n this chapter we will take a very brief walk through the past two thousand years and examine what has happened to the church, why there were Crusades, an Inquisition and a Reformation. On the Day of Pentecost, about 50 days after Jesus’ resurrection, the Holy Spirit was sent to consummate the new covenant and the first people were born again.1 On that day the divine nature of God came to dwell within about three thousand people and they saw physical manifestations of His presence. This was the birth of the Church. The Church was never thought of as a building where people gathered, but rather the people who gathered in the building. Some of the last words Jesus had said to the disciples were that they would receive power from above to be His witnesses throughout the world. Jesus commanded disciples to ‘go into all the world and make disciples, and to baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’.
Within a few weeks the first Christian was murdered for preaching the good news. Stephen infuriated the Jewish leaders by associating them with the people who had killed the prophets and rejected God’s message. Stephen was stoned to death, and a young Pharisee called Saul was guarding the clothes of the killers and watching the scene with approval. The Church was scattered. This same Saul hunted Christians throwing them into prisons, however, in an encounter with the risen Christ he was born again and became the greatest Christian missionary and the man who wrote the majority of New Testament letters as the Apostle Paul.
In 64 AD the Roman emperor Nero falsely blamed Christians for the burning of Rome and used this as an excuse to murder many brave souls who refused to deny Christ. Even Roman citizens such as the pagan historian Tacitus were disturbed by the ferocity of Nero’s attack on these innocent people.2 Heresies also began to develop at this time such as Gnosticism which claimed a secret knowledge to certain people through angels and other mediums. Satan was busy trying to destroy the Church from within and without. The godlessness in the world meant that some desired to live apart, and a misunderstanding of Paul’s instructions about marriage led many to believe that a single life was more holy.
Within a few centuries of sporadic persecutions the books considered to be inspired were collected into the final Bible, a process which was done within extremely strict criteria. For three hundred years it had been the Christians themselves who knew through the collective witness of the Holy Spirit which books were inspired by God and which were not. In a very real sense, only those letters and gospels which had been written by an apostle, and verified as truth by all Christians, everywhere since the birth of the Church were considered to be inspired by God. In other words, it was only those Scriptures which had been used by the entire Church which were accepted.3
In general terms, the Church resisted those who tried to make it into a religion of rules and regulations for the first 300 years, and generally speaking the requirements for becoming a Christian were consistent with Jesus’ teachings. People did not become Christians unless they were truly called by the Holy Spirit and had considered the possibility of dying for their faith. Persecution keeps the Church pure; there are few hypocrites around when it comes to being ripped apart by lions or burned to death by crazed emperors.
In the early fourth century all of that changed radically. The Roman emperor Constantine decided that Christianity would be helpful for his empire. Some suggest that he became a Christian; however, I believe that this is a completely wrong understanding of true Christianity. Constantine was a pagan worshipper, he considered the Sun to be the greatest god and he insisted that a symbol of the sun be above all pictures of Jesus or other Christian figures, the sign which is now commonly referred to as a halo. Constantine remained the high priest of the pagan cults until his death, and he received baptism on his death bed, thinking that this act would save him.
Once the Church joined the Roman empire, it entered into a thousand years of darkness, which is called the Dark Ages or the Medieval Period. People were ordered to be Christians against their will, but secretly, many remained pagan worshippers. Christianity became something you inherited rather than a personal surrender to Christ out of conviction of sin and love for God. In short, the Roman Catholic Church became a form of christian religion and a far cry from the pure Church of the first three centuries. The Roman Catholic Church (RCC) used fear as a means to force people to submit to its rule. It incorporated pagan festivals into its teachings in order to make people ‘catholic’. It created a theology of hell and purgatory which is not biblical, and painted pictures of people being tortured for eternity within the walls of the churches. Christ was portrayed as a merciless judge who watched the eternal torment of disobedient ‘christians’ and pagans. People had no access to the Bible to see the truth for themselves, and the church services were said in the Latin language. People ignorant of truth and full of fear were easy to control.
God was portrayed as an angry God who must be appeased. People turned to Mary for help. Perhaps Jesus’ mother could speak to her cruel son on their behalf. The RCC developed a hierarchy of holiness with the pope at the top of this spiritual pyramid and some popes claimed to be infallible. The papacy also claimed that popes were the spiritual heads of the Church, a succession from the apostle Peter. Popes created ‘saints’ and the cult of worshipping and praying to dead people developed over time.
The theologian Augustine suggested that people were born sinners, possibly a knee jerk reaction to another theologian, Pelagius who was accused of teaching that it was possible to live a perfect life.4This doctrine posed a problem. If Jesus inherited a human nature and all babies were born sinners, then how did Jesus escape this predicament? The RCC found a solution. They declared that Mary was perfect, indeed she was God’s wife, the Queen of Heaven and therefore Jesus could be the only child born sinless. Children were then sprinkled with water with the false idea that this form of ‘baptism’ would save these “born sinners” from being thrown into hell.
