History of the Development of the Church during the
Græco-Roman and Græco-Byzantine Periods.
§ 19. CONTENT, DISTRIBUTION AND BOUNDARIES
OF THOSE PERIODS.
At the very beginning of the Apostolic Age the universalistic
spirit of Christianity had already broken through the particularistic
limitations of Judaism. When once the substantial truth of divine
salvation had cast off the Judaistic husk in which the kernel had
ripened, those elements of culture which had come to maturity in the
Roman-Greek world were appropriated as means for giving to Christian
ideas a fuller and clearer expression. The task now to be undertaken was
the development of Christianity on the lines of Græco-Roman culture, or
the expansion of the church’s apostolicity into catholicity. The ancient
church of the Roman and Byzantine world fulfilled this task, but in
doing so the sound evangelical catholic development encountered at every
point elements of a false, because an unevangelical, Catholicism. The
centre, then, of all the movements of Church History is to be found
in the Teutono-Roman-Slavic empire. The Roman church preserved and
increased her importance by attaching herself to this new empire, and
undertaking its spiritual formation and education. The Byzantine church,
on the other hand, falling into a state of inward stagnation, and
pressed from without by the forces of Islam, passes into decay as
a national church.
The history of this first stage of the development of the church falls
into =three periods=. The first period reaches down to Constantine the
Great, who, in A.D. 323, secured to Christianity and the church a final
victory over Paganism. The second period brings us down to the close of
the universal catholic or œcumenical elaboration of doctrine attained by
the church under its old classical form of culture, that is, down to the
close of the Monothelite controversy (§ 52, 8), by the Sixth Œcumenical
Council at Constantinople in A.D. 680. But inasmuch as the _Concilium
quini-sextum_ in A.D. 692 undertook simply the completion of the work of
the two previous œcumenical synods with reference to church constitution
and worship, and as here the first grounds were laid for the great
partition of the church into Eastern and Western (§ 63, 2), we prefer
to make A.D. 692 the closing limit of the second period. The conclusion
of the third period, is found in the overthrow of Constantinople
by the Turks in A.D. 1453. The first two periods are most evidently
distinguished from one another in respect of the outward condition of
the church. Before the times of Constantine, it lives and develops its
strength amid the oppression and persecution of the pagan state; under
Constantine the state itself becomes Christian and the church enjoys all
the advantages, all the care and furtherance, that earthly protection
can afford. Along with all this worldly splendour, however, a worldly
disposition makes its way into the church, and in exchange for its
protection of the church the state assumes an autocratic lordship over
it. Even in the inner, and pre-eminently doctrinal, development of the
church the two periods of this age are essentially distinguished from
one another. While it was the church’s endeavour to adopt only the forms
of culture of ancient paganism, while rejecting its godless substance,
it too often happened that pagan ideas got mixed up with Christianity,
and it was threatened with a similar danger from the side of Judaism. It
was therefore the special task of the church during the first period to
resist the encroachment of anti-Christian Jewish and Pagan elements. In
the first period the perfecting of its own genuinely Christian doctrinal
content was still a purely subjective matter, resting only on the
personal authority of the particular church teachers. In the second
period, on the other hand, the church universal, as represented by
œcumenical synods with full power, proceeds to the laying down and
establishing of an objective-ecclesiastical, œcumenical-catholic system
of doctrine, constituting an all-sided development of the truth in
opposition to the one-sided development of subjective heretical teaching.
In doing so, however, the culture of the old Græco-Roman world exhausted
its powers. The measure of development which these were capable of
affording the church was now completed, and its future must be looked
for among the new nationalities of Teutonic, Romanic, and Slavic origin.
While the Byzantine empire, and with it the glory of the ancient church
of the East was pressed and threatened by Islam, a new empire arose
in the West in youthful vigour and became the organ of a new phase of
development in the history of the church; and while the church in the
West struggled after a new and higher point in her development, the
Eastern church sank ever deeper down under outward oppression and inward
weakness. The partition of the church into an Eastern and a Western
division, which became imminent at the close of the second period, and
was actually carried out during the third period, cut off the church of
the East from the influence of those new vital forces, political as well
as ecclesiastical, and which it might otherwise, perhaps, have shared
with the West. By the overthrow of the East-Roman empire the last
support of its splendour and even of its vital activity was taken away.
Here too ends the history of the church on the lines of purely antique
classical forms of culture. The remnants of the church of the East were
no longer capable of any living historical development under the
oppression of the Turkish rule.