This has been blowing my mind lately, and I can’t seem to articulate it in a way to others so it feels as earth-shattering. It came from an interview with Tom Holland — the historian, not the actor.
He said that Christianity was the first religion, in the sense that there was never anything else that was purely ‘religious’ before it.
Now, today, we live in a world where you could more or less walk down the shopping aisle of gods and pick and choose which religious bumper sticker you want to slap on your life — or your Instagram bio — because you’re merely adopting the spiritual dimension of this system. But this was not always the case. In fact, one could argue, this is only the case because of Christianity.
If one wanted to convert to be a Jew, they would have to adopt the entire ‘system’ of Judaism, rather than just picking out the ‘religious’ bits of it and leaving the rest.
Another way to put it is, say a Chinese man wanted to become a Jew and worship Yahweh. He would have to leave behind his cultural ‘Chinese-ness’ and fully become, culturally and religiously, Jewish. He would have to follow their laws and traditions and customs and follow the rules that make one Jewish; the laws that hold them in the bounds of Moses’ covenant.
The same is largely true of Islam (even though it came after Christianity), and any other ancient belief system. They are less of pure religions and more entire ways of life.
But if this Chinese man wanted to become a Christian, he could retain all of the cultures and traditions of his Chinese heritage and still be a Christian; he could still be in relationship with Jesus and take on this spiritual identity as a Christian.
My cage was rattled recently then, after coming to understand this and then returning to familiar Bible verses like Galatians 3:28, which reads, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
By becoming a Christian and entering spiritually into this religion, you become a member of a family where we have males, females, Greeks, Jews, and all other types of people on earth. They are not washed out and cleansed of their former identities; rather, they come together and bring those differences together into the church, where their different backgrounds come together.
This is also why Paul so adamantly condemns the idea that the males must be circumcised in order to become Christians — they are not merely switching from one culture to another; rather, they are opting into something that transcends all of these categories. The New Testament spends a good chunk of text making it clear that all these older traditions are done away with, or fulfilled, because Jesus has come to implement a new system. A way of connecting with God that is not cultural, but purely spiritual.
One misconception people have is that becoming a Christian washes away their previous cultural allegiances or traditions. But this isn’t the case. There is not just one ‘Christian type of people.’ Look at Revelation 7:9, where “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” come to worship God. Note that it does not say that they all speak the same language, or they are all just one big tribe or nation now. Instead, they have retained their cultural identities and still come together to worship Yahweh.
God is not against culture.
God is not in the business of whitewashing the things that make people and people groups unique and making them all conform.
Christianity is a system of spiritual interaction with God that is able to transcend theocracy, rules, cultures, governments, systems, and tribes in order to bring people into relationship with God. This is something that cannot be said of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or any other religious system on earth (discounting Buddhism, which has not proper deity and is more of a philosophy…despite how depressing the temples are when they pressure people into paying for them under threat of receiving luck from their ancestors…).
So either, Christianity is the first religion — a system where one can adopt the spiritual dimension without having to adopt all the other factors — or it is not a religion at all. It is something greater; something that bends our categories of what religion is altogether. It’s a family that unites African tribes with Chinese businessmen and white suburban housewives from Michigan. And all of them, all of us, with God.
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Day 94 of 100 Days of Blog