38-Barbarians at the Gates . . . and Everywhere Else

by Lance Ralston | May 11, 2014 | English | 0 comments

The title of this episode is “Barbarians at the Gates – and Everywhere Else”

I live on the coast of Southern California in one of the most beautiful places on the planet – Ventura County. The weather is temperate all year round with an average temperature of 70 degrees. The beaches are pristine and most of the time, uncrowded. The County has several prime surf spots. But every so often, usually during the Winter, storms throw up huge waves that trash the shore. Some of these storms are local and wash down huge piles of debris from the hills that then wash up on the beach. Others are far to the south, off the coast of Mexico but they roll up waves that travel North and erode tons of sand, altering the shoreline.

In the 5^th and 6^th Centuries, waves of barbarian invasion from the North and East swept across Europe to alter the political and cultural landscape and prime Europe for the Middle Ages.

When Bishop Augustine of Hippo died in 430, the Vandals were laying siege to the city. While the Council of Chalcedon was meeting in 451, Pope Leo negotiated with the Huns to leave Rome unmolested.

European history of the 5^th and 6^th Cs was dominated by the movement of mostly Germanic peoples into the territory of the old Roman Empire. The subsequent displacement and population shifting had a major impact on Christianity in the West. Medieval civilization was a result of this barbarian upheaval coupled with the vestiges of late Roman society and the impact Augustine had on the theology and practice of the Church.

The incursion of Germanic tribes into the Roman Empire was just the first of 4 massive waves of migration.

The Germans came in the 5^th C. The Vars and Slavs swept into the Balkans in the 6^th. The Muslims in 7^th. And the Vikings in the 8^th to 10^th Cs.

The resulting societal changes created by these invasive migrations had a monumental effect on the Church. We’ll take a look now at just the first of these population shifts – the Germanic invasions.

The 5^th C saw the climax of what was really a long process of mostly controlled immigration by the Germans. They settled land at the Empire’s frontier and served in the military. In truth, while the Romans referred to the Germans as barbarians, they often preserved the Empire by filling gaps in the declining population of Roman lands and by manning the legions. It was the Perfect Storm that saw things figuratively go south for Rome. Factors combining to generate this Perfect Storm were à

1) The Germans were pressed by invaders out of central Asia,

2) Key treaties between the Romans and Germans were broken,

3) The warm weather that had seen a population boom in Northern Europe was followed by bitter cold so that the Germans were forced to move South in search of lands to sustain their larger numbers. It didn’t help Rome that the Germans now knew Roman military tactics and bore Roman arms.

Note to Self: If you don’t want your neighbor to take over your house, don’t give him the keys and alarm code.

Certain dates in the first half of the 5^th C are important à

In 410, Alaric, leader of the Western Goths, or Visi-goths, sacked the city of Rome. This was an understandably traumatic event for the Western Empire. His successor, Ataulf, married the Emperor Honorius’ sister.

In 430, Augustine, attempted to explain Rome’s Fall to the Visigoths in his classic work The City of God. He died the year before the Council of Ephesus and the fall of his city, Hippo in N Africa to the Vandals.

In 451, Attila and the Huns from central Asia, swept thru Western Europe, then were defeated by an alliance of Romans and Germans led by Aëtius.

In 455, Aëtius and Emperor Valentinian III were assassinated, and the Vandals under Gaiseric again sacked Rome.

The first contact the Romans had with the Goths came during the reign of the Emperor Decius. During Constantine’s reign they became allies and often entered the Legions at elevated ranks. The Visigoths were being pressured from the East by the Huns, and in 376 sought refuge on the Roman side of the Danube. The emperor Valens granted their request, and there began a mass conversion of the Goths to Arianism. Due to mistreatment by Roman governors, they revolted in 378 and killed the Emperor Valens in the famous Battle of Adrianople.   Thus began the real Germanic invasions of the Empire. By 419 The Visigoths had subdued Southern Gaul and all of Spain.

As we’ve noted in previous episodes, when the Goths invaded the Western Empire in the 5^th C, for the most part, they came, not as pillaging pagans but as Arian Christians. A Goth Bishop named Theophilus had attended the Council at Nicaea in 325.

The missionary who carried the Gospel to the Goths was Ulfilas in the mid to late 4^th C. Ulfilas had amazing success in seeing the Germans won to faith for 2 reasons . . .

1) Their native religion was in decline. Simply put, their gods seemed rather old and shabby.

2) The many German tribes shared a common language.

Realizing translating the Bible into German was a key to successful evangelism, Ulfilas spent considerable time on the project before his death. He left the books of Samuel and Kings out of his translation because he figured the Goths à Well, they already knew enough about warfare.

In 406 when Rome recalled the Legions from the Rhine to protect Italy, another Germanic tribe called the Vandals poured into Gaul, then SW into Spain, and eventually jumped the Strait of Gibraltar to harass North Africa. Their King Gaiseric led them to Carthage which he conquered in 439 and made the capital of an Arian Vandal kingdom. Gaiseric was intolerant of other forms of the faith. In 455 he sent ships across the Mediterranean to sack Rome.

At first, the Donatists in North Africa rejoiced at the coming of the Vandals. Remember they’d been labeled heretics by Rome. But it didn’t take long for them to realize that the enemy of my enemy isn’t always my friend. The Vandals were not friendly. So in 484, a Donatist-Catholic synod met to try and patch up their theological differences.

Catholics were persecuted under some of the Vandal kings in the late 5^th and early 6^th Cs. It was this persecution that gave the Vandals a bad name far more than any actual acts of “vandalism.” Really, the Vandals were no more barbaric than other Germans.

Justinian’s famous general, Belisarius, repulsed the Vandals and reoccupied North Africa for the Byzantine Empire in 534.

The Visigoths and Vandals were followed up by Suevians, the Burgundians, and the Franks.

The Franks were the least mobile of the Germanic tribes. They settled in northern France and expanded their rule from there. They joined several other German tribes along with the Romans to stave off the common threat of the Huns in 451.

Of all the German tribes, the Franks were the least inclined to heed the work of Christian missions. They seemed immune to conversion until their king Clovis in the mid 5^th C.

Clovis’s conversion to the Faith was a significant moment in the history of Europe. Since the Vandals, Goths and Burgundians were Arian, it seemed likely Arianism would take over the West. Alone of the Germanic kingdoms, the Franks under Clovis embraced what we call Catholic or Nicean Christianity, the majority faith of his European subjects.

In 492, Bishop Avitus of Vienna arranged the marriage of a Burgundian princess named Clotilda to Clovis. Clotilda was a committed Christian of Nicean-flavor. The Royal couple had a son, who was baptized but died while still in his baptismal robes. Clovis, who at that point was still a pagan, loudly declared his gods would not allow such a thing to happen. Later they had another son. This one thrived.

Then, in battle with the Alemanni and things not going in his favor, the desperate Clovis asked for the aid of the Christian God. The battle turned in his favor. When the Alemanni were defeated, Clovis submitted to baptism. Bishop Remigius of Rheims performed the rite on Christmas day in 496.

The source for all this is a work by Gregory of Tours titled History of the Franks. This book gave the Franks their identity and shaped their understanding of the future they were to have in forging European history.

Following his baptism, Clovis was anointed in his role as monarch. This anointing of the king by a bishop became a custom among the Franks. The resulting aura of sacred Christian kingship seemed to justify Frankish control of the Church. Sadly, Clovis’s character remained little changed by his official acceptance of Christianity. It seems he adopted the religion as a matter of political expediency, but he didn’t receive the Gospel.

In 493, Odoacer, the German general who’d forced the abdication of the last Western Roman Emperor a little less than 20 years before, was killed by the Eastern or Ostro-goth king Theodoric. Next to Clovis, Theodoric was the most important ruler of the barbarian kingdoms. Theodoric made Ravenna in Italy his capital. He was an Arian who adopted Byzantine culture. Though he was personally tolerant, his Nicean-Catholic subjects weren’t so much. His rule saw the last flowering of late Roman culture in the West. The Ostrogothic kingdom continued until 553, when the Eastern general Belisarius retook much of Italy for the Byzantine Empire.

The cultural revival that occurred during the first half of the 6^th C  has been called the “Indian Summer of Christian Antiquity.” This period saw a number of influential persons who laid the foundation of Early Medieval society.

Boethius was a from a leading Roman family who became a philosopher and statesman in the court of Theodoric. Although loyal, Boethius came under suspicion and Theodoric had him imprisoned and executed. While in prison, Boethius wrote his most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy. This work is important because it marks the transition from the Church Fathers or what’s called Patristics to the Scholastics, who we’ll talk more about later.  Through his translations, Boethius handed to the Middle Ages, the ethics and logic of Aristotle. The Scholastics regarded Boethius as the greatest authority in philosophy after Aristotle.

Dionysius Exiguus was a Central Asian who came to Rome toward the end of the 5^th C. He collected and translated the canons of the Eastern Church into Latin. He also collected the canons and papal decrees of the Western church. His work bore tremendous ecclesiastical authority.

But Dionysius had a much wider significance in that he introduced a system of dating based on the Christian era, beginning with the incarnation of Christ. He’s the one who came up with the whole BC and AD markers to divide time. Until that time, the secular method of charting the date was determined by the rule of the consuls of Rome and the Empire of Diocletian. Unfortunately, Dionysius miscalculated the date of Jesus’ birth, so that according to contemporary reckoning Jesus was born at least 4 BC.

This is also the time of Gregory the Great, who’ll we’ll devote an entire episode to soon.

Last in the chronicle we’ll include in the list of barbarians invasions is the Lombards. In 568 this Germanic tribe broke through the northern bounds of Justinian’s Empire and entered Italy. Gregory the Great turned them back in 593 and secured peace by dividing Italy between Lombard and Imperial land. The Lombards were a factious lot and ruled from 3 centers: The kingdom at Pavia in the north threatened the imperial capital at Ravenna; the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento in central Italy were a danger to Rome and Naples. The Lombards were Arian. Their acceptance of Catholic Christianity did not come until the 7^th C.

As we wrap up this episode, let’s take a look at the effect of the Barbarian Invasions.

Augustine wasn’t the only one who attempted a literary response to the Germanic invasions. While the sack of Rome in 410 seemed to many the end of the ages, Orosius,  wrote 7 volumes against the Pagans to show that the pre-Christian world suffered no less than the present. The work became a kind of manual for understanding history in the Middle Ages. Orosius gave a central place to the Roman Empire in God’s plan. His history placed on the Western mind the idea of the divine role of Roman civilization. Jerome had already interpreted the 4^th kingdom of the book of Daniel as Rome and concluded that it was to continue as long as the Church did. Orosius promoted the view that both the Hebrews and Romans played an important part in the salvation of the world.

Salvian’s work titled On the Divine Government in 440 promoted the historical significance of the Germans. He exaggerated their good characteristics as set over against Roman corruption. He said God used the Germans as the sword of judgment on wicked Rome.

Three attitudes prevailed in Europe regarding the barbarian invasions à

Augustine held that ultimately, political success or failure make no difference. His focus was on the world to come. In contrast, Orosius said Christianity was the guarantor of the Empire’s prosperity. Salvian claimed the Empire was punished for its sins.

But an interesting thing happened once the German invaders settled down in the old Roman lands. By and large, they shed either their Arian-flavored faith for Nicean-Catholic Christianity and they adopted the Roman culture – or at least, what was left of it. Over a couple generations they came to identify themselves as Romans rather than as Goths, Franks, Burgundians and Lombards.

But even with these adaptations to Roman culture, the old Roman and the new Germanic peoples were divided by language. The Romans spoke Latin, the Germans Goth. Customs of food and dress carried on in many places with the Latins wearing togas while the Germans wore trousers.  Their legal systems differed and laws were applied to the different classes in the same kingdom. It took centuries for the 2 peoples to blend and become the nations of modern Europe. Greco-Roman civilization was based on cities. The Germanic invasions brought a decline to cities. A rural economy developed in the West, accelerating the move to what we’ve come to associate so centrally with the Middle  Ages – Feudalism. While in the East, cities remained the main fixture of the social organization, in the West, landed estates rose to prominence. Rulers relied on their own lands, so there was a decentralization of government.

With a decline in centralized government in the West, the Church took over many of the services once provided by the State, like education. Churches and monasteries were bound to the agricultural economy of the West and profited by a close relationship with local rulers. But one thing that saw the importance and influence of the Church grow substantially at this time was the fracturing that occurred in the political realm. When Western Europe was divided up into hundreds of smaller regions, each with its own ruler, the universal authority of the Church under Rome and the regional bishops provided a continuity that was desperately needed. No secular authority in the West was able to control the Church as an organ of state to the same extent as the Eastern emperors. So in the West, rather than kings ruling in Church affairs, it was the Church that increasingly played an role in political affairs.

Once again I want to say thanks to all those who’ve gone to the CS FB  page and given us a like. The comments have been a blessing.

I especially want to say thanks to those who’ve given the podcast a good review on iTunes. iTunes is the main portal for the podcast and positive reviews go a LONG way in helping promote the podcast.

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37-Patrick

by Lance Ralston | May 4, 2014 | English | 0 comments

This week’s episode is titled, “Patrick”

Last week’s episode was a brief review of Christianity’s arrival in Britain. We saw how the Anglo-Saxons pressed in from the east coast where they’d been confined by what remained of the Roman army. But when the Roman’s pulled out in 410, the Saxons quickly moved in to take their place, confining the Romano-British Christians to the western region of the Island. It was from that shrinking enclave of faith that a spark of faith leapt the Irish Sea to land in the dry tinder of Celtic Ireland. That spark’s name was Patrick.

While there’s much legend surrounding Patrick’s life, there’s scant hard historical evidence for the details of his story.  We have little idea when or where he was born, where he lived & worked, when & where he died, & other important specifics. What we do have are incidental clues & his own records, vague as they are.

The record of Christianity in Ireland prior to Patrick is sketchy. A bishop named Palladius was appointed by Pope Celestine to the island, but he didn’t stay long. He left the same year Patrick arrived.

Patrick was born into an affluent & religious home. His father was a deacon; his grandfather a priest. The family was likely of the Romano-British nobility & owned minor lands along the shores of western Britain. Several locations claim to be Patrick’s ancestral home.  At the age of 16, he was captured by Irish slavers who regularly raided Britain’s coast. He was taken back to Ireland & sold into captivity.

Patrick recounts little of his 6 yrs as a slave except to say he was a shepherd or swine-herd who spent long periods tending his charges. Being a slave, he endured long periods of hunger, thirst & isolation. This trial moved him to seek God in earnest. The faith of his parents became his own.

Years later, in writing what is known as his Confessio, Patrick said he believed his slavery was discipline for spiritual apathy. Not only did he attribute his own slavery as the chastening of the Lord, he said thousands of fellow Britons also suffered for the same reason.  He came to see the discipline as God’s grace because it led him to God. He wrote –

More and more, the love of God and the fear of Him grew in me, and my faith was increased and my spirit enlivened. So much that I prayed up to a hundred times in the day, and almost as often at night. I even remained in the wood and on the mountain to pray. And—come hail, rain, or snow—I was up before dawn to pray, and I sensed no evil nor spiritual laziness within.

At 22, Patrick said he heard a supernatural Voice calling him to fast in preparation for returning home.  Not long after, the Voice spoke again: ‘Behold! Your ship is prepared.’ The problem was, Patrick was 200 miles from the sea. Confident he followed the direction of God, he struck out for the coast.  When he arrived & informed the captain he was supposed to board, the captain recognized him as a runaway slave and refused. Patrick realized now his situation was precarious and looked for a place to hide. Seeing a nearby hut he began to make his way there when one of the crew shouted at him to hurry up and board. It seems the crew was short-handed & thought to use Patrick as extra a novice seaman, paying for his fare by the hard work of a lowly deck-hand.

The ship set sail & 3 days later landed. Where is a bit of a mystery as Patrick is vague at this point. The best guess was northern Gaul. He says once they landed the crew wandered in a kind of wilderness for nearly a month. We do know that between 407 & 410, the Goths & Vandals ran amok across this region. Things grew desperate and the captain began to berate Patrick, mocking his trust in an all-powerful, all-loving God. Where was all that power and love now that they were in danger of starving to death? Patrick wasn’t intimidated by the challenge. As we’ll see, this kind of opportunity called forth from Patrick an even more determined faith. He told the captain, “Nothing is impossible for God. Turn to Him and He will send us food for our journey.” In desperation the crew obeyed. And as they prayed, a herd of pigs suddenly appeared. The sailors feasted & thanked Patrick, but they balked at embracing his faith in God.

