Participants: Pr Shawn Boonstra
Series Code: SEM
Program Code: SEM000004A
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00:01 male announcer: The world, forever changed.
00:04 His legacy, an empire reaching across centuries. 00:08 His name... 00:11 Constantine. 00:15 "Shadow Empire." 00:19 ♪♪♪ 00:30 Shawn Boonstra: When you hear the word "basilica," 00:32 most people typically think of a church 00:33 and that's because for the last 1700 years or so, 00:37 that's the way we've used the word, 00:39 and not just any church is a basilica, 00:42 it's gotta be a church that has been granted special ceremonial 00:46 rights or privileges by the bishop of Rome. 00:50 But a basilica was not originally a Christian building, 00:53 in fact, a basilica wasn't even a religious building. 00:56 It was a public court like this one used by 01:00 the pseudo emperor Maxentius 01:02 and then Constantine after the battle of Milvian Bridge. 01:06 And just up the road behind me is another famous basilica, 01:10 one of the most famous in the world and that basilica 01:14 represents the merging of two empires, 01:17 the kingdom of heaven and another shadow empire 01:21 that ran parallel beside it. 01:30 This is the basilica of St. John Lateran, 01:33 one of the most famous churches in the world. 01:35 Structurally, it resembles ancient Roman basilicas. 01:39 You've got a big open space in the middle called the nave 01:42 and there are aisles running along the outside. 01:46 When you look at the interior of St. John Lateran or other famous 01:49 basilicas and you go back and compare it to Roman basilicas, 01:53 it becomes obvious that after Constantine, 01:55 the Christian church was no longer a fringe group, 01:59 an outside religion forced to survive in spite of the empire. 02:03 Now, it was part of the empire. 02:06 In fact, in Constantine's mind, Christianity would be the glue 02:10 that held his new empire together. 02:17 Now remember, under Diocletian, the unity of the empire 02:20 was all important and Diocletian achieved stability 02:24 by establishing a tetrarchy, four emperors who controlled 02:28 the eastern and western halves of the territory. 02:32 But Constantine changed all that, not long after he defeated 02:36 Maxentius, he also conquered the rest of the empire 02:39 which made him the only ruler. 02:43 Rome was back to just one god but Constantine knew full well 02:48 he was going to have to find some way to keep it all 02:50 together, some way to achieve harmony and that's where he saw 02:55 value in the Christian religion. 02:58 To his way of thinking, 02:59 Christians were a perfectly unified people. 03:02 He'd seen the way they stood together against 03:04 Roman persecution and it looked like they were 03:07 so perfectly united, so perfectly in agreement 03:11 that nothing would ever make them fall. 03:13 Now, that's what he wanted for his empire. 03:16 He wanted to transplant the Christian dedication 03:19 and unity he saw into his kingdom. 03:32 Now, tradition tells us that Constantine underwent 03:36 a radical conversion the day before he won 03:38 the battle of Milvian Bridge, 03:40 but if that's true, if he really became a Christian that day, 03:46 then he was remarkably silent about it. 03:49 If he really did see a cross in the sky, if he really did hear 03:52 a voice telling him, "Go conquer in this sign," then you'd expect 03:57 those details to show up in the original telling of the story, 04:01 but why didn't Constantine tell that story the day 04:03 he marched into Rome? 04:05 Why doesn't it show up anywhere on his arch? 04:08 Why don't we have any record of it anywhere until 10 years later 04:14 when he suddenly tells it to a church historian? 04:18 And if Constantine really did convert to Christianity 04:21 that day, I mean, if he really did submit himself 04:24 to the Prince of peace, then why did he go on 04:27 killing his relatives, the ones he considered 04:29 to be political threats? 04:31 And why did he actually put off his own baptism 04:34 until he was practically on his death bed? 04:39 ♪♪♪ 04:46 Shawn: There are just too many holes in the story, enough 04:49 to make me personally doubt Constantine's conversion. 04:52 What seems more likely is that Constantine embellished 04:56 the story over time and the Chi-Rho symbol he painted 05:00 on his men's shields slowly morphed into the vision story 05:03 over the span of 10 years. 05:06 Here's what probably happened, Constantine gave credit to 05:10 the Christian God for his victory and he began to think 05:13 that the Christian God was the best way to hold 05:16 his kingdom together. 