Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

As the decades passed between 325 and 381, when the second general council of the church met, leaders in the Arian debate slowly clarified their use of person. Three so-called Cappadocian Fathers—Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil the Great—led in this achievement. The Cappadocians used the social analogy, but they saw that the distinctions between the three divine persons were solely in their inner divine relations. There are not three gods. God is one divine Being in three “persons.”

Of course, Augustine made it clear that this was only an analogy; he was far too profound a thinker to suppose that God was a glorified man sitting in heaven. We are finite human beings seeking to speak faithfully about the mystery that is God.

Men have given a thousand answers to Jesus’ question. Some have said, “He is an unusual Jewish rabbi preaching a kingdom of love.” Others answer, “No, he is a social revolutionary whose primary purpose is the overthrow of Rome’s tyrannical rule.” Still others claim, “He is a misguided dreamer who looked for God to step into history and establish justice on the earth.”

We call this area of theology Christology because it raises the question, “Who was Jesus Christ?”

The very existence of this question in the life of the church is profoundly significant. So far as I know, Islam has no Mohammedology and Buddhism has no Buddhology. The debate in the history of Christianity is a monument to the uniqueness of the One Christians call the Son of God.

The early, leading voice at Alexandria was Origen, who, in speaking of Jesus Christ, coined the term God-man.

The debate over the meaning of the Event raged for generations in part because political influence was at stake. After Christianity emerged as the official religion of the empire under Theodosius, the structure of the church centered upon a few powerful figures. The bishops in the chief towns of the imperial provinces came to be called archbishops. The term for the official center of a bishop’s jurisdiction and authority is see. Those bishops in the premier cities of the empire—Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch—were considered highest of all and were called patriarchs. Throughout the fourth and fifth centuries these four powerful patriarchs were attempting to extend the prestige and power of their spiritual offices.

In this climate the Christological debate stretched over a century and was the primary passion in the churches of the East. Between 350 and 450 heresies arose, each of them forcing the churches to greater clarity in their answer to the question, “Who is Jesus Christ?

Like his instructor, Nestorius rejected a popular designation of Mary as the “God-bearer, Mother of God.

“one of the most repulsive contests in church history.”

Some recent liberal understandings of Christ are labeled as Nestorian. They reason, if Nestorius believed that only the will power of the human man Jesus held him in a moral and volitional union with divine Word, then the difference between Christians and Christ himself is one of degree. Jesus was more attentive and submissive to God than we are. Jesus was not divine but only a loftier picture of how close a person can be to God; Jesus is a human model but not a divine savior.

Sadly, some evangelical believers fall sway to the same failure in doctrine; they seek Jesus as a role model for self-help and ignore the life-giving transformation offered by Emmanuel: God with us.

We all with one voice confess our Lord Jesus Christ one and the same Son, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, . . . acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, or without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way abolished because of the union, but rather the characteristic property of each nature being preserved, and coming together to form one person.

So against Arius the church affirmed that Jesus was truly God, and against Apollinaris that he was truly man. Against Eutyches it confessed that Jesus’ deity and humanity were not changed into something else, and against Nestorius that Jesus was not divided but was one person.

From that date forward most Christians in Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy looked to Chalcedon for the foundation of the doctrine of salvation, a unique God-man, Jesus Christ.

Numbers of Christians in the Near East, however, rejected the work of Chalcedon. They held that instead of the divine and human natures joining to form one person in Jesus, he possessed but one nature in which divine life and human were indistinguishable. This monophysite (one nature) teaching was an important factor contributing to the breaking away of the Monophysite Churches from the rest of Eastern Orthodoxy. Coupled with the decline of the Byzantine power in the outlying areas of the Eastern Empire, monophysite doctrine led to the Coptic Church, the largest Christia...

Obviously Chalcedon did not solve the problem of how deity can unite with humanity in a single person. At the human level the problem resists explanation. The Bible regards the Event as absolutely unique. The merit of the Chalcedonian statement lies in the boundaries it established. In effect, it erected a fence and said, “Within this lies the mystery of the God-man.” Fifteen hundred years after ...

Basil, who died in 379, was especially important as the designer of the Rule of Discipline under which the monasticism of Greek Orthodoxy is organized to this day.

“Benedict was wise enough to know that a sensible man, even if given absolute authority in theory,” should not refuse the advice of others in matters of great importance.

Donatism was almost a hundred years old. The movement stood for a holy church, for church discipline, and for the unflinching resistance of unworthy bishops. The Catholics, said the Donatists, had surrendered all of these by ordaining immoral priests and bishops.