There’s a break in Patrick’s account at this point so we’re not sure what happened next. A couple years pass and he’s back home in Britain with his family. They pleaded with him to stay but he’d learned enough of the will of God to know not to make such promises. A short time later he heard the call back to Ireland. He says he had a visionary dream in which an Irishman invited him back to the land of his slavery. Patrick writes in the Confesso –

His name was Victoricius, and he carried countless letters, one of which he handed over to me. I read aloud where it began: ‘The Voice of the Irish’. And as I began to read these words, I seemed to hear the voice of the same men who lived beside the forest of Foclut, which lies near the Western sea where the sun sets. They seemed to shout aloud to me as with one and the same voice: ‘Holy boy, we beg you, come back and walk once more among us.’ I was utterly pierced to my heart’s core so that I could read no more.

Realizing God was calling him back to the Green Isle, Patrick began to prepare. He understood the call to evangelize the Irish but didn’t think himself properly equipped to do so. He sought training in the form of theological study & official ordination. Since both his father & grandfather had followed this course it seemed proper for him as well.  There’s some confusion at this point on where Patrick went to get his education. One biographer sends him to Rome while others say he went to northern Gaul to study under Bishop Germanus.

How long Patrick spent in training is unknown but he was eventually ordained as a deacon. One notable event from this time that would later be important to his life was his confession of a youthful sin to a close friend. It was something Patrick had done about a year before the Irish raiders captured him. It troubled him ever after and moved him to confess to a friend there in Gaul. The friend told him he thought it not that important an issue to fret over and that it would not prohibit him from being used by God. The friend even assured Patrick he would one day be made a bishop. Though the sin is left unspecified to us, it would later come back to haunt him.

How Patrick evangelized Ireland is an important case study because it opens to us the mind of Christian missionaries during this period. It may also help us understand the troubling religious syncretism that infected the medieval church.

The native Celtic religion of Ireland when Patrick returned was dominated by a pagan priesthood called the Druids.  What we know of this Celtic religion is sketchy at best. Julius Caesar is one of our main sources from his encounters with them in his conquests of Gaul and Britain. The Romans loathed and at times feared the Druids. This was due to their near complete control over their people, a control enforced by abject terror. That terror may very well have been put in place by their being empowered by demonic spirits. Human sacrifice was a regular feature of the druidic system and they were attributed with the power to work the miraculous, often in cruel fashion.

As I mentioned, there was some limited Christian presence on Ireland prior to Patrick’s arrival but the church had made little headway against the domination by the Druids. Patrick’s 6 year foray as a slave prepared him to know what he faced in the way of religious opposition when he returned. His plan was to confront the Druid’s on their own turf. He understood the only way to make headway among the people was by freeing them from their fear of the Druids. To do that, he’d need to look to the power of God to trump any demonstrations of demonic power the Druids conjured up.

This is where the stories of Patrick’s life become difficult to discern the truth of. His medieval biographers take this kernel of truth and spin elaborate yarns about his confrontations with the Druids. Most of those stories are probably fictional, while a few may be based on real events. The larger lesson for us to glean is Patrick’s method of evangelism.

The idea had grown among theologians that pagan religions weren’t so much anti-Christian as they were pre-Christian.  Drawing from the Apostle Paul in Romans 1:20, they believed that “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible attributes were clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” Paul himself applied this in Athens when spoke to the philosophers on Mar’s Hill. Paul was disturbed by the many idols he encountered in Athens, yet used them to evangelize the Athenians. He said, ‘I see how ultra-religious you are in every way. I even found an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god’. What you worship as unknown, I’m here to make known to you.” In Ecclesiastes, Solomon said God has written eternity on people’s hearts. Patrick & those who followed after looked for how to bring the Truth of Christ to the lost by using whatever elements of their native faith they could, converting it to the Truth of Christ.

Patrick and his contemporaries in no way approved of paganism or considered it an acceptable variant of the Gospel. They believed there were supernatural beings behind the idols & ideals of paganism; demons who kept people in spiritual bondage. They believed miracles and magic did occur. After all, Pharaoh’s magicians used supernatural power. But à & here’s the key to Patrick’s methodology à the God of Moses was more powerful, & used His power to bring good while demonic power served only to promote ruin.

So when Patrick arrived in Ireland and proclaimed the Gospel, the druids came out in opposition. Their hegemony over the Irish was imperiled. They thought nothing of moving swiftly to kill him. They were the law and could do what they wished. But: They found it harder than they thought. None of their plans or plots worked. It was as if a supernatural wall protected Patrick. He wrote of this time, “Daily I expect murder, fraud, or captivity. But I fear none of these things because of the promises of heaven. I have cast myself into the hands of God Almighty who rules everywhere.”

While trusting himself to the protection of God, he also took practical measures to gain allies among the Irish by building amiable relationships with them. These allies kept him informed of the various plots against him.

While Patrick does not himself record any specific confrontations with the druids, that’s the subject of many of his biographers. A turning point in Patrick’s mission came when an Irish chieftain named ‘Laoghaire’ came to faith. This chieftain had a group of powerful druids who advised him but who were unable to defeat Patrick in demonstrations of supernatural power.  When a couple of those Druids fell ill, Laoghaire was convinced of the superiority of Patrick’s God and message and professed faith in Christ. As was common to that culture, with his conversion, the people of His clan also came to faith. Their alliance with other clans opened the door for Patrick to bring the Gospel to them as well and soon the entire region had converted.

This then was Patrick’s method of evangelism as he made his way across Ireland. He confronted the Druids head on, showing the superiority of God’s power, breaking their monopoly on the minds of the Irish first, then going after their hearts with the Grace of God in the Gospel of Christ.

Another turning point was the conversion of some of the Druids themselves.

Patrick was driven to bring the Gospel to Ireland because Hibernia, as Ireland was called, was considered the end of the World & Jesus had said the Gospel would be preached to the ends of the world, then the end would come.  Patrick thought he was hastening Christ’s return. In his writings, he repeatedly mentions he was in ‘the last days’, and quoted Matthew 24:14. He wrote, “It has been fulfilled. Behold! We are witnesses to the fact that the Gospel has been preached out to beyond where anyone lives.’

Patrick wasn’t alone in this belief. Christians never gave up the idea Christ would return when all the nations heard about him; they just discovered more nations. About exactly a thousand years after Patrick, Columbus went to America not merely in a quest for fame and riches, but to hasten the 2^nd Coming.  His Book of Prophesies shows how he thought his discovery fitted into biblical predictions of the end times.

While the legend of Patrick’s use of a shamrock to explain the Trinity is interesting, there’s no historical evidence of it. It wouldn’t have been necessary because in the Celtic religion, the concept of a divine trinity was already in place. There’s also no evidence to support the story of Patrick driving all the snakes out of Ireland.

We’ve quoted the first of the two documents Patrick left us, his Confessio. The other was a letter he wrote to a British chieftain named Coroticus. Coroticus claimed to be a Christian but sent his soldiers on raids to Ireland. They’d taken many of Patrick’s converts as slaves. In one case, just a day after being baptizing, dozens of Patrick’s converts were brutally attacked by Coroticus’ raiders. Though they were still dressed in their baptismal garments, many were killed, the rest hauled off as slaves.  Patrick was outraged and wrote an open letter to Coroticus which he circulated to many others. It excommunicated both Coroticus and his soldiers, barring them from Christian fellowship and Communion until they did penance and restored what they’d stolen.

Not long after Patrick was named bishop of the Irish church, that friend to whom he confessed his youthful sin, betrayed him. Though the man had earlier said what Patrick had done was no great error, he decided to brand it so by making it public and bringing shame on Patrick. Though we never do discover the nature of the thing, it was a scandal to church officials. Some called for Patrick’s immediate ouster as bishop. Misfortune is a magnet of ill-news and soon others were adding to the accusations against him.  One man claimed Patrick had gone to Ireland merely to get rich, an odd charge when we considered the poverty that marked his life and the unlikely prospect before he went of the success of that ambition.

The charges were serious enough to require a church synod. They commissioned an investigation. A group went to Ireland to question Patrick. Though he never testified at the synod back in Britain, the turn-coat friend who’d betrayed him thought better of his betrayal and ended up defending him. The Confessio was Patrick’s reply to the charges against him.

While the official outcome of the synod is unknown, that Patrick was never censured or deposed as bishop suggests the charges were refuted.

Patrick was less concerned with planting churches as he was in making converts and was tireless in his journeys back & forth across the island. Following the pattern of the time, he considered the ascetic life of the monastery as the purest form of the Faith and encouraged his converts to be monks and nuns. This led to the building of dozens of monasteries and nunneries in Ireland. The rural nature of the island also encourage this form of the Church. Without major urban centers, large churches overseen by bishops were rare. So Irish Christianity was centered in communal monastic life.

Patrick died of natural causes on March 17^th, 493.  Today, he’s one of the most famous figures from the 5^th C.  Like so many others of the past who accomplished great things, we’d probably not even know of him were it not for the dynamic missions outreach that came from Ireland. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland was British. And the Faith he transplanted across the Irish Sea eventually came back to Britain.

Many have noted how the Irish have a habit of leaving Ireland. The missionary monks were no exception. There were churches in Britain before Patrick’s day. His father and grandfather were church leaders. But the Anglo-Saxons had confined Christian Britain to a small sliver of the west. A century after Patrick, an Irish monk named Columba founded a monastery on the island of Iona, off the coast of Scotland. Though a small base, Iona was nevertheless responsible for a mighty wave of missionary outreach to Scotland & Britain.

With this vibrant base in Ireland & Britain, Celtic monks went to the Continent.  They established bases of outreach in Germany, Switzerland & Italy. These in turn became centers of evangelization and scholarship. These Celtic monasteries maintained a fierce independence from Rome, though they held the same faith. The Roman popes tried to assert authority over them but for the most part Celtic Christianity resisted such control.

It was in these monasteries that much of the ancient wisdom of the Greeks & Romans was stored, laboriously copied, & assiduously studied, waiting for the day when it would re-emerge in what’s known as the Renaissance.

In his book How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill says this of Patrick –

The Irish gave Patrick more than a home—they gave him a role, a meaning to his life. For only this former slave had the right instincts to impart to the Irish a New Story, one that made new sense of all their old stories and brought them a peace they had never known before.

36-Did Those Feet?

by Lance Ralston | Apr 27, 2014 | English | 0 comments

This episode is titled – “Did Those Feet?” Why it bears that title is this . . .

Have you ever heard the anthem “Jerusalem”, whose lyrics come from a poem by William Blake? The song was performed by the 1970’s progressive rock band, Emerson, Lake & Palmer on their album, Brain Salad Surgery.

The opening lines are . . .

And did those feet in ancient time — Walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God — On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

A mysterious riddle for those not aware of the ancient legends surrounding Britain’s entrance upon the Christian faith.

For centuries England prided itself that the church there was founded by Jesus himself. This tale was invoked in British disputes with France over preeminence & in late Protestant claims that Rome had nothing to do with the English church. It’s unclear how much the mystic, artist, and poet William Blake believed the tale, but his question remains famous.

In the Council of Basel in 1434, the Council decreed, “The churches of France and Spain must yield in points of antiquity and precedence to that of Britain, as the latter church was founded by Joseph of Arimathea immediately after the passion of Christ.”

Uh, huh?!!?

Okay, so à We all know this is supposed to be a history podcast, not a wild, flight of fancy, let’s repeated every crazy thing people have believed, podcast. So, why am I sharing this? It’s illustrative of how many, maybe even most, of the churches of the ancient world laid claim to a special origin and identity. By way of illustration, let’s look at the legends surrounding England’s embrace of the Faith.

According to well-established legend, Joseph of Arimathea, the Jewish leader who petitioned Pilate to bury Jesus’ body, was also Mary’s uncle. When Mary, Joseph and 12-year-old Jesus went to Jerusalem for Passover, it was at Uncle Joseph’s place they stayed. Sometime later, Uncle Joe took the teenage Jesus on a tin-trading trip to Glastonbury, in England.

Other legends put the adult Jesus in Glastonbury, using his constructions skills in making a house and working as a ship’s carpenter. Older and even less reliable legends leave Jesus in Israel but send Uncle Joseph to Britain alone 30 years after Jesus’ ascension.

In the 12^th Century, a monk named William of Malmesbury made a record of the history of the Church at Glastonbury. In the introduction added a century later, the story goes that the Apostle Philip sent Joseph & 11 others to Britain where they were allowed to build a church there. Then, after yet another century, John of Glastonbury said Joseph of Arimathea was an ancestor of King Arthur & bringer of the Holy Grail to England.

Okay, enough of the legends. What is certain is Origen’s reference to the Gospel having been received among the Britons in the early 3^rd Century. And the faith hadn’t just come there, it was widely accepted. Even the North African apologist Tertullian wrote in An Answer to the Jews some time around ad 200 that the Faith had taken root and was growing in Britain. The first church historian Eusebius notes that “some apostles passed over the ocean to what are called the British Isles.”

In AD 43, 2 years after Claudius was hailed Emperor of Rome, 40,000 Roman soldiers finally achieved Julius Caesar’s plan to invade Britain. Times had changed; Claudius invaded the island mainly because he could, and he needed the prestige of a military victory. Having landed on the coast of Kent, the legions subdued Wales and England, but found themselves overextended after a few victories against the Picts of Scotland.

The British Celts adapted quickly to the lifestyle of their Roman conquerors. Celtic languages were abandoned in favor of Latin, and Celts began bowing to the gods of the Roman pantheon.

It was because of this new Romanized British religion we learn the name of a British Christian: Alban.

Alban was a pagan, but a friendly one. He welcomed a Christian priest fleeing persecution into his home. Which persecution is uncertain but the Anglo-Saxon church historian the Venerable Bede says it was under Diocletian at the end of the 3^rd Century. It didn’t take long for the priest’s devotion to influence Alban. He renounced idolatry and put his faith in Christ. But no sooner had Alban knelt in prayer than soldiers appeared at the door, having been informed of the priest’s location. The new convert swapped clothes with the priest. It wasn’t until Alban was brought before the judge that his identity was revealed. The judge said Alban would bear the priest’s punishment. He had only one out à to sacrifice to the idols. Alban refused.

The judge asked, “What’s your family and race?’

Alban replied, “What does that concern you? If you want to know the truth about my religion, know that I’m a Christian and practice Christian rites.’

The Judge blustered à “I demand to know your name!”

Alban answered, “My parents named me Alban. And I worship and adore the living and true God, who created all things.”

Again the judge ordered him to sacrifice to the pagan gods, & again he refused, saying whoever did so was “doomed to the pains of hell.” When beatings and whippings couldn’t change his mind, he was sentenced to death.

The story of Alban’s martyrdom goes on. While it’s difficult to sort out fact from legend, his tale gives us an idea of the high regard the martyrs were given in the Early Church. Supposedly on the way to the hill where Alban was to be executed, his guards were unable to cross a bridge because of the crowd that had gathered. So Alban parted the river as Moses had parted the sea. This was too much for his executioner, who instantly became a believer himself and joined Alban at the block where his head was removed from his shoulders.

Alban became Britain’s first, but by no means only, martyr. Turns out Alban & his former executioner weren’t the only ones martyred that day. So were 2 others.

One of the challenges historians face when reviewing the history of Christianity in England is the syncretism that often seems to mark its early years. Syncretism refers to the blending of different things. Religious syncretism is something the Church has had to deal with since its earliest days. In many places around the Roman Empire, while Christianity supplanted paganism, in a few places, pagan ideas and rituals were taken up and adopted by the Church. Old feast days were gutted of their pagan origin & made to represent Christian commemorations, and so on. It’s in England such syncretism stands out. Several artefacts reveal that conversion out of paganism into a clear NT Christianity was a slow process. Pagans and Christians worshipped side by side in the same building in Kent. Several British churches were built in imitation of pagan temples and shrines. A mosaic in Dorset includes both pagan and Christian themes. The same situation appears in Ireland, where pagan and Christian statues are found side by side.

While the assumption of most historians is that all this points to a syncretistic blurring of the lines between pagans & Christians, an alternative position sees the close proximity of pagan & Christian elements as evidence of a remarkable tolerance between the two groups. It may have been that the two groups shared the same location without conflating their faiths.

In 314, 3 bishops from Britain: Eborius from York, Restitutus of London & Adelphius from Lincoln, attended a church council at Arles, in southern Gaul. The Council was called to decide the issue of the Donatists in North Africa, which we’ve dealt with in an earlier episode. It was at this council Donatists were officially labeled heretics. British bishops were also present at Sardica in 343 & Armininum 16 years later.

That these British church leaders were able to attend these councils suggests they were organized early, well before Constantine’s Edict of Milan. It also means they had contact with the Church on the Continent. Monasticism, which would find such a prominent place in England, was a product of the Church in North Africa.

Monasticism came to England via the work of Martin of Tours. Martin was a military veteran from Hungary who, after his conversion to Christ, seems to have a hard time deciding whether he wanted to work in a church or a monastery. His real passion was evangelism. So he preached Christ to the unconverted & the asceticism of monastery-life to the already converted. One of those was a Briton named Ninian.

