Let's look now at this watershed period in church history. We picked up more traditions, made more blunders, and changed the course of the church more radically from 323 to 327 than in any other period of history. Look what happened during this time.
When Constantine founded the city of Constantinople (Istanbul), he planned a gigantic capital which he called New Rome. It sat, literally, half in the Orient and half in the Occident. He built a new and uninhabited city from the ground up. In it he commissioned the building of pagan temples and something he designated as buildings for Christians to meet in. A pagan temple of that time was a small, round building with stairs leading up to an altar in the middle. Usually the people gathered around the temple and worshipped while standing outside.
*Across the street from some of these pagan temples, Constantine commissioned Christian meeting places.
These were not shaped like pagan temples, but like the government civic auditoriums. (Christians had met inside for three centuries. But it was inside homes.) Here, for the first time, stood officially designated places for Christians to meet. This was a wonder which no Christian had ever seen before. Put another way, it was in 323, almost three hundred years after the birth of the church, that Christians first met in something we now call a "church building."
*For all three hundred years before that, the church met in living rooms!
Constantine built these assembly buildings for Christians not only in Constantinople, but also in Rome, Jerusalem, and in many parts of Italy, all between 323 and 327! This then triggered a massive "church building" fad in large cities all over the Empire. Many thousands of pagans came into these buildings. One could only wish they had all become saved and grown to maturity.
In his pagan mentality, Constantine ordered each building to be named after one of the Christians in the New Testament.
Why?
*Well, mark the answer well: because pagan temples had always been named after pagan gods.
So the builders put a word like "Joseph" on the front of each building, or "Mary" or "Peter" or "Paul," just as pagan temples had on them "Apollo" or "Zeus." The die was beginning to be cast.
*We were headed straight for a totally different kind of Christian worship in a wholly different atmosphere from what the first century believer had ever dreamed of...
Constantinople was finally completed, and people moved there in droves from Rome. Imagine a typical Christian walking into one of these strange looking "Christian buildings." He had never seen anything like this! I suppose he walked into the building and sat down on the cold stone floor. (Constantine had forgotten to invent the pew.) This definitely was no comfortable living room.
In fact, trying to figure out whether to sit on the cold floor or stand throughout the whole meeting (as the pagans did across the street) caused one of the great debates and marked differences between the Eastern church and the Western church. The Italians dragged in benches and got comfortable. The Greeks stood up. (The Western church grew, the Eastern church didn't!) By now people were coming into the church en masse out of paganism, following the strong example of their emperor, Constantine.
*The church was changing to accommodate them, introducing structure and ritual into the meetings, with chanting and pageantry-all things familiar to these ex-pagans.
The clergy - this very word had previously been used to designate a pagan priest - began to wear strange clothing (costumes, if you please) to set themselves apart from the laity.
*Church buildings sprouted up everywhere on the crest of state tax money pouring into the church's coffers all over the Roman Empire. Soon the living room church meetings were but a memory, and even that memory seems to have been stamped out.
Until that time, any tax money that went to religion had been channeled exclusively to the pagan religions. By A.D. 400 it flowed exclusively to the church.
*Pagan priests were suddenly becoming "Christians" to keep up with the whereabouts of their money. Government officials and politicians were becoming Christian priests in droves because it was lucrative to do so.
A.D. 380 is the date when you could probably say that Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Or you might put it another way: In 380, Christianity was merged with the pagan Roman state religion.
Now, if you are exceptionally quick, you may be asking yourself, And just when was Christianity unmerged from paganism? When did the Church repudiate and divorce herself from neo-paganism?" Well, I'm still researching that one. If I ever come across an unmerge date, I'll be sure to let you know. By the mid-400s, the pagan temple's choir was also transplanted over into the Christian buildings. So was the ambo. What's an ambo? You know it by the name pulpit.
