Europe at Present [Spring 2003]

MAIN RELIGIONS IN EUROPE

Introduction

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the three great monotheistic religions of the contemporary world. They are also the three largest religions in Europe. Their adherents believe in one God, whose words have been given to people and written in sacred books.²⁹⁸

Christianity

Christianity begins with Jesus Christ, who lived among Palestinian Jews from about 6-5 BC to 30 AD.³⁰⁰ The effects of his life, the response to his teachings and the experience of his death and resurrection were the beginnings of the Christian community. When the apostle Peter is represented in the New Testament as confessing that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God”, he speaks for the Christianity of all ages. And it is in response to this confession that Jesus is described as announcing the foundation of the Christian church: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it.”³⁰¹ Our knowledge of Jesus' ministry derives almost entirely from the four Gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), which present Jesus as one who proclaimed the arrival of the kingdom of God throughout the villages and countryside of Galilee. His acceptance of social outsiders and his claim to prophethood and divinity led to conflict with the Jewish priesthood and ultimately to his arrest and execution by crucifixion. Each of the Gospels contains accounts of Jesus' resurrection from the dead, and John's contains a reference to Jesus' ascension to heaven.³⁰²

Christianity is the religion of people whose belief system centres on the person and teachings of Jesus. To Christians, Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Messiah or Christ promised by God in the prophecies of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible). By his life, death, and resurrection he freed those who believe in him from their sinful state and made them recipients of God's saving grace. Many also await the second coming of Christ, which they believe will complete God's plan of salvation. The Christian Bible, or Holy Scripture, includes the Old Testament and also the New Testament, a collection of early Christian writings proclaiming Jesus as lord and saviour. Arising in the Jewish milieu of 1st- century Palestine, Christianity quickly spread through the Mediterranean world and in the 4th century became the official religion of the Roman Empire.³⁰³

Christians have tended to separate into rival groups, but the main body of the Christian church was united under the Roman emperors. During the Middle Ages, when all of Europe became Christianised, this main church was divided into a Latin (Western European) and a Greek (Byzantine or Orthodox) branch. The Western church was in turn divided by the Reformation of the 16th century into the Roman Catholic church and a large number of smaller Protestant churches: Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist), Anglican, and sectarian. These divisions have continued and multiplied, but in the 20th century many Christians joined in the ecumenical movement to work for church unity. This resulted in the formation of the World Council of Churches³⁰⁴. Christianity exists in all parts of the world.

The growth of Christianity testifies to its continuing strength in the world today. While church attendance has been in decline in Europe, in other parts of the world Christianity continues to flourish. The 20th century has seen a marked shift in the global demography of Christianity so that for the first time since the 7th century there are now more Christians outside of Europe than in Europe. In the 21st century the majority of the world's Christians will live in Latin America and Africa.³⁰⁵

According to Christian belief, the original human beings rebelled against God, and from that time until the coming of Christ the world was ruled by sin. The hope of a final reconciliation was kept alive by God's covenant with the Jews, the chosen people from whom the saviour sprang. This saviour, Jesus Christ, partly vanquished sin and Satan. Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit, preached the coming of God's Kingdom but was rejected by the Jewish leaders, who delivered him to the Romans to be crucified. On the third day after his death God raised him up again. He appeared to his disciples, commanding them to spread the good news of salvation from sin and death to all people. This is the mission of Christ's church.³⁰⁶

Christianity inherited and modified the Jewish belief that the world would be transformed by the coming of the Reign of God. The Christians held that the bodies of those who had died would rise again, reanimated, and that the righteous would be triumphant, the wicked punished. This belief, along with Jesus' promise of "eternal life," developed into a doctrine of eternal rewards (heaven) and punishments (hell) after death. A source of doctrinal uncertainty was whether salvation depended on God's election in advance of a believer's faith, or even in a decision of God before the disobedience and fall of the first man and woman.

Although Christians today tend to emphasize what unites them rather than what divides them, substantial differences in faith exist among the various churches.³⁰⁷ Those in the Protestant tradition insist on Scripture as the sole source of God's revelation. The Roman Catholics and Orthodox give greater importance to the tradition of the church in defining the content of faith, believing it to be divinely guided in its understanding of scriptural revelation.³⁰⁸ They stress the role of ecumenical councils in the formulation of doctrine, and in Roman Catholicism the pope, or bishop of Rome, is regarded as the final authority in matters of belief.

Christians also vary widely in worship. Early Christian worship centred on two principal rites or sacraments: baptism, a ceremonial washing that initiated converts into the church; and the Eucharist, a sacred meal preceded by prayers, chants, and Scripture readings, in which the participants were mysteriously united with Christ. As time went on, the Eucharist, or mass, became surrounded by an increasingly elaborate ritual in the Latin, the Greek, and other Eastern churches, and in the Middle Ages Christians came to venerate saints – especially the Virgin Mary. In the West, seven sacraments were recognized. The Protestant reformers retained 2 sacraments – baptism and the Eucharist – rejecting the others, along with devotion to saints and images, as unscriptural. They simplified worship and emphasized preaching. Since the 19th century there has been a certain amount of reconvergence in worship among ecumenically minded Protestants and Roman Catholics, with each side adopting some of the other's practices. For example, the Catholic Mass is now in the vernacular. Among other groups in both traditions, however, the divergence remains great.

In most Christian churches Sunday, the day of Christ's resurrection, is observed as a time of rest and worship. The resurrection is more particularly commemorated at Easter, a festival in the early spring. Another major Christian festival is Christmas, which commemorates the birth of Jesus.