Ninian’s story, like so many from church history, is a shadowy tale clouded in legend. We’re not even sure that’s his real name. He was a missionary to the Picts in Scotland. Probably not the first to take the Gospel north of Hadrian’s Wall, he was the first to get credit for it. Martin urged several masons to go with Ninian to build a monastery at Whithorn. Venerable Bede says it was named The White House. It became a center of monastic activity, drawing students from Ireland & Wales.

Needing the legions to defend the empire from hostile Germanic tribes, in 407, Emperor Honorius recalled them to the Continent. Within just a few years, Roman rule of England was completely dismantled.  In less than a generation nearly all traces of Roman culture, from philosophy to architecture was in ruins. And while many of the native Britons rejoiced as the Eagle flew south, they certainly did NOT appreciate the consequences as wave after wave of invaders washed over the land. The Picts came south from their highland homes. Scots invaded from Ireland. You might say, “Wait – Scots are from Scotland, not Ireland.” And that’s where a little known fact of history proves important. It wasn’t called Scotland at that time. Scot was the word used for the Irish. When they invaded and settled among the natives of northern Briton, it became known as the Land of the Scots.

The real change for Britain came when the Saxons invaded from Germany. Then the Saxons were flowed up by the Angles & Jutes from Denmark. Foreign cultures overran Britain, snuffing out the last vestiges of Roman culture. In the eastern region of the isle even Celtic culture nearly disappeared.

But it wasn’t just weapons that Saxonized & Anglicized the Britons. The British nobles who’d adopted Roman ways promptly “went-Saxon” so they could hang on to their social status. Immigration changed England’s demographics. Yet despite the large numbers of Northern Europeans who made their way to Britain’s shores, lots of ethnic Britons still inhabited 5^th C England. Now without Roman infrastructure, life changed. Communication with the continent diminished. And with less interaction with Rome, the British church became insular. Older  historians emphasized this isolation, using it to explain the independent mindset that marked the Medieval English Church. But it turns out while communication did in fact fall off, it didn’t cease altogether.

So while monasticism boomed in England after the Romans departed, and it took on a distinctly English form, it wasn’t utterly divorced from the monasticism practiced in the rest of Europe. And it wasn’t long before Celtic monks went forth from their isolation to carry Celtic Christianity to the mainland.

35-Overview 1

by Lance Ralston | Apr 20, 2014 | English | 1 comment

This episode of CS the first of a couple summary reviews we’ll do. My plan is to continue on as we have, pausing occasionally to in one episode catch us up in broad strokes on what we’ve covered so far.

My hope is to avoid the whole, “Can’t see the forest for the trees” thing. For those listeners where English is a second language, that phrase is an idiom that means the loss of perspective behind too many details.

Though I want to give a clean straight narrative for our story of the Church, we can’t help but bounce around ab it between times & places. It’s just the nature of trying to examine all of church history, instead of its course in one location. Still, I hope to build a basic sense of historical flow. To that end, stopping every so often to step back and provide a quick summary of the material we’ve covered so far seems appropriate.

Overviews won’t have nearly the detail as a regular episode, but they will have a lot more names & dates since it’s a culling & gleaning of what the last so many episodes have covered.

Okay, here we go with our first Overview . . .

While the Christian Faith began as an inordinately tiny sect within 1^st Century Judaism, it grew rapidly, first among Jews, then among Gentiles. This growth can be attributed to two main causes. First, was the generally lethargic spiritual condition of the ancient world, most especially in those regions dominated by the Roman Empire. Several factors conspired to make people ripe for the message the Gospel proclaimed. Second, was the spiritual dynamic provided by early followers of Jesus. They demonstrated an exceptional lifestyle that attracted others. Even while Rome followed an official policy of opposition to the Faith, the number of its adherent grew.

Early Christianity is divided by historians into 2 periods: the Apostolic & Post-Apostolic.

The Apostolic lasts from the mid-1^st Century to the early 2^nd when the last of the Apostolic Fathers died. The Apostolic Fathers are counted not only as the original disciples of Jesus and their peers but their direct followers; men like Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch & Polycarp.

The Post-Apostolic period stretches from the early 2^nd Century to the beginning of the 4^th. During this time the leadership of the church moved from direct dependence on the Apostolic Fathers to local church leaders, known as pastors. As the decades passed, these local lead pastors morphed into bishops who oversaw a growing episcopal structure.

This period was marked by episodic & regional persecution of Christians in Roman lands. It wasn’t until the mid to late 3^rd Century that persecution became a widespread policy. It ended with the arrival of Emperor Constantine and the Edict of Milan in 313. Names associated with this time are Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen.

Besides persecution, the main challenge the Post-Apostolic church faced was presented by heresy.

Early Christians heeded the New Testament’s repeated call for maintaining correct belief and refuting false teaching. The Faith wasn’t just the philosophical ramblings of a sun-burnt sage. It was rooted in historical events both ancient & recent. When aberrant teachers attempted to hijack core & cardinal doctrines, bishops gathered to study what their Scriptures said and arrive at a consensus. In this way, they refuted the challenge of such groups & teaching as Docetism and its later evolution, Gnosticism.  They rebuffed Marcionism, the Ebionites, Manachaeists & the aberrant teaching of Montanus. The greatest threat rose from a Bishop named Arius who denied Jesus’ deity.  Though Arianism was officially quashed at the First of the Great or what are called Ecumenical Councils held at Nicaea in 325, it continued to be espoused in many regions for the next century and a half. The Council of Nicaea established the orthodox Christian position today known as Trinitarianism, which holds that God is one in essence while three in persons. While 300 bishops signed the Nicaean Creed, many of them went away from the Council unsettled about the terminology used in the Creed to define the correct view of God. The task of sharpening the terms & arriving at the proper description of the Biblical doctrine of the Trinity was left to the Cappadocian Fathers some time later.

The Post-Apostolic period is also when the Church Fathers realized the need to provide a definitive list of books that comprised the Bible. The work of several councils finally closed the Canon during this time.

The Post-Apostolic Period was followed by what’s often called Catholic Christianity; not to be confused with ROMAN Catholic. The term ‘catholic’ means universal and stands in contrast to the many often subtle doctrinal challenges that arose following the Council of Nicaea. This period, stretching from the beginning of the 4^th Century to the end of the 5^th saw 7 major Church Councils that all met to address some new or renewed challenge to orthodoxy, specifically as it related to the theological can of worms the First Council at Nicaea opened, and maybe we should say, sought to close. You see, once the Church settled on the Trinity as the right way to understand God, the main questions were;

1) How do the persons of the Godhead relate to one another?

2) How are we to understand the person of Jesus? How do we reconcile Him as both God & Man?

This second issue ended up in sometimes bloody brawls as advocates of different positions used the debate to secure political favor & religious prestige.

During this period of Catholic Christianity, 4 cities rose as the gravitational centers of the Christian world; Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, & the new capital of the Empire, Constantinople. Alexandria, Antioch & Constantinople were all in the East while Rome was alone in the West. The main contest for prestige & power was between Alexandria & Antioch which used 2 different ways of interpreting Scripture and understanding the Person & Nature of Christ. Alexandria had a long reputation as a center of scholarship but Antioch continually produced excellent preachers. Since the Church at Constantinople, being near the royal palace, was the premier church in terms of securing imperial favor, whoever was the bishop there tended to secure favor for his side of the debate. It infuriated many of the bishops at Alexandria that Antioch kept providing new leaders for the Church at Constantinople. The supreme example of all this is the verbal and at times physical brawl that took place between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius from Antioch, who became Bishop at Constantinople.

It was during this time as well that the Church at Rome emerged to become, not just the lead church in the West, but over the entire Empire. One of the reasons for this is the generally excellent leadership the Roman Bishops provided. When the Eastern churches were wracked by debate, Rome often played a mediating influence or lent a perspective that resolved the issue.

What encouraged Rome’s emergence as the lead church in the Faith was the claim of some Roman Bishops that they were spiritual heirs to Peter’s spiritual hegemony. That claim was not without considerable push-back by many, but it eventually proved persuasive so that Rome was given tacit, if not outright honor as the lead church.

Again, it was during this era the Ecumenical Councils were convened. They were concerned largely with settling the Christological disputes tearing apart the Church. The First Council of Nicaea in 325 & First Council of Constantinople in 381 condemned Arianism. The Council of Ephesus in 431 condemned Nestorianism and affirmed Mary as the Theotokos; that is the “Mother of God.”

The Council of Chalcedon just 20 years later affirmed that Christ had two natures; He was fully God and fully man, yet was one person. It specifically condemned Monophysitism, the belief that Jesus’ divine nature overwhelmed his human nature. Following Chalcedon, several groups broke with the orthodox, or what we would call from this time, Catholic position; again, not Roman Catholic. The term simply means what was the accepted position of the Church & churches of the Roman World. The churches of Egypt, headquartered at Alexandria tended to be Monophysite while the churches that moved into the East followed a distorted view of Nestorius’ & began to adopt the idea that Jesus was not only of two natures, He was two persons in a single body. As we’ve seen in previous episodes, it’s unlikely Nestorius himself believed that, though his opponents claimed he did, and his later followers do seem to have moved in that direction.

One of the most significant events of this period occurred in late February of 380. Emperor Theodosius I signed the Edict of Thessalonica which made Catholic, Trinitarian Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Prior to this the Emperors Constantius II & Valens favored Arian flavors of the Faith. Theodosius I declared the Trinitarianism of the Nicene Creed as the perennial position of the Empire. While there were going to be all kinds of problems associated with making Christianity the State religion, what ensured it would really go awry was that Theodosius went further and in effect outlawed unbelief; any belief but Catholic Christianity was deemed heretical. Heretics weren’t just put out of the Church, they were put out of life!

It didn’t take long for the Church to avail itself of the Imperial organizational structure, adopting similar geographical borders. They even kept the old imperial name – Diocese. Bishops oversaw the various dioceses. The bishop’s home was known as a seat, or see.

Back-tracking a bit, when Christians were being persecuted during the 2 and 3^rd Centuries in the West, many of them fled for refuge to the East and the Sassanid Empire, the long-time enemy of Rome. Though the Sassanids were Zoroastrians, they welcomed the Christians because, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

When Rome became a Christian State, the Sassanids feared the Christians would become a kind of religious Fifth Column and began persecuting them. The once vibrant Persian church was decimated and many of these Eastern Christians fled even further East, becoming what is today referred to as the Church of the East.

As we’ve seen in recent episodes, Monasticism became a standard feature of Christianity during the time of Catholic Christianity and carried on for centuries after in the Middle Ages.

While there are dozens of names associated with this time, we’ll limit our list to a few as we wrap up this episode.

There are the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil the Great, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and their friend, Gregory of Nazianzus.

There’s the Popes Damasus I & Leo the Great.

We’ve mentioned Cyril of Alexandria & his nemesis, the defrocked & banished Nestorius.

There’s the astoundingly gifted Bishop of Milan, Ambrose and his student who eventually outshined his teacher – Augustine.

This is the time of Jerome & the Golden-tongued Chrysostom.

It’s the time Attila the Hun and Alaric whose Goths sacked Rome.

It’s the age of the Vandals who are such brutes they give their name to bad behavior.

This is also the time of an interesting character whose life has become a thing of legend – Patrick of Ireland. We’ll take a look at him soon.

The Era of Catholic Christianity ends in the late 5^th Century with the Fall of the Western Roman Empire. This is of course an arbitrary line we draw, especially when we consider that the Eastern Empire saw itself as the continuation of the Empire for another thousand years.

But most historians see the Fall of the Western Roman Empire as a momentous event that leveled a blow to the European mindset it took centuries to recover from. Thus, the period between the Roman Empire and the Modern Era is called the Middle Ages. And while it’s been fashionable for a long time in the popular idea of history to see the Middle Ages as Dark and a long stretch when nothing of much consequence happened, the more astute student knows the Middle Ages were a time of amazing development.

34-The Great Recession

by Lance Ralston | Apr 13, 2014 | English | 0 comments

This episode is titled – The Great Recession.

I usually leave house-keeping comments for CS to the end of each episode but wanted to begin this by saying thanks to all who subscribe, listen regularly, and have turned others on to the podcast.

Website stats tell us we have a lot of visitors & subscribers. Far more than you faithful ones who’ve checked in on the Facebook page & hit the “like” button. Can I ask those of you who haven’t yet to do so?

Then, if you’re one of the many who accesses the podcast via iTunes, you probably know how difficult it can be to find what you’re looking for there. Millions use iTunes as their podcast portal yet the search feature is clunky. So tracking down what you want can be a challenge. What helps people find content on iTunes is reviews. So, if you’re an iTunes user and like CS, you could be a great asset by writing a brief review for the podcast. Thanks ahead of time.

Okay, enough shameless self-promotion . . .

Christianity more than proved its vitality by enduring waves of persecution prior to Constantine the Great. When persecution was withdrawn & the Faith climbed out of the catacombs to become the darling of the State, the question was whether it would survive the corruption political power inevitably brings. While many thousands of pagans professed faith because it was the politically expedient thing to do, some sincere believers marked the moral corruption that took place in the church & forsook society to practice a purer faith in monasteries, as we saw in our last episode.

The institutional Church, on the other hand, organized itself in a manner that resembled the old Roman Imperial system. When the Empire crumbled under the weight of its own corruption, that fall accelerated by barbarian invasions, the question was, would Christianity fall with it?

The story of Christianity in the West is a remarkable tale of survival. So often in history, when a culture is swept away, so is its religion. Christianity has proven an exception. As often as not it endured when the culture changed. Such was the case in Europe and the events that followed the Fall of Rome at the end of the 5^th Century.

When the Gospel first came to those urban centers which were the cultural heart of the Roman Empire in the late 1^st & early 2^nd Centuries, it was regarded as a Jewish reform movement. Its first converts were Jews scattered around the Empire and those Gentiles who’d attached themselves to the Jewish synagogues. But once these God-fearing Gentiles came to faith, they evangelized their Gentile friends. Following Paul’s example in speaking to the philosophers on Mars Hill, these Gentile Christians recast the Gospel in Greco-Roman terms, using ideas & values familiar to the pagan mind.

When I say “pagan” don’t think of it as the insult it is in our modern vernacular; someone void of moral virtue. By pagan, I mean those who practiced the religion of the Greeks & Romans with its pantheon of gods. In that sense, Plato & Aristotle were pagans. Zeno, the philosopher who developed Stoicism, was a pagan. These were all men who developed the philosophical framework that shaped the worldview of Greco-Roman culture & society. They asked some penetrating questions that provided the intellectual backdrop of the 1^st & 2^nd Centuries. Gentile Christians picked up these questions & used them to say they’d found their answers in Christ. Many other pagans found these arguments convincing & were won to faith. Some of the Early Church Fathers even appealed to the ancient philosophers in the formal letters they wrote to the Emperors on why persecution of Christians was bad policy. They argued for a promotion of the Faith as a boon to the health of culture, not a harm to it. Their defense of the Faith was couched in terms the Emperors were familiar with because they shared the same philosophical language.

My point here is that Christianity made an appeal to the Greco-Roman worldview it was growing in the midst of. So, what would happen when that society fell?

Also, the Church’s organizational structure increasingly came to resemble the Imperial structure. What would happen when that was dismantled? Would the Faith survive? Had Christianity grown too close to the culture?

The answer is à Yes & no. The Empire’s demise did pose a set-back to the Church. But we might ask if maybe that was good. The institutional Church had in many ways deviated from its purpose & calling. Not a few bishops were far more concerned for their political power than for their role as spiritual shepherds. In many minds, spiritual & earthly power had merged into the same thing.

Rome’s fall allowed the Faith to break away from the political attachments that had corrupted it for a century & a half.  But there’s little doubt that from the 6^th through 9^th Centuries, Christianity suffered a kind of spiritual declension. Over that 400 years, the total number of people who claimed be Christians dropped, fresh movements of renewal declined, & moral & spiritual vigor flagged.  While there were exceptions, overall, Christianity lost ground, giving this period of time in Church history the title, as Kenneth Scott Latourette calls it, the Great Recession.

Following the timeline of Church history at this point becomes difficult because so much was going on in various places. So for the balance of this episode, I want to give a quick sketch of both the many reversals & few advances Christianity saw from the 6^th thru 9^th Centuries.

When the Goths, Visigoths, & Ostrogoths moved in to pick clean the bones of the Western Roman Empire in the 5^th Century, something remarkable happened. While they helped themselves to the wealth of the Empire, they also adopted some of the Roman customs they admired. But nothing was so surprising as their embrace of Christianity. In truth, these barbarians were already what we’d have to describe as nominally Christian. Their invasion of & settling into Roman lands greatly furthered their identification with the Faith.

Remember that in the ancient world, war was more than just an attempt to take land & plunder; it was a contest of faiths. The ancients believed armed conflict was a kind of spiritual tug of war. The mightiest god gave his or her people victory. This is why when one people defeated another, the loser’s religion was often wiped out.

