There are about 47,000 Christian denominations in the world, the kind of number that atheists are keen to weaponize whenever they bring up the dim probability of belonging to the one, true church. With other major religions on the board, choosing the correct faith further seems a daunting game of chance, where a wrong decision, or even a wrong birthplace or cultural background, might lead to an eternal punishment in some instance of hell. This is problematic for anyone trying to pick their way to heaven most analytically: There is only one way to hit the bull’s eye and a whole lot of ways to miss it.
Despite this vast diversity in Christian truth claims, it is hard to fault people for showing no interest in reevaluating beliefs outside of their local beliefs. The necessity to verify religions and churches is significantly eclipsed by the number of tasks and vocations people go through in their daily lives. A jeepney driver wakes up in the morning, drinks his coffee, eats his bread, and ventures out to ferry passengers for the rest of the day. When he gets home well into the evening, perhaps he is further faced with a litany of chores to do, such as fixing a broken sink, hammering a fence, reinforcing a roof, or attending to any of the million other things that could suffer decay in a house. (Not to mention other domestic responsibilities for the wife and the children.) For someone who is paid to work behind a desk for hours on end, perhaps she is as bored as she is tired once the dreaded, tedious commute is over, and she would only prioritize worrying about the fine points of Christianity after she has watched all existing shows on the internet.
We simply cannot question everything, including the whole of Christianity and the complicated weave of facts, histories, comments, and debates that surround it. Even if we have the time and resources, there is little guarantee that we would choose to do so over indulging ourselves with activities we deem more pleasurable and entertaining. “The sleep of reason produces monsters,” Goya says, a reflection on man’s capacity to ignore his needs and bring his downfall for the sake of attaining a rational goal. In the case of exhausted jeepney drivers and pencil pushers, the much-deserved need is rest, something even God is subject to in the biblical Creation.
Yet, on the other hand, blindly participating in an institution that enforces its own set of rules does not seem the lesser of two evils. Not contesting a system of beliefs that must be taken always as the gospel truth can lead to horrors of the magnitude of Nazi Germany, of the ethnic cleansings in Rwanda and Bosnia, and of planes crashed into twin towers—among other evils. In literature, we witness the iron grip of authorities at its extremified worst in novels like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and A Brave New World—all a testament to the fact that without checks and balances, without the personal and the general will to validate, institutions may consume their adherents for their ill intent.
Given that we cannot question each of our beliefs (lest we become nihilists) and that we cannot leave our institutions unaudited (lest we lose our personal identities), then we must be continually in dialogue with what we hold to be true to the best of our abilities despite the pressing demands of our circumstances. And if we aspire to live a good life, we would do well to reconcile what we hold to be true to what is good, since we are liable to believe in bad things and mistake them to be good. By the same logic, if we claim that Christianity can lead us to what is good, perhaps even to the understanding of the very mechanism by which we judge good and evil, then we would do well to study it, to make sense of it in the spirit of goodness that it portends. We would do well to frame it so that we can wrestle with the traditions we grew up in and hone our faiths by fire. The councils of Nicaea and Constantinople in the fourth century did so, and so did Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastic thinkers of the Middle Ages, and Martin Luther and the Protestants of the Reformation—along with the multitude of religious leaders and church founders that came after.
While scholasticism is encouraged, it would be ineffective to turn 47,000 stones and commit to a life of poring over dusty old books, eternally adrift between universes of opposing Christian dicta. We are better off making the argument that traditions bear insights that are reflective of the human condition, and it is to these insights that they owe their longevity and civilizational imprint. Our greatest, most beautiful buildings, paintings, sculptures, and stories have been preserved with regimented care throughout the generations because they represent what we ultimately value. Likewise, our most sacred traditions have been passed down throughout the centuries because they reveal truths about consciousness, purpose, meaning, and the overall patterning of reality.
It is this overall patterning that is responsible for the way traditions serve as vehicles for truths. Because we, as a human society, exist in a mode of being that is nested within universals, we can distill our experiences into abstractions that are true anywhere at any time. For instance, regardless of our unique upbringings, the perpetual themes of pleasure and suffering, fear and courage, order and chaos, rebirth and destruction, and life and death are something we all recognize as deep facilitators of action. The earliest among us to recognize, our ancestors, long derived vital lessons from such universals, worthy of preservation in the form of symbols, images, and myths.
