Rediscover Your Christian Roots: John to Constantine, Part 6

Fortunately, I have some coffee. Now I'll start talking 50 miles an hour. So we're up to the third century. It's a long time since the time when Jesus walked the earth, hundreds of years. Since the writers wrote the New Testament, they're all gone, their descendants are gone, generations and generations have gone by. And the church, by the early 300s, is a dramatically different place than what the early Christians would have understood. And let me tell you one way it was different.

And this is something I don't mention in this book. I'm actually working on a sequel to this where I go through the life of Constantine more in detail and cover what happened to Christianity up until the First Crusade. Because in that period, just massive changes took place as you have what is known as Christendom.

Christendom begins with Constantine. It doesn't reach its full extent until the late Middle Ages. That still exists today, although the power it had in the late Middle Ages is just amazing. But there's something else. It's an effect of a number of things. Think about what it's like in the second century when maybe your uncle and aunt were dragged off into the arena and killed. Maybe they were crucified. Maybe you were in a village that had some pretty regular persecution. And you lived in fear. Maybe you fled, and now you live in a different village. And your life goes on, and you tell your children about the time you had to leave that village.

All through the second century, all through the third century, there is periodic persecution of Christians. Now you have to think about the effect that had on them. I mean, Origen going out and trying to pick fights. He literally, when they would be taking a Christian off to jail, he would run up and hug and kiss the Christian. Now he's a young teenager, hoping, take me too. And the Roman soldiers would just laugh, throw him aside, and go on. He couldn't die. He tried.

But think about the effect on generation after generation living in that kind of fear and what it meant to them. So what they started to do was honor those who had died. Now we would do that too. Once again, this wasn't wrong. But what if you had a piece of clothing? What if you had your cap? You know, I have things that belong to my dad.

He died a natural death, but they mean something to me. Think about someone in your family that was maybe martyred, and you had a piece of their clothing, or their Bible, and you wanted to keep that. Well, in the second and third centuries, as martyrs were killed, people wanted mementos. And usually they came down to clothing, or a knick-knack they had. Most people didn't have Bibles. They were too expensive. But they kept things. And they started, on the anniversary of the martyr's death, to go to the gravesite and have a ceremony. Now, this of itself doesn't seem to be a major problem, except that it was something that was common in the pagan world.

They would do this with their relatives. So they would go to a gravesite, and they'd be honoring and have a ceremony for the dead martyr. And over here, somebody would be having something that would be a ceremony and honoring their dead brother. The difference is the pagans used this as a time of celebration. So they'd have a party. So over time, Christians started to have grave parties in honor of these martyrs. In fact, it's interesting.

This was brought up to Augustine in the early 400s. And he writes, look, they only allowed it back then so that we could keep pagans coming into the church. They never expected that 200 years later we'd still be doing this. So that's his argument. We really only did it to get people in the church.

Or they did, because it was before his time. So if I have something that belonged to a martyr, that was very important. That was very special, right? And we would all think that way. But over time, here's what happened. The belief was that if they were a martyr, they went directly to heaven in a very special way. It was called the baptism of blood. You can even be a non-baptized person. But if you died by claiming, I am loyal to Jesus Christ, you immediately went to heaven, and you had a special place in heaven.

And if they had a special place in heaven, and you prayed to them, they could go to Jesus for you. So if you had a piece of clothing of your uncle, who 100 years later had been murdered because he was a Christian, and you used that piece of clothing and held onto it while you prayed, you would get special contact because your uncle would go to Jesus for you. Now this evolved over time. Eventually, there weren't too many martyrs because Christianity became, you know, the Catholic Church became the main church, so there was no wide-sale killing of Christians.

It didn't happen for a while. Not at first. It did happen later. But not at first. So now you had, well, how can I get to be one of those special people? Well, you have to become a saint. So they started making saints. Mary became a saint. All the people of the New Testament became saints.

