When and how Christianity degenerated into a pagan cargo cult, and the case for Restoration

The word on the street is that Christianity is seeing a revival lately. This is due to a range of factors, like the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk and a general growing disgust for the godless Leftism that has permeated our civilization. Many young people are looking for an alternative to the destructive system of values they’ve inherited from popular culture and our corrupt civil institutions, and they are seeking it in churches.

This will likely come as no surprise to regular readers of The Third Helix, but this so-called “revival” doesn’t give me quite the same unalloyed hope that it does many Christians and conservative commentators.

Calling it a “revival” in the first place seems an exaggeration borne of wishful thinking: Christianity’s decline in the West has very recently slowed somewhat, but that is not growth. That’s just losing with slightly less inertia. We’ve hit some speed bumps on our downward slide, but we have not reversed course.

But even if the “revival” was truly that, I have long argued the case here that Christianity – as we popularly understand and practice it – is not the solution to our problems. It is the problem.

But, there is a glimmer of hope in this momentary resurgence of interest in Christianity. It’s an opportunity for a genuine revival, but only if we reform ourselves first by restoring the true gospel.

If we do not, we have only accelerated our decline.  

I have explained at length elsewhere how our overall narrative and soteriology are contrary to the actual teachings of the Bible, as well as how our commonly accepted epistemology grows out of that false soteriology, leading to an empty and futile pseudo-faith, which leads to a collectively dysfunctional ecclesiology.

All of this naturally invites the question, though, of “Where did it all go wrong? When did the Church lose its way?”

And, behind that question often lurks a very understandable skepticism toward restoration movements.

After all, we’ve seen no shortage of attempted restoration movements over the past few centuries. Some, like the Protestant Reformation, have constituted genuine progress toward restoration – but not nearly as much as Protestants typically suppose, as we will discuss shortly. Others, like Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses and the so-called New Apostolic Reformation have been destructive cults that have done more to hasten the decline.

So, I understand the wariness my claims typically provoke. It sounds like wannabe cult-leader stuff. I get it. (But don’t worry – God has graciously withheld from me both the social acumen and the charisma necessary for that particular temptation to present itself.)

But, all of these prior would-be restoration movements have in common that they recognize a genuine need in the Church: there is widespread acknowledgment that something has gone very wrong. There is something vital that we are missing in the Church. We have indeed lost our way. These destructive cults’ entire appeal is that there is a genuine unmet need for Restoration, and they falsely promise to fulfill it.

And until we do find our way again, cults will continue to rise up and proliferate, like weeds choking out the wheat … wheat that is already withering and dying on its own, without any help from cults.

The only legitimate restoration movement was the Protestant Reformation and its pre-printing press precursors, but it ultimately failed because it didn’t go back far enough and so only restored the Church to a more primitive stage of apostasy.

So, we need to go back farther.

(There is also the common objection of, “How can you believe that God would allow His Church to go so far astray?”, but that’s a separate, albeit closely related topic that deserves its own treatment in a follow-up article. Our attention here is on the historical record by which to observe that fall into apostasy. The theological explanation is another question.)

The Trap of the Eternal Recurrence

Prior to Christianity and Judaism, what we now call “paganism” held sway in the world.

Of course, there was no single “-ism” that encompassed all pagan belief, but there were general features that were more or less universal.

In ancient pagan thought, for instance, time was cyclical and eternal.

There was no “personal spirituality” as we conceive of it today. The gods were personified anthropomorphisms of natural forces on whom the seasons and agricultural cycles depended, and they were only “known” to mortals by standing at a distance and observing them through ritual reenactments and mythical retellings about what they understood to be eternal truths within the wheel of time. They believed their gods dwelled literally on earth through their idols in their temples, but their temples functioned merely as microcosms by which to glimpse the larger cosmic reality that was otherwise beyond their reach.  

There were, of course, nuanced variations from culture to culture, but that cyclical nature of time, as they conceived of it, was universal across the pagan world.

For instance, the Babylonian sacred text, the Enuma Elish, provides the liturgy for “Akitu,” the annual new year ritual to enact the storm god Marduk’s defeat of the dragon Tiamat to signify the imposition of divine order over primordial chaos. This wasn’t an event that happened at some point in the historical past – it happened every year by their ritual performance, and it was required to (among other functions) maintain the cosmic order by which the seasonal rain would come that was necessary for agriculture.

