«The God of the ancient Jews, the God of the Old Testament, was the prototype of the Christian God. Strictly speaking, for Christianity it is the same God, only his relationship with man changes. Thus, the Old Testament faith is seen as a preparation for the New Testament, i.e. a new union of man with God. And indeed, despite the significant differences in the ideas of the Old and New Testaments, it is the Old Testament sages who for the first time have those spiritual requests that Christianity was able to answer. But first let’s focus on the differences» (Gurevich A. Ya. Categories of medieval culture. M., 1994, p.67).
If the God of the Old Testament is addressed to the whole people as a whole, then the God of the New Testament is addressed to each individual. The Old Testament God pays great attention to the fulfillment of a complex religious law and the rules of everyday life, numerous rituals accompanying each event. The God of the New Testament is addressed primarily to the inner life and inner faith of each person.
«However, already in the Old Testament we see man’s thirst for a genuine encounter with God and the desire to spiritually free himself from subordination to the external side of life. These motives are primarily expressed in the book of Job and the book of Ecclesiastes» (Men A. History of Religion. M., 1993, vol. V, p. 56). This desire for spiritual overcoming of the external side of existence is especially evident at the turn of our era, because the people again fall under the power of foreigners, which this time became the Romans. In the Old Testament history, God fulfilled his promise, gave the people a place for independent life. Now all that remained was to wait for the Savior, who, according to the beliefs of the ancient Jews, was to save the entire people and become the head of the kingdom. But the Savior (in Greek – Christ) did not come, and it only remained to think: or maybe the expected salvation will not be at all national-state, but spiritual in nature? It was with such a sermon that Jesus spoke.
«It is impossible to conclude from doubts about the reliability of individual biographical details that the preacher Jesus never existed as a historical person. In this case, the very emergence of Christianity and the spiritual impulse that (despite all private disagreements) unites and leads the authors of the Gospels (they formed in the late – early 1—2 centuries AD) and unites the first Christian communities becomes a miracle» (Petrov M. K. Socio-cultural foundations of the development of modern science. M., 2005, p.40). After all, this spiritual impulse is too brilliant and powerful to be just the result of a concerted invention.
Subsequent events have shown that the content of the new spirituality (and it was realized not only in the sermon, but also in the very life of Jesus and his closest disciples) has a meaning that goes far beyond the borders of little Judea. At this time, the Roman Empire is being engulfed by a gradually increasing spiritual (semantic) crisis: in the vast expanses of the empire, people feel spiritually lost, they become only cogs of a huge bureaucratic machine, without which it is impossible to manage the empire. Traditional pagan gods expressed a sense of spiritual involvement in the life of the cosmos, the continuation of which was perceived as the life of the ancient city-state (polis). In the 1—2 centuries, the first Christian communities began to appear, which were persecuted, and after the adoption of Christianity as the state religion in the 4th century in Rome, Christianity became a feudal exploiter.
Man was created by God in the «image and likeness of God», i.e. he is a person with freedom and creative ability. The freedom of the individual is connected with the fact that it embodies the supramundane spirit originating from the Divine Spirit. The original sin of Adam and Eve violated the God-likeness of man and alienated him from God, but the image of God remained intact in man. The whole subsequent history is considered by Christianity as the history of the reunion of man with God.
The highest religious goal of Christianity is salvation. The specificity of the Christian understanding of salvation is expressed in the dogmas of the trinity and the Incarnation of God. God eternally has three equivalent persons (personalities:) – the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit – united by a single divine essence («nature») and having a single will. At the same time, Christian theology demands «not to mix persons and not to separate entities.» The Savior (Christ) is one of the persons of the one God (God the Son). God the Son incarnates into human nature («becomes human») and becomes Jesus of Nazareth in order to atone for original sin and create conditions for the restoration of man’s God-likeness. «God became man so that man could become God,» the Church fathers said (true, man is not called to become God «by nature», but «god by grace»). Salvation requires spiritual efforts from a person, and, above all, faith, but it is impossible to be saved independently, this requires an appeal to Jesus Christ and the effective intervention of the Savior himself. The way of Salvation is the way of becoming like Jesus: spiritual fusion with the person of Christ and (with His help) purification and transformation of one’s (sinful) nature, which leads a person to final deliverance from the power of sin and death. However (due to the consequences of original sin), a person cannot escape bodily death. However, the human soul and his personality (spiritual «I») are immortal.
The path to salvation and eternal life in unity with God for man lies through physical death; this path is paved by the death of the cross and the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Salvation is possible only in the bosom of the Church, which is the «body of Christ»: it unites believers in one mystical body with the «deified», sinless human nature of Christ. Theologians compared the unity of the Church with the unity of loving spouses, merging in love into one flesh, having the same desires and will, but preserving themselves as free individuals. Christ is the head of this one, but many-faced church body, just as the husband is the head of the marriage union (hence the self-designation of the nuns: «brides of Christ»).
Christian morality proceeds from the self-worth of the individual (the individual is the «image of God» in a person) and the indissoluble connection of goodness, truth and freedom. «…You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,» «Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin,» Jesus said (John 8:32,34). At the same time, goodness and truth are expressed not in impersonal formal rules, but in the very person of Jesus Christ; hence the fundamental informalizability of Christian morality, which by its very essence is the morality of freedom. Expressing human freedom, the truly Christian faith rests not on fear and external duty, but on love directed to Christ and to each person as the bearer of the image of God.
Good is done by man through the use of free will in the name of personality and love: «Whoever does not love has not known God, because God is love» (1 John 4:8). Another use of free will turns into its self-denial and spiritual degradation of a person. Thus, human freedom contains not only the possibility of good, but also the risk of evil. Evil is a false application of freedom; the truth of freedom is good. Therefore, evil has no independent essence and is reduced only to the negation of good: all supposedly independent definitions of evil turn out to be only definitions of good taken with the opposite sign.
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