My Jesus is bigger than Yours; Celebrating The Differences Together

Mark Bachchan Kujur
Feb 19, 2016
2 min read

Catholicism was the dominant Christian religion of the Western Europe before the Protestant Reformation - the religious struggle during the 16th & 17th century - which began as an effort to reform the Catholic Church and ended with the splintering of the Western Christiandom into the Catholic and Protestant Churches.

For over a century and a half following the Reformation the streets of Europe were drenched with the blood of Protestants and Catholics as everyone tried to kill everyone in the name of 'their' Jesus and 'their' True Church. "My Jesus is bigger than yours"

However, in the early modern period of Christianity, a semblance of sanity descended on both Catholics and Protestants and several strategies were developed to deal with religious diversity - namely, Christian diversity; Christian-Jewish-Muslim diversity; and, the diversity of Eastern and new religions. Today, most of the mainline Christian churches are continuing with the processes of adjustments with various sects and religions.

Diana Butler Bass, in 'A People's History of Christianity', gives an example of efforts made during post-Reformation period by Protestants and Catholics towards peaceful co-existence. Ms Bass writes, "One of the most imaginative rendering of toleration in the Europe of that period is the Church of St.Martin's in Biberach, Germany. There in 1548, Protestant and Catholic townspeople created a Simultankirche, a 'simultaneous church'. A single Church that has two naves, a Lutheran one and a Catholic one. From one direction the Church appears Protestant in its depiction of biblical scenes and the life of Jesus; from the other it appears Roman Catholic, decorated with its panoply of church fathers, saints, popes and the Virgin Mary........In 1649 The city fathers worked out a schedule of services for the church......... The same church bells called both communities to worship. Protestant and Catholic neighbours passed one another in the church doors on the way to their sacred services.

'Thus', writes historian Benjamin Kaplan, 'were Protestant and Catholic Biberachers (religious groups sharing use of a building) required to share a building charged with symbolism.....It required opponents to face one another, acknowledge publicly one another's existence, share resources, and cooperate.'........ Regular people learned the art of accepting differences - the skills they translated into the political arena regarding issues of citizenship, intermarriage, and inheritance. They learned to let 'God's house be used by God's enemies', eventually finding the way to peaceful coexistence and outright toleration."