The Emperor Takes Over

Words to Know

Council — an official meeting of bishops to decide questions of belief.

Exile — being ordered out of the country by the government.

State religion — the one religion a government requires and enforces.

The year 312: a general fights under my sign.

His name was Constantine.

He was fighting a civil war for control of the western empire, against a rival named Maxentius who held Rome itself. The two armies met at the Milvian Bridge, just outside the city, on the 28th of October.

Before the battle, Constantine put a Christian sign on his soldiers’ shields.

Now ask why a pagan general would do that, because it is the strangest thing in this lesson and nobody ever stops on it.

We are talking about a small, illegal sect. Roman officials had been burning its books nine years earlier. Constantine’s own soldiers were not Christians — most of them served the sun and the old gods, and so, up to then, had he. There was no obvious advantage in it whatsoever.

He said afterward that he had been told to. The story comes down in two versions: a sign seen in the sky with words attached, and a dream the night before the battle. Both were written down later, by men who admired him, and they do not agree with each other. ¹

I am not going to tell you what happened to that man. I do not know.

I will tell you what he got out of it. He won. Maxentius’s army broke on the bridge, and Maxentius drowned in the river. Twelve years later, in 324, Constantine beat his last rival in the east and ruled the entire Roman world alone. ²

And the sign that won it was a monogram of my name — on the equipment of an army, on its way to kill other Romans.

Within a few decades, the instrument of my execution was a military standard.

The year 313: they stop killing you.

Constantine and his eastern colleague, an emperor named Licinius, agreed a policy: Christians and everyone else could worship as they chose, and nobody would be punished for it. ³

And they gave the property back.

That part never gets mentioned, and it matters more than the tolerating did. The agreement ordered that the buildings and the land taken from congregations during the persecution be returned — immediately, at no charge — and that anyone who had bought such property in good faith would be compensated out of the imperial treasury.

Ten years earlier the churches had been pulled down and their books burned. Now the empire was handing back the deeds and paying for the inconvenience.

Think about what that does to a movement. For the first time in its life, being a church is not a risk.

It is an asset.

The end of the killing gets celebrated, and after two and a half centuries of being hunted, I understand the celebrating completely. Nobody should die for what they think.

But watch what happened next, because it happened fast.

The year 325: the emperor calls a meeting about me.

The town was Nicaea, on a lake in what is now Turkey. The meeting is called the Council of Nicaea, and it is where the creed in the back of your hymnal comes from.

Why would an emperor care?

Because he had just spent eighteen years fighting to make one empire out of broken pieces, and he had picked the Christian church as something that would help hold it together. It was the one organization with a branch in every city, everywhere, all of it now owing him a very large debt.

And that organization was tearing itself in half over Arius, the preacher from the last lesson, and the question of whether I was made or not made.

Constantine did not care about the answer. There is a letter from him about it, sent to both sides, in which he calls the whole dispute small and foolish and tells them to stop it. ⁴

He cared that there were two answers. A church at war with itself was no use to him at all.

So he did what an emperor does.

He summoned the bishops — somewhere around three hundred of them — and put them on the imperial post, the government courier system, so they travelled at state expense. He paid for their lodging and their food. He opened the proceedings himself, in the hall, in his robes, and then sat down with them. ⁵

Go deeperWho was actually in the room at Nicaea

Look closer at who filled that room. Almost every bishop came from the Greek-speaking east, only a handful from the Latin west, which is strange to sit with, since the creed they wrote is now recited mostly in Latin-descended churches worldwide.

Many of them were also old enough to remember the persecution, and some were still carrying it on their bodies. One is remembered as having lost an eye for it. Twenty-two years earlier, this same empire had been putting out their eyes.

They took a vote, and it was not close.

The bishops approved a statement saying that I am of one substance with the Father, begotten not made.

Nearly all of them signed it. Two refused. ⁶

And then the state moved.

Arius and the men who would not sign were sent into exile — not by the church, by the government, by imperial order, with soldiers.

And Constantine ordered that Arius’s books be burned, and that any man found hiding a copy be put to death. ⁷

Stop there and read that again.

An argument about me was settled by a vote of officials whose travel an emperor had paid for. The losing side was removed from the country by soldiers. And owning the losing side’s books was made a capital offense.

That is the moment.

Not the cross. Not Paul. Not the forged letters.

The moment the definition of me became a matter for government administration, with exile behind it, the thing was finished.

And here is exactly how the incentives changed, because I do not want you taking that on trust either.

Before 313, being a leader in a congregation could cost you your property, your freedom or your life.

After Constantine, here is what it got you instead.

Clergy were released from the public duties that ruined ordinary well-off men — the expensive local offices a town could force you to pay for.

Bishops were given legal power. A bishop’s court could settle a dispute, and the state would enforce the ruling.

Churches were given the right to receive property in wills, which they had never had before. Money began arriving from the dead.

