In our study on the doctrinal development of the universal church theory we have resumed our series with an extended look at the most pivotal period in history, the Fourth Century. Here we have returned to Constantine, progressed to Nicaea and its aftermath, and found ourselves in a tumultuous period of church-state relations from Constantius to Julian which led to persecution, banishment, and even death of those who held to the orthodox Nicene position over and against Arianism. As a reminder, Arianism is the belief that God the Son is not of the same substance as God the Father, in other words a created being and not eternal. The rise in opposition against orthodoxy from within by those who were sympathetic to Arianism reached its apex during the reign of Constantius, one of Constantine’s sons among whom his empire was divided. Constantius ruled from the East, the part of the empire that was most sympathetic to the beliefs of Arianism, and he reigned down terror. In our last post we saw that after the death of Constantius he was succeeded by Julian the Apostate who did his best to sow confusion and reestablish paganism as the religion of the empire. Upon his death, we noted that Valentinian became emperor in the West and assigned the east to his pro-Arian brother, Valens.
During this period of the 370s, another champion of orthodoxy arose, Ambrose, who became bishop of Milan in 374. Ambrose was a local politician who was elected bishop upon the death of the previous bishop, despite not belonging to any church or having yet been baptized. Ambrose developed a reputation as an excellent preacher and introduced the responsive singing or chanting of Psalms with the more Eastern practice of antiphonal singing of hymns (newly written) where one part of the congregation sang a verse and the other responded with the following verse.1 Four short years after Ambrose’s appointment, Emperor Valens died in battle in 378 and was replaced by Emperor Gratian’s (West) appointee, Theodosius. Initially, the new Emperor made Milan his political capital in the West and found friendship and an advisor in Ambrose. The new bishop made it clear to the new emperor that he was to have no role in the rule of the church, which as we have seen since Constantine had become the norm. Famously, Ambrose said, “The Church belongs to God, therefore it cannot be assigned to Caesar. The emperor is within the Church, not above it.”2
For the first time, both the Eastern and Western Emperors were Nicene in their theological understand of God the Son. Perhaps seeing momentum on the side of the Nicenes, in 380, ruling from Constantinople, Theodosius issued an edict (Edict of Thessalonica) that declared Christianity to be the official state religion of the Roman Empire. It was championed by the eastern Emperor, but was co-signed by the emperor in west, Gratian, along with his vice-emperor Valentinian II. In it, the Nicenes were the only ones, “legally entitled to use the name ‘Catholic'” and as Needham points out this gave them sole possession of all the church buildings.3 Schaff adds that this edict, “required all his subjects to confess the orthodox faith, and threatened the heretics with punishment.”4 He then, through the bishops he had assigned, ran all of the Arians out of their churches. The full citation of this edict is necessary to understand its significance in declaring Christianity the official religion of the state and thereby solidifying the marriage of church and state:
It is our desire that all the various nations which are subject to our clemency and moderation, should continue the profession of that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter, as it has been preserved by faithful tradition and which is now professed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic holiness. According to the apostolic teaching and the doctrine of the Gospel, let us believe in the one Deity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity. We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title Catholic Christians; but as for the others, since in our judgment they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give their conventicles the name of churches. They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation, and in the second the punishment which our authority, in accordance with the will of heaven, will decide to inflict. Theodosian Code XVI.i.25
To solidify his actions and the issuance of the edict, Theodosius called for the second ecumenical council to meet in the east at the city named after Constantine. In 381, the Council of Constantinople was convened. At this council, the goal was to reaffirm Nicaea, specifically concerning the doctrinal heresy of Arianism. Constantinople, the city that the sacral emperor Constantine had built, was a pro-Arian city until Theodosius had attempted to replace pro-Arian bishops. The result of Constantinople’s ecumenical council was unification around a clarifying creed, an updated version of the previous Nicene Creed. However, this time rather than framing the creed with an anathema to be pronounced on all dissenters, the phrase concerning the universal church was modified and included as an article of faith “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church”.
What did this change mean for the development of the universal church?
