One morning, nine year-old Claire asked her dad this question, "Dad, if there is only one God, why are there so many religions?
It was a simple question from a young girl that adults would have been hard pressed to answer. Whatever answer Claire got from her dad at that point of her life may not have mattered much to a young girl . She was likely to have forgotten the answer anyway and soon she would have outgrown that moment of curiosity and go on to other things.
What if she didn't? And if she keeps on asking, will she find better answers? Perhaps she took her dad's answer to heart, whatever it was at that moment, but she may have kept thinking about it into her later life - pondering and re-thinking the different iterations of the question and the answers she got from other people and from reading. What would Claire have found if indeed she kept asking?
Claire went about the second half of her childhood as most of her friends did. Her family was Presbyterian, her mom sang at the church choir, her dad a deacon. By her senior year in high school Claire decided she wanted to major in history in college, to the slight disappointment of her parents but they didn't show it. Claire had applied to and was accepted by several colleges.
That summer she spent a good amount of time at the local library to read when she was not at her summer job. The question she asked her dad when she was nine kept intruding into her thoughts so she concentrated on researching middle eastern history - part of her preparation for college and to further her young childhood curiosity.
First, she quickly found that around the world, across different nationalities and cultures, there were quite a number of religions, cults and sub-cults and indigenous belief systems and superstitions. There were written texts, structured practices around each of the major religions and invariably established places of worship. Long before monotheism, belief in just one God, paganism that worshiped many gods and different deities was the prevailing belief system of empires for thousands of years of human civilization up to the time of the Pharaohs in Egypt.
Claire took the less traveled road back in time, where she found that it was 6000 BCE when the Nile valley was first inhabited. In 4000 BCE, the earliest depiction of gods were on the walls of tombs. The Egyptian empire did not begin until about 3000 BCE. The pyramids were built between the 2600 to 2500 BCE.
From the World History Encyclopedia, she read:
"2000-1700 B.C.E.: Abraham, spiritual founder of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is born in southern Mesopotamia.
According to tradition, Abraham (the Bible refers to him as Abram and later Abraham; the Koran refers to him as Ibrahim) is chosen by God to spread the message of monotheism. Abraham's wife, Sarah, unable to have a child, tells him to conceive a child with their Egyptian servant Hagar, and Ishmael is born. Sarah, however, later has a son, Isaac, with her husband. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all consider themselves Abraham's spiritual descendants. Muslims claim descent from the firstborn son, Ishmael; Jews track their descent through the line of Isaac and his son Jacob".
Claire surmised that all three major religions must have been rooted from one main trunk, as if they were all branches from the same tree. And like everything, as in language and cultural evolutions, faith and belief systems went through many tributaries from and along the same river of time.
Jesus of Nazareth was born approximately 2000 years from the time of Abraham's estimated birth. It had been another 2000 years or so to today since that moment in time in Bethlehem. In that period, world empires changed hands many times. Nazareth then was part of Judea that was part of the vast territory of the then pagan Roman Empire.
Followers of Jesus and his disciples all through the succeeding generations became the first Christians; but because of their beliefs they were persecuted which forced them to go underground.
That all changed when Constantine (for whom Constantinople in what is now in Turkey was named after) became Roman emperor. He stopped the persecution of Christians and by 313 AD he endorsed the Edict of Milan allowing for Christians to worship freely. Constantine's mother was a Greek Christian who may have had some influence later on the emperor's "conversion". There was no evidence of that nor was there proof of the story that the emperor saw an image of the cross in the sky before a crucial battle.
What is true is that from Constantine's reign emerged The Holy Roman Empire.
Claire had Catholic friends and on a few occasions she had a chance to attend their church services during Christmas holidays. She on one occasion asked one of her friends why there were statues or sculptures of several Saints inside the church that were treated with reverence inside and during street processions. She asked, "Doesn't the Second Commandment prohibit that?" She quoted:
"You shall not make for yourself any graven idol, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water below the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God .."
-- Exodus 20:1-17 (MEV, Modern English Version)
Her friends did not have an answer, except to say that it was the tradition they grew up with. Claire went on to read up on it. She found a plausible explanation. The conversion of the Roman empire after Constantine was slow in chronological time but it was a rapid change in the ideological sense. The old Roman temples, like their Greek equivalent of an earlier era of the Greek empire, had many gods attending to the people's needs. National Geographic dedicated one issue on the subject:
"The Roman Empire was primarily a polytheistic civilization, which meant that people recognized and worshiped multiple gods and goddesses.. They believed that these deities served a role in founding the Roman civilization and that they helped shape the events of people’s lives on a daily basis".
It's plausible, Claire read the explanation of some scholars, that an accommodation was made during the conversion to not subject the people to an abrupt, perhaps even traumatic, and complex change from temple worship to the new idea that was Christianity. Methodically, the statues of the gods were slowly changed to or renamed after Christian saints and martyrs to adapt to the new concept of monotheism and, henceforth, to preaching Christianity. Being what they were to the worshippers, the images and sculptures, steeped in tradition, remained in the traditional places of worship, patrons to different needs of the people. Plausible but perhaps not conclusively established. Claire kept that to herself and not make it a judgment wedge between her and her Catholic friends, although the vexing question of the Second Commandment in Exodus 20: 1-17 remains.