And now they had saints. You had martyrs and saints, and you could pray to them. And of course, the greatest one was Mary. And you would go directly to them in your prayer. Now, this is still believed today. If there are certain denominations, if you go in their churches, there's an altar. In those altars are a box. That box contains something from different martyrs. Maybe a comb from someone in the Middle Ages. If you get something from the first or second century, wow, that's great. There might be a finger in there that belongs to some martyr.

If you go to Rome, there's another city in Rome, St. Catherine from the Middle Ages. You will see her body. And you'll go in, and a light will come on, and you can look at her body in this coffin and put money in a little box and pray to her. And she will go to Mary for you. Who goes to Jesus for you? If you go to Rome, her head's there, and you just pray in front of her head. It's in the little box. The light comes on. How many of you remember Fulton Sheen? Fulton Sheen, very famous. She had to be a certain age to know him. I remember him. I was very young.

He was one of the first people to have a religious radio program. He won two Emmys because a religious radio program like his was just unusual. He was a Catholic priest or bishop. And he was very funny. That's what people knew him for. He'd give these little sermons. I don't remember ever really watching one, but I remember seeing him. When he died after a time period, he wanted to be made a priest, a saint.

And then we're going to make him a saint. But he's still not a saint. And the reason why is they can't figure out what to do with his body because they're fighting over where to put his body. Because wherever his body is buried, you can go there and pray to him to go to Mary, to go to Jesus for him. So poor, he's waiting to get sainthood, but he can't until they figure out where his body goes.

It's important to understand how deeply those beliefs are held. And they come from a time it started back in martyrdom. The problem is that, of course, it's not biblical. And it's during that second, third century that this starts to form as people say, we have to get to God. And so the belief was that these saints would do it. John 16. I just bring this out because I believe this is an important, extremely important issue that needs to be explained in Christianity. John 16, verse 23. These are the words of Jesus. And in that day, you ask me nothing. Most assuredly I say to you, whether you ask the Father in my name, he will give you. Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask and you will receive that your joy may be fulfilled. And that's why we pray in Jesus' name. Those prayers are completed with a statement like that. Jesus continues, these things I have spoken to you in figurative language. The time is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figurative language, but I will tell you plainly about the Father. In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not say to you that I shall pray to the Father for you, for the Father Himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came forth from God. Jesus said, when you pray in my name, I take you right to the Father. That is a privilege. That is, we don't... Wow, how do we deserve that one? And that message is totally blinded in the worship of the saints and the martyrs. That there's all these people we have to get through to get there. No, we don't. And that message is important. And that started in the second or third century. It's an amazing study. Like I said, I'm in the middle of the whole other book where I'm going through that, how it developed. How there were priests and bishops that said, you know, we really shouldn't be doing this. But they couldn't stop it. People needed... They didn't feel connected to God because God had become the Platonic God, the God of Plato. This unknown being that you really can't even get to. That maybe if you get to Mary, she'll get to Jesus and then he'll take care of it. And what did Jesus say? You come to me and I take you there and you go there. We go right to the Father. That message is absolutely vital for Christianity. And the second or third centuries, it got cloudy, disrupted to where the Father was unreachable.

But Mary was. But St. Stephen was. Whatever. St. Luke was. So I mention that not because I want to attack people who do that. I want them to understand that's not how this works. But God has offered them as a whole lot greater than that because God is... In other words, to pray to Mary to go to God doesn't work. That's not how it works. We pray to God in Jesus' name and he listens. And that, that's so important. That's so important. So I feel strongly about that. So once again, I wasn't going to preach a little bit. But that's because as I write and work on this new book, I realize how invasive that is when you chop off people's bodies. Because that gives me a way to get there. I mean, if his fingers here, he's really going to listen to me. If a piece of hair is there, and I had to laugh, in Constantinople, it was probably... I can't remember exactly when. It was probably about... It was in the thousands AD, the first 1000 to 1100. In Constantinople, there were at least three heads of John the Baptist. Three churches where they had... I don't know who the other people were. I don't believe any of them were John the Baptist. But even if one was, who are the other two poor guys? You know, that their head is now rotting away in some church. Well, people think they go in there and they pray, and John the Baptist is going to intercede for them. He's going to listen to them. He's going to go pray to God for them. And I just find that so sad. I find that very, very sad. I want that to change.

