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One detail that I find fascinating about Christian anarchism is the way it interacts with Christian power structures.
There's a great book about the early Christian church and it's conflicts called "The Gnostic Gospels" by Elaine Pagels. It's definitely an academic read but very fascinating to me. It shows how many of the current doctrines were not a given in the first few centuries of Christianity.
The most illuminating part to me was how it understood the development of church hierarchy. The largest conflict was between the developing Catholic church and the "gnostics" who they considered heretics. The gnostics generally had a view that each individual had a personal relationship with god/christ and as such there didn't need to be this church hierarchy. The Catholics instead believed that true knowledge essentially flowed from the pope downward. There are were a bunch of other disagreements that were interesting but this one was at the heart of it.
Of course the gnostics were eventually expelled and they disappeared. Then the Protestant Reformation sort of rebelled against a lot of that hierarchy, but still held onto many of those hierarchical beliefs of the Catholics.
I view Christian Anarchism in the vein of Tolstoy as the inheritor of that decentralized early gnostic belief. It reinvents a lot of those looser structures by focusing so much on the individual's religious views and spirituality. It eschews church structure and organized religion in general. Which has always been the worst part of any religion.
I highly recommend that book for anyone interested in history and religion. I'm not Christian myself, but I grew up Christian, so it was very interesting being able to dissect some of those early beliefs and see how much of today's Christianity is built on millennia-old arguments about heresy.
I’ve always thought that Paul appropriated the early church and turned into the strict hierarchical structure is has today.
That book has a large part that is directly about that. It's interesting the way it breaks down on a theological level though.
One of the most interesting ways to me was actually regarding the debate about whether Jesus resurrected physically or spiritually. Gnostics thought of the resurrection as more of a ghost, while Catholics thought of it as the resurrection of the physical body. However, this allowed the Catholic church to limit who encountered the resurrected Jesus to mostly just the disciples and gang. Meanwhile the gnostics thought that anyone could see a vision from ghost jesus and it would be just as legitimate as the disciples' experience.
This fed into the divide between hierarchy and decentralization. The Catholic Church used the authority derived from physically encountering Jesus to say the disciples were the ones with the true knowledge. Paul in particular was decided as the successor by Jesus, and as such they created a hierarchy. Paul then passed this on to his successor creating the lineage of Popes. All based off of that single experience with the resurrection.
The Gnostics didn't see it this way, and as such rejected the hierarchy of the popehood. Since Jesus could appear to anyone, that knowledge was accessible to anyone. It didn't need to funnel through the disciples.