Christian Radical Press

The  Church  of  the  Empire

versus

the Christian  church  of North Africa

312-430  A.D.

by  Terry  Sullivan

(c) 2008

cover symbols: 

Dagmar Crucifix 

Roman  sword  from  Trajan's  column

God  &  King   Cross of the Dannebrog  Knights

ISBN   0-9764168-2-4  

christian   radical   press

            It is demonstrably true that the Imperial so-called CatholicChurch of the Roman Empire promoted a general change of Christian faith and morals and church discipline in many areas, and that it substantially  modified  basic Christian doctrines.  As did the Imperial so-called Orthodox Church of the eastern empire. 

            (It is the false claim of mainstream Protestantism that the Reformation restored the original Christian faith, which was allegedly perverted, not by the advent of the Imperial Church, but long afterwards, by the Pope's assumption of secular power.  Luther accepted the church of Constantine and the Reformers were followers of Augustine.  Luther and Calvin both sanctioned the State Church, to which they owed their positions.)

Development  of  Doctrine ?  or  Corruption  of  the Faith ?

            After he became a Catholic, John Henry Newman argued that development of doctrine does not necessarily mean corruption of faith and morals.  But one of the prime examples he gives of a  development  of  doctrine  is a striking instance of just how great a change there was.

            In  An  Essay  on  the  Development  of Christian  Doctrine  (5.1.3  page 172-173)  "Genuine Developments Contrasted With Corruptions"  he writes:  "In like manner, it has been argued by a late writer,  [ Milman ]  whether fairly or not does not interfere with the illustration, that the miraculous vision and dream of the Labarum could not have really taken place, as reported by Eusebius, because it is counter to the original type of Christianity.  For the first time, he says, on occasion of Constantine's introduction of the standard into his armies, the meek and peaceful Jesus became a God of battle, and the Cross, the holy sign of Christian Redemption, a banner of bloody strife. . . . This was the first advance to the military Christianity of the middle ages, a modification of the pure religion of the Gospel, if directly opposed to its genuine principles, still apparently indispensable to the social progress of men."

            And then Newman comments:   "On the other hand, a popular leader may go through a variety of professions, he may court parties and break with them, he may contradict himself in words, and undo his own measures, yet there may be a steady fulfillment of certain objects, or adherence to certain plain doctrines, which gives a unity to his career, and impresses on beholders an image of directness and large consistency which shows a fidelity to his type from first to last."

            In short, Jesus Christ, like Disraeli or Bill Clinton, may have shifted his policies from one time to the next.  He may have been the Prince of Peace at one time but that didn't prevent Him from becoming the new  war  god  of  the Roman Empire at another time.  Like a popular politician looking for votes, Jesus Christ sometimes took a position just the opposite of that which he had formerly espoused.  Like Disraeli or Bill Clinton, he may have left some of his followers dismayed and confounded, but the more sophisticated understood what he was doing.

            It is apparent that both Milman and Newman perceive the obvious contradiction between these two beliefs as to what Jesus Christ stands for, but neither one is able to state it

plainly.  Newman lets Milman state it for him while he preserves his "neutrality" on a radical and fundamental change in Christian history and Christian faith and Christian morals.  Milman does state it:  directly opposed to its genuine principles  and then backs away from it.  Because both men are bound to the state church tradition, neither can say bluntly and unequivocally what is obvious to both of them:   Constantine's "miracle" was a perversion of the Christian faith.  Constantine's  "Jesus Christ" is the negation of the real Jesus Christ, is the anti-Christ.

            These men illustrate here the fallacy that "ideas" or purely intellectual truth can ever be the real Christian truth about anything.  Without the Spirit of Truth you do not have the Spirit of Courage that is required to stand up for the Truth.  It is obvious that the nit-picking intellectualism of the Imperial Church "theologians" served to hide from themselves and others their cowardly abandonment and betrayal of Christian faith and morals in a dozen major ways.

worldly  power

            The writer of the eb 9 essay on Constantine does a similar duck out:  he endowed the new religion for the first time with that instrument of worldly power . . . whether for good or for evil or for both . . .  (VI 301c)   Like the world to which it has now conformed, the new Christianity is inevitably a murky mixture of good and evil with no way of separating the two.  The murky analysis of these scholars arises from their own compromised positions.