On the other side of the world, the Aztecs similarly saw time as a series of repeating cosmic cycles, each of which ends with the destruction of the sun. To keep the sun from going out, the gods had to be fed an endless supply of human sacrifices. If the sacrifices were not offered, that current cycle of time would end, and their world with it.

In Hinduism, all of life is trapped in an endless cycle of life, death and reincarnation called “samsara,” and this occurred within endlessly recurring cycles of time known as the “Yuga cycle.” The state of order within each Yuga cycle degenerated over time, until that order collapsed and a new cycle would begin, but the decay could be slowed by the regular offering of sacrifices.

In Plato’s “Timaeus,” the philosopher described time as “the moving image of eternity.” As in, ultimate reality is timeless and eternal and characterized by unchanging Forms, and time came into existence with the material universe, and those eternal Forms manifest in the material world through time, but there is no beginning within time. Time has a “beginning,” but it is a wheel, which goes on forever – the wheel was created whole in the eternal past, with its cycles predetermined, and it continues eternally.

The common feature of all of these pagan cosmologies of cyclical time was that life for mortals was brief and harsh and, ultimately, meaningless, because nothing ultimately changed. There was change within the cycle, but the cycle itself repeats forever, over and over again, so everything that has ever happened happens again and will continue into the future without end, so ultimately, there is no change. At least, not for the better – they looked back on earlier golden and silver ages of history, but each successive age was a downgrade from previous epochs, with each degenerating from bygone glories (as in Hesiod’s poem, “Theogony,” for instance). The best they could hope for was to maintain the present order for as long they could by currying the favor of the gods by their sacrifices.

In other words, there was no expectation – nor even any conception – of progress or improvement to human life. Hope for the future was a totally alien, unconsidered concept in the pagan mind, because the best of life was already in the distant past and never to be restored – only mournfully remembered through ever-diminishing imitations.

So, there was no meaning to history, no ultimate purpose to human existence, except to live on earth briefly in subordination to the gods, enjoying what pleasures might be found in life and avoiding as best they could the inevitable suffering the gods capriciously dealt out to all mortals, and then to die and escape the endless cycles of time in a gloomy, unchanging afterlife. There was no “Why?” to any of it, because even the gods did nothing but play out the roles suited to their respective natures within the cosmic cycle. The wheel of time just is what it is, and it seldom occurred to anyone that it should or could be otherwise. “Salvation” just meant maintaining a stable status quo.

The God of Progress

In stark contrast – and unique among all the religions in the ancient world – in the Bible, time is linear, with a definite historical beginning, with progress and improvement inherent to our existence and nature: Mankind was made in the image of God, as the crowning conclusion to an ascending process of creation, for the express purpose of being God’s agents through whom to rule that creation – the vehicle through whom God’s very Presence is mediated in the world.

Mankind was bidden to increase: to expand the size and scope and reach of the Human Family that is God’s Representation on earth, ever-increasing, ever-progressing in that objective, ever-improving, ever making God’s Presence in the world greater and more pervasive by advancing divine order throughout the wilderness of creation. (For a more comprehensive treatment of this, see “The Unsubverted Gospel.”)

Man fell from that role and from his place in God’s Presence, but before the ramifications of the fall were even fully declared, a better future was promised, in which the Evil responsible would be crushed and Man would be restored to his proper role and function.

In his fallen state, Man’s proclivity was to consolidate and seek the comfort and seeming security of stagnation, but God, in His love for us, would not allow it. It is Man’s destiny and purpose and highest nature to advance.  

So, the Israelite religious calendar wasn’t concerned with looking up to an out-of-reach cosmos and reflecting upon the patterns of nature and ruminating about archetypes and “timeless truths.” It was the precise opposite: it was about commemorating and reliving those moments from their past when God Himself had broken into time and history to move events forward through His people, by being present and active among them.

The consistent message of the Prophets was that God would do so again, through the Chosen One, to progress human history toward its ultimate goal of Man’s redemption and the eradication of evil.

