"Sacred Roots: Development of the Relationship Between Church and State" by Stephen Russell

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Welcome to Strength to Strength. It's good to have you with us here this morning, especially those of you who are here with us in person on this call. Good to see you, and welcome. Hope you experience a blessing here with us this morning with some more history lessons. So this morning we continue with the Sacred Roots series, and I think this is the ninth one we've done or we're doing here.

And I'd encourage you, if you've missed any of these, to go back and listen. You can listen to them on our website, strengthtostrength.org, if you go to the Talks page on the menu there, or you can go on YouTube and find us there or your podcast platform and listen to these Sacred Roots series especially. They're really good for establishing your knowledge of the history of the church and what it has done and believed through the past. And as we continue to build on this through the past years, it's good to get some of these first ones down for sure. So thinking about Sacred Roots a little bit, I thought of Psalm 1:1-3 where it says, "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful, but is delighted in the law of the Lord and his law, and in his law he meditates day and night.

He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither, and whatever he does shall prosper." Now this is an individual here that is talking about the man who walks, but I think this could also be the church. The church too is like a tree and bears fruit as we work together as believers, and we're rooted into the ancient past, especially on the work of Christ and also what the apostles did in their teaching and establishing churches. So we're going back to see where this tree is rooted, and this morning's talk is a little further on. The title is Sacred Roots: Development of the Relationship Between Church and State.

So here we're seeing history where it changed a bit and they started to join up with the state, and we're looking forward to hear that from Mr. Russell. I've really enjoyed getting to know Mr. Russell. This past winter, I was at Faith Builders for winter term for three weeks and was sitting in his Anabaptist history class. I was auditing that class and really, really enjoyed that to hear that history. And Mr. Russell is someone who loves history himself. You can tell when you're in his class, especially, and he tells it as a story, and you can tell it's all in his head. He's studied it well, and he's a master at it. So I'm really looking forward to, again, this morning to hear what he has to share with us from this era of history.

So we'll begin with a word of prayer here, and then we'll hand it over to you, Mr. Russell. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this opportunity this morning to get together in this way and to hear some history here taught to us, to look at the church and how it functioned and how it acted in the early years. And Lord, just bless Mr. Russell this morning as he shares with us and as he struggles with knowing how much to share in this allotted time. Lord, just watch over him and give him clarity of mind and wisdom and strength and courage for this. May we be blessed in learning this history, and may it teach us lessons for today that we can be careful in how we think about things and that we continue to remain rooted in the faith once delivered and that we would be strong and building on Christ and continually coming back to him for our inspiration and for our true foundation.

Guide and direct us this morning. May we give you all the honor and the glory. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, Mr. Russell, you can go ahead and share with us. Okay. Well, first, I'd like to just make a remark about what you said after reading the Psalm and commenting on it yourself. And that is, you know, if we're not rooted, then we're not in a stable situation. So the more rooted we are, the more stable we are as we hit storms, and we're all going to hit storms. And right now in the world, Christianity is frowned upon, and so there's more storm present now and coming in the future, I think.

So anyway, I do want to talk about the development of the relationship between the church and the state. The first 300 years of the church's existence were marked by distrust and persecution of the church by the Roman Empire. The next 12 centuries reveal an ever closer entanglement of church and state in Western Europe. Why did the church and state grow together, and what are some of the results of this?

Before I begin to speak about that, about these changes that happen in the relationship between the church and the state, I want to state a few basic ideas that are behind my talk. First of all, I uphold what is called the great tradition. In other words, I see all of history of the various churches that uphold Orthodox doctrine, and by that, I mean they would agree with what the Nicene or the and/or the Apostles' Creed says. I see those as valid to study and to learn from. Indeed, I would claim all of the history of this kind of history as my own for the good and the bad. Doing otherwise binds us to our own faults and weaknesses and confuses the story of how we received good influences over time from other streams of tradition.

It also removes from consideration pieces of the story that can help us make better decisions today as we face new challenges to our faith. I recognize four streams in the great tradition: the Anabaptist, the Protestant, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Catholic. Each of these streams has its own strengths and weaknesses. There is something we can learn from each of them. My choice to be an Anabaptist indicates that I find in that stream the most significant strengths of the great tradition. So I'm a committed Anabaptist, but I also want to learn from the whole of the church's history.