Augustine rejected the Donatist’s view of a pure church. Until the day of judgment, he said, the church must be a mixed multitude. Both good and bad people are in it. To support this idea he appealed to Jesus’ parable of the wheat and tares (Matt. 13:24–30), overlooking the fact that Jesus was not speaking of the church but of the whole world.

His defense of the Catholic Church in the Donatist controversy also led Augustine to support the use of force in the suppression of the rivals. Initially he was strongly opposed to coercion. But step by step he came to another view. In the face of Donatist resistance to the government’s mounting pressure, he came to accept the use of force in a religious issue. What looks like harsh action, he said, may bring the offender to recognize its justice. Had not the Lord himself in the parable said, “Compel people to come in” (Luke 14:23)? Thus Augustine’s prestige was made available for those in later ages who justified the ruthless acts of the Inquisition against Christian dissenters.

Why? What did Pelagius teach to arouse Augustine’s vigorous opposition? The monk denied that human sin is inherited from Adam. Man, he said, is free to act righteously or sinfully. Moreover, death is not a consequence of Adam’s disobedience. Adam, indeed, introduced sin into the world, but only by his corrupting example. There is no direct connection between his sin and the moral condition of mankind. Almost all the human race has sinned; but it is possible not to sin, and some people have in fact lived without sin. God predestinates no one, except in the sense that he foresees who will believe and who will reject his gracious influences. His forgiveness comes to all who exercise “faith alone”; but, once forgiven, man has power of himself to live pleasing to God. Thus Pelagius found no real need for the special enabling power of the Holy Spirit. His idea of the Christian life was practically the Stoic conception of ascetic self-control.

In Augustine’s view, Adam’s sin had enormous consequences. His power to do right was gone. In a word, he died—spiritually, and soon physically. But he was not alone in his ruin. Augustine taught that the whole human race was “in Adam” and shared his fall. Mankind became a “mass of corruption,” incapable of any good (saving) act. Every individual, from earliest infancy to old age, deserves nothing but damnation. Since man of himself can do nothing good, all power to do good must be the free gift of God, that is, grace. Out of the mass of the fallen race, God chooses some to receive this grace, which comes to them from the work of Christ, and ordinarily through the church and especially through its sacraments. All who receive baptism receive regenerating grace, which gives man back his freedom to serve God, though that service is imperfect even at best, and is maintained only by the constant gift of more grace.

The Protestant Reformers would depend greatly upon Augustine’s view that mankind is incapacitated by sin’s grip and the notion that only God’s grace could rehabilitate man. These teachings fit well with Augustine’s teaching of predestination, which the Reformers expanded. They disregarded how Augustine tied salvation and grace to the sacraments of the church.

Pelagius’s teaching was condemned by the great council of Ephesus in 431. He had failed to grasp sin’s great distorting effect and how turning toward God without his grace was impossible. Yet over the next century the church expressed independence from Augustine’s ideas of irresistible grace and predestination. Some critics argued that Augustine had broken the longstanding practice of embracing human freedom. Vincent of Lerins complained of this innovation when he wrote that a Christian should believe what has been believed “always, everywhere, and by all.

Man to man, the contest seemed unequal. On the one side, the law of conquest; on the other, the law of faith. On the one side, triumph over the wounded, the ravaged, the dying; on the other, submission to the divine mysteries of the church. A foreign king and a ruling pope.

The papacy is a highly controversial subject. No other institution has been so loved and so hated. Some Christians have revered the pope as the “Vicar of Christ”; others have denounced him as the “Anti-Christ.”

As the church grew it adopted, quite naturally, the structure of the empire. This meant that the provincial town of the empire became the episcopal town of the church. Above the provinces in the empire was the metropolis, so bishops in these larger cities soon supervised the bishops in the provinces of that area. Finally, the empire was divided into several major regions, so within the church people came to think of the church at Rome exercising authority in Italy, Carthage in North Africa, Alexandria in Egypt, Antioch in Syria, and so on.

As the primacy of the Apostolic See is based on the title of the blessed Peter, prince of the episcopal dignity, on the dignity of the city of Rome, and on the decision of the Holy Synod, no illicit steps may be taken against this See to usurp its authority. For the only way to safeguard peace among the churches everywhere is to acknowledge its leadership universally.

