Question... Was there ever an apology?

timothyu said:

Why blame Constantine? He was just doing what men of the world have done all along. It was those claiming to be of the Kingdom that should have known better.

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Okay. Dig them up, then.

Why would someone be in favor of a persecuted religion if he didn't believe in it.

timothyu said:

Yet who saved them. The leadership or those they enlisted?

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Both? Monks were called to be leaders, patriarchs in fact. All our church bishops are selected from monastics, whos intent already was to renounce the world. They are picked and they can accept or reject based on the council of what they are needed for. A bishops job is to pray constantly for the people. That is their main job, it always has been. Having met several myself I can say that the ones I met were extraordinarily wise, and extraordinarily quiet and prayerful. Most of them barely talk at all unless asked something.

timothyu said:

Whatever that has to do with me or what I said. But anti-Christian is putting the will of man before God, self interest, self justification, gain at the expense of others, not loving all the world as self. You know.. all the things the world is built upon.

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Will of man can go both ways. Repentance is turning the will towards God. Men are not entirely evil, we are created in God's image and can restore that image. The will of man can be Holy as long as that will is in submission completely to God, which some rulers have done.

timothyu said:

Yes, so man's worldly law overrode God's law of the Kingdom.

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So in your opinion Christianity should have remained illegal? Hmmmmmm

timothyu said:

And yet no one seems to put the will of God before the self serving will of man, nor love all as self.?

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Beating a doctrinal tub, are we? OK, those of your sect are The Only Real Christians. Go in peace.

timothyu said:

Just repeating what Jesus taught.

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Quoth every heresiarch who ever lived.

timothyu said:

One would expect those leaders claiming to be doing the will of God to actually do it, not harlot what was entrusted to them to the world of self serving man so that ist may bolster it's own power.

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Sure, and one would hope that all Christians would be impeccable. But that expectation would be quite naive, even as leaders and teachers will certainly be held to a higher standard. Either way, being accepted rather than rejected, unpersecuted instead of persecuted, does not a harlot make even if it made an uncomfortable alliance in the end that would eventually, and fortunately, prove itself to be unworkable. For awhile I'm sure that many in the Church believed that God's kingdom was actually being realized here on earth. But either way it did allow the church to grow and spread the gospel, which is God's purpose. And as has been established, the Church did not bow to any governor's wishes when it came to defining doctrine and dogma. The Church, in fact, was considered to have authority that the governing body did not possess, spiritual vs the mundane.

timothyu said:

He did. He used the corruption of man that built a religion more favourable to the world than the Kingdom, in order to forward scriptures through time so that those of His choosing willing to lose the scales the worldly blind have put on their eyes, may see. Scripture is essential while in the end, religion and institutional churches are not. God's truth lives in scripture while man's truth lives in religion. Remember what Jesus told Peter. It was God's truth, not man's that was the foundation.


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Of course God's truth is what counts; we wouldn't need Him if we had the truth already, on our own, IOW. And He established a Church to safeguard that truth, to receive and preserve and preach the gospel before a word of the NT was written and then later to write that testament and later yet to assemble it into canon. And to continue to interpret and understand it in light of the historical context in which it was written and which the church was uniquely able to carry and pass down through the centuries. While Scripture is central along with Tradition as sources of revelation, neither of those sources are valuable unless and until properly understood. And even if it was possible to mass-produce the bible in centuries past, which it wasn't, arguably the majority of believers have been illiterate. People simply did not need to read the bible to understand our faith. In fact, individual reading and interpretation of Scripture probably cause more division in beliefs than any other source as can be witnessed by reading through just about any thread on this forum. Of course you may believe, as most others do, that your particular interpretation is necessarily the right one, for whatever reason you might have.

timothyu said:

At the time of Constantine, Christianity accepted an offer to become the State religion of a new Roman Empire following a civil war. As a result it abandoned the counter-culture of Jesus' Kingdom, to rejoin the world of man, a world built upon self serving ways and self justification, as a result of the Fall. A religion meant to serve the opposing will of God, joined forces with the will of man, to become a power of man and eventually as it evolved, a worldly empire of it's own.

My question..... Did any Christian institution/denomination ever officially apologize for this traitorous act that anyone knows of? Did any repent of/change their official position and turn from accepting the offer of the Tempter that Jesus rejected, where 'all this could be yours'? Do they carry on like the rest of the governance of man to this day or do they now teach separation between the two worlds as Jesus taught. Will they teach that which condemns their act of joining the world of man and rejecting the Kingdom?

James 4:4 Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.

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Actually Constantines edict of Milan gave religious freedom. Christianity became the state religion later. But this was a victory at the time and a major win for Gods Kingdom. Think things went badly wrong about time of Justinian when the confusion of powers of Emperor and church became absolute. I would suggest the rise of Islam was in response to this emperor as Pope phenomena as a corrective and reminder that Gods Kingdom was not of this world. Christian's should seek to mould political institutions and laws but should also respect free will.

timothyu said:

At the time of Constantine, Christianity accepted an offer to become the State religion of a new Roman Empire following a civil war. As a result it abandoned the counter-culture of Jesus' Kingdom, to rejoin the world of man, a world built upon self serving ways and self justification, as a result of the Fall. A religion meant to serve the opposing will of God, joined forces with the will of man, to become a power of man and eventually as it evolved, a worldly empire of it's own.

