Paper 195 Overview: After Pentecost

Peter's preaching on Pentecost day established how Christianity would spread through the world. The Jewish people did not accept Jesus' gospel, but the rest of the Roman Empire was ready for a new spiritual teaching. Christianity was able to win the loyalty of many people in the western world.

Christianity's success came from its organization, its acceptance of Greek philosophy, its teaching about Jesus, and its willingness to make compromises with other religions. Even though the early Christians made these compromises, they still preserved Jesus' most important teachings. Christianity brought a new and higher type of morality, a broader understanding of God, hope for life after death, and most importantly, the truth about Jesus of Nazareth.

The results of Peter's preaching on Pentecost day set the future path for most of the apostles as they spread the gospel of the kingdom. Peter became the real founder of the Christian church, while Paul took Christianity to the non-Jewish people, and Greek believers carried it throughout the Roman Empire.

The Jewish people as a whole did not accept either Jesus' teaching about God's fatherhood and human brotherhood or Peter and Paul's message about Jesus' resurrection and ascension. However, the rest of the Roman Empire was ready for the Christian teachings. Western civilization was smart, tired of war, and doubtful of all existing religions and philosophies. Despite their great achievements in philosophy, art, and politics, the western peoples had no satisfying religion.

When Jesus' teachings reached these spiritually hungry western peoples, it created a new way of living. This led to conflict between old religious practices and the new Christian message. Christianity claimed to address too many aspects of life for people to fully accept in just one or two generations. It wasn't simply a spiritual message as Jesus had presented, but quickly took positions on religious rituals, education, medicine, art, law, government, morals, and many other areas of life.

The making of Christianity into a Greek-style religion began when the Apostle Paul spoke to the council of the Areopagus in Athens. There, this Roman citizen told the Greeks about his version of the new religion that had started in the Jewish land of Galilee. Many of Jesus' teachings were similar to Greek philosophy because both aimed to free the individual – Greek philosophy for social and political freedom, and Jesus' teaching for spiritual freedom.

Christianity became successful and won over other religions mainly because Greeks were willing to accept new ideas, even from the Jews, and because Paul and those who came after him were clever and willing to compromise. When Paul spoke in Athens about "Christ and Him Crucified," the Greeks were spiritually hungry and interested in spiritual truth. Remember that at first the Romans fought against Christianity, while the Greeks accepted it, and it was the Greeks who eventually forced the Romans to accept this new religion.

The Romans took over Greek culture and replaced government by chance with representative government. This change helped Christianity because Rome brought a new openness to different languages, peoples, and religions to the whole western world.

Much of the early trouble for Christians in Rome happened because they unfortunately used the word "kingdom" in their preaching. The Romans accepted all religions but strongly disliked anything that seemed like political competition. When these early troubles ended, the field for spreading religious ideas was wide open. The Romans were interested in political matters and cared little about art or religion, but were unusually accepting of both.

After Roman rule grew stronger and Christianity spread, the Christians found themselves with one God, a great religious idea, but without an empire. The Greco-Romans had a great empire but no God to unite them spiritually. The Christians accepted the empire, and the empire adopted Christianity.

Christianity became popular in Rome during a time of great debate between the teachings of the Stoics and the salvation promises of mystery religions. Christianity brought comfort and freedom to spiritually hungry people whose language had no word for "unselfishness."

What gave greatest power to Christianity was the way its believers lived lives of service and even the way they died for their faith during the earlier times of harsh treatment. The teaching about Christ's love for children soon ended the common practice of leaving unwanted children, especially baby girls, to die.

The church, being part of society and a friend of politics, shared in the decline of thinking and spirit during the so-called European "dark ages." During this time, religion became more focused on monasteries, denying pleasure, and rules. In a spiritual sense, Christianity was sleeping.

During these dark and hopeless centuries, religion became almost secondhand again. The individual person was nearly lost under the power, tradition, and control of the church. A new spiritual danger came with the creation of many "saints" who were thought to have special standing with God, and who could speak to God for humans if asked properly.

But Christianity was changed enough by society that, while it could not stop the coming dark ages, it was better prepared to survive this long time of moral darkness and spiritual lack of growth. It continued through the long night of Western civilization and was still working as a moral guide in the world when the renaissance arrived.

The twentieth century has brought new problems for Christianity and all other religions to solve. The higher a civilization grows, the more necessary it becomes to "seek first the realities of heaven" in all efforts to make society stable and help solve its material problems.