05:18 The tenacity of Christians impressed him and he thought 05:21 people who would die for Jesus might also be willing 05:25 to die for him. 05:26 He thought Christians would be loyal to Rome if he could merge 05:30 the empire and the church. 05:34 So, one of the first things Constantine did was give this 05:36 palace, the Lateran palace, to a guy by the name of Miltiades. 05:41 He was the bishop of Rome and he really needed a place to live 05:45 because up to this point, the bishop of Rome basically 05:48 lived in a shack over on the other side of the Tiber River. 05:52 What was left of the original Lateran was ripped down 05:55 in the late 1500s and this one was one built in its place. 06:00 Today, it's home to the vicar general of Rome, 06:03 a representative of the pope who handles all his business 06:06 inside the city. 06:09 But the reason this is a Christian building at all 06:11 is because Constantine gave it to the church. 06:15 It was a clear signal, Constantine had refused to thank 06:19 Jupiter for his victory and now he'd given the Christian bishop 06:23 one of the most prestigious pieces of real estate in 06:26 the entire city and to top it off, he built 06:29 a massive basilica, the original St. Peter's 06:32 over on Vatican Mountain. 06:35 Christianity had now come to Rome for good. 06:39 But then something else amazing happened, in the year 313, 06:43 Constantine unwittingly fulfilled a prophecy 06:46 from the Book of Revelation. 06:48 He traveled up to the city of Milan for a wedding and while he 06:52 was there, he did something that completely reversed 06:55 Diocletian's policy of persecuting Christians. 06:58 Constantine felt like the persecution 07:00 was destabilizing the empire. 07:03 It was making people distrust the Roman government 07:06 so he convinced other dignitaries that they 07:09 should stop killing Christians. 07:12 This all resulted in the Edict of Milan, 07:15 a document which suddenly put an end to persecution 07:18 and elevated the Christian faith to a position of prominence. 07:27 Shawn: Constantine returned the property that had been 07:29 confiscated during the 10-year reign of terror. 07:32 And if you found yourself in the unfortunate position 07:35 of owning confiscated Christian property, you could actually ask 07:39 Constantine's government for compensation. 07:42 The church was no longer a fringe group. 07:45 It was a considered a legitimate corporation, a legitimate part 07:48 of the Roman Empire. 07:51 And most importantly, Constantine introduced 07:53 the concept of full religious liberty. 07:56 In the words of the Milan Edict, Constantine said, 07:59 "We should give Christians and everyone else freedom to follow 08:02 the religion each may want so that whatever divinity 08:05 may exist in the heavens will be willing to show benevolence 08:09 to us and to all those who live under our authority." 08:15 So, how does that fulfill Bible prophecy? 08:19 Well, if you remember from a previous episode when John 08:22 wrote seven letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor 08:26 in the Book of Revelation, there was a direct reference 08:29 to severe persecution in his letter to Smyrna. 08:33 Now, Smyrna was the crushed or persecuted church. 08:37 For centuries, sincere Bible students have recognized that 08:41 those seven letters predicted the entire span 08:43 of Christian history and the letter to Smyrna fits 08:47 persecuted Christianity exactly. 08:51 In Bible prophecy, a day is generally used to represent 08:54 a year so 10 days of persecution would actually be 10 years. 08:59 The prophecy fits what Diocletian did 09:02 to the Christians. 09:04 It says in Revelation 2, verse 10, 09:06 "Do not fear any of those things which you are about to suffer. 09:10 Indeed, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, 09:14 that you may be tested, and you will have tribulation ten days. 09:19 Be faithful until death and I will give you 09:22 the crown of life." 09:24 The Diocletian persecution began with the edict of 303 and it 09:29 came to an abrupt end exactly 10 years later when Constantine 09:33 issued the Edict of Milan. 09:40 Shawn: Now, that should be the end of the story and from 09:43 this point on, the church should have lived happily ever after 09:47 because they were now the emperor's favorite. 