My justification for this approach to history is found in how God dealt with his people in the Old Testament. When Solomon's kingdom split apart, God's focus seems to be on the kingdom of Judah. Indeed, his main work was in and through them, and we can think about the fact that the lineage of the Messiah came through Judah. However, God never gave up on the northern kingdom of Israel. In fact, God sent his first great prophets after Moses, Elijah and Elisha, to the northern kingdom. Later, we read in Ezekiel 37, right after the prophecy of the resurrection, that God intends to reunite Israel and Judah. God continued to work with his people even when they went astray.

We can see something similar happening in the story of the church. Major mistakes and sins do not forestall God's continued work with the church. Another background idea in my talk is that governments always seek to be undergirded by religion. Even the communist governments desire something transcendent, I think you could say, to undergird them, although they would deny that it's religious. They would probably call it ideological. But what do you call all the icons or the celebratory pictures of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Xi on the walls of schools and government buildings in communist states? And what do you call the mausoleums in Moscow and Beijing that contain the embalmed bodies of Lenin and Mao?

Sounds religious to me. My third background idea concerns a unique aspect of Christianity compared to all other religions. All other religions see membership as conferred by birth. This doesn't mean that no one can ever convert into most of these religions, but it is not the usual way one enters.

Well, on the one extreme, we have this religion called Zoroastrianism, which traditionally says that you have to be born into the religion, although there are some contemporaries of Zoroastrians who do allow conversion. On the other extreme is Islam that claims that everyone is born a Muslim, but may then be corrupted by his family and society to become a member of another religion. Because of this view, one doesn't convert to Islam as far as a Muslim's concerned, but rather reverts or goes back to his original religion.

This is important because Christianity alone, at least at its beginning, did not recognize automatic membership through birth, but required all to be born again. To be a Christian originally meant first hearing the good news, then repenting, and then choosing to follow and submit to Christ and his church.

And very briefly, the period before Pentecost in AD 30 and up to the defeat of the last persecuting emperor, Licinius, in 324, was characterized by a clear sense of separation between those who follow Christ and the Jewish and pagan worlds. A key aspect of this separation was conflict between the church and the pagan state. Each claimed the supreme allegiance of the members of their society. The Christian found it impossible to say both Jesus is Lord, as his faith demanded, and Caesar is Lord, as the Roman state demanded.

But this total commitment of the Christians to the way of Christ led to their rejection by the larger society and often to martyrdom. I want to begin our investigation of the changing relationship between the church and the Roman state by focusing on the 280 years between the ascension of Diocletian to the imperial throne in 284 to the death of Emperor Justin I in 565.

Diocletian initiated in 303 the last and most severe of the 10 persecutions of Christians in the Roman Empire. But before he started the persecution, he expelled all Christians from the army in 292 because he believed that their presence in the army was an offense to the gods, and therefore the gods were less likely to bless Rome's military actions. He also believed that Christians undermined the manly virtues that had enabled Rome to be able to conquer the world. This last persecution ended when Constantine defeated Licinius and became the sole ruler of the empire, and that was in 324.

After describing how Christians were in fear during Licinius' reign, Eusebius, one of the church's first historians, goes on to tell of the reaction of believers after Constantine's victory. And this is a quote from the history of the church by Eusebius. "Men had now lost all fear of their former oppressors. Day after day, they kept dazzling festival, light woods everywhere, and men who once dared not look up greeted each other with smiling face and shining eyes. Thus, all tyranny had been purged away, and the kingdom was preserved securely and without question for Constantine and his sons alone." End of quote. You can sense the joy and the overwhelming joy that the Christians had because now God had worked through Constantine to end the persecution.

With Constantine, a new attitude towards the church arose in the government. By the Edict of Milan, the empire recognized equally paganism, Judaism, and Christianity as valid religions. Constantine returned the property of Christians and churches that had been confiscated during the persecution. He made Sunday a holiday to make it easier for Christians to worship. He allowed bishops to act as judges if both parties were agreeable. He had Eusebius, that I mentioned earlier, produce 50 Bibles in 331, and he had Athanasius, who was a bishop in Egypt, produce an unknown number of Bibles in the late 330s. So we don't know exactly how many were involved there. He also became intimately involved in the church affairs, first trying to end the Donatism in North Africa and later calling and subsidizing the first ecumenical council in Nicaea in 325, the year after the persecutions ended.