The Israelite rationale for sacrifice was likewise the precise opposite to that of the pagans. Pagans offered sacrifices to feed the gods so that they would maintain the cosmic order on which mortals depended. Israelites offered sacrifices to expiate their sins so that they could maintain their proximity to God’s Presence and partake of His life and holiness, and having been so empowered, they were to act as God’s agents to advance the divine order on earth. The blessings and purpose of sacrifice flowed in the opposite direction to that of pagan sacrifice: it was for God to give life to mortals, not for mortals to nourish the gods.

When the Messiah came, that philosophy of progress and hopeful advancement of divine order was no longer confined to Israel and the Jewish people, but God Himself – active and present in the world though the Church – carried it forward to the nations. As that Message spread and was integrated deeper and farther into society, human civilization progressed forward, and continues to do so wherever and to whatever extent Christianity holds sway.

(Tom Holland – not the Spider-Man, but the historian – wrote a tremendous book on this, entitled “Dominion.” Holland is an atheist, for some reason, so his survey of history was not conceived as a work of apologetics for Christianity. It just turned out to be so because the facts themselves dictate it.)

The War on Progress

That divinely-driven progress has commenced in opposition to the malevolent spiritual entities who have ruled this world since the Fall. The end-goal of this age of history – the terminus by which we measure that progress – is their defeat, dethronement and death when the nations finally turn away from them to obey the one true God.

This outcome has been decreed by God, and they cannot avert it – they know it to be inevitable. But, they can delay it, and hope to do so as long as possible, and so we are at war. Impeding our progress is how they wage that war, and we can see how they managed to hamstring the Church very early on (I intend to expand on this in the aforementioned follow-up article about the theological reasons for our apostasy).

The signs were subtle, at first, but highly significant, and they grew increasingly less subtle as time went on.

Mile Markers on the Road to Apostasy

One of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament (and it might even predate some books of the New Testament, depending on which scholars you ask) was a manual on church operation called “The Didache,” or “The Teachings of the Twelve Apostles.”

It contains instructions about the Christian way of life and the performance of rituals like baptism and serving the Eucharist, as well as fasting.

Interestingly, there is no explicit command or instruction to fast (except in preparation for baptism) – it is simply taken for granted that Christians, as Christians, would fast as a regular, ongoing practice. The only explicit instruction on fasting is as follows:

“But do not let your fasts coincide with those of the hypocrites. They fast on Monday and Thursday, so you must fast on Wednesday and Friday. Nor should you pray like the hypocrites … ” (Didache 8:1-2)

There is nothing inherently wrong with fasting on Monday and Thursday – at least not that the text indicates. It’s just that “the hypocrites” fasted on those days, and Christians were not to do anything that resembled or could be associated with the hypocrites.

“The hypocrites” being the Jews – fasting on Monday and Thursday was a well-established practice among the Jews by the Second Temple period.

When Christianity began, it was, of course, a sect of Judaism, centered upon the Jewish Messiah having arrived in fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. Jesus was a Jewish rabbi who preached Judaism to Jews in the land of Judea. All of his disciples were Jews, and synagogues throughout the Jewish Diaspora were prioritized in the apostles’ missionary efforts. The first major doctrinal controversy that arose in the Church was over whether Gentiles must be required to convert to Judaism through circumcision as a condition of being included among Jesus’ followers.  

As time went on and Christianity spread to Gentiles, the internal tension between Jewish and non-Jewish identities within the Church grew more rancorous, and the split became more pronounced (and some would argue, final) when the (still overwhelmingly Jewish) Church refused to participate in the Jewish Revolt(s) against the Romans.

It wouldn’t be remotely accurate to call it “anti-Semitism,” because that connotes a one-sided persecution of Jews by a larger, more powerful group of non-Jews. Christians were themselves still a persecuted minority, led by a Jewish core, and the Church wouldn’t have any capacity to persecute anyone for another three centuries. But, there was a mutual hostility between non-Christian Jews and Christians that undeniably lies at the root of the anti-Semitism that persists to this day.

And, the growth trajectory of that mutual hostility can be seen in other early Christian writings, the most conspicuous of which is undoubtedly the Epistle of Barnabas.

