GODCHURCH: A Theistic Survey of Church History

By Edwin Walhout

What role does the Christian church play in human history? If you take the sovereignty of God seriously, what role should the church play? Here is an interpretive survey of church history that attempts to answer those questions. It’s written for serious Christians who may be just a little uncertain about church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edwin Walhout
• Release date: Nov 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301345274

Edwin Walhout

I am a retired minister of the Christian Reformed Church, living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Being retired from professional life, I am now free to explore theology without the constraints of ecclesiastical loyalties. You will be challenged by the ebooks I am supplying on Smashwords.

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GODCHURCH

A Theistic Survey of Church History

by Edwin Walhout

Published by Edwin Walhout

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Edwin Walhout

Cover design by Amy Cole

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Consult Smashwords.com for additional books by this author.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Part One THE ROMAN EMPIRE ERA (30-500)

Chapter 1 OPPOSITION FROM JUDAISM

Chapter 2 OPPOSITION FROM GRECO-ROMAN CULTURE

Chapter 3 CHRISTIANITY TRIUMPHANT

Chapter 4 THEOLOGY IN THE GRECO-ROMAN MILIEU

Chapter 5 THE GRECO-ROMAN MINDSET

Chapter 6 THE APOSTLES’ CREED

Chapter 7 THE NICENE CREED

Chapter 8 THE FORMULA OF CHALCEDON

Chapter 9 THE ATHANASIAN CREED

Chapter 10 THE PELAGIAN CONTROVERSY

Chapter 11 THE CHURCH HIERARCHY

Chapter 12 PERSPECTIVE ON THE ROMAN EMPIRE ERA

Part Two THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ERA (500-1500)

Chapter 13 THE CONVERSION OF EUROPE

Chapter 14 THE SPREAD OF ISLAM

Chapter 15 THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM

Chapter 16 CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION

Chapter 17 THE CHURCH-STATE CONFLICT

Chapter 18 REFORM MOVEMENTS

Chapter 19 PERSPECTIVE ON THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ERA

Part Three THE PROTESTANT ERA (1500-2000)

Chapter 20 THE REFORMATION

Chapter 21 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Chapter 22 EFFECTS OF THE REFORMATION

Chapter 23 MODERN MISSIONS

Chapter 24 THE CHURCH’S AGENDA

PREFACE

This book is a survey of the history of the Christian Church. It is addressed to the inquiring Christian who has become more than a bit dissatisfied with what he or she sees happening in the contemporary church world. It presupposes that the reader is a committed Christian but who is entertaining some unanswered questions about what is being taught and practiced in the churches. If we want to make accurate judgments about the church, we need to have some realistic insight into what made the churches what they are today, and this necessitates going back to the beginning to trace its development.

There are three levels on which this study of Church History is written: a) factual, b) connective, and c) interpretive.

The factual level is concerned with basic knowledge of what actually happened, the questions of what and where and when and who. The difficulty on this level is not so much the accuracy of data, which competent historians have ascertained, but the selection of which items to include. This present survey selects minimum data to illustrate the larger patterns of development and change, leaving the more detailed information for collateral study.

The connective level is the attempt to show developmental patterns from one era to the next. We are today the product of the choices and decisions that our ancestors made hundreds and even thousands of years ago. What happened in the ancient church shaped what happened later in the medieval church. Likewise what happened in the Reformation shaped what is happening still today in the twenty-first century. Our modern world is the product of everything that happened in previous centuries, the cumulative effect of prior human decisions.

The interpretive level is the most definitive and important part of this project. It is the theistic level, the level which moves beyond the actual human events and beyond their connections to ask the question, What is God doing? Theism is the view that God, having brought the universe and the earth and the human race into existence, continues his work of shaping and forming that human race into the condition and achievement that he desires. This implies, of course, that everything that happens on earth, especially the variegated events in church history, is at the same time the action of God in the ongoing shaping of the human race into his image. The first two levels will be intertwined in the following chapters, but this third level of theistic interpretation will usually be found in separate sections entitled Perspective.

This present survey of church history takes its theistic orientation from the first chapter of Genesis, the passage that informs us that God created the human race in his image and commanded them to populate the earth, subdue it, and gain dominion over it. This is to be understood as a continuing process, not a once for all fiat. The human race, emerging as it does from prior forms of life, must learn how to utilize the givens of its natural environment, learn how to construct a flourishing civilization, and – most important – learn how to do this in such a way as to image the Creator. Church history is not only a part of this ongoing process, but is its shaping force.