Philosopher and mythologist Mircea Eliade has compiled some of these patterns: the Axis Mundi, the Flood, the Underworld, to name a scant few. We have the Babylonian god Marduk creating the world from Tiamat, the primordial ocean; we have the Egyptian Atum rising out of the chaotic waters. Hebrews’ Noah walked out of his ark and became the resurgent man for the renewed earth. In a different yet equally cataclysmic flood, Manu tied his ship to the fish avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu and lived to reestablish humanity. These mythical tales, and their cross-cultural equivalents, gave us the Yin and Yang, the Eye of Horus, and the Self-Eating Serpent. In the early centuries Anno Domini, the story of Christ gave us the Cross, the symbol upon which modern society was largely founded.
The tradition-based approach to framing Christianity calls first for an introduction to the Bible. As the foundational text that contains all the religion’s symbols and stories, it is where the divergence of Christian dogmas, translational discrepancies aside, comes to a diluted point. Therefore, it is an obvious priority for those attempting to understand the Christian worldview. Also, as the Scripture that puts forth as a puzzle the genesis of the world and humanity’s role in it in direct relationship with God, there is no other reading where interpretation of the isolated sort welcomes the sin of pride. A moralistic whim finagled out of its pages can entice one into proclaiming oneself the sole interpreter of God, having the power to dictate what is good and evil.
This danger of taking a bite of the forbidden fruit is addressed by the effort to emphasize tradition. Consider that any reading of the Bible must be preceded by an already fabricated set of beliefs, and that these beliefs are constrained within the universal truths about human life. These truths, throughout time, have been reified into human laws—our collective proposal on how to best act in the world so that we may meaningfully coexist with one another. Consider, too, that existing laws are constructs that have been refined by the very undertaking to interpret the Bible properly (by Catholicism, as far as the West is concerned). Given all these, it can be concluded that interpretation of the Bible within the moral milieu laid down by the Christian tradition is in itself a byproduct of its own process.
In other words, one does not legalize murder out of some self-proclaimed “truth” received from the Bible and act on it without his society rallying against him. Anyone who wishes to found a church with such an outlandish claim cannot expect to be in business for more than a day, given that registering a church requires approval from the government. This interference of the state and its people, whose moral judgments draw from Judeo-Christian values, practically illustrates a time-honored consensus regarding the Bible: That is, if truths can be recognized as preexisting, perhaps there is only hubris in turning them into one’s own. If there is an all-encompassing truth in Christianity, perhaps before it there can only be participation.
What follows the Bible as the textual anchor of Christianity are the writings of the Undivided Church, the earliest participants of the Christian throughline. After the Apostles (along with key witnesses and disciples) enshrined the works, teachings, and miracles of the Messiah as the New Testament, the first Christians began to formalize their core rituals and beliefs, in line with the nascent formulation of a liturgy they had received from their predecessors. It was the religious format they deliberated with in their councils, after a brutal period of Roman persecution, that would then spread throughout the world and shape the values of the Western spirit. Given the lasting influence of these prominent early believers—called the Church Fathers—the commentaries that they offer cannot be dismissed. Many of the ideas at the heart of Christendom today, such as the Trinity, attained central status due to the interpretative process they set in motion.
Once a tradition’s process, however, ends up dividing the tradition itself, we get the same problem of choosing. The Great Schism of the eleventh century split the one Church into a Catholic and an Orthodox front. At this point, under what rubric should a choice be filtered? While 2 gives better odds than 47,000, it is not satisfactory to leave it to a coin toss. The Roman Catholic Church can claim a wider outreach as it became the more dominant of the two branches, eventually flourishing side-by-side with kingdoms and empires for the salvation of the pagan wild. But this leaves much to be said about why choosing it relies on its worldly impact that can only be seen fully with the gift of hindsight, and mostly not during the Inquisitions, and mostly not three hundred years ago during the Enlightenment—at the time when it was in turmoil due to the increasing favor of man’s reason. “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors,” Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton says. But the fact that indwelling truths must always be alive, even in our hunter-gathering days, even in the days of Aristotle, undermines the traditional framework. If we had to build the frame during the darkest time of a Christian tradition considered to be the one, true church, would we have chosen that church?
Here, a secular point can be interjected: If we can intuit the universal nature of good and evil outside of a church, if we can raise a child properly by instilling values that are geared toward the highest human good (eudaimonia), then can we not do away with the framing entirely? Can we not establish a covenant directly with the universal truths fathomed through a deepening knowledge of human behavior?
But of course, traditions must remain. Even in the darkest of times we must judge our institutions with the ethical lenses that those institutions have given us. We cannot escape a reality founded on symbols and rituals, with cathedrals built at the heart of our cities as a sacred reminder of the highest thing that binds us. And so, if we must stay faithful to our framework, we must honor our dead forefathers’ democratic vote on what truths give our lives purpose and meaning. We must know their language and understand how they saw, heard, and felt the patterns that orient our conscious existence. We must consider their good faith so that we may pass down our own to our awaiting people.
