History of Christianity

[bbbbbbb]

All fair points, but the perception is what really counts- and the perception is that Christianity is a western and American reality, as well as a dissident reality that forms part of the people's social protest against the Communist Party government, and that's one reason for the present growth of Christianity in China. And yes, while Christianity has in fact always been an eastern phenomenon rather than a southern one, and Nestorian Christianity has been in China since the fifth century and Catholic Christianity has been in China since the sixteenth century Jesuit missions, the present flowering of Chinese Christianity has less to do with any continuity with the remnants of those earlier Christian presences than one would normally expect.

All absolutely true.

 

[hedrick]

Given the importance and centrality of the Eucharist, likely the biggest corruption of Church practice was the transforming of Eucharist from banquet to symbolic meal.
With that change, institutional religion displaced the egalitarian home church. This displaced the role of women also, who were integral to the home, but sidelined from a model of bishop based on administration from cities.

I fear some of your concept of the egalitarian home church may be a bit lacking in evidence. It's hard to believe that in that culture there would have been a church without some kind of authority structure. But surely not the centralized one that grew later.

Also, there was surely a symbolic element from the beginning. It's implicit in bread and wine being symbolic of Christ's body and his death, something that goes back at least to Paul. The commentaries I've seen think he was quoting an earlier liturgy. That informal home celebration you're imagining must have had some sense of connection with Christ's death.

Yet I agree that over time things did change. Here's Rauschenbusch's assessment:

"Christianity in the heathen world rapidly relapsed toward the pre-prophetic stage of religion. The material furnished by Christianity was worked over into a new ceremonialism, essentially like the magic ritual of the Greek mysteries and Oriental cults, only more wonderful and efficacious. Baptism was a bath of regeneration, cleansing the guilt of all pre-baptismal sins, and making the soul like that of a newborn child. In the sacrament of the eucharist in some mysterious way the very body and blood of the Lord were present, and the divine could be physically eaten and its powers received to transform the material into the spiritual and immortal. The formulas of baptism and the Lord’s Supper were fraught with magic powers. Worship became a process of mystagogic initiation into the divine mysteries. All the old essentials of pagan religion were reproduced in Christian form, but with scarcely a break in their essence: the effort to placate God by sacrifice, the amulets, vows, oracles, festivals, incense, candles, pictures, and statues. It was like a tropical jungle sprouting again after it is cut down."

There's clearly some hyperbole there. Rauschenbusch is also exaggerating the opposition between ethical and spiritual practice and worship, in both the prophets and early Christianity.

Yet I have to say, there's a fair amount of truth. Jesus' purpose was to establish the Kingdom. This had ethical elements, founded on the love of God, and practices such as prayer. He was also very clear that we would be held accountable for responding.

However it looks to me like over time people focused more and more on judgement. For Jesus this was an attempt to prod people to take his call seriously. But it became the focus of Christianity. Instead of a prod to take the primary message seriously, it became the primary message. Christianity focused more and more on how to escape hell, and Kingdom ethics turned into moral purity, which tended to focus on sexual purity. (It also, somewhat ironically, developed into a clone of the Pharisee's religion.)

I certainly don't believe that the Gospel was lost. Jesus' teachings continued to be an inspiration for all kinds of Christians. But still, Christianity turned into a religion of saving us from going to hell because of our sins, rather than a call to live in the Kingdom and reconcile those who aren't in it yet. Communion changed from a meal to help us think of Jesus' death and be close to him into a conduit for a grace that increasingly changed from God's desire to save people who didn't deserve it to a kind of fluid dispensed by the Church. I'm ambivalent about Rauschenbusch's negative view of sacraments. But if what he means by sacramentalism is this view of sacraments as a conduit for the Church to dispense grace, maybe I agree. (That's different, in my view, from saying that God uses the sacraments to help us, i.e. as a means of grace, as understood by the Reformed tradition. Whether Rauschenbusch's portrait was ever the official Catholic view is arguable, but I think it was de facto common.)

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

Did I ever say that Constantine was unimportant, or that Constantine's actions didn't change the face of international Christianity?

What I'm saying is that Constantine's legalization of Christianity did not transform Christianity into a "bully" so profoundly that we can look to the events of 312-13 and say "there, there is where the church no longer was the church."