So, that's another thing that happened in that second and third century. And that's a whole other thing. Because what happens is, 311, the Roman Empire is involved in another civil war, which happened on a periodic basis. And there were two armies that faced each other, both Roman armies. I don't know what the Roman Empire would have done if they weren't killing each other off so much. Because when there was no one else to fight, they simply fought each other. And these two armies clashed. And the general of the one army called his army together and said, we're going to win today. Because the Christian God is for us. And there's a couple different stories of how this goes. No one really knows. But Constantine is supposed to either have seen in the sky some kind of Christian symbol or had a dream that it was given to him. The problem is, the symbol he was given wasn't the Christian symbol at the time. But anyways, he said this was from the Christ and the Christian God. And he faced off against the other Roman army and they smashed into each other. And he started to win. The problem is, Maxensius' army's back was against the Tyre River. And they're pushing them back and they panic. They realize they're going to push us into the river. So they panicked and tried to cross the bridge. And the general got pushed over the bridge. He drowned half the army. He was terrible. It was a slaughter. And Constantine, through this fine way of getting power of slaughtering thousands of people, became the first Christian emperor.

Constantine is a brilliant politician. Constantine now said, I am the first Christian emperor and I make Christianity an official religion. He didn't make it the religion of the empire yet because he had a real problem. Over half the people were pagans and they didn't accept Christianity. So he's got a real problem when he's him. So what he does is he simply claims that for all practical purposes, he doesn't use this term, he's the Pontifacemos of religions. Remember all Roman emperors were the Pontifacemos? Well, he's the high priest of all religions. And his religion is the Christian religion. Well, people started to flock to, well, we better follow the emperor and become Christians.

But he never showed that he even understood Christianity. He wasn't baptized until right on his deathbed. The reason for that was, as emperor, he was going to have to do some pretty nasty things like kill his wife, but he can't do that if you're a Christian. So what you have to do is wait until the last minute and hope you'll die along the way and get baptized at the very end of his life. Now, you think, okay, well, he's baptized at the end of his life. I want you to think about this. The first council of Nicaea that begins to form the Catholic, the universal church, very, very important. Well, the Quatrodesivans are attacked again, by the way, as I mentioned. That is called by him, not by the bishop of Rome. There is sort of a papal power forming, but they don't call that. He calls it. He is an unbaptized, and any definition of Christianity at that time, you still want to be baptized. He's unbaptized. He calls them together. He gives them some issues, and he says, work this out! There's too much division and fighting within Christianity, and I want you to work it out. And so he presides, once again, in the role of Pontus Maximus, the high priest of Christianity, he presides over the first Nicaea and Crede. And there's Constantine. So, you have his face on his coins. You can buy these coins. They've got so many of them. I mean, the copper ones, you think, wow, they've got to be worth thousands of dollars. Now there's too many of them. If you buy one in good shape on the other side, you can see Apollo.

You can see, and other times, his coins have a Christian symbol on the back, maybe a cross or something. But here he is trying to bring his empire together. He can't claim Christianity as the only religion. Most of his soldiers follow Mithra. It was the soldiers' religion. And the reason why is, Mithra supported manly virtues, and women couldn't even be part of it. So it was a good old boys' club. You could be part of Mithras and couldn't leave the women at home. So they had the worship of Mithras. And many in his army were worshipers of Mithras. Now Constantine comes along and says, every once a week, all the soldiers have to do a sacrifice to my God for me and my sons. Now you think, oh well, all the army must have been Christians. Before Constantine ever came along, every single emperor said, the army must sacrifice to whatever God I pick for me, so that I get health and be taken care of and the gods are with me. Or they would sacrifice to the emperor himself as having some kind of divinity. So the soldiers sacrificing either to the emperor or for the emperor, they had always done that. So you could be, you could worship Mithras, you could worship Jupiter, you could be an atheist. But you'd go out when it was supposed to be, and you would do a sacrifice to the emperor because that was considered being patriotic. That's what patriotism was. That was your involvement in the state.

