Church History

I recently read about a daytime talk-show host—a professed Christian—who informed her audience that the ancient Greeks were the ones tossing Christians to the lions and that the Christians predated the Greeks and Romans. Needless to say, this talk-show host has been the target of ridicule since then. And rightly so: not knowing when Christians came onto the scene or who persecuted them is the Christian equivalent of Americans not being able to name the first U.S. president: it's not something you need to know in order to be an American, but it sure helps you understand what being an American is about; and you look like and idiot if you don't know.

Therefore, in order to spare my readers the shame of not knowing their Crusades from their Reformation, I have compiled this brief summary of the otherwise very long, dramatic, complicated, and brutally violent history of the Christian Church:

After Pentecost, sometime around the year A.D. 33, the Apostles disbursed throughout the Roman Empire, establishing churches, appointing church leaders, and baptizing converts, covering a territory that stretched from India to Spain, Britain to Ethiopia. In time, four churches emerged as centers of Christian leadership: Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem (Constantinople would later be included in this "Pentarchy" and given a rank second behind Rome).

In the aftermath of a devastating fire in Rome in A.D. 64, persecution of Christians became the state policy of the Empire, and remained so for the next 249 years, during which time thousands of Christians were put to death, including all but one of the Twelve Apostles, every single bishop of Rome, and such Christian luminaries as Ignatius of Antioch, Justin of Caesarea, Perpetua and Felicity, Polycarp, and Irenaeus.

When the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Antioch became the center of Christianity. Twenty-five years later, St John the Evangelist completed his book of Revelation, the last canonical book of the New Testament.

In 301, Armenia became the first nation ever to adopt Christianity as the state religion. Ten years later, the Emperor Galerius, formerly an adversary of Christianity, issued a deathbed statute suspending the state policy of persecution against Christians. Then, in 313, the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and issued the Edict of Milan, legalizing Christianity in the Empire; he then relocated his capital to Byzantium, renaming it Constantinople. In 391, the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the empire. As Christianity spread, many false teachings, or heresies, sprang up. In response to these heresies, the Church held a number of Ecumenical Councils, affirming the "faith which was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3) and defending and confirming doctrines related to the Incarnation of Christ and the nature of the Holy Trinity. One of the better-known results of these Councils is the Nicene Creed, which to this day is affirmed by Christians as the fundamental statement of Christian faith.

A series of local councils during the 4th and 5th centuries ratified and confirmed the canon of Scripture, rejecting many books and epistles thought to be uninspired or of questionable doctrinal integrity.

In 589, a local synod of bishops in Toledo, Spain, in an attempt to fight Arianism, inserted the filioque clause (Latin: filius “son” and -que “and the”) into the Nicene Creed. This addition, although initially rejected by the Eastern and Western churches alike, was gradually adopted by Rome and is generally regarded as the first in a long succession of events that eventually led to the rupture between the Eastern and Western Churches.

An Arabian merchant and self-proclaimed prophet named Muhammad began in 632 to preach a new faith (الإسلام al-'islām, meaning “submission”), which spread rapidly throughout the Middle East and North Africa, beginning what would up to the present day be a major threat to Christianity in the region.

Pope Leo III, in 800, further set the east and west at odds when, despite the fact that the Roman Empire was still alive and well in Constantinople, he crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor in the west.

In 862, two brothers from Thessalonika, Greece, named Cyril and Methodius, set out to evangelize the Slavs. Their evangelization efforts eventually led to the conversion of Prince Vladimir I of Kiev, who in 988 adopted Christianity as the state religion of Kievan Rus’ (Russia). During his missionary work, St Cyril created a new alphabet into which he translated the Bible. This system of writing, called the Cyrillic alphabet, is still in use today in the languages of Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Macedonia, Serbia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Mongolia.