 

[squint]

Did I ever say that Constantine was unimportant, or that Constantine's actions didn't change the face of international Christianity?

What I'm saying is that Constantine's legalization of Christianity did not transform Christianity into a "bully" so profoundly that we can look to the events of 312-13 and say "there, there is where the church no longer was the church."

Of course history can be viewed subjectively by any reader.

At that point, of Constantine, killing and conquering for christian unity came into the 'church' and in the eyes of some, there is only compromise, killing, conquering and political power mongering from that point forward.

Our illustrious church history with a big old question mark behind the word church.

And some seem to revel in that for some odd reason. IN some eyes there isn't any other kind of christianity but power domination, of might makes right. Of the will of the religious majority, run amok over others at any cost.

REAL church history is so bloody and compromised it's almost a shame to look at it.

Oh, but when done to non-christians it's all good ain't it? It really doesn't matter how many people are slaughtered if they are unbelievers in the need of conquering.

In the Name of Jesus, by all means, carry on ye fine historians.

 

[Targaryen]

Two videos I'm presenting here, over 6 hours of viewing but I think this series of two videos is worth exploring:

History of Christianity-The first 1000 years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKOoPcHxPhU

History of Christianity- The second 1000 years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxEeBYWkLOg

Condesation of History of Christianity-the first 1000 years.


1st hour: The Apostles after Christ's time on earth and the beggining of the church, first presecutions and Paul's conversion, the minstry of Paul and outward exapnsion, the conversion of Gentiles and changing of Christianty away from Jewish roots, The persecutions by Rome, Christianty during the Persecution,catecomb and house churches, roles in the house churches, Ignatius of Antioch and the new model of christian leadership, rise of christianity in Roman society, Constantine and the conversion, The Edict of Milan, the change of the day of worship, gnosticism.

2nd hour: Continuation of Gnosticism, The council of Nicea, the concepts of the Trinty and the Arian view and Athanisius, The Nicene Creed, the canonization of the New Testament, beginning of monasticism, the first corporate monasteries, aestheticism, St.Augustine, the East/West spilt of the Empire and the beginnings of the Dark Ages, The politicalization of the Bishop of Rome and title Pope, the first assertion of Rome's primacy, Attila, the end of the Roman Empire, St.Patrick's ministry in Ireland, celtic monastery christianity, The Byzantine Empire, The Seven Ecumentical Councils, monophysites, Chalcedon, the Oriental schism and fallout, Justinian and Theodora,monophysite ascendancy under Theodora and monophysite Patriarch of Constantinople, Hagia Sophia completed,
the eastern attempt to retake the West

3rd Hour: Attempt at monophysite/orthodox reconcilliation, monphysite re-persecution,rise of Islam, Islamic conquests, Oriental church resurgence under Islamic rule, Leo VI and the veneration of icons,the east/west
gap widens, Charles Martel saves Western Christian Europe, Dark Age impact on Christianity,The bishop of Rome redemands primacy of the Church, Rome's power in the West grows, the nobles fight for the Roman papacy, Charlemagne,The Holy Roman Empire, Byzantine reaction to Charlemagne Imperial coronation, Charlemagne's conversion style,
his training of western clergy, the vikings, the rise of Mary in Western theology, the first apocolyptic thoughts in christian theology, Pope John XII and his excesses, Sylvester II, Europe is finally christianized in full,
The Great Schism, Pope and Emporer stand off and the Emporer is excommunicated then reconciled after admitting papal church authority.

Condensation of the History of Christianity-The second 1000 years:

1st hour: Review of the first 1000 years of the faith, western europe and state of the church at the year 1000, the beginnings of the great western cathedrals, the beginnings of the universities, Gregory VII and Henry IV dispute,the imposition of celebacy on the clergy, Henry II and Thomas a Becket, Urban II and the Crusades, the impact at the time of the Crusades on Europe then and the review of them now, the sacking of Constantinople,
the East begins to decline, the Albagenses and heresy, the Dominicans, St. Francis of Assisi, first nuns, Gregory IX and the Inquistion, the printing press, Tyndale, Martin Luther and the 95 theses.