The goal of church history is the formation of a godly civilization that has as its goal the betterment of the entire human race. God brought Jesus into the world precisely for the purpose of showing the Way for the human race to become what its Creator wishes. The process Jesus initiated becomes an interesting and often baffling movement from one level of development to the next, and that process is what these church history chapters will examine.

Part One: THE ROMAN EMPIRE ERA

For the first three hundred years of its existence, the Christian church existed in an environment that was hostile. That hostility was sometimes strong and active, sometimes weak and passive, but it was always there. And it came from two distinct sources: first from Judaism and later from the Roman Empire.

Chapter 1: OPPOSITION FROM JUDAISM

During the last week of his life Jesus changed from being loved to being hated. On Palm Sunday the people hailed him as the king of the Jews, Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven! But by Friday they were clamoring, Crucify him! Why this abrupt change?

On Sunday the Jewish people were expecting Jesus to announce that he was starting a revolution that would drive out the Romans and set up an independent Jewish kingdom. When the days passed and he did not do that, the people turned against him as a false messiah, and their love turned into hate.

So the reasons the people turned against Jesus were mostly political. They wanted Jesus to gain Jewish independence from Rome, and Jesus simply had no plans to do that.

But there was another reason why the leaders of the Jews, the high priest and the scribes and Pharisees, were opposed to Jesus. Not so much for political reasons but for religious reasons.

Jesus had been challenging the people about the way they obeyed the Law of Moses, the Torah. Too often, Jesus kept telling the people, they merely went through the correct motions of keeping the rules. They observed the various prohibitions about what they could and could not do on the sabbath day, but without in the least thinking about God. They could eat kosher food and use kosher cooking implements without worrying about what God thought of them at other times. They could bring sacrifices to the temple as they were supposed to do, without even thinking that there should be some carryover into their daily living.

Jesus said on one occasion, You tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. And he followed that up by saying, You clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence, and by accusing them of hypocrisy, On the outside you look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

So these teachings of Jesus made the Jewish leaders angry. They saw Jesus as being opposed to the Law of God, the Torah, teaching people that there were more important things than keeping the traditions that made their religion what it was. The result was that they started looking for a suitable occasion to stop Jesus and, if possible, to execute him.

It is interesting to see how these two attitudes, political and religious, played out when Jesus was brought to Pontius Pilate for trial. At first Pilate simply told the Jewish leaders to take care of it on their own; he did not want to get involved in the religious squabbles of the Jews. But then the Jews changed their accusation to the political one, saying Pilate would get into trouble with Rome if he let someone who was starting a revolution get off free. So it was the political reason that finally persuaded Pilate to order Jesus to be crucified.

The hatred his countrymen showed to Jesus when they rejected him did not stop at his crucifixion. They kept hating his followers, and it continued for a long time, as long as the majority of people in Christian churches were converted Jews.

Unconverted Jews despised their Jewish brethren who chose to follow Jesus as the messiah, and made whatever trouble they could for them. We see examples of this in the stoning of Stephen, the martyrdom of James, and in the intense hatred of Saul prior to his conversion. But even later, in the churches that the Apostle Paul began, there was constantly an internal religious struggle between Christians who wanted to keep observing the Jewish laws, the Torah, and those who did not think that was necessary.

We can understand well enough why unbelieving Jews would oppose Christianity, but it may seem strange that the same legalistic attitude toward the Torah would continue even after they were converted and became good Christians. Some of these believers of Jewish background wanted to combine their previous religious habits with their new faith in Jesus. They were somehow able to accept Jesus as the messiah and continue to keep the Jewish religious customs. They insisted on doing both, being convinced that the Torah of Moses was indeed the final and permanent Law of God. If God gave the Torah and also sent Jesus, then we have to accept both – that was their argument.

The problem that Paul found in many churches was that there were influential church leaders insisting that all believers, Jews and Gentiles, must obey the traditional Jewish religious customs. This made Paul furious. He could sense that for these Judaizers (as we call them) the Law was more important than the Holy Spirit of Jesus, external religion was more important than internal religion, so he opposed them with all his might. Paul kept insisting that true Christian faith does not depend on keeping religious rules, no matter how helpful they may have been in the past, but upon receiving into one’s heart and life the Spirit of Jesus which would create genuine obedience to God, not mere outward conformity.

