Charles Kannengiesser is Emeritus Professor from Notre Dame University, Indiana, and presently teaching at Concordia University, Montreal, and St Paul University, Ottawa. He was Visiting Professor within the Centre for Early Christian Studies, McAuley Campus in 2000.

Relevance means confirmed value, or the obvious aptitude to furnish an adequate response to the challenges at hand. My present essay is relevant if it meets real questions in the reader’s mind and engages in a possible answer to those questions. One day or another we all may feel irrelevant, when we fail to keep our social links alive in a given situation, when a sound understanding of the situation escapes us.

On a broader scale such seems to be the case for a majority of Christians presently ignorant of their religious tradition, cut off from the learned conversation of specialists about their own past, and socially or culturally, even mentally, disconnected from the very foundations of Christianity. For them, nothing would sound more absent from their usual preoccupations than an in-depth attempt to investigate those foundations. For many reasons they would find the topic irrelevant, or consider themselves irrelevant as an audience for such discussion.

A similar reaction marks the attitude of more militant Christians, either promoting new forms of spirituality, or waging the battle of traditional viewpoints. Charismatic innovators and sectarian conservatives alike would agree in denouncing a focus of research on the origins of Christianity as irrelevant for their own strategies. Opening the spectrum of negative receptions by shifting from a spatial to a temporal direction, I would suggest that the whole bulk of theological and devotional practices in the post-Reformation churches of the past two or three centuries, including the Roman-Catholic one, has excluded any possibility of a new thinking about Christian origins. Too many doctrinal positions were fiercely barricaded against polemical attacks, or viciated by confessional bias. No free space was left open for a truly ecumenical debate between believers, who in fact were not separated by beliefs derived from their origins, but by more recent turns of events.

As a result of that evolution, the theoretical apparatus of all churches closed itself up in clerical and academic confinements, inside of which peculiar systems of thought were endlessly erected as sacred forms of orthodoxy. The common believer had no access to the bastions of learned polemicists and apologists. Without much thought, people kept true to their familial and tribal religiosity. Under the formidable pressure of modern communication technologies, inherited religion lost its status in public discourse, if it was not exploited for commercial and partisan purposes. A triumphant consumerism put the Western economy in a commanding position on the world’s global marketplace, on the fringes of which religion hangs on as a relic of the past. At the Vatican II Council, the future of an uncertain survival attracted more attention and generated more generous ideas, than would have a creative revision of past traditions. For any constructive and positively critical retrieving of their own religious past (Hans Küng tried it in a provocative book entitled The Church), would have imposed on the participants of the council the crucial obligation to redefine the very origins of the church, but no one in the synodal assembly was ready for such a task. Half a century later, after crossing the threshold of a new millennium, not much has changed in that regard, except the fact that since Vatican II, institutional sclerosis leads in an accelerated pace to institutional death, or, as John Paul II stated in the circular letter Veritatis Splendor, to something like a generalized cancer.

Against the background of that ecclesial development (which has also in many regards a brighter side not mentioned here), the relevance of a study on the origins of Christianity can only be radical and paradoxical, if not a tragic one. Such was the relevance in their day of the greatest prophets in the midst of biblical Israel, Isaiah and Jeremiah among others, or the relevance of Jesus himself: a relevance that utterly challenges the conventional establishment of religion up to a point of tension where its advocates are eventually silenced.

The present essay on the origins of Christianity offers a provisional outline by articulating in short (and without much reverence) a few risky insights. Between two academic assignments, one in Australia and the other in Canada, it is worth marking a pause in thought on a more personal level: How in my inner self am I really concerned by what I am teaching as a patristic expert? Which basic motivation legitimates the luxury of patristics in the current turmoil of the world and in the church to which I belong?

1.   A retrospective evaluation

Exploring Christian origins means facing a complex reality. If the present relevance of that study is at stake, the former stages of the envisaged exploration need some careful attention. Indeed, it would seem irrelevant now to project a study of Christian origins in the way it was launched a hundred or fifty years ago. In the Humanities, contrary to mathematics or technical matters, the history of the research itself is always part of inquiries leading to new insights. Such inquiries at all times are conditioned by the scientific community inside of which their necessity and goals are perceived. Since the nineteenth century different perceptions of Christians origins characterized distinct schools of thought almost from one generation to another. Such were the still Romantic perception of John Henry Newman and Johann Adam Moehler in the 1830’s, the philological and strongly confessional perception of Adolf von Harnack and Louis Duchesne in the late 1800’s, the rationalistic one proper to Alfred Loisy and other Modernists at the start of the twentieth century, the intensely erudite and documentary one prevailing among exegetes and historians in the middle of the twentieth century, the more elitist and properly patristic one of Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar in the recent past; and finally, a deconstructive vision of Christian origins prevailed among some scholars provisionally labeled post-Modernists.