The Roman church, after centuries of debate and equivocation, formally confirmed the use of the filioque in 1009 by inserting it into the Mass, and Constantinople in response, removed the name of the Roman pope from their diptychs (the prayers venerating and recognizing Orthodox bishops). For the next forty-five years, the popes of Rome attempted to be reinstalled in the diptychs, which the Patriarch of Constantinople refused unless Rome dropped the filioque. Then in 1054, a delegation from Pope Leo IX walked into the Church of the Holy Wisdom (Άγία Σοφία) in Constantinople during the Liturgy and laid a bull of excommunication from the pope upon the altar, making official the break in communion between the churches of Rome and Constantinople.

In 1066, William the Conqueror of Normandy invaded England and defeated the Orthodox king Harold II at the Battle of Hastings. Pope Alexander II of Rome crowned William of Normandy king of England and Orthodox English bishops where then systematically deposed, imprisoned, or executed (or all three!), and replaced with Norman bishops loyal to Rome.

In early 1095, the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I sent to Rome for help defending his empire against the invading Islamic Seljuk Turks. Later that year, Pope Urban II, at the Council of Clermont, called on all Christians to join in a holy war against the Turks and the recovery of the Holy Land from the Muslims, promising immediate remission of sins to those who died in the cause. Thus began the Crusades, which led to the breaking off of communion between Rome and the other Patriarchs—Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—and the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, further widening the break between East and West. The slaughter of eastern Christians and the desecration of their churches by the participants of the fourth Crusade were regarded by the East as the ultimate outrage, and by this time, neither East nor West recognized the other as belonging to the “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.”*

The Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus recaptured Constantinople from Latin rule in 1261.

At the Council of Florence in 1439, an attempt was made at reconciliation and reunification between the Eastern and Western churches. A few eastern churches submitted to Rome, but the majority felt that the filioque and papal supremacy represented an impasse to East/West reunion.

The Church of Russia became autocephalous in 1448, and Moscow came to be regarded as the Third Rome (after Constantinople), hence the use of the title “tsar” (from “Caesar”) for Russian leaders. Not long after tons of priceless church art treasures were relocated to Moscow from Constantinople, the latter fell to the Islamic Ottoman Empire in 1453. Thus ended the millennium-old Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire.

Two years later, the German inventor Johann Gutenberg printed the Bible for the first time ever.

Then in 1478 Pope Sixtus IV granted Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile permission to launch the Spanish Inquisition, a church tribunal targeting recent Jewish converts to Christianity, and later Protestants. The tribunal was officially abolished in 1834 by Isabella II.

During the 16th century, various Christian groups began parting ways with the Roman church because of disagreements regarding theology, practice, hierarchy, etc. In 1517 Martin Luther touched off the Protestant Reformation with the publication of his 95 Theses, and in 1534 King Henry VIII rejected papal authority and named himself supreme head of the Church of England. Soon dozens—and later hundreds—of groups also split with Rome, and then with each other.

Tsar Peter the Great of Russia began reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1700, altering the church government and restricting entry into monasteries. These reforms essentially made the Church a department of state, severely weakening it and placing it in a poor position to take on the challenges it would face centuries later.

In September 1794, eight Russian monks, including St Juvenal, the first Orthodox martyr of the New World, arrived in Alaska, introducing Orthodox Christianity to the indigenous peoples of America and initiating an evangelization mission that would reach as far south as California.

During the nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church introduced new doctrines to the faith, including the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and papal infallibility in 1870.

In 1917, the largest Christian nation in the world fell into Communist control. From that time until the fall of Communism in 1990, the Russian Church suffered persecution on a scale never before realized as nearly fifty million Russian Christians were martyred for their faith.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Eastern Europe experienced an explosion of Christian activity that continues to this day.

On 25 July 2008, Ukraine celebrated the 1020th anniversary of St Vladimir's baptism and the conversion of Kievan Rus'.

Today, there are approximately 2 billion self-professed Christians in the world who belong to over thirty-thousand confessional bodies.

Here is a graphical timeline of Church history.

For a fascinating account of the early Church through the middle of the fourth century, read Eusebius' Church History



*While each side believed—and still believes—that they alone were catholic (i.e. “universal and complete”) and orthodox (i.e. “theologically correct”), over the centuries the western Church came to be known as the “Catholic” or “Roman Catholic” church, while the eastern Church came to be known as the “Orthodox” or “Eastern Orthodox” church.