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

It was Gregory the Great in the year 500 that took the Latin, took the chants, took the mystical union of the chanting and the incantations of the pagan temples, and his crystal pagan mind… Truly, he was medieval… he brought these things together into a ritual for Christians to observe. He created the Roman Catholic Mass, and it hasn’t changed in 1700 years. Isn’t that disgraceful? Isn’t that a total lack of imagination? Isn’t that horrible? Say so. Terrible. Well, you Protestants have been stuck with one way of meeting for 400 years. Why don’t you change? They’re simply 1300 years ahead of you because they got here first.

You could take a man from outer space and bring him down to earth, and on Sunday morning, take him to a Baptist church, a Methodist church, a Presbyterian church, and a Lutheran church, and let him go to all four worship meetings, and he would not be able to distinguish them whatsoever, and no difference in his eyes. If you’ve been a Baptist all your life, you can tell there’s a little difference, and Presbyterians do something a little different. But essentially, our way of meeting was born in Wittenberg around 1530, and it has not changed since that day. Brothers and sisters, the Christian faith is in the throes of death, and has been for 400 years, in what has got to be one of the most horrible inventions mankind ever perpetrated upon the human race. And that’s the Sunday morning worship service. Say amen, whether you believe it or not.  (laughter) We are dying from a lack of imagination.

The stained-glass window, by the way, came in approximately the year 1200 in the city of Saint Denys, and it came straight out of the writings of Plato. In fact, it was justified in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. It was blessed by Bernard of Clairvaux in the building of the Gothic Cathedral in St. Denys by a man named Bishop Suger. It is essentially a Platonic concept of “the all,” and church buildings are built on the Neoplatonic philosophy that they exist to create “awe” in the heart of man. Hence, we have the high domes. Hence, we have the great steeple pointing as a finger up to God, showing men from which cometh their creator and their supply, to which I have one word to answer. Burp. I don’t know if you understand this or not, but there has to be a philosophical reasoning behind all architecture, behind everything we do as Christians. I sat in seminary, and I got it all, and every bit of it is justified by tradition, usually by Neoplatonic interpretation. It is not in any way Christian. It has its roots in this syncretism of the 300s and the 400s.

Let me say this: most of our traditions come from what I would call a 90-year period. If we could graft it, I would graft it like this. Here’s the first century. We are picking up traditions, human traditions, as we go along. You get to see us getting a few traditions as we go along. You come to the year 324, and wow, and for about 50 years, we’re picking them up. That’s where most of them came from. Then you get it some more, a few here and a few more there, and then you come to the year about 1520, and the chart jumps up again, and it stops. It comes back down, probably around 1570 or so, and then it goes along. We’ve been picking them up like this all along, but the two great eras of Christian traditions, which have absolutely nothing to do with the Christian faith, we picked up during that time.

Gene, what difference does it make? Well, I have a question to ask. My question is not, “Where did we get these traditions?” “Why did we get these traditions?” My question is not even, “Where did these traditions come from?” My question is not even, “Why do we keep these traditions?” My question is not even, “Why do we never ask where these things come from?” My question is, “How is it that the Christian mind of the 20th century can open all of the New Testament, study it for 50 years, know every word of it, memorize it, preach it, and never once see the tremendous conflict between 20th-century Christianity and the first-century faith?” Therein lies a basic part of our problem. The question is: how can we process these things, and never even think about them? This worries me, and it fascinates me too.

Ministerial garb and getting dressed on Sunday morning. This is really vague. I think we could probably trace it back to Sylvester, Damasco?, Constantine, and maybe even the Council of Nicaea. Eusebius provides a graphic description of Constantine’s arrival at the Council of Nicaea. He must have been dressed literally covered in gold, silver, and purple. They were awestruck. Now, strangely enough, he was also awestruck. He went along, feeling the gouged-out eyes and the lost fingers, and he wept at the Christians standing there and what had happened to them under the persecution of Diocletian. But I think there were some men in that room who were really fascinated with the way he dressed, and also the priests, the pagan priests, had their particular kind of dress. It seems right around the time of Sylvester or Damasco…by the way, if and when the emperor ever made an appearance, you got out your, may I quote, “Sunday best.” You cleaned up your town, and you put on your best clothes. Either Sylvester or Damasco, or someone right along that line, when the emperor left, began to wear the robes of purple, and others began to put on ministerial garb. With that, in some way I do not understand, came the concept of dressing up to go to church, which I think is the second-worst thing ever perpetrated on Christian believers in all of Christian history. Say, “Amen.”

