Covid-19, and the Separation of Church and Constantine

When I was a little girl – I mean, just before my fifth birthday – I received my first full-length Bible. King James Version, no less. That worn-out Bible you see above is it.

My parents had taught me to read at two and led me to Christ that same year.

So, since I had little better to do at four going into five, I sat down with this new Book and read it cover to cover over the course of the next year. I didn't know that you weren't really expected to do that until you were an adult, and of course, I didn't understand most of it. But I was five, and had little else to remember, so, in it went into my memory.

Now being a tiny little Christian with that much head knowledge can be dangerous. As life circumstances play out with you and around you, the Word starts to come back to mind and so you know that you and others are not following it. That's a BIG problem when you don't know adult conversations are not for you yet.

This also made church life a little challenging, because I had already read the book of Acts, and as I grew older, I noticed that church as we do it in the United States was not at all like church in the Bible. The challenges have only grown more stark in adulthood.

I'm not picking on any denomination. Because of my skills as a musician, I've worked in just about every major denomination available.

But that whole thing about so many denominations … the result of Protestants who keep on protesting one another …

And that whole thing about how many of us think church is a set of Sunday rituals …

We owe this first to the emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and stopped the persecution of Christians across the empire. That was a good thing.

But the emperor also made himself head of the new state religion, and also added both Roman religion and adapted elements of ancient Judaism (found in the Bible, true enough, but explicitly ABOLISHED for the Christian in Acts 15 and also the books of Galatians and Hebrews) in order to make the new state religion glorious and acceptable to all people.

One major problem resulted immediately.

When the emphasis on meeting with God in a fixed temple with certain rituals was dragged into Christian life, that forced an immediate choice between the words of the Lord Jesus Christ and the words of Constantine, for as early as John 4:21-24, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself said the places of meeting people were arguing in his day would someday be pointless (and destroyed), but God the Father was looking for those who were going to worship Him everywhere “in Spirit, and in truth.”

The Roman church took Constantine over Christ, in defiance of Christ and actual Christian practice for 300 years before then – even before persecution, one can read in the Bible where Christians were meeting together from house to house, fellowshipping whenever and wherever every day, in the midst of life.

No fixed temple, and all the things that go with that – rituals, clergy, choirs, etc, and the need of offerings to keep that up – is ever contemplated in the New Testament. Offerings are taken to meet needs, but there is nothing to hold up a liturgical structure.

And this leads to the second major problem … did I mention that Constantine was the emperor of the Roman Empire? His brand of European imperial Christianity would sweep the world in the next 1,700 years of Europe's conquests, and his legacy of Sunday ritualized worship is re-enacted across denominations every Sunday wherever Europe has gotten a foothold.

Until NOW.

Covid-19 has broken the mold.

Still, over that same 1,700 years, real Christians have been practicing what they preach every day of the week, worshiping and praying together in the midst of life, looking out for each other and the community, building hospitals, schools, and many other things to make life more livable in the midst of preaching eternal life through the cross work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Perhaps it is now a moment that this pure strand of Christianity can flourish again in the United States of America.

Certainly we have had enough of self-centered prosperity preaching and the same nationalism and disregard for the humanity of all people being backed up from popular pulpits for political gain.

It IS a struggle – in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, churches are complying with the order to shut down all gatherings. This is extremely disruptive to my community, and especially our seniors, to whom this has cultural ramifications younger people do not always appreciate.

But today, we have technology … all kinds of opportunities to make sure no one feels abandoned and isolated.

All kinds of opportunities to show REAL love, REAL faith, REAL service to others, even during this lockdown. I thank God I am in a church that already was moving in this direction!

The rituals of life, and our indulging in them, cover up a lot of things … Covid-19 is ripping the covers off of a lot of those things across the culture.

We shall see, soon enough, whether this thing called Christianity is still anything real in the United States of America, absent the trappings Constantine left us.