And so he's not shutting down paganism, and that's what his most important edict that he gave was the one that he gave on March 7, 231. All judges, city people, and craftsmen shall wrestle in the venerable day of the sun, but countrymen without hindrance attend to agriculture. And mainly because it's, you know, a lot of times you have to work on Sundays in order to grow your food. And this was hailed by Christians to show that he was the first Christian emperor by creating, allowing now Sunday worship and making it an official day of the empire. But I want you to understand something. I want you to look at this real close, because he did another one a few months later and basically did the same thing. The venerable day of the sun is a religious term about but the venerable day of the sun, the wonderful day of the sun. Sun worship was the most popular religion inside the Roman Empire. Also, God is not mentioned, the God of the Bible is not mentioned, Jesus is not mentioned, and Christians aren't mentioned. But this is used in Christianity to say, we won. No, Constantine is very smart. Now, I'm not saying he didn't see himself as a Christian, because he did. He did see himself as a Christian. But as a politician, he had to keep all these religions happy, or he was going to have more civil wars. So what he did was literally tell everybody, let's make this our day of worship. And it became the day of worship for everybody, because Christ isn't mentioned. Christianity isn't mentioned.

And that's very important to understand. What he did was he had a political solution to a problem, that I've got to keep my empire together, and Sunday worked. Sunday worked. He did not know, if you look through his life, he did not totally understand the difference between the worship of Christ and the worship of the Son. Now, once again, I don't want to make him out that he didn't see himself as a Christian. He did. But Christianity has become an amalgamation of things at this time. An amalgamation of different religions, all sort of mixed together. Constantine literally was attempting to create some order out of the Christian chaos when he started bringing bishops together. And since he was an unconverted, unbaptized emperor, he started to stamp his approval on all kinds of things that may or may not have been biblical. And he wouldn't have known the difference. He told a group of bishops one time, you might be God's bishops to his people, the church, but I am God's bishop to the empire, to the physical things of the empire. And of course, there's a message in that too, is you get your power from me. From this point on, for the next 15, well, over a thousand years, there was a constant battle in Europe between is the secular power in charge or is the papacy in charge? And back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Constantine had no problem. He was in charge. Now, he approached the bishop of Rome and honored him and said, I'll help you in any way. I'll support you. I'll support your decisions. Remember, he's not asking him to support his decisions. He's saying, I will support your decisions as the emperor. There's no doubt who the emperor was. It was Constantine.

So, he doesn't really understand the difference between things. He actually creates a major split in the Catholic Church down in North Africa. Most of the bishops down there in Diocletian's last persecution on the church, what he does is there's a group of bishops down there that says, look, any priest, any bishop that gave in to the persecution has to be removed from the ministry, period. We will not accept them because they gave in. And all the priests and bishops who had given in said, no, no, no, no. We had a moment of weakness. We are still bishops and priests. And the bishop of Rome said, yes, we should accept them. Constantine comes along and says, but the bishop of Rome couldn't enforce it. He didn't have enough power yet. Constantine comes along and says, yes, they must be reinstated. And he lost most of the churches in North Africa. And they stayed separated from Catholicism until the Muslims came in and wiped them out, which was a number of centuries later. See, this battle that's taking place, what Constantine does is he allows the empire to have control in union with this universal church. He was shocked at all the divisions in the church. He didn't persecute people in the way that we usually think he did, but he set it up to happen. He set it up to happen. Theodosius comes along and Theodosius in the 380s says, nope, it's enough. Paganism is outlawed. Judaism is outlawed. And any other form of Christianity is outlawed. And now the people who have been persecuted, or their families, because they grew up in a world where they've been in peace, they're now persecuting. They are now persecuting. Paganism is being stamped out through violence, not through conversion, but through violence. And there was still that, who is really in charge here? There's an interesting story, and I'll just tell them about Theodosius, it's not in the book, but Theodosius loses his temper. There's a riot over a soccer, not a soccer game, over a chariot race. And there's, yeah, they didn't play soccer back then. There were chariot races, and chariot races back then were very violent. But there was a riot. He gets angry. Pax Romana was under attack, Roman peace. So he sends a legion in and they kill 7,000 people. Good. Now this is the Christian emperor, killed 7,000 people. He shows up at the cathedral to go to church, and the bishop won't let him in. Ambrose. Now Ambrose is the bishop of Rome, but he's actually more powerful. He's this huge influence. He would train Augustine. And Ambrose says, you can't come in here. You've committed a sin. Well, I'm the emperor. I can go wherever I want. No, you can't. Not into this church. He says, I'll bring soldiers in and kill you. Oh, that's what you're going to do. You're going to start killing us Christians now. Oh. And the emperor backs down. So the power struggle continues between the power of the state and the power of this universal church. And everybody else is caught in the middle between it. And this would go on and on and on and on until basically 1700s, even beyond that in localities, but I mean on a larger scale.

