THE JESUS STORY CONTINUED --

The Six Ages of the Christian Church

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 6, 2015

NOTE:

Excerpt from Search for the Real Parents of My Soul

Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.

W. A. Billy Sunday (1862-1935), popular outfielder in Major League Baseball, then an American evangelist.

If the growth of modern science has taught anything in religion and in the modern world, it is that the method of progress is the method of evolution, not the method of revolution.  Let every man reflect well on these things before he assists in stabbing to death or in allowing to starve to death, organized religion in the United States.

Robert Andrews Milikan (1868-1953), American experimental physicist, Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for his measurement of the elementary electronic charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect.

American Catholics rejoice in our separation of Church and State, and I can conceive no combination of circumstances likely to arise which should make a union desirable either in Church or State.

James Gibbons (1834-1921), American Roman Catholic Cardinal from Baltimore.

Man is not yet so transfigured that he has ceased to keep the window of his mind and heart open towards Jerusalem, Galilee, Mecca, Canterbury, or Plymouth.  The abstract proposal that we worship at any place where God lets down the ladder is not yet an adequate substitute for the deep desire to go up to some central sanctuary where the religious artist vindicates a concrete universal in the realm of the spirit.

Willard L. Sperry (1882-1954), Dean of Harvard Divinity School.

As The Christian World Turns

We are in a new century, the twenty-first, but the sage voices that bridged the nineteenth and twentieth century still ring with the nostalgic message – we are not complete within and of ourselves.

That said, as this is being written, the Christian Church, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, appears in disarray if not in chaos and crisis.  This is no new experience for Christians in spite of the unity and continuity of the Christian tradition. 

As the world has grown more crowded, the once enormous space between peoples, cultures and religions has all but disappeared.  Now, in this Information Age, there is less space for people but equally less space for the animal kingdom that once graced the oceans, lakes, tundra, hinterlands, deserts, mountains and valleys in bountiful numbers.  

All life is collapsing in on itself with little room for man to breathe and think, or animals to roam.    

Given this development one might think man would recognize that his material side was out of control and that prudence dictated that he engage his spiritual side for insight and a return to balance, but, alas, that has not happened. 

Instead, man in his crippling hubris attempts to invent himself out of the situation with more technology, more cerebral cognitive philosophy, more abstract frenetic wondering that has instead successfully if not unequivocally separated his mind from his body, the material from the spiritual world.  

Will this dichotomous ligation grow until man no longer has forests that reach to the heavens and stretch across hills and mountain tops, no longer has virgin lakes and rivers alive with species going back thousands of years, no longer has quiet hamlets, towns and cities for man has been lost to collateral damage of constant war.

We need a Jesus at the moment, not a god, not a divine being, not an Apostle Paul project, but a voice and a mind, as Jesus had, which is to remind us of our sacred nature, and our latent capacity to love unconditionally, to love ourselves so that we may in turn love each other. 

We don’t find Jesus in Christianity as he has been locked out with our collective obsession with the seven deadly sins.  What we have instead are billionaires, millionaires, entrepreneurs and trendsetters, celebrities and entertainers, spin doctors and communicators, all titillating and scintillating the material side of our nature in our frenetic dance to oblivion. 

It seems appropriate, given these circumstances, to review the Six Ages of the Christian Church in the context of this odyssey.  

Each of these successive ages in Christian history possess distinctive characteristics and facets of what we have come to call the Christian life and culture.  I will address these ages only briefly giving a little more attention to the first age, but all give palpable clues to what we are and from whence we have come, and why we have survived. 

Each of these ages lasted approximately four centuries.  Each begin and ended in crisis, and each, except the last one, passed through three distinct phrases of growth and decay.

First, there is a period of intense spiritual activity when the church is faced with a new historical situation and begins a new apostolate.  There follows a period of achievement when the church seems to have conquered the world and is able to create a new Christian culture of life, art and thought.  Then there is a period of retreat and decline as the church is attacked by new enemies from within and from without, and achievements of the second phase are first compromised, then depreciated and finally lost.