09:49 Nobody could touch them. 09:52 Now, the Edict of Milan didn't establish Christianity 09:55 as the official religion of the empire but it did establish 09:58 Christians as a real reason for religious liberty and there was 10:02 no question that Christians had suddenly moved from underdog 10:06 to a position of privilege, a position they would hold 10:09 for many centuries to come. 10:12 But there was a big problem. 10:14 It turns out that Christianity was nowhere near as unified 10:17 as Constantine hoped. 10:19 Within months of his victory, he made an unsettling discovery 10:23 and unfortunately, it's a discovery a lot of people 10:26 still make when they get to know the Christian community. 10:30 Christians can be anything but united. 10:33 I mean, sure, on the big stuff they all get along but on 10:36 the day-to-day things, well, Christians are still 10:39 human beings, imperfect sinners in need of a perfect God 10:43 and Christians know how to argue just like everybody else. 10:51 Within months of Constantine's victory, a controversy erupted 10:54 on the other side of the Mediterranean over in Egypt. 10:58 You see, during the Diocletian persecution, 11:01 a lot of Christian leaders had caved in under pressure 11:04 when the Romans came to confiscate 11:06 their Christian books. 11:08 They turned in their Bibles. 11:10 They caved. 11:11 They left the Christian church and then when the persecution 11:14 ended, they suddenly wanted back in because now it was easy 11:18 to be a Christian. 11:19 As you can imagine, those who stayed the course, 11:22 those who were in the church during all those dark years 11:26 were completely unimpressed. 11:29 They called the people who had abandoned the church, 11:31 "traditores," it's where we get the word "traitor" 11:34 and they didn't think those people 11:36 should be allowed back in. 11:38 And if they did come back in, 11:40 they certainly couldn't hold church office. 11:43 And if you'd been baptized by a traditores, someone who left 11:47 during the persecution, well, they considered your 11:49 whole baptism completely invalid. 11:55 The people who wanted to keep the traitors out of the church 11:58 had a leader by the name of Donatus Magnus 12:01 and they were called Donatists. 12:03 They wanted Donatus to become the bishop of Carthage 12:07 in North Africa but there was a problem, there was 12:09 already a bishop of Carthage, a guy by the name of Caecilian 12:13 and he was in favor of bringing the traitors 12:16 back into the church. 12:18 So, there was this really heated controversy 12:20 right in the beginning of Constantine's reign 12:23 and when Christians couldn't settle the matter themselves, 12:27 they made a direct appeal to the emperor. 12:30 They wanted the state's help to resolve a dispute. 12:37 Shawn: That represented a radical change in the way 12:40 that Christians handled their internal disputes. 12:43 Centuries earlier, the Apostle Paul wrote to 12:46 the Corinthian Christians telling them not to drag 12:49 their disagreements into public court. 12:52 According to Paul, Christians served a king whose kingdom was 12:55 not of this world and because of that, worldly courts had 12:59 no place in the church. 13:01 Now, you'll notice the Bible still anticipates that 13:04 Christians would have disputes because they are, after all, 13:07 human beings. 13:09 But the place for arbitration is the church, not the courthouse. 13:16 But under Constantine, that all changed. 13:19 The Donatists, no longer fearing any kind of persecution, thought 13:23 it would be a good idea to let the state decide their case. 13:27 So, Constantine asked the bishop of Rome to preside over a panel 13:31 that would make a decision one way or another. 13:34 Should traditores be readmitted to the church? 13:37 Should they be allowed to hold office and perform the rights 13:40 and rituals of Christianity? 13:42 Well, that panel decided against the Donatists and the Donatists 13:47 were furious so they appealed the case saying their side 13:50 had not been given a full hearing. 13:52 They said the bishop of Rome had stacked the meeting against them 13:56 so Constantine ordered another meeting 13:59 in another city in 314 A.D. 14:02 This time he called bishops from all over the empire to come 14:06 and decide the matter and once again, they ruled against 14:09 the Donatist and once again, the Donatists were not happy. 14:22 Shawn: It was becoming obvious to Constantine that 14:24 the glue for his new empire, the Christian church, 14:26 might not be as strong as he thought. 14:29 At one point, he got really irritated and he wrote this 14:32 letter, "So great a madness persists," and he's speaking 14:36 to the Donatists, "that with incredible arrogance they 14:40 repudiate the equitable judgment that has been given, so that by 14:43 the will of heaven, I have learned that they demand 14:45 my own judgment. 