We shall first look at the history of the Church, for "by their fruit ye shall know them", we shall then discuss the theology of ecclesiology (the doctrine of the Church) - what are the doctrinal arguments for the Church as an institution? Finally we shall look at the alternative Christian tradition of individual Christianity, as exemplified by Ellen White in The Great Controversy.

The Church Controlled by Satan
In his book All in the Mind (Hodder and Stoughton 1999, ISBN 0 340 68064 4) the author Ludovic Kennedy remarks as follows.

"In all the millions of words that have been written about the history of the Christian Churches between, say, 500 and 1800, there is very little recorded about love and mercy and forgiveness - I do not mean of God to humans but of humans to humans. There are on the other hand many accounts of Christian barbarities, some unspeakable, perpetrated by the Churches on those who disagreed with them." (p. 108)

Kennedy lists many wrongs committed in the name of Christianity throughout history. Here are some of them.

Murder of those who disagreed with Orthodox Christianity.
In 396 St Augustine became Bishop of Hippo, and like Bishop Ambrose of Milan believed non-Orthodox Christians had to be crushed. Jerome, author of the Vulgate translation of the Bible, speaks of hideous tortures inflicted on those who refused to recant, red-hot plates applied to the genitals and laceration with whips tipped with lead.

In 710 the Archbishop of Ravenna disobeyed a command from the Pope, for which the Pope ordered that he have his eyes gouged out - a standard punishment for the time.

In 760 when Pope Paul I died a local duke names Toto organised a coup with three brothers, one of whom, Constantine, was proclaimed Pope. Another claimant, called Christopher, resisted and had his eyes gouged out, suffered other mutilations and died of his injuries a few days later. The same fate met another of the brothers and his chief supporter, who also had his tongue cut out. Constantine himself was dragged from his palace, locked up in a monastery and blinded before being thrown at the feet of another claimant who became Pope Stephen III.

In 782 Charlemagne beheaded four and a half thousand Saxons for worshipping a non-Christian god.

The Crusades saw many horrific acts committed in the name of Christianity. In order to pay for the first crusade hundred of Jews were butchered for their wealth by German crusaders in cities like Mainz, Worms and Spier In 1097 the Crusaders captured Jerusalem and killed between 30,000 and 40,000 Jews and Moslems in two days. A Christian knight, Count Raymond of Aguilers wrote:

"wonderful sights were to be seen. Some of our men cut off the heads of our enemies, others shot them with arrows so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. What more shall I tell? Not one of them was allowed to live. They did not spare the women or children. The horses waded in blood up to their knees, nay up to the bridle. It was a just and wonderful judgement of God."

A popular slogan was "we shall slay for God's love" and St Bernard preached "a Christian glories in the death of a Moslem because Christ is glorified".

In 1209 a "crusade" against the people of Languedoc and Provence in France was declared. The heretics were called the "Albigenses" because many of them lived around Albi, the army attached the beautiful towns and villages, killing between 15,000 and 20,000. Simon de Montfort in charge of the army was asked how he would be able to distinguish between the heretics and Catholics, he replied "kill them all, God will look after his own". No mercy was shown to women, children or the old. Prisoners were blinded, mutilated, dragged behind the hooves of horses and used as target practise by archers. De Montfort organised three mass burnings of those who refused to recant.

In 1231 the Papal Inquisition was set up in which torture was permitted on prisoners in order to extract confessions.

The Protestant Reformation again saw the Catholic Church kill those who disagreed with her. John Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" details the suffering and deaths of Protestants executed during Queen Mary's attempt to turn England back to Rome. The book first appeared in 1563 and was expanded in 1570 to 2,300 pages describing the oppression of English Protestants at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. The book was displayed in churches across the country and by the seventeenth century there were 10,000 copies in circulation. After the Bible it was the most available book in the land.

The story of Katherine Cawches, burned at the stake with her two daughters in St Peter Port, Guernsey in 1556, contains the account of how the pregnant belly of one of her daughters exploded. Out popped a newborn baby, carried clear of the flames by the force of the explosion, only to be taken from the crowd of onlookers and thrown back into the fire by a bailiff. Foxe adds that the child was therefore 'both born and died a martyr, leaving behind to the world, which it never saw, a spectacle wherein the whole world may see the Herodian cruelty of this graceless generation of popish tormentors, to their perpetual shame and infamy'.