These successive movements of achievement and retreat suggest that the history of Christianity is subject to a social psychological law which might go something like this:

Inherent in Christianity is a limiting mechanism curtailing complete spiritual expression which prevents the individual from fulfilling his self-actualizing needs and the church from completing its universal mission.

Before calling this Fisher’s Law, I might confess in my parochial education I was told again and again that the church on earth “is not of this world” and, therefore, likely to be subjected to continual attack and constant warfare challenging its survival; that it cannot rely on temporal or territorial success.  

As one nun, a Sister of St. Francis once told me, “The enemies of the church have saved the church time and time again.  Why, if it had not been for the likes of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, it is difficult to imagine where we would be today!”

That pattern is found most clearly in the first stage of the church.  From the moment of its existence, the church became involved in a life-and-death struggle between the persecution of the Roman Empire, and finding a separate identity from its Judaic Hellenistic ancestral roots.

After three centuries of conflict, the church was victorious and the Roman Empire became Christian with the conversion of Emperor Constantine.  Almost immediately, however, the church had to face a new enemy in the form of a Christian heresy known as “Arianism.”  Monk Arius (256 – 336 A.D.) was an ascetic Christian presbyter of Libyan birth, possibly of Berber extraction, and priest in Alexandria, Egypt, of the church of the Baucalis. 

Arius and the Deity of Christ

Arius was a tall, handsome, earnestly religious cleric, and eloquent in his arguments. He gave the impression also of being arrogant.  He lived at a time when the Eastern Church was divided because of the Christological dispute which he was instrumental in starting. He taught that Christ is not divine, but created.

Arius was strongly opposed by his bishop Alexander, who was bishop of Alexandria (Egypt) from 313 AD. Alexander insisted that the Son was fully and truly God in as absolute a sense as the Father was. The problem for Alexander was to show that this (orthodox) truth did not lead to a belief in two Gods, as Arius maintained that it did.

Alexander assembled a council of Egyptian bishops in 320 A.D., which deposed Arius for heresy. Arius, however, was not ready to give up without a fight, and went to Palestine, canvassing support from other Eastern bishops.  He wrote letters to Lucian’s ex-students who were now presbyters or bishops, addressing them as “Dear fellow-pupils of Lucian.” Lucian’s views of Christ seem to have been similar to that of Arius.

All came to a head when Emperor Constantine I, to safeguard the unity of the empire and the church, convened the First Council of Nicaea, which declared the Son to be equal with the Father and issued the Nicene Creed (which we know today as the "Apostles Creed"), saying that Christ is “God from God, true God from true God, only begotten Son (Jesus Christ) not created, of the same essence as the Father....” 

This Nicene Creed is fundamental to Catholicism to this day, and is known with the opening lines: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord ……” (Durant 1944)

Those many years ago all but two of Arius’s supporters, Secundus of Ptolemais and Theonas of Marmarica, gave in and signed the Nicaea Creed. Arius refused. These three were sent into exile by Emperor Constantine. They were anathema to the church and condemned.

To make emphatic the decisions of the Council, Constantine introduced the death penalty for disobedience, and ordered the burning of all books composed by Arius and deposed Eusebius of Nicomedia and another bishop who had been active in their support of Arius.

The dispute, though, continued throughout the fourth and fifth century. The heresy named after Arius was based on his teachings that the Father alone is God. The Logos or Son was a created being and there was a time when the Son had not existed.

According to Arius, the Son was the first and greatest of all that God had created; He was closer to God than all others, and the rest of creation related to God through the Son (for instance, God had created everything else through Christ). 

By developing this arch-heresy, Arius thought he was defending the fundamental truth that there is only one God - monotheism. A belief in the full deity of Christ, he supposed, would mean the Father and Son were two separate Gods, which contradicted the many statements of the Bible about God’s oneness.  