Some of our people look at this intervention by Constantine into the affairs of the church as the fall of the church. I disagree with this and will tell a story to show that while the church made a mistake in relying on Constantine to resolve certain religious issues, it was a mistake, and I don't think it was a fall. At the opening of the council that I mentioned in Nicaea, Constantine gave a banquet in honor of the bishops who were attending. Now, remember, this was only a year after the persecution ended in the eastern part of the empire in Egypt and places like that.

There was a certain Egyptian bishop named Paphnutius who suffered during the last great persecution started by Diocletian. He lost his right eye during torture. He attended the council, and Constantine, who had heard of his witness for Christ, recognized him, got up, and kissed him on the cheek below his missing eye.

I cannot imagine that a man like this was part of a council that brought the fall of the church. Indeed, as Eusebius had written, all these bishops saw Constantine as God's man. Now, some would have had a little more restraint in how they looked at him, but think about what it felt like to experience the greatest persecution ever and then to have one emperor fight another and end the persecution. I think the church leaders should have thanked Constantine for his offer to host the council, but they ought to have proceeded on their own. However, there was as yet no experience by the church of what effect such collaboration with the state would bring.

We, however, as well as the Anabaptists of the 16th century, have a historical record in which we can see the effects over time. While I dare to call this a small mistake to allow the emperor to insert himself into a church issue, it became a large mistake over time, as we can clearly see in the development of late antiquity and into the Middle Ages and even to our own day.

Contrary to what many believe, Constantine favored the church. He did not establish it as the state religion. His sons who followed him as emperors continued to increase the favored position of the church. They also were deeply involved in the controversies about the nature of the Trinity and the nature of Christ, and they caused more confusion than clarity on the issue, their involvement. Then, from 361 to 363, Constantine's nephew, Julian, came to the throne when the last son of Constantine died. And when he came to the throne, he denied the faith. He had survived a purge of Constantine's male relatives who might have opposed a threat to the rule of Constantine's sons. Julian had assumed the appearance of being a follower of Christ to avoid persecution.

However, on taking the throne, he tried to revitalize paganism and to sow confusion among the Christians since there was still a good deal of discussion going on and disagreement concerning the proper way to understand the Trinity and Christ. Then, in the 380s, things changed rapidly.

In 380, the Edict of Thessalonica was signed by three emperors, and they declared the Nicene Christianity, the Christianity that's described in the Nicene Creed, as the official religion of the empire. And they named those who did not hold to this creed as heretics. This is a state edict. The First Council of Constantinople in 381, the year after the Edict of Thessalonica, strengthened certain aspects of the original Nicene Creed, now the official position of the state church. In 383, Gratian, who was an emperor, refused to reinstate the altar of victory in the Roman Senate, which was still mostly pagan, and rejected the pagan title of Pontifex Maximus, which means the great bridge builder between God or the gods and man.

Even Christian emperors had continued to use this. So Gratian was the first emperor who claimed to be Christian who dropped that title.

In 392, pagan temples were closed, and the next year, the Olympics were held for the last time, and the Olympics were a part of the pagan religion. The triumph of Christianity, or perhaps better, the triumph of Christendom, had arrived at last. These are some of the more important official happenings during the 4th century after Constantine started to rule. However, this is not the full story. During this century, the original stance of Christians against war and against participation in government continued, but it began to decline.

Christians, in part because they were becoming the majority, began to feel a responsibility to the state because the state provided stability and kept chaos at bay. Many Christians from influential and powerful families became less reluctant to serve the state and thus to participate in coercive state actions such as ruling, policing, judging, and fighting wars. The change was gradual. At first, young Christian men who believed in Christ decided to serve the state or to serve in the army before they were baptized. Then, at some point, they would withdraw from their position in the state or in the army and finish their catechumenate study and be baptized. This usually was the end of their participation in the other kingdom.