But the Germanic barbarians tended to embrace Christianity rather than destroy it. There was something different in the message of Christ from their ancient folk faiths that drew and converted them. So when they took down the Roman Imperial structure, they left the churches intact. Bishops continued to exercise oversight in their flocks.

Unlike other religions, Christianity was super-cultural. It wasn’t just the faith of one group; it potentially embraced all. Even those who rejected the Gospel recognized it wasn’t merely the spirituality of a specific ethnic group. Its message transcended culture to encompass all humanity.

That was the situation on the north & northeastern borders of the Empire. The situation in the south was very different.  In the 7^th Century, Islam swept out of Arabia to conquer the Middle East & North Africa. The Muslims managed to get a foothold in Spain before the armies of Charles Martel stopped them pushing any further North in 732. Where Islam conquered, it replaced native religions. Enclaves of determined Jews & Christians eked out an existence but by & large, the Crescent replaced the Cross throughout the Middle East & North Africa.

While there’s no specific date or event that marked the onset of the Great Recession, we’ll set the year 500 as the starting point.  Here’s why …

In 476 the last Roman Emperor was deposed by the Goth leader Odoacer. This marks the end of the Western Roman Empire. The capital then shifted undisputedly to Constantinople in the East.

20 years later, in 496, the Frank king Clovis was baptized. This marked a new era in which Germanic rulers became the standard-bearers of the Faith instead of Romans.

Then in 529, the Eastern Emperor Justinian closed the Schools of Athens. These academies were the last official symbols of Greco-Roman paganism. Justinian ordered them closed to signal the final triumph of Christianity over paganism.

In that same year, 529, Benedict built his monastery on Monte Cassino as we saw in our last episode. The Benedictine Rule was to have a huge impact on the course of the Faith in the West.

While Christianity seemed to stumble in many of the places where it had been installed 3 & 400 years before, it continued its relentless spread into new territory. It was during the early 6^th Century that the Faith went up the Nile into Sudan. In the latter part of that century, Pope Gregory sent missionaries to Britain and in the early 7^th Century the Gospel reached China.

But the 7^th Century was when the Arab conquests began. In less than 20 years after Mohammed’s death, Islam had raised its banner over, Israel, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, & Egypt. Before the end of the Century they’d conquered all North Africa, including the capital at Carthage and by 715 had taken Spain.

If you’ve been listening from the earliest episodes, you know that these lands the Arabs conquered had a rich Christian history, especially in North Africa. Alexandria & Carthage were home to some of the most prominent Christian leaders & theologians – Athanasius & Arius, Alexander, Cyril, & Augustine, to name a few.

At the same time, the Arabs were spreading Islam across Christian lands, up in the Balkan peninsula & Greece, pagan Slavs moved in. In 680, Asians called Bulgars crossed the Danube River & set up a kingdom in what had been the Eastern frontier of the Empire.

Between these losses to the Arabs in the South & the Slavs & Bulgars in the East, about half the total land area that had been Christian territory was lost.

The 8^th Century saw large numbers of German tribes come to Faith. But the 9^th & 10^th Centuries were marked by repeated invasions of pagans from the distant north. These  Scandinavians raided the shores of northern Europe, Britain, and all the way to Russia. They delighted in looting the many defenseless churches & monasteries they included in their conquests.

These Scandinavian raids helped shatter the fragile unity the Carolingians had pulled together in Europe. As society broke apart into minor political regions, the quality of spirituality in the churches declined.  Discipline in the monasteries grew lax. Bishops focused more on secular than spiritual matters. The clergy grew corrupt. The Roman Papacy became a political football.

The Eastern church of the 8^th & 9^th Centuries was rent by a theological controversy over the use of images. In the 9^th Century, Muslims conquered Sicily & Crete, & established a beachhead in southern Italy.

In China of the mid 9^th Century, Christianity experienced a wave of fierce persecution. This was due to the Faith having been too closely identified with the previous dynasty.

As we come to the dawn of the 10^th Century, there were several positive signs the Faith was growing again in the regions where it had declined. Churches were planted among the Slavs & Bulgars. The Faith extended its reach into Russia & there are indications the Church in India grew during this time.

One sign of a positive spiritual turn took place in Eastern France in a place called Cluny. In 910, Duke William of Aquitania founded a monastery on the Rule of St. Benedict. The abbots selected to lead it were men of tremendous character & piety. They were determined to correct the lax moral attitudes that had become all too common in monastery life.

The Clunaic reforms not only reinvigorated monastic life, they established a new hierarchy for monasteries. Prior to Cluny, monasteries were connected to & in a sense answerable to local bishops & nobility. Cluny and the monasteries that came from it were directly answerable to the Pope.  This became an important element of church life when during the 11^th Century, the popes tried to un-tie the Church from secular powers.

While the monastic life may seem strange & at the same time stereo-typical of the romanticized view of Medieval life we have today, monasteries acted as repositories of the wisdom & learning of previous generations. As wave after wave of invaders washed over Europe, and society was shattered into a thousand bits, monasteries remained cultural lighthouses.

33-Monks

by Lance Ralston | Apr 6, 2014 | English | 0 comments

This episode of CS is titled – Monks.

We took a look at the hermits in Episode 18 and delved into the beginnings of the monastic movement that swept the Church. The hermits were those who left the city to live an ultra-ascetic life of isolation; literally fleeing from the world. Others who longed for the ascetic life could not abide the lack of fellowship and so retreated from the world to live in sequestered communes called monasteries & nunneries.

The men were called monks and the women; the feminine form of the same word – nonnus, or nuns. In recent episodes, we’ve seen that the ascetic lifestyle of both hermits & monks was considered the ideal expression of devotion to God during the 4^th & 5^th Centuries. We’re going to spend more time looking at monastery-life now because it proves central to the development of the faith during the Middle Ages, particularly in Western Europe but also in the East.

Let’s review from Episode 18 the roots of monasticism . . .

Leisure time to converse about philosophy with friends was highly prized in the ancient world. It was fashionable for public figures to express a yearning for such intellectual leisure, or “otium” as they called it; but of course, they were much too busy serving their fellow man. It became hip to adopt the attitude, “I’m so busy with my duties, I don’t get much ‘Me-time’.”

Occasionally, as the famous Roman orator & Senator Cicero portrayed it, they scored such time for philosophical reflection by retiring to write on themes such as duty, friendship & old age. That towering intellect & theologian Augustine of Hippo had the same wish as a young man, & when he became a Christian in 386, left his professorship in oratory to devote his life to contemplation & writing. He retreated with a group of friends, his son & his mother, to a home on Lake Como, to discuss, then write about The Happy Life, Order & other such subjects, in which both classical philosophy and Christianity shared an interest. When he returned to his hometown of Tagaste in North Africa, he set up a community in which he & his friends could lead a monastic life, apart from the world, studying scripture & praying. Augustine’s contemporary, Jerome; translator of the Latin Vulgate, felt the same tug. He too made an attempt to live apart from the world.

The Christian version of this yearning for a life of philosophical retirement had an important difference from the pagan version. While reading & meditation remained central, the call to do it in concert w/others who set themselves apart from the world was added.

For the monks and nuns who sought such a communal life, the crucial thing was the call to a way of life which would make it possible to ‘go apart’ & spend time w/God in prayer and worship.

Prayer was the Opus Dei, the ‘work of God’.

As it was originally conceived, to become a monk or nun was an attempt to obey to the full the commandment to love God with all one is & has. In the Middle Ages, it was also understood as a fulfillment of the command to love one’s neighbor, for monks & nuns were supposed to be primarily praying for the world. They really did believe they were performing an important task on behalf of lost souls. So among the members of a monastery, there were those who prayed, those who ruled, and those who worked. The most important to society were those who prayed. Ideally, while monks & nuns might have different duties based on their station & assignment, they all engaged in both work & prayer.

But a difference developed between the monastic movements of East & West.

In the East, the Desert Fathers set the pattern. They were hermits who adopted extreme forms of asceticism, and came to be regarded as powerhouses of spiritual influence; authorities who could assist ordinary people w/their problems. The Stylites, for example, lived on platforms on high poles; an object of reverence to those who came to ask their spiritual advice. Others, shut off from the world in caves or huts, denied themselves contact with the temptations of the world, especially women. There was in this an obvious preoccupation with the dangers of the flesh, which was partly a legacy of the Greek dualists’ conviction that matter was inherently evil.

I want to pause here & make a personal, pastoral observation. So warning! – Blatant opinion follows.

You can’t read the New Testament without seeing a clear call to holiness. But that holiness is a work of God’s grace as the Holy Spirit empowers the believer to live a life pleasing to God. New Testament holiness is a joyous privilege, not a heavy burden & duty. It enhances life, never diminishes it.

This is what Jesus modeled so well, and why genuine seekers after God were drawn to Him. He was attractive! He didn’t just do holiness, He WAS Holy. Yet no one had more life. Where He went, dead things came to life!

As Jesus’ followers, we’re supposed to be holy in the same way. But if we’re honest, for many, holiness is conceived of as a dry, boring, life-sucking burden of moral perfection.

Real holiness isn’t religious rule-keeping. It isn’t a list of moral proscriptions; a set of “Don’t’s! Or I will smite thee w/Divine Wrath & cast thy wretched soul into the eternal flames.”

New Testament holiness is a mark of Real Life, the one Jesus rose again to give us. It’s Jesus living in & thru us. The holy life is a FLOURISHING life.

The Desert Fathers & hermits who followed their example were heavily influenced by the dualist Greek worldview that all matter was evil & only the spirit was good. Holiness meant an attempt to avoid any shred of physical pleasure while retreating into the life of the mind. This thinking was a major force influencing the monastic movement as it moved both East & West. But in the East, the monks were hermits who pursued their lifestyles in isolation while in the West, they tended to pursue them in concert & communal life.

As we go on we’ll see that some monastic leaders realized casting holiness as a negative denial of the flesh rather than a positive embracing of the love & truth of Christ was an error they sought to reform.

Indeed, one of the premier teachings of Jesus adopted by monks & applied literally was  Matt. 19:21, “Sell your possession, give to the poor.” Jesus & the Twelve Apostles were cast as ideal monks.

The early Church also faced the challenge of several aberrant groups who espoused a rigorous asceticism & used it as a badge of moral superiority. So some Christians thought a way to refute their error was by showing them up when it came to austere devotion.

Even those believers who rejected the error of dualism justified asceticism by saying they renounced what was merely good in favor of what was best; a higher spiritual mode of living.

Understood this way, the monasticism began as a protest movement in the Early Church. Church leaders like Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea & even Augustine co-opted & domesticated the monastic impulse, bringing it into the standard Church world.

In the East, while monks might live in a group, they didn’t seek for community. They didn’t converse & work together in a common cause. They simply shared cells next to one another. Each followed his own schedule. Their only contact was that they ate & prayed together. This tradition continues to this day on Mount Athos in northern Greece, where monks live in solitude & prayer in cells high on the cliffs. Food is lowered to them in baskets.

Monastic communities and those seeking to be monks or nuns exploded in popularity in the 4^th Century. This popularity was born out of a protest on the part of many at the growing secularization they witnessed in the institutional church. The persecution everyone was so ready to be over not long before was now looked back upon almost nostalgically. Sure the Church was hammered, but at least following Jesus meant something and the seriousness with which people pursued spiritual things was palpable. Now it seemed every third person called themselves a Christian without much concern to be like Jesus. The monastic life was a way to recover what had been lost from the glory days of the persecuted but pure Church.

One of the first set of rules for monastic communities was developed by someone with whom we’re already familiar, Basil the Great, leader of the Cappadocian Fathers who hammered out the orthodox understanding of the Nicene Creed. Basil was born into one of the most remarkable families in Christian history. His grandmother, father, mother, sister, & two younger brothers, were all venerated as saints. Wow – imagine being the black sheep in that family! All you had to do to qualify for that dubious title was fail to make your bed.

Besides taking the lead with his brother Gregory of Nyssa and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus in hammering out the exact terminology that would be used to define the Orthodox position on the Trinity, Basil was an early advocate & organizer of monastic life. Taking a cue from his sister Macrina, who’d founded a monastery on some of the family’s property at Annessi, Basil visited the ascetics of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, then founded his own monastery, also at Annessi around 358. For the monks there he drew up a rule for their lives called Asceticon; sometimes referred to as the Longer & Shorter Rules. It consisted of 55 major regulations & 313 lesser guidelines. While each monastery during this time followed its own order, more and more began adopting Basil’s template.

The first rule to present a rival to Basil’s was the Rule of Augustine.

In our last couple episodes on Augustine, we saw that when he returned to Tagaste, he and his friends formed a community committed to serving God. At the bishop of the church at Hippo, Augustine founded a monastery, turning the episcopal digs into a monastic community specifically for priests. It became a spiritual nursery that produced many African bishops.

These priest-monks were a corporate reflection of Augustine’s ideal of the whole Church: a witness to the future kingdom of God. The Rule associated with Augustine, and the monastic orders of monks and nuns that bear his name, emphasize “Living in freedom under grace.” They sought for their monastery to be a microcosm of the City of God, longing for mystical union with Him, but firmly rooted in the love and service of others, both within the community and the world.

There’s no mention of Augustine’s Rule, in his own literary work called Retractions or Possidius’s Catalogue, but there’s evidence of a monastic rule attributed to Augustine a century after his death. Benedict of Nursia, who we’ll get to next, knew of & was influenced by it, as were several other founders of religious orders. There are existing monastic communities today that still hearken back to the Augustinian Rule as the core of their order’s life.

A crucial development in Western monasticism took place in the 6^th Century when Benedict of Nursia withdrew w/a group of friends to try to live the ascetic life. This prompted him to give serious thought to the way in which the ‘religious life’ should be organized. Benedict arranged for groups of 12 monks to live together in small communities. Then he moved to Monte Cassino where, in 529, he set up the monastery which was to become the headquarters of the Benedictine Order. The rule of life he drew up there was a synthesis of elements in existing rules for monastic life. From this point on, the Rule of St Benedict set the standard for living the religious life until the 12^th Century.

The Rule of St Benedict achieved a balance between body & soul. It aimed at moderation & order. It said those who went apart from the world to live lives dedicated to God should not subject themselves to extreme asceticism. They should live in poverty & chastity, & in obedience to their abbot, but they should not feel the need to brutalize their flesh w/things like scourges & hair-shirts. They should eat moderately but not starve themselves. They should balance their time in a regular & orderly way between manual work, reading & prayer—which as their real work for God. There were to be 7 regular acts of worship in the day, known as ‘hours’, attended by the entire community. In Benedict’s vision, the monastic yoke was to be sweet; the burden light. The monastery was a ‘school’ of the Lord’s service, in which the baptized soul made progress in the Christian life.

A common feature of monastic life in the West was that it was largely reserved for the upper classes. Serfs didn’t have the freedom to become monks. The houses of monks & nuns were the recipients of noble & royal patronage, because a noble assumed by supporting such a holy endeavor, he was earning points w/God.  Remember as well that while the first-born son stood to inherit everything, later sons were a potential cause of unrest if they decided to contest the elder brother’s birthright. So these ‘spare’ children of noble birth were often given to monastic communes by their families. They were then charged with carrying the religious duty for the entire family. They were a spiritual surrogate whose task was to produce a surplus of godliness the rest of the family could draw on. Rich and powerful families gave monasteries lands, for the good of the souls of their members. Rulers and soldiers were too busy to attend to their spiritual lives as they should, so ‘professionals’ were drawn from their family to help by doing it on their behalf.

A consequence of this was that, in the later Middle Ages, the abbot or abbess was usually a nobleman or woman. She was often chosen because of being the highest in birth in the monastery or convent and not because of any natural powers of leadership or outstanding spirituality. Chaucer’s cruel 14^th Century caricature of a prioress depicts a woman who would have been much more at home in a country house playing w/her dogs.

This noble patronage of monastic communities was both a source of their economic success & their eventual moral & spiritual decay. Monastic houses that became rich & were filled with those who’d not chosen to enter the religious life, but had been put there by parents, usually became decadent. The Cluniac reforms of the 10^th Century were a consequence of the recognition there needed to be a tightening up of things if the Benedictine order was not to be utterly lost. In the commune at Cluny and the houses which imitated it, standards were high, although here, too, there was a danger of distortion of the original Benedictine vision. Cluniac houses had extra rules and a degree of rigidity which compromised the original simplicity of the Benedictine plan.

At the end of the 11^th Century, several developments radically altered the range of choice for those in the West who wanted to enter a monastery. The first was a change of fashion, which encouraged married couples of mature years to decide to end their days in monastic life. A knight who’d fought his wars might make an agreement with his wife that they would go off into separate religious houses.

But these mature adults weren’t the only ones entering monasteries. It became fashionable for younger people to head off to a monastery where education was top-rank. Then monasteries began to specialize in various pursuits. It was a time of experimentation.