I’ve already told you where the Sunday morning church service came from. Remember? Okay. Now, I’m going to stop preaching and go into “meddling”. This was easy to take; you haven’t heard anything yet. Now, we see syncretism. We see combinations, and something comes out of it that’s neither fish nor fowl nor vapor nor smoke. Let me see if I can explain why we get preached to so much. Let me see why, if I can explain to you why you are a big ear and I am a big tongue, and never the twain shall change. All you do is listen, and all I do is talk. All you do is listen. All I do is talk. Nothing ever happens.

Let’s go to the movie stars of the Greco-Roman world. They were the movie stars of that day. They were the orators. You cannot imagine their place in Greco-Roman society. They were the adulation of society. They were the movie stars. They were the people you walked up to and said, “Please sign, give me your autograph.” They were some…they were just that. They were the heroes of their day. Now I want to tell you something else. I want to talk to you about the philosopher, the pagan philosopher, and the priest, and now we are going to start getting really uncomfortable.

I am a pagan, see, and I am 70 years old, and I am about to die. Are you with me? Now the man that they will call in to comfort me at my deathbed will be either a philosopher, an orator, or both. One who is a philosopher orator; if there is only one, they will bring in a philosopher. Now, for some strange reason, they never invited the pagan priest in. They invited the philosopher, paid him for his services, and he would walk in, take the person’s hand, pat it gently, and talk to them about the goodness of life, their time here on earth, and the joy…I’m not exaggerating, folks, you’ve got to believe me, this is history, I didn’t make this up…the joys that wait before them in heaven, and then the old boy would die. A day or two later, they’d bury him, or maybe they buried him the same day he died; I suppose that’s what they did. Whenever they buried him, either this philosopher or an orator would be brought in to orate over him, to bring an oration over him. Brothers and sisters, there is a book of funeral sermons from the age of paganism—the most frequently used and the best orations that an orator or philosopher could bring over the dead. I have never read it, but I’ve read excerpts from it. It will singe your hair. I have said the same things word for word, and so has just about any other preacher worth his salt.

I’ll come back to that in a minute. I want to take just a second now before I go any further. I want you to understand the world they’re living in… this age. The priest…the pagan priests…are referred to, I’m not making this up. I didn’t know this until I dug it out. The priesthood of paganism, the thousands and tens of thousands of them, were called clergy.

Now, the Roman Empire, at one point, had become unmanageable by provinces. It was managed by provinces. One governor in each province. If it were a peaceful province, the governor would have been sent there by the Senate. If it were a warlike one, not quite pacified, the emperor sent the governor there with an army. But the provinces became too populous and too large, so they divided them into dioceses for governance. This is pre-Christian, or at least it was before the Christians came around. The man who was head of the priesthood, the top priest of all pagan priests, was referred to as the “Pontiff Maximus”. It was the grandson, I believe, of Constantine who gave that up out of love for what he thought was the Christian faith, I guess, and it was immediately accepted by the bishop of Rome at that time. He assumed the title “Pontiff Maximus” and sent bishops throughout the Roman Empire. He sent bishops to churches and archbishops to dioceses. Are you following me? These are the things that are happening now.

Now, let’s see if I can explain to you…I think you’ve already figured out where the funeral comes from… the Christian funeral, that is. I got two last ones now, and this is where it gets funny. I want you to see an orator orating. These are the dolls of the Roman Empire. These men are important. They have studied the ability to speak. Rhetoric is one of the three main subjects studied in school. Rhetoric is the study of the art of speaking. It is ancient. The Romans picked it up from the Greeks. Assemblies like this would be filled with the city’s best orators. They would be invited to speak at the Lions Club and the Rotary Club of those days. They would come into an auditorium like this. They would walk to the platform in a robe, specifically for orators. They would open the poetic books. They would open the scrolls and say… and I know you’re not going to believe this… “I am reading from Homer…” Announce which part of Homer? “I am reading from chapter so and so, verse so and so.” He would take his text, because he had learned how to, and I’m using their term, “exegete”. He would then close his scroll, walk to the front, and sit down, and for one hour, he would spellbind those people with the art and science of oration, clothed in his oratorical garb.