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The Unholy Trinity in Western Christianity

"...I have long felt that it was a mistake to pile Greek philosophy and the Roman Imperial organisation on top of the essentially personal teaching of this supreme religious genius." — J.B. Priestley (1940)

There are many great religions in the world and they share many great messages alike. But somewhere along the way, Western Christianity lost touch. It has become a thorn in the side of every rational American, social emancipation is leaving its leaders floundering, Churches are seeing their congregations tumble right, left and centre as their moral bankruptcy is exposed. Yet the message of Christ remains the spiritual touchstone of billions of people worldwide. This conflict of one world with another is not good for either. How did it come to this pass?

I have come to believe that there is an underlying evil which has insinuated its way deep into Western Christian theology - so potent and insidious is it that it darkens almost all of the many Churches and sects into which Western Christianity has fragmented over the years. Other Churches such as the Orthodox and Coptic also suffer, though to a lesser extent. This evil has struck at the Western Church's roots three times in history, to my knowledge, so let us follow the trail.

The first stroke of evil is hard to follow, for by its nature it sought to airbrush the truth out of history. But modern archaeology and anthropology have unearthed many hidden jewels which survived its onslaught. The tale I tell begins with the picture which these findings are revealing to us.

Jesus himself chose James to be his successor, saying of Peter only that he would be "the rock" on which his church was to be founded, whatever that means. After his death the Apostles - Mary Magdalene included - each went their separate ways. Each founded a local Church according to their own lights, and each of these soon created its own unique body of teachings, practices and holy literature - gospels among them. Wide differences soon became apparent; in theological ideas, sexual practices, chauvinism, political activity and so forth.

Peter felt strongly that he was "the rock" and sought to curb these other Churches and bring them into line with his own thinking. In defiance of Jesus' tolerance of the "publicans and sinners", even idolatrous Roman soldiers, as equals, Peter peddled a brand of intolerant chauvinism which relegated women to second-class status and supported it with a strict sexual morality. Peter's Church was inclusive only by dominance, not by tolerance. His arrogance and grandiose dreams led him to Rome, where he was duly martyred for refusing, quite rightly, to acknowledge the Emperor's divine primacy.

Then Saul of Tarsus, an agent of Rome seeking to eradicate the rest of these pesky heretics, underwent a spiritual conversion and became St. Paul, preaching Peter's brand of Christianity to the world. What is significant here is that he did not stop there, his intolerance drove him against all the other Churches he could find until he finally knocked the stuffing out of them.

This pursuit of intolerance was the first Cardinal Sin of Western Christianity. It sanctified a mindset and ethos of top-down chauvinism and suppression of other mores which has infected almost the entire body of Christianity ever since, Orthodox included. It underpins the Crusade against Islam, the persecution of Jewry, the torture and eradication of American Indian cultures both North and South, and of course the relegation of women to second-class status and the abomination of the LGBT-born. It also similarly infests Islam and Judaism to their own detriment, promoting mutual hatred all round. In the battle against the modern liberal rationalist, it does irreparable harm to its masters.

The next step on the road to ruin came when the Roman Emperor Constantine decided to shake up and re-unify his disintegrating empire. There were so many gods in the Roman world that each fragment of empire was elevating its own and god was being set against god in a cycle of internecine warfare and self-destruction. He wanted to brush the whole mess aside, and what better than the One God? That meant Pauline Christianity, so he pulled all the still-bickering Church factions together and they hammered out a standard theology and a Holy Bible.

Paul's intolerant chauvinism was not only the dominant sect within the Church but was also convenient for Constantine - Romans had never had much truck with women at the top of the pile. The new order would cement male dominance in place. It also had to settle the matter of Jesus Christ's divinity. Many early Churches treated him as an ordinary man given to us by the Divine, others leaned more towards the notion that, being "The" Son of God, he had some divine claim of his own. Constantine's needs drove the agenda. He needed Divine authority to justify usurping the old gods and the best way to get that across was for God's divinity to pass down to Jesus. In that way, following the Christ was unmistakably following the authority of God.

And so the second Cardinal Sin, the deification of a man, was cemented into Christianity. This too is shared by the Orthodox, though many other religions regard such an idea as anything between primitivism and outright heresy. To get it past the voice of common sense it had to be carefully wrapped up in the dogma of the Holy Trinity, but we need only consider the Anglican liturgical "not three incomprehensibles but one incomprehensible" to recognise the bankruptcy of this wrapping.

One of the deliberate after-effects was, as I alluded to at the beginning, a slow airbrushing-out of history of all those earlier Churches: Mary Magdalene came in for especial bile. It began of course with the carefully-censored New Testament, then continued as discarded gospels were burned, images defaced, good Christian churchmen excommunicated, practices stamped out. Wherever the Pauline tradition reached its corrupted grasp, there it squeezed as hard it might. And this would prove to be only the beginning.

