The Sunday News
WHAT we discussed last week was but the tip of the iceberg in my view. The journey of the Christian faith has been long so far getting g into the 21st century and still going on. We would be naïve to imagine that these changes are just cosmetic and procedural. I posit that unless we become more serious there is a chance that our children shall in the next fifty years be presiding over either dead churches of the “Ichabod’’ type or very radicalised fundamentalist churches that would be as intolerant as the times of the crusaders. If you doubt just take a sober look at the circumstances of Boko Haram, Al Shabab and the Garisa University massacre in Kenya to sample but a few.
Africa is the centre of a new Christianisation which is open to many threats and attacks and that for no mean reason. I am emboldened to assert that this is because the new home of Christianity is Africa and the midwives for that new sojourn are under attack. INkosi yoxolo isisize bethuna!
I need to take a step back into history and state that until the third century Christianity as we know it now was not yet a universal Europeanised religion. One of his first acts was to draft a proclamation that ended official persecution of Christians. Called the Edict of Milan, it placed Christianity on a par with the other faiths that enjoyed freedom under Rome, in order “that we may not seem to detract from any dignity or any religion.” For the first time since the year 64, when the emperor Nero declared war on the Christians of Rome, and burned them as human torches in his garden, they had reason for hope.
The full notion of Christendom — a political world entirely dominated by Christianity — was slow to take shape, however. Not until after 380, under the emperors Theodosius I in the East and Gratian in the West, would pagan temples be forcibly closed, and all Roman subjects required to become Christian. Nonetheless, Constantine gradually infused his empire’s legal structure with significant Christian values. He made Sunday an official day of rest. New laws forbade the practice of divination and other magic. Confiscated Christian properties were restored. Magnificent churches rose in all major cities. He moved the imperial capital from pagan Rome to a new site, specifically built as a Christian city and named Constantinople (today, Istanbul).
Christian clergy administered an imperial welfare program. In time, the emperor ceased paying the traditional homage to Jupiter on Rome’s Capitoline Hill. Coins no longer bore images of pagan deities.
Meanwhile, state and church were inescapably fusing. Constantine held the title Pontifex Maximus, highest priest, with the duty of overseeing religion in the empire. After 313, he promoted Christianity as the favoured faith of the empire. Although he was unbaptized and had little patience with theological wrangling, he assumed the authority to arbitrate church disputes. Thus he presided over the crucial council at Nicea that formally declared the divinity of Jesus Christ and as we saw last week made changes to the Apostle’s Creed.
Christianity had been to this time relevant and related to the Jewish faith and very well acceptable to the African world view. That is why the Church was already thriving in inland Ethiopia, with major Christian presence in Alexandria, Cyrene, Carthage and most of Northern Africa. What you see as an Islamic and Arabic North Africa is more recent. I will hasten to add that when Jesus was carrying his cross to Calvary the Romans (who were European and Caucasian) did not see the Jews as the present day Caucasian Jews we see. The Jews were of a darker skin more chocolate as most of us Africans.
That is why they took Simon of Cyrene an African to carry his cross. It was no accident. They had to select one closer to Jesus’ race. Simon was a kinsmen.
The changes therefore enacted by Constantine were therefore meant to not only make this new found faith a legal part of the then Roman Empire but also to make it as western European as was possible. This was done even if it meant adopting certain pagan practices and baptise them into Christian practices. Let me summarise the changes Constantine made to the Christian faith they are mainly six of them but these six led to many others related to the pagan origins. He changed the place and time of the Resurrection of Christ. third it was the time of Christ’s birth. He altered the scriptural method of becoming a Christian. He also changed the manner in which the church related to the state. He then changed the headquarters from Jerusalem to Rome and Constantinople. These may have seemed very cosmetic and operational but they essentially changed the form of Christianity. In the year 326, Constantine sent his mother Helena to Jerusalem to discover the spot that he had foreseen as the place of Jesus’ Resurrection. This was the site of the temple of Venus on the western side of Jerusalem. He ordered the temple torn down and a church constructed on the site. This is called the church of the “Holy” Sepulchre to this day. I hope you see what I am seeing.
I know that I have stirred a hornet’s nest but the aim is for you and I to discuss further. We will have to keep this in focus as we interrogate what Christianity will be as it takes its sojourn in Africa. History makes us understand the present and shapes our perception of the future. Till next week then, Shalom!
