Good post, daniel, authority is what this is all about. I just posted this on another thread about Constantine. He was the authority sitting upon his throne ruling over the Bishops at Nicea. Not exactly in the same vein as your post, but I think you can catch the drift:
............................
Catholics claim the church conquered the Roman Empire, but in reality the Roman Empire conquered the church - by making the church over into the image of the Roman Empire.
Beginning with Constantine, the church changed its nature, entered its great apostasy, became a political organization in the spirit and pattern of Imperial Rome, and took a nose-dive into a thousand years of Papal tyranny and abominations.
The Imperial Church became an entirely different institution from the persecuted church of the first centuries. In its ambition to rule and subjugate all to the Pope it became the persecutor.
Worship, at first very simple,was developed into elaborate, stately, imposing ceremonies having all the outward splendor that formerly belonged to pagan temples.
Ministers became priests. The term “priest”was not applied to Christian ministers before a.d.200. It was borrowed from the Jewish system, and from pagan priesthood. The Catholic priesthood eventually became celibate, forbidden to marry by the law of the Imperial Church.
Conversion of the pagan masses filled the church with all kinds of pagan practices and philosophies. Various Greek and Oriental philosophies became amalgamated with Christianity.
Was all this Constantine’s fault? Not really, he only did what Emperors normally do, he took charge. We have all the weak-backed compromising Bishops, who allowed Constantine to sit in the place of authority over them at Nicea, who sold out the true church to statism, transforming it into an Imperial church, to thank.
And I just posted this in response:
Beginning with Constantine the Church was no longer an outlaw organization and being a member was no longer punishable by death. Changes like that tend to change public behaviors.
I never cease to be depressed when those who claim to be Christian see their fellow Christians as the source of all evil and a more worthy target for their hatred and vitriol than radical Islam, atheistic secularism, humanism, modernism, and Satanism. I pray that those who do and see differences in doctrine as somehow demonic and intentionally sinful as opposed to simple error. Those who hold those thoughts are demonstrably not Christians.
Jesus' repeated command to us is to love one another and the definition of love is the desire for good for the other simply for the sake of the other. If we only love those who love us or are like us it is not love but a form of egotism.
As St. Thomas Aquinas taught, the greatest love is found in the shared love a transcendental third thing. For example, we may both like each other based upon nothing more than a shared like of the same baseball or football team. The greater the love for that transcendental third, the greater the bond between us. Christian marriage needs to be based upon a greater love for the bond of marriage and the "us" formed than for the love of our spouse or self. If we both express the ultimate love for God, we should therefore have a love between us that transcends the differences of definition, doctrine and the punctuation in Koine Greek idioms that too many choose to divide us.
"This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you." - John 15:12
Thanks. Never saw you before in these exchanges. Member since 2003!
“But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now. “ (Galatians 4:29)
Sadly, the use of physical force to conquer theological foes is something some of the early Reformers followed Rome in, and needed to unlearn.
Exactly! Right down to their dress style, bow to man and kiss the ring!