The Age of the Christian Roman Empire (312 A.D. – 590 A.D.)
• Describe how Christianity’s becoming legal and then the state religion of the empire affected the dynamics of Christianity in terms of doctrinal perspectives and disputes, the rise of monasticism, and the development of hierarchy.
• Discuss how and why Noll (2000) views the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon and Benedict’s Rule as turning points in church history.
Module 3: Assignments
Politics and the Early Church Essay
1) Write a 500–750-word essay in which you discuss the doctrine and politics of the early church.
2) Prepare this assignment according to the APA
HTH 379
Objectives
• Describe how Christianity’s becoming legal and then the state religion of the empire affected the dynamics of Christianity in terms of doctrinal perspectives and disputes, the rise of monasticism, and the development of hierarchy.
• Discuss how and why Noll (2000) views the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon and Benedict’s Rule as turning points in church history.
The Age of the Christian Roman Empire (312 A.D. – 590 A.D.)
LECTURE Three
READINGS
• Read chapters 3 and 4 in Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity.
• Read chapters 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16 in Church History in Plain Language.
INTRODUCTION
The text for this course is historian and Notre Dame instructor Mark Noll’s book Turning Points, which is widely used by universities and colleges for courses on church history. The following is the continuation of the interview with Mark Noll about his book and your course.
Noll Interview (cont’d)
Michael Young: Here we go. Welcome back, Dr. Noll. Again, I thank you for giving me the time to do this, and I’m sure the students are going to benefit immensely from it.
In a previous part of the interview, we focused on what you would do differently in the book, but what I’d like to focus on here is the different eras of church history. The first of course would start off with the establishment of the church. At the beginning of the church, or I guess it would just be considered a movement at that point, what would you say would characterize the – obviously the Holy Spirit would account for the growth – but what would you see happening maybe church history-wise that helped move the church along?
Mark Noll: I think if you look at the era of the New Testament, I think that there are several areas that are quite remarkable. One is – and the important thing – is the response of the believing community to the resurrection of Christ and the giving of the Holy Spirit. That’s essential in the scriptures, and it obviously provides a good explanation for the energy and the force and the dedication of the people that were witnesses to these things.
What’s also dramatic is the rapid movement out from Jerusalem. The events at Pentecost give testimony to the gospel being preached in many languages. The Book of Acts itself records the encounter of Philip with the Ethiopian eunuch, Paul’s trip to Athens to give his speech on the Areopagus. It includes the disciples who went to Antioch after the great persecution and proclaimed the Lord Jesus, and not adding the Jewish term “Christ”. And it included, by the end of the book, the expansion of the church, at least the preaching in Rome and many parts of the Mediterranean world. So you have not just a spiritual explosion, but a demographic and a linguistic and other kinds of explosions of well.
Yes, it is a movement. By the time you reach the end of the 1st century and start of the 2nd century, I think the non-canonical evidence suggests that there’s some preliminary organization underway. There are elders in each place. Some people see early formations of bishops. There’s also obviously use of scripture, prayer to Christ. These things are all informal in some ways, but they’re on their way to having the kind of organization that is apparent by the end of the 2nd century.
So the big difference I see between the age of the New Testament and what follows is documentation. We’ve got some reliable documentation for the New Testament era. We don’t have a whole lot of the documents until we get to the end of the 2nd century, and that makes for a transition.
Young: The decline of Jerusalem, would you say that that also would be a significant mark?
Noll: Definitely. Christianity is for all intents and purposes a sectarian movement within Judaism. Definitely, when Jerusalem is destroyed and when the tie back to Jerusalem is broken, I think there’s a strong impetus out to the rest of the world.
Young: Everybody points to the second chapter of Acts as describing what a New Testament church would have looked like. Would you agree that maybe our identifying with this scripture in what we see today is really what was taking place?
Noll: That’s a good question. I’m not sure I can answer that. Probably 20 years ago I could have given you a different answer, but I’m sure that there are points of continuity within Christian worship today and what we read in Acts chapter two.
Today, I think I would stress more the cultural specificity of what happened. It’s not as though what the early church experienced is completely different from what is experienced today, but there’s a lot that was built into the Jewish background, a lot that was built into the practices of the 1st century that simply don’t happen anymore.
We do have the record of the correspondence in the fairly early 2nd century between Pliny and his supervisor, or the other way around. I’m not sure Rome paid a whole lot of attention until there was a stronger church in Rome itself, until the churches became numerous enough to be important culturally by the 3rd century.
But it’s clear from the records that we do have that wherever the churches spread, they contributed to education, they often contributed to what we would today call healthcare. They were relatively heterogeneous, that is, they took in people of all sorts more readily than did other social organizations of the time. I do think there was a persistence and consistent social effect of churches wherever they went. The cumulative effect by the 3rd century demanded attention from Rome, and certainly received it.
Young: So then moving into the topic of Rome, would you agree that the Caesars probably didn’t have great concern over what was happening until the Constantine time period?