14:47 They demand my judgment when I myself await 14:50 the judgment of Christ." 14:53 Constantine believed that if he could not bring unity 14:55 to the Christian church, God would stop favoring him 14:59 and he would never be able to unite the whole empire 15:02 so he got angry. 15:04 He told the African church if they didn't get their act 15:06 together, he was coming down in person to show them 15:10 how to run a church. 15:12 If anybody didn't like that well, to quote Constantine, 15:15 "These without doubt I shall cause to suffer 15:18 the due penalties of their madness 15:20 and their reckless obstinacy." 15:23 Basically what happened is that Constantine resorted to 15:26 the one thing he knew as a Roman soldier, 15:29 he resorted to force. 15:31 He began mixing church and state in a way that had never happened 15:35 in the first 300 years of Christianity. 15:38 He blended the interest of the empire with the life 15:41 of the church and he even threatened the death penalty 15:44 for people who didn't toe the line. 15:46 Some historical records even indicate that Caecilian, 15:49 the bishop who won the Donatist dispute actually rounded up his 15:53 opponents with the help of the Roman authorities 15:55 and had them put to death. 15:57 The Roman emperor had now become the de facto head 16:01 of the Christian church. 16:08 That became even more obvious in the next dispute that erupted 16:12 in the brave new world of state-sponsored Christianity. 16:16 A priest by the name of Arius also from North Africa, 16:20 began to question the divinity of Christ and that created 16:24 a massive uproar. 16:26 This wasn't a matter of church politics like 16:28 the Donatist controversy, this was doctrinal. 16:32 It touched on a key teaching of the Christian faith, Jesus, 16:36 the God-man, the second person of the Godhead, 16:39 God in human flesh. 16:41 Now, without getting into the technical details, 16:43 the heretic Priest Arius was teaching that Jesus 16:46 was not equal to the Father, that he held a lesser position. 16:51 Arius was teaching that Jesus proceeded from the father 16:55 at some point way back in ancient history. 16:58 Now, to solve the dispute, Constantine called a meeting 17:01 in the ancient city of Antioch, which was one of the key centers 17:04 of the Christianity, and the reason Constantine called that 17:08 meeting was because he now considered himself 17:11 the head of the church. 17:13 ♪♪♪ 17:27 Shawn: The meeting in Antioch was a bust, so Constantine 17:31 called another one, one of the most famous church councils 17:34 in Christian history and he called it in what today is 17:37 the city of Iznik but back then was known as Nicaea. 17:41 Delegates from all over the empire went to Nicaea 17:43 and history tells us that every single one of them actually had 17:47 scars from the 10-year persecution. 17:50 Some were blind, some were missing their limbs, 17:52 some had burns all over their bodies. 17:55 Every one of them had survived Diocletian's 10 years of terror. 18:00 At the Council of Nicaea, the delegates confirmed what 18:03 Christians had always believed, Jesus was fully God 18:07 coeternal with the Father. 18:09 Some people you'll hear say Constantine invented 18:12 the divinity of Christ and he used the Council of Nicaea 18:15 to do it. 18:16 It's a popular theory with lots of modern skeptics but honestly, 18:23 how do I put this? 18:24 It's--well, it's nonsense. 18:26 Historically speaking, that is not what happened here 18:28 in the city of Nicaea. 18:29 Go back through the writings of the Roman pagans in the first 18:32 years of the Christian church and one of the key objections 18:35 that pagan philosophers had to the Christian faith was the fact 18:39 that they were actually worshiping Jesus. 18:42 So, it wasn't the Christians who questioned the divinity of 18:45 Christ, it was the Romans and while the Council of Nicaea 18:49 absolutely did affirm Jesus' divinity, it didn't invent it 18:54 and neither did Constantine. 18:57 ♪♪♪ 19:14 Shawn: The other thing that some people say happened here 19:16 in Nicaea is that the council essentially invented our 19:19 New Testament. 19:20 Now, I've heard that a lot in recent years. 19:23 You'll have people arguing that before 325 A.D. 19:26 there may be hundreds of books that Christians were considering 19:29 sacred, maybe dozens and dozens of gospels but here in Nicaea 19:34 they say Constantine only allowed the books 19:36 and the gospels into the New Testament 19:38 that agreed with his ideas and he rejected the books 19:41 that didn't teach the divinity of Christ. 