However, a compromise like this cannot remain stable. Young men serving the state for a while and then dropping that and then being baptized and recognizing Christ as Lord in their life. That's not a stable situation. More and more, the old lines separating the Christian life from the coercion practiced by the state were crossed and became blurred.

I want to illustrate this change or compromise by telling a bit about Ambrose, who lived at the very end of the 300s. He became the bishop of Milan in 374. Ambrose was raised by a Christian mother. His father was Christian too, but he had died when Ambrose was young. So he was raised by a Christian mother who was part of the aristocracy. He was raised a believer, but he also, as a member of the aristocracy, took on government responsibilities as he got older, and he eventually became the governor of northern Italy. In the middle 300s, there was a time of dispute and conflict between the Orthodox Nicene Christians and the Arians and the Semi-Arians. And it was the Arians and the Semi-Arians that the councils had found against, and they had written the Nicene Creed because they were saying that they were wrong.

From 355 until 374, an Arian had been the bishop of Milan. When he died, Governor Ambrose went to the church where his successor would be chosen. He implored the people to choose an Orthodox bishop. The story goes that after Ambrose spoke, a child's voice was heard saying, "Ambrose for bishop." And the people started saying, "Ambrose for bishop," and they chose him by acclamation.

But the point of my telling this story is that Ambrose, though a believer and a catechumen, he was officially enrolled in the catechumenate, was not baptized because he was exercising coercive power in the name of the state. Within eight days of being chosen by acclamation to be bishop, Ambrose stepped down as governor, was baptized, ordained, and then consecrated bishop of Milan.

And I could tell other stories that illustrate this gradual shift from absolute avoidance of involvement with the government to eventual acceptance of it. But I'm going to skip that for right now. As a bishop, Ambrose deeply affected the emperors of his time. He was influential in causing Gratian, whom I mentioned earlier, to reject the altar of victory in the Senate and to reject the title Pontifex Maximus.

When Christians in a city in the eastern part of the empire rioted and burned down a Jewish synagogue, Ambrose convinced the emperor not to force the local bishop to pay for the building of a new synagogue. He also disciplined Theodosius, who was an emperor, who had allowed his anger to get the better of him, so that he ordered the slaughter of several thousand Thessalonians in 390. Ambrose refused entrance to his church or communion until the emperor displayed repentance. So he actually succeeded in getting the emperor to, at least officially, show his repentance and ask forgiveness. He also told his church members to hand over their gold coins when the emperor demanded them so that he could debase the coinage.

This enabled the emperor to benefit his treasury while not raising taxes because he made more gold coins by adding silver to them, and he kept the extra gold coins himself. But Ambrose commanded his people to hand those coins over, and he pointed to the statement by Jesus that we are to render to Caesar what is Caesar's. So he was a very influential bishop, both with the people and with the emperors of his time.

So gradually, various practices in relation to the government that earlier Christians had avoided became acceptable. This caused the more faithful Christians who still sought to live the separated life according to the Sermon on the Mount to withdraw and form their own communities, which eventually developed into monasteries and convents. Christianity was on the road to a two-tiered approach to being a Christian. The more devout being in these monasteries and trying to follow the Sermon on the Mount, the ones who couldn't quite do that just living the kind of life that was not that much different from their neighboring pagans.

The 5th and 6th centuries brought to a near completion the accommodation between the church and the state. During Theodosius II's long reign, numerous significant events occurred. Numerous German tribes invaded the western part of the empire when the Rhine River froze in 406. In 410, the Visigoths, who were a German tribe, and they had entered the empire in 378. In 410, they sacked Rome.

They eventually established a Germanic kingdom in Spain. The other German tribes also carved out their own kingdoms in Britain, in Gaul, which is what we call France today, and on the north coast of Africa and in Italy. Imperial authority was restricted to the eastern portion of the empire. The German tribes controlled the west of what had been the Roman Empire, and the emperor only controlled the eastern part.

In 416, pagans were expelled from the army essentially for the same reason Diocletian had expelled Christians 124 years earlier in order to please God or the gods. So if you look at the beginning of the chart in 292, Diocletian had expelled the Christians that were in the army because he wanted to please the gods. Now, Theodosius II expels pagans from the army because he wants to please God.

