Continued...
Early Church in the City of Rome
The Papal Church is a magnificently rich, splendidly housed political and ecclesiastical power headquartered in Rome. It stands in stark contrast to what started there in the first century with some pastors ministering to small congregations. The differences are graphic. The early home churches under their pastors looked to the authority of the Word as received in the gospel accounts of the life of the Lord and the writings of the Apostles, together with the Old Testament. These pastors and churches had a true and living faith in God’s grace through the Gospel. From the letter of Paul to the Romans one sees that the Gospel was faithfully treasured in those early Roman congregations. At the beginning of his letter, the Apostle commends the believers at Rome for their faith, “
First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world. For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son.”[xiv] Such approvals are infrequent with the Apostle Paul. The faith of the churches of Rome continued to be well known and faithfully lived for two hundred fifty years more under very adverse situations, including extreme persecutions, the most famous of which took place under Emperor Nero in the 64 A.D. Totally unimaginable for these early believers in Rome would be the present concept of “the most holy Roman Pontiff.” Unthinkable likewise would be the belief that rituals could confer the grace of the Holy Spirit and that Mary, the mother of the Lord, could be addressed in prayer as “the All Holy One.”[xv] In the fellowship of believers, a top heavy hierarchical system, from layperson to priest, from to priest to bishop, from bishop to cardinal and cardinal to pope would have been totally abhorrent, as from the world and not from Christ who said,“
One is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.”[xvi]The persecution of Christians of which we mentioned earlier ended in 313 A.D. In that year the emperors Constantine in the West and Licinius in the East proclaimed the Edict of Milan.This decree established the policy of religious freedom for both paganism and Christianity. Four vice-prefects governed the Roman Empire under Constantine. Accordingly, under his authority the Christian world was to be governed from four great cities, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Rome. Over each city there was set a Patriarch, who governed all the elders of his domain. (This was later to be a called a diocese.) The mind of and purpose of Constantine was that the Christian churches were to be organized in a fashion similar to the government of the Empire.The respect enjoyed by the various Christian elders was usually in proportion to the status of the city in which they resided. Since Rome was the most powerful and prestigious city in the world at the time, it stood to unbiblical reason that the most prominent and influential bishop should be the Bishop of Rome. Gradually the honor and respect given to the Bishop of Rome grew, and these bishops in turn desired this adulation from bishops of other cities. The church was in such decline that with the passing of third and fourth centuries the bishops of Rome began to demand recognition for the exalted position they now considered their possession.
Gradual Rise of Papal Rome
In the fourth and fifth centuries as the true Gospel was watered down, its place was taken by ritualism and ceremony. The true worship of God and the inner conviction of the Holy Spirit gave way to formal rites and idolatry. Pagan practices were also introduced, white washed with an external form of Christianity. From the beginning, the Gospel produced an internal unity among the believers, but with the substitution of ritualism for the Gospel came the insistence on an external, visible unity for the church. The clergy-laity division of the church became the accepted base. This further devolved into a hierarchy of the ruling clergy. By the end of the fifth century, a sacrificing priesthood in which the priest presumed to mediate between God and men had replaced the early ministers of the Gospel who had taught the Scripture. The Church was no more the fellowship of believers under Christ Jesus, united by the Gospel, true worship, and indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but rather an institution dominated by a hierarchy of bishops and elders.[xvii] Simultaneously, from early to mid-fifth century, the city of Rome was beset first by Alaric the Goth, who captured it in 410 but did not stay to rule; Attila the Hun, who in 452 was persuaded by Leo, the then Bishop of Rome (440-461), to stop his advance and leave Italy altogether; and finally Genseric, leader of the Vandals, who captured the city, but was persuaded by Leo to spare the lives of Romans.[xviii] Leo’s fame as Rome’s protector grew enormously as a result. The position of Imperial Roman emperor by now had become clearly vacant. A vacuum had been established because the Imperial leadership had left Rome and none of the barbaric leaders had tried to set themselves up in that position. Leo, as the Bishop of Rome, saw the opportunity that lay in front of him, “Leo began to feel that the time had come to materialize the claims of Augustine regarding the temporal millennial kingdom of Christ, and with his avowed vested powers of loosing and binding openly to declare his right to the vacant throne as the fitting seat of Christ’s universal kingdom. In this way the Roman church pushed its way into the place of the Western empire, of which it is ‘the actual continuation.’ Thus, the empire did not perish; it only changed its form. The Pope became Caesar’s successor. This was a long stride forward.”[xix]
