The Emperor's New Church

The Naked Truth about How Constantine Stripped the Church of Its Power and Reclothed It with Invisible Finery (part 1)


by Gene Edwards with humor and comments by James Rutz (used with permission)



Most of what you do today as a participant in the church was set in concrete during two short periods of history, neither of them in the New Testament period. The first was A.D. 323-327, and it was almost all bad. Dreadful, actually. The second was the fifty years following October 31, 1517, and it was a mix of bad and good.

This chapter is about the first, the next chapter is about the second. Constantine became Caesar of the Roman Empire in 306, the biggest turning point in church history-a downward turn, by the way. And on October 31, 1517, a date symbolically denoting the beginning of the Reformation, Luther nailed ninety-five subjects he would like to debate (all written in Latin) onto a church door.

Those two periods of time are like two gigantic cauldrons out of which have flowed most of the practices of present-day Christianity (not its theology, mind you, but its practice). A few of our present practices were introduced in the Middle Ages (like the education of the clergy). And a few things evolved in the last hundred years or so, some even in the last forty years. But in the greater scheme of things, these two periods formed most of what you see when you watch the church in action today.

Let's look first at the pre-Constantine age, 100-313, and then at the age of Constantine, including the years immediately thereafter.

Once upon a time, Christians used to do lunch with lions. And we were the lunch. Such heavy persecution was unusual, though, despite what Hollywood says. In fact, it was quite sporadic for most of the first three centuries. And even in the worst times, there were many areas where the authorities simply didn't bear down on us at all. But then came February 23, 303. Now that was persecution. On that date, Diocletian, who was otherwise a pretty good emperor, signed his first general edict against Christians.

This edict mandated that all copies of the Scriptures were to be burned, that all Christian worship be banned, all meeting places closed, and all church leaders rounded up wholesale and forced to recant. The torture and bloodshed were so great that even the pagan citizens were sickened and repulsed. The worst part of Diocletian's persecution was that it crippled our leadership and left the church with her guard down, wide open to the tragedy that quickly befell her when Constantine, professing to be the first Christian emperor, came along and befriended the beleaguered leaders. He took over as undisputed emperor after his victorious battle at the Milvian Bridge in 312. At that time, apparently, not a single prophet was left to arise and denounce what took place under the new regime.

Constantine has been called the first "medieval" believer. That means, roughly: complete dedication, little knowledge, less fruit. He had the mind of a Caesar (an emperor). He had absolute authority in everything, and that definitely included the empire's Department of Religion. Secondly, he also had the mind of a pagan, which sees a world filled with darkness, spookiness, weirdness, ghosts, apparitions, worship of idols and magic-in a word, superstition. In another word, paganism! Yes, he was reported to have had a sudden and miraculous conversion upon beholding a cross appearing in the heavens that bore the inscription, "By this sign shalt thou conquer (in hoc signo vinces)." But this tradition is very doubtful, and the fact is that he had very little Christian understanding to enlighten his pagan values.

[Tedious footnote for historians: These two chapters aren't intended to be a balanced dissertation showing the evidence for and against everything. History books do that very well, but this is just a short, popular summary of the evidence about man-made customs in the church, trying to show events as clearly and forcefully as possible. It's possible, for example, to give much evidence to suggest Constantine was a brave and sincere Christian. Unfortunately, the preponderance of evidence shows that his motivations were mixed-mixed with large doses of paganism. Also, any reading of church history will show that God has been infinitely powerful and gracious in working through the church, His bride, during even the worst periods and through the most flawed structures. And the very institutions skewered in these pages (sermons, choirs, etc.) have been used by Him to draw millions of people to himself. Praise to His name for each one! If you feel a strong loyalty to the customs discussed in these two chapters, you may be bothered by the zest with which they are dispatched. But when you examine the evidence closely, you must conclude that, on balance, it is inescapably negative. J.R.]

He was also a megalomaniac. For example, in one of his grander church buildings, he set thirteen statues of the "thirteen apostles," he himself being the thirteenth and having a larger statue than all the others!

Blend all that together, and you have the basic ingredients of medieval "Christianity," a blight that eventually spread across Europe on a grand scale.

It was a mixture of Christian faith, paganism, and the values of the Roman Empire, which all flowed together to produce the Christian worldview of post-A.D. 500. (That outlook did begin to change again, arguably, not long before Luther nailed those ninety-five theses on the door of the Wittenberg church.)



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