In 438, Theodosius also had the Roman laws codified. And this is a very typical state action. But his legal code incorporated rules for the church. So it wasn't just about the secular rule. It also included things about the church. Another very significant development during the late 300s and the early 400s was Augustine's use of Cicero's concept of a just war to justify Christians in the government and in the military, providing safety to citizens under attack. With this new concept of just war, non-resistance gradually disappears except in the monasteries. Augustine is also responsible for the increase in infant baptisms through his writings that state unequivocally that unbaptized babies go to hell. When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, the pagans accused Rome's downfall on the turning away from the gods who had made Rome great, while the Christians at the same time asked Augustine to explain why this shocking event had happened.

Rome was the eternal city. It should not fall to the barbarians. To answer both, Augustine wrote a book called The City of God. It was a very influential history. It was a very influential history. It was also very different from the history that Eusebius had written that I quoted from earlier, the history of the church. That history glorified Constantine as God's man while ignoring his misdeeds. Augustine wrote that the whole world is divided into two cities, the city of God and the city of man. Each is motivated by its own love. The city of God is motivated by love of God. But the city of man is motivated only by selfish love. All empires and kingdoms are part of the city of man and driven by self-love and self-interest.

Therefore, all earthly kingdoms are flawed and destined to fall because of their inherent wickedness. God used the Roman Empire for his purposes in enabling this gospel to spread because there was this large area that was at peace, and this enabled the church to be well established. But like all sin-wracked kingdoms, the empire has to fall at some point because of its disobedience to God. Even so, Augustine said, because of the stability that the empire provides, Christians must fight to protect it. Seems like a contradiction to me, but anyway. At the end of the 5th century, we notice how much the Christian worldview has shifted as we listen to a statement by Pope Galatius I. It was in a letter to the emperor in 494. "There are two powers, August Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power.

Of these, that of the priests is more weighty since they have to render an account for even the kings of men in the divine judgment." So there's two ways that God rules the world, through the church and through the state. But the church should be seen as over the state, according to Galatius in 494.

As we turn our focus to the 6th century, we see a resurgence of imperial power as the empire in the east under Justinian, and this would be in the middle part of the 500s, sends out armies to reconquer from the German tribes Italy, North Africa, and much of Spain.

Justinian also was occupied with war against Persia, which was the empire to his east. By the end of his reign, the empire was at its height since the incursion of the German tribes wrenched the western part of the empire from imperial control. But it was also financially and militarily exhausted. So Justinian almost reestablished his rule over all of the old Roman Empire. He did not quite. In the west, there was still a little bit of Spain and a little bit of, and all of Gaul or France and Britain still under the German tribes.

But this had been accomplished through a lot of war. And so his country, the Roman Empire, at the end of his reign, was just about exhausted. The last German tribe to invade the empire was the Lombard tribe of Germans, and they captured most of Italy after invading in 568, which is just a few years after Justinian died.

Not only did Justinian regain much of the lost territory of the Roman Empire, but he also closed the Platonic Academy in Athens, which was perhaps the last stronghold of pagan philosophy. He also updated the Roman legal code during his reign. And this version of the Roman law was later used in medieval Europe and still influences to some degree modern legal codes.

His code also included a lot of laws about the church. Late antiquity is usually seen as ending with this last exertion of imperial might by Justinian to control the whole of the Mediterranean. The constriction of imperial rule to the eastern part of the empire after the death of Justinian and the strengthening of the Germanic kingdoms in the western part of what had been the empire and the eruption of a new religious and military force called Islam in the east and in North Africa swept away old political and commercial connections. Populations started to decline because the economy declined.

And what had been a robust educational system in the Roman Empire ceased to exist after a while because of the weakening economy and the decline in population. Early medieval Europe faced a very different social, political, intellectual, and religious setting than had existed in late antiquity. Monastic and cathedral schools became the main source of education as these old secular schools died out. Thus, most of the educated people during the early medieval period were churchmen. Over time, the various Germanic kingdoms had to turn to the monks to run their government because so few laymen, even among the nobility, could read and write.

In central Italy, the power of the pope grew when the secular power of the eastern emperors receded. It was not that the popes originally sought political power, but they needed to fill the vacuum when the imperial troops or the officials from the emperor could not protect Rome.

