Jesus Christ

The figure of Jesus Christ has been interpreted in a variety of ways in the widespread Christian congregations that exist throughout the world, with the figure of Jesus evolving in the interpretations that have been accorded to him by the worshipers and onlookers of Christianity and other Abrahamaic religions, from the early point in which Jesus Christ fulfilled a basic function as an activist and revolutionary in the colonial struggle of the Judean people against the Roman Empire, to latter-day interpretations of Jesus in a context widely divorced from the original, historical origins of the figure of Jesus as a spiritual leader. These varying interpretations that have been created and disseminated in regard to the figure of Jesus Christ have been found to take a particularly wide array of forms in the practice of American Christianity, in which it has been observed by various sociologists and scholars of the figure of Jesus that the practice of religion places a particularly strong emphasis on the Jesus Christ figure of the Holy Trinity, which as a whole receives less attention from popular religion and its echoes in popular culture. One influential study that has been cited in regard to the understanding of the place of Jesus Christ in contemporary American religion and culture is the recently published study “American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Incon,” by Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, which received substantial degrees of attention from the country’s publishing world and from its corners given over to religious commentary in regards to how Prothero advanced an intriguing and well-argued argument as to the ways in which the figure of Jesus has functioned in American culture.

Prothero’s book argues that the most commonly advanced and held American interpretations of the existence of Jesus Christ can be traced back to the beliefs of Thomas Jefferson, who during his time in the office of the White House took up the exercise of editing out all of the sections of the New Testament dealing with Jesus that he did not feel were compatible with his philosophy of rationalism. When he had finished culling the material dealing with Jesus in the New Testament, he placed them together and had the results published as a text called “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth,” which removed the emphasis placed by accepted Christian practice on the role of Jesus Christ in regard to the Trinity, and instead showed the figure of Jesus as a sage and a philosopher. As some critiques of Prothero’s “American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon” have pointed out, a large portion of the American portion continues to hold beliefs directly apposite to those held and disseminated by Thomas Jefferson, with the evangelical movement in American culture generally advancing a traditional interpretation of Christianity. Prothero’s book may be better understood, according to reviewers, as an explanation for why the fascination with Jesus cuts across social, political and even religious American borders.

Churches

As much as a church is a set of beliefs and practices related to a particular philosophy for conducting the worship of Jesus Christ or a community of believers which are joined together by adherence to those beliefs and the performance of those practices, churches must also be considered in terms of their basic functions as physical spaces, which both flows from and in some cases has influenced the ideas which form the core of church doctrine. Because of the particular emphasis brought to questions of the relationship between abstract beliefs and physical reality by the functions of a church in regard to dealing with metaphysical issues, the various shapes taken by the visual design of individual churches have been the cause of great deals of study and debate, and at time contentious debate.

The design elements that are used in the creation of churches can be seen as either religious and secular, which also relates to the issue of the divide that is drawn in culture between a church and secular life. A noted trend that has been studied by scholars of architecture and church belief has been the degree to which religious and secular forms of architecture exercises influence on each other, with some eras in the building of churches seeing such buildings influencing the design of buildings created for secular purposes and in other eras churches being influenced by secular architecture.
The earliest period in the use of churches excluded design as such, and saw residential buildings being put to use for the use of secret church meetings. At this point in time the Christian church had yet to assume political, social and intellectual ascendancy over the life and ideas of the European world, and in fact had been banned by the Roman Empire as an upstart sect which challenged its authority. At some points the early Christian sects practiced their services of worship in synagogues, and at other points in covered courtyards and the upper floors of homes belonging to Christian worshipers. When the Christian church had assumed dominance over the area which still belonged to the Roman Empire due to the decision of Emperor Constantine to adopt the religion as the empire’s official faith, many Christian churches were moved into the buildings known as basilicas under the earlier pagan era of the Roman Empire, with statues of God represented in terms of earthly monarchs replacing the figures that were once erected of the Roman Emperor.

The high point of the medieval era, which was marked by the strength and dominance of the Catholic church over European life, also helped set the mold for existing principles in church design architecture. Much later in the nineteenth century when the Industrial Revolution appeared to be clearing away established standards of traditional life, such traditional building practices as were put to use in the design of church architecture came to influence practices in the construction of secular buildings. The 20th century saw secular architecture heavily influence church design principles.