Out of this period of experiment came one immensely important new order, the Cistercians. They used the Benedictine rule but had a different set of priorities. The first was a determination to protect themselves from the dangers which could come from growing too rich.

You might ask, “Hold on Lance, how could people who’ve taken a vow of poverty get rich?”

There’s the rub. Yes, monks & nuns vowed poverty.  But their lifestyle included diligence in work. And some brilliant minds had joined the monasteries, so they’d devised some ingenious methods for going about their work in a more productive manner, enhancing yields for crops & the invention of new products. Being deft businessmen, they worked good deals and maximized profits, which went into the monastery’s account. But individual monks did not profit thereby. The funds were used to expand the monastery’s resources & facilities. This led to even higher profits. Which were then used in plushing up the monastery even more. The cells got nicer, the food better, the grounds more sumptuous, the library more expansive.  The monks got new habits. Outwardly, things were the same, they owned nothing personally, but in fact, their monastic world was upgraded significantly.

The Cistercians responded to this by building houses in remote places & keeping them as simple, bare lodgings. They also made a place for people from the lower classes who had vocations but wanted to give themselves more completely to God. These were called “lay brothers.”

The startling early success of the Cistercians was due to Bernard of Clairvaux. When he decided to enter a newly founded Cistercian monastery, he took with him a group of his friends & relatives. Because of his oratory skill & praise for the Cistercian model, recruitment proceed so rapidly many more houses had to be founded in quick succession. He was made abbot of one of them at Clairvaux, from which he draws his name. He went on to become a leading figure in the monastic world & European politics. He spoke so movingly he was useful as a diplomatic emissary, as well as a preacher.

We’ll hear more about him in a later episode.

Other monastic experiments weren’t so successful. The willingness to try new forms of the life gave a platform for some short-lived endeavors by the eccentric. There are always those who think their idea is THE way it ought to be. Either because they lack common sense or have no skill at recruiting others, they fall apart. So many pushed on the boundaries of monastic life that one writer thought it would be helpful to review the available modes in the 12^th Century. His work covered all the possibilities of monastic & priestly life.

The 12^th Century saw the creation of new monastic orders. In Paris, the Victorines produced leading academic figures & teachers. The Premonstratensians were a group of Western monks who took on the monumental task of healing the rift between the Eastern & Western churches. The problem was, there was no corresponding monastic group IN the East.

But that’s getting way ahead of ourselves as we try to keep to a closer narrative timeline.

In future episodes, we’ll revisit the monks & monasteries of the Eastern & Western Church because it was often from their ranks the movers of church history were drawn.

32-Augustine Part 2

by Lance Ralston | Mar 30, 2014 | English | 0 comments

This episode of CS is titled “Augustine – Part 2.”

Augustine wrote a work called Retractions in which he lists the many books and treatises he’d penned. Each work is given a summary and additional notes are added charting the development of his thought over time.

He wrote some 113 books & treatises, close to 250 letters, some of which are treatises themselves, and 500 sermons.

Here’s a rundown on some of them …

The best introduction to Augustine’s thoughts is his Enchiridion – also known as On Faith, Hope, & Love.  The section on faith is an exposition of the Apostle’s Creed. Hope is captured in the Lord’s Prayer, while Love is the summary of the Commandments.

On Christian Teaching is Augustine’s theology of Scripture; what it teaches, how it ought to be understood, and a practical theology on how to share it. It’s here he developed the foundational principle of the analogy of faith. It establishes the rule that no teaching which is contrary to the general tenor and story of the Scriptures can be developed from any particular passage. The history of heresy and pseudo-Christian cults makes clear most of them violate this basic rule of hermeneutics.

On Catechizing the Uninstructed gives both a long and short form for how to deal with inquirers.

Augustine’s On the Good of Marriage affirms the benefits of marriage as bringing children into the world, protecting fidelity, and serves as a picture of Christ and the Church. Although, keeping with the sensibilities of the time, it made clear the superior position of celibacy.

Shortly after arriving back home in Tagaste, around 389, Augustine wrote what is probably his most famous work – Confessions. The word meant more then than it typically does today. Yes, it bears his confession of sin, but Augustine also meant the word as his profession of faith and a declaration of the goodness of God. Com­pleted by 401, it lays bare his soul. He describes his life before conversion, the events leading to his conver­sion, and his path back to North Africa. The Confessions of St. Augustine is counted as one of the greatest autobiographical works of all time. It contains the oft-quoted “You have made us for Yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee” in the first paragraph. Scholars & students of ancient literature are moved by Augustine’s remarkably candid and perceptive analysis of his struggle with sin. At one point he shares the struggle he had with lust this way. He cried out to the heavens, “Give me chas­tity and holy desire; Only—not yet.”

After the Confessions, Augustine’s most important work, and one he labored on for 14 years is The City of God. This is arguably the climax of Christian Latin apologetics and became the blueprint for the Middle Ages.

It began as a response to the Sack of Rome by the Goths in 410. Though Rome was no longer the capital of the Empire, it remained the enduring symbol of it. Pagans loudly protested Rome was sacked because the old gods were furious they’d been forsaken; thrown over for this new deity out of the Middle East name Jesus.

Augustine began the work as a reply to this damning charge. It grew into a comprehensive philosophy of history; an eloquent apologetic for what would come to be known as the Providential View of History.

Augustine posited 2 cities; One of the world, the other of Heaven. These 2 cities are the result of 2 kinds of love; the love of self and the love of God. It begins with a negative and apologetic part that attacks paganism and its claims against the Faith. The next section is positive and describes Augustine’s philosophy of history. He describes the origin, progress and terminus of both cities. When I say “city” think society, for that is what Augustine meant.

Such a description as this, and most others may make it appear Augustine posits the 2 cities as ever distinct. That’s not the case; rather, they are, at least as they are manifest in the world, always confused and mixed; yet ever at odds.

In earlier works, Augustine laid out a pattern for history as progressing from . . .

• Before the Law,
• Under Law,
• Under Grace,
• & In Peace.

These corresponded to the individual believer’s spiritual path as well. Augustine also charted 7 periods of history based on the Creation-week. Five of them fell under the Old Testament, one in the new, and the 7^th was the Millennium, which in this earlier work he described as coming after Jesus’ Return.

But in The City of God, Augustine’s idea of history was Amillennial. He cast the 1000 years of Rev 20 as symbolic either of the Church age or the ultimate summation of history. THAT view replaced the prior, literal millennial eschatology that had been the position of the Church to that time. The Amillennial position became the dominant view in Western Christianity thru the Middle Ages and beyond.

The City of God is so noble in its treatment of theology and philosophy it’s endured as a classic statement of Christians’ views on a wide range of topics. Augustine treats with such subjects as rape, abortion, and suicide.

Many historians consider Augustine the most important and influential Christian thinker from the Apostle Paul to the Reformers Luther and Calvin who both drew heavily from his work.

When he became Bishop at Hippo, the Donatists still thrived in North Africa, in some places forming the majority. Augustine supported the Roman position against them.

By way of review, the Donatists argued for a pure church, one led by bishops who’d not caved to persecution, recanted their faith, or surrendered Scriptures to be burned, then, when persecution passed, were allowed to return to their post. Rome said such lapsed bishops and priests could be restored. The Donatists said they could NOT and that any service they performed was invalid. The Donatists were deeply upset that the Bishop at Rome welcomed these lapsed priests back into their positions as leaders.

Augustine argued against the Donatists, saying that according to Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, the Church was a mixed multitude; holding both the lost and saved.

Now: I have to admit I’m at a loss to see how that justified allowing apostates to regain leadership positions in the church.

Let’s cast that in light of a far sometimes problem today. Should a pastor who commits adultery, and is caught in it, not from which he repents before being caught; should he be allowed back into his role as a pastor just because he breaks up with his mistress?

For Augustine, the issue wasn’t so much that these lapsed priests and bishops were allowed back into their roles; it was the question of whether or not their religious service held any efficacy for those they were served by; things like Communion and baptism.

Augustine differed with the Donatists on the validity of these baptisms and communion served by lapsed priests. Donatists claimed an apostate had lost authority to administer these rites. Augustine said the moral and spiritual standing of a priest wasn’t important, only that he be aware he bestowed God’s grace on others by baptizing and serving communion.

While no doubt many of us would agree that it isn’t the moral excellence of the officiating minister that determines the value of communion and baptism, what surely some of our listeners will find difficult is the idea that a special grace is communicated BY a priest, through these rituals.

You see, this brings us right up to a much later controversy that will surface during the Reformation. Do the sacraments convey grace or are they meant to be memorials that point to a historical event we renew our faith by? Notice I did NOT say, they are MERELY memorials, for that goes too far and misrepresents the position of the radical Reformers, But that is a subject for a much later episode.

Augustine’s argument at this point laid the foundation for the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrine that an ordained priest becomes the channel of grace to church members. Next stop on that train is Sacramentalism and Sacerdotalism.

Augustine’s support of the Roman church and Bishop in the Donatist controversy included the use of force to suppress rivals and coerce them to accept church policy. In another example of his misuse of Scripture, he quoted Luke 14:23, wherein the parable of the banquet the host said: “Compel them to come in.” Augustine used this to justify forcing opponents to comply. This again seems an odd application of a passage that’s self-explanatory. For the servants of the host didn’t go out into streets and beat people; driving them with whips into the banquet.

Now: I recognize the historic weight and significance assigned to Augustine of Hippo. He was a towering intellect who made a major contribution to Christian theology. There’s no denying that. But there’s much in his work that seems to some, and I am one, that is inconsistent, even contradictory. For instance, a moment ago I mentioned Augustine developed the hermeneutical principle of the Analogy of Faith, a rule he shatters by justifying the use of force to compel adherence to church policy by using Luke 14:23.

Following his refutation of Donatism, Augustine turned his impressive intellectual attention to the teaching of a British monk named Pelagius. Pelagianism was a Christianized form of Greek stoicism. Pelagius said humans aren’t sinners by nature; that they’re free moral agents who become sinners by sinning and that it was possible to live without sin apart from the empowering of the Holy Spirit. Pelagius believed Jesus’s death atoned for sins but that humans possessed the power in themselves to live holy lives. Augustine’s own experience with sin proved Pelagius wrong and he argued forcefully against his ideas. Augustine said the entire human race was in Adam so that when he fell, all fell with him and sin passed to everyone. Sinners, Augustine argued, are not only saved by God’s grace, but they’re also kept by it and can only live God-honoring lives through the power of the Holy Spirit. He taught that God chooses only some to be saved and bestows this saving grace through the church by baptism and communion.

This is another example of Augustine’s confusing theology. He said only those who joined the visible church receive grace, then turned around and said salvation is a private matter between God and the individual. It was the former idea that laid the Roman Church’s claim to being the sole agent of bestowing grace, and the later teaching that formed the Protestant Reformation’s view of salvation. One has to wonder what Augustine thought the unmerited favor of grace was if joining a church, being baptized and taking communion acquired it.

He helped develop the doctrine of pur­gatory and so emphasized the value of baptism and communion as means of bestowing grace that the false doctrines of baptismal regeneration and sacramentalism were logical outcomes of his views.

As Augustine neared his final days, the Vandals who’d sacked Rome, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and swept East to lay siege to Hippo. Two months into the siege Augustine died & a year later when the city finally fell, the Vandals entered to find everyone either dying or dead from hunger. Though they destroyed most of the city, out of respect for the renowned Augustine, they left his church intact.

31-Augustine Part 1

by Lance Ralston | Mar 23, 2014 | English | 0 comments

This episode of CS is titled “Augustine – Part 1.”

Late have I loved You, O Beauty so ancient yet so new; Late have I loved you. You were within while I was without. I sought You out there. Unlovely, I rushed heedlessly among the lovely things You made. You were with me, but I was not with You. These things kept me far from You; even though they’d not even be unless You made them. You called and cried aloud, and opened my deafness. You gleamed and shined, and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrant odors and I drew breath, and now I pant for You. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for Your peace.

Wrote Augustine of Hippo in his classic Confessions.

We turn now to the life and work of a man of singular importance in the history of the Church due to his impact on theology. I’ll be blunt to say what it seems many, maybe most, are careful to avoid when it comes to Augustine. While the vast majority of historians laud him, a much smaller group are less enthused with him, as I hope becomes clear as we review the man and his impact.

Augustine is the climax of patristic thought, at least in the Latin world. By “patristics,”  I mean the theology of the Church Fathers. If you’ve ever had a chance to look through collections of books on theology or church history, you’ve likely seen a massive set of tomes called the Ante & Post Nicene Fathers. That simply means the Church Fathers that came before the Council of Nicaea and those who came after and helped lay the doctrinal foundation of the Church. Augustine was THE dominant influence on the Medieval European; so much so, He’s referred to as the Architect of the Middle Ages. Augustine continues to be a major influence among Roman Catholics for his theology of the church and sacraments, and for Protestants in regard to his theology of grace & salvation.

Augustine’s back-story is well-known because there’s plenty of source material to draw from. Some say we know more about Augustine than any other figure of the ancient world because—not only do we have a record of his daily activities from one of his students; Possidius, Bishop of Calama; we also have a highly detailed record of Augustine’s inner life from his classic work, Confessions. We also have a work titled Retractions where Augustine chronicles his intellectual development as he lists 95 of his works, explains why they were written, and the changes he made to them over time.

Let me begin his story by laying the background of Augustine’s world . . .

The end of the persecution of the first 2 centuries was a great relief to the church. No doubt the reported conversion of Emperor Constantine seemed a dream come true. The apostle Paul told the followers of Christ to pray for the king and all those in authority. So the report of the Emperor’s conversion was a cause of great rejoicing. It was likely only a handful of the wise who sensed a call to caution in what this new relationship between church and state would mean and the perils it might bring.

During the 4^th Century, churches grew more rapidly than ever. But not all those who joined did so with pure motives. With persecution behind them, some joined the Church to hedge their bets and add one more deity to their list. Others joined thinking it would advance their social status, now that being a Christian could earn them points with officials. Some sincere Christians witnessed the moral and spiritual dumbing down of the faith and fled to the wilderness to pursue an ascetic lifestyle as a hermit or into a monastery as a monk. But most Christians remained in their cities and towns to witness the growing affiliation between the church and earthly institutions. The invisible, universal or catholic church began increasingly to be associated with earthly forms and social structures.

I need to pause here and make sure everyone understands that the word Catholic simply means UNIVERSAL. Historically, this is the Age of Catholic Christianity – not ROMAN Catholic Christianity. Historians refer to this time and the Eastern Orthodox Church as Catholic, to differentiate it from the several aberrant and heretical groups that had split off.  Groups like the Arians, Manichaeans, Gnostics, and Apollinarians, and half a dozen other hard to pronounce sects. But toward the end of the 4^th Century, the Institutional replaced the Communal aspects of the Faith. The Gospel was supplanted by dogma and rituals in many churches.

Jesus made it clear following Him meant a call to serve, not be served. Christians are servants. They serve God by serving one another and the world. During the first 3 centuries when the church was battered, the call to serve was valued as a priority. The heroes of the faith served by offering themselves in the ultimate sense-with their lives. But when the Church rose out of the catacombs to enter positions of social influence and power during the 4^th Century, being a servant lost priority. Church leaders, who’d led by serving for 300 years, began to position themselves to be served. Servant-leaders became leaders of servants.

This change escalated with the disintegration of the Western Empire during the 4^th & 5^th Centuries. As foreigners pressed in from the North and East, and civil authorities fled from the frontiers, people look more and more to the bishops and church leaders to provide guidance and governance.

We’ve already seen how the Church and Bishop at Rome emerged as not only a religious leader but a political leader as well. The fall and sack of Rome by the Vandals in 410 rocked the Empire, leaving people profoundly shaken. One man emerged at this time to help deal with their confusion and anxiety over the future.

Augustine was born in 354 in Tagaste, a small commercial city in North Africa. His father Patricius was a pagan and member of the local ruling class. His mother Monica was a committed Christian. Though far from wealthy, Augustine’s parents were determined he should have the best education possible. After attending primary school in Tagaste he went to Carthage for secondary education. It was there, at the age of 17, he took on a mistress with whom he lived for 13 years & by whom he had a son named Adeodatus. While this seems scandalous, realize it was not all that uncommon for young men of the upper classes to have such an arrangement. Augustine seems to have had a genuine love for this woman, even though he fails to give us her name. It’s certain he did love their son. And even though Augustine loved his girlfriend. He later wrote throughout these years he was continually hammered by sexual temptation and often despaired of overcoming it.

Augustine pursued studies in philosophy in general; picking no specific school as the focus of his attention. When he was 19 he read the now lost Hortensius by the Roman orator Cicero & was convinced he should make the pursuit of truth his life’s aim. But this noble quest battled with what he now felt was a degrading desire toward immorality. For moral assistance to resist the downward pull, he defaulted to the faith of his mother’s home and turned to the Bible. But being a lover of classical Latin, the translations he read seemed crude and unsophisticated and held no appeal.