My question..... Did any Christian institution/denomination ever officially apologize for this traitorous act that anyone knows of? Did any repent of/change their official position and turn from accepting the offer of the Tempter that Jesus rejected, where 'all this could be yours'? Do they carry on like the rest of the governance of man to this day or do they now teach separation between the two worlds as Jesus taught. Will they teach that which condemns their act of joining the world of man and rejecting the Kingdom?

James 4:4 Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.

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Prior to Constantine was King Tiridates of Armenia. When St. Gregory the Illuminator went to evangelize Armenia (following Apostles Thaddeus/Jude and Bartholomew) King Tiridates had him thrown in a pit for a dozen years. When the King started going mad, and they were desperate, they asked Gregory to pray for him. Gregory did and God healed the King. The King converted to Christianity and it became the state religion in 301 AD, 5 years before Constantine was even a ruler.

So what apology would you expect from Armenian Christians for Constantine?

Christianity is not entirely from Constantine so why do you want "Christianity" to apologize for or about Constantine? It's a weird thing to ask.

There might be a lot of ways of looking at the OP, but from reading the many interesting responses, what I reckon to be the crux of the matter is not what others have responded to. For the sake of discussion I offer that the OP was aiming at the same thing Jesus aimed at when He warned the religiously inclined of the day to not trust that they were sons of Abraham, that they had the law although they weren't keeping it, and even John called them a brood of vipers. The proclivity to get to that point exists in the Church - it didn't die out with the death of Jesus. Those who put their trust in anything or anyone but God/Jesus, especially with an opportunity to find ease and convenience at the sake of holding to the Truth, would find themselves in the same place of whoredom. The way I added it up, this dear Friend is asking a question that leads to our discovering this warning for ourselves. We err to think we've arrived and all the others have not. The concern shouldn't be how many people have a convenient "Christian" life getting along just fine with the world's system of things, buying and selling on the Sabbath, sleeping around without rebuke, re-defining marriage, re-defining morality and responsibility, redefining what loving God and loving our neighbor really looks like in action, and in short doing things that God already said we shouldn't be doing. The crucial concern to me looks like continual attention to areas like: what else have I left undone, how can I do more, am I obedient all the way through, have I hung Jesus back up on the cross by my shameful willful defiance, am I maintaining humility and walking in the way He told us. There is no safety in being a friend to the world, regardless of the legal status of the "Church." We are to be a holy assembly and can only do that by attending to personal holiness according to the definitions God gave us.

To divert the usual response of "well, we can't avoid sin," I suggest that it might be entirely possible to avoid most of it, and when we do miss the mark, we are required to repent. That means if you stole something, you are obligated to return the item you stole and make amends - and QUIT stealing. Build a wall inside yourself to make it harder to breech next time. Seek His forgiveness and amend your ways, clean up your heart in agreement with what God is trying to do with you. That means DON"T allow lust to put you into fornication/adultery/perverseness. Build a wall in your heart to make it easier to stay out of that slime. Open the doors of your heart to God but build walls against sin. Apply yourself! How hard is it to stay out of your neighbor's bed? How hard is it to NOT take something that doesn't belong to you. Do the same thing with the finer nuances of interactions with people by realizing that they too were made in God's image: we can't be disregarding and disrespecting each other. Instead encourage everyone to draw closer to God with their every aspect of their own lives. This isn't about anyone having a following or anyone having power over another. This is about working on ourselves and at the same time encouraging and feeding others, giving words of warning if needed since we are so easily deceived, all of this aiming to a day when we are all approved at His right hand. That approval is not by my definition and it's not by yours - it's by God's. He defined what is acceptable already and I don't see any indication that He planned to change His mind. He delights in mercy, lovingkindness, and judgement/justice. If we stay in Christ Jesus (Who agreed with all that God ever said, being God), we know His judgement will be designed to return us to obedience, as a father disciplining the child he loves. There is no condemnation in that spot. The question is, are we there? Or are we just talking words while flirting with or sleeping with the world?

timothyu said:

At the time of Constantine, Christianity accepted an offer to become the State religion of a new Roman Empire following a civil war.

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Um. You mean Theodosius I? And who exactly accepted this "offer" on behalf of the Christianity? What about Arians Christians? Where they included in this offer? This is a historical fiction. What happened was Theodosius issued several decrees whose end result was Nicene Christianity was the state religion. Where there and are there still problems from this marrying of Altar and Throne? You bet. In fact this event causes the monastic movement to pick up steam and many new adherents as a result. Although there are many problems that result from this marriage why do you think it wasn't God's will for this to happen? I have complete confidence that the LORD knows how to grow and keep His Church.

timothyu said:

It is interesting who objects. You would think all would know that Christianity whored itself to Babylon (Rome which Peter called Babylon) and that we should learn from yet another example of worldly man using everything of God for their own self interest.

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I don’t know what you do with Rom 13. Recall every even worldly governments derive their authority from God. Even Babylon and Rome.
Romans 13:1–8 (NAS): 1 Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.
2 Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves.
3 For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same;
4 for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil.
5 Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience’ sake.
6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing.
7 Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.
8 Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.

timothyu said:

Again, it wasn't Constantine who sold out.

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OK, but you say "Christianity accepted a role as state religion of the Roman Empire."

My point is that "Christianity" existed well outside the Roman Empire, such as in Armenia, so it couldn't be all of Christianity that "accepted the role of state religion of the Roman Empire."

So what apology would you expect from all of "Christianity" or churches/denominations like the Armenian (or Syriac or Coptic or Ethiopian, etc.) Church?