Post-Scripture Christianity

 

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 day 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 actually 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 original context of the New Testament. For example, the Greco-Roman philosophical concepts that formed the Trinity is not found in the New Testament.  

See the book Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola, where Viola as an Evangelical Christian explains that most of the modern Christian Churches' practices and ideas are not based in the New Testament at all but based on pagan ideas and structures. So basically, what his book does it show how Christianity today is really more of an Indo-European phenomenon. Viola's solution to the paganized modern churches is to abandon the church building and pees and pulpit and the whole the Indo-European and Greco-Roman church practices; and go back to spontaneous, supernaturally led, leaderless groups meeting in homes just like the original Pauline Christians in the first century; when they met in each other's homes and claimed to be guided supernaturally by the will/mind of Jesus (allegedly possessing/indwelling them all equally), without a leader or hierarchy or organizational structure.  

The irony is that while Frank Viola promotes this egalitarian spiritually spontaneous nonstructure in his books, in reality trying to return to the way of the original Pauline New Testament churches ends up becoming chaotic and eventually dysfunctional. Viola himself realized this after people emailed him trying to find a good "home church" that practiced like the original Pauline churches that Viola described in his books. Viola realized that all these "home churches" that began a prop up based on his books, are too chaotic and dysfunctional; and so now, last time I checked, he discourages his readers from trying to find a Home Church. Viola ended up admitting that "home churches" or the Home Church Movement simply doesn't work in practice. 

I think this is because the original Pauline church structure was a spirit possession cult based in magical thinking and lacked the more rational Greco-Roman/Indo-European hierarchical structure that the post-Constantine and Germanized Church created. So when Viola attempted to resurrect the early Pauline churches, it just ended up being too chaotic as the unstructured spontaneity in the "home church movement" ended up creating endless chaos, power grabs, and division. So that, again 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 Pauline churches. He flat out admits they are going to be disappointed because of the lack of organization and chaotic nature of such groups. In my opinion this proves the importance of the Germanization of Christianity.

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" (Ekklesia), 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 so there is no human leader (for Christ is the omnipresent spirit entity as the only leader that guides them telepathically or "spiritually"), 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 idea) realize they can't organize themselves. What the later developed organized Christianity became post Constantine, was not based on the ideas in the Pauline churches (in the seven authentic letters of Paul) but was based on surviving Gentile/Indo-European Converts to Christianity after 70 AD who ended up organizing Christianity cohesively in the long term through a more Greco-Roman structure. We see early glimpses of this transition in the New Testament with the development of the pseudopigraphic/forged writing claiming to be Paul. Then later further development later by Constantinian Roman Church that utilized a Greco-Roman governmental structure. 

So this idea that the Pauline New Testament is a manual for living today is completely impractical and even absurd. Christians are not following the literal teachings and ideals 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 Ephesians 5:  25-33 on Christian men loving their wives, and 1 Timothy 3:2: where it says Bishops should have one wife. And they will hammer on about those later post-Pauline verses from the Disputed (i.e. Forged) writing of Paul, cherry picking them 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 Pauline Christianity, they would understand that this literally meant voluntarily seeking after one's death by the hands of first century 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 the writing of the Gospel of Luke (who was possibly a Indo-European Gentile), this was reframed as "take up your cross daily," so you already see this type of modification and moving away from the more extremist Pauline "martyrology" 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 morphed 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; thus 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 apocalyptic 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, in the New Testament itself 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 Jewish practices like circumcision. Then you have the author of Luke-Acts disagreeing with much of the Pauline-Markan tradition.  

TheNew Testament is thus not a manual for living modern life but a historical representation of the infighting and disputes in the various Christianities emerging and competing over time: from the Pauline sect that 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 a Fraternity. It is important to understand the difference between the Torah-observant Jewish Christianity of James the Just and Peter (a Jewish sect that died out after 70 AD) and the later more Indo-European Christianity that won out in the marketplace of ideas after 70 AD, which I will be covering in this blog series.