Church History - United States

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The Edict of Toleration For about 250 years, after the Romans realized Christianity was not just an offshoot of Judaism, a legal religion to the Romans, Christians were persecuted in the vast Roman E... View MoreThe Edict of Toleration For about 250 years, after the Romans realized Christianity was not just an offshoot of Judaism, a legal religion to the Romans, Christians were persecuted in the vast Roman Empire. The persecutions went in waves and varied in intensity at different times and in different regions. However, at no time during that period did the Christian religion have approval as a legal religion in the empire. It was, in fact, always illegal to be a Christian during this 250-year period, and there was great variance in how harsh or how little the law was enforced against these illegal Christians. The worst time of persecution was by Emperor Diocletian and later Galerius from 303 to 311 AD called the "Great Persecution.” Galerius, Diocletian’s junior and later his successor, had convinced Diocletian that Christians were dangerous enemies to the empire. It was the last great attempt by the Romans to wipe out the Christian faith. The irony is, Dioclietian’s wife, Prisca and daughter, Valeria, were probably secret Christians. And Valeria was married to Galerius. Diocletian first prohibited all Christian worship, and all churches and Christian books were to be destroyed. Later he ordered clergy to be arrested unless they sacrificed to pagan deities. In 304 this edict was extended to all Christians. Diocletian stepped down in 305 and his understudy, Galerius, took over as emperor. Galerius issued an edict requiring everyone in the empire to sacrifice to the gods of the empire or suffer execution or forced labor. After 8 long years of terror, many were martyred, many apostatized. But it failed, Christianity proved to be impossible to eradicate. Finally, one week before Emperor Galerius died, he eased the rules against the Christians—called the Edict of Toleration, ending the Great Persecution. However, this was short of acceptance as a legal and valid religion, just tolerance. Kind of like a truce. Historian Philip Schaff called it a “hostile neutrality” toward Christianity. The Edict of Milan, two years later, would grant Christianity as a licit, or legal, religion of the Roman Empire. We will discuss the Edict of Milan next time. If you would like to read the full Edict of Toleration, here it is: “Among other arrangements which we are always accustomed to make for the prosperity and welfare of the republic, we had desired formerly to bring all things into harmony with the ancient laws and public order of the Romans, and to provide that even the Christians who had left the religion of their fathers should come back to reason ; since, indeed, the Christians themselves, for some reason, had followed such a caprice and had fallen into such a folly that they would not obey the institutes of antiquity, which perchance their own ancestors had first established; but at their own will and pleasure, they would thus make laws unto themselves which they should observe and would collect various peoples in diverse places in congregations. Finally when our law had been promulgated to the effect that they should conform to the institutes of antiquity, many were subdued by the fear of danger, many even suffered death. And yet since most of them persevered in their determination, and we saw that they neither paid the reverence and awe due to the gods nor worshipped the God of the Christians, in view of our most mild clemency and the constant habit by which we are accustomed to grant indulgence to all, we thought that we ought to grant our most prompt indulgence also to these, so that they may again be Christians and may hold their conventicles, provided they do nothing contrary to good order. But we shall tell the magistrates in another letter what they ought to do. Wherefore, for this our indulgence, they ought to pray to their God for our safety, for that of the republic, and for their own, that the republic may continue uninjured on every side, and that they may be able to live securely in their homes.” https://saviorconnect.com/pages/227/