Bishop of Rome Becomes the Pope
The removal of the seat of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople in 330 A.D. marvelously enhanced the Bishop of Rome’s power. The ecclesiastical contest which had been going on for some time between Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Rome as to which was the greatest was now for most part confined to the dioceses of Rome and the new contender, Constantinople. The barbarian invasions of the Western Roman Empire helped immeasurably to build the whole structure of papal Rome. The ten barbarian kingdoms that were a serious threat were the Alamanni, Franks, Visigoths, Burgundians, Suevi, Anglo-Saxons, Lombards, Heruli, Vandals, and the Ostrogoths.[xx] The Emperor of Rome now lived in Constantinople; yet his armies uprooted and destroyed the Vandals and the Heruli, while simultaneously contending with the Ostrogoths, who continued their siege of Rome.Clovis, King of the Franks, was the first of the barbarian princes to accept the faith proposed by the Church of Rome. In fulfillment of a vow that he had made on the battlefield when he defeated the Allemanni, Clovis was baptized in 496 A. D. in the Cathedral of Rheims. The Bishop of Rome gave him the title of “the eldest son of the Church.” In the sixth century, the Burgundians of Southern Gaul, the Visigoths of Spain, the Suevi of Portugal, and the Anglo-Saxons of Britain all followed suit in joining themselves to the religion of the Bishop of Rome. These barbaric kings and their peoples accepted easily the faith of Rome, which because it lacked the Gospel, was not very different in form and substance from their own pagan worship. All of these conversions advanced the power of the Roman Bishop. Then, too, these barbaric nations more easily accepted the religion of Rome because this city had traditionally been the seat of authority of the Caesars as masters of the world. The bishops of Rome now played their role as rightful heirs to the Caesars. The city that had been the seat of power for the Empire became the place for the Bishop to exercise his authority. More and more nations accepted his position. Emperor Justinian I (527-565) was the one, more than anyone else, to establish the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. He did it in a formal and legal manner by bringing purely ecclesiastical edicts and regulations under the control of civil law. Justinian’s decree did not create the office of the Pope but rather set the legal foundation for advancement in ruling power by the bishops of Rome. To allay the demise of the Imperial Empire, ecclesiastical unity was to be imposed by coercion if necessary, not the first time nor yet the last that religion would be used to buttress political positions. As proclaimed head of the Empire’s church, the job fell to the Bishop of Rome. The title of “Pope” began to fit the one who sat as “Bishop of Rome,” who now was free to use the civil sword of coercion given him by Justinian’s decree. Formerly, ecclesiastical unity came by the moral persuasion of the Gospel and the Scripture alone to save individuals who then would be salt and light to their civil societies. But such unbiblical ideas and methods as the Bishops of Rome had so willingly sought after and received could hardly produce something other than worldly corruption. It is no surprise then that soon the Bishop of Rome desired to reign like a king with worldly pomp and worldly power. The very thing that the Lord had warned against was now transpiring. “
And he said unto them, the kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them…but ye shall not be so.”[xxi]
The Empire continued to crumble. The Emperor Phocas reigned in Constantinople from 602 to 610 A.D. Boniface III, who became pope in 607, had known him previously, for Boniface had been a legate to the Emperor Phocas before becoming pope. Boniface showed great skill in obtaining further official recognition from the Emperor. Pope Boniface III shrewdly took hold of two measures to secure papal hegemony in the ecclesiastical domain of the failing empire. First, he made excellent use of the conjecture that Peter was the First Bishop in Rome.[xxii] Second, his acquisition of the title of “Universal Bishop,” granted to him by Emperor Phocas, accorded him dominion and power to reign in ecclesiastical supremacy from the central city of Rome to the utmost reaches of the Empire. This twofold stratagem has continued throughout history.