Gregory I, Pope Gregory I, who ruled right around the year 600, needed to step in when the emperor was weak. He organized food supplies for Rome and strengthened the defensive walls of the city and made sure that troops were prepared to repulse any attack. But Gregory's real love was the church. But because of his administrative skills, he also took on the temporal needs of Rome because of the weakness of the emperor.

This pattern recurs when the emperor is strong, the popes submit to him. When he is weak, the popes supply the temporal needs of the city. This occasional exercise of temporal power by the popes was solidified and made permanent by the conquest of the German Lombard kingdom in Italy by Pepin the Short. Pepin the Short was the king of the Franks, and he was the father of a very important emperor, Charlemagne.

After Pepin conquered the Lombard kingdom, he gifted the central part of Italy to the pope as the papal states. And this happened in 756. So from 756 until 1870, the popes ruled the central part of Italy as the papal states.

A significant new development in Christianity was the influence of Islam that led to the concept among European Christians of holy war or crusade. This comes directly from the practice of Islam to wage jihad or holy war. In the late 8th century, Charlemagne waged war for the first time by a Christian ruler to force conversion on the Saxons to Christianity. That's exactly what the Muslims would do. They would conquer a people, and if they were pagan, they would insist that they become Muslim or die. At the end of the 11th century, as the Turks took over the Holy Land and made pilgrimages, they made pilgrimages by Christians difficult to the Holy Land. Pope Urban II, at the Council of Clermont in 1095, called on European Christians to go to the east and to help their fellow Christians in the east.

And I'm going to quote what he said, "Urged by necessity, I, Urban, by the permission of God, chief bishop and prelate over the entire world, have come into these parts as an ambassador with a divine admonition to you, the servants of God. The Turks and Arabs have attacked and conquered the eastern Christians. On this account, I, or rather the Lord, beseeches you to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends. I say this to those who are present at the council. It is meant for those who are absent. Moreover, Christ commands it." End of quote.

Urban also promised that those who went on the crusade were guaranteed forgiveness of all their sins and thus entrance to heaven. The crowd erupted at the end of his sermon with Deus Volt, which is Latin for God wills it.

Now, I want to shift our focus again to the late Middle Ages, from 1300 to 1500. Because of the assumption of political power by the popes and later by various other churchmen, much of Europe in the late Middle Ages was actually politically controlled by the church. The British historian Lord Acton has said that power corrupts and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. We see this happening in the church as she takes on not just spiritual power, but political power, and now comes into conflict, sorry, with the other political powers in Europe. But even as corruption entered the church, there were many positive things that came from the church. Schools and universities grew up and expanded.

The monasteries were centers that made agriculture, technical, and scientific advances. Hospitals, orphanages, leprosariums, and weigh stations for travelers were set up by monks. Almost all knowledge that was preserved from antiquity into the Middle Ages was due to the church's efforts. So a very mixed picture comes to us from the Middle Ages. Church and state were seen as complementary institutions of God's authority, both of which were valid areas for Christian participation. Because almost everyone in Europe was baptized into the church, everyone was seen as a Christian. The old separation between followers of Jesus and those who reject him was lost. With only a shadowy reminder of this in the monastic institutions, where theoretically the Sermon on the Mount still provided the pattern for the lives of the monks.

As we approach the end of the time period under consideration, essentially from 300 to 1500, we need to note several events that prepare Europe for the earthquake that was the Reformation. In the mid-1300s, the Black Death struck Europe. It spread rapidly and within two or three years had killed between one quarter to one half of the population of Europe.

The plague turned the minds and hearts of people to consider their ultimate destiny. So it had the effect of making people seriously consider their faith. It led to a more serious devotional life by many. Two other events deeply affected the worldview of Christian Europeans. On the one hand, the discovery of the new world acted in a positive way on the imaginations of Europeans. The world was so much larger and more different than they had imagined. Catholic monks, eager to spread the gospel, went into the most remote areas of the new world, Africa, and Asia to convert the people there. On the other hand, this is the second thing that influenced the Christians towards the end of the Middle Ages.

