The prophecies of Daniel - part 3

Jesus told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared." -- Matthew 13: 24-26

A great many church historians view the fifth century as a kind of high water mark. Rome covered most of the civilized world at the time and when it imposed Christianity on it's people that meant that the majority of the people in the civilized world became "Christians". The percentage of "Christians" would never again be so high. You may have already noticed the problem. It wasn't Christians that suddenly populated the world. It was "Christians" with the somewhat sarcastic quotation marks surrouding them.

The reality is that during the fifth century AD the church lost more of its influence, more quickly, than at any other time in history. The reason for this is simple: you can not impose Christianity. It can't be done. For every other world religion the methods of worship are designed to allow people to gain a measure of control over god/gods. Take the Greco-Roman paganism for example. When a person sacrificed to the goddess Demeter, they were making an investment that they expected would return a bountiful harvest, since Demeter was the goddess of agriculture. Their worship was like a series of chemistry experiments where a certain formula of prayer and sacrifice would yield a predictable result.

There are no predictable results from the human perspective in Christianity. Even the promises of God that we know to be true play out in ways that constantly surprise us. The God of Heaven is not predictable, he is mysterious -- meaning that His knowledge and moral virtue are so much greater than our own that we can never render anything He does in Chemistry experiment terms. God does what He does because it is His nature. Not because He owes us for our sacrifices and prayers.

When Christianity became the established religion of Rome the total number of so-called "believers" increased ten fold. Churches that had a hundred, now had a thousand. A thousand became ten thousand. I think most of the bishops of this time truly meant well, but they were given an impossible task; their job was to integrate an overwhelming number of unwilling pagans into the Christian faith.

The results did not turn out well. Christianity became what you and I know today as Roman Catholicism. The church leaders introduced bits of pagan methodology in an attempt to connect with their new flock, but the indoctrination process was never complete; so worship of local gods became veneration of the saints, prayer to a feminine deity became prayer to Mary, sacrificial atonement became simony (paying for sins with money), and on and on.

But the most important change was that participation within the churches went from an expectation to an exception. The Biblical model for churches was that everyone was expected to contribute their gifts and abilities for the good of the group. The Roman Catholic model was that a few professional priests would do the work of God, everyone else was simply expected to show up and do as they were told. This will have major repercussions for our later 'times'.

For now, just notice part of the pattern. An upswing in the cycle of the church occurs when Christianity acts out its faith in the presence of non-believing world. The first of these upswings turned down when the non-believing world was coerced into pretending to be Christians.

For the next upswing, we will see that Christianity wasn't established everywhere, all at once. We will also look at the next downturn -- the crusades.