Named for Paul’s traveling companion who is mentioned prominently in the Book of Acts, the Epistle was written in the late-1st, possibly early-2nd century.

It was never considered canonical nor even generally accepted as having authentically been written by Barnabas (it most certainly wasn’t), but it was highly respected and influential in the early Church, being referenced quite often by the early Church Fathers. So important was it to Christians in the ancient Church that it was included in Codex Sinaiticus, which includes our earliest complete manuscript of the New Testament, and so is a major cornerstone of all modern translations. Codex Sinaiticus dates to the 4th century and is of such high quality that many scholars believe it was among the 50 copies of the Bible commissioned by Emperor Constantine for use in churches in his new capital city of Constantinople. To produce Codex Sinaiticus, roughly 400 animals would have been required and thousands of hours of skilled labor from parchmenters, binders and scribes (mostly the scribes). In today’s money, it would have come to about $5 to 10 million to produce – enough at the time to purchase a luxury estate, a small fleet of ships, or to fund a legion or two of soldiers for a few years.

So, Codex Sinaiticus was a big deal – an exorbitantly expensive undertaking. That the Epistle of Barnabas was included in it speaks to the level of value and importance the Epistle held for Christians well into the 4th century, along with the influence suggested by the early Church Fathers’ numerous favorable references to it.

Its value among early Christians is rivalled only by the absolute, utter insanity of its premise.

According to the Epistle, the Jews and Israelites were never, at any point, God’s covenant people – they always, from the very beginning, misunderstood the Torah and the Prophets and the Aaronic priesthood, and God never truly dwelled among them in the tabernacle and temple. This was all only figurative, “spiritual” language that the Jews failed to grasp, which awaited the coming of Christ and the founding of the Church before its true meaning finally came to light.  

Just to be absolutely clear: its premise was not that the Jews of Jesus’ time misunderstood the Scriptures and so failed to recognize him as the fulfillment and embodiment of their very genuine identity as God’s covenant people. They are (according to the Epistle) not God’s people who have fallen into apostasy by their rejection of their Messiah, eventually to be restored when they collectively repent, as the Torah and the Prophets and the New Testament writers consistently foretold.

No, the thesis of the Epistle of Barnabas is that they never were God’s people in the first place, and they never will be. They were always alienated from God. He disinherited them in the golden calf incident – contrary to the narrative of Exodus itself – and afterward they were only tolerated placeholders until Christ came, acting as mere custodians of revelation intended for others. The true meaning of all of the Law and Prophets and Writings is that it was the Church, and was only ever the Church, who are God’s chosen people, to the exclusion of the Jews.

They were deceived for their entire history by thinking that circumcision, the temple sacrifices and the dietary laws and all the rest were ever supposed to be taken literally.

Specifically, it claims that Abraham was “deceived by the Evil One” into taking the command for circumcision literally (Barnabas 9:4). But, when he circumcised his 318 men, this was numerologically-coded language, with “18” signifying the first two Greek letters of Jesus’ name, Iota and Eta; and the “300” being the Greek letter Tau, which signified the cross. (The Scriptures were originally written in Hebrew, mind you, not Greek.)

So, circumcision was only ever supposed to be figurative and “spiritual,” never literal, and had the Jews and Israelites properly understood, they would have seen the clear intent and not taken any of it literally.  

And, the dietary laws were likewise figurative, and the Jews (had they not been so led by their flesh, Pseudo-Barnabas argued) should have understood that each prohibition was intended figuratively to mean they should not associate with certain kinds of people who corresponded in type to those animals.

“Moses mentioned the swine for this reason: you must not associate, he means, with such men, men who are like swine. That is, when they are well off, they forget the Lord, but when they are in need, they acknowledge the Lord, just as the swine ignores its owner when it is feeding, but when it is hungry it starts to squeal and falls silent only after being fed again … Furthermore, ‘You shall not eat the hare.’ Why? Do not become, he means, one who corrupts boys, or even resemble such people, because the hare grows another opening every year, and thus has as many orifices at it is years old.” (Barnabas 10:3-11)

And, the writer goes on, with each animal forbidden by the Levitical dietary laws corresponding with some specific set of characteristics of people whom the Israelites were not supposed to associate or emulate. As in, eating bacon, lobster, hyenas and the rest was actually perfectly acceptable to God, the writer argues, because the true meaning was “spiritual.”

