Saving Christianity

We read quite a lot in the gospels about Jesus’ teaching of God’s Kingdom on earth. We even often repeat his famed prayer. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. I sometimes wonder if we actually think about what we are praying when we repeat that prayer.

I like to think of that kingdom as God’s Paradise rather then “kingdom” since we no longer find many kingdoms on the earth. And Paradise on earth was the original goal of very early Christians. They hoped to establish a place on earth where peace and justice prevailed and people lived together as family and in community.

Early Christians remembered the teachings of Jesus. They cared for the poor, fed, ministered to the needs of the imprisoned and even shared a common meal in their worship services. All that changed over time. Salvation began to be thought of as occurring in the afterlife but Jesus had taught that the kingdom was already on the earth.

For nearly a thousand years, that vision prevailed. Then something truly terrible happened. The vision of paradise was overcome by the vision of salvation by violence. The Crusades commenced and Jews, Muslims and infidels of all stripes were put to the sword. It was another thousand years before that new and terrible vision began to be seen for what it really was. Salvation by violence as reward in the afterlife is not the gospel Jesus taught.

These earlier followers of Jesus embraced a theology of hope, life, and living in community as opposed to the emphasis on torture, suffering, and death that came later.

This was an earlier understanding when Jesus teaching was understood and depicted as opening the possibility again of human life together in an earthly paradise, before that vision was replaced by one of Christian imperialism and salvation by violence.

From where does the violence of our society come? It comes from a thousand years of emphasis on acceptable violence. It was a thousand years before it became acceptable to take human life for any reason. But when that teaching was instigated, it birthed violence of all kinds.

How do we return to the proper vision of Jesus?

I think we begin by teaching the principles Jesus taught. The principles taught in the stories of Jesus’ wonderful acceptance of women, the outcasts of society, untouchables, those who were mentally and physically ill, and those who were hated as pawns of the Romans, are principles we all need to be embracing.

We need to be feeding and caring for the poor, instituting principles of justice in our courts, and pursuing peace with the same vengence we have pursued war. Principles such as “just war”, vengeance and revenge have no place among those teachings of Jesus.