His reasoning: if God the Father is Absolute, unbegotten, and eternal unity, then “the only begotten Son (Jesus Christ) is then subordinate and inferior as “there is a time when the Son was not” (Harvey 1964).

Arius was also unhappy with Origen’s idea that there could be ‘degrees’ or ‘grades’ of divinity, with the Son being slightly less divine than the Father (this became known after the Nicene Council as semi-Arianism).

Arius argued that since the Father is clearly God, it follows that the Son could not be God - so He must be a created being.  Seventeen centuries later, Arianism is having a rebirth.

First Age of the Church Not Following a Precedence

The church was creating something absolutely new.  Hence, its initial phase, the Apostolic Age, stands apart in church history as the archetype (ideal type) of spiritual creativity. 

In that moment, the creative activity of the church was inseparable from the actual creation of the church itself.  So, Pentecost was at once the birthday of the church and the beginning of the church’s apostolate.  

Moreover, the new born church was faced almost at once with a second change of more revolutionary significance than any it would subsequently face, the required departure from the apostolate of a small provincial Jewish state to a much larger Gentile dominated environment with massive conversions across cosmopolitan urban centers in the Mediterranean basin from Antioch, where it all started, to Rome itself, where it would take root. 

We have an account of this change in the “Acts of the Apostles” in the New Testament.  This gives us an invaluable insight into the beginnings of the church from a Gentile perspective.  Unfortunately, we possess no such comparable account of the change from the Judaic-Christian point of view.

The main achievement of the first age of the church was the successful penetration of the dominant urban Roman-Hellenistic culture.  Although the church remained outside civic influence and authority for several generations, and existed with few if any legal or political rights, being intermittently subjected to persecution and discriminating practices including unlawful incarceration, it became the greatest creative force in the Roman world in the third to fifth century while Rome itself was unraveling. 

The church created a new Christian art and a parallel society to that of Rome’s, a culture that would survive and flourish in monasteries across Europe after the collapse of Rome and the nearly thousand years of what has come to be known as "The Dark Middle Ages.”

The Dark Middle Ages

This Medieval period lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery.

The Dark Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: Antiquity, Medieval period, and Modern period. The Medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, the High, and the Late Middle Ages.

Depopulation, de-urbanization, invasion, and movement of peoples, which had begun in Late Antiquity, continued in the Early Middle Ages. The barbarian invaders, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire.

In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East, once part of the Eastern Roman Empire came under the rule of the Caliphate, an Islamic empire, after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with Antiquity was not complete. The still expansive Byzantine Empire survived in the east and remained a major power.

The Empire's Law Code, the Code of Justinian, was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became widely admired later in the Middle Ages. 

In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions. Monasteries were founded as campaigns continued to Christianize pagan Europe. The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established an empire covering much of Western Europe; the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th and early 9th century, but it later succumbed to the pressures of internal civil wars combined with external invasions.  These were led by the Vikings from the north, Magyars from the east, and Saracens from the south.

During the High Middle Ages, which began after A.D. 1000, the population of Europe increased greatly as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and the Medieval Warm Period climate change allowed crop yields to increase.

Manorialism, or the organization of peasants into villages that owed rent and labor services to the nobles, and feudalism, the political structure whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords in return for the right to rent from lands and manors, were two of the ways society was organized in the High Middle Ages.

The Crusades, first launched in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Middle Eastern Holy Land from the Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralized nation states, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant. 

Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasized joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities. The theology of Thomas Aquinas, the paintings of Giotto, the poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the travels of Marco Polo, and the architecture of Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres are among the outstanding achievements of this period.

The Late Middle Ages was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine, plague, and war, which much diminished the population of Western Europe; between 1347 and 1350, the Black Death killed about a third of Europeans. Controversy, heresy, and schism within the Church paralleled the interstate conflict, civil strife, and peasant revolts that occurred in the kingdoms. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern period.

