Tag Archives: Early Christianity

The Place of Authority 2-5: The Constantinian Revolution Part 1-The Rise of Power and the Crisis of Authenticity

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The Baptism of Constantine, 1520-1524 by students of Raphael, Public Domain Art

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please” Luke 6.5f NRSV

In 312 CE when Emperor Constantine adopts a favorable stance towards the church and ends roughly 150 years of various levels of persecution a major change takes place. Christianity moves from the position of powerless to powerful, from being viewed as atheistic to becoming the religion of the empire (although this move is not completed under Constantine, it begins here) from being a persecuted and scattered minority to being an institution able to build large buildings, gather and deliberate in public and to freely communicate back and forth. In short the world that the church knows is turned upside down and it raises a lot of questions then and now. For some the church sold its soul to the devil and aligned itself with Rome, was corrupted and would never be the same. For others this was the Church’s great triumph and it ushered in the new age for the Christian Church. Reality is probably somewhere between these two extremes, but this was an era of such remarkable change in the church’s identity and authority that we need to spend a little time here.

People flocked into the now suddenly popular church. Church buildings became large structures like the temples of other religions, priests and leaders who had previously dressed in common clothes began to wear formal dress, and even incense once the province of the Imperial court became an aspect of the church’s worship. There also is a sense in which the leaders began to model themselves after the Old Testament priesthood and to occupy more of a priestly role within the church and society. Those in the church who viewed the emperor’s favor as a positive thing began to look upon the emperor as the one anointed by God to bring both history and the empire to its apex. But this sudden rise was certainly not without its own set of crises and problems.

There was a major crisis of authenticity within the church. Many Christians had faithfully endured shame, suffering and in several cases death and had not renounced their faith-but others, including some leaders had under the pressure of interrogation or the threat of death sworn an oath of allegiance to Caesar, had handed over Christian scriptures or in some other way renounced their faith. Others had simply fled away from the persecution rather than to become a martyr for various reasons. Now that Christianity was no longer a persecuted religion it raised many new questions: “Do those members and leaders of the community who renounced their faith still have a place within the community?” “Does the work of leaders who renounced their faith still have a valid standing (for example does a person baptized by a leader who renounced the faith need to be re-baptized)?”  “How do we accept new members who have not had to go through the struggles we went through when we became Christians?” “Are these new converts to the faith doing this for reasons of social advancement or are they doing it because of a sincere devotion to God?” These were not questions answered easily or quickly.

One of the early controversies within this change has to do with leaders who failed to remain faithful through the persecution. The Donatist controversy, where the question of “did the faithfulness of the leader impact the efficacy of an act (like baptism or eucharist or forgiveness) or not?” Paired with this question was the secondary question of whether a lapsed or unfaithful leader could return to leadership within the church. Ultimately the church answered that the ministry they did was valid and that it was possible (although not necessarily automatic) that a leader who under pressure had renounced his faith (and it was almost always a male leader at this point) could return to an active role in the leadership of the church.  With this new members were welcomed and many quickly joined the Christian church now that it was no longer a persecuted minority. When in 380 CE Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire under Emperor Theodosius the church is still trying to sort through the effects of the transition to being the dominant religion.

For some this was a severe dilution of the holiness of the church and they would in many cases flee from the cities and attempt to live a holy life in isolation or in communities. This is not the beginning of Monasticism, where monks and nuns would retreat from the world around them in order to live holy lives, but it certainly marked an escalation in the number of people trying to pull away in order to be faithful.  In contrast to the regality that clergy and worship throughout the empire were beginning to adopt, the monks and nuns fled into the wilderness or out of the cities to practice a simpler and more constant devotion. These monks and nuns would provide one of the major institutions that would be important for the centuries to come. The monks and sisters would evolve into one of the major reforming voices in the church. Monks would both pose a challenge to the bishops and their sometimes very worldly lives and at other times they would find themselves called upon to be leaders of the church. The monks would also be responsible for preserving much of the knowledge that would otherwise be lost in the conflicts of the coming centuries.

Even with all of these challenges the position of the church had changed dramatically. With that change came the ability to focus internally on how it would determine what it would believe, to formalize its doctrine and its cannon, and to move towards becoming the authority the society would look to in the coming collapse. The authority of the church would not go unchallenged, but as the church addressed these challenges it would centralize its authority, its doctrine, and in this age of the theologian bishops two major authorities would hold power-the emperor and the council and it is to this reality that we will turn next.

