Church History Conference Part 2 – Early Church vs Modern Christianity: The Constantine Turning Point

It means this. It means we’ve got a right to be here, and we’ve had a right to be here all along. And that we’re carrying a torch not only for the first century but for the second and for the third, that they were of a Christian group of great variety, embarrassingly great. One of the writers said that this evidence puts to rest the myth that Christianity followed a single set of beliefs, a single way of meeting, or a single accepted view of orthodoxy. There was plenty of elbow room to be a Christian without orthodoxy looking over you.

Let me tell you one of the saddest things that you discover is that after Constantine came along, all of the depictions, and this is within 30 years after Constantine’s death. Alright, so within 30 years after Constantine emerged, within 30 years…this is incredible, the apostasy, the change in people’s minds of who the Lord was within 30 years of the rise of Constantine: you have got the Lord Jesus Christ depicted as a sour old man, robed in the emperor’s garbs, with great big huge spheroid eyes and a very unhappy look, and he’s looking down on you like he’s saying, “You’re not trying hard enough.” That we have a right to be here on the basis of evidence of second and third century Christians; that we have no shame and no apology for the simple way we practice the Christian faith.

Our disdain for peripheral doctrine is grounded in what is real, but the one thing that I would have them tell you, and for you to remind your own heart, is that all of that art and all of those artifacts and all of that evidence is saying that it is coming out of an intense, living relationship of fellowship of believers together. Forgetting all else, that is their message to us.

Now that’s it. I promised to take questions on anything except the woman’s place in the church. Now, can you please stay on topic? I don’t care what it is in church history. We got 10 minutes here, and then I’ll be over time. Brother, would you stand and say it really clearly, and I’ll try to repeat it if I can hear it.

Audience: These three bishops who were found buried together, were they all buried at the same time?

They seem to have been buried in the same place, one right on top of the other. Same time, same place, perhaps even killed. Yes.

Audience: What do you say to the liberal who takes essentially the same evidence that we have, and, in fact, that as Christians, we cooked up all these doctrines, such as the virgin birth and the incarnation, at a later date, and that’s why you don’t find any evidence early on.

I would say, brother, excuse me, I’m sleepy, and I’ve got to take a nap. My first year in seminary was in an extremely liberal seminary. I doubt there’s a more liberal seminary on earth, and they got a hold of my head there for about a week. I sat down and started reading the other view because I wasn’t getting it from whoever was teaching me. Man, I had the privilege of taking my other three years in a conservative seminary. You know, those people do not have a critical leg to stand on. And again, as someone so wisely said, every turn of the archaeological spade is putting them to flight, and I can’t say anything more than that. Alright. Yes, brother.

Audience: Is there anything to support the history…?

I want to introduce you to a book. Now, I want you to know that atheists, sectarianists, and liberals write these books. Most of these men couldn’t care less. They’re scientists. The name of this book is The Christianizing of the Roman Empire. It’s a new book by Ramsay MacMullen for you three history buffs out there. It’s put out by Yale University Press. They’ll give you good help. It’s the study of evangelism in the second and third centuries, and they often don’t even know what they’re talking about.

My impression is that…I’m going to use the word “itinerant”. The itinerant Christian worker seems to have survived until about 200 A.D., maybe a little later, and unfortunately, that’s the last evidence we have of him. I would not answer on the basis of apostles and prophets and those kinds of words, just say those who “itinerantly moved”. As far as the local preaching of the Gospel, I’m going to try to get into that two days from now. Who was proclaiming the gospel locally? Obviously, there were no professionally trained men there, but I think that perhaps one of the great tragedies of the Christian faith, and it’s almost never dealt with in anybody’s books, is the loss…and I’m going to substitute the word “apostle”; that word gives me hives. I’ve never liked it. There are 12 apostles. There may be 13, 14, 15, who knows how many there were, but there is a concept that they themselves exemplified, and that, I think, is one of the four or five major elements that are slipping away from the Christian faith in the years that came; we lost the church planter. We lost the concept of the church planter somewhere between 200 and 220 A.D. He seems to have slipped off the stage at that point, and I cannot tell you why. I wish he’d come back just as soon as he can get here, and I hope he hurries. Yes, brother