by Dwight A. Pryor
WHAT TODAY IS CALLED “CHRISTIANITY” actually began as a messianic movement within Judaism. It was nurtured by the fertile spiritual soil of Second Temple Judaism, which was especially diverse and vibrant in the First Century.
From its inception the Jesus movement was thoroughly Jewish in its composition and culture. The Rabbi from Nazareth taught in the manner and methods of other Jewish sages, but with uncommon authority and unprecedented claims of Divine identity. Like other esteemed teachers he raised up many disciples, all of whom were Jewish. He taught them from the Torah and the Prophets, never undermining or “abolishing” the Word of God, but filling it fuller with sound interpretation and spiritual implications.
Before his sacrificial death, Yeshua promised to empower his disciples with the Holy Spirit to take the good news of the Kingdom message that he had proclaimed to Israel, to “all nations” (Luke 24:47). Beginning from Jerusalem, the word of the Lord was to go forth from Zion “to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
The rest of the world at that time was Roman. Its Hellenized (Greco-Roman) culture was every bit as compelling as its imperial rule. To successfully transport, therefore, the message of a Jewish Messiah, steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures and Hebraic mindset, to the Greco-Roman world required skillful adaptations of the Greek language and concepts. The Apostle Paul succeeded in that difficult task, although even then his writings were often misunderstood (2 Peter 3:16).
In subsequent centuries, however, the Hebraic foundations of the Gospel in the West were eroded or even excised under the weight of the prevailing Roman worldview. Some of the shifts were seismic, others were more subtle, but together their influence reverberates upon the Christian mind even today.
FOR EXAMPLE, BY THE END OF THE FOURTH CENTURY, the emperors Constantine and Theodosis had wed the church to the Roman Empire. What began as a persecutedminority sect metamorphosed into a persecuting majority, a triumphalistic State religion concerned more with worldly power than fidelity to Yeshua’s gospel of the Kingdom.
Theological shifts occurred as well. Preoccupation with the individual and the soul’s place in the afterlife displaced the Hebraic orientation of creating a new humanity, a renewed covenant community of people, reconciled to God and one another in love. The powerful redemptive work of Messiah that transformed lives became objectified in the sacraments, held to be efficacious apart from faith and repentance. And the church which began as a redeemed community of committed disciples became an imperial organization composed of anyone willing to confess the Apostles’ Creed.
The multiple images of atonement found in the New Testament, all drawn from the Hebrew Bible – such as sacrifice, conflict and victory over evil, ransom and redemption, reconciliation, and adoption into a family – gave way to doctrinal “theories of atonement.” Justification and a juridical view of salvation began to dominate, conceived more in categories of retributive Roman law than the relational context of a Torah given in grace to a redeemed covenantal community. Satisfying Divine justice and honor via penal substitution (Christ dying in our stead) suited the West’s preoccupation with introspective conscience and guilt that prevailed from the time of Augustine and his doctrine of Original Sin (in which all stand guilty from birth for Adam’s transgression).
Y/H/W/H, Israel’s gracious God, became re-imaged in the popular mind after the likeness of Greco-Roman deities whose anger had to be appeased and whose wrath propitiated. Once the Torah was dislodged from its covenantal context of grace, Temple sacrifices were construed as attempts to appease the anger of a judgmental Deity instead of the means of evoking repentance, enhancing fellowship and drawing near to a gracious Father who abounds in hesed or lovingkindness.
The sixteenth century Protestant Reformers charged that “Hellenistic errors” had crept into Latin theology. Though they rejected many of the practices of the medieval church, ironically, Luther and Calvin retained the Augustinian assumptions and Roman worldview that lay at the base of it all.
The restoration of Yeshua’s full Jewish identity and the Hebraic foundations of the Kingdom movement he started is a profoundly important work of God’s Spirit in our time. The church is being transported back, beyond Wittenberg and Geneva, Rome and Athens, all the way to Jerusalem, to recover the foundations of our faith. In this we should rejoice!
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Want to study this subject in-depth? We recommend Exploring Our Hebraic Heritage.
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