The family in the Bible

The Reformation did not stop with Luther, of course. It eventually developed the left-wing Reformation of those who almost obliterated the corporate or collective dimension from their forms of Christianity. Thus arose the Anabaptists and their heirs the Baptists, such as Roger Williams who founded Rhode Island, who insisted that each individual should read the Bible for him/herself, and that each reading was valid for that individual. Protestantism generally is a trip into the world of individualism. Some Protestant churches, however, continue to practice infant baptism and reading Scripture from a common lectionary, marks of corporate worth and responsibility (such as the Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Methodist). Protestants speak of the number of members in their congregations while Jews, Catholics, and the Orthodox speak of the number of families in their congregations.

Alexander's philosophy had a profound effect on enough Jews that some were able to hear a message, emanating from the Galilee, that God in their time had been incarnate in one person, one Jew, for the sake of all persons of whatever tribe or family anywhere. "Emanuel=God with us" had always meant God's being with the Jewish people as a whole. Early Christians, however, resignified it and applied it to their belief in God's being in one Jew, Christ. Hellenistic individualism permitted them to hear the message that GOd had resurrected that one person for the sake of every individual in the world. When those Hellenized Christian-Jews emerged into the Greco--Roman world outside Palestine the message was rapidly embraced and celebrated. It is utterly astounding to the historian how rapidly Christianity, with its almost uncanny combination of semitic emphasis on corporate worth and Greek emphasis on individual worth, spread through the world Alexander had Hellenized. There were enough Jews, like those at Qumran and the Pharisees, suppressed and oppressed as they were by the Greeks and the Romans, who resisted such individualization and hence the Christian message. For those Jews the idea of God's incarnation in one person was pagan and should be vigorously resisted. But it spread with amazing speed out in the Greco--Roman world.

Alexander had paved the way, and so had the Hellenization of most Early Judaism. It was the combination of the two worlds, the Hellenic and the semitic Jewish that gave Christianity its basic character. When Paul and John tried to develop an ecclesiology, a biblical view of the nature of the Church, they drew upon the corporate idea of the Church being "En Christo," "in Christ." This eventually led to the doctrine that "the Church is the Corporate Body of Christ Resurrected." The left-wing churches in the continuing Reformation developed the further idea, influenced by Greco--Roman mystery cults, that salvation was not corporately in the Church, but came about when each individual accepted "the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior." The concept of Christ being a personal savior is only marginally biblical, but the left-wing Reformation went its merry way in embracing individualism to the point of understanding the Church as the sum of the individuals who make personal decisions to enter it. They in effect set aside the earlier tradition of the Church being the heir of Israel called forth by God in a pastoral call on Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 12 and established by Christ for the whole world. Such minority forms of highly Hellenized, so-called conservative Christianity today tend to be exclusivist admitting only those individuals who share similar emotions about a personal experience of salvation (Sanders 2001).