One particularly memorable description is the execution of Ridley and Latimer, bishops of London and Worcester. Condemned to be burned at the stake for their refusal to recant and acknowledge the authority of Rome, on 16th October 1555 the two men were brought to a ditch outside Balliol College, Oxford. There they were made to listen to Dr Richard Smith preach a sermon on the text 'If I give my body to be burnt and have no charity, it profiteth me nothing'. Then their outer clothes were stripped from them and given to the crowd.They were shackled to a stake by a chain round their waists, the faggots of wood piled up around their feet. Ridley's brother is said to have appeared with a bag of gunpowder, which he tied around the bishop's neck, to shorten the agony. Ridley asked him to do the same for the elderly Latimer, after which the wood at their feet was set alight. As the flames licked around them, Latimer is said to have cried out to his fellow bishop, 'Be of good comfort, Master Ridley. We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out.' Latimer died quickly, Ridely only after revolting agonies.

Promoted unhealthy anti-sex and anti-woman doctrines.
The early Church Fathers such as St Augustine believed sexual pleasure was sinful. St Augustine said that for a man to gain pleasure from having sex with his wife and to arouse her sufficiently to gain pleasure from it to, was like treating her as a whore and himself as an adulterer. He believed virginity was the moral ideal and marriage without sex the next best thing. St Augustine avoided the company of women altogether and never let any inside his house. Wasting sperm was also regarded as a sin: an Anglo-Saxon penitential of around 800 CE laid down seven years or a lifelong penance for oral intercourse, ten years for anal intercourse and seven to ten years for the taking of an abortifacient to destroy the foetus. Masturbation was forbidden. Methods of intercourse were also controlled. The missionary position was approved of, but the woman sitting astride the man required three years penance.

In 1139 Pope Innocent II declared that priests could no longer marry, and those already married were no longer allowed to sleep in the same bedroom as their wives.

Superstition.
Many churches kept "artefacts" from the time of the Bible. For example Reading Abbey in England lists 242 different items from the Bible, such as the rods of Moses and Aaron, Jesus's swaddling clothes and his mother's hair. In the thirteenth century the Lateran Basilica in Rome listed in its possession the Ark of the Covenant, the Ten Commandments, an urn full of manna, the shirt of John the Baptist and the remains of five loaves and two fishes. The Sainte Chapelle in Paris in 1248 housed the Crown of Thorns, also a portion of the True Cross, the lance and sponge from the crucifxion and the skull of John the Baptist.

Penances are another example of superstition - performing some task to earn remission of sins. For example wearing a hair shirt for three days or singing one hundred psalms, walking barefoot or fasting on bread and water were all ways to earn remission for specific sins. Pilgrimage was another way, and going to Rome or Jerusalem could earn full remission of sins. Sometimes penitents would pay others to perform penances for them. Papal indulgences could be bought from the Church which would allow the sinner to go to heaven immediately without going to purgatory first.

The Burning of Witches.
Hundeds of thousands of people were burnt as witches by the church, following the commandment "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Ex 22:18). Archbishop von Schoneburg burned 368 witches in twenty-two villages, so that in two of them there was only one female left. The Bishop of Wurzburg burned more than 900, including his nephew, nineteen priests and a child of seven, while in Bamberg the bishop had 600 burned in a period of ten years. In England torture was forbidden, and fewer than 1,000 witches were hanged over a hundred year period, whereas in Scotland torture was permitted and 4,500 witches were hanged, strangled or burned. The last witchcraft trial took place in Scotland in 1727, when an old woman was strangled for turning her daughter into a pony; while in mainland Europe the last recorded execution of a witch was in Switzerland in 1787.

Ecclesiology
Tradition has seen the Church as mediator between opposing terms: law/spirit, faith/works etc - it is the Church who resolves the opposing terms, but this was not the message of Christ. Christ came to cut the tree with an axe, not to prune it. He said follow me, not visit me regularly. The Church as mediator means the Church compromises the two terms being mediated. Jesus prayed that his followers would be one: not the two of clergy and laity. Jesus did not join a religious hierarchy, he opposed the religious hierarchy. He did not add religious laws he deconstructed them.

