Excuse a tad of snarkiness, but what I mean to say is, that sure was a distorted overview of a couple thousand years' worth of the pilgrimage of Christ's Church on earth.
This paragraph encapsulates the difficulty as well as any:
"In the case of the Roman Empire, the clergy accepted Constantine as the first representative of a Christian theocracy. Founded as a spiritual entity, but forced to care for temporal needs, it merged into a single divine institution with the Roman state."
"The clergy" never accepted Constantine as anything of the sort. Constantine himself was not even a professed Christian until his deathbed, when he chose at last to be baptized, not by a bishop who held the Catholic Faith, but by an Arian bishop. And the Church certainly did not subsequently merge into a "single divine institution with the Roman state."
By the late 400's, the invading barbarians took over temporal power and there was no Roman state: which, if your account were correct, would have meant the end of the Catholic Church, but it was not so. The Church continued doing what she has always done by divine mandate: teaching, governing, sanctifying, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The Eastern Church, so often totally neglected in our slapdash histories of the West, followed a somewhat different course, but even in the Byzantine symphonia of spiritual and temporal power, there was never this merger you describe.
I am not writing this to deny that there were periods when Catholic prelates thought, lived, and ruled like secular princes, nor that worldly leaders often turned their backs on a neglected flock. But we were never left orphans. The persistence of the Church over 2,000 years, holy, Christ-honoring, and growing past the sprawling remains of every other earthly institution, must certainly suggest the activity of Divine Providence to those who are paying attention.
There is a lot of difference between Christianity as spiritual faith and as constructed into a religion where an acquiescent clergy will backwards engineer from the demands of an oligarchy through selected scriptures and homilies into a system of apologetics than can be used to dominate a people. Martin Luther saw that distortion achieved within his lifetime.
In my original post I said, “This new church direction was variously coerced, accepted, imposed, avoided, rationalized, applauded, and managed. The clergy who rationalized, applauded, and managed the new relationship dominated as Rome fell and Europe entered the Dark Ages.” Essentially it was a matter of who won and who lost in a worldly sense. St Patrick’s and other monasteries became the primary keepers of the faith.
I stand by the next statement of my essay. “The Catholic Church’s final rise to European political dominance began with the co-dependent relationship of Pope Stephen and Pepin king of the Franks in 750 A.D. In exchange for defeating Lombard incursions, Pope Stephen proclaimed Pepin’s sons, and their descendants, kings by “divine right”. When Pepin first met Pope Steven, he dismounted and led his horse like a groom. Pepin’s act of submission reflected the Catholic Church’s act of submission to worldly advancement when adopting those Machiavellian strategies allowing political prosperity in the midst of pervasive brutality and treachery. The Papal estates were transformed into the Papal States.
The Papacy became heir to the persistent vision of a Roman Empire, and formed a Teutonic-Latin alliance enabling shared political dominance for the next 600 years. The Catholic Church’s falsifying of divine, spiritual appointments served as the currency to purchase participation in every seat of power in Europe. The clergy abandoned its spiritual identity of professing eternal life in our Lord Jesus Christ, substituted human knowledge and cunning for survival, and then ascended in the temporal world. In response to European chaos, the Catholic Church became a notorious haven for clergy and kings seeking fulfillment of addictions to power and pride equivalent to addictions to drugs or pornography.”
The above is one example of a persistent direction churches take. Because of an article titled McChurch posted to Free Republic, I had an email exchange a few years ago with a Catholic priest. He lamented about Christianity “lite” in his denomination, and I saw the correlation with the Emerging Church, etal plaguing denominations besides Catholicism. Apart from government involvement such an approach enables personal advancement for church leaders coveting acceptance and acclaim within a larger social and academic secular community; a community holding values defined by popular media, academics, and progressive agendas. C. S. Lewis described these traps when he said in The Screwtape Letters, “Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels he is ‘finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him”.
A partial bibliography includes:
A History of Christianity by Ray C. Petry
A History of the Papacy by M. Crieghton
The History of the Church by Charles Jacobs
A History of the Expansion of Christianity by Kenneth Scott Lattourette
The Dark Ages 476-918 by Sir Charles Oman
The Middle Ages 395-1500 by Joseph R. Strayer and Dana Munro