“Political ENGULFMENT is not at all the same thing as God’s anointing or blessing or approval.”
Q, why do you persist in the belief that whatever problems the non-Roman Catholic West has with the Church of Rome began with +Constantine the Great? That is simply, historically untrue. There was a time, centuries later, when the Western Church and at least in some parts of Western Europe, the State, became one. But that was centuries and centuries after Constantine. It is true that Orthodoxy became the “State Church” in most of the East, just like various forms of Roman catholicism and Protestantism did in Western Europe and here in the Americas. But there was never a theocracy in the East. In fact, throughout the history of Orthodoxy, even in Russia, the Church has been at odds with the secular rulers near (in some places far more often than not) as often as on their side.
It is a myth that +Constantine the Great created the Roman Church just as it is a myth that “Roman Catholicism” as such, existed before the Great Schism, perhaps even before the Reformation. To say that an emperor who called a great council, the First Ecumenical Council, thereby created a politically, and religiously compliant and hierarchial Roman Church defies history. That great gathering of hierarchs and priests did just what +Constantine did not want them to do; they gave us the Creed and condemned the foul heresy of Arianism. Certainly God approved of that, wouldn’t you say? The 6 great Ecumenical Councils which followed defined basic Trinitarian and Christological theology shared by virtually all of us. I am at a total loss as to why anyone believes that +Constantine established Roman Catholicism or that anyone would think that that belief advances the cause of non-Latin or non-Orthodox Christians one whit.
Anyone even marginally familiar with history would know, for example, that Constantine did not establish Christianity as state religion; that throughout the history of church-state relations in the West conflict was frequent (look up “investiture controversy” for starters). Anyone who would bother to read ante-nicene fathers will find that the Church was eucharistic and hierarchical as early as when St. Ignatius coined the word “Catholic” sometime at the close of 1st c.
I agree with you historically, but part of the blame goes to the Roman Catholic Church which teaches (at least in traditional circles) that Constantine was "Catholic." You can listen and watch traditional Catholic sermons on You Tube and hear exactly that!
The West was exposed to the RCC and the Reformation was expressly a reaction to Vatican's autocratic tendencies, just as the Schism came out of a power struggle for universal jurisdiction of the popes. We are to a great extent, to this day, unwilling to share our Eucharist with the Latins and their followers from other rites precisely because of that same reason.
I’m merely persisting in the contention that
The Roman church was essentially a political creation and that some several hundred years after Christ.
That’s all. Seems to me, that’s pretty historically accurate.
But I have been known and certainly accused of being wrong a time or 3.