But here's the thing. That Christianity of Theodosius...what is that Christianity?

This Hellenized Orthodoxy had formed. It had some elements of the Bible. It had a lot of elements of everything from Gnosticism to Hellenization to Roman mythology to just things that were just common of the day. And this is what it was. I'm going to end with this. I'm going to ask some questions.

In the early 500s, you do have a pope now, and he's in Rome. And there are thousands of people there, and it's a sunrise service. And they're about to go into the church, the cathedral, the basilica there, to worship. And he's there, and he's telling them about Jesus Christ. And as the sun comes up, the entire mass of people turn and worship the Son as Jesus Christ. They didn't know the difference. That's what Christianity had become. As the sun rose, they thought Jesus was the sun god, or if that was some manifestation of Jesus Christ. And the pope's up there saying, that's not Jesus Christ. That's not Jesus Christ. But, you know, then they all turn around, and they go into the basilica to worship God. That's what the church had become in the late 3, 4, or 500s.

And then the universal church clamped down to create this syncretized religion that is still affecting us today. And that's why we're going to have to live in the shadow of all this. That's why this is important. This is important because we have to get back to what was Christianity at the beginning. What was it? And if we're really going to worship God, and we're going to really follow Jesus Christ, what do you want me to be, Father, as Christ brings us to Him, and we are there before Him? What do you want me to be? We have to beg that. We have to ask that. We have to deal with our own spiritual poverty. Because the bottom line is, you and I can't create the system, we'll make it work. Only God can. Don't just create more and more churches. You have to find out from Him, and then find others who are going in that same direction. What is it I'm supposed to be? Why was I made in your image? Why am I not in your image anymore? And what does it take to restore me to being your child in your image? That's what it's all about. What do I have to do? How must I repent? I don't care what it takes. You want me to be baptized? I'll be baptized. Whatever you ask of me, I will do. Because I wish to be where you want me to be.

Because I can't live like this anymore. And I tell you something, the tepid Christianity that's forming in this country frightens me. It frightens me. A whole new Christianity is forming. It's like we're living in the third century again. A whole new Christianity. And I don't want to go there. But then I realize I don't want to be exactly where I am either. If I want to move into the future, if we want to move into the future where Jesus Christ is, we're going to have to go back and say, who was He, and what did He really teach, what does it mean to be a disciple? Not just a believer. A disciple is an imitator. And that's why I go through the history. The history is we've been headed down. Christianity has been headed down a wrong road since, well, even before the Apostles died. They were fighting it then. And they were saying, this is where we have to be. We have to be here. By the end of the first century, they were already headed down the wrong road. We have to go back to that. In our lives, on a personal level. And that's what this is all about. I didn't come here just to tell you about Tertullian. Because most of you will leave here and say, what was that guy's name, Turtle? What was his name again?

