As we discussed in the last article in this series, there was never an “undivided”
Church. That idea was promulgated by some very early western Christians who seem to have truly believed it, but whose outlook was limited by their political horizons.
That is, to the Roman Empire. Indeed, that was probably a pretty healthy set of horizons to have, in the first few hundred years of Church history.
Think about it: in a country where you could be ordered to worship the political leadership (literally worship: pray to; give money to; sacrifice to), it probably wasn’t at all healthy to discuss membership in organizations that existed well outside that leadership’s control.
Now, the Roman Empire was, in those days, already beginning to divide itself into eastern and western wings, and from the earliest days, there were beginnings of divisions between the Latin-speaking west and the Greek-speaking east. But, what about the Celtic-speaking British Isles? What about the Gallic-speaking Gaul that existed outside the Empire?
What about the whole Persian Empire, where Christians still spoke (and still do) Aramaic? Or the Christians in India, whose liturgy was Syriac, whatever language they spoke on an everyday basis?
In the Nestorian Church, which even today traces its roots to Antioch, they use a translation of the Bible that has many books in common with the Bible, but it also includes books that never made it into our Canon, and they don’t recognize our Canon, anyway. And, by the way, they don’t call it “the Bible”. It’s called the “Peshitta”.
Almost everything we in the west know about the Church and what it believes is dependent upon the decisions made not by Church fathers, but rather by political authorities. The Council of Nicaea was not called by Bishops of the early Church. It was called by the Emperor Constantine. He presided over it. He declared that 50 “Bibles” be prepared and distributed all across the Empire, to standardize what Christians in the Empire believed.
But, what about those Christians outside the Empire? Were they required to believe what the Emperor of Rome said they were to believe? That’s a silly question! Even if they wanted to believe what he said they had to believe, how would they even know what that was? Of course, they would not. And, they did not. Yet, these people were Christians, too, were they not? They were part of the Church.
The “established” Church, headquartered both in Rome and in Constantinople struggled for close to a thousand years to bring these outlying Christians under their control, and in fact, most of them did, but some never did “come in”. In the next few episodes of this series, we’ll be looking at some of them. It’s a fascinating story.