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The Place of Authority 2-4: The Practices of the Early Church

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Baptism Fresco on the Catacombs of St. Marcellinus and Peter, Via Labicana, Rome, Italy

There are two ways, one of life and one of death, but a great difference between the two ways. The way of life, then, is this: First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbor as yourself, and do not do to another what you would not want done to you. Didache (Chapter 1), 2nd Century Christian Writing

There are times I feel like Cuthbert Binns, the History of Magic Teacher from the Harry Potter series who one day falls asleep in the teacher’s lounge, dies and then as a ghost goes on teaching without seeming to realize the difference. I hope that unlike Cuthbert my approach to looking at authority within the history of Judaism and now Christianity is not incessantly boring, and is rather enlightening as we go back through time and examine the story of how we got where we are today. There are times where I want to take a shorter path, but I personally am learning a lot from going back and re-engaging material I haven’t studied since seminary-I have made some new connections that will impact some of my conclusions.

Practices are critical to the formation of identity and they help to shape what the people and any group come to believe. As Prosper of Aquitaine (390-455 CE), a Christian from a later era than I am currently discussing, memorably put it “the rule of prayer should lay down the rule of faith” (Pelikan, The Christian Tradition 1:339) and so the everyday practices of early Christians allowed them to make sense of the persecution they received from the Romans or the struggles they went through in their daily lives. It also gave them the basis of their community and bound them together with Christians across the empire and indeed across the world. Practices may not sound exciting to talk about, but their meaning will be discussed and debated for the millennia to come.

Love is the foundational idea that gets worked out in these practices, a love for neighbor and even for enemy that forms the basis for the actions of the early church. Certainly there will be many times where the early churches (like modern churches) will fail to live up to this ideal, yet in a society with no social safety net the vulnerable (the widows, orphans, immigrant and the elderly or disabled) were often taken in by many of the early churches and given identity and meaning. Certainly there were apologists and early thinkers like Justin Martyr or Origin who tried to make an intellectual case for Christianity, but most people came to Christianity through the example and witness of anonymous Christians, and they were invited into the journey of coming Christian by people who they encountered in the marketplace, their homes and their worksites.

With the persecution by the Roman Empire it was a dangerous thing to become a Christian, and early Christians wanted to make sure that potential converts were truly seekers and not spies. Often there would be a detailed process of catechesis, education in the faith, before a seeker would be admitted to the mysteries of the faith (baptism and then communion or Eucharist). Most of these communities were rather small, meeting in houses, cemeteries, catacombs  or in business places both because they could not have afforded a building dedicated for their meetings, but also for fear of being detected by authorities.

Baptism was the mystery of faith that led to identity with the church and mystically with Christ. A person in the waters was made clean, forgiven of sins, regenerated into a new person and received the Holy Spirit. Once a person was baptized they were a full participant in the life of the community, they could worship with all their new brothers and sisters in Christ, they could partake in the Eucharist. Even without any significant conflict the meaning of baptism was pretty much stabilized by the end of the second century with no real conflict over practice and thought (with one exception) until the time of the Reformation.

Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper or Communion was a community meal in which the people present celebrated their unity in Christ, remembered the actions of Jesus during the last week of his life and shared a meal that they understood having both spiritual and earthly realities. The precision of the debates that would emerge during the time of the reformation are not present, but the idea of the Eucharist having the power to transform the bodies of the early Christians from corruptible to incorruptible or they could call it the ‘flesh of Christ’ or even a sacrifice, but the fact that they didn’t nail down precisely what was happening did not stop them from trying to explain what it meant. It would take focusing in on Christology (who Christ was) before the early Church would have the language for the precision of later centuries.

 Around both of these realities was worship which focused on Jesus, eating together with the community, sharing their lives together and continuing to confess “Jesus as their Lord” even in the face of hardship. As the church moved into the third century it was still a persecuted group, the basics of structure had come into being (offices like bishop, presbyter and deacon were used-people set aside for helping the community function, but it was not a hierarchical as we are used to and there was not a specific class of clergy) and there was the beginning of movement towards what a canon would look like, what practices would be formational, and at least some commonality in what was to be believed, but a major change was on the horizon, a change that would transform the church from top to bottom. For some the early church was about to experience its triumph, for others it was making a deal with the devil, but in 312 CE the emergence of Constantine, an emperor favorably disposed to Christianity, the church would have to redefine itself yet again and ask itself the questions of authority that continually emerge.

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The Place of Authority 2-3:The Early Church’s Identity Problem

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Image of Christ Pantocrator (Almighty or Lord of Hosts), Hagia Sopia, Istanbul, Turkey

When a movement is centered on one person who is no longer present in a corporeal (bodily) form that the members of that movement can continue to speak to and learn from eventually there will come an identity crisis where people begin to ask, “Are we following the right Jesus?” “Are we being faithful to his vision?” “Are we still following the God he pointed to?” As the church entered the second century it was dealing with heavy pressures from the empire around it and at the same time this early church had to figure out who it was from pressures from within.