There is likewise a “spiritual” reading for every major feature of the Law of Moses, all of it being coded language to establish that it was only ever the Church who are God’s chosen people, and never the Israelites and Jews.

I include these examples to demonstrate the totally ad hoc, special-pleading nature of his arguments, offered to support a thesis that is simply not rationally tenable in light of the Bible. The document reads like it was written by someone who expected to take a multiple-choice test on Christianity and got to see the test answers beforehand and memorized them without any comprehension, only to find out that it was an essay test instead, so he made it up on the fly. It has dim echoes of genuine truths all Christians should believe – the Hebrew Scriptures are indeed ultimately about Jesus as the Messiah. But the way that that is true appears to have been totally unknown to the writer. He’d been indoctrinated into those beliefs, as well as into that deepening attitude of resentment against the Jews as rival claimants to the Church’s identity as God’s true chosen people. But he was totally ignorant about what the Hebrew Scriptures actually taught, and so he let his imagination – conditioned by his Gentile cultural background – fill in the gaps.

Despite its astonishingly glaring shortcomings, the Epistle of Barnabas was embraced and revered by the early Church.

Not every Church Father agreed with every point made in it, and some openly disagreed. And, to be fair, there are a few nuggets of precious truth within the Epistle, such as an affirmation of what we now call “penal substitutionary atonement.” But, I’m confident that anyone well-versed in the Bible who takes the time to read the Epistle of Barnabas for himself will agree that its central thesis is so obviously contrary to the plain teachings of the Bible and its arguments are so poorly reasoned that it should have been entirely disqualifying.

Yet the early Church, for centuries on end, treated it as quasi-Scripture.

The Church Cast Adrift

So, we have the Epistle of Barnabas, along with that early, subtle but significant pressure to dissociate from the Jews in even the most trivial resemblance, documented within the Didache.  These are just two conspicuous exhibits among a prodigious collection of other possible examples that demonstrate a very early and significant shift in Christian thought and attitude.

It was an emphatic rejection of Judaism and any practice, mode of thinking or biblical interpretation that was associated with Jews. The early Church quite consciously and deliberately uprooted Christianity from its native Jewish soil, and this created an interpretive vacuum, and over time, they unconsciously – and I want to stress that this aspect was, by all evidence, unconscious – filled it with other interpretive paradigms.

The damage was not immediate, but the stage was set for a gradual, steady drift into apostasy.

The Church had drawn a very stark, impenetrable line between the categories of “Christianity” and “Judaism,” as they understood them, despite the original Christians’ clear understanding that these are not separate categories at all – different (but still overlapping) ethnic identities, maybe, but not separate belief systems.

As time went on, and Gentiles became more and more predominant within the Church, that line shifted ever farther from original Jewish Christian beliefs, and the category of “Christian” beliefs more and more encompassed ideas from their own native philosophical background in Greco-Roman paganism, Platonism and Gnosticism, while excluding identifiable “Jewish” beliefs. They brought a whole range of assumptions about metaphysics and cosmology and theology, and read the Bible through that lens, finding answers in it to questions that were totally alien to its outlook and purposes.

Virtually all Christians today take for granted the idea of “salvation” consisting of going away to heaven in death as a disembodied “soul” or “spirit.” As I have explained at length in other articles, these ideas are nowhere to be found in the pages of Scripture, Old or New Testament. But they were commonplace in those aforementioned pagan religions and philosophical systems.

And we can trace how the Church gradually transformed from its original Jewish Messianic substance into, well … a pagan bastardization.

The Great Reversal

There are clues that this creeping pagan bastardization began in New Testament times.

