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Accident of History. An expert in the history of the early church, Brandon has some iconoclastic ideas about the evolution of the Christian understanding of destiny. In effect, he argues that the form in which that understanding came down to the present day is largely the result of an accident of history—the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The Christian teaching that a Saviour God redeemed sinful man by his death on the Cross and will return at the end of history to judge the world, he points out, contains echoes of Greek, Jewish and Egyptian teaching. So elaborate a doctrine must have emerged only after decades of theological argument. To most Christian laymen, the story of this development is disguised by the seemingly natural arrangement of the New Testament: the life of Jesus in the Gospels is followed, in Acts, by an account of the early church, then by an elaborate theological explanation of the Christian message in Paul's Epistles.
In reality, as Brandon and others before him point out, the earliest New Testament documents are the Pauline Epistles, written before A.D. 68. In these letters to young churches, Paul is defending his interpretation of Christ from attacks by unnamed enemies. These opponents, too powerful for him to criticize openly, were almost certainly the Apostles James and Peter, who governed the mother church of Christianity in Jerusalem. Brandon argues that these first disciples thought of Jesus exclusively within the context of Jewish history. To them, the Messiah was simply a national hero, who would bring Israel to glory at the imminently awaited Parousia (second coming); his message was meant primarily for the Jews. But Paul, a Roman citizen and a cosmopolite familiar with Greek learning, reinterpreted Jesus, on the authority of his own private revelations from God, as the Saviour of all mankind.
The Jerusalem church censured Paul in A.D. 56 for the heresy of believing that gentiles could be saved. But 14 years later, Roman troops destroyed the city and dispersed its inhabitants. Since the church of Jesus' own disciples was so fortuitously wiped out, Paul's interpretation of Jesus gradually was accepted by other congregations as the authentic teaching.
The Gospels, which were all written after the fall of Jerusalem, reflect this Pauline view of Jesus as Lord of History, rather than the original apostolic understanding of him as Jewish hero.
Science's Effect. In the writings of Augustine, Aquinas and other church fathers, Pauline Christianity flowered into what Brandon feels was man's most completely satisfying attempt to explain the nature of man, the world and divine judgment.
Now that flower is sadly wilted. Brandon blames that old devil science. Christianity taught that man was saved in a universe where God's grace was present. Yet science explains the world "as the field of the interplay of impersonal forces, where man and his needs and aspirations appear completely irrelevant." Brandon sees the intense interest in the works of thinkers like Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as an indication of Christian man's need to escape from his present cultural schizophrenia by finding a viable explanation of the teleological character of the universe.