What did appeal to Augustine was the Manichaeans with whom we’ve already treated.  By way of review, Mani was a teacher in Persia in the mid-3^rd Century who mashed a Gnostic-flavored religion together with ancient Persian ideas as embodied in Zoroastrianism. Augustine was an intellectual, the kind of person Manichaeanism appealed to. They disdained faith, saying they were the intellectual gate-keepers of reason and logic. They explained the world in terms of darkness and light. Light and Spirit were good, darkness and the physical; evil. The key to overcoming sin was an early form of the campaign used on public school campuses in the US years ago regarding drugs: “Just say no!” Augustine was told if he just employed total abstinence from physical pleasure he’d do well. He was a Manichaean for 9 yrs until he saw its logical inconsistencies and left.

His record of this time reveals that while he remained within their ranks, he had problems all along. Assuming he just needed to learn more to clear up the problems, the more he studied, the more problems popped up. When he voiced his concerns, other Manichaeans told him if he could just hear the teaching of Faustus, all his concerns would dissolve. Faustus was supposed to be the consummate Manichaean who had all the answers.

Well, Faustus eventually arrived and Augustine listened in the expectation that everything he’d been doubting would evaporate like dew in the morning sun. That’s not what happened. On the contrary. Augustine said while Faustus was eloquent of speech, his words were like a fancy plate holding rotten meat. He sounded good, but his speech was empty.

Augustine spent time with Faustus, trying to work through his difficulties but the more he heard, the more he realized the man was clueless. So much for Manichaeanism being the gate-keeper of reason.

At the age of 20, Augustine began teaching. His friends recognized his intellectual genius and encouraged him to move to Rome. In 382, closing in on 30, he and his mother moved to the Capital where he began teaching.

As often happens when someone’s religious or philosophical house is blown over like a stack of cards, Augustine’s disappointment with Manichaeanism led to a period of disenchantment & skepticism. Remember; he’d given himself to the pursuit of truth and had assumed for several years Mani had found it. Now he knew he hadn’t. Once bitten, twice shy works for philosophy as well as romance.

Augustine was rescued from his growing skepticism by Neo-Platonism and the work of Plotinus who fanned to flame his smoldering spark of longing for truth.

In 384, Augustine was hired as a professor of rhetoric at the University of Milan where his now widowed mother Monica and some friends joined him.

More out of professional courtesy as a professor of rhetoric than anything else, Augustine went to hear Milan’s bishop Ambrose preach. Augustine was surprised at Ambrose’s eloquence. It’s not like this was his first time in church. He’d attended the churches of North Africa while growing up there. But he’d never heard anyone speak like this. Ambrose showed Augustine that the Christian faith, far from being crude and unsophisticated, was both eloquent & intelligent.

An elder named Simplicianus made Augustine his personal project. He gave Augustine a copy of a commentary on Paul by Marius Victorinus, who’d converted from Neo-Platonism to Christianity 30 years before. Being a Neo-Platonist himself, Augustine went through something of an intellectual conversion, if not a spiritual transformation.

Augustine’s future was bright. He had a prestigious job, committed friends, wealth, influence and he was still young and healthy. But inwardly he was miserable. His mother Monica suggested what he needed was a normal family. Of course, she was against his long-time but illicit affair with his girlfriend, the mother of his son. She’d followed him on all his various moves; to Tagaste from Carthage to Rome, then Milan. Monica told Augustine his girlfriend was keeping him from finding a suitable wife, someone more fit for his social standing. Though Augustine loved her, his mother’s constant urging to put her away eventually moved him to locate his inner unrest with his mistress. So he ended their relationship. He then proposed to a young woman of wealth and society. Problem is, she was too young to marry so a far-off date was set. Augustine couldn’t master his lust, and only a short time after breaking up with his mistress, he found another. From Augustine’s own account of his struggle in the Confessions, we might describe his problem as a sexual addiction. His inner battle between the higher call of virtue and the lower pull toward vice threatened to tear him apart in a mental breakdown.

It was then, as he devoured material in his quest for truth that he heard of Christian hermits like Anthony of Egypt who’d mastered their fleshly desires. Their example shamed Augustine. Until then he’d considered Christians as intellectually inferior — yet they were able to accomplish a victory over sin he’d been powerless to attain. He began to wonder if maybe Christianity possessed a power he’d missed.

Conversion became for Augustine, as it was for so many at this time, not so much an issue of faith as action. He was persuaded of the intellectual strength of Christianity; he just did not want to give up his sin, though he knew he should.

One day in 386, while walking in the garden of his house, his soul seething in confusion and moral anguish, he carried a Bible hoping to draw guidance from it. But he could make no sense of it. He dropped it on a bench and paced back and forth; his mind in torment. From somewhere nearby, he heard a child’s voice calling out the line of what must have been a game though Augustine did not know it. The voice said, “Tolle lege (tawlee Leggy) = Take up and read.” He reached down and picked up the Bible he’d just dropped. The page fell open to Romans 13 where his eyes fell on words perfectly suited to his current mindset. He read à

Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.

Augustine later wrote, “As I read those words, instantly it was as if the light of peace poured into my heart and all the shades of doubt departed.” The following Easter, Augustine and his son Adeodatus were baptized by Bishop Ambrose. A few months later Augustine returned to North Africa. On the way, his mother Monica died and not long after he returned to Tagaste, his son also passed. Augustine lost interest in living and longed to leave the world he once longed for.

His friends rallied round and gave him a purpose to carry on. They formed a monastic community, out of which would come the famous Augustinian Order and Rule.

While Augustine would likely have been content to live out his life in the monastery, the North African church desperately needed a leader with his gifts. In 391 the church at Hippo ordained him as 1 of their priests. He did the preaching because their bishop was Greek and could speak neither Latin nor the local Punic. He became co-bishop 4 years later, then a year after that, sole bishop at Hippo. He served in that capacity for the next 33 years.

He kept up the monastic life throughout his tenure as Bishop at Hippo. His was an extremely busy career; divided between study, writing and general oversight of church affairs.

We’ll pick it up at this point in our next episode as we consider some of his more important writings. Then we’ll get into Augustine’s career as a theologian.

30-Ambrose

by Lance Ralston | Mar 16, 2014 | English | 0 comments

The title of this episode is simply à “Ambrose.” And once we learn a little about him, we’ll see that title is enough.

For Ambrose was one of the most interesting figures in Church History, a hinge around which the course of the Faith swung.

Born in 340, Ambrose was the second son of Ambrosius, the imperial governor of Gaul and part of an ancient Roman family that included the famous Marcus Aurelius. Not long after Aurelius, and his disastrous son and heir Commodus, the family became Christians who provided not a few notable martyrs. Ambrose was born at Trier, the imperial capital of Gaul. While still a child, Ambrose’s father died, and he was taken to Rome to be raised. His childhood was spent in the company of many members of the Christian clergy, men of sincere faith with a solid grasp on the theological challenges the Church of that day wrestled with; things you’re familiar with because we’ve spent the last several episodes dealing with them; that is, the Christological controversies that swirled first around Arius, then the blood-feud between Cyril & Nestorius.

Now would be a good time for me to toss in some place-markers so we can get a sense of what was going on as Ambrose grew up. Donatus is the bishop of Carthage. The Cappadocian Fathers, Basil, and the 2 Gregory’s are hammering out the proper verbiage to understand the Trinity. Athanasius has his long run as THE chief defender or Biblical orthodoxy. When Ambrose was 16, the famous Desert Father Anthony of Egypt died. The Goths ran rampant over Northern Europe, causing great consternation in the Roman Empire. When Ambrose was 38 the Goths defeated the Romans at the Battle of Adrianople in a loss so thorough, the Emperor Valens was killed.

During Ambrose’s lifetime, Pope Damasus will rule the Church at Rome. Jerome will move to Bethlehem and complete the Vulgate. John Chrysostom will serve as Patriarch at Constantinople.

Clearly, a lot with major import was going on during Ambrose’s lifetime.

When he turned 30, Ambrose, based in the capital at Milan, became governor of all NW’n Italy. He was charged with the responsibility to officiate church disputes.  This was at a time when Nicaean & Arian believers were at war with each other; a war not fought with literal weapons but with words. Ambrose was no friend to the Arians, but he was so fair-minded and well-regarded, both sides supported him in his role as governor. When the Arian bishop of Milan died, Ambrose attended the meeting to elect his replacement, hoping his presence would forestall violence. To his surprise, both sides shouted their wish that he be the replacement.

Ambrose didn’t want it. He was doing quite well as a political leader. Following the practice of many at that time, he hadn’t even been baptized yet. But the people wrote to Emperor Valentinian, asking for his approval of their selection. Ambrose was placed under arrest until he agreed to serve a Milan’s new bishop.

Now, if the Arians had hoped to gain favor by supporting Ambrose as bishop, they were destined to disappointment. Their new bishop helped define what the word ‘orthodox’ meant. He soon took the Arians to task & refused to surrender a building for them to meet in. He wrote several works against them that went on to prove instrumental in ultimately bringing an end to Arianism.

Trained in rhetoric and law, and having studied Greek, Ambrose became known for his knowledge of Greek scholars, both Christian and pagan. In addition to Philo, Origen, and Basil of Caesarea, he quoted the Neo-platonist Plotinus in his sermons. He was widely regarded as an excellent preacher.

In many of his messages, Ambrose expounded upon the virtues of asceticism. He was so persuasive that noble families sometimes forbade their daughters to attend his services, fearing they’d trade their marriageable status withy its potential for a bride price, for the life of nun.

One piece of his pastoral advice became a maxim for the clergy: “When you are at Rome, live in the Roman style; when you are elsewhere, live as they live elsewhere.”

Ambrose also introduced congregational singing, and was accused of “bewitching” Milan by introducing Eastern melodies into the hymns he wrote. Because of his influence, hymn-singing became an important part of Western liturgy.

While Ambrose was a fierce opponent of heresy, as seen in his stand against Arianism, his opposition to religious issues didn’t morph over into how people were treated civilly. Arians & pagans were still citizens who possessed rights as citizens. As human beings, they were still objects of God’s love and desire for salvation. Respect needed to be shown them, even while opposing them theologically. That was a rare perspective for the time; inordinately rare. And it earned Ambrose tremendous respect from all quarters.

While the people of Ambrose’s time credited his writings and worship innovations as the most notable feature of his life & ministry, history attributes two other momentous events to his impact on the Church.

First is in the realm of church-state relations.
Second would be his influence on a young pagan who visited his church and became a follower of Jesus. His name was Augustine.

Let’s consider first, Ambrose’s impact of church-state relations.

His relationship with Emperor Theodosius, who finalized a long-running political trend of folding the Roman Empire into a Christian state, was a dramatic shift from the first 200 years of Church history that saw an on & off persecution.

An example of the change from paganism to Christianity occurred in 390, when local officials imprisoned a charioteer of Thessalonica for homosexual behavior. The public rebelled against this action because the charioteer was a major celebrity, a sports hero & crowd favorite. Riots broke out w/a loud cry for his release. Not a few of the rioters and innocent bystanders were killed, including the governor. The mob took over the prison and the prisoner was freed.

The Emperor was enraged by the melee. He was determined to exact revenge against the people of Thessalonica for such a flagrant disregard for the law and the disrespect he felt at having his hand-picked governor so casually relieved of life. So he slyly announced another chariot race. When the crowds showed up & settled into their seats, the gates were locked, the people inside—massacred. Over the following 3 hours, 7,000 were put to the sword.

Ambrose was stunned! Once he recovered from his shock, he sat down and composed a letter to Theodosius, demanding the Emperor repent. As chief ruler, Theodosius wasn’t inclined to follow some far-off bishop’s counsel. Ambrose was merely a clergyman in Milan, Italy; Theodosius was the mighty ruler headquartered in the East at Constantinople.

But Theodosius didn’t stay in Constantinople. Wouldn’t you just know it? Imperial business took him, guess where! Yep – Milan. As a Christian Emperor of a now Christian Empire, Theodosius went to church, and expected Pastor Ambrose to serve him Communion. Ambrose refused! His letter calling for the Emperor to repent had gone unheeded. Who did this guy think he was that he could just waltz into the church in Milan and line up for Communion as though everything was hunky-dory? The nerve of the guy!

Ambrose repeated the condition: Unless the emperor repent of his gross abuse of power, & do so publicly, no Communion would pass his lips! Either Ambrose was gutsy or had a death wish! An Emperor who’d ordered the execution of thousands probably wouldn’t think much of offing a lone, obstinate bishop. But Ambrose demonstrated he would not compromise his calling to save his life and Theodosius realized his best course was to do as instructed and repented by setting aside his royal garments & emblems of State, wearing humble sackcloth, & a face streaked w/ash as a sign of penance.

Ambrose never intended this humiliation of the Emperor as a way to elevate himself or other church officials. It was simply something he believed Theodosius, who claimed to be a Christian, was required to do as a sign of sincere contrition before God. Ambrose would have been appalled at how later bishops used their office & power to administer the sacraments as a way to manipulate civil rulers, and by doing so, use civil power to accomplish church ends. Or we should say, their own ends hidden ‘neath a thin veneer of religion.

Though Ambrose could not have foreseen the consequences of this episode with the Emperor, it introduced the medieval concept of a Christian emperor as the compliant “son of the church serving under orders from Christ.” Over the next millennium, secular and religious rulers vied with each other over who was sovereign in the different spheres of life.

Though we might expect Emperor Theodosius to leave Milan with an axe to grind as it related to Ambrose, legend says he was so impressed with Ambrose’s courage & quality of Christian witness he said, “I know no bishop worthy of the name, except Ambrose” When the emperor died, it was in Ambrose’s arms. Of Theodosius’ death Ambrose said, “I confess I loved him, and felt the sorrow of his death in the abyss of my heart.”

Two years later, Ambrose himself fell ill. The worries the entire Italian countryside felt were expressed by one writer as; “When Ambrose dies, we shall see the ruin of Italy.” On the Eve of Easter in 397, Milan’s beloved bishop breathed his last.

Only one name is more associated with Ambrose than Theodosius’. And that leads us to the second impact of his ministry, the one historians reckon as most important. That one name is the student who outshined this teacher: Augustine. But that’s the subject of our next few episode . . .

29-Syncretism

by Lance Ralston | Mar 9, 2014 | English | 4 comments

This episode of CS is titled, “Syncretism.”

Recent episodes have chronicled the growing rift between the Eastern church centered at Constantinople and the Western-based in Rome. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451 Eastern bishops elevated the Bishop of Constantinople to near equal status and authority with the Bishop of Rome, giving the Church 2 heads. It was increasingly obvious politics played a greater role in church affairs than the quest for doctrinal purity or faithfulness to the Gospel–mandate. East & West were moving in opposite directions.

Since Constantinople as the “New Rome” was the political center of the empire the Eastern church grew increasingly linked to Imperial power. In the year 380, on Feb. 27^th in his Edict of Thessalonica, Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity the official state religion and banned paganism. Since the Church had no authority or power to enforce compliance to the Faith or to punish unconverted pagans, Imperial power was lent to enforce the Emperor’s will.

This forced-conversion of vast multitudes of pagans saw an influx of new church members whose commitment to the Gospel was doubtful. Priests were now in the uncomfortable position of having to lead people they knew were at best, only nominally-committed.

Since the Christianity of the 4^th C had moved away from its roots in Judaism with its knee-jerk hostility to idolatry, a growing number of priests, who’d themselves been idol-worshiping pagans before conversion, though it might facilitate the assimilation of new converts to the Faith if concessions were made to the old forms. Why not take age-old traditions and direct them toward new ends? The veneration of angels, saints, relics, pictures, and statues was an attempt to bring ex-pagans into a more familiar form of worship and accommodate their religious sensitivities. Of this process, Philip Schaff writes, “The Christianizing of the State amounted in great measure to a paganizing and secularizing of the church. The world overcame the Church, as much as the Church overcame the world, and the temporal gain of Christianity was in many respects canceled by its spiritual loss. The mass of the Roman Empire was baptized only with water, not with the Spirit and fire of the Gospel, and it smuggled heathen manors and practices into the sanctuary under a new name.” [1]

It’s a risky venture attributing motive to those removed from us by such a long distance in time, but I suspect for many church leaders the assimilation of pagan forms into the liturgy of the Church was seen as a necessary concession to the large numbers of barbarians now required to convert. The hope was that as these new, nominal church members learned the Gospel, the truth would set them free from their superstitions and the Church could return to a pure and orthodox liturgy. No doubt the reasoning went something like à God had become man to reach sinful men. Why could not the Church become, to use Paul’s words “all things to all people in order to win the more?”

