I’ve been reading a lot about early Christianity, and how the followers of the new Christian religion differed from the people around them. Despite the fact that most early Christians were poor social outsiders, they usually displayed a sense of happiness and exuberance that puzzled non-Christians. I don't know how much of this applies to modern Christians, but let's see.
Religious scholar Huston Smith says the early Christians' strange exuberance can partly be traced to the Christian notion that everyone is equal in the eyes of God. This idea broke down social barriers and made race, gender, and socioeconomic status inconsequential. Early Christians actually did love each other, believing that it was their duty to love one another as they believed God loved them.
But what made this love that the early Christians expressed so powerful? Huston Smith offers a few ideas. He says that Christianity successfully removed three painful burdens that all human beings generally experience, making it possible for Christians to focus on love.
The first burden was fear, and the fear of death in particular. If you had lived your whole life worrying about being carried off by the next big disease or famine, you’d probably be just as thrilled as the first Christians to find out that, if you believe in Jesus Christ, death will be your ticket to a place in heaven, not just something to be dreaded.
Clearly, despite my best efforts this month, I have still not entirely bought into the idea that we get to go to heaven when we die because I’m still pretty obsessed with—and terrified of—our many modern-day plagues and famines. I have noticed, however, that a lot of modern Christians do seem to have less fear in general than I do. So maybe they're on to something.
Anyway, the second burden that Christianity lifted was guilt, according to Huston Smith. (As a former Catholic, I might argue that as Christianity evolved, it actually added guilt—and lots of it—to believers’ lives, but that’s a topic for another time, I guess.)
Feeling guilty makes us less creative, less able to live to the fullest. And we all feel guilt, at least occasionally, because nobody—no matter how productive or successful they are—ever achieves everything they hope to do. But, at least according to the early Christians, like Paul, believing in Jesus released them from the terrible guilt that had made their lives miserable.
I don’t know. Sounds a little far-fetched to me. And, like I said, most modern Christians (or at least Catholics) I've met seem to feel a lot more guilty over a lot of trivial things than their non-Christian counterparts do. But let’s move on.
The third burden from which early Christians were supposedly released was the ego. Christianity taught that love was endless and limitless—not confined to what any one person was capable of expressing. As Robert Penn Warren wrote, “the human curse is to love and sometimes to love well, but never well enough.” With Christianity, the boundless love between God and people made any previous limits on love disappear.
Again, I’ve got to say that I have my doubts about all this. Talking about God’s love being perfect and limitless is one thing, but comparing it to the kind of love humans have for each other is a problem for me. I don’t know about you, but anytime I’ve ever tried to love a human being completely, I got punished for it—crushed, humiliated, abandoned, or otherwise slapped in the face. Saying that God’s love is like human love, but bigger and more intense, just makes me wonder how painful the inevitable slap-down will be when it comes.
Man, I’m really glad we’re almost done with this month of Christianity. I’m just getting more pissed off and more depressed as the month goes on. If I can’t even talk about love without getting angry, it may be time to move on to something new.
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