The Roman Empire was vast. It was all of Europe and the Middle East and parts of Asia. Like the Greek empire before it, the Roman Empire was influential in how culture and the sciences and religion were spread and developed. Roman Catholic doctrine spread throughout the empire. Italy today was where the seats of power used to be at the time of the Caesars (notably, twelve of them in succession) from the last century before the birth of Jesus Christ to the end of the first century after his death. Rome and where the Vatican is today was the seat of Roman Catholicism. The empire's influence was such that much of the languages in Europe evolved from Latin, which was the language used during the Catholic Mass until the Vatican Council decreed the end of its use in 1963-64; by 1969 churches worldwide stopped using it to conduct the mass completely.
Fast forward to 16th century Germany. In 1517, one hitherto unknown priest named Martin Luther caused what started as a minor stir by challenging a Dominican friar's preaching, "that the purchase of a letter of indulgence entailed the forgiveness of sins". Luther's concern was that it could lead to a slippery slope where rich people could conceivably buy their way out of sins, i.e., a large donation or an outright offering of a tract of land to build a church could buy salvation. That little disagreement led to more and what followed was known as The Great Reformation.
Martin Luther pushed and succeeded in having the Bible translated from Latin to the German vernacular to allow the common people to read and understand the "written Word of God" and interpret them in ways not dictated only by the religious leaders. On June 13, 1525, already out of the priesthood and actively involved in the movement of Reformation, Luther married Katharina von Bora, herself an ex-nun when she and several other nuns escaped from a monastery to join the movement. Luther hence decried the practice of celibacy because it was not a Biblical requirement for anyone who professes to preach and spread the Gospel.
To make a long story short, the movement to reform the church led to peasant protests. That started to split among specific area and jurisdictional churches into several splinter groups of protesters, henceforth labeled Protestants.
Claire soon found a very long list of different denominations of churches under the main umbrella of Christianity, so many to list here. Claire was intrigued by the Amish. Where did they come from? In America, the general public recognizes them for their traditional attire, horse drawn black carriages, coexisting as an anachronism in a modern society, who speak German at home but speak English to conduct their trade and engage in commerce.
Claire was actually led to the Amish when she first read about Anabaptists. They were one of the splinter groups who called for re-baptism, because the protesters were all baptized at infancy but learned from Biblical passages that Jesus was baptized as an adult by John ..
"Mark 1:9–11, 9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan river. 10 And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11 And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son;1 with you I am well pleased.”
The Anabaptists, therefore, merely followed the scriptures once they started reading the Bible. Baptism hence was done as a total immersion in water on adults only because infants were not only deemed innocent they were unable to speak to confession, and whose faith were yet to be determined. "The Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites are direct descendants of the early Anabaptist movement".
Anabaptists were persecuted in Germany. Many escaped to other parts of Europe. Generations of them later made it to the newly created nation called America where they were and are free to worship freely.
Claire read:
"Because the Amish do not have church buildings, they hold church services in their homes. Every other Sunday, the members of the local district meet in the home of one of their members. Services rotate among the homes throughout the year, coming to each household about once a year depending on the number of households in the district".
There are no altars, stained glass windows, not even hymnals because they sing from memory (in German), etc.
Claire could not find any reference in the New Testament that Jesus referred to worshiping in a physical church. Instead, she saw Jesus as a reformer who did not call for people to be in a specific man-made structure in order to worship God. In fact, she read, from Matthew 6:6 ESV, Jesus proclaimed,
“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven". Jesus also spoke in parables.
"6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."
Claire was overwhelmed by the number of Christian denominations - from the various Catholic and Protestant denominations all over the world worshipping in small and mega churches and cathedrals. By that time Claire was not so much confused as she was exhausted after she read from Matthew 24,
"And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world? And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many..
Claire then believed that the last portion of the Biblical quote above led to the question she had asked as a child that could be interpreted to predict the spread of so many who will call themselves Christians but not least of all are the other prevailing belief systems - Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, each with several subsets.
In the end it was not so much that Claire found her answer but that it gave her a more profound resolve to read the Bible for spiritual guidance and leave history where it belongs - in the past.
Before the summer ended she decided that she will change her major from history to chemistry or biology, to the delight of her parents who knew of Claire's affinity to and proficiency in math and the sciences, graduating valedictorian. Her Dad asked, "Why the change of heart?"
Claire replied, "I believe I have sufficiently enough of history that I need. I'd like to focus on the future. I hope to do well and go on to medical school but I promise, you will only pay for my undergrad and I will be on my own towards a post graduate degree". Her Dad assured her he has enough saved for that already and not to worry.
We can only wish Claire the best as she finds herself at a crossroad in a world where uncertainty dominates her future despite the seeming abundance of answers.
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