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

Do you know the word syncretism? The syncretic. You know what that means? Well, I’m going to give you a word here today. I’m going to stretch the meaning of it. It basically means smorgasbord. You choose a little this, little that, little this, a little that, and bring it together. I would press the definition and say syncretism, or the syncretic, in this case today, is the taking of something that is a Christian element, something that is a pagan element, and when the two come together, what comes out is neither that which used to be the pagan element or that which used to be the Christian element, but you come out with something literally totally new. Did that make sense? One of the things that we will discover in the modern sermon is a “syncretism.” It is the blending of two things—something Christian, something pagan. And out of it came the modern-day sermon and many other things. In fact, nearly everything in my notes is syncretic. They are a combination of pagan and Christian, and yet they kept the Christian name.

Now it was these five years that turned. Here’s what happened. Just within a very short time, this Constantine, who professed to be a Christian, one of the great debates in Christian history, perhaps the greatest of all, was whether Constantine was a Christian and if so, what made him one, and how Christian he was. He called for the council of Nicaea; he literally chaired that thing, he sat in the front, and called the speakers up front. This is one of the things he did.

In the year 323 or 324, he went over to the town of Byzantium, not much more than a village at the isthmus of Istanbul, the isthmus of Byzantine, or the isthmus of Constantinople. All I can tell you is that if you stand on one side of the bridge, you’re in the western world. If you go across that bridge, you’re in the eastern world. One side’s the Orient, one side’s the West. He walked out onto the peninsula; he walked several miles, dragging a spear. The peninsula was shaped like this. You see my V? He walked out to here, stood there, and he dragged his spear across to here. He said, “Build a wall there.” Well, he was way out miles from the city of Byzantium, and he said, “Now I want a city, a new city built in this territory, and it will be the capital of the entire Roman Empire, straddling the east and the west. And the coffers, the coffers of the temples of the Roman Empire, were pillaged, and a lot of other things were pillaged for the gold and the resources in order to build this incredible new city. This is another thing he did. He built “Metropolitus” Constantine: Constantinople.

Well, he also called for an incalculable number of buildings for Christians to meet in. He singlehandedly created the “church building”, which was later to be known as the church. As far as I can find in the literature of antiquity, the first human being ever to call a building a church was Chrysostom, who was a contemporary of that age. That would be something like calling your wife a skyscraper to call a building the church of Jesus Christ.

Well, he called for the building of church buildings in sacred places in the city of Rome and several non-sacred places; just build them. One was to be over a section of a cemetery on the side of a hill. The cemetery was called the “Vaticanus”; you can figure out the rest of that story and why it was built. Another building that was later to be called St. John of the Lateran. He also called for some other buildings to be built in and around the city of Rome, and he asked in the city of Constantinople… This, to me, offers great insight into Constantine’s mind. By the way, Gregory the First, or Gregory the Great, has usually been called the first medieval Christian. I call Constantine the first medieval Christian. That darkness and shadow of paganism and the bringing in of a watered-down Christianity, and the two met in his mind.

And in the city of Constantinople, he decreed the building of many memorable buildings. Some of them were to be pagan temples, in memory of gods, because that’s what emperors did. They decreed the erection of buildings in memory of some god that they had felt had delivered them, or given them power, or done something good for them. In these temples, they always tried to have a relic, usually a meteorite or something inexplicable. They felt this was something cast down from Mount Olympus or from the heavens by one of the gods, and they would put it in this building, this temple, and you can figure out from there where relics came from.

He also decreed the building of many buildings for Christians to assemble in, and out of his desire, this medieval mind of his, to give this god who had caused him victory and allowed him to be emperor, he decreed the erection of many Christian buildings so that Christians could meet in that city. And for the first time, this started a trend that lasts till this day, and it’s one of the reasons you have a Christian name. He named these buildings after outstanding Christians from the biblical or post-biblical eras, just as he named some of the temples being erected after Apollos, Zeus, Jupiter, Hermes, Mercury, or whoever, or Venus, or whatever. Now, this city was built in its entirety, more or less empty, and was finished in the year 327 AD. The entire congregation of Rome’s elite, its government, and its well-to-do moved out of Rome into Constantinople. There, one side of the street would be a pagan temple, and the other a Christian gathering place. So, between 324 and 327, this massive building project began. This is not all.

