Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

by T. W. Allies

When St. Peter and St. Paul had crowned the Roman Church with their joint martyrdom under the authority of Nero, that Jewish revolt had already begun the issue of which was the accomplishment of the divine prediction that their “house should be left to them desolate.” But the stroke of Nero’s sword, wielded by his deputies,[163] was but the final act of Jewish enmity to St. Paul; what his life had been at their hands we have vividly described in his own words: “Of the Jews five times did I receive forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once I was stoned; thrice I suffered shipwreck; a night and a day I was in the depth of the sea.”[164] And as to St. Peter, they for whom Herod Agrippa, seeing that the slaughter of St. James pleased the Jews, proceeded to imprison Peter, intending after the Pasch to bring him forth to the people for public execution, would pursue him with their enmity all the rest of his life. And what happened to the chiefs, St. Peter and St. Paul, happened in their measure to the other first teachers of the new faith: they gained their crown of martyrdom through the perpetual enmity of the unbelieving Jews stirring up the Roman power against them.

The position of bitter enmity to the Christian religion taken up by the unbelieving Jews was far from terminating with the destruction of Jerusalem. As the nation, with its imperishable vitality, survived that blow, and the further severe punishment dealt upon it after the insurrection headed, in the reign of Hadrian, by the false Messiah Barcochba, who inflicted upon the Christians in Judæa fearful torments, so through the whole period of persecution which the Church suffered from the Roman empire, the Jews fanned by every means in their power the heathen hatred of the Christian people. Tertullian, at the end of the second century, represents them as not possessing an inch of land which they could call their own, yet at the same time as propagating every vile report against Christians. He gives this specimen: “Report has introduced a new calumny respecting our God. Not so long ago a most abandoned wretch in that city of yours (Rome), a man who had deserted indeed his own religion—a Jew, in fact, who had only lost his skin, flayed of course by wild beasts, against which he enters the lists for hire day after day with a sound body, and so in a condition to lose his skin—carried about in public a caricature of us with this label, An ass of a priest. This had ass’s ears, and was dressed in a toga, with a book, having a hoof on one of his feet. And the crowd believed this infamous Jew. For what other set of men is the seed-plot of all the calumny against us?”[165]

Jewish hatred of the Christian faith stopped as little with Constantine’s edict of toleration as it had with the destruction of the temple by Titus or the banishment of the people by Hadrian; but here we have only to consider it in the first period of the forty years.

This is one aspect of that first conflict with Judaism, but there is likewise another, of which the issue was the gradual severance of the Christian Church from the synagogue. As the first struggle came from the enmity of those who rejected Jesus as the Christ, so the second came from those who received Him, but at the same time clung to the Jewish law and its observances.

The problem of the first twelve years’ teaching was, whether the Jewish nation would, as a nation, receive the faith of Him whom its rulers had crucified. An ardent longing for the salvation of their people as a whole must have lain deep in the heart of those first Jewish converts. But even after it became plain that only a remnant would accept the faith, and after a great number of Gentile converts had been received throughout the empire, on conditions which exempted them from the practice of the law of Moses, when St. Paul, at a late period of his ministry, went up to Jerusalem, he was entreated, because there were many thousands among the Jews that had believed who were all zealots for the law,[166] to perform in his own person publicly in the temple a vow according to the law, with which he complied.

No doubt one of the greatest difficulties experienced in these first forty years was the amalgamation of Jewish and Gentile converts in the one Christian Church; but I would draw attention only to the completeness of the result. Among the questions then settled[167] were the meaning of the Old Testament law in regard to the faith in Christ, the relation of our Lord to the Jewish prophets, His superiority to them, His divine nature, and thus His relation to God the Father. I pass over the consideration of all these to make one remark. The ultimate result is the proof of power, and by the time the Jewish temple and the public worship carried on in it were destroyed by the Roman avenger of the God he did not know, the Christian Church was seen to emerge in its character of a religion for all mankind. The association of St. Paul with St. Peter in the patronage of the Roman Church is the most conclusive refutation of theories as to their enmity and rivalry. The one Christian community, ruled by one Episcopate, derived from the Person of Christ, and containing Jews and Gentiles in the one Body of Christ, is the best proof that the force of that divine unity prevailed over zeal for the law and national privileges on the one hand, as over all the errors and confusions of heathen life on the other. Jewish persecution had its completion in the ruin of the deicide city. Those thousands of believers, zealots for the law, were in a few short years merged in the ever-increasing number of the Gentile converts. That great mother Church of Jerusalem, mindful of her Lord’s prophecy dwelling in her thoughts, was warned by the Roman standards encompassing the city to migrate to Pella, beyond the Jordan, and thus the centre of Jewish influence in the Church was dissipated beyond recall. The Christian Church took over the inheritance of the synagogue, displaced and destroyed, without being confined to its rites and ceremonies. The high priest, the priest, and the levite of the old covenant, touched with the life-giving flesh of Christ, passed into the ministry of the new; and while the lamb ceased to be offered for the daily sacrifice in the temple, the Lamb of God on every Christian altar became the Sacrifice and the Food of the one Christian people.