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November 28, 2021 2:05 pm

This is the fist question on the Church History Quiz

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Quiz answer #1: Polycarp and the Early Persecutions Polycarp (69-155AD), the disciple of John the apostle, before being burned to death in a Roman arena said, “You threaten me with fire which burns f... View MoreQuiz answer #1: Polycarp and the Early Persecutions Polycarp (69-155AD), the disciple of John the apostle, before being burned to death in a Roman arena said, “You threaten me with fire which burns for an hour, and is then extinguished, but you know nothing of the fire of the coming judgment and eternal punishment, reserved for the ungodly. Why are you waiting? Bring on whatever you want....Eighty-six years I have served Christ, and He never did me any wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” Polycarp was told to give tribute to Caesar and say “away with the atheists,” (Romans believed that not believing in the pantheistic Roman gods was atheism). Polycarp, waved has hand to the crowd and said, “away with the atheists.” Polycarp lifted his eyes to heaven and prayed: "Father, I bless you that you have deemed me worthy of this day and hour, that I might take a portion of the martyrs in the cup of Christ. . . Among these may I today be welcome before thy face as a rich and acceptable sacrifice." As men and women died for their faith, so bravely and peacefully, the crowds who witnessed the martyrs wondered—"Who are these people who die like this, so sure of themselves and their God?" Martyrs, like Polycarp, had a profound impact on those who watched. However Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180) was not so impressed. Aurelius spoke of the martyrs “with scorn, tracing their noble enthusiasm for martyrdom to 'sheer obstinacy' and love for theatrical display,” historian Phiilip Schaff writes But the martyrs were a powerful witness, as the word “martyr” in Greek literally means--"witness." Their dignity and serenity in death was a witness to the workings of God. Many Romans came to the spectacle with a morbid excitement but left the stadium struck by the calm of the Christians who faced death so bravely. The Church Father Tertullian (165-249 AD) had converted to Christianity based in part on his wonder at Christians' faithfulness in the face of martyrdom. He said, “Kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to dust; your injustice is the proof that we are innocent...The more we are struck down by you, the more numerous do we become. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” The seed was planted in the hearts of audiences all over the Roman Empire. The witness of the bold believers calmly facing death was greater than words. Justin Martyr who himself was martyred in 165 said, “We do not give up our confession though we be executed by the sword, though we be crucified, thrown to wild beasts, put in chains, and exposed to fire and every other kind of torture. Everyone knows this. On the contrary, the more we are persecuted and martyred, the more do others in ever increasing numbers become believers and God-fearing people through the name of Jesus.” Origin in the early third century said, “the more that kings, rulers, and peoples have persecuted them everywhere, the more Christians have increased in number and grown in strength." Philip Schaff writes: “The persecutions of Christianity during the first three centuries appear like a long tragedy: first, foreboding signs; then a succession of bloody assaults of heathenism upon the religion of the cross; amidst the dark scenes of fiendish hatred and cruelty the bright exhibitions of suffering virtue; now and then a short pause; at last a fearful and desperate struggle of the old pagan empire for life and death, ending in the abiding victory of the Christian religion. Thus this bloody baptism of the church resulted in the birth of a Christian world. It was a repetition and prolongation of the crucifixion but followed by a resurrection.” Schaff is referring to the three centuries of martyrdom and oppression by the hands of the Romans before the miraculous and instantaneous Roman reversal of policy and acceptance of Christianity by the emperor Constantine in 313 AD. It was an amazing turn of events for Church history. https://saviorconnect.com/pages/227/