Apart from the religious significance of the church’s survival in that hostile thousand year period, it is worthy to note from a sociological perspective that the primitive church was not merely a sectarian cult-sect-organization but very much a real society.  From the church’s beginning, largely due to the genius of Apostle Paul, the church possessed a strong sense of social cohesion within its ranks and a highly developed hierarchical order anchored to a vibrant priesthood.

Clement and Origen, Tertullian and Cyprian

The culture of the first age of the church reached its full maturity in the first half of the third century with Clement and Origen in the East and Tertullian and Cyprian in the West.

Titus Flavius Clemens (c. 150 – 215 A.D.), known as Clement of Alexandria to distinguish him from the earlier Clement of Rome, was a Christian theologian who taught at the Catechetical School of Alexandria. 

A convert to Christianity, Clement was an educated man who was familiar with classical Greek philosophy and literature. As his three major works demonstrate, Clement was influenced by Hellenistic philosophy to a greater extent than any other Christian thinker of his time, and in particular by Plato and the Stoics.

His secret works, which exist only in fragments, suggest that he was also familiar with pre-Christian Jewish esotericism and Gnosticism.

In one of his works he argued that Greek philosophy had its origin among non-Greeks, claiming that both Plato and Pythagoras were taught by Egyptian scholars.  Among his pupils were Origen and Alexander of Jerusalem.

Clement is regarded as a Church Father, like Origen. He is venerated as a saint in Oriental Orthodoxy, Eastern Catholicism and Anglicanism. He was previously revered in the Roman Catholic Church, but his name was removed from the Roman Martyrology in 1586 by Pope Sixtus V on the advice of Baronius.

Quintus Tertullianus, Anglicised as Tertullian (c. 160 – 225 A.D.), was a prolific early Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa.  He is the first Christian author to produce an extensive corpus of Latin Christian literature. He also was a notable early Christian apologist and a polemicist against heresy. Tertullian has been called "The Father of Latin Christianity" and "the founder of Western theology."

Though conservative, he did originate and advance new theology to the early Church. He is perhaps most famous for being the oldest extant Latin writer to use the term Trinity (Latin: Trinitas), giving the oldest extant formulation of the Trinitarian terminology later adopted at the First Council of Nicaea.

Other Latin formulations that first appear in his work are "three persons, one substance," which would become known as the Blessed Trinity, or Three Gods in One Person, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost (Holy Spirit).  He wrote his trinitarian formula after becoming a Montanist.  

Montanism, also known as the Cataphrygian Heresy and the New Prophecy, was a heretical movement founded by the prophet Montanus that arose in the Christian Church in Phrygia, Asia Minor, in the 2nd century.  Unlike many Church fathers, however, Tertullian was never canonized by the Catholic Church, as several of his later teachings directly contradicted the teachings of the Church.

Cyprian (c. 200 – 258 A.D.) was bishop of Carthage and an important early Christian writer, many of whose Latin works are extant. He was born around the beginning of the 3rd century in North Africa, perhaps at Carthage, where he received a classical education. After converting to Christianity, he became a bishop soon after in 249. He was a controversial figure during his lifetime with strong pastoral skills, but held firm to his views during the Novatianist heresy. 

Novatianists were early Christians followers of the Antipope, Novatian.  They held a strict view of baptized Christians who denied their faith or performed ritual sacrifices to pagan gods under the duress of possible persecution by Emperor Decius in AD 250.

Novatian was a Roman priest who in 251 A.D. opposed the election of Pope Cornelius, following the assassination of Pope Fabian.  This was a period of sporadic persecution of Christians, who could avoid such fate by tacitly paying homage to the Roman gods. Novatian found this behavior despicable, but Pope Cornelius even more so for being lax in accepting these lapsed Christians back into the fold.

He allowed himself be made a rival pope, one of the first antipopes, holding that lapsed Christians, who had not maintained a confession of faith under persecution, could never again receive Holy Communion in the church.  He also claimed second marriages to be unlawful.