It was the fact that the Ottoman Turks had swept away the last remnants of the old Roman Empire and were conquering all the small Christian kingdoms in the Balkans. The Turks eventually reached and besieged Vienna in 1529. If they had conquered Vienna, all of Central Europe would seem to be open to their control. The European Christians looked upon the successful expansion of the Ottoman Empire as God's judgment on European Christians for their sins.

The Renaissance was another powerful movement in the late Middle Ages. The men and women of the Renaissance sought to recapture the forgotten knowledge and skill of the ancient Greco-Roman world. One positive aspect of this was that the work of Erasmus of Rotterdam enabled him to publish the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament, as well as the writings of many early church fathers. His work led directly to the Reformation. However, without a crucial invention, even Erasmus' work would probably not have had its great effect. That invention was the printing press with movable type. Gutenberg developed this technique in the middle 1400s and enabled the cheap and easy spread of the written word. Because of this, the ideas from both sides of the Reformation could be heard and discussed in very short order.

In the high and late Middle Ages, several men and movements came to life and showed the need for change. I'll briefly mention four. Peter Waldo recognized the need for good preaching, which was very lacking in Europe, and requested permission to preach even though he was a layman. He was thwarted in this, but nevertheless continued to preach and sparked a movement of like-minded men called the Waldensians. They were condemned by the Catholic Church for disobedience, not for heresy, but for disobedience in 1215.

Francis of Assisi also saw the need for good preaching and was allowed to establish a new religious order, the Franciscans, in 1209. His approach and his goals were similar to those of Peter Waldo, but Francis was willing to submit to the direction of the Catholic Church's leadership. His movement was very successful and spread over all of Europe. By and large, these men and women, the Franciscans, were truly committed and gave up all their possessions to spread the word and to serve the people. When the Black Death hit, the Franciscans tended to remain with their people and help the stricken. And therefore, they lost a large number of their people to the plague. Many of the other priests fled the onslaught of the plague.

So the Franciscans were very dedicated men and women. The last two men who began movements that set the stage for the Reformation were John Wycliffe and John Huss. Wycliffe was a professor at Oxford in the late 1300s. He saw four problems in the medieval church. God had established two lordships, the temporal and the spiritual. This is similar to our two kingdom concepts, similar but not the same.

Both of these lordships were to take their cues from Christ, who came to serve. The two spheres of lordship were not to overlap or try to control the other. As we have seen, this was a dire problem in Europe at this time. The popes and the emperors and the kings struggled with each other, trying to gain the upper hand politically. Emperors sometimes appointed their choice of pope, and popes sometimes deposed emperors or kings. And of course, the papal states and the other church-ruled lands were clearly a mixture of temporal and the spiritual. Wycliffe had also held to strict predestination. The elect were chosen by God, and man could not be sure who they were, but there were some clues as to who they might be.

And one of those clues was poverty, something the church had held in high honor since the very beginning of the church because of some of the things that were said in the gospels. So if poverty was a clue about who might be elect, it seemed important, and it seemed to point to the fact that the bishops and other church leaders were not the elect because they were very rich often. And so this seemed to point towards the peasants as the ones who were probably the elect.

And because the peasants were probably elect, and because the Bible was God's word to his people, the Bible ought to be in the language of those who were most likely elect. So Wycliffe translated the Bible into English. Finally, Wycliffe taught that the bread and wine do not become the body and blood of Christ in the communion service, as it was officially taught by the Catholic Church. Wycliffe lost his teaching post because of his unorthodox teachings, at least unorthodox in the way the Catholic Church saw things at that time. In the early 1400s, these teachings by Wycliffe came to the university in Prague, which is now in what we call the Czech Republic.

John Huss was the head of the university, and he allowed his students to discuss these ideas without necessarily advocating for them himself, at least at first. He believed that at a university, the students needed to have freedom to discuss diverse ideas. His bishop opposed this freedom, and eventually, Huss was called to a church council at Constance. He thought that he was going to be able to explain himself and explain his ideas, but instead, the leaders of the council seized him. They tried him as a heretic, and they burned him at the stake. The council also ordered Wycliffe's bones to be exhumed, burned, and the ashes scattered on the River Swift since he was the source of the heresy of Huss.