There was a test that Paul gave to the churches. The test was whether or not Jewish Christians could accept non-Jewish Christians as members of the same church without insisting that they obey Jewish laws. If they could do this, fine; but if not, then their devotion to the Torah was pure legalism and must not prevail.

So this was one of the two major sources of hostility in the ancient church, from Judaism. It gradually disappeared within the church as time went on, as the great majority of Christians became non-Jewish with no connection to the Torah. But then a new source of hostility came into play, a much more powerful one, from the Greco-Roman culture.

Chapter 2: OPPOSITION FROM THE GRECO-ROMAN CULTURE

At first the Roman authorities did not distinguish between Christians and Jews. This was simply because most Christians were Jews. Whatever they thought about Jews they thought about Christians. For example, when the Apostle Paul was arrested in Jerusalem after his third missionary journey, Felix and Festus both simply assumed the trouble was a religious squabble among Jews. Festus, in his cover letter to the Emperor, wrote about the accusations made against Paul, They had certain points of disagreement with him about their own religion and about a certain Jesus, who had died, but whom Paul asserted to be alive. Festus did not know how to handle that situation, very much like Pilate in his trial of Jesus.

Paul ran into a lot of trouble during his missionary work. Unconverted Jews would sometimes pursue him into nearby cities and persuade the authorities that Paul was a trouble-maker. In Ephesus his enemies started a riot and forced him out of town. In Philippi he was even put in jail for a while.

Then there was that notorious incident of Emperor Nero, who in AD 64 is said to have set Rome on fire in order to make space for constructing some magnificent public buildings, and then to have blamed Christians for arson. Dozens of Christians were hunted down at the time, crucified and burned to light the gardens of Nero. By that time Christians were being persecuted, not because they were Jews but because they were followers of Jesus.

We may wonder why people in general way back then were so anti-Christian. It was partly because Christians no longer did the things most people did, like worshipping the Roman gods, or buying religious trinkets, or joining them in their drunken parties. People regarded Christians as atheists because they did not have images of the gods to worship. In addition there was a rumor that Christians were eating somebody’s flesh and drinking his blood at their secret meetings. That sounds like cannibalism. And of course when people heard that the leader of the Christians was supposed to have risen from the dead they couldn’t believe such nonsense. So public opinion had it that these Christians were weird people who despised everyone else and were bad examples of citizenship.

Christians were not consistently and universally under open persecution. Sometimes the local Roman authorities were perplexed as how to handle problems concerning Christians. Pontius Pilate had such a dilemma with Jesus. Governor Festus did also with the Apostle Paul, finally sending him to Rome for trial.

Other examples of governor’s dilemmas exist in records that are not in the Bible. For example, a man named Pliny who was governor of Bithynia, asked Emperor Trajan what to do about people who were accused of being Christian. It was assumed that being Christian was being criminal. The Emperor advised Pliny not to hunt them out, but if they were caught and were willing to reject that faith, to let them go. Punish them only if they persist in their faith.

Still, opposition did keep getting worse, until there were Roman emperors who regarded Christianity as a serious threat to the integrity of Roman government. In 176 Marcus Aurelius enforced a law against strange religions. Some emperors opposed Christianity, some ignored it, and some seemed even to favor it.

There was no empire-wide persecution until later, notably under two emperors: Decius and Diocletian. Decius, about the year 250, made it his major task as emperor to destroy Christianity. His aim was to compel Christians by torture, imprisonment, or fear to make sacrifices to the pagan gods. On a certain day everyone in the empire must make a sacrifice to the gods and to the emperor, and secure a certificate to that effect from the town officials. Here is a sample of such a certificate, found in Egypt in 1893, I have always sacrificed to the gods, and now in your presence, in accordance with the terms of the edict, I have done sacrifice and poured libations and tasted the sacrifices, and I request you to certify to this effect. Farewell. As might be expected, though many Christians recanted temporarily, others bought a certificate or had a pagan friend get one.

Another emperor, Valerian, ordered that bishops, priests, and deacons should be punished, and that high ranking Christians in the Senate should be degraded and lose their property, and if they still remained Christians, then they should also lose their heads.

Hundreds of Christians all over the empire lapsed, many died, but the persecution soon diminished. It didn’t stop altogether, but was not as severe until in 303, Emperor