The problem is, if that was the rationalization for adopting pagan forms of worship, it didn’t work. The Church didn’t temporarily materialize its liturgy to accommodate nominal members; it institutionalized those pagan forms, making them into new traditions, some of which continue to this day.

Another unfortunate development during this time was the distance that developed between the clergy and laity. For the first 3 Cs, lead pastors or bishops as they were called, were honored as God-ordained leaders by their congregations, but they weren’t regarded as special. The elevation of bishops and priests into a special class developed slowly during the 4^th & 5^th Cs.  By the dawn of the 6^th they were regarded as being unique; part of a distinct category. The reason for this elevation differed in the East and West. In the East, Church & State were joined in a religio-political union. Because of the close of affinity between priest and politician, clergy adopted the lavish trappings Eastern officials affected. Constantine began this trend when he moved his capital to Constantinople.  He adorned himself as a traditional opulent Eastern monarch rather than an austere Western Emperor.

For the first 2 Cs, Western clergy wore clothing similar to their congregations. But as the monastic movement began providing more priests for the church, the monk’s habit became more prominent. This continued for some time among the priesthood, but as the political structure of the Western Empire fell apart and church leaders were increasingly looked to, to provide civil governance, some bishops adopted garments that marked them as civil rulers, flavoring their robes with religious symbols. But the message was clear à Church and State had merged in the office of Bishop.

At General Councils, when Western bishops observed the sumptuous regalia of their Eastern peers, they aspired to wear similarly elegant gear and began to don the Eastern fashions. All this only served to further distance the clergy from the laity.

Another carry-over from paganism was the observance of special days. Constantine set Sunday as the official day of Christian worship. In the mid-4^th C, Christmas became a regular practice, taking over the pagan December festival of Saturnalia. Epiphany celebrated either, in the West the visit of the Magi, or in the East, Jesus’ baptism.

The annual commemoration of notable martyrs became Saint’s days.

More rituals were added to the Church calendar. The only 2 sacraments in the New Testament call Christians to practice Baptism & Communion. By the end of the 6^th C, 5 more were added.

The development of the doctrine of original sin encouraged the practice of infant baptism. The emergence of Communion as the centerpiece of worship saw a deepening of its meaning from a commemoration of Jesus’ death to a re-enactment of.

The Church father Cyprian taught that the priest acted in Christ’s place at Communion and that he offered a true and full sacrifice to God. Pope Gregory I emphasized the sacrificial nature of Communion. By the dawn of the 7^th C, Sacerdotalism was well on its way.

Sacerdotalism is the belief that grace is literally & actually bestowed on worshipers through the mediating influence of an ordained priest, officiating the sacraments. Think of it this way à The Bible says we are saved by grace through faith. The official position of the Church was that by the faith of the officiating priest, working in harmony w/the worshipper, the sacraments were vehicles by which grace was bestowed & salvation was renewed. è Spiritual vitamins to keep one healthy.

All this led to a further separation of clergy and laity. Later it became the means by which Church leaders manipulated civil officials. When clergy have the power to bestow grace via sacraments, they can threaten a ruler to comply or risk the torment of hell.

The veneration of saints grew out of a long tradition that held the martyrs in the highest regard. It’s not difficult to see how those who’d died during persecution were esteemed as heroes and examples all could aspire to.  The anniversary of their martyrdom was made a day of commemoration, eventually morphing into Saint’s Days. Since pagans were in the habit of lauding their heroes by marking them with special celebrations, attributing them with special powers, Saint’s Days were substituted for these celebrations, and the saints were accorded special-access to God. What had been prayers by Christians at the tomb of martyrs for the peaceful repose of the martyr’s soul, turned into prayers TO the saints for their intercession with God and requests of the saints to assist them in their special area of expertise. Going on a journey? Ask St. Cristofer for protection. Starting a new business venture? Ask St. Bartholomew for prosperity.  On and on it went.

The veneration of saints was endorsed by the 2^nd Council of Nicaea in the 8^th C. Churches and chapels were built over saint’s graves and became destinations for pilgrims. Festivals associated with their death were placed on the calendar, and legends of miracles associated with them developed rapidly. Traffic in relics, including parts of a saint’s body—teeth, hair, and bones, became so great a prob­lem, an Imperial order stopped it in 381. These relics became the focal point of the many cathedrals built across Europe and were ultimately the goal of the millions of pilgrimages people embarked on during the Middle Ages. Think of a cathedral as merely a large ornate box that held some saint’s shin-bone and you get the idea.

The use of images and pictures in worship expanded rapidly as increasing numbers of barbarians came into the church. Images gave substance to the invisible reality of deity for these superstitious worshipers. Pictures also had a decorative function in beautifying churches. The Church Fathers tried to make a distinction between reverence of images and worship, but it’s doubtful this distinc­tion prevented peasants from conflating an image with the thing it was meant to represent.

Government aid after Constantine led to ex­tensive church building.  These imperial churches followed the basilica architecture Romans developed for their public buildings.

Constan­tine’s mother, Helena, visited Israel in her later years and was thought to have discerned both by the Spirit’s leading and local reports, the location of several Biblical events, leading to the construction of churches right over where those events were supposed to have occurred.

The earliest singing in the church was conducted by a leader to whom the people gave response in song. Antiphonal singing, in which 2 choirs sing alternately, developed in the East at Antioch. Ambrose intro­duced the practice of antiphonal sing­ing in Milan, from which it spread throughout the Western church.

The veneration of Mary was also pretty well in place by the close of the 6^th C, though the Roman Church didn’t officially adopt the doctrines of her immaculate conception and miraculous assumption until 1854 and 1950.

A misinterpretation of Scripture, coupled to the many miracles attributed to Mary by apocryphal works, led to growing respect for her as unique in redemptive history. Several of the Church fathers, influenced by the preference for virginity among the monastics, assumed the perpetual virginity of Mary. That heavyweight of theology, Augustine, claimed Mary never sinned. And since it was assumed a son held a special affection for his mother, Mary was appealed to, to intercede with Jesus. After all, what son can refuse his mama?

We’ll end this episode there; with the mention of Augustine because he’s a towering figure in Church History we’ll need to look at soon. Just before Augustine, we need to look at  another person I just mentioned, Ambrose. We’ll do that next time as we move the story along and prepare to sit down with Augustine of Hippo.

[1] Schaff, Philip, History of the Christian Church.  Vol III, Pg. 93

28-Justinian Sayin’

by Lance Ralston | Mar 2, 2014 | English | 2 comments

This week’s episode of Communion Sanctorum is titled – “Justinian Sayin’”

During the 5^th C, while the Western Roman Empire was falling to the Goths, the Eastern Empire centered at Constantinople looked like it would carry on for centuries. Though it identified itself as Roman, historians refer to the Eastern region as the Byzantine Empire & Era. It gets that title from Byzantium, the city’s name before Constantine made it his new capital.

During the 5^th C, the entire empire, both East & West went into decline. But in the 6^th  Century, the Emperor Justinian I lead a major revival of Roman civilization. Reigning for nearly 40 years, Justinian not only brought about a re-flowering of culture in the East, he attempted to reassert control over those lands in the West that had fallen to barbarian control.

A diverse picture of Justinian the Great has emerged. For years the standard way to see him was as an intelligent, ambitious, energetic, gregarious leader plagued by an unhealthy dose of vanity. Dare I say it? Why not: He wanted to make Rome Great Again. While that’s been the traditional way of understanding Justinian, more recently, that image has been edited slightly by giving his wife and queen Theodora, a more prominent role in fueling his ambition. Whatever else we might say about this husband and wife team, they were certainly devout in their faith.

Justinian’s reign was bolstered by the careers of several capable generals who were able to translate his desire to retake the West into reality. The most famous of these generals was Belisarius, a military genius on par with Hannibal, Caesar, & Alexander. During Justinian’s reign, portions of Italy, North Africa & Spain were reconquered & put under Byzantine rule.

The Western emperors in Rome’s long history tended to be more austere in the demonstrations of their authority by keeping their wardrobe simple & the customs related to their rule modest, as befitted the idea of the Augustus as Princeps = meaning 1^st  Citizen. Eastern emperors went the other way & eschewed humility in favor of an Oriental, or what we might call “Persian” model of majesty. It began with Constantine who broke with the long-held western tradition of Imperial modesty & arrayed himself as a glorious Eastern Monarch. Following Constantine, Eastern emperors wore elaborate robes, crowns, & festooned their courts with ostentatious symbols of wealth & power.  Encouraged by Theodora, Justinian advanced this movement and made his court a grand showcase. When people appeared before the Emperor, they had to prostrate themselves, as though bowing before a god. The pomp and ceremony of Justinian’s court were quickly duplicated by the church at Constantinople because of the close tie between church & state in the East.

It was this ambition for glory that moved Justinian to embark on a massive building campaign. He commissioned the construction of entire towns, roads, bridges, baths, palaces, & a host of churches & monasteries. His enduring legacy was the Church of the Holy Wisdom, or Cathedral of St. Sophia, the main church of Constantinople. The Hagia Sofia was the epitome of a new style of architecture centered on the dome, the largest to be built to that time.  Visitors to the church would stand for hours in awe staring up at the dome, incredulous that such a span could be built by man. Though the rich interior façade of the church has been gutted by years of conflict, the basic structure stands to this day as one of Istanbul’s premier attractions.

Justinian was no mean theologian in his own right. As Emperor he wanted to unite the Church under one creed and worked hard to resolve the major dispute of the day; the divide between the Orthodox faith as expressed in the Council of Chalcedon & the Monophysites.

By way of review; the Monophysites followed the teachings of Cyril of Alexandria who’d contended with Nestorius over the nature of Christ. Nestorius emphasized the human nature of Jesus, while Cyril emphasized Jesus’ deity. The followers of both took their doctrines too far so that the Nestorians who went East into Persia tended to diminish the deity of Christ, while the Cyrillians who went south into Egypt, elevated Jesus’ deity at the expense of his humanity. They put such an emphasis on his deity they became Monophysites; meaning 1 nature-ites.

Justinian tried to reconcile the Orthodox faith centered at Constantinople with the Monophysites based in Egypt by finessing the words used to describe the faith. Even though the Council of Chalcedon had officially ended the dispute, there was still a rift between the Church at Constantinople and that in Egypt.

Justinian tried to clarify how to understand the natures of Jesus as God & Human. Did He have 1 nature or 2? And if 2. How did those 2 natures co-exist in the Son of God? Were they separate & distinct or merged into something new? If they were distinct, was one superior to the other? This was the crux of the debate the Council of Chalcedon had struggled with and which both Cyril & Nestorius contended over.

Justinian had partial success in getting moderate Monophysites to agree with his theology. He was helped by the work of a monk named Leo of Byzantium. Leo proposed that in Christ, his 2 natures were so co-mingled & united so that they formed one nature, he identified as the Logos.

In 544 Emperor Justinian issued an edict condemning some pro-Nestorian writings. Many Western bishops thought the edict a scandalous refutation of the Chalcedonian Creed. They assumed Justinian had come out as a Monophysite. Pope Vigilius condemned the edict and broke off fellowship with the Patriarch of Constantinople because he supported the Emperor’s edict. Shortly thereafter, when Pope Vigilius visited Constantinople, he did an abrupt about-face, adding his own censure to the condemned pro-Nestorian writings. Then in 550, after several bishops criticized this reversal, Vigilius did another & said the writings weren’t prohibited after all.

Nothing like being a stalwart pillar of an unwavering stand. Vigilius was consistent; he consistently wavered when under pressure.

All of this created so much controversy that in 553 Justinian called the 5^th Ecumenical Council at Constantinople. Though it was supposed to be a counsel of the whole church, Pope Vigilius refused to attend. At Justinian’s demand, the Council affirmed his original edict of 544, further condemning anyone who supported the pro-Nestorian writings. The Emperor banished Vigilius for his refusal to attend, saying he would be reinstated only on condition of his accepting the Council’s decision.

Guess what Vigilius did. Yep. He relented and endorsed the Council’s finding. So the result was that the Chalcedonian Creed was reinterpreted along far more Monophysite lines. Jesus’ deity was elevated to the foreground while his humanity was relegated to a distant backwater. This became the official position of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

But Justinian’s desire to bring unity wasn’t achieved. The Western bishops refused to recognize the Council of Constantinople’s interpretation of the Chalcedon Creed.  And while the new spin on Jesus’ nature was embraced in the East, the hard-core Monophysites of Egypt stood their ground. They’d come to hold their theology with a fierce regional loyalty. To accept Justinian’s formulation was deemed a compromise they saw not only as heretical but as unpatriotic. They vehemently refused to come under the control of Constantinople.

What Justinian was unable to do by theological compromise and diplomacy, he attempted, by force. After all, as they say, a War is just diplomacy by other means. And as Justinian might say, “What good is it being King if you can’t bash heads whenever you want?”

The Emperor also sought to eradicate the last vestiges of paganism throughout the Empire. He commanded both civil officials & church leaders to seek out all pagan cultic practices and pre-Christian Greek philosophy and bring an immediate end to them. He closed the schools of Athens, the last institutions teaching Greek philosophy. He allowed the Jews to continue their faith but sought to regulate their practices. He decreed the death penalty for Manichaeans and other heretics like the Montanists. When his harsh policies stirred up rebellion, he was ruthless in putting it down.

Toward the end of his reign, his wife Theodora’s Monophysite beliefs influenced him to move further in that direction. He sought to recast the 5^th Council’s findings into a new form that would gain greater Monophysite support. This new view has been given the tongue-twisting label of Aph-thar-to-docetism.

According to this view, even Jesus’ physical body was divine so that from conception to death, it didn’t change. This means Jesus didn’t suffer or know the desires & passions of mortals.

When he tried to impose this doctrine on the Church, the vast majority of bishops refused to comply. So Justinian made plans to enforce compliance but died before the campaign could begin, much to the relief of said bishops.

Justinian took an active hand in ordering the Church in more than just theology. He passed laws dealing with various aspects of church life. He appointed bishops, assigned abbots to monasteries, ordained priests, managed church lands and oversaw the conduct of the clergy. He forbade the practice of simony; the sale of church offices. Being a church official could be quite lucrative, so the practice of simony was frequently a problem.

The Emperor also forbade the clergy from attending chariot races and the theater. This seems harsh if we think of these as mere sporting and cultural events. They weren’t. Both events were more often than not scenes of moral debauchery where ribald behavior was common. One did not attend a race for polite or dignified company. The races were à  well, racy. And the theater was a place where perversions were enacted onstage. That Justinian forbade clergy from attending these events means had been common for them to do so.

He authorized bishops to function in a quasi-civil fashion by having them oversee public works and enforcing laws against vice. In some places, bishops served as governors.

It was under Justinian that the church became an instrument of the state. That process had begun under Constantine but it wasn’t until the 6^th C under Justinian that it reached its zenith.

Christianity continued to extend its influence along the borders of the Empire. With the re-conquest of North Africa, the Arianism that had taken root there was eradicated. The Faith moved up the Nile into what today we know as Sudan. The Berbers of North Africa were also converted. In Europe, Barbarian tribes along the Danube were reached.

The divide between Monophysites & Orthodox Justinian had tried to heal continued to plague the church into the 7^th C when a new thread emerged; Islam.

Emperor after emperor knew a fragmented church meant a weakened society which would be easy prey to the new invaders. So they worked feverishly to bring about theological unity.

Let’s see – how do we bring the Orthodox & Monophysites together?

Sergius, the Patriarch of Constantinople had an idea. Based on what were thought to be the writings of one of the early church fathers named Dionysis, Sergius thought he found support for a new idea that could reconcile the two sides. He said that while Jesus was both divine & human, He worked by only one energy. This sounded great to the Monophysites of Egypt and for a time it looked like there would be unity.  But other bishops cried foul, so Sergius quickly shifted ground and said, “Okay, forget the one energy deal and how about this; Christ was both divine & human but possessed only one will which was a merging of the 2 natures.” Pope Honorius put his stamp of approval on this view & now with the agreement of the 2 most influential churches, it looked like a theological slam-dunk. So in 638, Emperor Heraclius passed an edict expressing Sergius’ views and forbidding further debate.

The Emperor passed an edict – so that settles it right? >> Not quite.

When Pope Honorius died, the next pope announced Jesus had two wills. Oh, & furthermore – that was the real position of Honorius – he’d just been misunderstood by Patriarch Sergius. Each Pope thereafter affirmed Jesus’ divine & human wills as distinct though in harmony with each other. This view held sway in the West as opposed to Sergius’ view which became the position of the East.

When in 648 the issue threatened to once again tear the church & Empire in 2, Emperor Constans II declared all debate about 1 or 2 wills or energies, off-limits. But wouldn’t you know it – when word of the ban reached Rome a year later, Pope Martin I called a synod to discuss the issue; decided Jesus had 2 wills and denounced the patriarch of Constantinople. The bishops also said, “How dare the Emperor tell us what we can and can’t talk about!”

