What event triggered the
Persecution of Christians in AD 247?
•AD 247 was the 1,000th birthday of the city of Rome.
•Because the celebrations focused on Roman
gods and goddesses, many Christians refused to participate in the festivities.
•Soon after the celebration, plague
ravaged the city of Rome.
•Hoping to regain the gods’ good favor,
Emperor Decius launched an empire-wide persecution of Christians.
•Anyone without a “sacrifice
certificate”—granted by sacrificing to a pagan god—could be imprisoned.
•Origen of Alexandria was martyred during
this persecution.
•This persecution ended with the death of
Emperor Decius in AD 251.
•The effects of the persecution lasted for
decades
During the persecution, many church
members sacrificed to Roman gods.
Others obtained fake sacrifice
certificates.
Still others fled and hid from
persecution.
During
the persecutions, any Christian who renounced Christianity, made offerings to
the Roman state gods and/or the Imperial divine cult, and who burned any sacred
Christian texts they may have had, were spared. Those who refused — especially
those caught with Christian texts that they refused to hand over or destroy —
were usually killed.
While some Christian clergy resisted and
were martyred, many did not.
They renounced Christianity, offered
a sacrifice to the emperor, allowed their books
to be burned, and were spared and given a certificate of
sacrifice compliance.
Some
obtained false certificates and escaped death or having to renounce their
faith. Those who had renounced Christianity or had false certificates were
considered lapsed.
Donatus
and his faction declared the lapsed
clergy were to be excluded from the
church, ineligible to perform the sacraments, and
that any which they may have performed, were invalid. The opposing party
declared, again, that lapsed clergy could be restored to full authority —
including the performance of
sacraments — after having performed appropriate penance. They based this idea
on the concept of forgiveness for all.
•What about church members who
obtained false certificates?
CYPRIAN SAID … These church members should be given a second chance; re-admit them to the church after they show the authenticity of their repentance through prayer and fasting.
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How was Christianity declared
legal in the Roman Empire?
•In the early 4th century, Emperor Galerius recognized
that, despite harsh persecution, most Christians still refused to worship the
gods.
•On his deathbed in AD 311, Galerius
declared that it was legal for Christians to worship Jesus alone “as long as
they don’t disturb the public order.”
What event changed Rome to favor
Christianity?
•In AD 312, Constantine was fighting to
become sole emperor of the Roman Empire.
•Constantine’s soldiers chalked the
Chi-Rho on their shields—a figure that some seem to have understood as an
abbreviation for “Christ.”
•Constantine declared in the Edict of Milan: “Our purpose is to allow Christians … to worship as they desire, so that whatever Divinity lives in the heavens will be kind to us.”
•Emperor Constantine granted favors to
churches and to church leaders.
•In AD 312, a group of church leaders
asked Constantine to settle a dispute in the churches regarding whether Donatus
had been correct.
•Constantine decided against the followers
of Donatus and established a precedent of imperial
involvement in church decisions.
•The Donatist controversy would emerge again later, in
the 5th
century.
•In the early 4th century, Arius of Alexandria began to
teach that Jesus was not eternal God.
•The followers of Arius sang in the
streets,
“There was a time when the Son did not exist!”
•Those who rejected Arius responded
with the Gloria Patri:
“Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the
beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.”
•To maintain peace, Constantine convened a
council in the village of Nicaea, in northern Asia Minor.
•More than 300 bishops made their way to
Nicaea; many elders and deacons—including Athanasius of Alexandria—were also
present.
•On July 4, 325, Constantine called the
council to order and declared himself a bishop and an apostle.
•When Arius stated that Jesus had not
existed eternally, all but two bishops agreed that this contradicted Scripture.
•The Creed of Nicaea responded to Arius’ heresy.
The Creed of Nicaea
“We believe in one God, the
Father, almighty creator of all things visible and invisible. We believe in one Lord,
Jesus Christ, God’s Son, begotten from the Father, uniquely begotten from the
Father’s essence; God from God, Light from Light, very God from very God;
begotten not created, of one essence with the Father. Through him all things were made,
in heaven and earth; for us humans and for our salvation, he came down and was
made flesh—was made human—suffered, and rose again the third day; he ascended
into heaven and is coming to judge the living and the dead.
We believe in the Holy Spirit. The
universal apostolic church curses all who say, ‘There was a time when he was
not’ and ‘Before he was begotten, he was not’ and ‘He came out of nothing,’ or
those who pretend God’s Son is of another substance or essence or created or
variable or changeable.”
What role did Athanasius play in
preserving the doctrine that God the Father and God the Son were of the same
substance?
How the monks and nuns begins?
•After decades of persecution, now there
no longer seemed to be any possibility of persecution or martyrdom.
•Many Christians—longing for a more demanding faith
—retreated to the deserts, to live alone.
—retreated to the deserts, to live alone.
•They lived in extreme poverty, eating
only enough to stay alive.
•These men and women became known as “monks” and “nuns,” from Latin terms that mean “alone.”
Who were the Great Cappadocians
•Gregory Nyssa, his brother Basil, and
Gregory Nazianzus supported the Creed of Nicaea in the eastern Empire.
•Macrina,
the sister of Basil and Gregory Nazianzus, founded the first communities for
nuns and monks in the eastern Empire.
After
Nicaea, there were many bishops who drifted away
from the Nicene Creed. There arose in the church significant numbers of bishops
who rejected the teachings of Nicaea
and rejected the teaching that Jesus
Christ is truly God. Soon, another council was called, this time at
Constantinople in 381. It was the work and teaching of
the 3 Great Cappadocians
which guided and maintained orthodox thinking at the
Council of Constantinople. At that council, the Nicene Creed was reaffirmed and
reestablished in the church.
It
was also the three Cappadocians
who firmly entrenched the
definition of the Trinity in the life of the church,
that God is one substance in three persons.
And it was the three Cappadocians
who helped that doctrine work its way into the life of the church and to be firmly established in the life of the church.
Jerome and the Latin Vulgate?
•Jerome lived in the desert for two years
before he realized he was not called to live alone.
•When he returned to Rome, the bishop
asked him to create a reliable Latin Bible.
•A wealthy widow named Marcella financed
Jerome’s translation.
•Jerome, Marcella, and a friend named
Paula embraced extreme self-denial—even to the point of refusing ever to bathe.
•The Latin text that Jerome finished in AD
405 became known as the Vulgate (or “common”) Bible.
•For nearly 1,500 years, the Vulgate was
the Bible of the Roman Catholic Church.
Last week we learned that the Christian
church evolved “centralized authority"? what would be some pros and cons of this?
Jerome and the Latin
This week we learned that the
bishop of Rome commissioned the Vulgate Latin translation of the bible from the
original Greek and Hebrew languages.
What would
be some pro
and
cons to this?
Vulgate
By 500 AD the Bible had been translated
into over 500 languages. Just one century later, by 600 AD, it has been
restricted to only one language: the Latin Vulgate! The only organized and
recognized church at that time in history was the Catholic Church of Rome, and
they refused to allow the scripture to be available in any language other than
Latin. Those in possession of non-Latin scriptures would be executed! This was
because only the priests were educated to understand Latin, and this gave the
church ultimate power… a power to rule without question… a power to deceive… a
power to extort money from the masses. Nobody could question their “Biblical”
teachings, because few people other than priests could read Latin. The church
capitalized on this forced-ignorance through the 800 year period from 600 AD to 1,400 AD knows as the “Dark and
Middle Ages”.
Next
week Chapter 4
Servant-Leaders or Leaders of Servants?
AD 376 to AD 664
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