Paul attacked the clergy/laity concept (formulated at the time into apostles and laity) when he proclaimed that any who had experienced the risen Christ were apostles - thus he too was an apostle with authority. By extension we are all priests ("the priesthood of all believers") and so are one, not two.

Elaine Pagels in "The Gnostic Gospels" shows how the development of Church theology reintroduced the bureaucracy and power structures of the Church, theology thus became an ideology of organisational power.

What is the story of the early church structure? This is certainly not an important theme in the New Testament, but rather something that occurs in the background. Why? Because the message of God we find opposed to hierarchy and control. Paul, the champion of the individual believer, is constantly in conflict with James and the organised Church. Far from establishing an earthly structure, the message of the New Testament is that the Church as the people of God are constantly fighting the concept of the Church as earthly structure.

Peter is called the rock and the holder of the keys of the kingdom. The symbol of the keys portrays Peter as a doorkeeper, yet if he is the rock, how can he also hold the keys? How can we enter the kingdom through a rock? The solution to this puzzle is to understand that Jesus was not making Peter the founder of an earthly structure, the first Priest to control and command the laity. Jesus was using apocalyptic imagery, found in the books of the Old Testament such as Deuteronomy and Daniel and used also in the New Testament in the book of Revelation. To understand the use of such terms we need to read Matthew 16:13-20 as a piece of apocalyptic literature and interpret the symbols accordingly. For example "the rock cut out of the mountain, but not by human hands - a rock that broke the icon, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold to pieces" (Dan 2:45). The people of God exist upon the ruins of earthly power, not within another earthly structure legitimising more human power and authority.

The law is no longer a religious duty interpreted by the clergy or priesthood. The law/command/word spoken by God (Gen 1:1-3, John 1:1-3) is a new creation, the law in its natural, heavenly state. Jesus shows that the true law was that spoken from the beginning. When questioned about an apparent contradiction between what he was saying and the law of Moses, Jesus replied "Moses permitted you… but it was not this way from the beginning" (Matt 19:8). This clearly shows we should look at what was spoken from the beginning as the true law, not the Torah or Law of Moses, which Jesus shows cannot be the ultimate law.

Tradition is not fixed and unchanging. The history of the Church is full of reinterpretation, rewriting, retelling. If this was not so, the Church would still be conducting crusades. So if there is no fixed tradition that a believer can use as a guide, does it follow there needs to be an institution to tell the believer what to believe and how to act? Should the individual be obedient to a human institution? No, we cannot worship two Gods - obedience to God through our own conscience must be our only master, we cannot accept the words of a man as having divine authority. We are free of we are nothing.

We should be informed by the past but under no obligation to it, nor controlled by it. The People of God are married to Christ, not to the past and tradition and we should not therefore "commit adultery" by lusting after tradition instead of staying true to Christ.

The Alternative Christian Tradition
In The Great Controversy Ellen White traces an alternative Christian Tradition of individuals who opposed the established Church and worshipped God directly instead. The Christian Church is just an example of another human religion, where the "religious professionals" rule the community, controlling faith and worship, fighting battles amongst themselves and writing almost all the books. They have been a mixed group of people: bishops, monks, professors and others, but over the centuries they have developed a complex ideology called "Christianity". The term "Church" in popular English idiom refers to the clergy as a corporation, "going into the Church" is being ordained. Church history is the history of the clergy, and theology is clerical ideology, the means by which the professionals justify and seek to extend their power.

The "decline of religion" doesn't mean people have become less religious, but rather the corporations of religious professionals are much less powerful than they used to be, secularisation emancipates and empowers the laity.

One area of alternative Christianity is the mystical tradition, which represents a thinly-veiled religious protest against the higher clergy's claims to have divine authority to set up roadblocks and collect fees all the Way to salvation. The mystic through visions directly challenges the Church's claim to have access to God - for the visions show that God deals directly with individuals. What we need to beware of are organisations that seek to "spin" the visions into another ideology of organisational control.

We should not be nostalgic for power and authority in church institutions. There are people who feel nostalgic for the monarchy and feel emotionally that it is a better system of government than democracy. This democratisation of Christianity should be seen as its emancipation, not its decline. The Christianity of visions, direct access to God, waiting for God to do new things - expecting God to do new things - is a deeper, more loving, more truthful Christianity.