The River of Christianity

Gregory J. Riley

The River of God is a well written book by Prof. Gregory J. Riley on the origins of Christianity. Riley uses three metaphors to trace the development of Christianity-- of river, of genealogy, and of evolution, and he names his book with the metaphor of river. I think a more appropriate title for the book might be the River of Christianity because Riley is tracing the development of Christianity.

We, human beings, live our life based on how we understand life. Religion, as I understand it, is a combination of a view of life and a way of life based on it, and it varies according to time and place. Christianity is an instance of religion at a specific time and place. How this form of religion came into existence and how it further evolved is the subject of Riley’s book. Several streams contribute to form a river, and it further splits into several tributaries. A human being is a child of two parents, and he/she with a partner further gives birth to children. A species evolves to adapt with the changing environment. Using these three metaphors in the background, Riley explains how Christianity evolved.

This, I think, is an honest and scientific approach to the study of religion, which is opposed to the fundamentalist approach, which is subjective, naïve, and biased. This approach doesn’t entertain any claims of superiority to any form of religion. It places a specific form of religion in a time and place, and traces its genealogy backward and forward. A form of religion is not necessarily of more quality than its parents or its siblings. Survival of a form is not always due to better quality.

At any point in time and place a variety of religious forms exist simultaneously. If the people who hold these various views have to live together, they must have a pluralist and multicultural view. While holding on to one’s own view, people must develop openness to the view of others.

By Christianity Riley means the religious movement that began in the first century CE Palestine and spread all over the Roman Empire and elsewhere. This movement has behind it all the religious forms in and around Palestine. The religion in Palestine was mainly Judaism. Palestine was a part of the Roman Empire in those days. Earlier, Palestine was under the Greek Empire, and before that it was under the Persian Empire. The Roman Empire inherited the religion of the Greek Empire, and so the Greco-Roman religion may be seen as one here for convenience. Hence besides Judaism, the Greco-Roman religion as well as the Persian religion was very much alive there.

Thus the religions of Palestine, Rome, Greece, and Persia may be seen as the direct parents of Christianity. The genealogy of each of these religions may be further traced backward. Judaism has behind it the Canaanite religions. The Greco-Roman religion has behind it the Indo-European religions, which shared the parentage of even the religions of the Far East. The Persian religion has behind it the religions of ancient Mesopotamia. Thus these religions may be considered the grandparents of Christianity. Christianity in turn was not the one unique child of its parents. It was one among many siblings. The other children either couldn’t survive long or still survive unnoticeably. Christianity in turn gave birth to several offspring under the influence of various challenging religious forms. Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and various protestant churches may be seen as the children of Christianity.

Riley rightly observes that the geocentric worldview developed by the Greek Philosopher-scientists was the primary influence that formed the worldview of Christianity. This worldview is radically different from the worldview we see in the Hebrew Bible. In the Hebrew Bible, the world was very small, and it was managed by several gods who were not very different from human beings. In its place, the Greek worldview brought about a very huge world with one God who is non-material or spiritual.

God was identified as entirely unknowable and immaterial. Soon a problem was identified. How could the transcendent God of light be the creator of the material world of darkness? That is how an intermediary called Logos was necessary to create the world. Logos later became the second person of the Holy Trinity. Later a third person was identified –the Holy Spirit. The evolution of the idea of the Holy Spirit is hard to trace. Because God does not have a material body, whatever God wants to do in the world is accomplished by infusing His spirit in somone with a material body, which is probably how the idea started.

In the Hebrew Bible, God is the source of both good and evil. This idea was challenged by the Persians, who have two different gods for good and evil. This Persian influence made them see God as the source of good only, and as the source of evil, a devil came into existence. An eschatological worldview also came into existence, with the world as an arena of cosmic battle between God and devil. A final judgment and an end of world when all evil would be wiped off was conceived. Such cosmic catastrophe would need a cosmic savior – the incarnated Logos.

A human being was seen as earth animated by God’s breath in the Hebrew Bible. As God was pictured as entirely spiritual, a new view of human being was borrowed from the Greek view as a combination of matter and spirit. A human being was seen as a combination of eternal soul dwelling in a temporary clay vessel.

Thus Christianity was born from the union of Judaism and the Greco-Roman and persian worldviews. The Greco-Roman worldview was and is still strongly alive in the far eastern religions of India. But Riley fails to notice this connection between Hind and Hellas.

Today the river of Christianity is facing the challenge of a much bigger view of the world. The Christian geocentric view later gave place to a heliocentric view, and today we live in a world of galaxies, black holes, and subatomic particles. All branches of Science have advanced so much. Christianity will have to adapt with the changing worldview and create a strong basis for human existence or it will have to die out.
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Comment from Prof. Gregory Riley
January 21, 2010
Dear John,

Thank you for your reading and review. I have been away, and while looking over my older emails I discovered that you had written a review of my book. I wrote the book as a Christian for other Christians. Had I chosen to write for the world as a whole, I would have framed my argument differently. I do believe that we are all far too limited to understand "things as they actually are," as Plato would have expressed it. All people have equal access to the Divine.