What I mean by Post-Scripture Christianity is the fact is most of the New Testament contains ideas and practices that are completely foreign to Modern Christians themselves. In other words, even though Fundamentalist/Biblicist type Christians claim to be "New Testament Christians," they are actually just cherry-picking the New Testament to form their own post-scripture theology which is based more on Greco-Roman philosophy and the writings of later Indo-European Church Fathers writing after the New Testament was composed. Most modern Christians today have essentially created their own version of Christianity outside the New Testament. For example, the Greco-Roman philosophical concept of the Trinity is not found in the New Testament.
See the book Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola, who is an Evangelical Christian himself. Viola is all about how most of the modern churches' practices and ideas are not based in the New Testament at all. Viola's solution to the paganized modern churches, is to abandon the church building and the Greco-Roman church practices; and go back to spontaneous, supernaturally led, leaderless groups of Christians: meeting in homes and claiming to be guided supernaturally by the will of Jesus (allegedly possessing them equally), without a hierarchy or organizational structure. The irony is that while Frank Viola promotes this in his books, a return to the original Pauline New Testament churches that functions like this, as people emailed him trying to find a good "home church" that practiced like the original Pauline churches; Viola ends up discouraging his readers from trying to find a Home Church. Viola ends up admitting that home churches lacking the Greco-Roman/Indo-European hierarchical structure, end up being too chaotic as the unstructured spontaneity in the "home church movement" ends up creating endless chaos, power grabs, and division. So that last I checked, Viola himself does not recommend somebody who reads his books to attempt to find a home church that functions like the New Testament churches. He flat out admits they are going to be disappointed because of the lack of organization and chaotic nature of such groups.
So what Frank Viola's Pagan Christianity book, ends up doing is actually showing that if it was not for the Indo-European Spirit of forming structure and organization, Christianity would not have survived. For Christianity needed that Greco-Roman Indo-European energy and structure to continue to survive and flourish.
This is an example of how most Christians are really post-scripture Christians. For if they tried to really practice the New Testament Pauline model of church, they would do what Viola suggests in his books and try and find a home church where everyone acts like they are all literally possessed by the spirit of Christ equally; with the only Head (or Leader) of the Body of Believers being the omnipresent Christ. So that everyone speaks together as literally "one mind of Christ" and there is no leader, which as expected just ends up being chaotic eventually.
So in reality, those who do take the New Testament seriously (like Viola's home churches) realize they can't organize themselves. What organized Christianity is was not the ideas in the Pauline churches in the seven authentic letters of Paul; what ended up organizing Christianity cohesively in the long term, was the Greco-Roman structure that developed in the pseudopigraphic letters of Paul; and the later Constantinian Roman Church that utilized Greco-Roman philosophy and governmental structure.
So this idea that the New Testament is a manual for living today is completely absurd. Christians are not following the literal teachings of the New Testament. The reason why most Christians think they can utilize the New Testament as a manual for daily living, is because they really don't understand what they are reading in the New Testament. This is because most modern translations obscure and re-translate the original New Testament Greek and as Bart Ehrman explains, most of what pastors learn in the seminary is not taught to the layperson at church.
So what happens is most people cherry pick from the New Testament, as they completely cherry pick out the scriptures they like and ignore all the rest. So for example, when Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 7 about the ideal of celibacy (which is reiterated by the Pauline-Christ in Matthew 19:12), most Christians ignore this ideal. For if one were to take the New Testament seriously and literally, they would ideally be celibate; but the majority of Christians ignore this Pauline ideal. Instead, they will point out passages in the Disputed Letters of Paul like in 1 Timothy 3:2, where it says Bishops should have one wife. And they will hammer that one verse from the Disputed Paul, cherry picking that out and ignoring 1 Corinthians 7 and Matthew 19:12.
Take the example of "take up your cross," which if one understands it was based on original martyrdom-centered Christianity, they would understand that this literally meant voluntarily seeking after one's death by the hands of Rome. This only made sense in the context of first to second century Roman courts where a Christian was asked to either declare Caesar as Lord or Jesus as Lord. Well today there are no Roman courts demanding you declare Caesar as Lord, and therefore Christians cannot literally "take up their cross" and confess Christ before a Caesarean court and risk being sentenced to death today. So what happened was, even by the time of Luke (who was likely a Indo-European Gentile), this was reframed as "take up your cross daily," so you already see this type of modification in the New Testament itself.
Another example is the Book of Revelation, which is actually about Torah-observant Jewish Christians believing the Jewish Christ is going to destroy Rome. Instead, what happened is that Constantine converted to Christianity and Christianity moved from a primarily Jewish Christianity to a more Indo-European Romanized Christianity; so much so that later Christians wrote their own version of Revelation updating it to match the reality of Rome being the good guy in the end, as it was Rome that saved Christianity from extinction when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity: turning Christianity into a global power rather than just some small obscure Jewish sect that would have died out like the Ebonites if it had stayed within the Torah-based Jewish tradition only.
So a Post-scripture Christianity is the understanding that the New Testament is a library of different documents and even different religious writers that did not agree with each other; in fact, there are arguments and disputes going on between the Torah-observant Christians like James and Peter and the Pauline Christians who rejected Torah-observance and things like circumcision. Then you have the author of Luke-Acts disagreeing with much of the Pauline-Markan tradition. The New Testament is thus not a manual for living modern life but a historical representation of the infighting and disputes in the various Christianities emerging from the Pauline sect which morphed into Constantinian Christianity causing it to win in the social marketplace of ideas.
These are just a few examples of how Christians are not treating the New Testament as a manual for living today.
A post-scripture Christianity is better treated today as Christianity as Fraternity, through understanding the difference between the Torah-observant Jewish Christianity of James the Just and Peter (which died out after 70 AD) and Indo-European Christianity that won out in the marketplace of ideas, which I will be covering in this blog series.