Each of these perceptions was rooted in the historical culture proper to the generation in which they were worked out. Nothing helps more to define one’s own vision than to sharpen it in comparison with the insights highlighted by predecessor. A sound self-criticism passes through much comparison with other achievements. A better acquaintance with methods and results of former experts in the field inspires modesty and prudence. One reaches a higher degree of lucidity in one’s own intuition, when keeping the mind on high alert throughout the sequence of former models critically evaluated. The present attempt to formulate once more an original notion of Christian origins cannot omit the retrospective evaluation because in many regards it is resulting from the earlier attempts of predecessors in the field.

2.   A proper definition of “origins”

The purpose of the exploration is to reach a better understanding of Christian origins as relevant for today’s church. Now it is the very notion of such origins that incites us to raise the question of their actual relevance. Perhaps, when used in the plural, “origins” gives a first hint of what we should emphasize: they are a complex reality, a phenomenon to be considered from different angles, and according to each viewpoint, like in a prism, the inner complexity of the phenomenon would appear differently.

i.    A spiritual event

First, a proper consideration of Christian origins focuses on a spiritual event. Only the transendency of absolute spirituality, identified by Origen of Alexandria in Peri archon, Book I, as deity itself, might ultimately explain the worldwide repercussion of that extraordinary event (so much for a believer’s opinion!). A spiritual event, like mystiscm at its best, can be thoroughly incarnate, practical and bound to every-day life. The spiritual nature of that event was encapsulated by its earliest actors and witnesses in one phrase. They announced God-made-man as the nuclear bliss, the unthinkable fusion of all spiritual energies, for all times achieved in one individual. Hence, we are speaking about a spiritual event calling for a spiritual reception. To show up as a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, calls for at last some personal practice of non-violence. To enter into the timeless motion of Zen requires a monastic discipline appropriate for that form of asceticism. Here, the gospel event that results from the nuclear fusion of all biblical faith calls essentially for faith as the all-time best response. I firmly believe that only faith reaches the spiritual ground of Christian origins. More about that later.

ii.   A historic event

Secondly, we are targeting a historic event. Only since less than a century has history in the modern sense been declared a decisive key for understanding human existence, and only in recent decades did it start effectively permeating all theological disciplines. In the astonishing investment of intellectual resources behind the theoretical construct of the early church, which up to the present day underscores Christian doctrine on God and Christ, history as we understand it had no part at all. Jesus became a personal incarnation of God at the cost of his Palestinian identity. In the process his Jewishness was completely obliterated. Presently, however, and for the first time in Christian history, one tends to consider the whole gospel event, Jesus included, in its true historic nature. For at least two centuries all churches had become involved in a stormy struggle, until finally professional theologians and church authorities admitted that indeed Jesus was a product of his time, and that true christology deals with a saviour born from history, a saviour whose message can only be understood in terms of history. For, at the core of the gospel event, God was made history, according to his disciples, Jesus was a man making for ever history as a unique incarnation of God. Solemn statements of the early church ratified the message.

iii.   A religious event

Thirdly, we wonder about the relevance of a religious event. The gospel event as such had nothing properly religious in its spiritual nature. Even the gospel writers, who belonged to the religious culture of their age, could not help telling the story of a charismatic, young leader deprived of any official attribution which would have linked him with the religious establishment in Jerusalem. Finally that establishment turned against him, and killed him. The gospel writers clearly introduced a popular prophet and healer, who never thought of initiating a religious tradition of his own. However, as the Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted in his prison cell before being hanged by the Nazis, the spiritual message of Jesus could only reach out by being translated into the religious discourse of his disciples.

Known thanks to the New Testament and the witnessing of early Christian communities, Christian origins call for a systematic study of their religious documents, their religious creativity in institutional matters, and their religious self-identification on the map of the Mediterranean world, where religions competed anyway with each other. For two or three generations, a productive school of thought concentrated in Europe and North America on a so-called “comparative history of religion”, as a way to disclose some of the striking features in the Bible, and in particular in the story of Jesus. Approaching today the spiritual and history reality of Christian origins with the question of their actual relevance in mind, requires foremost a penetrating analysis of what religion has meant for the reception of the gospel event. At this point, the challenge consists in reaching final conclusions, when admitting that the religious culture inherited from Antiquity, which played a decisive role in the early reception and interpretation of the gospel event, has gone, whereas the transcendent truth of the gospel event itself remains fully alive.

Christian origins are a reality at once spiritual, historic, and religious. Only by taking the complex reality of their origins as it materialized in becoming a human experience and a legacy for the centuries may one perceive their present relevance in a world and at a time apparently oblivious of them.

