Just when I'd given up on the BBC's series on the history of Jesus as being a bit dull and uninspiring - the last one in the series is a corker ! Well worth listening to. Jesus the guru - starts to look at the development of christianity around the world in different cultures. My only criticism is it doesn't really go far enough to show different examples of christian mash-ups.
Listen to what the indian monk - a convert to christianity says about Christ and his faith, and the idea of the whole cosmos being bound up within a Hindu or Buddist temple and tying that back to his understanding of Christ's message.
The program touches on the issue of how the historical image of christ was stoutly defended (and is even now) by institutions, and suggests it is as part of a power struggle between cultures. Again unfortunately the program doesn't go far enough in examining that point, and just leaves you with a hint that the Victorian Evangelists taking Christ to the world were also exporting their culture). The traditional European image of what he looked like, and defending challenges to that image is about the control of the message.
The program finishes with a brief summary of the whole series, about how he started with the historical background to understand the life of jesus as much as possible from a factual perspective and how our understanding of that is changing, through the early discussions about the meaning of that life - moving through the adoption of christianity by Emperor constantine and the institutionalisation of the religion, to finally the 'dissipation' (my word) of that understanding and the view of christ being changed and developed in other cultures.
Powerful and exciting thought - that of Christ the Universalist not bound within the "European" image of christianity aggressively exported as part of its colonising missions.
There are strong images presented - of the juxtapositon of the exported Euro image - ie the white man in india - how christ image always white and the nigerian congreation dressing up in sunday best which is essentially western clothing to go to church. Against that is the idea of the Indian Guru, and the respect of the monk for krishna who is the Hindu embodiment of the cosmos on earth, and Christ depicted as a bhudda in 9th century paintings in China.
Brings to mind orla and my honeymoon in Guatemala 15 years ago where the hill churches still contained and embraced some pagan festivities and cultures that were so alien to us. Plus of course the whole issue of Christmans and the Christmas tree - our view of the christian religion is bound up with European pagan traditions - so why are ours any more relevant to our faith and knowing god than someone else's ?
Definitely a new task is to find some other mash-ups of the christian message. Got to be tons (although interesting that a program that's theme was the expansion of christ to other cultures didn't end up coming up with more examples)
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