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the emperors demanded that the popes support their theological positions.
During all this time, and until Gregory III (731–741), the election of a pope had to be confirmed by the authorities in Constantinople before the pope could be consecrated as bishop of Rome.
The protests of the government at Constantinople need not be heeded, and the popes became rulers of a vast portion of Italy.
From that point, the alliance between the Franks and the popes grew closer, until Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor of the West on Christmas Day, A.D. 800.
Then something unexpected happened. Out of
Arabia, a forgotten corner of the world that had been generally ignored by both the Roman and the Persian empires, a tidal wave of conquest arose that threatened to engulf the world. In a few years, the Persian Empire had vanished, and many of the ancient Roman territories were in Arab hands.
The driving force behind this human avalanch...
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His message, which he claimed had been revealed to him by Gabriel, was that of a single God, both just and merciful, who rules all things and requires obedience from all.
Mohammed claimed that he was not preaching a new religion, but simply the culmination of what God had revealed in the Hebrew prophets and in Jesus, who was a great prophet, although not divine as Christians claimed.
The date of that flight, A.D.
622, is the beginning of the Moslem era, from which years are counted.
By his death in 632, a goodly part of Arabia was in Moslem hands.
After that date, with minor setbacks, the Moslems swept through what had been one of the most powerful kingdoms on earth.
In 732, they were finally defeated by Charles Martel at the battle of Tours, which marked the end of the first wave of Moslem expansion.
These invasions had enormous significance for Christianity. For one thing, many of the ancient centers of Christianity—Jerusalem, Antioch, Damascus, Alexandria, and Carthage—were now under Moslem rule.
But above all, the entire geographic configuration of Christianity changed. Until then, Christianity had developed along the Mediterranean basin. Now, it would find its center along an axis that ran from north to south, including the British Isles, the Frankish kingdom, and Italy.
Therefore it is no coincidence that a few years after the Arab conquests, in A.D. 800, the pope felt inclined to crown Charlemagne emperor of the West, and both he and Charlemagne were ready to ignore the protests that came from Constantinople.
Historians, however, can now see that by the early Middle Ages the two branches of the church were drifting apart, and that the final schism, which took place in 1054, was long in the making.
In the West, the demise of the Empire created a vacuum that the church filled, and thus ecclesiastical leaders—particularly the pope—also came to wield political power.
For these reasons, theological controversy became one of the hallmarks of eastern Christianity during the early Middle Ages.
The issues at stake were often central to the Gospel.
Finally, out of these debates the first permanent schisms developed within Christianity, giving rise to separate churches that still exist.
Foremost among these was the question of how divinity and humanity are joined in Jesus Christ. This is the fundamental Christological question.
The question then was, how can the immutable, eternal God be joined to a mutable, historical man?
The Alexandrines, like Clement and Origen
centuries earlier, stressed the significance of Jesus as the teacher of divine truth. In order to be this, the Savior had to be a ful...
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Both sides agreed that Jesus was both divine and human. The question was how to understand that union.
If any believe in Jesus Christ as a human being
without human reason, they are the ones devoid of all reason, and unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not taken up he has not saved. He saved that which he joined to his divinity. If only half of Adam had fallen, then it would be possible for Christ to take up and save only half. But if the entire human nature fell, all of it must be united to the Word in order to be saved as a
