Jeff,

Cor­rect Chris­t­ian doc­trine shouldn’t be afraid of criticism.

For starters — the Bible was writ­ten first to a peo­ple group who were a minor coun­try in the Mid­dle East, and sec­ond to a group of peo­ple with the expec­ta­tion that they be a per­se­cuted minority.

The idea that Chris­tians should be in the ascen­dancy and impos­ing their belief sys­tem on oth­ers rather than con­vinc­ing peo­ple of the truth per­son­ally is a rel­a­tively new idea.

And an idea rel­a­tively for­eign to any­body out­side of Amer­ica. The polit­i­cal sys­tem in the US has been pretty messed up by bad doc­trine. Fix the doc­trine and you (hope­fully) fix the politics.

This is a good ques­tion Jeff. And I’ve been think­ing about it since you posted it. It deserves a longer answer — and I’ll prob­a­bly turn it into a post.

I don’t think Chris­tians have ever nailed down doc­trine per­fectly. Each gen­er­a­tion brings new and dif­fer­ent strug­gles for Chris­tians. I’ll answer your ques­tion assum­ing, for a moment, that Chris­tian­ity is true, and that the Bible has a sig­nif­i­cant role to play in guid­ing both our under­stand­ing of God and our con­duct as his people.

In the early cen­turies — prior to Con­stan­tine — Chris­tians were fac­ing ter­ri­ble phys­i­cal per­se­cu­tion by the state. The Bible has a lot to say to these peo­ple because it assumes that Chris­tians will func­tion as a cul­tural minor­ity. We have prob­lems today when we extrap­o­late things writ­ten to the orig­i­nal audi­ence (and I believe one of the first prin­ci­ples of under­stand­ing the Bible is under­stand­ing its mean­ing for the first read­ers). The early church didn’t have to deal with issues of sep­a­ra­tion of church and state because they were quite clearly in oppo­si­tion to the state. And yet they were told to pray for them and respect their authority.

They also didn’t have the ben­e­fit of hav­ing the Bible as a sin­gu­lar book — instead rely­ing on teach­ings of the early church and a smat­ter­ing of let­ters — the texts that were later col­lated into one book for easy reference.

Clearly from the point the church was insti­tu­tion­alised by the Roman Empire it became a tool for two mas­ters — Rome, that wanted to extend the empire/political power, and Chris­tians who wanted to see the gospel taught.

I would see the period of time where the church played an active role in sup­press­ing the pop­u­lace, and treat­ing the Bible as the realm of priests alone, was a par­tic­u­larly dark period. I think there were gen­uine Chris­t­ian churches in that time — but I think his­tory shows us that the church was a vehi­cle for ter­ri­ble atroc­i­ties like the Cru­sades born out of either greed or a bizarre dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ist the­ol­ogy that taught that the phys­i­cal Israel had some value to Christians.

There have been bright lights through­out his­tory that I think are great exam­ples of Chris­tian­ity being “on track” or exem­plary. I think the ref­or­ma­tion was great, I think moves to make the Bible acces­si­ble and avail­able in the com­mon lan­guage were good.

It’s dif­fi­cult with­out com­mit­ting what you might con­sider to be the No True Scots­man fal­lacy to dis­tin­guish between the acts of those call­ing them­selves the “church” who ran around wear­ing crosses on their armour and those who actu­ally were the church (ie the body of believers).

I don’t think “Chris­tian­ity”, defined as fol­low­ing the lord­ship of Jesus Christ, has for­got­ten its ori­gins. I think other peo­ple have har­nessed the guise of Chris­tian­ity for their own agen­das. And this has been harmful.