His mama, his mother, who carried the name Empress, was named Helen. Now that’s not my wife; that’s Constantine’s mother. She went on what I would suppose would be the first Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Lands. Word was sent to the Christians in Jerusalem, “Mama’s coming.” And word was sent to the Christians in Bethlehem, “Mama’s coming.” And she came in, I believe, in a convoy of 10 ships. Constantine said, “When she gets there, I want you to locate the place where Jesus Christ was crucified and resurrected and also the place where He was born.” Well, now, if I had been a Christian receiving a document with the name “Constantine” at the bottom and the seal of the Roman Emperor, no matter who I was or what, I would be sure to find the site of the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And whether they did or did not, I do not know. I would value Lance’s opinion on that. I do know that they found this old, abandoned temple, or the ruins of it, for Apollos, I believe it was, and they said it was under this temple. Here’s the sacred place where He was crucified, and here He was resurrected. There was also a grotto in Bethlehem. Anyway, when she got there, I mean, this is an interesting story, and if anybody can help me get one little piece of it, I’d appreciate it. It is called the fastest message ever sent in antiquity.

Constantine decreed that a big pile of brush would be piled up every few miles from the city of Jerusalem all the way to the city of Rome. Now, that is one incredible distance. When the man at this pile of brush would see the fire lit at that one, he would light that one, and so on it would go. The announcement would come by way of a fire burning all the way to the city of Rome, indicating that the crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and birth of the Lord Jesus had been located there. What I want to know is, did he go up through Yugoslavia and down through the Alps and across the boot, or did he do it with barges across that strip between what we would call Yugoslavia and Italy? If anybody can ever tell me that, I wish you would. I’ve never heard of it. I don’t even know if it’s known.

Anyway, now I want you to remember, please, can you imagine that just a few days, a few years before in the year 313, Christians were having their eyes gouged out and thrown in prison and being crucified, and here it is the year 327. Now, that’s only a period of how many years? 14 years. When that fire, that last pile of brush, was lit and it was seen on one of the hills of Rome, the entire population of the city poured out of the city, rejoicing, shouting, and dancing in the street that the crucifixion, birth, and resurrection place of the Lord Jesus Christ had been discovered. Fastest message ever delivered in antiquity: delivered just in a matter of a few hours. Well, he then decreed that a building would be built over it, which was called the grotto in Bethlehem. It’s called the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. All of these buildings in Rome, in Constantinople, around the city of Rome, in some of the places, I believe in Naples, and some of the others, and in the holy lands, all of them were erected within a period of three years.

Now, the impact this had on the empire and Christianity is incalculable. It can’t be explained. It can’t be understood. I’ve spent an awful lot of time reading an awful lot of books trying to understand that period because so much changed during that period. I find it difficult to assimilate it and to comprehend how it took place, and I still ask many questions. But I’m going to give you one other thing that I think played a major part in the shock waves this created throughout the entire Roman Empire. Now, you’re dealing with a population of 75 million, if Gibbons was correct, and I don’t know if he was. Nobody knows how many people were in the Roman Empire. 75 million people – if 5% of those people were Christian, somebody tell me how much that is. Four million Christians. Three and a half…somebody said four million Christians. Around four million Christians in the entire Roman Empire, and suddenly this whole thing is turned upside down, you’ve got a Christian emperor. He doesn’t know what that really means, but if there was one thing that I think caused the enormous influence it had, it was that.

Can you imagine a future president of the United States building a new capital in Kansas, and as he leaves the White House, Washington will continue to have major influence, just a little town in Kansas where the Congress is going to meet, and the president’s going to live? As he walks out of the White House, he gives the White House to Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell or the Cardinals in Chicago or, even more so, and I hope you’ll understand what I’m trying to communicate here, you turn it over to the leader of the Hare Krishnas. What an impact that would have on this country, and our president had nothing like the influence, the all-godlike position of the emperor. He turned his palace over to Sylvester, the leading churchman in the city of Rome. In the year 327, when he left Rome for the last time, he had 10 more years to live. He would die near Constantinople 10 years later. It was these shock waves that caused something to happen; what you might call the evangelization of the world. Now, I could spend three or four days telling you what happened during this period. It just goes on and on. You pick up a little bit here and a little bit there. It needs to be put together very definitely because I’m telling you, brothers and sisters, in 70 years from that time, the change has become so radical. I’m talking about the year 327, and within 70 years of that day, things have become so radically changed that they cannot be comprehended. By 380, about 50 years later, Priscillian had his head cut off because someone disagreed with him doctrinally. A Christian killed a Christian over a peripheral doctrine. How could that happen so quickly? It is enormous.