Noll: Constantine conversion in the first decades of the 4th century is obviously a momentous development in the Western church. That definitely had a terrific impact, as recognition and legalization under the Emperor Theodosius by the end of the 4th century made Christianity the religion of the empire.
Some people, of course, call this a disaster for the church. I think it was more mixed myself. There were positive developments with respect to doctrine, with respect to the use of scripture, public worship, and architecture. But then the entanglement with power was also a problem. Certainly, by the time we get into the end of the 4th century there were lots of mistakes being made by church officials trying to win power in politics and quite a bit of damage being done by some of the emperors in the church.
I see the adaptability of the Christian faith as a really important thing. It had been neglected and occasionally persecuted; now it was favored, and yet the gospel message continued on. Churches continued to develop; individuals and families continued to experience Christian life. I think what happened was a premonition to what has happened many, many other times in human history where Christianity has come into new cultural and political climates.
Young: Continuing to move through our timeline, I wanted to talk a little bit about Gnosticism. A big chunk of what Shelley talks about is Gnosticism, and he has that time period happening within the age of Catholic Christianity. Would you say that Gnosticism had an important role in our church history?
Noll: Yes, certainly. I think we can see some Gnostic elements that the Apostle Paul is warning the Christians at Colossi against. The Letter to Colossians might be seen as an early effort to put down false philosophies. Cleary there were Gnostic elements that fed into the sense of Jesus being only a spiritual rather than a material being.
Gnosticism I’m certainly no expert in, but my understanding is that we know about it from the texts of people like Arinaus of Leon and Christian leaders who wrote against it. So it obviously became a threat on many levels. Certainly, I think Bruce Shelley is correct that what led to the organizing or the church in the West was the need to discriminate between what was truly Christian and what was falsely Gnostic. So yes, I’m sure he’s right. I just wish I knew a little bit more about the details of Gnosticism to speak with more authority.
Young: I think what stems from that are creeds, and that’s where he puts in what we would call the Apostle’s Creed as the old Roman creed. I wonder too, why one sees the importance of creeds coming out in our church history rather than – there’s a denomination today that would say, “No creeds, but Christ.”
Noll: Sure. I’m really a very strong defender of the creeds myself, because I think what they do is provide a teaching device. They provide a distillation of what’s found in the scriptures. They provide a statement about what’s most important in the Christian faith. They all result in one way or another – and there are really different patterns because there are different creeds – but they all result one way or another from the communal action of a whole lot of people thinking together.
In the case of the Apostle’s Creed, you do have the very important statement about the God of the material creation being the same as the God from whom Jesus came. You have a statement about the reality of the Christ, the resurrection of Christ. So, yes, creeds should not replace the scriptures, but I think they’re very, very important.
Young: Do you think creeds are easier to learn and recite? I guess I’m wrestling with our time period and the education of people in general.
Noll: Certainly. Yes, definitely. The Apostle’s Creed was almost certainly used as a baptismal creed that people recited after they’d undergone instruction in the Christian faith. I actually think that even churches today that operate without formal creeds usually have informal creeds. There will be certain things that are emphasized and stressed from the scriptures. What the creeds do is make that process formal.
Young: As we talk about that and the Bible, let’s talk about the Bible itself and that coming into being. I know that growing up Catholic I learned a lot in religion classes. I never used the Bible. I had a religion book. Yet in Protestantism the Bible is the primary resource. We talked about the printing press last time and its relation to the development of scripture. The Catholic Church utilized icons in the earlier days of the church because people couldn’t read.
Noll: Right. The scriptures were always present and always important, but important in different ways. One of the great contributions of the monastic movement was to reinforce studying of the Bible and the teaching of the Bible.
Yes, I think clearly when populations are not as literate, scripture is not as directly important. Although I think it’s always important as a background. Where you have a more literate population the scriptures are more important. One of the fascinating ways of studying the history of Christianity is actually to simply concentrate on the Bible and to note how it’s interpreted, how it’s taught, and how it’s disseminated. There have been immense changes. There’s a huge spectrum of how the Bible is understood and taught and appropriated.
Young: Talking about the canon and deciding what is to be included and excluded would have a place in the debate between Protestantism and Catholicism because you run into the question of Apocrypha.
Noll: Right. Canon formation is a murky subject because the documentation for the history of the canon is sparse. By the end of the 2nd century most of what we recognize today as the Protestant canon was in place. It’s really not until we get to the Reformation in the 16th century that there’s a lot of focused discussion. It’s at that time that we have the division between Protestants with non-apocryphal books and Catholics with the apocryphal books.
I’m not sure I want to comment too much on the canon beyond what’s in the Turning Points book, just because it is a technical subject that stems from a lot of detailed interest from many documents in the early history of the church.
This is the end of the week three interview with Dr. Mark Noll. We’ll continue this interview in week four.
CONCLUSION
This series of interviews provides a fresh perspective on the assigned readings and additional critique of the required reading text, Turning Points. While exploring the history of the church, it is important to realize that the church is the Bride of Christ. There are times throughout history when the church did a poor job of presenting the ministry of Christ, and there are other times when it was the bastion of moral and ethical reason.