            The latest benefits of the merger of the Church with worldly power include 60 million killed in World War II.  In conformity with the morality of the State Church, the Catholics and Lutherans of Germany marched off to carry out the grand vision of the new German Caesar to establish a world empire.  Franz Jaggerstatter shows what the difference could have been.  How easily these Christian nations submitted to Stalin and Hitler, how readily they embraced their mission of mass murder.  Of course it was the great war which erupted in the middle of Christendom in 1914 that produced Bolshevism and Nazism in two supposedly Christian Nations.  The endless wars of Worldly Christianity are the sure sign of its moral apostasy.

            Newman's lack of moral courage here is not surprising.  It is conspicuous in shaping the decision he made which he discusses in his  Apologia pro Vita Sua.  There is a striking contrast with the courage that  John Wesley showed in following his conscience in a similar predicament.  Newman apparently could not imagine how to live outside the safe sinecure of a state church establishment.  If he wasn't an Anglican in his rooms at Oxford, he had to be a Catholic in the best University they had to offer.  It was beyond him to follow the Spirit of Truth, if it meant that he might wind up like Wesley did, out in a field somewhere preaching to a bunch of colliers.  So his remarkable insights into the truth of the Christian faith are always subordinated, as here, by the final necessity of conforming to the establishment line.

            Newman is twitting his former Anglican colleagues by diffidently pointing out that they are not in a position to argue about the corruption of basic Christian beliefs in the Catholic Church.  Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.  If there is idolatry in promoting Mary to  God  the  Mother, the new mother goddess of the Imperial pagan & "Christian" Church,  there is a far more pernicious idolatry and perversion in the establishment of a State Church which promotes Jesus Christ into the  new  Mars.  If the authority claimed by the Pontifex  Maximus  over the Christian Church is a usurpation, what about the authority that the Emperor and the King assumed over the Church ?  That is, the Anglicans had better refrain from seriously pursuing the question of "development of doctrine" in the Church.  They are stuck with defending   military  christianity  and the State Church just like the Catholics.

credulous history

            The state church historians are credulous historians.  They believe in any and all miracles.  They believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and in his miraculous partnership with Constantine.  They believe in the miraculous cures of Jesus of Nazareth and the miraculous poisoning of Arius and the miraculous arson of the pagan temple that Julian restored near Antioch.  They believe in the miracle of Constantine and they believe in the Christian Empire which was thereby established.  They combine faith with superstition into a kind of Christian credulity that has marked  Christendom  ever since.  It is a faith in the power of the Holy Spirit and a faith in the power of armies and an inability, a refusal, to distinguish one from the other.  It is a  combined faith in the  Christian Church and the Roman Empire.

            You can't write Christian History without a faith that Jesus Christ is the central fact of history, that his life and death really do mark the beginning of the history that matters.  But if your faith in Jesus Christ includes a faith in the Emperor Constantine then it becomes an entirely different history.  These are two contrary histories.

            Of course there are "developments" in Christian history.  Saul becoming Saint Paul is an important development in Christian history.  But what is Constantine ?  Does he represent a "development" or does he represent a betrayal ?  A Christian historian has to face up squarely to that question.  If he evades the question, he can never give a true answer to other basic questions about the history of Christianity.  That is really what has happened.  That is why the history we have is bad history.  Because it is cowardly and dishonest history, as in the section of Newman's book that I quoted.  Having evaded the essential question, Newman wanders off into what is essentially garbage, for all its sophistication.  Here is a rare intellect, thoroughly knowledgeable about the history of the Church, who writes interminable twaddle because he doesn't have the courage to truthfully answer an essential question about the history of Christianity.

            Constantine's "miracle" was not just a one time event that can be disregarded as a fable.  It was, as Milman says, the beginning of  military  christianity.  It was a  modification  of  the  pure  religion  of  the  Gospel . . . directly  opposed  to  its  genuine  principles  .  .  .   And, if he could have brought himself to put a period there, his history of the church would have been entirely different from the one he wrote.