2nd hour: the Diet of Worms, Luther's ideas, John Calvin and Geneva, the Eastern church's decline and the fall of Constantinople, Moscow's rise in Eastern church, the renaissance, the birth of Science, Henry VIII and the supremacy act, More's martyrdom and Anne Boleyn's execution, Loyola and the birth of the Jesuits, the Protestant/Catholic wars, the Global expansion of Christianity, the Conquistadors, slavery, Science and Christianity's retreat, Galileo and the Catholic church, the Industrial Revolution, Wesley and Methodism, the birth of the revival meeting, the Great Awakening and North American evangelism,the Puritans, Roger Williams and William Penn.


3rd hour: The War of Independance, The American constitution, The Bill of Rights and division of church and state, The French Revolution, the French extortion of the Pope, Catholic reaction to the Revolutions, the First Vatican council and Papal Infalibility, unification of Italy and papal held territories lost, the Protestant missionaries, colonialism, Dr.David Livingston, the slave trade ends, the Latter-Day Saints, Catholic church lashes out against modernism in an encyclical, Pentecostal movement, the fundamentailsts,Scopes/Monkey trial, televangelism's rise, Aimee Semple McPherson and Billy Graham, the instant information age, the effect of slavery on African-Americans the African-American church and Martin Luther King, Second Vatican Council, Liberation theology and Archbishop Oscar Romero, Pope John Paul II and his ministry, the declaration of the Lord Jesus, speculation of the future of the faith.


EDIT: I am reposting this so everyone can debate on each of these topics listed without the thread getting derailed again

 

[Tzaousios]

The still image on that first video is a manuscript illustration depicting the Byzantine emperor John VI Kantakouzenos presiding over a synod with Hesychast supporters.

I couldn't help myself -- the late Byzantine period is my favorite historical time period.

 

[Standing Up]

As you point out, the whole change didn't happen with Constantine. But it certainly started the process of giving the Church the power to enforce conformity. Centralization and the willingness to kill people because of heresy grew over time, complexly. But I don't think it's wrong to consider Constantine the beginning.

Yep. That Church married the State at that point, getting her power to enforce her views.

 

[prodromos]

All fair points, but the perception is what really counts- and the perception is that Christianity is a western and American reality, as well as a dissident reality that forms part of the people's social protest against the Communist Party government, and that's one reason for the present growth of Christianity in China. And yes, while Christianity has in fact always been an eastern phenomenon rather than a southern one, and Nestorian Christianity has been in China since the fifth century and Catholic Christianity has been in China since the sixteenth century Jesuit missions, the present flowering of Chinese Christianity has less to do with any continuity with the remnants of those earlier Christian presences than one would normally expect.

You neglected to mention the Orthodox Church in China, which was almost completely wiped out during the Boxer Revolution.

 

[SolomonVII]

I fear some of your concept of the egalitarian home church may be a bit lacking in evidence. It's hard to believe that in that culture there would have been a church without some kind of authority structure. But surely not the centralized one that grew later.

Yes. It is lacking in evidence.
It also comes from listening to the first video, which does have an implicit point of view when it comes to women in the early church.
When it comes to evidence of the role that women play in the early church, there are no unbiased sources.
What can be said about the early church is that it was extremely, extremely diverse, and that in many or at least some of these communities the evidence does point to women playing a larger role than in subsequent centuries.

Also, there was surely a symbolic element from the beginning. It's implicit in bread and wine being symbolic of Christ's body and his death, something that goes back at least to Paul. The commentaries I've seen think he was quoting an earlier liturgy. That informal home celebration you're imagining must have had some sense of connection with Christ's death.

Agape meals are even Biblical and they do go back to Paul's teaching as well. With almost no doubt, it was the lack of egalitarianism with larger community involvement that helped lead to an exclusively symbolic meal. From manna, to fish and loaves to the Last Supper, what is apparent is that the Eucharist describes a banquet. This does not negate the symbolic elements, or the spiritualization of the meal, for the language of Eucharist itself demands of us to look beyond the calorie intake, beyond the fellowship of a common meal even, and toward the ultimate meaning of what it means to consume the Body and Blood of Christ.

Yet I agree that over time things did change. Here's Rauschenbusch's assessment:....

....

There's clearly some hyperbole there. Rauschenbusch is also exaggerating the opposition between ethical and spiritual practice and worship, in both the prophets and early Christianity.

