UCG.org / Good News / Modern Christianity’s Forgotten Roots. by Scott Ashley
The following article does not necessarily express the views of The Plain Truth. We are sharing other opinions and will sometimes offer a commentary on anything we may disagree with.
Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish writer and religious philosopher, wrote that the “Christianity of the New Testament simply does not exist.” He questioned how popular Christianity had strayed so far from the way of life described and practiced in the Bible.
Is it possible that today’s Christianity is fundamentally different from the teachings of the apostles? Some scholars and serious students of the Bible have recognized and acknowledged that the practices of the early Church varied greatly from those of today.
Norbert Brox, professor of early church history at the University of Regensburg, Germany, describes the viewpoint of the early Church: “Thus the first [Christian] communities were groups that formed within Judaism . . . Christians believed as before in the God of Israel: their Bible was the Bible of the Jews . . . They continued to observe (as Jesus did) the Jewish practice of temple worship and law (Acts 2.46; 10.14), and gave outsiders the impression of being a Jewish sect (Acts 24.5, 14; 28.22), not a new religion. They themselves probably also simply thought of themselves as Jews” (A Concise History of the Early Church, Continuum, New York, 1996, p. 4).
How did this transformation in the practices of Christianity come about? Read the history of this transformation to paganism HERE