            Whether Constantine's vision was real or not, the Imperial Church he founded was real.  And the faith in Secular Christianity was real.  It shaped history for 1600 years thereafter.  This was the first of many military marvels and miracles upon which the faith of Secular Christianity was established.  Constantine's mother discovers the true cross in Jerusalem through a series of miracles.  Most of the cross is placed inside the statue of the Emperor Constantine in Constantinople where it becomes a center of devotion.   (Philostorgius II 17,  Socrates I 17  &  Theodoret I 34)  The presence of the true cross in Constantinople guarantees the military safety of Constantine's capitol.  Constantine makes a bridle bit for his war horse with the nails from the cross.  He takes the martyr's title of  Victor  to show that by his sword he has fulfilled the victory that the Christian martyrs won by submitting to the sword of Imperial persecution.

Mary  the  mother  of  battles

            As Milman says, military  christianity was thereby established.  Like Jesus himself, his apostles are now enlisted in the wars of the empire.  The Emperor Theodosius I supposedly won his great victory over Eugenius in 394 A.D. thanks to the miraculous help of Saints Philip & John.  (eb9 XXIII 257c)   Mary, the mother of Jesus, also thereafter plays an important role as a goddess of battles.  Narses, the eunuch general of Justinian in the 6th century, never went into battle until he received a sign from the Virgin. (eb9 XVII 234c) 

            The holy lance with a point supposedly made from the nails of the Cross helps Otho the Great defeat the pagan Hungarians in a battle of the 10th century.  These miracles and signs and wonders of Constantine and the other so-called "Christian" emperors, if they are accepted as an authentic part of the Christian faith, have the effect of transforming the Christian faith.  They are far more potent than changes in church discipline or theology, but of course they are accompanied by the changes in morality and theology which are necessary to justify them.  Seventy-five years later, Augustine became the major architect of the changes in theology which the new Church of the Empire required.  He developed the theoretical framework for the new Secular Faith.  But the practical changes in faith and morals had already been made. 

            If Jesus Christ is now Constantine's partner, then it is right for Christians to serve in Constantine's armies.  It is right for Christians to fight in a "just war" or an unjust war according to Augustine's doctrine because no one except the emperor can decide whether or not it is just.  It isn't up to the individual Christian to decide whether or not a war is just.  If it isn't, the emperor must answer to God, but the duty of the individual Christian is to obey the emperor. 
(  c. Faust 22.74-75 )  Peter's injunction that  we must obey God rather than man  is obsolete doctrine now that we have an emperor who calls himself a "Christian."

            When Pope Pius XI blessed the army of Mussolini on its way to the rape of Ethiopia, he was re-affirming the partnership between Church and State that was established by Constantine's miracle 1600 years earlier.  When German Catholics and German Lutherans put on their uniforms and went off to kill whoever Der Kaiser or Der Fuhrer ordered them to kill, they were acting in conformity with the teaching of Augustine of Hippo.   But was it the teaching of Jesus Christ ?  That is the question that Newman and Milman could not answer honestly.

            The credibility of the later cross in the sky story is undermined by the original cross of triumph story which Eusebius tells in ix.9.10-11 of his Church History and in I.40 of his Life of Constantine:  When he entered Rome in A.D. 312, Constantine immediately ordered a statue of himself with a cross in his hand to be set up  in  the  most  public  place  in  Rome  with an inscription stating that  by this salutary sign, the true proof of bravery, i saved and delivered your city from the yoke of the tyrant.  Constantine did erect a triumphal arch, made over from the arch of Trajan.  It is still standing and many later visitors to Rome have seen it and read the inscription--which neglects to say anything about the cross of Jesus Christ.  Meanwhile, no one except Eusebius seems ever to have seen the statue of Constantine holding the cross and the inscription which accompanied it.  Even though it was presumably made of durable material,  it vanished as quickly as the vision of the cross in the sky !