History of Christianity

In the history of Christianity, many disputes and conflicts have arisen over the direction that should best be taken by the institutions and practices of Christianity in the interests of serving the faith’s dissemination throughout the world, the continued adherence to it displayed by religious worshipers, and the assurance that the dominant form being taken by then currently practiced varieties of Christianity can be considered correct and in line with the basic precepts of Jesus Christ. Often these occurrences of discord have had significant effects not simply on the history of Christianity but also on the political, social and economic history of cultures and countries in their totalities. The great importance and stress placed on the ability of Christianity to provide for the spiritual needs of people in the next life has also been shown in the long course of the history of Christianity to be a potential cause for conflict in terms of the immediate, material world, an issue which has proved central to understanding the continued relevance and place that Christianity has in the contemporary world. One such instance in the history of Christianity of conflict arising to an extent which disturbs the overall course of world history can be found in the events leading up and resulting from the split that occurred in the earliest general institution of Christianity between the sections of the church that can be found in the Eastern and Western sections which largely dominated the practice of the faith at that point in the history of Christianity.

At that point in time, the two primary divisions in the kinds of institutions which were available to worshipers to guide them in and provide for their practice of Christianity were both centered in the part of the world stretching from Europe to the Middle East, roughly understood as centered on the Mediterranean region, which had provided the two basic languages operative in the history of Christianity, Greek and Latin. The former was the language in which the Gospels were composed and was also the language of choice for the early leaders in the history of Christianity such as Paul, while the latter was the language of the Roman Empire, which transitioned in the reign of Emperor Constantine from enforcing the suppression of the Christian faith to acting as the agency through which it was spread throughout the Western world. After the destruction of the Roman Empire, it survived through the course of the history of Christianity as the main reminder of the period when the Roman Empire had dominated much of the world. These two sections of the Roman Empire were, however, eventually split from each other, during the eleventh century, when a dispute arose over the control over the practice of Christianity exercised by the Pope in comparison to the Eastern source of authority to be found in the Patriarch of Constantinople, who struck the first blow by suppressing the others’ language in their regions, which led to a final and irrevocable split in Christianity.

Christians

A fascinating and important aspect of the history of Christians can be found in the form of the early Christian era, which preceded the long period of the dominance that was exercised by the institutions created by Christians for the purpose of disseminating and enforcing the strictures of the Christian faith over the political, social and intellectual life of Europe. This era in the European history of religion set some of the foundations for the practice of the Christian faith in the experience of opposition which was encountered by the early religious practitioners of this faith. Before the number of Christians was widened to include the elite of society the early worshipers in the faith were forced to devise a number of practices and strategies that were designed for the purposes of evading the prosecution being enacted by the Roman Empire against the practice of Christianity. One aspect of the practice of Christian faith which at this time showed the effects of the need to evade Roman prosecution consisted of the means through which Christians found physical structures to act as churches in the absence of the ability to construct and use actual places of worship.

With the official prohibition that was in place against the practice of the Christian faith throughout the Roman Empire, Christians were forced to hold their practices of worship in private residences or in synagogues alongside Jewish worshipers. As the latter practice indicates, at this point in the history of Christianity the relationship between Jews and Christians had not become as hostile as it would later become, as both faced a degree of prosecution, though to differing degrees, from the religious authorities of the time. Later in the history of Christianity and Judaism bitter feelings arose between the two religions, despite their common origins in the Abrahamaic texts compiled in the Bible, over the question of which faith could be considered superior to the other in terms of its correctness. At this time illicit Christian worshipers often created acceptable spaces for the holding of their religious services through a number of improvised strategies, such as using the top floors of private residences which were not readily accessible by the enforcers for political authority, or the idea of holding religious services in courtyards which would be covered with a cloth to prevent people from seeing the worship services which were then ongoing.

One early example of an improvised Christian shrine can be found in the Eastern Syrian city of Dura Europa, where at some point around the year 200 C.E. a church was created through the technique of knocking down the separating wall between two rooms and thus creating a large enough location to serve as an acceptable worship space. The early Christians first obtained the ability to create their own churches in the year 301 C.E., in which Armenia attained the status of becoming the first country in which Christians could know that their faith was the nation’s official religion, thus creating the real history of church architecture.