19:45 Now again, it's more historical nonsense. 19:48 The early church fathers made clear reference to the books of 19:51 the New Testament already back in the 2nd century, 19:54 100 years before the council met here in Nicaea. 19:59 In the year 180, for example, an early church father 20:01 by the name of Irenaeus, 20:03 referred to four gospels and he argued four is 20:06 the perfect number for how many gospels there would be. 20:09 You'd expect God to choose that many. 20:11 Now, if Constantine picked our four gospels and put them in 20:15 the New Testament, how in the world did Irenaeus know 20:18 150 years before that how many there would be? 20:27 The truth is that the New Testament 20:29 was already very well established 20:32 by the time we had the Council of Nicaea 20:34 and Christ's divinity was well understood the very day 20:37 the Christian church started. 20:38 That was something Jesus taught to his disciples. 20:42 As much as the critics want the Christian church to be 20:44 an invention of Constantine, it's just not true. 20:48 The church was established long before he was even born but, 20:53 of course, that doesn't mean that Constantine 20:54 didn't change something. 20:56 At the Council of Nicaea, he underscored the emperor's 21:00 new role as the head of the church. 21:02 He actually came in person and presided over a lot of 21:05 the discussions and it's at this point in history that the state 21:09 takes charge of determining what is Orthodox belief. 21:14 It started deciding cases for the church. 21:17 Now fortunately, the state mostly came to 21:19 the right decision on that occasion regarding the teachings 21:23 but they had the wrong person presiding. 21:25 It should not have been a Roman emperor. 21:28 In the New Testament, Paul writes that the Scriptures are 21:32 the standard of truth, not the emperor 21:34 or his state-appointed councils. 21:37 ♪♪♪ 21:45 Shawn: The Christians had everything they needed to run 21:48 the church and make decisions about what they would 21:50 and would not believe because they have the Bible. 21:54 They didn't need the empire to run the church. 21:56 Jesus was clear, "My kingdom is not of this world." 22:00 But starting in the 4th century when the favor of the emperor 22:03 suddenly fell on the church, our Christian ancestors launched 22:06 something of a shadow empire. 22:08 It looked like Christianity, it sounded like Christianity, 22:12 but it had some problems. 22:14 The life of the church was now about the Roman Empire 22:17 and not really about the gospel commission. 22:19 Over the years, it became more about Rome's European successors 22:23 than the coming kingdom of Christ. 22:25 We stopped preaching the words of Jesus, you know, "Render unto 22:29 Caesar the things that are Caesars and unto God the things 22:32 that are God's." 22:34 Instead, what we did is we started blending the things of 22:36 God with the things of Caesar and history has proven 22:40 that was not a healthy development. 22:43 The state tragically started using force to run the church to 22:46 the point where Constantine even passed one of the very first 22:50 Blue laws, a law forbidding work on Sunday in the city of Rome. 22:54 What was really strange about that was that most Christians 22:56 weren't even observing Sunday in the early 4th century 23:00 but the first day of the week was sacred to the Romans 23:02 and it was a key part of Roman life so it became part 23:05 of the church, not through the Bible, 23:08 but through the emperor. 23:12 Constantine gave us the marriage of church and state, a marriage 23:16 that continued well into the history of medieval Europe. 23:19 He created an environment where eventually it was not just 23:22 the state running the church, it was also the church 23:26 running the state. 23:28 It was a shadow empire, not the kingdom that Jesus intended 23:32 but a shadowy substitute and it was not good for Christianity. 23:38 I mean sure, in the very early years under Constantine, 23:41 just getting rid of persecution brought a lot of relief and 23:44 freedom was a breath of fresh air but honestly, we really lost 23:49 something when our faith became easy. 23:53 Once we blurred the line between Caesar and Christ, between 23:57 church and state, Christians became a tool of the state 24:01 and the state became a tool of the church. 