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

I’m going to try to explain something to you here. Imagine my artwork here, my graph. This is the elite of the Roman Empire, the movers and the shakers, the government, the imperial people, and the wealthy. Then there’s this and that and the middle class and the priests and all of those pagan priests and all that. Then here are the nice, you know, illiterate people and the slaves and so forth. The Christian faith entered the Roman Empire down here, a pure thing or fairly pure, and it began to work its way up, not intentionally particularly through the Strata, and it went too quickly. I wish it hadn’t gotten to the imperial level so fast, frankly. Probably, Empress Helen was the one who did it; his mother. Now that only this little yeast leaven has reached a small area of this great mass of people, but in some way, it has gotten all the way up to the top, really quickly. It has not permeated the entire base down here, just a little, and then made a string, hair-like, to the top.

Now, after 327 AD, it will start to go down, from the top. Can you follow that? The first group to undergo Post-Constantinian conversions was the elite, and they did so because it was propitious. It was to your advantage to do it. They were figuring that out quickly. I mean, the temples were being shut down. The gold was being taken out. Tax money was being turned over to Christians. Bishops who were now rising out of nowhere were being given the right to stand in judgment, make decisions, and conduct trials. Money, what we would call millions of dollars or billions of dollars, was being poured into these new buildings. People were getting paid, but this didn’t happen very much…not like we used to preach long ago that they bought the Christians, but some people were paid to encourage others to become Christians. A large part of even the elite did not convert to Christianity, but a good hunk of it did, and it began percolating down like Reagan’s “re-economics”. You know, you heard the trickle-down theory. It began to trickle back down, but as it did, it picked up the pagan mind. It became syncretic. It was a combination of superstition, Christianity, true Christian faith, paganism, and who knows how many other cultural and social elements. By the time it got down to the illiterate, you could call it crystal pagan.

Whatever it was, it would change the course of Christianity forever. That trickle-down took at least 150 years. Probably took until about 500 AD. There were many people still confessing to being pagans in the light of an awful lot of opposition, including military torture, threats, being made second-class citizens, and so on. Now, very quickly, and having left out multitudes of interesting things that I wish I had time to tell you, that’s what happened.

Now, I’d like to stop here and talk about some of the things we picked up on the way. Good night. I’ll never get through this message. I need six weeks, I do. I’ve already covered the church buildings a little bit. Let me talk about Constantinople and other such places. Most of the Christian buildings built at that time were along the line of the Basilica. A few were in temple architecture. None of them exist. The Basilica was basically a government building, often an auditorium. It became the Christian church building. It later became known as Byzantine architecture. The word basilica comes originally from the word bath, and its architecture drew on the Roman baths in the city of Rome. You can still see them where the Romans went to take their baths; they took that basic architectural structure and built auditoriums, and then built church buildings out of them. So, when you think of orgies in the Roman baths, remember that those were later Christian architecture. I just wanted to throw that in.

I want to say something as an aside here. Have you ever heard of colonial architecture? You have, haven’t you? There’s a Baptist church down the street here somewhere. We passed it at night, coming in. I said, “Honey, that’s a Baptist church. That’s colonial architecture. I can tell.” Sure enough, it was Baptist as we passed the sign. There’s no such thing as colonial architecture. Back when British imperialists came to the south and wanted to show how wealthy they were, they asked architects to build them Greek temples to live in, and that became what is called “colonial”. But in fact, every time you see those colonnades, those columns holding up the front of a Baptist church, remember that that came from the Parthenon in Athens, a Greek temple.

I think that I’m just poking fun at Christian architecture in general. We ought not to have it. It ought not to really exist. Byzantine architecture held sway until the construction of St. Denys and the Gothic cathedral in the city of Saint Deny around 1200, after which Gothic architecture has been used in every Christian building ever built. You go to a little country church, and there’s that steeple, and they have got nothing in the world but a translucent glass or something. It all hearkens back to France and St. Denys.