ONE SUMMER AFTERNOON IN the year 1054, as a service was about to begin in the spacious Church of Holy Wisdom at Constantinople, Cardinal Humbert and two other representatives (legates) of Pope Leo IX entered the building and made their way up to the sanctuary. They had not come to pray. They placed a Bull (an official papal document) of Excommunication upon the altar and marched out once more. As he passed through the western door, the cardinal shook the dust from his feet with the words, “Let God look and judge.” A deacon ran after him in great distress and begged him to take back the Bull. Humbert refused, and it was dropped in the street. For centuries Christians have considered this incident the beginning of the great division between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism. Its counterpart in the sixteenth century was Martin Luther’s tacking the 95 Theses on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, precipitating the schism between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. This confrontation in Constantinople came only after a long and complicated process.

Of the three major divisions in Christianity today—Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism—the least known in the West is Eastern Orthodoxy. Most Christians in Europe and North America, if they think of Orthodox Christians at all, think of Orthodoxy as a kind of Roman Catholicism without the pope. Such an uninformed response is understandable. Christians in the West, both Protestant and Catholic, generally start by asking the same questions: How is a person saved? What is the church? Where does religious authority lie? Protestant and Catholic simply disagree about the answers. In Orthodoxy, however, it is not merely the answers that are different. The questions themselves are not the same. Orthodoxy reflects a distinctive history and a unique culture.

What is Eastern Orthodoxy? Today it is about fifteen distinct churches, mostly in Eastern Europe, bound together by a common faith and a common history. The best starting point for understanding Orthodoxy, however, is probably not its basic doctrines but its holy images called icons. Most westerners can recall those characteristic pictures of the saints with the golden nimbuses encircling their heads. These are basic to understanding Orthodoxy. The Orthodox believer who enters his church to attend services, for example, goes first to the iconostasis, the wall of paintings that separates the sanctuary from the nave. There he kisses the icons before taking his place in the congregation. Or a guest who enters an Orthodox home finds an icon hanging in the eastern corner of the living room and bedroom. If he is himself an Orthodox believer he will, upon entering a room, greet the icons first by crossing himself and bowing. Only then will he greet his host.

Protestant voices have compared theosis to the union that Christ establishes with believers.

The symbol that East and West were headed in two diverging directions came in 395 when Emperor Theodosius the Great, on his deathbed, divided the empire between his two sons. Honorious received the West and Arcadius the East. Theoretically the empire continued to be one state with two emperors, but in practice, from that point on, the Eastern and Western roads inevitably diverged.

On the surface this conflict, which raged for over a century, was a disagreement over the use of icons. But at a deeper level it was a disagreement over which things were sufficiently sacred or holy to deserve worship. Some said the Christian clergy are set apart by ordination; hence, they are holy. Church buildings are set apart by dedication; thus they are holy. The martyrs and heroes of the faith are set apart by their deeds, and they are normally called saints. Do they not deserve the same reverence as the clergy?

Early in the eighth century, however, Emperor Leo III (717–41) launched an attack on the use of icons. Perhaps he was motivated by a sense of the empire’s wrongdoing. Christianity taught that God punished the children of Israel because of their idolatry. Perhaps the humiliating defeats and losses of the previous century, as well as the calamitous earthquake early in Leo’s reign, were intended to bring “God’s new chosen people” to their senses. In any case, before the end of the seventh century, feeling against the icons developed and spread.

John Mansour (about 730–60), in a monastery far away in Arab-controlled Palestine, formulated the ideas that were eventually used to justify religious icons. Mansour, better known as John of Damascus (his birthplace), was the greatest theologian of the eighth century. He is recognized today by the Orthodox churches as the last of the great teachers of the early church, the so-called Fathers. John explained that an image was never of the same substance as its original, but merely imitated it. An icon’s only significance is as a copy and reminder of the original. His argument is based on Plato’s notion that everything we sense in this world is really an imitation of the eternal, original “form,” which can be known only by the soul in the nonmaterial world. To deny, as the iconoclasts did, that any true icon could depict Christ, was, in effect, to deny the possibility of the Incarnation. Although it was wrong to worship an icon, the presence of an icon of Christ could instruct and assist the believer in the worship of the true Christ. Icons should be honored and venerated in much the same way as the Bible, or the symbol of the Cross.

Orthodox churches today still celebrate the first Sunday in Lent each year as the Feast of Orthodoxy, to commemorate the triumph of icons.

Over the years Russia made the aesthetic glories of Orthodox Christianity her own. Gradually Moscow came to see herself as the leader of the Orthodox world. A theory developed that there had been one Rome, in Italy, that had fallen to the barbarians and to the Roman Catholic heresy. There had been a second Rome: Constantinople. And when that fell to the Turks, there was a third Rome: Moscow. The emperor took his title from the first Rome—Tzar is the same word as Caesar—just as he had taken his religion from the second. Even in recent decades the Kremlin has stood as a reminder of the rich and inspiring past. The onion domes of Orthodoxy’s former glory remain and point toward heaven.