In his first letter to the Church in Corinth, Paul rebukes them harshly for their denial of the resurrection. In affirming the truth of the resurrection against their error, Paul wrote, “Do not be misled: Bad company corrupts good character. Come back to your senses as you ought, and stop sinning; for there are some who are ignorant of God – I say this to your shame.” (v. 33-34)

He didn’t mention specifically what beliefs they held as the alternative hope of the gospel, but since substance dualism and spiritual translation to an otherworldly afterlife was the default belief in pagan religion, I would argue that as the leading contender. But, at the very least, by insisting that, without the resurrection, Christians have no hope at all, by implication he eliminated any notion of any alternative paradigm of salvation, such as disembodied souls going to heaven in death.  

Justin Martyr, on the other hand, writing just about exactly 100 years later, was more explicit in his denunciations than Paul, when the (presumably same) error asserted itself in his time: “If you have fallen in with some who are called Christians … who say there is no resurrection of the dead, but that their souls, when they die, are taken to heaven – do not imagine that they are Christians.” (Dialogue with Trypho, chapter 80)

This was the first documented explicit mention of this belief we now take for granted, and it was a condemnation. As in, there were professing Christians at the time who spoke of salvation in those terms, and they were unequivocally rejected as false Christians because of it.

But, some of Justin Martyr’s other remarks (in chapter 5 of his Dialogue) indicate that he himself embraced the substance dualism that would eventually be included in the standard “Christian” set of beliefs.

(And, to be accurate, the Book of Enoch, significant among other examples, demonstrates that Second Temple Judaism had begun to absorb Hellenistic metaphysics about the afterlife and the “soul,” so the drift technically began much earlier than the Jewish/Christian split. But, these ideas are nonetheless absent from the actual Scriptures, and the post-split Christian Church was most emphatically not, over time, drawing their hermeneutical cues from Second Temple Jewish literature.)

Many other Church Fathers besides Justin Martyr made remarks about the soul surviving the death of the body and retaining conscious experiences in some sense, but the full-throated proclamation of this, and of heaven as the destination of the disembodied souls of the righteous, did not begin until Origen of Alexandria in the 3rd century.

Origen is typically described as a “Christian Platonist” – rarely, if ever, a “Platonist Christian,” notably – precisely for his deliberate articulation of Christian doctrines according to Platonic metaphysical categories. His general approach to the Bible was to “spiritualize” it, treating it predominantly as allegory and symbolism to reframe the gospel according to Platonist terms.

“Salvation,” then, according to this view, consisted of the soul ascending beyond time and material reality to be united to God in death.

Tertullian, technically, was the first to speak of this explicitly, but it was Origen who systemized it by infusing Christian doctrine with Platonic metaphysics and normalizing it, so that after him, this became the commonly-held idea of what “salvation” meant among Christians.

Notably, Origen was heavily criticized during his lifetime for these and other offenses against accepted Christian beliefs, and then condemned as a heretic by later generations for taking his “spiritualization” and allegorizing of Scripture too far in various respects, but never for his teaching about souls ascending to heaven in death as the primary meaning of “salvation.”

No, after Origen, this became standard, and it was eventually institutionalized by Augustine in his “City of God,” among other works, so that “going to heaven” became and remained the standard “Christian” hope ever since.

The Other Side of the Reversal

In sharp contrast, we see the basic, standard belief of original Jewish Christianity follow the precise opposite trajectory to the “going to heaven as a disembodied soul”-paradigm.

Every Church Father from the earliest periods of Christianity who spoke on eschatology took for granted what we today would call “Premillennialism”: the belief that Jesus will return in order to reign visibly on earth. Their view was virtually identical to the Jewish concept of the Messiah that existed prior to Christianity and that they generally still hold today: the promised king from the line of David who would establish God’s kingdom on earth, centered upon Mount Zion in Jerusalem, ruling over the nations.

This was clearly the central hope of the New Testament writers, and the driving motivation for all of their work: “Therefore, gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed,” wrote the apostle (1 Peter 1:13).

To point out what should be obvious, but too often isn’t: all of their hope was to be set on a future historical event, not on their individual trajectory in the afterlife.  

He repeats this idea five more times in his epistle, as do the other writers in numerous other passages throughout the New Testament, and the early Church Fathers clearly understood the substance of that hope to be Christ’s visible reign on earth and their own bodily resurrection and glorification to rule alongside him.