Right? It's to tell you, this is just a little piece of the story. A little piece of the story. There's a whole lot more to it. So let's go find out what we're supposed to be as the children of God. Okay, any last questions before we end up here?

Do you believe we should keep the Sabbath as outlined in the Mosaic law? Do I believe that we should keep the Sabbath and keep the Mosaic law? Is that what the question was? Just the Sabbath, like on the seventh day.

As you go through this journey, we all go through things we discover, things we're led to, things we believe. I am a Sabbatarian, but it's not because I'm somehow trying to achieve salvation through Mosaic law. I'm a Sabbatarian because I believe that Apostle Paul, when he says that God made all things through Jesus Christ. So the Creator was there with Jesus Christ. And he's the same yesterday, today, and forever. He created the Sabbath. It's in Genesis. It's part of the Ten Commandments, which I believe are important core teachings of the Bible. And I do know that Jesus kept the Sabbath. And throughout the New Testament, the Scriptures that are used to say that they didn't keep the Sabbath are pretty weak. So I am a Sabbatarian. I do it, though, once again, I don't earn salvation from it. I do it because I believe God made that for me, and he made it a special time between me and him. And it's an important time to me. So that's why I do it. Does that answer your question? Okay, good. Yeah. I'm sorry. Thank you. You pointed out that we go through Jesus Christ directly to the Father, Jesus Christ being our High Priest. And you mentioned that in the Roman Church, they used, well, they prayed to martyrs and to saints. When did the custom come up that they also used priests, like in the Catholic Church? Because obviously the apostles didn't consider themselves priests. But when did the Catholic Church or the Roman Church, or when did that start that they established a priesthood? Oh, you mean for like confession and those kind of things? Yes. I'm so glad people don't confess to me. They confess to God. I don't want to know you. I get enough sins to deal with myself. So when did the confession and the priests being an intercessor? That's a long time. I don't know exactly when. It really becomes central in the, sometime in the Middle Ages. But you can go back and see the development already early on. But a lot of these things took a long time to actually develop, where they developed the one part of the empire and not in another. Of course, then the Roman Empire is shattered by the invasions, and Christianity goes in a different direction because of the shattering of Christianity by the invasion of the different peoples that came in. So it's just a long process. So I don't know if there's an exact date. We do know you get in the mid part of the Middle Ages, it's there. Yes?

This one is just to answer him on that question. From what I know, it was based on since some of them believed that Peter was their first Pope, in quotation, when there's a verse in the New Testament when he talks, when Jesus was telling Peter that the sins that you forgave will be forgiven, like, will be forgiven, and those that you don't... Oh, I can't remember exactly how it goes. Like, what is the sense... whatever you bind on earth will be binded in heaven and vice versa. They based it on that one, so they believe the Pope has the same power, which was also given to the priest. What if you confess to them, they can forgive you of your sins. So there's a lot of it that goes into it, where, like, for example, like, the Pope decided that abortion wasn't forgivable. And then all of a sudden now it's forgivable. So they based it on, like, what Jesus told Peter. Yeah, that became... it took a long time for that to develop into a priesthood rite, but it did. Over time, that very Scripture is used. It just took time. We tend to think of this monolithic thing that just grew up, called the universal church, and that's not how it happened. It happened in bits and pieces and sometimes through violence and all kinds of things. Anything else? Well, I just want to say I appreciate so much how attentive you are. This was an attentive group, and he had great questions. There's a couple I didn't answer because they were just beyond the scope of this. And I just appreciate that, the attentiveness, the interaction. We shared some ideas. We had some questions. We had times where I was talking, and we may disagree on points, but we were able to peacefully discuss it. That's the important thing. We were able to peacefully discuss it as we worked through. We're all trying to get here. We're trying to get back to that authentic Christianity. Thank you very much. I appreciate being here and letting me come to your community. And my wife's here, too. She's actually much nicer than me. So thank you very much. Now, we are going to sing another hymn, and Mr. Freeman-Kunz is going to come up and lead us in that song.