He and his followers were excommunicated by a synod held in Rome that same year. Novatian suffered martyrdom under the Emperor Valerian I (253–60) at Carthage, which vindicated him and restored his reputation, proving his sanctity in the eyes of the Church. His skillful Latin rhetoric led to his being considered the preeminent Latin writer of Western Christianity until Jerome and Augustine.

Given these high charged personalities and the violent clashes of ideas, surprisingly, the third phase of cultural retreat and disintegration that would mark the later years of every other age of the church henceforth, did not dissuade the momentum of the First Age of the Church.

Events were overshadowed by the vast catastrophe of the last great persecution, which threatened to destroy the existence of the church, but, paradoxically, ended in the church’s greatest achievement.  This is how historian Will Durant records the period:

The Diocletian (Roman Emperor) was the greatest test and triumph of the church.  It weakened Christianity for a time through the natural defection of adherents who had joined it, or grown up, during a half century of unmolested prosperity.  

But soon the defaulters were doing penance and pleading for readmission to the fold.  Accounts of the loyalty of martyrs who had died, or of “confessors” who had suffered for the faith were circulated from community to community; and these Acta Martyrum, intense with exaggeration and fascinating with legend, played a historic role in awakening or confirming Christian belief.  “The blood of martyrs,” said Tertullian, “is seed.”  

There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while the enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known.  Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won (Durant 1944).

The Second Age of the Church

The Second Age of the Church begins with the most spectacular of all the external victories that Christendom has known, the conversion of Emperor Constantine to the Christian faith with Rome the new Christian capital of the Christian emerging empire.

This marked the beginning of Christendom in the sense of a political society or group of societies which had found their principle of unity in the public profession of the Christian faith. 

There is also the Byzantine culture in the East, which was now in the process of translating the Hellenistic culture of the Roman Empire into Christian terms.  Both Christianity East and West were to endure.  Emperor Constantine formed an alliance of the Church and State in the West and Emperor Theodosius did the same in the East.

The next three centuries, between the peace of the church and the Moslem conquest of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, have an internal unity and coherence.  This has been known as the “Age of the Fathers,” as both the Eastern and Western church looked back on this period as the classical age of Christian thought and the fountainhead of theological wisdom (Hoare 1954).

It should be pointed out that the Fathers were not systemic theologians in the sense of Thomas Aquinas, but were successful in forcing the mind of the church to norms of theological thought which were to be followed. 

This resulted in massive creative achievement with the rise and development of Christian monasticism which would have immense influence on the Christian culture.  Monasticism is a religious way of life in which one renounces worldly pursuits to devote oneself fully to spiritual work.

Monastic life plays an important role in many Christian churches, especially in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Similar forms of religious life also exist in other faiths, most notably in Buddhism, but also in Hinduism and Jainism, although the expressions differ considerably.

Males pursuing a monastic life are generally called monks while female monastics are called nuns. Many monks and nuns live in monasteries to stay away from the secular world. Yet, monastics differ between and within Christian traditions. As a general rule, in Roman Catholicism, monks and nuns are called brother or sister, while in Orthodox Christianity, they are called father or mother.

From a social psychological perspective, though monasticism spread with extraordinary swiftness across Europe and Eurasia, it retained the imprint of its earlier origins in that the intimacy of small groups clustered in isolation outside the mainstream of society were tantamount to sealing off a belief system with the Christian imprimatur. 

In the Dark Middle Ages, monasteries and convents were citadels where nuns and brothers industriously preserved Western culture and knowledge while outside in an ocean of despair Western civilization took a thousand year hiatus.  

This period was also marked by the flowering of Christian art and architecture, and liturgical poetry.  During the Age of Emperor Justinian every aspect of social and artistic life was subject to Christian influence.  Yet, already the spiritual vitality of the age was beginning to flag.  It was evident that the Eastern and Western churches were not on the same course.

During the last phase of the period, there developed an open schism between Constantinople (now Istanbul) and Rome.  Finally, the “Age of the Fathers” ended in the loss of the Christian East and the establishment of the new world power of Islam…….