It was still early in the church’s young life; the canon (the selections of works that would come to make up the bible) was not fixed. The four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were in wide circulation as well as many of the letters associated with Paul, but depending where you went the Shepherd of Hermas or the Letters of Clement or the Didache may also be present (which would later be viewed a positive works but not held at the same level as scripture). The challenge to how to tell the story of being the people of Jesus arose from within and to react to this challenge the church adapted and changed.

One of Christianity’s greatest gifts was that it was not tied to one language or culture. As it spread across the known world at that time it would be quickly translated into Greek (the language of the Eastern half of the Roman Empire) and eventually into more and more languages and cultures. The reason that the books that are a part of the New Testament are in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic,  is that by the time the stories of Jesus are written down and as Paul and others wrote letters they were going to churches that primarily spoke Greek (at least as a second language). With this encounter with the Greek world and language also came an encounter with Greek thought which was much different from the Jewish or Hebrew worldview that Jesus and all the original apostles came out of. As Greek speaking and thinking individuals encountered Christianity and they translated the message they would both be changed by it and in their own way they would transform the message as well. The question has to emerge what is a valid transformation and what is not? Two long lasting assumptions that many Christians include as central to their thought: the immortality of the soul or the absoluteness of God are Greek ideas not Biblical ones and yet with the introduction of Greek culture they become a part of the thought of the early church.

One of the early challenges came from a wealthy Christian named Marcion. While Hebrew thought has no problem with contradictions and gaps, a Greek thinker like Marcion could not abide contradictions. Among other things, Marcion felt that the God of the Old Testament was not reconcilable with the God of Jesus. Marcion read how in the Old Testament that God called for wars which wiped out entire populations, called down judgments in a harsh and unforgiving manner and came to the conclusion that in combination with these things he read and the reality of suffering in the world that the creator must be evil and different from the God of Jesus. In contrast to almost every other church leader at the time, Marcion read Old Testament literally rather than allegorically. Marcion felt that the Old Testament should not be a part of the Christian scriptures and therefore it should be thrown out. In addition to this, in a Greek way of thinking that viewed sex, childbirth and the body in general as bad, Marcion could not accept that Christ was born of a woman-even if it was a virginal birth God could not be born of a woman. For the first time we begin to see in a very powerful way the emergence of theology more than narrative as formational for a way of thinking about God and Jesus. Marcion quickly identified the contradictions and the differences in the New Testament gospels that were being held in most churches, so he eliminated Matthew, Mark and John and seriously redacted Luke to try to remove anything “impure” to be put alongside of Paul’s letters (also purified of Jewish “interpolations”). These modifications were viewed to be unorthodox by the leaders of the church in Rome and in 144 CE he was expelled from the early church. Marcion became one of the earliest to try to put together a canon, a list of texts that would form the basis for the church’s authority and the church would continue to deal with his followers for decades.

Another threat to the view of who Christ was came from those often referred to as Gnostic Christians. Gnostics are so named because they believed that they had secret knowledge that others, including other Christians, did not have. I am not convinced that there is one direction among the groups and the scriptures that we might label Gnostic, in fact they seem to represent a wide range of things. We are the beneficiaries of the rediscovery of several of the Gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi in 1945 which give us a window into what Gnosticism may have looked like. Some of these, like the Gospel of Thomas, are very similar to many of the sayings in Matthew and Luke and portray Jesus as a wisdom teacher. Others like the Gospel of Truth associated with the Gnosticism of the Valentinians develop a whole cosmology that put Jesus among many heavenly beings and looks very little like anything we would recognize as Christian. Like Marcion they held the body as bad and the soul as good (or divine spark would be a term you might see in Gnostic gospels) and the purpose of having the proper Gnostic knowledge is for that soul or divine spark to be liberated from the body.  Again the early church made the decision that this was not an accurate representation of the faith and the Gnostic gospels would not become a part of the canon.

Each time a crisis presented itself between a Greek way of thinking and a Jewish way of thinking the church attempted to remain with the Jewish way. At the same time, even while trying to remain close to the Jewish origins of the story, the questions that were being asked were no longer the questions of the Hebrew mind, they were the questions of the Greek world. The Bible began to be viewed in terms that were familiar to the Greek way of thinking, so God had to be omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent (all powerful, all knowing and present everywhere) and this rather than the narrative became decisive for decisions. The biblical hope of a bodily resurrection at the return of Jesus, the participation in the new creation and all the images that populate the gospels and Paul’s letters began to be read in terms of the soul joining God in heaven. The story when it was read was often interpreted allegorically (there are gifts and challenges that come with this) and theology and a few common practices became the points where identity was formed for the early church. It is to these practices we will turn next.

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