Maybe it is just not hyperbole involved, but the need to round some corners and smooth some edges in order to lead the reader to a bigger picture.
There is always something lost when we do that, and always we show our own biases when we do so as well.
But as the church moves into a more centralized, more institutionalized, more formal format, based more on the rule of bishops in the city, as Ignatius letters allude to (whether or not they were forgeries), symbolization and ritualization become necessary. Primary personal relationships between an intimate group of people in a familial setting become less possible just due to the larger numbers involved, especially as different communities begin to coordinate their beliefs with one another.
A larger, more culturally and ethnically diverse Church, composed of members who have developed different traditions, means that some corners will be rounded, and some practices will be smoothed over, in order to arrive at a common set of beliefs.

Yet I have to say, there's a fair amount of truth. Jesus' purpose was to establish the Kingdom. This had ethical elements, founded on the love of God, and practices such as prayer. He was also very clear that we would be held accountable for responding.

However it looks to me like over time people focused more and more on judgement. For Jesus this was an attempt to prod people to take his call seriously. But it became the focus of Christianity. Instead of a prod to take the primary message seriously, it became the primary message. Christianity focused more and more on how to escape hell, and Kingdom ethics turned into moral purity, which tended to focus on sexual purity. (It also, somewhat ironically, developed into a clone of the Pharisee's religion.)

Puritanical sexual mores became very developed by the hermits and the monks, but were present even in the life of Paul. Jesus was chaste as well.
Here again though, the message of the books of the Bible carry with them a fair degree of diversity.
The battle against demons, and the other sufferings of ascetics carry with them an intensity and a passion that have had a powerful influence on Christian development. When a man spends thirty years sitting on the top of a column, it cannot help draw the attention of the community toward him.
Suffice it to say nevertheless, that Jesus was not an ascetic. He described his time on earth as a wedding banquet.

I certainly don't believe that the Gospel was lost.

Just to be clear, neither do I. When I say that the major corruption of the message was in the movement from a banquet Eucharist to a purely symbolic Eucharistic meal( which would include the Real Presence where the nourishment is spiritual\symbolic only as well), what I am saying is that something very important was lost. Without that as Step A, we would never arrive at the Step B of an official Church a few centuries later.
Something is lost, but something is gained as well.

Jesus' teachings continued to be an inspiration for all kinds of Christians. But still, Christianity turned into a religion of saving us from going to hell because of our sins, rather than a call to live in the Kingdom and reconcile those who aren't in it yet. Communion changed from a meal to help us think of Jesus' death and be close to him into a conduit for a grace that increasingly changed from God's desire to save people who didn't deserve it to a kind of fluid dispensed by the Church. I'm ambivalent about Rauschenbusch's negative view of sacraments. But if what he means by sacramentalism is this view of sacraments as a conduit for the Church to dispense grace, maybe I agree. (That's different, in my view, from saying that God uses the sacraments to help us, i.e. as a means of grace, as understood by the Reformed tradition. Whether Rauschenbusch's portrait was ever the official Catholic view is arguable, but I think it was de facto common.)

I very much see the sacraments as essential to the Christian message. Food, water, oil, touch and an the spiritualitzation of the ordinary elements of our world go to the heart of the theology of God Incarnate, and make Christianity unique from any of the other religions.

The desire for unity in a very diverse and dispersed population of Christians is a dominant theme of the New Testament even before the advent of the official Church, and it is understandable enough of why this would be desirable.
Ultimately though, it failed. Somebody tagged the name Theodora, and the failure of the love of Theodora and Justinian to be emulated by the larger church demonstrates that failure. Their own acceptance of differences of faith understanding were something that they accepted in each other. That was unacceptable to the Church as a whole, and is a clear demonstration of how the official Church failed in its primary task of unity, even in the times when the power of Christendom was at its pinnacle. Even the love of an Emperor and an Empress were not enough to bring the Church back together over what turned out to be a difference in linguistic styles.

 

[MoreCoffee]

A most beautiful homage for the saints who were martyred during the boxer rebellion, it makes one want to cry ...

Chinese Martyrs is the name given to a number of members of the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church who were killed in China during the 19th and early 20th centuries. They are celebrated as martyrs by their respective churches. Most were Chinese laity, but others were missionaries from various other countries; many of them died during the Boxer Rebellion.

