CHURCH BETWEEN THE SERMON AND A STATEMENT

When Rome captured and conquered the Church, it “transformed” the Church into an organisation, with all the corresponding paraphernalia, that the empire was so familiar and well-versed with. The Church which was dynamic and daring, till then, had become an arm of the Roman empire. We have become ineffective and worthless. The church has contaminated itself, and has lost its savour; the light so brightly shined till then, is masked and dimmed…sadly even till today.

Socrates Scholasticus, around AD 440, recorded these observations in the book, “The Ecclesiastical History of Socrates Scholasticus,’ Bk. II, ch. 13, about violence as the means to settle disputes in the church…
– ‘When [General] Hermogenes persisted in his efforts to drive out Paul [bishop of Constantinople] by means of his military force, the people became exasperated as is usual in such cases; and making a desperate attack upon him, they set his house on fire, and after dragging through the city, they at last put him to death.”

Socrates Scholasticus observes, that, at the church in Rome, petty and irrelevant things took centre stage and prominence, over the important matters of faith…
– “Dissension arose among the people [of Rome]; their disagreement being not about any article of faith or heresy, but simply as to who should be bishop. Hence frequent conflicts arose, insomuch that many lives were sacrificed in this contention.”

Jerome [340-420 AD] a speaker, writer, and leader of the early church, says…
– *“…after the empire became Christian…a general corruption both of faith and morals infected the Christian Church; which by that revolution…lost as much of her virtue as it had gained of wealth and power”

Philip Schaff [1875] a highly respected Protestant historian, writes thus in his 8-volume “History of the Christian Church”…
– Socrates and Sozomen [5th century historians] … date the decline of discipline and of the former purity of morals from…A.D. 390….[The]…vast Roman state could not so easily and quickly lay aside its heathen traditions and customs; it perpetuated them under Christian names. The great mass of the people received, at best, only John’s baptism of repentance, not Christ’s baptism of the Holy Ghost and of fire.”

Tom Lee observes – what the LORD Jesus gave as the manifesto of the Church, the “Sermon on the Mount’ to the Chosen and Royal Priesthood, was turned into a mere “Statement” of faith in the Nicean Creed…
– “Delivered from physical danger at the hands of the State, the Church was soon torn by theological dissension within; the almost inevitable outcome of its changed character. Having assimilated Hellenic philosophy and ethics and social forms, the Church also assumed a new frame of mind that shifted the emphasis from conduct to belief. The total contrast can be seen by comparing the Sermon on the Mount, which came at the beginning, and the Nicene Creed, which finalized the initial stage of the theological process of elaboration. The former is a sermon on ethics; the latter is a dogmatic, metaphysical credo, unrelated to conduct, in which contentious ideas and surmises with no provenance in Jesus’ teaching became improbable dogmas.”

We are still in the same effect, where the emphasis is on our belief, and not on our conduct, in direct contravention of James 2:26’s faith and works equation. We have utterly lost the moral and ethical compass, that our LORD gave us, right from the very beginning, culminating in the Sermon on the Mount, and the same being expounded in the rest of the New Testament. We can talk about anti-Semitism, slavery, racism, colonialism and ultimately the holocaust in the Christian Europe. All these evil enterprises had the unquestioning backing of the Church, and strong ‘theological’ framework to undergird the practice and propagation of the same.

May we get back to the authentic Christianity…the one to which our LORD had called the apostles, and the one to which the early church was wedded to, so intimately. Even so the LORD help us.