Sect or Cult?

Moving away from the safe territory of the previous set of posts I thought I would jump into a little foray on sects and cults. The post is a little (but only ever so little) provocative.

‘Sectarian’ although strictly just meaning to belong to a particular sect often manifests in prejudice, discrimination and hatred. Sects can breed sectarianism in this sense of opposition to others, but a sect does not necessarily have to mean that is the outcome.

A sect is recognised as a sub-set within a broader classification (more later on this). A cult though is viewed as having deviant beliefs (or behaviour / practices) and therefore not true to the core beliefs of what it is loosely connected to. Traditionally, for example, Mormonism has been viewed as a cult, with sufficient beliefs that made it different to ‘orthodox’ Christianity. Some ‘cults’ are later rehabilitated and accepted (and maybe if we have a particular political allegiance and someone from that former cult is running for a position of power that just might influence the push for acceptance?).

There are three core monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All three connect in some way to the biblical stories. Judaism has the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (although this latter term is late, originally it was known as the Mikra, meaning that which is read). The Tanakh, we can say, corresponds to our ‘Old Testament’, and Christians add a ‘New Testament’ (and of course within the big Christian traditions there are different authoritative writings (canons)). Islam has the Quran and holds respect for prophets such as Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus; Muhammad being the final prophet. The Quran being the words from Allah that he communicated to Muhammad via the angel Gabriel.

Islam, the most recent of the three monotheistic faiths, has an interesting beginning. The context is of Arabia where Muhammad receives a revelation in a cave. In an animistic / polytheistic culture he proclaims there is one true god (Allah being the Arabic word for ‘god’). Into that context that is quite a proclamation.

Was his revelation from heaven? Was there any part of it that came from heaven? Or was it simply ‘demonic’?

A sect is a distinct grouping within a wider context; essentially believing that they are more faithful to the worldview and beliefs of the wider group they belong to. In the Jewish world there are, and certainly were in Jesus’ day numerous Jewish sects. We come across two main ones in the NT, with the Pharisees and the Sadducees. There were others, certainly the Essenes (maybe they based themselves at Qumran with the Dead Sea Scrolls being related to them); the Herodians might be more a political distinction than religious; and likewise the Zealots might be a term more related to their proposed methodology than to their religious party affiliation. It is for this reason we cannot really say ‘the Jews believed’. In the time of Jesus the Sadducees were the dominant group inside the Sanhedrin. They were less in favour of oral tradition than the Pharisees, who in turn were further divided dependent on which of the Rabbis was viewed as the one to follow (in Jesus’ day the schools of two rabbis, Hillel and Shammai were well established and their different views on divorce lay behind the question posed to Jesus about divorce, a question that was intended to set him up). Pharisees believed in resurrection, the Sadducees did not (which shows how much we read into Scriptures when we insist that such beliefs are there in the Old Testament). Probably the Pharisees carried greater weight among the people and influenced the common understanding; and certainly post AD-70 it was their approach that became the dominant one, with Rabbinic Judaism becoming mainline Judaism.

Paul was a Pharisee, and he excelled within that. He was righteous, zealous for the Law, such zeal being in line with Old Testament action, such as the ‘righteous’ actions of the sons of Levi who slaughtered 3000 fellow-Jews, in order to keep the people pure. (Did the later Paul have the same interpretation of their action as he would have held before his conversion?) He persecuted followers of Jesus… Jewish-followers of Jesus as there were no other kind of ‘Christians’ at that time. He would not have been interested in whether a bunch of renegade Gentiles developed some kind of faith in Jesus, for after all they never were part of the chosen people. I think his attitude would have been ‘believe what you want, you’re damned already’. On the other hand if Jews were to proclaim that Jesus (crucified and therefore evidently cursed and not the son of God) was the Messiah that would only provoke God to anger. Paul knew that he and his fellow Jews were already in trouble, so to prevent compounding the problem, he being devoted to the law, was motivated to persecute any unfaithful person in Israel. He went house to house to cleanse the people.

His own reflections were:

• He was righteous according to the law and his traditions.
• He now understood that he was a blasphemer (he had been misrepresenting God),
• and was formerly ignorant (so says Mr Highly Learned Saul of Tarsus!).

His conversion was no small thing. It was more than a tweak, and perhaps there is real value in suggesting that he found the solution (Jesus) so had to then work backwards to find out what the problem was.

We could describe Christianity (followers of the way) as another Jewish sect, though perhaps Paul would have seen them as a cult.

Here are a few wacky suggestions.

• Maybe Islam is a non-Jewish Jewish sect / cult, with a belief in Abraham et al.
• Probably Islam drinks from the well that much of Christianity became, the Christianity of power, control and Christendom.
• The revelation that is in Jesus of who God is (and also who humanity at core is) positions faith in Jesus in an interesting place. Islam the god of power, sovereignty… I pause for a moment, so how different is that from the god of much of Christianity / certainly the god of Christendom?
• Maybe Islam (some forms of) and Christianity (some forms of) even go beyond that of a Paul-as-Pharisee response to not only purifying the people of faith, but wanting to purify one and all, and produce a Christian (or Islamic) nation. Shock… I don’t see that as being very smart. Going beyond the one who claimed his behaviour was blasphemous?
• Jesus, the Incarnation, the humility, the eternal servant-nature. Scripture does not suggest the Incarnation is a temporary revelation, for we read that ‘being in the form of God’, Jesus, being God, acts in a God-like way and empties himself.
• Maybe there are forms of Islam, Judaism (the one that Paul adhered to that later he said was a misrepresentation of God) and Christianity that are all from the same well. Do they have a revelation from heaven… in part?… or simply demonic? That well being ‘God sovereign over all, and we live from that basis’?
• What if we are all sects of the big worldview that there is only one true God? All thinking we represent the God we believe in just believing we are doing it better than all other sects.

I used to think I was part of a sect (Protestantism is full of sects) that was pushing to be true to what Jesus had revealed (centred on ecclesiology: the right form of church). I wonder if I should push it wider and ask if we are all just a variation, a sub-set of a bigger monotheistic belief, and perhaps we would do well to seek avoiding crossing the line and becoming a cult. And finally how deviant do we have to be (belief and / or behaviour) to no longer be a sect but to become a cult?