 

[~Anastasia~]

subscribing - no time to watch the videos today

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

Of course history can be viewed subjectively by any reader.

At that point, of Constantine, killing and conquering for christian unity came into the 'church' and in the eyes of some, there is only compromise, killing, conquering and political power mongering from that point forward.

Our illustrious church history with a big old question mark behind the word church.

And some seem to revel in that for some odd reason. IN some eyes there isn't any other kind of christianity but power domination, of might makes right. Of the will of the religious majority, run amok over others at any cost.

REAL church history is so bloody and compromised it's almost a shame to look at it.

Oh, but when done to non-christians it's all good ain't it? It really doesn't matter how many people are slaughtered if they are unbelievers in the need of conquering.

In the Name of Jesus, by all means, carry on ye fine historians.

The Eusebian triumphalism that followed in the wake of Constantine's conversion was quickly squelched by the Julian apostasy, resulting in a much-restrained Christian celebration of the Theodosian settlement. And even after the Emperor Theodosius' made Christianity the official religion, thirty years later Augustine could write The City of God specifically to repudiate any notion (found in the minor writer Orosius) that the 410 Sack of Rome by the Vandals should be taken as either an approval of paganism or an approval of Christianity.

Do any of these facts actually matter to you? Did you know any of that?

 

[Targaryen]

The Eusebian triumphalism that followed in the wake of Constantine's conversion was quickly squelched by the Julian apostasy, resulting in a much-restrained Christian celebration of the Theodosian settlement. And even after the Emperor Theodosius' made Christianity the official religion, thirty years later Augustine could write The City of God specifically to repudiate any notion (found in the minor writer Orosius) that the 410 Sack of Rome by the Vandals should be taken as either an approval of paganism or an approval of Christianity.

Do any of these facts actually matter to you? Did you know any of that?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but by the time of the sack of Rome in 410, the Vandals were Arian Christians were they not?

 

[MoreCoffee]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but by the time of the sack of Rome in 410, the Vandals were Arian Christians were they not?

I reckon so

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but by the time of the sack of Rome in 410, the Vandals were Arian Christians were they not?

Correct. The claim Augustine was countering (made by the remaining pagans in the city who fled to North Africa) was that the conversion away from paganism had resulted in the sack of Rome.

 

[squint]

The Eusebian triumphalism that followed in the wake of Constantine's conversion was quickly squelched by the Julian apostasy, resulting in a much-restrained Christian celebration of the Theodosian settlement. And even after the Emperor Theodosius' made Christianity the official religion, thirty years later Augustine could write The City of God specifically to repudiate any notion (found in the minor writer Orosius) that the 410 Sack of Rome by the Vandals should be taken as either an approval of paganism or an approval of Christianity.

Do any of these facts actually matter to you? Did you know any of that?

I made a very general observation, that the alliance of church and state dramatically changed the churches.

To the point where some would no longer view them as such.

Carry on.

 

[Tzaousios]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but by the time of the sack of Rome in 410, the Vandals were Arian Christians were they not?

Correct. The claim Augustine was countering (made by the remaining pagans in the city who fled to North Africa) was that the conversion away from paganism had resulted in the sack of Rome.

Indeed. However, if I remember correctly, Augustine remarks with some irony in The City of God that the heretic Arian Visigoths who "sacked" Rome acted with surprising charity towards the Romans. There was not much rape and pillage as the "pagan barbarians" had perpetrated in the past.

 

[GoingByzantine]

I made a very general observation, that the alliance of church and state dramatically changed the churches.

To the point where some would no longer view them as such.

Carry on.

The alliance of Church and State was not always bad.

The Byzantine Empire protected Christianity up until its fall.

 

[ChristsSoldier115]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG55ErfdaeY

 

[SolomonVII]

Indeed. However, if I remember correctly, Augustine remarks with some irony in The City of God that the heretic Arian Visigoths who "sacked" Rome acted with surprising charity towards the Romans. There was not much rape and pillage as the "pagan barbarians" had perpetrated in the past.

The video covered that sack, and attributed much of the charity to the courage and the diplomatic skills of Pope Leo, who made a bargain with the Vandals that they could pillage unimpeded,in exchange for the lives of Roman citizens.

The way that he was able to use diplomacy to assuage the Huns years earlier is the stuff of miracle.