24:04 The Roman basilica became a Christian basilica 24:08 and eventually when the Roman emperors all moved east 24:11 to Constantinople, the church actually became 24:13 the de facto Caesar in the west. 24:18 Suddenly, it wasn't Diocletian persecuting Christians for their 24:21 beliefs, Christians actually started persecuting each other. 24:27 We started running the church 24:28 like the Romans ran their empire. 24:30 If someone didn't toe the line, we brought them 24:33 to a torture chamber 24:34 or maybe even tied them to a stake and burned them. 24:39 Now, let me ask you, where did we get those kinds of ideas? 24:44 You can search a Bible from cover to cover and you will not 24:47 find Jesus telling anybody to burn the heretics, 24:50 that was a tactic we learned from the Romans. 24:54 And today, the world looks on Christians with a great deal 24:57 of skepticism and to be honest, we've kind of earned it. 25:01 For hundreds of years, we lived in the shadow empire 25:04 of Constantine instead of the biblical kingdom of Christ. 25:09 We started to build a so-called kingdom of God on earth using 25:12 human government but the Bible teaches that human governments 25:17 are standing in the way of God's will on earth. 25:26 Shawn: Ancient biblical prophets like Daniel actually 25:29 predicted the development of human kingdoms 25:31 hundreds of years in advance. 25:34 He managed to predict the empires of Babylon, 25:36 Persia, Greece, and Rome. 25:38 He even named names long before any of it existed, 25:42 but Daniel's point was essentially this, 25:45 all those kingdoms would pass away the day Messiah 25:48 came back and set up his own everlasting empire. 25:52 Now, today you and I are lucky enough to live in 25:54 the freest society in the history of the whole world. 25:58 We have what the early Christians really never had. 26:02 In the words of Thomas Jefferson, 26:04 we have a wall of separation between church and state 26:08 and that wall gives us the freedom to worship 26:11 as we please, to live freely as the followers of Christ. 26:16 But in the 1980s, in the face of rapid moral decay 26:20 in North America, we started to question 26:22 that all-important wall. 26:25 We started to say that maybe some atheists, maybe even 26:27 the Soviet Union came up with the idea of separation 26:30 of church and state to undermine the Christian faith. 26:34 We started to think that maybe the best way to secure 26:36 our future was to win with Christianity at the ballat box, 26:41 to just take over the reins of government and make Christianity 26:43 the official state religion. 26:47 At this juncture in history, it's very important that we 26:50 realize what happens when Christians build 26:52 a shadow empire. 26:55 When we recreate Christianity in the image of Rome, we end up 26:59 with something that kind of looks like Christianity. 27:02 It has all the same trappings, all the same language, 27:05 but it has a completely different objective. 27:08 It no longer represents the humble teachings 27:10 of the carpenter from Nazareth. 27:15 And that means that you and I have a decision we have to make. 27:19 Will it be Caesar or Jesus? 27:23 By all means, live in this world, be an active part 27:27 of the community, obey the powers that be, 27:29 be a good citizen, all of that is your God-given biblical duty 27:33 but at the same time, you have to know 27:35 who the real King is and never lose sight 27:38 of the real kingdom. 27:41 And when there is a discrepancy between Caesar 27:43 and the King of kings, there is no choice 27:47 for the Christian but to cast his lot with Jesus. 27:52 ♪♪♪ 28:03 announcer: Order your copy of "Shadow Empire" from 28:05 the Voice of Prophecy today. 28:07 Go to ShadowEmpireDVD.com now to get your set of this exciting 28:11 4-part series on DVD or call toll free, 1-844-822-2943. 28:18 Again that's 1-844-822-2943. 28:22 We're ready to help you Monday through Thursday 28:23 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. mountain time 28:26 or you can order anytime at ShadowEmpireDVD.com. 28:30 announcer: If you've enjoyed "Shadow Empire," 28:32 join the Voice of Prophecy for the sequel, 28:34 "A Pale Horse Rides." 28:36 We'll focus on a remarkable untold story that set the stage 28:40 for the appearance of Martin Luther. 28:42 Travel with us beyond the fringes of the Roman Empire 28:45 revealing the amazing tale of a biblical Christianity 28:47 that somehow survived the darkest hours 28:49 of the Dark Ages. 28:52 ♪♪♪ 28:57 announcer: Join other churches in hosting something big. 28:59 Visit our website now. |
Revised 2017-09-21