Christian Songs

n the contemporary tradition of Christian songs that is available for the listening and enjoyment of the practicing Christian in the United States today as well as any outside observers who may be interested in gaining new sources of insight into and appreciation for the traditions of American Christianity, a particularly interesting and significant contribution to the tradition of Christian song in the United States can be found in the form of the output of Christian songs of the classic country-and-western duo known as the Louvin Brothers, who in reality were a pair of brothers named Charles and Ira Loudermilk. As recording and touring artists, the Louvin Brothers, who had been raised in the Baptist faith, created both secular and Christian songs using an early form of the technique of “close harmony” in their singing, which had a substantial effect on the early formation of what would eventually become the American country music industry. A particularly well-known Christian song created by the Louvin Brothers can be found in the classic country and western composition “Satan is Real,” which appeared on the album of the same title and had an effect on both secular and religious music practices.
Prior to becoming the Louvin Brothers, the Loudermilk brothers were born in Section, Alabama. Their musical tastes were heavily influenced by the country music pioneers known as the Delmore Brothers and the Monroe Brothers, the latter of whom Ira Loudermilk played mandolin with in the 1940s. Outside of the realm of known musical acts, the duo were influenced by their early experience singing Christian songs in their local church choir, which helped to form their basic styles of singing. They would later support themselves by working in a post office as their day job while performing secular and Christian songs in the evenings at concert dates, with another brief interruption called for by Charlie’s decision to join the service again during the Korean War. During the decade of the 1950s the Louvin Brothers became more well known in the country music world and performed at the Grand Ole Opry, becoming members in 1955. One of their major contributions to that style of music and to the area of Christian song came with the recording in 1959 of the album Satan is Real. Even beyond the first appearance of the well-known Christian song “The Christian Life” and the title track of the album, the album also enjoys a reputation today beyond its original intention of addressing the fans of Christian song with its unusual album cover, which features the Louvin Brothers dressed in white suits and black string ties being menaced by the background figure of a plywood representation of the Devil with flames, produced at the photo shoot by setting tires alight with gasoline, appearing to sprout from around his ankles. “The Christian Life” later became well known as a classic Christian song when the Byrds decided to cover the track on their 1968 country tribute album Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

Contemporary Christian Music

Christian music has a long and storied tradition throughout the course of the history of the faith and the Western, European world in general. For much of this history, in fact, the concept of what could be considered to properly constitute “Contemporary Christian music” would have been inextricable from contemporary music in general, as religious belief and practice has furnished a basic engine behind the creation of music for much of human history, perhaps only rivaled by the secular function of providing for social gatherings, which in its most primal form might be reasonably considered to constitute a kind of religious activity as well. Popular as opposed to “serious” or academic music consumed by cultural elites has often been found to be less tied to prevailing cultural prohibitions and restrictions and thus can at times throughout history has been related more problematically to religious doctrines. During the 20th century, when the growth of the time available as leisure became more widely accessible to a larger segment of the population than ever before, coinciding with a weakening in societal norms and religious values, popular music as defined as being essentially secular gained rapidly over religious music, which came to be associated with traditional forms restricted in their airing to the environment of places of worship.

During the late 1960s, as popular forms of music such as rock & roll assumed a decided preeminence in cultural life, the concept of contemporary Christian music first arose as a planned response to and defense against the effects of this cultural shift. The idealism of the sixties counterculture, which was often directed in directions considered secular such as leftist activism and experimentation with drugs, often led to a new interest in the figure of Christ, and thus to a new potential source for listeners to and creators of Christian music. One consideration taken into account by Christian church leaders at this time was the growing popularity of rock music across a wide spectrum of the culture, transcending people with lifestyles incompatible with or beliefs directed against the adherence to a Christian lifestyle. An early book about Christian music to consider the possible effects of this trend was Rethinking the Church, by Paul Wohlegumuth, who predicted that in the 1970s contemporary Christian music would become more compatible with rock instrumentation and composition as the genre became more conservative with age.

In the community devoted to issues of Christian music, opinions vary on the issue of the direction taken by contemporary Christian music in the direction of the styles of rock and pop. It is a visible issue due to the strength of the contemporary Christian world as a viable market for the recording industry, which in the 1980s became a multimillion dollar business after a long period of being less visible. Some people feel, however, that Christian music should have the ability to stand against the practices of popular culture, while others have celebrated the present day popularity of contemporary Christian music among many young members of Christian congregations.