This deification of a humble man still sticks in many throats today and is one of the big stumbling-blocks to a unified view of world religions as all teaching the same fundamental truths. Its obvious primitivism not only provides the modern rationalist with another butt of his scorn, but in many religions is outright heresy, just the kind of narrow-minded paganism they seek to go beyond. For, despite all the theological knots that have been tied around it, that's all it is, its pagan roots cannot be undone.

The next sin crept in more slowly. Early Christians had adopted the Jewish admonishment against making images of God. Unlike early Buddhists, they usually allowed images of the man, Jesus. After the formal deification of Christ in the Trinity, images of him became controversial but, for the most part, remained permissible. The Hand of God might sometimes appear but, as a hand, was an obvious allegory, there was no "graven image" here. In due course the Catholic Church split from the Orthodox, founding the branch which I refer to here as Western Christianity.

While the Orthodox tradition continued to recognise the clear division between the Son embodied and the Father ineffable, the Catholic world was less picky. Depictions of God the Father as a wise patriarch began to creep in and reached their archetypal zenith with Michaelangelo's Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel.

Thus grew up, without fanfare or conscious direction, the third Cardinal Sin of Western Christianity. While it was done with the best of intentions, it took one liberty too many with the idea that "man was made in God's image"; if we depict God in man's image then that's just the same thing the other way, right? Like looking at a mirror which shows another mirror with God standing there. Of course, the original "image" is a spiritual one - man is made in the spiritual image of God - so when we look at these grave old men we recall that they are as allegorical as the Hand is, right? Sadly, no: "Thou shalt not make graven images", nor frescoes either, was given with good reason. All too often they mislead the simple-minded into a false understanding: they do not enlighten, they achieve precisely the opposite of the artist's naive intent and project the idea that God thinks like us. For this reason, other monotheistic religions such as Islam and Judaism - and even Orthodox Christianity - revile such images as yet more heretical primitivism.

We are not done yet. Each of these failings is bad enough but they form together an Unholy Trinity of Cardinal Sins which is greater than the sum of its parts.

The wise gentlemen depicted as God reinforce the First Cardinal Sin, the white male chauvinism of Peter and Paul - God was clearly seen to be male and was customarily written as Him and never Her or It. The divinity of Christ means that His word can never be questioned - even in poor translations of words taken out of their original social context - and so the whole dogma, arising as it supposedly does from the "Word of Our Lord", cannot be criticised. Wars must be fought, Crusades launched, campaigns of civil genocide pursued with vigour, to defend the Divine Right to claim to be right.

When Portuguese merchant sailors discovered a Christian Church on the West coast of India, said to have been founded by one of the original Apostles (Thomas, I think) and still carrying many hallmarks of the early, authentic Christian voice, their immediate reaction was not to recover what they had lost from Christ's own path, but to once again eradicate both it and its adherents. Thus is the power of evil in Western Christianity revealed in all its vile sordidness.

We see the results all around us today - in America the fundamentalists, unknowing dupes of Constantine and Michaelangelo, fight science with pseudoscience, in Rome each new Pope inches towards one token reform or another, retreating from anything his all-male Cardinals fight too hard, just so long as his own Divine authority is not questioned.

Among the wider public we see a steady disenchantment as we vote with our feet - falling congregations, a rise in atheistic creeds, a rejection of all things Christian. This is not what that son of a Jewish carpenter had in mind, two thousand and more years ago. The Unholy Trinity can see no finer triumph than the extinction of its own raison d'être.

To its credit the Anglican Church is not wholly blind to all this. It is making real progress with reform, beset of course by furious controversy. Women and gays are slowly being allowed back, one can treat Mary Magdalene as a disciple once again. Ever since a certain Bishop of Durham voiced his opinion, it has been tacitly permissible to treat Christ's divinity as symbolic rather than real. But sadly I see one thing missing. The new climate of tolerance which is eating steadily away at so much of the Pauline poison also militates against the banning of graven images. In such circumstance, even Anglican Christianity will remain the drug of the superstitious and the laughing-stock of the rationalist for the foreseeable future. I would hope that one day it will face this last challenge not as social liberals but as guardians of reality.

In the past, sacred images have sometimes been covered up, to be revealed only to the initiated during the appointed ceremony. I look forward to a day when this is turned backwards, when I can walk into a church for a service and the foolish images of "God" have been covered up until it is over, at which point the fine art will be re-displayed to a secular public until the next service. I can then turn to my entranced grandchildren and explain why this is so.

I shoule perhaps note that I am neither confirmed Christian nor denier. I am one of those floating souls who wonder whether we are or not, much as we wonder whether we are Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, Jew, Zoroastrian, Taoist, Pantheist, Wiccan, New Age and/or any of the rest. I belong to all or to none, the label is made by man and not by the Almighty, it is yours to choose for me, not mine to grab.

Updated 21 Nov 2016