Thus the providence of God, offering to His chosen people their Saviour, had, when they rejected Him, worked a double result of their unbelief: one, the destruction of their city and polity; the other, the coming forth in unity and independence of the true Israel, “the nation of Christ.”

In all this the Divine Kingdom accomplished its first stage, being founded by Jewish teachers in spite of the enmity of unbelieving Judaism without, and blending the Jew and the Gentile convert within by the force of its potent unity.

The contest with Judaism in both its phases had but a restricted scope, if we compare it with that manifold contest with error which filled the whole history of the Church from the Day of Pentecost to the convocation of the Nicene Council. It is not easy to realise the circumstances under which that contest was waged. First, from the persecution begun under Nero in the year 64, to the edicts of Constantine in 311-313, the Christian Church lay under the ban of the Empire as an illicit religion. It is indeed true that the whole of this long period of two hundred and fifty years is not a time of active persecution. There are intervals throughout, of considerable length, in which the Church carried on her silent course of conversion, without the law being executed against her, with at least anything like a general intention to destroy her. Still, even in these intervals, she was in the condition of a society in opposition at all points to the powers of the world, and, to say the least, discouraged by the spirit of the time. She could not unfold and publish her constitution. The thing of all others which she could least venture to disclose was her polity, that episcopate with its centre in Rome which was the bond of her strength as a regimen. In spite of herself, Roman law forced her into the position, in many respects at least, of a secret society; secret, not because her doctrines in themselves required concealment; secret, not because her polity was in itself an infringement of the Empire’s civil rights, but because both doctrine and polity involved a change in the religious, social, and civil relations of the world which the Roman Empire was not prepared to concede, and which, had it divined, not Nero alone, or Domitian, “a portion of Nero in his cruelty,”[168] but every Roman emperor, with Trajan at their head, would have stamped out. Again, it is difficult to realise the condition of a religious society which could not carry out its worship under the protection which publicity confers. Yet as to this we have no authority to show that there were public Christian churches before the reign of Alexander Severus, two hundred years after the Church began. Her eucharistic liturgy was a secret; her sacred books were kept out of the sight of the heathen; but even so the language and the treatment of subjects in these books, not to speak of the choice of those subjects, betoken that they belonged to a society which needed not only the harmlessness of the dove but the wisdom of the serpent. It had need to keep its head under cover. To take one instance out of many. I do not know a more remarkable example of reticence than that passage in the Acts of the Apostles wherein it is said of Peter, that when delivered by the angel from prison, he sent a message to James and the brethren, and then “went out and departed into another place.” Here St. Luke, writing in a time of active persecution, rather more than twenty years after the event which he was recording, and when Nero had broken out against the Church, carefully abstains from saying that the place to which St. Peter went was Rome, and that he went to found the Church there, for such foundation was the thing above all others which Roman law looked upon with most suspicion, in its confusion of temporal with spiritual rule. Now we have to bear in mind, in order to realise the condition of the Church in this whole period, that all her work of promulgation, her daily administration of sacraments, her worship, her defence of the truth which she had received and which she was to guard, were carried on under this state of compression, a perpetual outlawry in the letter of the law, which might be put into exercise at the will of a local magistrate or the rising of a discontented populace, and which on many occasions was actually enforced by the supreme authority of the emperor. And it is not a little to be borne in mind what the political condition of the empire then was. The rights of the citizen, as opposed to the government, were overborne by a tremendous despotism, which only allowed light and air to its subjects so far as the science of government had not reached the complete development of modern times. The Roman emperors were not enabled to wield a secret police, because such an instrument of servitude had not yet been invented, nor had they reached an universal military conscription, because the Roman peace rendered such a sacrifice unnecessary; they had only the supreme power of life and death in their hands without restriction. Into the midst of such a despotism the Christian religion was cast. The seed silently deposited in each city in the episcopal germ grew with its individual life, which was yet the life of one tree; but how little was that secret unity of root apparent to the world, at least in the first half of this time! How truly, indeed, was the prophecy of the Lord fulfilled: “Behold I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves;”[169] and how apposite the warning, “Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves!”

But as the Episcopate was a tree growing upon one root, so the faith on which it lived was one sap. Yet to what danger of isolation, especially in those first times, were small communities of Christians in so many several cities exposed. The Sees, it is true, were not crystallised units, but associated in provinces under Metropolitans. Yet their bishops did not possess the civil liberty of meeting when they chose. Upon the whole action of the Church there was a perpetual constraint from without. The two forces which held the Church together were the Episcopate viewed as one body, and the directing, controlling, regulating authority of St. Peter’s See at its centre. Yet not once in the well-nigh three hundred years could the Episcopate meet in universal councils, and the action of the Roman Church, an action which of all others within the bosom of the Christian society the Roman State would regard with the most jealousy, could only be exercised with a due respect to that jealousy, and in conjunction with that large measure of autonomy which the condition of a compressed and often-persecuted society, sprinkled over a vast number of provinces, imposed.