The advantages for the church were real enough, but there was a price to pay. Constantine ruled Christian bishops as he did his civil servants and demanded unconditional obedience to official pronouncements, even when they interfered with purely church matters. There were also the masses who now streamed into the officially favored church. Prior to Constantine’s conversion, the church consisted of convinced believers who were willing to bear the risk of being identified as Christians. Now many came who were politically ambitious, religiously disinterested, and still half rooted in paganism. This threatened to produce not only shallowness and permeation by pagan superstitions but also the secularization and misuse of religion for political purposes.
Rome
Decius Zulmü ve Dinden Dönenler Sorunu
A general from the Danubian frontier, Decius was determined to have no nonsense from Christians. In his eyes, they were enemies of the empire. Their atheism was responsible for the many troubles in the realm. Thus Decius commanded all citizens of the empire to sacrifice to the traditional Roman gods.
To save their lives, many Christians complied. Others were able to obtain certificates without having actually sacrificed. But an unknown number of Christians were imprisoned or executed—among them the bishops of Rome, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Those who were killed were called martyrs—that is, “witnesses.” Decius, however, was not out to make heroes. He wanted to discredit Christianity, so many Christians were tortured until they denied Christ by saying, “Caesar is Lord.” If a Christian endured this persecution without denying Christ, he was called a confessor. If a believer under torture did what the Romans demanded, he was classed among the lapsed, the fallen ones. The fury ended, at least for a season, in AD 251, when Decius, deserted by his gods, was killed in a battle with the barbarian Goths. Then the question of readmission to the church arose with striking intensity. Many believers were guilty of apostasy, sometimes as much as three-quarters of a congregation.
But how could the church receive those who had denied the faith? Didn’t Jesus say, “Whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven” (Matt. 10:33)? Wasn’t this the “sin against the Holy Spirit” for which there was no forgiveness? What evil could be worse than to deny, from fear or pain, the only way to salvation? If this sin was pardoned, wouldn’t that mean the suffering of the martyrs was pointless?
İmparator Kültü ve Hristiyanların Sadakat Sorunu
The supreme cause of Roman persecution of Christians arose from the tradition of emperor worship. This conflict between Christ and Caesar did not break out overnight. Only gradually did the worship of the emperor assume a central place in the life of the empire. The roots of the practice lie in the merits of Roman rule. When the Romans took over the government of a country, impartial Roman justice arrived, and citizens were freed from the capricious authority of unpredictable and often savage and bloodthirsty tyrants. When Roman administration came, the roads were cleared of robbers and the seas of pirates, and a new security entered into life. This was pax Romana, the Roman peace. The result of this security was a deep and heartfelt gratitude to the spirit of Rome. It was an easy step for the spirit of Rome to become the goddess Roma, and by the second century BC, there were many temples in Asia Minor to the goddess Roma. But the human mind and heart need a symbol; it was a further easy step to see the goddess Roma and the spirit of Rome incarnated in the emperor. He embodied Rome; he was Rome; in him the spirit or genius of Rome resided and had its earthly dwelling. The first temple actually built to the godhead of the emperor was built in 29 BC at Pergamum in Asia Minor. At first the emperors were hesitant to accept this reverence. Claudius (AD 41–59) refused to have temples erected to him because, as he said, he did not wish to be offensive to his fellow citizens. But slowly an idea began to form in the official mind. The problem of the Roman Empire was the problem of unification. The empire stretched from the Euphrates River to the shores of the Irish Sea. It stretched from Germany to North Africa, from Spain to Egypt and Syria. Here were all kinds of peoples and languages and faiths and traditions. How could they be welded into a unity? How could the consciousness of one empire be brought into the lives of such diverse peoples? There is no unifying force like the force of a common religion, and Caesar worship lay ready at hand. None of the local and ancestral faiths had any hope of ever becoming universal, but Rome was universal. As a result, Caesar worship became the keystone of imperial policy. It was deliberately organized in every province in the empire. Everywhere temples to the godhead of the emperor appeared. Little by little people within the empire came to believe that any allegiance in conflict with loyalty to the emperor, and therefore to the empire, could lead only to the disintegration of order. Worship of another Lord could only open the floodgates of chaos. Emperor Decius (249–51) took another important step. Caesar worship was made compulsory for every race and nation within the empire with the single exception of the Jews. On a certain day in the year, every Roman citizen had to come to the Temple of Caesar, burn a pinch of incense there, and say, “Caesar is Lord.” When a person had done that, they were given a certificate documenting that they had done so.
Thus we see that Caesar worship was primarily a test of political loyalty; it was a test of whether a person was a good citizen. If anyone refused to carry out the ceremony of acknowledging Caesar, they were automatically branded as a traitor. Exaltation of the emperor, then, created a problem for the Christians. They had not failed to pray for the emperor in their meetings, but they would not pray to him in private or in public.
Roma’nın Dini Toleransı ve Hristiyanlar
Imperial authorities were remarkably tolerant of religions from those lands overrun by the Roman legions. If the national religions of the conquered countries would add homage to the emperor to their other ceremonies, Rome almost never interfered. In one notable instance, Rome even dropped the requirement of burning incense to the emperor. The Jews, with their fanatical loyalty to their one true God, and their readiness to turn their homeland into a blood-soaked wilderness before they acknowledged any other deity, were the exception. As long as Roman authorities considered Christians as just one more sect of Jews, followers of Jesus enjoyed this same immunity from imperial pressure. But when the Jews made it known in no uncertain terms that they would have nothing to do with the new movement, the situation changed dramatically. Once the Romans discovered what the Christians were up to, they were confronted by the problem of toleration in a more exasperating form than even the Jews had presented. The Jews, after all, were “a sort of closed corporation, a people set apart from others by the mark of circumcision, who lived and worshiped largely by themselves, and did little active proselyting.” The Christians, on the other hand, were always talking about their Jesus. They were out to make Christians of the entire population of the empire, and the rapidity of their spread showed that this was no idle dream. Not only did they, like the Jews, refuse to worship the emperor as a living god, but they were doing their utmost to convince every subject of the emperor to join them in their refusal. From time to time, then, Christians felt the wrath of the empire and its people.