Now then, here is the story as best I can put it together. I think this is correct. Can you imagine the city of Constantinople opening, and Christians who had been meeting in homes walking into this big building? Well, the pagan temples always had rituals with people standing, and they didn’t have anything inside these buildings. Christians who were meeting in homes walked in and looked around, but there was no place to sit. I guess they sat down on the cold floor. I don’t know, but someone along the way told them to stand up. It was irreverent to sit down on a living room floor anymore. So, they stood up, as it was a pagan practice in temples, and if any of you are Greek Orthodox, 1700 years later, you are still standing throughout your entire 2 and 1/2-hour service. No wonder the Eastern Orthodox Church can’t grow.

Well, back in Italy, you take these nice, happy Italians. They walked into these empty buildings, and they weren’t about to do this, so they brought in benches, and so the pew was born. The Christian Protestants sat down in these little benches, and Luther used to preach for a couple of hours. About that time, the chair was invented, and somebody got the idea, let’s make one long chair. So, they put a back to it, and lo and behold, the Protestant Pew was born, and that’s how you got all those things. Are you following me? That’s where it came from. Within 50 years of Constantine, there was a building built in virtually every place, every village, every town, every city where Christians gathered. They were built mostly with tax money from the Roman Empire, at the decree of Constantine and his sons. By the way, one of the great tragedies that came out of Helen’s visit to the Holy Lands was that Christianity was made the state religion of the Holy Lands, and Judaism was outlawed at that time, and it’s an apology we’ll be making till the day the Lord Jesus comes.

Let me talk to you about the pulpit. I want you to know exactly where it came from because this gets really fascinating. Greek temples had something called an “ambo”. It was a place where the priests could stand at the end of the ritual and make announcements. Yes, Kenny, they had announcements even among the heathen. He would stand there and make a proclamation, or say something, or make an announcement to the gathered people after they had slaughtered whatever they slaughtered and offered whatever it was they offered. Well, they brought these ambos into these buildings. Now, exactly how it went from there, I do not know, but I have to change the subject now and talk to you just for a moment about something else.

In the city auditoriums, in the civic buildings, and in the amphitheaters, there were two things. One was a reader. It sat over here, and the orator, before he would speak to an auditorium, would come and read his texts here, then walk to the middle of the building, where there was a chair, and sit in it and speak. I do not know where it was, but somewhere along the line, when Christians began getting into these buildings, they had two readers. One in the middle or on that side from which announcements were made or sermons were preached, and on this side, scripture would be read. Later, it became the fad to take one of those, if not both of them, and stick them up on a high pillar on the church on the side. If you have ever been to Europe, you’ve seen them, haven’t you? After the service, the priest would walk onto the thing and make his announcements.

Well, when Martin Luther came along, he tore down the sanctum, this thing up here. He had the sanctum torn out, the Lord’s supper table removed, whatever the Catholics call it, and he built his stands. Actually, they were called scapels at the time. The reader is over here, and the place where he would stand is over here. They were literally, I believe, taken down in some cases from the pillars and put in the front. Their origin reaches back to the pagan orator, the reader, the little chair they sat in, and the ambo in the temple where the priest of pagan rituals made their announcements. I want you to remember that the next time some Baptist preacher stands up and says, “And we stand behind the sacred desk to proclaim the word of God.” Their origins are in paganism.

The choir came a little bit later, probably around 400 AD. I want to remind you again, I said this earlier, because we use the same vocabulary, the same words. We think somewhere solemn men took these things from the Jewish people. Brothers and sisters, we’re in Rome, in gentile territory, in a city that had moved further away from the gospel already than any of the other churches anywhere in the Roman Empire or outside of the Roman Empire. Around 400 AD, the chanting that was done – it was the popular music of that day, if you can imagine it, to chant – it came out of the pagan temples, and was moved into the Christian buildings/meeting places. Because there had been choirs, they moved the choir back here behind the sanctum, and they put them there, and they sang songs according to the popular tunes of that day. And they weren’t songs, they were chants, and they went like this…sounded like an Indian war chant. It was no less than Ambrose who probably stultified this thing and made it the Christian way of singing for the next 1700 years.