ABSTRACT
From its earliest beginnings, Christian theology has asserted itself as a theology of the One God proclaimed first by Israel and further revealed in Jesus. Indeed, as early as the mid-second century CE, Christian leaders debated and rejected as heresy the simplifying idea of the Marcionite Christians that the Jews worshipped a different deity than Christians. The fact of Jesus’ own Jewish identity may well have facilitated the agreement by Gentiles that their Christian God was no different than that of the Jewish God. By the fourth century, in fact, the Christians officially incorporated the Torah, wisdom literature, and prophetic writings of Jewish monotheism into the biblical canon as an indispensable component of Christian scripture.3 The gospel texts report that the central Jewish confession ‘‘Hear O Israel the Lord is our God, the Lord is One’’ (‘‘Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheru Adonai Ehad’’, from Deut. 6:4) along with the traditional Jewish ethic that love of God cannot be separated from love of neighbor formed the irreducible basis of Jesus’ own understanding of his faith. Because of this, the monotheism of the first Christians cannot be counted as an entirely new revelation but as an affirmation of their Jewish roots and indebtedness to Jewish concepts of God. But many Christians also began to distinguish themselves from Jews and
Jews from Christians fairly early on, sometimes because of the claims Gentile Christians began to make about the divinity of Jesus, and sometimes because of the related issue of Gentile conversion and leadership.
Also, Christianity emerged in the form of small and sometimes quite divergent communities of converts within the context of a huge confluence of great and ancient cultures, all of which were reeling from the impact of empire, of Roman technological innovation, and of religious upheaval. As more and more people converted to the small cult of Jesus-followers, Christian advocates necessarily drew their core metaphors, images, and interpretive tools from the riches of those cultures as well as from traditional Judaism. Because of the multicultural context of the Mediterranean basin during
the years that opened what we today call the Christian era,4 the reports of divinity and divine happenings that centered on stories of a Jewish teacher from Nazareth fit no single pre-existing interpretive frame, particularly for those listeners who were not themselves Jewish or privy to the historic or religious dimensions of Israelite conflicts with Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and Rome. Non-Jews who did not have the benefit of a Greek education tended, by virtue of widespread beliefs in dualistic realms of powerful spirits or communal realms of shape-shifting powers, to make sense of the Jesus stories in those terms, while Jewish converts attempted to incorporate the stories into the historical struggles and obligations of the Mosaic covenant with God. Upper-class Hellenized Gentiles from across the Mediterranean and North African regions likewise sought to place the Jesus story within a familiar intellectual framework; in their case it was often the eternal platonic ideals at work in the teachings and story of Jesus’ resurrection. In each case, enough people converted to faith in this god-man of
Nazareth to indicate that the Jesus movement’s eschatological promises of imminent good news for the poor and suffering were translatable and accessible across cultural lines, even if the ‘‘news’’ altered somewhat in the translations. Christian numbers grew rapidly and widely enough over the first three centuries to generate entrenched factions and conflicting interpretations. It is in such circumstances that Christian doctrines were born. Given the polyglot nature of Palestine, Asia Minor, Africa, and the
Roman Empire as a whole in the first centuries of the Christian era, any contemporary approach to the question of Christian monotheism and its origins must be necessarily complex and sensitive to the cultural differences that shaped the world at that time. This in itself makes the question of Christian monotheism interesting and somewhat undecidable. The historical, deeply personalistic, political covenant theology of Israel’s first five millennia most certainly shaped and gave orientation to the first Christian accounts of their faith, not only because Jesus and most of his immediate followers were Jewish inheritors of that theology, but because most of the earliest Christian interpreters were also members of Jewish communities under Roman colonial rule. Also, the speculations, philosophies and political experiences of Roman Hellenism gave hefty doses of shape and content to early Christian self-understanding, particularly as Gentile converts attempted to demonstrate the viability of this culturally marginalized faith
to the wealthy and powerful of the empire, especially to those who could put a stop to persecution and could fund Christian expansion. Finally, the very early conversions of African elites to the Christian movement meant that some of the first and most influential of the ‘‘Church Fathers’’ emerged from Carthage, Alexandria, Hippo, and Ethiopia, giving additional and distinctive shape and content to the beginnings of Christian thinking about God from cultures fed by the complex riches of the Nile. All three of these complicated cultural contexts are significant for any
serious investigation of the sources and problems of monotheism in Christian theology, and the chapters immediately following this one will take each source context up in turn. But, before we can do that, there is the issue of terminology to address. ‘‘Monotheism’’ itself is not an untroubled word with a serene and self-evident applicability even to those religious traditions most associated with the exclusive worship of and belief in one unique god or divine reality. Precisely because it is so widely used and so little investigated, or, as Mark Smith suggests, because ‘‘monotheism has apparently achieved a status in modern discourse that it never held in ancient Israel [or Greece, or Africa],’’5 it is good to pick the word itself up, turn it over in our hands a bit to see what strings attach to it, and so investigate both its taken-for-grantedness and its entailments.