Christian Religion and Faith

In the practice of the Christian faith in the United States, particular emphasis has long been placed on the importance of involving young people as worshipers and believers in the greater community of the Christian religion community. It arises from the sense that Christian faith does not occur simply in terms of an individual’s own belief but also occurs in the context of a community in which the Christian religion is actively practiced and nurtured. It is felt in the United States, where social mobility and rates of movement tend to weaken the basis of community life over long periods of time, that the process of passing the Christian faith from one generation to another and the upholding of the precepts of the Christian religion must be actively encouraged by the participants in and the leaders of a church-centered community. One particularly important element of this feature of religious life consists in the existence of youth ministries, which as an institution and a set of practices is a unique and significant aspect of the practice of the Christian religion in the United States. People who are involved in the practice of the Christian faith would do well to look at the way in which this institution has taken root and the various forms in which it has been practiced over the course of the American institutions of the Christian faith.

The idea that the Christian religion as it existed in the United States would do well to create a specific function related to the religious life of young people can be dated back to the point in history of the mid-eighteenth century, when the effects of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to affect the social condition of American rural life, included as it related to the implementation of the Christian religion. At this time the economic conditions of the country dictated that young people were encouraged to move to large cities where the prohibitions which had existed in the tight-knit communities which they had born in were no longer in force and often led to those young people adopting new standards of behavior in regard to the Christian faith. Noticing that these developments were ongoing in American society, the activist and community leader Dr. Francis Edward Clark created the organization of the Christian Endeavor Society, which first went into practice in 1881. Clark’s idea was that young people should be encouraged to participate actively in the institutions of Christian religion by the formation of youth ministries. The creation of the idea of youth ministries led to a quick proliferation in the number of such institutions across the country as functions of the community of the Christian religion. This period of the late 1880s was next succeeded by the post-World War II era of the United States, in which the youth ministries of the period began implementing a new idea of exposing young people to the most sophisticated religious ideas, and later by the 1970s response to the era’s social unrest.

Christian Churches

In the history of the various Christian churches which have interpreted and acted on the scriptures of the New Testament, a unique place has been held by the existence of the group of Christian churches which are referred to as the Mennonites, who adhere to the beliefs and practices of an Anabaptist kind of Christian church, which carried out the challenge to the authority of the Catholic Christian church in a markedly radical and strongly argued fashion, with a consequent result of incurring long periods of repression and persecution.

In the subsequent history of the Christian church, the role of the Christian churches which exist within the Mennonite philosophy has been noted by participants, observers and Christian church scholars for its part in spearheading politically progressive movements, particularly in regard to advocacy against war and for the philosophy of pacifism, and for its widespread dispersal throughout the world. Though relatively small in the number of adherents it can claim worldwide in comparison to other Christian churches, with only an estimated 1.5 million Mennonites throughout the world by the count of a study which was conducted in 2006, the Mennonite Christian Church is noted for its adherence to a doctrine which has been much embattled over the course of its history as well as for the degree of variety which can be found in the existence of Mennonite Christian churches throughout the world.

The Mennonite Christian Church is named for the Dutch Anabaptist leader Menno Simons, who lived in the 16th century and emphasized an approach to putting the ideal of the Christian church into active practice in the world through an emphasis on the mission and ministry of Jesus. In the subsequent development of the Mennonite doctrine, the followers who were attracted to this belief were subjected to a great degree of abuse and persecution from the other dominant Christian churches of the period, both those adhering to the traditional approach to the Christian church of Catholicism and the upstart Protestant Christian churches, both of which saw the anti-hierarchical principles of the Mennonite beliefs as challenges to their established working methods of relying heavily on authority imposed from above on Christian believers.

Many of the initial leaders of the Mennonite Christian church were killed in the 16th century after they refused to renounce their beliefs. Similar damage was enacted to other Christian churches which had a part in the Anabaptist movement, which shared a common belief in the idea that baptism should take effect only when the believer is an adult and possesses adult powers of reasoning to bring to bear on the questions associated with becoming believers. Simons adopted Anabaptism after a period in which, still adhering to the doctrines of the Catholic Christian church as a priest in that area of faith, he witnessed the murder of his Anabaptist brother at the hands of religiously motivated attackers. The Mennonites adopted pacifism in part due to their feeling they could not win in combat against the rival Christian churches.