The saints, with their particular assignments, may well have meant more to the people than Christ himself. St. Anthony took care of pigs, St. Gaul looked after hens, St. Apollonia, whose jaw had been broken in the persecution, cured the toothache, St. Genevieve cured fever, and St. Blaise was responsible for sore throats. For almost every human need these tenuously converted Germans could find a saint.

Europe owes more to the Christian faith than most people realize. When the barbarians destroyed the Roman Empire in the West, it was the Christian church that put together a new order called Europe. The church took the lead in rule by law, the pursuit of knowledge, and the expressions of culture. The underlying concept was Christendom, which united empire and church. It began under Charlemagne in the eighth century, but the popes slowly assumed more and more power until Innocent III (1198–1216) taught Europe to think of the popes as world rulers. Later centuries, however, saw the popes corrupted by power, and increasingly militant reformers cry out for change.

Rome was a symbol of the continent. What we now call Europe arose like a phoenix from the blazing ruins of a devastated empire. And more than any other force, it was Christianity that brought life and order out of the chaos.

The meritorious works, without which penance is not complete, are deeds involving sacrifice or suffering, such as almsgiving, ascetic practices, and prayers at all hours of the day. The greater our sins the more we must do to make up for them, and the more careful we must be to avoid them in the future. Whether we have done enough to atone for them we cannot know until after death. Fortunately, sinners have the help of the saints. The belief in the intercession of the saints and the custom of appealing to them to use their influence with Christ did not originate with Gregory; both the belief and the custom were much older than he. But he emphasized them and made them central for Christian piety. “Behold,” he wrote, “the severe judge Jesus is about to come; the terror of that mighty council of angels and archangels is at hand. In that assembly our case will be tried and yet we are not seeking patrons who will then come to our defense. Our holy martyrs are ready to be your advocates; they desire to be asked, indeed if I may say so, they entreat that they may be entreated. Seek them as helpers of your prayer; turn to them that they may protect you in your guilt.” Another aid to devotion was the holy relics. Gregory encouraged the collection and veneration of holy remains of the saints and martyrs: locks of hair, fingernails, toes, pieces of clothing. Gregory taught—and most of his contemporaries believed—that these items possessed great powers, including that of self-defense....

Thirty days later, I began to feel strong compassion for the deceased Justus. As I considered with deep anguish the penalty he was enduring, I thought of a way to relieve him of his suffering. With this in mind, I called Pretiosus, the prior, and said to him sadly, “Justus has now been suffering the torments of fire for a long time and we must show him our charity by helping as much as we can to gain his release. Beginning today, offer the holy Sacrifice for his soul for thirty consecutive days. Not one of these days is to pass without a Mass being celebrated for his release.” The prior obediently accepted the instructions and left. Days passed, and being busy with other affairs, I lost count of them. Then, one night, Justus appeared to his brother Copiosus, who asked him at once why he came and how he was. “Up to this moment I was in misery,” he said, “but now I am well, because this morning I was admitted to communion.”

did not resolve the quarrel, nor do contemporary accounts attach much significance to the incident—public penance was not uncommon in those days even for kings. Yet the pope had made progress toward freeing the church from interference by laymen and toward increasing the power and prestige of the papacy. The problem of lay investiture was settled in 1122 by the compromise known as the Concordat of Worms. The church maintained the right to elect the holder of an ecclesiastical office, but only in the presence of the emperor or his representative.

Many of Gregory’s claims now appear intolerable. Yet we must agree that Gregory and his powerful successors stood for two principles that to the Christian are incontestable: (1) In the loyalties of men, the spiritual has the primacy over the secular; and (2) the families of men can find true unity only in Christ and in obedience to the law of God. Medieval society was far from perfect. But during the Middle Ages, Europe became conscious of itself as a unity, far beyond the uncertain limits of the Holy Roman Empire; and the church attained a level of power and influence over the lives of men, for the most part used helpfully, such as it has never known since that time.

Thus the pope’s first weapon in bringing peasants and princes to their knees was the threat of excommunication. He could pronounce their anathema and they would be “set apart” from the church, deprived of the grace essential for salvation. After some bishop read the solemn sentence of excommunication, a bell rang as for a funeral, a book was closed, and a candle was extinguished, all to symbolize the cutting off of the guilty man. If he entered a church during mass he was expelled or the mass was halted.

While under excommunication, persons could not act as judge, juror, witness, or attorney. They could not be guardians, executors, or parties to contract. After death they received no Christian burial, and if, by chance, they were buried in consecrated ground, the church had their bodies disinterred and destroyed.