The idea of salvation by a simple faith in Jesus Christ was all but lost during the Dark Ages. Instead, a political religion which had as its agenda to take over the world by force in the name of God, met a similar force with a similar agenda, namely Islam. Mohammed had supposedly seen a vision of an angel and after initially thinking he may be either insane or possessed, he convinced himself he was the new prophet of a god called Allah. Islam captured most of the Middle East and was stopped in Europe by RCC armies. As the first millennium drew to a close RCC leaders were convinced that Christ must not return to find the Holy City of Jerusalem in the hands of Moslems so the first crusades were organized. Popes promised crusaders a guaranteed eternal life, and also that their dead relations would get time off from eternal torment. The crusaders raped and murdered in the name of Christ, they destroyed all who opposed them, even those who claimed to be Christians; they were terrorists long before the name was used for Moslems. The teachings of Christ to forgive and love one’s enemies were entirely ignored. This was a political power on a mission, not a Christian Church taking a gospel of love and peace to a dark world.
The two branches of the RCC, the Greek East and Latin West, split over arguments about power and policy. The Orthodox churches moved into the North; however they carried the basic message of the RCC with them, and in a real sense they were simply daughters of the RCC. At one stage in RCC history there were three popes at the same time, all claiming to be the true successor of Peter.
For all its political and religious might, the RCC could not stop various groups which refused to accept its perverted form of Christianity. The Inquisition was formed to control such people and all who opposed the pope’s authority were tried without a defense council, tortured into confessions of heresy, burned, hanged or drowned. Thousands of innocent women were accused of witchcraft and murdered. Any who tried to speak in their defense were considered to be under their demonic spell or in league with Satan, so these women died alone, murdered by an organization which claimed to be acting on behalf of Jesus Christ.
By the fourteenth century there were more voices of discontent. People wanted the truth. The RCC had turned true Christianity into a religion of power and wealth. Salvation was sold. Relics of dead people were viewed for a price, collections were taken to pay for a person’s dead relatives to help them get out of the RCC invention of purgatory, and beautiful cathedrals and palaces were built with the money. The RCC leadership lived in luxury and often sexual debauchery while those they were supposed to be discipling were in poverty. The Black Plague killed millions and did not discriminate between priest or farmer, cardinal or prostitute. People who had been taught that sin was God’s punishment began to ask why so many church leaders were struck down by this disease.
In the fifteenth century a young Augustinian priest by the name of Martin Luther, who desperately wanted to know God, had tried every religious discipline taught by the RCC without success. One day he was born again and his experience opened his eyes to the disgusting practices of the RCC. He wrote a document of 95 articles for discussion about the state of the Church, and this action eventually led to the Protestant Reformation. Through the invention and production of printing presses the common people
could finally get access to Bibles. Here they discov - ered that their so-called Virgin Mary had many children, that she considered Christ her Saviour, that infant baptism is unbiblical and praying to dead people banned, that all who are born again Christians are called saints, and that all Christians are equal in the sight of God. They also discovered that salvation is a free gift to all who recognize their sin and place their lives into Christ’s control by faith, taking Him as their Lord and Saviour.
Satan was also active and within a short period of time salvation by faith became salvation by God’s secret selection of the few. Hyper-Calvinism claimed that God chose a few for salvation and the rest were condemned to eternal punishment. Protestantism also became a religion of rules for many, although there were those who rejected such teachings and paid with their lives, such as the Ana-Baptists who refused to baptize their children or fight in wars. The RCC launched a counter-reformation, and eventually a war which lasted for thirty years was fought between nations who all claimed to be ‘christian’.
Science and rationalism gave birth to skepticism which led to many questioning the validity of the Bible. The Bible was dissected and analyzed by deists, scientists, atheists and others; however, although people like Nietzsche claimed that God was dead, God had other plans. A Great Revival of simple “born again” Christianity broke out and spread throughout the globe and many different branches of Protestant Christianity were created in different cultural settings, and although they had minor differences, on the whole there was a consensus regarding what it meant to be a Christian. Millions came to know and experience being filled with the Holy Spirit as did those first Christians on the day of Pentecost.
The history of the church, especially during the Medieval Period, is often cited by opponents of Christianity in order to bring dishonour to Christ. There is no doubt in my mind that the RCC and others have done exactly that and criticism of them is both warranted and justified. Millions were murdered by this organization, and sadly some protestant churches adopted RCC ideas and hunted people who they considered to be antichrist. We are fully justified to ask by what authority these people killed. Did Christ condemn sinners to torture and death or did He not command Christians to forgive and love their enemies?
I have no doubt that there were many sincere, loving and wonderful Christians who were part of these organizations, people who saw the hypocrisy but had no power to change it. Many tried and failed, many died trying. Some were heroes of the faith caught up in an organization which banned people from reading the Bible, banned people from questioning its teachings, and claimed to be the sole authority of Jesus Christ on earth.