Fraudulent Documents and the Rise of the Papacy as a Temporal Power
It was not until the middle of the eighth century that the outlandish claim was made that the Emperor Constantine had transferred his power, authority, and palace to the Bishop of Rome. The fraudulent “Donation of Constantine” was purported to be the legal document in which the Emperor Constantine bestowed on Sylvester, the Bishop of Rome (314-335), much of his property and invested him with great spiritual power. The enormity and grandeur of the bequest allegedly given by Constantine to Sylvester is seen in the spurious document. It was also in the eighth century that civil power came within the grasp of the Papacy. The kings of Lombardy, once barbarian and now believers in the Arian heresy, were intent on the conquest of all Italy, threatening even Rome itself. At the same time, the Muslims had overrun Africa, conquered some of Spain, and were also endangering Rome. pope Stephen II looked to France for help. He called on Pepin the Short. Pepin, the son of Charles Martel (Charles the Hammer) and the father of Charlemagne, was the chief steward of the king’s lands and army. Pepin had just usurped the throne from Childeric and needed approval for his new position. He therefore crossed the Alps with an army and was able to defeat the Lombards. The conquered towns he conceded to the Pope for his possession. Thus in 755 A.D. Pepin the Short made material the temporal power of the Popes, and achieved papal approval for himself.
Charlemagne, Pepin’s son, continued to strengthen the temporal power of the Pope. The Lombards were again about to besiege Rome. The Pope again looked to France for help and this time to Charlemagne, who answered the call and defeated the Lombards. He confirmed and enlarged cities and lands given by his father, Pepin, to the Church of Rome. Later, on Christmas Eve 800, Charlemagne, as master of nearly all the Romano-Germanic nations, knelt before pope Leo III. The Pope placed on his head the crown of the Western Empire. This act exhibited the Pope’s growing power. In 538 the Emperor Justinian had given the Bishop of Rome the title of Pontifex Maximus. Two hundred sixty-two years later, it was the Pope who was crowning an emperor.
A Summary of the Foundations of the Early Church
The world was floundering on its foundations when the Gospel of Christ was first preached. The national religions had not changed the heart and lives of mankind. People were destitute of spirit and of life. Fallacies and superstitions abounded to no avail. The Roman Empire a vast empire brought in universality and some political unity, but no light and hope. Then the Christ Jesus came among men to save that which was lost and to give everlasting life. This is the greatest event the history of the world. The Old Testament Scriptures predicted it, Gospel of the New Testament proclaimed it. The Lord’s followers starting at Jerusalem, proclaimed Him as the author of everlasting life. From the midst of a people who despised all nations, came forth a mercy that invited and embraced all men. Greeks and Romans and men and women from across the known world believed on the Lord Jesus Christ and came into new life in Him to the glory of His name. Peoples of Africa, Egypt, Gaul, Germany, Ireland Britain, and India had their eyes open to the Gospel by the conviction of the Holy Spirit by means of the Lord’s word. The Gospel proclaimed that salvation comes from Him alone by his grace as Lord.“
God hath given to us eternal life.” The Church began as a community of brothers and sisters and the Lord guided by a few of the brethren. The Gospels of the Lord Jesus Christ and the written letters of the Apostles settled the great questions of doctrine. There was nothing arrogant or high and mighty as the apostles addressed the churches. The unity in the Lord is seen when in the many expressions that they used for example and the Acts of the Apostles it was written, “
The apostles and elders and brethren send greetings unto the brethren.” We rejoice before the Lord God that the authentic Church had the true Gospel of God’s grace. Right across Europe and even Asia churches were established. Faith, consistent with the Scriptures is the means by which the believer enters into the salvation purchased the faithfulness and death of Christ Jesus. Therefore we rejoice that the Lord God is almighty and that there is good news for all who are “
dead in trespasses and sins.” In the light of His Word we know, “
the gospel of Christ…is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.”[xxiii]By nature we are all children of wrath, and by practice we are rebels against the Lord God and His Word. The perfect and just law of God condemned us all and the Lord God is not responsible to rescue any of us from His just wrath. Despite our sin nature and personal sin, the Lord God has given His beloved Son for all true believers. God is the All Holy One. His holiness is the distinguishing factor in all His essential characteristics. This is the reason why we need to be in right standing before the one and only All Holy God on the terms He prescribes. Turn to God in faith alone for the salvation that He alone gives, by the conviction of the Holy Spirit, based on Christ’s death and resurrection, and believe on Him alone, “
to the praise of the glory of his grace.”[xxiv] The understanding of the Gospel causes us to proclaim in loving gratitude, “
not unto us, o Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy, and for thy truth’s sake.”[xxv]
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