(Nashville, Tenn. – 7/11/2011) – Today’s diverse Christians around the world are poised to move beyond the “devil’s deal” created by Constantine in the 4th century and return to the “horizontally organized counter-culture” of the early church, a hopeful Harvey Cox posited in Monday’s “Be The Change” lecture in Plenary Hall during the 2011 General Assembly.
“[Early] Christians shared the bread and wine, but shared it within a multiplicity of liturgies,” said Cox, a long-time Harvard professor of divinity, author and historian. In contrast, Constantine co-opted the church into the first Christian-wide hierarchy, which became “calcified into what can only be called an ‘imperial’ church.”
Cox said that the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts in 1945 began a chain of inquiry, exposing how different the first three centuries of the nascent Christian movement were than the highly structured, creedal church that followed.
Utilizing research and themes set forth in his 2009 book, The Future of Faith, Cox illustrated how Constantine was more interested in power and war than the message of love, and thought that Christianity would be the glue to hold the declining Roman Empire together. Continuing to serve Helios, Constantine emblazoned soldiers’ shields with crosses and set up the system that would soon include bishops and other replicas of the empire itself.
Whereas Jesus and his followers in the early church proclaimed a new regime was on its way in, the new church was designed to protect the empire. Cox warned that the new empire was the “empire of consumer capitalism” that threatens to keep Christians from taking the message of love to “all corners of a culturally and religiously polymorphic world.”
In the lecture, Cox outlined four themes that today’s Christians could learn from the early church as they begin to “Tell It!”:
- Congregations were open to everyone – “fellowships of equals”
- Houses of worship were not called temples or religious assemblies, but rather “ecclesia” – “assemblies of citizens”
- By exchanging gifts and visitors, they undercut the existing patronage system of the empire
- Not putting a pinch of incense on the altar was not piety, but rather public protest
As he closed by encouraging Disciples to move forward into the world unbound by historical hierarchy, Cox recounted the post-resurrection words of Jesus to Mary Magdalene: “Noli me tangere” – “Don’t cling to me.”
By: Richmond Williams
Offering received Sept. 26 & Oct. 3