity rests on critical editions of its primary documents and on a vast historiography. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Allen Lane, 2009) is the standard single-volume narrative of the whole; Jaroslav Pelikan’s five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (University of Chicago Press, 1971–1989) is the authoritative account of how the creeds and dogmas took shape. For the contemplative strand, Bernard McGinn’s multivolume The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (Crossroad, 1991–) is the principal synthesis. For the Renaissance Christian appropriation of Jewish mysticism, Chaim Wirszubski’s Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Harvard University Press, 1989) remains the foundational reconstruction, and Frances Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1964) reopened the whole question of Christian Hermetism; for the Boehmean line, Alexandre Koyré’s La philosophie de Jacob Boehme (Vrin, 1929) is still the spine of the scholarship.

The archive hosts a cluster of the primary texts of the esoteric and contemplative Christianity that is its particular concern. The Cloud of Unknowing in Evelyn Underhill’s 1912 edition and John Parker’s 1899 translation of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius stand at the head of the apophatic tradition. G. R. S. Mead’s Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906) surveys the Gnostic Christianity of the second century from a sympathetic remove. Karl von Eckartshausen’s The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, in Isabel de Steiger’s translation, carries the Boehmean–theosophical current into the threshold of the modern occult revival.

It is worth marking that the mystical, the hidden, and the heterodox are undercurrents — real, persistent, and consequential, but never the whole of a religion whose mainstream has been creedal, communal, and public, and whose ordinary life has been lived in the parish and the liturgy rather than the hermitage or the laboratory.

→ 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) · Eckartshausen — The Cloud upon the Sanctuary (de Steiger)

→ Related: Bible · New Testament · Paul The Apostle · Jesus Christ · Gnosis · Gnosticism · Neoplatonism · Christian Mysticism · Christian Neoplatonism · Christian Kabbalah · Christian Theosophy Boehmean · The Reformation · Eastern Orthodox Christianity · Augustine Of Hippo · Thomas Aquinas · Grace In Christianity · Apophatic Theology · Islam