Sunday was made a public day of rest across the empire.

And the emperor’s own treasury started putting up enormous churches in stone. ⁸

Now do the arithmetic on a young man’s life.

In the year 300, joining the clergy was a way to lose everything you had.

By the year 350, it was one of the best careers available in the Roman world. Secure. Respected. Exempt from the duties that crushed other men. It came with authority over other people, and a building.

You do not have to accuse anybody of anything. Just ask what kind of man that job now attracts — and what kind of sermon keeps it.

And one more thing changed, and it was the worst of them.

Being wrong about me stopped being a religious problem and became a crime.

Once the state enforces the definition, a man who disagrees is not a mistaken brother to be argued with. He is a criminal, and there is a soldier for him.

Everything after is consequence.

Go deeperWhat happened to Constantine's own family

Here is one detail, not to be cruel, but because you should know who was in the chair, and because a church that will not tell you this about its first great patron is a church protecting something.

The year after that council, Constantine had his eldest son, Crispus, put to death. Shortly afterward he had his wife Fausta put to death as well. The historians of the period, several of whom admired him enormously, seem to have preferred not to record why. ⁹

I am not saying that makes the council's decision wrong. A bad man can chair a meeting that gets something right.

I am saying that the definition of me which you stand up and recite came out of a meeting run start to finish by this man, for reasons of state.

And nobody ever told you that.

The year 380: it becomes required.

The emperor was Theodosius, and the order is called the Edict of Thessalonica, issued on the 27th of February, 380.

Why then? Because fifty-five years after Nicaea, the argument was still not over. Arius’s side had never gone away. It had held much of the eastern church for decades, and it had won whole peoples outside the empire’s borders. Theodosius had just been made emperor in the east, he came from the west, and he intended to finish it by law.

So he commanded all the peoples under his rule to hold the faith in the form held by the bishop of Rome and the bishop of Alexandria.

Read that sentence again. Not this is true. This is the form, and these two men have it.

It called those who did not comply demented and insane, declared them heretics, and said they would suffer divine punishment first and then whatever punishment his own authority decided to inflict. ¹⁰

Read the last part once more. And then whatever punishment his own authority decided to inflict.

Five years later, somebody found out what that meant.

The year 385: they start killing people over it.

A bishop in Spain named Priscillian taught fasting, poverty and study groups that met in private houses, with women in them. Other Spanish bishops accused him. Heresy was not yet a capital crime, but sorcery was, so the charge became sorcery. He was beheaded at Trier with several companions, and Martin of Tours, who travelled there to stop it, lost. ¹¹

It is generally counted as the first execution of Christians by Christians over a question of belief. Eighty-two years earlier, Christians like the men making that decision were the ones being hunted.

Go deeperHow the first heresy execution was arranged

What made this different was not the man's teaching, which was a hard, stripped-down version of the faith, but the tactic used against him, one that would get used for the next thousand years.

He was tried at Trier in front of Magnus Maximus, an army commander who had just seized the western throne by force and badly needed to look like a defender of the true faith. That is who sat in judgment.

Not every bishop went along with it. Martin of Tours travelled to Trier specifically to argue that a church matter belonged to bishops, not to a court, and that an emperor had no business killing a man over what he believed.

Now count the years.

From a banned sect, to a tolerated one, to a favored one, to the official state religion, to a religion that executes people for getting it wrong.

That took seventy-three years.

They did not have to become Rome. Rome offered, and they said yes. And I understand why. It is very hard to say no to the end of being hunted.

But something was traded at that table, and I can tell you exactly what it was.

They handed over the right to be a thing the empire could not use.

And they got back buildings, exemptions, courts, inheritances and the law.

The thing that got traded was the only thing I had ever asked people to do.

And here is what everybody gets backwards.

Rome never defeated us.

Rome killed me. Rome killed Paul. Rome killed a great many people over two and a half centuries, and it did not work at all.

Then the empire simply put my name on its coins and its standards and its law.

And the movement that had survived every persecution did not survive the endorsement.

Check It Yourself

This one is history, not Bible. Look up any of these by name: the Milvian Bridge, 312. The Council of Nicaea, 325. The Edict of Thessalonica, 380. Priscillian, 385.

You will find: every single one is a government decision, not a religious one.

The Short Version

• In 312, Constantine won at the Milvian Bridge under a Christian sign, and in 313 the empire handed the churches their property back.
• In 325, Constantine convened, funded and opened the Council of Nicaea, which defined what I am — and the state exiled the two men who would not sign.
• Imperial favor turned church office from a way to lose everything into one of the best careers in the empire.
• By 380 the faith was compulsory; by 385 people were being executed over it.
• Persecution did not destroy the movement. Official approval did.

Think About It

1. If you had been a bishop in 313, after generations of being hunted, would you have said no?
2. What does a religion have to give up to become the official one?