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Archaeological Evidence Confirms Sodom and Gomorrah By Eric Metaxas (from https://www.newsweek.com/archaeology-proving-bible...) In 1846—before archaeology even existed as a field—an Assyrian obeli... View MoreArchaeological Evidence Confirms Sodom and Gomorrah By Eric Metaxas (from https://www.newsweek.com/archaeology-proving-bible...) In 1846—before archaeology even existed as a field—an Assyrian obelisk was discovered in what is today northern Iraq. It referred to Jehu, a ninth-century BC Hebrew king. For the first time, an archaeological find corroborated what was in the Bible, and Victorian society was electrified. But this was only the first in a torrent of similar discoveries that challenged secular claims that the Bible is a collection of made-up myths and folktales. This trend of archaeology corroborating Biblical accounts continued so consistently that in 1959 Rabbi Dr. Nelson Glueck declared "no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference." Since then, the evidence has kept coming. For example, in 1961 an inscription was found bearing the name "Pilate," the earliest known reference to this figure outside of the New Testament. In 1968, a first-century home in Capernaum was identified as that of the apostle Peter. In 1990 an ossuary was found bearing the inscription—and bones—of Caiaphas, the high priest who infamously pushed for Jesus's execution. In 1993, a stele mentioning the "House of David" was discovered, yanking King David out of the realm of myth and into the historical record. But just two weeks ago, the details of perhaps the most astonishing of all such finds appeared in a lengthy, peer-reviewed paper in Nature Scientific Reports. It described the cataclysmic destruction of a Middle Bronze Age city north of the Dead Sea and represented years of research and technical analysis by 21 scientists, who likely never expected to author a paper in one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals that mentioned the destruction of the Biblical city of Sodom. But in the end, the parallels proved impossible to ignore. For starters, the archaeologist who excavated the site had been guided there by what the Bible said about Sodom. Dr. Steven Collins knew if the place existed, this site—today called Tall el-Hammam—must be it. In 2006 he began excavating. When he and his team got down to about 1650 BC—when Sodom was believed destroyed—they uncovered a five-foot layer of soot. Randomly scattered throughout this vast "destruction matrix" were bits of melted brick, burned fragments of human bones and other baffling detritus. No volcanic eruption—or fire or earthquake—could have produced this. The day they found it, Collins discovered the shard of a jar. A seasoned ceramic typologist, he tagged it instantly as from about 1700 B.C. But one side of it had a strange glassy green glaze. The technology to intentionally produce anything like that would not exist for another 24 centuries. What could it be? A lab in New Mexico concluded that the pottery had been melted by super-intense heat lasting a very short period of time. What would do that? Another perplexing fact: though the site was inhabited for millennia before the cataclysm, immediately afterward, there was a gap of 700 years before humans again settled there. Why would a site offering unmatched natural resources and military advantages be shunned for so long? It was unprecedented. What Dr. Collins came to believe—and what the recent Nature article corroborated in extraordinary detail—is that what happened was a "cosmic airburst/impact event" very similar to what happened in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. That's when an asteroid of about 180 feet in diameter entered the Earth's atmosphere at 34,000 mph, and exploded a few miles above that largely uninhabited region. The equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs, the 1908 blast flattened 80 million trees, and so disturbed the upper atmosphere that for three days people in London could read newspapers at midnight. The Nature article says the Tall el-Hammam explosion was likely even more powerful. The destruction it wrought is hard to fathom. The most powerful hurricanes produce winds approaching 200 mph, but this explosion may have generated winds of 700 mph. Walls 15 feet thick were utterly obliterated. The heat was such that nearly all of the thousands of inhabitants were vaporized. In fact, Nature tells us that the temperature at the center of the Tunguska explosion was 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit; the Tall el-Hammam explosion was perhaps even hotter. Whatever charred bone fragments survived—along with melted pottery, plaster, and roofing tiles—indicate that for 25 seconds the temperature was roughly 3,500 degrees, hot enough to melt stainless steel and titanium. The only events comparable to what happened at Tall el-Hammam are the atomic bomb tests in the New Mexico desert in 1945, which melted the sands into a glaze so similar to what Collins found on the Bronze Age pottery that when he first showed the fragment to the lab scientist she assumed it was from the Los Alamos testing site. The Nature article concludes explicitly that what happened in 1700 BC bears inescapable parallels to what the Bible says about Sodom. And indeed, they are startling: "(i) stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came down from the sky; (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv) a major city was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed; and (vi) area crops were destroyed." It even says that what happened "may have generated an oral tradition that...became the source of the written story of biblical Sodom in Genesis." That a prestigious journal of science would admit these things should at least make skeptics sit up and take notice. Few people—whether religious believers or skeptical scientists—ever dreamt such a thing was possible. Archaeology has been pointing to the accuracy of the Hebrew scriptures for 170 years. But this latest find—pushing things all the way back to the Middle Bronze Age world of Abraham—is arguably the most astounding of all. And perhaps the one question to ask at this juncture is simply: whatever will they find next?