Papias of Hierapolis, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lactantius – all of these among other early Christian leaders affirmed Premillennialism. No early Church Father prior to Origen ever disavowed or disparaged it, and every single one who spoke on eschatology at all affirmed it. What we call “Premillennialism” today simply was Christianity. Christ’s resurrection from the dead was understood to be a preview of the Eschaton, and the Messiah’s reign on earth was the central feature of the Eschaton.   

As the Church drifted ever farther from its Jewish roots, the result was that what had previously been the central hope of Christianity held out by its earliest leaders – the Millennial Reign of the Messiah – became the object of ridicule and embarrassment to its later exemplars.

Origen, Dionysius of Alexandria, Jerome, Eusebius of Caesarea, Augustine and others staked out what would become the standard position taken for granted among all Christians everywhere when they denounced Premillennialism. They called it a “Jewish fable” and condemned it as “carnal.”

Notably, Eusebius of Caesarea preserves for us some valuable quotations from Papias of Hierapolis about the authorship of the Gospels, but makes a special point to denounce Papias as a person “of very small intelligence” because of his Premillennialism.

They embraced what is now called “Amillennialism” by “spiritualizing” all of those passages about the Messiah’s reign on earth to mean the current age of history, the Church Age, based on their settled insistence that the Church is the True Israel.

So, the early Church – beginning very early on, but in gradual stages over centuries – abandoned the actual salvation for which Jesus died in favor of a pagan counterfeit.

We Must Break the Wheel

The swapping-out of Millennialism for “going to heaven” as the central “Christian” hope is the most conspicuous and so easily identifiable example of the Church’s early and lasting apostasy, but it’s far from the only feature of our collective confusion and error.

Institutionally, Christians have never explicitly swapped out the broader cosmological framing of biblical linear-progressive time in favor of pagan cyclical time, as we did with the aforementioned paradigms of salvation. But, the effect is the same as if we had. The Church now functions exactly as if we had.

We’ve lapsed into the same prison of fatalism from which the gospel was supposed to liberate humanity.

Origen, Augustine and the rest of the Church Fathers who normalized and institutionalized the aforementioned errors never explicitly denied or denounced the resurrection from the dead nor the Second Coming, and so we still have these as doctrinal boxes that we check off.

But, we treat them as afterthoughts – footnotes to the main emphasis of our “gospel.” The topic of eschatology – End Times, the progression of history toward its divine telos – is commonly treated as secondary, at best, and all too often as a divisive topic to be avoided by responsible, unity-minded Christians, because it’s “not a salvation issue.” And, of course, by “not a salvation issue,” what is meant is that “Error on this topic will not prevent a person from going to heaven. It doesn’t matter what a person believes about these trivial details – don’t ‘major in the minors.’ What matters is holding the correct doctrines necessary to be admitted into heaven when you die.”

Except … the entire message of the Bible throughout is Eschatology, and there is not a single word spoken about the afterlife.  

That expectation of Christ’s return and the Church’s role in working toward it to bring it about is repeatedly held out in the New Testament as the entire motivating hope of the Christian life.

By shifting the focus of attention to individual “salvation” to a “spiritual” existence outside of time and history and material reality, there never needed to be an explicit embrace of pagan cosmology and renunciation of biblical linear time for us to fall into the same error as if we had.

We just sort of … forgot about it. We lost the plot somewhere along the way and just never missed it enough to think to look for it.

So, we just don’t think of the Church in terms of being God’s very Presence on earth – His vehicle for the advancement of divine order in the world to drive the progress of human civilization toward His purposes.

Instead, the role of the Church is much more akin to those pagan religious practices described earlier. The Church serves largely as passive and inert cultural furniture, to meet the “spiritual” needs of individuals by punctuating the seasons of their lives by providing a venue for them to hold wedding ceremonies, to “baptize” their babies, eulogize their dead, and learn about “the good life” among like-minded people of similar socio-economic status, and to get some life-coaching about how to regulate their moods and maintain the status quo until their time to leave this world.

Meanwhile, the concept of “progress” has been hijacked and counterfeited by our enemies to mean the precise opposite of what it should.

So, the Church, as we know it, is essentially a pagan cargo cult: outwardly, it imitates what we see in the Bible, but without understanding its substance.