3.   The task

Every day thousands of men and women assume the responsibility to explore the origins of Christianity. Biblical scholars, historians of civilization, church historians, experts in Judaica and interpreters of the New Testament, theologians, and many others, share a common interest in questions related to the beginnings of the Christian movement. Only a candid abstraction, invoking God and other supernatural powers as an answer to all questions, could reduce the origins of Christianity to the divine figure of Jesus as described in the gospels, and explain the expansion of the new religion as a permanent miracle performed according to a divine strategy. Given the ancient mindset of two millennia ago in the religious culture of the Near East, such a supernaturalist conception of Christian origins was included in the spontaneous self-identification of believers.

The beginnings in question made sense only as resulting from a genuine revelation, a proper initiative of God, the almighty partner of human agents in the course of history. As long as a religious vision of the beginnings prevailed, their scientific investigation remained limited to a paraphrase of the godly claims issued by the very sources making known the miraculous facts. In the non-religious culture of today, a rational approach starts by taking into account the inner dynamic of ancient religiosity. One tries to understand how people were thinking in Antiquity and why in the normative strictures of their inherited religion they could not think otherwise. Then one avoids the confusion of apologetics mixing theological projections with historical inquiries, a confusion which for many centuries characterized the religious perception of human reality.

Thus more than ever the origins of Christianity, seen as generating their own signification in the religious culture in which they happened, represent a fascinating fact. Their “supernatural” dimension no more imposes the fiction of a divine world juxtaposed to the human sphere, with all sorts of interferences by heavenly agents in down-to-earth circumstances. In the past such representations helped people to identify the divine nature of very special events. Now these same representations become part of the very fact which we call Christian origins. They derive from the mental process genuinely linked with the foundational fact. In short, what we can “Christian origins” is a successful concentration of spiritual creativity, human inventiveness, and community dynamics.

The canonical gospels offer a miniaturized model of Christian origins as a whole: they do not depict Jesus for himself, in isolation, as biographers would have done; they tell the story of Jesus and the apostles as a significant group, the story of Jesus in the midst of fellow believers facing with him the national establishment of their common religion. The gospel event is eminently of a social nature, and it takes on the shape of a political drama. As in a paradigmatic prelude, the written gospels tell the story of a complex and highly sophisticated event, anticipating what would happen in the early church.

The church remained “nascent” for some time, all the time needed for the hermeneutical conversion made possible by the gospel event to expand on the scale of the Roman Empire. The blood of martyrs, the testimony of converts, the intellectual achievement of educated people, the liturgical and pastoral initiatives of whole communities are many aspects of the historic phenomenon called “Christian origins” in its first expansion. For several centuries, the church originated structures of thought and sacramental procedures, which later generations declared inamovise foundations, or canonical institutions. Hence a immoveable great variety of experts scrutinizes Christian origins, and patristic scholars still today face an enormous task. I have elaborated on it in the recent Festschrift for Robert Wilken, a contribution which resulted from a seminar given in 1999 at the Australian Centre for Early Christian Studies, directed by Professor Pauline Allen.

4.   The vision

From the historical perspective, by pushing Christian origins into a far distant past, the very nature of the gospel event, with its worldwide explosion, urges us to understand such origins as a present reality. In its concrete realization, by its belonging to history, the gospel event is a chronological one, inaugurating the Christian movement. In its mystical dimension, by which it generates hermeneutical conversion, the gospel event is transcendent: at anytime and anywhere it actualizes the truth of the gospel. In other words, the gospel event at once marks a historic origin and constitutes a spiritual event that originates Christian reality in a constant actuality. If its transcendent nature is ignored, it loses its relevance. For this reason, I said earlier that only faith reaches the spiritual ground of Christian origins.

The relevance of an exploration of Christian origins depends then on the spiritual quality of that enterprise. To be valid in its present stage and with its multiple layers of scholarly commitments, the study of the early church needs first of all to focus on the gospel event. From a critical perception of that event believers derive a capacity to properly evaluate church matters, and to challenge them decisively when required. Paradoxically, the fact that early Christian studies seem to be so irrelevant and marginalized – in academic circles and in the church at large – opens a deeply creative perspective when reflected in the light of the gospel event.

An immediate follow-on to my very limited and tentative attempt to categorize Christian origins as a present challenge for patristic scholarship would be to examine the many structural affinities between new “origins” of the present time and the “origins” experienced in early Christianity. Institutional death inside today’s church is itself a central feature of the gospel event. The relevance of a critical retrieving of Christian origins can hardly be questioned, when seen as a challenge to undergo the same hermeneutical conversion, and to assume the same kind of originating faith, which are proper to the gospel event itself.