Constans II decided to show the Pope how he dared and had him arrested & hauled to the capital where he was condemned, tortured, and banished. Martin died in exile.

Then a funny thing happened. Not funny really – tragic more like. North Africa, that region of the Empire that had been so fastidiously devoted to Monophytism was conquered by Islam. And suddenly the debate lost its main voice. So Constantine IV, called a 6^th Ecumenical council, again in Constantinople in 680. This council officially declared the idea of one energy & one will in Christ heretical. Jesus had 2 wills; one divine, the other human. The Council claimed its views were in accord with a similar council held in Rome a year before under the auspices of Pope Agatho.

Most Church historians consider the 6^th Council to be the last at which the nature of Jesus was the primary theological consideration. To be sure, the Nestorians continued to spread Eastward as they made their way to China and there were still pockets of monophytism in Egypt, but in both the Eastern & Western regions of the Empire, Orthodoxy or what is often called Catholic Christianity now held sway.

27-Orthodoxy, with an Eastern Flavor

by Lance Ralston | Feb 23, 2014 | English | 0 comments

This Episode of CS is titled, “Orthodoxy, with an Eastern Flavor.”

We need to begin this episode by defining the term “Orthodoxy.”

It comes from Greek. Orthos means “straight” & idiomatically means that which is right or true. Doxa is from the verb dokein = to think; doxa is one’s opinion or belief.

As it’s most often used, orthodoxy means adherence to accepted norms. In reference to Christianity, it means conforming to the creeds of the early Church; those statements of faith issued by the church councils we’ve looked at in recent podcasts and we have a series on in Season 2.

In opposition to orthodoxy is what’s called heterodoxy; other-teaching. Heterodoxy deviates from the Faith defined by the Creeds. Specific instances of heterodoxy, that is – deviant doctrines are called heresy; with those who hold them known as heretics. When heresy causes a group of people to remove themselves from the Communion of Saints so they can form their own distinct community, it’s called a Schism.

But there’s another, very different way the word Orthodox is used in Christianity. It’s the name of one of the 4 great branches of the Church; Roman Catholic, Protestant, & Eastern Orthodox. The fourth is that branch of the Faith we’ve been looking at for the last couple episodes – The Nestorian Church, AKA The Church of the East.

In the West, we’re familiar with Roman Catholicism & Protestantism. We’re less aware of Eastern Orthodoxy and most people haven’t even heard of the Nestorian Church. Ignorance of Eastern Orthodoxy is tragic considering the Byzantine Empire which was home to the Orthodox Church continued to embody the values & traditions of the Roman Empire until the mid-15^th C, a full millennium after the Fall of Rome in AD 476.

It’ll be many episodes of CS before we get to the year 1054 when the Great Schism took place between the Eastern & Western churches. But I think it helpful to understand how Eastern Orthodoxy differs from Roman Catholicism so we can stay a little closer to the narrative timeline of how the Church developed in upcoming episodes.

One of the ways we can better understand the Eastern Orthodox Church is to quickly summarize the history of Roman Catholicism in Europe during the Middle Ages as a contrast.

In the West, the Church, led by the Pope with cardinals & bishops, oversaw the spiritual & religious aspects of European culture. The affiliation between church & state that began with Constantine the Great & continued for the next century & a half was at best a tense arrangement. Sometimes the Pope & Emperor were close; at other times they were at odds & competed for power. Overall, it was an uneasy marriage of the secular & religious. During the Middle Ages, the Church exerted tremendous influence in the secular sphere, & civil rulers either sought to ally themselves with the church, or to break the Church’s grip on power. Realizing how firm that grip was, some civil rulers even sought to infiltrate the ranks of the church to install their own bishops & popes. The Church played the same game & kept spies in many of Europe’s courts. These agents reported to Rome & sought to influence political decisions.

The situation was dramatically different in the East where the church & state worked in harmony.  Though foreign to the Western Mind, & especially the Modern Western Mind which considers a great barrier between Church & State, in the ancient Byzantine Empire, Church & State were partners in governance.  They weren’t equivalent, but they worked together to shape policies & provide leadership that allowed the Eastern Empire to not only resist the forces that saw the West collapse, but to maintain the Empire until the 15^th C  when it was finally over-run by the Ottoman Turks.

In our attempt to understand Eastern Orthodoxy, we’ll look to the description Marshall Shelly provides in his excellent book, Church History in Plain Language.

The prime starting point for understanding Orthodoxy isn’t to examine its basic doctrines but rather its use of holy images called icons. Icons are highly stylized portrayals of one or more saints, set against a golden background and a halo around the head. Icons are crucial in understanding Eastern Orthodoxy. Orthodox believers enter their church and go first to a wall covered with icons called the iconostasis. This wall separates the sanctuary from the nave. The worshipper kisses the icons before taking his/her place in the congregation. A visitor to an Orthodox home will find an icon in the east corner of the main room. If the guest is him/herself Orthodox, they’ll greet the icon by crossing themselves & bowing. Only then will they greet the host.

To the Orthodox, icons are much more than man-made images. They’re manifestations of a divine ideal. They’re considered a window into heaven. In the same way grace is thought to be imparted through the Roman Catholic Mass, grace is thought to flow from heaven to earth thru icons. Protestants can better understand the importance of icons to the Orthodox by considering how important The Bible is to them.  As Scripture is the written revelation of God’s will & truth, so icons are considered as visual representations of truth that have as much if not more to impart by way of revelation to believers. In fact, icons aren’t painted, they are said to be “written,” conveying the idea that they fulfill the same role as Scripture. The Bible is the Scripture in words; icons are scripture in images.

As I said, an icon is a highly stylized portrayal of saints or Bible scenes on panels, usually made of wood, most often cypress which has been prepped with cloth & gesso. The background is gold leaf, depicting the glory of the divine realm the image is thought to come from, with bright tempura paint making the figures & decoration. When dry, the panel is covered in varnish. Some ancient icons are amazing pieces of art. Icon artists consider the writing of icons as a spiritual act & prepare by fasting & prayer, after having completed laborious technical training.

Strictly speaking, Eastern Orthodox theology says icons are not objects of devotion themselves. They’re thought to be windows into the spiritual realm by which the divine is able to infiltrate & effect the physical.  Though that’s the official doctrinal position on icons, they are kissed & venerated at the beginning & at various points during a service.  Icons aren’t worshipped, they’re venerated; meaning while they aren’t given the worship due God alone, they are esteemed as a medium by which grace is bestowed on worshippers. While this is the technical explanation for the use of icons, watching how worshipers use them and listening to how highly they’re regarded, I’m hard-pressed to see how in a practical sense, there’s any difference between veneration & worship. To many objective observers, the use of icons seems a clear violation of the Second Commandment prohibiting the use of images in the worship of God.

Scholars debate when Eastern Christians began to use icons. Some say their use began in the late 6^th or 7^th C. Before icons became popular, relics played an important part of church life. Body parts of saints as well as items connected to Biblical stories were thought to possess spiritual power.

Caution: I know opine à All of this was superstitious silliness, but it framed the thinking of many. Since there were only so many holy relics to go around and each church made claim to one to draw worshippers in, icons began to be used as surrogates for relics. If you can’t have a piece of the cross, maybe a golden painting of Mary holding the baby Jesus would do the trick. If you can’t have Stephen’s index finger, how about his icon? Miraculous stories hovering round relics & icons were legion, each claiming some special connection to God & saints. Relics were said to bring healing. Icons were said to weep tears or bleed. The fragrant scent of incense was said to attend many of the greatest icons. The tales go on & on.

The question in all these claims is; where do we find the use of such things in Scripture? By way of reminder, Evangelical Christians determine what defines Biblical as opposed to Eastern Orthodoxy by this set of questions –

1) Did Jesus teach or model in in the Gospels?
2) Did the Early Church practice it in the book of Acts?
3) Do the NT epistles comment on or regulate it as normative for faith & practice?

Using this 3-fold filter, the use of relics & icons isn’t orthodox.

The Eastern Orthodox church refers to itself as the Church of the 7 Councils. It claims a superior form of the Christian Faith because it draws its doctrine from what it says are the main Church Councils that defined normal Christian belief. The last Council, Nicaea II in AD 787, came about as a response to the Iconoclast Controversy which we’ll talk about later. The point here is that Nicaea II declared the veneration of icons to be good & proper. What we’re to glean from this is that claiming to be a church that adheres to the creeds of the 7 Councils doesn’t mean much if those councils were just gatherings of men. It isn’t their Creeds that are important & that define the Faith; It’s Scripture alone that has that role. Creedal statements are only so good in as much as they are proper interpretations of the Word of God. But they are not themselves, that Word.

Another important distinction between the Eastern & Western Church is how they view the object of salvation.

Western Christians tend to understand the relationship between God & man in legal terms. Man is obliged to meet the demands of a just God. Sin, sacrifice, & salvation are all aspects of divine justice. Salvation is cast primarily in terms of justification.

In Roman Catholicism, when a believer sins, a priest determines what payment or penance he owes to God. If he’s unable to provide enough penance for some especially heinous sin, then purgatory in the afterlife provides a place where his soul can be expiated.

In Protestantism, penance & purgatory are set aside for the Biblical doctrine of the substitutionary atonement of Christ whose work at the cross atones for all sin, for all time. Justification by grace through faith is a keystone of evangelical theology. But here still, the issue is legal & forensic.

This legal emphasis is continued in Roman Catholicism’s view of the papacy. According to Rome, Christ commissioned & authorized Peter & his successors, the popes. That legal authority is seen in the symbols of the papacy – a set of keys.

Eastern Orthodoxy presents a contrast to this legal emphasis in Roman Catholicism & Protestantism. The core of Orthodox theology is the incarnation of God & how it effects the restoration & re-creation of fallen man. In Orthodoxy, sin isn’t so much a violation of God’s law as it is a denigration of God’s image. Salvation is less an issue of making sinners just before a holy God as it is a restoration of God’s image in them.

In Western Christianity, Jesus is seen primarily as the substitutionary sacrifice Who atones for sin & reconciles sinners to God. There’s a great burden of guilt due to the penalty of sin God’s righteous justice must be paid for. His law has been broken; it must be set right. Jesus sets it right by the cross, His resurrection vindicating & validating His sacrifice as sufficient. This is why the crucifix is such a prominent feature in Roman Catholicism & the Cross is central to classic Protestant preaching.

In Eastern Christianity, Christ is God incarnate & on mission to restore the image of God in man. And when I say ‘image,’ think “icon”.  This is not to say that in Orthodoxy there’s no mention of justification or that in Romanism there’s no suggestion of restoration. There is. It’s more about where the emphasis lies.

In Orthodoxy, the church is far less the formal institution that developed in the West. It’s conceived more as the mystical body of Christ continually renewed by the Holy Spirit. This seems a rather odd claim to Protestants who’ve visited an Eastern Orthodox church, which is filled with images & a formal liturgy that’s quite formal. Compared to the spare architecture & decoration of Protestant churches, Orthodoxy does appear formal, but that formalism doesn’t extend to the hierarchy of the church. There’s no pope in the Eastern Orthodox church. Each of the major branches of Orthodoxy has its own patriarch, but there’s no one over-arching head bishop who oversees the Orthodox Church, as the Pope rules in Rome. The Eastern Church sees itself as a community where men & women are restored to the likeness of God.

So, we might ask: When did this fundamental difference between doctrinal emphases begin? That’s difficult to say for certain because the theology grew through a slow, steady progression. But we could say the differences emerged when the Gospel arrived in Corinth, then Rome in the 1^st Century. Corinth was Greek; Rome Latin. The Greeks were more philosophical by nature & the Gospel appealed to their ancient quest to perfect man. The Latin Romans were fascinated by all things legal. They were a race of lawyers. A brief look at the history of Rome’s rulers reveals the importance the law played. Whoever could manipulate the courts & Senate ruled.

A good way for us to get a handle on the difference between Eastern & Western Christianity as it exists today is this – many Western Christians look back at Constantine’s uniting Church & State as a negative development. At the time, it seemed a blessed relief to a church hammered by 2 centuries of persecution, but looking forward form that ancient place, knowing what’s coming, we lament the corruption that’s in store for the church. So historians of Western Christianity speak of the enslavement of the church by the state.

For Eastern Christians, Constantine is regarded as a hero & saint. Orthodoxy considers his reign as the climax of the Roman Empire. According to this view, Rome evolved into a religious monarchy with the emperor as the connecting link between God & the world.  The civil authority of the State was the earthly reflection of divine law while the Church was the religious reflection of Heaven on Earth. In Orthodoxy, the emperor was the place where the civil & religious authorities united. While the church & state were different entities, they weren’t seen as separate spheres. They worked together to govern all of human society.

Constantine’s imprint on Eastern Orthodoxy is undeniable. He considered the empire the “bearer” or litter that carried the Church. As Emperor, his role was to lead both church & state. Recognizing the need to mark this new moment in history, Constantine moved his capital to what was called – “New Rome” or what the people called Constantine’s City – Constantinople.  He built the splendid Church of the Holy Apostles to shift the center of Church life to the East. To indicate the importance of the Emperor as God’s agent, in the midst of the 12 symbolic tombs of the apostles in the Church of the Holy Apostles, Constantine built a 13^th for himself, making it clear he considered himself foundational to the faith & an equal to the Apostles.

This helps us understand why Constantine was so zealous to find a solution to the trouble the heresy of Arianism caused. As Shelly says, Constantine was superstitiously anxious that God would hold him personally responsible for the divisions and quarrels among Christians. If Christianity lacked cohesion and unity, how could it be a proper religion for the empire? So Constantine and the emperors who followed him made every effort to secure agreement about the Christian faith.  Constantine thus adopted the practice already in use by Christians to settle differences on a local basis. He called ALL the leaders of the church to meet & agree upon proper belief & practice. This policy became an integral part of the Eastern Christian tradition. From the first Ecumenical Council at Nicea in 325, to the 7^th in 787, also held in Nicaea, Emperors called the councils & imperial power presided over them.  That’s why to this day the Eastern Orthodox Church refers to itself as the “The Church of the Seven Councils.”

These councils produced the creeds which embody orthodoxy.  That orthodoxy was then enforced in society by the civil authorities. Faith ceased to be a purely spiritual or church matter; it took on a political dimension.^[1]

While the Byzantine Empire had several notable rulers, the most significant after Constantine was Justinian the Great who ruled from 527-65. Constantine maintained a distinction between being a Christian & the Emperor. Justinian merged the 2 to become a Christian emperor. And this reveals one of the fundamental differences between East & West.

In the East, the head of the State & the head of the Church were fused into 1 office.

In the West, while there were times when a pope wielded tremendous political power, it was in a covert manner. Civil rulers were also at times given great influence in church affairs but typically sought to use that influence behind the scenes. Church & state were kept in separate spheres in the West. In the East, they merged.

Justinian thought himself God’s agent & the executor of his will. The empire was God’s instrument in the world. It bent its knee to Jesus, then rose to enforce its vision & version of Jesus’ will on the Earth.

This union of church & state continued on in the years that followed. Even under Communism, the Russian Orthodox Church, a branch of Eastern Orthodoxy, continued to operate through State license.

It was under Justinian that the unique Byzantine merger of Roman law with Christian faith & Greek philosophy took place, all of it flavored by a dash of Orientalism. This is seen most clearly in Byzantine art. Whereas the West had gone in for the realism of the Greek Classical Age, the Byzantines submerged the physical world of human experience under the supernal & transcendent realm of the spiritual. Nothing revealed that more than the Church of Holy Wisdom, known today as the Hagia Sophia. Justinian’s church was a remodel of an earlier church constructed by Constantine. Justinian gave the order it was to be the grandest building on the face of the Earth. Constructed in record time, it was indeed an amazing feat. When it was consecrated in 538, Justinian exclaimed he’d outdone Solomon. The dome, the largest to date, was thought to hang by a golden chain from heaven. It was so immense & high above the ground some thought it was a piece of the sky. The mosaics that made up the floor of the church dazzled the eye.

Years later when emissaries from the king of Ukraine visited Constantinople on a quest to find a suitable new religion for the Ukrainians, they were overwhelmed by the Hagia Sophia. It may well have been their report back to their monarch that moved him to choose Christianity as the new state religion. The emissaries said when they stood in the Hagia Sophia, they didn’t know if they were in heaven or on earth.

It’s important to mention here the Byzantines rarely if ever identified themselves as such; they were Romans. Constantinople was New Rome but they were not part of a new Empire called Byzantine. That’s a label applied by much-later historians. They were Romans and part of the Roman Empire. The Western half of the Empire may have fallen to barbarian invaders, but the Empire lived on in the East & would do so for another thousand years.

^[1] Shelley, B. L. (1995). Church history in plain language (Updated 2nd ed.) (141–145). Dallas, Tex.: Word Pub.