It is apparent that Wycliffe's teachings were similar to those of Luther, yet they did not start a widespread Reformation. Probably this was because the printing press was not yet available to enable the quick spread of ideas as it was in Luther's days.

To recap, after Constantine, the Christians found themselves in a completely new environment. The government's attitude shifted, first to tolerance and then to favoring Christianity. As the government's attitude changed, so did the attitude of the Christians. They began to compromise in ways that led them to think that it was reasonable to change their old Christian worldview.

Soon, the church was made the official state religion. Eventually, the Christians came up with justifications for the necessity to go to war and to start persecuting heretics, just as they had earlier been persecuted by the empire. They tried to convert the army and the law into Christian tools of coercion.

With their newfound power, they dismantled as much of the remaining pagan infrastructure as possible. Christianity, which was unique among the world's religion in requiring a conscious choice to join, now made itself into an image of all those other religions by instating and requiring infant baptism. The collapse of the imperial state in the western part of what had been the Roman Empire led the church to becoming inadvertently, at first, more deeply entangled with these German kingdoms, which led over time to an actual combination of church and state in the papal states and in other lands controlled by the church. Perhaps the low point came when the Christian West instigated the Crusades. What could be farther from the call of our Lord on the lives of his people than going to a crusade?

As I wrap up this talk, I would argue that there is much to learn during this period of church history between 300 and 1500, both good and bad. I own it as my own, hoping to learn from it all. This approach to history fits under the heading of the great tradition, which I had mentioned at the beginning. I am trying to see the mistakes that were made and to discern why they were made.

As an example, I mentioned at the beginning of the talk that throughout history, governments seek to undergird themselves by religion. Why wouldn't powerful leaders of a kingdom, why wouldn't they seek to identify and align with God or with the gods or whatever powers there might be? While the church leaders often felt pushed to fill a vacuum left by a weak government, eventually exercising a power that was never meant to belong to the church, comes to feel natural and right. After all, who can rule better than a Christian? I hope the good actions and teachings can help me as I try to live my life for the Lord. Some of the Christians saw at least potential problems as the church moved into territory not belonging to it.

Something I didn't mention is that at various times, as the church sank to new low levels, a whole new generation would arise and bring reform and revival. This happened over and over in the Middle Ages. So we should never despair. God has never allowed his church to sink to utter decrepitude and ruin. My hope is that we can learn from the past and recognize the dangers before the present-day church, such as the empty allure of political participation to enable good and the oxymoron of Christian nationalism, which is pulling on many Christians and leading them into this contradictory combination of the two kingdoms that we saw developing, first in the Roman Empire and then in medieval Europe.

So this is my hope. This is my attempt to explain how the church and the state became increasingly entangled with each other, and I hope we can see the problems that came from it. I don't think that God ever stopped working with the church, but clearly, some very bad things happened during this time. So that's my talk.

I welcome any questions or responses. All right. Well, thank you very much for sharing this with us. I enjoyed that quick walk through a large part of church history there. It was good again. I would have heard some of that background laid out in our Anabaptist history class, so it was good to have some of that reiterated again to see what was taking shape before the Reformation happened. I like how you showed that this happened gradually. It's easy for us to oversimplify history and to just blame Constantine. And in fact, it's a bit of a hashtag joke with some of the people I connect with online over early church history, and we have this hashtag, blame Constantine.

Always blame him. And it's true that there was some radical shift happening there, but it did continue from him on in more solid or, yeah, different ways. So a question I have is, during that era of change that happened over several hundred years, probably, was there people that wrote or spoke in outcry to the departure of the viewing of the sword and of using of coercion and of tight unity to the government powers? Do you know of any that would have spoke out against that?

Well, because they had seen the state as providing protection, and indeed, this is what the scriptures say, the state is supposed to provide stability and protection and encourage good. Because of that, and because all this happened so slowly, after a while, it just seemed natural. However, within the Catholic Church, the monks and nuns were still supposed to be non-resistant, and we do have some people within the church, although they thought that crusading was okay, they would tell their own people, "It's better, though, to not go on crusade, but to join a monastery." Now, those were the two best things to do: go fight in a crusade for God or join a monastery. And clearly, they would have held the monastery up as the highest.