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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.
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.
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."
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
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.
You neglected to mention the Orthodox Church in China, which was almost completely wiped out during the Boxer Revolution.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.
Yes. It is lacking in evidence.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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.)
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.I certainly don't believe that the Gospel was lost.
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.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.)
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?
I reckon soPlease 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?
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?
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?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.
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.
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.
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