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The First Thanksgiving (part 3) The crossing across the Atlantic was difficult, but it was nothing compared to the Pilgrims’ first year in the New World that would nearly obliterate them. The colonis... View MoreThe First Thanksgiving (part 3) The crossing across the Atlantic was difficult, but it was nothing compared to the Pilgrims’ first year in the New World that would nearly obliterate them. The colonists were not prepared for the New England harsh winter. They expected a milder climate – the map shows that the New World is much further south than the latitude of London--much closer to the latitude of Madrid, Spain. Out of the 102 who made the trip only 51, exactly half, survived the winter and most of the wives died—leaving many widowers and orphans. At one point there were only six who were well enough to take care of the others. The first few months, over the winter, the settlers remained on the anchored Mayflower. Some of the men during the spring spent time scouting the territory. One day a lone Native American named Samoset surprisingly walked up to them and greeted them in English. He knew some broken English from trappers. He asked for a beer. He told them of another native named Tisquantum, also known as “Squanto.” Squanto spoke English fluently. A few years before Squanto had been captured by English traders and brought to England and lived there for several years. He returned to his native land to find that his whole tribe had been wiped out from an epidemic. He was the last survivor. Squanto lived with the Pilgrims, adopting them as his new tribe and family. He was crucial to the Pilgrims in helping negotiate peace with the surrounding natives, and, more importantly, taught them how to live off the land. He was instrumental in the survival of the colony. Pilgrim William Bradford described Squanto as "a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.” The settlers “began to plant their corn, in which service Squanto stood them in good stead, showing them how to plant it and cultivate it. He also told them that unless they got fish to manure this exhausted old soil, it would come to nothing ... In the middle of April plenty of fish would come up the brook ... and (he) taught them how to catch it." Squanto was key to the bountiful abundance of the Pilgrims and the friendliness of the natives in November 1621 that brought about the celebration we now call “Thanksgiving.” The only account of the first Thanksgiving is by Pilgrim leader Edward Winslow. It was in a series of letters that were published in England, titled: "A Relation or Journall of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Setled at Plimoth in New England, by Certaine English Adventurers both Merchants and Others, with the Difficult Passage, their Safe Arrivall, their Joyfull Building of, and Comfortable Planting Themselves in the Now Well Defended Towne of New Plimoth." (Can you believe that was the title!). Now simply known as “Mourt’s Relation” (Relation meaning “report”). The following account contains everything we know about the first Thanksgiving: "Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed upon our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty." The picture of the natives and the white men and women joining together in three days of sharing and gratefulness to God is a powerful scene that has endured to this day, 400 years later. Thanksgiving is the celebration of God by a group of people that endured hardship and death but held on to their faith, even cheerfully. “That the Pilgrims could celebrate at all in this setting was a testimony both to human resilience and to heavenly hope,” wrote author Robert McKenzie. https://saviorconnect.com/pages/227/

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The Pilgrim’s Journey (part 2) In the fall of 1620, the Pilgrims chartered the Mayflower to take them to a new life in the New World. The Mayflower left the port in Plymouth, England in September 162... View MoreThe Pilgrim’s Journey (part 2) In the fall of 1620, the Pilgrims chartered the Mayflower to take them to a new life in the New World. The Mayflower left the port in Plymouth, England in September 1620. “Truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting. To see what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound among them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each heart,” wrote fellow Pilgrim and future governor of the colony, William Bradford. The Mayflower was very small--ninety feet long and twenty-six feet wide. One hundred and two passengers and about 25 crew were packed in a boat no larger than a modern yacht. Not all were Pilgrims, in fact, most weren’t. Only 41 of the 102 were Pilgrims; the Pilgrims called the other travelers “Strangers.” The Strangers were craftsmen, merchants and workers recruited to help make the venture successful. Crossing the Atlantic proved difficult. Strong winds blew from the west which hampered their travel. One man fell overboard but was saved and another man died during the voyage. The passengers were crammed like sardines below deck in a 80 foot by 20 foot space and a five-foot ceiling. Men holding their wives who were holding their children. For two months, everyone was miserable, cold and soaked. “Cramped in so small a space and subject to rough weather, the passengers suffered a good deal,” writes author Victor McKinnon. “The sailors cursed the pious Pilgrims, whom they detested. Food consisted of dried fish, cheese and beer. The only sanitary accommodation was a slop bucket. There was nowhere to bathe. Seasickness was rampant during storms. With little air below decks, the conditions were nauseating at the best.” They arrived at Cape Cod on November 11, 1620. They were contracted to land on the Hudson River near another English colony, but they landed further north in present day Massachusetts. The Strangers argued that they were no longer bound by the charter since they didn’t land in Virginia. William Bradford reported “mutinous speeches” and the Pilgrims had to act quickly. They needed a set of laws to govern themselves. They quickly put together the Mayflower Compact: “In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc. Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith, and the honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia; do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another; covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620.” Almost every male signed it and it quelled the rebellion. It helped bind the Strangers and the Pilgrims together, as they agreed to abide by the same laws. “Plymouth Colony was the first experiment in consensual government in Western history between individuals with one another, and not with a monarch. The colony was a mutual enterprise, not an imperial expedition organized by the Spanish or English governments,” wrote author Rebecca Fraser. “In order to survive, it depended on the consent of the colonists themselves. Necessary in order to bind the community together, it was revolutionary by chance.” https://saviorconnect.com/pages/227/

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November 22, 2021 6:45 pm

A Heavenly Country (part 1) As Thanksgiving approaches, let’s look a bit at what led up to the original Thanksgiving that occurred in November, 1621, exactly four hundred years ago this month. In t... View More

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