The edict declaring Christianity as the official religion of the state, equipped with state-sponsored punishment for heretics, now had an article of faith attached to the catholic or universal church, complete with its husbandry to the sword-bearing state. For the first time a positive confession concerning the church must be assented to before faith was recognized. It was no longer enough to profess faith in the Son of God and His atoning sacrifice, faith must now also be in the institutional church with all of her developments from the episcopacy to Arian/Nicene doctrines, however that may have been defined in the moment, to the sacral sword-wielding spouse of the state. What we had heard from Cyprian in the 3rd Century had now been ratified in the 4th Century, that outside of the church there was no salvation, “No one can have God for his Father, who does not also have the Church for his Mother.” In July of 381, Theodosius “ratified the decrees of the council…enacted the law that all churches should be given up to bishops who believed in the equal divinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and who stood in church fellowship with certain designated orthodox bishops. The public worship of heretics was forbidden.”6
About a decade later, for the first time the Church would push back against the overlords of the state. In 390, there was a riot in the city of Thessalonica resulting in the death of the governor and some of his officials. This drew the ire of Emperor Theodosius who in a fit of rage sent soldiers to the city to avenge the governor’s death. Apparently having a change of heart, likely due to calming down emotionally, Theodosius tried to recall the troops, but to no avail. The soldiers had already killed 7000 citizens in the city. His friend and former advisor, the venerable Ambrose, heard of the murders and immediately called on the emperor to repent, excommunicating him until such a time. As Needham points out, on that Sunday, Theodosius showed up to church, “as though nothing had happened, only to find Ambrose barring his way, refusing to let him enter.”7 The emperor declared that he had repented, but Ambrose wanted a public repentance to match the public sin. Theodosius agreed and walked throughout the church of Milan “doing public penance.” At the conclusion of his eight-month ban, Theodosius returned to church, kneeled, and begged God’s forgiveness. Now, the tides had turned. Rather than the emperor directing the bishops and the church, the bishop had now declared (spiritual) authority over the emperor. “Ambrose’s relationship with Theodosius showed that the Western doctrine of the Church’s independence of the emperor could, in practice, turn into the Church controlling the emperor.”8
As the universal or catholic concept of the church developed rapidly in the fourth century, built on the episcopy and wed to the state through the efforts of Constantine, by attaching an anathema to the creedal confession of Nicaea it gave the church the power of the state’s sword to enforce compliance. Heretics would no longer simply be excommunicated, but now they could be arrested, jailed, exiled, or even killed. On the surface, this appears all well and good if you are pro-Nicene and the emperor shares in your beliefs. However, as we have seen above, emperor’s change, as do kings and presidents and all other leaders for that matter. At its heart, this is one of the rotten fruits of the unscriptural, unholy alliance of church and state, i.e. the ever-changing position of the state and subsequent enforcement. As we saw in the example of Athanasius, it leads to a schizophrenic state whose theological beliefs and foundation are quicksand. As the pendulum swung with Ambrose and Theodosius we then saw a shift from what had been infant Caesaropapism, that is the Church under the authority of the state, to what would be infant Erastianism, that is the Church’s authority over the state. We need also to keep in mind the concept of imperio-papal principle, in which the Church (or pope) holds spiritual authority while the State (or emperor) holds temporary authority. These will be important terms as the relationship between the Church and State impacted the understanding and development of the universal church in the centuries that followed.
In summarizing our period of the fourth century, Constantine joined the state with the church in an attempt at political and theological unity in order to gain favor with God. However, as Schaff has stated, “Arianism proceeded from the bosom of the Catholic Church, was condemned as heresy at the council of Nicaea, but afterwards under various forms attained even ascendency for a time in the church, until at the second ecumenical council it was cast out forever.”9 From what may have been noble attempts to curb a serious error on the nature of God’s Son, going about it through the use of political power was a disaster and set precedent going forward. As we may have learned, Arianism was a “religious political war against the spirit of the Christian revelation by the spirit of the world, which, after having persecuted the church three hundred years from without, sought under the Chrisitan name to reduce her by degrading Christ to the category of the temporal and the created, and Christianity to the level of natural religion.”10 The only way that Arianism gained its political power and subsequently had an in-roads into Christianity was because of the development of the universal church and its betrothal to the state. Finally, we look to Schaff one more time for his excellent analysis on this situation, “Arianism associated itself with the secular political power and the court party; it represented the imperio-papal principle, and the time of its prevalence under Constantius was an uninterrupted season of the most arbitrary and violent encroachments of the state upon the rights of the church.”11
My goal with this series has always been to return us to the time of the Reformation in order to see how the development of the universal church theory impacted that movement. Arguably, more important than the Reformation period as it relates to the development of the universal church theory was the fourth century, requiring a bit more in-depth look. It is towards a summary overview of compulsory catholic unity that we now turn, followed by a collapse of the Roman Empire and the Rise of The Roman Catholic Church. This will prepare us for the Reformation and how the first Reformers did not fully split from sacralism, rather they came to fully embrace it, wielding the sword that was at one time used against them.
The journey continues. Soli Deo Gloria
- Needham, N.R. 2000 Years of Christ’s Power (3rd ed). London, Grace Publications Trust, 2011, p. 172 ↩︎
- ibid, p. 172 ↩︎
- ibid, p. 222 ↩︎
- Schaff, Philip. History of the Christian Church: Vol. 3 (5th ed). Peabody, Hendrickson Publishers, 2006 (1867), p. 639 ↩︎
- Bettenson, Henry (1967). Documents of the Christian Church. Oxford University Press US. p. 22 ↩︎
- Schaff, Philip. History of the Christian Church: Vol. 3 (5th ed). Peabody, Hendrickson Publishers, 2006 (1867), p. 640 ↩︎
- Needham, N.R. 2000 Years of Christ’s Power (3rd ed). London, Grace Publications Trust, 2011, p. 173 ↩︎
- ibid, p. 173 ↩︎
- Schaff, Philip. History of the Christian Church: Vol. 3 (5th ed). Peabody, Hendrickson Publishers, 2006 (1867), p. 619 ↩︎
- ibid, p. 642-43 ↩︎
- ibid, p. 643 ↩︎