Christian Beliefs and Values

In the body of Christian beliefs that have been built up over the thousands of years in which Christian values have acted as guiding principles for large masses of religious worshipers and provided a structure for social institutions, a particularly important concept has been provided in the form of Christian beliefs in that of the Trinitarian doctrine, which has helped shape Christian beliefs by setting down a sophisticated apparatus of spiritual belief for the understanding of the relationship between Jesus Christ and God. Though Christian values can be seen by some lights as simply ethical principles that exist in regard to various codes of prohibition and imperatives for behavior, an important foundation for these codes of practices exists in the form of those more abstract Christian beliefs which are of less immediately relevant pertinence to everyday human life but have nonetheless helped to shape the wide spectrum of Christian beliefs.

Though Christian beliefs, as can be attested to by any casual religious historian and scholar, vary widely throughout the many congregations and churches that have arisen over the course of Christian history, the Trinitarian doctrine can been found in almost all of the mainstream traditions of both Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. In fact, the belief in the existence of the Trinity can be seen as acting as a defining element among Christian beliefs, to the extend that it is described by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church as “the central dogma of Christian theology.”
Despite the widespread prevalence among widely disseminated Christian values of the need to adhere to the Christian beliefs of the Trinity, it might be noted by observers of the field of Christian religion that the basic concept of the Christian trinity does not clearly exist in the language of the New Testament as such, though some theologians believe that they can find earlier traces of the concept in the formula for baptism given in the Gospel of Mathew. Among the body of Christian beliefs, the idea that God existed in the form of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost only came into clear and widespread existence by the end of the fourth century, after a widespread series of controversies among theologians that arose in regard to the question of the language that could be acceptably used in regard to the nature of God.

The Christian beliefs which concern the idea of the existence of a Trinity comprising the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are not related only to the language used acceptably by worshipers in speaking of religious ideas but also in the field of visual representations of God, which Christian values, as compared to other faiths in general and in particular the other strains of the Abrahamaic tradition, tend to encourage to be produced and spread throughout the Christian communities of belief. It has been found that artists driven by Christian values tend to represent the Holy Ghost as a dove, the Father as an old man, and the Son as a young man.

The Bible

The text known as the Bible has existed in a number of different editions and versions throughout the history of religion, in the course of which it has served the crucial historical functions of being the primary text of two of the world’s most influential religions, Judaism and Christianity, as well as serving in its ideas and stories to help influence the practice of Islam. The means through which a form of the Bible is made effective for the use by religious clerics and acceptable for being read by religious worshipers has been a central issue in the controversies which has arisen in Bible influenced religions. Issues related to the transmission of a Bible throughout culture have also served to influence sections of culture which are secular or at least not necessarily religious, such as the general practice of literature and the expectations regarding acceptable standards of literacy. One particularly important example of how the Bible has been transformed in its physical form and thereby has influenced the practice of both established standards of religion and the place of written language in the larger social context of a culture can be found in the historical scenario surrounding the Gutenberg Bible, which stands today as the first instance of a book being printed in Europe through the use of a printing press.

The fact that the Bible was the first text to be selected for the beginning of this revolutionary development in the course of European culture can be seen as an instructive indication of the place of religion and literacy in general in the European culture of the time, and of the Bible in particular. Though in some sources it may be referred to as the first book to be published through the use of the device of the printing press to be found anywhere in the world, it has been noted by historical and Bible scholars interested in dispelling the effects of a Eurocentric philosophy that the first book printed through the use of a printing press can be tied down as having been created in Korea prior to the printing of the Gutenberg Bible. This note does not, however, alter the fact of the widespread influence which the creation of the Gutenberg Bible would have both for the reception accorded to the Bible throughout Europe and to the rise in the publishing industry, popular literature and emphasis placed on literacy and rates of reading in that part of the world. The particular version of the Bible which is represented by the Gutenberg edition is the Vulgate, a Latin language version of the Bible which was heavily in use during the Middle Ages by religious figures in the Roman Catholic Church. The decision to print it was made by the printer Johannes Gutenberg, who created the book in Mainz, Germany, in the 1450s, from which there still survive twenty one complete copies which are still available for study by scholars of the Bible as well as the merely curious.