Truth often becomes confusing when it is taken apart, separated, and studied too much. Living truth teaches the truth seeker correctly only when it is embraced as a whole and as a living spiritual reality, not as a fact of science or an inspiration of art.

Religion shows people their divine and eternal future. Religion is a personal and spiritual experience and must always be kept separate from other high forms of thought, such as: logical thinking about material things, appreciation of beauty, understanding of social duties, and sense of right and wrong.

Scientists have pushed people into a fear of losing spiritual values. They have started a run on the moral bank of the ages. People who don't think become scared about their spiritual wealth.

This bank of human experience has huge spiritual resources. It can stand up to these demands. When this fear of losing spiritual values is over, the religion of Jesus will still be strong.

No matter what the conflict seems to be between material thinking and Jesus' teachings, be sure that Jesus' teachings will win in the future. True religion cannot get into fights with science because religion is not about material things.

How sad it is when people allow theories about a machine-like universe to rob them of spiritual resources. Facts never fight with real spiritual faith, but theories might. Science should destroy superstition, not religious faith.

Science should help people grow materially just as religion helps them grow spiritually. Science and religion should not fight with each other. Science measures physical things but cannot measure spiritual experiences.

If this were just a material world and people were just machines, no one could know they were a machine. The people who say we live in a material universe don't realize they need spiritual insight to even think such thoughts.

Even after material thinking is mostly defeated, the harmful effect of twentieth-century non-religious thinking will still damage many souls. This non-religious thinking came from two sources: godless science and the controlling medieval church.

At the time of this writing, both European and American thinking is mostly non-religious. For three hundred years Western thinking has moved away from religion. Religion has become less important, mostly just rituals.

It took great power to free Western people from the church's control. Non-religious thinking broke these chains, but now it threatens to create a new godless control over modern people's hearts and minds. The controlling political state comes directly from scientific materialism and non-religious philosophy.

Do not overlook the value of your spiritual heritage, the river of truth running down through the centuries, even to the barren times of a materialistic and secular age. In all your worthy efforts to rid yourselves of the superstitious beliefs of past ages, make sure that you hold fast the eternal truth. But be patient! when the present superstition revolt is over, the truths of Jesus' gospel will persist gloriously to illuminate a new and better way.

But paganized and socialized Christianity stands in need of new contact with the uncompromised teachings of Jesus; it languishes for lack of a new vision of the Master's life on earth. A new and fuller revelation of the religion of Jesus is destined to conquer an empire of materialistic secularism and to overthrow a world sway of mechanistic naturalism. The earth is now quivering on the very brink of one of its most amazing and enthralling epochs of social readjustment, moral quickening, and spiritual enlightenment.

The teachings of Jesus, even though greatly modified, survived the mystery cults of their birthtime, the ignorance and superstition of the dark ages, and are even now slowly triumphing over the materialism, mechanism, and secularism of the twentieth century. And such times of great testing and threatened defeat are always times of great revelation.

Religion does need new leaders, spiritual men and women who will dare to depend solely on Jesus and his incomparable teachings. If Christianity persists in neglecting its spiritual mission while it continues to busy itself with social and material problems, the spiritual renaissance must await the coming of these new teachers of Jesus' religion who will be exclusively devoted to the spiritual regeneration of men. And then will these spirit-born souls quickly supply the leadership and inspiration requisite for the social, moral, economic, and political reorganization of the world.

Christianity has indeed done a great service for this world, but what is now most needed is Jesus. The world needs to see Jesus living again on earth in the experience of spirit-born mortals who effectively reveal the Master to all men. It is futile to talk about a revival of primitive Christianity; you must go forward from where you find yourselves. Modern culture must become spiritually baptized with a new revelation of Jesus' life and illuminated with a new understanding of his gospel of eternal salvation.

Jesus' disciples should be more than conquerors, even overflowing sources of inspiration and enhanced living to all men. Religion is only an exalted humanism until it is made divine by the discovery of the reality of the presence of God in personal experience.

The beauty and simplicity, the humanity and divinity of Jesus' life present such a striking picture of man-saving and God-revealing that the theologians and philosophers of all time should be effectively restrained from daring to form creeds or create theological systems of spiritual bondage out of such a transcendent bestowal of God in the form of man. In Jesus the universe produced a mortal man in whom the spirit of love triumphed over the material handicaps of time and overcame the fact of physical origin.

Ever bear in mind—God and men need each other. They are mutually necessary to the full and final attainment of eternal personality experience in the divine destiny of universe finality. "The kingdom of God is within you" was probably the greatest pronouncement Jesus ever made, next to the declaration that his Father is a living and loving spirit.