In the last chapter of his book Promise and poison: the story of emerging ChristianityJohn Van Hagen writes:
My goal in writing this book is to present emerging Christianity’s efforts to create moral communities as a model or example of the immense difficulties and potential solutions involved in the formation of such idealistic groups. …They had to explain who Jesus was and why he was so cruelly executed. They had to decide on the conditions of membership. …They experimented with forms of leadership and faced the conflict and uncertainty endemic to the beginnings of any idealist movement.
Drawing on contemporary interpretations of the New Testament authors, Van Hagen emphasizes the importance of understanding the “agendas” of different writers and their editors. To this end, I must disclose that John Van Hagen and I are members of the same seminary class. Ordained shortly after Vatican II, we were close as priest friends and became even closer over the years as we married and raised children.
As Van Hagen is a trained psychologist, Promise and poison focuses much attention on the traumatic impact of the Crucifixion on the early disciples and their followers, as well as the devastating effects of the destruction of the Temple a few decades later.
Van Hagen reminds us that the very first Christians were Jewish believers, many of whom continued to attend synagogue. He also reminds us that the Crucifixion and the destruction of the Temple contradicted, in the minds of the first disciples, their expectation that the “end times” were near – and that this unrealized hope and its cognitive dissonance influences the way the stories created by the first Christian communities.
The title Promise and poison refers to the way in which early Christians’ attempts to establish their identity “inspired altruistic behavior and fostered hope that others would join their community.” Others have interpreted the crucifixion as a call to right thinking and a mandate to persecute those who believed differently. “.
The book’s early chapters explore many New Testament writings, beginning with some of Paul’s early letters and followed by the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and John. Van Hagen aligns himself with scholars who date the Gospel and Acts of Luke to 100 CE. I will leave it to Scripture scholars to evaluate Van Hagen’s choice of exegetical understandings of the stories of “emerging Christianity” that are captured in the New Testament.
Readers who are unfamiliar with the progress that archaeologists, historians, and scripture scholars have made in understanding the New Testament writings may be surprised by some of Van Hagen’s accounts of how early Christian communities emerged with significant differences in how they appropriated the meaning of the crucifixion and how they dealt with the growing number of Gentiles who became followers of Jesus. His descriptions are, for the most part, entirely consistent with Raymond Brown’s wonderful book. The churches that the apostles left behind.
Van Hagen effectively shows how, in their need to find an identity, early Christians created boundaries that demonized those outside (particularly Jews and some well-meaning “heretics”) while creating an unhealthy dependency (sometimes placed evidenced by a lack of self-confidence). critical thinking) and harmful internal divisions.
Although Van Hagen regularly attends the Catholic Sunday Eucharist, he also describes himself as agnostic (see his previous book, Agnostic at the altar). Perhaps this is why he does not pay much attention to the belief in the resurrection as an important part of how early Christians made sense of the crucifixion. Nor does it reveal how early Christians relied on their belief in the Holy Spirit to help them on their faith journey. And I wish he had paid more attention to how the celebration of the Eucharist illustrated the unity of the early ecclesial communities despite their many differences.
The final four chapters of the book focus on the history of emerging Christian communities in the mid-2nd century. Van Hagen is very impressed by the Christian community described in the Didache. The structure of this community seems very different from that of the Church of Antioch and the role of its bishop, Ignatius, who exercised his authority by promoting the almost unconditional power of bishops – an issue still relevant today which contrasts strongly with a “synodal” church.
After reading this book, I was left with three main takeaways. First, storytelling is a powerful dynamic that contributes to the emergence of communities – and to understand history, one must understand the storyteller’s agenda. This applies not only to the authors of the New Testament, but also to the institutional Church which, over the centuries, has ignored emerging conflicts between Christianity and instead presented a carefully presented, airbrushed narrative of teaching Catholic.
My second takeaway is that Jesus’ early followers created various small communities whose identity was marked more by their moral choices and celebration of the Eucharist than by adherence to a set of dogmatic beliefs.
And finally, I noted that in creating boundaries as part of their quest for identity, communities must be careful about how they perceive those on the “outsider” and what they demand of those inside “. Likewise, we must exercise a healthy dose of humility in making truth claims that can define our identity as believers.
